page_title: Ad orientem
section_title: History and practice
hierarchical_section_title: Ad orientem / Liturgical orientation / History and practice
caption_attribution_description: English: Mass celebrated on Palm Sunday in the chapel of Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston. April 2009 photo by John Stephen Dwyer. Español: Misa de rito romano celebrada por el rito nuevo en la catedral de Boston. Utiliza el color rojo para el Domingo de ramos, innovación introducida en el misal de Paulo VI.
context_page_description: Ad orientem is a Latin phrase used in several contexts of Christian worship and Christian prayer, comprising the preposition ad and oriens, participle of orior. In the celebration of the Mass, it indicates that the priestly celebrant faces the altar with his back to the congregants, so they all face the same direction, as opposed to versus populum, facing the people.
  In another sense, Arthur Serratelli understands ad orientem as facing toward no physical direction, but toward Christ Himself:
  We turn our eyes and our hearts ad orientem, to Christ.... Whether celebrated with priest and people facing each other or with priest and people together facing the same direction, every Eucharist is Christ coming to meet us.
  Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, has said: "in the Christian liturgy the congregation looked together ‘toward the Lord.’ They did not close themselves into a circle; they did not gaze at one another; but as the pilgrim People of God they set off for the Oriens, for the Christ who comes to meet us”."
context_section_description: The earliest churches in Rome had a façade to the east and an apse with the altar to the west; the priest celebrating Mass stood behind the altar, facing east and so towards the people. According to Louis Bouyer, not only the priest but also the congregation faced east at prayer. Michel Remery strongly criticizes Bouyer's view on the grounds of the unlikelihood that, in churches where the altar was to the west, Christians would turn their backs on the altar (and the priest) at the celebration of the Eucharist. According to Remery, the view prevails that the priest, facing east, would celebrate ad populum in some churches, in others not, in accordance with the churches' architecture. The official journal of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments Notitiae also commented in its May 1993 issue on the unlikelihood that the people would turn their backs on the altar so as to face east; and it recalled the reproaches of Pope Leo I against those who on entering Saint Peter's Basillica would turn round to face the rising sun and bow their heads to it.
  Outside of Rome, it was an ancient custom for most churches to be built with the entrance at the west end and for priest and people to face eastward to the place of the rising sun. Among the exceptions was the original Constantinian Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which had the altar in the west end.
  It was in the 8th or 9th century that the position whereby the priest faced the apse, not the people, when celebrating Mass was adopted in the basilicas of Rome. This usage was introduced from the Frankish Empire and later became almost universal in the West. However, the Tridentine Roman Missal continued to recognize the possibility of celebrating Mass "versus populum" (facing the people), and in several churches in Rome, it was physically impossible, even before the twentieth-century liturgical reforms, for the priest to celebrate Mass facing away from the people because of the presence, immediately in front of the altar, of the "confession" (Latin: confessio), an area sunk below floor level to enable people to come close to the tomb of the saint buried beneath the altar.
  Anglican Bishop Colin Buchanan writes that there "is reason to think that in the first millennium of the church in Western Europe, the president of the eucharist regularly faced across the eucharistic table toward the ecclesiastical west. Somewhere between the 10th and 12th centuries, a change occurred in which the table itself was moved to be fixed against the east wall, and the president stood before it, facing east, with his back to the people." This change, according to Buchanan, "was possibly precipitated by the coming of tabernacles for reservation, which were ideally both to occupy a central position and also to be fixed to the east wall without the president turning his back to them."
  In 7th century England, it is said, Catholic churches were built so that on the very feast day of the saint in whose honor they were named, Mass could be offered on an altar while directly facing the rising sun. However, various surveys of old English churches found no evidence of any such general practice.
  The present Roman Missal (revised in 1969 following the Second Vatican Council) does not forbid the ad orientem position of the priest saying Mass: its General Instruction only requires that in new or renovated churches the facing-the-people orientation be made possible: "The altar should be built separate from the wall, in such a way that it is possible to walk around it easily and that Mass can be celebrated at it facing the people, which is desirable wherever possible." As in some ancient churches the ad orientem position was physically impossible, so today there are churches and chapels in which it is physically impossible for the priest to face the people throughout the Mass. A letter of 25 September 2000 from the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments treats the phrase "which is desirable wherever possible" as referring to the requirement that al
caption: A Palm Sunday Low Mass celebrated ad orientem (not necessarily in the geographical sense) in 2009.
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