The Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments has been restructured. The main change is an office to promote the development and use of appropriate liturgical art, architecture and music.
The office will provide advice, encouragement and guidance, but it will not attempt to impose specific styles, according to Marist Father Anthony Ward, undersecretary of the congregation.
“The Church has always adopted local artistic, architectural and music styles,” Father Ward told Catholic News Service. At the same time, as the Second Vatican Council taught, “it always has emphasised Gregorian chant as the homegrown music of the Latin rite.”
The Second Vatican Council’s document on the liturgy said, “The Church has not adopted any particular style of art as her very own; she has admitted styles from every period according to the natural talents and circumstances of peoples, and the needs of the various rites.”
The council called for the preservation of the great liturgical art of the past and the encouragement of modern artists to create pieces appropriate for Catholic worship, “provided that it adorns the sacred buildings and holy rites with due reverence and honour”.
The changes in the congregation were introduced just one year after Pope Benedict XVI issued his motu proprio Quaerit Semper on September 27, 2011.
This took away two of the matters for which the congregation had previously been responsible — to do with the invalidity of priestly ordination and the dispensation for contracted but unconsummated marriages — and put the Roman Rota in charge of these.
In the motu proprio, the Pope explained: “In present circumstances it has seemed appropriate for the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments to focus mainly on giving a fresh impetus to promoting the Sacred Liturgy in the Church, in accordance with the renewal that the Second Vatican Council desired, on the basis of the constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium.”
The new office for liturgical art, architecture and music will become operational in the new year.
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Image: Corpus