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Liturgy |
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The basic meaning of the Greek root-word from which “liturgy” derives is a purely secular one: an orderly and public service in the interest of the entire people (understood as the body politic or the national community). In the two centuries immediately preceding the birth of Christ, and hence also in the Greek translation of the Old Testament (Septuagint), the word takes on a cultic meaning also found in the New Testament. Thus, with the help of cultic, priestly vocabulary evoking a worship setting, the Letter to the Hebrews contrasts the earlier (ineffective) service rendered by humans with the uniquely effective action of God in Christ (e.g., Heb 10:1-10). Acts 13:2 mentions the common prayer of individual prophets and teachers at Antioch. By word and example the Lord Jesus during his public life strove to encourage his disciples in the practice of prayer in common. Not only did he frequent the temple with them in order to participate in the rituals prescribed by Mosaic law, but he also gave them the words of the Lord’s Prayer and at the Last Supper an exemplar of the great Eucharistic prayer, both of which even today are fundamental to the Church’s public prayer. Vatican Council II indicates that the Sacred Liturgy is the public worship of the Eternal Father performed by the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, that is, by the Head and his members. Since every liturgical celebration is an action of Christ the Priest and of his Body, which is the Church, it is an actio praecellenter sacra, a sacred action surpassing all others (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 7). Our earthly liturgy expresses, recalls to mind, and continually renews the paschal mystery of salvation, and thus the liturgy bears a number of characteristic notes. * It is a public manifestation of the Church’s indefectible holiness and one of the most prominent signs of her divine origin. * It is a cry bursting forth from the heart of the Church to the Father under the impulse of the Holy Spirit. * It is perfect praise and adoration in the Spirit and in truth, giving all honor and glory to God in Christ and through Christ. * It is a perennially effective instrument for the purification and sanctification of men. * It is the greatest of all pedagogical means by which the Church forms and instructs her children. * It is luminous and richly rewarding contemplation of the complete treasury of Revelation. * It is not only the most efficacious form of the active apostolate but also the most inclusive and yet most secure foundation of the apostolate of prayer. * It is an excellent exercise of supernatural charity, rooted in the communion of saints to effect fully the living unity of the Church. * It is an anticipation of the eternal praise already begun in heaven, with which it constitutes one integral worship and toward which it unceasingly tends as to its final consummation. Properties of the Sacred Liturgy • Once this broadly inclusive understanding of the Sacred Liturgy has been grasped, its chief properties emerge into full view. Among them is the fact that all liturgy is based upon Christ the Priest and above all upon his redemptive sacrifice, which always remains present to us in the Holy Eucharist. Since the liturgy is primarily a sacred action directed toward God and performed by the Church, all its other effects of sanctifying and instructing men, though very important, are simply corollaries of this chief purpose or means for achieving it. The worship rendered by the Church to God in the liturgy must be exterior, because the nature of man as a composite of body and soul requires it to be so and because it is a public act. But to be true and genuine, its chief element must be interior, for we must always live in Christ and give ourselves to him completely so that in him, with him, and through him the heavenly Father may be duly glorified (Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei, 23-24). In the Sacred Liturgy, both of these elements must be intimately linked, else religion amounts to little more than formalism without meaning or content. The internal element is not limited to the thoughts and sentiments of the liturgical ministers or the participants in a particular celebration. Rather, it also includes the present interior life of the other members of the Church, which signifies and expresses her entire life in each truly liturgical celebration. Thus participation in the liturgy must take place primarily at the supernatural level, meaning that it is rooted in faith, hope, and charity. Its chief strength and efficacy do not depend upon the external apparatus of effective staging or the number of the participants but rather upon the ardor with which those participants are aflame, the intensity of their spiritual life and union with God. As a public act of the Church, liturgical worship is necessarily hierarchical and ordered, which means in practice that it is subject to the prescriptions of the competent authority. Therefore, arbitrary individual initiatives and disobedience to the legitimate prescriptions ipso facto change the liturgical nature of the action: It is no longer the worship of the Church, the whole Christ, but the private cult of one person or a particular group. In the course of time, the Lord Jesus forms his Church by means of the sacraments emanating from his plenitude (Vatican Council II, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, 7, 11). Through these sacraments, the Church makes her members participants in the mystery of the death and Resurrection of Christ, in the grace of the Holy Spirit who gives her life and movement (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 5-6; Lumen Gentium, 7, 12, 50). As Vatican II rightly stressed, the great deeds of God on behalf of the people of the Old Covenant were but an overture to the work of Christ the Lord in redeeming mankind and giving perfect glory to God. The Savior accomplished this chiefly by the paschal mystery of his blessed Passion, Resurrection from the dead, and glorious Ascension, whereby “dying, he destroyed our death and, rising, he restored our life.” For it was from the pierced heart of Christ on Golgotha that there was born “the wondrous sacrament of the whole Church” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 6). The paschal mystery of Jesus Christ is the wellspring from which all the sacraments and sacramentals draw their power and efficacy (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 61). The liturgy that Christ’s beloved bride, his Church, celebrates on earth is a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy celebrated in the Jerusalem that is above, in the heavenly city where God will be all in all. By the design of God, the earthly liturgy makes use of sacred signs perceptible to man’s senses, in order to signify the invisible divine realities by which is brought about, in the manner proper to each one, the sanctification of man (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 7, 33). As an exercise of the priestly office of Christ the Lord, the liturgy has a twofold dynamism: a movement from God to men, that their sanctification be achieved; and a movement from man toward God, that he be adored in spirit and in truth (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 5-7). In this way the Church’s worship not only fulfills but expands and transforms the natural worship offered to the Deity by men. Liturgy and Sacraments • Although the Sacred Liturgy does not exhaust the entire activity of the Church, it is still the high point toward which the Church’s activity is directed and at the same time the fount from which all her power flows (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 9-13). Our fathers in the faith, the first Christians, spoke of all the truths and saving events of Christian life (which are incomprehensible to purely natural man) as mysteries. The Latin for that originally Greek word is sacramentum – which lives on in our term “sacrament.” In ancient times the word “mystery” indeed referred to secret events or hidden things shown only to the initiated. But for the men of those first Christian centuries the very word embodied the idea that through the power and grace of this mysterious event, man was raised up to God, indeed “divinized.” We can therefore understand why it was chiefly the three great, mysteriously divine events of Baptism, Confirmation, and the Holy Eucharist that were regarded as mysteries. With the passage of time, this expression was applied more and more exclusively to the Eucharistic Sacrifice and banquet, and as a matter of fact the Eastern liturgies even today commonly refer to Holy Mass as “the divine mysteries.” At the very heart of the Church’s liturgical life is the Holy Eucharist, sacrament and sacrifice, than which the holy Church of God possesses nothing more worthy, more holy, or more admirable because in it is contained God’s greatest gift: the very wellspring and author of all grace and holiness, Christ the Lord himself (Roman Ritual, 1614; cf. Sacrosanctum Concilium, 10). Sacraments have traditionally been defined as outward signs instituted by Christ to give inward grace. Thus a sacrament is a sign of something that is effected invisibly, but also a sign that in itself presents the possibility of indicating the invisible effect in a manner comprehensible to all. If the liturgy is the life of the Church moved by the Spirit of Christ, then the sacraments are the channels through which this life continually flows out to us. Whether it is a tiny trickle or a flood tide will depend upon the love with which we allow them to act upon us. But love always presupposes knowledge as well as leading to it; and we attain the knowledge in question here only through believing discernment of the liturgical essence of the sacraments. Through the sacrament of Holy Orders, priests, by the anointing of the Holy Spirit, are marked with a special character that configures them to Christ the eternal High Priest in a manner enabling them to act in the Person of Christ the Head of the Mystical Body. Through the priestly ministry the spiritual sacrifice of the faithful is completed in union with the sacrifice of Christ, who is the sole mediator between God and man. That sacrifice is offered in the Eucharist through the hands of the priest in the name of the entire Church in an unbloody and sacramental manner, until the Lord himself comes (cf. Lumen Gentium, 10; Vatican Council II, Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests, Presbyterorum Ordinis, 2). The rites of Christian initiation, which include the catechumenate and the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation, are plainly related to the reception of the Eucharist, the third of the sacraments of initiation. The penitential liturgy and the liturgy of the sick aim ultimately at preparing Christians to receive worthily the Body of Christ. And the rich symbolism of the sacrament of Matrimony is not without reference to the Eucharist, since marriage represents the union of Christ and the Church, of which the sacrament of the Eucharist is a figure (cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, q. 65, a. 3). Though the Church has neither the right nor the power to institute sacraments, she does possess the power to institute sacramentals, which are rites resembling those of the sacraments but independent of them, instituted by the Church for the supernatural benefit of the faithful. As a kindly mother, the Church supplies all the reasonable demands and needs of her children, even those of the weak and simple. Though sacramentals, such as blessings of persons, places, and things, neither obliterate mortal sin nor infuse sanctifying grace, their efficacy is nonetheless very special because it involves not only the pious acts of the individual believer but also the intercession of the Church as a whole (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 60-61, 79). Aside from the personal devotion of the user, sacramentals have no effects other than those for which the Church prays. To be distinguished from sacramentals are the objects and practices of popular piety and devotion that surround and accompany the sacramental life of the Church. Among them are pilgrimages and processions, veneration of relics, praying the Rosary, making the Stations of the Cross, etc. Such expressions of Catholic piety are subject to the judgment of duly constituted authority in the Church (cf. Sacrosanctum Concilium, 13). The Liturgical Year • “Pray constantly!” was the admonition of the Savior and the Apostles. How does the Church fulfill this command? Though she is spiritually present to the Lord at all times, as the Lord is always present to his Church, it is impossible to carry out literally the apostolic injunction. But the Church does fulfill it, nonetheless. In ancient times it was believed that an action repeated at equal, regularly recurring intervals of time attained a kind of earthly “eternity.” Just as in nature time renews itself through the orderly succession of years and moons, and through this permanent cycle of rebirth becomes, in a sense, “eternal,” so, too, an event is celebrated “eternally” by observing it on a monthly or annual basis: The solemnitas or annual recurrence of the event or festival becomes aeternitas. On such a foundation rests the celebration of the Church’s year of feasts and fasts. In it, the mysteries of salvation are re-presented regularly, at carefully calculated intervals, and thus they “eternally” become reality, until their celebration in heaven will pass over into a reality that is everlasting in the full sense of the term. The Lord’s Day is the most familiar instance of this principle. Sunday is the day on which Christ proved himself to be the Lord of life and death by arising from the tomb. It is the day on which he brought to a glorious consummation the saving action of our redemption, and that is why each Sunday becomes a new Easter for us (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 106). It was only logical that the annual commemoration of the actual day of Christ’s Resurrection should be celebrated with very special joy and solemnity, and so the Christian Easter Sunday was born; and with it was laid the foundation stone of what we know as the Church year (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 102-104, 110). Other days recalling the saving deeds of the Redeemer were gradually grouped around the celebration of Easter, at first chiefly in the Holy Land and at Jerusalem, where the memory of the Savior’s days on earth was especially vivid. Good Friday, Holy Thursday, and Palm Sunday arose before Easter, Pentecost, and the Ascension after it: Thus evolved the Easter cycle of feasts. But long before this development had reached its climax, its influence contributed to the formation of a second cycle of feasts grouped around the celebration of Christmas, to commemorate the coming of redemption. Though the feast of Christmas as we know it today is of Western origin, its roots lie farther eastward, chiefly in the holy places of the promised land. And these celebrations, too, culminated in the celebration of the Eucharist, in which the entire work of redemption – including its first dawning – is transfigured and rendered present. In sum, then, the Church has fulfilled the command to pray constantly (1 Thes 5:17, Col 14:2; cf. Acts 6:4, 12:5) by praying at fixed times, even daily. Such hours of prayer make up the Liturgy of the Hours, which, like a golden coronet that frames and bears the precious jewel of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, revolves around the fixed pole of the liturgical representation of that event which forms the very central core of Christianity itself: the redeeming death and Resurrection of Christ (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 83). Priests and others are specially deputed by the Church to pray the Divine Office, the public prayer of the Church, which is composed chiefly of readings from Holy Scripture (psalms, canticles, passages from the other books of the Bible) and other authors such as the Fathers of the Church and theologians (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 95-96, 98). The most important “hours” of prayer in the Divine Office are the morning and evening hours of Lauds and Vespers, which form the axis around which the Liturgy of the Hours rotates, the “two hinges on which the daily office turns” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 89). If the faithful pray the Liturgy of the Hours together with a priest in the approved form, then that, too, is “the voice of the Bride herself addressed to her Bridegroom. It is the very prayer which Christ himself together with his Body addresses to the Father” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 84).
The Sacred Liturgy
is the worship (“divine service”) that the mystical Christ – that is,
the Church as a community in association with Christ its Head – offers
to the heavenly Father. It consists in the celebration and application
of the redemption that takes place through the hierarchical priesthood
of the ordained and the universal priesthood of the baptized, in the
form of sacramental actions. “Worthy art thou, our Lord and God, to
receive glory and honor and power, for thou didst create all things, and
by thy will they existed and were created” (Rv 4:11). See: Communio; Devotions; Eucharist; Holy Orders; In Persona Christi Capitis; Liturgical Year; Liturgy of the Hours; Lord’s Day; Mass; Prayer; Priesthood in the Old Testament; Priesthood of Christ; Religion, Virtue of; Sacrament; Sacramentals; Sacraments of Initiation; Worship. |
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