The Farnés and Ratzinger Dialogue on The Spirit of the Liturgy

In the fifty years since the Second Vatican Council many books have been written on liturgy and the merits of the revised liturgical books. Few of these match Cardinal Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy published in German in 1999. This work now forms the centerpiece of Volume 11 of Joseph Ratzinger’s Collected Works.¹ At the time of its publication, the work was understood by most observers to be a highly significant contribution to the debate on the current state of Catholic liturgy. Many welcomed the book’s call for a new “liturgical movement,^”2 but the work did not meet a lot of acceptance from “professional” liturgists and those who teach liturgical studies at many universities. In particular, Cardinal Ratzinger’s support for the tradition of celebrating the Eucharist ad orientem met with a lot of disagreement. Pope Benedict would later comment on this in his preface to the volume of his collected works,

Unfortunately almost all of the reviews jumped on a single chapter: “The Altar and the Direction of Liturgical Prayer.” Readers of these reviews must have concluded that the whole work dealt only with the direction in which Mass is celebrated; that it was all about trying to reintroduce Mass celebrated by the priest “with his back to the people.” Given this distortion, I thought for a while about omitting this chapter—nine pages out of a total of two hundred—so that finally a discussion could begin about essential things in the books about which I had been and am concerned.³

When he wrote The Spirit of the Liturgy Cardinal Ratzinger did not it write as a document of the Magisterium, but in his capacity as a private theologian. As a scholar and a pastor Joseph Ratzinger has always been marked by a gentleness and respect for other opinions, while at the same time not being afraid of expressing his own opinion, even when he knew it would be strongly disagreed with. When he was appointed as Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, it was very important to him that he be allowed to continue writing as a private theologian.⁴ In his introduction to the first volume of his Jesus of Nazareth trilogy, after his election to the Petrine office, he summed up his place as a theologian:

It goes without saying that this book is in no way an exercise of the magisterium, but is solely an expression of my personal search “for the face of the Lord” (cf. Ps 27:8). Everyone is free then to contradict me. I would only ask my readers for the initial goodwill without which there can be no understanding.⁵

Cardinal Ratzinger may have been surprised by the vigorous reaction to the publication of The Spirit of the Liturgy by the liturgical establishment. But he did not ignore all of the criticisms he received. In fact, Cardinal Ratzinger did answer a number of the book reviews on The Spirit of the Liturgy. One such exchange has been published in an earlier issue of Antiphon and his response to another Protestant scholar can be found in his Theology of the Liturgy.⁶ Here we present a translation of an exchange from the pages of the Spanish liturgical journal Phase between Canon Pedro Farnés and Cardinal Ratzinger. Farnés is not very well known outside the Spanish-speaking world, but, as a disciple of Dom Bernard Botte, he was a very influential liturgist in the years after Vatican II working as a seminary professor and as one of the founders of the Center for Pastoral Liturgy (Centro de Pastoral Litúrgica) of the Archdiocese of Barcelona. He was also involved in editing the Spanish language vernacular version of some of the ritual editions of the liturgical books in use in Spain and Latin America. Farnés published a review of The Spirit of the Liturgy in Phase (the journal of the Center for Pastoral Liturgy) in 2002. He forwarded a copy of his review to Cardinal...