The Mass
Luther called it the greatest and most horrible abomination in the papacy. The Thirty-Nine Articles called the sacrifices of masses blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits. The Heidelberg Catechism called it an accursed idolatry. The Westminster divines called it most abominably injurious to Christ’s one only sacrifice. These are not the words of men reaching for effect. They are the considered verdicts of four separate Reformation traditions, arrived at independently, on a single question.
The question is this. When a priest stands at an altar and offers Christ to the Father for the sins of the living and the dead, what has happened to Calvary?
It is worth being clear at the outset about what the Reformers were and were not objecting to. They were not objecting to the Lord’s Supper; they restored it, and Calvin wanted it weekly. They were not objecting to reverence, or liturgy, or ceremony as such. They objected to a rite that had been turned from a meal into a sacrifice, from a gift received into a work performed, and from the congregation’s participation into the priest’s transaction — and which, in that form, contradicted the two truths the Reformation had recovered: that the sinner is justified by faith alone, and saved by grace alone.
What the Mass Is
In Roman teaching the Mass is not merely a service in which the Lord’s Supper is administered. It is a sacrifice, offered to God, by a priest, at an altar. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states the claim without qualification:
The Eucharist is thus a sacrifice because it re-presents (makes present) the sacrifice of the cross, because it is its memorial and because it applies its fruit.1 Catechism of the Catholic Church§ 1366
The relation between this offering and Calvary is then defined in words taken from the Council of Trent. It is not a different sacrifice; it is the same sacrifice, offered in a different manner:
The victim is one and the same: the same now offers through the ministry of priests, who then offered himself on the cross; only the manner of offering is different.2 Catechism of the Catholic Church§ 1367, quoting Trent
Two further features complete the picture. The offering is propitiatory — that is, it is held to avert the wrath of God and obtain the remission of sins. And it may be offered on behalf of others, including the dead: the Eucharistic sacrifice, the Catechism says, is offered for the faithful departed who “have died in Christ but are not yet wholly purified.”3
So the Mass stands at the junction of everything else treated in this section of the site. Transubstantiation supplies the victim on the altar. The Mass offers him. Purgatory provides the beneficiaries. The indulgence markets the benefit. Pull out the Mass and the whole structure loses its center.
The Theology Beneath It
An altar requires a sacrifice. The logic runs in one direction only. Once the Lord’s Table is called an altar, something must be offered on it; once something is offered, the one who offers is a priest; and once there is a priest, the congregation is no longer a body of worshipers but an audience for whom the offering is made. The vocabulary decides the theology. The New Testament calls the ministers of the church elders, overseers, and shepherds — never hiereus, sacrificing priest. That word is reserved in the New Testament for two subjects only: the Lord Jesus, and the whole people of God.
The offering is propitiatory. Trent was explicit that the Mass does not merely commemorate; it propitiates, and it does so for the living and the dead:
If any one saith, that the sacrifice of the mass is only a sacrifice of praise and of thanksgiving; or, that it is a bare commemoration of the sacrifice consummated on the cross, but not a propitiatory sacrifice … let him be anathema.4 Council of TrentSession XXII, Canon III, 1562
The same session taught that in the Mass “that same Christ is contained and immolated in an unbloody manner,” the sacrifice being truly propitiatory not only for the living but for “those who are departed in Christ, and who are not as yet fully purified.”5
The benefit is applied by the act. Because the Mass is a sacrament, it operates on the principle that governs the whole Roman sacramental system: the rite, rightly performed, conveys what it signifies. The Catechism glosses the technical phrase ex opere operato as “by the very fact of the action’s being performed,” and states that “the sacrament is not wrought by the righteousness of either the celebrant or the recipient, but by the power of God.”6 See the Roman doctrine of the sacraments.
Rome has always maintained that this is not magic, that faith and disposition matter, and that the Mass does not add to Calvary but applies it. Those qualifications are real and a fair account must include them. But they do not touch the difficulty. If the fruit of the cross must be applied by a repeated offering made by an ordained man, then the sinner’s access to God runs through a rite, and the finished work is finished in a sense that still requires completing.
The Collision with the Solas
The Reformation did not stumble into conflict with the Mass. The conflict was structural, and it can be shown at three points.
Against sola fide. If justification is received by faith alone, then nothing done at an altar adds anything to it. Trent understood this perfectly well and answered it directly, not once but twice. In Session VI it anathematized the doctrine itself:
If any one saith, that by faith alone the impious is justified; in such wise as to mean, that nothing else is required to co-operate in order to the obtaining the grace of Justification … let him be anathema.7 Council of TrentSession VI, Canon IX, 1547
And it pressed further, striking at the very definition of faith that the Reformers had recovered — faith as trust in the divine mercy for Christ’s sake:
If any one saith, that justifying faith is nothing else but confidence in the divine mercy which remits sins for Christ’s sake; or, that this confidence alone is that whereby we are justified; let him be anathema.8 Council of TrentSession VI, Canon XII, 1547
Against sola gratia. If grace is God’s free favor toward sinners, it cannot be a substance dispensed in measured quantities by men. Yet Trent bound the conveyance of grace to the performance of the rite and condemned the alternative in the plainest possible terms:
If any one saith, that by the said sacraments of the New Law grace is not conferred through the act performed, but that faith alone in the divine promise suffices for the obtaining of grace; let him be anathema.9 Council of TrentSession VII, Canon VIII, 1547
That canon is worth reading twice. It is a condemnation of faith alone, delivered in the doctrine of the sacraments. Our Table RCC4 sets the two accounts of grace side by side.
Against the sufficiency of the cross. The third collision is the deepest. A propitiatory sacrifice offered repeatedly implies a propitiation not yet complete. The Reformers did not accuse Rome of denying Calvary; they accused her of a practice whose logic denied its sufficiency. Hebrews contrasts the many sacrifices that could never take away sins with the one offering after which the priest sat down. An altar in every parish, served daily, is the visible opposite of a seated priest.
This is why the Mass, and not indulgences, is the true center of the controversy. Luther saw it early. Indulgences were the abuse that provoked him; the Mass was the doctrine that kept him.
How the Rite Developed
The Mass of 1517 was not the supper of the upper room, and the distance between them was covered in identifiable stages.
A meal and a thanksgiving. In the New Testament and the earliest centuries the church gathered on the first day of the week to hear the apostles’ teaching, to pray, and to break bread together. The language of sacrifice appears early, but as a metaphor for praise and self-offering — the sacrifice of thanksgiving, the reasonable service of Romans 12.
Sacrificial language hardens. By the third century, in Cyprian especially, the minister is spoken of as a priest and the rite as an offering. Metaphor begins to migrate toward description. Once the offering was thought to be objective, the question naturally followed: for whom may it be offered?
The private and votive Mass. The answer produced the most consequential change of all. If the Mass benefits those for whom it is offered, it can be offered for a particular person, and need not wait for a congregation. Masses came to be said by a priest alone, for a named intention, for a fee. Gregory the Great’s stories of souls released by repeated masses gave the practice its popular warrant. By the later Middle Ages a large church might have many altars and many priests saying many private masses on the same morning, each for a different soul.
The congregation withdraws. Three developments turned worshipers into spectators. The liturgy remained in Latin long after Latin ceased to be spoken. The canon of the Mass came to be recited silently. And the cup was withheld from the laity, a practice formally defended at the Council of Constance in 1415 — the same council that burned Jan Hus, whose followers made the restoration of the cup their emblem. The elevation of the host, introduced in the twelfth century, supplied what participation no longer could: people came to see the host rather than to eat.
Codification. Trent settled the doctrine in 1562 and the rite followed in 1570, when Pius V promulgated the Roman Missal that would stand with little change for four centuries.
What It Produced
Doctrines are known by their fruit, and the fruit here was an economy.
If a Mass benefits the soul for whom it is said, then masses are worth paying for, and the rich may buy more of them than the poor. Men endowed chantries — foundations whose whole purpose was to support a priest saying mass in perpetuity for the founder’s soul. Guilds were formed to fund obsequies for members. Whole clerical incomes rested on the dead. A priest’s livelihood might depend not on preaching or pastoral care but on the number of masses he could say in a morning.
Luther connected the rite to the traffic exactly, and did not soften it:
This dragon’s tail, [I mean] the Mass, has begotten a numerous vermin-brood of manifold idolatries. First, purgatory. Here they carried their trade into purgatory by masses for souls, and vigils, and weekly, monthly, and yearly celebrations of obsequies.10 Martin LutherSmalcald Articles, II.ii, 1537
His objection was never merely commercial. The Smalcald Articles put the theological charge in a sentence: it was held that this work of the Mass, “even though it be rendered by a wicked [and abandoned] scoundrel, frees men from sins, both in this life and also in purgatory, while only the Lamb of God shall and must do this.”11 There is the heart of it. A work performed by a man was credited with what belongs to the Lamb of God alone.
The Verdict of the Reformers
On the Supper the Reformers divided, and the division at Marburg in 1529 was never healed. On the Mass they did not divide at all.
Luther attacked it in 1520 in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, naming three captivities: the withholding of the cup, transubstantiation, and — the worst — the treatment of the Mass as a good work and a sacrifice. He never retreated from it, and in 1537 gave his settled judgment:
That the Mass in the Papacy must be the greatest and most horrible abomination, as it directly and powerfully conflicts with this chief article, and yet above and before all other popish idolatries it has been the chief and most specious.12 Martin LutherSmalcald Articles, II.ii, 1537
Note again the reason: it conflicts with this chief article — justification by faith. Luther did not object to the Mass because it was ornate or unintelligible, though he thought it both. He objected because a sacrifice offered by men cannot stand in the same theology as a righteousness received by faith.
The confessions converge. The Thirty-Nine Articles ground the objection where it belongs, in the completeness of the one offering:
The Offering of Christ once made is that perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction, for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual; and there is none other satisfaction for sin, but that alone. Wherefore the sacrifices of Masses, in the which it was commonly said that the Priest did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables, and dangerous deceits.13 Thirty-Nine ArticlesArticle XXXI, 1571
The Heidelberg Catechism reached the same conclusion in Question 80, calling the Roman mass a denial of the one sacrifice of Christ and an accursed idolatry — language added to the later editions of 1563 in direct answer to Trent.14 And the Westminster Confession stated the Reformed position with its usual precision, affirming what the Supper is before denying what it is not:
In this sacrament Christ is not offered up to his Father; nor any real sacrifice made at all, for remission of sins of the quick or dead; but only a commemoration of that one offering up of himself, by himself, upon the cross, once for all … so that the popish sacrifice of the mass, as they call it, is most abominably injurious to Christ’s one, only sacrifice, the alone propitiation for all the sins of his elect.15 Westminster Confession of FaithXXIX.2, 1646
The Answer of Trent
The Council of Trent took up the sacrifice of the Mass in Session XXII, in September 1562, and did what it had done on transubstantiation: it conceded the abuses and confirmed the doctrine.
The reforms were real. The council legislated against avarice in the saying of masses, against wandering priests who lived by them, against irreverence, superstition, and the treatment of the rite as a commodity. A decree on abuses instructed bishops to root out “whatever savours of filthy lucre” in connection with the Mass. Anyone who supposes Trent complacent about the medieval traffic has not read it.
But the doctrine was defined and every Protestant alternative anathematized. It is a true and proper sacrifice (canon 1). Christ did ordain that priests should offer his body and blood (canon 2). It is propitiatory and not a bare commemoration (canon 3). And Session VI had already condemned the doctrine of justification on which the Protestant objection rested.
The Reformation and Trent therefore did not merely disagree about a ceremony. Each concluded that the other had lost the gospel. Trent said that whoever holds justification by faith alone is anathema. The Reformed confessions said that the sacrifice of the Mass is injurious to the one only sacrifice of Christ. Both understood the stakes, and neither was exaggerating for effect.
The Mass Today
Much has changed in the celebration, and a fair account must say so. The Second Vatican Council’s constitution on the liturgy called for the full and active participation of the people; the vernacular replaced Latin in most places; the cup has been restored to the laity in many settings; the reading and preaching of Scripture were given a far larger place; and the Missal of Paul VI in 1969 reshaped the rite substantially. A Protestant who attends a parish Mass today will find far more Scripture read aloud than his grandfather would have found.
These are genuine improvements, and several of them are things the Reformers asked for. But the doctrine is unchanged. The Catechism of 1992 teaches the sacrifice in the words quoted at the head of this page, citing Trent by name. Masses are still offered for particular intentions and for the dead. The canons of Session XXII have never been withdrawn. Rome still calls the Eucharist “the source and summit of the Christian life.”16
The difference between the traditions is therefore not what it is often taken to be. It is not ceremony against simplicity, or Latin against English. It is whether, when the church assembles, something is offered to God for sin, or something is proclaimed and received from him.
They Devoted Themselves to the Apostles’ Teaching
The positive answer to the Mass is not a bare denial. It is a different account of what happens when the people of God assemble — and Scripture gives us that account in one sentence, describing the first congregation in the world.
And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Acts 2:42
Four things, and no altar among them. There is teaching, there is fellowship, there is the breaking of bread, and there are prayers. The first is named first, and the order is not accidental. What creates and sustains the church is the apostolic word; the meal, the fellowship, and the prayers are the life that word produces.
The Word is central because faith comes by hearing. “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17), and Paul’s chain of questions before it makes the ministry of preaching indispensable: how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard, and how shall they hear without someone preaching? This is why Paul’s charge to a young minister is not offer but preach: “devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching” (1 Timothy 4:13); “preach the word; be ready in season and out of season” (2 Timothy 4:2). Where the pulpit is displaced by the altar, the means God appointed for creating faith is displaced by a rite performed on faith’s behalf.
The Supper proclaims a finished death. It is not an offering but an announcement: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26). And the death it proclaims was completed once: “when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God” (Hebrews 10:12). The priests of the old covenant stood daily at their service, because their work was never finished. Christ sat down.
The assembly is a congregation, not an audience. Every member has something to bring: “When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation … Let all things be done for building up” (1 Corinthians 14:26). They are to be “teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom” as the word of Christ dwells richly among them (Colossians 3:16), and to be “stirring up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together … but encouraging one another” (Hebrews 10:24–25). None of that is possible for people watching a rite performed in a language they do not speak, at a distance, by a man whose back is turned.
And the priesthood belongs to the whole church. Peter addresses ordinary Christians as “a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:5), and calls them “a royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9). There are sacrifices in the New Testament church, and the New Testament names them plainly: praise, thanksgiving, generosity, and our own bodies presented to God (Hebrews 13:15–16; Romans 12:1). What it never names as a sacrifice is the bread on the table. There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5), and one offering, made once, needing nothing added.
So the Reformation did not empty the church; it refilled it. It put the Book back in the middle of the room, gave the cup back to the people, turned the priest around and made him a preacher, and restored to the congregation the songs, the prayers, and the mutual edification that had been taken from them. It replaced a sacrifice offered by one man with a word proclaimed to all and a meal shared by all.
That is what the first church did on the first days, and it remains the pattern. Where the Word is preached, the sacraments administered as Christ appointed, and the people gathered in prayer and fellowship, there is a church — with no altar, because the altar was Golgotha, and the offering there was finished. “It is finished” (John 19:30).
Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version.
