Condensed from the 30 Days printing of
Cardinal Ratzinger's preface to La Reforme
liturgique en question, by Klaus Gamber,
Editions Sainte-Madeleine. (Only the
French translation is on hand.)
The Mass Reduced to a Show
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
A Young priest recently told me: "Today we need a new liturgical
movement". He was expressing a desire, these days, only deliberately
superficial souls would ignore.
What matters to that priest is not the conquest of new, bolder
liberties. For, where is the liberty that we have yet to arrogate
ourselves? That priest understood that we need a new beginning born
from deep within the liturgy, as liturgical movement intended
. . .
In its practical materialization, liturgical reform has moved further
away from this origin. The result was not re-animation but
devastation.
On the one hand, we have a liturgy which has degenerated so that it
has become a show which, with momentary success for the group of
liturgical fabricators, strives to render religion interesting in the
wake of the frivolities of fashion and seductive moral maxims.
Consequently, the trend is the increasingly marked retreat of those
who do not look to the liturgy for a spiritual show-master but for the
encounter with the living God in whose presence all the "doing"
becomes insignificant since only this encounter is able to guarantee
us access to the true richness of being.
On the other hand, there is the conservation of ritual forms whose
greatness is always moving but which, when pushed to extremes,
manifests an obstinate isolationism and leaves, ultimately, a mark of
sadness.
There is no doubt that between these two poles there are priests and
parishioners who celebrate the new liturgy with respect and solemnity.
But they, too, are made to feel doubtful by the contradiction of the
two extremes and, in the final analysis, the lack of unity within the
Church makes their faith seem - and wrongly so in most cases - just
their own personal version of neo-conservatism.
Therefore, a new spiritual impulse is necessary so that the liturgy
becomes a community activity of the Church for us once again and to
remove it from the will of parish priests and their liturgical
teams.
There can be no "fabricating" a liturgical movement of this kind, just
as there can be no "fabricating" something which is alive. But a
contribution can be made to its development by seeking to re-
assimilate the sprit of the liturgy and by defending publicity that
which was received.
The new beginning needs "fathers" who would serve as models, who would
not content themselves with just showing the way . . . It is
difficult to express in just a few words what is important in this
diatribe of liturgists and what is not. But perhaps what I have to
say will be of use. J.A. Jungman, one of the truly great liturgists
of our century, offered his definition of the liturgy of his time, as
it was intended in the West, and he represented it in terms of
historical research. He described it as "liturgy which is the fruit
of development".
This is probably in contrast with the Eastern notion which does not
see liturgy as developing or growing in history but as the reflection
of eternal liturgy whose light, through the sacred celebration,
illumines our changing times with its unchanging beauty and greatness.
Both conceptions are legitimate and by definition they are not
irreconcilable.
What happened after the Council was totally different: in the place of
liturgy as the fruit of development came fabricated liturgy.
We left the living process of growth and development to enter the
realm of fabrication. There was no longer a desire to continue
developing and maturing, as the centuries passed and so this was
replaced - as if it were a technical production - with a construction, a
banal on-the-spot product.
- Christian Order, March 1993, pages 162-163,
used with kind permission.
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