Liturgical Movement

It has a number of facets. Initially, it was an attempt to rediscover the worship of the Middle Ages which was held to be the ideal form of worship. Secondly, it became a scholarly exercise in examining the history of worship. Thirdly, it widened into an examination of the nature of worship as a human activity. Fourthly 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. Fifthly, has has been a movement of reconciliation between the churches on both sides of the Reformation.

At the Reformation of the sixteenth century, whilst the new Reformed Churches abandoned the old Latin Mass , the Roman Catholic Church merely revised it. The split between Catholic and Protestant which was, in part, a difference about attitudes to the Bible was made so much wider because of the fact that, whereas 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. The Liturgical Movement was, in part, a 'catching up' process whereby the Roman Catholic Church made its liturgy more accessible to worshippers. It was however a much deeper process of discovery of the principles of worship which has affected both Catholics and Protestants. In both, for different reasons, frequent communion was unusual and both sought to remedy this.

ORIGINS

The response of the Roman Catholic church to the breaking away of European Protestants was to engage in its own reform, sometimes known as the Counter Reformation . One expression of this was the holding of the Council Of Trent (1545-1563) in northern Italy at which a revised form of the Latin mass, often called the Tridentine Mass , was approved. Thereafter, the Mass, always in Latin, remained unchanged for four hundred years.
Meanwhile, the liturgies of the Reformed Churches, Anglican, Lutheran, Calvinist had undergone a much more radical change from their Roman original. They were in the language of the people (more or less), in most cases had deliberated distanced themselves from 'popish' practices and in many cases, therefore, had become Churches of the Word - of Scripture and preaching - rather than of the 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. Nevertheless, Holy Communion became less frequent and was replaced in many churches by the service of morning prayer. In the Lutheran tradition, the Mass was stripped of much of its character leaving not much more than the so-called 'Words of Institution' ('This is my Body...this is my Blood') and the common practice was to make the service of the day the Ante-communion into a preaching service so that communion again became infrequent.

The first stirrings of interest in liturgical scholariship within the Roman Catholic Church (and thence of liturgical change) began in 1832 with the refounding of the French Benedictine Abbey at Solesmes under Dom Prosper Guéranger . Interest at first focussed on the study and recovery of the authentic Gregorian Chant . Guéranger, and his contemporaries were at first interested in the rediscovery of the forms of liturgy of the Middle Ages , for them the ideal age. Other scholars such as Cabrol and Batiffol, contributed to the investigation of the origins and history of the liturgy in which the Benedictines were, at first and for a long time, the pioneers.

The process was aided by the discovery, during the nineteenth century of a number of new liturgical texts. Jacques Paul Migne (1800-1875) had produced his editions of religious texts of the first centuries, Patrologia Latina and Patrologia Graeca . New texts were discovered such as the Didache , one of the earliest manuals of Christian morals and practice, found in a Constantinople library in 1875, and the Apostolic Tradition , attributed to the third century Roman theologian, Hippolytus which was published in 1900.

Then in 1903, Pope Pius X issued a Motu Proprio on church music, inviting the active participation of the faithful 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 he called a conference at Malines in Belgium, which was what inaugurated the Liturgical Movement proper. Liturgy was to be the means of instructing the people in Christian faith and life. The conference called for the translation of the Mass into the vernacular , a necessary change to secure active participation, but one which would take many years to achieve. Dom Lambert Beauduin of Lovain, one of the leading participants, and whose book ''La Piete de l'Eglise''was to be the basis of many of the ideas of the movement, argued that worship was the common action of the people of God not what the priest did.

Meanwhile, the interest of the Church Of England in liturgy, had grown through the work of the Oxford Movement in drawing attention to the historic character of the church and its relation to the Roman Catholic church. The short-lived Camden Society (1839-63), originally formed for the study of eccesiastical art, generated interest in liturgy which was to lead to the Ceremonial revival of the later nineteenth century. This was to bring Anglican scholars into conversation with their Roman colleagues who, following the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 were freer to take part in public life.

DEVELOPMENT

The Movement had a number of elements: Pastoral Theology, Liturgical Scholarship and Liturgical Renewal. Maurice de la Taille (1872-1933)wrote his influential book ''Mysterium Fidei'' in 1921. He argued that Christ's sacrifice, begun his self-offering at the Last Supper, which was completed in his 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. He was not a liturgist but his work raised a huge controversy which served to raise interest in the character of the Mass and therefore on its form. 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 efficatious act.

Meanwhile, liturgical scholarship moved, between the wars to Germany and centred much on the beautiful Abbey of Maria Laach (set on the Laachersee a mile or so above the Rhine), under Dom Odo Casel (died 1948). Casel's book ''Ecclesia Orans'' (The Praying Church) was published in 1918. It was the achievement of this stage of the movement that scholars were able to get behind the alleged mediaeval ideal to the origins of the liturgy and its relationship with other cultic acts, understanding liturgy as a profound universal human act as well as a religious one. Casel studied and interpreted the pagan mysteries of Greece and Rome, both relating them to and distinguishing them from the Christian mysteries. Other figures who were part of this explosion of scholarship were Jean Daniélou, Lous Bouyer and Josef Jungmann. And while Maria Laach was scholarly , the work of Pius Parsch at Klosterneuburg was more populist, though the ideas were the similar.

THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL

Until the allowing the Easter Vigil to take place in the evening!). It remained for the Council to agree, by an overwhelming majority, the Constitution ''De sacra liturgia'' in 1963. The vernacular liturgy was, for the first time, permitted; the emphasis in the liturgy was now on ''anamnesis'', very much as de la Taille had advocated, the influence of Hippolytus was likewise to be seen in the form of Eucharistic Prayers. Accompanying this was the encouragement for liturgies to express local culture (a feature which was at first taken up with enthusiasm and then discouraged in the inevitable conservative reaction which eventually took place).
The recovery of the Divine Office (called the Liturgy Of The Hours in the United States), the daily prayer of the Church was just as startling. This was an office to be said, not privately, as hitherto, but in choir, that is, together.

THE ANGLICAN, LUTHERAN AND REFORMED CHURCHES

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Liturgical Movement