The High Mass as Sacred Dance

Abstract

“It is everywhere assumed in the literature of the liturgy but almost nowhere else in the church that ceremonial is the art of the body, which is why Newman described the movements of the ministers at high mass as ‘sacred dance.’… The sacred dance, like all liturgical art, must struggle for the incarnation in it of the supernatural if it is to be transfigured. In the Holy Place, at the heart of the liturgy, it can most easily be debased.”