IF THERE’S NO MASS, THERE’S
NO CHURCH
Bill
Huebsch rightly observes that “if there’s no mass, there’s no church”. (“Vatican
II in Plain English”, Thomas More, Allen, Texas, 1997) Indeed, for most,
the main way of being Catholic is attending Mass. But it’s also a little deeper
than that. Most Catholics also believe that what happens at Mass cannot and
does not happen anywhere else in the world or the universe.
Catholics
believe that a priest have the power to change the bread and wine into the
actual Body and Blood of Christ. This is how they identify themselves as
Catholics. This belief runs very deep in the Catholic mind, giving the Mass a
very high place in Catholic thinking as the most important human activity. In
the famous movie “Romero”, this is made vividly clear.
It’s
a movie about the life and death of Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador who was killed for his
defense of the poor. The filmmaker shows a moment in Romero’s life where
he was confronted by the power of the national army as he stood in a peasant
village, which he’d come to defend.
He
was shirtless and vulnerable as he stood there. Their weapons were drawn and
aimed at him. Their anger was intense. He appeared to be utterly powerless. But
his response was the Catholic response. “We will now begin the Mass,” he said,
standing there in the street, naked, beaten, and poor. “In the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit . . .” he began as he traced on
his body the Sign of the Cross.
The
camera faded back to show peasants knelling in the dust of the roadway, signing
themselves and enacting that most powerful of human activities: the Mass. The
centrality of the Mass was driven home even more powerfully at the end of the
film as Oscar Romero was murdered by an assassin, even as he raised the host
during the consecration of the Mass.
Bill
adds that after Vatican II, the Liturgy of the Word became a more prominent
part of the Mass, offering Catholics more access to Scripture and preaching
than before. But in popular understanding, the consecration and communion
remain the center-point of the celebration. The old Baltimore Catechism taught that we were obliged to be present only
for the three principal parts of the Mass; the offertory, the consecration, and
the priest’s communion. Some of that
belief still remains. We mess with other parts of the Mass, but we don’t mess
with the consecration of the bread and wine.
Bill
argues that we may replace priests when we need to for preaching, teaching,
visiting the sick, handling the money, baptism, funeral, and even for the
Liturgy of the Word in priest-less parishes but never for the mass. Because if
there’s no priest, there’s no Mass.
The
Mass is the Church for many Catholics. If we take away all the other activities
and leave only the Mass, we’d still have the Church. But if we take away the
Mass, and leave everything else or even increase it, there’d be no Church left.
It’s really that central to Catholic self-identity.
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