March 2, 2012 – Catechism 1362-1372

Catholics are sometimes accused of thinking or believing that we are Sacrificing Jesus at every Mass. That is not what we believe. Christ died, once and for all. What happens at Mass is, as it puts it in the paragraphs, a re-presenting of the Sacrifice on the Cross. The word memorial is used to help describe this understanding, but I don’t think that helps because we use memorial differently than it used to be understood. We see memorials as celebrations of something in the past. Birthdays, anniversaries, they are looking back at a certain event and remembering it from a distance. That is not the same as memorial was thought of in Christ time. As it states, Memorial to the Jews was an entering into the past event in a special way. When Jews celebrated Passover they prepared themselves as if they were going to leave Egypt, they, in a mysterious way, join in the fleeing of Egypt. It was not merely looking back and remembering, it is reliving it and experiencing it. Christ told us to make a memorial of what He was going to do at the Last Supper and gave us the means to do it.

I was trying to think of a way that we could make our “memorials” into a Jewish idea of “memorial”. Maybe, if on your birthday, you watched your own live birth. That is not just remembering, but entering into the event in a special way. Maybe you go to the hospital. I was thinking about when a couple renews their wedding vows on their anniversary. There is a whole ceremony, usually fairly similar to the original event. It is not just remembering, but entering into that past event and re-creating or re-presenting it in a new way. They are not perfect examples and cannot truly explain the mystery God is working through the Mass, but I wanted to distinguish between our understanding of merely looking back and remembering an event and the concept of celebrating a memorial of the event as Jews understood it and as Christ intended.