Dominica 1 in Quadragesima / Evening, 4 March 2017 / Church of St John
He
will overshadow you with his shoulders, and beneath his wings you will hope (Ps 90:4).
The
Roman Canon has been spoken silently by the priest for more than a thousand
years.[1] Often this is one of the
most striking differences between the usus
antiquior and the modern form of the Roman Missal. But why is this done?
Why in the middle of the Holy Mass does a curtain of silence descend upon
Catholic worship?
Because
a death occurs.—Remember what the Mass is, especially as taught by the Council
of Trent:
In this divine
sacrifice . . . the same Christ who offered himself in a bloody manner on the
altar of the Cross is contained and is offered in an unbloody manner. . . .
For, the victim is one and the same: the same now offers himself through the
ministry of priests who then offered himself on the Cross; only the manner of
offering is different.[2]
Christ
does not die again. Rather, the Mass as it were transports us through space and
time, as if we gathered here were standing beneath the Cross, at the one
sacrifice of Christ on Calvary. This is the Mass. And if you and I were there
on that most solemn, sorrowful, and yet glorious afternoon, what would have been
our reaction?—Silence. Even now in the face of human death, the only
appropriate reaction is a reverent silence. All the more appropriate then is
this silence of the canon of the Mass, when that very death of our Savior is
set before us in a sacramental way.
If
that is true, then you, the faithful, need silence in order to pray. You need
silence to form your intentions. You need silence to tell Christ your burdens.
You need silence to place your prayers into the hands of the priest. You need
silence to thank God for the gifts he gives, to praise him. You need silence to
ask his pardon, to understand his will for you, to pray for the people you know
and love. This silence is not meant to exclude you or hide the worship of the
Church from you—on the contrary, the silence of the canon is given to you as a
gift, as a time of intimacy and freedom and peace.
If
you do not mind me saying, the priest also needs this time of silence. He needs
this time to quiet his lips in order to quiet his heart. He too comes laden
with prayers and burdens, and he needs to place them before Heart of his
Master. The more devoutly he offers the sacrifice, this aids the devotion of
the people—though it must be said that an unworthy minister does not stop up
the flow of grace. Nevertheless, between the Sanctus and the Doxology, the priest enters into the very heart of the
Father through the Heart of Christ: he passes into the Holy of Holies, like
the priests of the Old Law in the Temple.
The
canon is silent because the priest is uttering the most important, profound
words of his life; the canon is silent because this is the most sacred action
that a priest performs. The canon is silent because the priest speaks to God on
behalf of all the people, the whole Church, in point of fact—for every intention that affects the
salvation of every human person. Memento
Domine famulorum famularumque tuarum et omnium circumstantium. That truly
means everybody. Moreover, what would the priest’s life be without those
magnificent words?—Hoc est enim corpus
meum.
It
must also be said that the priest offers the Mass “with his back to the people”
for much the same reason. The point is not that the priest has turned his back
away from anyone, but toward the one
to Whom all our worship is addressed. Because the priest has begun the Canon
and so entered into the most intimate places of our worship, his personality
ceases to matter: both his voice and his face descend into a kind of sacred
anonymity. Why? So that every mind and heart may be directed to Christ’s
sacrifice, present in sacramental reality.
Today,
the First Sunday of Lent, we pray much with Ps 90: the introit, gradual, tract,
offertory, and communion are all different verses from this psalm. In fact, the
offertory and communion antiphons are identical, and in them we hear: “He will
overshadow you with his shoulders, and beneath his wings you will hope.” It is the silence of the Roman Canon that
acts like the sheltering wings of God’s protection and fidelity.
How
can we really appreciation enough the mysteries we handle? Perhaps in his time
the good God will deign to reveal something of this mystery to us. In the
meantime, the only right attitude is one of awe-filled silence, of happy
wonder, of tender gravity.
[1] Cf Jungmann, vol 2, p 104ff.
Jungmann’s discussion is disjointed and does not treat the silence of the Canon
in one segment, but weaves it into his discussion about the separateness (or
not) of the preface from the canon—it seems in order to assert that “the whole
prayer was said in a loud voice.” The reader is left wondering.
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