sense of the sacred: The Vesting of a Bishop

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

The Vesting of a Bishop

A wonderful post on vesting the Bishop in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite! Perhaps many bishops will hesitate to go through this ritual vesting. In fact, liturgical vestments have lost their meaning in the minds of many priests. Today, we don our vestments while chatting. We no longer say the prayers while vesting. Thus, it should not come as a surprise how the liturgical vestment is regarded simply as a uniform or a costume. Some priests are more delighted in wearing an academic gown than a liturgical vestment. How I wish we could restore the sense of the sacred with regards the liturgical vestments.

Follow the link The Vesting of a Bishop in East and West

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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 )