The Power of Silence

by Robert Cardinal Sarah,

  It is sad, and almost a sacrilege, to hear occasionally priests and bishops chattering incessantly in the sacristy, and even during the entrance procession, instead of recollecting themselves and contemplating in silence the mystery of the death of Christ on the Cross, which they are preparing to celebrate and which ought to inspire in them nothing but fear and trembling.

  262. In the 1969 Missal, silence is first prescribed during the penitential preparation: “The Priest calls upon the whole community to take part in the Penitential Act, which, after a brief pause for silence, it does by means of a formula of general confession.” Then, for the collect: “. . . the priest calls upon the people to pray and everybody, together with the priest, observes a brief silence so that they may become aware of being in God’s presence and may call to mind their intentions.” Similarly,

  The Liturgy of the Word is to be celebrated in such a way as to favor meditation, and so any kind of haste such as hinders recollection is clearly to be avoided. In the course of it, brief periods of silence are also appropriate, accommodated to the assembled congregation; by means of these, under the action of the Holy Spirit, the Word of God may be grasped by the heart and a response through prayer may be prepared. It may be appropriate to observe such periods of silence, for example, before the Liturgy of the Word itself begins, after the First and Second Reading, and lastly at the conclusion of the Homily.

  This advice applies also to the homily, which must be received and assimilated in an atmosphere of prayer. Finally it becomes a genuine prescription addressed to the faithful for the Eucharistic Prayer, when “the people, for their part, should associate themselves with the priest in faith and in silence.”

  We find again the option of remaining silent after Holy Communion or to prepare to listen to the “Post-Communion” prayer. At a Mass celebrated without the people, a moment of silence is recommended to the celebrant: “After the purification of the chalice, the priest should observe a brief pause for silence.”

  263. Silence is therefore by no means absent from the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, at least if priests follow its guidelines and celebrate in the spirit of its recommendations. Unfortunately, too often we have forgotten that the council includes silence as part of actuosa participatio also, which promotes truly deep, personal participation, allowing us to hear interiorly the Word of the Lord. Now in some liturgies no trace of this silence is left. Apart from the homily, all other speeches or introductions of persons should be forbidden during the celebration of Holy Mass.

  264. Today you often get the impression, as Nicola Bux states in his book on Benedict XVI’s Reform, that:

  Catholic worship. . . has gone from adoration of God to the exhibition of the priest, the ministers, and the faithful. Piety has been abolished as a word and liquidated by liturgists as devotionalism, but they have made the people. . . put up with liturgical experiments and rejected spontaneous forms of devotion and piety. They have even succeeded in imposing applause on funerals in place of mourning and weeping. Did Christ not mourn and weep at the death of Lazarus? Ratzinger rightly observes: “Wherever applause breaks out in the liturgy. . . it is a sure sign that the essence of the liturgy has totally disappeared.”

  What would be your fondest wish concerning the place of silence in the liturgy?

  265. I call Catholics to genuine conversion! Let us strive with all our heart to become in each of our Eucharistic celebrations “a pure Victim, a holy Victim, a spotless Victim”! Let us not be afraid of liturgical silence. How I would love it if pastors and the faithful would enter joyfully into this silence that is full of sacred reverence and love for the ineffable God. How I would love it if churches were houses in which the great silence prevails that announces and reveals the adored presence of God. How I would love it if Christians, in the liturgy, could experience the power of silence!

  It is necessary to strive to understand the theological reasons for the liturgical discipline with regard to silence. I think that two particularly well-qualified authors can help us in this area and succeed in convincing us that, without silence, an essential and necessary part of the liturgy is lost.

  In the first place I want to mention Monsignor Guido Marini, Master of Pontifical Ceremonies. In La Liturgie: Gloire de Dieu, sanctification de l’homme [The liturgy: Glory of God, sanctification of man], he speaks about silence in these terms:

  A well-celebrated liturgy, in its various parts, provides for a happy alternation of silence and speech, in which silence animates speech, allows the voice to resonate with an extraordinary depth, and keeps each verbal expression in a proper atmosphere of recollection. . . . The requisite silence must not. . . be considered a pause between one moment in the celebration and the next. Rather, it should be considered a genuine moment of the ritual that complements the words, the vocal prayer, the singing, and the gestures.

  Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger had already noted in The Spirit of the Liturgy:

  The greater mystery, surpassing all words, summons us to silence. It must, of course, be a silence with content, not just the absence of speech and action. We should expect the liturgy to give us a positive stillness that will restore us. Such stillness will not be just a pause, in which a thousand thoughts and desires assault us, but a time of recollection, giving us an inward peace, allowing us to draw breath and rediscover the one thing necessary.

  This is therefore a silence in which we simply look at God and allow him to look at us and to envelop us in the mystery of his majesty and love.

  266. We have lost the most profound meaning of the offertory. This, nevertheless, is the moment when, as the name indicates, the whole Christian people offers itself, not alongside of Christ, but in him, through his sacrifice that will be consummated at the consecration. Vatican Council II admirably underscored this aspect by insisting on the baptismal priesthood of the laity, which consists essentially of offering ourselves with Christ in sacrifice to the Father. This teaching of the council was expressed magnificently by the old prayers of the offertory. I have already said that it would be good if we could use them again freely in order to enter silently into Christ’s self-offering. As early as the seventh century, Pseudo-Germanus reports that the procession with the offerings began with this warning: “May all observe a spiritual silence while watching at the doors of their souls. By making the sign of the Cross over their faces, may they guard themselves from the tumult of words and vices. . . . May they guard their lips from all vulgar words so that their hearts may be turned to Christ alone.”

  If the offertory is seen just as a preparation of the gifts, as a practical, prosaic gesture, then there will be a great temptation to add and invent rituals so as to furnish what is perceived as an empty space. I deplore the long, noisy offertory processions, embellished with endless dances, in some countries in Africa. Some of the faithful bring forward all sorts of produce and objects that have nothing to do with the Eucharistic Sacrifice. These processions give the impression of being folklore displays, which distort the bloody sacrifice of Christ on the Cross and separate us from the Eucharistic mystery; it ought to be celebrated soberly, with recollection, because we too are immersed in his death and offering to the Father. The bishops of my continent should take measures so that the celebration of the Mass does not become a celebration of one’s own culture. The death of God for love of us is beyond any culture. It submerges all culture.

  Thus it is advisable to insist on the silence of the laity during the Eucharistic Prayer, as Monsignor Guido Marini explains:

  This silence is not synonymous with laziness or a lack of participation. Its purpose is to make all the faithful enter into. . . the act of love by which Jesus offers himself to the Father on the Cross for the salvation of the world. This truly sacred silence is the liturgical moment during which it is necessary to say yes, with all our strength, to Christ’s action, so that it might become our action, too, in everyday life.

  According to Cardinal Ratzinger, for their part, “the silent pray
ers of the priest invite him to make his task truly personal, so that he may give his whole self to the Lord.” For everyone, the silence “after the reception of Holy Communion. . . is the moment for an interior conversation with the Lord who has given himself to us, for that essential ‘communicating’, that entry into the process of communication, without which the external reception of the Sacrament becomes mere ritual and therefore unfruitful.” After the faithful have finished receiving the Body of Christ, the choir should stop singing so as to leave everyone the time for an intimate conversation with the Lord who has just entered the temple of our body.

  What a miracle, to receive the Lord of the Universe in the depths of our heart! “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If any one destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and that temple you are” (1 Cor 3:16-17). Indeed, God truly expects of people sanctity of life, the virtues of silence, humility, and simplicity.

  At this stage of our reflection, can we speak, therefore, about silence as a Christian ascetical value?

  267. In the negative sense, silence is the absence of noise. It can be exterior or interior. Exterior silence involves the silence of words and actions, in other words, the absence of noise from doors, vehicles, jackhammers, airplanes, the noisy mechanism of cameras, often accompanied by dazzling flashes, and also that horrible forest of cell phones that are brandished at arm’s length during our Eucharistic liturgies. . . . Virtuous or mystical silence obviously must be distinguished from disapproving silence, from the refusal to speak up, from the silence of omission through cowardice, selfishness, or hardness of heart.

  268. Exterior silence is an ascetic exercise of self-mastery in the use of speech. First of all, it may be helpful to recall what asceticism is. This word is not praised to the skies by our consumer society—far from it!—and, we must admit, it frightens our contemporaries, including very often the Christians who are influenced by the spirit of the world.

  Asceticism is a means that helps us to remove from our life anything that weighs it down, in other words, whatever hampers our spiritual life and, therefore, is an obstacle to prayer. Yes, it is indeed in prayer that God communicates his Life to us and manifests his presence in our soul by irrigating it with the streams of his trinitarian love. And prayer is essentially silence. Chattering, the tendency to externalize all the treasures of the soul by expressing them, is supremely harmful to the spiritual life. Carried away toward the exterior by his need to say everything, the chatterer cannot help being far from God, superficial, and incapable of any profound activity.

  The wisdom books of the Old Testament are full of exhortations aimed at avoiding sins of the tongue, in particular, slander and calumny (Prov 10:8, 11, 13). The prophetic books, for their part, mention silence as the expression of reverential fear of God; it is then a preparation for the theophany of God, in other words, the revelation of his presence in our world (Lam 3:26; Hab 2:20; Is 41:1; Zech 2:13). The New Testament is not outdone in this respect. Indeed, there is the Letter of James, which clearly remains the classic passage about controlling the tongue. However, we know that Jesus himself warned us against wicked words, which are the expression of a depraved heart (Mt 15:19), and even against idle words, for which an accounting will be demanded of us (Mt 12:36).

  In reality, true, good silence always belongs to someone who is willing to let others have his place, and especially the Completely-Other, God. In contrast, external noise characterizes the individual who wants to occupy too important a place, to strut or to show off, or else who wants to fill his interior emptiness, as is the case in many public places where deafening noise and pride prevail.

  269. As for interior silence, it can be achieved by the absence of memories, plans, interior speech, worries. . . . Still more important, thanks to an act of the will, it can result from the absence of disordered affections or excessive desires. The Fathers of the Church assign an eminent place to silence in the ascetical life. Think of Saint Ambrose, Saint Augustine, Saint Gregory the Great, not to mention the Rule of Saint Benedict of Nursia on “taciturnity”, or his words about grand silence at night, where he adopts the teaching of Cassian. Starting with those spiritual masters, all the medieval founders of religious orders, followed by the mystics of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, insisted on the importance of silence, even beyond its ascetical and mystical dimension.

  Is silence, therefore, an essential condition for contemplative prayer?

  270. The Gospels say that the Savior himself prayed in silence, particularly at night, or while withdrawing to deserted places. Silence is typical of the meditation by the Word of God; we find it again particularly in Mary’s attitude toward the mystery of her Son. The most silent person in the Gospels is of course Saint Joseph; not a single word of his does the New Testament record for us. Saint Basil considers silence not only as an ascetical necessity of monastic life but also as a condition for encountering God. Silence precedes and prepares for the privileged moment when we have access to God, who then can speak to us face to face as we would do with a friend.

  271. We arrive at the knowledge of God by way of causality, analogy, eminence, but also negation: once we affirm the divine attributes, which are known by natural reason (this is the kataphatic way), we must deny the mode of limited realization thereof that we know here below (this is the apophatic way). Silence is an essential part of the apophatic way of gaining access to God, which was so highly prized by the Fathers of the Church, especially the Greeks; this makes them demand silence of arguments when faced with the mystery of God. I am thinking here of Clement of Alexandria, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa.

  It is nonetheless true that silence is above all the positive attitude of someone who prepares to welcome God by listening. Yes, God acts in the silence. Hence this very important remark by the great Saint John of the Cross in his Maxims on Love: “The Father spoke one Word, which was His Son, and this Word He always speaks in eternal silence, and in silence must It be heard by the soul.” The Book of Wisdom had already noted in this regard the manner in which God intervened to deliver the chosen people from captivity in Egypt: that unforgettable act took place during the night: “For while gentle silence enveloped all things, and night in its swift course was now half gone, your all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne” (Wis 18:14). Later, this verse would be understood by Christian liturgical tradition as a prefiguration of the silent Incarnation of the Eternal Word in the crib in Bethlehem.

  And so we have to be silent: this is of course an activity and not a form of idleness. If our “interior cell phone” is always busy because we are “having a conversation” with other creatures, how can the Creator reach us, how can he “call us”? We must therefore purify our mind of its curiosities, the will of its plans, in order to be totally open to the graces of light and strength that God wants to give us profusely: “Father, not my will, but yours be done.” Ignatian “indifference” is therefore a form of silence, too.

  IV

  GOD’S SILENCE IN THE FACE

  OF EVIL UNLEASHED

  For the man of today, compared to those of the time of Luther and to those holding the classical perspective of the Christian faith, things are in a certain sense inverted, or rather, man no longer believes he needs justification before God, but rather he is of the opinion that God is obliged to justify himself because of all the horrible things in the world and in the face of the misery of being human, all of which ultimately depend on Him.

  —Benedict XVI, interview with Jacques Servais, S.J.,

  October 2015, published in the English edition

  of L’Osservatore Romano on March 17, 2016

  NICOLAS DIAT: What is the relation between silence and evil? Why is God able to remain silent in the face of sorrowful events?

  ROBERT CARDINAL SARAH:

  272. Evil raises an immense question, an enigma that is impossible to resolve. No one in any era of huma
n history has succeeded in giving a satisfying response to the problem of evil. In his book Croire: Invitation à la foi catholique pour les femmes et les hommes du XXIe siècle [Believing: Invitation to the Catholic faith for women and men of the 21st century], the theologian Bernard Sesboüé writes: “When we wonder about evil, we actually do not know what we are asking. For we seek to understand something that is incomprehensible. Evil is the irrational par excellence, something irretrievable, something that reason really cannot make sense of. . . . Our reflection on evil can only be modest, and it always leaves much to be desired.” What can we say when faced with the suffering and death of a child who is brutally snatched from the affection of his parents? Why have so many lives been mutilated in the gulags and extermination camps of totalitarian systems? Why are children born with terrible handicaps? Why are there so many horrible sicknesses and so much unjust suffering? There is no answer to these questions; we will never be able to say that the veil has been lifted, suffering can be explained.

  273. Man is incapable of scrutinizing all the immensity of the heavens and the tens of millions of galaxies. Yet he can descend into the most unsuspected depths of suffering.

  His intellect is capable of solving extraordinary problems. The technological prowess of our century seems limitless; man thinks that his eyes have seen everything. He has dried up the sources of the rivers and “the thing that is hidden he brings forth to light” (cf. Job 28:11). But we will never go so far as to fathom and understand the mystery of evil. Wisdom belongs to God alone. The only certainty in this world lies in interior silence, in filial piety that trusts and surrenders. We often find ourselves confronted with what could be called “innocent evil”, in other words, the reality of evil inscribed in the nature of things, independently of any human responsibility.