The Spirit of the Liturgy

Contact Excerpt from Cardinal Ratzinger's The Sprit of the Liturgy Rites are not rigidly fenced off from each other. There is exchange and cross-fertilization between them. The clearest example is in the case of the two great focal points of ritual development: Byzantium and Rome. In their present form, most of the Eastern rites are very strongly marked by Byzantine influences. For its part, Rome has increasingly united the different rites of the West in the universal Roman rite. While Byzantium gave a large part of the Slavic world its special form of divine worship, Rome left its liturgical imprint on the Germanic and Latin peoples and on a part of the Slavs.

In the first millennium there was still liturgical exchange between East and West. Then, of course, the rites hardened into their definitive forms, which allowed hardly any cross-fertilization. What is important is that the great forms of rite embrace many cultures. They not only incorporate the diachronic aspect, but also create communion among different cultures and languages. They elude control by any individual, local community, or regional Church. Unspontaneity is of their essence. In these rites I discover that something is approaching me here that I did not produce myself, that I am entering into something greater than myself, which ultimately derives from divine revelation. That is why the Christian East calls the liturgy the "Divine Liturgy", expressing thereby the liturgy's independence from human control.

The West, by contrast, has felt ever more strongly the historical element, which is why Jungmann tried to sum up the Western view in the phrase "the liturgy that has come to be". He wanted to show that this coming-to-be still goes on — as an organic growth, not as a specially contrived production. The liturgy can be compared, therefore, not to a piece of technical equipment, something manufactured, but to a plant, something organic that grows and whose laws of growth determine the possibilities of further development.

In the West there was, of course, another factor. With his Petrine authority, the pope more and more clearly took over responsibility for liturgical legislation, thus providing a juridical authority for the continuing formation of the liturgy. The more vigorously the primacy was displayed, the more the question came up about the extent and limits of this authority, which, of course, as such had never been considered. After the Second Vatican Council, the impression arose that the pope really could do anything in liturgical matters, especially if he were acting on the mandate of an ecumenical council. Eventually, the idea of the givenness of the liturgy, the fact that one cannot do with it what one will, faded from the public consciousness of the West.

In fact, the First Vatican Council had in no way defined the pope as an absolute monarch. On the contrary, it presented him as the guarantor of obedience to the revealed Word. The pope's authority is bound to the Tradition of faith, and that also applies to the liturgy. It is not "manufactured" by the authorities. Even the pope can only be a humble servant of its lawful development and abiding integrity and identity. Here again, as with the questions of icons and sacred music, we come up against the special path trod by the West as opposed to the East. And here again is it true that this special path, which finds space for freedom and historical development, must not be condemned wholesale. However, it would lead to the breaking up of the foundations of Christian identity if the fundamental intuitions of the East, which are the fundamental intuitions of the early Church, were abandoned. The authority of the pope is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition. Still less is any kind of general "freedom" of manufacture, degenerating into spontaneous improvisation, compatible with the essence of faith and liturgy. The greatness of the liturgy depends — we shall have to repeat this frequently — on its unspontaneity (Unbeliebigkeit).

Let us ask the question again: "What does 'rite' mean in the context of Christian liturgy?" The answer is: "It is the expression, that has become form, of ecclesiality and of the Church's identity as a historically transcendent communion of liturgical prayer and action." Rite makes concrete the liturgy's bond with that living subject which is the Church, who for her part is characterized by adherence to the form of faith that has developed in the apostolic Tradition. This bond with the subject that is the Church allows for different patterns of liturgy and includes living development, but it equally excludes spontaneous improvisation. This applies to the individual and the community, to the hierarchy and the laity. Because of the historical character of God's action, the "Divine Liturgy" (as they call it in the East) has been fashioned, in a way similar to Scripture, by human beings and their capacities. But it contains an essential exposition of the biblical legacy that goes beyond the limits of the individual rites, and thus it shares in the authority of the Church's faith in its fundamental form. The authority of the liturgy can certainly be compared to that of the great confessions of faith of the early Church. Like these, it developed under the guidance of the Holy Spirit (cf. Jn 16:13).

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Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2000), pp. 164-167).

Well, there are those who treat the following as though these were lines of poetry rather than an article of faith.

On the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium Et Spes) The Church strives to be that spotless bride to be presented at the "wedding feast of the Lamb" The Eucharist help us to become holy, "The Lord left behind a pledge of this hope and strength for life's journey in that sacrament of faith where natural elements refined by man are gloriously changed into His Body and Blood, providing a meal of brotherly solidarity and a foretaste of the heavenly banquet." (Chapter III: Man's Activity Throughout the World)

Read what I said again. The dialectic is a process that has nothing to do with liturgical development and very little to do with doctrinal development which begins and ends with revelation.

Either you know nothing of doctrinal and liturgical development or you are trying to avoid answering the problem you posed, which is: "What is the nature/process of organic change in liturgy?"

What you deny, vehemently I might add, is that Vatican II had to happen. It had to happen for the same reason the Novus Ordo had to happen. The process, which you cannot describe, was thwarted by the centralization of ecclesial innovation and change in Rome. This centralization ended with stasis. And the institution of a museum piece of liturgy, the Tridentine. The attempt to overthrow that stasis at its foundation is inherent in Vatican II and its documents as it is in the Novus Ordo and the intentional opportunities it creates for innovation in the mass.

At one time the mass could evolve. There was room for adding and taking away. Which is how we got so many wonderful rites. But as the stasis and centralization completed itself. Catholicism's practices became a beautiful, but stagnant thing.

You're right that innovation begins and ends with revelation, but you're wrong that dialectic isn't the key to change. Dialectic is the means for conveying revelations exigencies. Go read St. Thomas, St. Augustine, et. al. and tell me that the doctrines of the church aren't arrived at through dialectic. Liturgical innovation is a smaller form of the same process.

Unfortunately Ultima, you're swimming against the stream. The irony of your position is that you want to preserve the fruit of Rome's centralization while at the same moment trying to deny her capacity to overthrow herself! Lol.

1. If the Church is "overthowing itself" as you say--and I have to agree it certainly is trying to do this ever since Vatican II--then why should we believe in it as an institution? By denouncing its own past, which it had claimed was guided by the Holy Spirit, it only makes a mockery of its present claims to divine assistance and thereby destroys its own legitimacy. Who can believe in a Church that says it was wrong for 1500 years, but that it has finally got it right? What makes its present leadership so much wiser and smarter and holier than that of the past? Is modern always better? Then where are the fruits of modernist wisdom and holiness? Why should the faithful follow such leaders and abandon all the popes and councils of the past when all the modernists have to show for post-conciliar innovations are institutional decline and moral degeneracy?

2. If what went before was so wrong, then what's going on now is a neo-Protestant revolution. But to attempt to do this--to actually lay a new foundation for faith itself--is by definition heretical. Yet this is what is happening. Rome has been instituting a new religion ever since the Council and while it may call this new entity by the same name, it's clearly not Catholicism and it can no more claim the guidance of the Holy Spirit than any other heresy can. What it actually is is a stew--a concoction comprised of Diana-fied religious sentimentality, ad hoc Protestant political correctness, a splattering of social activism, seasoned with a dash of papolotry. What it isn't is Catholicism.

3. And if this is what's going on, as you admit, then why hasn't Rome been honest and up front about it with the people? Why does it pretend nothing has changed essentially and that the thousand and one changes since Vatican II are a mere "updating", that the Mass itself has merely been accidentally altered and is not really the Protestant Lord's Supper which Trent had condemned? Why aren't the modernist bishops and cardinals and theologians honest enough to say they are scrapping doctrines such as the Real Presence, Hell and Purgatory, the Divinity of Christ, the Virgin birth, and the Resurrection? Why not admit the new religion is not unlike the agenda of the Democratic Party--a stew of feminism, gay rights, social justice, humanism, anti-capitalism--with a touch of Pope-worship thrown in, combined with a taste for auto-destruction and a distaste for the sacred?

4. Finally, following your logic, why should anyone follow such claptrap? The people who push this new "revelation" are proven pedophiles, gay activists, apostates. Their innovations have spawned crisis after crisis and scandal after scandal. There has been no springtime of ecclesial rejuvenation, but instead a long winter of discontent. So either it's ALL been a lie--or the Traditional Church was the true Church all along and this post-conciliar "overthrow" is just another heresy. There is no middle ground.

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