Mass

← Encyclopedia

When the rite is finished the deacon, or in his absence the priest, turns to the people and dismisses them: Ite, missa est — go, you are sent. The phrase is among the oldest fixed words in the service, and it is from this dismissal, not from any of the prayers at its center, that the whole liturgy took its name. Missa, the sending, came to stand for the thing one was being sent away from. The Mass is the central act of worship in the Catholic Church: a liturgy in which bread and wine are offered and consecrated, and the assembly shares in them as the body and blood of Christ.

The two movements

Its shape is old and remarkably stable. The service falls into two great movements joined at the middle. The first, the Liturgy of the Word, is built from scripture: an Old Testament reading, a responsorial psalm, an epistle, the Gospel proclaimed standing, and a homily that opens what has been read, closing on the Sundays and feasts with the recited Creed and intercessions for the Church and the world. The second, the Liturgy of the Eucharist, begins when the gifts of bread and wine are brought forward and set on the altar; over them the priest prays the great thanksgiving — the eucharistic prayer or anaphora, into which the words of institution are set — and the consecrated gifts are then broken and distributed in communion. The hinge between the two is the table itself, where the book gives way to the bread.

The fixed sung texts that recur at every celebration — the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Creed, the Sanctus, the Agnus Dei — make up what is called the Ordinary, the unchanging skeleton beneath the Proper texts that turn with the day and the season. Anglican worship preserves the same skeleton in English through the Book of Common Prayer; the family resemblance across a confessional divide is one of the surer signs of how deeply the structure runs.

The genealogy of the forms

What scholarship can establish with confidence is the descent of this shape. The early Christian communities did not invent their gathering from nothing. The first movement, the service of readings followed by exposition, is the synagogue order carried over almost intact — scripture read aloud, then opened by one who instructs. The second movement descends from the Jewish table: the blessings spoken over bread and over the cup at a shared meal, the berakah of thanks to God who brings forth bread from the earth. The Last Supper of the Gospels, in which Jesus is recorded taking bread, giving thanks, breaking it, and saying this is my body, supplies both the warrant and the words the rite still repeats. Dom Gregory Dix, in The Shape of the Liturgy (1945), reduced the eucharistic action to four moments answering exactly to that account — the gifts taken, the thanksgiving said over them, the bread broken, the gifts given — and argued that this fourfold shape, not any particular set of prayers, is what every historic eucharist holds in common.

By the middle of the second century the pattern was already recognizable as a whole. Around 155, writing in Rome to a pagan emperor, Justin Martyr described the Sunday assembly in terms a Catholic would still find familiar: the people of town and country gather in one place, the memoirs of the apostles and the writings of the prophets are read for as long as time allows, the president instructs and exhorts, all rise and pray, bread and wine and water are brought, the president offers prayers and thanksgivings to which the people answer Amen, and a portion of what has been blessed is carried even to the absent. The Didache, earlier still, preserves short thanksgivings over the cup and the broken bread. The long history since is largely one of elaboration and, periodically, of pruning back: the accretion of prayers, the rise of chant, the gradual fixing of the Latin Ordinary, and the reforms that have trimmed it again.

What the Church holds

At the heart of the rite lie two claims the Church holds as doctrine, and which no account of the forms exhausts. The first is the real presence: that after the consecration the bread and wine are, in substance, the body and blood of Christ, however unchanged they remain to sight and taste. The medieval West gave this conviction a philosophical grammar in the language of transubstantiation — the substance changed while the outward accidents persist — a term the Fourth Lateran Council used in 1215 and the Council of Trent ratified as a most apt name for the change at its thirteenth session in 1551. The Christian East holds the same presence without binding it to that Aristotelian vocabulary; the wider Orthodox refusal to reduce the divine to a formula has its own deep root in the essence-and-energies theology of Palamism, where God is truly given without ever becoming a captured object.

The second claim is sacrifice: that the Mass does not merely recall Calvary but makes the one sacrifice of Christ present, offered anew upon the altar. Trent, at its twenty-second session in 1562, fixed the formula that the victim is one and the same — the same Christ now offering himself through the ministry of priests who once offered himself on the cross — the manner of offering alone being different, bloodless here, bloody there. The single offering of Calvary is not repeated but re-presented, made present out of its own time.

Both claims were sharpened in dispute, and the disputants were in earnest. The sixteenth-century Reformers read in the language of a sacrifice offered by priests an affront to the one finished sacrifice of the cross, a thing accomplished once and not to be added to; and they rejected, in varying degrees, the bodily presence under the appearances of bread. For some the supper was memorial, for others a true but spiritual feeding; for nearly all the Roman doctrine of an altar-sacrifice was the error to be undone. The Book of Common Prayer reshaped the English rite precisely to unsay it. Against this the Council of Trent did not soften but stated, defining the Catholic position in terms meant to leave no ambiguity. That the eucharist is at once sign and reality, memorial and offering, accomplished once and made present always, is a fault line that still divides the churches — not a misunderstanding to be cleared up but a real disagreement over what the rite is and does.

A rite watched, then spoken

Through the medieval centuries the Western Mass drifted toward something heard and seen rather than spoken. The Latin that had once been the common tongue of the empire became, as the vernaculars diverged from it, a sacred language the laity no longer followed word for word; the canon was said in a low voice, the altar stood at the far end of the church with the priest’s back to the people, and the high moment of the rite became the elevation of the host, lifted for the people to see and adore rather than to consume. Devotion attached itself to the gazing. The codified form that crowned this development — the Roman Missal issued after Trent in 1570 — is treated under the Tridentine Mass; its celebration on behalf of the dead under the Mass for the dead.

The twentieth century reversed the drift. The liturgical movement, of which Joseph Jungmann’s The Mass of the Roman Rite (1951) was a scholarly summit, recovered the older sense of the Mass as the work of the whole gathered people and not a clerical performance attended in silence. The Second Vatican Council’s constitution on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium of 1963, called for the full and conscious participation of the faithful and permitted the mother tongue alongside Latin; the revised Missal that Paul VI promulgated in 1969 turned the priest around to face the people across a freestanding altar and gave the rite in the language of those who pray it. The bread is the same bread, the words the same words; the people now hear them in their own speech and answer aloud.

Texts and scholarship

The two pillars of modern study remain Jungmann’s The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, which traces every prayer and gesture to its source across two volumes, and Dix’s The Shape of the Liturgy, whose four-action thesis reframed how the eucharist’s structure is read across the divided churches. Behind both stand the primary witnesses: Justin Martyr’s First Apology, whose chapters on the Sunday assembly are the earliest connected description of the rite; the conciliar definitions of Trent, sessions 13 and 22, which fixed the doctrines of presence and sacrifice; and the modern charter of reform, Sacrosanctum Concilium, which set the rite as it is now most widely prayed. The Catholic Encyclopedia gathers the older scholarship on the word, the parts, and the history of the rite.

The wider rite

The Mass does not stand alone in the Church’s worship. It is the chief of the sacraments, and it gathers the others around it: the baptized are confirmed at the altar in confirmation, the men who will consecrate are set apart in holy orders, the dying are strengthened in the anointing of the sick, and couples are joined in marriage within its frame. Around its daily celebration runs the Liturgy of the Hours, the Church’s prayer through the day. For those who hold the inner claim, the Mass is not a representation of an absent event but the thing itself, repeated daily across the world. The gestures are plain — bread lifted, words said over it, the gifts shared out. The weight the tradition places on them is not.

→ Related: Notre Dame De Paris · Basilica And Expiatory Church Of The Holy Family · Ascetical Theology · Liturgy · Sacrament · Tridentine Mass · Mass For The Dead · Book Of Common Prayer · Jesus Christ · Christianity · Kyrie · Agnus Dei