Quotes: Liturgy, Doctrine, Authority and Faith

Legislation cannot change historical facts. Nor can an act of legal positivism determine what is or is not part of the lex orandi of the Church. - Dom Alcuin Reid

The tendency today is to subordinate the dogmatic to the pre-dogmatic: to set up putative power relations and concepts such as oppressor and victim as the framework for interpreting dogmatic statements. Dogma thereby loses its priority and becomes a tool for manipulation. We should eschew such approaches. Read 2 Corinthians, the most personal of Paul’s letters, and then read 1 Corinthians, taking note of how Paul’s experience of ministry is shaped by his understanding of the cross of Christ. His is a dogmatic testimony, whereby his suffering (and victimhood) does not provide the framework for understanding the dogmatic content of the faith. Quite the reverse: For Paul, the faith is the framework for understanding his experience.

Dogma is foundational and provides the lens by which everything else is to be understood. And it gives content to things such as hospitality, love, and hope. We are hospitable because God is hospitable (Deut. 10:17-19). We understand love as constituted by sacrificial action because that is what God has revealed his love to be (John 3:16). And we hope because Christ is raised and therefore our suffering—and even death itself—is transformed (2 Cor. 4:16-18; 2 Tim. 1:8-11). Christian hospitality, love, and hope all rest on truth claims, not sentiments. - Carl Trueman, First Things, adapted from an address at the 2021 Napa Institute Conference

Liturgy gives us the only accurate perception of the world because liturgy keeps our eye trained on an eschatological horizon that admonishes us about this world’s passing. To admonish means “to reprove gently but earnestly, and counsel against something to be avoided”. Liturgy counsels us, gently but earnestly, not to place our hope in the wrong source, not to put our faith in the wrong wellspring, not to give our love to the wrong author. The world will never redeem us, no matter how far along its history we journey. It is not just that the world has not redeemed us yet, it is that it will never redeem us because it does not wield such power. Eternity must irrupt into temporality. The world will feel this irruption as forcible and uninvited because a consequence of sin is the world’s resistance to the eternal Kingdom. It comes from an exaggerated and unhealthy valuation of earthly, material life. It comes from preferring to imagine, fancifully, that the world is the center of meaning, and its history will go on perpetually. The world would prefer to consider itself in autonomous control of the passage of time. It will resist being told that it is impermanent and was created to lay itself down for the glory of its Creator. As a result, the world will never come to a correct reckoning of time. - Excerpt from Chapter 7, Liturgical Temporal Cosmology in Liturgical Dogmatics https://www.ignatius.com/Liturgical-Dogmatics-P3784.aspx by Dr. David Fagerberg, reprinted by Dr. Jeff Mirus at Catholic Culture

In his enthusiasm to eliminate the usus antiquior, the pope even seeks to downplay the fact that the Roman rite was never the only rite permitted in the Latin Church, and seems to treat liturgical diversity itself as a threat to the integral unity of the Church. In reality, both the Latin Rite and Eastern Rite churches have enjoyed a rich variety of liturgical practices from time immemorial. The pope’s ahistorical reasoning might have sinister overtones for Catholics who are integrated into the dozens of other rites that exist in the Eastern churches: if a single rite is necessary for unity in the Latin Church, why would this not be true of the Church as a whole? - Matthew Cullinan Hoffman

We are our rites. As the Church prays, so do we believe and live. - Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Of late Roman Catholicism seems to be entering into a period of dangerous diminishment at greater speed than our secular ex-Christendom — even if, having the loaves and fishes reading in last Sunday’s Gospel, we know that God is not bound by the usual laws of scarcity.

But the point applies generally: For all that rising expectations can famously lead to revolution, it’s when the course runs the other way, with a society accustomed to stability meeting a future of scarcity and disappointment and decline, that the gods of the copybook heading are most likely to fearfully return. - Ross Douthat