July Allocutio 2025

The Offering of the Mass

Fr. Paul Churchill, Concilium Spiritual Director

There is a painting in the National Gallery London which depicts the day when Mary, with Joseph, presented Jesus in the Temple. It shows Mary handing Jesus over to Simeon in front of an Altar. The artist depicts Simeon as an old man. But he also paints him as wearing an alb and chasuble, the garments a priest wears when celebrating Mass. Mary offering Jesus, the lamb of God, to God, along with herself, capsulates what the Mass is.

It seems to me that there is great need to remind ourselves what the Mass is. Some people say to me after Mass, “I enjoyed that ceremony, father!”, “Great service Father!”. That can sound like some protestant ceremony! Others might see it as a prayer meeting or some other great community event. But the Church has always referred to it as the Sacrifice of the Mass, or as we in Ireland say, an t-Aifreann, things to be offered up and sacrificed (Latin: offerenda). I would like now with Mary’s help to ask everyone in the Legion to help live and proclaim what is at the heart of the Mass: the offering of ourselves united to Christ’s offering of himself to God on the Altar of the Cross.

We have always been told that if you get late to Mass, if you manage to arrive before the offertory, you will have fulfilled your obligation. Why? Because what is at the heart of the Mass is our act of offering ourselves to God and his service, offering ourselves to be part of Our Lord’s own offering and sacrifice.

When Our Lady stood at the foot of the Cross she suffered. She handed everything over to God, partaking with Jesus in his disposition: “Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit”. She renewed in an even deeper her Fiat, “Be it done unto me according to thy word”.

Pope (Saint) John Paul II had as his motto Totus Tuus. And that must be our inner disposition at Mass: Totus Tuus,all yours! We place ourselves totally on the Altar with the gifts of bread and wine, which symbolize our life’s energy, and we say “I am all thine, my King and my Lord, and all that I have is thine”. At the Consecration we can say with Jesus, “This is my body given up for you; this is my blood given up for the forgiveness of all sins done to me”.

Because the bread and wine have become the Body and Blood of Christ, we are in the presence of that great act of sacrifice and love that was made on Calvary. We unite ourselves with it to be new sacrificial lambs with Christ. There is no greater act of worship that can be made because the sacrifice of Calvary brings a perfection to our humble offering that makes it divine. This is not just a prayer meeting or some human fellowship. It is an act of total worship and handing oneself over to God with Jesus, to be with Jesus as God designs it, new acts of complete dedication to God.

This act of the Mass can only come from the depth of our hearts. That is the place, from our side, where the real act of the Mass must take place. We might be there just to be entertained, or meet others, of give ourselves some buzz, as they say. There is some element of that also present but the heart of the Mass is about us entering Christ’s great act of complete abandonment into the hands of God, offering our meagre selves to work with God and do his will and having our offering subsumed into his great act of Christ. So that we can say, “Through him and with him and in him, all glory and honour is Yours.” Those words of the doxology are, after the words of the consecration, the most important in the Mass because that is when we hand over the whole sacrifice to God our Father, ourselves united with Jesus’ sacrifice. There should be a resounding Amen to them by everyone.

I began with the Presentation in the Temple, the day when Mary was told that a sword would pierce her heart too! It was the day they offered a “pair or turtle-doves or two young pigeons” to be sacrificed. That small sacrifice pre-figured the shedding of blood that was needed for our sins, the blood of Christ. We must never forget that when we bring ourselves to Mass we come as sinners. It is part of our make-up. It is also part of our act of worship, then, that we allow ourselves be washed clean in the blood of the Lamb. And so, in the third Eucharistic Prayer we pray, “Look, we pray, upon the oblation of your Church and, recognizing the sacrificial Victim by whose death you willed to reconcile us to yourself … ”. We are reconciled by the blood of Christ which takes the barriers of sin away. Our act of worship at Mass must always have embedded in it an ownership of our sinfulness and a grateful allowing ourselves be bathed in his blood that restores us. The meaning of the Greek word “Eucharist” is thanksgiving, thanksgiving not just that God gave us existence or that he overcame death but especially because by his blood we are redeemed. In this month of the Precious Blood let us in Mary’s Legion work to restore the deep meaning of the Mass and ensure that its proper meaning is not lost in any watery revision.

I appreciate that I have just centered here on the heart of the Mass and have left aside many other elements.