92. The Mass. (Chapter 10. Medieval Worship and Ceremonies.) (History of the Christian Church) (Schaff, Philip)

Comp. vol. III. 96-101 and the liturgical Lit. there quoted; also the works on Christian and Ecclesiastical Antiquities, e.g. Siegel III. 361-411.

The public worship centered in the celebration of the mass as an actual, though unbloody, repetition of the sacrifice of Christ for the sins of the world. In this respect the Eastern and Western churches are fully agreed to this day. They surround this ordinance with all the solemnity of a mysterious symbolism. They differ only in minor details.

Pope Gregory I. improved the Latin liturgy, and gave it that shape which it substantially retains in the Roman church. He was filled with the idea that the eucharist embodies the reconciliation of heaven and earth, of eternity and time, and is fraught with spiritual benefit for the living and the pious dead in one unbroken communion. When the priest offers the unbloody sacrifice to God, the heavens are opened, the angel are present, and the visible and invisible worlds united.

Gregory introduced masses for the dead, in connection with the doctrine of purgatory which he developed and popularized. They were based upon the older custom of praying for the departed, and were intended to alleviate and abridge the penal sufferings of those who died in the Catholic faith, but in need of purification from remaining infirmities. Very few Catholics are supposed to be prepared for heaven; and hence such masses were often ordered beforehand by the dying, or provided by friends. They furnished a large income to priests. The Oriental church has no clearly defined doctrine of purgatory, but likewise holds that the departed are benefited by prayers of the living, especially such as are offered in union with the oblation of the bloodless sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ, and by works of mercy done in faith for their memory.

The high estimate of the efficacy of the sacrament led also to the abuse of solitary masses, where the priest celebrates without attendants. This destroys the original character of the institution as a feast of communion with the Redeemer and the redeemed. Several synods in the age of Charlemagne protested against the practice. The Synod of Mainz in 813 decreed: No presbyter, as it seems to us, can sing masses alone rightly, for how will he say sursum corda! or Dominus vobiscum! when there is no one with him? A reformatory Synod of Paris, 829, prohibits these masses, and calls them a reprehensible practice, which has crept in partly through neglect, partly through avarice.

The mysterious character of the eucharist was changed into the miraculous and even the magical with the spread of the belief in the doctrine of transubstantiation. But the doctrine was contested in two controversies before it triumphed in the eleventh century.

The language of the mass was Greek in the Eastern, Latin in the Western church. The Latin was an unknown tongue to the barbarian races of Europe. It gradually went out of use among the descendants of the Romans, and gave place to the Romanic languages. But the papal church, sacrificing the interests of the people to the priesthood, and rational or spiritual worship to external unity, retained the Latin language in the celebration of the mass to this day, as the sacred language of the church. The Council of Trent went so far as to put even the uninspired Latin Vulgate practically on an equality with the inspired Hebrew and Greek Scriptures.