How many sacrifices?

At Mass in the Roman Rite the Priest, having prepared bread and wine and washed his hands, invites the people to pray with the words 'Pray, brethren, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God, the almighty Father'. To what do the words 'my sacrifice and yours' refer? Some understand them to refer to the bread and wine that lie on the altar, others to the one sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, about to be made present in the Eucharistic Prayer. A seventeenth-century English Catholic prayer book translates the Priest's words as 'My sacrifice, which is also yours'. When the Missal was being re-translated, one suggested version was 'the sacrifice that is mine and yours'. In both these examples, the words are assumed to refer to a single sacrifice.

But there is another way of understanding this invitation, according to which my sacrifice is different from yours. Every Christian is called to do good works and to offer them to God. The works are many, but as we offer them up to God, we do so in union with that sacrificial community which is the Church. Vatican II put it like this in Presbyterorum Ordinis 2: "By the ministry of the presbyters, the spiritual sacrifice of the faithful is completed in union with the sacrifice of Christ, the unique mediator, which is offered in a sacramental and unbloody manner by their hands, in the name of the whole church, until the coming of the Lord".

At a solemn celebration, as I cense the Altar, I like to think about the sacrifices that the people bring to Mass: one may be caring for a sick relative, another perseveres in boring work, a third endures loneliness, and so on. This meditation helps prepare me to speak of 'my sacrifice and yours'.

I am told that in the Premonstratensian Rite, the Priest says hoc meum ac vestrum sacrificium, that is, 'this my sacrifice and yours', clearly indicating that a single sacrifice is envisaged. We may see this as a symptom of the gradual loss of awareness of the priesthood of the laity that took place during the Middle Ages