Liturgical Movement

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The Liturgical Movement is a movement of scholarship and the reform of worship within the Roman Catholic Church that has taken place over the last century and a half and has affected many Protestant and Reformed Churches including the Church of England and other Churches of the Anglican Communion. It has been one of the major influences on the process of the Ecumenical Movement, and thus the healing of the divisions which began at the Reformation.

It has a number of facets. First, it was an attempt to rediscover the worship of the Middle Ages which was held to be the ideal form of worship. Second, it became a scholarly exercise in examining the history of worship. Third, it broadened into an examination of the nature of worship as a human activity. Fourth, it became an attempt to renew worship in order that it could be more expressive for worshippers and as an instrument of teaching and mission. Fifth, it has been a movement of reconciliation between the churches on both sides of the Reformation.

At the Reformation of the sixteenth century, while the new Protestant Churches abandoned the old Latin Mass, the Catholic Church reformed and revised it. The split between Catholic and Protestant was, in part, a difference about attitudes to the Bible and was exacerbated because, with the development of written European languages, a Latin service would be something one would primarily see and secondarily hear, a vernacular service, one in the language of the worshipper, would be one which the worshipper was supposed to understand and in which to participate. Language was only one issue. The revision of the Roman liturgy which followed, and which provided a single use for the whole Church, restated, in opposition to the Reformers, the sacramental principle and in particular the doctrine of the Eucharist. The Liturgical Movement, which began as further attempt to restore the liturgy to its ancient principles, resulted in changes that have affected both Catholics and Protestants. In both, for different reasons, frequent communion was unusual and both sought to remedy this.

Contents

[edit] Origins

The Catholic Church responded to the breaking away of European Protestants by engaging in its own reform, the Counter Reformation. The Council of Trent, which resulted in the adoption of the Tridentine Mass as the standard form of worship, was held in 1545–1563. From then on the Latin Mass remained substantially unchanged for four hundred years.

Meanwhile, the liturgies of the Protestant Churches (Anglican, Lutheran, Calvinist) were changed more radically: the language of the people was used at mass. Deliberately distancing themselves from 'popish' practices, these churches became “Churches of the Word” - of Scripture and preaching - breaking away from the Catholic Church's focus on sacraments. In the case of the English Book of Common Prayer the changes were relatively conservative, though actively anti-Roman, and did not substantially change after the sixteenth century. The practice of Holy Communion became less frequent and was replaced in many churches by the service of Morning and Evening Prayer. In the Lutheran tradition, the Mass was stripped of much of its character; not much more than the so-called 'Words of Institution' ('This is my Body...this is my Blood') remained. Common practice was to make the service of the day (the ante-communion) into a preaching service.

The first stirrings of interest in liturgical scholarship (and thence liturgical change) within the Catholic Church arose in 1832 when the French Benedictine Abbey at Solesmes was refounded under Dom Prosper Guéranger. For a long time, Benedictines were the pioneers in restoring Roman liturgy to its original form. At first Guéranger and his contemporaries focussed on studying and recovering the authentic Gregorian Chant and the liturgical forms of the Middle Ages, which were held as an ideal. Other scholars such as Cabrol and Batiffol also contributed to the investigation of the origins and history of the liturgy.

The 19th century saw the discovery of new liturgical texts. Jacques Paul Migne published editions of two early texts, Patrologia Latina and Patrologia Graeca. In addition, the Didache, one of the earliest manuals of Christian morals and practice, was found in 1875 in a library in Constantinople, and the Apostolic Tradition, attributed to the 3rd-century Roman theologian Hippolytus, was published in 1900.

In 1903, Pope Pius X issued a Motu Proprio on church music, inviting the faithful to participate actively in the liturgy, which he saw as a source of the renewal of Christian spirituality. He called for more frequent communion of the faithful. In 1909 Pius X called a conference at Malines in Belgium, which inaugurated the Liturgical Movement proper. Liturgy was to be the means of instructing the people in Christian faith and life; thus the mass would be translated into the vernacular to promote active participation of the faithful. One of the leading participants in the conference, Dom Lambert Beauduin of Louvain, argued that worship was the common action of the people of God and not solely performed by the priest. Many of the movement's principles were based in Beauduin's book, La Pieté de l'Eglise. In 1947 Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Mediator Dei et hominum which warned of false innovations, radical changes and protestantizing influences in the liturgical movement. At the same time he encouraged the "authentic" liturgical movement which promoted active participation of the congregation in chant and gestures.

Meanwhile, liturgical interest in the Church of England had grown through the work of the Oxford Movement, which drew attention the church's history and relation to the Catholic Church. The short-lived Camden Society (1839–63), originally formed for the study of ecclesiastical art, generated an interest in liturgy that led to the ceremonial revival of the later nineteenth century. The revival brought Anglican scholars into conversation with their Roman colleagues, who were freer to take part in public life in England after the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed in 1829.

[edit] Development

The Movement had a number of elements: Pastoral Theology, Liturgical Scholarship and Liturgical Renewal. In his influential book Mysterium Fidei (1921), Maurice de la Taille argued that Christ's sacrifice, beginning from his self-offering at the Last Supper, completed in the Passion and continued in the Mass, were all one act. There was only one immolation - that of Christ at Calvary to which the Supper looks forward and on which the Mass looks back. Although Taille was not a liturgist, his work created a huge controversy which raised interest in the form and character of the Mass. His argument, whilst not yet congenial to Protestants, removed the objection that each mass was a separate and new 'immolation' of Christ, a repeated and thus efficacious act.

Between the First and Second World Wars, there was an explosion of liturgical scholarship in Germany, centred mainly on the Maria Laach Abbey under Dom Odo Casel. At this stage of the movement scholars were beginning to reach beyond the Middle Ages to study the origins of Christian liturgy in pagan cultic acts, understanding liturgy as a profound universal human act as well as a religious one. In his Ecclesia Orans (The Praying Church) (1918), Casel studied and interpreted the pagan mysteries of ancient Greece and Rome, discussing similarities and differences between them and the Christian mysteries. Other important figures in the movement at this time include Jean Daniélou, Lous Bouyer and Josef Jungmann. In addition to the scholarly writing produced at Maria Laach, the work of Pius Parsch at Klosterneuburg treated similar ideas in a more populist tone.

[edit] The Second Vatican Council

The Latin Tridentine Mass remained the standard eucharistic liturgy in the Catholic Church in the West until the Second Vatican Council. (The small exception to that truth is the changes that were made to the Holy Week ceremonies in 1955 by Pope Pius XII allowing the Easter Vigil to take place in the evening!). In 1963, the Council adopted, by an overwhelming majority, the Constitution On Sacred Liturgy "Sacrosantum Concilium". For the first time the vernacular liturgy was permitted, even if to a possibly minor extent to the one actually reached afterwards by national churches; the emphasis in the liturgy was now on anamnesis, such as de la Taille had advocated. The influence of Hippolytus was evident in the form of Eucharistic Prayers. Accompanying this was the encouragement for liturgies to express local culture (subject to approval by the Holy See).

The recovery of the Divine Office (in the U.S. the Liturgy of the Hours), the daily prayer of the Church was just as startling. As liturgical prayer is the prayer of the Church, the Constitution states that "in choir" (common) office prayer is always preferable with respect to individual one.

[edit] Protestant churches

The effects of the liturgical movement on the Protestant Churches have been varied. The Church of England saw quite radical ceremonial and ritual changes in the 20th century resulting from the late-19th-century Ritualism movement. The adoption of Roman styles of dress: (e.g. stoles, chasubles) was widespread in the early part of the 20th. century. Gradually, the Eucharist (or Mass as Anglo-Catholic churches called it) became more common as the main Sunday Service, often using Roman prayers. Changes in the actual rite (ritual, properly so called) came about slowly and were met with much suspicion and resistance. The Parish Communion Movement led by such scholars as Gabriel Hebert interpreted the liturgy on wider social principles, rejecting in the process the idea of the eucharistic fast. The attempt to revise the Book of Common Prayer failed in 1928 and it was only with the production of the Alternative Service Book in 1980 that permanent, if optional, provision was made, influenced by the Gregory Dix's work in the 1940s. The latest product of the process is the Common Worship series of book produced in 2000. Other provinces of the Anglican Communion have engaged in a similar process.

Equally dramatic in some places has been the change in some of the Lutheran churches. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, for example, has been heavily influenced by the movement in its vesture and ritual. Black gowns have been replaced by coloured vestments, with their shape conforming to the modern pattern. This is less true in its ceremonial (the liturgical action, in which movement takes place during the liturgy to express its different parts is largely lacking). In Germany, the excising of the Eucharistic Prayer by Martin Luther in his Kirchenordnungen, one of a number of factors which contributed towards infrequent communion, was reversed in the decade after the Second World War with new service books and subsequently by the challenge of the Second Vatican Council. In the United States the new Lutheran rite (1970, Lutheran Book of Worship) draws considerably from Roman sources.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  • A Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship, J.G. Davies (SCM)
  • The Early Liturgy, Josef Jungmann (DLT 1960)
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