More Thoughts from Joseph Ratzinger About the Liturgy

Ten Years of the Motu Proprio "Ecclesia Dei"

by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

translated by Fr. Ignatius Harrison, Brompton Oratory, London

A lecture given at the Ergife Palace Hotel, Rome on Saturday 24th October 1998, to an audience of some 3000 traditional Catholics. (Source)

[Bold-faced text represents my emphasis.]

Ten years after the publication of the Motu proprio "Ecclesia Dei", what sort of balance-sheet can one draw-up? I think this is above all an occasion to show our gratitude and to give thanks. The divers communities that were born thanks to this pontifical text have given the Church a great number of priestly and religious vocations who, zealously, joyfully and deeply united with the Pope, have given their service to the Gospel in our present era of history. Through them, many of the faithful have been confirmed in the joy of being able to live the liturgy, and confirmed in their love for the Church, or perhaps they have rediscovered both. In many dioceses - and their number is not so small! - they serve the Church in collaboration with the Bishops and in fraternal union with those faithful who do feel at home with the renewed form of the new liturgy. All this cannot but move us to gratitude today!

However, it would not be realistic if we were to pass-over in silence those things which are less good. In many places difficulties persist, and these continue because some bishops, priests and faithful consider this attachment to the old liturgy as an element of division which only disturbs the ecclesial community and which gives rise to suspicions regarding an acceptance of the Council made "with reservations", and more generally concerning obedience towards the legitimate pastors of the Church.

We ought now to ask the following question: how can these difficulties be overcome? How can one build the necessary trust so that these groups and communities who love the ancient liturgy can be smoothly integrated into the life of the Church?

But there is another question underlying the first: what is the deeper reason for this distrust or even for this rejection of a continuation of the ancient liturgical forms?

It is without doubt possible that, within this area, there exist reasons which go further back than any theology and which have their origin in the character of individuals or in the conflict between different personalities, or indeed a number of other circumstances which are wholly extrinsic. But it is certain that there are also other deeper reasons which explain these problems. The two reasons which are most often heard, are: lack of obedience to the Council which wanted the liturgical books reformed, and the break in unity which must necessarily follow if different liturgical forms are left in use. It is relatively simple to refute these two arguments on the theoretical level. The Council did not itself reform the liturgical books, but it ordered their revision, and to this end, it established certain fundamental rules. Before anything else, the Council gave a definition of what liturgy is, and this definition gives a valuable yardstick for every liturgical celebration. Were one to shun these essential rules and put to one side the normae generales which one finds in numbers 34 - 36 of the Constitution De Sacra Liturgia (SL), in that case one would indeed be guilty of disobedience to the Council! It is in the light of these criteria that liturgical celebrations must be evaluated, whether they be according to the old books or the new. It is good to recall here what Cardinal Newman observed, that the Church, throughout her history, has never abolished nor forbidden orthodox liturgical forms, which would be quite alien to the Spirit of the Church. An orthodox liturgy, that is to say, one which express[es] the true faith, is never a compilation made according to the pragmatic criteria of different ceremonies, handled in a positivist and arbitrary way, one way today and another way tomorrow. The orthodox forms of a rite are living realities, born out of the dialogue of love between the Church and her Lord. They are expressions of the life of the Church, in which are distilled the faith, the prayer and the very life of whole generations, and which make incarnate in specific forms both the action of God and the response of man. Such rites can die, if those who have used them in a particular era should disappear, or if the life-situation of those same people should change. The authority of the Church has the power to define and limit the use of such rites in different historical situations, but she never just purely and simply forbids them! Thus the Council ordered a reform of the liturgical books, but it did not prohibit the former books. The criterion which the Council established is both much larger and more demanding; it invites us all to self-criticism! But we will come back to this point.

We must now examine the other argument, which claims that the existence of the two rites can damage unity. Here a distinction must be made between the theological aspect and the practical aspect of the question. As regards what is theoretical and basic, it must be stated that several forms of the Latin rite have always existed, and were only slowly withdrawn, as a result of the coming together of the different parts of Europe. Before the Council there existed side by side with the Roman rite, the Ambrosian rite, the Mozarabic rite of Toledo, the rite of Braga, the Carthusian rite, the Carmelite rite, and best known of all, the Dominican rite, and perhaps still other rites of which I am not aware. No one was ever scandalized that the Dominicans, often present in our parishes, did not celebrate like diocesan priests but had their own rite. We did not have any doubt that their rite was as Catholic as the Roman rite, and we were proud of the richness inherent in these various traditions. Moreover, one must say this: that the freedom which the new order of Mass gives to creativity is often taken to excessive lengths. The difference between the liturgy according to the new books, how it is actually practiced and celebrated in different places, is often greater than the difference between an old Mass and a new Mass, when both these are celebrated according to the prescribed liturgical books.

An average Christian without specialist liturgical formation would find it difficult to distinguish between a Mass sung in Latin according to the old Missal and a sung Latin Mass according to the new Missal. However, the difference between a liturgy celebrated faithfully according to the Missal of Paul VI and the reality of a vernacular liturgy celebrated with all the freedom and creativity that are possible - that difference can be enormous!

With these considerations we have already crossed the threshold between theory and practice, a point at which things naturally get more complicated, because they concern relations between living people.

It seems to me that the dislikes we have mentioned are as great as they are because the two forms of celebration are seen as indicating two different spiritual attitudes, two different ways of perceiving the Church and the Christian life. The reasons for this are many. The first is this: one judges the two liturgical forms from their externals and thus one arrives at the following conclusion: there are two fundamentally different attitudes. The average Christian considers it essential for the renewed liturgy to be celebrated in the vernacular and facing the people; that there be a great deal of freedom for creativity; and that the laity exercise an active role therein. On the other hand, it is considered essential for a celebration according to the old rite to be in Latin, with the priest facing the altar, strictly and precisely according to the rubrics, and that the faithful follow the Mass in private prayer with no active role. From this viewpoint, a particular set of externals [phénoménologie] is seen as essential to this or that liturgy, rather than what the liturgy itself holds to be essential. We must hope for the day when the faithful will appreciate the liturgy on the basis of visible concrete forms, and become spiritually immersed in those forms; the faithful do not easily penetrate the depths of the liturgy.

The contradictions and oppositions which we have just enumerated originate neither from the spirit nor the letter of the conciliar texts. The actual Constitution on the Liturgy does not speak at all about celebration facing the altar or facing the people. On the subject of language, it says that Latin should be retained, while giving a greater place to the vernacular "above all in readings, instructions, and in a certain number of prayers and chants" (SL 36:2). As regards the participation of the laity, the Council first of all insists on a general point, that the liturgy is essentially the concern of the whole Body of Christ, Head and members, and for this reason it pertains to the whole Body of the Church "and that consequently it [the liturgy] is destined to be celebrated in community with the active participation of the faithful". And the text specifies "In liturgical celebrations each person, minister or lay faithful, when fulfilling his role, should carry out only and wholly that which pertains to him by virtue of the nature of the rite and the liturgical norms" (SL 28). "To promote active participation, acclamations by the people are favoured, responses, the chanting of the psalms, antiphons, canticles, also actions or gestures and bodily postures. One should also observe a period of sacred silence at an appropriate time" (SL 30).

These are the directives of the Council; they can provide everybody with material for reflection. Amongst a number of modern liturgists there is unfortunately a tendency to develop the ideas of the Council in one direction only. In acting thus, they end up reversing the intentions of the Council. The role of the priest is reduced, by some, to that of a mere functionary. The fact that the Body of Christ as a whole is the subject of the liturgy is often deformed to the point where the local community becomes the self-sufficient subject of the liturgy and itself distributes the liturgy's various roles. There also exists a dangerous tendency to minimalize the sacrificial character of the Mass, causing the mystery and the sacred to disappear, on the pretext, a pretext that claims to be absolute, that in this way they make things better understood. Finally, one observes the tendency to fragment the liturgy and to highlight in a unilateral way its communitarian character, giving the assembly itself the power to regulate the celebration.

Fortunately however, there is also a certain disenchantment with an all too banal rationalism, and with the pragmatism of certain liturgists, whether they be theorists or practitioners, and one can note a return to mystery, to adoration and to the sacred, and to the cosmic and eschatological character of the liturgy, as evidenced in the 1996 "Oxford Declaration on the Liturgy". On the other hand, it must be admitted that the celebration of the old liturgy had strayed too far into a private individualism, and that communication between priest and people was insufficient. I have great respect for our forefathers who at Low Mass said the "Prayers during Mass" contained in their prayer books, but certainly one cannot consider that as the ideal of liturgical celebration! Perhaps these reductionist forms of celebration are the real reason that the disappearance of the old liturgical books was of no importance in many countries and caused no sorrow. One was never in contact with the liturgy itself. On the other hand, in those places where the Liturgical Movement had created a certain love for the liturgy, where the Movement had anticipated the essential ideas of the Council, such as for example, the prayerful participation of all in the liturgical action, it was those places where there was all the more distress when confronted with a liturgical reform undertaken too hastily and often limited to externals. Where the Liturgical Movement had never existed, the reform initially raised no problems. The problems only appeared in a sporadic fashion, when unchecked creativity caused the sense of the sacred mystery to disappear.

This is why it is very important to observe the essential criteria of the Constitution on the Liturgy, which I quoted above, including when one celebrates according to the old Missal! The moment when this liturgy truly touches the faithful with its beauty and its richness, then it will be loved, then it will no longer be irreconcilably opposed to the new Liturgy, providing that these criteria are indeed applied as the Council wished.

Different spiritual and theological emphases will certainly continue to exist, but there will no longer be two contradictory ways of being a Christian; there will instead be that richness which pertains to the same single Catholic faith. When, some years ago, somebody proposed "a new liturgical movement" in order to avoid the two forms of the liturgy becoming too distanced from each other, and in order to bring about their close convergence, at that time some of the friends of the old liturgy expressed their fear that this would only be a stratagem or a ruse, intended to eliminate the old liturgy finally and completely.

Such anxieties and fears really must end! If the unity of faith and the oneness of the mystery appear clearly within the two forms of celebration, that can only be a reason for everybody to rejoice and to thank the good Lord. Inasmuch as we all believe, live and act with these intentions, we shall also be able to persuade the Bishops that the presence of the old liturgy does not disturb or break the unity of their diocese, but is rather a gift destined to build-up the Body of Christ, of which we are all the servants.

So, my dear friends, I would like to encourage you not to lose patience, to maintain your confidence, and to draw from the liturgy the strength needed to bear witness to the Lord in our own day.

The Gamber Preface: Paragraph 3

I have nothing to add to what Cardinal Ratzinger says in his second paragraph, but I must cover paragraph 3, since that is where one of the famous "money quotes" is found, a quote which is heard over and over again. Here is the relevant passage:

What has happened after the Council signifies a whole other thing: in place of a liturgy which is the fruit of a continual development, they have given us fabricated liturgy ("une liturgie fabriquée"). They have gone outside the living process of growth and development so as to delve into fabrication. They have no longer wanted to continue the organic development and maturation of the living thing ("du vivant") down through the centuries, and they have replaced them -- as if it were a technical production -- with a fabrication, a banal product of the moment.

In my original post I mentioned that one "Antiquarian" had objected to using this Preface as a "proof text" to demonstrate that even Cardinal Ratzinger despised the "new rite". "Antiquarian" held that such interpretations misrepresented the point of the Cardinal's words. I agree with him.

The key phrase is "they have gone outside the living process of growth and development", and the pronoun "they" needs to be concretized. As the prior article attests, "they" refers not to the Council, not to Paul VI, not even to the post-Conciliar liturgical Concilium per se, but rather to what I have translated as the "liturgical guild", in French, "le groupe des fabricants liturgiques".

The error consists in their no longer wanting "to continue the organic development and maturation of the living thing down through the centuries". This fault is made manifest by the substitution for that grasp on the authentic Origin of the liturgy, with the fruit of their own hands, "a banal product of the moment". What the "liturgical guild" has been pushing is artificial, not because the words and actions are human -- the words and actions authorized by the Church authentically are also human -- but because the "concrete" expressions that they have generated are not tapped into the Living Origin of the liturgy, the necessary link is not there, the Sacramental signs have been eviscerated.

Cardinal Ratzinger situates the work of Msgr. Gamber in opposition to this "guild" approach, both because of his devotion to the historical sources of the liturgy of the Roman Rite (history implies development, something familiar to the Western tradition), and because he shared the Eastern Churches' sense of the liturgy as "the glint of the eternal liturgy, the light of which, in the sacred action, enlightens our changing time with its immutable beauty and grandeur". In addition, he asserts that these two ways of viewing the liturgy are completely compatible, because they are both true, and non-exclusive.

Thus, Catholics should not be shaken by the abuses of the "Liturgical Guild", and the latter should cease and desist. Above all, Catholics should not engage in the kind of thinking that holds up one Form of the Roman Rite above the other (or any other Catholic Rites). The means are not the End; the means are not the Origin. God is both the Origin and the End of the liturgy, and His will for us is to be simple, faith-filled, charitable, courageous Christians, following the Holy Spirit in accordance with the teachings of His Church.

The Holy Spirit is the Source of the Church's Unity, and liturgy should foster unity and reconciliation, not reinforce divisions.

The Gamber Preface: Paragraph 1

In a previous post, I mentioned that I might have more to say about the Preface by Cardinal Ratzinger to Msgr. Klaus Gamber's "Reform of the Roman Liturgy". There are a number of interesting points for a recursive Christian, and the first one is that of "origin".

"Origin" of the Liturgy

In any recursive data structure, the main thing one has to keep track of is the origin or root of the data structure. That is because by design if one knows the origin one can access any of the other nodes.

The liturgy is not itself a "data structure" but it does have a structure, which is comprised of words (prayers and Scrpture readings) and rubrics (instructions to the priest how to act), which can be regarded as its "data". For those new to the terminology, "rubric" comes from a Latin word meaning "red", because typically the rubrics are printed in red ink in Missals intended for the priests to use in the liturgy.

Ratzinger speaks of the words of the young priest he has just mentioned as a yearning to find, and hold on to, the origin of the liturgy:

He felt that we need a new beginning emanating from the intimacy of the liturgy, just as the liturgical movement had desired when it was at the apogee of its true nature, when it was not a matter of fabricating texts, of inventing actions and forms, but of rediscovering the living center, of penetrating into the very tissue, properly speaking, of the liturgy, so that its realization have issued from its very substance.

Hence, the liturgy has a living tissue, a substance, which it is necessary that we humans tap into if we are to understand and celebrate the liturgy the way it was meant to be used. It is important to realize that the liturgy is intended to be used. It is not an end in itself, anymore than the Church is an end in herself.

The end or purpose, of course, is the Trinitarian Godhead -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- who has created all things, and keeps them in existence. Jesus Christ, the Son of God Incarnate, has founded the Church and given it all its sacraments -- there are Seven -- establishing with His foundational act the very essence of each and every one of them. The liturgy comprises all the rites and ritual surrounding the administration of those seven Sacraments (or Mysteries as they are called in the Christian East) as well as the sanctification of time, known variously down through the ages and places, but commonly called the Liturgy of the Hours. The "Church" is not the "source" of the liturgy, but its servant; the Source of the liturgy is the Triune God.

Thus, God is both the source and the end of the liturgy, and tapping into the "origin" is tapping into God, into the Holy Spirit. Only He can enliven, or quicken, the liturgy; as we say in the Creed "I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life". Moreover, unless it is He who does so for us, we Christians have wandered from the path of legitimate liturgy. He is Mystery; and that connecting to Him by us is the mystery of the Christian life, and that connection is not formed exclusively by authentic liturgy, but certainly it is nourished and energized by that liturgy. Without Him, we wander about like "strangers in a strange land".

The Effect of Wandering Away from the Origin of the Liturgy: Division

What happens when we do not tap into the true origin of the Liturgy? Cardinal Ratzinger presents 3 scenarios which were apparent then, and remain so today. First, he mentions what happens when we contemplate the work of the "liturgical guild":

On one side, we have a liturgy that has degenerated into a show, where one attempts to make religion interesting helped by fashionable nonsense and catchy moral platitudes, with short-lived successes amongst the liturgical guild, and a rather pronounced shrinking from it on the part of those who seek in the liturgy not a spiritual show-master, but an encounter with the living God before Whom all «doing» becomes meaningless, that encounter alone being capable of making us draw near to the true riches of being.

Next, he characterizes the effect of rejecting not just the "fabricating" being foisted on the Church by the liturgical guild, but also the very Rite, approved by the Church herself, and now known as the Ordinary Form of the one Roman Rite:

On the other side, there is a conservation of ritual forms whose grandeur is always moving, but which, pushed to the extreme, manifests a dogged isolation and, in the end, allows only sadness.

One can only think that those Ratzinger has in mind here are not simply Catholics who attend the Extraordinary Form of the one Roman Rite, but those who, as he puts it, "pushing to the extreme", actually take more solace in the positive aspect of celebrating according to the usus antiquior, then it tapping into the Origin of the liturgy, the Holy Spirit. Why? Because the Holy Spirit is the guarantor, the Pledge, of the Church's unity, or communion, and He is the source of Christian joy. Affirming one aspect of Catholic belief or practice by denying the validity of other aspects thereof is not the work of the Holy Spirit, nor is it authentically joyful.

Next, he mentions the situation of the "non-radicalized" members of the Church:

Surely, between those two sides, there remain all the priests and their parishioners who celebrate the new liturgy with respect and solemnity; but they are left wondering by the contradiction between the two extremes and, in the end, the lack of internal unity in the Church, makes their fidelity appear to be, wrongly for many of them, a merely idiosyncratic neoconservatism. Because that is what it has come to, a new spiritual impulse is needed so that the liturgy be for us once more a community activity of the Church, taking it back from the arbitrary grasp of curates and their liturgy teams.

In summary of this first paragraph, for us to be able to celebrate the Sacraments as Christ wanted us to do, it is essential that we always be striving to connect via the Origin of the liturgy. Those who have wandered from that Origin by striving to perfect some human techniques in place of focusing ever anew on that Origin, wind up appearing as "show-masters". The excuse often given is that there is a "need" to "enculturate the liturgy". Even were that true, enculturation cannot be "made up" or "produced", it must occur in the gradual way that all life unfolds.

Those who, sensing the inanity of that consciously manipulative approach, fall back into an extreme rejection, not just of the abuses, but also of the very Rite approved in text and rubric by the Church, create a problem themselves. By rejecting, root and branch, the Church's authority to authorize a new formulation of the liturgy, they also disconnect themselves from the Origin of the spirit of the liturgy.

For the liturgy is not intended to be a "red badge of courage" obtained in so-called "liturgy wars", but, as Ratzinger puts it toward the end of this paragraph as "une activité communautaire de l’Église", which I have translated as "a community activity of the Church", but the French goes deeper than that expression connotes. Really, it is "a common act performed in communion with our fellow Catholics in the whole Church", an expression of our being sons in the Son, co-heirs of the kingdom of God, where the "liturgy" is (right now) being celebrated continuously.

Nothing less than that is at stake.

Ratzinger's Preface to Gamber's "Reform of the Roman Liturgy: Its Problems and Background"

Because we continue to see people who make the argument that the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite shows the impoverishment of the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, in spite of the words of Pope Benedict XVI in his letter to the Bishops which accompanied the promulgation of the Motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, some anonymous person, with the avatar "Antiquarian" suggested in a recent blog combox at WDTPRS that people were opposing to the Pope's words his thoughts written in the preface to the French edition of Msgr. Klaus Gamber's well-known book on the Roman Rite, and that the translation most often quoted by them was actually a mis-translation of his words. This led me, who studied French in high school and college, to read the original three paragraphs, and make my own English translation, without the benefit of the presumed faulty translation before me (I don't own the book, nor have I read it, but I have seen this preface quoted in various places over the last several years). My French is now, forty years later, rusty, but I think I get the gist of what "Antiquarian" was driving at, and it is this. Those making the above-mentioned comparison take Ratzinger's words to apply to the texts and rubrics of the New Mass as they have come from the Vatican; what seems apparent to me in reading the original French is that this is not correct. What he opposes to the traditional Mass, the usus antiquior, is actually more the "enculturation" with which those texts have been used, especially in the parishes of those countries often understood to be the components of Western Civilization. Perhaps I will say more about this in future, but for now here is a) my English translation, followed below it by b) the original French, taken from a PDF document offered by "Antiquarian".

My translation

Recently, a young priest told me, What we need today is a new liturgical movement. His words were an expression of a hope which, in our day, only a willfully superficial spirit could discard. What was important for this priest was not the conquest of new and daring liberties: who hadn't already taken to himself such liberties? He felt that we need a new beginning emanating from the intimacy of the liturgy, just as the liturgical movement had desired when it was at the apogee of its true nature, when it was not a matter of fabricating texts, of inventing actions and forms, but of rediscovering the living center, of penetrating into the very tissue, properly speaking, of the liturgy, so that its realization have issued from its very substance. The concrete instance of liturgical reform that we have now has strayed ever farther from this origin. The upshot has not been re-quickening but havoc. On one side, we have a liturgy that has degenerated into a show, where one attempts to make religion interesting helped by fashionable nonsense and catchy moral platitudes, with short-lived successes amongst the liturgical guild, and a rather pronounced shrinking from it on the part of those who seek in the liturgy not a spiritual show-master, but an encounter with the living God before Whom all «doing» becomes meaningless, that encounter alone being capable of making us draw near to the true riches of being. On the other side, there is a conservation of ritual forms whose grandeur is always moving, but which, pushed to the extreme, manifests a dogged isolation and, in the end, allows only sadness. Surely, between those two sides, there remain all the priests and their parishioners who celebrate the new liturgy with respect and solemnity; but they are left wondering by the contradiction between the two extremes and, in the end, the lack of internal unity in the Church, makes their fidelity appear to be, wrongly for many of them, a merely idiosyncratic neoconservatism. Because that is what it has come to, a new spiritual impulse is needed so that the liturgy be for us once more a community activity of the Church, taking it back from the arbitrary grasp of curates and their liturgy teams.

One cannot «make up» a liturgical movement of that sort -- any more than one can «make up» something that is alive; but one can contribute to its development by making the effort to assimilate anew the spirit of the liturgy, and by defending publicly what one has thus received. This new beginning is in need of «fathers» who are models, and who are not happy merely to point out the way to be followed. Anyone looking for such «fathers» today will inevitably encounter the person of Msgr. Klaus Gamber, who was taken from us too soon, unfortunately, but who perhaps, precisely by leaving us, has become truly present to us in all the forcefulness of the perspectives he has opened up for us. By his very leaving us he escapes from the partisan quarrel. Thus he may be able, in this hour of distress, to become the «father» of a new beginning. Gamber bore wholeheartedly the hope of the old liturgical movement. Without any doubt, because he came from a foreign school, he remained an outsider on the German scene, where no one really wanted to give him entree; even recently, one thesis encountered significant opposition because the young researcher had dared to cite Gamber too abundantly and with too much approval. But perhaps that shunning was providential, because it forced Gamber to follow his own path, which allowed him to avoid the dead-weight of conformity.

In the midst of the quarrel of the liturgists, it is hard to express in a few words what is truly essential, and what is not. Perhaps the following pointer may prove helpful. J. A. Jungmann, one of the truly great liturgists of our century, had defined the liturgy of his time, just as it was understood in the West especially, by representing it by means of historical research, as a «liturgy fruit of a development»; probably also by contrast with the eastern notion which in the liturgy does not see the historical growth and development, but only the glint of the eternal liturgy, the light of which, in the sacred action, enlightens our changing time with its immutable beauty and grandeur. These two ways of seeing the liturgy are legitimate and definitely not irreconcilable. What has happened after the Council signifies a whole other thing: in place of a liturgy which is the fruit of a continual development, they have given us fabricated liturgy. They have gone outside the living process of growth and development so as to delve into fabrication. They have no longer wanted to continue the organic development and maturation of the living thing down through the centuries, and they have replaced them -- as if it were a technical production -- with a fabrication, a banal product of the moment. Gamber, with the vigilance of an authentic seer and the courage of a true witness, opposed this falsification and taught us tirelessly the living fullness of a true liturgy, thanks to his incredibly rich acquaintance with the sources. As a man who knew and loved history, he has shown us the many forms of development and the way of the liturgy; as a man who saw history from within it, he has seen in this development and the fruit of this development the intangible glint of the eternal liturgy, which is not the object of our making, but which can continue marvelously to ripen and blossom, if we unite ourselves intimately to its mystery. The death of this man and eminent priest ought to stimulate us; his work may help us to take up new momentum.

Because my French is a bit rusty, if any French/English speaker would like to suggest improvements to my expression, please feel free to make suggestions to the comments.

French original

TEXTE du cardinal Ratzinger paru en tête de l’édition française de La Réforme liturgique en question (Die Reform der Römischen Liturgie) par Mgr Klaus Gamber Éditions Sainte-Madeleine F-84330 LE BARROUX
Original here: Preface

Un jeune prêtre me disait récemment : Il nous faudrait aujourd’hui un nouveau mouvement liturgique. C’était là l’expression d’un souci que, de nos jours, seuls des esprits volontairement superficiels pourraient écarter. Ce qui importait à ce prêtre, ce n’était pas de conquérir de nouvelles et audacieuses libertés : quelle liberté ne s’est-on pas déjà arrogée? Il sentait que nous avions besoin d’un nouveau commencement issu de l’intime de la liturgie, comme l’avait voulu le mouvement liturgique lorsqu’il était à l’apogée de sa véritable nature, lorsqu’il ne s’agissait pas de fabriquer des textes, d’inventer des actions et des formes, mais de redécouvrir le centre vivant, de pénétrer dans le tissu proprement dit de la liturgie, pour que l’accomplissement de celle-ci soit issu de sa substance même. La réforme liturgique, dans sa réalisation concrète, s’est éloignée toujours davantage de cette origine. Le résultat n’a pas été une réanimation mais une dévastation. D’un côté, on a une liturgie dégénérée en show, où l’on essaie de rendre la religion intéressante à l’aide de bêtises à la mode et de maximes morales aguichantes, avec des succès momentanés dans le groupe des fabricants liturgiques, et une attitude de recul d’autant plus prononcée chez ceux qui cherchent dans la liturgie non pas le showmaster spirituel, mais la rencontre avec le Dieu vivant devant qui tout «faire» devient insignifiant, seule cette rencontre étant capable de nous faire accéder aux vraies richesses de l’être. De l’autre côté, il y a conservation des formes rituelles dont la grandeur émeut toujours, mais qui, poussée à l’extrême, manifeste un isolement opiniâtre et ne laisse finalement que tristesse. Certes, il reste entre les deux tous les prêtres et leurs paroissiens qui célèbrent la nouvelle liturgie avec respect et solennité; mais ils sont remis en question par la contradiction entre les deux extrêmes, et le manque d’unité interne dans l’Église fait finalement paraître leur fidélité, à tort pour beaucoup d’entre eux, comme une simple variété personnelle de néoconservatisme. Parce qu’il en est ainsi, une nouvelle impulsion spirituelle est nécessaire pour que la liturgie soit à nouveau pour nous une activité communautaire de l’Église et qu’elle soit arrachée à l’arbitraire des curés et de leurs équipes liturgiques.

On ne peut pas « fabriquer » un mouvement liturgique de cette sorte — pas plus qu’on ne peut « fabriquer » quelque chose de vivant —, mais on peut contribuer à son développement en s’efforçant d’assimiler à nouveau l’esprit de la liturgie et en défendant publiquement ce qu’on a ainsi reçu. Ce nouveau départ a besoin de «pères» qui soient des modèles, et qui ne se contentent pas d’indiquer la voie à suivre. Qui cherche aujourd’hui de tels « pères » rencontrera immanquablement la personne de Mgr Klaus Gamber, qui nous a malheureusement été enlevé trop tôt, mais qui peut-être, précisément en nous quittant, nous est devenu véritablement présent dans toute la force des perspectives qu’il nous a ouvertes. Justement parce qu’en nous quittant il échappe à la querelle des partis, il pourrait, en cette heure de détresse, devenir le « père » d’un nouveau départ. Gamber a porté de tout son coeur l’espoir de l’ancien mouvement liturgique. Sans doute, parce qu’il venait d’une école étrangère, est-il resté un outsider sur la scène allemande, où on ne voulait pas vraiment l’admettre; encore récemment une thèse a rencontré des difficultés importantes parce que le jeune chercheur avait osé citer Gamber trop abondamment et avec trop de bienveillance. Mais peut-être que cette mise à l’écart a été providentielle, parce qu’elle a forcé Gamber à suivre sa propre voie et qu’elle lui a évité le poids du conformisme.

Il est difficile d’exprimer en peu de mots ce qui, dans la querelle des liturgistes, est vraiment essentiel et ce qui ne l’est pas. Peut-être que l’indication suivante pourrait être utile. J. A. Jungmann, l’un des vraiment grands liturgistes de notre siècle, avait défini en son temps la liturgie, telle qu’on l’entendait en Occident en se la représentant surtout à travers la recherche historique, comme une «liturgie fruit d’un développement»; probablement aussi par contraste avec la notion orientale qui ne voit pas dans la liturgie le devenir et la croissance historiques, mais seulement le reflet de la liturgie éternelle, dont la lumière, à travers le déroulement sacré, éclaire notre temps changeant de sa beauté et de sa grandeur immuables. Les deux conceptions sont légitimes et ne sont en définitive pas inconciliables. Ce qui s’est passé après le Concile signifie tout autre chose: à la place de la liturgie fruit d’un développement continu, on a mis une liturgie fabriquée. On est sorti du processus vivant de croissance et de devenir pour entrer dans la fabrication. On n’a plus voulu continuer le devenir et la maturation organiques du vivant à travers les siècles, et on les a remplacés — à la manière de la production technique — par une fabrication, produit banal de l’instant. Gamber, avec la vigilance d’un authentique voyant et avec l’intrépidité d’un vrai témoin, s’est opposé à cette falsification et nous a enseigné inlassablement la vivante plénitude d’une liturgie véritable, grâce à sa connaissance incroyablement riche des sources. En homme qui connaissait et aimait l’histoire, il nous a montré les formes multiples du devenir et du chemin de la liturgie; en homme qui voyait l’histoire de l’intérieur, il a vu dans ce développement et le fruit de ce développement le reflet intangible de la liturgie éternelle, laquelle n’est pas objet de notre faire, mais qui peut continuer merveilleusement à mûrir et à s’épanouir, si nous nous unissons intimement à son mystère. La mort de cet homme et prêtre éminent devrait nous stimuler; son oeuvre pourrait nous aider à prendre un nouvel élan.