November 22

About the life of Saint Cecilia we have practically no historical data before the year 545, when her feast day was celebrated in Rome in the basilica erected in her honor. For the rest, her life remains hidden in the quicksands of time; all we know is that she made room in it for the praise of God and that her own name, her own life, has been, as it were, subsumed into that praise. This reminds me of a saying of the young Saint Thérèse: “I want only one thing: to begin to sing now what I shall sing for all eternity—the mercies of the Lord.” The Gospel (Mt 5:14–16) speaks of the duty of every Christian to be a light to the world, to reflect the splendor (the brightness) of the beautiful. This brings me back to Saint Cecilia. Significant in view of her role as patron saint of music is the sentence in the legend that reads: Cantantibus organis in corde decantabat Domino (while the instruments were playing, she sang to God in her heart)—during the wedding that was forced upon her, she sang to the Lord. This accords well with the actual historical account: what history shows us is a life that praised God, a life that was overwhelmed, ignored, and passed unnoticed in the confusion of the secular world. The silent song of her heart was at first a hidden song, but it now sounds throughout history. It has at last risen above the “organa” (the “instruments”) of the heathen world, which have long since fallen silent. In the legend, these “instruments” become “organs”. Here, too, we find an element of truth: faith was able to transfer the organa of the heathens from a profane and incongruous noise into an instrument for the glorification of God and to adopt it as an accompaniment of the Faith in liturgical worship. In actuality, then, the song sung in the heart existed first but comes to us now from without in the great Christian Tradition—a tradition by which we must let ourselves be transformed so that we too may become “instruments” of Christ.

From: Ordinariatskorrespondenz, November 22, 1978

 Ratzinger, J., Co-Workers of the Truth: Meditations for Every Day of the Year (ed. I. Grassl) (San Francisco 1992) 368-369.