Celebrating the Liturgy with Pope Benedict XVI

Even the New Yorker magazine has commented on the Holy Father celebrating Mass. A feature article of July 2005 titled "Vatican Notebook," though not exactly friendly, said, "Pope Benedict's deep love of the liturgy is manifest whenever he engages in the priestly acts that mean so much to him. Young Catholics describe with phosphorescent enthusiasm the delicacy and devotion with which the Pope celebrates Mass. His loving eulogy for Pope John Paul II and the funeral Mass over which he presided filled cardinals and pilgrims alike with affection for him and helped him win rapid election as Pope."¹ 


It's what we saw on our television screens as Cardinal Ratzinger celebrated the funeral Mass for Pope John Paul II and then the Mass for his own installation as Bishop of Rome. Pope Benedict celebrating Mass gives a powerful message for the life of the Church and her mission in the world. It is a glimpse of what the renewal of the liturgy proposed by the Second Vatican Council really means when it is understood and practiced as part of the unbroken tradition of the Catholic Church that mediates the revelation given in Jesus Christ.


In the memoirs that he wrote in 1997 Cardinal Ratzinger tells of his seminarian study of theology at the University of Munich immediately after the Second World War. He mentions one of his teachers, Professor Joseph Pascher, who taught pastoral theology; he writes, "Pascher's conferences, and the reverential manner in which he taught us to celebrate the liturgy in keeping with its deepest nature, made me a follower of the liturgical movement."² 


An awareness of the deepest nature of the Church's worship and a reverential attitude in celebrating it—those were among the chief goals of the liturgical movement that has increasingly given vitality to the Catholic liturgy over the past one hundred years. Some of its earliest impetus came in 1903 from the appeal of Pope St. Pius X for "an active participation by Catholics in the mysteries and in the public and solemn prayer of the Church."³ 


In November 1947 Pope Pius XII gave a tremendous thrust to the movement with his encyclical Mediator Dei ("On Divine Worship"). Catholic worship is more than a matter of ceremonies or rubrics, said Pius XII. He focused on the supernatural reality contained in the liturgical rites. The liturgy, he said, is an exercise of the priesthood of Jesus Christ and of his body which is the Church.


The next great event in that liturgical renewal took place in November1964 with the promulgation of the Second Vatican Council's Constitution on the Liturgy. That document gave partial but very important and far-reaching expression to the vision outlined by Pope Pius XII. It set out to show that in the liturgy, by means of signs perceptible to the senses, the sanctification of human beings is signified and brought about in ways proper to each of those signs; in the liturgy the whole public worship is performed by the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, that is, by the head and his members. Along with that understanding the council proposed a renewal of the forms of that liturgy. I was in Rome doing postgraduate study in theology when that document of the council was promulgated, and I shared fully in the enthusiasm and euphoria that it generated. 


A couple of years later, in July 1966, having concluded my academic work and before leaving Rome to go back to New Zealand, I went to St. Peter's to celebrate Mass. Afterward, in the sacristy, I noticed an elderly priest also unvesting. It was Monsignor Martin Hellriegel, the pastor of Holy Cross parish in St. Louis, Missouri, and a great pastoral pioneer of the liturgical movement in the United States. I said to him, "Monsignor, you must be so very pleased that your life's work in promoting the renewal of the liturgy is crowned by the Constitution on the Liturgy." He paused before replying. "Yes," he said, "the Constitution on the Liturgy is a great thing for the Church...