Do Not Impoverish the Liturgy to Make It Appealing
Closing a Lateran University gathering, the CEI liturgy director urges formation, lay gifts, and access for the disabled—not dilution of rite.
On November 9, 2026, Don Alberto Giardina, director of the Italian bishops’ National Liturgy Office, insisted that sacred worship must not be diluted to win an audience. Closing the convention titled "The Liturgical Assembly and the Workshop of Our Time," he said the liturgy "must not be lowered or impoverished to make it appealing and understandable."
The meeting ran November 4–6 at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome. It gathered diocesan liturgy offices, liturgical music commissions, and students of liturgy for sessions on young people and ritual language, Sunday assemblies without a priest, persons with disabilities, and streamed Masses.
Liturgy and life, not marketing
Giardina framed the Church’s task as recovery rather than redesign. The work, he said, is "not so much introducing a structural change as rediscovering and nourishing this deep bond between liturgy and life." Young people, he noted, often experience faith practices as formalistic, abstract, and distant from daily life. At the same time they cultivate a desire for God that they pursue directly and without mediation—a desire that "does not mean an absence of ritual."
To draw them into ritual action, the Church must "educate and accompany" their longing for intimacy and silence, their search for God and belonging, and their need for truth and beauty, so that they can grasp and make their own the language of the liturgy. Formation, not simplification, is the path he set out.
Assemblies without a priest, disability, and screens
Addressing Sunday assemblies without a priest—an issue he linked to the growing shortage of clergy—Giardina called for valuing "the presence and gifts of all the baptized," including lay ministries, some of which may lead the liturgy when no priest is present.
On disability he was unambiguous: "liturgy is not closed to persons with disabilities." He urged accessible spaces, reading tools for the blind and visually impaired, and concrete roles for disabled people in the choir or among altar servers.
Asked whether, with streamed liturgy, "the Mass is over," he distinguished carefully prepared televised Masses on national channels from casual online streams. The latter, he said, should neither discourage those who can attend in person nor leave parishes complacent. Communities should instead carry liturgical gestures to the homes of the elderly and the sick.
He also recalled the teaching of Pope Leo, who reminds the faithful that "our communities need a spirituality of ecclesial unity in love." Across youth, shortage of clergy, disability, and digital mediation, Giardina’s line remained steady: the Church serves the faithful by guarding the integrity of the rite and by forming hearts to enter it—not by reducing worship to what seems immediately attractive.