Pope Leo today addressed eastern Catholics gathered in Rome for the Jubilee of the Eastern Churches. His address, published on the Vatican’s website and covered by Vatican News, was to the assembled partriarchs, cardinals, bishops, priests, male and female religious, and laity of the Eastern Rites who were assembled for the Jubilee.
Much of the address centered on the them of peace, something Pope Leo has spoken of a great deal in this first week of his pontificate. Wartorn Ukraine, Syria, Lebanon, Armenia, and other troubled hotspots were represented in the Paul VI Audience Hall where the address took place, and the Holy Father spoke of the crosses that our Catholic Eastern brethren carry due to the scourge of war.
One paragraph from that address that has garnered attention is an encomium that Pope Leo gave to the beautiful liturgies, customs, and spirituality of the Eastern Rites and the need that we in the West have of learning from them:
The Church needs you. The contribution that the Christian East can offer us today is immense! We have great need to recover the sense of mystery that remains alive in your liturgies, liturgies that engage the human person in his or her entirety, that sing of the beauty of salvation and evoke a sense of wonder at how God’s majesty embraces our human frailty! It is likewise important to rediscover, especially in the Christian West, a sense of the primacy of God, the importance of mystagogy and the values so typical of Eastern spirituality: constant intercession, penance, fasting, and weeping for one’s own sins and for those of all humanity (penthos)! It is vital, then, that you preserve your traditions without attenuating them, for the sake perhaps of practicality or convenience, lest they be corrupted by the mentality of consumerism and utilitarianism.
Without attempting to read motives and intentions into the words of His Holiness, I would simply state what I consider to be obvious: the undeniable beauty, transcendence, and ceremonial sacrality of the Eastern Rites — as well as their traditions of “the primacy of God, the importance of mystagogy… constant intercession, penance, fasting, and weeping for one’s own sins and for those of all humanity” — have their Western counterpart, not in the Novus Ordo Missae and the rites and customs that accompany it, but in the Traditional Latin Liturgy and its accompanying rites, customs, and spirit.
Any disciple of Dom Prosper Gueranger knows how much admiration that masterful liturgical practicioner and scholar had for the Eastern Rites, but his love for them was not the admiration of one suffering from an inferiority complex (as many modern Occidentals have), but that of one who sees the beautiful complementary of the Latin with the Eastern Rites, as well as the continuity that exists in all traditional liturgies with what came before in the Middle Ages and in Christian antiquity.
The sad shattering of that continuity that took place in the name of “the Council” has caused great spiritual harm to the Church.
Again, I am not reading my thougths into Pope Leo’s words. They are his words, not mine. Let us hope that the Holy Father will one day say to Catholics of the Latin Rite what he said today to our Eastern brethren:
It is vital, then, that you preserve your traditions without attenuating them, for the sake perhaps of practicality or convenience, lest they be corrupted by the mentality of consumerism and utilitarianism.
Those of us who worship in the Traditional Latin Rites would welcome such a statement with great joy and enthusiasm.
In summary, I am heartened by these words of the Holy Father, and I hope that the faithful of all Catholic rites see in them a call for a return to tradition.
