RESTORED

Given the encouragement of CSL 50, three items which had disappeared centuries earlier from the mass and to which great symbolic importance was attached, so that they featured on almost every reforming liturgist’s wish-list, were restored when the changes were implemented.

• The Bidding Prayers or, to give them their official title, the Prayers of the Faithful, now restored to the very end of the Liturgy of the Word, after the Creed. Their restoration is one of the rare items explicitly called for in the mostly general CSL.
• The Offertory Procession, when the bread and wine for Communion is brought to the altar by members of the congregtion.
• The Kiss of Peace shortly before Communion.

All three restorations involve members of the congregation, which could well be one of the reasons they were restored, lay participation being a central goal of the reform.  A reader leads the Bidding Prayers with the celebrant, the congregation responding; escorted by acolytes members of the congregation bring the ‘gifts’ or ‘offerings’ (the hosts and wine to be consecrated) in procession from the back to the church up to the altar; all present are invited to exchange a ‘sign of peace’ (normally a handshake) with those immediately next to them. Despite scholars welcoming their reappearance, it would be difficult to argue that these elements has had a significant impact on the proceedings since being reinstated. In the first two cases, there is also the matter of the resulting duplication of other features. After all, they had failed to retain their place, presumably because, as the mass developed, they became redundant. 

The Bidding Prayers^[1]

The ancient Prayer of the Faithful was integrated into, then superseded by, the ‘prayers from the pulpit’, which followed the sermon, and which included prayers and instruction in the local vernacular. That this happened as early as the fifth to sixth centuries implies they did not fulfil a useful function. In practice, the Bidding Prayers in the new mass are usually vague and banal. Moreover they duplicate the prayers of intercession in the Eucharistic Prayer, which is probably why they disappeared in the first place.

The Offertory Procession

 The aim was to restore, at least symbolically, the ancient practice already present in second-century accounts of the Eucharist, whereby members of the community came to the altar and contributed their own food and drink to be consecrated, as well as donating gifts for the poor. Using everyday bread from their homes eventually became impossible with the church’s adoption of stylised bread in the form of hosts, small, thin discs.  Here too there is a degree of overlap, or even duplication, as a result of the restoration, because in the course of time the money collection, at the same point in the mass, came to replace the function of the bringing of gifts, and is anyway more meaningful, involving real rather than symbolic giving.  By 1000 AD, the procession was taking place only on four or five major feasts before disappearing.^[2]  

You cannot get round the fact that nowadays the bread and wine come from the sacristy, not even indirectly from parishioners’ homes, and, unlike the collection, they are not really ‘gifts’ at all.  At most, the chalice and hosts could be said to symbolise gifts from ‘the work of human hands’, as the new prayer at this point puts it, but this aspect is not developed, so the actual purpose and meaning of the procession remains obscure, despite the requirement that the liturgy should be easily understood, requiring little by way of explanation (CSL 36). 

The Kiss of Peace, 

Well-documented in the very earliest forms of the liturgy, it  was restored to the whole congregation, having become restricted to clerics in the middle ages. It remains a good way of concretely expressing the peace given by Jesus Christ, and the hesitation and embarrassment among reserved Northern Europeans has become less marked. The once common tendency for priests and people to go walking about, shaking hands and waving to acknowledge those further away, although still remembered in traditionalist polemic, is also no longer evident. For on its remarkable history click here..

Although the three restored actions all featured in the earliest phase of the liturgy’s development, none of them meets the sole criterion for restoration (CSL 50), as they cannot be said to have ‘suffered injury through accidents of history’, they simply disappeared from the mass because they were no longer functional.