Questo articolo è disponibile anche in:
Italian 
English 
Spanish
Question
Dear Father Angelo,
you’ve already given us some precious clarifications. Now my question is very short. Due to the confused period the Church is experiencing, I’d like to know: can we omit the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (or the Apostles’ creed) during the Sunday Mass and replace it with a series of prayers adding something like “I believe in You, Lord”? It’d be like another Prayer of the faithful, probably without all the truths of the faith which the Creed expresses. I said probably because they don’t deliver us any paper with the text of that Creed during the Sunday Mess!
I thank you and I’d like to receive a private answer even if it means abusing your patience.
May Jesus Christ be praised!
Answer
Dear you,
1. The Creed doesn’t only refer to our profession of faith, but also it makes us memorize crucial truths about Christian revelation. Just repeating the formula “I believe in You, Lord” doesn’t help our memorization. Moreover, without the written text you may suppose some of the truths have been deleted or hidden.
2. Learning by heart the formula about our faith is full of pros. Above all, it makes us use the right words to express some of the most important truths about God’s nature, Jesus Christ, mysteries of our salvation and our eternal destiny. Sometimes, in order to fix a mistake you only need to remember that they have used some other words in our Profession of faith. And soon you’ll realize it is much more precise. Moreover, those professions of faith have been conceived after a long period of discussions precisely to avoid misunderstandings and mistakes.
3. You are right when you say that if you only repeat “I believe You, Lord”, if you don’t have a written text, if people who lead the prayer aren’t good enough or if they cough next to you, you may not understand what you claim to believe.
4. To me, it is so strange that we need to restate some obvious things that should make everyone understand where such changes that you’re obliged to experience are leading to. That’s because of a certain clericalism according to which the priest is thought to be able to do whatever he wants during liturgical celebrations. It is frequent to identify this behaviour exactly in people who say not to be like that. But in the meantime they manipulate liturgy as they want and oblige people to follow their innovations.
5. Dealing with the memorization, it is useful to enlighten an important excerpt from a Church document about catechesis written after a Synod wanted by Pope Paul VI in 1977. He didn’t manage to publish the final document because he died first. The same happened to his successor Pope John Paul I. So on 16 October 1979, Pope John Paul II published that document named Catechesi Tradendae. There you can find something about how much we need to memorize our profession of faith.
6. Here it is: “The final methodological question the importance of which should at least be referred to-one that was debated several times in the synod-is that of memorization. In the beginnings of Christian catechesis, which coincided with a civilization that was mainly oral, recourse was very freely to memorization. Catechesis has since then known a long tradition of learning the principal truths by memorizing. We are all aware that this method can present certain disadvantages, not the least of which is that it lends itself to insufficient or at times almost non-existent assimilation, reducing all knowledge to formulas that are repeated without being properly understood. These disadvantages and the different characteristics of our own civilization have in some places led to the almost complete suppression – according to some, alas, the definitive suppression – of memorization in catechesis. And yet certain very authoritative voices made themselves heard on the occasion of the fourth general assembly of the synod, calling for the restoration of a judicious balance between reflection and spontaneity, between dialogue and silence, between written work and memory work. Moreover certain cultures still place great value on memorization.
At a time when, in non-religious teaching in certain countries, more and more complaints are being made about the unfortunate consequences of disregarding the human faculty of memory, should we not attempt to put this faculty back into use in an intelligent and even an original way in catechesis, all the more since the celebration or “memorial” of the great events of the history of salvation require a precise knowledge of them? A certain memorization of the words of Jesus, of important Bible passages, of the Ten Commandments, of the formulas of profession of the faith, of the liturgical texts, of the essential prayers, of key doctrinal ideas, etc., far from being opposed to the dignity of young Christians, or constituting an obstacle to personal dialogue with the Lord, is a real need, as the synod fathers forcefully recalled. We must be realists. The blossoms, if we may call them that, of faith and piety do not grow in the desert places of a memory – less catechesis. What is essential is that the texts that are memorized must at the same time be taken in and gradually understood in depth, in order to become a source of Christian life on the personal level and the community level.
The plurality of methods in contemporary catechesis can be a sign of vitality and ingenuity. In any case, the method chosen must ultimately be referred to a law that is fundamental for the whole of the Church’s life: the law of fidelity to God and of fidelity to man in a single loving attitude.” (n. 55).
7. The collective ritual of saying the Creed out loud during the Mess is the public demonstration of our faith. All the community say it, word by word. They declare it to the world and pass it down on future generations, without any manipulation or subjective interpretation.
Being proud of your attention to the purity of proclamation and to the public testimony of our faith, I wish you all the best, I remember you to the Lord and I bless you.
Padre Angelo
Translated by Giulia Leo