Bishop Schneider: The timeless Catholic liturgy nurtures the Church
Even from the moment we enter a church to participate in the Holy Mass, we have to try to lift up your mind and heart to Golgotha and to the Heavenly Liturgy.
(PerMariam) — Editor’s note: Below is the second part of a talk given by Bishop Athanasius Schneider, the first part of which appeared on Per Mariam in previous days and can be read here.
‘The light of the Catholic Faith’: Part 2 – Bp. Schneider
Many Protestants and modernist Catholics have the opinion that one cannot genuinely worship God with the heart in the midst of so much gorgeous liturgical ceremony. However, the truth is precisely the reverse, namely, “that the worship of the Catholic is the heart’s adoration, presented to God in the most beautiful and perfect manner imaginable.” (Bishop Henry Grey Graham, “From the Kirk to the Catholic Church,” Glasgow 1960, p. 58)
The ritual of the Catholic Church is fixed: a Catholic need never bother his head about it; his whole attention is given, free and undivided, to the inward worship “in Spirit and Truth,” whether he is priest or layman.
There is, indeed, unity of worship; for it is the same divine Sacrifice and the same liturgy the world over. But yet there is a most wondrous diversity along with it; for every soul has its own particular needs and desires and aspirations, and presents them before God with its own words; so that the humble beggar kneeling obscurely in a corner of the great cathedral, who unites with the nobleman and the grand lady – aye, and with the bishop and the Pope himself, if he be offering the Holy Sacrifice – is as much a worshipper apart and separate, and dear to the heart and the eye of God, as though there were no other in the wide world.
O truly sublime and wonderful worship of the Roman Church! Beautiful outwardly, beautiful inwardly, made according to the pattern God Himself has shown, no marvel is it that so many distracted and tempest-tossed souls have been riveted and fascinated and consoled by it. No wonder that it should have satisfied their heart and their intellect as well as their senses; for Jesus Christ, “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,” is in it. He is its glory and its beauty, here as in Heaven. He is the centre of the worship of the Catholic Church, for He is the Sacrifice of the Church. And so it comes that half an hour of the Roman Mass excels all the worship of all the heretics throughout the world.” (From the Kirk to the Catholic Church, pp. 59-60)
“No rites and ceremonies, no saints or angels, no external beauty or fascination, could ever by themselves satisfy the soul of any Catholic. These would in themselves be less than nothing and vanity, and all the gorgeous and ravishing attractiveness of the Catholic Church would be but a hideous and a barren mockery, were it not that the Eternal God and Savior dwells in the midst of her, and gives a meaning and life to them all. They exist for His sake, and honour Him, and reflect His beauty; but He Himself it is, and nothing less than He, on whom the affection and faith of our hearts are fixed.” (What Faith really means. A simple explanation. London 1914, p. 91)
“Just as the essential glory and happiness of Heaven is the Presence of God Himself, and without Him all else, however beautiful, would only sicken and delude us, so in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth which is the Catholic Church it is Jesus Christ Our Lord, the Lamb slain, that constitutes our joy and peace. He is ever with us, loving us so much that He has chosen to abide with us in the Blessed Sacrament, night and day, receiving the loving adoration of legions of angels and of millions of human souls throughout the world.”
“He it is and He alone that has so inflamed the hearts of saints that they have had to cool their breast at a fountain of water, lest they should be altogether consumed with the fire of Divine Love. He it is, and He alone, that has drawn saints into such ecstasies of love and union with Him that, like St. Paul, they could say they had been ‘rapt even to the third heaven and heard unutterable words.’" He it is, and He alone, that has often appeared to holy priests at Mass under the sweet figure of a little child. Could our Protestant friends but know how we love Jesus and how Jesus loves us, and how the livelong day and night there is never an hour, never a moment, in which He is left without adorers" in spirit and in truth" whether in silent cloister or lonely chapel or gorgeous cathedral they would surely cry aloud: "In Judea God is known." "As the hart pants after the fountains of waters, so pants my soul after Thee, o God."
So echoes the Catholic soul, and in His lovely dwelling-place upon earth we find Him at all times and at any time giving peace in our troubles, joy in our sorrow, consolation in our distress, perfect repose of mind and will and intellect, peace which the world can neither give nor take away. We receive Jesus Christ, and we are satisfied; satisfied so far as we can be out of Heaven. It is the privilege of the noblest, the mightiest, the richest, but it is also the privilege of the poor and lowly, the unlettered and despised, that they may not only approach Our Lord and touch the hem of His garment, but receive Him into their very breast, and lavish upon Him their heart's affection, and be united to Him and repose upon His bosom.
Yea, so true is this that those who have literally nothing of this world's goods, and none to comfort them, and nothing to lean upon for enjoyment or pleasure, nor even perhaps the bare necessaries of life these, I say, God's poor, yet find in Jesus all they need, and with Him fear no ill. and even in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, they are calm and confident and happy, for they know that some day, perhaps it may be very soon, Him whom they loved and received under the Sacramental Veils they will see face to face, and will dwell with Him for ever in that Temple where the Lamb of God Himself is enthroned in glory, and where there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.” (pp. 92-93)
May all faithful grow in the steadfastness of the Catholic Faith and in the love for the beauty of the house of God and His sacred worship according to the Catholic liturgy of all times. Let us be inspired and encouraged by the example of unshakable fidelity in times when the venerable and millennium-old liturgy is being restricted as in the current crisis within the Church, or when priests and faithful – because of their love to the sacredness of the liturgy of the Mass – are being marginalized within the Church and treated as second-class Catholics.
The following testimony of Archbishop David Kearney of Cashel in Ireland from the beginning of the seventeenth century should deeply moved us:
“When the persecution threatens and the soldiers are in pursuit we fly to secret recesses; when the persecution relaxes we venture again into public. As they leave nothing undone to capture us, we are ever on the alert, and seldom can they obtain any certain information about our whereabouts. We do not stop long at any one place, but pass from house to another, even in the cities and towns.
This journey, too, is made at dawn, or by night ... It is at night that we perform our sacred functions, that we transfer the sacred vestments from one place to another – celebrate Mass, give exhortations to the faithful, confer holy orders, bless the chrism, administer the sacrament of Confirmation, discharge, in a word, all our ecclesiastical duties.
The heretics make diligent search to seize on those who assist at Mass, and they, moreover, inflict fines on all who absent themselves from the heretical temples. They cast into prison not only those who favor the priest, but those who refuse to persecute and deliver up the priests. They interdict the use of chapels, they prevent pious pilgrimages, and punish whom they will, and rage arbitrarily against us.
Last year, when the persecution relaxed a little, I administered the sacrament of Confirmation at noonday in the open fields to at least ten thousand persons; for our Catholics so venerate this sacrament that they come even from the most distant parts of the country when there is an opportunity of receiving it.” (Cardinal Patrick Moran, History of the Catholic Archbishops of Dublin, Dublin, 1884, p. 235)
In 1731 there were 892 Mass-houses and 54 private chapels in Ireland, in addition to portable altars, of which it was reckoned there were more than one hundred. There were 1,445 priests and 254 friars officiating at them – in a country in which the law didn’t presume a single Catholic priest to exist.
Father Augustine, OFM Cap., in his book Ireland’s Loyalty to the Mass (London, 1933) reports what a non-Catholic Chief Secretary of Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century observed, saying, “that it is the Mass that matters. It is the Mass that makes the difference; so hard to define, so subtle it is yet so perceptible between a Catholic country and a Protestant one. Here I believe is one of the battlefields of the future” (p. 212-213)
Very moving and glorious historical examples of the fidelity of Catholics to the Mass were reported from the time of persecution in Ireland, about the so called ‘Hidden Saints of the Mass’, described in the book of Father Augustine, OFMCap., as follows:
“After a tour in Ireland, the illustrious Count de Montalembert published in Paris, in the year 1829, some very interesting letters in which he describes what he had seen and felt in this country. ‘I shall never forget,’ he says, ’the first Mass which I heard in a country chapel. I rode to the foot of a hill, the lower part of which was clothed which a thick plantation of oak and fir, and alighted from my horse to ascend it. I had taken only a few steps on my way when my attention was attracted by the appearance of a man who knelt at the foot of the firs. Several others became visible in succession in the same attitude; and the higher I ascended the larger became the numbers of these kneeling peasants.
At length, on reaching the top on the hill, I saw a cruciform building badly built of stone, without cement, and covered by thatch. Around it knelt a crowd of robust and vigorous men, all uncovered, though the rain fell in torrents and the mud quivered beneath them. Profound silence reigned everywhere. It was the Catholic chapel of Blarney (at Waterloo) and the priest was saying Mass. I reached the door at the moment of the Elevation, and all this pious assembly had prostrated themselves with their faces on earth. I made an effort to penetrate under the roof of the chapel thus overflowed by worshippers.
There were no seats, no decorations, not even a pavement; the floor was of earth, damp and stony, the roof dilapidated, and tallow candles burned on the altar in place of tapers. When the Holy Sacrifice was ended, the priest mounted his horse and rode away. Then each worshipper rose from his knees and went slowly homeward. Many remained for a much longer time in prayer, kneeling in the mud in that silent enclosure chosen by the poor and faithful people in the time of ancient persecutions’.” (Ireland’s loyalty to the Mass, op. Cit., 194-197).
When we recognize and really believe in what each Holy Mass is, then every detail of the rite of the Holy Mass, every word, every gesture is important, deeply meaningful and spiritual. Even from the moment we enter a church to participate in the Holy Mass, we have to try to lift up your mind and heart to Golgotha and to the Heavenly Liturgy.
Saint John Henry Newman wrote: “The Catholic Church alone is beautiful. You would see what I mean if you went into a foreign cathedral, or even into one of the Catholic churches in our large towns. The celebrant, deacon and subdeacon, acolytes with lights, the incense, and the chanting—all combine to one end, one act of worship. You feel it is really a worshipping; every sense, eyes, ears, smell, are made to know that worship is going on. The laity on the floor saying their beads, or making their acts; the choir singing out the Kyrie; and the priest and his assistants bowing low, and saying the Confiteor to each other. This is worship, and it is far above reason" (words of Mr. White in the novel “Loss and Gain”, op. cit., p. 44).
The fidelity in the Catholic faith usually remains a minority phenomenon, as St. John Henry Newman said: “I have all that time thought that a time of wide-spread infidelity was coming, and through all those years the waters have in fact been rising as a deluge. I look for the time, after my life, when only the tops of the mountains will be seen like islands in the waste of waters…Great actions and successes must be achieved by the Catholic leaders, great wisdom as well as courage must be given them from on high, if Holy Church is to be kept safe from this awful calamity, and, though any trial which came upon her would but be temporary, it may be fierce in the extreme while it lasts.” (Letter from Jan. 6th, 1877)
“It is plain every great change is effected by the few, not by the many; by the resolute, undaunted, zealous few. Doubtless, much may be undone by the many, but nothing is done except by those who are specially trained for action. In the midst of the famine Jacob's sons stood looking one upon another, but did nothing. One or two men, of small outward pretensions, but with their hearts in their work, these do great things. These are prepared, not by sudden excitement, or by vague general belief in the truth of their cause, but by deeply impressed, often repeated instruction; and since it stands to reason that it is easier to teach a few than a great number, it is plain such men always will be few.” (Newman, Parochial and plain sermons, I, 22)
All the little ones of the Church of our days who – as priests, religious, fathers and mothers of families, young people and children – are marginalized and humiliated for the sole reason of their unshakeable fidelity to the integrity of the Catholic faith and the liturgy, are indeed the true glory of the Church and blessed by Christ’s ineffable Eucharistic love.