It is said further that the liturgy is communal through and through. Faith is not passed on only by one person preaching or teaching another, but within a people that celebrates, so that the believer is never alone: he belongs to a “we” that was there before him, goes with him, and reaches beyond him. This is offered as a remedy for the selfish individualism the Considerations find so common.

Because the celebration belongs to the whole Church, it is said to be bound up with inculturation, described with an earlier text as the effort to bring the Gospel’s truth home to a given place without letting go of that truth. For the liturgy this is said to mean keeping the riches of the Church’s symbolic tradition while opening them to men and women now, held in “a healthy and fruitful tension”: faithful to what is handed down, and yet understood.

It furthermore declares, that this power has ever been in the Church, that, in the dispensation of the sacraments, their substance being untouched, it may ordain,—or change, what things soever it may judge most expedient, for the profit of those who receive, or for the veneration of the said sacraments, according to the difference of circumstances, times, and places. And this the Apostle seems not obscurely to have intimated, when he says; Let a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and the dispensers of the mysteries of God. … Wherefore, holy Mother Church, knowing this her authority in the administration of the sacraments, … has approved of this custom of communicating under one species, and decreed that it was to be held as a law; which it is not lawful to reprobate, or to change at pleasure, without the authority of the Church itself.

c · Trent, sess. XXI (1562), ch. 2 · Waterworth (1848)

^dThen it was first instituted that after the manner of the Eastern Churches, Hymns and Psalms should be sung, lest the people should wax faint through the tediousness of sorrow: and from that day to this the custom is retained, divers (yea, almost all) Thy congregations, throughout other parts of the world following herein.

d · Augustine, Confessions IX.7 · Pusey

ad c

Trent states the hinge of n. 91's healthy tension. The substance is untouched; the rest is the Church's to order, and one of her grounds is the profit of those who receive. Comprehensibility is Trent's word before it is the Dicastery's.

Trent's own example is a change made by authority and then held as law, not to be changed at pleasure without the Church. The bound of n. 94 is already here.

ad d

Milan took the East's hymns in a time of trouble, and almost every church followed. A change in the changeable part, received: inculturation before the word existed.

☞ The checker

violation(change_to_substance( book_x, baptism, matter))

info(change_stands( book_y, matrimony, canonical_form))

A book changing the water of baptism: refused. A book changing the canonical form of marriage: it stands. Fidelity binds the substance; comprehensibility moves within what the Church may change.