Question 10.164

10.164 Our interview will soon come to an end. Can you tell us about your appointment by Pope Francis to head one of the most important dicasteries in the Roman Curia, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments?

Every time the successor of Peter has been so kind as to entrust to me a responsibility for the service of the Church, I have always had the sense of my shortcomings and my inadequacy.

Although I feel the all-too-heavy weight of the mission that is entrusted to me, because of my objective weaknesses, nevertheless I hear flowing from my heart an immense thanksgiving to the Lord, who as a rule chooses what is nothing in the world’s sight in order to accomplish his work.

I therefore thank the Lord who grants me the privilege of working with him and for him for the purpose of helping the people of God to enter fully into the mystery that he celebrates in the holy liturgy.

Humbly I thank the pope. I also feel genuine gratitude toward my coworkers in the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. Together, with God’s help and through his active presence-for the eucharistic liturgy, Sacramentum caritatis recalls, “is essentially an actio Dei which draws us into Christ through the Holy Spirit”-we work so that the celebrations of worship and the sacraments might always be experienced in the presence of God and in wonder at his salvific action, encompassing not only the individual but the whole Church, all of society, the whole universe, in the great movement that causes mankind and the world to pass from death to life in the mystery of the Lord’s Passover. Together, we seek to make people understand that the liturgy is determined by God himself and not by men. Indeed, man cannot simply fabricate worship ex nihilo. For “we do not know with what we must serve the Lord until we arrive there” (Ex 10:26). If God does not reveal himself, man only embraces emptiness.