“ Nothing is more educative for man in his totality than the liturgy. The Bible is certainly a marvelous teacher of prayer, of the sense of God and of the adult convictions of conscience. Used alone, the Bible might produce a Christian of the Puritan tradition, an individualist and even a visionary. The liturgy, however, is the ‘authentic method instituted by the Church to unite souls to Jesus.’ The sort of Christian produced by an enlightened and docile participation in the liturgy is a man of peace and unified in every fibre of his human nature by the secret and powerful penetration of faith and love in his life, throughout a period of prayer and worship, during which he learned, at his mother’s knee and without effort, the Church’s language: her language of faith, love, hope, and fidelity. There is no better way of acquiring ‘the mind of the Church’ in the widest and most interior interpretation of this expression.
Cardinal Yves Congar, O.P., 1963 (quoted by Geoffrey Hull in The Banished Heart, 2010)
(Source: schatzkammer)
