Pope at Audience: Active participation in liturgy leads us to relationship with God

By Isabella H. de Carvalho

During the Wednesday General Audience in St. Peter’s Basilica on August 26, Pope Leo XIV highlighted the importance of the liturgical reform enacted by the Second Vatican Council, which encouraged the faithful to participate more actively in the liturgy and enter into a deeper relationship with God. 

“Through the Church’s ritual actions, whilst the memorial of the work of salvation is celebrated, the opportunity is provided to experience a true relationship with God, coming into contact with the salvific event,” the Pope said.

“Since the gestures and words of the sacred liturgy are critical to realizing this experience, the participation of the faithful cannot be passive,” he said.

Pope Leo continued his series of reflections on the Documents of the Second Vatican Council, and delivered his final catechesis on the 1963 Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium.

Sacrosanctum Concilium was the first text to be promulgated at the Second Vatican Council and brought about important changes to the liturgy, such as allowing it to be celebrated in vernacular languages and encouraging a more active participation of the faithful.

In his catechesis, the Pope looked at the reasons why the Council Fathers decided to promote this reform.

Pope Leo XIV during the General Audience   (@Vatican Media)

Liturgical reform rooted in living tradition of the Church

Pope Leo noted that this desire for reform did not come suddenly but had been evident in actions and documents published by successive Popes since the beginning of the 20th century.

He cited for example Pope Pius XI’s 1928 Apostolic Constitution Divini Cultus, Pius XII’s choice to reschedule the times of certain Holy Week rites, or Saint John XXIII’s 1960 Motu proprio Rubricarum instructum.

“The liturgical reform promoted by the Second Vatican Council is thus firmly rooted in the living tradition of the Church,” the Pope said. “A correct understanding of it also enables us to reject the abuses that occurred in certain sectors of the Church during the post-Conciliar period, and which, unfortunately, still occur from time to time today, where some of the principles underlying the reform itself have been taken to extremes or misunderstood.”

The Wednesday General Audience on August 26   (@Vatican Media)

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Responsibility of bishops and priests to safeguard the liturgy

The Pope also underlined that Sacrosanctum Concilium insists on the point that “liturgical services are not private functions, but are celebrations of the Church, which is the ‘sacrament of unity,’ namely, the holy people united and ordered under their bishops.”

Therefore, the Pope, said that it is “the primary responsibility of pastors, of bishops but also of each individual priest, to safeguard and promote a liturgy which, while respecting liturgical norms, shines with noble simplicity and thus manifests the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.”

“Such a liturgy will also be a fundamental vehicle for evangelization, the instrument of grace through which, as the Council teaches, we may learn to offer ourselves and, through Christ’s mediation, be perfected in unity with God and amongst ourselves,” the Pope continued.

St. Peter’s Basilica during the Wednesday General Audience   (@Vatican Media)

Expression of both divine and human

To understand the reasons for the reform, Pope Leo XIV cited a letter that the then-Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini – the future Pope Paul VI – sent to the faithful of his Church in October 1962. 

In it he pointed out how the liturgy “is a sincere expression of both the divine and the human,” as it is “a language,” “a vehicle for divine teaching,” and a “a voice in dialogue with God.” 

“The faithful ‘cannot and must no longer remain silent and passive’” as their “’their physical presence cannot be reconciled with their spiritual absence,” the future Pope had written. 

Pope Leo noted that these thoughts are echoed in point 48 of Sacrosanctum Concilium, which emphasized that the Church desired that the faithful not participate in the liturgy as “strangers or silent spectators,” but rather “take part in the sacred action conscious of what they are doing, with devotion and full collaboration.”

In this way, they can “be drawn day by day into ever more perfect union with God and with each other, so that finally God may be all in all,” the Constitution’s text continued.

Pope Leo XIV greets the faithful during the General Audience   (@Vatican Media)

Living liturgy that adapts to the times

The Pope said these words showed “a renewed awareness of the value of the liturgy” and allowed it “to shine forth as ‘the primary source of that divine exchange in which the life of God is communicated to us’.”

From this conviction came the need to make the biblical texts and prayers more accessible and to streamline the order of the celebration, the Pope highlighted.

He explained that, since the “liturgy is a living entity throughout the centuries, it has always been subject to developments and changes,” adapting its forms to the needs of different time periods.

“It is therefore not surprising that the Second Vatican Council, too, with the utmost respect for the heritage of tradition, and precisely in order to make it more accessible, considered it necessary to revise the liturgical books,” the Pope said. 

Quoting point 21 of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Pope noted that the text made a distinction between the “immutable elements divinely instituted” and the human elements which “not only may but ought to be changed with the passage of time.”

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Thus, the texts and rites can be changed so that they can “express more clearly the holy things which they signify” and the faithful may be able “to understand them with ease and to take part in them fully, actively, and as befits a community.”