Pope Benedict, Msgr. Klaus Gamber, the Universal Indult and the Reform of the reform

KATHOLIKOS DIAKONOS schrijft: "After a lunchtime discussion yesterday with several people who know far more than I do about the sacred liturgy, I re-read the late Msgr. Klaus Gamber's book The Reform of the Roman Liturgy: Its Problems and Background. This book is really two books co-published together in English by Una Voce and The Foundation for Catholic Reform in 1993 and distributed by Roman Catholic Books, which has some relationship with Ignatius Press.In reading a translated excerpt then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote for the French edition of the book, it is impossible not to see the significance of Gamber's writings for his own thinking about and writing on the liturgy. Another connection is that while Herr Doktor Joseph Ratzinger was teaching theology at the University of Regensburg and his brother, Msgr. Georg Ratzinger, was liturgy and music director at Regensburg's Cathedral of St. Peter (pictured to the left), Msgr. Klaus Gamber, who passed away in 1989, headed the Liturgical Institute in Regensburg. "What happened after the Council," writes the then Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in his introduction, was that "in the place of the liturgy . . . came fabricated liturgy". According to the pre-Benedictine Cardinal Ratzinger, the "organic, living process of growth and development over centuries" was abandoned and replaced by "a manufacturing process", that produced "a banal on-the-spot product". In this same introduction, he writes, "Gamber, with the vigilance of a true prophet and the courage of a true witness, opposed this falsification" and "taught us about the living fullness of a true liturgy".It is my belief after re-reading Gamber's book last night, that it gives us a road map for what Joseph Ratzinger, as Pope Benedict XVI, hopes to accomplish in his reform of the reform of the Sacred Liturgy during his pontificate. Hier meer