We know the Pope loves music

And we know Cardinal Ratzinger wrote a great deal about the liturgy, and sacred music, among other things.

Now don’t be fooled into thinking this is a breaking news item, BUT…..

Sandro Magister has this column that is a fascinating exercise in creative thinking and projection. Take it as such.

Let’s imagine that the document that follows is the discourse that Benedict XVI has prepared for the upcoming feast of saint Cecilia, patroness of music, which falls each year on November 22.

The person who “discovered” the document and sent it to www.chiesa is professor Giacomo Baroffio, one of the world’s leading specialists in Gregorian chant and liturgical music.

Okay, just a reminder. What follows is a fictionalized account of what Pope Benedict might say, as imagined by professor Baroffio.

…Wherever there is no deep interest in sacred music, it is because even before this there is no attention to the liturgy. A perverse worldly infiltration has overturned the order of things, and has fostered the rise and spread of a dreadful conviction: that the liturgy is a series of cultural maneuvers created by men according to their individual tastes; as desired, when desired, if desired. There has been a loss of the mystical sense of what in the Church, and for the life of the Church, was and is the “Opus Dei”: the work that we accomplish in the sight of God by lifting up our prayer to Him, but even before this – and this is the most important thing; it is essential – it is what the Spirit of God carries out in our hearts, and brings to fulfillment when, in the totality of our personhood, we are transfigured and made capable of calling God by the tender name of “abba,” “daddy.”

The liturgy is not a moment in the journey of faith that can be relativized, that can be performed or omitted as one pleases, nor can it be manipulated and twisted in a breathless quest for support and applause. The liturgy is a privileged and unique moment in the history of salvation: it has as its protagonist Christ the Lord, who calls us to follow him through his hidden life in Nazareth and his public life – in social engagement, in spreading the good news of the Beatitudes, and in the silent wonder of adoration. The liturgy is, in the first place, the memorializing of the passion, death, and resurrection of the Lord, who opened his heart in confiding his deepest secrets through the words of the Gospel…

It’s an interesting exercise. Do read the rest of it for enlightenment.