Turning Toward the Lord: Orientation in Liturgical PrayerIntroduction by Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) Turning towards the Lord presents an historical and theological argument for the traditional, common direction of liturgical prayer, known as "facing east", and is meant as a contribution to the contemporary debate about the Catholic liturgy. Lang, a member of the London Oratory, studies the direction of liturgical prayer from an historical, theological, and pastoral point of view. At a propitious moment, this book resumes a debate that, despite appearances to the contrary, has never really gone away, not even after the Second Vatican Council. Historical research has made the controversy less partisan, and among the faithful there is an increasing sense of the problems inherent in an arrangement that hardly shows the liturgy to be open to the things that are above and to the world to come. In this situation, Lang's delightfully objective and wholly unpolemical book is a valuable guide. Without claiming to offer major new insights, Lang carefully presents the results of recent research and provides the material necessary for making an informed judgment. It is from such historical evidence that the author elicits the theological answers that he proposes. |
From inside the book
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... Common Direction of Liturgical Prayer: Its Theological and Spiritual Contents 95 1. The Relevance of Liturgical Practice in the Early Church 95 2. Turning to the Lord—The Theological Dimension of Liturgical Practice 106 a. The cosmic ...
... common in the controversies of the last forty years. At the same time it highlights the internal direction of liturgical action, which can never be expressed in its totality by ex- ternal forms. This internal direction is the same for ...
... common direction of priest and people is intrinsically fitting and proper to the liturgical action. Louis Bouyer (like Jungmann, one of the Council's leading liturgists) and Klaus Gam- ber have each in his own way taken up the same ...
... common direction of liturgical prayer in the modern world. Häußling's chief objection is this: Against the intention of the Council, the author does not consider the most important argument in favour of the altered direction of the ...
... direction of prayer should point towards the transcendent addressee of prayer. Hence the question of the focal point of the presidential prayer needs to be considered seriously.... If the common direction of presider and congregation ...