Worship Weblog
Thursday, April 28, 2005
Benedict XVI on Worship
Media coverage of Pope Benedict XVI’s election has focused mostly on his social views and has been nearly oblivious to the pope’s prodigious liturgical scholarship, which includes over two dozen books (written as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) on the Church and liturgy. At staff meeting this week, Dr. Witvliet showed us a portion of Ratzinger’s Worship in Accord with the Logos, which includes these passages:
It has been forgotten that the liturgy should be opus Dei [the work of God] in which God himself first acts and we become redeemed people precisely through his action. The group celebrates itself, and exactly for this reason it is celebrating nothing at all since it is no cause for celebration. This is why the general activity turns to boredom. Nothing happens if he is absent whom the world awaits. ...
One recognizes right liturgy by the fact that it liberates us from ordinary, everyday activity and returns to us once more the depths and the heights, silence and song. One recognizes right liturgy in that it has a cosmic, not just a group, character. It sings with the angels. It is silent with the expectant depths of the universe. And that is how it redeems the earth.
Earlier: John Witvliet on Protestants and Pope John Paul II
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