Last week I was pleased to take part in a conference organized by at the Gregorian University’s Faculty of History and Culture and the Institute of Liturgy at the University of Santa Croce entitled L’edificio di culto e gli artisti: A 25 anni dal primo Giubileo degli Artisti (2000-2025). The theme was church architecture and art over the past 25 years. The conference brought together an impressive group of international architects, artists, and theologians.
My own rather modest contribution was to extend the reflection I began in November’s issue of First Things on “Screens and Sacraments.” The talk seemed to produce a good deal of agreement that we need to be more discerning in how we allow technology to intrude on our sacred spaces.
On a related note, I was also happy to read a quite generous response to my article from Kevin Martin of Raleigh, North Carolina in the January 2025 issue of First Things. He reports being “strong-armed against [his] better judgement into Zooming the liturgy during the first year of the pandemic,” but eventually abandoning the practice because it felt wrong for many of the reasons I discussed in my article. He wonders, however, if I do not concede too much by suggesting that it might be OK to continue to broadcast the Liturgy of the Word, while stopping at the Liturgy of the Eucharist.
It’s a thoughtful question. I’d begin by saying that I am by no means arguing that one must broadcast any form of worship, and I have no quarrel with the decision of Rev. Martin’s church to give up streaming altogether. At the same time, I’m not an absolutist when it comes to technology, and some of the goods that people claim from broadcast Masses are real. Sick parishioners in particular can be helped to pray by seeing images of the liturgy online and comforted by the sight of their home church and familiar faces. These might supplement pastoral outreach to the homebound, without replacing it. I’m a little more skeptical about the evangelical or formative value of e-liturgy, since I think its appeal is mainly to those who have already been sufficiently formed by real liturgy.
In any case, I also think it necessary to be clear that when we are watching images of the liturgy on TV we are not actually participating in the liturgical action. The liturgy is an irreducible act, greater than the sum of its parts, and the human body is a part of what that act is. Those who follow along from, say, home or a hospital room might be using the images of the liturgy as a prayer prompt–and that’s not a bad thing at all. (A painting of the Last Supper may stimulate Eucharist-centered prayer, which is also good, but is not the same thing as participating at Mass.)
My proposal of a prohibition on filming the Liturgy of the Eucharist is meant to allow for a certain creativity. Some might bristle at talk of a “prohibition,” but this is an unreflective response. I’m not trying to prescribe a specific plan for what everyone should do because I think limits on certain uses of technology can stir creative reflection on better uses. Unfortunately, what we saw during the pandemic was not the Church being creative, but simply following the crowd. A guided meditation or extended reflection might be a better fit for the digital medium than the Mass.
But to Rev. Martin’s specific point. The logic of the liturgy itself drew me to the distinction between the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist. I agree that both parts are sacred and should be treated as part of a sacred act. The Liturgy of the Word is not just Bible study. That said, not all parts of the liturgy are equally sacred. We stand for the Gospel, but not the Old Testament. A hierarchy of sacrality is built into the rite, and, since antiquity, the liturgy of the Eucharist has indubitably been treated as holier than any other part of the Mass. In the patristic era, catechumens were dismissed before the Liturgy of the Eucharist began. From the Didache and Justin’s Apology we know that the unbaptized were not admitted to communion, though they were presumably allowed to hear the Word. It’s also perhaps not irrelevant that when those first Christians were celebrating the Eucharist, the New Testament itself wasn’t yet complete.
It may well be that “screening” any part of the liturgy unacceptably disrupts the dynamics of the rite–and I’m open to those arguments–but the argument that both halves are equally “sacramental” doesn’t seem to respect either the logic of the rite itself or the most ancient Christian traditions. Luther, who Rev. Martin cites, was driven by his own set of motivations. Obviously, the decision of a Lutheran church to broadcast or not would need to be based on Lutheran theological principles, but I don’t think that all of those principles line up entirely with the Fathers or with Catholic sacramental theology. In short, everything in the liturgy is in some broad way sacramental, but not equally so.
A final, somewhat related thought. In the medieval liturgy that Luther knew, the distinctiveness of the Liturgy of the Eucharist would have stood out less than it did in the time of the Fathers because in a society of the baptized there was no longer any need to dismiss catechumens. In fact, there hadn’t been for several centuries. We, however, no longer live in such a monochromatic society in which we can assume that everyone is in the same relationship with the Eucharist. A much broader spectrum of union and disunion exists today. I suspect that we may need to rediscover some of the gradation present in Christian initiation because such distinctions better reflect where people are right now. The sensibilities of the Fathers may more closely respond to our realities than those of medieval Christendom.
Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 