Topic: Liturgy, Pomp and Ceremony
Question:
A Protestant friend of mine complains about all of the "Pomp and Ceremony of the Mass" Do you know where I could find the origins of the ceremony?
Answer:
Well, one excellent source that springs to mind is Dom Gregory Dix's "The Shape of the Liturgy" (Dacre Press). Dix's is an Anglican with profoundly-Catholic sympathies and his historical analysis is excellent. He also shows quite clearly from historical sources that Christian Church worship had all manner of Catholic "pomp and ceremony" hundreds of years before Constantine and the legalization of Christianity. This is very clear from the earliest sources like 1 Clement to the Corinthians (c. 90 A.D.), etc., which show that the earliest Christians (most of whom were Jews) were merely adapting the forms of worship employed in the Jewish Temple. In other words, they worshipped in the context of their own Semitic culture (the culture to which Jesus Himsef belonged) as opposed to some modern, Anglo-Saxon, American concept of ancient Christianity, which Protestants tend to read-into the New Testament, being, as they are, victims of their own limited imaginations. To cite another example, Dix presents us with a pagan Roman imperial dispatch that records the capture and arrest of a Christian house-church during the reign of anti-Christian Emperor Diocletian, a generation **before** Constantine, while the Church was still an illegal, underground society devoid of pagan secularism. Dix writes ...
"We get a vivid little picture of the possibilities of such domestic [Christian] worship even in much less impressive surroundings from the official report of the seizure of a Christian place of worship at Cirta in North Africa, at the beginning of the last persecution in A.D. 303. It happens to survive because the report of the occassion officially filed in the municipal archives was put in as evidence in a 'cause celebre' in the African courts a generation later:
'In the VIIth consulship of Diocletian and the VIIth consulship of Maximian, on the XIVth day before Kalends (May 19th, 303 A.D.) from the official acts of Mutatus Felix, [pagan] high priest [of the Emperor] for life and Warden of the colony of the Cirtensians. Upon arrival at the house where the Christians customarily met, Felix, hight priest and Warden said to Paul the bishop: "Bring forth the scriptures of your law and anything else you have here, as has been ordered by the edict, that you may carry out the law." Paul the bishop said: "The lectors have the scriptures, but we surrender what we have got here." Felix high-priest, etc. said to Paul the bishop: "Point out the lectors or send for them." Paul the bishop said: "You know who they all are." Felix, etc. said: "We do not know them." Paul the bishop said: "Your staff knows them, that is Edusius and Junias your notary clerks."
Felix, etc. said: "Leaving aside the question of the lectors, whom my staff will identify, surrender what you have here." Paul the bishop sat down, with Montanus and Victor of Deusatelium and Marcuclius the presbyters, the deacons Mars and Helios standing by him, Marcuclius, Catullinus, Silvanus, and Carosus the subdeacons, Januarius, Maracius, Fructuosus, Miggin, Saturnius, Victor and other sextons standing present, and Victor of Aufidum writing before them the inventory thus:
2 golden chalices
6 silver chalices
6 silver dishes
a silver bowl
7 silver lamps
2 torches
7 short bronze candlesticks with their lamps
11 bronze lamps with their chains (i.e., used for incense)
82 women's tunics
38 veils
16 men's tunics
13 pairs of men's slippers
47 pairs of women's slippers
18 pairs of men's wooden shoes' "
(Gregory Dix, the Shape of the Liturgy, Pg 24).
These are some of the less precious articles which Christians of this period were using for the early Liturgy --**before** the Church was supposedly "paganized" by Constantine and his legalization of the Faith. And if this is the kind of "pomp and ceremony" involved in a little back-water town like Cirta, can you imagine what the Christians of Rome, or Antioch, or Alexandria, or Ephesus were using for their Liturgies??? :-) Clearly, these early Christians were not the "spartan puritans" that modern Evangelical Protestants would imagine them to be. Rather, they were men and women of their own time and culture, the heirs to the style of worship which Christianity inherited, naturally and organically, from its Jewish origins.
Mark Bonocore
Catholic Apologist
Februar 26, 2003