The Holy Father's "Reform of the Reform": An Excerpt from Cardinal Burke's Homily at Solemn Mass of Thanksgiving

Among other things, in his homily at the Solemn Mass of Thanksgiving on the Occasion of the Ordinary Public Consistory celebrated at the Pontifical North American College in Rome, Raymond Cardinal Burke had this to say about the Holy Father's "reform of the reform":

"I think also of the tireless work of our Holy Father to carry out a reform of the post-Conciliar liturgical reform[11], conforming the celebration of the Sacred Liturgy to the perennial teaching of the Church as it was presented anew at the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, so that in every liturgical action we may see more clearly the action of Christ Himself who unites heaven and earth, even now, in preparation for His Final Coming, when He will inaugurate "news heaven and a new earth," when we will all celebrate the fullness of life and love in the liturgy in the heavenly Jerusalem. The Cardinal today is called, in a special way, to assist the Successor of Saint Peter, in handing on, in an unbroken organic line, what Christ Himself has given us in the Church, His Eucharistic Sacrifice, "the font and highest expression of the whole Christian life." The right order of Sacred Worship in the Church is the condition of the possibility of the right order of her teaching and the right order of her conduct."

Read the whole text here.

Season of Advent

The idea of Advent is "Prepare you for the coming of Christ." Therefore the very appeals of the Patriarchs and Prophets are put in our mouths in Advent. Prepare for the coming of Christ the Redeemer, Who comes to prepare us for His second coming as Judge.

When the oracles of the Prophets were fulfilled and the Jews awaited the Messiah, John the Baptist left the desert and came to the vicinity of the Jordan, bringing a baptism of penance to prepare souls for the coming of Christ. The world took him to be the Messiah, but he replied with the words of Isaiah: "I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness: prepare ye the way of the Lord."

During Advent we make straight for Christ the way to our souls--and behold, our Lord will come at Christmas.

Does the Mass differ in any way from the Sacrifice of the Cross?

1.) EXTERNALLY
We have seen that on the Cross, Christ expressed inner adoration toward His Father, by loving Him more than the thing most precious to Him--His own life. We find the same interior adoration in the Mass, since Christ's preferential love for His Father persists eternally.

The difference appears in the outward expression of Christ's inner sentiments. On the Cross, Christ manifests His love for His Father by His death in a bloody manner. In the Mass, Christ offers Himself to His Father in a non-bloody manner.

What sign, then, in the Mass gives outward expression to Christ's inner adoration? For the Mass, like the Sacraments, has a visible sign that signifies and actualizes the Sacrifice. This sign is the separate Consecration of the bread and wine, representing the separation of our Lord's body and blood on the Cross. The active Consecration--that is, not yet accomplished, but in process of accomplishment--effectively signifies Christ's Sacrifice; since it renders present on the altar the same Sacrifice as that of Calvary.

Note that the Real Presence of Christ in the tabernacle is not, properly speaking, a sacrifice; since the exterior sign--the Consecration--is lacking. Where the exterior element is lacking, there can be no sacrifice.

2.) BY THE MODE OF OFFERING
Two things are needed to make a sacrifice: (a) Renunciation or immolation; (b) preference, choice, oblation or offering.

Now on the Cross, as in the Mass, it is the same Victim that is immolated--our Lord. A difference exists, however, in the method or mode of oblation. In the Mass, it is still our Lord who offers Himself as He did on Calvary, but through the ministry of His priests.

Nevertheless, the priest is merely Christ's representative. There is only one priest--Jesus Christ. But our blessed Lord, in His great mercy, and in order to make us participate still more intimately in His Sacrifice, has self-imposed the condition whereby He cannot offer Himself on the altar without His priests. Thus, on the Cross, Christ offers Himself by Himself in our name. In the Mass, it is the priest who, in the name of all the people, offers Christ exteriorly. For interiorly, it is always Christ who offers.

3.) AS TO TIME AND PLACE
The Sacrifice of the Cross occurred at a given moment in a given spot on the earth. Christ offered His death in the present. In the Mass, Christ offers Himself throughout the whole universe, exactly as the prophet Malachi had prophesied, and at each moment of the day and night. He offers His death as an accomplished historical fact.

The Holy Guardian Angels

Tomorrow, October 2, is the Feast of The Holy Guardian Angels. God's love for us was not satisfied with giving us His Son, Jesus, for our Redeemer and Mary for our Advocate; He has been pleased to give us also His Angels to be our guardians: "He hath given His Angels charge over thee to keep thee in all thy ways" (Ps 90:2). These holy spirits and princes of heaven are always present with us, and assist us in all our actions. And on this account, out of regard to our guardian Angels, we ought carefully to refrain from every action which can displease them.

"O God, Who in Thine ineffable Providence hast deigned to send Thy holy Angels to keep watch over us: grant to us Thy suppliant people, that we may always be defended by their protection, and may rejoice in their fellowship for ever" (Oratio, Memorial of the Holy Guardian Angels, October 2).

In What Does Christ's Sacrifice Consist?

1.) Our Lord's Sacrifice consists in His complete self-renunciation--an immolation that began with the first instant of His earthly existence and terminated on Calvary's Cross.

2.) Our Lord's Sacrifice consists above all in the preferring of God's will to His own: a preference shown by His oblation, which persists eternally. This perfect love of Christ for His Father was stabilized by His death and will abide throughout eternity.

Death fixes us in the dispositions we have at the moment of dying. Our degree of charity at death will mark our degree of glory for eternity. The set of our hearts at death remains as the final disposition of our wills. Our Lord, at the moment of His death on the Cross, attained (so to speak) the climax of His love for His Father. And it is precisely these sublime dispositions of our Lord toward His Father at the moment of His death that are made actual in the Mass. Now do you see why the Mass is of such great value?

Is the Mass the same as Christ's Sacrifice on the Cross, or is it a different Sacrifice? It is the same Sacrifice. Christ offered Himself once for all. "...[We] are sanctified by the oblation of the Body of Jesus Christ once" (Heb 10:10).

To understand this, we have only to go back to the concept of oblation, renunciation, and choice. The renunciation is summarized by Christ's death accepted once and for all. On Calvary, this act of renunciation was made once, and it passed.

But above all, our Lord's Sacrifice consists in this constant desire for His Father's will in preference to His own; and this preference remains eternally fixed in heaven. Suffering passes--the fact of having suffered remains.

It is the same thing for us when we renounce anything. The act of self-denial is, like all acts, temporary; but the disposition of the will to deny itself for a greater good remains just so long as we do not take it back. Death fixes us forever in the dispositions in which it finds us. Christ's Sacrifice persists in heaven, because the legacy of His life made on the Cross has never been cancelled. That which He gave was given for all time....Christ's immolation is eternal. St. John, in his vision of heaven, sees Jesus as "a Lamb standing upright, yet slain (as I thought) in sacrifice" (Rev 5:6).

This is understandable. The purpose of our Lord's Sacrifice having been to glorify God, the act whereby He glorifies Him must, of necessity, be eternal.

When the priest brings Christ down upon the altar, he renders Him present such as He is in heaven; and He is in heaven with the same loving dispositions that He had on Calvary at the moment of His death.

The Mass is, therefore, not a new Sacrifice by Christ; but the same Sacrifice actualized in the present. "We know that Christ rising again from the dead, dieth no more" (Rom 6:9).

The Mass is thus the perpetual prolongation of the Sacrifice made on the Cross. Consequently, every Mass is the one immolation of Christ repeated in the Act of Oblation. By the same act of the will, Jesus offers at the Last Supper His death in the future; on Calvary His death in the present; in heaven and on the altar His death in the past.

This special presence of Christ on the altar is peculiar to the Mass and demonstrates its grandeur.

When we celebrate the other mysteries of Christ's life, we merely commemorate them. There is no real renewal of the mystery on the day devoted to it. At Christmas, the Church recalls to our minds the Savior's birth, but this birth does not really take place--is not actualized in the present. On Ascension Thursday, our Lord does not renew His ascent into heaven. It is quite otherwise for the Mass. It is no simple symbolic representation, for the same Sacrifice that Christ accomplished on the cross is made truly present in an unbloody manner on the altar.

Offering Christ to the Father

We have seen that Christ is the center of religion and the universe. The creation, over which Christ reigns, is willed by God for His glory. We are beings created solely for the praise and the glory of God.

How can such a frail creature as man offer acceptable praise to the Blessed Trinity? In this way. The Word of God was incarnated, became one of us, and to each one of us gave something of Himself in such a way that we are enabled through Him, with Him, and in Him, to fulfill our religious duties toward God, duties that may be summarized in two acts, as follows:

1. Our continual offering of Jesus Christ to God the Father.
2. Our offering of ourselves with Him and like Him in complete self-surrender and self-sacrifice, so as to become one with Jesus Christ.

For Christ alone can glorify God as He deserves. Christ, equal to the Father by His Godhead, lowered Himself to our level by the Incarnation. As man, Christ is able to bow before God and render Him true adoration in humility, submission, and obedience. As God, Christ offers His Father homage of infinite worth.

It is the Incarnation that empowers us to offer God to God in the Person of Jesus Christ. Hence the grandeur and incomparable superiority of the Mass over all other acts of religion.

Why so many Masses? In order that the thought of offering Him up to God the Father may be continually present to our minds, Christ has willed to re-present the offering up of His Sacrifice.

But the Christ who thus offers Himself in the Mass is not just "Jesus, the Son of Mary," but the total Christ--Christ complete, entire. That is, all the members of the Mystical Body offer themselves with Christ, their Head. Hence, the active role we should play in the Mass.

Pope Pius XII recalled this truth in his encyclical on the Mystical Body (Mystici Corporis): "In it, the priest not only represents our Savior, but the entire Mystical Body; and each of the faithful in particular. The faithful themselves, moreover, united to the priest in a common will and prayer, offer up to the Eternal Father the Immaculate Lamb brought down on the altar by the voice of the priest. They offer Him, by the hands of the same priest, as a most pleasing Victim of propitiation and praise, for the necessities of the whole Church. And just as the Divine Redeemer, dying on the Cross, offered Himself as Head of the human race, to the Eternal Father; in the same way, in this 'clean oblation,' He not only offers Himself as Head of the Church to the Heavenly Father, but in Himself He also offers His mystical members; since all--even the most infirm and feeble--are contained in His loving heart."

The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass

The Mass is the means whereby we may become the prolongation of Christ.

Through the offering of ourselves with Christ.
Through the consecration of ourselves through Christ.
Through the communion in Christ
to the greater glory of the Blessed Trinity and the sanctification of our souls. The Mass reminds us at one and the same time of God's CONdescension toward man, and of man Ascension toward God! For the Mass sums up the twin mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption, at the same time that it applies to us their fruits. Crib and Cross manifest to mankind God's love for all; whereas the Mass stresses His love for the individual.

One ought, then, to look on the Mass as the sum total of man's ascensions toward God, because it presupposes and completes them. The sinner derives from it abundant graces of conversion. The just man finds fervor in it--outstripping himself from one Consecration to another. Through the Mass man offers to God praise that is worthy of Him.

This, then, is the place that the Mass occupies in God's plan. Like Christ, it is at the center: as a sun to bring light and warmth, to transform and uplift all creation and bring it back to its Creator in a hymn of thanksgiving.

The Mass ought to occupy ALL the place in our lives. We ought to:

• Offer ourselves up, like Christ on the Cross.
• Consecrate ourselves, "transubstantiate" ourselves--dying to our life of sin; to live, henceforth, the life of Christ.
• Unite ourselves to Someone stronger than ourselves, communicating with Christ through reception of His Sacred Body, in order to identify ourselves ever more closely with Him, so that--our bodily members belonging more to Him than to us--we may be able to accomplish divine and supernatural works.
• Render--through Christ--perfect praise to the august Trinity.

Such should be the constant concern of our earthly existence, and the prelude to our heavenly life in a blessed eternity.