In addition to Pope Francis’ passing comment in recent weeks that he intended to name women to decision-making posts in the Dicastery for Bishops for the first time, which he did July 13, he made news in other ways by celebrating the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul on June 29 by publishing an apostolic letter on that date titled “Desiderio Desideravi.” The text’s title is taken from Luke 22:15, where Jesus says that he has “eagerly desired” to eat the Passover meal with his disciples before undergoing his Passion. Focused on liturgical formation, “Desiderio Desideravi” is a complementary piece to his 2021 document “Traditionis Custodes.”
The opening paragraphs are pointed. “No one earned a place at that supper. All had been invited. Or better said: all had been drawn there by the burning desire that Jesus had to eat that Passover with them.” The pope goes on to say, “The world still does not know it, but everyone is invited to the supper of the wedding of the Lamb (Re 19:9). To be admitted to the feast, all that is required is the wedding garment of faith, which comes from the hearing of his Word (cf. Ro 10:17). … We must not allow ourselves even a moment of rest, knowing that still not everyone has received an invitation to this Supper or knowing that others have forgotten it or have got lost along the way in the twists and turns of human living.”
The pope of course realizes that the Eucharist is often not recognized for its most essential quality: being the supreme gift of the divine to creation. Rather, it is lamentably regularly “exploited in service of some ideological vision, no matter the hue.” His consistent call is for the Church, and through the community’s missionary efforts, the entire world, to recognize with amazement and astonishment (in Italian, “stupore”) the Paschal Mystery that is rendered concrete and present in sacramental signs.
The pope critiques various distortions of the ars celebrandi, the “art of celebrating,” which can fall prey to a multitude of human manipulations. He condemns two somewhat polar reductive approaches: seeing the liturgy as “only a rubrical mechanism” (sola osservanza di un apparato rubricale) and what he calls “an imaginative – sometimes wild – creativity without rules” (una fantasiosa – a volte selvaggia – creativitá senza regole).
The pope’s refrain of naming some overarching concerns about the modern world leads one to surmise that at least the bulk of the text was written by his own hand. He has consistently decried spiritual worldliness, neo-Pelagianism and the re-emergence of a type of Gnostic cultism as ongoing threats to the transmission and reception of the Gospel. They all reappear here.
The liturgy must be a place of an authentic encounter with beauty itself, and “beauty, just like truth, always engenders wonder, and when these are referred to the mystery of God, they lead to adoration.”
Like so much else of the Catholic “analogical imagination,” a deepened theology of symbols is absolutely indispensable to forming a believer’s world view, and perhaps accordingly is sorely lacking in our day. One of Pope Francis’ (and Pope Benedict’s) favorite theologians is Romano Guardini. The current Holy Father even once considered doing doctoral research on his work before being called instead into administrative leadership in the Jesuits and the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires.
In “Desiderio Desideravi,” Pope Francis cites the German-Italian theologian’s diagnosis that the contemporary person has become illiterate regarding the interpretation of symbols and the capacity to use them effectively in light of Christian hope. This has disastrous consequences for sacramental and liturgical theology. He calls for us to be re-initiated into the proper use of symbolic language, never allowing ourselves to be “robbed of such richness.”
The document closes with nods to two cornerstone elements of the Christian tradition: the Second Vatican Council’s Sacrosanctum Concilium and the writings of Saint Francis of Assisi. Both encourage an ongoing lifetime of deeper engagement with the liturgy, with that trembling (even “fearful”) reality that God hides himself in the mundane ordinariness of the “appearance of bread” (apparenza di pane). God then, “earnestly desires” each of us to come to know him in the liturgy, and so we should, in response, “Hold back nothing of yourselves for yourselves, that he who gives himself totally to you may receive you totally.”
Originally from Collingswood, Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.
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