“A PART OF SOMETHING BIGGER”

Liturgical Rites & the Christian Tradition

“…it is important that the individual rites have a relation to the places where Christianity originated and the apostles preached: they are anchored in the time and place of divine revelation. Here again ‘once for all’ and ‘always’ belong together. The Christian faith can never be separated from the soil of sacred events…‘Always’ can only come from ‘once for all’…Rites are not, therefore, just the products of inculturation, however much they may have incorporated elements from different cultures. They are forms of the apostolic Tradition and of its unfolding in the great places of the Tradition.”
“…What is important is that the great forms of rite embrace many cultures. They…create communion among different cultures and languages. They elude control by any individual, local community, or regional Church. Unspontaneity is of their essence. In these rites I discover that something is approaching me here that I did not produce myself, that I am entering into something greater than myself, which ultimately derives from divine revelation.”
- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)
The Spirit of the Liturgy (pp. 163-165) [Ignatius Press, 2000]