Presentation of the Exhortation by Bishop Koch, President of the Swiss Bishops’ Conference, and by Archbishop Vingt-Trois, of Paris

On March 13, 2007, the day of the release of Sacramentum Caritatis, Bishop Kurt Koch, President of the Swiss Bishops’ Conference, commented upon the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation and insisted upon the fact that the document was in the direct line of the Second Vatican Council. “In as far as Pope Benedict XVI continually recalled the positive and beneficial influences of the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council on the life of the Church, he unequivocally emphasized why he wanted a consistent – and obviously still far from being achieved – application of the Second Vatican Council.”

The next day, on March 14, the Archbishop of Paris, Mgr Vingt-Trois addressed a message presenting the Exhortation to the priests of his diocese. In it we could read: “To all who doubted that the Pope was truly in the continuation of the Second Vatican Council and who imagined that he might relativize the liturgical orientation, [the Exhortation] brought all the necessary precisions from its very introduction (n°3). The Pope placed its decisions and liturgical orientation in a historical reading of the successive adaptations of the rites. “In a particular way,” he wrote, “the Synod Fathers acknowledged and reaffirmed the beneficial influence on the Church’s life of the liturgical renewal which began with the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council… Concretely, the changes which the Council called for need to be understood within the overall unity of the historical development of the rite itself, without the introduction of artificial discontinuities.”

“More broadly,” continued Mgr Vingt-Trois, “the pope invited us to join the Synod Fathers in thanksgiving for the fruits produced by the application of the application of the Council’s liturgical reform, recalled without ambiguity.”