When freedom was granted the Church she came, as they say, out of the Catacombs. Emperor Constantine built lordly basilicas over the tombs of the Apostles, and his mother delighted in restoring and adorning the holy places. From the beginning the Christian "watched in prayer," according to our Lord's admonition, and they saw in this practice of Christian warfare the "Station," or sentry duty of the Roman soldier. In the fourth century these stations began to be observed with great solemnity. The people gathered at fixed points and marched in procession to the station church. During the procession they sang responsive prayers called Litanies or Supplications. The entrance into the church became a splendid ceremony called the Introit, and while it was going on the choir sang a psalm known as the Introit or Entrance Hymn.
The solemn procession and entrance took up considerable time. To make room for this, it became the custom at Rome to drop the second lesson or reading from the Sacred Scriptures, except on days of fasting and penance, when men would be expected to spend a longer time in prayer. To speak more accurately, the first and second readings were amalgamated so that the lesson was taken sometimes from the Old Testament and sometimes from the New. As this lesson is usually taken from the Epistles or Letters of Saint Paul, we will speak of it in future as the Epistle.
The Christians, as we saw in No. 100, celebrated the resurrection of our Lord every Sunday. Each week, therefore, was practically a commemoration of Holy Week. Thus every Friday was a day of sorrow and abstinence, and every Sunday a high festival. The Liturgy was performed on week days in the same manner as on Sundays, so that throughout the whole year the Mass was always the same. We saw, too, that the yearly celebration of Easter was preceded by a season of preparation known as Lent, and followed by a series of feasts which commemorated the chief events after the Resurrection until Pentecost. The observance of Christmas, with its preparatory season of Advent and its subsequent feast of the Epiphany, rounded out the Church year, so that the year became a memorial of the whole life of Christ. This development took many centuries to accomplish, but it received its strongest impulse in the fourth century, when the liberty conceded by Constantine to the Church gave the Christians the opportunity to make public observance of their religious feasts. The veneration of the birthdays" of the martyrs (No. 98) filled out the ecclesiastical year, and, accordingly, in the fourth century we find that the Liturgy in the Latin Church is influenced considerably by these anniversaries.
The influence of the Church year made itself felt in the fourth century on the choice of the Epistle and Gospel. Formerly, these extracts were continuous, that is to say, the Scriptures were read consecutively. The lessons of one day were a continuation of the lessons of the preceding day. At the end of the fourth century, however, certain extracts were made from the Bible which were appropriate to the festivals celebrated. Thus, on Easter was read the account of the Resurrection, on Ascension Day the account of the Ascension, and so on. Pope Saint Damasus, who reigned from 366 to 384, is said to have committed the arrangement of the scriptural extracts to Saint Jerome. Saint Jerome was the greatest biblical scholar of his own or of any age. He first revised the common translation of the Bible already existing, and afterwards made a new translation of many of the sacred books from the Hebrew and Greek. The old Latin Bible is known as the "Old Italian," and Saint Jerome's translation or revision is called the "Vulgate" because, after his death, in 420, it came into common or "popular" use. ("Vulgus" is Latin for "people.") In the Liturgy, the psalms sung in the Mass are taken from the old Italian translation. The Epistles and Gospels are from the Vulgate.
The suppression of the second lesson on ordinary days resulted in bringing together the two psalms sung after each extract. The desire for shortening the service and the influence of the Church year resulted in reducing them to a few verses appropriate to the feast. These verses, however, are still taken from two psalms. As they were formerly sung as solos or as a solo and chorus from the steps of the Ambo (No. 81), they were called the "Gradual," from the Latin "gradus," a step. In No. 141 we saw that "Hallel" was the Hebrew word for "praise." "Hallel-u-Ya" means "Praise-ye-God, " and was used by the Jews as an exclamation of rejoicing. It was borrowed from the Church under the form "Alleluia," and was employed by the Eastern people, especially, to express joy for the triumph of our Lord. It was introduced into the West by Saint Jerome, and, during the Paschal season, it occurs in all the psalms sung at the Mass; but, during the other festival times of the year, it is confined to the second psalm between the lessons. This psalm, therefore, is called the Alleluia. In penitential seasons, as, for instance, during Lent, the Alleluia is not sung. The second psalm is then recited in a slow and "protracted" manner, and is named the "Tract." Accordingly, the psalms sung between the lessons may be either the Gradual or Alleluia or the Gradual and Tract.
Just as the time occupied in entering the Church was filled up by a psalm sung by the choir, so the time occupied in presenting the gifts at the altar, and in preparing them for the sacrifice, was employed in the same manner. This psalm is known as the Offertory. When the congregation had finished offering the gifts, the ministers selected enough bread and wine to suffice for the sacrifice and the communicants. The bread was laid on the paten, and was brought, together with the chalice, to the altar and placed thereon.
It is but natural that, while the priest is engaged in certain manual acts or ceremonies, and while the choir and the people are singing, he should occupy himself with silent prayer. In particular the setting forth of the gifts on the altar was accompanied by silent prayer offered by the priest. Those prayers were, of course, that God would accept the gifts and that He would accept the givers. As they were offered either silently by the priest or in a whisper so as to be heard only by the attendant ministers, such prayers are commonly called "secret" prayers or "secrets."
The use of incense as a symbol of prayers was common both to the Jews and pagans. In the book of Exodus we read that God commanded Moses:
"Thou shalt make also an altar of setim wood to burn incense. It shall be a cubit in length and a cubit in breadth and two cubits in height. And thou shalt overlay it with the purest gold and thou shalt make a crown of gold round about it. And thou shalt set the altar over against the veil, that hangeth before the ark of the testimony, before the mercy seat where I will speak unto thee. And Aaron shall burn sweet smelling incense upon it in the morning. When he shall light the lamps he shall burn it, and when he shall place them in the evening he shall burn an ever lasting incense before the Lord throughout your generations." (Exodus 30)
From this extract it may be seen that, among the Jews, incense was really a sacrifice (No. 14). It had the same signification among the Pagans. In fact, during the persecutions, the Common sacrifice demanded from the Christians was the burning of a few grains of incense on an altar before an idol. When incense was used by the Christians, it had quite a different signification.
In the Apocalypse Saint John saw how
"Another angel came and stood before the altar, having a golden censer: and there was given him much incense, that he should offer the prayers of all the saints upon the golden altar which is before the throne of God. And the smoke of the incense of the prayers of the saints ascended before God from the hand of the angel." (Chapter 8)
Incense, then, was a symbol of prayer, and there fore an invitation to prayer. As such, it was employed at the processions introduced into the Liturgy after the triumph of the Church. These processions occurred at three points during the Mass. First, there was the Entrance Procession or the Introit. Secondly, there was a procession from the Altar to the Ambo when the deacon went to read the Gospel. Thirdly, there was a procession when the bread and wine were laid on the altar at the Offertory. Hence in all these cases we find incense employed. Incense is not now burned on our altar but in a portable vessel called a censer or thurible.
The Great Thanksgiving (No. 150) was the chief and longest prayer in the Liturgy. Modeled on the great Hallel, it gave thanks to God for the work of creation and redemption. It was the Christian hymn of triumph uttered in the face of the persecutors. It contained the prophecy of God's ultimate victory, and, in the darkest days, it consoled the suffering people with the promise of the overthrow of idols. In the fourth century the prayer was fulfilled. Idolatry was overthrown. Christianity was triumphant. The needs which had produced the prayer disappeared, and it began to change its form. As it was the longest portion of the Mass, the demand for the shortening of the Liturgy affected it first. It was reduced in Rome to a general expression of thanks giving, with a mention of the season which was being observed. In this shortened form it was called the Preface, and, with the Sanctus, served as an introduction to the Canon.
It seems likely that in the beginning the priest passed immediately from the Sanctus to the recital of the Words of institution, but we find that at Rome the Intercessions for the living now come in between. It may be that this transposition was necessitated by certain heresies concerning the nature of the invocation of the saints and the prayers for the dead. In the same way, what appears to be part of the prayer to the Holy Ghost (No. 154) also appears in the Roman Canon before the Consecration, and we know that there was, especially in the East, an opinion that Transubstantiation was effected, not by the words of institution, but by the calling down or Epiklesis of the Holy Ghost. To guard against such an error would be a good reason for the transposition.
We remarked in No. 167 that the petition of the Lord's Prayer, "Give us this day our daily bread," was interpreted by the Christians to refer to the Blessed Eucharist, and that this interpretation caused its insertion into the Liturgy. We must not imagine, however, that this was the only interpretation given to the words. Men also understood them to mean the bodily food by which the bodily life was sustained. Now the Manicheans (No. 172) believed that everything produced on the earth was evil. To combat that belief the Church declared that God's gifts were good, and inserted that declaration in the Liturgy in closest connection with the recitation of the prayer which asks God to give us our daily bread. Wine and oil, milk, honey and new fruits were, therefore, on certain days solemnly blessed by the Bishop, before the "Pater Noster, " with the words:
"Through Jesus Christ our Lord Thou dost always make all these things good and dost hallow them, quicken them, bless them and grant them unto us."
The ceremony of the "leaven" was introduced to symbolize the unity of the Church. The Bishop broke a piece from the consecrated Host and sent it to his priests to signify that the sacrifice was one and the same wherever offered. When the factions and schisms which at first troubled the Church disappeared, and newer and greater dangers, in the shape of the heresies described in No. 172 arose, the ceremony of the Leaven took a new meaning. The Nestorians, by declaring that there were two persons in Christ, made practically two Christs, one a God and the other a man. The Catholics insisted that the Human Nature of Christ was united to the Divine Nature in only one Person. To symbolize this union, they took the "leaven" and dropped it into the chalice, so that the commixture of the body and blood would manifest the truth that there was only one Christ. Just as the union of body and blood make only one person, so only one person united the Divine and Human Natures in our Lord. This rite is known as the "Commixture."
- taken from The Mass, by Father Peter Christopher Yorke