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The Spiritual Formation of the Celebrant

The secret of learning to be a celebrant is love

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The 20th-century pontiffs have underlined the risk of bureaucratizing the Church. The Church is not a nongovernmental organization or a collection of committees. She is a mystery: the sacrament of love between Christ and the Church made manifest everywhere Christians come together to preach the Gospel, feed the hungry and celebrate the Eucharist.

Importantly, there is another ecclesiological risk, the flip side of the bureaucratic reduction. The Church might become so sacralized that the flesh and blood of ecclesial communion is forgotten. Ecclesial life becomes about an escape from the mundane. Mass is a leaving behind the created order, an exercise in jettisoning our material condition for at least a moment.

Both tendencies may be reflected in the Eucharistic ars celebrandi of the celebrant. The first type of celebrant becomes the talk-show presider or, perhaps better understood in our own day, the YouTube celebrity. The celebrant adopts an intentional informality, designed to put the assembly at ease. When he can speak his own word, rather than what is written in the missal, he will. He is the leader of the NGO, and this is his opportunity to address his board of directors.

The second celebrant seeks a total distance from the assembly. He is the priest, and, therefore, his praying of the Mass becomes part of the ecclesiological mystery. It is his individual praying of the liturgy that is the essential dimension of the celebration. In fact, the assembly may be understood as an impediment to this prayer.

These two types are theoretical models — most likely, they do not exist in their pure form in any one celebrant (and both forms may exist in the same celebrant). But they do reveal that the heart of ars celebrandi, the art of celebrating the Mass, is to possess a proper understanding of the Church as a mystery of the communion between God and the human person, between Catholics and one another. The question we must ask is: Who is the priest in this communio?

Priesthood of the Faithful

To begin, the priest celebrant must remember that the origin of his priesthood is his baptism. Pithily, before he was a priest of the ministerial sort, he was a priest of the common sort. Common, in this case, isn’t a ranking — that is, it doesn’t mean less important than the extraordinary priesthood of ordination. Instead, common means that which is shared by all. We pursue a common good. The earth is our common home.

When we are baptized, no matter our age, we share in the priestly, prophetic and royal vocation of Jesus Christ, the God-man. This priestly vocation means that the Christian becomes a sacrificial person who is called to make the totality of his or her existence into a sacrifice of praise. St. Paul exhorts the Romans to “offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship” (Rom 12:1). Liturgical language is used to describe not a rite but the very body of the Christian. Everything that the Christian does is to become a way of worshipping God.

It is for this reason that Pope St. John Paul II reminded the Church in Christifideles Laici of the Eucharistic nature of lay Catholic life. All Catholics who go to Mass are called to celebrate the liturgy. They are to hear the word, to respond to that word with a total response, and to offer in return their lives as a sacrifice back to the Father through the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit. The baptized bring to the altar the very world, and then they leave the sanctuary to transfigure the entire cosmos in Eucharistic love.

Such context is essential if the ministerial priest is to understand his role. He celebrates the liturgy at the service of this fundamental baptismal Eucharistic vocation. For him, the quality of his celebration should be measured in the increasing awareness of the baptized of their own Eucharistic vocation. He should pray the liturgy in such a way that the baptized are drawn into offering this very sacrifice for the life of the world.

And the baptized include himself! There is a mutual listening to the word of God, a mutual call to conversion and a mutual act of praise and sacrifice. A good presider will discover in presiding a new conviction to become himself a sacrificial offering that brings about the salvation of every man or woman.

Eucharistic Vocation of the Ministerial Priest

Now, in saying that the ministerial priesthood is ordered toward the baptismal priesthood, this does not mean that the ordained priest possesses no vocation distinct from the baptized priest. If the uniqueness of the ministerial priesthood is forgotten, the liturgical celebration becomes reducible to power. The priest, as celebrant, gets to say the prayers, make the ritual gestures and wear the vestments.

The ordained priest is given a specific power through the Sacrament of Holy Orders to celebrate the liturgy. In the liturgy of his ordination, the instruments of his office are handed over to him: the bread and wine that will be used in the celebration of the Eucharist. He has a unique right and responsibility as the celebrant of the Eucharist.

The uniqueness of this vocation, though, does not come from his own power. The priest exercises his authority in the person of Christ and the Church. Both dimensions cannot be forgotten.

He is a priest, exercising his authority in persona Christi. When he prays specifically the Institution Narrative at Mass, he speaks the words of Christ: This is my body, given for you. This is my blood, poured out for you. These are not words that he can speak in his own name. He is consecrated so that through his voice he may speak Christ’s words, transforming bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.

This power is given to him for the sake of the Church, who is to receive the Eucharistic Lord at Mass. It is an objective power: If the priest speaks these words, the words are Christ’s. Bread becomes body. Wine becomes blood. But as St. Thomas Aquinas noted in his account of the Eucharist, the priest who is holy, who seeks to conform his life to the meaning of these words, will celebrate the Eucharist in a distinctive way.

Therefore, the heart of Eucharistic celebration for the priest is discernible in the imitatio Christi. Does he live as Jesus does? Such Christological attunement is not only to be carried out in the Eucharistic rites of the Church. The celebrant takes seriously his specific vocation toward self-emptying love in every dimension of his vocation.

If a priest, therefore, wants to celebrate Mass well, he must regularly examine himself before the mirror of the face of Christ. A priest who understands his vocation as primarily about power and prestige may have a deep reverence toward the Eucharist, but he will be a very poor celebrant of the liturgy.

You can wonder if this is really any reverence at all. True Christian reverence is grounded in the sonship of Christ. The Son gives himself over to the Father. His whole life is a prayer. The more the priest prays, whether in the Liturgy of the Hours or a slow reading of sacred Scripture, the more he will learn the art of self-emptying love. In that sense, it should be clear that the priest, as celebrant, is praying rather than just saying words.

The second dimension of the priest’s vocation is to act in the person of the Church. He brings before the Father the prayers of the baptized priesthood. He speaks in our name. If you pay attention to the grammar of the Eucharistic prayers, the priest generally speaks in the person of “we.”

The priest celebrant, therefore, should take seriously his vocation to know his flock. He is not speaking in some generic “we,” but rather the “we” of this parish. This parish, where that woman in the front row just lost her son to an overdose. This parish, where that couple is experiencing marital troubles. This parish, where those parents are fighting for the education of their children with special needs.

Pastoral care, in that sense, does not exist alongside serving as a liturgical celebrant. It is integral to the ars celebrandi. The priest speaks in the name of concrete individuals, and he should have them in mind when he prays the Mass. If he is praying intercessions, he should have in his mind those in his community who are poor, who hunger and thirst for justice, and who long for redemption. When he prays the Eucharistic prayer in the context of a funeral or a wedding, he should know his people.

Such prayer extends well outside the formal celebration of the Mass. Just as parents regularly pray for their children, the priest must do the same. His private prayer should always be at the service of his parish, remembering the joys, hopes, suffering and desolation of his assembly.

A Formation into Love

We began this piece with two reduced accounts of celebration, the YouTuber and the priest who makes the Mass ultimately about his own spiritual life. The renewal of liturgical celebration in the Church and the formation of the priest into ars celebrandi must avoid both extremes. You can’t just focus on how Mass is celebrated. What’s the quality of my voice in prayer? How do I hold my hands? These are important concerns, but they’re not the exclusive ones.

Instead, the heart of ars celebrandi is the priest conforming himself to the love of Christ, making himself entirely available for the vocation of the baptized priesthood. Priests who possess this deeper sense of priestly vocation will celebrate the Mass in a way that is reverent but not stuffy, leading the assembly into deeper communion with God and one another.

As it turns out, the secret of learning to be a celebrant is love. Not a love that is self-created, but a love that is first received from Christ upon the cross, now offered in the Eucharistic liturgy, and then extended into the fostering of a Christian culture defined by divine love.

TIMOTHY P. O’MALLEY, Ph.D., is director of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy in the Institute for Church Life and a concurrent assistant professional specialist in the Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame.

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