Pope Leo XIV addressed the motivations behind the Church’s liturgical renewal at a general audience held August 26, 2026, at St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, drawing on papal teaching from the past century to explain how successive pontiffs prepared the way for the Second Vatican Council’s transformation of worship.
The Pope centered his remarks on the Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Council’s foundational document on the sacred liturgy, tracing its roots through the twentieth-century papacy. He highlighted how Popes Pius XI, Pius XII, and John XXIII each took deliberate steps to reform ritual practice, laying groundwork that Vatican II would consolidate and expand.
The path toward active participation
Central to the Pope’s reflection was the Council’s insistence on the role of the faithful in liturgical worship. The Sacrosanctum Concilium, in its section 48, states that the Church “earnestly desires that Christ’s faithful, when present at this mystery of faith, should not be there as strangers or silent spectators.” This principle, the Pope explained, was not new to the Council but rather the culmination of earlier papal concern for genuine participation, as first reported by the OSV News.
Pope Pius XII, in his 1947 encyclical Mediator Dei, had emphasized the liturgy as the Church’s central act of worship and had reorganized the rites of Holy Week, moving them from their traditional morning hours to times that corresponded more closely to the actual hours of Christ’s passion and resurrection. That shift reflected a pastoral concern: that the faithful understand and enter more fully into what they witnessed.
Simplification and preparation
Pope John XXIII simplified the rubrics—the precise rules governing how the Mass and Divine Office were conducted—through his 1962 apostolic letter Rubricarum instructum, removing unnecessary ceremonial complexity to make worship more accessible. Pope Leo XIV has previously reflected on the liturgy as the Church’s primary school of prayer, a theme that echoes this earlier papal emphasis on clarity and accessibility in ritual.
The Pope also cited a letter from Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, then archbishop of Milan, written on October 28, 1962, as Vatican II convened. Montini, who would himself become Pope Paul VI, wrote to his faithful that “the liturgy is a sincere expression of both the divine and the human,” capturing the conciliar conviction that worship engages the whole person and community, not merely the priest at the altar, as first reported by the OSV News.
Vatican II as synthesis
Pope Leo XIV situated the Council’s work not as rupture but as synthesis. The Second Vatican Council, he indicated, gathered these reform impulses and gave them systematic expression, particularly through section 21 of Sacrosanctum Concilium, which laid out principles for how the liturgy should be reformed to serve the spiritual good of the faithful while preserving the substance of the faith.
The Pope’s audience underscored a theme of continuity: that the desire to involve the faithful more consciously in the Church’s worship, and to express that worship in forms the people could understand and embrace, emerged gradually from papal teaching long before the Council met. In a reflection at Castel Gandolfo on the Assumption, Pope Leo XIV has spoken of enduring love as true beauty, a principle that extends to how the Church invites all the baptized to participate in its central act of prayer and thanksgiving.
The general audience addressed no new policy or discipline but rather offered the Pope’s pastoral reading of how the Church’s twentieth-century popes, guided by the Holy Spirit, prepared the way for the renewal that Vatican II articulated.