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Pope Leo addressed the Jubilee of Eastern Churches yesterday with these words:
The Church needs you. The contribution that the Christian East can offer us today is immense! We have great need to recover the sense of mystery that remains alive in your liturgies, liturgies that engage the human person in his or her entirety, that sing of the beauty of salvation and evoke a sense of wonder at how God’s majesty embraces our human frailty! It is likewise important to rediscover, especially in the Christian West, a sense of the primacy of God, the importance of mystagogy and the values so typical of Eastern spirituality: constant intercession, penance, fasting, and weeping for one’s own sins and for those of all humanity (penthos)! It is vital, then, that you preserve your traditions without attenuating them, for the sake perhaps of practicality or convenience, lest they be corrupted by the mentality of consumerism and utilitarianism.
The address first quoted Francis, but also John Paul II and several times Leo XIII. His Twitter account even posted about it:
After this part of the address he rightly condemned the wars which bring great suffering to our Eastern brethren and all peoples. He encouraged the Eastern brethren to remain in eastern lands and fight for the truth, reconciling enemies, as he quoted three greats of the east: St. Ephraim, St. Isaac the Syrian and St. Symeon the New Theologian.
These comments obviously seem great for us, Latin rite traditionalists, who have indeed been attempting to preserve the rites of our forefathers in the face of harsh persecution. These words recall, however, the words of Pope Francis at the beginning of his own pontificate:
In the Orthodox Churches they have kept that pristine liturgy, so beautiful. We have lost a bit the sense of adoration. They keep, they praise God, they adore God, they sing, time doesn’t count. God is the center, and this is a richness that I would like to say on this occasion in which you ask me this question. Once, speaking of the Western Church, of Western Europe, especially the Church that has grown most, they said this phrase to me: “Lux ex oriente, ex occidente luxus.” Consumerism, wellbeing, have done us so much harm. Instead you keep this beauty of God at the center, the reference. When one reads Dostoyevsky – I believe that for us all he must be an author to read and reread, because he has wisdom – one perceives what the Russian spirit is, the Eastern spirit. It’s something that will do us so much good. We are in need of this renewal, of this fresh air of the East, of this light of the East. John Paul II wrote it in his Letter. But so many times the luxus of the West makes us lose the horizon. I don’t know, it came to me to say this. Thank you.
Therefore we wait and hope that His Holiness will turn his words into action not only for the eastern rites, but also for the apostolic Roman rite of our forefathers.