Vatican liturgy chief addresses national gathering in Baltimore 

In a call to refocus on the heart of Catholic worship, British Cardinal Arthur Roche, head of the Vatican’s liturgy office, urged believers to embrace the wonder of the Eucharist and model their lives on humility and love. 

Cardinal Roche, prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, was the plenary speaker for the 56th annual National Meeting of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions, held Sept. 30-Oct. 2 at the Hilton Inner Harbor in Baltimore. The gathering drew around 200 participants, including clergy, laity and seminarians from around the country.

In an Oct. 1 keynote address, Cardinal Roche gave a detailed reflection on Desiderio desideravi, a 2022 apostolic letter by Pope Francis on liturgical formation. The letter said the “sense of mystery” and awe Catholics experience at Mass should be prompted by an awareness of Christ’s sacrifice and his real presence in the Eucharist.

“With this letter I simply want to invite the whole church to rediscover, to safeguard and to live the truth and power of the Christian celebration,” Pope Francis wrote. “I want the beauty of the Christian celebration and its necessary consequences for the life of the church not to be spoiled by a superficial and foreshortened understanding of its value or, worse yet, by its being exploited in service of some ideological vision, no matter what the hue.”

Cardinal Roche drew parallels between Pope Francis’s letter and St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, written when news reached Paul about disputes over how to celebrate liturgy in the church he had founded and loved.

“The reports he had received regarding the public worship of the church had been the cause of great alarm,” Cardinal Roche said. In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul bluntly tells them “I do not commend you, for when you come together it is not for the better, but for the worse.”

Pope Francis “did not set out to give a systematic treatment of liturgical formation,” Cardinal Roche said. Instead, he wished “to take the church by the hand and lead her toward the center of the mystery we celebrate, towards the heart of Christ which burns with his ardent desire that we should draw nigh, take his body and drink his blood, to worship the father with hearts and minds made new, through having been washed in the blood of the Lamb.”

Unity with Christ and in the church are key to liturgy, he said.

“Love always seeks communion,” Cardinal Roche said. “When this was broken by our first parents it inflamed the Holy Trinity with an even greater desire to reestablish it, to bridge the distance that would be achieved through the self-giving of Jesus to us in the Passover.”

He emphasized that Christ’s self-giving “must also be matched by our willingness to receive him. This is the meaning of ‘I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you.’ This ‘with you’ is part of the very logic of his giving. If there is no ‘you’ ready to receive, then what he offers can never be a gift.”

Pope Francis’s letter emphasized the need to “rediscover the theological sense of the liturgy,” he said. “Therefore, when the pope speaks about the liturgy, he is saying, ‘the liturgy is God’s action with us and we must be attentive to him, to him who speaks, to him who acts, to him who calls, to him who sends.'”

Cardinal Roche celebrated Mass Oct. 1 for the Memorial of St. Thérèse at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Baltimore. In his homily, he told the congregation that the childlike simplicity of St. Thérèse of Lisieux is a model of love and humility for today’s world.

“In an age where people are sometimes pathologically obsessed with fame and glory of celebrities or even of themselves, St. Thérèse’s ‘little way’ teaches us that the route to obtaining glory is not through changing something” to bring oneself fame or glory,” the cardinal said.

St. Thérèse, also known as the Little Flower, found happiness through simplicity and expressing love, he said. “Her ‘little way’ had very little of herself in it.”

Cardinal Roche connected her philosophy to Matthew 17, where Jesus tells Peter that while kings collect taxes from others rather than their own children, they should pay the temple tax anyway to avoid causing offense, instructing him to find a coin in a fish’s mouth for payment.

The cardinal suggested this instruction likely made bystanders jealous and “were probably completely embarrassed” by what they thought of as Jesus “pointing out their immaturity” with his reference to children.

“Jesus was teaching his disciples a vitally important lesson,” he said. The same lesson was central to St. Thérèse’s “little way,” which encouraged childlike trust in God, small acts of love, finding joy in service and focusing on the present, not the past or future.

The “little way was nothing more than discovering” all that God offers and that God’s love is immeasurable, Cardinal Roche said.

The three-day gathering included a panel discussion on anointing of the sick; a plenary talk by Benedictine Abbot Gregory Polan on using the psalms in liturgy and personal prayer; a plenary panel on encouraging communal celebrations of the Liturgy of the Hours and several workshops.

Awards were presented to Dominican Sister Lois Jean Paha, diocesan director of pastoral services of the Diocese of Tucson, and to El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz for his advocacy for social justice and “the artful celebration of liturgy.”

The Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in Homeland hosted a special Mass Sept. 30 celebrated by Cardinal Christophe Pierre, apostolic nuncio to the United States.

In one workshop, Father Bruce Cinquegrani, a priest of the Diocese of Memphis and director of the diocese’s Office of Divine Worship, explored how elements of the contemporary Liturgy of the Hours have their roots in Jewish prayer rituals of Jesus’s time and earlier.

Studies of the archaeological site at Qumran in Palestine suggest the Jewish community there might have prayed as many as six times a day, said Father Cinquegrani, who is also an assistant professor at Christian Brothers University and a member of the board of directors of the Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions.

By the first century AD, the typical pattern for ritual prayer was twice daily, with other prayers available for set periods of the day, such as the lighting of the lamps.

The Liturgy of the Hours, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, consists of the daily prayers of the church, “marking the hours of each day and sanctifying the day with prayer.” The Divine Office, as it is also known, includes five hours: the Office of Readings, Morning Prayer, Daytime Prayer, Evening Prayer and Nighttime Prayer.

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