NOT SILENT SPECTATORS, BUT A SACRIFICIAL PEOPLE
Leo XIV, λειτουργία, the ministerial priesthood, and what “active participation” in the Holy Sacrifice actually means
There are phrases which, repeated often enough, cease to illuminate and begin instead to obscure. Few expressions in modern Catholic liturgical discussion have suffered this fate more completely than “active participation.” For more than sixty years it has been invoked in support of vernacularisation, audible presidential prayers, multiplied lay ministries, constant congregational dialogue, architectural reordering and an almost compulsive anxiety about silence. Beneath much of this development lies an assumption so deeply embedded that it often goes unnoticed: if the faithful are not visibly doing something, audibly saying something or immediately comprehending everything, they are not really participating.
Pope Leo XIV has now returned directly to the question. In his General Audience of 26 August, concluding his catecheses on Sacrosanctum Concilium, he cited Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini’s 1962 assertion that the faithful “cannot and must no longer remain silent and passive.” Leo then placed those words alongside the Council’s familiar statement that Christians should not be present at the Eucharistic mystery “as strangers or silent spectators,” before concluding that “the participation of the faithful cannot be passive.” He went on to associate that conviction with the perceived need to make biblical and liturgical texts more accessible and to streamline the order of celebration.¹
There is much in the proposition itself which no traditional Catholic need dispute. The faithful ought not to be passive. They ought not to be spiritually absent. They ought not to occupy a pew while their minds wander elsewhere and the mysteries of redemption pass before them unnoticed. No serious exponent of traditional Catholic liturgy has ever proposed such a thing. But a distinction of immense importance must immediately be restored: silence is not passivity.
One of the fundamental errors of much twentieth-century liturgical discourse was the gradual confusion of interior activity with exterior activity. A man may be vocally busy while spiritually passive. He may sing every response, understand every word, perform a sanctuary function and remain interiorly untouched by the Sacrifice. Conversely, a woman may kneel motionless during the Canon while making acts of adoration, contrition, thanksgiving and petition; joining the sorrows of her family to the Passion; offering herself with the Victim upon the altar; and deliberately surrendering her life to God. To call the former “active” and the latter “passive” merely because one can be heard and the other cannot would be to mistake physiology for theology.
Before discussing actuosa participatio, however, we ought to recover the meaning of an even more basic word: liturgy itself. The word comes from the Greek λειτουργία — leitourgia. It is frequently rendered in modern Catholic explanation as “the work of the people.” That shorthand can be given an orthodox meaning if carefully qualified, but as a historical explanation of the Greek it is incomplete and, when used carelessly, positively misleading.
In classical Greek civic usage, a leitourgia was a public service or public duty undertaken for the community, characteristically by a particular citizen charged with providing something for the common good. The word is formed from lēitos, relating to the public or the people, and ergon, work or deed. The idea is therefore not simply “what everybody does together,” but a public work belonging to the commonwealth and performed for its benefit.²
Ancient Athens makes the point concrete. A wealthy citizen might undertake the choregia, bearing the expense of a chorus for the dramatic festivals, or the trierarchia, assuming responsibility for equipping a warship for the city. The whole citizen body did not become choregoi or trierarchs in order for those actions to be genuinely public. The service was public precisely because it was undertaken for the polis and on behalf of its common life. Thus “work for the people” is at least as important to the historical concept of leitourgia as the much looser modern slogan “work of the people.”³
That distinction is not philological trivia. It strikes directly at one of the assumptions which has distorted modern discussion of liturgical participation. If liturgy is explained merely as “the work of the people,” it can easily be made to suggest that the congregation collectively produces the sacred action and that authentic participation therefore requires the distribution of visible functions amongst as many members of the congregation as possible. But the older sense points in another direction: a public work may belong genuinely to the whole community while being performed by particular persons entrusted to act for it.
Christian revelation did not discard this language; it elevated it. In the Septuagint, leitourgia and its cognates increasingly designate the sacred service of the Temple. In the New Testament, Zacharias completes “the days of his service” in the Temple, while the Epistle to the Hebrews applies the terminology to the priestly ministry of Christ, who has obtained a “better ministry” as High Priest of the New Covenant.⁴ The development is significant: from civic public service, to sacred Temple service, and finally to the definitive priestly service of Christ.
The supreme Leitourgos, therefore, is not the congregation but Christ Himself. Christian liturgy is fundamentally His action before it is ours. The Mass is not first a communal act of religious self-expression proceeding upwards from an assembled congregation. It is the sacramental making-present of Christ’s own priestly action. He is Priest and Victim. His one Sacrifice of Calvary is made sacramentally present upon the altar. The ordained priest acts in His person, and the baptised faithful are drawn into that Sacrifice according to the mode proper to their own participation in Christ’s priesthood.
Here the distinction between the ministerial priesthood and the common priesthood of the faithful becomes indispensable. Both come from Christ. Both are real. Both belong to the constitution of His Church. But they are not interchangeable manifestations of the same function. Lumen Gentium states the matter unequivocally: although the two are ordered to one another and each participates in the one priesthood of Christ, they “differ essentially and not only in degree.” The ministerial priest, by sacred power, acts in the person of Christ, effects the Eucharistic Sacrifice and offers it to God in the name of the people. The faithful, in virtue of their royal priesthood, join in the Eucharistic offering and exercise that priesthood through prayer, thanksgiving, sacrifice of self, holiness and charity.⁵
Leo XIV himself reaffirmed precisely this distinction earlier this year. On 25 March he explicitly recalled that the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood differs from the common priesthood “in essence and not only in degree,” while both participate, each according to its proper manner, in Christ’s one priesthood.⁶ That distinction cannot remain an abstract statement in an ecclesiology textbook. It must be allowed to have liturgical consequences.
The ordained priesthood is not merely the baptismal priesthood with additional ecclesiastical permissions attached. Nor is ordination simply an authorisation enabling one member of an essentially homogeneous assembly to preside over everybody else. Holy Orders sacramentally configures the priest to Christ the Head. In the Eucharistic Sacrifice he performs an action which the unordained faithful cannot perform: he consecrates in persona Christi and sacramentally offers the Divine Victim in the name of the Church.
Equality of baptismal dignity does not imply identity of liturgical function. Catholic sacramental theology requires precisely the opposite. The unity of the Mystical Body is expressed through an ordered distinction of members and offices. Saint Paul’s image of the body is apposite precisely because the members are not interchangeable. The eye does not become a hand in order to demonstrate equality; the body is one because distinct members act according to distinct functions within one living whole.
This gives us the proper grammar of Catholic participation: the priest offers sacramentally; the faithful offer participatively. The distinction does not exclude the faithful. It explains how they are included. The faithful do not participate in the Mass by becoming lesser versions of the priest. They participate by becoming, with Christ, an offering.
Their baptismal priesthood is exercised not by acquiring fragments of ministerial function but by consciously joining themselves to the Sacrifice which the ordained priest makes sacramentally present. They offer praise, thanksgiving, expiation and petition. They bring their work, their marriages, their families, their temptations, their disappointments, their penances, their sickness, their griefs and their hopes. Ultimately they offer themselves.
The Epistle to the Hebrews expresses the structure with magnificent simplicity: “For every high priest taken from among men, is ordained for men in the things that appertain to God, that he may offer up gifts and sacrifices for sins” (Hebrews 5:1). Taken from among men, ordained for men, standing in those things which pertain to God, offering sacrifice: there, in a single inspired sentence, is the vertical logic of priesthood which much modern liturgical culture has struggled to preserve.
The ancient meaning of leitourgia therefore becomes unexpectedly illuminating. In Athens, a public service did not cease to belong to the people because a particular person performed it for them. Quite the contrary. Its public character consisted precisely in its being undertaken for the common body. So too in Catholic worship. When the priest enters the sanctuary, he has not excluded the congregation from the liturgy. When he alone pronounces the words of consecration, the faithful have not been deprived of participation. When he recites the Canon submissa voce, the Mass has not ceased to be a public act of the Church. When he faces liturgical East, he has not abandoned the people.
He stands with them, at their head, exercising a sacramental office for the whole Church. The faithful meanwhile participate according to the mode proper to them by joining themselves, interiorly and exteriorly according to the rite, to the sacrificial action of Christ made present through His minister. The priest performs what belongs to the priest, the deacon what belongs to the deacon, the subdeacon what belongs to the subdeacon, the schola what belongs to the schola, the servers what belongs to the servers, and the faithful what belongs to the faithful. Even Sacrosanctum Concilium preserves this principle, insisting that each person should perform “all of, but only, those parts which pertain to his office.”⁷
The multiplication of lay sanctuary functions can therefore never in itself be regarded as a measure of participation. The baptismal priesthood does not increase according to proximity to the altar. It does not become more real because a layman reads a lesson, carries a vessel or distributes Holy Communion. Nor is the Catholic kneeling silently in the nave exercising an inferior degree of Christian dignity because another layman has been assigned something visibly liturgical to do. A function is not a sacrament, activity is not holiness, and visibility is not participation.
Long before Vatican II, Saint Pius X had already called Catholics to active participation in the sacred mysteries and the public prayer of the Church. But the Pope who did so did not therefore conclude that Latin, sacred silence, Gregorian chant, hierarchical distinction or differentiated liturgical functions prevented participation. On the contrary, his programme for liturgical renewal was inseparable from the restoration of Gregorian chant and the solemn character of Catholic worship.⁸
Pius XII subsequently supplied perhaps the clearest theological explanation of what participation actually entails. In Mediator Dei he insisted that Catholic worship possesses both an exterior and an interior dimension, while stating categorically that “the chief element of divine worship must be interior.” Exterior rites are necessary and important precisely because they express, nourish and deepen the inward act of religion: the mind and heart turned towards God and united to Christ.⁹
Pius XII then addressed exactly how the faithful participate in the Eucharistic Sacrifice. The sacramental immolation itself is performed by the priest and “by him alone,” acting in the person of Christ. Yet the faithful nevertheless truly offer the Divine Victim according to a different mode. They offer through the hands of the priest and in union with him. This participation does not arise because they too perform the visible sacerdotal rite; it arises because they unite their hearts in praise, petition, expiation and thanksgiving with the intention of the priest and, through him, with Christ the High Priest.¹⁰
This is a direct answer to the notion that participation depends upon visible ministerial activity. The people do not become participants because priestly functions are redistributed amongst them. They participate because the Sacrifice offered sacramentally at the altar becomes the sacrifice of their own hearts through intentional, ecclesial and spiritual union with Christ.
Pius XII goes further still. The participation of the faithful reaches its proper fulfilment when they add to the offering of the Divine Victim the offering of themselves. Their cares, sorrows, necessities, sacrifices and entire Christian existence are to be joined to Christ until the interior dispositions of the Victim — adoration, obedience, thanksgiving, expiation and self-surrender — increasingly become their own.
That is actuosa participatio in its deepest Catholic sense. It is not ecclesiastical busyness, compulsory verbalisation, an endless proliferation of ministries, constant visual interaction with the celebrant, or the transformation of the sanctuary into a platform upon which the congregation watches representatives of itself perform. It is self-oblation united to Christ’s oblation.
The point becomes even harder to evade when we turn to the Sacred Congregation of Rites’ 1958 Instruction De musica sacra et sacra liturgia, promulgated on the eve of the Council. The Instruction specifically warns that the faithful should not assist at Low Mass as “strangers or mute spectators.” Yet when it explains how they should participate, it identifies first precisely interior participation: devout attention to the principal parts of the Mass. It then distinguishes exterior forms of participation.¹¹
That evidence is crucial because it tells us how the Church herself understood this language before the great post-conciliar transformation. The opposite of passivity was not necessarily speech. The opposite of spectatorship was not necessarily visible activity. Interior participation was not a concession for those unable to participate “properly”; it was explicitly recognised as authentic participation.
This is where Leo XIV’s formulation of 26 August requires careful qualification. His assertion that participation cannot be passive is entirely correct. But Montini’s coupling of “silent and passive,” followed immediately by the language of “silent spectators,” risks allowing silence itself to acquire the appearance of liturgical deficiency. Yet Leo himself supplied the necessary correction only seven days earlier. On 19 August, quoting Benedict XVI, he insisted that active participation must be understood through deeper awareness of the mystery celebrated and the conversion of Christian life. In the same catechesis he recalled that Sacrosanctum Concilium itself requires “reverent silence” and that each person should perform only the parts belonging to his office.¹²
The conclusion should be unavoidable: if reverent silence is something which the liturgy positively requires, silence cannot be synonymous with passivity.
The traditional Roman Canon demonstrates the point with extraordinary force. The priest lowers his voice. The congregation hears little. There is no running commentary. No assumption exists that every sacred word must strike every ear. The priest is not primarily addressing the congregation at all. He stands before Almighty God, exercising the sacramental priesthood of Christ. To a functionalist mentality this may appear deficient because something is happening which the congregation cannot continuously hear. To the traditional Catholic mind, however, something vastly more profound has occurred: the liturgy has entered the Holy of Holies.
The silence is not an absence of action; it marks the magnitude of the action. The priest whispers because the Sacrifice is not a performance. The congregation kneels because it is not an audience. Priest and people are united not primarily by looking at one another but by being oriented together towards God. The silence of the Canon establishes precisely that sacred distance in which awe, adoration and contemplation can flourish.
The faithful meanwhile are anything but inactive. They adore, repent, plead and give thanks. They contemplate the Passion. They join their intentions to those of the priest. They pray for the living and the dead. They place their necessities before God. They surrender themselves. They await the sacramental coming of the King. When the bell penetrates the silence and the Sacred Host is raised above the priest’s head, the congregation beholds not something it has manufactured but Someone it receives. This is participation of extraordinary intensity.
It is also profoundly human. The greatest realities of human existence frequently exceed speech. A mother keeping vigil beside the bed of her dying child is not passive because she says nothing. A husband standing beside his wife’s grave does not cease to love because words fail him. Lovers, penitents, mourners and contemplatives understand instinctively that there are moments when speech becomes inadequate and silence becomes the language of the soul. How much more must this be so before God, and how much more before Calvary.
There is therefore another weakness in Leo XIV’s 26 August argument. The Pope moves from the legitimate necessity of authentic participation to the historical claim that this created a corresponding need to make texts more accessible and to streamline the celebration.¹³ But the first proposition does not logically entail the second. One may certainly advance pastoral arguments for increased intelligibility, a wider presentation of Scripture or the simplification of particular ritual developments, but these are prudential arguments. They do not arise necessarily from the theological definition of participation itself.
Interior participation does not intrinsically require universal vernacularisation. It does not require every prayer to be audible. It does not require the removal of ancient repetitions, the dismantling of ritual density, the celebrant constantly to face the congregation, the multiplication of sanctuary personnel, or every gesture to be immediately intelligible without catechesis. Those are theories about how participation might be facilitated. They are not participation itself.
More than sixty years of liturgical experience also permit the question whether the hypothesis achieved what was promised. A rite may be immediately comprehensible while inadequately contemplated. A congregation may say more while believing less. A sanctuary may be filled with activity while the supernatural understanding of sacrifice recedes. Accessibility is not transcendence, comprehension is not contemplation, speech is not prayer, and visibility is not participation.
Mystery is not the enemy of the faithful. Mystery is often precisely what teaches man that God is God.
Indeed, Sacrosanctum Concilium 48 itself contains the corrective to shallow interpretations of its famous language. After saying that the faithful should not attend as “strangers or silent spectators,” the Constitution proceeds to describe what participation is actually meant to achieve. The people are to give thanks, offer the Immaculate Victim through and with the priest and, crucially, “learn also to offer themselves.”¹⁴ The climax is not vocalisation. It is oblation.
At that point the traditional doctrine and the strongest words of the Council meet. The ministerial priesthood does not suppress the baptismal priesthood of the faithful. It serves it precisely by making sacramentally present the Sacrifice to which their own spiritual sacrifices can be united. The ordained priest does not exist so that the faithful need do nothing. He exists so that they may offer themselves through, with and in Christ.
The layman does not therefore need to become quasi-clerical in order to exercise his baptismal priesthood. He needs to become sacrificial. He brings his work, his marriage, his children, his temptations, his failures, his thanksgiving, his penance, his loneliness, his sickness, his mortality and his hope, and he places all of it spiritually upon the altar with Christ.
The paradox of much post-conciliar liturgical practice is therefore considerable. A reform undertaken partly to prevent the congregation from becoming spectators often produced the arrangement which most visibly resembles a spectacle: a priest behind a freestanding altar facing the assembled congregation, his face and gestures continuously visible, his voice electronically amplified, his personality increasingly perceptible, while numerous other persons enter and leave the sanctuary before the gaze of the people. The ancient Roman arrangement communicates something radically different.
The priest does not turn his back upon the people; he stands at their head. They face the same Lord. He goes before them because his sacramental office differs essentially from their baptismal priesthood. He approaches the altar because he has been ordained to offer Sacrifice. They follow him spiritually because the Sacrifice he offers sacramentally is the Sacrifice into which their own Christian lives must be incorporated.
The Mass is therefore neither something the priest does while the congregation merely watches nor something priest and people manufacture collectively. There is a third and authentically Catholic understanding: Christ offers; the ordained priest acts sacramentally in His person; the whole Church is united to His offering. That is the structure of the sacred leitourgia.
The ancient Greek background now becomes unexpectedly illuminating. A leitourgia was a public service undertaken for the common body, frequently by one charged to perform it. Christian revelation takes that language into the supernatural order. Christ performs the definitive priestly service for His people. Through the minister sacramentally configured to Him, His one Sacrifice is made present. The priestly people are then drawn into that offering, each according to the mode proper to his state.
This brings us finally to perhaps the most perfect icon of active participation that Christianity possesses: Our Lady beneath the Cross. She did not preach. She did not exercise the ministerial priesthood. She did not demand that Calvary become more dialogical. She did not require the High Priest to turn towards her. She did not interrupt the Sacrifice with commentary. She stood — Stabat Mater — silent, receptive, suffering, consenting, loving and offering.
Was she a “silent spectator”? The very suggestion exposes the poverty of the category. Her exterior stillness concealed an immeasurable interior act. Her Fiat at Nazareth reached its terrible fulfilment upon Calvary. She participated not by competing with the Priest and Victim but by allowing His Sacrifice to penetrate her whole being. She stood beneath the Cross and, according to her unique maternal vocation, joined the offering of her immaculate heart to that of her Divine Son.
That is what the traditional Roman Rite asks of the faithful. None of this renders exterior participation worthless. Catholics should know the Mass. They should understand its structure and prayers. Gregorian chant should belong to them where the rite assigns it. Responses may properly be made. Bodily posture has theological meaning. Missals are valuable. Catechesis is indispensable. There are moments when the people properly sing, respond, stand, kneel, genuflect and communicate. But these are means. The end is union with Christ’s Sacrifice.
When exterior participation serves interior participation, it is fruitful. When exterior participation becomes an end in itself, it degenerates into liturgical activism. And liturgical activism can leave a soul every bit as spiritually passive as inattentive silence.
Leo XIV is therefore right to insist that Catholics must not be passive before the mysteries of salvation. But the traditional Roman Rite never asked them to be passive. It asks something considerably more demanding. It asks them to die to distraction, to self-importance and to the conviction that worship exists for their entertainment or self-expression. It asks them to relinquish the demand that everything sacred must immediately accommodate itself to them. It asks them to place themselves upon the paten with the Host, to pour themselves spiritually into the chalice, to unite their sins to the Miserere, their lives to the Offertory, their hearts to the Canon, their sufferings to Calvary and their hope to the Resurrection.
The faithful do not participate in the Mass by becoming lesser versions of the priest. They participate by becoming, with Christ, an offering. That is not spectatorship. It is the common priesthood of the faithful being exercised in its Eucharistic perfection. It is actuosa participatio. It is leitourgia properly understood.
And when a church full of Catholics falls into profound silence while the ordained priest whispers the immemorial Canon before Almighty God, nothing could be further from inactivity. Christ the High Priest is offering. His ministerial priest acts sacramentally in His person. The priestly people unite themselves to the Victim. They are not silent spectators before an altar; they are an army upon its knees before the Holy of Holies.
¹ Leo XIV, General Audience, 26 August 2026, The Documents of the Second Vatican Council: Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium — The motivations of the liturgical reform.
² H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. λειτουργία; Adrian Fortescue, “Liturgy,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. IX, 1910.
³ P. J. Rhodes, “Liturgy, Greek,” Oxford Classical Dictionary; Fortescue, “Liturgy.”
⁴ Cf. Luke 1:23; Hebrews 8:6; and the Septuagintal development of leitourgia and its cognates for Temple service.
⁵ Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, 21 November 1964, §10.
⁶ Leo XIV, General Audience, 25 March 2026, on the hierarchical constitution of the Church and the distinction between the ministerial and common priesthoods.
⁷ Second Vatican Council, Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium, 4 December 1963, §28.
⁸ St Pius X, Motu Proprio Tra le sollecitudini, 22 November 1903.
⁹ Pius XII, Encyclical Mediator Dei, 20 November 1947, §§23–24.
¹⁰ Mediator Dei, §§84–104.
¹¹ Sacred Congregation of Rites, Instruction De musica sacra et sacra liturgia, 3 September 1958, §§28–29.
¹² Leo XIV, General Audience, 19 August 2026; Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis, §§52, 55; Sacrosanctum Concilium, §§28, 30.
¹³ Leo XIV, General Audience, 26 August 2026.
¹⁴ Second Vatican Council, Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium, §48.
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