November 2021 Print

By Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre

We have examined the professions of faith of the Church, the attitude of the Church’s enemies towards our Lord and the manifestations of His divinity. Now let’s look at the place that our Lord holds in the liturgy and in the life of the Church. It is in the liturgy that the Church expresses most perfectly what she thinks of our Lord Jesus Christ and what she asks us to contemplate in His Person. It would be wrong to think of the liturgy as just a beautiful page of history that is recounted to us throughout the year. To consider the liturgy under this aspect alone would be to misunderstand it.

The liturgy is not just a reminder of the events of the life of our Lord, of His actions and His teaching; it is above all a life. By means of the liturgy, our Lord communicates to us not only the Faith, but also sanctification. He communicates to us His grace, sanctifying grace. For the Church, it is clear that the central point of the salutary action that communicates grace to us is the holy sacrifice of the Mass. In order to help us participate more fully in the Mass, the Church has set it amidst a cycle of feasts and reminders of the life of our Lord and the lives of the saints. Each event of the life of our Lord brings a particular grace. Unfortunately, left to ourselves we are unable to understand the depth and magnitude of the mystery of our Lord. That is why the Church, like a wise mother, adapts it to our level. She distributes the graces of the liturgy throughout the year marked by the feasts of our Lord, and especially by the two great cycles of the liturgical year, Christmas and Easter.

This is what Fr. Pius Parsch in Guide to the Liturgical Year expresses:

What should we expect of the liturgical year? Divine life, and life in abundance. The divine life planted in our soul by the sacrament of Baptism must develop during the ecclesiastical year, and tend to its perfection by means of liturgical prayer. The liturgy is like a precious ring whose diamond is the Eucharist and the eucharistic Sacrifice, and whose setting is formed by the feasts and the ecclesiastical seasons.

The journey through the liturgical year is like an excursion in the mountains. There are two peaks to climb: the first summit which is the mountain of Christmas, and the dominant peak which is the mountain of Easter. In both cases there is an ascent, the time of preparation: Advent before Christmas, Lent before Easter; and a walk along the ridge from one peak to another, from Christmas till Epiphany, and from Easter to Pentecost.

This image given us by Fr. Parsch helps us to understand better what the liturgical year is:

Consequently, we have two cycles of feasts to travel through. In both, the object of their particular considerations is the kingdom of God in the soul and in the Church. Twice a year we seek the kingdom of God, we find it, and we build it. In the ecclesiastical year, the Church teaches us. It is a school of the Faith.

Throughout the course of the liturgical year, the truths of the Faith, one by one, are presented and recalled to us. The liturgical year is a zealous educator; it desires not only to communicate to us the truths of the Faith, but it wants to make us better and bring us up for heaven. Every day of the liturgical year the same appeal is addressed to our hearts: “Take off the old man and put on the new.”

This is what Dom Gaspard Lefebvre also reminds us. It must be remembered that from the beginning of the century, a considerable effort was made to enable the faithful to better understand the liturgy. And the faithful were very interested. The Liturgical Year by Dom Guéranger, for example, was extraordinarily successful. It used to be that one could easily find people who assisted at Mass with a book of The Liturgical Year in hand. Or at least many people had it in their library, and loved to prepare themselves for the Mass by reading from its pages.

If we really desire to penetrate the mystery of our Lord, to know Him truly, to love Him as we ought to love Him, to cleave to Him and to receive His graces, it is absolutely necessary to know, study, and appreciate the liturgy. This is certainly a great means of sanctification:

Public worship, rites, sacraments, official prayers, feast days and liturgical seasons are all means which the Church uses to unite us to Christ and to transform our souls unto His own likeness. Each year from Advent to Pentecost, she has us celebrate the principal events of the life of the Savior, not as a mere reminder....

Which is the opinion of the Protestants. For them, the liturgy (if indeed the liturgy can be modified by the adjective Protestant) is only a reminder, a history that is narrated about the life of our Lord. It lacks the vital significance it has for Catholics, and it is not the source of life and sanctification which is capital for all Catholics. Our Lord desired that His life, the life of grace, be transmitted by means of the sacraments and by the liturgy:

....but to renew us by the application of the particular graces that He brings us at each celebration. The vital communication of the mysteries of Christ imbues our souls with an authentic Christian life intimately tied to the life of the Church. The meaning and the spirit of these liturgical celebrations is impressed upon us by the Church herself. One has only to let oneself be guided by her in order to reach the heart of the Christian mystery and to profit fully from its supernatural efficacy.

Dom Marmion says the same in an admirable way:

Guided by the Holy Spirit, Who is the Spirit of Jesus Himself, the Church unfolds every year before the eyes of her children, from Christmas to the Ascension, the complete cycle of the mysteries of Christ, sometimes greatly condensed, sometimes in their strict chronological order, as during Holy Week and Eastertide. She thus makes us relive, by a very animated and lively representation, each of the mysteries of her Divine Spouse; she makes us retrace each of the stages of His life. If we allow ourselves to be conducted by her, infallibly we shall end by knowing the mysteries of Jesus and especially we shall penetrate the sentiments of His divine heart. (Christ in His Mysteries, p.22; French ed.).

It is in fact because the mysteries of Christ, Dom Marmion says, are not just scenes to look upon and examples to imitate; they are also sources of graces. There is thus a special grace attached to each mystery of our Lord in the liturgy: spiritual rebirth (Christmas), death to sin (the Passion), freedom of soul and living for God (Easter), life in heaven by faith (the Ascension):

By following Christ Jesus in all His mysteries in this way, by uniting ourselves to Him, little by little yet surely, and each time more intensely, we shall participate in His divinity, in His divine life. According to the beautiful sentence of St. Augustine: “What came to pass before in a divine reality, is renewed spiritually in pious souls by the repeated celebration of these mysteries”1 (Op. cit., pp. 26-27).

— Extract from, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, The Mystery of Jesus. (Saint Marys: Angelus Press, 2000), chapter 7.

Endnote:

1 “Quod semel factum in rebus veritas indicat, hoc saepius celebrandum in cordibus piis solemnitas renovat” (Sermo 220, in vigil. Paschae II).