Active Participation Revisited

Nearly ten years ago, I found myself in Rome for a private audience with Cardinal Robert Sarah, the then-Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, in order to share with him the vision and plans for Source & Summit and to seek his feedback and blessing.

After waiting some time for the meeting to begin in his unusually warm office, his secretary came in and opened the windows to let in some cool air. Eventually, Cardinal Sarah entered the room, almost floating through the doorway, and had a seat. After some brief introductions, I began my presentation as he sat listening silently. A few minutes later, a large gust of wind outside caused the door he had left open to slam thunderously shut. My colleagues and I jumped in surprise while the Cardinal sat unflinchingly still without even blinking, continuing to stare intently into my eyes. I knew at that moment that this would be unlike any pitch I had ever given, and that I was meeting with a living saint.

A half hour or so passed with the Cardinal saying next to nothing—English is far from his first language, and my enthusiastic ramblings about technological innovations in service of the liturgy and sacred music in American English were probably a bit difficult for him to follow. But he listened graciously, and at the end of my presentation, he pondered silently for a moment and then finally spoke. I will never forget his words:

“The crisis that we face with the liturgy today,” he said, “is that we do not know what it is. There are priests—there are even bishops—who do not know what the liturgy is.” And he continued on for a few minutes, drawing upon his theological father Pope Benedict XVI, expressing how critical a right understanding of active participation in the liturgy is for the success of the Church’s life and mission in our times.

What Cardinal Sarah described to me that day with great spiritual insight is something that many Catholics today sense intuitively. Throughout their lives they have been told that full, conscious, and active participation in the liturgy is what the Second Vatican Council proclaimed to be “the aim to be considered before all else”—along with the promise that if everyone could just sing a little louder, say the responses a little more enthusiastically, and if we could just have a few more lay lectors, extraordinary ministers of holy communion, and ushers, then a new springtime in the Church would surely arrive at any moment.

Instead, after more than six decades, and despite an abundance of well-intentioned efforts along the way, we can see that many of the Council’s stated aims remain largely unfulfilled while entirely new crises have come into the fore. The data suggest that we may need to reconsider some longstanding assumptions. Because of its fundamental importance for the renewal of the Church in our times, a deeper understanding of the meaning of active participation in the liturgy is in order, along with a right application of it in our parishes today.

The term active participation did not enter the Church’s magisterium in the 1960s, but in 1903 with the motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini of Pope St. Pius X on the topic of sacred music. Sacrosanctum Concilium of Vatican II draws upon Pius X entirely when it calls active participation “the primary and indispensable source from which the faithful are to derive the true Christian spirit” (SC 14).

Active participation was an increasingly common topic of liturgical and theological conversation for fifty years prior to the motu proprio, through the influence of the Liturgical Movement that was launched in France in the mid-19th century. The idea is nothing novel. Active participation in the liturgy has been perennially present from the beginning of the Church and is an essential aspect of the nature of the liturgy itself. The attention and priority given to it by the Liturgical Movement, and the Second Vatican Council a century later, was not because it was fashionable, but because the forces of the modern world were making it something increasingly difficult for people to achieve. And because of its fundamental importance in the Christian life, the active participation of the faithful in the liturgy was something in urgent need of attention.

Dom Prosper Guéranger, the forefather of the Liturgical Movement, did not set out merely to revamp the external forms of the liturgy, but to confront the existential threat posed to liturgical worship by the French Revolution and the rampaging secularizing forces of the modern world. In addition to the politics at play, the materialist worldview stemming from modern philosophy and gradually inculcated by the Industrial Revolution was slowly hollowing out the sacramental imagination of Catholics—an innate sacramental worldview that active participation in the liturgy assumes as a starting point.

With the primary and indispensable source of the true Christian spirit being slowly overshadowed by the spirit of the age, the campaign for the promotion of active participation in the liturgy continued onward through the Liturgical Movement and a host of early 20th-century papal documents toward its most authoritative and forceful ecclesiastical endorsement by the Second Vatican Council in 1963.

This prehistory was both a gift and a challenge for the Council. On the one hand, virtually all of the legwork for the liturgy constitution had already been done. On the other, the Church’s centuries-long response to the challenges of the modern world perhaps delayed the delivery of one of the principal remedies to the increasingly dire condition of modern man: a fully conscious and active participation in the liturgy capable of imparting the true Christian spirit and of regenerating a collapsing society.

The challenge the Church faced in this effort was not so much articulating the vision, which was handled masterfully by the liturgy constitution—it was the task of imbuing that vision faithfully into the pastors who would put it into practice that proved most difficult. This task, by the Council’s own admission, would take not weeks or years, but potentially decades or even generations through cascading efforts of liturgical education. Given the speed and urgency with which the conciliar directives on the liturgy were delivered, and the cultural milieu within which they were received, it is understandable why such an incomplete interpretation of active participation in the liturgy was initially made and put into effect.

Read in isolation, the Council’s most oft-quoted pronouncement on active participation appears relatively straightforward. It says, simply, that:

Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful should be led to that fully conscious, and active participation in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy. Such participation by the Christian people as “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a redeemed people”, is their right and duty by reason of their baptism. (SC 14)

A brief set of clear-cut instructions follows later:

To promote active participation, the people should be encouraged to take part by means of acclamations, responses, psalmody, antiphons, and songs, as well as by actions, gestures, and bodily attitudes. (SC 30)

When taken together, the most immediately practical interpretation became clear.

To say nothing of the many other factors at play, the resulting interpretation and implementation of active participation by most pastors in most parishes, almost universally, was that active participation primarily means little more than maximal external activity by the faithful during the celebration of the Mass, and the proliferation of lay liturgical ministries.

What may have been overlooked, or at least disproportionately deemphasized, in the haste of the initial roll-out was the entire first chapter of the liturgy constitution, which articulates a profound synthesis of the Church’s theology of the liturgy. It is what is referred to when the constitution says that active participation “is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy”; the first chapter, in point of fact, is entitled “The Nature of the Sacred Liturgy and Its Importance in the Church’s Life.”

Similarly, what immediately follows the liturgy constitution’s pronouncement on active participation is a lengthy sequence of dependent formation activities that would be required in order to fulfill the constitution’s mandate, beginning with the liturgical formation of priests in seminary, the formation of professors to teach them, the foundation of liturgical institutes to train the professors, and so on.

Clearly, there would be no quick and easy solution to the Church’s call for active participation in the liturgy. It is a task that was meant to take time, and, in actuality, it has taken several decades for the Church to begin to mature in its implementation of the Council’s lofty vision.

Fortunately, at a distance of more than 60 years since the initial implementation of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the holistic task of authentic liturgical renewal continues on. With the help of several postconciliar instructions on the liturgy, the authoritative interpretation of many popes, and a mature reflection on the experience gained since the Council, a deeper understanding of the meaning of active participation continues to be gained by priests and laity alike and put into practice on the parish level.

Here are five principal points that can help pastors and parishes today more faithfully and fully implement the Council’s teaching and directives on active participation, and that can help guide our efforts to renew the Church from its primary source while directing it toward its ultimate end.

1. Active participation is above all internal, but it is also expressed externally.

Musicam Sacram, the 1967 postconciliar instruction on sacred music, clarifies and elaborates upon the liturgy constitution’s description of active participation. It teaches that this participation “should be above all internal, in the sense that by it the faithful join their mind to what they pronounce or hear, and cooperate with heavenly grace.”¹ At the same time, it should also be expressed externally “to show the internal participation by gestures and bodily attitudes, by the acclamations, responses and singing.”²

Consequently, as we find in the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis, active participation “does not refer to mere external activity during the celebration”³ and “is not per se equivalent to the exercise of a specific ministry.”⁴ If the Church intended for active participation simply to mean external activity, the term participatio activa could have been used. The term chosen instead was participatio actuosa, describing a participation that is fully engaged and operative—a full and conscious participation of the whole person in the liturgical action, integrating mind, body, and soul.

2. Active participation in the liturgy is a participation in the action of Christ by the members of his Mystical Body.

The liturgy is an action of Jesus Christ—it is not an activity that we ourselves can create. Through baptism, we are enabled to participate in this divine action as members of the Mystical Body of Christ joined to Christ the Head, just as the liturgy constitution teaches, saying:

[T]he liturgy is considered as an exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ. In the liturgy the sanctification of the man is signified by signs perceptible to the senses, and is effected in a way which corresponds with each of these signs; in the liturgy the whole public worship is performed by the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, that is, by the Head and His members. (SC 7)

Pope Francis, in his apostolic letter Desiderio Desideravi on liturgical formation, echoes this principle:

[T]here is only one act of worship, perfect and pleasing to the Father; namely, the obedience of the Son, the measure of which is his death on the cross. The only possibility of being able to participate in his offering is by becoming “sons in the Son.” This is the gift that we have received. The subject acting in the Liturgy is always and only Christ-Church, the Mystical Body of Christ.⁵

3. Active participation means conforming ourselves to the mystery being celebrated, not conforming the liturgy to ourselves.

Many of the liturgical abuses that occurred in the immediate wake of the Council were carried out in the name of meeting the pastoral needs of the faithful and flew under the banner of active participation. While acknowledging the legitimate progress the Church has made since the Council, Pope Benedict XVI offers an important corrective in Sacramentum Caritatis to the excesses of “pastoral liturgy,” saying “the active participation called for by the Council must be understood in more substantial terms, on the basis of a greater awareness of the mystery being celebrated and its relationship to daily life.”⁶ He goes on to say that “fruitful participation in the liturgy requires that one be personally conformed to the mystery being celebrated, offering one’s life to God in unity with the sacrifice of Christ for the salvation of the whole world.”⁷

In other words, active participation in the liturgy is meant to change us—it does not invite us to change the liturgy in order to meet people’s personal tastes, preferences, and desires. While it is possible at times for certain, limited pastoral accommodations and adaptations to be made to help make active participation easier for different groups in different cultures, the ultimate goal of active participation in the liturgy is the transformation of the person into the image of Christ through a liturgical act of self-surrender.

Pope Francis puts it this way in Desiderio Desideravi: “The liturgy is the priesthood of Christ, revealed to us and given in his Paschal Mystery, rendered present and active by means of signs addressed to the senses (water, oil, bread, wine, gestures, words), so that the Spirit, plunging us into the paschal mystery, might transform every dimension of our life, conforming us more and more to Christ.”⁸

4. Active participation in the liturgy both forms us and requires formation.

The liturgy itself, celebrated well, has the ability to teach and form us. At the same time, it also requires formation—and particularly a mystagogical catechesis that helps the faithful learn how to move from the liturgical signs to the realities they signify. It is for this reason that Pope Benedict XVI taught that “the primary way to foster the participation of the People of God in the sacred rite is the proper celebration of the rite itself”⁹ and, further, that the art of liturgical celebration, also known as the ars celebrandi, “is the best way to ensure their actuosa participatio.”¹⁰ The ars celebrandi, he says, “is the fruit of faithful adherence to the liturgical norms in all their richness.”¹¹

Consequently, attention to the right and artful celebration of the liturgy is an essential aid to active participation. When the liturgy is celebrated beautifully, faithfully, and rightly, the faithful can be more easily led to participate in it effectively, both through the radiance of the signs themselves and with the help of catechesis on their meaning.

5. Participation in the Eucharistic Sacrifice is the fount and apex of the Christian life.

And finally, active participation in the liturgy is fundamental for the authentic renewal of the Church because the Eucharistic celebration is the “source and summit of the Church’s life and mission.”¹² By participating in Christ’s self-offering to the Father, the lives of the faithful increasingly become a living sacrifice—an “act of worship pleasing to God”<¹³—and carry that eucharistic form into their daily lives as missionary disciples.

Or, as Pope Benedict XVI puts it so beautifully:

The love that we celebrate in the sacrament is not something we can keep to ourselves. By its very nature it demands to be shared with all. What the world needs is God’s love; it needs to encounter Christ and to believe in him. The Eucharist is thus the source and summit not only of the Church’s life, but also of her mission: “an authentically eucharistic Church is a missionary Church.”¹⁴

A deep and renewed understanding of active participation in the liturgy is as necessary today as it has ever been. With the Holy Spirit’s help and our willing cooperation, our parishes can truly become places of transformation, sanctification, and mission. And the renewal of the Church in our times can flow from its primary source while being directed toward its proper end, so that one day it might come to completion in a never-ending participation in the liturgy of the Heavenly Jerusalem.

(Editor’s note: This essay was posted originally at “What We Need Now” and is published here with kind permission.)

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