By Fr. Paul Robinson, SSPX

The Mass: A Literal, Historical, and Dogmatic Explanation of Its Prayers and Ceremonies. By Pierre Lebrun, COIM. Translated by Harry Oesman. Vol. I. San Diego, Ubi Caritas Press, 2024. 620 pages, ISBN 979-8855681468.

It is in the Providence of God to allot talents unequally to His children. Particularly rare is the gift of genius. From time to time, there will appear a Thomas Aquinas, a Mozart, an Einstein—each appointed to make his contribution to the collective store of knowledge possessed by the human race.

When God created Fr. Pierre Lebrun, it is clear that He desired to bestow upon the early eighteenth century a virtuosic researcher and writer, for the greater glory of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The timing was excellent. Two-hundred years of Protestant revolt against the Catholic Church had passed but the age of modern revolution was yet to come. The authentic Catholic spirit was still vibrant, the great graces pouring forth from the Council of Trent were still having their effect, and the Church was reasserting her true identity with a baroque exclamation point. It was an ideal time for a deeper understanding and appreciation of the Roman Rite.

God equipped Fr. Lebrun with the necessary intelligence, work ethic, authorial discernment, and spiritual fire to provide the world with a four-volume work explaining the Mass of All Time. He would have produced ten volumes had he not died in 1729 at the age of 67. Still, the work that he was able to bequeath the world is a monument for posterity.

I myself was encouraged by Rev. Fr. Alain Nély, when he was Second Assistant in the SSPX, to acquire a copy of the first, and most important, volume of the work for the benefit of our religious brothers in Australia. When I dutifully did so in Paris in 2016, I discovered that Archbishop Lefebvre had written an introductory preface to the 1976 reprint saying that “nothing can be more salutary in our times than the rediscovery of the unfathomable riches of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass,” expressing his pleasure that the book once more was in print, and wishing that it would receive a wide distribution.

I had the occasion to type up 25 pages of notes on the book and delivered to the brothers not a few conferences on the Mass based on those notes. Sometime later, I was asked to do podcasts on the Mass in the Sacrament Series for the SSPX on YouTube. I recommended Fr. Lebrun’s work while mentioning that, unfortunately, it had never been translated into English. One of the viewers of the podcast happened to be Mr. Harry Oesman, founder of Ubi Caritas Press. Upon hearing my lament, he set himself to fill this void in the Catholic English-speaking world. In early 2024, his work came to fruition, and the first volume of Fr. Lebrun’s work is now available in English!

One of the unfortunate characteristics of many translations of the Fathers, and also the Douay-Rheims version of the Bible, is the use of an antiquated English that obscures the meaning of the text for modern readers. I was happy to find that Mr. Oesman’s translation has nothing of a dusty feel about it, but rather is fresh and readable. We hear Fr. Lebrun telling us, for instance, that “The advent of printing made it possible to produce large numbers of missals, and made it impossible to keep it as squirreled away as it had been” (p. xliv). Or, on page liv, “Like them, M. de Vert had allowed himself to be dazzled, on the specious pretext of seeking a simple, literal, and historical meaning; but, like them, in willing to grasp it, he, too, has been deceived.”

Having mentioned these things, it remains to explain exactly why Fr. Lebrun’s work is a classic and deserves to be read. Are there not innumerable books available today on the Mass? What could possibly be said in the 1700s that is more enlightening than what is being said in the 2000s?

As mentioned above, the great value of the work is that Fr. Lebrun did ground-breaking research on the origin and precise meaning of each part of the Mass. The medievals were accustomed to assign a mystical meaning to each part of the Mass, to provoke spiritual reflection. For instance, in the book on the Mass written by Pope Innocent III and recently published by Angelus Press, the Pope compares each part of the Mass to the stages of Our Lord’s Passion. Others, such as the abbot Claude de Vert named above, sought to find a merely practical purpose in each of the ceremonies of the Mass, in reaction against the purely mystical explanations of the Middle Ages. He claimed, for instance, that the only reason for lighting candles at the Mass was to provide light and that incense was introduced to banish bad odors (p. liii)!

Fr. Lebrun explains why a one-size-fits-all strategy for explaining the ceremonies of the Mass is limited. Sometimes, there was a practical reason for the introduction of a ceremony; sometimes, there was a mystical reason. Sometimes there was neither. To find the actual reason for the origin of ceremonies, Fr. Lebrun explains, one must discover the place and time that they appeared, how the ecclesiastical authors of that time understood them, and how the ceremonies expressed the signification intended (pp. lxi-lxii).

This is what Fr. Lebrun did for each ceremony of the Mass; he was the first to do so, and he did it thoroughly and masterfully. What did he discover? Innumerable fascinating things about the Mass that is so dear to us!

For instance, candles were not originally lit at daytime Masses, but the Eastern churches started having them lit for the Gospel and eventually for the entire Mass. This practice was ultimately introduced into the Roman Rite (p. 52). The primary reason for the procession with the sprinkling of holy water before the Sung Mass on Sundays is to honor the Resurrection of Our Lord and specifically His journey from Jerusalem to Galilee (p. 64). The triple striking of the breast at the Confiteor, according to St. Augustine, is to show that we want to break our hearts, so that God may give us new ones, and that we repent for sins of thought, word, and deed (pp. 94-95). The opening and closing of the priest’s hands throughout the Mass at the “Dominus vobiscum” is to signify the affection and ardor with which he greets the faithful (p. 141). The incensation of the faithful during the Mass indicates that they are the “good odor of Jesus Christ” and that they are meant to have their eyes lifted up to Heaven, just as the incense rises up (p. 247).

These and many other wonderful aspects of the Mass are systematically explained in Fr. Lebrun’s work. Reading about them cannot fail to awaken in the heart of today’s faithful Catholic a more profound appreciation for the sublime ceremony at which, in the words of Fr. Lebrun:

Jesus Christ offers Himself to His Father for our sake…as the Eternal High Priest, He renews every day the oblation He once made on the Cross. In it, He gives Himself to be eaten by the faithful, who thus find at the Altar the sustenance for their spiritual life, since, in it, they are nourished by God Himself (p. xli).