Why the Epistle Should Be Read Eastwards and the Gospel Northwards (Part 1)

Responding to Brant Pitre’s Critique of the Tridentine Rite

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Introduction

Dr. Brant Pitre is one of our most highly respected Scripture scholars. We owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude for his work on the Last Supper, the defense of high Christology, the role of the Virgin Mary, the Ignatius Catholic Introduction to the Bible (Old Testament), and much more. He is an indefatigible expounder of divine revelation as found in the written Word of God. In fact, my wife and I assigned readings from him to our children in homeschooling, so important and accessible did we consider his work (and still do).

Even the best-intentioned scholars will make mistakes, however, when they step outside their field of specialization (and even, at times, when they remain within it; errare humanum est). While it is true that Dr. Pitre takes a keen interest in the study of the liturgy, his presentations in defense of the liturgical reform and of the Novus Ordo Missae involve a number of misunderstandings, sometimes quite serious ones.

In a recent video production, “The Mass Explained: ‘Active Participation,’“ there are a large number of truths, a large number of half-truths, and some outright errors. Most of these will be examined in a future critique. Today, I would like to take up only one particular issue, namely, the direction in which the readings are done at the traditional Latin Mass. At a Low Mass, the priest reads the Epistle and the Gospel at the altar; at a High Mass, the subdeacon chants the Epistle and the deacon chants the Gospel. In both cases, the Epistle is read eastward, and the Gospel northward. (This is more obvious in the solemn Mass, but even at the Low Mass the missal and the priest are tilted toward the north for the Gospel, as the next best thing to standing fully northward — the Low Mass follows the High Mass in an abbreviated way.)

I find that many Catholics, including traditionalists, simply don’t understand this custom of doing the readings in a direction away from the congregation; and Dr. Pitre does not appear to understand it either. In his presentation he opines that the reason the priest continues to read facing the altar is because the Roman Rite codified in 1570 (which we might simply call “the Tridentine rite”) was derived from the pope’s private-chapel curial rite, where there was no congregation, so there was no reason to turn around and read for anyone. He claims, moreover, that the changing of direction after Vatican II was a wise and legitimate restoration of early-church practice. Thus, at 28:50, he states:

People have often wondered about this: why does the priest read the lections, read the scripture readings, facing the altar rather than facing the people? Well, it makes sense. If you’re in the pope’s private chapel and you’re doing the readings, there are no people there to be read to — it’s a private Mass. So it’s totally fitting that the priest would keep the Missal on the altar and read the readings facing the altar rather than facing the people; there are no people there to be read to.

Again, at 40:39:

The readings and the Gospel: this makes very much sense, that [in the Novus Ordo] they’re going to be read not facing the altar away from the people, but read to the people, just as they were done in the Roman liturgy in the first millennium.

In this two-part series at Tradition & Sanity (today and Thursday), I will argue that it was, and is, right and fitting for the Church to read or chant the readings of the Mass eastward for the Epistle and northward for the Gospel, regardless of how readings may have been done differently a thousand years ago or more.

The reason I say this is that I reject (as Pius XII instructs us to do: Mediator Dei 62–64) the false antiquarianism that insists we ought to return to some putatively original and better way of doing things that has been forgotten or lost due to this or that “corruption” or “mistake.”¹ Instead, even as the Church refined and improved the manner of receiving Communion over time (something I have written about at length elsewhere²), so too she refined and improved the manner of offering the readings, as I will explain in detail here. It will become evident that the directionality of the readings, as received and accepted in the West for a millennium, has much deeper foundations than an historical accident concerning the papal private chapel.

Ironically for a scholar so keenly attuned to the spiritual senses of Scripture and to the ongoing initiation into the mysteries known as mystagogy, Dr. Pitre seems to ignore key spiritual meanings and mystagogical avenues present in the Western liturgy as it developed over the centuries, offering, in its medieval maturity, rich nourishment to a dazzling array of saints and serving as the basis of countless works of commentary by medieval luminaries such as Amalarius of Metz, Honorius Augustodunensis, Innocent III, William Durandus, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventure, and, in modern times, lovers of the inherited Roman liturgy such as Jean-Jacques Olier, Pierre Lebrun, Prosper Guéranger, Ildefons Schuster, and Pius Parsch.³

Without further delay, let us begin our exploration and defense of the custom of reading the readings at Mass in a direction other than the congregation (that is, not to the west, but to the east and the north).