Here is the text that this pastor and teacher offers us:
No one is too much in the Church of God
«Doubt has taken hold of Western thought. Both intellectuals and politicians offer the same impression of decadence. Faced with the breakdown of solidarity and the disintegration of identities, some look to the Catholic Church. They ask individuals who have forgotten what unites them as one people for a reason to live together. They ask him for a supplement of soul to make the cold hardness of the consumer society bearable. When a priest is killed, the whole world is affected and many feel deeply struck.
But is the Church capable of responding to these appeals? It is true that she has already played this role of guardian and guide of civilization. In the decline of the Roman Empire, she was able to transmit the flame that the barbarians threatened to extinguish. But do you still have the means and the will to do so today?
In the foundation of a civilization, there can only be one reality that surpasses it: a sacred invariant. Malraux pointed it out realistically: 'The nature of a civilization is what is built around a religion. Our civilization is incapable of building a temple or a tomb. It will be forced to rediscover its fundamental value or it will break down. '
Without a sacred foundation, protective and insurmountable limits are abolished. A completely unholy world turns into a vast expanse of quicksand. Everything is sadly open to the winds of arbitrariness. Without the stability of a foundation that surpasses man, peace and joy - signs of a civilization destined to last - are constantly swallowed up by the feeling of precariousness. The anguish of impending danger is the mark of barbarous times. Without a sacred foundation, all ties become fragile and fickle.
Some call on the Catholic Church to play this solid foundational role. They would like it to assume this social function: to be a coherent system of values, a cultural and aesthetic matrix. But the Church has no other sacred reality to offer than her faith in Jesus, God made man. Its sole purpose is to make possible the encounter of men with the person of Jesus. The moral and dogmatic teaching, as well as the mystical and liturgical heritage, are the framework and the means for this fundamental and sacred encounter. From this encounter the Christian civilization is born. Beauty and culture are its fruits.
For this reason, in order to respond to the expectations of the world, the Church must rediscover herself and make the words of Saint Paul her own: "I did not want to know anything between you, but Jesus and Jesus crucified." She must stop thinking of herself as something supplementary to humanism or ecology. These realities, although good and just, are for her only consequences of her only treasure: her faith in Jesus Christ.
What is sacred to the Church, then, is the unbroken chain that unites her with certainty to Jesus. A chain of faith without rupture or contradiction, a chain of prayer and liturgy without rupture or denial. Without this radical continuity, what credibility could the Church continue to have? In the Church there are no changes of opinion, but an organic and continuous development that we call living tradition. The sacred cannot be decreed, it is received from God and transmitted.
For this reason, without a doubt, Benedict XVI could affirm with authority: “In the history of the Liturgy there is growth and progress but no rupture. What was sacred for previous generations also remains sacred and great for us and cannot be unexpectedly totally forbidden or even harmful. It is good for all of us to preserve the riches that have grown in the faith and prayer of the Church and to give them the right place. " At a time when some theologians seek to reopen the liturgical war by confronting the Missal revised by the Council of Trent with which it has been used since 1970, it is urgent to remember it. If the Church is not able to preserve the peaceful continuity of her bond with Christ, she will not be able to offer to the world "the sacred that unites souls," in Goethe's words. "
Beyond the dispute over rites, the credibility of the Church is at stake. If she affirms the continuity between what is commonly called the Mass of St. Pius V and the Mass of Paul VI, then the Church must be able to organize their peaceful cohabitation and the mutual enrichment of it. If one were radically excluded in favor of the other, if they were declared irreconcilable, a rupture and a change of orientation would be implicitly recognized. But then the Church could no longer offer the world that sacred continuity that is the only one that can give it peace. By maintaining a liturgical war within it, the Church loses its credibility and becomes deaf to the calls of men. Liturgical peace is the sign of peace that the Church can bring to the world.
Therefore, the stakes are much more serious than a simple question of discipline. If she demanded a change in her faith or in her liturgy, in the name of what would the Church dare to address the world? The only legitimacy of it is its coherence in continuity.
Furthermore, if the bishops, responsible for the cohabitation and mutual enrichment of the two liturgical forms, do not exercise their authority in this sense, they run the risk of no longer appearing as shepherds, guardians of the faith received and of the sheep that they have been trusted, but as political leaders: commissioners of the ideology of the moment rather than guardians of the perennial tradition. They risk losing the trust of men of goodwill. A father cannot introduce distrust and division among his faithful children. He cannot humiliate some by turning them against others. He can't ostracize some of his priests. The peace and unity that the Church intends to offer to the world must first of all be lived within her. In liturgical matters, neither pastoral violence nor partisan ideology have ever produced the fruits of unity. The suffering of the faithful and the expectations of the world are too great to wander down these dead ends. Nobody is too much in the Church of God!