The Spirit of the Liturgy: The Next 25 Years
If there’s one thing worth celebrating this year, it’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Spirit of the Liturgy, Cardinal Ratzinger’s great gift to the Church. Published five years before he became pope, Ratzinger’s seminal work of liturgical scholarship might yet prove to be his greatest and most enduring legacy. Its publication heralded the beginning of the restoration of the splendor of the liturgy and stemmed the tide of the liturgical vandalism of the post-conciliar period, which had seen the dumbing-down of the liturgy to the lowest common denominator of crass vulgarity. “It is strange,” Ratzinger observed, “that the post-conciliar pluralism has created uniformity in one respect at least: it will not tolerate a high standard of expression.”1 One is reminded of Chesterton’s prophecy more than fifty years earlier that the “coming peril” was “standardization by a low standard.”2
The reference to Chesterton is appropriate because there are parallels between Chesterton’s approach to the beauty of orthodoxy and Ratzinger’s.
Dorothy L. Sayers described Chesterton as “a kind of Christian liberator” whose impact was explosive: “Like a beneficent bomb, he blew out of the Church a quantity of stained glass of a very poor period, and let in gusts of fresh air.”3 The same could be said of the impact of the beneficent bomb that Ratzinger had planted with the publication of The Spirit of the Liturgy. Its reverberations are still being felt and there’s no doubt that the explosion of interest in liturgical tradition is due, in large part, to its publication. It has blown out of the Church a quantity of liturgical quirkiness which can already be seen to be of a very poor period.
At its worst, the post-conciliar liturgy had become little more than second-rate religious entertainment, dependent on the personality of the priest who had replaced the Lord as the center of attention. But the liturgy was not merely entertainment, Ratzinger insisted, nor was it dependent on “brilliant producers and talented actors.” Its power “does not come from what we do” but from what “is taking place,” something which “all of us together cannot ‘make’”: “In the liturgy there is a power, an energy at work which not even the Church as a whole can generate: what it manifests is the Wholly Other, coming to us through the community (which is hence not sovereign but servant, purely instrumental).”4 The anarchic way in which self-styled liturgists had tampered with the rubrics of the Mass had transformed the majesty and mystery of the liturgy into what Ratzinger described as “a do-it-yourself patchwork” which had “trivialized it, adapting it to our mediocrity.”5
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