Cardinal Cantalamessa warns against losing sacredness of liturgy

By Deborah Castellano Lubov

"If the sense of the sacred were to be completely lost, the soil, or the climate, in which the act of faith blossoms, would be missing for His people," said Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa, O.F.M. Cap., Preacher of the Papal Household, during the fourth sermon he has delivered for Lent 2023.

His homily, focused on 'Mysterium Fidei: The Liturgy' was given in the Vatican on Friday morning to the Roman Curia, with Pope Francis in attendance.

Cardinal Cantalamessa began by noting that, after having reflected on evangelization and theology, he wished to propose some considerations on the liturgy and the worship of the Church. He did so, he stated, with "the intention of making a contribution, however modest and indirect," to the work of the synod.

The Cardinal highlighted that the liturgy is the point of arrival, what evangelization tends toward.

St. Augustine's first encounter with God

The Cardinal recalled the intense emotions that overcame St. Augustine when he met God.

Turning to God, in his Confessions, the Doctor of the Church said, “When I met you for the first time…, I trembled with love and horror.” And again, “I shiver and I burn; I shiver because of the distance, I burn because of the resemblance.”

The Cardinal stressed the importance of maintaining the sacredness of the liturgy.

This, he said, is the worst effect of secularization.

Needing the sense of holiness

"Charles Péguy," he recalled, "wrote that 'the frightening scarcity and indigence of the sacred is the profound mark of the modern world.' If the sense of the holy has disappeared, however, nostalgia for it has remained, which someone has defined, in secular terms as 'the longing for the totally Other.'”

The Cardinal pointed out how young people often feel the need to get away from the banality of everyday life and have invented their own ways of satisfying this need.

Privileged place to experience God

He then analyzed how the Church can be, for people today, the privileged place of a true experience of God and of the transcendent, and discussed the many occasions where one feels a powerful experience of God and the beginning of a new and personal relationship with Christ.

Cardinal Cantalamessa warned against distorting the beauty of the liturgy "with arbitrary and bizarre improvisations," and "called for "maintaining the necessary sobriety and composure even when the Mass is celebrated in particular situations and environments."