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Connect liturgy to people’s lives, experts advise at Miami meeting

Catholic News Service provides this brief snippet:

Here’s a recipe for better Masses: Let the symbols speak, get the people to participate and make sure what happens in church connects with their lives. That was the advice offered by two liturgical experts from Rome during a symposium Feb. 7 at St. Thomas University in Miami on “Shaping the Liturgy of the 21st Century.”

Questions: How, how and how?

Also on this page: Cardinal Dulles says Vatican II a renewal, not rupture with past

“The council has elicited many healthy initiatives over the past 40 years, but its beneficent effect has been partly offset by the false interpretations based on a mentality that has its sources in an alien culture,” the cardinal said. “The widespread misinterpretation of the council, in my judgment, is due to the cultural ambience in which this document has been read,” he said. “The thinking and feeling of our age is dominated by subjectivism, individualism, relativism and historicism—things that are as prevalent today as ever in the past.”

Posted 02.21.2004
by Aristotle A. Esguerra
2 comments.
Filed under: Relevant Reading.

2 Comments

Isn’t that the same advice offered by experts for 30 years?

Gen X Revert
02.21.2004 @ 12:40 pm #

Peace, all.

Advice not always followed.

The good question, how: could be answered.

When letting “symbols speak” it simply means that liturgy is not a didactic tool in which one prepares, tells the people what’s going to happen, then does it. The Tridentine Rite, for its perceived stagnation, let the symbols speak.

Getting people to participate: good singable music in good acoustics with good organ and other instruments, competent leadership in music. Lots of lay participation on various liturgy committees involving the parish ministries.

Connecting liturgy to lay life? Maybe the hardest one. You need homilies that will move people off square one … or wherever they are. Most of all, you need a weekly liturgical experience that inspires and feeds people to live better Catholic lives. Liturgy is meant to be a source and summit of Christian life. Won’t happen if the Mass is more of a distraction to endure, or an obligation to fulfill than something people look forward to week after week. Simple, but not at all easy.

Todd
02.21.2004 @ 6:37 pm #

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