Archbishop Ranjith promotes reform of the reform

Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith, the Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship, has written the foreword to a book to be published in September by Roman Catholic Books, "True Development of the Liturgy" by Msgr. Nicola Giampietro.

Catholic World news has a feature on the foreword and NLM has its own piece by Gregor Kollmorgen.

The Archbishop, who is second in charge of the Holy Father's curial dicastery for the Liturgy says:
Some practices which Sacrosanctum Concilium had never even contemplated were allowed into the Liturgy, like Mass versus populum, Holy Communion in the hand, altogether giving up on the Latin and Gregorian Chant in favor of the vernacular and songs and hymns without much space for God, and extension beyond any reasonable limits of the faculty to concelebrate at Holy Mass. There was also the gross misinterpretation of the principle of "active participation".
He also encourages us to be
courageous in improving or changing that which was erroneously introduced and which appears to be incompatible with the true dignity of the Liturgy.
Sometimes I am taken to task for saying too much on this blog about the Extraordinary Form and not enough about the newer form of the Mass and how it should be affected by the hermeneutic of continuity. Archbishop Ranjith shows us that the celebration of the newer form needs to be reassessed in the light of tradition, something that I try in a small way to further in my parish.

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