By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
The most important news to come out in the last few weeks was the Robert Cardinal Sarah interview with the French publication Famille Chretienne. Why? The cardinal is the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments and therefore chief adviser on liturgical matters for the Pope and the universal Church.
As related in the Catholic World Report article used for this column, he “explains how God can be put ‘back at the center’ of the liturgy” where in so many places the nearly complete horizontal or human orientation of the liturgy has made God nearly invisible.
This interview relates to the most important thing priest and people do together each week, the Holy Mass; therefore, it is important to give the widest possible coverage to it among our people.
Cardinal Sarah in this interview explains in practical terms how the priest and people can very effectively and quickly move to put God “back at the center” of the Mass through using the ad orientem posture where the priest turns and faces the Lord together with his people as he offers the Eucharistic Prayer, or Canon, of the Mass. With this one change of posture, as we have done at all the Masses at my parish, the prophetic and future-oriented nature of the prayer of Mass is recovered.
The artificially limiting and earth-bound closed circle of priest and people so commonly experienced in most Catholic parishes is therefore broken and opened to God and to Heaven and the glorious return at the end of time by Christ the one true High Priest who in fact offers every liturgy on Earth.
Cardinal Sarah bases his advice to adopt the prophetic posture because the liturgy “is the door to our union with God. If Eucharistic Celebrations turn into human self-celebrations, there is a great danger, because God disappears. We have to start by placing God back at the center of the liturgy. If the man is the center, the church becomes a merely human society, a simple NGO, as Pope Francis said.”
The cardinal calls for total dedication in parishes to “a true conversion of the heart” which finds its source in the manner in which the Holy Mass is prayed.
He says, “Vatican II insisted on a major point: In this area, the important thing is not what we do, but what God does. No human work will ever be able to accomplish what is found at the heart of the Mass: the sacrifice of the cross.”
Turning toward the Lord together on the part of everyone at Mass offered reverently and beautifully “allows us to go outside the walls of this world. Rediscovering the sacredness and beauty of the liturgy therefore requires a work of formation for the laity, the priests, and the bishops. I am talking about an interior conversion.”
“In order to put God back at the center of the liturgy, silence is necessary too: the ability to be quiet so as to listen to God and His word. I maintain that we only meet God in silence and by pondering His word in the depths of our heart.”
Conversion means “to turn toward God.” Silence belongs in the liturgy as well because “our bodies must participate in this conversion” and silence speaks to the whole person, body and soul. Turning bodily together toward the Lord orients priest and people to Him, present but also coming.
Cardinal Sarah reassures those who have lost all memory of liturgy prior to Vatican II that using the tradition of an ad orientem posture is “lawful and in keeping with the letter and the spirit of the [Second Vatican] Council.”
In a June 2015 article that he wrote for L’Osservatore Romano, “I proposed that the priests and the faithful turn toward the East at least during the Penitential Rite, during the singing of the Gloria, the Prayers of the Faithful, and the Eucharistic Prayer.”
This sounds much like my own recommendations for the “Ad Orientem Starter Kit” I have practiced with many congregations for many years and published in a previous column in The Wanderer.
Sarah makes clear that reforming the liturgy may make a “change in orientation of the altar” necessary. As well, he urges, “More than fifty years after the close of Vatican II, it becomes urgent for us to read its documents! The Council never required celebrating Mass facing the people! This question was not even addressed by the Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium.”
A quote from his book God or Nothing helps set the context and offer insights for proper formation of all our young people, leading to a lifelong love for and faithful practice of the Mass:
“When I was an altar boy, I observed very attentively the sensitivity and fervor with which the priests in my village celebrated their daily Masses. In this sense, it is not wrong to say that from a young age I was able to understand the need to offer spiritual worship that was holy and pleasing to God. At Mass we are present first and foremost to God. If we do not turn our attention radically toward God, our faith becomes lukewarm, distracted, and uncertain.
“At Ourous, [Guinea], as an altar boy, I gradually learned to enter into the eucharistic mystery and to understand that the Mass was a unique moment in the life of the priests and of the faithful. Divine worship lifted us out of the ordinary. Seeing things with the eyes of a child, I had the feeling that the priest was literally absorbed by Christ at the moment when, facing East, he lifted the consecrated Host toward Heaven” (p. 50).
Also, he says, I “realized that the liturgy was the most precious sacred moment in which the Church allows us to encounter God in a unique way. We must never forget to unite the liturgy with the tragic event of the death of Jesus on the Cross.”
Also found in God or Nothing:
“Unfortunately, right after the Council, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy was understood, not in terms of the fundamental primacy of adoration, of the Church humbly kneeling before the greatness of God, but rather as a book of formulas. . . . We have seen all sorts of ‘creative’ liturgical planners who sought to find tricks to make the liturgy attractive, more communicative, by involving more and more people, but all the while forgetting that the liturgy is made for God. If you make God the Great Absent One, then all sorts of downward spirals are possible, from the most trivial to the most contemptible.”
(Translation from the French by Michael J. Miller, who also translated God or Nothing.)
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(Visit Fr. Cusick at @MCITLFrAphorism on Twitter.)
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