Well Jim, I’ll give you my 2cents worth.
With the preliminary caveats that I know hardly anything about Dom Cyprian Vagaggini (save that he was an expert at the Second Vatican Council, and helped compose one of the Eucharistic Prayers for the current Ordinary Form of the Mass), and that I am not a liturgist or liturgical theology expert. . . .
I have some difficulty with the passage quoted by Dr. Scott Hahn.
As I read it, there is a contrast being made between certain portions of the liturgy (e.g. the Mass of the Nativity, say) and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass proper. If you look at that contrast, Vagaggini says (here) that the former re-actualizes an event in the life of Christ by reapplying or making available that event’s redemptive power – but that it doesn’t re-actualize as a “historical event”; whereas the latter (the Mass itself) does something different or more.
There might be a couple ways to read what he is saying here (and his other work might illuminate it), but ONE way to read it, and a way that I think Dr. Hahn might be amenable towards, is that the Sacrifice of the Mass *does * re-actualize the historical event of Golgatha, in an unbloody way. Now, this could be taken in an pious way or in a more literal way. If taken in a literal way, I think it is confusing – what parts of the historical event are re-actualized?
I’m under the impression that there is a relatively modern concept of the Sacrifice of the Mass that attempts to characterize it as some sort of actual time displacement, that we are present at the eventS of Calvary. For more on this, you can read up on Dom Odo Casel’s theory of sacrifice. But, I don’t think this is a really tenable solution. Again, it raises the question of exactly which events?
But, if it is taken in a pious way, then we don’t deal with that question. Rather, we ask the question in what does the sacrifice consist? Trent answered that the Sacrifice of the Mass is the same sacrifice of Calvary (note: not the same events of Calvary) because the priest is the same, and the victim is the same.
We can talk more about why I think the “time warp” theory or the “historical event re-actualized theory (strict form)” is problematic, and about Dom Casel, etc. if you find it of interest.
VC
