Sermon Given on Holy Thursday by Father Richard Cipolla

Sermon Given on Holy Thursday, March 28, 2013
by Father Richard Cipolla
St. Mary Church, Norwalk CT

There are those words that are so central to an understanding of what the Catholic faith is, on what it is founded, what its self-understanding is, and this is true not only of the faith but on the Catholic understanding of the Church. The concept of Tradition is fundamental to the Catholic faith and the Catholic Church. I can assume that those who are at this Mass tonight understand that we are not talking about traditions, things that are a part of Catholic life but change with cultural situations. These are many and good, but they are not what St Paul is talking about in the epistle. His understanding of the Mass is based on what was handed down to him by those in the apostolic Church who were either apostles or those who knew the apostles. It was not something St Paul dreamt up but rather it was what he received and what he had the obligation to pass on. And what Paul describes so succinctly here is what Jesus did at the Last Supper, took bread, gave thanks, gave it to his disciples and said: This is my body. He took the chalice of wine and blessed it by giving thanks, and declared: this is the chalice of my blood, the blood of the new covenant. And then he said: Do this in memory. And it is that kernel that underlies what we know as the Mass, the Eucharist, and it is from that kernel that is at the heart of the Tradition that the structure and ritual of the Mass developed. This Mass we celebrate tonight is the Mass in Cena Domini, the Mass of the Supper of the Lord, commonly called the Last Supper. We celebrate this Mass in Holy Week at the beginning of the Triduum, the three days that mark the most sacred time in the whole Church year. But we have to be clear about what we are doing here tonight, for there has been confusion about this for many years now. We are in no way re-enacting the Last Supper. We are celebrating the institution of the Mass, and the Mass is not the Last Supper. This is one of the errors of the Protestant reformers and an error that appears among Catholics even in our own time. This Mass celebrates, a bad word to use in contemporary English, so let us say that this Mass is a commemoration of the Passover meal that Jesus shared with his disciples on the night he was betrayed, on the night before his crucifixion. And we commemorate not the Passover meal but rather the astounding departure from the Passover meal where Jesus breaks from the script, so to speak, takes bread, blesses it, gave it to his disciples and says those words: This is my body, Hoc enim corpus meum, and with these words he breaks out of the Passover meal that commemorates the deliverance of the Jews from slavery in Egypt to words that do what they say, words that consecrate that bread and wine to become his body and blood that will be offered up on the Cross and that will save the world from sin and death, that body and blood that will rise again on Easter Day. The words are uttered in the context of the Passover meal, in the context of the deliverance of the Jews from slavery, but more importantly for us, and this is the point, these words are uttered in anticipation of his sacrifice on the Cross, so that what Jesus did at the Last Supper was and is an offering of Himself in a real and total way that is fulfilled on the next day on the altar of the Cross. It is not mere anticipation, it is not an acting out in some symbolic way what he will do on the next day. Jesus’ words at the Last Supper make present that supreme offering on the Cross for the apostles before it actually happens.

And this should not surprise us too much, if we remember that the birth of Christ is an event at which time and eternity intersect, that after God becomes man at a certain time in human history, that time is no longer linear but rather becomes a sphere, where the center of that sphere is the birth of the God-man, and all time radiates from that point, both past and present. So what Jesus does at the Last Supper is the offering of himself on the Cross for his disciples and for the whole world before that actual physical offering on the Cross of his Sacrifice. That is why the wonderful offertory prayers of the traditional Mass, speak of the unconsecrated bread and wine as if they were already consecrated: receive, O Lord, this host, this spotless host. The same thing happens in the Orthodox Divine Liturgy, where before the consecration the unconsecrated bread is brought out veiled and shown to the people as if it were consecrated. And so what we commemorate here tonight in this traditional Mass is when Jesus institutes the Mass that is the ritual observance of his sacrifice on the Cross. We do not commemorate a community meal, we do not commemorate the Last Supper. We commemorate the foundation of that Tradition that becomes what we know as the Mass, as the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, where the sacrifice of the Cross that we commemorate on Good Friday is truly and real made present for us in an unbloody way, where we receive the grace of forgiveness of sins and the grace of faith, that grace that issued forth from the wounded side of Christ, that grace that flowed forth and that shone forth and that burst the bonds and bounds of his Sacred Heart: and what this means is that the Mass is a real encounter with the crucified and living Lord.

This is why we sing the Gloria at this Mass and ring the bells, for we rejoice in this solemn time of the year that God has given us the gift of the Mass, the Mass that is the heart of our practice of our faith, the Mass that feeds us with spiritual food, that prepares us for our death, the Mass that breaks through space and time, the Mass breaks the strictures of language and culture, the Mass without which there is no kernel, no reality of our Catholic faith. And we celebrate this special Mass within the Tradition of the Church, we celebrate this not by doing what we feel like doing or what we think should be done, but we do this by entering into what is already there, we enter in the very heart of the Tradition of the Church and in that entering we encounter the very person of Jesus Christ, him crucified for us and risen from the dead.

But this is also the commemoration of the institution of the priesthood. And once again we turn to what Jesus did at the Last Supper, when as the great high priest he consecrates the bread and wine of the Passover meal to become his body and blood and gives that body and blood to his disciples and then gives them an order: Do this in memoria mei, in remembrance of me. Do this. Jesus gave very few distinct orders to his followers. But one of them: do this in remembrance of me, given to the disciples, is the foundation of the priesthood, for without Christ giving the disciples the power to Do this, there could be no Mass, and it is this gift he gave to his disciples at the Last Supper that has been passed down within the Tradition of the Church, to bishops first, who are the successors of the apostles, and then to priests, who are the sons of their father, the bishop.

And so we rejoice tonight in the gift of the priesthood, and that is part of the joy of the bells rung at the Gloria. But we must take note that the understanding and practice of this priesthood has been and continues to be under severe attack by forces both without and within the Church. The attack on the Liturgy and the attack on the priesthood are intimately related, and how could they not be? And this attack is taking many forms. Just the other day the NY Times published a letter from a former Chancellor of the Archdiocese of New York claiming that priestly celibacy has its roots in the middle ages and came about because of the Church’s desire to control the property of priests. And so, argues the monsignor, it is high time priestly celibacy was made optional. The reverend monsignor’s reading of the history of celibacy is cavalier at best and dishonest at worst. The roots of clerical celibacy are not in the middle ages but rather firmly in the New Testament, the roots of clerical celibacy are in the person of Jesus himself, and are strongly echoed by St Paul. Priestly celibacy is one of the deepest of the imitations of Christ. Its purpose is to imitate that total freedom that was bought on the cross for each and every one of us: freedom to dispose of one’s life for the sake of the Church, and not the Church in general, but for the people he serves. And this does not mean merely to have the time to visit the sick and comfort the dying. Celibacy taken on for the sake of Christ and His Church makes the priest, in spite of himself, and I have to use an Italian word here and the word is very similar in Spanish, disponibile. It does not mean merely being available. It means that the priest is displaced from himself, that he does not form the center of his being but rather that the flock he tends becomes the place where he offers himself to be broken up, to be dispersed, to be disposed of. But please note that this is not negative, this is not a form of psychological debasement. If the Eucharist is, in the words of Romano Guardini, Christ in his self-surrender, the external reality of the suffering and death of the Lord immortalized in a form that permits us to draw from it vitality for our spiritual life, then the priest, who stands at the altar to offer the Mass for his people must be an imitator of the self-surrender of Christ and must know how this feels in his life as a pastor of a flock, whose sins and failings he knows all too well. He must stand there to offer the Sacrifice knowing his own failings and sinfulness, and yet the priest can do nothing else, for this is what he is meant to do, and once this is forgotten the priesthood becomes sentimentalized, secularized and good for nothing.

On recent trip to Rome I noticed seminarians walking around in their immaculate black clerical suits, with their starched clerical collar, and the white cuffs with nice cufflinks sticking out beyond the jacket sleeve. I had to fight depression at this sight, for these I am sure good young men were dressed as professional religious men, where the priesthood is enclosed in the clothes of what the world calls religion, what the world wants priests to be: they will do their job in their little part of the world, they will function as they should, they will hopefully behave, they will be popular among their flock and be welcome guests at dinner parties, who will be earnest and well-meaning, who will respect the power and authority of those above them, who will be patient with the system of advancement in the Church; they will function in a broken system that makes priestly community difficult at best, impossible at the worst; they will function in a system that separates them from their flock and isolates them in an unreal world; in a word, they will function in the system, they will be religious functionaries. The world can handle religious functionaries, because they are part of the scene, just like the Anglican clergy in Jane Austen’s novels. But when a priest dares to take on something so counter-cultural, so in your face damning the culture, as celibacy and does it in freedom, not because this is part of the package, but because this is in imitation of his Lord and Savior, and in so doing, turns his back on the false and hideous understanding of freedom that the world preaches and lives by: then the priest incurs the hatred of the world, and, if the truth be told, the annoyance of many of his own flock. When the priest accepts his personal suffering as a genuine and necessary part of his life as a priest as a joining of his suffering to the suffering of his flock all grounded in the suffering of Christ on the Cross, when he accepts that as priest he will always have in his heart la tristezza così perenne, that sadness that is always there, and when he stands at the altar and loses himself and allows the reality of his suffering and the suffering of his people to be offered up by his hands and to be placed in the crucible of the fiery love of God and there to be transformed by that love that is present at that moment in our time and space, that love whose locus is the Cross, that love that cannot be contained by time and space and yet is contained in that bread and in that wine, that love that makes itself completely disponibile, to be touched, lifted up, adored, and ultimately eaten and drunk. How can the priest’s heart not break with love and therefore with joy at the celebration of every Mass, knowing who he is and what he is doing? St John Vianney said that the problems that exist in the priesthood are because the priests have forgotten the Mass. They have forgotten what the Mass is and therefore who they are and have become functionaries who stand in front of their people to lead them through whatever they have to go through on a Sunday morning and who dispense Sacraments as religious tokens.

And so now follows the ceremony of the washing of the feet, an ancient ceremony associated with Holy Thursday because of the gospel reading at this Mass, but only recently done within the Mass itself. There has been and there will be a lot of talk about this act that is the imitation of Christ’s humility before his disciples. The world always likes official acts of humility, because the world interprets these acts as evidence of weakness and lack of power. For the world still fears the power of the Church of God. The world interprets this ceremony as something nice that religious functionaries should do, a gesture of noblesse oblige, at least once a year imitating something the founder of their religion did to make a point. This is intended to make everyone feel good in a self-satisfied way: the priest, the people, the world. But what does this really mean? Can we possibly understand this ceremony as it is, without the secular and religious cant surrounding it? Can we just look and see at this time and place in this church during this Mass, can we clear our minds and hearts of the junk and cant and false posturing and look and see? What else can we do but hope that this is still possible.