The Removal of Tabernacles and the Desacrificialization of the Mass

Why was the tabernacle removed from the high altar or kept away from the center of so many churches during the past fifty years? There are many reasons for this disgraceful pushing away of our Lord Jesus Christ in the miracle of His abiding Eucharistic presence among us, including the specious academic rationales that have been refuted so often by better scholars than their purveyors. But it may be that a subtler dynamic was also at work (and, sadly, sometimes still is).The ancient rite enshrines and expresses in the most perfect way the sacrificial nature of the Mass, the fact that what is of infinite importance and centrality is the Sacrifice of Calvary, the immolation of Our Lord Jesus Christ which wrought and continues to work our salvation and that of the whole world. Speaking frankly, the expression of this sacrificial dimension is not simply muted in the Novus Ordo, it is largely absent. In a vernacular Mass said versus populum in the usual manner, with the zippy Eucharistic Prayer II as a default, how much is there in text or ceremony that strongly and unambiguously conveys the Sacrifice of the Cross? In the traditional Roman Rite, the Offertory is a luminous foreshadowing of this very sacrifice, clearly establishing the priestly intention; the Roman Canon is permeated with the language of oblation and sacrifice; the consecrations for which the offertory prepares, with their double genuflections and glorious elevations in the midst of an ocean of silence, is a piercing evocation and making-present of Calvary. In contrast, one might say that the Novus Ordo emphasizes the presence of Christ in our midst, but not His sacrifice.[1]A difference in catechesis follows upon this difference in phenomenology.When teaching children what happens at Mass, one says something like the following. “Jesus dying on the Cross offered His life to God, so that our sins could be washed away in His precious Blood. Jesus wanted to make it possible for us to be right there, so that our sins could be washed away, too, and we could be one with Him. So He gave us the Mass. The priest at the altar takes bread and wine, as Jesus did at the Last Supper, and, by God’s power, changes these things into the body and blood of Jesus and raises them up on high, as Jesus was raised up high on the Cross. God rejoices in this perfect gift of His Son and, in His overflowing love for Him and for us who belong to Him, He lets us receive the body and blood of Jesus in communion. This makes us as completely one with Jesus as we can be in this life; the Father is pleased with us as He is pleased with His Son; and we are prepared for heaven, when it is our turn to be just like Jesus and offer up our own life to God at the moment of our death.”I’m not saying that one couldn’t find a better way of putting it, but something along those lines will get the thing going. What really struck me in working with my own children, however, was how little catechesis, relatively speaking, was required to make sense out of the gestures of the priest at the traditional Mass, and how powerfully those gestures remind one of the meaning learned and continually reinforce it, burning it into the memory. Once you know a little about what Jesus did at the Last Supper and on Good Friday, the actions and prayers practically hit you over the head with a chain of mysteries — mediation, redemption, atonement, satisfaction, adoration. It doesn’t take a lot to be equipped to perceive the traditional Mass as an awesome sacrifice joining earth to heaven, the sinner to the Savior, the altar to the cross.Conversely, I found that my children and other children routinely did not see the same connections at the Ordinary Form Masses we attended. The connections were not nearly so obvious. This manner of Mass seemed like a loosely related but rather different ritual, one that was more focused on the people, with a lot of talking, and the reception of communion tacked on at the end. What was most of all hidden to the senses was that this liturgy is a sacrifice. It looks like a manipulation of bread and wine over a table, a meal in imitation of the Last Supper. What I realized, to my chagrin, is that I had to assert, without much in the way of supporting evidence, that the Novus Ordo Missae was the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, even though it didn’t look like one and didn’t have the marvelous panoply of texts and ceremonies that underlined the sacrificial nature of the action.That bothered me then, and it still bothers me now. It’s as if the rite was designed by someone who wanted it not to be easy to perceive, by the combined strength of a simple catechism and a complex liturgy, that the Mass is the unbloody re-presentation of the bloody sacrifice of our Lord on Calvary. In the sphere of the Ordinary Form, in contrast, we need a complex catechism to go with a simple liturgy, because otherwise the truth won’t be known. The liturgy doesn’t embody and proclaim it the same way, so we have to spend more time explaining, asserting, and keeping our fingers crossed that the brittle fideism won’t give way to the ravages of forgetfulness, boredom, or heresy.Combined focus: altar, tabernacle, crucifixNow for my theory about the moving of the tabernacle. The overwhelming miracle of Our Lord’s Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament reserved in the Tabernacle sets a challenge to the Mass. To speak in halting human terms, the only way the Mass could be or do something greater than that miracle, the only way there could be no confusion of orders, is if the liturgy had the wherewithal to monstrate the very Sacrifice that allows for the abiding presence of the divine victim in the tabernacle. The Mass in a certain sense must be seen and felt to outweigh the Tabernacle so that there can be no confusion between the two orders — Sacrifice and Presence. That this is the case with the traditional Mass vis-à-vis the Tabernacle I have no doubt; even in European churches with enormous gilded tabernacles bedecked with extravagant decoration, the old Mass holds its own, draws all eyes and hearts to itself, and remains the total master of the building, the altar, and the furnishings. It is clearly the reason for everything else and its earnest spirit of prayer, with invisible arms spread out and raised aloft, gathers all into a single offering of praise.In contrast, the Tabernacle has the wherewithal to overwhelm the liturgy of the Novus Ordo, which is, in many respects, weak, consumptive, and thin, barely able to hold its own in a magnificent church or at a splendid high altar. The Sacrifice is, so to speak, phenomenologically suppressed by the Presence (both as it resides in the Tabernacle and as it will reside upon the Cranmer table, which is nothing but an artistic denial of sacrifice). Therefore, by a kind of malevolent instinct for compensation, “the Tabernacle has to go!,” it must be removed, decentralized, hidden, so that a weak liturgy can muster some communicative force of its own. It is like removing the smartest pupil from a class because the teacher is not smart enough to deal with him. The liturgy has to be unobstructed, with no competition and no context, or it will vanish into the background. It has to claim as much space for itself as it can and push out all vestiges of a world of greater mass and gravity. Doesn’t this make more sense out of the postconciliar rage for ecclesiastical wreckovations and monstrosities? Not only must the tabernacle go, but so must the high altar, and maybe the crucifix or stained-glass windows or elevated pulpit or communion rail, etc. Maybe we need to tear it all down and replace it with an empty gray box that has no symmetrical curves and no ornamentation. Against that stage, the clean, efficient, succinct lines of the Novus Ordo will ring out with metallic clarity. And the people who still care for such “devotions” might find the reserved Sacrament somewhere behind or over to the side, as if placed in an Ordinary Time-out.* * *Question: Why has there been so much of a need for the Church’s pastors since the liturgical reform to emphasize the truth — never disputed since the Council of Trent — that the Mass is really and truly a sacrifice? Why such a stream of papal and curial documents, most of them ignored?The answer is quite simple. If what we do at the Novus Ordo Mass looked like a sacrifice, if it expressed the sacrificial reality in a sensible and intelligible way, there would be no need for endless reassertions and clarifications. The doctrine was taught de fide by the Council of Trent, and the Mass of St. Pius V embodies that doctrine perfectly. As long as the Mass remains faithful to the fundamental principle of sacramentality — namely, that something ought to signify what it does and do what it signifies — it will be known to do what it really does by a manifest and unambiguous signification. This, clearly, is not the case with the Mass of Paul VI.We have seen many polls over the years that prove the loss of faith among Catholics in the real, substantial presence of Our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. What I would love to see is a poll that, having identified mainstream Catholics and traditional Catholics by means of a couple of deft questions (perhaps even as simple as “Have you heard of Summorum Pontificum?”), proceeded to ask each group: “Do you believe that the Mass is the true and proper sacrifice of Christ on the Cross?” It is not hard to imagine the results: the former group would mostly say no (as a matter of fact, more than a few would register surprise at the question, which might be found to introduce a claim they have never even heard), and the latter group would unanimously say yes. Their answers would mirror perfectly their experience of the liturgy.Although its work is the glorification of God and the sanctification of man, the liturgy has always been a great catechizer, almost in spite of itself; and now, with the Novus Ordo, there is a vacuum of catechism at the very heart of Catholic life. We now need to keep repeating that “the Mass IS a sacrifice” because it has so little that is obviously sacrificial about it. It is frighteningly close to the way that democratic governments keep saying “This is the Will of the People,” precisely because it isn’t. Trying to convince people of something they cannot in any way gather with their own senses is an uphill battle.NOTE[1] Nor should this be surprising to those who know the history of the liturgical reform, whose architects were enamored of ecumenism to such an extent that they admitted they were trying to recast the Roman Rite in a manner that would be acceptable to Protestant advisers. The conservative Protestants were only too happy to concede a “presence” of Christ in the Mass, but talk of sacrifice was anathema to them (if one might so speak). Joseph Ratzinger’s magnificent essay “The Theology of the Liturgy” goes a great deal into this rejection of sacrifice.