The Spirit of the Liturgy

The Spirit of the Liturgy is Cardinal Ratzinger’s latest and perhaps most ambitious effort to reform the reform, and it comes as a welcome breath of fresh air to architects gasping in the noxious atmosphere of the archi-liturgical establishment. It is the disarming clarity of his meditation that catches the attention of the designer, who by now has grown numb to the equivocations, deliberate ambiguities, and often downright faithlessness of recent trends in liturgical thinking. Though some of his conclusions leave something to be desired, the alacrity with which he points out the Emperor’s state of undress is bound to provoke a smile in even the most disaffected reader. Passages such as the following stand out:

In the early days of the Liturgical Movement, people sometimes argued for a distinction between the “thing-centered” view of the Eucharist in the patristic age and the personalistic view of the post-medieval period. The Eucharistic Presence, they said, was understood, not as the Presence of a Person, but as the presence of a gift distinct from the Person. This is nonsense. Anyone reading the texts will find that there is no support anywhere for these ideas. (p. 88)

His lucid meditations, peppered with frank passages such as this, clarify many issues of serious consequence to the designer, issues that have been clouded for almost a half-century now.

Two issues stand out right away for the architect, of course, and they are the altar and the tabernacle. In the case of the altar, Ratzinger relies heavily on the scholarship of Louis Bouyer, making a very powerful case for the ad orientem posture for the Mass. This, he says, contrary to popular wisdom, was the early Christian posture for prayer, and it was a development from the Jewish synagogal practice of facing Jerusalem. When they prayed, Jews oriented themselves toward the Shekinah—the cloud of God’s presence—in the Holy of Holies. After the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D., that tradition continued in expectation of the Temple’s reconstruction and the Shekinah’s restoration with the arrival of the Messiah. To Christians, of course, the Messiah had already come, and the Jerusalem for which they waited and hoped was not an earthly Jerusalem, but a heavenly one. Hence, the Christian posture for prayer took on an eschatological significance: geographical east was the orientation for prayer in expectation of the Second Coming, the rising sun that would never set.

He laments the now practically universal versus populum posture which has been misinterpreted to be the intention of the Council. Indeed, it is based on a dual misunderstanding: first on the nature of a communal meal in antiquity, particularly the Last Supper; and second on the adequacy of the meal image to describe the Eucharist. Turning once more to Bouyer’s scholarship, the ancient meal, he points out, would never have involved the presider facing the other participants. Indeed, they would all have been seated on the convex side of a crescent-shaped table, the other side being left open for service. In either case, however, the meal image is insufficient to describe the nature of the Eucharist. For Christ used the Jewish Passover meal as a framework for the establishment of the new reality of Christian worship, the Eucharistic reference to the Cross, “and thus to the transformation of Temple sacrifice into worship of God that is in harmony with logos” (p. 78).

Ratzinger dismisses the notion that the Council’s admonition for “full, conscious and active participation” implies, or much less requires, Missa versus populum, in his chapter on “The Body and the Liturgy.” There he makes the case that the phrase refers primarily to an interior union with the central action of the Mass, the Eucharistic Prayer, rather than to general activity. When it comes to the sacramental celebration proper, external actions are secondary, for there space must be made for the actio Christi, and ours is to become “one body and one spirit” with Him. He states, “Anyone who grasps this will easily see that it is not now a matter of looking at or toward the priest, but of looking together toward the Lord and going out to meet him” (sic).

The reader, however, will be puzzled to learn that Ratzinger insists on the ad orientem posture only for the Liturgy of the Eucharist, and not for the Liturgy of the Word. The latter, he states, suggests a “face-to-face exchange,” a particularly baffling assertion considering Ratzinger’s heavy use of the work of Bouyer, who points out that in the synagogue God’s word was read facing Jerusalem (Liturgy and Architecture, p. 9). It was more than mere teaching, but rather a “true encounter with God” (Liturgy and Architecture, p. 10). Should we not say the same for the Liturgy of the Word in the Mass? And architects hoping for encouragement to reverse the now thirty-year-old migration of the altar westward will also be disappointed. Eminently practical, if not pastoral, the Cardinal suggests that, in recently renovated churches, the crucifix placed on the altar could function as the oriens of the priest and praying community.

Ratzinger’s discussion on the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament is likewise at once rewarding and frustrating. He restates beautifully the Church’s traditional teaching that the whole Christ is corporeally present under the appearance of bread and wine, defending the so-called “medieval errors” of transubstantiation, adoration and other Eucharistic devotions. He even handily dismantles the corpus mysticum vs. corpus verum argument of the modernist establishment. In the middle ages the use of the two terms switched: where the Fathers used "corpus mysticum" to signify the Eucharist, the medievals now used "corpus verum,” and where “corpus verum” was used to signify the Mystical Body of Christ, now was used “corpus mysticum. ” The trade was taken by the modernists to mean that a naturalism had taken hold in Eucharistic doctrine and that a correction was in order. This arrow is in the quiver of almost all liturgical design consultants today seeking to tuck the Blessed Sacrament discretely away in some inconspicuous corner. But, Ratzinger argues, mysticum did not mean “mystical” in the modern sense, but rather “pertaining to the mystery, the sphere of the sacrament.” Yes, there were certain losses in Christian awareness of the corporate character of the Eucharist; nevertheless, the Eucharist can only bring us together to form Christ’s “true Body” because “in it the Lord gives us his true Body” (p. 88). Ammunition such as this will compel an interior cheer in any member of a building committee who has had to duel a liturgical renovator in defense of his fair church building.

Ratzinger then goes on to argue that the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament is not opposed to the Mass. Indeed, “Communion only reaches its true depths when it is supported and surrounded by adoration” (p. 90). Furthermore, the Blessed Sacrament brings life to an otherwise dead church. He paints bold strokes in favor of the traditional direct relationship of altar and tabernacle, going so far as to say, “How many saints—yes, including saints of the love of neighbor—were nourished and led to the Lord by this experience [of the Eucharist]”. Or so it would seem. Just when we expect him to deliver the coup-de-grace and declare forthrightly that the tabernacle never ought to have moved off the altar, he states wanly that we really ought to find the proper place for the tabernacle.

Perhaps the Cardinal was being rhetorical, and said as much as he could say in the current political climate and in light of the fact that the new GIRM states that it is more in keeping with sign value that the tabernacle should not be on the altar on which Mass is celebrated (no. 314-5). Even so those who honor tradition have much to be thankful for in this chapter, as in the whole book. And modernists have much to fear. It is clear that the book was intended as a corrective to the disastrous effects of the modernist architectural and liturgical hegemony. In its preface, in fact, the Cardinal states that he hopes it will spawn a new liturgical movement. We sincerely hope it will.

Dino Marcantonio is assistant professor of architecture at the University of Notre Dame.

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