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| Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, April 16, 2015, Celebrates 88th |
Tomorrow being the tenth anniversary of the Election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, I offer below a celebratory quote from Co-Workers of the Truth's [April 19th] to laud the day our ever Provident Lord and God Jesus Christ gave us the great liturgist Pope!
April 19
It is right, and even necessary, that there exist today a radical call for a simplicity that will purify the liturgy of all aesthetic embellishments so that we may experience once again the original force of the word and the reality that we encounter there.
The Church must return again and again to the simplicity of her origins if she is to experience and mediate the reality that underlies all appearances.
She must nevertheless not forget that the celebration of the Lord's Last Supper means, by its very nature, the celebration of a feast, and that festive embellishments are an integral part of any feast.
The expression praeclarus calix (illustrious chalice) dates from the very hour of the Last Supper, and when the whole liturgy strives to be a praeclarus calix, a precious and illustrious chalice in which we are able to see and hear the glow of eternity, it must not allow itself to be deterred therefrom by any purism or archaism. Perhaps such adornment can be a more selfless service than the creative urge that takes pleasure in the constant changing of liturgical ideas.
Finally, the liturgical language must always be comprehensible; that is irrevocably true and a fundamental law of the liturgy.
Yet when the Church departed from her Semitic motherland she took with her some words that have since become familiar to all Christians: amen, alleluia, hosanna--and, above all, marana-tha.
When Rome ceased to use the Greek language, the same thing occurred. The Kyrie eleison was retained, along with the Hagios o Theos; and in the festive papal Mass the Gospel was (and still is) read in Latin and Greek.
We often fail to realize that language carries more weight than we usually assign to it.
That means that whenever the Church advances to a new level in her progress through history, the translation of the liturgy will become imperative, but it need not degenerate into iconoclastic revelry.
--pp. 129-130
N.B. "[The title on the cross, which]...many of the Jews did read,...was written in Hebrew, in Greek, and in Latin." John 19:20
P.S. Recall his 2008 Historic 81st Birthday in our Nation's Capitol, and at the New York Seminary for his third anniversary as successor of Saint Peter.