De sentrale biskopene Giuseppe Betori og Angelo Bagnasco i Den italienske bispekonferansen har uttalt seg om pavens skriv om den gamle messen, og legger aller størst vekt på at liturgien må skapes og utvikles på organisk måte, ikke gjennom plutselig brudd. (Men når jeg nå i det siste har lest en del om det som skjede med liturgien på 60-tallet, er det nettopp de dramatiske forandringene som står sentralt.)
What the Pope urges us to adopt, beyond the cultural forces to which it is inevitably subject, is really an inclusive, not confrontational, key of interpretation. In the history of liturgy, as in the life of the Church, there is «growth and progress, but no rupture», as he already took the opportunity to affirm in an address to the Roman Curia on 22 December 2005. On that occasion, in fact, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council, he indicated as valid not «the hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture», but rather that of «reform, of renewal in continuity with the one subject, the Church».
Father Z. har skrevet denne engelske oversettelsen, og han legger også til sine egne tanker/oppsummering:
* For bishops and priests, don’t pick and parse, but apply the provisions of Summorum Pontificum.
* Read the document for the Pope’s thinking, without twisting it out of shape by your own agenda.
* In the tension between the Church’s past experience in the face of exigencies and today’s needs as we look forward, we must have an interpretive key, a hermeneutic of continuity. This is inclusive, not exclusive.
* What we do must not be reduced to personal preference or aesthetics. Instead, what we do must reveal Mystery. This was precisely the point of the sermon I gave on 14 September in the UK and what I have been writing about.
* The provisions of the Motu Proprio will function as a dynamic force within that tension of past/present/future. The fruit of that tension, as it is lived out in parishes, will eventually be a renewal of the whole of the Church’s liturgy, and therefore her whole life. This expresses what I express using images like «gravitational force» and «Marshall Plan.