For the most part, the comments are depressing.

Fr. Neil Xavier O’Donoghue has written a response to Magister, and sent it to us. I consider it a “must-read” to help us have a better informed and more well-rounded discussion here at Pray Tell. Here’s a bit of it:

I have personally attended thousands of Eucharistic celebrations in Neocatechumenal communities in the United States, Canada, Ireland, England, Scotland, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, Estonia, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Australia, Guam, Saipan, Taiwan and Israel.  All of these Eucharists have been in conformity with the relevant rubrics and used the approved liturgical books of the Roman Rite.

I find it hard to put up with the constant criticisms from Magister and the like who blend some plain untruth with half-truths taken out of context.

You can read the whole thing here.

Update: Here are some photographs of Neocatechumenal Way liturgies, also supplied by Fr. O’Donoghue.

April 3, 1997 Convivence with 253 Bishops of the Americas on the theme: "Evangelization and the Neocatechumenal Way."

Pope John Paul II celebrating the Eucharist in December 1988 on the Feast of the Holy Family at the Neocatechumenal Center in Porto San Giorgio (Italy).

Then-Cardinal Ratzinger celebrates Mass during his visit to the Redemptoris Mater Seminary in Rome where he delivered a conference on Dominus Iesus on December 16, 2000

Here are the items that raised Magister’s eyebrows:

The Masses of the Neocatechumenal communities have always been distinguished by at least four elements.

1. They are celebrated in small groups, corresponding to the different stages of advancement on the catechetical journey. If in a parish, for example, there are twelve Neocatechumenal communities, each at a different stage, there will be twelve Masses, celebrated in separate places more or less at the same time, preferably on Saturday evening.

2. The surroundings and furnishings trace out the image of a banquet: a table with the participants seated around it. Even when the Neocatechumenals celebrate the Mass not in a parish hall but in a church, they often ignore the altar. They put a table in the middle and sit around it in a circle.

3. Each of the biblical readings of the Mass is preceded by an extensive “monition” on the part of one or the other of the community and is followed, especially after the Gospel, by “resonances,” or personal reflections by a substantial number of those present. The priest’s homily is added to the “resonances” without being distinguished from them.

4. Communion also takes place in banquet form. The consecrated bread – a large unleavened loaf, two thirds white flour and one third whole wheat flour, prepared and baked according to detailed rules established by Kiko – is broken and distributed to those present, who remain in their places. After the distribution, it is eaten at the same time by all, including the priest. After this, the priest goes from one person to the next with the chalice of consecrated wine, which everyone drinks.

There are also other peculiarities, but these four are enough to understand how different in form and substance the Masses of the Neocatechumenals are from those celebrated according to the general liturgical rules. A difference that is certainly more pronounced than that between the Masses in the ancient Roman rite and in the modern rite.

The Vatican authorities have repeatedly sought to bring the Neocatechumenals back to greater fidelity to the “lex orandi” in effect in the Catholic Church. But with a weak pulse and almost no results.

But it seems the Holy See did not mind so much after all. The movement has come away with the laurels in its recent interactions with the Pope, who appears to have approved their practices while urging more openness to integration with the work of the bishop and the life of the ordinary parishioners.

Catholic Culture now reports that the approval does not extend to how they celebrate Mass. But, then, it never did. So the situation appears to be unchanged. The rules they didn’t follow before are still in force. And still able to be ignored.

As several commenters mentioned, in the Eastern Churches consecration isn’t so tightly confined. That reminded me of a great video I used to show my undergraduates how differently we treat the unconsecrated bread and wine in East and West. This is a Ukrainian Catholic Church, with clergy and assistants preparing for the Great Entrance, before the anaphora (Eucharistic Prayer) begins. The title of the video comes from the fact that it’s filmed behind the iconostasis, where laypersons are very rarely able to see. You can see the eucharistic elements here are venerated (bowed to).

This is reflected in Eucharistic theology as well as in practice: in the East language about the Eucharist as symbol, icon, or image of Christ in heaven has been retained (alongside “realistic” language that affirms the Eucharist the assembly eats is the body and blood of Christ) since the patristic era. Both kinds of language can be used before or after the eucharistic prayer. (It’s worth mentioning that symbolic language is much more robust in the East, due to its association with Christology, than it seems to most Western Christians.) Symbolic language was less accepted in the West after the medieval controversies on Eucharistic presence. The West took for its inspiration the work of Ambrose of Milan:

[The Roman Canon] says: “On the day before He suffered, He took bread in his holy hands.” Before it is consecrated, it is bread; but when Christ’s words have been added, it is the body of Christ . . . . And before the words of Christ, the chalice is full of wine and water; when the words of Christ have been added, then blood is effected, which redeemed the people (Ambrose, The Sacraments, 4.23; trans. Roy J. Deferrari, Fathers of the Church vol. 44, p 305).

Packaged eucharistic hosts on a shelf

Today at Mass, in a parish I was visiting, the intercessions brought this home to me very concretely.  The intercessions opened with a prayer for Pope Benedict and for the local bishop.  We then prayed for the unborn, and for the very sick and aged, that they would be allowed to die naturally.  We concluded with a prayer for the living and deceased of a particular group, for whom ‘this Mass was being offered up.’  Not that there are problems with any of the concerns voiced in these intercessions; I united my own prayers without difficulties with those of the assembly.  Rather, the point is the different kinds of concerns voiced in this parish from the ones I hear routinely in my own community (both parishes are in the same city).

My own community as often as not will voice the city’s heartaches in intercessions: the plight of the homeless and of those out of work or the suffering of those affected by the increase in violent crime.  And especially during the open intercessions, one might hear people “balance out” – for lack of a better term – the community’s prayers.  I remember, for example, how a prayer for the men and women in uniform was followed by a prayer for all the victims of violent, military intervention.

The point of all this is not that some intercessions have more right to be prayed than others.  My point simply is that our intercessions reveal who we are and what we passionately care about.  What will those who come to our liturgies as strangers learn about us, how will they “know” us, by our intercessions?

With that experience as background I have read with pure delight Neil Xavier O’Donoghue’s groundbreaking and magnificently “holistic” The Eucharist in Pre-Norman Ireland (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011) ISBN-13: 978-0-268-03732-1. On the one hand, the author updates a field that has not been carefully surveyed since F. E. Warren’s Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church, published in 1881. On the other, he models for all students of liturgical studies the integration of textual and non-textual data called for in “holistic” liturgical studies. After an extensive chapter outlining the historical development of Irish Christianity (and in the process challenging many of the assumptions and methods of earlier historians of the area), O’Donoghue lists, situates, and interprets the written sources by which pre-Norman Irish liturgy might be re-constructed. These include liturgical texts proper (the Stowe Missal with its Old Irish Mass Tract, the Palimpsest Sacramentary , various rites of the sick, the Old Hymnal and the Antiphonary of Bangor) and ancillary texts found in the Penitentials, monastic rules, saints’ vitae, homiletic materials, and treatises such as Gille of Limerick’s De statu ecclesiae and Gerald of Wales’ The History and Topography of Ireland. Having exhaustively gleaned these textual sources for what they can tell us about Eucharistic practices and texts, the author then surveys the remaining monuments in which the Eucharist might have been celebrated in pre-Norman Ireland (church construction, round towers, altars, monastic “cities” and stational liturgies) as well as the objects associated with its celebration (Eucharistic vessels, bread, flabella, and the Eucharistic iconography of high crosses and illustrated manuscripts).

O’Donoghue quotes Robert Taft in the conclusion of this wonderful work to the effect that “the history of liturgy is a mosaic of reconstruction, a work-in-progress, and it is not guesswork but only the recovering, cleaning and repositioning of each small tessera that renders this reconstruction possible.” I strongly encourage the readers of Pray Tell to make The Eucharist in Pre-Norman Ireland part of their reading, if not to dispel any myths about a separate Celtic or Irish Eucharistic rite in this period, to observe a master of “holistic” liturgical studies incorporating written and non-written sources in re-constructing a portion of the mosaic of Christian worship practices.

TOPIC 2 (Eucharist, Eastern):
Patristic and Early Medieval Byzantine Commentaries on the Eucharistic Liturgy

This topic exposes the examinee to four primary early and medieval commentaries (by Theodore of Mopsuestia, Pseudo-Dionysius “the Areopagite,” Maximus Confessor, Germanus of Constantinople and Nicholas Cabasilas) on the Divine Liturgies of the Byzantine rite, attending to what they reveal about the development of the liturgy itself, to the development of mystical commentary in the Byzantine tradition from “mystagogical” to “allegorical” and to the theology of the Eucharistic sacrament (including the topics of presence and sacrifice insofar as they are treated by the commentators).

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Primary Sources

Cabasilas, Nicholas. A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, tr. J. M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977.

Germanus of Constantinople. On the Divine Liturgy, tr. Paul Meyendorff. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984.

Maximus Confessor. “The Church’s Mystagogy,” 181-225. Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, tr. George Berthold. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1985.

Pseudo-Dionysius. “The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy,” 195-259. Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, tr. Colm Lubheid. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1987.

Theodore of Mopsuestia, “Baptismal Homily V” and “Baptismal Homily VI” (= Catechetical Sermons 15-16), 226-250. Edward Yarnold, SJ, The Awe Inspiring Rites of Initiation: The Origins of the R.C.I.A. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2001.

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Secondary Sources

Bornert, René. Les Commentaires byzantins de la divine liturgie du VIIe au XVe siècle (Archives de l’Orient Chrétien 9). Paris: Institut Français d’Études Byzantines, 1966.

Golitzin, Alexander. Et Introibo Ad Altare Dei: The Mystagogy of Dionysius Areopagita, with Special Reference to Its Predecessors in the Eastern Christian Tradition. Thessalonikē: Patriarchikon Idruma Paterikōn Meletōn/George Dedousis, 1994.

Loudovikos, Nikolaos. A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor’s Eschatological Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity, tr. Elizabeth Theokritoff. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2010.

Louth, Andrew. “The Reception of Dionysius up to Maximus Confessor,” 43-53. Re-Thinking Dionysius the Areopagite, ed. Sarah Coackley and Charles M. Stang Oxford Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Reine, Francis Joseph. The Eucharistic Doctrine and Liturgy of the Mystagogical Catecheses of Theodore of Mopsuestia. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1942 .

Rorem, Paul. Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to their Influence, 91-132. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Schulz, Hans-Joachim. The Byzantine Liturgy, tr. Matthew J. O’Connell. New York: Pueblo, 1986.

Taft, Robert F., “The Liturgy of the Great Church: An initial Synthesis of Structure and Interpretation on the Eve of Iconoclasm,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 34-35 (1980-1981): 45-75.

Tsirpanlis, Constantine N. The Liturgical and Mystical Theology of Nicolas Cabasilas. Athens: Theologia, 1976.

There are factual errors of which Somerville seems blithely unaware. I am no linguist but examine Somerville’s statement that since “Catullus was a contemporary of Caesar Augustine, the Latin in which he wrote would have been about the same as that used by Romans during the time Jesus lived on earth”. Even though this author is herself a poet she does not seem able to distinguish between poetic speech and everyday talk. It is hard to imagine ordinary Romans speaking in hendecasyllabic or elegiac couplets. And are we suggesting that Jesus spoke Latin?

Somerville alleges that the “Eucharistic Prayer may not be a poem in a technical sense, but it functions as one.” There may be a good point buried here, but what kind of poetic function is she talking about? I would have thought that the EP should instead consist of a ritual language, i.e., one that expresses (repetitively) truths that are already deep within the assembly—which includes the people in the pews, and therefore must “come across the footlights”, as the theater world say. As far as I can see this form is therefore quite different than most poetry.

That said, I do agree with some main points of Somerville. The new language does seem “stiff and unwieldy,” as she says. And I think it is silly for Church to say that, in the United States, the word “men” today still means men and women. This is quickly becoming a dead usage, and it certainly is out of place in a time when women are at last being recognized as equals to genetic “men”. I would agree that “chalice” is an awkward substitution for “cup.” It caters too much to the monarchical phase of the Church. And finally, I believe that the reversion to “for you and for many” is simply trouble-making. Again, I am no scholar in this, but those who pleaded with the Pope to allow at least “the many” as making good and proper sense in English were right. Somerville unfortunately labors the obvious but unthinkable interpretation that Jesus died for one group of people but not for any others. If anyone sees a valid reason for such wording, I hope we hear from them below.

The whole is worth a read, but perhaps some paragraphs towards the end are particularly significant:

Our part of the Church is not alone in having spent a great deal of effort on liturgical reform. At Advent, our brothers and sisters in the Roman Catholic Church will be required to use new liturgical texts. We can always learn from the example of other members of the Christian community and indeed our own liturgy has been reformed by reference to the testimony and practices of the Church of the first centuries.

In former times before the liturgies of our Church had fully recovered these early forms, some of our priests adopted the Roman rite as a sign of fidelity to the ancient common tradition and an expression of our unity in Christ. At best their intention was to contribute to the recovery of a tradition which is both Catholic and Reformed, while pointing the way to the liturgical convergence we now enjoy, not least through the work of the international English Language Liturgical Consultation. They also recognised the proper place in the liturgy of prayer for leaders in the world wide church in addition to our own Archbishop. This is especially true of the Pope, who is undeniably the Patriarch of the West and as head of the Roman Catholic Church is charged with awesome pastoral and missionary responsibilities.

Much has been achieved and the debates of previous generations have influenced the Church’s liturgical practice and contributed to a convergence of eucharistic doctrine and rites. So it is with some dismay that I have learned of the intentions of some clergy in the Diocese to follow instructions which have been addressed to the Roman Catholic Church and to adopt the new Roman eucharistic rites at Advent.

The Pope has recently issued an invitation to Anglicans to move into full communion with the See of Rome in the Ordinariate where it is possible to enjoy the “Anglican patrimony” as full members of the Roman Catholic Church. Three priests in the Diocese have taken this step. They have followed their consciences.

For those who remain there can be no logic in the claim to be offering the Eucharist in communion with the Roman Church which the adoption of the new rites would imply. In these rites there is not only a prayer for the Pope but the expression of a communion with him; a communion Pope Benedict XVI would certainly repudiate.

At the same time rather than building on the hard won convergence of liturgical texts, the new Roman rite varies considerably from its predecessor and thus from Common Worship as well. The rationale for the changes is that the revised texts represent a more faithful translation of the Latin originals and are a return to more traditional language.

Priests and parishes which do adopt the new rites – with their marked divergences from the ELLC texts and in the altered circumstances created by the Pope’s invitation to Anglicans to join the Ordinariate – are making a clear statement of their disassociation not only from the Church of England but from the Roman Communion as well. This is a pastoral unkindness to the laity and a serious canonical matter. The clergy involved have sworn oaths of canonical obedience as well as making their Declaration of Assent. I urge them not to create further disunity by adopting the new rites.

There will be no persecution and no creation of ritual martyrs but at the same time there will be no opportunity to claim that the Bishop’s directions have been unclear. All the bishops of the Diocese when visiting parishes will celebrate according to the rites of the Church of England allowing for permitted local variations under Canon B5.

They do things differently in that part of the Church. For a Catholic response, perhaps less careful theologically than it should be but broadly sympathetic, see here.