And secularization touched the people The changeover from the Missal of Saint Pius V to the current one highlights the degrading of mystics (which is always a plea for the intervention of God) into ethical commitment
And Secularism Touched the People
by Gianni Baget Bozzo That debate is starting up again on the liturgical reform is of significance. Once upon a time in the Church there was a debate which had been smothered almost violently. I refer to La tunica inconsutile by Tito Casini, and the opposition from Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci to the introduction of the reformed Roman Missal. The request for reformation of the liturgy did not come from the Christian people, for the faithful have never been fond of changes to the exterior and symbolic face of their religion. The period after Vatican II was marked by the rapid secularization of theology, secularization that touched the people themselves only when it embarked on the liturgical reform. Christian prayer was reduced to public worship and the theme of personal religion, as it was called by Father De Grandmaison, the mystical life of the believer "hidden with Christ in God" was set aside. Public activity rendered inward silent prayer, marginal. It diminished adoration which, centring on the tabernacle, was the heart of Catholicism. Without the moment of adoration, in which man sets himself in the presence of the divine glory, acknowledges his frailty and puts his trust in the divine Power, religion has no reality. Islam has kept its social nature as a community because it has maintained adoration. Does adoration still exist in the shared life of Catholics, the sentiment of dependence? And fear of God, the fear of divine judgment, which is the beginning of wisdom? To say that God is love is not to say that God is bonhomie, indifference. The separation of the creator from the Abba of Jesus is an old Gnostic argument. Nowadays one comes across it in cryptic form. The God the theologians of our time prefer has to be "a trustworthy God".
The God love demands love, a need more radical and profound than fear but born out of nothing else. Not because God loves being feared, he loves to be loved, but fear of God is the way in which man opens himself to God, in which he misses him. The model of Christian prayer (the Psalms) has many themes, but one is central: the lack of God. In the Bible the theme of sin is not an ethical one, it is the sentiment that God is missing to man. He lacks inwardly and outwardly, the Psalmist begs for his inward presence and at the same time for outward help. He prays as a single entity: spirit, soul, body, self, people of God. But in all subjects and in all forms man declares to God that he feels far removed from him and that he has need of him. Biblical sin is not psycho-analytic guilt, it is not a category of the moral, nor a structure of anguish. It is a dimension whose sense lies in the fact that God is present, the Psalmist addresses himself to him, begs to live in him, to dwell within his house, to be freed from his enemies, from death. In the Psalms sin is the real and concrete difference between God and man and, at the same time, their essential relationship. And it is the difference itself that expresses the relationship, the invocation that pleads that the God to whose presence the utterance is addressed should intervene in history and in the heart. Biblical sin is a mystical dimension: that is why it supposes God is love. In the moment that he proclaims the separation, the Psalmist is aware of presence and begs to be pierced, seized, transformed by the love of God. This is what Psalm 73 says so splendidly: "Who else is there for me in heaven? And, with you, I lack nothing on earth ... my heart's rock, my portion, God for ever". The foregoing is meant to help grasp the acute and incisive comments made by Lorenzo Bianchi on the collects in the Roman Missal. And two observations in the article seem particularly striking and indicate the mystical decadence from the Missal of Saint Pius V to the one in current use. The replacement of the imperative by the indicative is the first. Prayer demands an inward and outward action on the part of God, it awaits divine action, it begs that the presence, before which the supplicant stands, become divine intervention. The prayer is addressed to the divine You so that it may make itself manifest in the inward and outward life of the believer. The imperative marks the need and the awaiting, the two forms which constitute, on the human side, the relationship with God. The indicative marks a reality already given, not a reality awaited: mystics is always, on man's part, a plea for divine intervention. Even the mystics of detachment from the world, like the Rhenish-Flemmish sort, is well aware that detachment is a gift of God, being pierced by his glorious essence. The second element one notes is the stress given not to divine help but to the human action that results from it. The mystical dimension declines into an ethical category.
Lex orandi, lex credendi: pray as you believe. This means that the difference between the two liturgies bears on the reality of the Churchly life and tends to construct a model of the Church in which the community dimension prevails over the personal, the immediate charm of social action becomes a diminishing of the inwardness and depth of faith. The spiritual dimension is the yardstick of the Church's authenticity. It is therefore right and proper to face up to the question of the lex orandi in open fashion since it is profoundly incisive on ecclesial reality.
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