Pope Leo’s talk for his General Audience on August 26, 2026 was about the reasons that bishops decided that the reform of the liturgy would be a major work of the Second Vatican Council.
He begins with these sentences:
The third Letter from the Council, which Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, then archbishop of Milan, sent on 28 October 1962 to the faithful of his Church, is particularly enlightening. The liturgy, he wrote, “is a sincere expression of both the divine and the human. It is language. On the one hand, it is a vehicle for divine teaching; on the other, it is a voice in dialogue with God. It is clear that it cannot renounce its didactic function, nor can it fail to offer faith and piety the opportunity to be expressed with spontaneous intelligibility”. Motivated by these convictions, the future Pope Saint Paul VI affirmed that the faithful “cannot and must no longer remain silent and passive. Their physical presence cannot be reconciled with their spiritual absence”.
Let’s take these ideas one by one.
The liturgy is a sincere expression: it is a genuine and heartfelt illustration or example.
Of both the divine and the human: both God and human beings working together.
It is language: it is communication; it is working to put into words who we think God is, and what we think our relationship with God is.
It is a vehicle for divine teaching: God is educating us; it is a school for discipleship.
It is a voice in dialogue with God: we are in conversation with God.
It has a didactic function: it is instructional.
Nor can it fail to offer the opportunity to express faith and piety: we convey our beliefs in words and actions with reverence and devotedness.
We express that faith and piety with spontaneous intelligibility: with unconstrained understanding.
And so the faithful cannot and must no longer remain silent and passive.
Pope Leo here quotes from the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy #48:
The Church, therefore, earnestly desires that Christ's faithful, when present at this mystery of faith, should not be there as strangers or silent spectators; on the contrary, through a good understanding of the rites and prayers they should take part in the sacred action conscious of what they are doing, with devotion and full collaboration. They should be instructed by God's word and be nourished at the table of the Lord's body; they should give thanks to God; by offering the Immaculate Victim, not only through the hands of the priest, but also with him, they should learn also to offer themselves; through Christ the Mediator they should be drawn day by day into ever more perfect union with God and with each other, so that finally God may be all in all.
We are not spectators in the liturgy, but full participants.
