Lavabo

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In the older order of the Roman Mass, after the bread and wine have been set on the altar and the gifts and the altar incensed, the priest moves to the south corner and holds out his fingers. A server pours water from a small ewer over them into a dish; another hands him a towel. He washes only the tips — the thumb and the two forefingers that will touch the host — and as he does he says, under his breath, Lavabo inter innocentes manus meas: “I will wash my hands among the innocent.” The lavabo takes its name from that first word. It is the smallest of the Mass’s actions, a few seconds of running water, and one of the oldest.

The hexagonal lavabo (washing fountain) in the cloister of the Cistercian abbey of Le Thoronet, Provence — the word names the place of washing as well as the rite. — Jjpetite, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

The full verse, in the Vulgate rendering long used in the West, reads — in the Douay-Rheims English drawn from it — “I will wash my hands among the innocent; and will compass thy altar, O Lord.” It is the sixth verse of Psalm 26 in the Hebrew numbering, Psalm 25 in the Vulgate’s, and in the Tridentine rite the celebrant carried the recitation through to the psalm’s end, verses six to twelve, closing with the Gloria Patri. The choice of psalm is not incidental. The whole of the psalm is a plea of innocence pressed before God by a speaker who asks to be examined and not swept away with the bloodthirsty; the line about washed hands stands inside an argument about the integrity of a life, and the priest borrows it at the moment he is about to handle what the Mass holds to be the body of Christ. It is not the only act of cleansing the rite stages: the opening Confiteor has already confessed sin in words near the Mass’s start, and the lavabo repeats in gesture, at the threshold of the offering, what that prayer spoke at the door.

From handled gifts to a retained sign

The gesture is older than its symbolism, and its symbolism is older than its present meaning — both can be said, and the standard scholarship keeps them apart. The liturgical historian Josef Andreas Jungmann, in his two-volume reconstruction of the Roman Rite (German 1948, English 1951), traced the Roman offertory washing to a practical need. In the early centuries the faithful did not merely look on; they brought their offerings forward — loaves, flasks of wine, and in places oil, wax, fruit, the produce of fields and presses — and a celebrant who had received and sorted these material gifts had literal cause to wash before going on to the central prayer. The hands that had taken in the people’s bread were cleaned before they lifted the bread that would be consecrated.

As the centuries passed the offerings narrowed. By the high Middle Ages the loaf brought from a household had given way to the priest’s own small unleavened host; the gifts shrank to bread and wine alone, and there was nothing left on the hands to wash off. The washing did not fall away with the reason for it. It was kept and re-read: what had been hygiene became a sign, an outward act standing for an inward cleansing. This is the pattern the historians describe — a practical origin outlived by a symbolic afterlife, the act surviving the circumstance that first called for it.

That tidy arc has a complication the same scholarship records, and it belongs in a different register: in the Christian East the washing was already understood as a symbol while the Roman gifts were still real things to be handled. The Apostolic Constitutions, the great Syrian church-order compiled around 380, direct that a sub-deacon bring water to wash the hands of the priests, “which is a symbol of the purity of those souls that are devoted to God.” A generation earlier in Jerusalem, the Mystagogical Catecheses attributed to Cyril — addresses to the newly baptized on the rites they had just seen — describe the deacon giving water to the bishop and to the presbyters who stand around the altar, and Cyril is at pains to say what it is not: the washing is given, he tells them, not at all for bodily defilement, for they had not entered the church with dirty bodies; the washing of hands is a symbol that one ought to be pure from every sinful deed, since the hands stand for action and to wash them is to declare the blamelessness of one’s conduct. The interpretive reading the West would later attach to a kept practice was, in the East, present from the witnesses we have. The two facts sit side by side: the Roman offertory lavabo grew from a real handling of gifts, and the wider church had long read hand-washing at the altar as an image of the soul.

Two washings drawn into one

The liturgists who reconstructed the medieval Mass distinguish more than one moment of washing, and the lavabo proper is only one of them. In the developed Roman order of the central Middle Ages there were two hand-washings within the Mass: an earlier one, near the beginning of the service before the canon’s preparations, and a later one at the offertory after the gifts were received. The first of these eventually disappeared; the one that survived is the second, the offertory washing, and it is this that the recited psalm fastened onto and that the word lavabo now names. The custom was widespread across the Latin West by the eleventh century.

The verse itself is attested in the medieval Latin service-books, and it was the sixteenth century that fixed the form for the Roman Mass: the Missal promulgated under Pius V in 1570, the Tridentine standard, set the offertory washing with Psalm 25 and its doxology as the universal Roman pattern. Before that standardization the medieval “uses” — the local variants of the one Latin rite — differed in the precise words and ceremonial that surrounded the act. At Salisbury, the Use of Sarum that governed much of medieval England, the chalice was prepared earlier in the service, between the Epistle and the Gospel, which compressed the offertory; the priest washed his hands there in silence, and the psalm Lavabo was not said at all, the prayer In spiritu humilitatis taking a different place than in the Roman order. Other regional uses — the see-bound order of the Patriarchate of Aquileia, the patchwork of Insular customs gathered under the label Celtic rite — carried their own arrangements; what they shared was a washing at or near the offering, not a single fixed wording. The thing washed was everywhere the same; the words over it were not.

The plea and the act

Read from inside the rite, the washing is a purification of the celebrant before he touches the elements that the prayer of consecration will set apart — clean hands and, by the hands, a clean heart. The psalm chosen says as much, and says it carefully: its speaker does not boast a purity already possessed but asks to be tested, to be redeemed and shown mercy, and to be allowed to stand among the upright and go about the altar. Commentators in the Western tradition have long read the lavabo in just this key — as a confession of unworthiness folded into a request for purity rather than a claim to it. The priest washing his fingertips is not asserting that he is innocent; he is asking to be made fit for what he is about to do. The narrowing of the gesture to the very fingers that will hold the host, in the rubric of the older rite, makes the point with the body: it is precisely the part that touches the holy that is cleansed.

The penitential undertone became explicit in the twentieth century. When the Mass was revised after the Second Vatican Council, the order issued under Paul VI in 1970 kept a single hand-washing during the preparation of the gifts, after the offerings are presented and any incensation is done and before the prayer over them — but it changed the words. In place of Lavabo inter innocentes, the psalm of pleaded innocence, the celebrant now says quietly Lava me, Domine, ab iniquitate mea et a peccato meo munda me: “Wash me, O Lord, from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.” The line is taken from the Miserere, Psalm 51 in the Hebrew numbering, the great penitential psalm. The shift of psalm is a shift of emphasis the act had always carried beneath its older text — from the plea to stand among the innocent to the plain admission of guilt and the request to be cleansed of it. The rite kept the gesture and traded the protestation for the confession; what it does not change is that the water answers something the hands alone could not say.

The basin, the towel, and the niche

By a natural extension the same word came to name the things the rite requires. A lavabo is the small ewer and dish — the vessel that pours and the bowl that catches — set ready for the washing, the drying-cloth beside them called a manuterge; in many churches these wait on the side table, the credence, at the epistle corner. From the movable vessels the word passed to fixed ones: the small permanent washbasin built into the wall of a sacristy where the celebrant washes before and after the service, and the architectural fitting in which a basin, or a recess for one, is set into the side wall of the sanctuary itself.

The object-sense has a monastic cousin under a kindred name. In the cloisters of the medieval abbeys stood the lavatorium, also called the laver — a communal washing-place, set near the refectory because the rule required washing before meals, sometimes a long trough fed by lead pipes running along the cloister wall, sometimes a free-standing fountain in a round or octagonal chamber. The Cistercian house at Fountains in Yorkshire kept a fine thirteenth-century example; Gloucester’s cathedral cloister kept another.

The fourteenth-century lavatorium (communal washing-place) set into the north cloister walk at Gloucester Cathedral, where monks washed before meals. — Fæ, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Ground plan of the Cistercian abbey of Fountains, Yorkshire, whose cloister held a noted thirteenth-century laver. — Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed. (1875–89), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

That communal laver is not the altar’s lavabo and the two should not be confused, but they answer the same instinct under one Latin root: a place set apart where water is met before one passes to what is set apart. The water of the lavabo is plain water, not blessed holy water; it is the washing that is freighted, not the medium, and that is part of the gesture’s economy — an ordinary thing made to carry an extraordinary meaning by where in the liturgy it falls.

Washing before the holy

Washing before approaching the sacred is older and wider than this single Christian rite, and the comparison is worth holding plainly and on its own terms. Priestly service in the Jerusalem temple required ablutions before the sacrifice could be offered. The five daily prayers of Islam are preceded by a prescribed washing of the hands, face, arms, and feet. Ritual bathing marks thresholds of approach in many traditions besides these. The recurrence is real: across distant systems there is the same intuition that one does not come to what is holy with unwashed hands. But recurrence is not derivation, and the meanings do not fold into one. Each practice names its own water, its own object, its own occasion, and answers to its own law; the temple ablution, the Muslim’s washing, and the priest’s lavabo are each intelligible only inside the rite that asks for them, and to read any one through another is to mistake a shared human grammar for a shared sentence. The Christian rite is best understood not by reference to the others but by its own internal history — which is the history of a gesture that lost its reason and kept itself anyway.

Scholarship and witnesses

The standard modern account of the lavabo’s place in the Roman Mass is Josef A. Jungmann’s Missarum Sollemnia, published in German in 1948 and in English as The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development (trans. Francis A. Brunner, 1951), which sets the offertory washing in the long development of the rite and argues its derivation from the practical handling of the people’s gifts. The older but still-cited summary in the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 gathers the psalm-text, the medieval double washing, and the regional variations in a single survey. For the early evidence that the washing was read symbolically from the first, the two principal witnesses are accessible in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translations: the Mystagogical Catechesis attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem, which insists the washing is not for bodily cleanliness but is a sign of purity of conduct, and the eighth book of the Apostolic Constitutions, which assigns the bringing of water to a sub-deacon and calls it a symbol of the purity of souls devoted to God. The medieval English variation — the silent washing at Sarum, with the psalm omitted — can be followed in the studies of the medieval uses and in the surviving missals from which they are reconstructed.

What stands at the offertory now is the residue of all of this: a washing whose material reason has been gone for centuries, kept because the act had come to mean more than the hands. The bread the laity once carried up no longer soils the fingers that receive it; the fingers are washed still, and the words said over them in the reformed rite no longer plead innocence but ask to be cleansed of sin. The water has nothing left to remove. It is poured for what cannot be reached with water, and the priest goes from it to the altar with his hands wet and his fitness asked for rather than assumed.

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