Sacramentum Caritatis and Continuity

Sandro Magister has a reasonable summary of Sacramentum Caritatis in his column on Chiesa. I have actually printed off a few copies for interested parishioners.

He introduces by saying, "A Christian cannot live without the Eucharist, Benedict XVI writes. In it, “the Lord truly becomes food for us, to satisfy our hunger for truth and freedom.” With the duty that stems from this, and in the political realm as well: to give “public witness to our faith”

He says that you should read the document itself, I agree. I must say the more I read it the more fruit I glean from it and the more it shows the delightfully subtly of the Holy Father's mind. Reading him is rather like listening to Mozart or better Bach, it is pleasurable the first time, and becomes more and more profound as one goes over it again and again.

It is good that the teaching of the past 40 years has been taken by the Holy Father and made his own. He has continually spoken of the "hermeneutic of continuity", the last thing he wants is to be seen as breaking with past. His teaching on the Church is that it is united with Christ, as a continuum through all time, with the Apostles, the First Millennium, the Middle Ages and the immediate past, and indeed the future.

The much rumoured Motu Proprio has been seen by many as God's Rottweiler turning the clock back, that is foolish. He doesn't see the Church as a museum but as the "Temple of the Holy Spirit", a living thing continually being built up on the foundations established by God, its history, its whole history has been guided by God, who having been with it from the beginning, will be with it until the end of time. For him organic development of the Liturgy is vital. Vital too, that we are connected to all that has gone before. We cannot imagine, as many did after the Council that somehow the Church's (Pol Pot style) Year Zero had occurred some time in the 60s, therefore the music, the art, the style and yes, even the Rites of previous ages are important, to loose sight of what has been our past, would be a denial of God's action through all time and a misunderstanding of the nature of the Church and of the nature of God's dealings with humanity.