Liturgy beyond surface realities

The Spirit of the Liturgy; by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger; San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2000; 224pp. (Translated from the German original Einführung in den Geist der Liturgie, 1999)

A New Song for the Lord: Faith in Christ and Liturgy Today; by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger; New York, The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1997; 176pp. (Translated from the German original Ein Neues Lied Für Den Herrn: Christusglaube und Liturgie in der Gegenwart, 1995)

Feast of Faith; by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger; San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1986; 153pp. (Translated from the German original Das Fest des Glaubens, 1981)

Reviewed by Gary Scarrabelotti

In a poem entitled An Art of Poetry Australia’s James McAuley offered some wonderful advice:

“Let your literal figures shine

With pure transparency:

Not in opaque but limpid wells

Lie truth and mystery.”

These lines sprang to mind as I tried to come to grips with Joseph Ratzinger’s work on the Catholic liturgy. The remarkable accessibility of his writing prompted the recollection. Here are great and profound matters. Yet Ratzinger speaks about them, for the most part, with an unexpected simplicity and clarity. I say “unexpected” because simple and clear is not what we inhabitants of the cultural “Anglosphere” imagine German professors to be. Obscure words that open upon dark and tortured passageways and end in emptiness and impenetrable black: thus Hegel, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and others. Not so Ratzinger.

One expects, of course, a Christian to be concerned with light and not darkness. But few can speak with clarity and simplicity about surface things let alone cast a light through the foreground realities into the “limpid” depths beyond them. I imagine McAuley would have been delighted with Ratzinger: on every page one plunges down into very clear, very deep water.

In the liturgical debates during the twenty-odd years during which Ratzinger wrote these books and essays – Feast of Faith and A New Song for the Lord are really collections of earlier, reworked articles – the warring advocates of liturgies new and old, have focused for the most part on surface issues. One expects this of thoroughgoing and honest modernists because for them there is, beyond sensory appearances, no transcendent reality about which to debate – or, for the less robust among them, at least there is nothing sensible to be said about whatever might lie behind the here and now. It is very strange, however, that their critics, who have rather firm views about the transcendental world, and our ability to enter into it, so often fall into the trap of accepting terms of debate set by the liturgical modernisers: iconoclasm versus images; utility versus art music; vernacular versus sacred language; words versus silences; self-expression versus ritual. Ratzinger does not make this mistake. Unlike most traditionalist and conservative critics of the liturgical revolution, who insist on going head-to-head with the liberals on their chosen ground, Ratzinger sweeps around his opponents’ heavily defended positions and drives straight on to his strategic objectives before mopping up “enemy” positions in the rear. The Panzerkardinal at work.

His great theme is the cosmic significance of liturgy. Ratzinger’s point is that unless one grasps the inner meaning of worship, and its relation to the way things are in the cosmos, and the end to which it is being drawn, one cannot begin to talk about liturgy. Creation, Redemption, Judgement, and the Consummation: these are the realities that determine what liturgy is. God is. He made us. He saved us. He will judge us. Then there will be an end to all things, and a new heaven and earth will appear. All Creation from the beginning has “groaned” for this. Worship is our part in the cosmic groaning for the Last Things, and liturgy provides the public form under which our part takes place. It is a grand and dazzling conception, absent of which liturgical debate is an empty, endless enterprise embarked upon by exponents of – what amounts to – occult knowledge.

Once liturgy is understood as part of a providentially directed cosmic event, some powerful conclusions can be drawn. The principle one for Ratzinger is that man does not “do” liturgy. God does it. Ours is not to make or unmake rites of worship. Ours is to receive them. God builds the house of the Church. He likewise forms its liturgy. He even provides the priest who carries out liturgical worship: His Son, Jesus Christ. Our rôle is to be formed according to the pattern of worship He has set. Obedience to a divinely ordained order is central here. The Psalmist says it all:

“Nisi dominus aedificaverit domum, in vanum laboraverunt qui aedificant meum.”

“Unless the Lord builds the house, they labour in vain that build it.” (Ps 126)

It is an astounding notion. It is also completely at odds with a contemporary cultural assumption about realising our “authentic humanity” through self-expression – an assumption which, at least in the West, Catholics have adopted as their own and applied it in a revolutionary reconfiguring of the liturgy. This turning of liturgy away from God and His cosmic plan (traditionally symbolised by the eastward orientation of worship) and toward man and his projects (symbolised by the priest and people facing each other) excludes God, Ratzinger argues, from the liturgical act – though precisely in what way, and to what extent, he does not say. This is a strange omission, especially given his Germanic thoroughness in sketching briefly the many implications of his argument. Perhaps some of them are too horrifying to spell out. Or perhaps at the time of writing Ratzinger still had not understood, or accepted, the full force of his own position. Be that as it may, once the principle that liturgy belongs to God is established, subsidiary issues about orientation (Ratzinger’s Number One issue), language (which, again rather strangely, he hardly mentions), text, music, action, and the like, all fall into their proper places. Suddenly debates which have seemed insoluble appear clothed in a context of doctrinal and theological principles within which conclusions might be drawn.

Ratzinger has stirred up a good deal of controversy with these books. Some Liberals floridly prophesy that he plans to trash the Vatican II liturgical reforms. Some traditionalists claim that he clearly has not listened to their gospel, so they now have no choice but to wipe the dust from their feet. Meanwhile, the “Ratzingerians” reckon their hero wants exactly what they want which is a “reform of the reform”. Support for all of these positions can be found in these books. To focus, however, on what kind of liturgy he favours, and on what changes (if any) he wants to make to the new one, misses the point. Ratzinger does not stand for a liturgical programme, whether liberal modernist, moderate reformist, or traditionalist. He espouses a liturgical reform that springs from re-siting liturgy in its proper doctrinal context. This is an approach he inherited from his mentor Romano Guardini, on whose Spirit of the Liturgy he modelled his own book of the same title. Its main thrust is to recover a lively – and, indeed, popular – sense of the unfathomable “truth and mystery” of God’s great design for us and for the universe: a design that determines and fixes what liturgy really is. Say what you like about it, but this is deeply traditional.

For what it is worth, I think the Guardini-Ratzinger approach is the right one. When I grew up the old liturgy was visibly dying. I know that many would disagree with me about this. They would counter by pointing to dioceses and parishes that were thriving liturgically at the time. But, in truth, these were out of the ordinary. Beacons burn brightly precisely because of the encircling gloom. Aside from these comparatively rare exceptions, the liturgy had entered what seemed to be the sleep before death. Like a saintly, jewel-encrusted bishop laid out to die in his full pontificals, the very weight of the ritual appeared to be pressing out the last breath from a living body from which the sustaining spirit had all but fled. Yes, fled. It was being driven out by a clergy that, in large numbers, had lost contact with the beating heart that gave life to the liturgy. They seemed no longer able to enter into the desires of the person who had shaped the liturgy toward its great end. They celebrated mechanically.

This is why so many heaved a great sigh of relief when finally it appeared that the old liturgy had breathed its last. This is the problem with which Guardini and Ratzinger have sought to wrestle. Spirit of the Liturgy: the title says it all – an invitation to the Spirit to re-enter the liturgy and for men to retire before Him.

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