"Private" Masses

One of the objections of the Lutheran Reformation was to the practice of so-called private masses.  By the time of Luther and the reformers, this had come to mean a mass without servers or congregation, the private mass of the priest as part of his individual piety and within the scope of his priestly duty or responsibility.  Now you might presume that this practice was old and well established by this time.  Old is a relative term and the individual priestly celebration of the mass was old but no older than one or two hundred years by the time of Luther.

We must distinguish the private mass of the priest from the small masses that did in fact include servers and a congregation, albeit a very small community.  Apparently, once Christianity was legal and had begun to construct church buildings, these small masses become problematic.  At the beginning of the 6th century, a ban was introduced on such celebrations of the mass in private homes on feast days and therefore outside official places of worship (extra parochias, in villa.  Again, there is scant evidence that this ever included what had become typical in the sixteenth century of a priest saying mass without server or congregation of any size.  While this does prove that these private and small celebrations of the mass were persistent and did not seem to give way to the parochial celebration of the church, the discipline of this ban was not toward “private” private masses.  In fact, this could be explained as the episcopal leadership calling the local church to the public mass of the church building which he saw being neglected by some.

What are truly “private” masses can be found clearly in the 13th century.  In fact, the Franciscan missal Regula which was published around 1230 and which preserved almost word for word the now extinct missal of Honorius III (1216-1227), gives us the most clear notice of a private mass.  “Sed si sunt plures sacerdotes in loco, secrete possunt cantare missam quam volunt”.   In 1243, an ordo missæ was for the first time published solely for the “private” mass, the Ordo “Indutus planeta.”  This seems to indicate the time when the norm for the Eucharistic liturgy became the private mass -- somewhat to the detriment of the solemn public liturgy.  This was a direct ancestor of the Ritus servandus in celebratione Missæ of the 1570 missal.  Only a few years before this, in 1226, Saint Francis of Assisi emphatically recommended to his brothers that, if several priests were in the same place, only one Mass should be celebrated per day, and that all should attend.  It would seem to be a significant discouragement for each priest celebrating the mass alone and individually. 

Such a private mass, according to Jungmann, is "a Mass celebrated for its own sake, with no thought of anyone participating, a Mass where only the prescribed server is in attendance..."  Though it ended up defending the practice, the first draft of the Council of Trent’s decree on the Mass urged that private masses not be celebrated without at least two persons present.  While there is a tradition for it, the private or solitary mass represents a eucharistic practice which has almost no justification in the church’s tradition and in that respect cannot be called traditional. The priestly discipline that became normative has no real stature or standing in the theology or doctrine of the Eucharist of the Church that went before this time.  My point in this is not really to say anything except that what had become normal by the time of Luther was technically an aberration or oddity only a hundred or more years before.  Luther's objections were therefore directed to something that was not an old and cherished tradition of Christianity through the ages but a more medieval invention that over a hundred years or more become normative and, at least in the eyes of the Reformers, an objectionable practice.  It is good to remember that maybe it was because it was an evolution or invention the private mass was rejected by the Reformers and remains suspect among their heirs today.