Ad Orientem

At St. Monica St. George, we celebrate Mass ad orientem at various times.  The most common of these is what we call Face the Father Fridays.

Let's learn together about what this is - what the liturgy is, what the Mass is, and why we celebrate the Mass the way that we do!  For the most recent articles, scroll to the bottom.

Face the Father Friday is when, on Friday mornings at the daily Mass, we celebrate the Mass ad orientem.  This is a Latin phrase which means “toward the east,” which also is interpreted as meaning that, at certain points throughout the Mass, the priest faces symbolically toward God.  Therefore, the people and the priest together are “facing the Father.”

What does this mean, practically?  It means that, as a general rule, the priest will face (at least symbolically) whom he is addressing.  Therefore, at those points where the priest is addressing the people, he will face the people, and at those points when the priest is addressing God, he faces the altar and away from the people.

As to the second question… That will require a long answer.  And so, instead of trying to do that in one fell swoop, perhaps it would be best if we step through a series of questions in order to grow in our understanding of the liturgy, the Mass, and the question of the priest’s orientation at the Mass.  The goal of all of this is to better enter into the Mass, so that we might grow in love of God and love of neighbor and come to our true homeland of heaven.  

And so, next time, we will ask the most basic question of all: What is the liturgy?

There are a lot of misconceptions about the word “liturgy.”  There are many who define the word to be “the work of the people.”  It is true that the word itself comes from two different Greek words: (1) laos, meaning “people” and (2) ergon, meaning “work.”  But the definition is not simply “work of the people.”  The Catechism gives a short history and definition of the word in paragraph 1069: “The word ‘liturgy’ originally meant a ‘public work’ or a ‘service in the name of/on behalf of the people.’  In Christian tradition it means the participation of the People of God in ‘the work of God.’”  And so it is God who is doing the work, and we participate within that.  St. Benedict said in his Rule: “Let nothing be preferred to the work of God [opus Dei].”  And what St. Benedict meant is prayer, not action (as we might naturally think).  The work of God is this: that He is glorified through worship and relationship with Him.

Later, in paragraph 1136, the Catechism says this in answer to the question, “Who celebrates the liturgy?”: “Liturgy is an ‘action’ of the whole Christ (Christus totus).”  So it is the Head, Jesus Christ, who celebrates, united to His members (ourselves, united to Him as His Church).  So the priest, who takes the place in his celebration of the Sacraments in Persona Christi Capitis [in the person of Christ the Head], is not the main focus of the liturgy but it is that, through the ministry of the priest, we are able together to worship God.  One implication of this is that the liturgy is not primarily a dialogue between priest/leader and people but between humanity (priest and people together) and God.

There is that unique kind of liturgy that Jesus gave to us Himself - the Mass.  What is that?  We will get into that next time!

The Mass is the celebration of the Sacrament of the Eucharist, which is described in the Catechism as the “heart and the summit of the Church’s life” (1407).  As with all Sacraments, it was instituted by Jesus Christ Himself.  On the night of the Last Supper, He took bread and proclaimed it to be His Body, and took a chalice of wine and proclaimed it to be His Blood, of a new covenant.  And then He commanded His disciples to continue this practice, which Catholic Christians have done in an unbroken tradition from that very first Mass.

The Mass, from the earliest Christian sources, always had two main divisions: the liturgy of the Word and the liturgy of the Eucharist.  These two divisions are united in what the Catechism calls “one single act of worship” (1408).  

The Mass is also, as the Catechism says in the next paragraph, “the memorial of Christ’s Passover, that is, of the work of salvation accomplished by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ…” (1409).  So the Mass is also a sacrifice - if we had to sum it up, it is the offering of the sacrifice of Jesus offered by Jesus Himself.  “It is Christ Himself … who … offers the Eucharistic sacrifice” (1410).

So, to sum up, the Mass is a Sacrament which is the heart of the Church’s life, an act of worship and an offering of the sacrifice of Jesus.  And now that we know about the Mass - we can discuss Vatican II and the Mass, next time!

The short answer is no.  Nowhere in the documents of the Second Vatican Council is the orientation of the priest at the Mass mentioned.  There are also numerous points in the Roman Missal, the current book used by the priest for the celebration of the Mass, where it is actually assumed that the priest is not facing the people and must turn around to face them for a dialogue.

This brings up a revolutionary thought about the Mass, something very often misunderstood.  When the Mass is celebrated facing the people, we, priest and people, can be convinced that every time the priest is facing the people, the priest is talking to the people.  However, at particular points, it is clear from language and rubrics that the priest is not addressing the people but the Lord God.  This is especially clear in the Eucharistic Prayer.  Here are the first few words of the three most common Eucharistic Prayers in our current Roman Missal:

1: To you, therefore, most merciful Father…
2: You are indeed Holy, O Lord, the fount of all holiness…
3: You are indeed Holy, O Lord…

This “focus” of the priest in speaking directly to God continues until the end of the Eucharistic Prayer.  There is one revolutionary implication in this: that when the priest is praying the prayer of consecration, when he says, “Take this, all of you, and eat of it…” “Take this, all of you, and drink from it…” he is not talking to the people, as we would think (because the priest is saying ‘you’).  He is talking to God.  More specifically, the priest is offering the sacrifice of Jesus to the Father.  If we are open to this truth, this can be the key to unlock our greater participation in the Mass.

Next time, we will look into a commonly held understanding of the Mass as a communal meal.

In his book The Spirit of the Liturgy, Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) states that, “the Eucharist that Christians celebrate really cannot adequately be described by the term ‘meal’” (p. 78)  And this is true - the Mass is so much more than this!  We talked about this in a previous question (see “What is the Mass?”).

But, in addition to this, there are a few points to consider when we start talking about the Mass as a meal.  Some say that the priest and the people should face each other because that is what happened at the Last Supper.  Even though we were not there, we can still infer some things about how the orientation of the Last Supper was.  Here, I will quote from well-known Vatican II theologian Louis Bouyer’s book Liturgy and Architecture: “The idea that a celebration facing the people must have been the primitive one, and that especially of the last supper, has no other foundation than a mistaken view of what a meal could be in antiquity, Christian or not.  In no meal of the early Christian era did the president of the banqueting assembly ever face the other participants.  They were all sitting, or reclining, on the convex side of a C-shaped table, or of a table having approximately the shape of a horseshoe.  The other side was always left empty for the service.  Nowhere in Christian antiquity could have arisen the idea of having to ‘face the people’ to preside at a meal.  The communal character of a meal was emphasized just by the opposite disposition: the fact that all the participants were on the same side of the table” (p. 53-54).

So, from what we know of meals of that time, all of the participants were on the same side of the table - not so different from the celebration of Mass ad orientem, where both priest and congregation are on the same side of the altar!

Next time, we will come to understand a little bit about the history of Mass celebrated ad orientem.

The history of the celebration of the Mass ad orientem cannot be summed up completely in a short article - it is actually rather complicated, but we can get some truths out of it.  We can start out with a short quotation from the Introduction to the 11th volume of Joseph Ratzinger’s collected works, in which he concludes after comprehensive study that “[t]he notion that priest and people should look at each other while praying appeared only in the modern era and was completely foreign to ancient Christendom” (p. xvii).

A resource that could help answer this question fully is a book by Fr. U. M. Lang of the Oratory called Turning Towards the Lord: Orientation in Liturgical Prayer, which is extremely enlightening!  But it is lengthy, so we will not dive into that rich resource. Instead, to give a little summary, we will quote from a document from the Congregation of Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, in the year 2000:

“It appears that the ancient tradition, though not without exception, was that the celebrant and the praying community were turned versus orientem [toward the East], the direction from which the Light which is Christ comes. It is not unusual for ancient churches to be "oriented" so that the priest and the people were turned versus orientem during public prayer.”

So, the history is ancient - in fact, with links to the Last Supper itself, as we saw in a previous article - and ad orientem worship at Mass was almost universal in the early Church and throughout the history of the Church until the 20th century.

Next time, we will discuss Pope Benedict’s hermeneutic of continuity and discontinuity!