Sacred Withdrawal

It has become a common refrain, particularly in post-conciliar pastoral circles: “Liturgy is important, yes, but it’s not the heart of Christianity. What matters is how we live.”

The implication is clear: the liturgy is a support mechanism, a symbolic gesture, perhaps even a cultural relic, but not essential. What truly matters is justice, love, service, or some other abstraction, often untethered from sacramental form.

But this framing is not only theologically incoherent. It is historically ignorant and spiritually impoverishing.

The Catholic tradition has never treated the liturgy as secondary. On the contrary, it has always understood it as the source and summit of the Christian life (Sacrosanctum Concilium, §10). That line is often quoted, rarely understood. The liturgy is not one ministry among many. It is the act through which the Church becomes what it is: the Body of Christ, gathered in worship, formed by word, fed by sacrament, and configured to eternity.

To subordinate the liturgy to “real life” is to invert the spiritual order. It is through the liturgy that we are shaped into Christians at all.

Liturgy is not an aesthetic preference

The common modern attitude toward liturgy treats it as a matter of taste. “Some people like incense and chant. Others prefer guitars and hand-holding.” But this relativization is only possible when the liturgy is seen as an external event, rather than as the Church’s interior life made visible.

Liturgy is not what we do. It is how we become. It is where heaven and earth intersect, not metaphorically, but sacramentally. It is where doctrine becomes flesh and time is caught up into eternity.

To treat it as a backdrop to the “real” work of Christian ethics is to sever Christianity from its mystical core.

Form is formative

In the pre-conciliar Church, liturgical formation was not optional, it was organic. A child raised in the rhythm of the calendar, the architecture of gesture, the sound of chant, was being catechized long before any textbook appeared. The faith was absorbed through form. Lex orandi, lex credendi. The law of prayer shapes the law of belief.

Today, this has been reversed. We attempt to teach doctrine through lectures, videos, and youth ministry strategies, while the liturgy itself collapses into informality and improvisation. Then we wonder why belief disintegrates.

If the liturgy is incoherent, so too will the faith be.

Christian life is impossible without liturgical life

We are frequently told to prioritize “encounter” and “mission.” But the Church cannot give what she does not receive. The liturgy is not a weekly pep talk for private virtue. It is the public act of the Mystical Body, through which grace is given and identity is formed. Without it, Christian life is reduced to moralism or sentiment.

St. Benedict did not build his Rule around pastoral initiatives. He built it around the Divine Office. The early Church did not spread by clever slogans. It spread through awe, beauty, martyrdom, and the Eucharist.

When the liturgy is sound, even flawed Christians are gradually conformed to Christ. When it is hollow, even noble efforts become scattered and unsustainable. We cannot live rightly unless we worship rightly.

Liturgy is not a distraction. It is the thing itself.

Those who say “Christianity is not about liturgy, it’s about love” fail to see that the liturgy is the love of God made form. The Eucharist is not an accessory to Christian life. It is its center. And the structure that surrounds it, the calendar, the rites, the music, the gestures, is not incidental. It is how the mystery becomes visible and livable.

To dismiss the liturgy as peripheral is to treat the Incarnation as optional. But God did not save us through abstraction. He saved us through flesh, time, sound, and matter.

So too does He sanctify us now.

Let us be clear: without liturgy, there is no Church. Without form, there is no transformation. Without worship, there is no mission, only activism.

And without the liturgical center, the Christian life becomes not deeper, but thinner.

---