Cardinal Robert Sarah told a meeting of liturgists that efforts “to sprinkle African and Asian elements into the liturgy” are “distorting the paschal mystery”.
Preaching at the opening Mass of the first International Congress of African Liturgists in Dakar on 4 December, Cardinal Sarah said: “Our liturgies are often too bland and too noisy, too African and less Christian.”
He said that excess “improvisation” led to “liturgical desolation” rather than renewal. “If we look at the liturgy as a practical matter of pastoral efficiency, we run the risk of turning it into a human work, a set of more or less successful ceremonies,” he warned.
The congress in the Senegalese capital marked the sixtieth anniversary of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy promulgated by the Second Vatican Council.
Sarah, a former prefect of the Congregation of Divine Worship, called it “historic and of vital importance” that liturgists “compare their thoughts on liturgical practice and the fidelity of African communities to the Christian tradition and the authentic values of African cultures”.
He said that an authentic liturgy was integral to the expression of Christianity. “Let us pray, dear brothers and sisters, that we may rediscover the Trinitarian origin of the liturgy,” he said.
In Washington, DC, Cardinal Wilton Gregory commented on the development and governance of liturgy in remarks to students.
“Tradition dies a slow death, sometimes a bloody death,” Gregory said, during a talk at the Catholic University of America when he was asked about restrictions on the pre-Vatican II liturgy in his archdiocese.
He recounted the history of permissions for the rite, which Pope Paul VI allowed for elderly priests when the Roman rite was reformed in 1971.
Gregory, who has a doctorate in Sacred Liturgy from San Anselmo in Rome, noted that “Two hundred years after Trent, there were parishes celebrating the pre-Trent Mass.”
He said that Traditionis custodes, Pope Francis’ 2021 motu proprio limiting access to the old rite, is “trying to complete what Pope Paul VI began” and ensure that the Vatican II liturgy is “the dominant rite”.
“In many of the places where it grew, the Tridentine rite, it grew because priests promoted it,” Gregory said. “In other words, if you had a guy that came into the parish and said, ‘Well I like this rite, I’m going to do it,’ and he gathered people together, and now all of a sudden he created the need in places where there wasn’t a need there.”
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