Fr. Z's Blog

His Eminence Raymond Card. Burke, in this video interview with Raymond Arroyo of EWTN, in commenting on Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum speaks to something that I have been harping on incessantly for years.

I have been saying that we must revitalize our Catholic identity. We cannot do that if we don’t know who we are. We cannot know who we are or be who we are called to be without a proper liturgical worship of God. For there to be any renewal of the Church, a new evangelization – call it what you will – we must first of all revitalize our worship of God. This is why Summorum Pontificum was such a great gift. We cannot revitalize our worship without striving to reestablish continuity with how Catholic have always worshiped and brought petitions to God.

Here is my transcription of a key part of Card. Burke’s interview:

What the Holy Father… and I’m just reflecting now on what he himself has written… is tyring to communicate is the continuity of our Catholic faith down the centuries. Sadly, what happened after the Second Vatican Council was – an idea developed that we were forming a new Church and that everything that had gone on since the time of the first Chrsitians was all retrograde and in some way a defection from what was supposedly this Church of freedom and truth and joy. And what happened in the process is that the tradition was lost, especially in the sacred liturgy. There were many abuses and even the reform of the rite itself was so radical that people didn’t see sometimes how there was a continuity between what’s now called the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite and the Extraordinary Form. The Holy Father … and this is important not just for the sacred liturgy but is important for every aspect of our life … we can see it in catechesis, we can see it the moral life, we can see it in family life, religious life, priestly formation – no need to go into all of that. The Holy Father rightly has put his focus on the sarcred liturgy because this is the highest and most perfect expression of our life in Christ. And if we can reestablish in the celebration of the sacred liturgy a strong sense of the worship of God as God wants it, not my creation, but the gift of God, that sacred worship has been handed down to us in the Church through the centuries, we’ll get a lot of other things straightened out at the same time. It has to start with the sacred liturgy.

Hear the rest of His Eminence’s comments in the actual interview. There’s more.