| 12/1/2009 12:15:00 PM | Email this article • Print this article | Order of the Mass
Mass - Part I
 | THE TEACHING OF CHRIST
By Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl
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Soon - probably in a year's time - we will have a new translation of the Roman Missal, approved by Vatican authorities and ready for use in the United States. At their annual November meeting that just concluded, the U.S. bishops approved the last section of the translation and forwarded it to the Vatican, where the rest of the translation has already been received and reviewed. Once the "recognitio" (approval) is given, it should take, we are told by publishers, about a year for the new text to be fittingly prepared and published.
In light of this coming new translation, I thought it would be helpful in our review of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to take a look once again at the Order of the Mass.
"At the Last Supper, on the night He was betrayed, our Savior instituted the Eucharistic sacrifice of his body and blood." This firmly held teaching of the Church, repeated in the Second Vatican Council's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (47), is reaffirmed in both the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1323) and the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults (Ch. 17, "Eucharist: Source and Summit of the Christian Life"). Every time we celebrate Mass, we do what Christ did at the Last Supper and what the Church has done at every Eucharist century after century from the rising to the setting of the sun in every part of the world. St. Thomas Aquinas sums up this mystery: "It [the Mass] is nothing else than the sacrifice which Christ himself offered."
Perhaps because we have such ready access to Mass and are so familiar with it, we can be tempted to take it for granted. Worse yet, we may be lax in our participation in this great gift. The more we learn about what actually takes place in the Eucharist the more we should desire it.
One of the most intriguing aspects of the celebration of the Eucharist is the fact that it has changed so little over twenty centuries. Its essential elements are found in the gospel narratives of the institution of the Eucharist. The liturgical structure of that celebration developed very rapidly in the early life of the Church and has changed only imperceptibly since. Even in many of the details, we find in the celebration of the Liturgy today an identity with what went before us for so many centuries.
In speaking about the continuity of the celebration of the Liturgy today with the most ancient forms, the Catechism holds up for examination the text of St. Justin Martyr: "As early as the second century, we have the witness of St. Justin Martyr for the basic lines of the order of the Eucharistic celebration. They have stayed the same until our own day for all the great liturgical families" (1345).
St. Justin Martyr was a devout follower of the Lord, convinced that he could bring others to the practice of the faith by explaining to them what Christians believe and how we worship. What we know about St. Justin has to be pieced together from various sources and writers. We are told that he was a Roman citizen. We also read that he was educated in Greece and there would have studied logic, philosophy and literature and would have come into contact with many of the leading currents of thought that swept the Mediterranean world.
Sometime around the year 155, he wrote to the pagan emperor Antoninus Pius, who reigned from 138 to 161, explaining what Christians did when they celebrated the Eucharist. In the Catechism there is a step by step outline in the words of St. Justin Martyr (1345). Were you to take this text and line it up against the Order of Mass that we use today, you would find very little difference and that only in the details.
In July 2007, Pope Benedict XVI, in his apostolic letter, Summorum Pontificium, highlighted the continuity of the Eucharistic Liturgy by pointing out that even in the face of numerous changes over the centuries in the Order of Mass, the differences we experience today between the 1962 Ordo and the 1970 Novus Ordo are expressions of the one same Eucharistic Liturgy.
As we learn in the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, the Church has always taken Christ's command to prepare the large furnished room where he would celebrate the Passover meal with them and institute the sacrifice of his body and blood as bearing on its own responsibility to give directions concerning the preparation of the minds of the worshippers and the place, rites and text of the celebration of the holy Eucharist. The norms that are used in the missal for the celebration of the Mass according to the Roman Rite "are also evidence of the great concern of the Church, of her faith, and of her unchanged love for the great mystery of the Eucharist" (1).
While the order of the Mass has experienced change over the two millennia of the celebration of the Eucharist in memory of Christ, when we come together at the table of the Lord we gather in the spirit of unity and faith. The Sunday celebration of the Eucharist commemorates the Resurrection of Christ and is therefore for Christians the Lord's Day, our holy day, the time to celebrate the memorial of his death and Resurrection that Christ asked us to do in his memory.
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