Between the Creed and the Eucharistic Prayer comes that part of the Mass known as the Offertory, beginning with the Offertory verse (originally a complete psalm) and ending with the Oráte Fratres and the Secret Prayer, or, to give it its Roman name, the Prayer over the Offerings (“Super Obláta”). In the 1962 Missal there are no less than eleven prayers (or seven at a Low Mass), all to be said silently by the celebrant, in between. Some of these prayers are quite short, others are rather longer.
Most of these prayers entered the Ordinary of the Mass at a relatively recent date. Originally the Offertory was the time when the congregation brought forward their offerings, bread and wine for the sacrifice of course, but also other commodities for the maintenance of the clergy or for distribution to the poor. These were received by the deacon, who set aside as much bread and wine as was required for communion and placed it on the altar. While this was going on, the choir sang a psalm, appropriate to the feast or feria. Afterwards the celebrant recited or sang the Secret (out loud at that time). There are still traces of the primitive practice in the text of many of the Secret Prayers. That for the fifth Sunday after Pentecost, for example, asks God to accept the “obláta famulórum famularúmque tuárum” (“the offerings of thy servants, male and female”), and that for the Nativity of St. John the Baptist begins “Tua, Dómine, munéribus altária cumulámus” (“We pile Thine altars high with gifts, Lord”).
In the course of time however the practice whereby the faithful brought their gifts up to the sanctuary individually was replaced by a collection of money, taken up while they remained in their places, and the Prayer over the Offerings became literally the Secret Prayer. The only surviving trace of the primitive action is now the offering by the server to the celebrant of the wine which is to be consecrated later. The Offertory Psalm was reduced to the present Offertory Verse, and the present offertory prayers were introduced. They are in the main non-Roman in origin. They began in the tenth century in the area north of the Alps, and gradually spread southwards. By 1571 they were already well established in the Roman rite, and were consequently included in the consolidation of the Tridentine Rite in St. Pius V’s Missal of that year, whence of course they have descended to the 1962 Missal, which is the standard for the celebration of the Old Rite today.
The present action can be divided into three parts. First the celebrant offers the bread and the wine separately to God, with prayers for their acceptance by Him, and consequent benefits for those present and for all Christians. Then he blesses incense and censes first the bread and wine and then the altar. Finally he washes his hands and offers up a prayer addressed to the Blessed Trinity, and invoking the intercession of all the saints.
The first prayer is quite long but structurally fairly simple. The priest elevates the unconsecrated bread and asks God to receive it, describing it, by way of anticipation, as “this immaculate victim” (“Súscipe, sancte Pater, ómnipotens aetérne Deus, hanc immaculátam hóstiam”). There follows a relative clause explaining on whose behalf it is offered (“for my innumerable sins, and offences, and omissions, and for all those present, but also for all faithful Christians, living and dead”) and why it is offered (“so that it may profit me and them to salvation into eternal life”). “Súscipe” is of course an imperative. We have come across “et” meaning “also” before, in the Canon. The persons on whose behalf the offering is made are in the ablative, following the preposition “pro”. “Profíciat” is subjunctive, coming after “ut”. “Vitam aetérnam” is accusative, not ablative, because “in” here means “into” (motion towards), not “in” (location). All of this we have met before in other contexts.
The second prayer, which accompanies the pouring of a drop of water into the chalice, is interesting because it was not composed for this purpose. It is in fact, oddly, an adaptation of a collect for Christmas Day, found in the oldest surviving liturgical book, the Leonine Sacramentary. If you remove the words “per huius aquae et vinae mystérium” (“through the mystery of this water and wine”) from the text you will see how the prayer read originally, and how appropriate it was in the context of Christmas. If you compare it with other collects in the Roman Missal, you will also see that it has the classic structure of the Roman collect, of which I hope to say more in a later chapter. Who it was who had the bright idea of adapting this particular prayer for the purpose of the offertory, history does not record. “Mirabíliter” is an adverb, “wonderfully”, and “mirabílius” is its comparative, “[even] more wonderfully”. The Creation is a wonderful work of God, the Redemption an even greater one. “Fíeri” is the infinitive of an irregular verb, meaning “to become” (its subjunctive, “fiat”, meaning “let it become” is very common in the liturgy).
With the offering of the chalice, the fact that these prayers entered the liturgy in a piecemeal fashion becomes evident. Whereas the offering of the host is couched in the first person singular (the priest alone), that of the chalice is in the first person plural (everyone present), an anomaly which could hardly have occurred if both these prayers had been composed at the same time and in the same place. “Deprecántes” is a present participle (note the “-nt-“ before the ending), meaning “imploring”. The wine is offered “pro nostra et totíus mundi salúte” (genitive before the noun again) and the prayer ends with a nice little rhetorical flourish, “cum odóre suavitátis ascéndat” (“may it ascend” [subjunctive] “with an odour of sweetness”).
The next prayer continues in the first person plural, this time the subjunctive since it is a request. “Suscipiámur” (“may we be received”) “in spíritu humilitátis et in ánimo contríto” (“in a spirit of humility and in a contrite [frame of] mind”), “and may our sacrifice in Thy sight today be such that it may please Thee, Lord God”. Note that, as in some modern European languages, the Latin idiom is “may it please to Thee”, i.e. the verb “placére” is followed by the dative case (“tibi”), not the accusative (“te”).
Then comes a sort of mini-epiklesis, again by way of anticipation, in which the celebrant calls on the Holy Spirit to bless the sacrifice. Both verbs (“veni” and “bénedic”) are in the imperative; the latter is an irregular formation, since we should have expected “benedíce” from “benedícere”.
At High Mass or in a Missa Cantata the celebrant now blesses incense and then takes the thurible and censes the offerings and altar. There are four prayers for this, one for the blessing of the incense, the second for the censing of the offerings, the third for the censing of the altar and the fourth when the thurible is returned to the deacon. God is asked to bless the incense through the intercession of Blessed Michael the Archangel “stantis a dextris altáris incénsi, et ómnium electórum suórum” (“standing at the right hand of the altar of incense, and of all his chosen ones”). “Stantis” is a present participle (note the “-nt-” again), in the genitive to agree with “beáti Michaélis archángeli”, and “dextris” (unusually, in the plural) stands, as we have seen before, for “right hand”. (The reference, by the way, is to Apocalypse 8, 3-5.) The rather unusual expression “electórum suórum” seems to refer to St. Michael’s traditional role in the Last Judgement, as the archangel who conducts the souls of the blessed to heaven, as we can see him doing in innumerable medieval doom paintings.
The second of these four prayers is brief and to the point and requires no explanation. The third, however, represents part of a psalm. I often find these difficult, because the Hebrew idiom is so different from the Latin. St. Jerome’s translation of the psalms, like the rest of his work, is a literary masterpiece, which preserves much of the Hebrew idiom while rendering the text into splendidly rhythmical Latin prose. It is not, however, easy to turn into good English, and can occasionally be quite difficult to understand. The general sense is however always clear. In the present case the psalmist asks God to direct his prayer, like incense, in His sight. The subject is “orátio mea” and the verb, “dirigátur” is passive subjunctive, (“may [it] be directed”). This is followed by a very terse phrase, “elevátio mánuum meárum sacrifícium vespertínum” (literally “the raising of my hands an evening sacrifice”). It is a highly concise and idiomatic way of asking that his prayer may be found acceptable. In the next verse he asks that God may protect him from committing sins of speech. “Pone” is imperative, “custódiam” and “óstium” are its objects, in the accusative naturally, “ori” and “lábiis” are dative, and “circumstántiae” is genitive after “óstium”, making specific what kind of “gate” he means. A literal translation would be “Place, Lord, a guard to my mouth, and a gate of enclosure to my lips” (we would say “a guard on my mouth, and a gate enclosing my lips”). Finally, the psalmist tells us why he wants God to do this “ut non declínet cor meum in verba malítiae, ad excusándas excusatiónes in peccátis” (“so that my heart may not stoop to words of malice, to making excuses for sin”). “Excusándas excusatiónes” is a peculiar construction (known as a gerundive) which I won’t explain in detail because it occurs only twice in the Ordinary of the Mass (the other example is “ad medélam percipiéndam” in the priest’s prayer before communion). The gerundive is a verbal adjective, corresponding to the gerund, which you will remember is a verbal noun. In English, present participles, gerunds and gerundives are all formed the same way (by adding “-ing” to the end of the verb), so we tend to think of them as all being the same, though grammatically they are really quite distinct.
The thurible is then returned to the deacon with a short and simple prayer which requires no elucidation. During the incensation of the ministers, servers and congregation the celebrant washes his hands, while reciting silently part of another psalm, in which the psalmist describes his love for the house of God, and asks God in consequence to preserve him from falling in with the wicked. This ritual washing is a very ancient part of the liturgy. It is first mentioned by St. Cyril of Jerusalem in 348 AD. Refuting the suggestion that the washing is a purely practical, rather than a symbolic, action, he says “we did not come into church covered in dirt”! The psalm which accompanies it is quite long and I will not go through it in detail, just mention one or two points which you might have difficulty with. “Locum habitatiónis glóriae tuae” contains a double genitive, “the place of dwelling of Thy glory” (or, as we would say, “Thy glorious dwelling place”). “Ne perdas” is a construction that we have not met with so far. It is a negative imperative (“do not lose”), which in Latin is formed by the use of the word “ne” followed by the subjunctive. There is another good example in the Pater Noster, “ne nos indúcas in tentatiónem”, (“do not lead us into temptation”). Latin has another way of expressing a negative imperative, which is to use the word “noli” followed by the infinitive. It doesn’t occur at all in the Ordinary but it does sometimes in the Proper; for instance in the Gradual for the Fourth Sunday of Advent we find “Veni, Dómine, et noli tardáre” (“Come, Lord, and do not delay”). “Déxtera eórum repléta est munéribus” means “their right hand” (literally “the right hand of them”) “is full of bribes”. The word “munus” (of which “munéribus” is the ablative plural) normally means simply “gift”, as it does for example in the passage from the Secret Prayer for the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, quoted above, but sometimes, as here, it has the more sinister connotation of “bribe”. The verb “ingredíri”, from which comes “ingréssus sum” is deponent, and therefore though passive in form is active in meaning. Literally the sentence translates as “But I have entered in my innocence”; we would probably say something like “But I have always walked in virtue”. “Autem”, meaning “but” or “however”, is one of those words like “enim” and “ígitur” which can never come first in a Latin sentence.
Returning to the centre of the altar, the celebrant bows low and recites silently a further prayer, addressed to the Blessed Trinity, asking God to accept the sacrifice which he is about to make in memory of the Passion, Resurrection and Ascension of Our Lord, and in honour of the saints, mentioning by name “beátae Maríae semper Vírginis, et beáti Ioánnis Baptístae, et sanctórum Apostolórum Petri et Pauli, et istórum, et ómnium sanctórum”. “Istórum” means “of these”, in other words those saints whose relics are contained in the altar. He concludes “so that to them it may be of advantage for [their] honour, to us however for [our] salvation, and [that] they may condescend to intercede for us in heaven, whose memory we recall on earth”. Note that here, as quite often in the liturgy, Latin uses the plural “caelis” and “terris” where we would use the singular. “Memóriam ágere”, meaning literally “to make the memory” is a standard way of saying “to remember”, as “grátias ágere” (which we met in the Gloria, and in the exhortation “Grátias agámus Dómino Deo nostro”) is of saying “to thank”.
The priest then turns to the people and, addressing them as “fratres”, asks them to pray “that my and your sacrifice may be acceptable to God the Father Almighty”. “Fiat” you will recognise as the present subjunctive of the irregular verb, “fieri”, which we met earlier in the Christmas collect from the Leonine Sacramentary. “Fratres”, though masculine, naturally includes everyone in the congregation (as we have already seen in the Confíteor). The standard ICEL translation, used in Novus Ordo Masses, is “brethren”. This does not satisfy some priests, who prefer to say “my brothers and sisters”. Whether they know it or not (I suspect many of them don’t), some of the medieval texts, including the one used in our own Sarum rite, do in fact read “fratres et soróres”. As I think I said before, inclusive language is far from being a twentieth century discovery.
Finally, the server replies to the celebrant’s request on behalf of the congregation. Neither the grammar nor the vocabulary of his response should by now cause you any difficulty; the only new word is “utilitátem”, which is the accusative of “utílitas”, meaning “benefit”.