The Vatican’s liturgy chief has called on priests to celebrate Mass facing east.
In an interview with the French Catholic magazine Famille Chrétienne, Cardinal Robert Sarah said the Second Vatican Council did not require priests to celebrate Mass facing the people. This way of celebrating Mass, he said, was “a possibility, not an obligation”.
Readers and listeners should face each other during the Liturgy of the Word, he said.
“But as soon as we reach the moment when one addresses God – from the offertory onwards – it is essential that the priest and faithful look together towards the east. This corresponds exactly to what the Council Fathers wanted.”
Cardinal Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, rejected the argument that priests celebrating Mass facing east are turning their backs on the faithful “or against them”.
Rather, he said, all are “turned in the same direction: towards the Lord who comes”.
“It is legitimate and complies with the letter and spirit of the Council,” he said. “As prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, I wish to recall that the celebration versus orientem is authorised by the rubrics, which specify the times when the celebrant must turn to the people. It is therefore not necessary to have special permission to celebrate facing the Lord.”
Cardinal Sarah’s remarks echo an article he wrote a year ago for L’Osservatore Romano, in which he said it was “altogether appropriate, during the penitential rite, the singing of the Gloria, the orations and the Eucharistic Prayer, that everyone, priest and faithful, turn together towards the east, so as to express their intention to participate in the work of worship and redemption accomplished by Christ”.
Vatican bank board members resign citing ‘differences’
Two members of the Vatican bank’s board of supervisors have resigned after disagreeing about the bank’s management.
Carlo Salvatori and Clemens Borsig stepped down from the Vatican bank, known formally as the Institute for the Works of Religion or IOR, “in light of legitimate reflections and opinions concerning the management of an institute whose nature and purpose” are “so particular”, the Vatican said in a communiqué.
With the institute’s annual report said to have been have been completed in a positive manner, the two finance executives “recently presented their resignations to the president of the Cardinals’ Commission of the IOR”, Cardinal Santos Abril Castello. The cardinal “thanked the two members of the board and accepted the resignations”, the Vatican statement said.
The two members “made a competent and qualified contribution in this important phase for the stability and integrity of the institute,” it added.
Mr Salvatori, president of the Allianz insurance company and investment bank Lazard Italy, and Mr Borsig, former chairman of the board of Deutsche Bank, had been appointed in 2014.
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