"ACTUOSA PARTICIPATIO" Towards Conversion

“I went to a Latin Mass and I couldn't participate because I didn't understand the language.” That is a fair comment, but maybe not. Not if we understand that the Mass is the Sacrifice of Christ, Calvary made actually present mystically in the here and now. Hence we can go to a Spanish, a French, or a German Mass, and we surely can fully participate. We may even be deaf or mute and still be very able to assist at Mass.

A sacrifice, we may recall, is “the offering (oblation) of a group-gift (called a victim) to God, and the destruction (immolation) of the victim to indicate that it is being given to God, by someone (called a priest) who has the right to represent the group” (Leo Trese,The Faith Explained). On the Cross Jesus, our High Priest, offered Himself, the Victim, to the Father– to worship, thank, atone for our sins, and petition the Father for graces –on our behalf.

On Holy Thursday Jesus instituted the Mass to extend his perfect sacrifice, the offering of his life to the Father, throughout time and space until the end of the world, so that we can plug into it and exercise our baptismal priesthood by offering ourselves in union with Jesus to the Father. Hence the essence of our participation is adoration and oblation, that inward sacrifice of ourselves, the giving of our soul, our whole being, to God. This is perfectly doable regardless of the language of the Mass.

Now we remember that one of the means proposed by the Church for active participation is sacred silence, an attitude of the soul. “Silence itself is fully a ritual, it envelops everything.
Silence is the fabric from which all our liturgies must be cut” (Cardinal Sarah,The Power of Silence).

Monsignor Guido Marini further explains: “This silence is not synonymous with laziness or a lack of participation. Its purpose is to make all the Faithful enter into…the act of love by which Jesus offers Himself to the Father on the Cross for the salvation of the world. This truly sacred silence is the liturgical moment during which it is necessary to say yes, with all our strength, to Christ's action, so that it might become our action, too, in everyday life.”

We then become “participants in a sacred mystery that infinitely surpasses us: the mystery of the death of Jesus out of love for the Father and for us”. “We have the ardent obligation to be open to an act that is so mysterious that we will never be able to perform it by ourselves: the sacrifice of Christ….a divine action, an actio Christi. In the presence of it, we are overcome with a silence of admiration and reverence. The quality of our silence is (therefore) the measure of our active participation.” (Cardinal Sarah) Every Mass can then be a quasi mystical experience, not necessarily emotional, though we are free to be emotional about it.

How beautiful it is that in the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM), in many instances, especially during the Canon (Eucharistic Prayer), the celebrant prays silently, in secreto. “The very mysterious words of the Canon and of the consecration are pronounced submissa voce [in a low voice], as though draped in a veil of silence”. (Sarah)

We all ought to experience being a church united in the silent praying of the Canon, the crux of the Mass, in a ‘filled silence’. Indeed everyone “does pray the Canon together, albeit in a bond with the special task of the priestly ministry” (Joseph Ratzinger).

How beautiful it will also be if in the Novus Ordo Mass priests will more often use the very theologically rich Roman Canon (Eucharistic prayer I), accenting the sacrificial dimension of the Mass, prayed in submissa voce.

We ought therefore to be enjoined to strive to unite our own interior sentiments and intentions “to the High Priest and His earthly minister, at the time the consecration of the Divine Victim is enacted, and at the time especially when those solemn words are pronounced, ‘By Him and with Him and in Him is to Thee, God the Father Almighty, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, all honor and glory forever and ever’; to those words in fact the people answer, ‘Amen’. Nor should Christians forget to offer themselves, their cares, their sorrows, their distress, and their necessities in union with their divine Savior upon the Cross.” (Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei)

As we more and more strive to actively participate (actuosa participatio) interiorly by the inward spiritual sacrifice of ourselves in union with Jesus we will then be led little by little to genuine conversion. For then we will strive in each of our Eucharistic celebrations, to be “a pure victim, a holy victim, a spotless victim”.

To be a victim means “to lay ourselves upon the altar of God's will. It means to say to God, from the heart's deepest abyss, ‘Take me, God. I am all yours. Do what you want with me. To live and to labor or to suffer or to die: it is all the same to me, just so your will is done in me. Make me an instrument for the doing of your work. Fit me into your plan, no matter how hard you may have to hit to hammer me into place” (Trese). And if we are not yet ready to make a full self-surrender we may pray instead: “‘Take me, O God, and give me the courage to want to be all yours’. God will be patient with our weakness and partial victimhood, and will build us up with His grace to that level of fortitude which now is lacking” [Trese, paraphrased].

This victimhood, ever deepening from Mass to Mass has all the power to increase the worship level of our daily lives, and to transform us little by little, interiorly, into forgetting ourselves, becoming more and more humble, and more self-giving to God and others.

May pastors more and more accentuate the sacrificial aspect of the Mass (instead of just a celebration) and so lead us (the Faithful) to that victimhood to be carried in our daily life.