Pope Pius XII Speaks Out


Now here's an interesting point. In his Encyclical Letter Mediator Dei, Pope Pius XII warned of a "wicked movement that tends to paralyze the sanctifying and salutary action by which the liturgy leads the children of adoption on the path to their heavenly Father." This wicked movement was concerned with reviving obsolete liturgical practices on the grounds that they were more primitive, and one of the suggestions Pope Pius condemned it for advocating was the restoration of the altar to the form of a table.

What I find interesting, perhaps "disturbing" would be a better word, is how something condemned by a Pope as "wicked" in 1947 suddenly becomes admirable in 1982. Similarly, Pope Pius condemned the suggestion that the tabernacle should be removed from the altar as "a lessening of esteem for the presence and action of Christ in the tabernacle." "To separate altar and tabernacle," he wrote, "is to separate two things, which, by their origin and their nature, should remain united." That's interesting, isn't it? How many churches do you know where Mass is still celebrated on an altar with a tabernacle?

What we see in the generality of Catholic Churches today is an altar replaced by a table, an altar separated from the tabernacle, and, in the place of honor, where the tabernacle once stood, a microphone. The Missal of St. Pius V and the three traditional altar cards have all been cast aside, together with the tabernacle. "In place of an altar there is a miserable table," wrote St. Richard Gwynn in the sixteenth century. If he were alive today he could add: "And in place of the tabernacle a microphone." There could be no more apt symbol of the verbose and mundane ethos of what purports to be worship in Catholic churches today.

"The desire to restore everything indiscriminately to its ancient condition is neither wise nor praiseworthy. It would be wrong, for example, to want the altar restored to its ancient form of table; to want black eliminated from the liturgical colors, and pictures and statues excluded from our churches." -----Mediator Dei.