Pope Leo XIV’s gentle criticism of contemporary western liturgy is a vital wake-up call
Tom Coley• May 26, 2025
Too often, the Catholic Mass in the modern Roman rite feels like a meeting. A well-meaning one, perhaps – but horizontal, flat and alarmingly un-mysterious. There’s handshaking. Folksy banter from the altar. Music that sounds like a leftover from a 1970s guitar retreat. It’s meant to be “engaging”. It ends up being banal.
And people are walking away. Not just from the pews, but from the sense that what happens at Mass is sacred – something transcendent, something beautiful, something terrifying in the best possible sense. Only two thirds of regular Mass-attending Catholics believe in the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist – the “source and summit” of the life of the Church – which is to say nothing of the majorities of Catholics in most countries who don’t even attend Mass.
Pope Leo XIV has noticed.
His 14 May Jubilee address to the Eastern Catholic churches is a rare intervention on this very point. Listening carefully to it, this becomes evident: while praising “the primacy of God” and spiritual depth of Eastern rites, the Pope is also sending a gentle warning to the West. The reforms of the 1960s and their aftermath have led us away from the sacred mystery that should define liturgy.
“The Church needs you,” he exhorted his audience. “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!”
The use of the word “recover” reveals much about his views. We will return to this later. However, in his next statement Leo made things even less subtle:
“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)!”
The Pope continued to praise “authentic spiritual traditions” which have been preserved in the East without being “corrupted by the mentality of consumerism and utilitarianism”. He spoke of the Eastern liturgies as embodying a deep spiritual richness, a reverence that invites the faithful to enter the sacred mysteries with a sense of awe and profound worship.
Leo then cautioned Eastern Catholic leaders that “it is vital, then, that you preserve your traditions without attenuating them, for the sake perhaps of practicality or convenience”.
In this he was, it appears, critiquing the Western tendency since the reforms to simplify, modernise and make the Mass more accessible – sometimes at the expense of mystery and reverence.
For if the West must “recover” a sense of mystery, the subtext is that this has been lost; to say that the West must “rediscover” the primacy of God is to call out its anthropocentrism.
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This shouldn’t go unnoticed by Catholics. The Pope is here implying the West once knew of these things. Amid a Church still warring over a liturgical reform which was implemented nearly 60 years ago, his words have clear ramifications.
The Pope’s words here could be easily missed in a much longer and more encompassing speech, but they shouldn’t be ignored – he is suggesting that contemporary liturgy and spirituality has become too worldly and man-focussed. The Tridentine Mass meanwhile, which Leo as Cardinal Prevost is rumoured to have celebrated, is to many observers free of such criticisms.
To understand the full depth of the Pope’s point, two ancient theological approaches that shape Catholic spirituality and liturgy ought to be kept in mind: cataphatic and apophatic theology. These are not theological abstractions but living currents within the Church’s prayer tradition.
Cataphatic theology is the Via Affirmativa or “positive” way. It uses symbols, images, sounds and gestures to help us approach the divine. It uses the sensory world – the smell of incense rising in the sanctuary and curling through the cathedral, the sound solemn chant reverberating through the space, the visual splendour of painted frescoes and statues, the meaningful gestures of reverent genuflection and bowing – all used to point to the divine. These are also cataphatic elements – signs that speak of God’s glory, beauty and majesty. They don’t capture God fully, but they can offer a glimpse – a brief reflection of the divine light, like the momentary glistening of a golden icon under the penetrating rays of the sun.
Apophatic theology, by contrast, is the Via Negativa, or “negative” approach. It speaks of God by saying what God is not – beyond all words, silence, mystery, the unknowable. It invites us into reverence and awe, acknowledging that God transcends human understanding. In the liturgy, this is the quiet, the sacred stillness, the spaces between words and gestures where mystery breathes. This tradition, central to mystics like Ss John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila, teaches that the highest encounter with God is beyond words, beyond comprehension, and beyond visible signs. It emphasises silence, awe and reverence, recognising that the divine mystery cannot be contained by human language.
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That said, the correct words are not obsolete in our efforts at describing our God, for words can either be used to near us or further us away from Him; but in the end they are ultimately insufficient. This paradoxical truth must be retained in the Church’s worship.
The liturgy, properly understood, lives in the tension between these two approaches. It must both reveal and conceal the divine mystery. The apophatic practices seek to purify the mind and consciousness of those things which merely distract or pull us away from God – to help empty our soul of those things in which the sacred presence (God’s truth, goodness, beauty, majesty, purity, humility) are not readily felt. Meanwhile, its cataphatic elements fill up the consciousness and soul with those things in which the mysterious, powerful, unnerving nature of God is more readily present – to the interior and exterior senses.
Unfortunately, Western liturgy has too often begun to reverse this, with gestures and words filling up the mind’s focus and our senses with that which is more down-to-earth, while neglecting to rely on those rubrics which invite necessary silence, obscuration or contemplation and pull us away from the mundane and profane.
The Eastern liturgies, Pope Leo XIV contends, have retained this profound balance. Their ancient chants, incense, ritual movement and deep silence invite the faithful into a sacred mystery that is both sensed and transcended.
Since assuming office as Saint Peter’s successor, Pope Leo has continued where Cardinal Robert Prevost left off: as an astute and careful diplomat. As such, we can only infer and piece together what his more controversial and broader opinions are from the few statements he has allowed to be suggestive.
However, his recent comments tie together with his words in a 2012 interview.
He said: “we should not be trying to create spectacle … theatre, just to make people feel interested in something which in the end is very superficial and not profound.”
Instead, he contended, “liturgy should be about” the experience of “coming in contact with [the] mystery” of the “God who is love, God who dwells within us, God who is indeed present in humanity and who’s revealed himself through Jesus Christ”.
“The way to discover God is not really through spectacle,” he continued. “And I think many times people have been maybe misled, people have gone looking for God in ways that in the end have been proven to be sidetracked and not really essential in terms of discovering the mystery”.
Combined with his address to the Eastern Catholics, here lies a warning against sensory distractions aimed at being chatty or merely keeping the congregation “awake” or “involved”. True liturgy should be an encounter with God.
Leo cited the “eloquent image” of Saint Symeon, the New Theologian, to illustrate the dangers of introducing too many worldly elements into the liturgy: “Just as one who throws dust on the flame of a burning furnace extinguishes it, so the cares of this life and every kind of attachment to petty and worthless things destroy the warmth of the heart that was initially kindled.”
Here is the crux of the Pope’s quiet rebuke: there is a risk that certain post-Conciliar reforms – an overemphasis on the responsorial psalm as an engagement tool, putting the liturgy into the vernacular, a versus populum stance which appears to place importance on the laity present rather than the altar and Blessed Sacrament, frequent informal gestures during Mass, or excessive attempts at making the liturgy “accessible” – can overshadow the elements that elevate worship to a sacred encounter.
Instead, Leo’s words suggest a recovery of the apophatic dimension. The liturgy must retain silence, reverence and mystery. At the same time, it requires cataphatic elements – chant, incense, sacred gestures, meaningful posture such as genuflections and the perhaps also symbolic directionality of facing East – that serve as tangible signs pointing us not merely to human beings (as important as loving and caring for others may be, we are distracted with their affairs and concerns more overwhelmingly throughout the week) but for at least a moment beyond ourselves to God’s holiness.
The Eastern Churches have preserved this ancient synthesis in a way that Western practice often no longer does. Pope Leo XIV’s Jubilee Address is not a rejection of calls for “full and actual participation”. Rather, it is an invitation to consider them more deeply – to understand participation not as mere activity, but as entering into the sacred mystery with body and soul.
This nuanced vision calls on the Church to resist “consumerism and utilitarianism” in worship, which treats liturgy like a product to be marketed and tailored to popular tastes. Instead, liturgy must remain a space where the transcendent God breaks into time, demanding our silence, awe and surrender.
Elsewhere in his address, Leo put things aptly. True liturgy and spirituality should contain traditions which remain “ancient yet ever new” and “medicinal”. The Church’s worship should be inspired by the way that in Eastern liturgy “the drama of human misery is combined with wonder at God’s mercy, so that our sinfulness does not lead to despair, but opens us to accepting the gracious gift of becoming creatures who are healed, divinised and raised to the heights of heaven.”
In the liturgy, those present should be able to easily connect to the sentiments Pope Leo cites from Saint Ephrem the Syrian: “Glory to you, who laid your cross as a bridge over death … Glory to you who clothed yourself in the body of mortal man, and made it the source of life for all mortals.”
If the Church continues down the path of spectacle and sentimentality, it risks worsening the haemorrhaging of the faithful from the pews at Mass and a further loss of belief in its most fundamental mystery among those who attend.
But there is hope. The way forward lies not in innovation for its own sake but in recovering what the East has never forgotten: that worship is about a mystery too vast for words but always inviting us closer.
The Pope’s words are gentle yet unmistakable: let us recover the sacred, the mysterious and the beautiful. Let us restore the balance between cataphatic richness and apophatic silence so that liturgy ceases to be a mere gathering and becomes again what it was always meant to be – a holy encounter with God.
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Photo: Pope Leo XIV delivers the Regina Caeli prayer after a Holy Mass for the Beginning of his Pontificate in St Peter’s square in the Vatican, 18 May 2025. (Photo by ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP via Getty Images.)