"Una voce dicentes" : the hierarchical vision of reality in the tridentine rite mass and its theological justification

The article uses characteristic examples to present a hierarchic order of reality as seen in gestures, acts, and prayers of the Catholic Tridentine Mass ritual, which was in use from the early Middle Ages (when it had developed this form in Western Church) until Paul VI’s reforms of 1969. This liturgy, recently (2007) appreciated by pope Benedict XVI and cleared for free use by priests as an "extraordinary form of the Roman rite", expresses with great force, using a number of complex symbols, the Catholic vision of the natural and supernatural world. The various aspects of the ritual were grounded in acts of the Magisterium and in theologians’ writings as cited in notes.