From the Editor

Abstract

From the Editor Uwe Michael Lang Lord, I love you"—these were reported to be the last words of Pope Benedict XVI before he died on December 31, 2022.1 The words echo the threefold profession of faith the Apostle Peter made to the Risen Christ in John 21. Both Joseph Ratzinger's warm personal faith, which he had treasured since his childhood in Catholic Bavaria, and his profound theological work were animated by his friendship with Christ. It is no easy task to render justice to the immense legacy of Benedict XVI, whose lifework stands out in so many ways. In the first place, we must be truly grateful for his loving service to God and the Church, as a theologian and pastor. Having had the grace of knowing Joseph Ratzinger personally, I have always found it painful to see how a man of such gentleness, humility, and openness in listening to others was often met with anticipated hostility from the wider public, and with thinly veiled obstruction from some even inside the Catholic Church. So many assaults on him were personal, manifestly unjust, full of verbal abuse and intended to distract from the real reasons why the opinion makers of our time intensely disliked him. Joseph Ratzinger was a Catholic thinker who explained the faith in a luminous and attractive way and intelligently questioned the assumptions of the relativism that has dominated the public square in the Western world for some time and is now showing increasingly totalitarian features. Throughout his long life and ministry that led him to the See of Peter, he strove to put God first and ensure that Christ was at the [End Page 1] center of the Church's mission. Since his early years of formation, he found in the New Testament "the soul of all theology."2 As cardinal and pope, he challenged the hubris of historical-critical exegesis and called for a rediscovery of what it means to read the Bible in the tradition of the Church. In the three volumes of his work Jesus of Nazareth, written during his pontificate, Benedict XVI invited us to join his search for the face of Christ, which he has now completed. Even though his university career focused on fundamental and dogmatic theology, Joseph Ratzinger considered the liturgy central to his academic and pastoral work and hailed it as the "living element" of theology, "without which it would necessarily shrivel up."3 Divine worship brings us into the right relationship with God and with one another, and its true meaning and relevance far exceed the actual liturgical celebration. As Joseph Ratzinger concludes from his reading of the Exodus narrative: the worship to which the people of Israel—and, by extension, all the nations—are called "embraces the ordering of the whole of human life."4 Joseph Ratzinger lived and worked at a time when the form and expression of the Church's faith in the sacred liturgy had become a highly controversial topic. As a theologian and bishop, he did not shrink from entering this contested arena with admirable lucidity. He was convinced that infelicitous choices have been made in the actual implementation of the sound principles of the Second Vatican Council's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. With his election to the See of Peter, Benedict XVI found himself in a position to shape the future of the Catholic liturgy, a position he could only approach with misgivings, because he strongly held that genuine liturgical renewal does not happen by decrees and instructions. Instead, he [End Page 2] intended to create favorable conditions and open perspectives for an "organic" development of the liturgy that would avoid the discontinuity that had done so much damage to Catholic ritual in the post-conciliar period. The Society for Catholic Liturgy is indebted in a particular way to the liturgical vision of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. Authentic liturgical renewal needs to be grounded in scholarship that is academically rigorous, faithful to the Church's perennial teaching, and guided by charity. The various activities of the Society, above all its annual conference and its journal Antiphon, promote such scholarship in the service of liturgical formation. It is rewarding...