This is the complete text of the Pope's answer to a question on Summorum Pontificum, in an interview granted yesterday on his Rome-Paris flight - the first public papal comment on Summorum since its publication (source: Holy See Press Office)
Question: What do you say to those who, in France, fear that the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum signals a backtracking on the great intuitions of the Second Vatican Council? How could you reassure them?
Pope Benedict XVI: It is an unfounded fear, because this 'motu proprio' is simply an act of tolerance, with a pastoral objective for people who have been formed in this liturgy, who love it, know it and want to live with this liturgy. It is a small group, given that it presupposes a formation in Latin, a formation in a certain culture. But it seems to me a normal demand of faith and pastoral concern for a bishop of our Church to have love and tolerance for these people and permit them to live with this liturgy. There is no opposition whatsoever between the liturgy renewed by the Second Vatican Council and this liturgy.
Each day [during the Council], the Council fathers celebrated Mass according to the ancient rite and, at the same time, conceived a natural development for the liturgy in all of this century, because the liturgy is a living reality that develops and that preserves its identity in its development.
Therefore, there are certainly distinct accents, but at the same time a fundamental identity that excludes a contradiction, an opposition between the renewed liturgy and the preceding liturgy. I think that there is the possibility of an enrichment of both parties. On one side, the friends of the ancient liturgy may and should know the new saints, the new prefaces of the liturgy, etc. [sic], on the other hand, the new liturgy underlines more the common participation but, it is, always, not simply the assembly of a certain community, but always an act of the universal Church, in communion with all the faithful of all the ages and an act of adoration.
In this sense, it seems to me that there is a mutual enrichment and it is clear that the renewed liturgy is the ordinary liturgy of our time.
