Today, the Churches of the West celebrate the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (while in the East, it is referred to as her "Dormition," or falling asleep). It is a Holyday of Obligation for Catholics of all rites of the Church. It remembers when the Mother of God, the Theotokos, was raised body and soul into Heaven. "Our tainted nature's solitary boast" paved the way for us, that we may one day do likewise in the resurrection on the Last Day. This dogma of the Church was defined and proclaimed infallibly (that is, without error and bound in heaven as on earth, yeah, that's how it works) by His Holiness Pope Pius XII in 1950.*As readers of this venue are aware (and you both know who you are), I prefer the traditional form of the Roman Mass (the Old Mass, or Tridentine Mass, or Traditional Latin Mass, the juridical understatement rendered as the "Extraordinary Form," or whatever somebody out there wants to call it). I presently sing in the schola cantorum of Saint Rita's Church in Alexandria, Virginia, but tonight was a Low Mass; no singing except for the impromptu opening and closing with the only two Marian hymns the priest knows.
I went anyway. What could go wrong?I entered the church to discover that Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament was in progress and nearing an end before the Mass would begin. The vicar was celebrant for the evening, but alas, there was no entourage of altar servers to assist him, and he was alone. I thought something might be amiss. Fortunately, "Have Cassock And Surplice Will Travel" and I ducked out quickly when it was over, to fetch my vestments waiting in the back seat of my car. Any door I would have entered to the inner sanctum was locked, so I knocked, and the good Father answered, to find me rather glibly asking: "Hey, Father, you look like you could use a hand." He gladly obliged. "Yeah, sure, suit up."
Unlike the reformed liturgy, where as often as not an altar server is viewed as a nuisance unless it's a sung Mass, the older form of Mass with a congregation requires a vested clerk (either an ordained major or minor cleric, or a layman acting in his stead), if only to assist the priest with preparing the Gifts, ringing the bell, and reciting the responses on behalf of the faithful (in the event that the latter are channelling their ancestors from the Penal Days and dare not utter a peep).
Contrary to popular belief, the Low Mass actually requires only one acolyte, being all the priest is entitled to have, with a second acolyte allowed by privilege (albeit one universally indulged).
And so it goes; indeed, so it went ...+ + +
I was blessed for this opportunity. Every boy who has ever knelt before the altar of God, and who subsequently comes of age, should have at least one chance to serve alone, all the more to appreciate the sublime beauty and noble simplicity of being one with the "alter Christus" in ascending the sacred mountain of which the Psalmist wrote.
V: Emítte lucem tuam, et veritátem tuam: ipsa me deduxérunt, et aduxérunt in montem sanctum tuum, et in tabernácula tua.
R: Send forth Thy light and Thy truth: they have led me and brought me unto Thy holy hill, and into Thy tabernacles.
V: Et introíbo ad altáre Dei: ad Deum qui lætíficat juventútem meam.
R: And I will go in unto the Altar of God: unto God, Who giveth joy to my youth.
Psalm 42(43): 3-4
It is an action that is in union with all those present in the assembly, with the whole Church around the world, indeed, with the Angels and Saints in Heaven. And yet, in the context of the simplest of the Missa Recta, it is an intimate moment between the priest and the one who serves him.
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IMAGE: The Saint Andrew Boys' Choir, Milford, Ohio, December 1966. Yours truly is third from the right.I can remember in the fifth grade learning the Latin that we were supposed to know. The postconciliar changes had already begun in 1965, but training for altar servers was still as much "old school" as it had ever been. Sister Shiela Marie had us repeat after her, the responses to the priest as she had written them on the board. In my parish, serving the Mass began in the sixth grade, while the fifth graders were confined to Rosary and Benediction every Friday night. Father Steinbicker called out the Mysteries of the Rosary. The servers led the Paters and the Aves, as if our training for the priesthood had already begun.
The old high altar was still holding out against the tide that year, only to be removed the following year, but our training remained the same. Two of us would stumble into the servers' sacristy early on a weekday morning, flip a coin or otherwise decide who got "the bell" (the first acolyte's position on the Epistle side) or "the book" (the second acolyte's position on the Gospel side). The more experienced server usually got the former, unless the coin toss prevailed.
Some of the boys got out of school to do Requiem Masses (funerals) during the week. Some were even picked to do Nuptial Masses (weddings) over the weekend. They usually received gratuities; yeah, they were paid! I was apparently not one of the chosen inner circle, having failed to impress the Sisters of "Charity," even though I was already reading Latin by the third grade. Then in the eighth grade, a few of the neighborhood girls decided to make me lose my composure while in the Communion line. My father upbraided me for this lack of manhood (I was thirteen), and the shame and dishonor I brought upon his noble house.
I stopped serving Mass, lacking the opportunity to earn gratuities, not to mention the aggravation of keeping the old man suitably impressed. I didn't get anywhere near it for fifteen years.
In the more recent fifteen years, the boy who wasn't good enough for weddings and funerals has been a Master of Ceremonies for Traditional Solemn High Masses, has trained dozens of servers, apprenticing emcees, and seminarians, and in the "Ordinary Form," has been a Master of Ceremonies for several bishops, two of them being members of the Sacred College of Cardinals, one of the two having been widely considered "papabile" (Italian more or less for "could be the next pope maybe") in the most recent conclave. Yeah, I wrote about that one already.
Isn't it awesome how the universe eventually achieves its balance in the form of poetic justice?+ + +
Many have seen the famous photo at right, of a Missa Solemnis (Solemn Mass), celebrated in the shell-shocked remains of the Cologne Cathedral in the aftermath of the Second World War. My father served Mass there in 1953. During the 1940s, he had studied for the priesthood through four years of preparatory school and the first three years of college. Even in the years after he left, he maintained ties to his longtime home away from home. One of this former colleagues was in Germany while Dad was a payroll officer for his Air Force squadron during the Occupation. They made arrangements to meet there, and it was in that sacred if desolated place that the good Father could be found, early on a Sunday morning, offering Mass at a side altar, with Dad offering assistance.
+ + +I agreed to put everything away when the Mass was over. By the time I left, practically everyone was gone. There, in the near darkness of the pews, was the good Father, breaking character and his evening of prayer just long enough to smile and wave. I don't get to serve Mass as often as I used to, but even when I was doing it every Sunday, whether as the MC for a High Mass or as a surrogate minor cleric "in choro" for a Pontifical Mass at a great Basilica, I never get tired of it.
Saint Augustine once wrote that a priest ceases to age during the moments of Consecration. One might reasonably conclude that he continues to age thereafter, but if the doctrine of "transubstantiation" is what Catholics are bound to believe, one cannot help but imagine being close to the portal connecting this world with a dimension beyond time and space.
Maybe that would explain accounts of Albert Einstein's fascination with such a belief, don't you think?
Or don't you?
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* In light of this proclamation, new Propers for the Mass (chants for the Entrance, between the Readings, the Offertory, and Communion), as well as new orations (the Collect, Secret, and Postcommunion prayers), were composed to reflect this raising of teaching to formal dogma, and as such, was ostensibly within the nefarious influence of Annibale Bugnini, who by then was already enjoying a running start to becoming the architect of the post-conciliar liturgical iconoclasm. Thus the Grand Conspiracy is worse than originally imagined by throes of über-traditionalist whipper-snappers squirming in their pews holding their precious 1948 edition hand missals, longing for a bygone era of which they know next to nothing.
