John Sweeney

Sunday, 14. December 2008, 19:46

Agreed Carlo, comes to us all although some unkind colleagues here have suggested I am more of a Deluded User at present.

John

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How are you facing up to this new post? Have you done studies in liturgy?
CAŅIZARES LLOVERA: From the very beginning of my priestly training I’ve always been passionate about the liturgy. Prior to my doctoral thesis in pastoral and catechetical theology I studied the Scriptures in the Paschal Triduum of Spanish liturgy. As priest I taught Liturgy and Catechesis. As bishop, first in Avila, then in Granada and then in Toledo, one of my main concerns was that in the dioceses that the Lord had entrusted to me the Liturgy of the Eucharist should be celebrated everywhere with sobriety and beauty, and always in compliance with the rules of Church. The mass in fact is truly the source and summit of Christian life – as we were reminded by Vatican Council II – and therefore cannot be celebrated in unworthy fashion. The Eucharist is truly the heart of the Church, and therefore Eucharistic adoration, in the liturgical celebration, but not only there, is decisive for the life of our communities.
Your priestly formation matured during the transition from pre- to post-Council...
CAŅIZARES LLOVERA: In effect I entered the diocesan seminary of Valencia in 1961, at 16, and then from 1964 to 1968 I studied at the Pontifical University of Salamanca where I took a degree in theology. In 1970 I was ordained priest and the following year I took a Ph.D. with specialization in Catechesis at the same University.
So you are the first prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship to celebrate from the start with the post-Council Novus Ordo...
CAŅIZARES LLOVERA: Clearly so. I celebrated with the Missal of 1962 only recently, in 2007, when I ordained two priests of the Cristo Re Institute in Gricigliano, near Florence.
What memories do you have of that phase of liturgical reform?
CAŅIZARES LLOVERA: I think that a deepening and renewal of the liturgy was necessary. But in my own experience it was not a perfectly successful operation. The first part of the Sacrosanctum Concilium Constitution did not enter the hearts of the Christian people. There was a change in the forms, a reform, but not a true renewal as required by the Sacrosanctum Concilium. At times change was for the mere sake of changing from a past perceived as negative and outdated. Sometimes the reform was regarded as a break and not as an organic development of Tradition. Out of that came all the problems raised by the traditionalists attached to the rite of 1962.
So was it a reform that, in actual fact, did not fully comply with the Council decision?
CAŅIZARES LLOVERA: More than anything else I would say that it was a reform that was applied and above all was experienced as an absolute change, as if a chasm has to be created between the pre- and post-Vatican II, in a context in which “pre-Council” was used as an insult.

Rose of York

Monday, 13. October 2008, 21:59

Full CCN Article

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Andrea Tornielli of Il Giornale has written that Cardinal Franics Arinze, the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, will soon be replaced by a Spanish prelate, Cardinal Antonio Canizares Llovera of Toledo.

A new appointment to the No 2 position
http://www.thetablet.co.uk/article/13255

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ON TUESDAY, Pope Benedict XVI chose a Dominican with whom he worked closely at the Vatican's doctrine office to become no. 2 official at the Congregation for Divine Worship (CDW), which deals with the liturgy.

Fr Augustine DiNoia has been under-secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) since 2002; it was headed by the then-Cardinal Ratzinger until his election as Pope in 2005.

The New York-born priest, who will be 66 next month, is considered a conservative but intellectually probing theologian. The Pope also promoted him to be the first titular Archbishop of Oregon City. Cardinal William Levada, the CDF prefect, will ordain him to the episcopacy on 11 July at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC.

Fr DiNoia's predecessor, Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith, who spent a controversial three and a half years as secretary of the CDW, has been transferred to his native Sri Lanka to head the Archdiocese of Colombo.

Like Archbishop Ranjith and the current CDW prefect, Cardinal Antonio Caņizares Llovera, who was appointed last December, Archbishop-elect DiNoia has no specialist training in liturgy. But because he is a native English-speaker he will be the top CDW official to oversee the final approval and implementation of the new English translation of the Roman Missal.

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How can the sense of the liturgy be recovered?

At present we work in a very quiet manner on an entire range of issues having to do with educative projects. This is the prime necessity there is: a good and genuine liturgical formation. The subject of liturgical formation is critical because there really is no sufficient education [at the moment]. People believe that the liturgy is a matter of forms and external realities, and what we really need is to restore a sense of worship, i.e. the sense of God as God. This sense of God can only be recovered with the liturgy. Therefore the Pope has the greatest interest in emphasizing the priority of the liturgy in the life of the Church. When one lives the spirit of the liturgy, one enters into the spirit of worship, one enters into the acknowledgment of God, one enters into communion with Him, and this is what transforms man and turns him into a new man. The liturgy always looks towards God, not the community; it is not the community that makes the liturgy, but it is God who makes it. It is He who comes to meet us and offers us to participate in his life, his mercy and his forgiveness ... When one truly lives the liturgy and God is truly at the centre of it, everything changes.
So far away are we today from the true sense of the mystery?
Yes, there is currently very great secularization and secularism, the sense of mystery and the sacred has been lost, one does not live with the spirit truly to worship God and to let God be God. This is why it is believed to be necessary constantly to be changing things in the liturgy, to innovate and that everything has to be very creative. This is not what is needed in the liturgy, but that it really be worship, i.e. recognition of the One who transcends us and who offers us salvation. The mystery of God, which is the unfathomable mystery of his love, is not something nebulous, but is Someone who comes to meet us. We must recover the man who adores. We must recover the sense of the mystery. We must recover what we never ought to have lost. The greatest evil that is being done to man is trying to eliminate from his life transcendence and the dimension of the mystery. The consequences we are experiencing today in all spheres of life. They are the tendency to replace the truth with opinion, confidence with unease, the end with the means ... Therefore it is so important to defend man against all the ideologies which weaken him in his triple relationship to the world, to others and to God. Never before has there been so much talk of freedom, and never before have there been more enslavements.

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This is why it is believed to be necessary constantly to be changing things in the liturgy, to innovate and that everything has to be very creative. This is not what is needed in the liturgy, but that it really be worship, i.e. recognition of the One who transcends us and who offers us salvation. The mystery of God, which is the unfathomable mystery of his love, is not something nebulous, but is Someone who comes to meet us. We must recover the man who adores. We must recover the sense of the mystery. We must recover what we never ought to have lost.

KatyA

Friday, 30. October 2009, 14:25

This is why it is believed to be necessary constantly to be changing things in the liturgy, to innovate and that everything has to be very creative.

Mairtin

Friday, 30. October 2009, 17:42

What sort of "constantly changing" is he referring to? I haven't seen any changes in the Liturgy in this neck of the woods for at least the last 20 years.

Cardinal Antonio Caņizares Llovera

 

Yes, there is currently very great secularization and secularism, the sense of mystery and the sacred has been lost, one does not live with the spirit truly to worship God and to let God be God. This is why it is believed to be necessary constantly to be changing things in the liturgy, to innovate and that everything has to be very creative. This is not what is needed in the liturgy, but that it really be worship, i.e. recognition of the One who transcends us and who offers us salvation. The mystery of God, which is the unfathomable mystery of his love, is not something nebulous, but is Someone who comes to meet us. We must recover the man who adores. We must recover the sense of the mystery. We must recover what we never ought to have lost./quote]

Cardinal Antonio Caņizares Llovera is critical of changes.