On Insulting God at Mass: and the Scriptural and Patristic Origins of Ad Orientem

One disputed topic in "the liturgy wars" came up yesterday when I was talking to a pleasant woman from Ireland who is in her late 70s. I'll call her Bridey. As we drove through Oakland with two friends, I mentioned in general conversation that I have a friend who goes to St. Margaret Mary Church in Oakland. "Oh, I know St. Margaret Mary," Bridey said disapprovingly. "They are very old school. Very traditional." 

"That's the only kind of Mass I go to, the traditional Latin Mass," I said.

"The priest says the Mass with his back to the people." Bridey added, I think for the benefit of the other two women in the car, with distaste in her voice.

I'm surprised to hear that bit of slander against that particular aspect of the traditional way of celebrating Mass is still being thrown around. There's no grounds for such smug dismissal of a time-honored practice of the priest facing the altar, which means he faces the crucifix, and the tabernacle, if it hasn't been moved elsewhere, and he also faces a direction called liturgical east. When the priest faces that way, his posture is called ad orientem, which means "to the East." Find something else to feel aggrieved about if you must: celebrating the Mass ad orientem is no insult to anyone.

I think that claim was first bandied around at a time when people were being incited to nurture grievance, and were being told that the hierarchical priesthood was an insult to the laity, depriving them of their proper place.  As for what that proper place might be, evidence suggests that the aggrieved came to think where they should be was at the exact center of everything, even of the Mass.

The document on the liturgy from Vatican II did not even mention which way the priest should face during Mass. It was one of the many changes pushed through after the close of the council, under the rallying cry of the "Spirit of Vatican II."

I replied to Bridey, "The priest is saying Mass facing God, not facing people." Sort of annoyed, she said, "God is in all of us." As if that was the last word.

So I thought, "Does that imply we are worshipping each other in the Mass?"

I didn't want to start an argument, and I didn't have a ready reply to explain why she's wrong. But here are some of the things I thought of later (as one does).

The prayers of the Mass are addressed to God. Why should the priest be facing the people? Doesn't it make more sense to face the crucifix on the altar?

Since Bridey and others complain it is insulting to people when the priest shows his back to them, isn't the priest who celebrates Mass facing the people showing his back to God? And isn't that an insult to God?

My personal experience when I came back to the Church in the mid 70s gradually brought me to this point of view. At first, I accepted the changes that had occurred while I was fallen away. After all, I had come back because I loved and trusted the Church. Then I gradually noticed that the change in posture with the priest facing people while saying Mass (along with the emphasis on "active participation" by the laity) had negative effects on the reverence of the priest and participants. Church musicians were performing, sometimes even singing secular songs that had nothing to do with the Mass, instead of praying the words of the Mass while singing Gregorian Chant. Before and after Mass, priests started playing to the crowd, and during the homilies started telling personal stories, sometimes telling jokes; a few of them even told risque jokes. The primary bad effect was that Jesus and His sacrifice was no longer the focus of the Mass.

It took me almost forty years after I came back to the Church before I chanced to find an oratory where the traditional Latin Mass was being celebrated, and after a while there I began to find the post-Vatican II ordinary form Mass with the priest facing the people to be distinctly uncomfortable. Now I rarely attend that kind of Mass any more, for this and many other reasons: I can't stand seeing the priest being rude to God.

When I posted some of these thoughts on Facebook today, Father Anthony Hernandez, pastor of the St. Basil the Great Byzantine Catholic Church in Los Gatos posted this excellent explanation about why priests prayed facing away from the congregation since the earliest days of the Church. Most churches have been built to face "liturgical East" and the liturgy is offered in that direction for profound spiritual reasons. 

"The original reason for praying 'oriented,' facing East, was to look to Christ as the 'Orient from on high' (oriens ex alto; i.e. the rising Sun, the 'Dawn from on high') Luke 1:78. The Mass/Divine Liturgy is not only a 're-presentation' of the salvific cross, tomb, resurrection but also an anticipation of the coming again of the Lord. 

"Masses/Liturgies were offered in the early morning in the direction of the rising sun, a sign of our looking to the return of the 'Sun of Justice (sol justitiae)' Malachias 4:2/3:20, that is, Christ, the Light of the World. 

"A great Eastern Father, Saint John of Damascus (Damascene) wrote: 'It is not for simplicity nor by chance that we pray turned toward the regions of the east (...). Since God is intelligible light (1 Jn. 1:5), and in the Scripture, Christ is called the Sun of justice (Mal. 3:20) and the East (Zec. 3:8 of the LXX), it is necessary to dedicate the east to him in order to render him worship. The Scripture says: "Then the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and he placed there the man whom he had formed"(Gen. 2:8). (...) In search of the ancient homeland and tending toward it, we worship God.  Even the tent of Moses had its curtain veil and propitiatory facing the east. And the tribe of Judah, in as much as it was the most notable, encamped on the east side (cf. Nm. 2:3). In the temple of Solomon, the Lord's gate was facing the east (cf. Ez. 44:1). Finally, the Lord placed on the cross looked toward the west, and so we prostrate ourselves in his direction, facing him. When he ascended to heaven, he was raised toward the east, and thus his disciples adored him, and thus he will return, in the same way as they saw him go to heaven (cf. Acts 1:11), as the Lord himself said: "For just as lightning comes from the east and is seen as far as the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be' (Mt. 24:27). Waiting for him, we prostrate ourselves toward the east. It is an unwritten tradition, deriving from the Apostles." (Expositio accurata fidei orthodoxae IV, 12: PG 94, 1133-1136.)'"

I rest my case.