I Have Ardently Longed

Thus says the Lord: I have ardently longed to eat this Passover with you before I suffer (Lk 22:15). This phrase gives Pope Francis the title for his recent letter on the liturgy (Desiderio Desideravi) and provides a way into understanding his core message.

Christ and his desire to be one with us is front and centre. Astonished, we can imagine the words of Christ, the new Adam, as he gazes at the Church: ‘Here at last is bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh’ (DD 14). Through our baptism and the gift of the Holy Spirit, we have become one flesh with Christ. Consequently, the subject acting in the liturgy is always and only Christ-Church, the mystical Body of Christ (DD 15).

The content of the Bread broken is the cross of Jesus (DD 7). The Last Supper is the ritual anticipation of his death; so our memorial at the table of the Eucharist is a participation in the paschal mystery. We see with the disciples on the way to Emmaus that the breaking of the bread  heals  the  blindness inflicted by the horror of the cross and renders us capable of ‘seeing’ the risen Lord. This is ‘the powerful beauty of the liturgy’ – it guarantees for us the possibility of a true encounter with Christ alive (DD 10). This is not just a mental exercise or a search for a ‘ritual aesthetic’ (DD 22); it is a visceral sacramental reality.

Yes, there is indeed an amazing sense of mystery in the liturgy. Not a reality obscured by clouds of incense or mysterious ritual, but marvelling at the fact that the salvific plan of God  has  been  revealed in the paschal deed of Jesus  and that  the power of this paschal deed continues to reach us in the celebration of the ‘mysteries’, of the sacraments (DD 25). Wonder, Pope Francis affirms, is an essential part of the liturgical act. In this apostolic letter, he manages to open up a fresh way of appreciating what we do when we celebrate the liturgy.

Here we have a very different liturgical document from those we have seen over the last several decades which focussed on the rules for a correct liturgy and the elimination of so-called ‘liturgical abuses’. Pope Francis moves from disciplinary themes to theological and pastoral insights.

He is explicitly following up on his restriction of the old Latin rite (Traditionis custodes, 2021), but he does so by displaying the beauty, the truth, the saving mystery enshrined in the Church’s reformed liturgy. It is a wondrous and attractive reality which draws the whole Church into unity, a unity centred on Christ who desires to eat the Passover with us. The pope moves beyond the empty polemics and tensions over liturgical practice to something more profound, rich and real.

Formation is required for the people of God. This does not mean programs and guidelines; it means discovering how to respond to Christ’s desire to be with us. We need sacramental eyes to see what God is doing in our liturgical celebration.

Wonder is an essential part of the liturgical act because it is the way that those who know they are engaged in the particularity of symbolic gestures look at things. It is the marvelling of those who experience the power of symbol, which does not consist in referring to some abstract concept but rather in containing and expressing in its very concreteness what it signifies. Therefore, the fundamental question is this: how do we recover the capacity to live completely the liturgical action? This was the objective of the Council’s reform. The challenge is extremely demanding because modern people – not in all cultures to the same degree — have lost the capacity to engage with symbolic action, which is an essential trait of the liturgical act (DD 26-27).

A sacramental vision is incarnational. It requires a confidence about creation. We become capable of apprehending symbols when we know that bread, wine, water, oil, ashes, fire, light, colours, bodies, words, sounds, silences, gestures, movement, space, time, all manifest the love of God shown in its fullness in the Cross of Jesus (DD 42). In a sacramental Church, symbol is substance.

Of course, the liturgical rites and prayers need to be followed carefully (DD 23). But this is neither an end in itself nor does it imply a rigorist rubricism (which Pope Francis has often rejected). Belonging to the Church should lead us beyond the externals to ‘full, conscious, active participation’. This is a way of approaching the paschal mystery from within the ecclesial communion. It is the community of Pentecost that is able to break the  Bread  in  the certain knowledge that the Lord  is  alive,  risen  from the dead, present with his word,  with  his  gestures, with the offering of his Body and his Blood (DD 33).

In reflecting on how the liturgy should be celebrated, Pope Francis speaks of the attitudes and behaviours of all the baptised (not just those of the ordained minister). Silence in the liturgy, for example, is not an inner haven in which to hide oneself in some sort  of intimate isolation, as if leaving the ritual form behind as a distraction (DD 52). It is something much more grand: it is a communal space for the presence and action of the Holy Spirit.

Speaking specifically of the leadership of the priest, the pope takes a strong middle path. He says that the priest’s way of presiding shapes the community’s liturgical life, sometimes negatively. He lists a range of inadequate presiding ‘styles’: rigid austerity or an exasperating creativity, a spiritualising mysticism or a practical functionalism, a rushed briskness or an overemphasised slowness, a sloppy  carelessness  or an excessive finickiness, a superabundant friendliness or priestly impassibility (DD 54). For this service to be well done – indeed, with art! – it is of fundamental importance that the priest have a keen awareness of being, through God’s mercy, a particular presence of the risen Lord (DD 57). Presiding well is a work of humble service of the beauty and truth of the paschal mystery. It does not require a ‘directory’, but an encounter with Christ and an engagement with his action in the liturgy.

This Apostolic Letter is excellent. Read it. Pope Francis concludes with spirited recommendations: Let us abandon our polemics, to listen together to what the Spirit is saying to the Church.  Let us safeguard our communion.  Let us continue to be astonished at the beauty of the liturgy. The paschal mystery has been given to us.  Let us allow ourselves to be embraced by the desire that the Lord continues to have to eat his Passover with us (DD 65).

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This article was originally published in Liturgy News Vol 52(3) September 2022. Reprinted with permission.