They risk losing the trust of men of good will. Moreover, if the bishops, who are in charge of the cohabitation and mutual enrichment of the two liturgical forms, do not exercise their authority to this effect, they run the risk of no longer appearing as shepherds, guardians of the faith they have received and of the sheep entrusted to them, but as political leaders: commissars of the ideology of the moment rather than guardians of the perennial tradition. If she were to claim a reversal of her faith or of her liturgy, in what name would the Church dare address the world? Her only legitimacy is her consistency in her continuity. What is at stake is therefore much more serious than a simple question of discipline. Liturgical peace is the sign of the peace that the Church can bring to the world. By keeping alive a liturgical war within herself, the Church loses her credibility and becomes deaf to the call of men. But then the Church could no longer offer the world that sacred continuity, which alone can give her peace. If one were to radically exclude one in favor of the other, if one were to declare them irreconcilable, one would implicitly recognize a rupture and a change of orientation. Pius V and the Mass of Paul VI, then the Church must be able to organize their peaceful cohabitation and their mutual enrichment. If she affirms the continuity between what is commonly called the Mass of St. If the Church is not capable of preserving the peaceful continuity of her link with Christ, she will be unable to offer the world “the sacred which unites souls,” according to the words of Goethe.īeyond the quarrel over rites, the credibility of the Church is at stake. Īt a time when some theologians are seeking to reopen the liturgy wars by pitting the missal revised by the Council of Trent against the one in use since 1970, it is urgent to recall this. It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place.”. What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. “In the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture. This is undoubtedly the reason for which Benedict XVI could authoritatively affirm: Without this radical continuity, what credibility could the Church still claim?.
A chain of faith without rupture or contradiction, a chain of prayer and liturgy without breakage or disavowal.
What is sacred for the Church, then, is the unbroken chain that links her with certainty to Jesus. Christian civilization is born of this encounter. Moral and dogmatic teaching, as well as mystical and liturgical patrimony, are the setting and the means of this fundamental and sacred encounter. Her sole goal is to make possible the encounter of men with the person of Jesus. But the Church has no other sacred reality to offer than her faith in Jesus, God made man. They would like to see her assume a social function, namely to be a coherent system of values, a cultural and aesthetic matrix. Some ask the Catholic Church to play this solid foundation role. Without a sacred foundation, every bond becomes fragile and fickle.
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