Cardinal Ratzinger on true consciousness in liturgical matters

 

"For fostering a true consciousness in liturgical matters, it is also important that the proscription against the form of liturgy in valid use up to 1970 should be lifted. Anyone who nowadays advocates the continuing existence of this [older] liturgy or takes part in it is treated like a leper; all tolerance ends here. There has never been anything like this in history; in doing this we are despising and proscribing the Church’s whole past. How can one trust her at present if things are that way?"

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, God and the World, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002), p. 416.

Cardinal Ratzinger on Liturgy - 2

“For fostering a true consciousness in liturgical matters, it is also important that the proscription against the form of liturgy in valid use up to 1970 should be lifted. Anyone who nowadays advocates the continuing existence of this liturgy or takes part in it is treated like a leper; all tolerance ends here. There has never been anything like this in history; in doing this we are despising and proscribing the Church’s whole past. How can one trust her present if things are that way? I must say, quite openly, that I don’t understand why so any of my episcopal brethren have to a great extent submitted to this rule of intolerance, which for no apparent reason is opposed to making the necessary inner reconciliations within the Church.”

God and the World: A Conversation with Peter Seewald, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002, p. 416.

Cardinal Ratzinger on the Novus Ordo Missae

Ratzinger celebrating the Tridentine Mass in Wigratzbad, Germany in 1990.

The liturgical reform, in its concrete realization, has distanced itself even more from its origin. The result has not been a reanimation, but devastation. In place of the liturgy, fruit of a continual development, they have placed a fabricated liturgy. They have deserted a vital process of growth and becoming in order to substitute a fabrication.They did not want to continue the development, the organic maturing of something living through the centuries, and they replaced it, in the manner of technical production, by a fabrication, a banal product of the moment.

(Revue Theologisches, Vol. 20, Feb. 1990, pp. 103-104)

Cardinal Ratzinger on Liturgy - 1

In an interview with Raymond Arroyo (EWTN) in 2003, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger argued that:

• the liturgy post-Vatican II was not implemented correctly;
• there were cases where priests 'invented' things during Mass and became self-centred;
• ad orientem could in some cases help people to understand better Mass;
• Mass in the vernacular was positive but the main prayers should remain in Latin so that Catholics around the world felt that they belong to the same Church;
• the Tridentine Mass was never abrogated and faithful should have better access to it, in obedience with their Bishops.