In a media-driven age, writes Pope Benedict XVI, signs and symbols are no longer understood
By Father Randy Stice
Recent popes have identified three cultural challenges that can affect our participation in the Mass.
Pope Francis has written that many today no longer believe that God is present and active in the world. Pope Benedict XVI has observed that, in our technological age, signs and symbols are no longer understood. He has also noted that our attachment to mass media and to our devices makes it difficult for us to practice recollection and cultivate a fruitful silence. Have these challenges affected our participation in Mass? Do we believe that God acts powerfully and personally in the Mass, and if so, how? Do we understand the signs and symbols of the liturgy? Do we welcome silence, or do we find it uncomfortable? In this column, I want to reflect on these three challenges.
The first challenge is an increasing doubt that God is personally active in our world. In The Light of Faith, Pope Francis wrote, “Our culture has lost its sense of God’s tangible presence and activity in our world. We think that God is to be found in the beyond, on another level of reality, far removed from our everyday relationships.”1 This, wrote the pope, is not the perennial faith of the Church. “Christians, on the contrary, profess their faith in God’s tangible and powerful love which really does act in history and determines its final destiny: a love that can be encountered, a love fully revealed in Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection.”2 This belief includes God’s activity in the Mass. The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes St. Leo the Great’s assertion that “what was visible in our Savior has passed into His mysteries.”3 In other words, all that Jesus did during His earthly ministry He continues to do now in the sacraments, preeminently in the Mass. “Here and now,” wrote St. Leo, “we experience his power at work among us.”4
St. Teresa of Avila experienced Jesus’ power in many ways during Mass—healing, consolation, encouragement, enlightenment—especially after receiving Communion. She told her nuns, “If when He went about in the world the mere touch of His robes cured the sick, why doubt, if we have faith, that miracles will be worked while He is within us and that He will give what we ask of Him.” When Jesus comes to us in Communion, “His Majesty is not accustomed to paying poorly for His lodging if the hospitality is good,” if we turn our attention to Him in prayer and adoration. “This is a good time for Jesus to teach us and for us to listen to Him.”5
A second challenge is a decline in our ability to understand the meaning of the signs and gestures of the liturgy. “A highly technological age like our own,” wrote Pope Benedict XVI, “risks losing the ability to appreciate signs and symbols.”6 The signs of the Mass are important because when they are “integrated into the world of faith and taken up by the power of the Holy Spirit,” they “become bearers of the saving and sanctifying action of Christ.”7
But if we don’t “understand the meaning of the liturgy’s words and actions,” wrote St. John Paul II, we cannot “pass from its signs to the mystery which they contain, and to enter into that mystery in every aspect of [our] lives.”8
Incense is a good example of a liturgical sign that is rich in meaning. It recalls the pillar of cloud (Exodus 13:21) by which God led Israel in the wilderness, the cloud itself symbolizing “God’s glory and presence in the midst of the Israelites,” thus suggesting “both the otherness of the transcendent God” and contributing “powerfully to a sense of mystery.”9 It “is an expression of reverence and of prayer, as is signified in sacred Scripture (cf. Psalm 141:2, Revelation 8:3).”10 During the Mass, the gifts on the altar as well as the cross and altar are incensed “so as to signify the Church’s offering and prayer rising like incense in the sight of God.”11 Incense is a sign of the dignity of God’s people: “the priest, because of his sacred ministry, and the people, by reason of their baptismal dignity, may be incensed by the deacon or by another minister.”12 It is also an expression of reverence, “a sign of respect and honor” before Christ,13 when, for example, it is used during the proclamation of the Gospel and when the host and chalice are elevated after the consecration.
A third concern, also noted by Pope Benedict XVI, is the loss of an appreciation for silence. He wrote, “Ours is not an age which fosters recollection; at times one has the impression that people are afraid of detaching themselves, even for a moment, from the mass media. For this reason, it is necessary nowadays that the people of God be educated in the value of silence.”14 Silence is prescribed at several points of the Mass for different reasons. In the Penitential Act, it is a time for those present to recollect themselves. Then, following the priest’s invitation to pray, the assembly again “observes a brief silence so that they may become aware of being in God’s presence and may call to mind their intentions.”15 During the Liturgy of the Word, silence creates a space so that “under the action of the Holy Spirit, the Word of God may be grasped by the heart and a response through prayer may be prepared.”16 It is especially recommended after Communion so that all may “praise God in their hearts and pray to him.”17 Pope Benedict, writing as Cardinal Ratzinger, stressed the importance of this moment in the Mass. “This, in all truth, is the moment for an interior conversation with the Lord who has given Himself to us, for that essential ‘communicating,’ that entry into the process of communication, without which the external reception of the sacrament becomes mere ritual and therefore unfruitful.”18
Popes Francis and Benedict XVI have identified crucial issues that can affect our participation in the Mass. In a world that increasingly doubts the personal presence and action of God, Pope Francis and Sts. Leo the Great and Teresa of Avila teach us that Jesus still does today all that He did in the Gospels. Pope Benedict XVI and St. John Paul II emphasize that He does so “sacramentally,” through signs, symbols, words, and gestures that communicate to us His saving and sanctifying action and that bear more fruit in our lives when we understand them. Benedict also reminds us that silence is an essential part of the Mass, a time for a personal and intimate encounter with Jesus when we can speak with Him and He with us, and when He can touch us in miraculous ways. May their teaching help us to enter more deeply into our liturgical encounter with the Lord.
1 The Light of Faith, no. 17.
2 The Light of Faith, no. 17.
3 Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1115.
4 The Liturgy of the Hours, Volume II, p. 660.
5 All quotes are from The Way of Perfection, Chapter 34.
6 The Sacrament of Charity, no. 64.
7 CCC, no. 1189.
8 Mane Nobiscum Domine, no. 17.
9 Introduction to the Order of Mass (IOM), no. 58.
10 General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM), no. 276.
11 GIRM, no. 75.
12 GIRM, no. 75.
13 IOM, no. 58.
14 Verbum Domini, no. 66.
15 GIRM, no. 54.
16 GIRM, no. 56.
17 GIRM, no. 45.
18 Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, p. 210.
Father Randy Stice is director of the diocesan Office of Worship and Liturgy. He can be reached at frrandy@dioknox.org.
