Better late than never, but my goodness is he late for the train, or what?
"The candles, the vestments, the music, and everything human art has to offer, must not be eliminated as if they were superficial pomp. The entire celebration of the eucharist should be a foretaste of the coming kingdom of God. In it, the heavenly world descends to our world. This aspect is particularly vivid in the liturgy and theology of the Eastern Church. In the West, however, after the council both the liturgy and theology have unfortunately become puristic and culturally impoverished in this regard."
As for communion, Kasper confirms that "we cannot invite everyone to receive it." Exclusion applies especially to non-Catholics: But it also applies to Catholics in a state of grave sin. Kasper recalls the duty - largely fallen into disuse - to make recourse to the sacrament of penance, in order "not to eat and drink unworthily the body and blood of the Lord":
"Here we meet with another weak point of postconciliar development. The affirmation that unity and communion are possible only in the sign of the cross includes another affirmation, that the eucharist is not possible without the sacrament of forgiveness. The ancient Church was fully aware of this nexus. In the ancient Church, the visible structure of the sacrament of penance consisted in the readmission of the sinner to eucharistic communion. Communion, excommunication, and reconciliation constituted a single unity. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian executed by the Nazis in 1945, rightly warned against cheap grace: 'Cheap grace is the sacrament on sale, it is the Lord's supper without the remission of sins, it is absolution without personal confession'."
"Cheap grace is, for Bonhoeffer, the cause of the Church's decline. The rediscovery and renewal of the character of the assembly and of the banquet of the eucharist have undoubtedly been important, and no intelligent person thinks of undoing them. But a superficial conception of these, detached from the cross and from the sacrament of penance, leads to the banalization of these aspects and to a crisis of the eucharist such as we are witnessing in the life of the Church today."
It's good to hear this, but the irony of his laying it out like this is almost too much to bear. Everything he said here has been said, ad nauseum, by the Traditionalists for the past 30 years.
"Everything he said here has been said, ad nauseum, by the Traditionalists for the past 30 years."
Amen. But we should still pray the perhaps finally the traditionalist warnings for 30 years are maybe now having some effect.
Someone must have tossed him a life preserver.