Cardinal Robert Sarah
Cardinal Sarah encourages
celebrating Mass facing the Lord In an interview that appeared on May 26, 2016,
in the pages of the French weekly magazine Famille Chrétienne, Cardinal Robert
Sarah declared that “the liturgy is in danger.”
One of the highest abuse in the new mass
The Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments deplores the fact that, in the so-called “Ordinary” rite, “man seeks to take God’s place”
and that “the
liturgy runs the risk of becoming merely a human game.” The prelate from Guinea
regrets that many Masses “become spectacles” in which the priest no longer
celebrates “the love of Christ through His sacrifice” but rather “a meeting of
friends, a convivial meal, a fraternal moment”.
Dancing in the church
“In seeking to invent creative or festive liturgies,” Cardinal Sarah also warns, “we run the risk of making our worship too human and bringing it down to the level of our desires and of momentary fads.... The danger is immense, because God disappears.” He adds: “I am convinced that the whole crisis that the Church is going through... results from the fact that God’s presence in the Eucharist is not noticed or is denied in practice.” In his opinion, the main reason why contemporary liturgy is adrift is “the priest’s position turned toward the people”, which sometimes makes the assembly a “community closed in on itself” and no longer “open, either to the world to come or to Heaven”.
Dancing at the altar
The abuse continues
The priest must not be “the center, the main protagonist of the Eucharistic celebration”, Cardinal Sarah insists, because “the faithful did not come to speak to the priest but to God.” In order “to put God back at the center of the liturgy”, the high-ranking prelate proposed “celebrating—priests and lay faithful both—facing the same direction together: toward the Lord who comes”. This is because the problem is not “celebrating with one’s back turned toward the faithful or facing them” but rather “turning together toward the apse, which symbolizes the East where the cross of the Risen Lord is enthroned”. The Cardinal denounces wrong interpretations of Vatican Council II, which “never asked priests to celebrate facing the people”.
