page_title: Ad orientem
section_title: Liturgical orientation
hierarchical_section_title: Ad orientem / Liturgical orientation
caption_attribution_description: Čeština: Pozdvihování hostie. English: Host elevation. Esperanto: Hostilevado.
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: Ad orientem is commonly used today in Western Christianity to describe a particular orientation of a priest in Christian liturgy, facing the apse or reredos or wall behind the altar, with priest and people looking in the same direction, as opposed to the versus populum orientation in which the priest faces the congregation. In this use, the phrase is not necessarily related to the geographical direction in which the priest is looking and is employed even if he is not facing to the east or even has his back to the east.
  In contrast to this common present-day use, the Tridentine Roman Missal published in 1570 used ad orientem to indicate the exact opposite, namely, "facing the people" (presumably, the Latin phrase still had its normal meaning and referred to the situation  in a church where the altar was at the west end): "Si altare sit ad orientem, versus populum, celebrans versa facie ad populum, non vertit humeros ad altare, cum dicturus est Dóminus vobiscum, Oráte, fratres, Ite, missa est, vel daturus benedictionem ..." (If the altar is ad orientem, towards the people, the celebrant, facing the people, does not turn his back to the altar when about to say Dominus vobiscum ["The Lord be with you"], Orate, fratres [the introduction to the prayer over the offerings of bread and wine], and Ite, missa est [the dismissal at the conclusion of the Mass], or about to give the blessing ...). The wording remained unchanged in all later editions of the Tridentine Missal, even the last, which is still in active use today even outside the circumstances in which its use is authorized by the 2007 document Summorum Pontificum.
caption: Catholic priest at an altar attached to a wall
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