The Quote: “If An Angel Allowed Me One Suggestion”
Today I stumbled, in a good way, upon this quote from Malcolm Muggeridge’s daughter-in-law, Anne Roche Muggeridge.
“If an angel allowed me one suggestion as to what more than anything else would most quickly restore the sense of the sacred to the Mass, it would be this: to do away with Mass facing the people. I am convinced that the position of the priest at the altar is the single most important liturgical “external” symbol, the one that carries the most doctrinal baggage. To put the priest back on our side of the altar, facing with us towards God, would at one stroke restore the Mass from an exercise in interpersonal relationship to the universal prayer of the Church to God our Father. With the priest facing God once more as leader of the people, the importance of the microphone will diminish, and the priest can stop making faces at us. He and we can go back to thinking only about what is happening in the Mystery.”
[Anne Roche Muggeridge, The Desolate City: Revolution in the Catholic Church, rev. ed. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990, pp. 176-77.]
Who Was Anne Roche Muggeridge?
Anne Roche Muggeridge (1926–2011) was a Canadian Catholic writer and the daughter-in-law of the journalist and Christian convert Malcolm Muggeridge. In her 1986 book The Desolate City: Revolution in the Catholic Church, she argued that many post-Vatican II liturgical changes, including turning the priest to face the people, had weakened Catholics’ sense of the sacred and of the Mass as an act of worship offered to God rather than a performance for the congregation.
What Does “Ad Orientem” Mean?
Ad orientem is Latin for “to the east.” At Mass, it describes the priest and the people facing the same direction together, rather than the priest facing the congregation (called versus populum). Historically that shared direction was literally toward the east, a symbol of Christ as the rising sun and of the whole Church, priest and people together, turned toward God rather than toward one another. The liturgy shapes how Catholics experience what is happening at the altar, which is why the priest’s posture at Mass carries the doctrinal weight Anne Roche Muggeridge describes above.
Photo: Bishop Conley of Nebraska celebrates Holy Mass ad orientem — that is, facing East, toward God, together with the people.