It does stick out, to our usual way of thinking. It doesn’t feel like prayer or worship, but more like a kind of pledge. Or like the kind of agreement to the company’s terms you have to check off before buying something from a website, which you click on usually without reading just to get on to the thing you want. Or maybe a kind of loyalty oath.

I mean the Nicene Creed we say at Mass on Sundays and other major feasts.

“What is this doing here?” I thought at the first liturgical service I went to, at 20, when the congregation popped up and started reciting this formal statement of belief. I came from a world very concerned with ideas and beliefs, and was entranced by Christianity’s dogmatic mind when I first met it, but even so didn’t expect to find a dogmatic statement in the middle of the service.

I was, looking back, a typical sentimental modern person who separates feeling and belief, seeing one as a matter of the heart and the other as a matter of the mind. The first rules in our “personal” and “subjective” experiences, including religious activities like prayer and worship. The second rules in the “public” and “objective” parts of life, in which religion has no place.

Now a Catholic, I know better, but I’ve talked to Catholics who feel as I did. Few mind saying the Creed, though I’ve met some who do, and disconcerting they are. A surprising number don’t see the point. They wouldn’t blink if the Church suddenly dropped it. Very few people I’ve talked to about the Mass mentioned the Creed as one of the parts they liked.

I like saying the Creed, but it doesn’t always feel like part of the drama. I can find my attention wandering far afield while still saying every word, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that. Most congregations seem to zip through it in an “IbelieveinGodtheFatherAlmighty” way. I’ve only heard a few references in the homily to the Creed that weren’t fly-by references, like footnotes.

Heart and Mind

To be honest, why we say it at Mass isn’t obvious. In his wonderful book The Mass in Slow Motion, Father Ronald Knox calls the Creed “a curious feature of the Mass” and points out that “it’s not so obvious why we do say it.” It sweeps us into “the most baffling and the most august mysteries of theology” — yes, but why at Mass?

It isn’t essential, or else we’d say it at every Mass, and Christians would have said it at Mass from the beginning rather than starting (in the West) in the 11th or 12th century. We say it at all the big Masses, though, so it must mean something. It must do something for us we need. It’s there for a reason, but finding the reason takes some thought.

Why say it at Mass? I have one answer, building on Father Knox and Dominican theologian Father Bede Jarrett.

Prayer Needs Dogma

Father Jarrett was one of a group of very gifted English Dominicans at the beginning of the last century, the other best-remembered figure being Father Gerald Vann. Father Jarrett wrote about 20 books, whose subjects ranged from the Holy Spirit to medieval social thought to the history of Europe to Our Lady of Lourdes, and founded both Blackfriars, the Dominican priory at Oxford and the theological journal. He died in 1934 at 53. He and his peers are too little read today.

Prayer, Father Jarrett explains in his book Meditations for Layfolk, “has been defined to be the raising up of the mind and heart to God; but it would be more descriptive, and perhaps more accurate, to say that it is the raising up of the heart through the mind to God.” We want to know things about someone we love, but to love him, we must also know something about him.

Some kind of belief therefore comes first. “Unless I believed in His [God’s] mercy or His power or His justice or beauty, or one or other of His many attributes,” he writes, “I should never turn to Him at all.”

Father Jarrett notes that the Church’s prayers usually begin with a doctrinal statement like “O God, who by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ” or “Our Father, who art in heaven.” The praise and the petitions only come after their dogmatic foundation has been set.

Therefore, he explains, “I must get my faith quite clear, or at least as clear as I can, before I can settle down to pray.” Otherwise, what are we really saying? Who are we praying to? And why to him? What do we expect him to do?

Father Jarrett calls beginning with belief “the only way to pray.” If you do that, he says, you will find prayer easier as your knowledge grows. “The two run parallel, prayer and faith; the absence of either, or their disuse, paralyzes the practice of the other.”

Father Knox puts the same insight a different way, building on Jesus’ declaration to Pilate that he came to bear witness to the truth. “That is man’s first need,” he writes in the chapter titled “Credo” in The Mass in Slow Motion, a collection of sermons delivered to a girls’ school during World War II.

He’s much better known now than Father Jarrett, but not known well enough. He’d been a rapidly rising star as a minister in the Church of England, till he entered the Church in 1917 at the age of 29 and was ordained a year later. He wrote dozens of books, most for laypeople, because he had a great talent for exposition, and even translated the Bible. Cluny Media is reprinting his books.

Father Knox continues: “He [man] is a reasonable animal, and he must know what he is and where he stands before he can sit down and be satisfied. And that is man’s first duty; to think, and to think right. As part of your worship of him, God demands that you should let your intellect travel on the right lines in thinking about him.”

He indirectly answers the question of why we say the Creed at Mass, giving the answer to which Father Jarrett had pointed. “You have come to Mass to worship God,” he says, “and that means worshipping God with your whole being, not just with bits of it.” At Mass, we “go out to God,” as he puts it, and we must go out not only with our feelings and our wills, but with our minds.

Why We Say the Creed at Mass

This is the way I would answer the question of why we say the Creed at Mass. As Father Jarrett and Father Knox explained, we worship God with our whole being and that means with our minds. They did not recognize the distinction between the subjective private world and the objective public world and rejected the banishment of religion to the first. They knew Christianity to be a statement about the nature of reality, a vision of the universe that was true for everyone.

I would say that we say the Creed in the Mass because it re-forms our minds and helps us understand the faith better, partly because we say it in our worship and as an act of worship, as one of the things we do as we’re on our way to meet Jesus in the Sacrament. Being said at Mass transforms a dogmatic statement into a personal commitment.

We are, most of us, to a sad extent sentimental modern people who value feelings over thoughts. We can’t help it, because the world thinks that way. We need correction and training and the major Masses provide a very good place for the Church to give it.

The Creed makes clear and dramatic the inescapable necessity of dogma and of ideas governing and directing feelings, and says that in the middle of the very intimate experience of worship. It declares that everything we’ve been doing since we blessed ourselves as we entered the church depends on a detailed and precise understanding of the cosmos, and one that depends on divine Revelation.

In saying the Nicene Creed, we enact our belief that the Catholic faith is objectively true, not a matter of our subjective feelings, and that it declares how things are. We make an implicit promise to live by the truth we’re proclaiming and to learn as much as we can about it.

The Creed tells us, if we’re paying attention and not just rattling through it, that it is the only-begotten Son of God etc. we will shortly receive in the Blessed Sacrament. He is the most real reality. He is the fundamental truth of everything. And he gives himself to us.

THE PRAYER, by Father Ronald Knox

“So, when you assist at a Mass where the Credo is said, there is something for you to think about. Tell Almighty God, ‘I know what I was born for, I know what I came into the world for; to bear witness of the truth. I can never really be a partaker of the Divine nature, Jesus Christ can never be on easy terms with me, until I have learned to see things as they are and to call things by their right names. And the most important kind of truth is the truth you have revealed to us; I want to let my mind be carried away by it, because that is one of the ways in which it is possible for me to worship you; indeed, it is the first thing I have got to do, if I am going to worship you. This and this and this I believe to be true, because you have told me that they are true; and although my mind can only take these truths in very imperfectly, because it’s such a silly mind, I want it to be carried away by these truths, penetrated by these truths; I want it to chime in with these truths, as instinctively as my voice chimes in with the note that is given on the harmonium. Then my intellect, as well as the rest of me, will be worshipping you.’”