The centerpiece of Roman Catholic theology of worship is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is celebrated in worship.
The whole of Christian life takes its meaning from that which alone gives meaning to everything: the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus. This Paschal Mystery is the basis of any theology of Christian worship that takes the New Testament as its starting point. Until recently, however, Roman Catholic theology, like that of the Reformation churches, has suffered from the assumptions of medieval cosmology and scholastic philosophy. These assumptions continue to have their impact upon the concrete understanding and practice of the sacraments, especially Initiation and the Eucharist. The impact of historical studies upon the understanding of Scripture and other ecclesial documents not only provides for a richer integration of biblical data and subsequent church practice but also gives strength to ecumenical theology.
Worship in the New Testament
All salvation history—every event, object, sacred place, theophany, cult—has been assumed into the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate Word of God. This Anointed One is God’s eternal Word (John 1:1, 14); the new creation (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15; Rom. 8:19ff.; Rev. 21–22) and the new Adam (1 Cor. 15:45; Rom. 5:14); the new Pasch and its Lamb (1 Cor. 5:7; John 1:29, 36; 19:36; 1 Pet. 1:19; Rev. 5ff.); the new covenant (Matt. 26:28; Mark 14:24; Luke 22:20; Heb. 8–13), the new circumcision (Col. 2:11–12), and the heavenly manna (John 6:30–58; Rev. 2:17); God’s temple (John 2:19–22), the new sacrifice, and its priest (Eph. 5:2; Heb. 2:17–3:2; 4:14–10:14); the fulfillment of the Sabbath rest (Col. 2:16–17; Matt. 11:28–12:8; Heb. 3:7–4:11) and the messianic age that was to come (Luke 4:16–21; Acts 2:14–36). “Let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a sabbath. These are only a shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ” (Col. 2:16–17, rsv).
The Old Testament temple cult (worship) with its rituals and sacrifices is not replaced by another set of sacrifices and rituals, but by the sacrifice of Christ (Heb. 8–9), that is, the free response of the Word made flesh to the Father by the power of the Spirit. Therefore, the only true worship pleasing to God is the saving life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Christian worship is Christ’s total response of worship into which we have been grafted by the power of the Spirit to the glory of the Father.
In his letter to the Romans (chapters 6–8), St. Paul presumes the existence of a rite by which persons are made Christians and comments on the meaning and consequence of baptism. Being grafted into the death of the Lord by the power of the Spirit, that is, being conformed to Christ in the activity by which humanity is justified, implies that Christian worship, obedience, and faith are a singular gift which precedes human choice; that is, by the one Spirit, we have been grafted into the perfect act of humanity before God, the perfect act of worship.
This union with the crucified and risen Lord is permanent since it is Christ the Lord who baptizes in and through the church. Therefore, in the time of the church, Christ cannot be separated from the members of his body. This gift of insertion into Christ conforms the Christian to the triune life of God (because of the divinity of the Word) and to all humanity (because of the human nature of Christ). However, baptism constitutes a specific kind of relation to Christ, that is, a relationship with other Christians in the activity by which God had redeemed the world. In this sense, the church is the sacrament of salvation whose purpose is to proclaim the kingdom of God to the world.
Such insertion into Christ does not preclude the need for the free human decision of worship, obedience, and faith on the part of the baptized according to their ability. However, the weakness of human nature means that we can refuse to worship; and that refusal to worship is sin. Therefore, while the saving act of Christ on the cross is the sufficient source of all salvation, and in baptism that gift of salvation and worship is given with no need for repetition, the gift must be continually accepted and celebrated in human history in the liturgy of the sacraments, especially the celebration of the Sunday Eucharist.
Liturgy, the Public Worship of the Church
One is baptized into the corporate reality of the church—Christ and his body. This is a worship of the Father by the power of the Spirit. Hence, for St. Paul liturgy is primordially the worship which is the gift of the Christian life. Paul does not use words like liturgy, sacrifice, priest, or offering for anything but the life of Christ and a life lived by that norm. The reality of being in Christ is the norm for Christian gatherings which we call public worship or liturgy (1 Cor. 10–14, Eph. 4, or Gal. 3:27–28).
Leitougia describes Zechariah’s service in the temple (Luke 1:23), the collection of money for missions and the poor (2 Cor. 9:12), Ephaphroditus’ fellowship with Paul (Phil. 2:30), as well as the total response of Christ to the Father by his death on the cross (Heb. 8:6). In other words, personal and communal prayer, service to the world, fellowship, and communion with one another are not radically separate activities, but the concrete expressions of the single response of our entire being which has been grafted by the Spirit into the “once-for-all” sacrifice (self-gift) of Christ to God on the cross (Heb. 10:10). The chief rites of the church, that is, the sacraments, are the concrete expressions of the social need to actualize what has been given, that is, to build up the body of Christ into that new temple and liturgy and priesthood, in which sanctuary and offerer and offered are one.
Service to word and sacrament are service to the Word made flesh, the “Christed” Word, never to be separated from humanity in virtue of his humanity, and never separated from the members of his body the church for the sake of proclaiming the kingdom. At liminal moments in life, Christ in his body, the church, speaks the saving word to a given situation. From this viewpoint, the sacraments are not contrived or ‘merely of ecclesial origin,’ for Christ cannot be separated from the body. The sacraments of the church are precisely acts of worship of the body, each mirroring a facet of the mystery of Christ in which the church lives and moves and has its being.
Having been initiated into Christ with the consequence of intimate union with the members of his body, the celebration of the weekly Eucharist is the most intense manner by which Christians call to mind their origin, the sacrifice (total self-offering) of Christ; their present state, being “in Christ,” and their future hope, the fulfillment of all things in Christ. This intimate union of Christians with Christ is the basis for the celebration of the Eucharist, where the sacrifice of Christ is offered in anamnesis.
In Catholic conviction and theology, anamnesis (making memorial) of the sacrifice of Christ is, therefore, not simply a psychological acknowledgment that Christ died on the cross so that individuals may be moved by that death in the present, nor is the Mass a repetition of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross (even though corrupt practices may have led to that conclusion). When the church in the eucharistic Prayer prays: “Father, calling to mind the death your Son endured for our salvation … we offer you in thanksgiving this holy and living sacrifice,” it does so in the conviction that precisely because it is grafted into Christ’s sacrifice, it offers to God that one same sacrifice of praise, and a repetition of the original sacrifice.
When the church baptizes, the baptism needs to be done once because it is Christ who baptizes. In the weekly celebration of the Eucharist, in contrast, the church makes a memorial of the saving act of God in Christ which is its origin, its judgment, its consolation, and its hope: Christ crucified and risen, from whom it cannot be separated. In response to this unearned gift of salvation, grateful praise is the only response. The Eucharist is the sacrifice of praise, the perfect act of worship because it is Christ who offers it, the same Christ in whom the church dwells.
As the human sciences indicate, ritual itself is a set of conventions, an organized pattern of signs and gestures which members of a community use to interpret and enact themselves and to transmit to others. Ritual confirms their relation to reality. Such is the case for the chief rites of the church known as the liturgy of the sacraments. They are always subject to reform, as the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, issued by the Second Vatican Council proclaimed.