While it is no longer the practice for all priests to offer prayers while vesting for Mass, many do offer these "vesting prayers." The prayers are a good occasion for them to be enriched with a profound humility and willing availability to act in the very Person of Christ at the Holy Sacrifice. In this series, we look at each vesting prayer and its corresponding vestment, as an intimate insight into the spiritual lives of priests at their most vulnerable moment every day, helping all the rest of us also to understand just who we are before God and neighbor.
PRAYER 4 – "Ad cingulum" (Prayer used for the cincture)
"Præcinge me, Domine, cingulo puritatis, et exstingue in lumbis meis humorem libidinis; ut maneat in me virtus continentiæ et castitatis." ("Gird me about, O Lord, with the cincture of purity so as to extinguish in my loins the inclinations of wanton desires, that the virtue of continence and chastity may abide in me.")
If without God-given virtue, the bodies, the loins of the priest – as with everyone else – are given to the inclinations of wanton desires, and if followed, brutally destroy the purity of heart and agility of soul, the continence and chastity with which every priest is to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The idea here is not to repress anything, which never works, and which the Church never recommends. It's true that this prayer is recited as the priest ties this liturgical rope about his waist, both gathering the folds of his alb and holding the ends of the stole in place, but the cincture has no superstitious value. It is not a kind of badge of the Manichaean heresy, which has it that spiritual things are good while material things are evil.
Instead, humility is necessary for the priest to be at ease not with sin, but with any weakness, any of the effects of original sin inherent to our fallen human nature. He prays for purity, particularly purity of intention, which only God can provide – making the priest a kind of mirror radiating an intimate friendship with God. It is that lively friendship, full of integrity, honesty, righteousness, goodness and kindness, with respect for self and others, which brings about the virtue of profound continence and chastity, the scintillating brilliance of personally being a kind of tabernacle of the Most High with the indwelling of the Most Holy Trinity.
In providing an abundance of purity, of friendship, the Lord has untoward inclinations extinguished. Purity is that singular virtue of continence (to be contained in the love of God, which is positive) and chastity (being cut off from worldly selfishness, the result of that which is positive). In other words, wanton inclinations are not denied or attacked, but instead are overwhelmed just as darkness is overcome by light. This is not about coping mechanisms, or thinking that tying a rope around oneself is a protection against sinfulness; it's about Jesus' truth and love.
The symbolism of the cincture ties together many millennia of liturgical practice, stretching far back into the Hebrew Scriptures, right to the beginning. In Genesis 3:21, God caused Adam and his wife to be clothed in the bleeding skins of freshly slaughtered beasts. Instead of the fig leaves they used for repression, He covered them with an indication of the violence of sacrifice by which, in the future, He would lift them out of their quagmire through the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. He took the initiative to place enmity (grace) within us by reaching out His heel to crush the power of Satan while Himself was crushed, He taking on the death we deserve for sin and having the right in justice to have mercy on us (see Gn 3:15).
St. John the Baptist wore a leather cincture (see Mk 1:6 and Mt 3:4) even as he pointed out the Lamb of God who would be sacrificed for us. In that sacrifice, He clothed us in the first garment Adam wore before the fall, that of grace, even as His own skin was torn from Him by the Roman soldiers' scourging. Even more than that grace before the fall, we are now clothed with the grace of unity with the very Son of God. Although the leather cincture is worn as part of the habit of many religious orders, diocesan clergy and some religious orders use a cloth fascia with their cassocks and religious habits. For the sake of poverty, some religious orders use rope.
Jesus, the first-born of our Heavenly homeland, let His life be smitten for us, speaking of the fulfilment of the Passover, of His body being given over for us, His blood being poured out for us. For the Passover, the Lord commanded this: "In this manner you shall eat it: your loins girded ... For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will smite all the first-born" (Ex 12:11-12). For the Last Supper, Jesus said this: "Gird your loins ... Blessed are those servants whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival. Amen, I say to you, he will gird himself and have them recline at table, and proceed to wait on them" (Lk 12,35-37). At Mass, the Lord serves us.
Without purity, especially purity of intention, a priest could easily sin against continence and chastity by violating the conscience of his congregation, effectively raping them by using the Mass as a bully pulpit for promoting his own views instead of the living truth of Jesus, who is Himself the Spouse of the Church. With purity the priest lives his own marriage with the Church, rejoicing to recite the wedding vows of Christ: This is my body given for you, my blood poured out for you. Such a priest will respect himself and others, and know honesty, integrity, righteousness, goodness and kindness, inviting others to do the same. This prayer for purity is an excellent preparation to say Holy Mass.
Father George David Byers is administrator of Holy Redeemer Parish in Andrews.