The honorary “hosts” thus participated especially in the prayer of the community and saw this as of particular benefit. This benefit was later defined in terms of a particular intention, in present practice almost always associated with prayer for the deceased.
Offering a Mass for an intention is a way to secure a spiritual good. It is a hallmark of Catholicity. Even Henry VIII, who went into schism, left money for perpetual Masses for his soul.
There is a famous story by Honore Balzac, “The Atheist’s Mass” in which the curious action of a prominent Paris physician, an unbeliever, who goes yearly to a low Mass offered at Saint Sulpice is analyzed. The story reveals that the physician, who owed his professional career to a poor laborer who helped him with his studies, honored the latter’s memory each year with a Mass. The workingman had believed, and so the physician secretly but faithfully had a Mass offered for the soul of his benefactor on the anniversary of the man’s death.
Recently I read “My Mortal Enemy,” a short novel by Willa Cather, a Baptist-turned-Episcopalian who was nevertheless fascinated by Catholicism. In it a fallen away Catholic, who has become desperately poor, reveals to her relative that she has money hidden from her husband to use for having Masses said after her death. The gold coins were not for any material expenses, only spiritual ones.
More in The Spirit of the New Translation
Like in the example of Balzac, sometimes we see more clearly what our faith means through the eyes of people who do not share it.
But the sacrifice is not just the Church’s or the priest’s but of each member. It would be useful to ask each Catholic, what is your relationship to the sacrifice? That is what the new language highlights, too. Your sacrifice – in what does it consist?
This reminds me of one of the most harrowing tales of the Old Testament, the sacrifice of Isaac.
Abraham is taking his beloved son up the mountain to offer him to God. The boy notices that something is missing. He is carrying the wood (like Jesus carried the cross up another mountain) but there is no animal to sacrifice. Abraham, whose heart must have been breaking, says, “God will provide the sacrifice.”
God provides us at Mass with the sacrifice, His own Son. But he asks of us an interior sacrifice so that we can worship Him completely. It is a woeful spirituality that is dependent on the homily or the music of the Mass, the flowers or the interior decorating – however important all these may be – to make the worship meaningful.
If someone is bored at Mass, what is he or she offering to the Lord? If you came to offer yourself to the Lord in communion with the greatest sacrifice of all time – that of Jesus on the cross – how can you say, “I didn’t get anything out of it”? Maybe you did not put anything in, is what I would be tempted to say.
Don’t forget that the Mass is your sacrifice, too. “My sacrifice and yours” can help us in our distraction to really and personally encounter the Lord in the Eucharist.
(Column continues below)
Subscribe to our daily newsletter