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In the Heart of the Church: Archbishop Charles Chaput |
 Glorify
God by your life: evangelization and the renewal of the liturgy
Archbishop Charles Chaput
June 24, 2010
Archbishop Chaput
reflects on questions of evangelization and the renewal of Catholic
liturgy. He examines the key issues of today’s liturgical worship
within the context of American culture. Where does the Catholic
liturgy fit in a culture which prizes technology, science and
material proof, but has lost the vocabulary to understand humanity’s
oldest and deepest need: faith in an unseen God?
I’m very honored to be here tonight. This annual lecture reminds us
that the Church in Chicago has played an historic role not only in
the renewal of the liturgy, but also in the evangelization of
America.
The vision of Cardinal Mundelein and Cardinal Stritch, along with
the pioneering efforts of priests like Msgr. Hillenbrand and lay
apostolates like the Catholic Family Movement, bore lasting fruit.
They gave the Church an infusion of apostolic energy that nearly a
century later still informs our worship and our Catholic witness in
this culture.
So I’m happy to pay tribute to that. But the fact that this
Institute is celebrating its 10th anniversary also reminds us that
the Chicago legacy is being carried on with zeal and intelligence
under the leadership of my friend, Cardinal Francis George.
I’m a member of the bishops’s Committee on Divine Worship and I’ve
been honored to work with Cardinal George on the next major
development in the liturgical renewal—the English translation of the
new edition of the Roman Missal, which we begin implementing in the
United States sometime next year.
But I’m not here to talk about the new Missal tonight. I’ve been
asked to speak on the broader questions of evangelization and the
renewal of the liturgy, and I will. I do need to mention one caveat,
though: The thoughts I offer you tonight are mine alone. I don’t
speak for any of my brother bishops, or for the bishops’ conference;
and I’m very happy to defer to Cardinal George’s judgment in all
matters Catholic.
I want to start our conversation in an unlikely place. The scene is
Mainz, Germany, April 1964. Just a few months earlier, in December
1963, Vatican II had published its groundbreaking document on the
liturgy. Sacrosanctum Concilium was rightly hailed as the
distillation of the practical and theological genius of the
liturgical movement.
These were heady days, and the group gathering in Mainz for the
Third German Liturgical Conference was understandably in a
self-congratulatory mood. One of their friends, a pioneering
theologian in the continental liturgical movement, could not join
them. That friend was Father Romano Guardini, author of the now
classic work, The Spirit of the Liturgy.
Though he couldn’t be there, Guardini sent a long open letter that
was read to the conference. In it, he praised the work of Vatican II
as a testimony that the Holy Spirit was alive and guiding the
Church. He saw Sacrosanctum Concilium opening a new phase in the
liturgical movement.
But the bulk of his letter was a complex meditation on the meaning
of worship. And in his final lines he offered an opinion that left
people stunned. He wrote:
“Is not the liturgical act, and with it all that goes under the name
‘liturgy,’ so bound up with the historical background—antique or
medieval or baroque—that it would be more honest to give it up
altogether? Would it not be better to admit that man in this
industrial and scientific age, with its new sociological structure,
is no longer capable of the liturgical act?”i
Guardini’s remark caused quite a stir. But there’s no evidence that
theologians or liturgists ever took his concerns seriously. Let me
say that I do. I think he put his finger on one of the key questions
of mission in his time, and also in ours.
What Guardini meant by the liturgical act was the transformation of
personal prayer and piety into genuine corporate worship, the
leitourgia, the public service that the Church offers to God. He
recognized that the Church’s corporate prayer was very different
from the private prayer of individual believers.
The liturgical act requires a new kind of consciousness, a
“readiness toward God,” an inward awareness of the unity of the
whole person, body and soul, with the spiritual body of the Church,
present in heaven and on earth. It also requires an appreciation
that the sacred signs and actions of the Mass -- standing, kneeling,
singing and so forth -- are themselves “prayer.”
Guardini believed that the spirit of the modern world was
undermining the beliefs that made this liturgical consciousness
possible. His insight here is that our faith and worship don’t take
place in a vacuum. We’re always to some extent products of our
culture. Our frameworks of meaning, our perceptions of reality, are
shaped by the culture in which we live – whether we like it or not.
I want to engage Guardini’s challenge in our current American
context. Let’s consider some of the evidence: We live in a society
where the organizing principle is technological progress, conceived
in narrow, scientific and materialistic terms. Our culture is
dominated by the assumptions of this scientific and materialistic
worldview. We judge what is “true” and what is “real” by what we can
see, touch and verify through research and experimentation.
In this kind of culture, what meaning can there be for the
traditional Catholic notion that the human person is created in the
image of an invisible God; that the person is a creature of body and
soul, infused with “the Spirit of sonship”ii through the liturgy and
the sacraments?
In practice, almost nothing of what we believe as Catholics is
affirmed by our culture. Even the meaning of the words “human” and
“person” are subject to debate. And other tenets of the Catholic
worldview are aggressively repudiated or ignored.
The question becomes: What implications does all this have for our
worship -- in which we profess to be in contact body and soul with
spiritual realities, singing with the angels and saints in heaven,
receiving the true Body and Blood of our once dead and now risen
Lord on the altar?
Here’s another datum: We’re surrounded in our daily lives by
monuments to our power over nature and necessity. The trophies of
our autonomy and self-sufficiency are everywhere -- buildings,
machines, medicines, inventions. Everything seems to point to our
capacity to provide for our every need through our own know-how and
technology.
Again the question becomes: What does this do to the central premise
of our worship -- that we are creatures dependent upon our Creator,
and that we owe thanksgiving to God for every good gift, beginning
with the gift of life?
We can ask the same questions about our mission of evangelization.
We preach the good news that this world has a Savior who can free us
from the bondage of sin and death. What can our good news mean in a
world where people don’t believe in sin or that there is anything
they need to be saved from? What does the promise of victory over
death mean to people who don’t believe in the existence of any
reality beyond this visible world?
So is Guardini right? Does modern man seem incapable of real
worship? I think so. But the more important question for us is this:
If he is right, what are we going to do about it?
One of the few people who have wrestled with the issues Guardini
raised is a Chicago priest who’s made his own important
contributions to the liturgical and intellectual renewal of the
Church, Father Robert Barron.
Barron puts the issue this way: “The project is not shaping the
liturgy according to the suppositions of the age, but allowing the
liturgy to question and shape the suppositions of any age. Is the
modern man incapable of the liturgical act? Probably. But this is no
ground for despair. Our goal is not to accommodate the liturgy to
the world, but to let the liturgy be itself -- a transformative icon
of the ordo of God.”
Barron suggests that in the post-conciliar era, the professional
Catholic liturgical establishment opted for the former path, trying
to adapt the liturgy to the demands of modern culture. I would
agree. And I would add that time has shown this to be a dead end.
Trying to engineer the liturgy to be more “relevant” and
“intelligible” through a kind of relentless cult of novelty, has
only resulted in confusion and a deepening of the divide between
believers and the true spirit of the liturgy.iii
I’m not here to reargue old debates. We need to be looking forward
to Jesus Christ. That means we need to take up the challenge implied
in Guardini’s question. The next great task of the liturgical
renewal is to build an authentic Eucharistic culture, to instill a
new sacramental and liturgical sensibility that enables Catholics to
face the idols and suppositions of our culture with the confidence
of believers who draw life from the sacred mysteries, in which we
have communion with the living God.
We need to discover new ways to enter into the liturgical mystery;
to realize the central place of the liturgy in God’s plan of
salvation; to truly live our lives as a spiritual offering to God;
and to embrace our responsibilities for the Church’s mission with a
renewed Eucharistic spirituality.
I hope the rest of my talk will offer a small contribution to this
next task of our renewal. I have four points I’d like to make.
The first is this: We need to recover the intrinsic and inseparable
connection between liturgy and evangelization.
Liturgy is both the source of the Church’s mission and its goal.
This was the teaching of Christ and the practice of the early
Church. And it was reaffirmed by Vatican II.
Sacrosanctum Concilium says this: “The liturgy is the summit toward
which the activity of the Church is directed; at the same time it is
the font from which all her power flows. For the aim and object of
apostolic works is that all who are made sons of God by faith and
baptism should come together to praise God in the midst of his
Church, to take part in the sacrifice, and to eat the Lord's
Supper.”iv
This is a beautiful vision of life lived from the Eucharist and for
the Eucharist. This should be the foundation not only for our
thinking about the liturgy but for our pastoral strategies as well.
The reason we evangelize is in order to bring people into communion
with the living God in the Eucharistic liturgy. And this experience
of communion with God, in turn, impels us to evangelize.
In this regard, the Novus Ordo, the new order of the Mass
promulgated after the council, has been a great blessing to the
Church. Our liturgy gives us the zeal for the evangelization and
sanctification of our world. The vernacular has opened up the
liturgy’s content in new ways. It has encouraged active, creative
participation by all the faithful -- not only in the liturgy but in
every aspect of the Church’s mission.
By the way, for the record, I’m also very grateful that the Holy
Father has allowed wider use of the older Tridentine form -- not
because I personally prefer it, in fact I find the Novus Ordo,
properly celebrated, a much richer expression of worship; but
because we need access to all of the Church’s heritage of prayer and
faith.
So my first point is that we cannot look at the liturgy as something
distinct from our mission. Our worship of God in the Mass is meant
to be an act of adoration, submission and thanksgiving. It’s also
meant to be loving acceptance of our vocation as disciples. That’s
why every Eucharistic liturgy ends on a missionary note -- we are
sent out, commissioned to share the treasure we have discovered with
everyone we meet.
Here’s my second point: The liturgy is a participation in the
liturgy of heaven, in which we worship in Spirit and truth with the
worldwide Church and the communion of saints.v
This may be the most neglected dimension of the liturgy today. If
our liturgies strike us as pedestrian, narrowly parochial, too
focused on our own communities and needs; if they lack a powerful
sense of the sacred and the transcendent, it’s because we have lost
the sense of how our worship participates in the heavenly liturgy.
To appreciate this a little more, we should recall the legend of how
Christianity came to Russia. The story goes that around 988, Prince
Vladimir I of Kiev was searching for a national religion. He sent
ambassadors to neighboring countries to seek out the respective
virtues of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. During the course of
their fact-finding journey the prince’s men had occasion to attend a
Eucharistic celebration in the great Church of Hagia Sophia in
Constantinople.
They were overcome with awe. They went back home and filed this
report: “We came to the Greeks, and we were taken to the place where
they worship their God. … We do not know whether we have been in
heaven or on earth. … We know only that God dwells there among
men.”vi Not long after that, Vladimir was baptized and exhorted all
his countrymen to be baptized too.
The source for this story is ancient, and many historians today
believe the account is apocryphal. But even so, it illuminates the
cosmic and missionary dimensions of the liturgy.
The Eucharist, as the Prince of Kiev’s men were said to have
experienced it, is a cosmic liturgy that unites the worship of
heaven with our worship here on earth. In the Divine Liturgy, the
Kingdom comes on earth as it is in heaven. Heaven and earth are
filled with the glory of God. This is what we believe, but I’m not
sure how many believers actually live it.
We see the heavenly liturgy in the Book of Revelation. Remember how
Revelation begins. St. John is “in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day.” In
other words, he was celebrating the Eucharist on a Sunday when he
was given a vision of the worship of heaven and the world to
come.vii
The book is filled with liturgical and sacramental imagery. At one
point John sees an uncountable multitude from every tribe, tongue,
people and nation worshipping before the Eucharistic Lamb. The
climax of the book is the coming of “a new heaven and a new earth”
and the announcement: “Behold, the dwelling of God is with men.”
There are two points I want to make here: First, our worship is an
icon of heavenly things, a window through which the reality and
destiny of our lives is glimpsed.
Second, the heavenly liturgy is the key to the universality of the
Church’s mission. In the Catholic vision of history, God’s plan of
salvation is destined to culminate in a cosmic liturgy in which all
creation gives praise and glory to God, the Creator of all things.
We have a foretaste of the liturgical consummation of history every
time we celebrate the liturgy on earth.
This truth should transform the way we worship. It should move us
with gratitude that our God would grant us the privilege of joining
the angels and saints who worship before him. It should make us
strive for liturgies that are reverent and beautiful, and that point
our hearts and minds to things above.
This truth should also change the way we think about our public
witness in this culture. We’re called to testify to Jesus Christ, to
make his teachings known, to fight against all that violates God’s
holiness and justice. And we need to understand our mission in the
light of God’s larger plan, conceived before the foundation of the
world.
The ultimate purpose of our witness is to prepare the way for the
cosmic liturgy in which all humanity will adore the Creator. Our
work takes part in this redemptive plan in which Christ continues to
reconcile all things, until that day when every knee in heaven and
on earth shall bend in worship, and God is “all in all,” as St. Paul
put it.viii
Here’s my third point: We need to strive to recover and live with
the same vibrant liturgical and evangelical spirituality as the
early Christians.
Some of the worst liturgical ideas since the council have been based
on a woolly romanticizing about what the early Christians believed
and how they worshipped. It has been argued, for example, that the
early Church had no sacramental priesthood and that the Eucharist
was celebrated with limited ritual, essentially as a meal shared
among friends.
I won’t take the time here to rebut these claims. The problem with
all such nostalgic-primitivist reconstructions can be summed up in
one thought: Nobody risks torture and death for a meal with their
friends. And torture and death were the frequent penalty for being
caught celebrating the Eucharist in the world of the early Church.
There are countless stories we could point to. One that especially
moves me comes from the year 304, during Diocletian’s great
persecution. A congregation in Abitina, a village near Carthage, was
rounded up. The account of their torture, written by a witness just
a few years after the fact, is brutally raw and graphic. What shines
out is the people’s Eucharistic faith.
Interrogated about why he disobeyed the Emperor’s decree, a young
lector named Felix said this: “As if one could be a Christian
without the Mass or the Mass could be celebrated without a
Christian! … The Christian exists through the Mass and the Mass in
Christians! Neither can exist without the other. … We celebrated the
glorious assembly. We gathered to read the Scriptures of the Lord at
the Mass."ix
We notice in this confession the same themes we’ve been talking
about. The Mass for these disciples is no mere meal. It’s a
“glorious assembly,” a heavenly liturgy. This liturgy defines their
identity as Christians. And it also defines the identity of the
Church; so much so that one of Felix’s fellow martyrs would confess:
“We cannot live without the Mass.”
This is the kind of faith that should inspire our worship. And this
is the kind of faith that our worship should inspire. Can we really
say today that we’re ready to die rather than not celebrate the
Mass?
The liturgy can only inspire us if we make it the heart of our days.
And that’s a task for us in this room. The centerpiece of a new
Eucharistic culture has to be the Sunday celebration of the Mass.
There is no greater sign of our culture’s impact on the Eucharist
than the fact that we no longer see Sunday as the first day of the
week but as the final day of our “weekend.”
Jesus Christ rose from the dead on “the first day of the week.”x
That’s why the first Christians hallowed Sunday as the “weekly
Easter,” the Day of the Lord. That’s why we should too.
The Mass should be the spiritual offering we make to begin each
week, not something we try to “fit in” among our leisure activities
before we have to return to work on Monday. Even this subtle change
in outlook could have a deep impact on the way we worship and the
way we live our faith in the world.
My fourth and final point is this: The liturgy is a school of
sacrificial love. The law of our prayer should be the law of our
life. Lex orandi, lex vivendi. We are to become the sacrifice we
celebrate.
It is striking how many stories of the first Christian martyrs --
especially the stories of bishops and priests -- are told in what we
might call a “Eucharistic key.” The classic is the martyrdom of the
elderly bishop Polycarp. The whole account unfolds along the lines
of a liturgy. Polycarp even delivers a long prayer that is modeled
after the Eucharistic canon of the Mass.
Finally Polycarp asks, again echoing the prayer of the Mass: “May I
be received this day … as a rich and acceptable sacrifice.” The
account continues with his being roasted alive. The witnesses
testify that they smell, not burning flesh, but the aroma of
breaking bread.xi
The other classic example is St. Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch. In
prison where he was awaiting his execution by being fed alive to
dogs, he wrote: “God’s wheat I am, and by the teeth of wild beasts I
am to be ground that I may prove to be Christ’s pure bread.”xii
But not only the martyrs should see themselves as a Eucharistic
offering. You and I should do the same. So should every baptized
believer. Again and again we read in the New Testament that we are
all called to offer ourselves to God as a living sacrifice of
praise, that we are to make ourselves a perfect offering, holy and
acceptable to God.xiii
This is a foundation stone to the Catholic belief in the priesthood
of all the baptized. The early Christians believed they were heirs
to the vocation given to Israel—to be a “chosen race, a royal
priesthood, a holy nation.” By the priesthood of our lives, all
baptized believers are to offer, not the blood-sacrifice of animals,
but the sacrifice of our hearts, the symbol of our lives, in
imitation of Jesus Christ.
We make our sacrifice of praise first and foremost in the Eucharist.
This is the meaning behind the council’s call for the “active
participation” of the laity in the liturgy.xv This expression
unfortunately has been taken as a license for all sorts of external
activity, commotion and busy-ness in our worship. That’s not at all
what Vatican II had in mind.
“Active participation” refers to the inner movement of our souls,
our interior participation in Christ’s action of offering of his
Body and Blood. This requires silent spaces and “pauses” in our
worship, in which we can collect our emotions and thoughts, and make
a conscious act of self-dedication. We are to “lift up our hearts,”
and in contrition and humility place them on the altar along with
the bread and wine.
But our work does not stop in the Mass.
Everything in our days -- our work, our sufferings, our prayer, our
ministries -- everything we do and experience is meant to be offered
to God as a spiritual sacrifice. All of our work for the unborn
child, the poor and the disabled; all of our work for immigration
justice and the dignity of marriage and the family: All of it should
be offered for the praise and glory of God’s name and for the
salvation of our brothers and sisters.
This is another great teaching of the council that we have yet to
integrate into ordinary Catholic spirituality. In Lumen Gentium, the
council taught that all our works “together with the offering of the
Lord’s Body … are most fittingly offered in the celebration of the
Eucharist. Thus, as those everywhere who adore in holy activity, the
laity consecrate the world itself to God.”xvi
All that we do -- in the liturgy and in our life in the world -- is
meant to be in the service of consecrating this world to God.
So my friends, we have come full circle.
This is the answer to Guardini’s challenge. You are the answer to
Guardini’s challenge.
The liturgical act becomes possible for modern man when you make
your lives a liturgy, when you live your lives liturgically -- as an
offering to God in thanksgiving and praise for his gifts and
salvation. You are the future of the liturgical renewal.
The liturgical act becomes possible for modern man when you see your
lives and work in light of God’s plan for the world, in light of his
desire that all men and women be saved and come to the knowledge of
the truth.xvii
The mystery we celebrate with the angels and the saints must take
root deep in our lives and personalities. It must bear fruit. Each
of us must make our own unique contribution to God’s loving plan --
that all creation become adoration and sacrifice in praise of him.
Thank you for your attention tonight. And it’s fitting that we
should conclude and go forth in the words of one of the new
dismissal prayers of the new Roman Missal. So let our prayer for
each other tonight be this: “Go in peace, glorifying the Lord by
your life.”
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Endnotes:
i. See the account in Robert Krieg, Romano Guardini: A Precursor of
Vatican II (Notre Dame, 1997), 87–90. A unofficial translation of
Guardini’s letter can be found at: http://www.jknirp.com/guardf.htm.
ii. cf. Rom. 8:15.
iii. Robert E. Barron, Bridging the Great Divide: Musings of a
Post-Liberal, Post-Conservative Evangelical Catholic (Rowan &
Littlefield, 2004), 66; cf. Chap. 5: “The Liturgical Act and the
Church of the 21st Century.”
iv. Sacrosanctum Concilium, 10.
v. cf. Sacrosanctum Concilium, 8, Lumen Gentium 50; Catechism, 1090,
1111, 1136, 1187, 1326, 2642.
vi. The Rus Primary Chronicle (Cambridge: Mediaeval Academy, 1953);
cf. Ratzinger, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith (Ignatius, 2005), 90–91.
vii. Rev. 1:9.
viii. 2 Pet. 3:13; Eph. 1:10, 23; 1 Cor. 15:28; 2 Cor. 5:19; Col.
1:18, 20 Phil. 2:5–12.
ix. Patrologia Latina, vol. 8, col. 696; the Latin dominico is
sometimes translated “the Lord’s Day” or “Lord’s Supper.” But the
form is a kind of slang, suggesting “Mass”; cf. Mike Aquilina, Fire
of God’s Love: 120 Reflections on the Eucharist (Servant, 2009), 13.
x. Mark 16:2, 9; Luke 24:1; John 20:1.
xi. Martyrdom of Polycarp, 9, in The Acts of the Christian Martyrs,
trans. Herbert Musurillo (Clarendon, 1972).
xii. To the Romans, 4.
xiii. cf. Rom. 12:1; 1 Pet. 2:5: Heb. 9:14; 13:15, 16.
xiv. cf. 2 Pet. 2:9; Rev. 1:6; Exod. 19:4.
xv. cf. Sacrosanctum Concilium, 14 (Latin: actuosa participatio).
xvi. Lumen Gentium, 34.
xvii. cf. 1 Tim. 2:4.
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