Jeg spurte for et par dager siden om Josef Jungmanns (jeg leser nå hans 1000 sider om messeliturgiens utvikling) synspunkter på at katolske altere ble «snudd» nesten over hele verden fra og med midten av 60-tallet. Svaret på spørsmålet er tydeligvis at han på 50- og tidlig 60-tall hadde arbeidet for en slik utvikling, men snudde mot slutten av 60-tallet og mente at en slik «snuing» var misforstått og uheldig. Slik åpner en artikkel som drøfter dette spørsmålet: «The claim that the altar of the early Church was always designed to celebrate facing the people, a claim made often and repeatedly, turns out to be nothing but a fairy tale.» —Josef Jungmann, S.J.
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Jungmann … had originally pressed hard for the implementation of the versus populum arrangement in the modern world. Shortly after the reforms began, he would come to question his presuppositions, and in time, admit their essential fantasy.
Jungmann’s pre-Conciliar support gave the practice a scholarly veneer. His historical works nonetheless do not treat the subject with great confidence: in his magisterial work The Mass of the Roman Rite, he touches on the issue of its historicity as a foregone conclusion, but fails to back his contentions with much in the way of solid documentation. In other works, he suggested that the proper rationale for present-day versus populum was principally pastoral rather than archaeological. Indeed, he even suggested the Early Christians were sloppy or even ambivalent to the whole issue of direction, apparently ignoring the vast corpus of early Christian hymnody, art and liturgy now known to be focused on Christ-as-rising sun and the East. …
… The long history of ad orientem liturgy is a matter of archaeological record. That being said, the question this paper answers might be said to be a moot point, if Pius XII’s advice in Mediator Dei is to be heeded. The worship of the primitive Christians is not the be-all and the end-all of liturgy:
Assuredly it is a wise and most laudable thing to return in spirit and affection to the sources of the sacred liturgy. For research in this field of study, by tracing it back to its origins, contributes valuable assistance towards a more thorough and careful investigation of the significance of feast-days, and of the meaning of the texts and sacred ceremonies employed on their occasion. But it is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device. Thus, to cite some instances, one would be straying from the straight path were he to wish the altar restored to its primitive table form …
The prevailing versus populum view of the liturgists of the 1960s was backed up by the latest in archaeological discoveries. This has in turn been disproved by even newer discoveries and scholarship which support the living tradition of ad orientem worship. Perhaps we would have done well to not be so skeptical in the first place of the customs that have been handed onto us. It is in this light that the deep wisdom of Pius XII’s words becomes apparent. The wisdom of what was once a continuous, living tradition, written off in the name of what was then the cutting-edge of a scientific approach to liturgy, has been found to be more trustworthy than we supposed, after all.
So what is the next step in our pilgrimage to the East? This question of orientation, underscoring the presence of the Living God in our sanctuaries, is one close to Benedict’s heart. Yet, having lived through the great trauma of the rapid and perhaps imprudent changes of the late sixties, he understands the dangers of radical, unexplained change. Ratzinger wrote in The Spirit of the Liturgy that it would be a mistake to “reject all the reforms of our century wholesale,” but that the face-to-face dialogue of the Liturgy of the Word must also be distinguished from the “common turning to the East during the Eucharistic prayer,” which remains “essential,” as“[l]ooking at the priest has no importance. […] It is not a question of dialogue but of common worship, of setting off towards the One who is to come. Ratzinger suggests the solution in places “when a direct common turning towards the East is not possible,” to create an “interior ‘east’ of faith,” in the form of a large standing crucifix on the center of the altar table-top for both priest and people to face, and to in part conceal the priest’s identity so that we might recall that he is not acting for his own sake at the altar. This, along with catechesis and education, will pave the way slowly towards a gradual re-orientation of the liturgy, and will prepare us in time to once again turn both physically and spiritually back to the East. Once we realize that we are meant to gaze upon the same Christ rather than on the talking head of the priest, the ancient custom of the eastward position will not seem so outré and alien. …