Too often, the Catholic Mass in the modern Roman rite feels like a meeting. A well-meaning one, perhaps – but horizontal, flat and alarmingly un-mysterious. There’s handshaking. Folksy banter from the altar. Music that sounds like a leftover from a 1970s guitar retreat. It’s meant to be “engaging”. It ends up being banal.
And people are walking away. Not just from the pews, but from the sense that what happens at Mass is sacred – something transcendent, something beautiful, something terrifying in the best possible sense. About a third of regular Mass-attending Catholics don’t believe in the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist – the “source and summit” of the life of the Church – which is to say nothing of the majorities of Catholics in most countries who don’t even attend Mass.
Pope Leo XIV has noticed.
His 14 May Jubilee address to the Eastern Catholic churches is a rare intervention on this very point. Listening carefully to it, this becomes evident: while praising “the primacy of God” and spiritual depth of Eastern rites, the Pope is also sending a gentle warning to the West. The reforms of the 1960s and their aftermath have led us away from the sacred mystery that should define liturgy.
“The Church needs you,” he exhorted his audience. “The contribution that the Christian East can offer us today is immense! We have great need to recover the sense of mystery that remains alive in your liturgies, liturgies that engage the human person in his or her entirety, that sing of the beauty of salvation and evoke a sense of wonder at how God’s majesty embraces our human frailty!”
The use of the word “recover” reveals much about his views. We will return to this later. However, in his next statement Leo made things even less subtle:
“It is likewise important to rediscover, especially in the Christian West, a sense of the primacy of God, the importance of mystagogy and the values so typical of Eastern spirituality: constant intercession, penance, fasting, and weeping for one’s own sins and for those of all humanity (penthos)!”
The Pope continued to praise “authentic spiritual traditions” which have been preserved in the East without being “corrupted by the mentality of consumerism and utilitarianism”. He spoke of the Eastern liturgies as embodying a deep spiritual richness, a reverence that invites the faithful to enter the sacred mysteries with a sense of awe and profound worship.
Leo then cautioned Eastern Catholic leaders that “it is vital, then, that you preserve your traditions without attenuating them, for the sake perhaps of practicality or convenience”.
In this he was, it appears, critiquing the Western tendency since the reforms to simplify, modernise and make the Mass more accessible – sometimes at the expense of mystery and reverence.
For if the West must “recover” a sense of mystery, the subtext is that this has been lost; to say that the West must “rediscover” the primacy of God is to call out its anthropocentrism.
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