VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Lengthy, abstract homilies are “a disaster”, so preaching should be limited to 10 minutes, Pope Francis said.

Speaking off the cuff to diocesan liturgical directors on January 20, the Pope said that homilies are not academic conferences. “I sometimes hear people say, ‘I went to this parish, and yes it was a good philosophy lesson, 40, 45 minutes,'” he said.

Pope Francis encouraged priests to keep their homilies to “no more than eight to 10 minutes”, and always include in them “a thought, a feeling and an image”, so that “the people may bring something home with them”.

Homilies are “sacramentals” to be “prepared in prayer” and “with an apostolic spirit”, he said.

But, in the Catholic Church, he said, “in general, the homilies are a disaster”.

The liturgical directors were in Rome to participate in a formation course on liturgy, “Living Liturgical Action Fully,” at the Pontifical Institute of Liturgy.

Pope Francis also warned against the liturgical master of ceremonies assuming too central a role during Mass. “The more hidden a master of ceremonies is, the better,” he said. “It is Christ that makes the heart vibrate, it is the meeting with him that draws in the spirit.”

Beyond a “deep knowledge” of religious celebrations, the Pope said that experts on liturgy must have a strong pastoral sense to improve a community’s liturgical life, and that religious celebrations must foster the “fruitful participation of the People of God”, and not just of the clergy.

A pastoral approach to the liturgy allows religious celebrations to “lead the people to Christ, and Christ to the people”, which the Pope said is the “principal objective” of liturgy and an essential principle of the Second Vatican Council.

“If we neglect this, we will have beautiful rituals, but without vigour, without flavour, without sense, because they do not touch the heart and the existence of the People of God,” said Pope Francis.

The Pope encouraged the liturgical directors to spend time in parishes, observe liturgical celebrations and help pastors reflect on how they prepare liturgy with their communities.

If teachers of liturgy are “in the midst of the people, they will immediately understand and know how to accompany their brothers and sisters, how to suggest what is suitable and feasible to communities, and what the necessary steps are to rediscover the beauty of the liturgy and celebrating together”, he said.

The job of a diocesan liturgical director, said Pope Francis, is to offer parishes a liturgy “that is imitable, with adaptations that the community can take to grow in liturgical life”.

A liturgical director should not care about a parish’s liturgy only when the bishop comes to visit and then let the liturgy go back to how it was after he leaves, the Pope said.

“To go to parishes and not say anything when faced with somewhat sloppy, neglected, poorly prepared liturgies means not helping the community, not accompanying them,” he added.

Photo: Pope Francis speaks to participants who attended his meeting with diocesan liturgy directors at the Vatican on January. 20, 2023. The liturgists were attending a course at the Pontifical Institute of Liturgy in Rome. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)

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“Beauty, just like truth, always engenders wonder, and when these are referred to the mystery of God, they lead to adoration,” he wrote in an apostolic letter “on the liturgical formation of the people of God”.

Titled “Desiderio Desideravi” (“I have earnestly desired”), the letter was released on June 29, the feast of Sts Peter and Paul. The title comes from Luke 22:15 when, before the Last Supper, Jesus tells his disciples, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer”.

In the letter, Pope Francis insisted that Catholics need to better understand the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council and its goal of promoting the “full, conscious, active and fruitful celebration” of the Mass.

“With this letter, I simply want to invite the whole Church to rediscover, to safeguard and to live the truth and power of the Christian celebration,” the Pope wrote. “I want the beauty of the Christian celebration and its necessary consequences for the life of the Church not to be spoiled by a superficial and foreshortened understanding of its value or, worse yet, by its being exploited in service of some ideological vision, no matter what the hue.”

“The priestly prayer of Jesus at the Last Supper that all may be one judges every one of our divisions around the bread broken, around the sacrament of mercy, the sign of unity, the bond of charity,” he said.

While his letter offered what he called a “meditation” on the power and beauty of the Mass, Pope Francis also reiterated his conviction of the need to limit celebrations of the liturgy according to the rite in use before the Second Vatican Council.

“We cannot go back to that ritual form which the council fathers, ‘cum Petro et sub Petro’, (with and under Peter) felt the need to reform, approving, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and following their conscience as pastors, the principles from which was born the reform.”

The liturgical books approved by “the holy pontiffs St Paul VI and St John Paul II”, he said, “have guaranteed the fidelity of the reform of the council”.

Although the post-Vatican II Mass is celebrated in Latin and dozens of vernacular languages, he said, it is “one and the same prayer capable of expressing her (the Church’s) unity”.

“As I have already written, I intend that this unity be re-established in the whole Church of the Roman rite,” he said, which is why in 2021 he promulgated “Traditionis Custodes” (Guardians of the Tradition), limiting celebrations of the Mass according to the rite used before the Second Vatican Council.

The bulk of the Pope’s new letter focused on helping Catholics learn to recognise and be astounded by the great gift of the Mass and the Eucharist, and how it is not simply a weekly “staging” or “representation” of the Last Supper, but truly allows people of all times and all places to encounter the crucified and risen Lord and to eat his body and drink his blood.

And, the Pope wrote, it is essential to recognise that the Mass does not belong to the priest or to any individual worshipper, but to Christ and his Church.

“The liturgy does not say ‘I’ but ‘we’, and any limitation on the breadth of this ‘we’ is always demonic,” he said. “The liturgy does not leave us alone to search out an individual supposed knowledge of the mystery of God. Rather, it takes us by the hand, together, as an assembly, to lead us deep within the mystery that the word and the sacramental signs reveal to us.”

“Consistent with all action of God”, he said, the liturgy leads people into the mystery using symbolic actions and signs.

Pope Francis acknowledged that some people claim that in reforming the liturgy and allowing celebrations of the Mass in the language of the local congregation it has somehow lost what is “meant by the vague expression ‘sense of mystery.'”

But the mystery celebrated and communicated, he said, is not about “a mysterious rite. It is, on the contrary, marvelling at the fact that the salvific plan of God has been revealed in the paschal deed of Jesus”.

The liturgy is uses “things that are the exact opposite of spiritual abstractions: bread, wine, oil, water, fragrances, fire, ashes, rock, fabrics, colours, body, words, sounds, silences, gestures, space, movement, action, order, time, light”, he said. Those concrete things proclaim that “the whole of creation is a manifestation of the love of God, and from when that same love was manifested in its fullness in the cross of Jesus, all of creation was drawn toward it”.

However, Pope Francis wrote, the words and gestures and symbols to be used are only those approved by the Church.

“Let us be clear here: every aspect of the celebration must be carefully tended to – space, time, gestures, words, objects, vestments, song, music – and every rubric must be observed,” he wrote. Otherwise, the celebrant or ministers risk “robbing from the assembly what is owed to it; namely, the paschal mystery celebrated according to the ritual that the Church sets down”.

Pope Francis said “the non-acceptance of the liturgical reform” of Vatican II, as well as “a superficial understanding of it, distracts us from the obligation of finding responses to the question that I come back to repeating: How can we grow in our capacity to live in full the liturgical action? How do we continue to let ourselves be amazed at what happens in the celebration under our very eyes?”

“We are in need of a serious and dynamic liturgical formation,” he said.

Photo: Pope Francis elevates the host as he celebrates Mass at the GSP Stadium in Nicosia, Cyprus, in 2021 (CNS Photo)

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The anti-Covid ordinance, which was approved by Pope Francis and signed by Cardinal Giuseppe Bertello, president of the commission in charge of Vatican City State, was released by the Vatican press office on September 20.

The only exemption in the order is for people entering Vatican territory for the sole purpose of attending a liturgical celebration; in that case, they will have access only “for the time strictly necessary” for the liturgy, and if they follow the health measures already in force: mandatory masking, temperature checks and social distancing.

The ordinance did not specify whether the Pope’s weekly general audiences on Wednesdays or his midday recitation of the Angelus on Sundays would be treated like a liturgy or like entrance to the Vatican Museums, which has been requiring proof of vaccination for admittance since early August. Even with the vaccination proof, visitors undergo a temperature check before admittance, and are required to keep a mask over their nose and mouth throughout the visit.

The Vatican police, known as the gendarme, will be charged with checking the documentation.

The ordinance specified that it applies to all Vatican “citizens, residents of the state, personnel in service at any level in the governorate of Vatican City State and in the various organisms of the Roman Curia and the institutions tied to it, to all visitors and beneficiaries of services”.

Italy requires foreign visitors to have vaccination proof and a negative Covid-19 test to enter the country. The vaccination pass or a negative test are required to enter restaurants, museums, gyms, indoor pools, cinemas, theatres and to visit patients in a hospital or nursing home. Beginning on October 15, Italy also will require the pass to fly or take long-distance trains or buses and to enter workplaces.

Photo: A woman shows her Green Pass, signifying vaccination against Covid-19 or a negative test taken within 48 hours, before entering the Vatican Museums last month (CNS Photo)

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A new prefect of the worship congregation was not announced.

Like bishops, cardinals are required to offer the Pope their resignations when they turn 75. Cardinals can still vote in a conclave until they are 80.

Cardinal Sarah, from Guinea, was appointed prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments by Pope Francis in 2014.

Though he often has been portrayed as a critic of Pope Francis, especially because of the cardinal’s cautious attitude toward welcoming Muslim migrants to Europe and his traditional approach to the liturgy, Cardinal Sarah said people who portray him as an opponent of Pope Francis are being used by the devil to help divide the Church.

“The truth is that the Church is represented on earth by the vicar of Christ, that is by the Pope. And whoever is against the Pope is, ipso facto, outside the Church,” the cardinal said in an interview in 2019.

From 2010 to 2014, he was president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, an office that coordinated and promoted charitable giving and is now part of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. Before that, he served nine years as secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, which oversees and cares for Catholic dioceses and jurisdictions in missionary territories.

Cardinal Sarah came to the Vatican after serving as archbishop of Conakry, Guinea, for 21 years, which included the last five years of the ruthless Marxist dictatorship of Ahmed Sekou Toure. Then-Archbishop Sarah earned a reputation as one of the few voices courageous enough to defend freedom and promote human dignity.

In his many years at the Vatican and attending various synods, Cardinal Sarah has underlined that the Catholic Church is not a social service agency; its aim is to lead people to the God who is love, which can also be expressed through Catholic charity.

He warned that Africa must protect itself “from the contamination” of increasingly popular Western ideas about family life and sexuality, saying attempts to redefine the family, to accept homosexual activity and to promote abortion as a right undermine the very fabric of stable societies.

The Pope also accepted the resignation of the 77-year-old Cardinal Angelo Comastri, archpriest of St Peter’s Basilica and vicar for Vatican City State. The Pope named Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, 55, to be the new archpriest of the basilica and his vicar for Vatican City.

(CNS Photo)

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NZC: In February, Pope Francis told the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments that the Liturgy is “a living treasure that cannot be reduced to tastes, recipes and currents . . . (it is) not ‘the field of do-it-yourself’, but the epiphany of ecclesial communion”. Can you comment?

Fr O’Connor: It is inspiring to witness Pope Francis celebrating the Mass. While he informally greets people with casual chat and humour before and after Mass, from the moment he makes the Sign of the Cross until the Prayer after Communion, he celebrates the Liturgy with single-minded focus. While socially he is relaxed and informal, when he is celebrating Mass he directs our attention to Christ.

Pope Francis is both truly radical and deeply conservative in his understanding of the Liturgy of the Church: radical because he seeks to get back to the root of the Liturgy originating in Christ and in the experience of the first Christians, and conservative
in ensuring that this living treasure is faithfully conserved, communicated and celebrated in the Church around the world today.

In one of his many teachings about the Liturgy, Pope Francis exhorted us to prepare well for the Mass: “When we enter a church to celebrate the Mass, let us think like this: ‘I am arriving at Calvary, where Jesus gives his life for me.’ And in this way, the show disappears, the chattering disappears, [along with] the comments and all those things that distance us from this beautiful thing which is the Mass, Jesus’ victory.”

It is essential to remember that we do not create the Liturgy, we celebrate the Liturgy. A parish or school liturgy committee might think that in a meeting to prepare a liturgy they are starting with a blank canvas. Thanks be to God this is not the case! Our work of preparation and active participation is primarily to make our hearts ready, becoming aware
of our need for Jesus in the midst of the routines and demands of daily life. On the fiftieth anniversary of the first papal Mass in the vernacular, Pope Francis reflected: “Authentic worship and liturgical celebrations should lead people toward ‘a real conversion’ of heart by letting them hear ‘the voice of the Lord’.”

NZC: Based upon the number of arguments it generates, the topic of liturgy can sometimes seem to divide as well as to unite. How can unity be maintained while allowing debate?

Fr O’Connor: Unity in the Liturgy cannot be reduced to uniformity. On first glance it might seem that people in different parts of the world celebrate the Mass in different forms including cultural adaptations of the rites, but the Mass is the same act of worship whether
celebrated in a cathedral, the hospital room of the dying parishioner, in Māori, English or in Latin, in ordinary or extraordinary form.

Good formation in our understanding of the Liturgy helps us to experience this depth of unity. Most often debates about liturgy centre on style and language. A liturgy committee might struggle to agree on music, organ or guitars, modern or chant, English or Latin,
but the Liturgy of the Church legitimately embraces a diversity of expressions when the central focus is the presence and action of Jesus Christ, rather than the instrument or language used.

Our prime mission is for the people of our Aotearoa New Zealand Church to grow in full, conscious and active participation in the Mass by deepening our understanding of what the Liturgy is and what it is not. If we see the Liturgy as our creation and our production, then, inevitably, what we do and how we do it will be the focus. When we understand that the Liturgy is our participation in the action of Christ, we are open to hearing what each person brings to the Mass, what the people bring and what they need, what Christ is giving to us and asking of us.

NZC: Some celebrants explain the Liturgy while they are celebrating it — punctuating it with little commentaries as to “why we are doing this”. Do you see a place for such
things in the Liturgy, or should it speak for itself?

Fr O’Connor: The Liturgy celebrated well is the most effective education and formation method. While at times it might be necessary to add an explanation comment either verbally or on a screen (for example when a large number present are new to the Mass, or at a funeral or wedding), those who come to the Mass for the first time are often inspired by the beauty of the ritual. They will have questions, but their experience of the Liturgy celebrated well will motivate them after the Liturgy to ask good questions of Catholics who love and understand the Mass.

Like every important endeavour, a time of training is required, but then quickly the extra words and instructions are unnecessary as the action becomes second-nature to us. In the past, many people found missals helpful, not only to help them to pray during Mass, but because they often provided helpful explanations that they could read after Mass as their
questions arose.

NZC: What do you consider you bring personally to the role of acting director of the NZ National Liturgy Office?

Fr O’Connor: While I have completed some study of the Liturgy sitting in classrooms with good text books and wise teachers, my real liturgical formation began as a young child at Mass, watching, listening, noticing and questioning. Somewhere back then, I picked up that the Mass in which I was participating was something that God was doing. I realised too that when I prepared well and participated with eyes and ears and heart open, I experienced the presence and strength of Jesus.

In recent years, an enormous amount of work has been done to provide good formation and resources to help parishes and schools to grow in their full, conscious and active participation in, and celebration of, the Liturgy.

Many of these resources are offered on the National Liturgy Office website and in other NLO publications. I hope to use my time in the role to bring these resources to dioceses, schools and parishes and am happy to respond to any invitation to assist this formation process.

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Professor O’Loughlin, an academic who came from Ireland and who is also a priest of the diocese of Arundel and Brighton in the United Kingdom, gave a talk on what constitutes good liturgy.

Contrary to what some Catholics might think, this is a vitally important question, he said.

This is because, as distinct from traditional societies, our modern society is very weak on “the carrying effect of societal memory” and “we actually have to evangelise each generation afresh”.

“In that evangelisation, liturgy not only becomes our shop window, but it also becomes our weakest link.”

That is because while good liturgy builds up the faith, bad liturgy weakens and even destroys it, Professor O’Loughlin said, citing a US bishops’ document on music from 1972.

So, what makes for good liturgy? Professor O’Loughlin used an analogy with good design, citing the principles of German designer Dieter Rams.

Such principles include “it should be user-friendly, it should be clear what you are doing, it should be intuitive how to go through it”.

Professor O’Loughlin said people are free to disagree with this approach. But he reflected on several aspects he suggested were needed for good liturgy. Among these aspects is the need to try to be as inclusive as possible.

“You go into a club and everyone is there wearing the club tie,” he said. “And immediately, you are the guest there, they turn around to you and they say, are you OK? At one level they are sending a signal to you, we are looking after you, but actually they are patrolling the boundary, by letting you know that you are a guest.

“Thankfully, it is not an experience that many of us have.

“Curiously, it is a very common experience of people who just come and look at our liturgy. They are given all sorts of little cues that there is the in-group who ‘know’, and then there is you — and really you do not belong. No, of course, you can take a hard theological line and say, you don’t belong, because you are not the right make of religion, or the right make of Christian, or the right theology or the right something else.

“But the problem is, we are the community which is supposed to be taking the Gospel to every creature. So if you are getting cues that you really don’t belong, we are really failing in our missionary endeavour, because we should be sending you a cue, if you want to belong, you are very welcome. Because, otherwise we are saying, our religion is our private domain, and our God is our private God. That is incompatible with what we claim about the universality of God, or what in Protestant theology would be known as missio dei — that God is speaking to every human heart.”

Professor O’Loughlin continued: “A specific characteristic of Christian liturgy is that the message of the Christ goes out to all boundaries. That is what Paul spent his entire career saying. There are no boundaries to where God is at work. So being inclusive is something we need to work at in liturgy, again because otherwise we are going to lose people, but also because it is true to our deepest theological roots.”

He went on to advocate for honesty in liturgy, where language and signs don’t clash; for a liturgy that respects creation, recognising that God is in the everydayness of peoples’ lives; for a liturgy that is open to surprises and improvements, because “God is always greater”; for a liturgy in which the gifts of the community are harnessed.

Other aspects that make up good liturgy include genuine concern for the marginalised, avoidance of “clutter”, joyfulness, the building up of community and the facilitation of engagement.

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Recently, it was reported that Pope Francis has formed a commission to review Liturgiam Authenticam, a document issued by the Vatican in 2001. The commission will reportedly be chaired by Archbishop Arthur Roche from England.

New Zealand Catholic Bishops Conference president Bishop Patrick Dunn said the New Zealand bishops welcome the move.

“The New Zealand bishops are delighted with the news that Pope Francis is arranging for a review of the 2001 document Liturgiam Authenticam, and we will be very happy to support Archbishop Arthur Roche in this work,” Bishop Dunn said.

“The New Zealand bishops agree that translations for liturgical texts should be 100 per cent accurate, but our concern has been that Liturgiam Authenticam has produced texts that impose Latin syntax on contemporary English,” he said.

“Latin favours long subordinated clauses, but contemporary English prefers to say the same things but with short and clear sentences.”

Bishop Dunn referred to a principle for translation set out by Pope Benedict XVI, pertaining to sacred Scripture.

“In 2010, Pope Benedict wrote in his Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini (#115) that ‘a translation, of course, is always more than a simple transcription of the original texts. The passage from one language to another necessarily involves a change of cultural context:
concepts are not identical and symbols have a different meaning,  for they come up against other traditions of thought and other ways of life’.”

Bishop Dunn continued: “We believe that this principle for translation, which Pope Benedict endorses for sacred Scripture, should apply also to translations for liturgical use.”

“We believe that some modification to the principles of liturgical translation as imposed by Liturgiam Authenticam could produce liturgical translations that could speak more easily to the hearts of English-speaking congregations and produce liturgical texts that are truly beautiful, as we believe the liturgy should be.”

Speaking to Auckland diocese priests last August, Australian theologian Fr Gerald O’Collins, SJ, called on New Zealand’s Catholic bishops to, among other things, appeal to Pope Francis to suspend Liturgiam Authenticam, which Fr O’Collins described as “a desperately bad
piece of guidance for translations”.

Writing on the Australian Jesuit website Eureka Street this year, Fr O’Collins reiterated his call, recommending not so much the revisiting of Liturgiam Authenticam, but rather its repeal.

“The road will then be open to revisit the clumsy, difficult 2010 Missal and replace it,” the theologian wrote.

He suggested that this be replaced by a 1998 ICEL translation that was rejected by the Vatican despite having been approved “by all the conferences of English speaking bishops”.

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