Pope at Audience: The liturgy leads us back to what is essential

In our hectic lives marked by busyness and commotion, the rite of the liturgy, along with its signs and symbols, helps us pause and connect with our inner spiritual life as it draws us closer to Christ and his love, Pope Leo XIV said during the Wednesday General Audience in St. Peter’s Square on June 3.

“With the solemn simplicity of its rhythms, the rite interrupts our frenetic activities, leading us back to what is essential,” the Pope emphasized.

“We thus discover another dimension of action, not guided by calculations of productivity, and another experience of time and space. In the rite we experience a logic of gratuitousness, we find a pause that regenerates the heart, we recognize that we are preceded by divine grace, we learn to live in a rhythm inhabited by the Holy Spirit.”

This week, Pope Leo continued his catechesis series on the Documents of the Second Vatican Council, and reflected on the 1963 Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium.

Sacrosanctum Concilium was the first text to be promulgated at the Second Vatican Council and brought about important changes to the liturgy, such as allowing it to be celebrated in vernacular languages and encouraging a more active participation of the faithful.

In this regard, the Pope explained that the Council – by building on the Liturgical Movement that pushed for these changes – helped highlight how the rites of the Christian liturgy are not “a mere external covering of the sacramental mystery, a collection of arbitrary ceremonies, but are the ecclesial mediation through which the divine gift reaches us.”

“Rite gives shape to liturgical action” and thus to our lives by “generating in us a spiritual sensibility that makes us capable of savouring the presence of God through Jesus Christ,” Pope Leo explained.