Baptisms that spread with imaginative formulas, such as 'Mom and Dad baptize you with great joy', weddings characterized by bizarre rites bordering on the folkloric, the Eucharist administered according to the priest's sensitivity, the anointing of the sick offered to the sick almost like a magic potion. There is now too much liturgical chaos in the Church, in the administration of the sacraments, that is, the 'seven vital gestures, which from the Council of Trent onwards constitute 'the encounter with Christ the Lord who gives his grace and who, with the words and ritual acts of the Church, nourishes and strengthens faith'. In short, something that cannot be distorted, modified, made pop. To remedy this underlying anarchy that threatens to undermine the roots of faith, Pope Francis has accepted the request of the cardinals and bishops who are part of the Dicastery of Faith, long alarmed by the many abuses reported.
The Dicastery has just published a document valid for all priests in the world. The intervention obliges them to remain faithful to the sacramental liturgy to 'express brightly the priority of God's action and humbly safeguard the unity of the Body of Christ which is the Church in its most sacred gestures'. The chaos that is rampant in many churches around the world has multiplied in recent years the requests for invalidity of the sacraments celebrated, precisely because they do not respect the rules, tradition and fidelity. Many baptisms have thus had to be redone from scratch.
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The document reads: 'The serious changes made to the matter or form of the Sacraments, making their celebration null, then led to the need to trace the people involved to repeat the rite of Baptism or Confirmation and a significant number of faithful have rightly expressed their disturbance. For example, instead of using the established formula for Baptism, formulas such as the following were used: 'I baptize you in the name of the Creator...' and 'In the name of mom and dad... we baptize you'. In such a serious situation, priests were also found. These, having been baptized with formulas of this type, have painfully discovered the invalidity of their ordination and of the sacraments celebrated up to that moment.
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The Vatican highlights that no one has the ability to 'modify on their own initiative the celebratory form of a Sacrament: this not only constitutes a simple liturgical abuse, as a transgression of a positive norm, but a wound inflicted at the same time on ecclesial communion and on the recognizability of Christ's action, which in the most serious cases makes the Sacrament itself invalid, because the nature of the ministerial action requires faithfully transmitting what has been received. It is becoming increasingly urgent to mature an art of celebrating that, keeping a distance both from a rigid rubricism and from an unregulated fantasy, leads to a discipline to be respected, precisely to be authentic disciples: It is not a matter of having to follow a liturgical etiquette: it is rather a 'discipline'.
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