The Mass: The Presence of the Sacrifice of the Cross by Charles Cardinal Journet (review)

670 BOOK REVIEWS allow the particularity of Christ's nonviolent charity shine more brightly than the synthetic power of Hegel's dialectic, which lures both Vattimo and Zizek alike into its orbit. Christ in Postmodern Philosophy not only serves as an excellent primer for those who might be relatively new to the conversation about Christ in contemporary continental thought, but also offers a set of insights and intuitions which will prove fruitful for further reflection upon Christ's uniqueness. Depoortere's intuitions, however, stand in need of further development on the issue of Christ and the religions. On the one hand, the "postmodern" Depoortere declares his opposition to those views which present non-Christian religions as "precursors" to Christ, a position he describes as "Hegelian." The "modern" Depoortere, however, looks to the anthropological and natural sciences to construct a somewhat wooden binary opposition between "the natural sacred" (with its inherent violence) and the supernatural revelation of God incarnate. Critics will suspect that a postmetaphysical Christology, cut off from a doctrine of creation and the goodness of nature, will inevitably yield such results. One might hope that Depoortere will turn his attention to these issues in the future. GARY M. CULPEPPER Providence College Providence, Rhode Island The Mass: The Presence of the Sacrifice of the Cross. By CHARLES CARDINAL JOURNET. Translated byVICTOR SZCZUREK, 0. PRAEM. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine's Press, 2008. Pp. xxii + 273. $37.50 (cloth). ISBN 978-158731 -494-0. The Swiss cardinal and theologian CharlesJournet (1891-1975) is best known as one of the principal founders of the journal Nova et Vetera and the author of the immense theological masterpiece L'eglise du verbe incarne. It is no small event that Journet's lesser-known La messe: Presence du sacrifice de la croix, one of the lost classics of Eucharistic theology, is now available in a fine English translation by Fr. Victor Szczurek, a Norbertine priest of St. Michael's Abbey in Orange County, California. Originally published in 1957, La messe came at the end of a great upheaval in Eucharist theology. At the turn of the twentieth century, a general Scholastic consensus existed in the field: Dominican, Franciscan, and Jesuit theologians perfected the general emphases of their schools while the more eclectic German school, represented by Nicholas Gihr and Joseph Pohle, largely upheld the consensus. Dom Odo Case!, who advanced an adventurous but novel account of sacramental presence, and Maurice de la BOOK REVIEWS 671 Taille, who used a massive amount of patristic data to offer a similarly novel account of the relationship of the sacrifice of the Mass to the heavenly liturgy, largely upset this consensus, and the first half of the twentieth century saw an explosion of creative but occasionally unmeasured treatises on the Eucharist. Journet looks back upon this development with the serenity afforded by his staunch Thomism. He insists on the two Thomistic positions that the Mass is primarily Christ's sacrifice rather than the Church's sacrifice and that the Mass is of infinite efficacious power. He follows his outline of these positions with a skilled historical account of the Church's teaching on transubstantiation, communion, and the settings of the Mass. Journet takes special care to outline the sacramental presence of Christ's sacrifice on Calvary at the Last Supper and at the Mass in light of Protestant criticisms, following the general emphases of Tridentine theologians, and he is a fine controversialist. Two appendices summarize the importance of Pius XIl's encyclical Mediator Dei and theological approaches to the mystery of the Mass in the medieval and modern periods. Journet is an able exponent of Aquinas's teaching, which he supplements with a skilled exegesis of Cajetan's contributions to the Thomist tradition and the guiding light of the Council of Trent. He also peppers his pages with quotations from mystics such as Catherine of Siena, John of the Cross, Benedict Joseph Labre, and Marie of the Incarnation; luminaries of modern French intellectual life like Pascal, Bossuet, Leibniz, Claude!, and "Theophile Delaporte" Uulian Green); and more exotic characters like Marguerite de Veni d'Arbouze and Anne de Gonzague de Cleves. While solidly Thomistic in its doctrine, The Mass is...