Friday 13 April 2018

Me Elsewhere

I have a short article up at Peregrine Magazine on Liturgy and the Common Good. This article was partially inspired by reading Pope Benedict in The Spirit of the Liturgy, and also by reading Charles DeKoninck on The Primacy of the Common Good Against the Personalists. In order to recover a true sense of politics, there needs to be recovered a sense of the eminently political activity: a work that is ordered to contemplation, directly involving the community in the common good. The liturgy is precisely such an activity. An excerpt:
Liturgical worship is accordingly an eminently political activity, perhaps the very highest political activity, since it is the principal communal act of the perfect polis which is the Church. In liturgical worship, the community, precisely as a community of persons, engages in the activity of contemplation of the common good. Conversely, in the liturgy, this highest good diffuses itself into the multitude of believers, as the good is wont to do. This is the very essence of Eucharistic communion, in which the goodness of God is poured out among all the worshipers, without thereby being diminished in any way, but binding the community together in the mystical body of Christ. It is in the liturgy that the desire of all things for participation in the divine good, the return to their first principle, is fulfilled. It is here that all aspects of life receive their final ordination to God the universal final cause. In practically every conceivable way, the liturgical act is the most perfect of all human acts, because it is the most divine – it is the work of God, opus Dei, in which we participate as priests and worshipers. 
Read the rest here

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