EKPOMA REVIEW

The Second Vatican Council's call for the reform of the liturgy has aroused much discussion and conflicting opinions. A leading voice in this discussion is Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 and resigned from his Petrine ministry in 2013. Unlike the exceptions he takes to certain formulations of some of the conciliar documents, like Gaudium et spes, for example,2 Ratzinger is not known to have expressed any reservation about the conciliar document on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. In fact, in his early and later writings, he is full of praise for this document. However, what becomes increasingly pronounced in his later writings is his criticism of the way the conciliar reform was implemented. He sees the liturgical abuses in post-conciliar times as manifestations of the deficiencies in the implementation of the conciliar reform. He particularly finds the promulgation of the new order of mass and some of the changes it called for problematic because it gave the impression of a break with the past in the Church's liturgical life. Such implementations were informed by a hermeneutics of rupture, that is, a break with past thatundermines the organic development of liturgy in the Church.

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