Obedience to rubrics is never sufficient

Oswald Sobrino offers a good, Catholic analysis in "Beyond Rubrics: A Biblical Warning" (Catholic Analysis, March 6, 2008), where he writes:

In reaction to years of liturgical abuse, there is now a new appreciation among some for following the official liturgical rules of the Church, the "rubrics." ...

My point in this post is that, while following the rubrics is absolutely necessary, it is never sufficient. We see that teaching in the prophets of Israel who decried those who relied on external observances over a change of heart and mind....

Those prophets were tough. Their words are still tough and, as affirmed by the Church for centuries, still relevant to Catholics today....

The Lord was tough, too.... [cf. Matthew 23:14-28]

It is thus no surprise that the Roman Catholic Church has always taught that the mere fact of receiving a sacrament or participating in some liturgical act is never enough if the heart is not really open to change.... "... the fruits of the sacraments also depend on the disposition of the one who receives them." [CCC 1128]

... No particular form of the Mass, whether ordinary or extraordinary, no exactitude and precision in external celebration, no particular liturgical language, no particular musical arrangement or panoply of vestments (however exquisite or refined) will do the great work of conversion for us and acquit us of the above biblical condemnations if we do not freely surrender to Jesus and freely ask for an outpouring of his Holy Spirit at some point in the course of the external observances. The reaction to past liturgical abuses is certainly understandable and needed; but the reaction should not lead us to another tempting dead end, a dead end about which we have ample, tough, and loud biblical warning that will always be relevant unto the end of time and the coming of the new heaven and the new earth.

If, in contrast to the banality of badly celebrated liturgies, you, like many others, want a deeper experience of and union with God in the liturgy, whether it's the ordinary form (popularly known as the "Vatican II Mass") or the extraordinary form (popularly known as the older "Latin Mass"), you have to go beyond the form and language of the celebration: you have to open your heart to a fuller release of the fruits and gifts of the Holy Spirit in your life. Once you take that step, your experience of God's grace or charis in any form of the Holy Mass will take a qualitative leap beyond anything you have ever experienced up to now.

My own experience has been that a certain handling (or mishandling) of the rubrics can promote (or hinder) the deeper experience of union with God for which Sobrino is calling here. (A good book in this connection is Dietrich von Hildebrand's Liturgy and Personality.) That notwithstanding, that deeper experience of union with God is the heart and soul of the participatio actuosa ("active participation") for which St. Pope Saint Pius X (the first to use the expression) called the Church in his Motu Proprio, Tra le Sollecitudini (1903), and echoed in the Vatican II Constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. The point is well-taken.

In a related veign, Sobrino writes, in a post entitled "An Easily Overlooked, Unconscious Heresy" (Catholic Analysis, March 3, 2008):

... we may feel that we are somehow automatically Catholic by virtue of our culture, our customs, and our celebrations. We can thus end up as baptized pagans who think we are Catholic but are not really so. That kind of subconscious ethnic or cultural identification with Catholicism is never sufficient. We are called to a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus in the heart of the Catholic Church--then we are really Catholic. I think that this subconscious reduction of Catholic identity to custom or ethnicity is at least partially responsible for many of our problems with liberal, heterodox expressions of Catholicism and even with some excessively traditionalistic, extreme expressions of Catholicism.

Amen to that. Correct that problem and you eliminate one of the major stumbling blocks to evangelical Christians (and many others) who fail to see the Catholic Faith as a live option. Think here not only of Don Corleone in the 'Godfather' or 'Catholic' government officials who publicly flaunt Church teaching, but of stock anti-Catholic phrases such as "empty ritual," "dead ceremonialism," etc.

[Hat tip to J.M.]