In the first gestures of Prevost, the lesson of the theologian who inspired Benedict XVI inspired: there is Christ at the center of the liturgy
Pope Leone XIV It was surprisingly clear (at least compared to the standards to which we had recently used to): “We must rediscover the primacy of God and the mystery,” he said speaking on the occasion of the Jubilee of the Oriental Churches. These churches, he continued, “in their liturgical and spiritual wealth, they are custodians of a precious treasure for the whole Church”. What is this treasure is soon said: the mystery. “How much need we have to recover the sense of mystery, so I live in your liturgies that involve the human person in its entirety, sing the beauty of salvation and arouse the amazement for the divine greatness that embraces human littleness,” said the pontiff. “And how important it is also to rediscover in the Christian West the sense of the primacy of God, the value of mixing, of incessant intercession, penance, fasting, crying for the sins of its own and of the entire humanity so typical of oriental spirituality”. This is the heart of Christianity: the mystery.
And what it is, this mystery, had to explain it Joseph Ratzinger thinking about the death of Jesus on the cross. It becomes, he wrote, “abandonment of himself to his father for men. In this way the horizon extends, here as in the resurrection, well beyond the pure human aspect and well beyond the pure fact of having been crucified and of being dead. The language of faith has called this excess of the mere historical moment and condensed the most intimate core of the renentoric event in the term Easter mystery “.
This mystery, this work of Jesus It is the “true content of the liturgy. Through this, with the faith and prayer of the Church, the work of Jesus continually reaches history to penetrate it ».
There is no doubt that the concept is not easy to penetrate, the greatest Christian thinkers have bold themselves around it. To understand something, the reading of a short text of Romano Guardini which is now translated for the first time in Italian by Morcelliana by Paolo Tomatis. It is titled precisely The liturgical mystery And it can be said that it was inspired by Ratzinger in the composition of Introduction to the spirit of the liturgya theological text that sold in Germany as much as the most popular bestseller and which was already renovated by the lesson of Guardini (more precisely a The spirit of the liturgy of 1918that the future Benedict XVI read in 1946).
Simplifying, we could say that for Guardini The great mystery lies in the fact that Christ It is a historical figure but at the same time it is present here and now: “The liturgy basically has no other content than the person, life, word and work of the Lord”, he writes. «With advent the time of waiting begins. Christmas is his arrival. Until the day of ascension it is his life, his suffering, death, resurrection. Then comes the event of Pentecost, with which the Holy Spirit intervenes, the pneuma, shape and strength of Christ in the history of the world. And finally a time that makes itself known as the course of Christian history until its end, “every day until the end of the world”. Christ It is “then” but also “now”, and this surprising way of being over time manifests itself with particular power in the mass. That’s why the liturgy is the heart of Christianity. The mass is not a staging, a sacred representation, an imitation: it is something alive and in some way creative, but it cannot be separated from the cult, that is, from the form.
And it is here that perhaps the most current lesson comes, very well caught by Ratzingerwhen he reiterated that man cannot make himself his cult. He cannot invent the way of celebrating Mass, of approaching the mystery. This cult, in a nutshell, is given to him, and cannot be changed at will. It is deduced – to come to practical things – that the form must be preserved, the signs, the gestures, the body movements and the location in space must be preserved. Everything else, to use the writer’s words Martin Mosebachis “heresy of the information”.
In this sense, gestures and ways of Leo XIV. The clothes, the movements, the movements: everything traces (and it is right that it is so) to a tradition that goes beyond the individual man and participates in the essence of Christianity and the Church itself. It cannot be changed at will, adapt creatively and change what is not appreciated only because it adapts little to the spirit of the times.
Always from the liturgy comes the second great lesson of Guardini before and of Ratzinger Then. At the center of Mass, of the mystery, there is obviously the Eucharist. The Fathers of the Church called oracle The solemn Eucharistic prayer in which the priest becomes a voice of God. That of the priest is not only a word however, but it is action. In the sense that those words produce a concrete fact. “This acting of God, who is accomplished through a human speech, is the true” action “, of which all creation is waiting”, he said Ratzinger. In the liturgy, the word is action, produces change, changes reality. Guardini And Ratzinger So testify to a rocky truth: the signs are fundamental, the word is decisive for Christianity but also for non -believers, for man as such. The gestures must therefore be measured carefully and the words must not lose the link with reality and truth. Otherwise they are not action but pure invention, they are artificial and useless or worse harmful. It seems that Leo XIV He took these themes very seriously at least in the first days of the pontificate, even when he invited to use unarmed words, well aware of the effects they can produce. Unfortunately it does not seem that this awareness, in the West, is widespread.
