May 8, 2005

A chief attention of our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI will be the Sacred Liturgy. “Lex orandi, lex credendi” — the way we pray indicates what we believe. The Pope wrote much about the “reform of the reform” of the Liturgy. By this he meant the correction of abuses which have spread as the result of a false understanding of what the Second Vatican Council intended.

Then Liturgy is at the heart of converting souls. The dismaying decline in worship in many places has ironically been the result of imposed attempts to “make the Mass more meaningful.” There still are some who defend radical changes in the Liturgy, in spite of the statistics that glare at them. Thus the old joke: The difference between a liturgist and a terrorist is that you can reason with a terrorist. Pope Benedict is a splendid, not a sham, liturgist and will call the world’s attention to the Church’s heritage which many Catholics have neglected. Young people have often been deprived of a richness of worship which is rightly theirs. If they fall away, it may be the consequence of not having been taught the true mystery of holiness. They do not need to go to church to be entertained. Worship is not entertainment. The astonishing practice in some churches of parishioners applauding each other and their choirs for their “performances” will be eliminated in true reform. It is no longer done here. In Eastertide, as part of the Year of the Eucharist, our archdiocese had a procession of the Blessed Sacrament the length of Manhattan, attracting over a thousand at some of the churches visited. Many of our younger parishioners participated. It is a sign of vital revival: This custom was largely lost in the guitar-playing 1970s but the younger people are recovering it, much to the happiness of many of their seniors who were not swept away in what Pope Benedict has called “the cult of banality.” This is threatening and confusing to those who in the last generation thought they could replace the sacred tradition of true adoration, but it is the heart of true renewal of Christian fervor.

In a spiritual anointing, our beloved late Pope John Paul II when he was dying assigned the future Benedict XVI the work of preaching the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday. The future Pope said amongst many things: “How often do we celebrate only ourselves without even realizing that He is there!” “He” refers to Jesus Christ crucified and risen, the great missing person of so many new liturgies, which have become “meaningless dances around the golden calf that is ourselves.”

Great days are ahead for our Holy Church which Pope Benedict has said is young and alive. Or as the converted Saint Augustine said, “Late have I loved thee, Beauty ever ancient, ever new.”

Fr. George W. Rutler