ABSTRACT
In one of his sermons, the fifth-century Pope, Leo the Great, declared that ‘What was visible in our Redeemer has passed into the liturgical ministry of the Church (Quod itaque Redemptoris nostri conspicuum fuit in sacramenta transivit)’ (quoted in Taft 2003: 37). Fifteen hundred years later, Pope Pius XII expressed a similar idea in his 1947 encyclical on liturgy, Mediator Dei, that the work of redemption and its fruits are imparted during the celebration of the liturgy. The present Pope, Benedict XVI, has also claimed in his discussion of liturgy that, ‘God has acted in history and entered into our sensible world, so that it may become transparent to him’ (Ratzinger 2000: 131). Images used in worship ‘do not merely illustrate the succession of past events but display the inner unity of God’s actions … Images thus point to a presence; they are essentially connected with what happens in the liturgy. Now history becomes sacrament in Christ, who is the source of the Sacraments’ (2000: 132). Liturgy has always given visible expression to the salvific work of Christ through its ritual re-enactments of His life. What Christ did as part of His ministry had to be ‘translated’ visibly by the Church into the action and imagery of the liturgy, if Christ’s redemptive love was to be given to each generation over time. Salvation itself consists in our participation in the performance of liturgy and its imaging of ‘another place’ to which we are called.
