THE SPIRIT OF THE LITURGY, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
As time has its sacred symbolism, so does space - the place of worship and its appropriate ordering and disposition. Ratzinger again draws attention to the way in which Catholic churches manifest the succession between Old and New Covenants: the central altar as the place of sacrifice, inherits and replaces the role of the Temple, while the lectern, pulpit or ambo for the proclamation of God’s Word to the assembled people follows naturally from the disposition of the synagogue, with its ‘Shrine of the Torah’ honouring the inspired Scriptures. In this context the author gives us a fascinating excursion into the origin of worshipping
ad orientem - towards the East. While synagogue worship was oriented toward Jerusalem, the place of the Temple, Christians now look toward Christ, whose future coming in glory is aptly symbolized by the brilliance of the rising sun. As is well known, Cardinal Ratzinger has been among those favoring a return to the traditional position of the priest at Mass, in which both he and the people are turned together towards Christ. Here (p. 68) he tells us that:
In the early Church, prayer towards the east was regarded as an apostolic tradition. We cannot date exactly when this turn to the east, the diverting of the gaze from the Temple, took place, but it is certain that it goes back to the earliest times and was always regarded as an essential characteristic of Christian liturgy (and indeed of private prayer).
These are strong words. Can something believed to be an “apostolic tradition”, and indeed, an “essential characteristic” of Christian liturgy, be so readily discarded as it has been since the 1960s? The position
versus populum, now almost universal in celebrations according to the post-conciliar Roman Missal, was in fact unheard-of for fifteen centuries after Christ, and had its origin in the heretical Eucharistic theology of the Protestant Reformers. Ratzinger dedicates an entire chapter (“The Altar and the Direction of Liturgical Prayer”) to this question, pointing out that Vatican Council II never even suggested this novel change of position, and exposing the principal arguments in favor of it as being historically unfounded. “The turning of the priest toward the people has turned the community into a self-enclosed circle. In its outward form, it no longer opens out on what lies ahead and above, but is closed in on itself” (p. 80)
This ‘self-centredness’ of the community is in turn linked to the new emphasis on the Mass as a ‘meal’. The liturgical innovators have assured us that the altar “had to be positioned in such a way that priest and people looked at each other and formed together the circle of the celebrating community. This alone - so it was said - was compatible with the meaning of the Christian liturgy, with the requirement of active participation” (p. 77). But even this concept of how a ‘meal’ would have been celebrated in biblical and patristic times - ‘gathered round the table of the Lord’, as a popular post-conciliar ditty puts it - is woefully anachronistic! Ratzinger quotes (p. 78) the noted French scholar Fr. Louis Bouyer, whose research has shown that:
In no meal of the early Christian era, did the president of the banqueting assembly ever face the other participants. They were all sitting, or reclining, on the convex side of a C-shaped table, or of a table having approximately the shape of a horseshoe. The other side was always left empty for the service. Nowhere in Christian antiquity, could have arisen the idea of having to ‘face the people’ to preside at a meal. The communal character of a meal was emphasised just by the opposite disposition: the fact that all the participants were on the same side of the table.
