Benedict XVI on Liturgical Music

An excellent essay which covers the 'high points.' Originally published in Homiletic and Pastoral Review, 2000, it is required reading for Catholic church musicians.

Cardinal Ratzinger On Liturgical Music

In an article entitled "Liturgie und Kirchenmusik" published in 1986 in Communio, Cardinal Ratzinger referred to the incompatibility between rock music and the liturgy of the Church. A storm of progressive protest ensued, most of it aimed at the messenger instead of arguing to the contrary. How can a theologian judge modern music? What right does a Curia official have to say how today's young people should participate in the Liturgy? Implicit in the controversy was the hackneyed caricature of Ratzinger as the Teutonic-academician-turned-doctrinal-watchdog.

A revisionist view became necessary in 1996 with the publication of another book-length interview with the Cardinal (this time by German journalist Peter Seewald), because the second Ratzinger Report began with eighty pages of biographical information. His Eminence, we learn, is only human after all. Reminiscing about his childhood in Bavaria, Cardinal Ratzinger admits that music (especially Mozart) had a major role in his family life. "Music, after all, has the power to bring people together . . . Yes, art is elemental. Reason alone as it's expressed in the sciences can't be man's complete answer to reality, and it can't express everything that man can, wants to, and has to express. I think God built this into man."1

Being an intellectual does not disqualify one from commenting upon either music or liturgy, provided one recognizes the limits of rational discourse. As Cardinal Ratzinger himself put it, theologians "cannot enter into musical discussions per se, but they can nonetheless ask where the seams are, so to speak, that link faith and art."2

What follows is a summary of three articles by Cardinal Ratzinger on liturgical music which appeared in German journals during the years 1986-1994 and were reprinted in English as part of the anthology, A New Song for the Lord: Faith in Christ and Liturgy Today.3

The essays were written for different occasions, but they follow the same pattern: the author contrasts a problematic theory or a pernicious trend with the true theology of the liturgy, and from that draws conclusions as to the proper place of music in the liturgy and suggests guidelines for practical applications.

A) The Cultural Challenge Vs. The Biblical Culture Of Faith

("' Sing Artistically for God': Biblical Directives for Church Music," pp. 94-110.)

"Since church music is faith that has become a form of culture, it necessarily shares in the current problematic nature of the relationship between Church and culture" (94). This relationship was in crisis during the Renaissance and the Reformation, but as of the Enlightenment, secular culture "emancipated" itself from the faith: they went their separate ways and have drifted further apart ever since.

Since the seventeenth century the Church has seen the Caecilian reform of sacred music, the rediscovery of Gregorian chant, and the renewal of polyphonic church music. Nevertheless, as a result of cultural dislocations, "we are at a loss as to how faith can and should express itself culturally in the present age" (95).

The picture from the culture's side is bleak. In the absence of religion, art becomes groundless aestheticism with neither direction nor purpose. Music in particular has split into two worlds: pop (a manufactured commodity) and rationally constructed high-brow music (an elite, degenerate form of "classical" music).

A middle ground remains: "a staying at home in the familiar music that preceded such divisions, touched the person as a whole and is still capable of doing this even today . . . Church music mostly settles in this middle ground" (95).

Many are the calls for the Church to dialogue with culture today, but few imagine the talks as being bilateral. You can't expect the Church to subject herself to modern culture, which, having lost its religious base, is in a never-ending process of self-doubt. Culture, too, must question itself radically and be opened to a cure, a reconciliation with religion.

Are there any biblical directives for the path that church music should take? Cardinal Ratzinger narrows the question: "Can we find one biblical text that sums up the way Holy Scripture sees the connection between music and faith" (96)?

The Bible contains its own hymnal: "the Psalter, born from the practice of singing and playing musical instruments during worship." Furthermore this practical tradition contains "essential elements of a theory of music in faith and for faith." Within the Old Testament, the Psalter is like a bridge between the Law and the Prophets; it also serves as a bridge connecting the two Testaments. From the earliest days of the Church, the psalms are prayed and sung as hymns to Christ, the Son of David the psalmist. "Christ himself thus becomes the choir director who teaches us the new song and gives the Church the tone and the way in which she can praise God appropriately and blend into the heavenly liturgy" (97).

Cardinal Ratzinger selects one psalm verse which appears throughout the history of theological reflection on church music. Psalm 47:7 (in some numberings Psalm 46 and/or the eighth verse) exhorts us to "Sing praises with a psalm" (RSV). The Hebrew word maskil is variously rendered in modern translations as "an inspired song" (M. Buber, German) or as playing "with all your skill" (Jerusalem Bible, French), or as singing "artfully" (in a version approved by the Italian Bishops Conference).

The ancient translations of the Church also shed light on the subject. "The Septuagint, which became the Old Testament of Christianity, wrote psalate synetos, which we might translate as: ' . . . Sing with understanding' — in both senses of the word: that you yourselves understand it and that it is understandable" (97).

Of course this involves more than a merely rational act; we are to sing "in a way worthy of and appropriate to the spirit, disciplined and pure" (98). St. Jerome's rendering is along the same lines: psallite sapienter. Sapientia means more than understanding; "[it] also denotes an integration of the entire human person . . . with all the dimensions of his or her existence." Just as the gift of wisdom integrates knowledge and experience with the requirements of Divine Law, so the singing of the inspired psalms involves the human person, body and soul, with all its faculties, in divine worship.

The first word of the verse, "Sing praises with a psalm," in Hebrew zamir, is also laden with history. "The emphasis is on articulated singing, a singing with reference to a text, which is instrumentally supported, as a rule" (98-99). In stark contrast to the orgiastic cult music of the pagans, zamir refers to "logos-like" music, "which incorporates a word or wordlike event it has received and responds to it in praise or petitions, in thanksgiving or lament." The Septuagint Bible chose psallein as its translation, giving a new, culturally conditioned meaning to a Greek word that previously had meant only to play a stringed instrument, but never to sing.
From this word study, Cardinal Ratzinger draws several conclusions about possible biblical directives for music in the Church.

The command, "Sing to the Lord," runs through all of Scripture as part of the call to worship and glorify God. "This means that musical expression is part of the proper human response to God's self-revelation . . . Mere speech, mere silence, mere action are not enough" (100).
There is no such thing as a faith completely undetermined by culture, which could then be inculturated any way you like. "The faith decision as such entails a cultural decision; . . . Faith itself creates culture and does not just carry it along like a piece of clothing . . . This cultural given . . . is capable of encountering other contemporary cultures . . . This ability to exchange and flourish also finds its expression in the ever-recurring imperative, 'Sing to the Lord a new song.'" The Christological interpretation of the psalms is a particularly dramatic example of this capacity for development in what is an irrevocable and fundamental cultural form (101).

The various meanings to be found in the second word of our psalm verse range between the two translations sapienter and cum arte. Singing in accordance with wisdom implies a word-oriented art, which is not concerned merely with intelligibility but "stands under the primacy of logos" and makes demands upon our highest moral and spiritual powers. The second translation, artfully, tells us that encountering God challenges a person to respond to the best of his or her abilities. God gave Moses detailed specifications for the tabernacle; artistic endeavor in the book of Exodus is portrayed as a participation in God's creativity (103).

The New Testament, by both frequent citation and explicit command, takes up the psalm tradition as an integral part of its own teaching and worship. "When you come together, each one has a hymn [Gk: psalmon], a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for edification" (1 Cor. 14:26). To the early Church the psalm appeared as a gift of the Spirit. The epistles also give evidence of exalted Christological hymns newly composed in Greek. By the second century, however, as a precaution after the musical innovations of the Gnostic sect, the Church reduced liturgical music to the Psalter. "The theology of the Psalter sufficed and set the standard in terms of content, but also . . . the way of making music specified by the Psalter became the musical model of emerging Christendom" (104). To put it in a less scholarly way, revelation was complete with the end of the apostolic age, and the divinely inspired hymns found in Sacred Scripture were sufficient for the Church's worship.

In light of the foregoing discussion, both "pop" music and the music of elitist aesthetes are unsuitable for divine worship. The latter, proclaiming art to be "for art's sake" and for no other purpose, elevates the composer to the level of a "pure creator." "According to Christian faith, however, it belongs to the essence of human beings that they come from God's 'art' . . . and as perceivers can think and view God's creative ideas with him and translate them into the visible and the audible" (106).

On the other hand, hasn't the Church's liturgical music always drawn on popular music to renew itself? Isn't "pop" music just what the Church needs in order to "relate" with contemporary culture? Cardinal Ratzinger recommends "treading carefully" in this area (107-108). In the past folk music was the expression of a clearly defined community held together by language, history and a way of life. Springing from fundamental human experience, it conveyed a truth, however naive the form may have been. Pop music, in contrast, is a standardized product of mass society, a function of supply and demand. The 20th-century composer Paul Hindemith called the constant presence of such noise "brainwashing," and C. M. Johansson claims that hearing it gradually makes us incapable of listening attentively: "we become musically comatose . . . This medium kills the message" (p. 108 cf. footnote 19).

Cardinal Ratzinger insists that the faith must not be trivialized in the name of inculturating it. Today we do not have to limit church music so strictly to chanting of the psalms, because we have "an infinitely larger trove" of good liturgical music to draw on. But to hold the line against the onslaught of misguided attempts to import "modern" musical forms into the liturgy requires "the courage of asceticism, the courage to contradict. Only from such courage can new creativity arise" (109).

B) The Sociological Challenge Vs. True Christian Anthropology

("The Image of the World and of Human Beings in the Liturgy and Its Expression in Church Music" pp. 111-127.)

"Conversation with God transcends the boundaries of human speech" (111); therefore it calls on music, both vocal and instrumental, for help.

After the Second Vatican Council there were disputes over the right form of music in worship. The initial clashes were between pastoral expediency ("We worship in the vernacular now . . .") and musicians who maintained that their traditional repertoire had intrinsic and pastoral value. The question underlying such differences of opinion then was: how do we apply liturgical directives? More recently, a second wave of controversy has been "pushing the questions forward, as far as the foundations themselves." The issue has become: what is liturgical action in the first place, what are its anthropological and theological foundations?

Symptomatic of the new thinking is the Nuovo Dizionario di Liturgica (1984), article on canto e musica. It declares the starting point of liturgy to be the gathering of two or three in the name of Christ (Matt. 18:20). This sounds harmless enough, but it gains revolutionary momentum when the verse is isolated and pitted against the entire liturgical tradition. Such a definition places the group before the Church and brings "autonomous" individuals into conflict with an "authoritarian" institution. "It is evident that with the adoption of sociological language the prior adoption of its evaluations has also occurred" (113). New music good; old music bad! Gregorian chant and Palestrina are seen as "tutelary gods" for those in power who, threatened by cultural change, cling to an ancient repertoire.

Cardinal Ratzinger turns the hermeneutic of suspicion back on the liturgical theorists. "There is of course not only an idolization of sociology at work here but also a complete separation of the New Testament from the history of the Church" (114). The notion, that the Church has been in decline since Jesus began it, is a familiar Enlightenment myth, which ultimately becomes an excuse for cut-and-paste editions of the Bible (like Jefferson's) or the Marxist texts of the Missa Nicaraguensis sung in the 1980s.

What are the new and better ideas of the liturgical experts? They insist on two basic values: "The 'primary value' of a renewed liturgy is, we are told, 'the full and authentic action of all persons.'" The people of God proclaims its identity in song. The second value judgment follows: music is the power that brings about cohesiveness within the group. Celebration, ergo, becomes creativity; the "how" becomes more important than the "what."

Condensed in this way, the argument reads like a lampoon. Yet Ratzinger's full analysis of the effects of modern "scientific" sociology upon liturgical music is trenchant. "I would not be speaking of all this in so much detail if I thought that such ideas were attributable to only a few theoreticians" (115). It is all too common that "so-called creativity, the active participation of all present, and the relationship to a group in which everyone is acquainted with and speaks to everyone else" are mistaken for the real categories of the conciliar understanding of liturgy.
The philosophical basis of this sociological "take" on liturgy is the view that power opposes freedom. This assigns, a priori, a negative quality to the concept of "institution" and reduces the object of hope from Paschal redemption to social progress. Herein lies the "tragic paradox" of this trend in liturgical reform: the institutional Church is seen as a hindrance to "freedom," yet liturgy without the Church is a self-contradiction. "Here it has been forgotten that the liturgy should be the opus Dei in which God himself first acts and we become redeemed people precisely through his action. [If] the group celebrates itself . . . it is celebrating nothing at all since it is no cause for celebration" (117).

In actuality, the Church is the communio sanctorum of all places and all times (118). Romano Guardini has elaborated upon the momentous consequences of realizing that the communion of saints (and not the Base Community) is the true subject of the liturgy. The Church's liturgy has an objective and positive character, because it lives in three ontological dimensions: cosmos, history and mystery. Liturgy has a cosmic dimension because as believers we do not create it, but participate in something greater that transcends us all. As a result of its historic dimension, it develops as a living thing while maintaining its identity (cf. the discussion of biblical culture, above). Finally, liturgy's dimension of mystery means that we do not initiate the liturgical event; rather, it originates in a call and a divine act of love, to which our response is obedience.
This vantage point is of great importance for the artistic questions involved in preparing liturgical music. The music of emancipation is inconsistent with true liturgy. Furthermore, "creativity" that ignores the creaturely status of man "is by its very nature absurd and untrue since humans can only be themselves through receptivity and participation." The real human condition is that we stand in need of a redemption which human effort cannot bring about.

Our faith is Logocentric, and so must our worship be (Cf. logike latreia Rom. 12:1). "The ' Word' to which Christian worship refers is first of all not a text, but a living reality: a God . . . who communicates himself by becoming a human being. This incarnation is the sacred tent, the focal point of all worship which looks at the glory of God and gives him honor" (121).

"Liturgical music is a result of the claim and the dynamics of the Word's incarnation . . . Faith becoming music is a part of the process of the Word becoming flesh" (122). At the same time (one might say: in counterpoint), the flesh becomes "logocized" or spiritualized, restoring harmony to postlapsarian creation. "Wood and brass turn into tone; the unconscious and the unsolved become ordered and meaningful sound."

Our Incarnate Lord, who was raised up on the cross, raised up our fallen human nature. Western music, from Gregorian chant through Renaissance polyphony to Bruckner and beyond, lives from this great synthesis "of spirit, intuition and sensuous sound . . . [T]he liturgical music of the Church must be subject to that integration of the human state which appears before us in incarnational faith" (124).

Practically speaking, the prerequisites for sacred music include "awe, receptivity and a humility that is prepared to serve by participating in the greatness which has already gone before" (125). Furthermore, the Church has posted road signs: the great liturgical texts (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei) and the references in her official documents to Gregorian chant and Palestrina as models providing orientation.

C) The "Postconciliar" Challenge Vs. The Cosmic Liturgy

("'In the Presence of the Angels I Will Sing Your Praise'; The Regensburg Tradition and the Reform of the Liturgy," pp. 128-146.)

The point of departure of this essay is a description of the medieval frescoes in the crypt of the monastery of Marienberg in South Tyrol. "The real focal point is the Majestas Domini, the risen Lord lifted up on high, who is seen at the same time and above all as the one returning, the one already coming in the Eucharist . . . Liturgy is anticipated Parousia . . . " (129).

Indeed, St. Benedict, in his Rule, reminds his monks of Psalm 138:1: "In the presence of the angels I will sing to you," and admonishes them, "Let us reflect on how we should be in the presence of God and the angels, and when we sing let us stand in such a way that our hearts are in tune with our voices." Cardinal Ratzinger goes on to explain, "The liturgy is not a thing the monks create. It is already there before them. It is entering into the liturgy of the heavens that has always been taking place." This is the clear meaning of the frescoes.

Sadly, this "already, but not yet" character of the earthly liturgy has been obscured lately by a preoccupation with a liturgical reform that is "already" with us but has "not yet" overcome the old Tridentine order. According to this strange perspective, "a chasm separates the history of the Church into two irreconcilable worlds: the preconciliar and the postconciliar" (130).

Cardinal Ratzinger's brother served as choirmaster in the Regensburg cathedral from 1964 to 1994. When he began, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of Vatican II had not yet been implemented. The music at Regensburg Cathedral realized in an exemplary way the artistic standards expressed in the motu proprio of Pius X, "Tra le sollecitudini" of November 22, 1903. As bishop of Mantua and patriarch of Venice, Pius X had opposed the operatic style of church music prevalent in Italy. "Insisting on chant as the truly liturgical music was for him part of a larger reform program that was concerned with restoring to worship its purity and dignity and shaping it according to its own inner claim" (131).

Another historical note helps to narrow the chasm between pre- and post-conciliar. Sacrosanctum Concilium, in laying the foundations for reform, constructed a large framework permitting a variety of actualizations. "The reform itself was then shaped by a postconciliar commission and cannot in its concrete details simply be credited to the Council." The history of liturgy is always marked by the tension between continuity and renewal; in the twentieth century the real tension has not been between tired tradition and radical reform, but rather between two stages of reform.

The Cardinal warns that "the dualistic historical view of a pre- and postconciliar world" leads to notions that call the very essence of liturgy into question. One example of this exaggerated "either-or" is the idea that the priest alone was the celebrant of the liturgy before the Council, but now it is the assembled congregation. This implies that the congregation determines what happens in the liturgy. But the priest never had the right to decide arbitrarily what was to be done in the liturgy. It was a "rite," that is, an objective form of the Church's corporate prayer (132).

The new Catechism, on the other hand, sums up the best insights of the Liturgical Movement. Liturgy means "service in the name of/on behalf of the people." But "the People of God is not simply there, as the Germans, French, Italians, or other peoples are; it comes into being again and again only through the service of the Son and by his lifting us into the community of God which we cannot enter on our own . . . Every liturgical celebration is an action of Christ the priest and his Body which is the Church (p. 134; cf. CCC 1069-1070)."

Cardinal Ratzinger does not mince words. "Liturgy presupposes . . . that the heavens have been opened . . . If the heavens are not open, then whatever liturgy was is reduced to role playing and, in the end, to a trivial pursuit of congregational self-fulfillment in which nothing really happens. The decisive factor, therefore, is the primacy of Christology" (133).

We must resolutely defend ourselves against "postconciliar" efforts to assign an absolute value to the "community." In the liturgy, the priest acts in persona Christi. The Catechism discusses the role of the congregation also, significantly in the chapter on the Holy Spirit: "The liturgical assembly derives its unity from the 'communion of the Holy Spirit' who gathers the children of God into the one Body of Christ.' This assembly transcends racial, cultural, social — indeed, all human affinities. The assembly should prepare itself to encounter its Lord and to become 'a people well-disposed'" (CCC 1097, 1098).

What significance does this Catholic understanding of liturgy have for church music? The Council's reform was aimed at counteracting modern individualism and the moralism connected with it, so that the dimension of mystery in liturgy could reappear, its cosmic character which embraces heaven and earth (p. 135; cf. SC 8). For Christians, the Logos orients our worship towards the historical origin of faith, preserved for us in Scripture and Tradition. Church music should not be a performance on the occasion of worship, but is to be liturgy itself, "a harmonizing with the choir of the angels and saints." Gregorian chant and classic polyphonic music are ordered to the mystery in liturgy and to its Logos-character, as well as to its bond to the historical world. They furnish us with a norm which does not exclude new musical forms, but which guides us more surely toward what lies on the horizon.

Attention to the essence of liturgy clarifies the question concerning the place of music in liturgy. You might say, "As liturgy goes, so goes musica sacra." Philipp Harnoncourt has put it this way: "Jews and Christians agree with one another that their singing and music-making point to heaven, or rather that these come from heaven or are learned from heaven" (137). Cardinal Ratzinger elaborates: "Faith comes from listening to God's word. But wherever God's word is translated into human words there remains a surplus of the unspoken and unspeakable which calls us to silence — into a silence that in the end lets the unspeakable become song and also calls on the voices of the cosmos for help so that the unspoken may become audible."

Because church music comes from the Word — both as expression of the Truth and response to a call — its character must correspond to the words in which the Logos has expressed himself. Hence not all music is appropriate for liturgical use: "By its nature such music must be different from music that is supposed to lead to rhythmic ecstasy, stupefying anesthetization, sensual excitement, or the dissolution of the ego in Nirvana, to name just a few possibilities" (138). St. Cyprian's treatise on the Lord's Prayer offers a useful guideline: "Discipline, which includes tranquility and awe, belongs to the words and posture of praying."4 It should also belong to sacred song.

Cardinal Ratzinger quickly dismisses two other specious demands of the "new" liturgists. Some, mistaking external busyness for "active participation," would veto the use of the choir as intruding between the congregation and the liturgical action. But the choir is part of the community and its singing legitimately represents the prayer assembly. The concept of representation, of standing in for another, affects all levels of religious reality, including worship, and is a fundamental category of the Christian faith.

Another commonly heard "postconciliar" objection is a "fanaticism about vernacular," even to the point of forbidding chant and hymns in Latin. The Cardinal wryly observes that, in a multicultural society, such an insistence on the vernacular has about as much logic to it as the demand for a hand-shaking, on-speaking-terms community does in an age of increased mobility. Harnoncourt notes that "The traditional, so-called 'Latin Mass' always had Aramaic (Amen, Alleluia, Hosanna, Maran atha) and Greek (Kyrie, Trisagion) parts, and the sermon was usually given in the vernacular. Real life is not acquainted with stylistic unity and perfection; on the contrary, where something is really alive, formal and stylistic variety will occur . . ., and the unity is an organic one" (140).

In concluding his talk, Cardinal Ratzinger commends the departing cathedral choirmaster for striving "to manage continuity in development and development in continuity" during the theological and liturgical upheavals since the Council, "so that the liturgy in the Regensburg cathedral kept its dignity and excellence and remained transparent to the cosmic liturgy of the Logos in the unity of the whole Church without taking on a museum-like character" (140). He also expresses the hope that true reform will "flourish in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council — reform that is not discontinuity and destruction but purification and growth to a new maturation and a new fullness" (146).

In each of the articles just summarized, Cardinal Ratzinger responds to a specialized, academic-sounding challenge to the traditional Catholic understanding of the liturgy by considering the issue from a wider, ultimately theological perspective. To multiculturalist demands he replies with a reminder that Catholic faith and worship are rooted in a historical religion and thus are part and parcel of a specific cultural tradition. When the sociological gauntlet is thrown down, he arms himself with the insights of a comprehensive Christian anthropology. The notion that Vatican II divides Church history into a reactionary past and a glorious future is gently corrected with evidence that the reform of the liturgy has been the ongoing work of a century and more.

This technique of "taking the broader perspective" is evident in the very arrangement of essays in the anthology, A New Song for the Lord. The articles on liturgical music are grouped with one on church architecture at the end of Part II, preceded by an essay on "The Resurrection as the Foundation of the Christian Liturgy" (explaining Sunday as a Little Easter and the new Sabbath). Part I of the book, "Jesus Christ, Center of Faith and Foundation of Our Hope," treats more fundamental questions of Christology, catechesis and the true understanding of power in the Church. The essays are cogently argued and can be read independently, yet taken together they offer an almost systematic, theological treatise on the liturgy.

We have grown accustomed to hearing famous professors weigh in with expert commentary, each presenting his own abstruse "take" on a given issue. Not so when Cardinal Ratzinger writes about the liturgy or sacred music. The themes and arguments in his essays on liturgical music recur throughout his works, because he is writing about the lifeblood of the Mystical Body and the atmosphere that baptized souls breathe in their life of grace.

A few random examples illustrate this consistency. In Co-Workers of the Truth, a selection from Cardinal Ratzinger's writings arranged as meditations for each day of the year, there are (besides excerpts from the articles summarized above) two other readings concerning sacred music:

"The first Christmas carol of history . . . had no human origins — Saint Luke records it as the song of the angels who were the evangelists of the holy night: Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth among men, those with whom he is pleased, those of good will. This song sets a standard . . . Peace among men results from God's glory. Those who are concerned about the human race and its well-being have to be concerned about God's glory first of all . . ., [which] is not some private concern . . . [but] a public affair."

"Three great symbols dominate the liturgy of this night of the Resurrection: light [the Paschal candle], water and 'the new song,' that is, the Alleluia . . . Granted, we shall not sing this new song in its fullness until we are in the 'new world,' until God calls us by a 'new name' (Rev. 2:17), until everything has been made new. But we are permitted to anticipate something of this [beatific] newness in the great joy of the Easter vigil."5

When arguing about the liturgy, one runs the risk of abstracting, of prescinding from the mystery. Cardinal Ratzinger's well-reasoned essays on sacred music bring to mind vividly the fact that the liturgy is, after all, divine.

Notes

1. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium (an interview with Peter Seewald, translated by Adrian Walker), Ignatius, San Francisco, 1997, p. 47.
2. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, A New Song for the Lord: Faith in Christ and Liturgy Today (translated by Martha M. Matesich), The Crossroad Publishing Company, New York, 1997, p. 96.
3. The Crossroad Publishing Company, 370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017. In this summary, the actual title of each article is given after a descriptive heading in bold. Page numbers for citations are included in the text.
4. St. Cyprian, De oratione dominica, 4.
5. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Co-Workers of the Truth: Meditations for Every Day of the Year (edited by Sr. Irene Grassl, translated by Sr. Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. and Rev. Lothar Krauth), Ignatius, San Francisco, 1992. The readings cited are for December 29 (pp. 408-409) and April 14 (pp. 123-124).
Mr. Michael J. Miller is a translator for Ignatius Press and a free-lance writer. His articles have been published in Faith and Reason, Catholic World Report and the Month. His last article in HPR appeared in March 1999.
© Ignatius Press 2000.

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