Pints With Aquinas - Why Celebrate Mass AD ORIENTEM? | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: July 20, 2024

Father Pine talks about Versus Populum and Ad Orientem postures for saying Mass. He talks about why one may be used their bases in Church documents, and Why he prefers Ad Orientem. Support The Show: https://mattfradd.locals.com 📖 Fr. Pine's Book: https://bit.ly/3lEsP8F 🖥️ Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ 🟢 Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas 👕 Merch: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com 🚫 FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ 🔵 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd  

Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work for the Thomistic Institute and this is Pines with Aquinas. In this episode I would like to talk about liturgical orientation. Certainly in the last three years the arguments regarding the old right and the new right have heated up and with those arguments the arguments regarding ad orientum and versus populum celebration have also heated up. But when arguments heat up it doesn't necessarily lead to better discourse or clearer discourse sometimes just leads to louder discourse and angrier discourse. So do I think that we can rise above said loud and angry discourse? Probably not. But I do think

that we can do our best to host the arguments and to work our way through some of them so that way we can have a better appreciation for the church's tradition and hopefully a better appropriation thereof. So, liturgical orientation. Let's get after it. Here we go. Okay, so when it comes to this issue you've got lots of takes and you've also got lots of arguments. I think the general impression is that a younger generation is more for the celebration of the Okay, so when it comes to this issue, you got lots of takes and you've also got lots of arguments. I think the general impression is that a younger generation is more for the celebration of the sacred mysteries ad orientum, whereas an older generation is more against

the celebration of the holy mass ad orientum. Whether or not that's true, I don't know. I haven't looked at the data closely, or I don't know how that data would be gathered slash whether it is gathered, regardless. I think that amongst younger people, sometimes you can get down or you can get weary of the current liturgical fights or battles, and then you might console yourself by saying that it's just inevitable that Mass will be celebrated at Orientum by and large in the Christian world, so we can just kind of hunker down and or whatever

else one does. But I think that in the meantime, we can align ourselves better with the church's tradition and her liturgical riches by refining our argumentation, just trying to have a conversation. So maybe just a brief word about the scope of the argumentation. You know, I think that most people agree that the church has a right to organize and thereby to orient her liturgy. So what we're talking about here is a matter of, okay, on the one hand ex operae operato, the Holy Mass, it causes what it signifies.

And that happens irrespective of whether the priest's face is ad orientum or versus populum. But then we would next address the question of ex operae operantes. So not just by the work having been worked, but by the work of the worker. That is to say, by the priest and those assisting at the sacred liturgy, by their devout and pious entrance into what the church presents or represents and applies, you stand a better chance at making good use of those graces or permitting those graces to take deeper hold of your life. So I think a lot of people working within this setting will say that mass celebrated

at orientum conduces better to the reception of the graces which are made available on the altar. I would argue in that way. So that's my position. But when we advance arguments, typically we're advancing arguments of fittingness. So not like arguments of demonstration or strict necessity like it's just this way and no other. So we're arguing that it's better or arguing that it's more fitting or arguing that it's more appropriate. Things along those lines. So then with

those kind of as a backdrop you can think then of your conversation partner like who do you want to have these arguments with or with whom do you want to have these conversations and yeah I think that naturally we're gonna have these conversations with people who are already convinced that is to say like people who already share our mindset because we tend to have these conversations with our friends or the people with whom we assist at mass. We tend not to have these conversations with those who are convinced otherwise or those who hold the opposite position. If we do it's often on the internet, you know, like Twitter,

whatever, X, and those tend not to be too terribly fruitful. So I think a good approach is when rehearsing these arguments to kind of have somebody in mind, maybe even somebody who's somewhat innocent of the conversation, not in the sense that like it's better not to know anything, but in the sense that they haven't been kind of introduced or inducted into the argument. I think here of my mom, because like my mom, you know, she passed away, but before she passed away and now presently, a pious, devout woman who loves the Lord and loves the church and just goes to Mass at her parish but doesn't think too terribly much about how it could be better or ought to be better. She's

kind of doing her darnedest to like gift wrap things on the way out the door so she can present presents to people, you know, after mass. So just thinking about this person, you know, like thinking about celebrating home masses for my family when my mom was sick, you know, I'd always celebrate out of orientum and, you know, people might scratch their heads and they might say like, would you like to celebrate like this or like that? And I'd always celebrate auto-orientum and people might scratch their heads and they might say, would you like to celebrate like this or like that? And I'd be like, like that. And I might supply arguments kind of slowly

but surely to that end. So I'm thinking of people like that or I'm thinking about my mom. And then with that in mind to set forward a kind of constellation of arguments or a number of arguments. So here I'm following some of the arguments advanced by Joseph Ratzinger, Cardinal Seurat, Lawrence Feingold,

Robert Sokolowski, Matthew Levering, and others by whom I've been influenced on this issue. So four things, the canonical thing, the historical thing, the theological thing, and the phenomenological thing, and just a brief kind of sketch of each. So the canonical thing, a lot of people will point to sacrosanctum concilium and the general instruction of the Roman Missal, sometimes called the germ, and they'll point often enough to this paragraph 299 which calls for altars to be set away from the wall and the way that it's described

in the setting of the document is so that you can incense around the whole altar and so that mass can be celebrated towards the people. There's like an ambiguous reference, like it's not clear whether it's encouraging mass to be celebrated towards the people or allowing that mass be celebrated towards the people. And you know, there are reasons for which one might want that given the orientation of the church itself or the liturgical space of the people or whatever else the customs of you know the time place. But it seems now that the interpretation of that text on the basis of the Latin grammar is that it's just affording for the possibility.

All right so it doesn't seem that mass is to be celebrated always and everywhere versus populum and that even if that paragraph were to argue in a stronger direction it seems like a very incidental or even accidental way to introduce what would be a big shift. And then people will point to other points in the germ where it's clear that the priest then turns to the people. So at various points in the Mass when celebrated auto-orientum the priest turns towards the people to engage them in a kind of dialogue or to alert them to what has taken place and the germ states those quite clearly with the presumption that the priest will have otherwise been facing auto-orientum. Okay so those

are kind of just like the canonical arguments or the liturgical textual arguments. Then you've got the historical arguments. So you've got the background of the synagogue and in Feingold's book, the Eucharist, he'll talk about how synagogue worship, I guess in the intertestamental period, would have been facing Jerusalem, right? So it has a kind of orientation which would involve facing one direction on the part of, you know, celebrant ministers or celebrant attendees for lack of a better description. And then it seems that in the first millennium of the Church's life Mass would have been celebrated

more versus populum. I'm not a scholar of this stuff so I'm going to be corrected. I should be corrected. And then in the second millennium in the medieval setting you have more there the development of mass celebrated ad orientum. So patristic setting of kind of versus populum and the medieval setting of more ad orientum. And then with the Protestant Reformation you have arguments in the direction of versus populum surfacing again with greater reveriments. So I think that like when we recover something, and you'll find this in a lot of liturgical arguments regarding like the placement of the tabernacle or receiving on the tongue or on the hand or receiving under both species, the question is if you're going to recover something, why? So why would you express a preferential option for the ancient or for the medieval?

Because the church's tradition doesn't seem to envision that we would skip over things. It seems to envision that we would work within the bounds of a kind of continuity. So I think that just beyond the lookout for historical arguments which say they did it then so we should do it now. Well it's like then when and what happened since and how did the church enunciate those changes in the meantime. So I want to spend most time though there with theological arguments. And here, you have various authors, and St. Thomas cites St. John Damascene to this effect, who argue for the fittingness of a worship auto-orientum, that is to say, to the East. And like one of the first reasons given is that because it's in the East that you have the movement of the heavenly bodies.

You can hear there a little bit of an ancient or medieval cosmology. Which movement of heavens displays the divine majesty? Right, so the idea there is that it's Godward, okay, so that the mass would be celebrated Godward. And in doing that, there's on the one hand a kind of disorientation in that we are no longer celebrating towards the earthly Jerusalem as would have been common with synagogue worship. Now, you know, following this disorientation there's an orientation we're celebrating towards the heavenly Jerusalem. So with that there's a kind of delocalization of

worship and then a localization of worship in God, that is to say in Christ. So St. Thomas will then add following St. John Damacy and a second reason that we worship kind of towards paradise, thinking here of Europe facing towards the east, where paradise is thought to have been or is, and that what we lost in sin we recover in redemption. So there's this kind of longing for a return to paradise. But then he says, I mean, finally, third and finally, that it's towards Christ, all right, who identifies himself as coming from the East, in Matthew 24, whom we acknowledge in the O Antiphons as O Oriens, O Daystar, as

coming from the East. So this idea here is that it situates us within salvation history. It is God-word. It's in Christ. So worship is not so much local as it is doxological, that is to say, ordered by glory, or eschatological, that is to say, ordered by the end times. Typically, though, when we rehearse theological arguments, the big ticket item is sacrifice. How best do we capture and communicate the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ? So clearly, our Lord intends us to perpetuate His sacrifice. He institutes it at the Last Supper, making what happens the next day there

present in sacramental fashion, making his body present in sacramental fashion, so that when it comes time on Good Friday to offer his life, in fact, right, that he fills that liturgical rite from the Last Supper with the power of his passion so that we can then represent and apply his passion in the celebration of the Holy Mass. So the perennial Catholic teaching is that the Mass is a sacrifice. Why? Well, because it's the same sacrifice as Calvary.

Because you've got the same priest, Christ, offering to the same God, the same victim, Christ, for the same people, us. So it's an unbloody sacrifice which perpetuates the bloody sacrifice of Calvary. And the orientation of Catholic worship is through sacrifice to communion. So the sacrifice is made present and in making the sacrifice present, so too then Christ is made present, really and substantially. So it seems that the Catholic teaching is that the Mass is, if we can speak of first and second, is first sacrifice and then a meal. That is to say, in making the sacrifice present, then

communion is made present, which we partake of and attain to the final effect of the sacred liturgy, which is the upbuilding of the bodily body of Christ. So we grow in grace and charity and are made yet more perfectly members of the mystical body so that we might be the one worshiping Christ head and members So then you know there's a Protestant critique of this teaching There's a worry that the sacrifice of the mass is an additional sacrifice and that it dilutes or debases The one sacrifice of Calvary and you can think here of the letter to the Hebrews So with the Protestant critique there's an insistence. This is not a sacrifice

You know the celebration of the Lord's Supper is not a sacrifice. What we're dealing with here is not an altar. It's a table. What we're having here is a meal, right? But in doing that, you cut the kind of continuity of the New Testament sacrifice with the Old Testament sacrifice and even the natural law sacrifice that has gone before. And you end up having problems with fulfillment, and we could discuss that at length, but maybe on another day. Basically, the Catholic conviction is that at length, but maybe on another day. Basically, the Catholic conviction is that the only thing that's going to save me is Christ's sacrifice.

It's the only thing that's sufficient to overcome sin and death, and that we need to have that represented and applied to us so that it can accompany us through the whole of our human life, so that when we sin, we have medicine in the cabinet, a medicine of immortality. So we want the sacrifice of Christ present to us. We want to cultivate an awareness of that sacrifice, an appreciation for that sacrifice. We want to lay hold of that sacrifice. We want to use that sacrifice. So then, you know, by faith and sacrament, we have access to it, and we don't want to like back away from that access, or we don't want to give up that access. So the idea is that the mass in its signification, in its celebration, should capture the sacrificial aspect. There should be a theocentrism to the offering of the mass. That is to say it should

be by Christ in the spirit to the father, ad patrem. And so then the further argument is that celebration of mass ad orientum better captures this sacrificial aspect because, yeah, you have it present there before you as the priest faces the Father acting in the person of Christ and leads with him the people of God who unite their sacrifice to his in that worship. And you see this in the liturgical language. So like the collect at the beginning of the mass You know, we're talking to God as a community But then once you get to the heart of the mass in the candidate itself and in the words of institution

The priest isn't like speaking on behalf of the community. He's speaking as Christ. So he goes from we to I all right So like the institution narrative is a matter of quotation both in its words and in its gestures So that it can become completely transparent to the sacrifice of Christ, which Christ institutes and which he perpetuates. So then this leads us finally into kind of some phenomenological arguments. People find, you know, I find that when facing the people there's like less clarity in the sacrificial aspect, right? There's less clarity that what's being done here is an offering to the Most High God, because when the host is lifted, you know, when the consecrated

precious body is lifted, when the consecrated precious blood is lifted, it seems as if it's lifted towards the people to show them, you know, there's a showing aspect, but it should be lifted towards God to whom the sacrifice is made, and eventually the people commune in it because it's offered on their behalf or for their edification so then There's a kind of pressure then on the priest I think in the setting to dramatize and not simply quote or to interpret rather than simply to represent and There can arise then a kind of risk on the part of the people to focus too much on the personality of the priest

Or just the priest simply rather than on this sacrificial aspect. So then we can harken to imagery, which we have cited for us in the tradition, that what we have is like the nave, the ship, the ship of the church headed towards its eschatological end and you have the captain, the priests and the ministers who lead the people of God, the crew in that effort and they all focus on the same horizon. They are all oriented to the same goal. Or you can think about it in terms of like an army. You've got the general and his captains, like the priests and the liturgical ministers,

who then lead the infantry, the soldiers, in that fight so that they might achieve the goal in the campaign of salvation. So the arguments here, kind of clearing the ground with the canonical and historical arguments and then advancing some of the theological and phenomenological arguments is that what you have in Mass Celebrated at Orientum better captures Christ's institution, better captures his sacrifice, and so then better captures the communion which we are intended to partake of. So that's what I hope to share. Alright, I hope that's helpful for you.

This is Pons of the Quinus. If you haven't yet, do subscribe to the channel and push the bell and get sweet email updates when other cool things happen. Also I contribute to a podcast called God's Plaining in which we have conversations with some frequency on the nature of the mass and our participation therein. And if you would, say a prayer for me because I'm writing a book about the Most Holy Eucharist, your Eucharistic identity, and I'm coming to the end here and I'd like to finish it and I'd like it to be good and I'd like it to be helpful and fruitful for the people of God. So if you

could pour a little prayer into that I'd be appreciative. Okay to that end, no of my prayers for you. Please pray for me and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines of the Aquinas.