Folia Theologica et Canonica 10. 32/24 (2021)

Ius canonicum

EXEGESIS ON MOTU PROPRIO SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM BY BENEDICT XVI 129

VI. The Theological Fundament

of the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum

It is not necessary here to justify that the Second Vatican Council can only bear fruit if it is inserted in the historical chain of multiple councils that have been held throughout the history of the Church. Were these to be questioned, one would also implicitly be questioning the documents of Vatican II, and among them, the Apostolic Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium, as well as all the post-conciliar liturgical reform that followed. The Liturgy of the Church cannot break with the Tradition, nor can it remain fixed in 1962, stigmatising as it were, the 1962-1965 Council.

But it is undeniable that this hermeneutic of renewal in continuity is incompatible with the “arbitrary disfigurations of the Liturgy” (GF paragraph 4), which do not express the lex orandi and damage the lex credendi, by which the sacramental celebration ends up becoming an arbitrary “discipline”, modifiable at whim, because the liturgical norm is understood almost in the manner of the positivist legalists of our times.

The comments that Cardinal Ratzinger made at the time on this point were very enlightening: “Creativity cannot be an authentic category in the liturgical practice. Furthermore, this term has developed within the ambience of the Marxist Weltanschauung”. And he continued: “Creativity means that in a world deprived of sense, which has come about through blind evolution, man finally creates a new and better world, based on his own strengths”.19

Already as Benedict XVI, in his speech before the German parliament, essential, in my opinion for contemporary discussion on the fundaments of Law, he highlighted the need to discard in everything an exclusively positivist view of mankind.20 If “a human ecology” really exists, how much more so does one of the Floly Eucharist exist, according to which all the liturgical abuses should disappear, so that nothing is to be preferred to the Work of God, a sentence taken from the Holy Benedictine Rule (chapter 43, verse 3) also mentioned in SP, paragraph 3 of the statement of reasons. These abuses are not automatically excluded either by merely celebrating with the 1962 edition of the Roman Missal.

In most of his writings, Ratzinger has always insisted that “the true polarity is not that of the old and the new books, but that of the liturgy of the whole Church and the liturgy made to measure”; that is to say, the true Sacra Liturgia versus a “self-made” one according to the personal whims of the celebrant

19 Ratzinger, J., El espíritu de la liturgia. Una introducción, Madrid 2002. 192. It is the Spanish translation of the original German text: Der Geist der Liturgie. Eine Einführung, Freiburg im Breisgau-Basel-Wien 2000.

20 Benedictus XVI, Alloc. Es ist mir Ehre (22 sept. 2011): AAS 103 (2011) 663-669.