Responding the other day to a question from a priest of the Diocese of Albano, the Pope said that we priests, when we celebrate Mass, ought to try and draw those present into a real dialogue with God, in which we ourselves, the priests, should be immersed.

Some people want to blame Vatican II for removing from the Mass this experience of being involved in deep prayer and communion with God.

This is unfair, because the whole point of the changes was to enable the people to participate more fully in the supreme dialogue of prayer at Mass.

What went wrong?

Some tried to turn the Mass into nothing more than a community experience. The Mass became something “we did together” for God, with the danger of becoming a spectacle or theater, as the Pope also remarked.

I oversimplify greatly, but this “do-it-yourself” tendency has been inclined to result in little more than a mere dialogue between human beings, with the occasional nod in God’s direction.

It’s not that the community dimension is not important. It certainly is.

But Christian community is based on vertical communion with God; we are one because each of us is one with God. We don’t make the community and then bring it to God. Community is God’s gift to us as a result of our communion with him.

Paradoxically, the more you emphasize the horizontal dimension of Christian community, the less people are attracted to it.

Does this explain the great fall off in Mass attendance and even the revival of the traditionalist movement and its nostalgia for the “old Mass”?

I hate to say it, but there are other human communities of greater interest than the random collection of people at Mass!

People are attracted to God; granted, that usually comes through the community. But when the community fails to focus itself on God, it loses its true foundation, its soul, and can disintegrate.

Thus, dialogue with God at Mass is not only recommendable, but is of the essence of the Mass. Dialogue with God is just another way of speaking of Holy Communion.

The Mass, then, is what God does for us, not what we do for God.

When we speak of the dialogue between the whole assembly and God, remember that the assembly was first united in Christ’s body by virtue of our common baptism.

The priest, on top of that, by virtue of another sacrament, that of holy orders, is united to Christ as head of the body.

It is through the priest, united with, and at the head of, the body of believers, that Christ unites us to himself in his dialogue with the Father on our behalf.

The Mass is a dialogue of words which express truth, love, sorrow and petition.

It is a dialogue of loving presence, an exchange of blessing from God with adoration from the assembly.

It is a dialogue of lives and bodies in Holy Communion.

The sign of the Cross made at either end of Mass places the whole assembly, as it were, in the embrace of the Trinity.

The dialogue begins when the priest leads us to ask the Trinity to forgive us our sins.

Then, when he says “Let us pray”, he offers a prayer to God the Father in everyone’s name, uniting all our intentions into one. The very words “Let us pray”, which he repeats three times during the Mass, show how we are all directed through him to the Father.

Then the Trinity speaks to us through the readings from the Word of God.

As God has listened to our prayer, we owe it to him to listen carefully, humbly and lovingly to his Word which gives us light, truth, comfort and joy. Otherwise how can we sincerely give thanks or praise at the end of the reading?

The sermon is part of God’s word to us: by it the priest, in virtue of holy orders, seeks to exhort and to explain God’s Word in a way that is relevant to the people. That is why he alone, or the deacon, must preach.

Then, in the Creed, we all respond to the Trinity that we indeed believe in its Word and in its work for us. We then ask the Trinity to hear our petitions of the day, for the Church, the world, the sick and the dead.

Christ works in the priest no more clearly than when it comes to that part of the Mass we call the Liturgy of the Eucharist.

It begins when some of you bring the gifts to the altar, which the priest prepares.

Then comes the great Eucharistic Prayer, which is truly our prayer of thanksgiving and blessing to the Father through Jesus for all the wonders he has done for us as told in the Word we have heard.

The Eucharistic Prayer begins with the dialogue, “The Lord be with you ... Lift up your hearts ..,” etc. You hear the priest’s voice, but the Father hears the voice of Jesus.

The more you are united interiorly, spiritually, with the priest, in deep and genuine devotion, the more you are united with the voice of Jesus being heard by the divine Father.

When the priest calls down the Holy Spirit upon the bread and wine, it is Jesus who does so.

When the priest recounts the words of Jesus at the Last Supper at the moment of consecration, it is truly Jesus himself speaking his own words again and again throughout history until he comes again.

As the Last Supper anticipated Calvary’s sacrifice, the empty tomb, the ascension and Pentecost, so the Mass makes all of those events of salvation truly present here and now.

We truly stand with Mary and John at the Cross.

We truly stand with Peter and John in the empty tomb.

We truly stand at the right hand of the Father with Jesus.

We truly are united in the Upper Room with the Eleven and with Mary as the Spirit is poured forth.

So, if you participate with deep interiority in these words, you are united with Jesus, the Lord of life and death and history, of your life and death and history, who speaks these empowering words of love, of self-sacrifice for you and for all.

The priest continues the dialogue by asking the Father to remember not just the assembly gathered here, but gathered around the world.

He prays for the unity of the Church, for the Pope and bishops, for the people of God, living and dead.

Once he concludes the great Eucharistic prayer with what is called the doxology, that is, the giving of glory to the Trinity (“Through him, with him, in him ...), then the whole assembly voices its gratitude for what Jesus has done for us by praying to the Father as Jesus taught us.

It is the whole sacrifice of Jesus, which we have just re-enacted in the Eucharistic Prayer, which makes us children of God and therefore able to pray the Our Father.

Then comes the climax of the Mass.

The dialogue of words gives way to that of total love and presence and communion.

In giving himself to each of us in communion, Jesus draws all of us into himself and therefore into real communion with one another, body and soul.

It’s not a “happy-clappy,” “eely-feely” communion, but something much deeper, much more real, because it is communion in the life and love of the Trinity present in the body and blood of Jesus.

 This is the purpose of the Mass.

 This is the substance and nature and life of the Church.

 This is the unbreakable unity of peace and love for which mankind longs.

Through the Mass, Christ is building through, and in, each of us the Kingdom of heaven.

The Mass is, in other words, the engine of the return of humanity to God, and thus of each human being to God –even of those who do not know it- and therefore of you and of me to God.

Without the Mass, that is, without Christ’s offering of himself to God on our behalf and in union with us, our lives, our loves, our culture and our civilization, in the end, do indeed mean nothing.

But because of the Mass they can achieve their eternal destiny in the One who alone means everything: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Msgr. Peter Magee

Sunday, September 3^rd, 2006

Annunciation, DC: 10.00 am