Pope Francis and the liturgy – a plea to put aside polemics and ego
Desiderio Desideravi is one of the Pope’s most compelling teaching documents, the fruit of a long and careful deliberation.
Pope Francis’ recent letter to all the faithful on the liturgy is a plea to put aside polemics and ego, and to marvel at the liturgy’s truth and beauty.
Francis’ captivating letter calling for a new formation in the “beauty and truth” of Christian celebration is the second instalment of his response to the so-called “liturgy wars” roiling parts of the Catholic Church. For Francis, those divisions are not, ultimately, about liturgy at all, but about doctrine and ecclesiology. But more deeply, they are the result of centring on our- selves rather than on God’s gift.
The first instalment was last year’s Traditionis Custodes, a juridical document for bishops that placed limits on the use of the pre-Vatican II liturgy by groups opposed to the conciliar reform, and made clear the Pope’s determination to re-establish the liturgical unity of the Roman rite. Now comes Desiderio Desideravi, which is directed to all the faithful and addresses the causes of the current divisions over liturgy. Even if Francis characteristically downplays its magisterial punch – it is an 11,500-word apostolic letter with “prompts or cues for reflections” – it turns out to be one of his most compelling teaching documents, the fruit of a long and careful deliberation that long predates his pontificate.
The document has two birthplaces. The first is a paper in Italian given by the then- Archbishop of Buenos Aires at a 2005 plenary of the then-Congregation for Divine Worship (CDW), of which Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a member. In “L’Ars Celebrandi” he urged the CDW to issue a document in the face of the growing tendency for people to treat the liturgy as an object needing either innovation or restoration. The document he wanted to see should be “a text for meditation” rather than either a juridical document or a footnote-heavy theological treatise because the issue at heart was the internal disposition of all those involved in the liturgy, celebrants, and congregants alike, and their capacity for “amazement” (stupore). Rather than trying to be comprehensive, Bergoglio suggested that it should “say little, in a targeted way; and say it well, in a convincing way”.
There was little hope of such a document coming from a CDW under Cardinal Francis Arinze, who headed the department in 2005, or Robert Sarah, the traditionalist who was Cardinal Prefect from 2014. But shortly before Sarah’s retirement, at 75, Francis asked the CDW to hold a plenary on liturgical formation, which led to the document that has been under preparation since the English cardinal-elect Arthur Roche took over the liturgy dicastery last year.
Both Traditionis Custodes in July 2021 and Desiderio Desideravi now, which bears the imprint of the Bergoglio 2005 paper, are bold bids to re-establish the reformed liturgy that followed Vatican II as “the unique expression of the lex orandi of the Roman rite”, as Traditionis Custodes put it.
In Desiderio Desideravi Francis wants us to get what liturgy is and does; and to alert us to what prevents us receiving it, namely Gnosticism and neo-Pelagianism, which in his 2018 apostolic exhortation, Gaudete et Exsultate, he calls the “two subtle enemies of holiness”. They are subtle because although they cloak themselves in religiosity, they are really all about us.
Gnosticism trusts in the intellect, leading to a disembodied spirituality that seeks to domesticate the mystery, the kind of “rational” Christianity that afflicts certain kinds of liberal Catholicism. Neo-Pelagianism, on the other hand, trusts in effort and will, in obedience to forms and rules, which is what so often drives traditionalism, rigorism and various kinds of restorationism. Authentic liturgy, says Desiderio Desideravi, purifies us of these temptations.
Liturgy is born of Jesus’ desire to re-establish communion with us: it is how he incorporates us, and how we are incorporated. Francis puts this graphically, imagining people arriving in Jerusalem after Pentecost with the desire to meet Jesus. They would have no option, he says, other than to seek out his disciples in order to hear his words and see his gestures: “We would have had no other possibility of a true encounter with him other than that of the community that celebrates. For this reason, the Church has always protected as its most precious treasure the command of the Lord, ‘Do this in memory of me.’”
This is not theatre nor an idea or concept, but an encounter with Christ in continuity with the same incarnational means God has chosen to save us. The liturgy “has nothing to do with an ascetical moralism”; it is neither “a careful exterior observance of a rite” nor “a scrupulous observance of the rubrics”. Rubrics are to be observed, and every aspect of the celebration carefully attended to; but these are by themselves insufficient. What liturgy asks of us is humility: receptivity to “the gift of the Paschal Mystery of the Lord which, received with docility, makes our life new”. It is a receptivity born of amazement or astonishment (stupore), “a marvelling at the fact that the salvific plan of God has been revealed in the paschal deed of Jesus (cf. Ephesians 1:3-14), and the power of this paschal deed continues to reach us in the cel- ebration of the ‘mysteries,’ of the sacraments”.
Noting that one of the traditionalist charges against post-conciliar liturgical reform is the loss of a “sense of mystery”, Francis warns that the phrase is slippery. For, “if the astonishment is of the right kind, then there is no risk that the otherness of God’s presence will not be perceived, even within the closeness that the Incarnation intends. If the reform has eliminated that vague ‘sense of mystery’, then more than a cause for accusations, it is to its credit.”
At this point Francis makes a key move, showing that the resistance to conciliar liturgical reform is not about liturgical preferences but doctrine and ecclesiology. It would be “trivial” to read the tensions over liturgy as “a simple divergence between different tastes concerning a particular ritual form”, he writes. “The problematic is primarily ecclesiological. I do not see how it is possible to say that one recognises the validity of the Council ... and at the same time not accept the liturgical reform born out of Sacrosanctum Concilium, a document that expresses the reality of the liturgy intimately joined to the vision of Church so admirably described in Lumen Gentium.”
The reason we have ended up divided over liturgy, Francis suggests, is because of “spiritual worldliness”: we take the Lord’s gift and turn it into our instrument. The reasons are partly cultural, as the German theologian Romano Guardini explored in his classic The Spirit of the Liturgy (1918) and in a later (1923) text, Liturgische Bildung (“Liturgical Formation”), which is referenced several times in Desiderio Desideravi. Guardini’s case is that what liturgy asks of us is not easy for contemporary human- ity: hence the need for liturgical formation, which is almost like re-learning a lost language. Francis notes how the Council’s aim was “to recover the capacity to live completely the liturgical action”, but “modern people ... have lost the capacity to engage with symbolic action, which is an essential trait of the liturgical act”. He quotes Guardini that “the first task of the work of liturgical formation” is to make us once again “capable of symbols”. Because the symbolic language of the liturgy has become “almost inaccessible” to us, we need to be taught it.
It is the same crisis laid out so powerfully in Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’. Liturgy, says Francis, is “real existential engagement” with Christ sacramentally: that is, through created things that are the opposite of spiritual abstractions: “Bread, wine, oil, water, fragrances, fire, ashes, rock, fabrics, colours, body, words, sounds, silences, gestures, space, movement, action, order, time, light.”
There can be “no question of renouncing such language”. As Desiderio Desideravi puts it beautifully, “things – the sacraments ‘are made’ of things – come from God. To him they are oriented, and by him they have been assumed, and assumed in a particular way in the Incarnation, so that they can become instruments of salvation, vehicles of the Spirit, channels of grace.” The task, then, is to “reacquire confidence about creation” for, “if created things are such a fundamental, essential part of the sacramental action that brings about our salvation, then we must arrange ourselves in their presence with a fresh, non-superficial regard, respectful and grateful”.
The primary school for this re-education is the liturgy itself: hence the importance of how it is celebrated, the Ars celebrandi, to which Francis turns in the final part of Desiderio Desideravi. This is not just about how priests say Mass but the way the congregation takes part. All deserve attention, “so that every gesture and every word of the celebration, expressed with ‘art’, forms the Christian personality of each individual and of the community”. Certain ways of presiding turn the celebrant into an obstacle through “a heightened personalism of the celebrating style which at times expresses a poorly concealed mania to be the centre of attention”.
The assembly has the right, Francis says, to see in the gestures and words of the celebrant Jesus’ desire to eat the Passover with us, and the priest should be “overpowered by this desire for communion” that the Lord has for each of us. “It is as if he were placed in the middle between Jesus’ burning heart of love and the heart of each of the faithful, which is the object of the Lord’s love.”
Although Francis has suggestions for seminaries and calls for a “permanent formation of everyone” to restore an attitude of wonder, Desiderio Desideravi is less a mandate than a plea: to put aside polemics and ego and to marvel at the truth and beauty of the liturgy, allowing ourselves “to be embraced by the desire that the Lord continues to have to eat his Passover with us”. It is a call to rediscover the one essential disposition Guardini said that liturgy required of us: humility.
Austen Ivereigh is a Fellow in Contemporary Church History at Campion Hall, at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church (Henry Holt) and, with Pope Francis, Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future (Simon & Schuster).