Our Mass returns to the time when it initially emerged from the oldest liturgy in existence, with no significant changes. It still evokes memories of that liturgy, of the times when Caesar dominated the world and believed he could put an end to Christian religion, when our ancestors gathered early in the morning and sung a hymn to Christ as to a God. Our investigation has led us to the conclusion that, despite unresolved issues and later modifications, no other Christian ritual is as revered as ours.
The text, sequence, and arrangement of the Mass have been a sacred tradition that no one has dared to modify, except in minor matters, since around the time of St. Gregory.
Of course, the New Testament’s description of the Last Supper is the initial source for the history of the Mass. Christian liturgies exist because Our Lord commanded us to imitate what He did in His honor. No matter how the various Eucharistic liturgies differ, they all carry out His directive to do “this,” i.e., what He Himself had accomplished. Within a few decades of the death of Our Lord, a clear structure for the Eucharistic celebration had emerged. This pattern persisted far into the end of the first century and is still plainly visible in the finished Roman Mass of 1570.
Early Catholic Liturgies
St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, which, of course, predates the Gospels and was written at Ephesus between 52 and 55 A.D., contains the earliest and most thorough description of the Eucharist. Scholars concur that St. Paul directly cites from a stylized phrase that was already in use in the Apostolic liturgy in the Consecration formula he uses in 1 Corinthians, Chapter 11. From St. Paul’s account:
Because I have heard from the Lord that which I also gave to you, that is, that on the night of His betrayal, the Lord Jesus took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and said, “Take this and eat. This is My Body, which shall be given for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.”
After He had finished eating, He said the same thing about the chalice: “This chalice is the new testament in My Blood. Do this as frequently as you shall drink, for the sake of remembering Me.” Because you will demonstrate the Lord’s death until He returns every time you consume this bread and drink from the chalice.
Therefore, anyone who consumes this bread or drinks from the Lord’s chalice in an unworthy manner is guilty of both the Lord’s Body and Blood.
It contains a lot of sound doctrine. The Eucharist is linked to the Passion in this passage. In the Blood of Jesus, God and man come to a new and lasting covenant or alliance. At the Last Supper, his sacrifice was mystically anticipated. The celebration of the Eucharist in His memory is mandated for the Apostles and implied for their successors. This memory is so powerful that it serves as a constant proclamation of His atoning death and keeps it genuinely present until the day He returns in the radiance of His Second coming. The Eucharist, or anamnesis in Greek, renews the Passion upon the altar without blood. It serves as a remembrance to the Passion. Finally, participation in a ceremony as solemn as the sacrifice and receiving of Our Savior’s Body and Blood requires extreme spiritual cleanliness.
Every ancient rite has the basic elements of the Eucharistic liturgy when combined with St. Paul’s story and the accounts of the four synoptic Gospels. Our Lord took some bread, offered thanks, blessed and broke it, and then gave it to His Apostles to eat. After that, He took a cup of wine, offered thanks once more (Luke and Paul omit this second thanksgiving), recited the Institution [or Consecration] words over it, and then gave it to them to drink. Thus, the five components of the Christian Eucharist are as follows: the bread and wine are brought to the altar; the celebrant expresses thanks; the bread is taken and blessed; and the words of consecration are said. The consecrated Bread, which has now been transformed into the Body of Christ, is broken and distributed to the congregation at Communion along with the liquid in the chalice, which is the Precious Blood.
The second century marks a significant development in our understanding of the liturgy, and particular attention must be paid to the testimony of a Roman pagan named Pliny the Younger, who was the governor of Bithynia at the time. He writes to his lord, the Emperor Trajan, between the years 111 and 113 to inquire about how he should handle Christians. He talks about what he has discovered about them from Christians who had converted while being tortured. “All have worshipped your image and the statues of the gods and have condemned Christ,” he says, referring to his apostate informers, with joy. He then relates what the apostates revealed regarding Christian worship:
They claim that this is the entirety of their fault or error and that they were accustomed to gathering before dawn on a particular day and singing hymns alternately to Christ as a god. They also claim that they swore an oath not to commit any crimes, other than not engaging in theft, robbery, adultery, breaking their word, or refusing to forfeit a deposit. When they were finished, it was customary for them to leave, but they would later gather to eat some common, harmless food. They claim that once I issued an edict forbidding private assemblies as you had instructed, the apostate informers halted what they were doing.
Without a doubt, Sunday is the status death. According to Pliny, there are two meetings: one early in the morning when they sing their hymn, and one later in the evening when they eat and participate in the Agape or Eucharist. Pliny’s uncertainty about the “oath to do no wrong” is probably what it is. The only requirement of which his informers could tell him was not to do wrong, but he would have assumed that these covert meetings involved some sort of conspirator’s pledge. The early Christians gathered for Divine worship in the home of one of their number, which had a large dining room, or coenaculum, as the Vulgate calls it. Pliny’s letter does not add much to our knowledge of the early liturgy, but it is worth quoting for the picture it gives, one of the first mentions of Christianity by a pagan, of the Christians meeting before daybreak and singing their hymn “to Christ as a god.” They were unable to construct any public structures since they were a persecuted minority. With each consecutive century and since the first Fathers, our understanding of the specifics of the liturgy has been better. A slow and natural development can be seen. The phrases and prayers gradually become established forms, as do the ceremonial actions. Differing liturgies will result from different arrangements of subsidiary sections and greater emphasis on specific elements in other locations, but they ultimately finally return to the scriptural pattern. The Epistles, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Gospels are where we first encounter the Roman Mass as a liturgical form, not in the decrees of some medieval pope.