Ratzinger’s Vision of Liturgy

The Dynamics of Liturgy: Joseph Ratzinger’s Theology of Liturgy: An Interpretation
D. Vincent Twomey, S.V.D.
Ignatius Press
San Francisco
2022
186 pages
ISBN 978-162164-486-6

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Fr Vincent Twomey’s latest work weighs in at a modest 186 pages, but it is a comprehensive review of the state of liturgy in the Church today, through the lens of Joseph Ratzinger’s theology of liturgy. Though the text of this book was completed before the publication of Pope Francis” motu proprio on the sacred liturgy in 2021, the author expresses the hope that it may contribute to a more balanced discussion of some of the issues raised by the Pope.

Reform of the liturgy is bound up with the Second Vatican Council, whose first document (Sacrosanctum Concilium) dealt with the sacred liturgy, which, for Ratzinger fittingly showed the priority of divine worship in the Church’s life.

The purpose of the council was pastoral, and the liturgy renewal was to invigorate the spiritual life of the faithful, who would then go forth and announce the Gospel. The liturgy needed this reform, as it always will, but unfortunately, by 2004, Ratzinger was to remark: “[a]nyone like myself, who was moved by this perception in the time of the liturgical movement on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, can only stand, deeply sorrowing, before the ruins of the very things they were concerned for.”

Fr Twomey’s volume traces these developments in the years since the Council in the light of Ratzinger’s theology of liturgy, which of course involves his theology of Christ and of the Church, offering suggestions to regain this fullness in our celebration.

Ratzinger’s Vision of Liturgy

Liturgy leads us to the Word: the word which involves the “we” and the “you” of the participants, and enables them to participate in the logike latreia (word-like worship) of the sacrifice. This taking part does not involve the externals so much as the inner processes: “let us pray”, “lift up your hearts”, “behold the Lamb of God”!  Liturgical prayer has the dynamics of revelation, where the words used teach our minds to adapt to the Word of God, made flesh: “our minds must be in accord with our voice” (St Benedict).

The liturgy is cosmic, the human world itself must become worship of God, an oblation in the Holy Spirit. The creation story tells us not how the world was made but why; for a Sabbath rest and the experience of the goodness of creation, leading to St Paul’s insight that the whole of creation has been groaning with labour pains together until now, and the ultimate roots of Christian liturgy are to be found in the very cultic rituals of mankind, reaching back to the dawn of time. The Temple worship too and the word-liturgy of the synagogue, the awareness of angels (another cosmic aspect of Jewish worship) were taken up into the Christian liturgy; but much of this has been tidied away by the reform after the Council which was unfortunately drafted around a committee table rather than emerging as fruit of an organic unfolding, as heretofore.

Liturgy, Art and Music

This is also reflected in sacred art and architecture. After the Council, the changes in the liturgy were seen in functional terms: multi-purpose churches, allergy to religiosity, a sense that the frontier between profane and sacred had been broken down by the Cross, all suggested a new minimalism, if not another iconoclasm. The high liturgical theology of Sacrosanctum Concilium, which linked Sunday Mass with the heavenly liturgy, got lost in the reductionist and a-historical theology of Liturgical Commission president Cardinal Lercaro and his secretary Archbishop Annibale Bugnini.

This led to the ditching of many beautiful artefacts, musical, architectural, artistic, fruit of the faith and generosity of the Christian people, in an updated form of clerical arrogance. Beauty had become an optional extra or a matter of taste, rather than, as it is for Ratzinger, theologically significant. Twomey quotes him: “[t]he Church must not settle down with what is merely comfortable and serviceable at the parish level: she must arouse the voice of the cosmos itself, making it also glorious, beautiful, habitable and beloved. Next to the saints, the art which the Church has produced is the only real ‘apologia’ for her history…. The Church must maintain high standards; she must be a place where beauty can be at home; she must lead the struggle for that ‘spiritualisation’ without which the world becomes the ‘first circle of hell’.”

Similar considerations apply to sacred music: the years which followed the Liturgical Commission’s work saw the increasingly grim impoverishment which follows when beauty for its own sake is banished from the Church and all is subordinated to the principle of “utility” or even of spiritualisation. The criticism is sometimes made that, like images, Church music too needs to be abandoned in favour of a more “useful”, more inclusive kind of sing-along music. But, says Ratzinger, moving from synagogue to the church, singing actually increased. Augustine found that the beauty of the music in Milan Cathedral shattered him to the core, and prepared his conversion.

So it is all about the right kind of spiritualisation, which for Christian theology does not exclude the body and matter: “the work of a Palestrina or a Mozart would be unthinkable apart from this dramatic interplay in which even material creation becomes the instrument of the spirit” (Fr Twomey actually concludes this volume with a beautiful appendix based on his own experiences of worthy and accessible Church music).

He offers five Ratzingerian principles for Church music:

1. Liturgy is catholic, for all, simple but not cheap.

2. Catholicity is not uniformity.

3. Active participation is not equal to activity.

4. A Church which only makes use of “utility” music has fallen for what is, in fact, useless. The task of Church music is to arouse the voice of the cosmos.

5. Use the musical traditions of other religions (not forgetting your own!)

Ritual and Rubric

The “rubrics”, (instructions for liturgical ceremonies, usually printed in red) were casualties of the “creative” form of liturgy. Many were impatient with the former “rubricist” approach where priests, it is alleged, had to execute the liturgy with a “puerile” obedience. But now it appears that the liturgy must obey us, to the extent of becoming a political, social or family meeting (“Good morning, everybody”). People must be involved, must understand everything, as though participation must be primarily rational. St John Paul II claimed that the liturgy mostly works on the subconscious, and there is no point in making everything explicit and explained – you might be explaining it away! Beautiful music, incense, silence, a solemn procession: if you need to explain these, you are definitely missing something!

Is there an alternative to the prevailing rationalist / utilitarian understanding of active participation? Fr Twomey’s answer is yes, “the true nature of celebration and the nature of ritual … find their expression in the humble though complex rubrics that have been honed by tradition. It was fidelity to these rubrics that enabled the theology of the sacraments, above all the Mass, to be experienced by the faithful over the centuries as sursum corda [lift up your hearts], an encounter with the Holy. That … is what is meant by full, conscious, active participation.”

It involves a spirit of contemplation as opposed to fashioning. If we see liturgy as a product of our doing, then it is hard to grasp what the Council meant by active participation in the liturgy: the effort to look on God, to centre our heart in him; otherwise it can end up meaning “what can I/we do to make this happen (or make it entertaining)?” Ritual has always been central to human life and society, but it opens us up to what transcends us, touching the nodal points like birth, death, meals, coronations, etc. Communities renew themselves by participating in initiations and other related rites. Christianity takes this natural symbolic language and purifies it, in the light of the saving historical event of the Incarnation, typified by the Old Testament rituals. The symbols of the cosmos, such as water, become the means of insertion into God’s design, and he reminds us of some Old Testament types: from the Flood through the Red Sea to the Baptism of Jesus and our own baptism.

Anthropologists Speak of Ritual

Fr Twomey taps into the anthropologists of ritual who studied African tribes and, yes, Lancastrian working class parish feast day Masses in the late sixties, in both of which the flow of the celebration works in accordance with a “ritual logic”, with action following action and which needs no conscious intervention on our part. This experience of immersion and unconscious control can occur in sport and art, but especially in religious experience. One of these writers points, by contrast, to the casual approach of priests to the liturgy as an obstacle to this flow of worship: “if you no longer see yourself as the servant of a tradition but its master, … then you are likely to treat the Mass more as a gathering of friends than as a sacrifice of God…. and liturgy[’s] capacity to excite as the source and summit of our salvation diminishes….. ‘Therefore no other person, not even a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority’ (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 22).” Small rubrics which help him to be aware of what he is doing, as for example, when he is to genuflect and adore the consecrated Host; the silent prayers for the celebrant before Holy Communion, at the washing of the fingers, etc.

He raises the question of a “rubric” which may need revision: the practice of the celebrant facing the faithful for the entire duration of Mass: a practice which makes the Catholic Church something of an outlier among Christian Churches, was not advocated at the Council, and which was based on the false assumption, now long disproved, that the early Church celebrated in this way. He agrees with Ratzinger that this posture may be appropriate for the “dialogical” Liturgy of the Word, but his facing the congregation for the entire Mass makes the personality of the celebrant become central to the celebration, turning Mass from a sacrifice into a teaching opportunity or, worse, an entertainment. Facing East, on the other hand, symbolically represents our turning, as one, to the Risen Christ coming in glory and present in the sacrifice of the Mass, in which he comes to us to save us.

Conclusion

The liturgy is the source and summit of the Church’s life, she is shaped by it to live in constant sacrifice of herself. St Paul spoke of being poured out like a libation, and the martyrs have continued this tradition, as has every Christian who carries the hidden Cross of every day. Ratzinger had reminded people that the liturgy needed reform on the eve of the Council if it was to reflect this paradoxical fullness of Christian life. But did the reform that occurred actually reflect the wishes of the Fathers of the Council? Ratzinger’s own proposed “reform of the reform” suggests that it did not, and that there is still much to do. Fr Twomey’s book will encourage many to believe and hope that the Holy Spirit will help us to “do this” more fully, in anamnesis of our Saviour.

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Rev. Vincent Twomey’s personal tribute to the late Pope Benedict XVI:

As his doctoral student from 1971 to 1978, it was my privilege to come to know one of the greatest theologians of our time. Like most of his former students, we kept in touch down through the years. He was, and remained all through his life, a simple, humble man of God, who valued human friendship. Dialogue was not only a dimension of his notion of God and of God’s relationship with humanity, it was also central to his own engagement with others, including those who disagreed with him. He was quintessentially a listener. Apart from being a brilliant lecturer and inspirational homilist, he remained all his life basically a fine scholar and yet a simple priest with a truly pastoral heart. For most of his public life, he was under attack for being a thorn in the flesh of many contemporaries. He bore it all with heroic patience and equanimity. In a word, he was magnanimous. He was unobtrusively saintly, if that is not a tautology. A smile was always on his lips. Above all, he loved the Church, which is say humanity in the process of being redeemed, and spent his life unstintingly in her service as scholar-priest, bishop, Cardinal Prefect and Pope.