Catholics are familiar with the idea that the Eucharistic sacrifice may be offered both for the whole Church, and also for some individual person or departed soul, or limited group of such individuals. Authors note that the liturgy of the Mass itself indicates that it is offered for the whole Church.Footnote ¹ Thus Cardinal Bona (1609-74) in his liturgical commentary states that ‘it is clear from the canon that the priest must apply [the Mass] for all: for the pope, the bishop, the king, and the whole Church, both militant and under purification’.Footnote ² St Robert Bellarmine in his Controversies points out that in the offertory prayers, the chalice is offered with the words pro totius mundi salute (‘for the salvation of the whole world’).Footnote ³ Both authors also give an even more profound reason for the same conclusion: the Mass is substantially the same sacrifice as that of the Cross, which Jesus Christ offered for all humankind.

That the Mass may also, and simultaneously, be offered for some special intention is not only suggested by its rubrics, which at certain points oblige the priest to pause and remember those in particular for whom he wishes to pray, but also guaranteed by universal custom. This doctrine has been confirmed by the magisterium. In 1794, Pope Pius VI condemned, in Auctorem Fidei, the teaching of the Synod of Pistoia about Mass intentions. Summarising the opinion of this synod as that ‘the special offering or oblation of the sacrifice that is made by the priest does not benefit those for whom it is applied more than it benefits anyone else, other things being equal’, the pope condemned this opinion as false, rash, pernicious, and injurious to the Church.Footnote ⁴

Authors generally refer to the benefits received in virtue of the Mass as its ‘fruits’. The term ‘fruits’ in this context is more specific than the term ‘effects’: the effects of the Mass include both that which it brings about in regard to God, such as adoration and thanksgiving, and that which it brings about in regard to human beings. The fruits or benefits of the Mass are thus understood to be a sub-category of its effects; they are defined by St Alphonsus Liguori as ‘the good things that God confers by reason of the sacrifice (intuitu sacrificii)’.Footnote ⁵

What are these good things? We may find an answer sufficient for present purposes in the decree of the Council of Trent on the sacrifice of the Mass. This council defined in its 22^nd session that the sacrifice is offered so that ‘we may obtain mercy, and find grace in seasonable aid’, and more particularly for ‘the sins, punishments, satisfactions and other necessities of the living’, as well as for the fuller purgation of those who have died in Christ.Footnote ⁶ The fruits of the Mass may thus be understood as all the assistance that is received in virtue of the sacrifice, both to be liberated from evils and to advance toward beatitude.Footnote ⁷

Since the time of Blessed Duns Scotus, it has been common to use technical language to distinguish between the benefits received in virtue of the Mass by the whole Church and those received by the person or group for whom the priest intends particularly to offer: one common and convenient usage is to speak of these benefits as, respectively, the ‘general’ and the ‘special’ fruit of the Mass.Footnote ⁸ In this article I shall be speaking of the so-called special fruit. I shall not offer any more arguments to defend its existence: hence I rely on the principle that the celebrant at Mass is able to offer the sacrifice for a special intention, in a way that differs essentially from the simple power that all the faithful possess of praying for their own intentions.Footnote ⁹

A question that has exercised theologians over the centuries is whether the fruit of the Mass is limited or unlimited. In discussing this question, they have distinguished between ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ limits.Footnote ¹⁰ Intensive limitation refers to the benefit which the person, or group of persons, for whom a given Mass is offered is able to receive from it. Here, the question is whether the Mass itself sets some limit beyond which a person will not benefit when the sacrifice is offered for him, however well disposed he may be. For example, if someone has repented after a life-time of committing mortal sins, could the offering of a single Mass be sufficient to release him from all the debts of temporal punishment in which his sins have entangled him? Note that the question is not whether he will in fact be so released by the offering of one Mass, but whether in principle he might be, if he were well enough disposed. If our answer to this question is ‘yes’, then we are holding that the sacrifice of the Mass is intensively infinite in its power.

The question of the extensive finitude or infinitude of the Mass, by contrast, asks whether the benefit that the sacrifice brings to a given person is affected by the number of people for whom it is offered. For example, if a priest offers for a single person, such as his father, will that person benefit more than if the same priest offered for a group of which that person is but one member, such as his whole family? Or does it make no difference to the benefits received by each, that a priest offers for many? If we hold that it makes no difference, then we are claiming that the Mass is extensively infinite in its power.

Although authors have distinguished these two questions, they have tended to conflate them in their answers, by adopting overall either a ‘finitist’ or an ‘infinitist’ position: that is, holding either that the fruits of the Mass are extensively and intensively finite or that they are extensively and intensively infinite.Footnote ¹¹ Yet it should be noticed that the questions are logically independent of each other, as will become clearer later on. It is possible, for example, that the Mass should have been instituted by God in such a way that those for whom it is specially offered will never receive more than some fixed benefit, but that this same benefit may be received by all these people, however many they may be.

Some theologians today would be uneasy even about the posing of such questions, on the ground that they exemplify what the Jesuit author, John Baldovin, has called ‘a quantitative approach to spiritual realities’.Footnote ¹² But this allegation, though often made, may be seen on reflection to have little weight. Whilst it would obviously be absurd to quantify spiritual realities if by this was meant trying to place them on some scale that can apply only to bodily ones, assigning them, say, a height or an atomic weight, there is nothing intrinsically strange about claiming that one spiritual reality is greater than another.Footnote ¹³ Most Catholics, for example, would probably agree that by spending thirty-seven years on a pillar in the Syrian desert, St Simeon Stylites made greater satisfaction for sin than would a person who chose the salmon steak because it was Friday, though he would have rather preferred the beef Wellington. Again, the Parable of the Talents in St Matthew's gospel authorises us to think of divine grace in mathematical terms.

In general, that two finite spiritual realities of the same species stand in some proportion to each other appears to be an example of what St Thomas Aquinas calls a truth ‘self-evident to the wise’; we may therefore invoke this principle in sacramental theology even if we are unable to determine even roughly what this proportion is in some given case. The practice of the Church also reassures us in this regard. In revising the norms for indulgences, Pope Paul VI decreed that ‘The faithful who […] perform an action to which a partial indulgence is attached obtain, in addition to the remission of temporal punishment acquired by the action itself, an equal remission of punishment through the intervention of the Church’.Footnote ¹⁴ The pope established, in other words, that the indulgenced work should possess twice the reparative value that it had independently of the Church's grant. We may take it, then, that there is nothing absurd about asking, say, whether a given Mass is able to take away a certain quantity of temporal punishment from a given person, and in what circumstances it might free him of twice, or of half, this amount.

This premised, we may now consider the arguments by which theologians have maintained either that the special fruits of the Mass are finite, or that they are unlimited, and in what sense. Theological discussion of this question appears to begin in the late 12^th or early 13^th century, in the context of commentaries on distinction 45 of the 4^th book of Peter Lombard's Sentences, where the author had asked whether the rich, who had been able to arrange for suffrages to be made for them by name after death, are more benefitted than the poor by the prayers of the Church.Footnote ¹⁵ From the beginning, two main schools of thought appear. Certain early authors, such as Praepositinus of Cremona ( = Gilbert Prevostin, d. 1210) and Guido of Orcelles (d. 1225/33) ascribe an unlimited power to the suffrages of the Church in general and to the Mass in particular. Praepositinus compared these suffrages to a lamp, which may have been lit to give light to a rich man, but which will in the nature of things also enlighten any other people who are with him, and which may even benefit these latter more, if their eyes are keener. The position of Praepositinus was however criticised by other authors, including Bonaventure and Aquinas; according to Edward Kilmartin, it is this contrary position that prevails from the second half of the thirteenth century and for the rest of the mediaeval period.Footnote ¹⁶

I shall consider the position of Aquinas below: for now I prefer to consider two slightly later figures as representatives of the two opposing schools of thought, namely, St Robert Bellarmine and Cardinal Cajetan. Cajetan is of particular interest inasmuch as he is consciously reacting against the widespread finitist view of his time, while Bellarmine's defence of this same finitist position is that of the counter-reformation controversialist par excellence. Both men, also, treat of our question at some length.

Although Bellarmine is the later author, I shall consider him first, since he, unlike Cajetan, agrees with the late mediaeval consensus. In the sixth book of his controversy ‘On the Eucharist’, he raises the question of the kind of causality present in the Mass. He states that according to the common opinion of theologians, with which he concurs, ‘the value of the sacrifice of the Mass is finite’.Footnote ¹⁷ This is also, he claims, ‘very clearly shown by the practice of the Church’, for were it otherwise, it would be unreasonable for Mass to be offered several times for the same end, for example, for a certain departed soul. In this, the Mass contrasts with the sacrifice of the Cross, which could be offered only once because by it alone was acquired that by which all past and future sins may be forgiven.

Bellarmine nevertheless confesses himself uncertain why the value of the Mass should be thus finite. He discusses three possible reasons. The first is drawn from considering that which is offered in sacrifice. On the cross, the natural being (esse naturale) of Christ in human form was destroyed; in the Mass, only his sacramental being (esse sacramentale) is destroyed. Bellarmine is dissatisfied with this explanation, which he thinks would explain at most why the sacrifice of the Cross is of greater value than the Mass, and not why there should be an infinite distance between them. Secondly, then, he proposes that the reason for the difference is to be sought by considering the one who is offering in each case, namely Christ in person, versus a merely human priest acting in Christ's name. In human affairs, he argues, a petition made by some prince or ruler in person has much greater force than when his ambassador makes it, even though the latter is acting in the ruler's name.

The third reason that he proposes, and which he seems to prefer, is that the difference derives simply from the will of Christ, who could certainly obtain everything from God through a single offering of the mystical sacrifice, but who has instead preferred to ask his Father that ‘the fruit of his passion should be applied in some fixed measure (certa mensura) by each sacrifice, either for the remission of sins, or for the other blessings that we need in this life’. Why the Lord should so have willed, Bellarmine adds, we should not be too curious to know; but we may speculate that it was to encourage us to come frequently to this holy sacrifice, without which religion cannot exist, and also because this befits ‘the orderliness of divine providence’.Footnote ¹⁸

Bellarmine's unqualified affirmation that the sacrifice of the Mass is of finite value is most naturally understood as teaching both intensive and extensive finitude. In other words, Christ has ordained that there be a limit beyond which the Mass will not benefit the person for whom it is particularly offered.Footnote ¹⁹ Likewise, it will benefit a given person less, if it be offered both for him and for some other person.

Cajetan's position, which he sets forth in his opuscule On the celebration of the Mass, and more briefly later in his commentary to question 79 of the third part of the Summa, stands opposed to all this.Footnote ²⁰ He bases himself on these words of St Thomas in the Summa: ‘Although this oblation, by virtue of its greatness, would suffice to make satisfaction for every penalty, nevertheless, it becomes satisfactory to those for whom it is offered, or even for those who offer, according to the quantity of their devotion, and not for the whole of the penalty’.Footnote ²¹ He appeals also to Aquinas's statement that what prevents a person from having all his debt remitted by a single offering of the Mass is not some defect in Christ's power, but a defect in human devotion.Footnote ²² But the quantity of one man's devotion, Cajetan points out, takes away nothing from that of another's.

From this, Cajetan concludes that people are in error when they ask a priest to say Mass only for their intention, if they do this from the conviction that they, or those whose interests they have at heart, will benefit less if the priest combines this intention with another one.Footnote ²³ Nevertheless, it is not irrational in the Church to approve the practice of offering Mass for some limited intention: for since each person especially loves his one's own good, while what is common is more neglected, our devotion is more stirred up when we know that Mass is offered for ourselves alone, or for some loved one alone, and hence greater benefits will accrue in proportion to this increased devotion.Footnote ²⁴

Cajetan goes still further, in responding to the objection that the Mass must be finite in value, for otherwise there would be no need to offer more than once for the same intention, for example, to arrange for thirty Masses to be said for a departed soul. He replies that if the person who had the Masses offered manifested an equal devotion in asking for one to be said as in asking for thirty to be said, a single Mass would indeed benefit the departed soul as much as the thirty; but that since it is clear that he has greater devotion when he asks for more Masses, insofar as he desires God to be glorified on more occasions, he benefits this soul more by the thirty.Footnote ²⁵ But it is a widespread error (communis error multorum) to suppose that every Mass of itself makes available some fixed quantity of merit or satisfaction (certum meritum vel certam satisfactionem) which may be applied to this or that intention.Footnote ²⁶

Cajetan holds, in other words, that the Church's sacrifice is of infinite value both extensively and intensively: when a priest expands his intention, each one benefits as much as if he were alone the object of that intention; and there is nothing intrinsic to the Mass which prevents it from benefitting any given person beyond some divinely-fixed limit.

Both positions, that of the Jesuit saint and that of the Dominican master-general, have about them something appealing and something unsatisfying. Cajetan's simple statement that ‘the power of the Mass is infinite because the power of Jesus Christ is within it’Footnote ²⁷ seems impossible to gainsay, whereas Bellarmine's bald assertion that ‘the value of the Mass is finite’ leaves one uneasy. On the other hand, Cajetan surely runs contrary to the sensus fidelium in his claim that it is irrational to wish a priest to have a single intention at a given Mass, and not to combine many.Footnote ²⁸ For his part, Bellarmine gives a perfectly natural explanation of the practice of offering several Masses for a single purpose; the donor, or the priest, supposes that each successive Mass will contribute something more toward achieving the goal, for example, toward the purification of a departed soul. Cajetan's account of this custom, by contrast, is strange: it is not the succession of Masses as such that benefits such a soul, but only the devotion with which they were originally requested. But is the repeated offering of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ really of no value in itself for such an end? And why, on Cajetan's view, would the soul in question not receive all the benefit as soon as the first Mass of the series had been offered? By offering the remaining Masses, would the priest simply be acquitting himself of his promise to the donor, but bringing no more benefit to the one for whom he offers?

How are we to escape this antinomy? I suggest that the passage from St Thomas on which Cajetan bases his position needs to be supplemented by Aquinas's discussion in book 4 of the Scriptum super Sententiis of Peter Lombard's question, mentioned above, about the value of the Church's suffrages. In the fourth article of distinction 45, question 2, Aquinas asks how much (quantum) the Church's suffrages benefit those for whom they are offered. One little question (‘quaestiuncula’) raised is whether suffrages (suffragia) made for many departed souls benefit each soul as much as if they had been offered for that soul alone.Footnote ²⁹ He notes that Praepositinus had answered this question in the affirmative, while certain other, unnamed authors, answer in the negative.

In his solution, St Thomas distinguishes between the power that such suffrages have to console the departed in virtue of the charity with which they are offered, and the power that they have to satisfy for the debts owed by these souls to divine justice. From the first point of view, that of consolation, each soul is benefited by common suffrages as much as if the same suffrages had been made for him alone; or rather, he is benefited still more, since whoever is in charity delights when good is done for more rather than for himself alone. But from the second point of view, that of satisfaction, each soul benefits less: ‘If we consider the power which suffrages have inasmuch as they are acts of satisfaction directed toward the dead by the intention of the one who performs them, then a suffrage is worth more to someone when it is made for him alone, than when it is made for him and also for many others. For thus is the effect of the suffrage divided by divine justice between those for whom the suffrages are made’.Footnote ³⁰

In the following quaestiuncula, replying to the argument that a single oblation of the Eucharist would suffice to empty purgatory because of the infinitude of Christ's power, St Thomas says: ‘Although the power of Christ, contained beneath the sacrament of the Eucharist, is unlimited, nevertheless, the effect to which this sacrament is ordered is something determinate (determinatus est effectus ad quem illud sacramentum ordinatur), and so it is not inevitable that all the punishment of those in purgatory will be expiated by a single sacrifice of the altar’.Footnote ³¹

Few authors, whether recent or more ancient, appear to have sought to harmonise St Thomas's position in the Scriptum with the later remarks in the Summa. We have seen that Cajetan bases himself entirely on the latter.Footnote ³² Francisco Suarez, by contrast, cites only the earlier texts, from the Scriptum, and thus includes Aquinas among those who attribute only a finite power to the Mass, both intensively and extensively.Footnote ³³ St Alphonsus, likewise, thinks that St Thomas seems to favour the finitist position.Footnote ³⁴ Among more recent authors, Kilmartin supposes that St Thomas changed his mind about the efficacy of the Mass between the Scriptum and the Summa.Footnote ³⁵ Jungmann states that ‘it is now agreed’ that the latter work corrects the position of the former.Footnote ³⁶ Baldovin strangely seems to think that the angelic doctor teaches the same thing in each work, namely, that nothing limits the efficacy of the Mass but human devotion.Footnote ³⁷

On closer inspection, the positions upheld in the Scriptum and in the Summa can be seen to be both different and yet mutually consistent. We should note that they are not in fact attempting to answer the same question. In the Scriptum, Aquinas is asking, in quaestiuncula 2, whether suffrages avail equally for John, say, when they are offered for him alone, as when the same suffrages are made for both John and Peter, and he says that they do not. He is also asking, in quaestiuncula 3, whether suffrages made for the faithful departed in general benefit John as much as suffrages made for the faithful departed in general plus suffrages made for Peter's soul in particular benefit Peter, and again, he replies that they do not. In the Summa, he is asking whether the fact that John does not receive a full remission of his debt when a Mass is offered for him is due to an inherent limitation in the Mass, or to some fact about John, and he says that it is due to John. However, it is quite possible that John may be less benefited because the sacrifice is being offered also for Peter, but that he would nevertheless have received a full remission of his debt if he had been better disposed than he is. In other words, there is no need to posit that St Thomas changed his position between the Scriptum and the Summa, even though he himself never sought to combine the two discussions.

I propose that by synthesising these two passages, we overcome the antinomy to which Bellarmine and Cajetan bring us. One offering of the Mass remits a debt of punishment in proportion to the devotion of those for whom it is offered, but in such a way that it benefits each one more in proportion as it is offered for fewer.Footnote ³⁸ To make this clear, it will be helpful to introduce some simple mathematical phrases, which given the difference between bodily and spiritual realities will no doubt appear incongruous, but which, given the analogy between these two orders of reality, are, as was argued above, legitimate.

Let us suppose, then, that, by divine institution, if the Mass is offered for a person who possesses an intensity of devotion that we may designate as d, it will liberate him from a debt of satisfaction of an amount that we may designate as s. This corresponds to the statement in the Scriptum that ‘the effect to which this sacrament is ordered is something determinate’ (IV dist. 45, 2, 4 qc 3 ad 2). In that case, following St Thomas's principle in the Summa that the Mass is satisfactory for a person in accordance with the quantity of his devotion, it follows that if his devotion reaches the level 2d, he will be freed by the offering of Mass from a debt of satisfaction equivalent to 2s. What if the same Mass is offered for two people, each of whom has a devotion d? Following the principle in the Scriptum that ‘the effect of the suffrage is divided by divine justice between those for whom the suffrages are made’, each person will in this case be freed from a debt of satisfaction equal only to s/2. On the other hand, if each of these two people should have a devotion of intensity 2d, then each will be freed from a debt of satisfaction equal to s. Finally, if one person has a devotion of intensity 2d, while the other has a devotion of intensity d, then when the Mass is offered for both together, the first person would benefit to a degree s, while the second person would benefit to a degree s/2. In summary, if n is the number of people for whom a given Mass is offered, then the general formula for each person would be s = d/n. The efficacy of the Mass is thus extensively finite but intensively unlimited.

This proposal for understanding the fruitfulness proper to the Eucharistic sacrifice may seem simply an ad hoc means to reconcile disparate texts of St Thomas; in fact I suggest that it preserves the insights of all parties. First if all, it preserves the insistence of Cajetan that the Mass is something of unlimited power (‘intensively infinite’), insofar as it is the true sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Hence, it is not possible that its power might be exhausted, and prove insufficient to deliver a man on earth or a soul in the next world from the burden of his debts because these debts are too many. Whenever a believer, whether on earth or in purgatory, is not fully delivered by the offering of a single Mass, this is always because his devotion was not great enough. It is always the case that, however great his debts, this one Mass would have delivered him had his devotion to God been greater.

On the other hand, the insight of Bellarmine is preserved, that the reason that it is good to offer a series of Masses for the same intention is that each of them will have only a finite effect, and that this is why many may be necessary for the goal to be reached. Lastly, the instinct of the faithful is preserved, by which they are glad to know that a Mass is wholly directed, insofar as it lies within the priest's power, to the interest which they have at heart – for, pace Cajetan, it does not appear that they should be ‘rebuked’ for this sentiment.Footnote ³⁹ Bellarmine, as we have seen, has provided us with one reason why God would have made the sacrifice of the Church extensively finite in this way, namely, so that we may more readily fulfill our duties of religion by causing Masses to be offered more often. Another reason is that it offers a way to fulfill the natural inclination to do more good to those who are closer to usFootnote ⁴⁰: for if the Mass were not extensively finite, the only way to benefit those closer to us more by means of the Mass would be deliberately to exclude others from being benefitted by it, even though they might have been benefitted without loss to our loved ones; and this looks like a sin. As for Cajetan's objection that the devotion of one does not harm the devotion of another, one may respond that to postulate extensive finitude to the fruits of the Mass is not to claim that one person is harmed by another's devotion, but simply that he receives less benefit in a certain respect – that of liberation from temporal punishment – in virtue of being less exclusively prayed for. One may also recall St Thomas's statement in the Scriptum that in another respect, that of ‘consolation’, departed souls are more benefitted as prayers are offered for a greater number.

A final question that may arise in the mind of the reader is what ground there is for claiming that a given degree of devotion corresponds by divine institution to a fixed degree of liberation. I answer that anything else would make of God a ‘respecter of persons’, contrary to Acts 10:34 and Eph. 6:9, since he would then be accepting as payment of a debt from one what he would be refusing as payment of the same debt from another (this does not of course exclude the possibility that he may from mercy remit more than this debt.) But we may also draw an analogy with a remark made by St Thomas about the grace of Christ considered as an individual man. Aquinas states that while, absolutely speaking, God could have endowed the humanity of Christ with a higher degree of sanctifying grace than that which it received at the moment of the incarnation, the degree of grace bestowed upon Christ is that which divine wisdom sees to correspond sufficiently to the human nature of a man who is God.Footnote ⁴¹ God sees what degree of sanctifying grace befits the finite reality that is the humanity of Christ as a result of the relation of this humanity to the Word, unlimited in being. In like manner, the divine wisdom sees what degree of liberation from sin befits the finite devotion by which some man is related to the oblation of the Word, infinite in power.