Peter Costello
Predictably, Cardinal Robert Sarah’s comments at the recent Sacra Liturgia conference in London have met with widespread debate and even heated disagreement online, so much so that Durban’s Cardinal Wilfrid Napier has tweeted from his @CardinalNapier account: “Cardinal Sarah addresses a meeting in London on subject no one has been consulted on, and everyone is jumping up and down. Hard to make out!”
A key part of Cardinal Sarah’s address had been, as is widely reported, a call for priests to resume celebrating the Mass – or, at any rate, those parts of it explicitly addressing God – facing East with the people.
The Pope’s confidant, Fr Antonio Spadaro SJ, has clearly not been persuaded of the need for this, tweeting repeatedly from @antoniospadaro to say such things as: “The priest, FACING THE PEOPLE and extending and then joining his hands, invites the people to pray – Institutio Generalis Missalis Romani 146.”
Quotations from the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM) seem a risky thing to introduce, however, with one tweeter citing Uwe Michael Lang’s 2004 book Turning Towards the Lord: Orientation in Liturgical Prayer to note how “the rubrics of the renewed Missale Romanum of Paul VI presuppose a common direction of priest and people for the core of the Eucharistic liturgy”, with at several points in the instructions the priest being described as turning towards the people.
Phrases such as “ad altare versus”, used in the GIRM, would be redundant if the priest was expected to be standing behind the altar facing the people, he quotes.
Worthwhile
Sr Catherine Wybourne’s ibenedictines.org is always a worthwhile spot for sensible and insightful comments, and on this occasion the so-called @digitalnun doesn’t disappoint.
Opening by saying that one might expect Benedictines like her community to have a serious interest in the practice and theology of liturgy, she says her community, “tiny though it is, has always tried to ensure that our liturgy is all that it should be: orthodox, reverent, beautiful, unhurried”.
While having no issue with any of the highlights from Cardinal Sarah’s speech that had been doing the rounds on social media, Sr Catherine said she had found that “following the Sacra Liturgia conference from afar, however, has been a mixed experience”.
Crucially, she said: “First, there is the fact that we have only had edited highlights so far, plus the reports and photos of social media friends who have attended. Context and nuance are important, and we haven’t been able to assess those.” (The cardinal’s comments have since been published in full at ccwatershed.org/blog.)
Contrasting the community’s own praying of the Divine Office with the Mass, for which they must depend on others, she points out that “when we go out of the monastery for Mass — which is nearly always the case — we have to accept whatever is offered, which can be problematic, especially if, as sometimes happens, liturgical rules are flouted or we simply find ourselves out of sympathy with the tone of the celebration”.
The tone can vary even when liturgy is not flouted, she points out, noting how she once spoke to a liturgically-minded deacon whose ideal of the Mass was a late Baroque High Mass, whereas her vision of the Mass was much older.
“For him, a sanctuary crowded with male servers and Baroque splendour was the ideal he carried in his mind’s eye, whereas for me, it was the sparer forms of Late Antique Rome,” she writes, acknowledging that the objective character of the liturgy matters much more than personal taste, and conceding that people will differ on these things.
Wondering whether arguments about liturgy can seem remote to people with more immediate concerns, she nonetheless stresses that all liturgy is about becoming closer to God.
“It is easy to make a great deal of noise about it; much harder to allow the liturgy to do its intended work in us. That is what I suggest we must pray about today and every day.”