“Now the priest – the “presider, as they now prefer to call him – becomes the real point of reference for the whole liturgy. Everything depends on him. We have to see him, to respond to him, to be involved in what he is doing. His creativity sustains the whole thing. Not surprisingly, people try to reduce this newly created role by assigning all kinds of liturgical functions to different individuals and entrusting the “creative” planning of the liturgy to groups of people who like to, and are supposed to, “make their own contribution.” Less and less is God in the picture. More and more important is what is done by the human beings who meet here and do not like to subject themselves to a “pre-determined pattern.” The turning of the priest toward the people has turned the community into a self-enclosed circle. In outward form, it n longer opens out on what lies ahead and above, but is closed in on itself. The common turning toward the east was not a “celebration toward the wall;” it did not mean that the priest “had his back to the people;” the priest himself was not regarded as so important. For just as the congregation in the synagogue looked together toward Jerusalem, so in the Christian liturgy the congregation looks together “toward the Lord” [symbolized in the rising sun –MCC]. As one of the fathers of Vatican II’s Constitution on the Liturgy, J.A. Jungmann, put it, it was much more a question of priest and people facing in the same direction, knowing that together they were in a procession toward the Lord. They did not close themselves into a circle; they did not gaze at one another; but as the pilgrim People of God they set off for the Oriens, for the Christ who comes to meet us.
“. . . .A common turning to the east during the Eucharistic Prayer remains essential. This is not a case of something accidental; rather it is a matter of what is essential. Looking at the priest is not important. What matters is looking together at the Lord. It is now a question, not of dialogue, but of common worship, of setting off toward the One who is to come. What corresponds with the reality of what is happening is not the closed circle but the common movement forward, expressed in a common direction for prayer”
(Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy: The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence, in: Joseph Ratzinger Collected Works, Theology of the Liturgy, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014) pp. 48-49, emphasis added.
Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) understands Foundational Theology as Liturgical Theology, not in the sense of the study of ritual and rite, but in the sense of what he calls the “spirit” of the Eucharistic Liturgy. “The Eucharist makes the Church,” famously wrote Henri de Lubac, and Ratzinger takes that to the depths of the point where Christian faith, life and teaching begin, the bedrock on which the visible Church rests. It is when the Church is gathered at Mass as the Eucharistic communion with Christ that the Church is located at its root and beginning. Not existential experience; not a graced moment; not the feeling of absolute dependence; not a phenomenology of Spirit: the real, visible, sensory act and experience of the celebrated Mass presents Christ and his Spirit to the world at first-hand, as the point of origin. Ratzinger’s entire theology begins and returns to this fundamental theology of the Liturgy.
This means that the visual, physical, sensory presentation and action of the Mass is not peripheral or arbitrary, but absolutely crucial for the formation of the Church and of Christians. There is a right way and a wrong way for the Mass to appear in the world, with an almost infinite spectrum of “truth and error” between the two absolutes. Because the Mass (or the Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Churches) remains fixed in form and guided by authoritative instructions, the “red parts” the “rubrics,” getting the Mass absolutely wrong probably would not be likely. But because it is fallible, fallen people (even priests are fallible and fallen) who celebrate the Mass there can be no perfectly correct or “rightly celebrated” Mass this side of the Kingdom. The Kingdom of God resonates as the perfect Mass, the perfect Divine Liturgy, where Christ is both victim and priest.
Ratzinger does raise an issue that has bothered me for years: priest and people facing each other across a humble “communion table.” I have been on both sides of that “table altar.” As a pastor in the Lutheran church, my training in liturgy at the seminary presupposed that the only proper way to “preside” at the Eucharist was facing the people. “God is in the midst of the people.” Christ is incarnate still, in the Holy Spirit filling people and pastor. The place to “look” to be “looking” at God is not the wall, but at an invisible point midway between people and pastor hovering over the table altar. The liturgy takes place, not in the Domus Dei [the “house” of God], but in the Domus Ecclesiae [the “house” of the Assembly]. The people assemble in a building – any building – and by that assembling turn that building into the “space” opened up for God to be “among us.” Having never been taught anything else, I trustingly set forth as a pastor to the people – those people on the other side of the “table altar” where God in Christ hovered in “real presence” between and within us.
I have a little background in theater and much background in teaching and public speaking, where emphasis always is placed on making “eye contact” with your audience. As the pastor, standing behind the communion table facing my congregation, my “audience,” I found my mind worrying more and more about “eye contact.” Reading the Eucharistic Prayer from the Altar Book was necessary (I was not going to risk memorizing the whole Great Thanksgiving and Eucharist Prayer). But I was not making eye contact with my audience, and so not holding their attention. Where were they looking while I was looking at the Altar Book?
I really did not need to worry, as they were looking in the Lutheran Book of Worship following the text of the liturgy without paying any attention to the action on the altar. So my worry changed. At the moment of consecration and the elevation of the elements, how could I regain their eye contact and visual attention? Often I would turn in a slow arc so that I could look in the eye the people in the first few pews. No wonder everybody wants to sit in the back. I spoke “This is my Body, given for you; do this in remembrance of me,” and “This is my Blood poured out for you, do this in remembrance of me,” in solemn declamation trying to make a noticeable demonstrable gesture of both elevating and of extending the elements, as to God and to the Assembly (where God really was anyway). But if God was in front of me, mediating between me and the people, why was I “elevating” anything at all?
All the variations I tried never solved my problem or calmed my worries. When I looked at the congregation, I did not see God; I saw the Church.
Christ is on the altar, in the bread and wine. That is the meaning of “Real Presence,” in which Lutherans believe as strongly as Catholics, at least in doctrine. In the distribution of communion I held up the host between me and the recipient as I said, “The Body of Christ, given for you” (that is the standard, traditional Lutheran formula). That was clear enough: this bread I am holding and giving to you is where Christ is, where you can look to find Christ, this is the body of Christ by the eating of which you become one with his body. I am just the conveyor. That was right. Yet that was not what I was doing or what was happening at the altar.
After seventeen years as a Lutheran pastor and forty years as a Lutheran, I entered the Catholic Church (the reasons for which would take too long to tell). I found myself then in the pew, not at the altar, a layman and not a pastor or priest. And now I have the same problem only in reverse. Where should I look during the Eucharistic Prayer, the Consecration, during the distribution of the sacrament? Most of the time it is the priest who is praying on our behalf; should I look at the priest? He is reading from the Missal just as I read from the Altar Book, so no eye contact. And it is odd when he does look up and intentionally make eye contact; why is he looking at me? I have tried focusing on the crucifix of the Processional Cross, on the large Cross with the Risen Christ on the wall behind the table altar, on the golden Tabernacle in which Christ in the form of the consecrated host is kept – except those hosts are out on the altar for distribution. It is extremely distracting.
In the passages I quoted from Ratzinger, The Shape of the Liturgy, he sees the problem of the “table altar” as solvable only by returning to the East Wall altar so that the priest prays with the people as well as for the people as all face in the same direction, East, toward Christ, the Sun of Righteousness rising to meet us.
But there is a considerable consensus of liturgical scholars, Church historians, and systematic theologians who defend the table altar. The historical evidence seems ambiguous. But it strikes me as odd that the Patristic Church would have a table altar, but the bishop would preside in front of it facing east with the people. I do not think that is what led to the east wall altar. The reason for that was probably a change in Eucharistic theology and the interpretation of “the body of Christ” and “the Mystical Body of Christ.”
In the Patristic and early Medieval Church, “the Body of Christ” was the Church itself, the communion of believers visible and active as Christ in the world. The Sacrament of the Eucharist, with the real presence of Christ embodied in the bread and wine, was no less real, but was the “mystery” (mysterion / sacramentum) of the miracle by which common bread and wine are transformed into the true presence of Christ, Body and Blood, soul and divinity. The real presence in the celebration of the Sacrament of the Eucharist was exactly the “mystery,” the “sacrament” of that indefinable presence: hence “the Mystical Body of Christ.”
By the 11th century, a major theological shift was beginning that would engulf the whole doctrine of the Eucharist by the 13th century. A number of sharp debates in the 10th -12th centuries revolved around just what was meant by “real” in “real presence.” An opposition movement arose that argued “real” could not be taken literally, or else it would be sacramental cannibalism, which is not at all what the Church means and teaches. Christ is consumed spiritually in the consuming of the elements, which are then the spiritual, not “mystical,” Body and Blood of Christ. Many monastic theologians reacted against this idea, insisting that the real presence is really real: the bread and wine become the true Body and Blood of Christ that hung on the Cross and bled from his wounds. Only that reality and the reception of the very real and literal Body and Blood, hidden under the sensual forms of bread and wine, conveys Christ himself to the believer to conform him to Christ and transform his soul to holiness.
Unfortunately, the argument for the “really real” real presence often was crudely or awkwardly expressed. No on ever had to define and defend the real presence before. Extreme statements emerged meant as hyperbole to make the point, such as biting the host will cause it to bleed, or spilling the wine from the chalice while consuming it was desecration of Christ and a mortal sin. Retorts asked the reduction to absurdity question, such as, if a mouse enters the church and eats a consecrated host, is the mouse saved or damned?
The debate reached its climax at the 4th Lateran Council (1215), which, using the newly developing philosophy of Aristotle canonized what would come to be called the doctrine of transubstantiation.
There is indeed one universal church of the faithful, outside of which nobody at all is saved, in which Jesus Christ is both priest and sacrifice. His body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been changed in substance, by God’s power, into his body and blood, so that in order to achieve this mystery of unity we receive from God what he received from us. Nobody can effect this sacrament except a priest who has been properly ordained according to the Church’s keys, which Jesus Christ himself gave to the apostles and their successors.
(“ Fourth Lateran Council” Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Vol. 1, Norman P. Tanner, S.J., English Editor (Sheed & Ward, Georgetown U. Press, 1990), p. 230.) Emphasis added.
This doctrine caused a reversal of terminology and so ecclesiology. The “place” where Christ was to be found was on the altar. It was appropriate, even desirable, that the priest “orient” himself with the whole ecclesia, facing now a genuine altar of sacrifice. The altar being a true sacrificial altar, it rapidly expanded in size, beauty and symbolism. And so the Church in the West adopted the East Wall altar, retaining the Patristic practice of “orienting” the church building to the east, only now giving it an allegorical interpretation.
(This history is worked out in close detail by Henri de Lubac in, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.)
An important development of doctrine slowly emerged from this reversal of terminology. The visible Church was now the Mystical Body of Christ, the mysterion, the sacramentum. The visible Church was now the sacrament of salvation for the world, and in so being, was the sacramental presence of Christ still at work in the world. “The Eucharist makes the Church.” Christ is really, bodily present in his Body and Blood under the forms of bread and wine. The mystery of the Eucharist, its sacramentum, is the real presence of Christ in the elements which are consumed by the assembled believers, the ecclesia. The true Body and Blood of Christ transform each person who receives it, drawing all together as one in the unity of the Body and Blood of Christ. So drawn together by the real, Body and Blood, Eucharistic presence, the people, the ecclesia, is now truly the presence of Christ in the world by virtue of his sacramentum, his mysterion. They are built up into the visible Church in and for the world, that is, the Mystical Body of Christ, the embodied sacramentum of salvation.
The problem with the East Wall altar and the priest facing east was that it blocked the view of the congregation; there was no way to see the sacramental Christ. This became intentional as the Church built sanctuaries with a choir and a “rood screen” imposed between the nave and the chancel, putting the liturgical action and the real presence of Christ even farther away and almost invisible to the people. The practice of ringing bells emerged at the moment of consecration and elevation of the bread-Body and wine-Blood to alert the congregation to pay attention and adore the sacred elements. The Body and Blood of Christ was not something to be consumed; it was his holy, divine and real presence to be adored from afar.
The introduction of the “table altar” intended to resolve this disconnect between Christ in his sacramental presence and Christ spiritually in his Holy People, and to encourage frequent reception of the Eucharist. The Pastoral Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy from Vatican II went on to minimize and discourage devotion to the Eucharist outside of the Mass or during the Mass, which was an unfortunate act of over-zealous reformers. This simply reversed the problem though. From not being able to see the priest and the liturgical action, to only seeing the priest and the liturgical action, the doctrines of Real Presence and Transubstantiation became confused, difficult to explain, and often simply left to the side, putting emphasis on the “meal-character” of eating the bread and wine at the “supper table” of the Lord. This remains a problem for pastoral celebration and catechesis regarding the Mass.
The basic problem seems to me to be where to look, where to focus attention during the Eucharist. There must be some thing large enough and significant enough to be the point of eye contact for both celebrant and people.
This idea is not original with me; but I cannot remember where I read it. In the front-center of the table altar, intentionally obstructing the view between celebrant and people, place a large (three feet tall with a solid, heavy base) crucifix, with the corpus facing the people and an etching or relief of Christ on the side facing the celebrant as the corpus. This crucifix must be broad, tall, and unavoidable. It should draw the people’s visual attention to the Great Cross on the altar and away from the celebrant. This would not obstruct the view of the liturgical ritual by the priest. It would, though, give the proper context and sacramental sense to those rituals.
At this point, then, I disagree with Ratzinger in his continued case for the East Wall altar, some 60 pages after the first long quote. I will spare you another verbatim quote from p. 109 (the whole page). The question Ratzinger approaches is how the emphasis on the eschatological and the mystical does not entirely spiritualize the Eucharist. What about the body – of Christ and of the Church?
His answer starts out as a good one: worship is “the liturgy of the Word incarnate, who offers himself to us in his Body and Blood, and, thus, in a corporeal way.” He follows this with an equally solid answer: “It is, of course the new corporeality of the risen Lord, but it remains true corporeality, and it is this that we are given in the material signs of bread and wine. This means we are laid hold of by the Logos and for the Logos in our very bodies, in the bodily existence of our everyday life… The body is required to become capable of resurrection, to orient itself toward the resurrection, the Kingdom of God . . . . Incarnation must always lead through the Cross (the transforming of our wills in a communion of will with God) to Resurrection, to the rule of love which is the Kingdom of God.” (All emphases are mine.)
Ratzinger merely repeats here the great flaw in Catholic theology. Catholic theology jumps from Incarnation to Resurrection with the Crucifixion as the event in Christ’s life that allows for that jump.
The absence or minimalizing of the Crucifixion as the definitive center leaves Catholic theology to make the same move which Ratzinger does with the liturgy. The Incarnate Christ becomes the Resurrected Christ who is the definite sign of eschatological salvation by sharing in that Resurrection. Liturgy and worship ought, then, to focus on Incarnation and Resurrection. This is why it is essential, necessary for Ratzinger that worship return to the East Wall sacrificial altar and the priest facing East with the people. It is an eschatological symbol and analogy. As the sun rises anew in the East each day, so will Christ, the Sun of Righteousness, arise in eschatological glory, for which our liturgy must be a preparation and celebration in anticipation.
But the Incarnation and Resurrection are both either meaningless or mythology without the Crucifixion, the historical death of Christ the Son of God on the Cross, the atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world. The Crucified God in Christ is the center, the whole point and purpose of Incarnation and Resurrection. What matters most for Christianity is precisely who is God Incarnate and why, what significance for all history does his Resurrection hold for us? Those questions are answered in a saving, reconciling, and redemptive way when the answer is the Crucified Christ, the Crucified God.
The Eucharist is precisely the Eucharistic sacrifice, and it a real sacrifice, the re-presentation on each altar around the world of the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. It is the crucified Body and Blood which we share in the bead and wine: “my body given for you . . . my blood shed for you.” The Cross of Christ is the center of our faith and the linchpin that holds it all together.
The Gospel of Christ is the very odd “good news” that God died, not nobly or heroically or mythologically; God died a human death as a suspected rebel against Roman rule by the most humiliating, disgraceful and tortuous means the Romans thought up: public crucifixion. Christianity is not a myth of “the dying and rising god.” It is the historical claim that at a unique moment in our real-time history, God himself was executed by crucifixion, and that is how God has atoned for our sins, redeemed us from slavery to sin, made us righteous in the presence of God, and reconciled us to live the eternal life of God in the company of God.
(An excellent study of the paradox of salvation by crucifixion is: Michael J. Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids, MI: William B Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2001)
That unique, unrepeatable but no less real moment in history is what determines the meaning of the whole of history and all of time and space. Salvation comes in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, fully God, incarnate in our human, flesh and blood reality, our “human nature,” whose purpose for becoming incarnate was precisely to die by crucifixion. The Crucified God determines the meaning of the whole past, beginning with Creation, and the whole future, reaching its goal in the New Creation. Time, history and salvation all come into being, not at a mythical “in the beginning,” but in the middle, when God himself was crucified.
This is both Ratzinger’s mistake and equally the mistake of the modern proponents of the “communion table” or “table altar.” The Crucifixion of Christ as the central moment and purpose of the Gospel is missing. For Ratzinger, that means a direct move from Incarnation to Eschatology, and the focus of liturgy and worship becomes wholly expectation, looking into the future for when Christ will return in glory. The “table altar” proponents are worse. They stop at the Incarnation and believe in an ongoing incarnation distinct from the Cross, where the Holy Spirit binds the People of God together around the incarnate, sacramental Lord. Here Ratzinger is right about the “table altar” creating a self-centered closed circle with no opening to God.
A clear centering of liturgy on the Crucifixion and the Crucified God who is Christ can be made evident by the proposal of a large crucifix firmly mounted on the Eucharistic table, such that it comes between the celebrant and the congregation in both directions. The congregation will look to the Crucified Christ as the center of the Eucharist. The priest will look to the Crucified Christ as his own anonymity as celebrating in persona Christi.
Christ Crucified is the New “East.” We celebrate the Eucharistic sacrifice as an event in our present, as the real presence of the crucified Christ uniting us to his crucifixion Every time we celebrate the Eucharist, we celebrate the presence of Christ at the center and ourselves caught up into that center. That is how we need to think about Christian eschatology. The Cross is Christ always present and so always coming to meet us from past and future alike.
Ratzinger is right about bare, unadorned, plain wooden table altars. But I disagree with his theological conclusions that lead inexorably to the East-Wall Oriented altar. The eastern “orientation” of the altar is eschatological. It trusts that the Resurrected Christ is the Son who will return on account of his Incarnation as the person, Jesus. What is missing is the centrality of the Crucifixion to hold together the Incarnation of God and the Parousia of Christ as real-time, historical events and not mythology or metaphor.
The Crucifix (and not the empty cross) is the central, defining symbol of the Christian faith, as it signifies the atoning death on the cross of Jesus which restores us to communion with and union in the Triune God. That real crucifixion of God in Christ took place in our real-time history. It was a single, unique, unrepeatable moment, as were the Incarnation, the Resurrection and the Ascension. What might be the “biography” of Jesus is subverted by these four events that define who Jesus was and what his mission on earth was to be; four events that can only happen once in the whole of history, and so are inaccessible to conventional “scientific” notions of history that credit as real only those types of occurrences and events which are repeatable and are actually repeated, a “control sample” which allows us to judge the reality of other reported events. God cannot act in that sort of way because God is totally Other and totally Unique.
The only way anyone can know God is to find him and see him and believe in him as he comes to us in the God-Man, the person Jesus, the Son of God the Father. For the human race, God exists only as this particular person, Jesus. The meaning and goal of our lives, our history and our existence can be found in an ultimate way only by believing in Jesus as God: Incarnate God; Crucified God; Resurrected God; Ascended God. The historical life of Jesus must be interpreted and understood through faith in the divine uniqueness of Jesus – Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension.
How we worship God must have the Crucifixion of God as its point of reference. To interpose a crucifix between celebrant and assembly on the Eucharistic table makes for a better symbol of this reality of the centrality of the Crucified God, Jesus Christ, than does either an East Wall Oriented altar of sacrifice or a plain table to celebrate “the Meal,” “the Lord’s Supper.” The Crucified Christ must get in our way at worship. A large Cross that dominates the Eucharistic table does exactly that: the Crucified Christ gets in our way, comes between celebrant and assembly, and gives to both a place, a location, a symbol of the sacrament being celebrated for real “eye contact” with God giving his own life to us in the sacrament of bread and wine. In this way the whole Church is “looking together at the Lord.”
{Footnote: In no way do I wish it to be taken that I distance myself from the theology and ecclesial achievements of Joseph Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI. The intellectual component of my conversion to Catholicism was shaped by three of the 20th century’s most significant and influential Catholic theologians: Henri de Lubac; Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Joseph Ratzinger. Henri de Lubac led the way. Von Balthasar saved me from “progressive” Catholicism. But Joseph Ratzinger most shaped my thought and my understanding of the content and interpretation of the Catholic faith. To whatever degree my mind thinks systematically (and that is often up for grabs) it is close by the path of Joseph Ratzinger. Ratzinger saved me from being seduced by Thomism. His construction of theology on St. Augustine and St. Bonaventure, and his “hermeneutic of continuity,” continue still to open fresh and new insights for me. The Spirit of the Liturgy is one of the books I would single out as “mind-changing” for me. Ratzinger’s encouragement of the Lutheran – Catholic Ecumenical Dialogues validated my conviction in Ecumenical Theology, while his motu proprio establishing the Anglican Ordinariate inspired me to think in new ways about the purpose, method and goal of ecumenism. In fact it takes more than a little “chutzpah” on my part to disagree with Professor Ratzinger, even on this minor point.}
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