Question 10.165

10.165 Joseph Ratzinger has indicated that the liturgy must show Christ, allow him to shine through in his transforming presence through the signs, the gestures, and the words that the Church has handed down to us in her rites. How do you understand this analysis?

Joseph Ratzinger tried to explain further what Sacrosanctum concilium asserts with great clarity: “The liturgy is the outstanding means whereby the faithful may express in their lives, and manifest to others, the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true Church” (SC 2). He stated that “God acts in the liturgy through Christ, and we, as the Church, can act only through him, with him, and in him.”⁷ In the Church, if the liturgy really is the epiphany or manifestation of Christ, the prolongation, as Saint Leo the Great puts it, of what the Lord experienced in Palestine-his birth, his preaching, his miracles, his teaching the disciples, his Passion, death, and Resurrection-then it is fundamentally a mystical and contemplative reality. But it is also a reality made up of signs, gestures and words, so as to put us in permanent contact with the redeeming work of Christ, and so that thus his transfiguring presence appears through “our lives. . . now hidden in God with Christ” (see Col 3:3).

Through the liturgy, Jesus enters into our hearts. Priests therefore must see to it that he has the first place so as to allow him to shine through; only in this way will people who look at us see Jesus. Christ must be seen through us.

In a world that constantly takes us out of ourselves, imprisoning man in sensory and material goods, sometimes totally depriving him of what is essential, the liturgy truly is the door to our union with God through our union with Jesus. It prepares us for the heavenly liturgy that will allow us to contemplate God unveiled, face to face, so as to love him without end. In the liturgy, we experience the manifestation and the operative presence of Jesus Christ, if the priest enters fully into the Paschal Mystery, which is celebrated with faith, devotion, and beauty in the Holy Eucharist.