After bowing down to recite the In spiritu humilitatis, the priest stands up, lifts his hands in a circle, and raises his eyes to Heaven. As Gregory DiPippo notes, “This is the same gesture that he makes at the beginning of the Gloria, the Creed and the Canon, indicating the importance of the action.”
The priest then makes the sign of the cross over the bread and wine while he says:Veni, Sanctificátor, omnípotens aeterne Deus: et bénedic hoc sacrificium, tuo sancto nómini praeparátum.Which I translate as:
Come, O Sanctifier, almighty, eternal God, and bless this sacrifice prepared for Thy holy name.
After first appearing in the Irish Stowe Missal (early ninth century), the Veni Sanctificator found its way into various medieval Missals at different places during the Offertory, while in the Italian ordines it occupies the place that it still has in the 1570/1962 Roman Missal. [1]
From a linguistic point of view, there are two riddles to solve. The first is the invocation of God as Sanctifier. Abbé Claude Barthe does not think that it is the Holy Spirit which the prayer has in mind [2] while Rev. Nicholas Gihr insists that the referent “is beyond doubt.” [3] Later amplified versions of the prayer support Gihr’s confidence, such as this invocation from the Missal at Monte Cassino (eleventh and twelfth century):
Veni, Sanctificator omnium, Sancte Spiritus, et sanctifica hoc praesens sacrificium ab indignis manibus praeparatum et descende in hanc hostiam invisibiliter, sicut in patrum hostias visibiliter descendisti. [4]Which I translate as:
Come, O Sanctifier of all, O Holy Spirit, and sanctify this present sacrifice prepared by unworthy hands, and descend upon this victim invisibly, as You descended visibly on the victims of the Fathers.And if indeed the priest is praying to the Holy Spirit, a familiar pattern emerges: that of the Holy Spirit overshadowing something or someone in order to bless it or give it life. Examples include the Spirit moving over the face of the waters when God created Heaven and earth, and the Spirit breathing a soul into Adam when God created the first human being. But the most relevant biblical precedent is the Blessed Virgin Mary conceiving of the Holy Spirit when He overshadowed her. (Luke 1, 35-38) Just as the Word became flesh in the hidden womb of the Mother of God, the priest prays that the Word become flesh hidden under the appearance of bread and wine. As Gihr writes, there is an
analogy which the Consecration bears to the Incarnation. The great similarity and manifold relation between the accomplishment of the Eucharist on the altar and the mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God in the bosom of the Immaculate Virgin Mary are often commented on by the Fathers, and are expressed also in the liturgy. The Incarnation is, in a manner, renewed and enlarged in the Eucharistic Consecration and that at all times as well as in numberless places. [5]
Because it is most likely the Holy Spirit who is being invoked, the Veni Sanctificator is sometimes portrayed as the Western Epiklesis. But we need not enter into this controversy in order to appreciate how the prayer reinforces the Trinitarian dimension of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which is offered to the Father, through the Son, and with the Holy Spirit.
The second riddle is the meaning of “this sacrifice.” Critics of the traditional Offertory rite think that its sacrificial language falsely invents a second sacrifice, one that is different from that which takes place during the Canon. DiPippo is right to conclude that they are wrong. “The Offertory as it stands in the Missal of St. Pius V,” he writes, “….does not constitute a separate act of offering from the Canon of the Mass, much less an offering of something other than what the Canon itself offers.” On the other hand, the Offertory rite does seem to be more than a mere “Preparation of the Gifts” insofar as something sacrificial does seem to be taking place from the moment the chalice veil is lifted.
One clue into a possible tertia via is to revisit the biblical allusion in the amplified version of the Veni Sanctificator from the Monte Cassino Missal, when the priest prays for the Spirit to come invisibly just as He once descended visibly on the victims of the Fathers. The clearest instance of God visibly descending on a sacrificial victim is when Elijah challenges the false prophets of Baal to a contest of holocaust offerings to see which party is praying to the true God. After the false prophets fail to get Baal to ignite their sacrifice, Elijah drenches his offering in water three times and then asks God to light the fire.
Then the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the holocaust, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. And when all the people saw this, they fell on their faces, and they said: ‘The Lord He is God, the Lord He is God.” (3 Kings [1 Kings] 18, 38-39)
Here, the sacrifice was consummated or completed when the fire of the Lord fell on the holocaust victim, but the sacrifice began when Elijah, after repairing the altar stones, ritually prepared the wood and the victim. Similarly, the sacrifice of the Mass begins when the priest begins the Offertory; he can thus refer to his actions as sacrificial even though he knows that the sacrifice will not reach its apex until the Words of Institution are uttered.
Notes
[1] Josef Jungmann, Mass of the Roman Rite, vol. 2, trans. Francis Brunner (Benziger Brothers, 1995), 68.
[2] Abbé Claude Barthe, A Forest of Symbols: The Traditional Mass and Its Meaning, trans. David J. Critchley (Angelico Press, 2023), 86.
[3] Gihr, The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass (Herder, 1902), 530.
[4] Jungmann, 68, fn 146.
[5] Gihr, 532.
