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I do not have easy answers to these questions. But I have just finished reading Pope Benedict\u2019s early memoir, Milestones: 1927\u20131977, <\/i>and I have found, to my relief, that questions of the liturgy have been central to his life. In fact, he writes (in the mid-1990s) that\u2014<\/p>\n
\u201cI am convinced that the crisis in the Church that we are experiencing today is to a large extent due to the disintegration of the liturgy.<\/i><\/b>\u201d<\/p>\n
Imagine that! My Pope says my question is central! Of course, I don\u2019t pretend to understand this \u201cdisintegration\u201d with the complexity of thought that Benedict, a great theologian, brings to it, but at least I know this is something worth thinking deeply about.<\/p>\n
Now, to close this already long post with a pretty long history lesson from my Pope\u2014<\/p>\n
The critical moment of concern, according to Benedict (writing as Cardinal Ratzinger<\/span>), was the introduction of a new missal by Pope Paul VI in the wake of Vatican II\u2014\u201caccompanied by the almost total prohibition, after a transitional phase of only half a year, of using the missal we had had until then.\u201d With arch-typical balance, Ratzinger<\/span> writes:<\/p>\nI welcomed the fact<\/b> that now we had a binding liturgical text after a period of experimentation that had often deformed<\/span> the liturgy. But<\/b> I was dismayed<\/b> by the prohibition of the old missal, since nothing of the sort had ever happened in the entire history of the liturgy. . . . <\/b>The prohibition of the missal that was now decreed, a missal that had known continuous growth over the centuries, starting with the sacramentaries<\/span> of the ancient Church, introduced a breach into the history of the liturgy whose consequences could only be tragic.<\/b><\/i><\/p>\nNever before in history? Tragic consequences? <\/i>Of course, Ratzinger<\/span> backs this up with history, looking back at the Council of Trent which was followed by the creation of a new Missale<\/span> Romanum<\/span> <\/i>in 1570 by Pope Pius V. He explains that Pius V did not <\/i>create a new missal and did not <\/i>prohibit old, local forms of the missal, so long as they had been in use for at least two hundred years:<\/p>\nMany of his successors had likewise reworked this missal again, but without ever setting one missal against another. It was a continual process of growth and purification in which continuity was never destroyed.<\/i><\/p>\n
Then comes, for me, the punch line, delivered like a knockout blow:<\/p>\n
The irruption of the Reformation had above all taken the concrete form of liturgical \u201creforms.\u201d<\/b> It was not just a matter of there being a Catholic Church and a Protestant Church alongside one another. The split in the Church occurred almost imperceptibly <\/b>and found its most visible and historically most incisive manifestation in the changes of the liturgy. These changes, in turn, took very different forms at the local level, so that here, too, one frequently could not ascertain the boundary between what was still Catholic and what was no longer Catholic.<\/i><\/p>\n
In the face of these questions, it seems we have to be extraordinarily vigilant. However, if you ask me to be vigilant on this issue, I feel like a child asked to perform nightwatch<\/span> duty, who is wide awake, vigilant as he can be (he is a good boy), but he doesn\u2019t know what to look for! <\/i><\/p>\nMy pope offers a few guiding principles, and with these this long post will close\u2014<\/p>\n
There is no doubt that [Pope Paul VI\u2019s] new missal in many respects brought with it a real improvement and enrichment; but setting it as a new construction over against what had grown historically, forbidding the results of this historical growth, thereby makes the liturgy appear to be no longer a living development but the product of erudite work and juridical authority; this has caused us enormous harm. For then the impression had to emerge that liturgy is something \u201cmade,\u201d not something given in advance but something lying within our own power of decision. . . . When liturgy is self-made, then it can no longer give us what its proper gift should be: the encounter with the mystery that is not our our own product by rather our origin and the source of our life.<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n
Rather than try to frame this post with some sort of concluding thoughts, I would rather ask readers (the few of you who have come this far) to offer your own complementary thoughts on the liturgy and what my Pope calls its \u201cdisintegration.\u201d<\/p>\n
Which is to say, your comments\u2014?<\/p>\n
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