I’m
taking the liberty of re-posting this article from Fr.
Z’s blog. Please pay his site a visit!
I Am
Thinking About Those Red Shoes, by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf
I am thinking about the infamous red shoes. I am thinking
about the non-wearing of the mozzetta. I am thinking about the growing
juxtaposition in some conversations of simple liturgy versus lofty liturgy.
Some people are saying, “O how wonderful it is to get rid of
all the symbols of office and power and be humble like the poor.”
When I first learned to say the older form of the Mass of
the Roman Rite, that is to say, when I first learned how to say Mass, because
there has never been a single of day of my priesthood when I couldn’t say it, I
admit that I was deeply uncomfortable with some of the gestures prescribed by
the rubrics. I even resisted them. For example, the kissing of the objects to
be given to the priest, and the priest and the kissing of the priest’s hands…
that gave me the willies.
I resisted those solita oscula because I had fallen
into the trap of thinking that they made me look too important.
The fact is that none of those gestures were about me at
all. They are about the priest insofar as he is alter Christus, not
insofar as he is “John”. For “John” all of that would be ridiculous. For
Father, alter Christus, saying Mass, it is barely enough.
When you see the deacon and subdeacon in the older form of
Holy Mass holding, for example, the edges of the priest’s cope when they are in
procession, or when you see them kissing the priest’s hand, or bowing to him,
or waiting on him or deferring to him or – what in non-Catholic eyes appears to
be something like adoration or emperor worship – you are actually seeing them
preparing the priest for his sacrificial slaughter on the altar of Golgotha.
It is the most natural thing in the human experience to
treat with loving reverence the sacrifice to be offered to God. The sacrificial
lambs were pampered and given the very best care, right up to the moment when
the knife sliced their necks.
The Catholic priest is simultaneously the victim offered on
the altar. All the older, traditional ceremonies of the Roman Rite underscore
this foundational dimension of the Mass. If we don’t see that relationship of
priest, altar, and victim in every Holy Mass, then the way Mass has been
celebrated has failed. If we don’t look for that relationship, then we are not
really Catholic. Mass is Calvary.
The use of beautiful marble in the church building, precious
fabrics and metals for vestments and vessels, music that requires true art and
skill to perform, ritual gestures which to worldly eyes seem to be the stuff of
bygone eras of royals and the like, all underscore the fact that step by step
during Holy Mass the priest is being readied for the sacrifice, which –
mysteriously – he himself performs.
Back when I resisted the liturgical kissing of my hand when
being handed a chain, spoon or chalice, I had made the mistake of imagining
myself to be more humble by that resistance. That was a mistake. Ironically, my
resistance to those gestures turned the gestures into being about me.
Submission to the gestures, on the other hand, erases the priest’s own person
and helps him to be what he needs to be in that moment: priest, victim, alter
Christus. The trappings, the rubrics, the gestures erase the priest’s poor
person. Resisting these things runs the risk of making them all about the
priest again.
In a sense, I had made the objection of Judas about the
precious nard which the woman brought to the Lord. Jesus responded that the
precious stuff should be kept for His Body, which was to be sacrificed. People
who object that we should have only poor liturgy are falling into the
argument of Judas. We must submit to the precious and sublime in recognition of
the truth of what is going on. To pit the sublime and complex and precious and
beautiful against the low, simple and humble is schizophrenic and not Catholic.
There is no real conflict of the humble and the sublime in
liturgical worship.
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