This month I want to offer some thoughts following my participation in the consistory Pope Leo asked all cardinals to attend in Rome.
As was reported, the Holy Father proposed four topics for discussion at the consistory. They were the evangelical mission of the church with a focus on the apostolic letter “Evangelii Gaudium” of Pope Francis, the reform of the service of the Holy See and the Roman Curia, which Pope Francis outlined in “Praedicate Evangelium,” synodality and liturgy.
Pope Leo asked four curial cardinals to prepare resource documents that might help focus our discussions of the topics. Once we arrived in Rome, Pope Leo asked us to choose two of the four, which ended up being the evangelical mission of the church and synodality.
While the topics of liturgy and the reform of the curia were not selected, all cardinals received the resource documents prepared on these topics by Cardinals Arthur Roche and Victor Manuel Fernandez, respectively.
Given the importance of the role of liturgy in the life of the church, I want to share with you some of the points Cardinal Roche, prefect of the Dicastery for the Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, made in the resource document he prepared.
He reminded us that from the earliest days of the church, the liturgy has always undergone reforms. As he noted: “The history of the Liturgy, we might say, is the history of its continuous ‘reforming’ in a process of organic development.”
Why is ongoing reform so central to the liturgy? It is because the ritual component of the liturgy is characterized by cultural elements that change in time and places. Thus, with the passage of time and changes in the culture, there is always a need to reform the liturgy.
Yet, as Pope Benedict wrote, reforms such as those done at the Council of Trent and the Second Vatican Council, do not threaten fidelity to the tradition of the church, since the tradition is not a matter of “the transmission of things or words, a collection of dead things” but “the living river that links us to the origins, the living river in which the origins are ever present” (General Audience, April 26, 2006).
Consequently, Cardinal Roche points out, “we can certainly affirm that the reform of the Liturgy, wanted by the Second Vatican Council, is not only in full syntony with the true meaning of Tradition, but constitutes a singular way of putting itself at the service of the Tradition, because the latter is like a great river that leads us to the gates of eternity.”
One other observation that I found particularly compelling was Cardinal Roche’s reference to St. Pope Pius V’s motivation for reforming the liturgical books in accord with the mandate of the Council of Trent. It was his desire to preserve the unity of the church. In issuing the Roman Missal of 1570, the saintly pope affirmed that “as in the Church of God there is only one way of reciting the psalms, so there ought to be only one rite for celebrating the Mass.”
This principle of church unity is particularly significant for understanding the reasons Pope Francis issued “Traditionis Custodes.” He stated that he wanted to make clear that the reform of the liturgy called for by the Second Vatican Council is the unique expression of the “lex orandi” of the Roman Rite. Again, as in keeping with his predecessor St. Pope Pius V, there must be only one rite as a means of preserving the unity of the church.
Pope Francis spoke to this issue again in “Desiderio Desideravi,” where he discussed the refusal to accept the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council as a threat to church unity. “If the liturgy,” he wrote, “is ‘the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed, and at the same time the font from which all her power flows,’ (Sacrosanctum Concilium, n. 10), well then, we can understand what is at stake in the liturgical question. It would be trivial to read the tensions, unfortunately present around the celebration, as a simple divergence between different tastes concerning a particular ritual form. The problematic is primarily ecclesiological. I do not see how it is possible to say that one recognizes the validity of the Council though it amazes me that a Catholic might presume not to do so and at the same time not accept the liturgical reform born out of Sacrosanctum Concilium, a document that expresses the reality of the Liturgy intimately joined to the vision of Church so admirably described in Lumen gentium.”
The two main takeaways in reading Cardinal Roche’s remarks are first, the nature of liturgy itself calls for ongoing reform, and second, that accepting the reform authorized by the church is a matter of preserving the unity of the church as St. Pope Pius V stated, a truth the late Pope Francis recalled.
The cardinals accomplished a great deal in the short time we had together, due particularly to the preparatory work done by some of our brother cardinals who serve in the Roman Curia. I plan to share information on some of the other resource documents in future columns.