“Are you resolved to celebrate the mysteries of Christ faithfully and religiously as the Church has handed them down to us for the glory of God and the sanctification of God's people?”

 

 

(Pontificale Romanum. De Ordinatione Episcopi, presbyterorum et diaconorum,

Edition typica (Typis Polyglotis Vaticanis 1990))

 

 

Dear brothers in the Priesthood,

 

The ministry which Our Lord Jesus Christ has, through the Church, entrusted to us, sees its most particular and irreplaceable expression in the Munus Sanctificandi. This is made real in the celebration of the “mysteries of Christ” which, again in an essential manner, engage, one could almost say “consume”, the best energies of the apostolate.

 

This “celebration” in which we are engaged is not “other” to the active apostolate and the mission: the Work of God is accomplished through the very sanctification of His people. This work “occurs” in the celebration of His mysteries, which are encountered with created freedom. Too often the truth has been overlooked that it is exactly through the celebration of the mysteries that the Salvation brought about by Christ the Lord is perennially actuated. 

 

The Church asks her minsters to celebrate “faithfully and religiously”. The two adjectives signify, respectively, the interior and exterior attitude of the celebrations. Pietas, that noble human sentiment, far from indicating an empty devotionalism, brings one immediately to that high sense of nobility and religiosity, of recognition and respect for the Sacred which must characterise the exercise of the Munus Sanctificandi. Piety and devotion - according to its proper meaning as a vowed offering of one’s life - are sentiments that are typical of the one who truly loves the Lord and who handles “His things” with that respect and tenderness which the heart, without any pressure, naturally gives to the Beloved. Faithfulness is determined both by the respect given to the forms established by the Church, by which the mysteries are to be celebrated, forms that are objective and universal, never arbitrary or tailored according to local or personal emotive exigencies, and by the “constancy” with which they are celebrated. The Liturgy, which is above all a divine act, does not live by “creative subjectivity” but by “faithful repetition” which never burdens us because it is the sign, in space and time, of the faithfulness of God himself. True creativity is really that of the heart which is always renewed because it is in love.

 

The mysteries are celebrated “for the glory of God and the sanctification of God's people”: it is not a casual order of factors which surely remain co-essential. We celebrate always “for the glory of God”, that is to say interiorly turned towards the Lord, in that verticality which is proper to the celebratory action, a window thrown open to eternity and an irruption of the Eternal in time. The priest, more than being the “animator” of prayer must be one who prays: prayer, in fact, is “animated” by actually praying and by demonstrating in concrete things its irreplaceable centrality. “For the glory of God” also means recognising the Glory of the Lord in divine worship: the care of the liturgy, the choice of chant and music, the preparation of the altar, the beauty of vestments and furnishings, all speak of who we are, to whom we belong, and what is at the core of our being; it all speaks of Who we are praying to and what we are truly celebrating. All this descends like gently falling rain and “refreshing dew”, upon the Holy People of God, for whose good the mysteries of the Lord are celebrated “for sanctification”! The life of the Priest is profoundly “cultic” so that all the baptised may, by means of the ordained ministry, succeed in offering to God their own being as “a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Eph. 5:2).

 

All this “as the Church has handed them down to us”. The efficaciousness and, indeed, the validity of the celebration of the mysteries consists in this: that they be “as the Church has handed them down to us”:  within in a history of two millennia which, above and beyond every particular period, has in Jesus Christ its proper origin and, through His permanence in the world by means of the Church, has its meaning. We receive a precious inheritance from the past and we are called to hand it on (tradere) intact to our brethren with all its richness and, when the Spirit and supernatural Grace allow, enriched by our faith and testimony.

 

This verticality, piety, faithfulness and obedience to the ecclesial Tradition are an authentic guarantee of the realisation of the Priest, who is such in order to “celebrate the mysteries of Christ”.

 

From the Vatican, 15th August 2009

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

XMauro Piacenza

Titular Archbishop of Vittoriana

Secretary