The Catholic News Agency's November 28, 2011 article / interview on Raymond Burke's first year as a member of the College of Cardinals has garnered attention primarily for its prediction of coming persecution against the Catholic Church in the U.S.A. Our readers might find the following passage to be of equal if not greater interest:
Cardinal Burke is also responsible for overseeing the Church's liturgy as a member of the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship.
He is grateful to Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI for giving the Church "a font of solid direction" regarding worship, based on the Second Vatican Council's vision of a "God-centered liturgy and not a man-centered liturgy."
That intention was not always realized, he said, since the council's call for liturgical reform coincided with a "cultural revolution."
Many congregations lost their "fundamental sense that the liturgy is Jesus Christ himself acting, God himself acting in our midst to sanctify us."
Cardinal Burke said greater access to the traditional Latin Mass, now know (sic) as the "extraordinary form" of the Roman rite, has helped correct the problem.
"The celebration of the Mass in the extraordinary form is now less and less contested," he noted, "and people are seeing the great beauty of the rite as it was celebrated practically since the time if Pope Gregory the Great" in the sixth century.
Many Catholics now see that the Church's "ordinary form" of Mass, celebrated in modern languages, "could be enriched by elements of that long tradition."
In time, Cardinal Burke expects the Western Church's ancient and modern forms of Mass to be combined in one normative rite, a move he suggests the Pope also favors.
"It seems to me that is what he has in mind is that this mutual enrichment would seem to naturally produce a new form of the Roman rite – the 'reform of the reform,' if we may – all of which I would welcome and look forward to its advent."
