The Problem of Liturgy

For the Church, divine worship is a matter of life and death. If it is no longer possible to bring the faithful to worship God, and in such a way that they themselves perform this worship, then the Church has failed in its task and can no longer justify its existence. but it was precisely on this point that a profound crisis occurred in the life of the Church. Its roots reach far back. In the late Middle Ages, awareness of the real essence of Christian worship increasingly vanished. Great importance was attached to externals, and these choked out essentials…


The main measure (of the Council of Trent) was to centralize all liturgical authority in the Sacred Congregation of Rites, the post-concilliar organ for the implementation of the liturgical ideas of Trent. This measure, however, proved to be two-edged. New overgrowths were in fact prevented, but the fate of liturgy in the West was now in the hands of a strictly centralized and purely bureaucratic authority. This authority completely lacked historical perspective; it viewed the liturgy solely in terms of ceremonial rubrics, treating it as a kind of proper court etiquette for sacred matters. This resulted in the complete archaizing of the liturgy, which now passed from the stage of living history, became embalmed in the status quo and was ultimately doomed to internal decay.
taken from: Theological Highlights of Vatican II by Joseph Ratzinger, Paulist Press, English Edition, 1966


One must ask whether fifty years after the opening of the Council, the present centralizing process does not risk producing similar results.