An Imagined Past: Initiation, Liturgical Secrecy, and "Mass of the Catechumens"

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Scholarly consensus holds that the Church of the second through fifth centuries treated baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist as "rites of Christian initiation" and required that catechumens preparing for these sacraments be dismissed from Eucharistic celebrations according to a "discipline of the secret" (disciplina arcani). The consensus accepts the earliness and authenticity of documents designated as "Church orders" whose titles suggest that they transcribe traditions of "apostolic" origin that shaped patristic-era practice. Analysis of these documents, however, reveals anachronisms and differences among manuscript transmissions. Homilies and treatises attributed to Church Fathers that seem to confirm liturgical secrecy have appeared in modern translations, anthologies, and secondary studies that overlook cases of pseudepigraphy or, where a writing is authentic, are inattentive to the original language and/or early translations of its text. The concept of liturgical secrecy may be the product of modern hypothesis rather than objective evidence of patristic-era liturgical practice.