Polermo, Italy 2007

Liturgy and the public square

In the Christian liturgy God announces salvation and pours out to all the world the grace that was definitively inaugurated in the Passover of Christ. At the same time this liturgy is that worship in spirit and truth which the baptized give to God through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit on behalf of all the world. Therefore, if the liturgy is exercised in the first place in the house of the Church, it also has a fundamental vocation to be directed outward toward others and toward the public world.

Liturgy has always done this, even when persecutions or the ancient disciplina arcani lead to a certain retreat, a retreat necessary so that the capacity of the community to announce the Gospel of Christ was not put in danger. Even in such a time Christians were aware of the public significance of their mysteria. Liturgy still in our days turns outward in witness and service. Also in our days the mysteries at the heart of the liturgy are intended to speak grace to the world. Nonetheless in our time that public significance may be both expressed and complicated by the media. For example, broadcasts of large gatherings – such as the megachurches of the USA or funerals of public figures – may have the effect of accentuating performance values.

This impact of the liturgy on the public square has been manifest in the past and often also today through aspects of popular devotion, notably the processions and pilgrimages of medieval Christianity, but also such rites as coronations. Marriages and funerals are another public face of Christian celebration. So have been sacrament meetings and revivals in parts of Christianity. One should also not forget the multiple artistic works that Christianity has influenced – e. g. musical productions and the medieval mystery plays – or the architectural monuments and urban organisation of which Sicily constitutes a remarkable example.

But the liturgical assembly, even if it is of very modest size, is by nature oriented toward a reality larger than itself, not only the manifestation of a God who makes covenant but also toward the very criteria of truth: service toward others (diakonia) and witness (martyria). Without ethics or the announcement of the faith, liturgy risks being reduced to the simple expression of individual aspirations and thereby loses its deepest character. As expressed by the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans (cf. Rom 12,1-2) liturgy is at the heart of the life of faith, the centre from which Christian life proceeds and to which it returns.

The XXI congress of Societas Liturgica which will take place in Palermo, Sicily, from August 6 to 11, 2007, will seek to engage the questions which are posed by liturgical and sacramental practice when these encounter the world in the public square. This public square may be an actual phenomenon of the city, amidst streets and lanes and civic life, or it may be the openness of the celebrating community toward people who have had no actual part in the liturgy or who take part only at a distance – inquirers, people who watch television, leading figures of civil society who visit a liturgy, or believers in another religion who find themselves in a Christian church.

Following on the XX congress at Dresden which gave attention to the work of the liturgy in transforming a broken world, the next congress will seek to better comprehend the theological and pastoral implications of the liturgy as a public action.

Such a consideration of liturgical practices thus invites us to attend to three principal trajectories for our thought.

1. The relationship between liturgy and society and liturgy and politics in a context in which the media tend to reduce liturgy to its appearances although it is first of all a fundamental place of the proposal and the confession of faith.

2. The impact of the great central symbols of liturgy in a world which is a market place of plural ritual offerings, often disconnected to ecclesial institutions.

3. The encounter with cultural and religious expressions which call for liturgical life to be a means of integration and of identity for its participants.Methodologically the subject invites us to honour several points of view. In the first place we will seek to cast a light on the diverse models which have marked the Christian tradition in different times and places. The congress will give a significant accent to this question, both in major lectures and in case studies, dealing with the multiple realisations of the relationship between liturgy and the public square which belong to all the periods of history (apostolic times, pastristic antiquity, the middle ages, the modern period), but also to different cultural environments in which Christianity has been enfleshed (the Christian East, Europe, but also Asia, Africa and Latin America).
In the second place we will give special attention to instruments of analysis from philosophy, sociology, and anthropology in order to better apprehend the specific situation of the liturgy in contemporary society.

In the third place we will seek to explore the ways in which liturgy itself and reflection on the liturgy may function as acts of political or public theology proposing meaning and liberation to society.

Finally, as with all of the gatherings of Societas Liturgica which take place as an international and ecumenical association of liturgists, it will matter for us to pay attention to the particular experience of the Christian communities that will receive us. Indeed, their singular history constitutes a provocation for us to more attentively seek the unity between the Churches, valuing that which is best in each tradition.