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Thursday, April 26, 2007

Interview with Archbishop Ranjith on Sacramentum Caritatis

There is an interesting interview floating around the web. Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith - a native of Sri Lanka - is the Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, and lately is quoted almost as much as the head of the CDW - Cardinal Arinze. Like his boss, Archbishop Ranjith is quite frank and quotable.

This interview comes via Union of Catholic Asia News (UCAN). Fr. Zuhlsdorf has it in its entirety, with his emphases.


Here is a sample from the interview on the recent exhortation, Sacramentum Caritatis


Some negative aspects have been the quasi total abandonment of the Latin language, tradition and chant; a far too facile interpretation of what could be absorbed from local cultures into the Liturgy; a sense of misunderstanding of the true nature, content and meaning of the Roman rite and its norms and rubrics, which led to an attitude of free experimentation; a certain anti-Roman "feeling," and an uncritical acceptance of all kinds of "novelties" resulting from a secularizing and humanistic theological and liturgical mindset overtaking the West.

These novelties were often introduced, perhaps unknowingly, by some foreign missionaries who brought them from their own mother countries or by locals who had been to those countries on visits or for studies and had let themselves be uncritically absorbed into a kind of "free spirit" that some circles had created around the Council.

The abandonment of the spheres of the Sacred, the Mystical and the Spiritual, and their replacement by a kind of empiricist horizontalism was most harmful to the spirit of what truly constituted Liturgy.



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