Towards an Ars Celebrandi in the Liturgy

Towards an Ars Celebrandi in the Liturgy Most Rev. Malcolm Ranjith Introduction The Oxford English Dictionary defines art as “the expression or application of creative skills and imagination,” or as “various branches of creative activity,” or even as “a skill at doing a specific thing.” St Thomas Aquinas defined it as “the right judgment about things to be produced.” What is common in these definitions is that art is generally understood as something closely connected to human activity and skill. And its use in connection with liturgy has been a late development, especially during the postconciliar period. It has been felt even more specifically within the last two decades. But, its general orientation has been more in relation to skills and dispositions of celebrating liturgy well and in such a way that it would become in itself an art, an experience of beauty in a rather aesthetic sense. Such enthusiasm is attested in a document issued in 1992 by the Italian Association of Professors of Liturgy entitled, To Celebrate in Spirit and in Truth. It affirms: “Rhythm, order and style, three terms that belong by right to the art of celebrating, because they belong to the reign of every art and to the great reign of the language of communication . They express the rule of beauty, the measure by which perfection is measured, the completeness of that which is fully realized and of that which is perfectly expressed. They express the yearning of every artistic initiation and every vision of beauty.” Thus, with time this expression assumed a profoundly anthropological orientation. It entered liturgical vocabulary as something that   Keynote Address at the Gateway Liturgical Conference, hosted by the Office of Worship of the Archdiocese of St Louis, St Louis, Missouri, 7-8 November 2008. It is published here with minor editorial changes and with the archbishop’s kind permission.   Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II q. 57 a. 4, in Summa Theologiae: First Complete American Edition in Three Volumes, Literally Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, vol. 1 (New York: Benziger, 1947) 830.   Associazione Professori di Liturgia, Celebrare in Spirito e Verità: Sussidio teologico-pastorale per la formazione liturgica (Rome: C.L.V .–Edizioni Liturgiche, 1992) 139; author’s translation. Antiphon 13.1 (2009): 7-17  Most Rev . Malcolm Ranjith expresses the necessary human action in the liturgy. In a socio-cultural context which tends to reduce the importance given to the role of the divine in human life and which gives pride of place to that which is essentially human and “this worldly,” the danger in positing a socalled art of celebrating the liturgy, in a purely humanistic sense, is not minimal. Indeed, if the ars celebrandi is to be understood as something based on human skills only, then we have missed the point altogether. Whatever serves as the foundation for creative human art and skills cannot ipso facto be transferred to the liturgy. But in some circles any acceptance of the term ars celebrandi is interpreted as a glorification of a sense of horizontalism. Ars celebrandi and Actuosa participatio That probably was the reason behind the clarification of Pope Benedict XVI on that subject in the post-synodal apostolic exhortation responding to the October 2005 Synod of Bishops, Sacramentum caritatis. Indeed the Holy Father alludes to this danger when he affirms : “In the course of the synod there was frequent insistence on the need to avoid any antithesis between the ars celebrandi, the art of proper celebration, and the full, active and fruitful participation of all the faithful.” The pope thus seemed, in the first instance, to indicate the need to adopt an ars celebrandi in order to celebrate the liturgy well, while at the same time insisting on the fact that “full, active and fruitful participation of all the faithful” cannot be realized without that. In other words, he seemed to indicate that actuosa participatio could not really happen unless the harmonious, beautiful, and orderly celebration of the liturgy was ensured. Without a properly understood and effected ars celebrandi, the liturgy would probably end up being merely a series of meaningless, chaotic and insipid actions. He affirms this emphatically when he states: “The primary way...