The Suscipe Sancte Pater

Lost in Translation #116

After the Creed, the priest begins the so-called Mass of the Faithful with the Offertory Rite. In the traditional Missal this rite consists of several prayers that were added to the liturgy of Rome from Gallican-transalpine sources around the fourteenth century. The style of these prayers is more florid and poetic than what Adrian Fortescue calls “the genius of the original Roman Rite,” which he characterizes as “almost bald” in comparison to “the exuberant rhetoric of the East” and other liturgical traditions. [1] Nevertheless, these Gallican additions are more of an enriching engrafting rather than an alien insertion. The prayers also provide an excellent summary of Eucharistic theology.

The first prayer, during which the priest offers the bread to God, is the Suscipe Sancte Pater, an early version of which first appears in the prayerbook of Charles the Bald (823-877).

Súscipe, sancte Pater, omnípotens aeterne Deus, hanc immaculátam hostiam, quam ego indignus fámulus tuus óffero tibi, Deo meo vivo et vero, pro innumerabílibus peccátis, et offensiónibus, et negligentiis meis, et pro ómnibus circumstántibus, sed et pro ómnibus fidélibus Christiánis vivis atque defunctis: ut mihi, et illis proficiat ad salútem in vitam aeternam. Amen.

Which the Baronius Missal translates as:

Accept, O holy Father, almighty and eternal God, this unspotted host, which I, Thy unworthy servant, offer unto Thee, my living and true God, for my innumerable sins, offenses, and negligences, and for all here present: as also for all faithful Christians, both living and dead, that it may avail both me and them for salvation unto life everlasting. Amen. [2]

The prayer is beautiful, in part because it contains gratuitous decorations: the Deo meo vivo et vero (my living and true God) rolls sweetly off the tongue but is logically unnecessary, and so is et offensionibus et negligentiis meis (offenses and failings) since both of these are covered by peccatis (sins). For although most translations treat peccata, offensiones, and negligentia as three different things, they are overlooking the et…et construction, which in Latin indicates “both…and.” The addition of et offensionibus et negligentiis meis, therefore, serves as an elaboration of sin (in this case, sins of commission and sins of omission), and so the line should be translated “for my innumerable sins, both my offenses and my failings.”

The priest refers to the bread he is holding in his hands with the paten as an immaculata hostia, which most translations render as an unspotted or immaculate host. The translation is valid but misleading insofar as the average Catholic thinks of the small unleavened wafer when he hears the word “host.” But the Latin hostia here refers to a sacrificial victim, and thus the prayer boldly conflates the unconsecrated wafer with a consecrated Host, Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Examples of this kind of dramatic anticipation can be found in all apostolic liturgies. [3] In the Byzantine Rite, for example, all bow before the unconsecrated gifts of bread and wine when they are processed to the altar. Such practices are an admirable counterweight to neoscholastic reductionism, which only cares about defining the exact moment of consecration and nothing more, and they are well-suited to human psychology. As Peter Kwasniewski explains:

Beings like ourselves, who live, think, and speak in time, must pray in such a way that our anaphoras (and our liturgies as a whole) draw out, step by step as it were, the meaning of mysteries that occur timelessly…. We humans can only speak of an instantaneous coming-to-be in language of change and therefore of measurable duration (consider all the troubles theologians have had to face when speaking of “creation ex nihilo”). Thus, every orthodox Christian liturgy speaks at length of the conversion of the gifts—it calls down the Spirit, recalls or repeats the institution, offers up the gifts to the heavenly Father, and so on (in different sequences for different rites)—but really, these things are occurring simultaneously. This we cannot express with our time-bound language.

Further, just as immaculata hostia looks forward to the consecration, it looks back to the rich theology of sacrifice in the Sacred Scriptures. The Mosaic Law had five basic kinds of sacrifice or offering, and every one in some way appears in the traditional Offertory Rite. In the Suscipe Sancte Pater, we see shades of the Grain Offering (Minchah), since bread is being offered, and with the reference to a unspotted host we see an allusion to the Peace Offering (Shelem), which required an animal without defect for the sacrifice. The Peace Offering, in turn, could be used as a Purification Offering (Chattah), which purported to purge the offerer of sin, and which, according to this prayer, is the purpose of the priest’s offering of bread.

Two other words are worthy of note. The priest refers to himself as a famulus rather than a servus, the other Latin word for a servant. In so doing he draws from the linguistic world of the Roman orations, which likewise evince a preference for famulus, [4] perhaps because it is slightly more and is etymologically related to familia. Second, the priest refers to the assembled congregation as circumstantes, which literally means, “those standing around.” Circumstances, for example, are those things that stand around the essence of the matter and affect that essence but are not a part of it. It is possible that the prayer has in mind those standing around the altar, namely, the sacred ministers, but it is more likely that it is recalling those standing (and they would have been standing prior to the use of pews) in front of the altar in the nave.

Finally, when the prayer transitions to include all faithful Christians, living and departed, it uses a disjunction. Sed et, which means “But also,” adds here a hint of improvisation, as if the priest were formulating his intentions on the spot and just came up with the idea of including the whole Church militant and Church suffering. The convention is also used in the Canon at the Hanc Igitur, Unde et Memores, and the addition of Saint Joseph, thus providing a stylistic bridge between the Offertory and the Canon.

Notes

[1] Adrian Fortescue, The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy (Longmans, Green, and Co, 1912), 183.

[2] The Daily Missal and Liturgical Manual (Baronius Press, 2007), 923-24.

[3] See Fortescue, 305.

[4] Mary Pierre Ellebracht, Remarks on the Vocabulary of the Ancient Orations in the Missale Romanum (Dekker & Van de Vegt, 1963), 30.