May 2024 Print

New Emphases and Omissions for “Modern Man”

By Matthew Hazell

The feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus is of comparatively recent institution in the liturgy. Its origins lie in the devotion to the Five Holy Wounds, particularly the Wound in Our Lord’s side, which the Gospel of John mentions:

When they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water. He who saw it has borne witness—his testimony is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth—that you also may believe. (John 19:33-35)

Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.” Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” (John 20:24-27)

Saint Augustine, along with many of the Fathers of the Church, saw in this Wound the life-giving grace of the Sacraments and the Church:

[T]here, in a manner of speaking, the door of life was thrown open from which the mystical rites of the Church flowed, without which one does not enter into the life which is true life. That blood was shed for the remission of sins; that water provides the proper mix for the health-giving cup; it offers both bath and drink… Here the second Adam, his head bowed, slept on the cross in order that from there might be found for him a bride [i.e., the Church]—that one who flowed from the side of the One sleeping. O death from which the dead live again! What is cleaner than this blood? What is more healthful than this wound?¹

In the Middle Ages, great saints such as Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bonaventure, and Saint Gertrude of Helfta developed and encouraged the devotion to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. In the seventeenth century, through the work of Saint John Eudes and Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, the feast came to be celebrated in the liturgy of the Roman Rite, beginning locally in France and spreading until, in 1856, Pope Pius IX placed it on the universal calendar on the Friday after the Octave of Corpus Christi, where it remains today.² A new Mass formulary, along with a special Preface, was promulgated in 1929.³ Given that this new formulary was less than forty years old when the post-Vatican II liturgical reforms began, one might have thought that it would largely have been left alone by the reformers. As with so much of the reforms, however, this was not the case. Not as many changes have been made to this feast, but some of them are quite major, and illustrate some of the systemic problems of the 1960s reforms.

The Novus Ordo gives two options for the Collect:⁴ the first is that from the Mass of the Sacred Heart as promulgated by Pius IX in 1856, and the second is from the 1929 Mass as found in the 1962 Missal. The first of these reads as follows in the 1970/2008 Missal:

Grant, we pray, almighty God, that we, who glory in the Heart of your beloved Son and recall the wonders of his love for us, may be made worthy to receive an overflowing measure of grace from that fount of heavenly gifts.

When one compares this with its source, the Pius IX collect—itself taken from the Mass composed under Clement XIII—a couple of alterations can be seen. The first, and more substantial, is that the end of the petition has been changed: originally, the collect asked that we “may rejoice alike in its work within us and in its fruits.” Whether this change is for the better or not is perhaps a matter of personal preference, but it can be noted that the criticism leveled by Bl. Ildephonse Schuster at the original prayer that it lacked the “beauty of style” (concinnitas) present in the Church’s ancient collects is, if anything, exacerbated by the edits here.⁵ The second change is smaller, and perhaps more curious: sanctissimo has been deleted from the source, so that the line “we, who glory in the Most Sacred Heart of your beloved Son” now reads “we, who glory in the Heart of your beloved Son.” Since the second option for the collect reads in Corde Filii tui, the word sanctissimo in the first collect may have been thought superfluous by the reformers, and its deletion does standardize the description of the Most Sacred Heart in the liturgical prayers. But this is still rather odd, and also subtly rationalist: what is wrong with a little variety in terminology?

For the Prayer over the Offerings, the Novus Ordo preserves the Secret in the 1962 Missal with no changes: “Look, O Lord, we pray, on the surpassing charity in the Heart of your beloved Son, that what we offer may be a gift acceptable to you and an expiation of our offenses.” This is something that is surprisingly rare in the reforms.

The Postcommunion, on the other hand, is effectively brand-new. The first half is inspired by the oration in the 1962 Missal, but the second half is completely changed:

May your holy mysteries, O Lord Jesus, grant us divine fervour, so that perceiving the sweetness of your most loving Heart, we may learn to despise the things of earth and love those of heaven. (1962 MR)

May this sacrament of charity, O Lord, make us fervent with the fire of holy love, so that, drawn always to your Son, we may learn to see him in our neighbour. (1970/2008 MR)

Originally, the reformers were going to keep the Postcommunion from the 1962 Missal in place, albeit changing it to address the Father rather than the Son, in line with their principles of revision.⁶ Why, then, the change later on in the reforms? Undoubtedly, it was to do with the phrase “despise the things of earth and love those of heaven” (discámus terréna despícere, et amáre cœléstia), a sentiment the reformers thought was too difficult for “modern man” and thus needed excising from liturgical prayer. In the words of one of them:

Concern for the truth required adaptation in the case of numerous orations, as we have said above. For example, many texts, for a long while too well-known, put heaven and earth into radical opposition: from whence the antithetical couplet oft repeated in the old missal: terrena despicere et amare caelestia, which, though a right understanding is possible, is very easily badly translated. An adaptation was imperative that, without harming the truth, took account of the modern mentality and the directives of Vatican II.⁷

Since the pre-1929 Postcommunion was, if anything, even more difficult for “modern man,”⁸ the Consilium could not fall back on that text, so a new one was composed. There is nothing objectionable about this new prayer in and of itself—loving our neighbor is the second of the two great commandments, after all (see Matthew 22:34-40)—but this change is part and parcel of a 1960s censorship that systematically deletes the biblical injunction for the Christian faithful to be in the world but not of the world (John 17:16), and to neither love the world nor the things in it (I John 2:15-17). To ideologically change this supposed “negative” theology into something more “positive” makes our liturgical prayer lopsided, and risks the faithful being formed by the liturgy to have an overly-optimistic view of the world.

The other major change in the Mass of the Most Sacred Heart in the Novus Ordo is in its Preface. Previous to 1929, the Preface of the Holy Cross was used, but then the feast was given its own Preface:

It is truly right and just… Who willed that your Only-Begotten Son, while hanging on the Cross, should be pierced by a soldier’s spear; that the Heart thus opened should, as from a well of divine bounty, pour out on us streams of mercy and grace, and that the Heart which never ceased to burn with love for us should be a repose for the devout, and an open refuge of salvation for the penitent…

In their remarks on this Preface, the liturgical reformers were rather ambivalent about it:

In the appreciation of this preface, introduced in the Roman Missal in 1928, let us content ourselves with noting that, in accordance with the other texts of the Mass, the object of worship rendered to the Sacred Heart is to pay reparative homage to the love of Christ, unrecognized and scorned.

The difficulty of integrating such an objective into the traditional structures of a liturgical celebration has been emphasized on several occasions. Therefore, it is not surprising that this Preface, through the themes it invokes and the vocabulary it employs, stands out very distinctly from all other Prefaces. To be convinced of this, one only needs to compare the use of the word “repose” [requies], as it is used here, with its traditional meaning in the Latin euchological vocabulary.⁹

It seems that the unique features of this Preface, rather than being a positive 20th-century contribution to the Roman liturgy, were a problem for the reformers. So it is perhaps no surprise that the idea of acts of reparation—a biblical as well as devotional concept (e.g., Colossians 1:24)—was entirely omitted from the Consilium’s newly-composed Preface, along with the distinctive poetry of the word requies (“repose”), a thematic echo of the petition “within thy wounds hide me” in the Anima Christi (14th century):

It is truly right and just… For raised up high on the Cross, he gave himself up for us with a wonderful love and poured out blood and water from his pierced side, the wellspring of the Church’s Sacraments, so that, won over to the open heart of the Saviour, all might draw water joyfully from the springs of salvation…

Originally, a Preface for Easter Sunday from the Bobbio Missal (8th century) was suggested for use by the Consilium, with some changes,¹⁰ but this was quickly replaced by the new composition we find in the Novus Ordo today.¹¹ This new text takes clear inspiration from the Bible and from Vatican II (Isaiah 12:3;¹² John 3:14; 19:34; Ephesians 5:2; Sacrosanctum Concilium, 61), as well as the Fathers of the Church—the idea of the Wound in Christ’s side being the “wellspring of the Church’s Sacraments” can be seen, for example, in the quote from Saint Augustine at the beginning of this article.

Again, taken on its own, this new Preface is unobjectionable, but since it lacks some of the ideas and themes of the older Preface it does lend a different emphasis to the feast of the Most Sacred Heart in the Novus Ordo. In fact, if the first option for the Collect is used, the notion of reparation—a strong theme in the 1962 Missal’s formulary—is almost entirely absent. This is contrary to what Pope Pius XII taught in his 1956 Encyclical Haurietis aquas, namely, that “the Church, the teacher of men, has always been convinced from the time she first published official documents concerning the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus that its essential elements [are] acts of love and reparation by which God’s infinite love for the human race is honoured.”¹³ Of course, this is in keeping with Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque’s third vision in 1675, where Our Lord asked her to work for the institution of a feast “to honour My Heart… making reparation for the indignity that it has received.”¹⁴

We have here, then, an occasion in the liturgical reforms that is decidedly mixed in its results. On the one hand, more of the preceding Roman liturgical tradition has been preserved in the Novus Ordo than is the case elsewhere in the reforms—albeit for a comparatively modern feast day. On the other hand, the changes that have been made substantially alter some of the traditional theological and devotional aspects of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, with certain concepts missing almost entirely in the post-Vatican II Mass formulary.

Dr. Peter Kwasniewski asks the question, “Why was the character of the feast tilted away from the theme of reparation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus for sins, blasphemies, outrages, sacrileges, indifference, and worldliness?”¹⁵ The answer, according to the reformers themselves, seems to have been that it was difficult to integrate this theme into the new liturgy primarily because it was too distinctive. The corresponding change of emphasis in the Novus Ordo for this feast, along with the textual omissions made for “modern man,” has resulted in the faithful not being given a full theological picture. Attempts have been made to claim this as a liturgical “development,”¹⁶ but even given the biblical and patristic inspirations for the revised texts, it is difficult to see how this can really be anything but a rupture with how the Church has understood the feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus since its inception.

Endnotes

¹ Saint Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 120, 2.

² Notwithstanding Pius XII’s abolition of the octave of Corpus Christi in 1955.

³ An account of the history and development of the devotion to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus up to the mid-20th century can be found in Arthur R. McGratty, The Sacred Heart: Yesterday and Today (New York, NY: Benziger Brothers, 1951). See also Pope Pius XII, Encyclical Haurietis aquas, May 15, 1956: AAS 48 (1956), pp. 309-353; Bl. Ildephonse Schuster, The Sacramentary , pp. 203-206.

⁴ Though having the option between two collects on a Solemnity (1st class feast) seems questionable in itself. In a Votive Mass, for example, where the liturgical tradition often permits diversity in the orations and readings, a choice of collects would be reasonable; when it comes to the Proper of Time, however, a certain uniformity in the liturgical texts seems better. For more on this subject, see Peter Kwasniewski, “The Minor Options of the Old Rite and How They Avoid ‘Optionitis,’ ” New Liturgical Movement (July 20, 2020), https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2020/07/the-minor-options-of-old-rite-and-how.html.

⁵ This is a problem particularly in the newly-composed orations of the Novus Ordo, which are often needlessly lengthy and complicated, especially in the “Masses and Prayers for Various Needs and Occasions” section.

⁶ See Consilium ad exsequendam, Schema 186 (De Missali, 27), September 19, 1966, p. 48, reproduced in Matthew P. Hazell (ed.), The Proper of Time in the Post-Vatican II Liturgical Reforms (Lectionary Study Press, 2018), p. 161: Domine Iesu is changed to Domine, and dulcissimi Cordis tui changed to dilectissimi Filii tui cordis. The principle that “all the orations of the Roman Missal be directed to the Father” is expressed on pp. 3-4 of Schema 186.

⁷ Antoine Dumas, “Les oraisons du nouveau missel romain,” Questions liturgiques 25 (1971), pp. 263-270, at p. 267: English translation from Lauren Pristas, “The Orations of the Vatican II Missal: Policies for Revision,” Communio 30 (Winter 2003), pp. 621-653, at p. 635. See also Anthony Ward, “Terrena despicere et amare caelestia,” Ephemerides Liturgicae 130 (2016), pp. 204-223.

⁸ This prayer reads as follows: “O Lord our God, who has vouchsafed to feed us with the banquet of peace and the sacraments of salvation, we humbly pray that, as you are meek and humble of heart, having cleansed us from the stains of our vices, we may more earnestly abhor the pride and vanities of the world.”

⁹ Consilium ad exsequendam, Schema 186 (De Missali, 27)—Addenda, September 19, 1966, p. 8.

¹⁰ Schema 186, p. 61: “It is truly right and just… through Christ our Lord: By the shedding of whose blood was established peace in heaven and earth. O truly precious testament of peace, which our Redeemer sealed by the oblation of holy blood; not with gold and silver, nor with gems and pearls, but with springs from the heart of the Saviour. The blood of the Lamb gladdens heaven, cleanses the earth, and confounds hell. The angels saw, and they received joy; men saw, and greatly rejoiced at the light. Therefore…” The source text can be found in E.A. Lowe (ed.), The Bobbio Missal: A Gallican Mass Book: Text (London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 1920), n. 270. This would probably have been more suited as a Preface for the feast of the Most Precious Blood (July 1), but of course this feast day was abolished in the reforms!

¹¹ A draft of this Preface, with minor differences (mostly in word order), can be found in Consilium ad exsequendam, Schema 249 (De Missali, 40), October 1, 1967, p. 22.

¹² Note that the title and first line of Pius XII’s 1956 Encyclical Haurietis aquas is taken from this verse in Isaiah.

¹³ Pius XII, Haurietis aquas, n. 101 (at AAS 48, p. 342).

¹⁴ From the account of Saint Margaret’s third revelation in Emile Bougaud, Life of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque (New York, NY: Benziger Brothers, 1920), p. 176.

¹⁵ Peter Kwasniewski, “Our Lord’s Request for the Institution of the Feast of His Sacred Heart,” New Liturgical Movement, June 27, 2019, https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2019/06/our-lords-request-for-institution-of.html.

¹⁶ See, for example, Brian Dunn, “The Liturgical Theology of the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart,” Homiletic and Pastoral Review, August/September 2006, pp. 22-26 (republished at https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=7146).