BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

In this week's issue, Britain's Catholic Herald sums up the recent 'controversy' over the reports by Andrea Tornielli on changes
to liturgical practices recommended by the cardinals and bishops who are members of the Congregation for Divine Worship.


Vatican seeks
‘reform of the reform’
By Anna Arco

28 August 2009


The Vatican has proposed sweeping reforms to the way Mass is celebrated, it has been claimed.

Communion on the tongue, Consecration celebrated ad orientem (facing east) and renewed use of Latin could all be re-introduced to ordinary Sunday Masses as part of proposals put forward by the Congregation for Divine Worship.

Andrea Tornielli, a senior Vatican watcher, reported last week that the congregation's cardinals and bishops voted "almost unanimously in favour of greater sacrality of the Rite" at a plenary meeting in March.

Members of the congregation are said to have put forward 30 propositiones ("propositions") aimed at reforming the way in which the Novus Ordo has been celebrated since the Second Vatican Council.

These set out to recover a "sense of Eucharistic worship", the use of the "Latin language in the celebration" and include the "remaking of the introductory parts of the Missal in order to put a stop to liturgical abuses".

According to Mr Tornielli, the propositions, which were voted on by the congregation on March 21, also include placing renewed emphasis on receiving Communion on the tongue "according to the norms".

Mr Tornielli said that Cardinal Antonio Cañizares Llovera, the prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship, had also been studying ways to return to the ad orientem celebration of the Mass. This would see the priest and the congregation facing the cross and the altar during the Consecration.

He also said that the "propositiones foresee a return to the sense of sacredness and to adoration, but also a recovery of the celebrations in Latin in the dioceses, at least in the main solemnities, as well as the publication of bilingual Missals - a request made at his time by Paul VI - with the Latin text first".

Mr Tornielli said these were the first concrete steps towards the "reform of the reform", a notion outlined in Pope Benedict's 2000 book, The Spirit of the Liturgy.

The book argues that some of the liturgical reforms following the Second Vatican Council got out of hand and needed reform as they no longer reflected the changes envisaged by the Council Fathers.

Cardinal Cañizares delivered the propositiones to Pope Benedict on April 4, receiving the Pope's approval, Mr Tornielli said. But Mr Tornielli also said that the "reform of the reform" would take a long time before it would be fully implemented. He said it would require a long and patient labour "from below" with the aid of the bishops.

"The point of departure and ultimately also that of arrival is the Council's Constitution on the liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium," he said.

"The Pope is convinced that it serves nothing to make hasty steps or to drop directives from on high, with the risk then that it could remain a dead letter. The style of Ratzinger is one of comparison and, above all, of example. This is evidenced in the fact that for a year now anyone who receives Communion from the Pope must kneel on a kneeler prepared for that purpose by the master of ceremonies."

Shawn Tribe, the editor and founder of the New Liturgical Movement, an online magazine which deals with liturgy, said: "Given what we know from the Pope's writing and discourses over the years, one can at least say that what is being suggested would be consonant with the Pope's own liturgical thought and approach.

"Evidently we can only speculate at this point and will have to wait and see what, if anything, might actually come to pass, though Tornielli has proven himself reliable in these regards in the past. If what has been reported does indeed come to pass, it would certainly be a matter of no little significance."

Fr Ciro Benedettini, the deputy spokesman for the Holy See, downplayed the report on Monday. He said: "At the moment, there are no institutional proposals in existence regarding a modification of the liturgical books currently in use."

But Mr Tornielli stood by his story, saying that he interpreted Fr Benedettini's denial of "institutional proposals" as indicative of "unofficial (for now) projects".

The American Catholic News Service (CNS) quoted anonymous Vatican sources as denying that proposals had been voted on at the plenary meeting. Rather, the congregation had forwarded its suggestions on the subject of Eucharistic Adoration - which had been the theme of the plenary session - to the Pope. The subject of ad orientem had never been discussed, according to the CNS source.

The Second Vatican Council's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, said that Latin should remain the language of the liturgy even as it promoted the wider use of the vernacular.

It said that "the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites" but also that "since the use of the mother tongue, whether in the Mass, the administration of the sacraments, or other parts of the liturgy, frequently may be of great advantage to the people, the limits of its employment may be extended".

Communion on the tongue continues to be the liturgical norm, while reception on the hand remains an indult granted on a local level. Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith, then secretary of the worship congregation, caused a stir last year when he said that Communion should be received on the tongue.

Archbishop Ranjith argued that the practice had been brought in hastily in some places and was only approved by the Vatican after it had been introduced.

The 2004 instruction Redemptionem Sacramentum also re-emphasised that the faithful had a right to receive Communion on the tongue but that receiving Communion on the hand was only granted to the faithful in areas where an indult had been given. Officials for the Congregation for Divine Worship were unavailable for comment.


In his blog today, Tornielli - a scrupulous journalist who has also been reliable about his behind-the-scenes reporting - replies to the criticisms made against his reports, saying that everything he reported was correct, and that he never said 'formal' decrees about the propositions were forthcoming.

Unfortunately, other media, including the Anglophone, interpreted his story to mean that formal instructions from the Vatican were imminent. It is ironic that Tornielli has been mentioned prominently as a possible nominee to be director of the Vatican press office to replace Fr. Federico Lombardi.

Here is a translation of his blog entry today:


The 'reform of the reform'
and the non-denial denials
by Andrea Tornielli
Translated from

August 29, 2009


Dear friends, I must go back to the subject of my report on August 22 about the questions discussed by the plenary assembly of the Congregation for Divine Worship for recovering a better sense of sacredness in the liturgy.

As you know, on Monday afternoon, the deputy director of the Vatican Press Office, Fr. Ciro Benedittini (whom I have great respect for), issued a statement through Vatican Radio about my article.

These were his words, very well calibrated and studied: "At the moment, there are no institutional proposals about a change in the liturgical books currently in use".

This presumed denial made the rounds of the blogosphere - not a few did not conceal their glee that the undersigned had received egg on his face.

In addition, in his recent interview with L'Osservatore Romano, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone made a reference to 'fanciful remaking' of documents in order to reflect retrogression with respect to the Second Vatican Council - words which the ZENIT news agency immediately considered to be a reference to my article.

I wish to point out that the denial by Fr. Benedettini was less about my article than it was by its use in many blogs (after the Williamson case, the blogs and Internet sites are now constantly monitored at the Holy See] who claimed that the propositions for change that I reported were imminent, along with changes to the ordinary form of the Mass towards a more traditional sense [or 'retrogression', to use Cardinal Bertone's term].

First of all, I never wrote in my article of imminent reforms, nor of documents that are ready, and I clearly said that the propositions were the start of a work plan. A plan that will take time, and does not envision imposing such propositions from on high but to involve the bishops in it.

I described the vote taken by the plenary assembly of the CDW, that its prefect, Cardinal Canizares, had presented those results to the Pope, that the CDW has started to study "not institutional proposals to change the liturgical books" but rather as more precise and rigorous indications about the way of celebrating Mass with the existing books, which in many cases, have only been recently published.

All this to make clear that you must not believe whose who write that, in fact, nothing is happening, that the Pope and the CDW are not thinking of any changes, that the 'reform of the reform' and the recovery of more sacredness in the liturgy are simply fantasies of this writer.

Since I began to cover the Vatican, I have made many errors and will commit more, but the article in question is not one of them.

Moreover, the fact that 'for now' there are no 'institutional proposals' for liturgical reform - as Fr. Benedettini put it - does not deny that there exist today propositions under study that have not yet become 'institutional'.

One only has to read what Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in his time and what Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his letter to the bishops that accompanied the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum to see how close these matters are to his heart.