“ORA celebration that does not evangelize is not authentic”. This is the message that the Pope Francisco want to send with Apostolic Letter to the People of God “Desiderio Desideravi”. On the day in which the Solemnity of Peter and Paul is celebrated, the Holy See has published this letter with which The Holy Father wishes to recall the profound meaning of the Eucharistic celebration arising from the Council and invite liturgical formation.
“desiderio” collects the result of the Plenary of the Dicastery of Divine Worship in February 2019 and follows the motu proprio “Traditionis custodians“, reaffirming the importance of ecclesial communion around the rite resulting from the reform of the post-conciliar liturgy.
Understand the beauty of the Liturgy
This is not a new instruction or a directory with specific norms, but a meditation to understand the beauty of the liturgical celebration and its evangelizing role, which concludes with an appeal: “Let us abandon the controversy to listen together to what the Spirit says to the Church, let us keep communion, let us continue to be amazed by the beauty of the liturgy“. The Christian faith, Francis writes, is an encounter with the living Jesus, “and the Liturgy guarantees us the possibility of such an encounter”.
“I would like the beauty of Christian celebrations and their necessary consequences in the life of the Church not to be disfigured by a superficial and reductionist understanding of their value or, worse still, by their exploitation at the service of some ideological vision, whatever it may be.”.
“The Cenacle is not entered except by the attraction of his desire to eat Easter with us”
After having warned about “spiritual worldliness” and the Gnosticism and Neo-Pelagianism that nurture it, Francis explains that “participation in the Eucharistic sacrifice is not our conquest as if we could boast of it before God and before our brothers” and that “The liturgy has nothing to do with ascetic moralism: it is the Easter gift of the Lord which, accepted with docility, makes our life new. The Cenacle is not entered except by the attraction of his desire to eat the Passover with us”.
It is necessary to rediscover the beauty of the liturgy, the Pope expresses, but this rediscovery “is not the search for a ritual aestheticism that delights only in the care of the external formality of a rite or is satisfied with a scrupulous observance of the rubric. Evidently, this affirmation does not want in any way to approve the opposite attitude that confuses simplicity with careless banality, essentiality with ignorant superficiality, the concretion of the ritual action with an exasperated practical functionalism.”.
Caring for all aspects of the Liturgy
The Pope explains that “we must take care of all aspects of the celebration (space, time, gestures, words, objects, clothing, singing, music…) and avoid stripping the assembly of what belongs to it, that is, “the paschal mystery celebrated in the ritual modality established by the Church. But even if the quality and standard of the celebratory action were guaranteed, this would not be enough for our participation to be full.”.
Ultimately, behind the battles over the rite, there are different conceptions of the Church. We cannot say, the Pontiff specifies, that we recognize the validity of the Council and not accept the liturgical reform born of the “Sacrosanctum Concilium“.
The importance of training
It is important, continues the Pope, to educate in the understanding of symbols, and one way to do this “is certainly to take care of the art of celebrating”, which “cannot be reduced to the mere observance of a rubric and cannot even be thought of as a creativity imaginative, sometimes wild, without rules”. The rite is in itself a norm and the norm is never an end in itself, but always at the service of the supreme reality that it wants to safeguard. The art of celebrating cannot be learned “by taking a course in oratory or persuasive communication techniques”, it requires “diligent dedication to the celebration, letting the celebration itself transmit its art to us”.
Francis regrets that in many Christian communities, their way of living the celebration “is conditioned – for better and, unfortunately, also for worse – by the way in which their parish priest presides over the assembly” which is amplified when the celebrations are broadcast online .
Finally, the Pope concludes the letter asking “all bishops, priests and deacons, seminary trainers, professors of theological faculties and schools of theology, all catechists and catechists, to help the holy people of God to take advantage of what has always been the primary source of Christian spirituality”, reiterating what is established in “Traditionis custodes”, so that “the Church can arouse, in the variety of languages, one and the same prayer capable of expressing its unity”.