To express one of its main ideas for the shaping of the liturgy, the Second Vatican Council gave us the phrase ‘participatio actuosa’, the “active participation” of everyone in the ‘opus Dei’, in what happens in the worship of God. It was quite right to do so. The ‘Catechism of the Catholic Church’ points out that the word “liturgy” speaks to us of a common service and thus has a reference to the whole holy People of God (cf. CCC 1069). But what does this active participation come down to? What does it mean that we have to do? Unfortunately, the word was quickly misunderstood to mean something external, entailing a need for general activity, as if as many people as possible, as often as possible, should be visibly engaged in action. However, the word “part-icipation” refers to a principal action in which everyone has a “part”. And so if we want to discover the kind of doing that active participation involves, we need, first of all, to determine what this central ‘actio’ is in which all the members of the community are supposed to participate. The study of the liturgical sources provides an answer that at first may surprise us, though, in the light of the biblical foundations considered in the first part, it is quite self-evident. By the ‘actio’ of the liturgy the sources mean the Eucharistic Prayer. The real liturgical action, the true liturgical act, is the ‘oratio’, the great prayer that forms the core of the Eucharistic celebration, the whole of which was, therefore, called ‘oratio’ by the Fathers.
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We should be clearly aware that external actions are quite secondary here. Doing [emph. in original] must really stop when we come to the heart of the matter: the ‘oratio’. It must be plainly evident that the ‘oratio’ is the heart of the matter, but that it is important precisely because it provides a space for the ‘actio’ of God. Anyone who grasps this will easily see that it is not now a matter of looking at or toward the priest, but of looking together toward the Lord and going out to meet him. The almost theatrical entrance of different players into the liturgy, which is so common today, especially during the Preparation of the Gifts, quite simply misses the point. If the various external actions (as a matter of fact, there are not very many of them, ,though they are being artificially multiplied) become the essential in the liturgy, if the liturgy degenerates into general activity, then we have radically misunderstood the “theo-drama” of the liturgy and lapsed almost into parody. True liturgical education cannot consist in learning and experimenting with external activities. Instead one must be led towards the essential ‘actio’ that makes the liturgy what it is, toward the transforming power of God, who wants, through what happens in the liturgy, to transform us and the world. In this respect, liturgical education today, of both priests and laity, is deficient to a deplorable extent. Much remains to be done here.
I had expected him to just say, “Corpus Christi.”