sense of the sacred: On Retreat

Friday, September 17, 2010

On Retreat

I have been on retreat this week with the diocesan clergy. While on retreat, I had the wonderful privilege of offering the Mass in the Oratory of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Atonement in Baguio City. The Oratory is a wonderful sign of the acceptance by the Bishop of Baguio of Summorum Pontificum which is rare in the Philippines. May God bless the good bishop!

I offered Mass in the Oratory during the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, and also on the Feast of Sts. Cyprian and Cornelius. What a fitting way of thanking God for the promulgation of Summorum Pontificum.

Thanks to Florentino Asuncion for the pictures!

1 comment:

UnknownSeptember 19, 2010 at 8:31 PM
Interesting thought father. I hardly saw any portrait of God the Father then however recently some parties are starting to show him as a gray bearded man and I really wonder is that the way he really is? Or perhaps He is beyond a mortal drawing.
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We ought to get back the dimension of the sacred in the liturgy. The liturgy is not a festivity; it is not a meeting for the purpose of having a good time. It is of no importance that the parish priest has cudgeled his brains to come up with suggestive ideas or imaginative novelties. The liturgy is what makes the Thrice-Holy God present amongst us; it is the burning bush; it is the Alliance of God with man in Jesus Christ, who has died and risen again. The grandeur of the liturgy does not rest upon the fact that it offers an interesting entertainment, but in rendering tangible the Totally Other, whom we are not capable of summoning. He comes because He wills. In other words, the essential in the liturgy is the mystery, which is realized in the common ritual of the Church; all the rest diminishes it. Men experiment with it in lively fashion, and find themselves deceived, when the mystery is transformed into distraction, when the chief actor in the liturgy is not the Living God but the priest or the liturgical director. - Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Chile, 1988)

Do we still need sacred space, sacred time, mediating symbols? Yes, we do need them, precisely so that, through the "image," through the sign, we learn to see the openness of heaven. We need them to give us the capacity to know the mystery of God in the pierced heart of the Crucified. - Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Spirit of the Liturgy )