Catholic World News News Feature

The Catholic Liturgy: What happened? What needs to be done? December 01, 2003

In the past forty years or so, a grammatical shift has taken place in Catholic parlance. It is the use of the word “liturgy” without the use of the definite article, let alone a defining adjective. Hence, one does not often hear or see the term “the Liturgy,” let alone “the Catholic Liturgy” or “the Sacred Liturgy.” Rather people speak about preparing or celebrating “a liturgy.” It is true that titles of courses, workshops, and seminars associate adjectives such as “pastoral” or “dynamic” or “living” with the word “liturgy,” but the use of such predicates underlines not only the grammatical shift which has taken place in Catholic circles, but indeed a theological shift in respect to Catholic Liturgy in the minds of some people that is of no little significance.

Before investigating what has taken place to bring about this shift, we must first ask: What, then, is Catholic Liturgy? And how is it distinct from other types of liturgy?

Catholic Liturgy is the public and official worship of Almighty God by the Church, as distinct from personal spiritual practices. Hence, the Liturgy comprises the Mass, the sacraments, the daily office celebrated by priests and religious and many lay people, and so on. By contrast personal prayer and meditation and various devotional practices are—even when performed together with others—simply private devotions.

There is, then, an objectivity inherent in Catholic Liturgy, for it is the public and official worship of Almighty God by his Church. This objectivity does not come from any centralizing need to control ecclesiastical protocol. Rather it stems from the theological importance and indeed the centrality of the treasures that the Liturgy contains. And by treasures I do not mean ancient texts or quaint rituals, however fascinating these may be. I refer, rather, to the tangible presence in our world of the Incarnate Christ whom we encounter in the Liturgy as we encounter him nowhere else. The sacraments, those mysterious material meetings with Christ, without which neither your nor my salvation is by any means assured, are inseparable from the Liturgy. And so from the earliest centuries the Church has developed and embellished and indeed protected her celebration of these saving mysteries in her Liturgy.

This theological centrality, indeed the theological priority of the Liturgy, is underlined by the ancient maxim lex orandi, lex credendi—“the law of prayer is the law of faith: the Church believes as she prays.” The Liturgy is nothing less than a constitutive element of Tradition (see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1124), a central pillar of Catholic life and theology, to be treated with great respect and care.

TAILOR-MADE FAITH?

This is why Catholics speak of the Liturgy, and capitalize the “L” or speak even of “the Sacred Liturgy,” for the rites and prayers and sounds and gestures and things which express, indeed which sacramentally convey, the very substance of our faith themselves enjoy a sacrality and a centrality that transcends their human origin. This is not to deny that liturgical forms have developed and changed throughout history, but they do so according to the principle of organic development, which insists that any pruning of or grafting onto the organism that is the Liturgy is proportionate, is truly necessary, and shows the utmost respect for the received Liturgy.

Thus Catholic Liturgy is not mere “liturgy” with a lowercase “l”. The Sacred Liturgy is not a subjective collection of customs, words, and rites that have little or no importance in themselves other than in the context of the particular group of Christians who happen to assemble to worship on a given occasion. If it were, each group of Christians would be free to fashion their own manner of worship, as indeed many Protestant groups do. Such subjectivization of the Liturgy affects more than just what such groups do ritually. If we appreciate the theological centrality of the Liturgy, we can see that fashioning and refashioning our own manner of worship is, in effect, tantamount to writing our own creed, omitting or adding beliefs according to our subjective perception. This was most clearly seen in the Protestant reformers’ production of their own liturgies.

Sadly—no, alarmingly—this subjective notion of liturgy has become quite widespread in Catholic circles since the Second Vatican Council. For decades “liturgy groups” have prepared liturgies tailored for their worshipping communities (freely moving beyond even the rather wide bounds set by the recent liturgical norms), rather than preparing to celebrate the Sacred Liturgy as fully and as well as possible. Or they have arranged “special” liturgies for particular occasions, putting together rites and prayers that are considered suitable for that group or occasion. Such people are often very conscientious and generous, and their efforts may indeed succeed in producing a form of worship with which their fellow worshippers can identify. However the assumptions from which such subjective liturgical constructions operate ignore the Catholic principle that, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote in The Spirit of the Liturgy:

Only respect for the Liturgy’s fundamental unspontaneity and pre-existing identity can give us what we hope for: the feast in which the great reality comes to us that we ourselves do not manufacture, but receive as gift.

Homemade liturgies run the risk that, instead of worshipping Almighty God, the community is simply celebrating itself. This tendency is the foundation and the perpetuation of the mentality that seeks a homemade faith or doctrinal relativization, popularly known as “supermarket” or “cafeteria” Catholicism, whereby we pick and choose what we like and leave the rest behind. This is not Catholicism at all.

THE BIRTH OF THE LITURGICAL MOVEMENT

So what happened? How did this subjective notion of the Liturgy gain a foothold?

Regarding not only the Liturgy, but indeed many aspects of the life of the Church, some people are tempted to place an “X” on a calendar date somewhere prior to or during the Second Vatican Council—before which, they suggest, all was bliss; afterward all was disaster. Such uncritical stances, understandable as they are given the trauma so many people have suffered, nevertheless ignore historical reality. Good and bad may be identified in matters liturgical before, during, and after the Council, although admittedly not in exactly equal proportions.

In Lent of 1903, Father Adrian Fortescue (who spent the last 16 years of his short life building up a parish in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, England, where the Sacred Liturgy was celebrated in an exemplary manner), was an assistant priest at the German Church in Whitechapel. He wrote to a friend:

Mr. Bernhard Schaefer, my rector, is an ex-Jesuit...an exceedingly pious person of the modern Gallo-Roman type (the sort who count special devotion to Saint Joseph and adulation of the illustrious incumbent of the Roman bishoprick as better than ethical righteousness)... he doesn't fast in Lent but he does scourge his old flesh so that it sounds like carpet beating all down the passage, his children don’t go to Holy Communion on Christmas day but do so on the first Friday of January, he won’t have the proper Holy Week offices but has an endless pleasant Sunday afternoon on Good Friday with special devotions to the Sacred Heart, he decorates his church more for the Sacred Heart feast than for Easterday, now he preaches and teaches the children not that it is Lent, but that it is somebody or other’s month, etc... Quite compatible with his piety (which is perfectly genuine) is the fact that he is a liar, a calumniator, and a receiver of stolen goods. However the odd thing about it is that I really like him very much.

The problem with Father Schaefer’s genuine piety was that it was dissociated from the Liturgy, the objectivity of which does demand that we fast in Lent and that we feast on feasts. However praiseworthy devotional practices are, they are secondary to the Sacred Liturgy, and ought to be in harmony with the liturgical feasts and seasons.

This problem, which may be described as a pietistic subjectivity, and which did not disfigure the Liturgy or construct new liturgies according to individual taste, nevertheless meant that the constitutive element of Tradition that is the Sacred Liturgy was, by and large, ignored by many people as the primary source of spiritual sustenance in living Christian life. People attending Mass would "get on with their devotions" oblivious to the centrality and the wealth of the liturgical rites and prayers enacted before them.

There were, of course, exceptions, particularly emanating from the work of the 19th-century French abbot of Solesmes, Dom Prosper Guéranger. However the problem was sufficiently widespread to merit the attention later in 1903 of the newly elected Pope Pius X. Just three months into his pontificate St. Pius X underlined a fundamental principle of Catholic life. He wrote:

It being our ardent desire to see the true Christian spirit restored in every respect and preserved by all the faithful, we deem it necessary to provide before everything else for the sanctity and dignity of the temple, in which the faithful assemble for the object of acquiring this spirit from its indispensable fount, which is the active participation in the holy mysteries and in the public and solemn prayer of the Church.

Saint Pius X taught that in order to live a truly Christian life one must draw one’s spiritual nourishment from the Sacred Liturgy, the public and solemn prayer of the Church, through active participation in its rites and prayers. In other words, one must have a liturgical piety, one must draw one’s spiritual nourishment from active and conscious contemplation of the faith of the Church as it is celebrated and expressed in the liturgical rites and prayers throughout the annual round of seasons and feasts of the liturgical year—as distinct from the practice of an unrelated devotion, howsoever worthy.

Dom Guéranger had drawn attention to the centrality of liturgical piety as early as 1841, with the beautiful appeal: “Open your hearts, children of the Catholic Church, and come and pray the prayer of your Mother.” But it was the authoritative voice of St. Pius X that provided the foundation on which the likes of Dom Lambert Beauduin, a Belgian Benedictine, organized the Liturgical Movement, the fundamental aim of which was the restoration of liturgical piety to its central place in Christian life.

"ACTIVE PARTICIPATION"

Saint Pius X called for “active participation” in the Sacred Liturgy. Some years ago, when I was correcting the proofs of a religious-education textbook, my pencil vigorously defaced the so-often repeated historical lie that “the Second Vatican Council introduced active participation in the Liturgy.” No; St. Pius X had re-introduced that concept some 60 years before the Second Vatican Council, as the sound work and writings of countless dedicated men and women associated with the Liturgical Movement in the ensuing years testify.

But there is “active participation” and “active participation,” and now we begin to see where, well before the Second Vatican Council, some approaches to Catholic Liturgy began to go awry.

The distinction I wish to make is between active (or better, “actual”) participation in the Liturgy, and “activist” participation. At the beginning of the 20th century, activist participation—having as many people as possible doing as much as possible in the liturgical rites so that they are “involved” or “included,” such as one so often sees at Masses for children or school groups—was unknown and unimaginable. At the end of the 20th century, however, it was actual participation—whereby the engagement of the mind and the heart in the liturgical rites has priority over doing things—that was more likely to be unknown.

Yet it did not take long for some people associated with the Liturgical Movement to set out down the activist path. From the 1920s forward, some of its enthusiasts placed too great an emphasis on having congregations actively make the responses to the priest at Mass in what became known as a “dialogue Mass.” Now there is nothing wrong with the faithful exercising their baptismal right to respond to the priest when he addresses them in the course of the Mass, and such sacral dialogue is itself meant to facilitate actual participation the Sacred Liturgy. But the emphasis placed on energetically drilling people to make responses was somewhat disproportionate and, I suggest, laid the foundation for the notion that “doing things” was what was most important in the task of re-connecting people with the Liturgy.

Another activist fad popular with many people in the Liturgical Movement was the novel idea that Mass should be celebrated facing the people, enabling everyone to see everything, and thereby purportedly enabling them better to participate in it. This innovation was based on flawed and antiquarian archaeological assumptions (as Klaus Gamber revealed in The Reform of the Roman Liturgy). And it fractured the tradition of both the Christian East and West, which kept the altar and its attendant Eucharistic rituals at one remove from public gaze, thereby underlining the utter otherness and sanctity of the Blessed Eucharist. But beyond that, the change brought about an expectation that participation in the Liturgy ought to be immediate, with nothing concealed or distant, thereby eroding at least one of those few mysterious elements of the characteristically sober Roman rite. The roots of this cancerous growth may be traced back to at least the 1930s, and the applicability of its underlying principle to the use of a sacred language in the Liturgy is clear.

Curiously, by ignoring the fact that actual participation is in fact enhanced both by the symbolism of facing East (toward Christ the morning star) and by the distance and sacrality that facing East establishes, proponents of the fad of facing the people have in fact decreased the possibility of our achieving what St. Pius X sought: acquiring the true Christian spirit from its indispensable fount, the active participation in the holy mysteries.

THE CULTURAL DILEMMA

But lest I mislead, I must repeat that the Liturgical Movement did much that was good, indeed very good. The promotion of the peoples’ missal, of which many superb editions appeared, placed the treasury of the Sacred Liturgy in peoples’ hands as their principal prayer book. The Liturgical Movement also energetically promoted the more frequent celebration of High Mass and of Vespers in parish churches, seeking thereby to improve peoples’ spiritual diet. And it did much for the formation of clergy in liturgical spirituality and for the promotion of Gregorian chant. Through such endeavors the movement emphasized the rightly pastoral value of the Liturgy—that is, its unique utility in the guidance and sustenance of people as they persevere in striving to live the Catholic faith in the hope of heaven.

But the Liturgical Movement faced a dilemma. The Sacred Liturgy bespoke the Christian culture in which it took its shape and developed. At best, 20th-century man was surrounded by only the vestiges of Christian culture. The world was increasingly self-consciously secular. The Liturgy was utterly sacred. To put it rather simplistically, in order that man could achieve optimum actual participation in the Liturgy (and therefore travel the safest road to his salvation) the Liturgical Movement had, it thought, either to change the prevailing secular culture, or to adapt the Liturgy.

This dilemma brought about talk of liturgical reform. Again, the Liturgy has developed through the centuries, in response to the needs of particular ages, and there is no reason why it should not have done so in the 20th century, or why it should not do so in the future, provided that such development is proportionate and organic.

However, from as early as the late 1940s there emerged a principle of liturgical reform which one might call “pastoral expediency,” based on the flawed assumption (propagated by the Austrian Jesuit scholar J.A. Jungmann) that the Liturgy as it had been received in the mid-20th century was essentially corrupt, and had been so since late antiquity. Accordingly the Liturgy was to be refashioned to meet the needs of contemporary secular man. Thus, the meaning of the word “pastoral” in this context came to denote the editing and rearranging of the Liturgy according to the subjective needs of a passing age.

The structures of authority in matters liturgical as they stood at that time meant that the full impact of such a principle was somewhat muted, but the principle was articulated and operative nevertheless. In the liturgical reforms that ensued throughout the 1950s one can identify its impact.

CHANGES BEFORE THE COUNCIL

Probably the most significant liturgical reform of this period was that of the Paschal Vigil in 1951. For some centuries until that date the vigil—the texts and rites of which assume its celebration at night, as a true vigil watching for the dawn of Easter day—had been celebrated on the morning of Holy Saturday. In 1951 its celebration during the night preceding Easter Sunday was permitted ad experimentum (and was made mandatory in 1956). This reform returned authenticity to the celebration of the Easter Vigil and as such, it cannot be said to be anything but sane and sound.

However the same reform radically cut the number of readings at the vigil, from twelve to four, on the grounds of facilitating greater participation in the rite. How one can effect more participation by removing two-thirds of that in which one wants people to participate seems, to me at least, to be a mathematical absurdity. A further problem with this purportedly pastoral abbreviation, or “expediency,” is that the structure of the readings thus destroyed was ancient, and was not without its own theological significance. But the reformers had decided that modern man could not stomach too much, so they cut severely and rearranged radically. Remember that we are talking about a reform promulgated early in 1951.

The same reform also introduced ex nihilo the renewal of baptismal promises into the Paschal Vigil, again to facilitate greater participation. It was a nice idea, and it has proved very popular in the ensuing decades, but as the Belgian Abbot Dom Capelle (who had been active in the Liturgical Movement from of old) protested when the reform was being prepared, one participates in the Easter mystery primarily through the sacrament of the Blessed Eucharist, not through Baptism. Such an innovation, besides being totally unnecessary was, therefore, somewhat theologically inept.

Most of the liturgical reforms of the 1950s were a similarly mixed bag of sane developments which were truly pastoral, and abbreviations or innovations motivated by a desire to meet the needs of modern man. Another factor at the time, which was the direct if somewhat poisoned fruit of decades of study into ancient liturgies, was a liturgical antiquarianism whereby desires arose to reintroduce obsolete liturgical practices which seemed expedient. There was much enthusiasm for offertory processions, bidding prayers, and for the ‘simple’ liturgies of the early Church. In this period, none of these principles got out of hand or was able to do severe damage to received objective liturgical tradition. But they were very much in the minds of those talking about and working on liturgical reform.

A word must be said en passant about the vernacular. Liturgical movement enthusiasts had long since argued for some use of the vernacular in the Liturgy. This, of course, was quite a different thing from calling for the complete vernacularization of the Liturgy, translating every last syllable into lowest-common-denominator speech. People argued—sensibly, in my opinion—for the readings from Sacred Scripture to be in the vernacular; they are, after all, intended to be immediately comprehensible. Who would seriously object to this reform today, if Latin had been retained for the other parts of the rite? We must also not forget that some parts of the sacramental rites were allowed in the vernacular from quite early in the 20th century. By the late 1950s talk of pastoral liturgical reform had gained quite some momentum. In 1960, the German-American Father H. A. Reinhold, published a book entitled Bringing the Mass to the People. As its title suggests, it proposed subjecting objective liturgical tradition to a reform that would meet the supposed needs of modern man. Reinhold is breathtaking in his self-assurance, asserting that:

The reform now underway is superior to preceding ones both in knowledge and in motive. As to knowledge: the research of the last decades has put us in a position better than that enjoyed by our predecessors for understanding the essential structure of the Mass and the development of the various rites. As to motive: the purpose of the reform of Charlemagne…was uniformity, discipline and the personal reform of the clergy; the purpose of that of Trent was simply to put an end to confusion. But Pius XII, following St Pius X, wanted to enable the spiritually underfed and thirsting masses to refresh themselves at the “primary and indispensable source of the true Christian spirit,” and to make the Sacrament a matter of true prayer, to which a feeling of wonderment is only a preliminary step.

To suggest, as Reinhold does, that the Carolingian and Tridentine reforms did not, within the circumstances of their time, seek to make the Liturgy “a matter of true prayer” in which the faithful could find the “primary and indispensable source of the true Christian spirit,” both fails to accord those reforms a fair historical analysis, and makes the ultimate archaeological (and Protestant) claim: that the Catholic Liturgy has been fundamentally defective for over a thousand years. Such arrogance—and arrogance is not too strong a word—was capable of rendering the Liturgy utterly subject to the whims of reformers.