Each month Glasgow and Galloway’s Learning and
Discipleship team invites a guest reviewer to suggest
and review a book for us. The simple objective is
that each book should encourage the reader in their
walk with Christ.
Our Reviewer this Month is Archbishop Mario Conti ,
the Roman Catholic Archbishop Emeritus of the
Metropolitan See of Glasgow. Archbishop Conti is
reviewing The Power of Silence - Against the
Dictatorship of Noise by Robert Cardinal Sarah,
Publisher: Ignatius Press. 2017
This book has had rave reviews, one reviewer going so far as to state: “This
book shows Cardinal Sarah to be one of the most spiritually alert churchmen
of our time”, and another to say, “it is impossible to exaggerate the
importance of this profound, uniquely beautiful book”.
The book follows a frequent form of positing questions to a leading
Churchman, recent Popes themselves accepting this methodology, to which
the interviewee responds at length. The interviewer in this case is the French
journalist and author, Nicholas Diat. The interviewee is the Guinean African
Cardinal Robert Sarah, made an Archbishop by Pope John Paul II, and
named Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship by Pope Francis.
In this latter role he has already attracted attention by certain statements he
has made, and been publicly corrected by the Pope for encouraging priests
to return to what the famous German liturgical scholar Jungmann called the
“Godward Stance” of the priest at the liturgy, namely facing away from the
congregation, orienting himself to address the Almighty, the liturgical reforms
of the 2nd Vatican Council rather favouring the priest-in-the–midst of the
gathered community, (altar facing the people). Consistent with this “Godward
Stance” is a desire to return to a quieter, even silent liturgy.
Cardinal Sarah is not thinking solely of the Liturgy; he is considering the
daily stance of the Christian: “No prophet ever encountered God without
withdrawing into the great silence of the desert...” Today, too, monks seek
God in solitude and silence...Silence is indispensable if we are to find God”.
Not surprising perhaps we find Nicholas Diat and Cardinal Sarah in the final
chapter at the Grande Chartreuse conversing with the Prior Dom Dysmas de
Lassus whose words are among the wisest, born of experience. Indeed, I
would suggest to any reader that he or she might find the reading of this
chapter the best introduction to the whole book.
The real subject of the book is not silence itself but contemplation for the
purpose of which silence both external and internal is a necessary condition
to combat what the author has called, within contemporary society, “the
Dictatorship of Noise”.
12