B.
ESSENTIAL QUALITIES
OF THE LITURGY
ESSENTIAL QUALITIES OF THE LITURGY
1.TRINITARIAN AND PASCHAL:
2.ECCLESIAL:
3.SACRAMENTAL:
4.ETHICALLY ORIENTED:
5.ESCHATOLOGICAL:
TRINITARIAN AND PASCHAL
TRINITARIAN AND PASCHAL
CFC1506.
•The Church’s liturgical prayer is directed to the Father,
through His Son, Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit. Its
specific Trinitarian form takes on a Paschal quality since
the liturgy celebrates the Good News of our actual
salvation worked by the Blessed Trinity through Jesus
Christ’s Paschal Mystery. The Trinity, then, far from
being an abstract god of the theologians, is the concrete
living, saving God who comes to us in the Risen Christ
and the Spirit, within the Christian community, the
Church (cf. CCC 1084ff).
ECCLESIAL
ECCLESIAL
CFC1507.
•Liturgy is the prayer of the Church gathered in assembly, an
ecclesial activity, celebrated by the WHOLE Christ, Head and
members (cf. SC 26f; LG 10; CCC 1140). That is, it is the action of
Jesus Christ the Priest, and at the same time an activity of the
community, a gathering together in an ordered assembly and
communion of the baptized. Moreover, the liturgical assembly is
arranged according to different roles: priest, deacon, readers,
ministers of music and of communion, etc. While we all share the
one Holy Spirit of love, different spiritual gifts or charisms are given
to community members for the good of all. Thus, the power for
salvation is mediated through various relationships within the
Church.
ECCLESIAL
CFC1508.
•This ecclesial quality is especially important for Filipino Catholics
because it draws them beyond family bonds of intimacy toward a
community solidarity based on faith in Christ. Ecclesial solidarity is a
community that has moved beyond the circle of intimacy toward unity
and collaborative activity grounded on Christian discipleship rather
than merely social relationships. In its authentic liturgy, the Church
has always rejected the temptation to limit the understanding of God’s
living Word to its earliest historical period, as the fundamentalists do;
or to reduce Christian life to individualistic piety or group intimacy, as
in sectarianism; or to make of faith a blind leap without any
understanding, as fideism proposes.
SACRAMENTAL
SACRAMENTAL
CFC1509.
•CFC1509. Basically, the liturgy celebrates the Church’s prayer through a pattern of
symbolic, ritual movements, gestures and verbal formulas that create a framework
within which the corporate worship of the Church can take place. By participating in
the liturgy’s sacramental, symbolic activities, the Church members both express their
faith in Christ and their desire to deepen it, and actually share in the reality signified,
namely, salvation through forgiveness and communion with the Risen, glorified
Christ in the Spirit. Among the predominant symbols used in the liturgy are the
gathering of the baptized assembly itself, the natural symbols from creation like light,
darkness, water, oil, and fire, as well as humanly produced symbols like bread and
wine, and specifically Christian salvific symbols like the reading and interpretation of
Scripture as the living Word of God, the Sign of the Cross, the Paschal Candle, laying
on of hands, etc. But the liturgy’s use of these symbols always involves persons, for
they express the personal mystery of God’s love manifest in Christ’s Paschal Mystery
(cf. CCC 1147-52).
ETHICALLY ORIENTED
CFC1510.
The liturgy relates directly to moral life since it empowers the people of
God to full Christian discipleship. Concretely, liturgical worship and Christian morality,
both personal and social, go together. One goal of liturgical celebrations is that we, the
faithful, return to our ordinary activities, newly strengthened in faith, confirmed in hope,
and inspired with the power to love. Far from separating us from our ordinary work,
duties, recreation, and relationships, the liturgy aims at confirming our mission as
Christians to be the light of the world and leaven of the mass (cf. SC 9). For “it is through
the liturgy that ‘the work of our redemption is exercised’ . . . [and] the faithful are enabled
to express in their lives and manifest to others, the mystery of Christ and the real nature of
the true Church” (SC 2). One norm for judging authentic liturgical worship, then, is
precisely its relation with “service of our neighbor.”
ESCHATOLOGICAL
• CFC1511.
• The liturgy’s ethical dimension just described reveals its eschatological characteristic as
well. The liturgy makes present (incarnational aspect) Christ’s saving Paschal Mystery
whereby He inaugurated God’s rule, the Kingdom. But God’s Kingdom, already begun,
has not yet been fully accomplished, as the early liturgical prayer, “Marana tha, Come,
Lord Jesus!” clearly depicts. The liturgy, then, at once commemorates Christ’s past saving
Mystery, demonstrates the present grace effects brought about by Christ, and points to the
future glory yet to come.
ESCHATOLOGICAL
• CFC1512.
• But this future orientation is operative now, and every moment of our daily lives. It is not
the future dreamy illusion which the Marxists claimed. They charged that the Christian
answer to social injustice and oppression was to “suffer now to gain eternal happiness in
heaven”
• --- in other words, “pie in the sky” palliative. Rather this future-orientation is active now,
just like the goal which galvanized Christ’s own ministry and mission, the very mission
which Christ shares with us, his disciples, today. The liturgy, far from being some escape
from the world, calls us to share in Christ’s own mission of saving the world. Again, we
see the intrinsic connection between authentic worship and Christian moral witness, which
PCP II describes as the thrust for justice and preferential option for the poor.
ESCHATOLOGICAL
• CFC1513.
• Both the eschatological future and the “now” dimensions are effectively brought together in
celebrating the feasts and seasons of the Liturgical Year (cf. CCC 1163-73). Vatican II describes
how “in the course of the year, the Church unfolds the whole mystery of Christ from the
Incarnation and Nativity to the Ascension, to Pentecost and the expectation of the blessed hope
of the coming of the Lord” (SC 102). This cycle includes five stages: 1) the Lord’s Day, 2) Holy
Week, prepared for by Lent, 3) Advent, preparing for Christmas, 4) the 33 Sundays of the
Ordinary Time, and 5) special Feasts, especially of Christ and Mary (cf. NCDP 336-41). Surely a
practical and informed personal understanding of the liturgical seasons is one chief means for
achieving the enthusiastic, active participation of the faithful in the Church’s worship, called for
by our Second Plenary Council (cf. PCP II 176-82).
