Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger was part of the Second Vatican Council, and he recognized the importance of the liturgical changes that the council had proposed in the document Sacrosanctum Concillium. He is of the opinion that the liturgical rites were ripe to be altered to reflect the changes that had occurred over time. He states that the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council restored Roman traditions to their purest form. Although he supported the sacred constitution of the Sacred Liturgy, some elements of it were misunderstood or wrongly implemented and did not truly reflect the opinions or the intent of the council.
He continues to state that the council had carried out radical standardization of the liturgy for the first time, and previously religious rites had disappeared over the century. He states that although the process had started as a means of making the liturgical processes uniform, in the end, it resulted in the extreme opposite of the process. Thus, it became a community creative process as it became a widespread dissolution of the rites.
He notes that it is important and essential for religious rites to have a connection to the teachings of the apostles and places where Christianity originated. In his book The Spirit of Liturgy, Cardinal Ratzinger states that the Church does not pray in some mythical temporality and cannot forgo history. Ratzinger says that church rites should recognize the true utterances of God precisely in the concreteness of history and in time and place; that these all tie us to each other and to God.
In Ratzinger’s opinion, the term ‘active participation’ came about after the Second Vatican Council as one of the main ideas for shaping liturgy. Ratzinger goes on to say that the word was misunderstood to mean something external, that it entailed a need for a general activity by as many people as possible. He says that the term refers to an action in which everyone has a part.
He says that in order to find out the true meaning of the term, we should first figure out what the participatory action is that everyone in the community is supposed to have a part of. He says that the Eucharistic prayer is the action referred that needs the active participation of faithful Christians. He says that the true liturgical action is the great prayer forming the core of Eucharistic celebrations. The liturgical prayers are what active participation entails and is not an event that everyone plays a part in.