Mens Concordet Voci
Honor God with Your Heart and Lips
The 7th Sunday in Ordinary Time C
February 23rd, 2025
For the last few weeks, we have meditated on the pedagogical value of Christian liturgical rites. Along this same line, I want to offer you a discourse by Pope Benedict XVI that points out the importance of understanding the words we say in prayer so that the liturgy can have its full educative impact on our hearts.
Ratzinger began his discourse by stating that the liturgical celebration is a conversation with God; hence, there must be listening and response. After that affirmation, he recalled a beautiful teaching of Saint Benedict:
St Benedict, speaking in his Rule of prayer in the Psalms, pointed out to his monks: mens concordet voci, “the mind must be in accord with the voice.” The Saint teaches that in the prayers of the Psalms words must precede our thought. It does not usually happen like this because we have to think and then what we have thought is converted into words. Here, instead, in the liturgy, the opposite is true, words come first. God has given us the word and the sacred liturgy offers us words; we must enter into the words, into their meaning and receive them within us, we must attune ourselves to these words; in this way we become children of God, we become like God. (Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience. Saint Peter's Square. Wednesday, 26 September 2012)
Pope Benedict reminds us of the natural process of human speech, which occurs in most cases. We think using interior words; that is, we express to ourselves our own knowledge and how we spiritually see things. Through exterior words, we communicate all of that interior spiritual world of ours in conversations.
We have said many times that we do not know how to pray. Thus, we do not have the right words to address God because we need to learn how to think like God. Christian conversion is a change of mind (and heart). Our mind needs to be transformed to conform to Christ’s mind.
The Christian liturgy offers us words with the virtue of reshaping our thinking, minds, and hearts. Within that context, the teaching of Saint Benedict, “mens concordet vocis,” shows all its wisdom. The Saint teaches that we should pay attention to the words with which we pray in the Psalms.
The book of Psalms in the Bible is very particular. This book is a testimony of our necessity of being educated to pray. As you know, all the books of the Bible are inspired in such a way that even though they have human authors, at the same time, they are the Word of God. The Church is aware of both facts. Indeed, in the liturgy, we read, for instance, a fragment of a letter of Saint Paul, and the lector introduces the reading by saying, “A reading from the letter of Saint Paul to…” However, at the end of the proclamation, the reader says, “the Word of the Lord.”
The Book of Psalms is a book of prayers, but it is also the Word of the Lord. Thus, it is inspired. God inspires prayers so that we can enter the charity conversation with the proper language. Moreover, attentive recitation of those words helps us learn to think like God. That is why Saint Benedict recommends paying attention, to follow attentively, to understand, and to make ours those words.
Pope Benedict is extending the teaching of Saint Benedict to the Christian liturgy. Our liturgies contain the recitation of many Psalms and the proclamation of the Word of God. We are called to make those words ours. In addition to the Word of God, the liturgy provides prayers that are in tune with the Word of God.
With this point, it is important to make a profound distinction between the Word of God and the words of the rites. The words of the rites are not the Word of God and neither do we think they are inspired. The charism of inspiration is something very concrete and precise. Nonetheless, we profess in the Creed that our Mother Church is Holy. That means that the Church is in tune with Jesus’ mind. She thinks like her Spouse. Let us offer another paragraph taken from the same discourse of Pope Benedict:
By entering into the words of the great history of prayer, we ourselves are conformed to the spirit of these words and are enabled to speak to God. In line with this I would just like to mention one of the moments during the liturgy itself; it calls us and helps us to find this harmonization, this conformation of ourselves to what we hear, say and do in the celebration of the liturgy. I am referring to the invitation that the celebrant expresses before the Eucharistic Prayer: “Sursum corda,” let us lift up our hearts above the confusion of our apprehensions, our desires, our narrowness, our distraction. Our hearts, our innermost selves, must open in docility to the word of God and must be recollected in the Church’s prayer, to receive her guidance to God from the very words that we hear and say. (Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience. Saint Peter's Square. Wednesday, 26 September 2012)
The words provided by the Church in liturgical prayers also help us to conform our minds and hearts to Jesus’ Sacred Heart so that we learn to pray as children of God. This reflection has important practical consequences for our spiritual lives.
Regarding the liturgy ministers, as the priest presiding over the Mass, I realize how presumptuous and ridiculous it is to change the words of the rite to improvise some poor prayer. If we priests do so, we deprive the people of God of the wise words of Tradition and its educative power, and replace them with our own human thoughts.
Concerning all of us participants in the liturgy, let us be grateful that we have the possibility of celebrating the sacraments and our liturgies in a language we can understand, and do not miss the opportunity of paying attention and meditate on those words we use every Sunday so that they shape our minds and hearts more and more.
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