As reported by the Benedict XVI Institute, contrary to the ongoing commentary by secular media of all stripes, Archbishop Cordileone says the most important issue for the Church and the next Pope is the liturgy:
“While liturgy was not a focus of the cardinals in the conclave that elected Pope Francis after the resignation of Pope Benedict, it will undoubtedly be a central focus in 
this upcoming one,” says Archbishop Cordileone.
“With all of the issues facing the Church at this time, none is more important than how we worship. God created us for worshipping him. Divine worship, if it is truly to deserve the name “divine,” relies on a sense of the sacred, which in turn springs from the sacramental vision of reality: Physical reality mediates and makes present the spiritual, transcendent reality lying beyond it. If we lose this, we lose everything.”
Archbishop Cordileone goes on to say (his Tweet with the quote below that was culled from his essay has gone viral, with more than 230,000 views):
“Most of the devout young Catholics I meet grow up with the typical parish fare on Sundays, only later discovering the beauty of our authentic Catholic liturgical patrimony. Their reaction? Wonder, mixed with anger. They tell me—and this is a literal, word-for-word quote—“I’ve been deprived of my Catholic birthright.”
“Pope Francis’s purpose in issuing Traditionis Custodes was to unite the Church in one form of worship,” he points out, but in reality “Now we have extremely divergent forms of the Roman Rite. A video of a German priest rapping at the Mass recently went viral. On the other hand, for example, there’s the Mass of the Americas, which I celebrated as a Solemn High Pontifical Latin Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., in November 2019.”
Read Archbishop Cordileone’s exceptional article that appeared in First Things magazine:
“The memories are still vivid, even though it was a long time ago. Having been born in 1956, I’m just old enough to remember the confusing and tumultuous era of “the changes” that came after the Second Vatican Council, particularly regarding the Mass. One elderly couple in my neighborhood mused aloud to my teenaged self that it was like the father not being home and the children playing however they liked.
“It should come as no surprise, then, that the full gamut of Church teaching, from morality to the exercise of authority to dogmatic truths of the faith, were doubted and even outright denied—and religious vocations plummeted. The old maxim lex orandi, lex credendi (to which some have added lex vivendi) proves itself true all the time. The era of the “liturgy wars” was not about rearranging ornamentation; at a time of confusion and dissent in all areas of Church life, it was foundational to all that happened.
“We seemed at one point in the recent past to have come to a peaceful coexistence with what Pope Benedict referred to as the two forms of the Roman Rite, after he issued his motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. However, ….Read more>>
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