The Seven Gifts of the Spirit of the Liturgy

New @IgnatiusPress: "The Seven Gifts of the Spirit of the Liturgy: Centennial Perspectives on Romano Guardini's Landmark Work", edited by Christopher Carstens: https://t.co/zuIBNyqmsR pic.twitter.com/ynJtpV24Wz

— Ignatius Insight (@ignatiusinsight) January 13, 2021

EWTN Documentary on Romano Guardini

What are you doing at 11p.m. EST on Monday 11/9? Might we suggest tuning into @EWTN to watch their new documentary about Romano Guardini, technology, & culture? Ft. interviews with our @JohnCavadini, @timothypomalley, @leodelo2, & @brettrobinson75. https://t.co/bBRhjf0LCZ

— McGrath Institute (@McGrathND) November 6, 2020

Come hear about one of @Pontifex’s major influences. https://t.co/fnGm4OuHER

— Timothy P. O'Malley (@timothypomalley) November 6, 2020

Pius Parsch, Romano Guardini, and Petrus Tschninkel

NLM

Accomodation to the State

The Christian Vitalist International: A translation of “Rescuing the Political” by Catholic philosopher-priest Romano Guardini.

https://t.co/xrwm1l5oj8

— Christian Vitalists 🔥🕊️ (@XtianVitalism) June 12, 2020

But what is the meaning of the state? You say that it should support and protect the wellbeing of individuals and the whole, that it should regulate and develop economic life, support cultural work. You say it’s everything that corresponds to the laws that the state gives, which it grasps by stimulation and creation through people and agencies. And everything is right. The political designates the economic and cultural significance of the state. But that’s still not the political in the special sense of the word.

To me the political meaning of the state actually appears to be sublimity [Hoheit]. It is the incorporation of majesty for its own sake. But sublimity has at its essence God alone. Thus, the political meaning of the state seems to me such that, since it is itself given by God, it demonstrates and validates His majesty among the natural matters and realities of life. Not in moral and religious matters. For those responsibility lies not with the state, but the church. The state has to represent the majesty of God in the matters of natural life.

It does this most of all by way of its presence. It is legitimate. It does not simply exist, but it exists “with right,” by the grace of God, and this rightful existence demands recognition from other states and from individuals. And it does this by way of right in the life of its citizens: it makes right. It does not have a political character insofar as it pursues goals, provides benefits, facilitates commerce, or seeks to bring welfare, but insofar as it carries its meaning within itself. That means that just “being right” is beyond every goal. Said more precisely: the state is the right that God affirms, and that is the essential order itself. It is right, then, as a natural revelation of divine sublimity. It is on this right that the state stakes in its entire legitimate existence, the intellectual brunt of its sublimity, i.e. the state is “authority.” At the end every law proceeds “in the name of God.” The state, however, even stakes its power on right. It coerces obedience to right.

It is a naive judgment of the state, common to Roman Catholic intellectuals, considering it to be a valid or legitimate form of political organization as what preceded it in history. On this they are in error.

One Take on the Eucharist

CWR Dispatch: Sacramental inefficiency and liturgical uselessness: Insights from St. John Paul II and Romano Guardini by Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille
Perhaps in this time of pandemic we may appreciate anew—but from afar and with real hunger and renewed appreciation—the sacraments we have hitherto taken for granted, now temporarily lost to us.

Melancholy

Liturgical Piety and Emotion

From "What Became of the Spirit of the Liturgy? Implementation of Sacrosanctum Concilium 1963—1965" by Susan Benofy

However, Guardini also says, the liturgy is difficult to adapt to modern man, who often finds it artificial and too formal, and prefers other forms of prayer which seem to have the advantage “of contemporary, or, at any rate, of congenial origin.”[8] But to be appropriate as a prayer for all people, and any situation, the liturgy must be formal, and keep “emotion under the strictest control.”[9]

The direct expression of emotion in prayer is more appropriate in personal prayer or popular devotions. These are rightly intended to appeal to certain tastes and circumstances, and consequently retain more local characteristics and aim more at individual edification, but they must remain distinct from the liturgy. “There could be no greater mistake than that of discarding the valuable elements in the spiritual life of the people for the sake of the liturgy, or than the desire of assimilating them to it.”[10] The liturgy is celebrated by the whole body of the faithful, not simply the assembled congregation. It embraces “all the faithful on earth; simultaneously it reaches beyond the bounds of time.”[11]

Guardini notes that, since the liturgy doesn’t fit any personality type exactly, all must sacrifice some of their own inclinations to properly enter into it. And, though liturgy requires fellowship, this does not mean ordinary social interaction. “[T]he union of the members is not directly accomplished from man to man. It is accomplished by and in their joint aim, goal, and spiritual resting place—God—by their identical creed, sacrifice and sacraments.”[12] Guardini insists that liturgical prayer “must spring from the fullness of truth. It is only truth—or dogma, to give it its other name—which can make prayer efficacious.”[13]

Is a Middle Position Possible?

Understanding vs. contemplation, hearing and active particiption versus the other senses... etc.

The Liturgy Is for (Little) Kids by Timothy P. O’Malley

CWR: Revisiting “The Spirit of the Liturgy” by Peter M.J. Stravinskas

Wolfram Schrems on the Roman Liturgical Reform

Rorate Caeli: Guest article — The Council’s Constitution on the Liturgy: Reform or revolution?

Robert Louis Wilken, "The Church's Way of Speaking"

First Things

The unique gift of liturgy, Roman Guardini wrote in his Spirit of the Liturgy, is to “create a universe brimming with fruitful spiritual life.” Liturgy does not “exist for the sake of humanity, but for the sake of God.” If the Bible is the lexicon of Christian speech, then the liturgy is its grammar, a place to come to know and practice the Christian idiom and to be formed by it. For Augustine, the reciting of the Psalms was a way of making the words of the psalmist his own, and he talked about what the words of the Psalms “had done to me.”

Romano Guardini

Did some Goggling on him... found the following to be of interest:

David Foote, Romano Guardini - The Essence of a Catholic Worldview

Silvano Zucal, The Intellectual Relationship between Joseph Ratzinger and Romano Guardini

Sandro Magister links to another essay by Silvano Zucal Benedict XVI Has a Father, Romano Guardini

Guardini's The Spirit of the Liturgy is available online - (no clue about the quality of the translation)

John Allen, Benedict's Final Theologian Quote

Apparently Jorge Bergoglio is a fan as well.

Zenit: Pope's Address on Romano Guardini

Pope's Address on Romano Guardini




"He Aspired to the Truth of God and to the Truth About Man"



VATICAN CITY, NOV. 24, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of Benedict XVI's address, which he gave last month upon receiving in audience members of the "Romano Guardini" Foundation of Berlin, who were in Rome for a congress dedicated to the memory of the theologian, who was a teacher of Joseph Ratzinger himself.

* * *

Excellencies,
Most Illustrious President Professor von Pufendorf,
Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Friends,

It is a joy for me to be able to welcome all of you here, in the Apostolic Palace, who have come to Rome on the occasion of the congress of the Guardini Foundation on the theme "Spiritual and Intellectual Heritage of Romano Guardini." In particular, I thank dear Professor von Pufendorf, for the cordial words he addressed to me at the beginning of this meeting, in which he expressed all the present "struggle" that unites us to Guardini and, at the same time, calls us to carry forward his life's work.

In the thanksgiving address on the occasion of the celebration of his 80th birthday, in February 1965, at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, Guardini described his life's task, as he understood it, as a way "of questioning oneself, in a continuous spiritual exchange, which means a Christian Weltanschauung" (Stationen und Ruckblicke, S. 41). The view, this joint look over the world, for Guardini was not a look from outside as a mere object of research. Nor did he pretend to the perspective of the history of the spirit, which examines and ponders what others have said or written on the religious way of an age. All these points of view were insufficient according to Guardini.

In notes on his life, he said: "What interested me immediately was not what someone said about Christian truth but what is true" (Berichte uber mein Leben, S. 24). And it was this approach of his teaching which impressed us young people, because we did not want to know the "pyrotechnic spectacle" of existing opinions in and outside of Christianity: We wanted to know what "is". And here there was one who without fear and, at the same time, with all the seriousness of critical thought, posed this question and helped us to think together.

Guardini did not want to know one or many things. He aspired to the truth of God and to the truth about man. For him the instrument to approach this truth was the Weltanschauung -- as it was called at the time -- which takes place in a lively exchange with the world and with men. What is specifically Christian consists in the fact that man knows himself in a relationship with God who precedes him and from whom he cannot subtract himself. Our thinking is not the principle that establishes the measure of things, but God who surpasses our measure and who cannot be reduced to any entity created by us.

God reveals himself as the truth, but the latter is not abstract, but on the contrary, is found in the concrete-living, in fine, in the form of Jesus Christ. However, whoever wishes to see Jesus, the truth, must "reverse his direction," must come out of the autonomy of arbitrary thought to the disposition to listen, which accepts what is. And this reversal, which he carried out in his conversion, molded all his thought and life as a continuous going out of autonomy to listening, to receiving. However, even in a genuine relationship with God, man does not always understand what God says. He needs a corrective, and this consists in the exchange with others, which in the living Church of all times has found its reliable form, which unites all with one another.

Guardini was a man of dialogue. His works arose, almost without exception, from a conversation, at least interior. The lessons of the professor of the philosophy of religion and of Christian Weltanschauung at the University of Berlin in the 20s represented above all meetings with personalities of the history of thought. Guardini read the works of these authors, listened to them, learned how they saw the world and entered into dialogue with them to develop, in conversation with them, what he, in so far as Catholic thinker, had to say to their thought. He continued this custom in Munich, and, in fact, it was also the peculiarity of the style of his lessons, being in dialogue with the Thinkers. His key word was "look," because he wanted to lead us to "see" and he himself was in a common interior dialogue with his listeners.

This was the novelty in regard to the rhetoric of old times: that he, in fact, did not seek any rhetoric, but spoke in a totally simple way with us and, at the same time, spoke with truth and induced us to dialogue with truth. And this was a wide spectrum of "dialogues" with authors such as Socrates, Saint Augustine or Pascal, with Dante, Holderlin, Morike, Rilke and Dostoyevsky. In them he saw living mediators, who discover the present in one word of the past, enabling one to see and live it in a new way. These give us a strength which can lead us back to ourselves.

From man's opening to truth issues, for Guardini, an ethos, a base for our moral behavior towards our neighbor, as an exigency of our existence. Given that man can find God, he can also act well. True for him is this primacy of ontology over ethos, of the being, of the very being of God correctly understood and heard, from which follows correct action. He said: "A genuine praxis, that is, correct action, arises from truth and must fight for it" (Ibid., S. 111).

Such yearning for truth and the tending toward what is original and essential, Guardini observed, above all, in young people. In his talks with youth, particularly in Rothenfels Castle, which at the time, thanks to Guardini, had become a center of the Catholic youth movement, the priest and educator carried forward the ideals of the youth movement such as self-determination, personal responsibility and the interior disposition to truth: he purified and deepened them.

Liberty, yes, but only he is free -- he told us -- who is "completely what he must be according to his nature. [...] Liberty is truth" (Auf dem Wege, S. 20). For Guardini the truth of man is essentialness and conformity to being. The path leads to truth when man exercises "the obedience of our being in regard to the being of God" (Ibid., S. 21). This happens ultimately in adoration, which for Guardini belongs to the realm of thought.

In supporting youth, Guardini also sought a new access to the liturgy. The rediscovery of the liturgy was for him a rediscovery of the unity between spirit and body in the totality of the unique human being, as the liturgical act is always at the same time a corporal and spiritual act. Prayer is dilated through corporal and community action, and thus reveals the unity of the whole of reality. The liturgy is symbolic acting. The symbol as quintessence of the unity between the spiritual and the material is lost when both are separated, when the world is fragmented in a dualistic way in spirit and body, in subject and object. Guardini was profoundly convinced that man is spirit in body and body in spirit and that, therefore, the liturgy and the symbol lead him to the essence of himself, in a word, lead him through adoration to the truth.

Among the great themes of Guardini's life, the relationship between faith and the world is of permanent timeliness. Guardini saw above all in the University the place of the search for truth. The University can be so, however, only when it is free of all instrumentalization and advantages for political ends or of another type. Today, in a world of globalization and fragmentation, it is even more necessary to carry this proposal forward, a proposal that is very important for the Guardini Foundation, and for whose realization the Guardini chair has been created.

Again I express my cordial gratitude to all those present for having come. May appealing frequently to Guardini's work refine sensibility to the Christian foundations of our culture and society. I impart willingly to you all the apostolic blessing.

[Translation by ZENIT]

Would it be inaccurate to say that Guardini had a big influence on Joseph Ratzinger?