2006 March, Vatican Website, Return to Sources, Archbishop Piero Marini, trans. TMD

Return to the Sources
A service of the Liturgy

H. E. Archbishop Piero Marini


This talk was given by Archbishop Marini at the symposium on the Monumenta Liturgica Concilii Tridentini at the Salesian Institute of the Sacred Heart, Rome, 23rd March, 2006. It puts into perspective what the liturgy is, how it arises and where it is heading. It focuses in its culminating paragraphs on how the Council of Trent fundamentally defined both itself and the faith of the Church by the basis from which it was prepared to dialogue with the German Protestant communities. These had been invited by the Council Fathers to come and share their difficulties in open debate. The offer was not accepted, but the terms in which it was made reveal the pillars of our faith, one of which is the liturgy.
Archbishop Marini the President of the Pontifical Committee for Eucharistic Congresses, was the Holy Father’s Master of Liturgical Celebrations at the time this talk was given. This translation was made before the appearance of an official English version on the Vatican Website, we retain it here as, in places, it is somewhat clearer than the official translation .



Something new and something old
Led by the Holy Spirit, the Church, the bride of the Incarnate Word, deeply immerses herself in Sacred Scripture so as to feed her children with the Word of God. Therefore she rightly encourages the study of the sacred Fathers of both east and west, and of the sacred liturgies1 .
In the grace-filled light of the Second Vatican Council, given expression in the Dogmatic Constitution, Dei Verbum, we can with great conviction, receive and revere the great and authentic tradition of the Church, who draws from her treasury, things both new and old. This is the work of the wise scribe, Matthew tells us, who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven; a work that requires us constantly to re-read the new, in and by the hidden treasures of our tradition, and bring it the light. This is the spirit, which moved the Second Vatican Council, the spirit out of which renewal sprang. Is it not, in fact the case, that this passage from Matthew is quoted in the conclusion of the Preamble to the General Instruction of the Roman Missal and is something which both justifies and explains the great importance of the rediscovery of the sources of the liturgy? In this way:
The Church faithfully fulfils its responsibilities as a teacher of the truth, to guard the ‘old’. that is, the deposit of tradition. At the same time it fulfils another responsibility: that of examining and prudently introducing the new2 .
Both the old and the new, are, therefore, an authentic expression of the faith and of human experience, which are not in irredeemable conflict, but on the contrary, support and illuminate each other.

To preserve and promote
This treasure of the Church as we well know, consists in the first place of Sacred Scripture which contains the Word of God that constantly demands to be brought into the light of our modern day. But alongside Sacred Scripture, the Church also has the treasure of the patristic tradition and of the liturgy, which yet draws us to rediscover, more truly, the dimension of a pilgrim community on the way. Sacred Scripture, with the Fathers and the sources of the liturgy, are not mere testimonies to past history, objects of archaeological interest; they are in the fullest sense of the word, the testimonies of one history lived between God and his people. They are the warp of a tapestry of which we form the most recent weft, the new threads woven in to make the new cloth. The Church’s challenging task is just this: to bring to birth a radical newness, to restore the deposit of faith she has already received. To do this she must immerse herself in the sources of her own faith, having before her eyes - or better still - in her heart - the needs of today’s world. True, as we look to the past, we must avoid anything that worships antiquity merely because it is old; the sources do not offer prefabricated solutions for us to appropriate. We are not the children of a mythical past; but, believing in the return of the Lord Jesus, we look to the fulfilment that is to come, not to what has gone before. On the other hand we must attentively guard against running away into a future that is both rootless and aimless.
There is no way to go back. Rediscovering the treasure that is the source of our own faith is not living in the past, just as authentic prophesy is not living in the future It is necessary to keep in mind that a return to the sources is not a temporal itinerary , but a road travelled in depth to what is essential. Following this path we will be assisted to winnow the chaff of our ecclesiology, our faith, our ideas, and our answers to the challenge of today.

A faith lived from the Church
Only a lived faith, a faith with a history, albeit a history of suffering, is truly a Catholic faith, not only in its synchronistic character but in its equally important diachronistic character. It is necessary to look beyond our immediate past - as the preface to the New Roman Missal says:
The usage of the holy Fathers’ does not require only the preservation of what our immediate ancestors passed on to us. The entire past of the Church and all its customs must be studied profoundly and understood: The Christian communities which flourished among the Semitic, Greek and Latin peoples differed from one another in the form of human culture by which they professed one common faith. This broader prospect shows us how the Holy Spirit keeps the people of God faithful in preserving the deposit of faith unchanged, while prayers and rites differ greatly3 .
A return to the sources is one mode by which we can rediscover and revitalise the riches of the earliest features of our Catholicity: one with a richness of form, of ideas, of tenable solutions. Possibly none of these can be adapted to the present day. But it is the route that interests us - and the variety of approaches. This is the very great gift that tradition offers us; she is the mistress of our understanding, the mistress of freedom, the mistress of change. Most of the time she will not offer us ready-made solutions but she will be our companion, if we have an attentive spirit, to the threshold. She will indicate the way, not replacing our creativity, but stimulating our understanding.

The place of communion
The treasure of the Church will also be our place of communion and encounter, as the first letter of the Apostle St John recalls: “That which was since the beginning, that we have heard, that we have seen with our eyes, on which we have gazed, which our hands have touched ...this also we proclaim to you so that you may have communion with us [1Jn1:1-3]. Our tradition is the place of communion therefore, between the witnesses of the Resurrection and ourselves - the men and women of today - and between ourselves and those whose responsibility it is to transmit the deposit of faith we have received. Where Christians have experienced division it is still to this that they must resort in order to reconstruct that communion which has been broken. As the Council of Trent, inviting those Christians who held to the Confession of Augsburg to participate in the Council, promised and guaranteed:
The controverted matters shall be treated .... according to Sacred Scripture and the traditions of the Apostles, approved Councils, the consent of the Catholic Church and the authorities of the holy Fathers 4 .
Sacred Scripture and the great traditions - these are the ground of our encounter. These we can acknowledge and can return to walk in, having, as the one absolute essential a wide vision that encompasses all that is offered to us by the ancient traditions of every time and place.

Lex orandi, lex credendi
But it is above all in the liturgy that renewal cannot make less than a sincere and deep return to the sources: the sources of what is to be celebrated and what is believed - lex orandi, lex credendi. Digging deeply into the sources, the theologian and the liturgist simply try to enter in depth the mystery of the faith which has been revealed in the concrete life of the Church along its history.

+ Piero Marini.


The Web page for the Italian original is-
http://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/2006/documents/ns_lit_doc_20060323_ritorno-fonti_it.html