his signature. Late in May 2016, Cardinal Sarah told an interviewer that the Second Vatican Council did not require priests to celebrate Mass versus populum, that is, facing the congregation. This way of celebrating Mass, he said, was "a possibility, but not an obligation". Readers and listeners should face each other during the Liturgy of the Word, he said. "But as soon as we reach the moment when one addresses God – from the Offertory onwards – it is essential that the priest and faithful look together towards the east. This corresponds exactly to what the Council Fathers wanted." Cardinal Sarah rejected the argument that priests celebrating Mass facing the East, or ad orientem, are turning their backs on the faithful or "against them". Speaking at a London conference on 5 July 2016, Cardinal Sarah asked all bishops and priests to begin celebrating the Mass ad orientem "wherever possible", "perhaps" by 27 November 2016, the start of Advent. He encouraged all Roman rite Catholics to receive Communion kneeling and said that Pope Francis had asked him to "continue the liturgical work Pope Benedict began". Sarah then met privately with Francis and on 11 July the Holy See Press Office issued a statement that said that Sarah's London remarks had been "incorrectly interpreted, as if they were intended to announce new indications different to those given so far in the liturgical rules and in the words of the Pope regarding celebration facing the people and the ordinary rite of the Mass", that celebrating Mass facing the congregation (versus populum) was "desirable wherever possible" and not to be superseded by ad orientem. It reported that the Pope and the Cardinal were in complete agreement on these points. He once wrote: "I refuse to waste our time pitting one liturgy against another or the rite of Saint Pius V against that of Blessed Paul VI." In July 2017, he wrote in the French magazine La Nef that he wanted the two forms of the Roman-Rite liturgy whose use is authorized by the 2007 papal document Summorum Pontificum to have the same calendar of feasts and the same Scripture readings, but that the work of a committee formed for that purpose had been unsuccessful. He still proposed that the newer form should restore certain practices that had been abandoned: that the faithful receive communion only on the tongue and while kneeling, that the prayers