Preface to “Worship and Sacraments”

The number of documents presented here, and the wealth of doctrinal and pastoral guidelines they contain, illustrate the importance the Church attaches to our personal and social relationships with God in prayer.

Most of the documents are recent and intended to guide us in our spiritual life at this particular moment in time. However, they are intended to show us that their sources are to be found in the Word of God and in the most ancient Traditions of the Christian community.

The new rules and practices are never in contradiction, but are in continuity with the past, and they put into focus what has always been considered most essential and most significant.

If there is one field of activity where we need precise definitions and directives, it is in prayer.

Personal prayer and mediation have an irreplaceable role and value in our life. But, God has created us as social beings and we need, even in our most intimate conversation, to be guided in order to be led from the instinctive to the fully human dimension. We all need to learn how to pray, but the necessity of public and well-ordered prayer is a consequence of the right God possesses to be honored, as its Creator, by society itself.

For the Catholic Church, defining and guiding divine worship and the liturgy of the sacraments is not only an indisputable duty, but also a means of implementing her triple mission of teaching the faith, sanctifying the world, and governing the people of God.

A religion is judged by the way it prays. An old adage says, lex orandi, lex credendi, that is: our faith is identified by the way we worship.

Many misunderstandings about our faith, at the origin of the Protestant succession, were precisely on the central role of the sacraments in our liturgy and their innate efficacy to procure justification and grace.

Sadly, even today, too many of our fellow Catholics have left the Church because of the parodies of the liturgy by some priests who misconstrued the true meaning of the liturgical renewal intended by Vatican II. Through ignorance, or disobedience to the clear wording of the Council, some have been led to indulge in adaptations of their own.

It is only the official documents of the Magisterium which set forth the characteristic notes of divine worship as it is practiced in the Catholic Church.

One is the role of Christ in our prayer. Not only does God invite us to pray by putting into our hearts a deep desire to tell Him what we feel and wish, but through His prophets, He has taught us even the very words with which we are to pray. His Son, Jesus, Himself, used these words in conversing with His Father. And now that He has redeemed us and given us His Spirit, it is He who prays within us and in the liturgy. This explains the preference given to the texts taken from Scripture, and to Gregorian Chant which is nothing else than the Bible teachings put into music for our meditation.

And always we keep before our minds the fact — the consoling truth — that the Mass is the most perfect prayer; the most perfect form of worship; the summit and source of Christian life!

Another characteristic of Catholic prayer is the centrality of the sacraments, and the Eucharist in particular. The Eucharist commemorates the mystery of our salvation and makes it present again every day and everywhere. And from the Heart of Jesus dying on the Cross flow the other sacraments which keep an essential connection with the Eucharist.

Our faith in the sanctifying action of the Sacraments distinguishes our liturgy from the worship of other monotheistic religions. The fact that they produce grace by themselves, ex opere operato, does not dispense us from having the right disposition to receive grace. Hence, the insistence on the initiation and the immediate preparation for receiving the sacraments. And also the instruction to be given in the celebration itself.

An active participation is required on the part of those who receive the sacraments, but they are, first and foremost, acts of God, acts of Christ, in His divinity and humanity, and acts of the Church in which Christ lives and operates.

It is Christ, through His Holy Spirit, who gives the sacraments their innate and special power to produce sanctifying grace, to introduce and renovate us in spiritual life, and also to procure for us the diverse sacramental graces required to respond in a Christian manner to our different functions and needs.

Worship and the liturgy of the sacraments have been, throughout the centuries, the object of a great portion of the interventions of the Magisterium. The merit of the present volume of the Précis is to give us a judicious and substantial selection of texts sufficient to know the decisions and the mind of the pastors “Christ has established over us to look after our souls.”

This very important volume continues the valued service which CCSP is rendering to the Church, and to all of us who cherish the teaching of the Church, by publishing these superb volumes on its “Official Teaching.”

Edouard Cardinal Gagnon
President,
Pontifical Commission for International Eucharistic Congresses