Pope Francis warns the Syro-Malabar Church of the dangerous temptation to focus on one detail, and an unwillingness to let it go, even to the detriment of the good of the Church. The Church has to honestly confront the warning. It can happen in life when certain detail concerns something which is of paramount importance in their life as the Eucharist. Even a metaphor will become a point of contention when the metaphor concerned deals with the very meaning of life. As Paul Ricoeur noted “The metaphor of a concrete object – the poem itself – cuts language off from the didactic function of the sign, but at the same time opens up access to reality in the mode of fiction and feeling.” The four Constitutions, nine Decrees, and three Declarations produced by the Council are an attempt to answer: What do the Church say about herself? What are the practical consequences of this answer? The recoveries and innovations of the Council can only be understood within the framework of the ecclesiology proposed by the Council fathers.
We are not conducting a sacrifice like the Roman pagan religions. The last supper of Jesus was very likely on a wooden table. This is testified by the most ancient representations of a Christian altar, discovered in Catacombs of St. Callixtus and Priscilla in Rome. But after the Edict of Milan considerable liturgical and architectural changes; from small church-houses the community now gathered in vast basilicas. One of the most notable changes was that as the Church developed her liturgy, stone became the predominant material for altars. Some believe that the Christian stone altar is an adaptation of the pagan altar used to offer sacrifice to the Roman household god; another possibility is that pagan altars were rededicated as Christian altars; from the days when Masses were offered in the catacombs over the tomb of the martyrs. Eucharist is also a sacrifice but very different from the pagan sacrifices. The Eucharist began to be seen and lived more as a sacrifice than as a banquet. All over the Church there is return to the table.
After the Edict of Milan, and especially in the fifth and sixth centuries, the altar was placed at the center of the nave in North Africa as is clearly expressed by Saint Augustine. The conclusion that “the position of the altar in the buildings has been able to vary in different periods and according to the regions.” The placement of the altar in the apse was probably connected with the idea of authority since it imitated the location of the secular governing cohort: “the bishop, as governor of the earthly church and founder of the great religious buildings of the congregations, assumes a more important role.” The sanctuary, or holy place, represented the Holy of Holies of the Temple of Jerusalem and, because of this, it was often separated by veils or by a screen displaying holy images and icons, especially in the East. In Medieval times the altar was moved closer to the back wall of the apse and it gradually it lost its cubic form, becoming longer because a gospel area on the left and an epistle to the right area was incorporated to it.
Beginning with the Carolingian period, eighth to ninth century, the altar was not anymore reserved only for the bread and the wine, but it became like a platform to expose many sacred objects: lectionaries and the sacred vessels containing the Eucharistic elements; the relics of saints or even the urns containing the mortal remains and images of saints. Lastly, in the 16th century, the tabernacle itself was placed on top of the altar, which, by now, almost completely lost the mensa table aspect.
The Christian altar was not an altar at all, in the sense of pre-Christian religions where the gift is hallowed and dedicated to God only when it touches the altar. The altar was often almost completely hidden from the sight of the people and the central prayer of the Sunday Eucharistic liturgy was carried out almost in secret outside of the sight and hearing of the assembly. The Second Vatican Council wanted to emphasize its symbolic value at the center of the assembly, to make it the natural focus in the sanctuary, and to enable it to be freestanding so that it could be incensed. Its position and appearance reflect the conception of the Eucharist of a given era and a given cultural context. Now theologically the altar moves towards the faithful to the extent that the Church is rediscovered as a community that prays and celebrates the liturgy.