This morning, in the Vatican Apostolic Palace, the Holy Father Francis received in audience a delegation from the Higher Institute of Liturgy of Barcelona, Spain, to whom he addressed the following greeting:

Greeting of the Holy Father

Dear brothers, professors and students
of Sant Paciá University,

I welcome you in this house of Peter, and I am pleased to be able to receive you this year which, as you know, I have decided to dedicate to prayer. It is important that your studies reflect on the need to seek this union with the Lord and on the means that He, through the Church, has given us to achieve it.

The liturgy also reminds us that this encounter around God is everyone’s. In the work of God, in which you are participating during these study days at Saint Anselm’s, the Church, as the convened People, is dedicating herself to the search of her most essential purpose, that which will be perpetuated in the heavenly Jerusalem, when we will join with choirs of angels in singing of the Holy. Man is for the liturgy because he is for God, but a liturgy without this union of man with God is an aberration. And an aberration, for example, would be a liturgy enslaved to rubricism, which does not foster union with God.

Perhaps for this reason, Saint Benedict, at the dawn of the vocational discernment of his monks – which we can welcome as a lesson for every Christian and, why not, for every liturgist – sets as a criterion for seeing whether one is truly seeking God the fact that the candidate is ready for the work of God, for participation in the divine Liturgy, in its meaning of a personal and communitarian encounter with God. But without forgetting that same urgency for obedience, that is, for service, for living the supreme mandate of fraternal love, in what God wills to ask of us; and for humiliations, embracing the cross, allowing ourselves to be modelled by God and touching the open wound of the Lord in the members of His Mystical Body (cf. Rule LVIII, 7).

I therefore ask you to work to bring our daily liturgy alive, so that it may express, challenge and nurture this relationship. In this way, our communities will be “tabernacles of God among men”, who seek in their prayer “the invisible heartbeat of the Bridegroom”. Souls “that not only love, adore, praise, but that console, repair, atone”, committed for the glory of God and the good of men (cf. Cristina de la Cruz, Escritos, 121). May He bless you and the Holy Virgin keep you.