On Acquiring the Mind of the Church Through the Sacred Liturgy

Don Mark Daniel Kirby, OSB, of the excellent blog, Vultus Christi, posted recently on Acquiring the Mind of the Church. His piece includes a quote from Yves Congar (which was found in Geoffrey Hull's The Banished Heart) which I wished to share:

The Authentic Method Instituted by the Church to Unite Souls to Jesus

Père Congar in 1963 quoted by Geoffrey Hull in The Banished Heart, 2010:

Nothing is more educative for man in his totality than the liturgy. The Bible is certainly a marvelous teacher of prayer, of the sense of God and of the adult convictions of conscience. Used alone, the Bible might produce a Christian of the Puritan tradition, an individualist and even a visionary. The liturgy, however, is the "authentic method instituted by the Church to unite souls to Jesus" (Dom Maurice Festugière). The sort of Christian produced by an enlightened and docile participation in the liturgy is a man of peace and unified in every fibre of his human nature by the secret and powerful penetration of faith and love in his life, throughout a period of prayer and worship, during which he learned, at his mothers knee and without effort, the Church's language: her language of faith, love, hope, and fidelity. There is no better way of acquiring "the mind of the Church" in the widest and most interior interpretation of this expression.