God has become “obscured” in the liturgy, resulting in a crisis for the Church, Benedict XVI has said.
In a foreword to the Russian edition of his collected liturgical writings, reproduced in La Stampa, the Pope Emeritus said that a misunderstanding of the nature of liturgy had led to man putting “his own activity and creativity” at the heart of worship.
“Nothing precedes divine worship,” he said. “With these words, St Benedict, in his Rule (43.3), established the absolute priority of divine worship over any other task of monastic life.”
Even though agricultural and academic work were heavily time-consuming, St Benedict made sure the liturgy received maximum attention, emphasising “the priority of God Himself in our lives”, he said. Today, however, “the things of God and thus the liturgy do not appear urgent at all”.
The Church “lives from proper celebration of the liturgy” and is in danger when “the primacy of God no longer appears in the liturgy nor consequently in life”, the Pope Emeritus said. “The deepest cause of the crisis that has upset the Church lies in the obscuring of the priority of God in the liturgy.
“If God is no longer important, the criteria for establishing what is important are displaced,” Benedict said. If man set God aside, he would end up a “slave to material forces.”
It is not the first time Benedict XVI has spoken of a Church crisis since he stepped down as pope. In a message at the funeral of Cardinal Joachim Meisner, he said he was impressed by the cardinal’s “deep conviction that the Lord does not abandon His Church, even if the boat has taken on so much water as to be on the verge of capsizing”.
Benedict also said that the liturgy was in “good hands” with the appointment of Cardinal Robert Sarah as Vatican liturgy chief, in an afterword to the cardinal’s book The Power of Silence.
Priest ‘liquidated like an insect’ is declared a Blessed
A Slovakian priest who died from torture and radiation poisoning after forced labour in Czechoslovakia’s uranium mines has been beatified.
Salesian Fr Titus Zeman, who died in 1969, was declared a Blessed during Mass in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava, by Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Saints’ Causes and himself a Salesian.
The cardinal said Fr Zeman had faced “genuine persecution” after World War II as the new communist government arrested clergy and suppressed Catholic schools and associations, but that he had shown that “love is stronger than hatred”.
Blessed Zeman was sacked as a science teacher after opposing the removal of crosses at his school. He smuggled more than a dozen seminarians out of the country before being captured and condemned to death for treason.
Instead he spent 13 years in the notorious Jachymov mine before dying from mistreatment after his release.
Cardinal Amato said that being sent to the uranium mine meant he was destined for “physical liquidation, like an insect”, in extreme hardship. He “ignored the evil suffering” and later refused to divulge the names of his betrayers.
Pope to hold pre-synod summit
Pope Francis has invited Christian and non-Christian young people from around the world to a meeting in preparation for the synod of bishops on youth in 2018. At the end of his general audience the Pope said that the pre-synod meeting on March 19-24 would be a chance to “listen to the voices, the sensibilities, the faith as well as the doubts and criticisms of young people”. The theme for the synod next October is: “Young people, faith and vocational discernment.”
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