By the Rev. Jon Tveit
“Liturgia est culmen ad quod actio Ecclesiae tendit et simul fons unde omnis eius virtus emanat.”[1]
These lapidary words from the Second Vatican Council’s constitution on the sacred liturgy have become commonplace in explaining the centrality of the liturgy in the life of the Christian. So too has the document’s declaration that “the full and actual participation of the whole people” in the liturgy is “the primary and indispensable source from which the faithful are to derive the true Christian spirit.”[2] While these statements are often applied to the spiritual life of the individual Christian, their scope is far broader. The action of the Church tends toward the sacred liturgy. Not merely the action of the clergy and hierarchy, but that of the whole of the Church of God together. Not merely as individuals, but as “the whole people,” the Body of Christ in union with its Head. The liturgy—and in a particular way the Eucharist[3]—is the source and the summit of Christian life, not of private life, but of the whole of life. These words, therefore, apply as much to the life of the family and to the life of society as they do to the life of the individual.
From these statements we can see there is a twofold necessity for proper liturgy in the life of society, namely a necessity of duty and justice toward the Most High, and a practical necessity since the liturgy is the source and engine behind any true reform and proper ordering of public life. The liturgy is the culmen of the public and corporate activity of man, and it is the fons from which flows the realization and the actualization of God’s order on earth. The liturgy is by nature ordered toward the glorification of God and the sanctification of man, which twofold orientation corresponds to this twofold necessity of man’s communal life.
I. Culmen
Pope Leo XIII treated the first half of this liturgical duty in his encyclical on the proper ordering of society, Immortale Dei. In this letter, the Holy Father teaches that the Church’s relation to the State ought to be that of the soul to the body, distinct but inseparable, that which serves as the body’s principle of life and unity. It is important to note that, at least ideally, the population of a given society and the population of the Church in that society would be coterminous. This is why it is fundamentally wrong to view the ‘State’ and the ‘Church’ or the ‘secular world’ and the ‘religious’ as separate, as Andrew Willard Jones has shown well in his Before Church and State. If the Church is meant to be the soul to the State’s body, there is no part of the State that should be outside or separate from the Church. Leo says that the State,
constituted as it is, is clearly bound to act up to the manifold and weighty duties linking it to God, by the public profession of religion. Nature and reason, which command every individual devoutly to worship God in holiness, because we belong to Him and must return to Him, since from Him we came, bind also the civil community by a like law. For, men living together in society are under the power of God no less than individuals are, and society, no less than individuals, owes gratitude to God who gave it being and maintains it and whose ever-bounteous goodness enriches it with countless blessings. Since, then, no one is allowed to be remiss in the service due to God, and since the chief duty of all men is to cling to religion in both its reaching and practice—not such religion as they may have a preference for, but the religion which God enjoins, and which certain and most clear marks show to be the only one true religion—it is a public crime to act as though there were no God. So, too, is it a sin for the State not to have care for religion as a something beyond its scope, or as of no practical benefit; or out of many forms of religion to adopt that one which chimes in with the fancy; for we are bound absolutely to worship God in that way which He has shown to be His will.[4]
The public profession of religion is as much a duty of society as it is of the individual man. Society “owes gratitude” to its Creator for His Goodness and Providence. Thus, “it is a public crime to act as though there were no God” and to neglect the public practice of the one true religion which God Himself enjoins upon us and by which “we are bound absolutely to worship God.”
Religion is the highest duty of justice and includes our due worship of the Almighty “as the first principle of all things.”[5] Since He is the “author, sustainer and end of their being,” God must be worshipped by individual men. But God is the “author, sustainer and end” of society as much as of the individual, so this duty applies to man’s common life as much as it does his private life.[6] Religion is a debt owed to God in justice not only by individuals, but by every community as well.
Cardinal Ratzinger speaks of this duty of society toward God in his Spirit of the Liturgy, when he treats the worship and social order which obtained in the Old Testament. He writes about the necessary interconnection between “the three orders of worship, law, and ethics.” Human affairs which are ordered without proper recognition of God lead to
a belittling of man. That is why, in the final analysis, worship and law cannot be completely separated from each other. God has a right to a response from man, to man himself, and where that right of God totally disappears, the order of law among men is dissolved, because there is no cornerstone to keep the whole structure together.[7]
The lack of proper worship in an individual’s life has dramatic ramifications, so too in the life of society. Ratzinger shows that every society has a god, something or someone which is publicly worshipped, and this will either be the true God or some golden calf. The life of God’s own people manifested this, who when they fell from true worship did not fall into no worship but into idolatry. To paraphrase Chesterton, when man (as much collectively as individually) ceases to worship the true God, it is not that he worships nothing, but that he will worship anything. Because of this,
worship, that is, the right kind of cult, of relationship with God, is essential for the right kind of human existence in the world. It is so precisely because it reaches beyond everyday life. Worship gives us a share in heaven’s mode of existence, in the world of God, and allows light to fall from that divine world into ours. In this sense, worship…has the character of anticipation. It lays hold in advance of a more perfect life and, in so doing, gives our present life its proper measure. A life without such anticipation, a life no longer opened up to heaven, would be empty, a leaden life. That is why there are in reality no societies altogether lacking in cult. Even the decidedly atheistic, materialistic systems create their own forms of cult, though, of course, they can only be an illusion and strive in vain, by bombastic trumpeting, to conceal their nothingness.[8]
We need only look around ourselves to see many ways in which the lack of true cult in society is replaced by vain and bombastic trumpeting, a thin veneer covering the lack of proper order.
II. Fons
The last passage from The Spirit of the Liturgy begins to point us in the direction of the second aspect of liturgy’s necessity in society. Ratzinger wrote, “Worship, that is, the right kind of cult, of relationship with God, is essential for the right kind of human existence in the world.” He arrives at his statement of the crucial role of worship in the life of any community by first showing how it was precisely worship which made Israel to be Israel. In the Exodus, the Israelites left Egypt to serve the Lord in the desert. They left precisely in order to worship God. This was no mere cover story to convince Pharaoh to let the people go temporarily. It was in the desert at Mount Sinai that this people received the Law, the all-embracing directives for their life and worship. Cardinal Ratzinger points out that Israel did not leave Egypt to become a nation like any other, but to receive a land in which the true God could be truly worshipped, in which the true God Himself would dwell as He would not dwell anywhere else on earth. In this we see a clear type of the Eucharist and the communion it provides, bringing into being the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ united by the Eucharistic Body of Christ, united to the Father and through Him to one another. A society which has this Eucharistic communion at its foundation will necessarily be a community in the truest sense.
The sacred liturgy is the mysterion[9] hidden from ages and generations but now manifested to God’s saints, the very life of Christ being lived in us and in our midst, now at work in the world until its final consummation. The liturgy, therefore, is the tropological or moral sense of the mystery of Christ, by which He is at work in us now, by which He is bringing us toward the full reality of the anagogical sense. The liturgy is Christ the Head’s worship of God the Father and the Body’s participation in it, by which the power of the Cross enters our here and now to pour its flood of grace into us and through us into our world. As Ratzinger said, “Worship gives us a share in heaven’s mode of existence, in the world of God.” Because of this, it is through the liturgy that Christ builds the Kingdom of God on earth, the Kingdom which the Lord conforms to Himself and will present to the Father.
The true faith is not Pelagian; we cannot save ourselves. Nor can we save the world ourselves or build the proper social order on our own. The Cross and the infinite font of its grace are the engine behind sanctification and the proper ordering of our lives, individually and communally, and the Church’s liturgy is the conduit. Our call to build up the God’s Kingdom on earth is not to be understood as the activism of “Go, Make a Difference” and “Sing a New Church into Being,” but rather as the true actualization of the reign of God on earth, which is brought about by the liturgy. It is the liturgy which brings order to time and space. We see this beautifully in the episcopal liturgical greeting of Pax tecum, literally ‘Peace with you.’ This is both an announcement and a pronouncement, a word which is declarative and performative, as it was the first time the Lord spoke these words on Easter Sunday. It announces and establishes among us that peace which the world cannot give, that tranquility which comes only from the assumption of the temporal order into the divine.
Sin divorces the temporal order from the divine and attempts to separate the State from its soul. The liturgy overcomes this separation by taking the temporal order up into the divine, re-ordering it, properly ordering it. This reordering of the world is sacramentalized in the highest way in the Eucharist. In It the Lord’s natural gifts which have been transformed by men are offered back to Him to be transformed into Him. Through the Eucharistic sacrifice, the liturgy brings about this transformation in us as well. We enter the Son’s self-offering to the Father in order that we may truly be sons ourselves. Through Christ, with Him, and in Him we offer ourselves and our world to God the Father in order to be transformed into Him. This is at the heart of the liturgy’s transformative role in society, the reason why it is the fons of all the power of the Body of Christ: not because of an activism but because of an actualism, the actualization of God’s order in us and through us. The Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes well the role of the liturgy, and especially the Mass, in bringing about God’s order in the world, quoting a text of Pope St. John Paul II:
The Eucharist is the efficacious sign and sublime cause of that communion in the divine life and that unity of the People of God by which the Church is kept in being. It is the culmination both of God’s action sanctifying the world in Christ and of the worship men offer to Christ and through him to the Father in the Holy Spirit.[10]
It is from the liturgy that we are to be the leaven, salt, and light in the midst of the temporal order which our Lord commands us to be. This is the connection between cult, culture, and the truest cultivation of society.
In Immortale Dei, Leo XIII declares that all rulers must honor the name of God, and that “one of their chief duties must be to favour religion, to protect it, to shield it” under the law. This is a duty which rulers owe to the ruled, for by virtue of our baptism, we are all ordered toward a supernatural end,
a supreme and final good in heaven, and to the attainment of this every endeavour should be directed. Since, then, upon this depends the full and perfect happiness of mankind, the securing of this end should be of all imaginable interests the most urgent. Hence, civil society, established for the common welfare, should not only safeguard the well-being of the community, but have also at heart the interests of its individual members, in such mode as not in any way to hinder, but in every manner to render as easy as may be, the possession of that highest and unchangeable good for which all should seek. Wherefore, for this purpose, care must especially be taken to preserve unharmed and unimpeded the religion whereof the practice is the link connecting man with God.[11]
The practice of the true religion is of crucial importance to the common good of a properly ordered society and is that which effects that order.
The proper worship of Christ as King is necessary for the peace of society, since giving God His due is an obligation of justice and since it is from true worship that society receives its proper order. Pope Pius XI spoke of this necessity forty years after Immortale Dei when he established the Feast of Christ the King on the Church’s universal calendar. In his letter Quas primas, Pius references an earlier encyclical in which he had noted that the “manifest evils” facing the world in his day,
Were due to the fact that the majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives; that these had no place either in private affairs or in politics: and we said further, that as long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations.[12]
True peace, the tranquillity of order, cannot exist in a society or between societies when there is no public recognition of Christ as King and no public worship of Him. The Holy Father says that it is only if “men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King” that “society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony.”[13] And such a recognition of Christ as King of a community would necessarily entail public worship.
Pope Benedict XVI spoke often of the importance of getting the liturgy right for any true reform in the Church. This could equally be said of any true reform in society. Only if our communal duties toward God are properly met and only if there is public worship of Him according to that religion which He has revealed can there be the order which we hope to establish in the world.
For through Him and with Him and in Him is to Thee, God the Father almighty, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honor and glory, world without end. Amen.
- Sacrosanctum concilium, 10. “The liturgy is the summit toward which the action of the Church tends and at the same time the font whence all her power flows.” Translation mine. ↑
- Ibid., 14. “Quae totius populi plena et actuosa participatio, in instauranda et fovenda sacra Liturgia, summopere est attendenda: est enim primus, isque necessarius fons, e quo spiritum vere christianum fideles haurient.” ↑
- Lumen Gentium, 11 modifies the statement of SC slightly: “Sacrificium eucharisticum, totius vitae christianae fontem et culmen, participantes, divinam Victimam Deo offerunt atque seipsos cum Ea.” “Taking part in the Eucharistic sacrifice, which is the fount and apex of the whole Christian life, they offer the Divine Victim to God, and offer themselves along with It.” Vatican translation. ↑
- Immortale Dei, 6. Vatican translation. ↑
- St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II.81.1 ad 4. Also II-II.81.3 ad 2 “By the one same act man both serves and worships God, for worship regards the excellence of God, to Whom reverence is due: while service regards the subjection of man who, by his condition, is under an obligation of showing reverence to God. To these two belong all acts ascribed to religion, because, by them all, man bears witness to the Divine excellence and to his own subjection to God, either by offering something to God, or by assuming something Divine.” ↑
- Henri Grenier, Thomistic Philosophy IV: Moral Philosophy, no. 1164 (Charlottetown, CA: St Dunstan’s University, 1950), p. 699. ↑
- Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy in Collected Works IX: Theology of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014), 9. ↑
- Ibid., 10-11. ↑
- Meaning here both the mystery that is God’s plan from all ages and the ‘mystery’ which in Latin is translated as sacramentum, the liturgical mystery. ↑
- CCC 1325, quoting Pope John Paul II, Eucharisticum mysterium, 6. ↑
- Immortale Dei, 6. ↑
- Quas primas, 1. ↑
- Ibid., 19. ↑