USCCB Meets. They Talk About the “Nones”. Wherein Fr. Z Rants.

“Save The Liturgy – Save The World”! Spot on, Father Zed!

From Fr Z's Blog 

How many times have I written it here?

Nothing we undertake as a Church, this plan or that project or this resolution to form a committee or action item, will succeed unless it flows from and returns to our sacred liturgical worship.

I watched the USCCB stream when they were talking about what to do to keep young people in the Church.

Guess what they didn’t talk about.

There’s a story at LifeSite which has reaction of young people about what has kept them in the Church: the TLM.

If we get our liturgical worship of God wrong, then everything else we do will fail.   We build on sand.  Put another way, familiar to long-time readers here, everything we undertake in the Church must begin with liturgical worship and must be brought back to liturgical worship.

If the virtue of justice governs what is due to human persons, since God is a qualitatively different Person a different virtue governs what we owe to God: religion.  The primary way in which we individually and collectively fulfill the virtue of religion is through our sacred liturgical worship.  If we screw up on the virtue of religion and our sacred worship, then all our other relationships will be out of harmony.  We have to get our worship right.  This is so intimate to who we are as Catholics that I constantly say: We Are Our Rites.

And because we have an individual and collective vocation not just within the Church (ad intra) but to the world around us (ad extra), we might say even “Save The Liturgy – Save The World”.

If we don’t know who we are, what we believe, how to act on it and have thin to no strong supports and sources in our sacred worship of God, then we will be ineffective across the board.

Why should the world pay any attention to us if we don’t know who we are?

Why should young people stay?

Not many reasons I can think of, given the state of worship and of preaching in the average suburban parish under the aging aegis of the 80’s formed clergy.  80’s and others.

We must MUST revitalize our worship of God and the way to do that is through the gift – the foresighted and farsighted gift that Benedict XVI gave us in when he implemented Summorum Pontificum.  And this is why that gift is so feared by those who think that we can do it on our own, who reduce the supernatural to the natural.

This is a huge issue, friends.  We need the TLM more and more and more in our parishes.

Again, we are our rites.  Change them and you change our identity and, hence, our impact in the world around us (as in “Save The Liturgy, Save The World“)… not to mention our path to salvation.

We Are Our Rites.