Papal Master of Ceremonies spells out ideals of liturgical reform, and roles of clergy, laity
By Anthony Barich
National Reporter
THE Pontifical Master of Liturgical Ceremonies has urged Australian priests to reaffirm the “authentic” spirit of the liturgy through orientation of prayer, use of music and re-establishing the crucial link between adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and the Mass.
At the 4-8 January Year for Priests Clergy Conference in Rome – attended by Perth priests, Frs John O’Reilly, Michael Rowe and Don Kettle and organised by the Australian Confraternity of Catholic Clergy – Mgr Guido Marini urged priests to promote the concept of an “uninterrupted tradition” of the Church, as continuity is the only criterion to correctly interpret the life of the Church, especially Vatican II documents and their proposed reforms.
He stressed that liturgy must not be a source of conflict for those who find good only in that which came before or, on the contrary, almost always find wrong in what came before.
In a talk titled Introduction the spirit of the liturgy on 6 January, Mgr Marini addressed the priests on the liturgy as God’s gift to the Church, the orientation of liturgical prayer, adoration and union with God, and the proper interpretation of Vatican II’s call for ‘active participation’.
He said the term ‘active participation’ has been widely misinterpreted, and re-aligned it with the Second Vatican Council’s universal call to holiness; that only by a true understanding of the mysteries and allowing them to transform them will the faithful be full and active participants in the liturgy.
The concept of the liturgy as God’s gift to the Church implies it is not open to manipulation, as many priests, he said, have participated in; while the orientation of prayer and music in the liturgy needs to retain the sense of the sacred so that the faithful can be transformed.
– Sacred liturgy is God’s great gift to the Church, Mgr Marini said, and while the Missal indicates the sections where adaptations may be made, “some individuals have managed to upset the liturgy of the Church in various ways under the pretext of a wrongly devised creativity”.
This has been done to adapt to the local situation and the needs of the community, thus appropriating the right to remove from, add to or modify the liturgical rite for subjective and emotional ends.
“For this, we priests are largely responsible,” he said.
It is for this reason, he noted, that the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said: “There is need of, at the very least, a new liturgical awareness that might put a stop to the tendency to treat the liturgy as if it were an object to manipulation. We have reached the point where liturgical groups stitch together the Sunday liturgy on their own authority.” While this is done by creative and skilled people, “it is too little”.
Mgr Marini added: “The liturgy is not a closed circle in which we decide to meet, perhaps to encourage one another, to feel we are the protagonists of some feast. The liturgy is God’s summons to His people to be in His presence; it is the advent of God among us; it is God encountering us in this world.”
“What casual folly it is indeed, to claim for ourselves the right to change in a subjective way the holy signs which time has sifted, through which the Church speaks about herself, her identity and her faith.”
– Prayer facing east – more specifically, facing the Lord, is a characteristic expression of the authentic spirit of the liturgy, Mgr Marini said.
The proposal of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and presently reaffirmed during his pontificate, is to place the Crucifix on the centre of the altar so that all during the celebration of the liturgy may “concretely face and look upon the Lord”, so as to orient also their prayer and hearts.
Quoting Pope Benedict’s Complete Works, dedicated to the liturgy, Mgr Marini said: “The idea that the priest and people should stare at one another during prayer was born only in modern Christianity, and is completely alien to the ancient Church. The priest and people most certainly do not pray one to the other, but to the one Lord.
“Therefore, they stare in the same direction during prayer: either towards the east as a cosmic symbol (the sun, which rises in the east, symbolises Christ) of the Lord who comes, or, when this is not possible, towards the image of Christ in the apse, towards a crucifix or simply towards the heavens, as our Lord Himself did in His priestly prayer the night before His passion (John 17.1).”
Mgr Marini also dismissed the claim that a crucifix on the altar, as suggested by Pope Benedict, distracts the congregation’s sight from the priest, “for they are not to look to the celebrant at that point of the liturgy”.
“They are to turn their gaze towards the Lord. In like manner, the presider of the celebration should also be able to turn towards the Lord,” he said.
“The crucifix does not obstruct our view but expands our horizon to see the world of God; the crucifix brings us to meditate on the mystery; introduces us to the heavens from where the only light capable of making sense of life on this earth comes,” he said.
– Mgr Marini also urged the restoration of the link between Eucharistic adoration and Mass. Quoting the Pope’s 2007 post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum caritatis (Sacrament of Charity), he said that during early phases of liturgical reform, the inherent relationship between Mass and adoration was unclear, due to the widespread notion that the Eucharistic bread was given to us to be eaten, not looked at.
Mgr Marini refuted this, however, by quoting St Augustine: “No one eats that flesh without adoring it; we should sin were we not to adore it.”
In this way, Eucharistic adoration, Mgr Marini said, is simply the natural consequence of the Eucharistic celebration, which is itself the Church’s “supreme act of adoration”.
Everything in the liturgical act – through the nobility, beauty and harmony of exterior signs – must be conducive to adoration and union with God, including the music, singing, periods of silence, gestures, liturgical vestments and sacred vessels and other furnishings, as well as the “sacred edifice in its entirety.”
This is why, he said, Pope Benedict has, since the feast of Corpus Christi last year, begun to distribute holy Communion to the kneeling faithful directly on the tongue. The pontiff’s example invites us also to a proper attitude of adoration before the greatness and mystery of the Eucharistic presence of God, he added.
He also addressed what he saw as a widespread misconception of what the Second Vatican Council meant by ‘active participation’ in the Mass.
Linking truly active participation with Vatican II’s universal call to holiness, he said people are only truly participating in the grace of the liturgical act when they adore the mystery, welcome it into their lives and demonstrate that they have comprehended what is being celebrated.
He cited then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy: “Unfortunately the word (active participation) was very quickly misunderstood to mean something external, entailing the need for general activity, as if as many people as possible, as often as possible, should be visibly engaged in action.”
The “true novelty” of the Christian liturgy compared to every other form of worship, Mgr Marini said, is that the true action carried out in the liturgy is “the action of God Himself, His saving work in Christ, in which we participate”.
“God Himself acts and accomplishes that which is essential, whilst man is called to open himself to the activity of God, in order to be left transformed,” Mgr Marini said.
The key, then, is to overcome the difference between God’s act and our own, in order to become one with Christ, he said, adding that this is why it is not possible to participate without adoration.
The promotion of active participation does not also necessarily mean rendering everything “to the greatest extent immediately comprensible”.
Neither, he said, should sacred music which must never be understood as a purely subjective experience, but anchored in biblical or traditional texts, as the Council of Trent declared.
He added that the Second Vatican Council “did naught but reaffirm the same standard” set by Pope St Pius X who replaced operatic singing with Gregorian Chant and polyphony from the time of the Catholic reformation as the standard for liturgical music.