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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... priest, after the homily, would cry out to the faithful: 'ConversiadDominum'—turnnowtowardstheLord.Thismeant in the first place that they would turn towards the East, to- wards the rising sun, the sign of Christ returning, whom we go to ...
... priest celebrates versus populum, he should always be oriented versus Deum per Iesum Christum (towards God through Jesus Christ). Rites, signs, symbols, and words can never exhaust the inner reality of the mystery of salvation. For this ...
... priest celebrated 'with his back to the people'; he emphasised that what was at issue was not the priest turning away from the people, but, on the contrary, his facing the same direction as the people. The Liturgy of the Word has the ...
... priest and people in liturgical worship have again become matters for theological debate. This seems a good occasion to publish a revised and substantially extended version of my essay 'Conversi ad Dominum:Zu Gebetsostung, Stellung des ...
... priest and people at Mass], which is also called into question by the experience of community practice.10 Gerhards also observes that present liturgical scholarship is quite favourable to recovering the category of sacrifice. As he ...