Although the Roman Mass, standardized by directives of the Council of Trent (1570), is technically a post-Reformation document, it is not an innovation but rather the summation of the medieval development of western Catholic worship. Consequently, the mass below is presented as part of the pre-Reformation liturgies as an example of ancient Catholic worship.
Introduction
The English text which appears below is a translation of the Low Mass of the Latin Rite which was used from 1570 until the reforms following the Second Vatican Council, which began in 1962. The Roman Mass comprises two classes of material: the “ordinary” of the Mass, those parts that remain constant through all the seasons and celebrations of the church year, and the “proper” of the mass, those parts that vary according to the season, the Sunday of the year, or the particular commemoration of the day. In the Low Mass, the “ordinary” parts (Kyrie eleison, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei) were recited, whereas in the High Mass these would be sung by a choir or a schola cantorum. The Low Mass grew out of the medieval practice at the monastery of Cluny, where the priest was directed to read the sung portions in the absence of musicians. The text we read dates from the time of Pope Pius V in the wake of the Council of Trent in 1568. This rite endured with almost no change until the Second Vatican Council, which called for the revision of the missal in light of the historical and liturgical studies of the first part of this century. The word “Mass”comes from the last words of the rite where the priest dismissed the people with the words, “ite, missa est,” meaning “Go, this is the dismissal” or “Go, you are sent.” The book that governed the proper performance of the rite of the eucharistic liturgy was therefore called the Missal.
It is important to understand the genesis and use of the Roman Missal to appreciate how the Roman rite enjoyed such great stability while suffering liturgical stagnation for almost four hundred years. Briefly, the earlier medieval period was very fertile in liturgical production, a fact attested to by Joseph Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite, and by Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy. Throughout the Middle Ages, there was a great proliferation of new and diverse prayers. Popular devotional prayers, as well as prayers to accompany the feasts of different saints, found their place in the Roman Missal. Medieval piety was nourished heavily by liturgical allegory, whereby invented and oftentimes fanciful meanings were overlaid upon the liturgical actions and words. The faithful, unable to participate directly in the Mass, were encouraged to pray the Paternoster in Latin, or in the vernacular if Latin were an impossibility for them. New prayers and hymns were composed and incorporated into prayerbooks to be recited and sung during Low Mass. For the illiterate, the recitation of communal prayers, such as the rosary, was the appropriate participation of the faithful.
On the other hand, the Middle Ages witnessed the development of a eucharistic theology strongly sacrificial in nature, which determined the role of the presider as the sacerdotal offerer of the sacrifice. This idea made the Mass more of an exercise of private devotion of the priest. The theology stressed that each Mass was in itself a good and holy work and a new act of Christ himself through which he applied his sacrifice of redemption. The medieval theology tended to accentuate the privileged place of the priest, which led to certain liturgical abuses.
Before the Missal was compiled, the rites of the church were scattered throughout a number of liturgical books such as the sacramentary, lectionary, and antiphonary, which were consolidated into this one book for the use of the priest in accomplishing his private Mass.
Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085) tried to correct the sad ecclesial situation, marked by gross illiteracy of the clergy, by instituting a reform that included the liturgy. His ambitious program tried to restore the clerical mores as well as ecclesiastical discipline. The Gregorian reform, rather than truly reforming the liturgy, turned out to be a type of instruction given to the clergy so that they would know and recognize better the parts of the Mass, especially the canonical and liturgical rules. The final result of this reform was a movement of unification of the liturgy.
It would be mistaken, however, to assume that absolute uniformity was achieved by the Gregorian reform. In Spain, for example, the liturgy of the Latin Rite entered with great difficulty, gradually supplanting the old Mozarabic rites. The Spanish bishops in the northern dioceses of Spain found a way to implant the official Roman rite by using monks from foreign lands. Little by little, the Roman rite gained ground in the Iberian peninsula, first in Aragon in 1071, then moving towards Castille in 1078. At the Council of Burgos in 1085, the local rite disappeared in favor of the official Latin rite, except for the cities of Valencia and Toledo, where special indulgence was granted to preserve the old Mozarabic rite.
In Italy, an independent rite associated with St. Ambrose flourished in the city of Milan. All attempts to suppress this rite in favor of religious and political unity and liturgical uniformity in the West were thwarted. The success of the Gregorian reform, however, is attributed to two principal causes: the work of Franciscan mendicants in the thirteenth century and the influence of the printing press in the fifteenth century.
The Franciscan order, founded by St. Francis of Assisi in the thirteen century, brought about two results regarding the Mass, namely abbreviation and unification. Formerly in Rome, two kinds of liturgies coexisted. The basilica liturgy was known for its conservative and traditional quality, while the curial liturgy, which had been adapted to the needs of the papal chapel which moved about frequently, was much less traditional. The papal chapel adopted the missal, containing all the readings and prayers in one consolidated book because these could be transported more easily. This later led to the adoption of the missal in an abbreviated form over the use of many different liturgical books. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, Innocent III officially established the Office of the Curia. The mendicant friars of St. Francis, renowned for their itinerant preaching, spread its use throughout Europe. In a papal decree of the Franciscan Pope Nicholas III, the abbreviated and simplified Mass supplanted the ancient basilica liturgy. In spite of the resistance at the basilicas of St. Peter and St. John Lateran, the new missal was rapidly adopted with only minor adaptations of the local churches who maintained the celebrations of local saints within the liturgical year. Shortly thereafter, by another official decree, the calendar of the saints was made universal for the church, unifying the Roman liturgy even more.
In the fifteenth century, the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg aided in the widespread diffusion of the Roman Missal. This also lead to the disappearance of many liturgical elements which formerly had been conserved in the independent ancient rites. Prior to the printing press, the liturgical books had been copied by hand, which was slow and costly, but allowed for regional differences in the contents of the missal. The first printed missals appeared in 1457 in Constance, the center of the diffusion for the Rhenish region. Later, in 1474, the first Roman Missal was published in Milan and the following year in Rome. Other European capitals—like Paris, Lyons, Salisbury, Strasbourg, and Venice—followed suit and undertook the task of printing and distributing the new missal, contributing to even more widespread uniformity according to the Roman usage.
A few notable exceptions to the liturgical simplification and uniformity can be found among the monastic and religious orders. The Dominicans, apparently heavily influenced by the basilica-style liturgy, launched their own reform of the liturgy between 1228 and 1238. The Cistercian Order had derived their liturgy from the important reformed Benedictine Abbey of Cluny, which conserved Franco-Roman usages. In 1618 they abandoned their ritual for the newly adopted Missal of Pius V. Other orders, such as the Premonstratensians and the Carmelites, blended their ancient liturgies with later liturgical customs.
The need for liturgical reform, especially of the Roman Missal, was recognized from the time of Pope Pius II (1458–1464). During the pontificate of Sixtus IV, several feeble attempts at reform were enacted, especially in the area of liturgical chant at the celebrated Sistine Chapel (1473). Sixtus was formerly the Superior General of the Franciscan Order and favored Franciscan liturgical usage. For many historical reasons, it was necessary to wait for the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century for the long-needed liturgical reform.
The liturgists, whose task it was to reform the Roman Missal, exhibited three distinct tendencies: humanist, traditionalist, and classicist. Acting on a mandate by Pope Leo X (1513–1521), the liturgical reformers first revised the hymns, having determined that this area had been impoverished by music of very poor taste. They produced a work that was almost completely new and brought about the flowering of the great age of polyphony. Beyond the musical dimension, several reforms were introduced to improve the liturgy: clarification of the legislation in liturgical matters through the use of rubrics (directions written in red ink); reformation of the Sunday cycle; revision of all the texts of the Mass, eliminating historical accretions to the liturgy of dubious origin and value; and simplification of certain historical additions, which would aid in better execution of the liturgy.
Various synods and regional councils sought more changes that would touch fundamental questions of liturgical reform. Partially in response to these requests, as well as to the demands of the Reformers North of the Alps and of the German Emperor Ferdinand I and the French King Charles IX, the Council of Trent, in its first session (1545–1547), undertook a larger reform of the liturgy. This program was approved during the second session (1547–1552) but was not fully implemented until the last session (1562–1563). The general tenets of Trent called for liturgical uniformity while upholding the rights for individual diocesan usages which were more than 200 years old.
Authorized by the twenty-fifth session of the council, Pope Pius IV began to promulgate the necessary decrees to insure the Tridentine reforms. The formation of a liturgical commission in 1564 was soon thereafter suspended, later to be reestablished in 1566. The next pope, Pius V, completed the work of Trent. The newly revised missal appeared in 1570 and contained several important points: simplification of the feasts of saints in order to reemphasize the priority of the Sunday cycle; suppression of numerous octaves (eight-day observances of certain feasts); and clarification of the rubrics.
Although the Mass text fixed by the Council of Trent endured for almost four hundred years, liturgical art and architecture, music, and vessels continued to develop and change throughout the centuries. It would be impossible to describe the typical setting and celebration since this varied from place to place and from century to century. A helpful study of these ancillary dimensions can be found in Edward Foley’s From Age to Age (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1991). In spite of these subtle changes, the impression that most Catholics had was of the invariability and timelessness of the Roman Rite. The fact that the performance of the liturgy was limited to the priests and servers rendered the faithful mere spectators and fostered the idea that the Mass was a fixed monument. The liturgy was considered as “a finished art-product, as a wondrous work of the Holy Spirit, and it is forgotten that in the service of this higher master, human hands had been at work through the centuries, probing and fumbling and, not always very happily, endeavoring to make the eternally incomplete as fit for its purpose as they could” (Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite, vol. 1, 158). One consequence of this mistaken notion of the unchangeability of the Mass has provoked the reaction of some Catholics who do not accept the recent reform of the liturgy promulgated by Vatican II.
The participation of the faithful was hindered for several reasons. First, the Latin language rendered most people incapable of following the action, let alone participating in the parts of the service designated as the people’s response. Altar servers, therefore, responded in the name of the people. At the time of the Council of Trent, it became apparent that even many priests did not know Latin sufficiently to understand what they were praying. One of the tasks of Trent, therefore, was seminary reform, to ensure that seminarians would understand the Latin texts. Second, the attitude that the Mass was the sole property of the priest-presider fostered the notion that the faithful would be better served by prayer books and rosary beads to occupy their time during the Mass. One significant attempt to render the Latin Mass more intelligible by the faithful was the personal missal, where the Latin text was juxtaposed with a translation in the vernacular. The personal missal was not, however, intended to foster active participation on the part of the faithful, but rather was a means for them to follow passively the liturgical action. The introduction of the private missal met with a negative reaction and the translation of the Latin prayers into the vernacular was forbidden. The intention of the church legislation in this prohibition was to retain a veil of mystery around the Mass.
The Tridentine Missal delineated several different parts of the eucharistic liturgy, yet one can broadly uncover a liturgical shape comprised of four parts: the Mass of the Catechumens, the Offertory, the Canon, and the Communion. In the preface of the missal, in the section entitled “Ritus Servandus,” detailed instructions are given to the priest as to the celebration of the Mass, beginning with the manner in which he is to prepare himself while vesting and how he is to proceed to the altar. These instructions go into greater detail, delineating all the various parts of the Mass, but in the interest of brevity and clarity, the four-part division mentioned above is helpful.
Conclusion
Due to the unintelligibility of the Latin Mass to the majority of the faithful, they depended heavily upon prayer books, which would help evoke the proper sentiments at the appropriate moments in the Mass. Music was also a key element for stimulating the proper feelings. Of course, a more complete study would reveal that the prayers and the musical styles changed according to the changes in the spiritual and cultural modes of the various centuries.
In conclusion, one can look at the enactment of the Mass on three levels. In the sanctuary of the church, the priest and servers engaged in a fixed form of liturgical prayer, the only variations in the order being the predetermined variable prayers. All gestures and words were carefully governed by the Roman Missal, which even indicated how far apart the priest’s hands should be while praying. The more solemn the occasion, the more ornate were the vestments and the more incense was used to create a sense of the celestial action. In the body or the nave of the church, the faithful watched, listened, smelled, but passively participated as spectators of this heavenly affair. By use of personal missals, the literate could follow the action, much like the way a modern operagoer would use a libretto. Otherwise, people used other means of popular piety, especially the rosary. In the loft, the choir would accompany the action, always being careful to their cues by way of bells, gestures, or certain keywords. The principle of progressive solemnity applied to them as well since the choice of the setting of the Mass could be determined by the liturgical feast. Often the priest would continue his part, speaking silently as the missal demanded, while the choir provided a rich aural background. Each actor, or group of actors, knew what was expected of them, but there was little intersection of dramatic action or dialogue.
Concerning the development of sacred music, the musical setting of a Mass became the standard repertory of any serious composer. Since the ordinary parts were fixed texts, composers took great liberties in setting them. By the late eighteenth century, some musical settings clearly went beyond liturgical use, and the musical piece was destined for the concert hall. A clear example of this is the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven. Josef Jungmann was sharply critical of the overall liturgical musical development in the post-Tridentine period: “It sometimes happened that this church music, which had fallen more and more into the hands of laymen, forgot that it was meant to serve the liturgical action. As a result of this, the music often fitted very poorly into the liturgical setting. And since this latter was but little understood, and because esthetic consideration began to hold sway, the liturgy was not only submerged under this ever-growing art but actually suppressed, so that even at this time there were festival occasions which might best be described as church concerts with liturgical accompaniment” (Mass of the Roman Rite [New York: Benziger, 1959], vol. 1, 149).
A more conscious attempt to promote active participation came from certain communities of Europe and in the nineteenth century when the German Singmesse was introduced, and in the early twentieth century, when themissa dialogata or missa recitata was tried. In these experimental rites, the congregation was encouraged to learn the Latin responses. But these attempts at fuller liturgical participation for the faithful were not widespread.
In spite of Trent’s intention to provide a pure Roman Missal, historical accretions did creep into the Mass. In 1833, the call came from the French Benedictine Dom Prosper Gueranger to rid these liturgical books of any arbitrary additions and return the Roman Rite to its noble purity. This signaled the beginning of the Catholic Restoration, which would grow into the liturgical movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A crack in the liturgical ossification was detected in 1949 and in 1952 when Pope Pius XII called for the restoration of the Easter Vigil. A few years later in 1956, the International Congress for Pastoral Liturgy met at Assisi, and in 1959, the Conference for Liturgy and Missions met a Nijmegen. Within a short decade, new reforms were demanded by the Second Vatican Council to return the liturgy to its pristine understanding as to the “public work” of the whole people of God.