Blog Sarah
While we were away- and we’re not saying the two are necessarily connected- Cardinal Sarah has been in the headlines of the ecclesiastical press. Cardinal Sarah wishes his name to be pronounced with stress on the second syllable, and he was made a cardinal by Pope Benedict. Anyway, he would like priests to begin celebrating Mass ad orientem, ‘that is facing east rather than the congregation’, the Catholic Herald tells us.
He said we should have confidence that ‘this is something good for the Church, good for our people.’ Having heard once that God doesn’t like families who celebrate the First Communion of a child with a bouncy castle, if we understood correctly, we are a little bit cautious about accepting sweeping statements like that of Cardinal Sarah too quickly. But we have decided that we cannot any longer resist the temptation to say ‘Well, que sarah, sarah’.
But we will point out that the good cardinal’s wish , of course, is going to present many Glasgow parishes with problems. In St Andrew’s Cathedral it means we’ll see the priest’s right profile, and in Our Lady of Perpetual Succour his left. It seems at first sight like business as usual in St Aloysius or St Patrick’s, although how this can be done without facing the congregation is tricky. The priest could do it if he stands at the back of the church, right enough.
‘How shall the world be served ?’ as one of Chaucer’s characters remarks.
This praying to the east is a very old idea, although the great Christian intellectual Origen commented that ‘the reasons for this, I think, are not easily discovered by anyone’ , and this in the fourth century.
St Charles Borromeo – he was like that- said if you’re going to build churches designed for this east thing, then get a compass and do it exactly right. He also said he didn’t care if it had to be done north and south. Even more interestingly, he also said the altar could be at the west end where- and this is the interesting bit- ‘in accordance with the rite of the Church it is customary for Mass to be celebrated at the main altar by a priest facing the people’ . No wonder Wikipedia says that today the custom is ‘little observed’
Cardinal Sarah also remarked that it is essential that priest and faithful look together towards the East, again without saying why. We , on this blog, can hardly let the whole thing go without pointing out that it is also a symbolic representation of the Tridentine priest as leader of the congregation.
That, it has to be accepted even by Cardinal Sarah, was then. This is now.