I am continually struck by this photo of a Solemn High Mass. It took place in a bombed-out cathedral in Germany after World War II ended.
The photo features three clerics standing in a straight line, all facing the altar in what we call ad orientem worship—toward the orient, the east, the rising Sun of Justice, who is Jesus Christ. Despite the bombed-out chaos all around them, the priests are dialed in, focused on the supernatural action taking place in front of them.
Christ set out on a journey to Jerusalem with His disciples, and as the gospel states, Jesus walked in front ahead of them. During the journey Christ turned around, faced them and said, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death …”
The photo of the bombed-out cathedral reminds me a bit of the basement in our home when I was a child. My father had a wooden workbench up against the far wall, with tools and spare parts for fixing things around the house. My siblings and I played down in the basement all the time. Balls would be flying, kids would be chasing after each other screaming, the dog would be barking—and amidst all that noise and chaos, every now and then we’d notice our father standing at his workbench, with his back to us, silently fixing something.
My father led my family in prayer. He sat at the end of the table and led the meal prayers. He led us saying the Rosary in the 1970s—a time when it was laughed off and replaced with new, “relevant” things. My father led the Rosary at the table, in the living room, and while driving his Ford Station Wagon packed with kids. Many times, when my high school sister’s dates came over to pick them up on Friday nights, those boys ended up kneeling on our living room floor saying the rosary with us before they left.
Speaking of new and relevant things: in 2007 Pope Benedict wrote, “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.” The pope was responding to those who pushed the erroneous idea that anything that came before 1970 had to be discarded. He was responding to those who argued that “Vatican II changed everything.” One example of those changes was the turning of the priest toward the people for Mass.
In 2000, before he became pope, Benedict wrote:
The turning of the priest toward the people has turned the community into a self-enclosed circle . . . it no longer opens out on what lies ahead and above, but is closed in on itself. The common turning toward the east was not a “celebration toward the wall”; it did not mean that the priest “had his back to the people”; the priest himself was not regarded as that important. (The Spirit of Liturgy, 80-81)
Benedict wrote that the Vatican Council “said nothing about the priest ‘turning toward the people.’ Despite that, new altars were set up everywhere in a reordering that . . . brings with it a new idea of the essence of the liturgy—the liturgy as a communal meal” (76-77).
My friends, the turning of Mass into a communal meal has brought on disaster. Among other things it has destroyed priestly identity. For what is a priest’s main job? Is it to preach or teach? Is it to feed and shelter the poor? Is it to host communal dinner parties? No, a priest’s ultimate job is to offer sacrifice. A Catholic priest’s job is to stand in for Christ, as He offers Himself to the Father on our behalf.
Now, when a priest is offering Mass on a worthy altar, facing God, or “with his back to the people” as the hoodwinked were taught to say, the impression given is that he is up their working. It looks like a workstation. It’s natural for young people to look up and curiously ask, “What is he working on up there?” There is a masculinity found in ad orientem worship. That is why the Church’s enemies, who hate healthy masculinity, hate ad orientem worship.
Now there are the photos of Notre Dame in Paris. The renovated church was re-dedicated recently. There is a photo of the massive, beautiful high marble altar that has been in the church for centuries. And there is a photo of the new altar placed in front of it. From the photo, the new altar looks like a brown bath tub, or perhaps a witches’ cauldron. It’s ghastly looking.
The French government owns Notre Dame. During the French Revolution, all Church property was confiscated, stolen. Later, the Church worked out a deal with Napoleon that any church built before 1800 would remain the property of the state, but the Church could get to use the churches. And so, these past few years, an atheistic French government was ultimately in charge of renovating Notre Dame. And it put a ghastly altar in it. The kind the priest stands behind and so faces the people.
Pope Benedict wrote:
[Ad orientem worship] is first and foremost, a simple expression of looking to Christ as the meeting place between God and man. It expresses the basic Christological form of our prayer. . . . Praying toward the east means going to meet the coming Christ. The liturgy, turned toward the East, effects entry, so to speak, into the procession of history toward the future, the New Heaven and the New Earth, which we encounter in Christ. (pp. 69-70)
Baruch told the Jews to look east because that was the direction of Babylon, where the Jews had been marched off to live in exile.
Up, Jerusalem! Stand upon the heights; look to the east . . .
But now they were coming back.
The verses directly before state: “Look toward the east, O Jerusalem, and see the joy that is coming to you from God! Behold your sons are coming, whom you sent away.” And so, Baruch gave instruction: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths . . . and the rough ways make smooth.”
Five hundred years later John the Baptist was out east. He was twenty miles east of Jerusalem where he echoed Baruch’s instructions:
For God has commanded that every lofty mountain be made low, and that the age-old depths and gorges be filled to level ground, that Israel may advance secure in the glory of God . . .
People really did that. When a king or foreign dignitary came to town, the host city’s slaves would have to go fill in the ruts on the desert road. They would have to level things off for the camels and chariot wheels. So, what Baruch and the Baptist preached made perfect sense to people. They understood that when a king came, the road was prepared for him.
And that is what we do. We turn off the noise and we grab our pickaxe and chip away at the mountain of our pride. We prepare the road that invites our Lord into our soul, and look east for our King, the man we sent away to Calvary.
But through the infinite mercy of God, we can go to Calvary in a timeless mystical sacrifice. At Mass, we can picture ourselves on the road, going up to Jerusalem, with Jesus walking ahead of us. With His back to us He makes the climb up to His altar, His workbench—where He silently fixes something. Amidst all the noise and chaos of our fallen world, Christ fixes our broken human nature. He does so by joining Himself to us in His one eternal sacrifice that pays the price for our sins.
Photos provided by the Author
