With this new Apostolic Letter, Pope Francis addresses to all the faithful a magnificent message that invites us to marvel at the powerful beauty of the liturgy.
This very strong text is of great spiritual depth. It is in line with the great theological reflection of the Second Vatican Council which always privileges and highlights the primacy of divine initiative. If the liturgy is indeed the celebration of the Covenant between God and men, it is always God who takes the initiative.
The liturgy thus leads us to wonder before the love of God for his creature which is still realized today in the concreteness of the paschal mystery. Our conscious and active participation in the liturgy is thus our way of responding by letting ourselves be drawn by this desire of God for us.
So the Pope begins his Letter with these words of Jesus to his disciples: Desiderio desideravi hoc Pascha manducare vobiscum antequam patiar: I have ardently desired to eat this Passover with you before suffering. (Lk 22:15). These words of Jesus with which the story of the Last Supper opens are, says the Holy Father, the crack through which we are given the surprising possibility of perceiving the depth of the love of the Persons of the Holy Trinity for us (no. 2).
Thus, the liturgy plunges us back into today of the history of salvation, allowing us to rediscover Christ, even in the concrete character of the Incarnate Word, all of Him having passed through the celebration of the sacraments. The liturgy is not the place of remembrance, but the place of reality. ” A vague memory of the Last Supper would do us no good. We need to be present at this meal, to be able to hear his voice, to eat his Body and drink his Blood. We need him. In the Eucharist and in the Sacraments, we have the guarantee of being able to encounter the Lord Jesus and of being touched by the power of his Paschal Mystery. (no. 11).
And the pope invites us to rediscover every day the beauty not of the Christian celebration, which would simply be an aesthetic beauty – which would not be so bad – but the beauty of the truth of the Christian celebration which pushes us to wonder ever greater in the very contemplation of the paschal mystery.
This is not without liturgical formation, and the pope strongly emphasizes the primordial importance of the formation of the faithful and clerics to always better perceive the meaning of signs and symbols, in order to always better associate themselves with the heart of the mystery of salvation which is concretely realized before our eyes.
Several paragraphs are then reserved for the art of celebrating, thears celebrandi which cannot be reduced to simple observation of a rubric system and even less to be considered as imaginative – sometimes wild – creativity without rules. It is always a question of rediscovering the reality of the presence of Christ among us. The actors of the liturgy are thus formed in depth by the liturgical action itself.
Unity of our popes
With this text, magnificent in its beauty, its depth and its accuracy, the pope is part of the continuity of his direct predecessors with whom some would nevertheless like him to break.
Indeed, with the Motu proprio Ecclesia Dei Adflict of July 2, 1988, Saint John Paul II had opened a door ” to enable the faithful attached to certain earlier liturgical and disciplinary forms of the Latin tradition to remain in full communion with the Church. and thus to avoid separation, division, schism.
Pope Benedict XVI had expanded the possibilities in this area with the Motu proprio ‘Summorum pontificum‘, of July 7, 2007. But we must not forget that on the plane which brought him to France on September 12, 2008, Pope Benedict XVI had himself specified that ” this Motu proprio was simply an act of tolerance, for a pastoral purpose for people who have been formed in this liturgy, love it, know it, and want to live with this liturgy. It’s a small group because that supposes a formation in Latin, a formation in a certain culture. But for these people to have the love and the tolerance to allow living with this liturgy, seems to me a normal requirement of the faith and the pastoral of a bishop of our Church. There is no opposition between the liturgy renewed by the Second Vatican Council and this liturgy… And it is clear that the renewed liturgy is the ordinary liturgy of our time.. »
And in the same sense, Pope Francis, who does not want this tolerance to allow some to imagine that we could envisage a return to the old form of the celebration of the Mass, says that we ” cannot return to this ritual form that the Council Fathers, cum Petro and sub Petro, felt the need to reform, approving, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and according to their conscience as pastors, the principles from which the reform was born. The Holy Pontiffs Paul VI and John Paul II, approving the reformed liturgical books ex decreto Sacrosancti Oecumenici Concilii Vaticani IIguaranteed the fidelity of the reform of the Council” (no. 61).
Reception of the Council
At this Second Vatican Council, which brought together some 2,500 bishops, Saint John Paul II himself participated. There he perceived the breath of the Spirit and he often described the Second Vatican Council as ” the greatest grace of the XXe century “. He committed his entire pontificate to its implementation and application, to its ” reception “ in the church.
Benedict XVI also participated as an expert for Cardinal Joseph Frings, then Archbishop of Cologne, and worked in the same direction.
The history of the Church teaches us that a council, because it is an act which commits the whole Church in the long term, always asks to be ” received “, that is to say known, understood and implemented both in its fundamental inspiration, in its theological content and in its pastoral orientations. This work of reception goes through the test of time. It took more than a century for the first Ecumenical Council, that of Nicaea (325), to be received in the East and in the West, with its affirmations relating to the divinity of Jesus, truly begotten by the Father and of the same substance as him, contrary to what the heresy of Arius thought.
If the Second Vatican Council is indeed ” the greatest grace of the XXe century “it must receive for what it is, in its integrity, and not take advantage of it to pretend to believe that it allows you to do what you want, or to reject it in whole or in part, under the fallacious pretext that it is not dogmatic, that it breaks with tradition, that it is progressive, when in reality it is only badly applied.
The Second Vatican Council ended on December 8, 1965 and is therefore just over fifty years old. No wonder, then, that the Church today still has the demanding mission of receive. We must therefore advance on the path traced out by the Council in order to draw the fruits of it through a better spiritual interiorization and a greater practical application.
It is to this work of reception that our Pontiffs do and especially this magnificent Apostolic Letter from our Pope Francis: Desiderio desideravi.
May he be warmly thanked! And bless the Lord!
Liturgy: “The Pope is part of the continuity of John Paul II and Benedict XVI”