THE LITURGICAL MOVEMENT

                         TRADITIO Traditional Roman Catholic Internet Site
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       Copyright 2006 CSM.  Reproduction prohibited without authorization.
                                                   Last Revised:  01/04/06


[Although the following article contains certain useful historical 
information about the history of the Modernistic changes engineered in the 
traditional liturgy, culminating at Vatican II, it comes to us from an 
"indult" organization, whose purpose was to ingratiate itself with the 
Conciliarist popes.  Therefore, it sometimes takes on a more sanguine 
position on the Modernistic innovations than the evidence bears.  When the 
article departs significantly from a traditional view of the facts, TRADITIO 
has added its own comments in square brackets.  The most passages displaying 
a servile sycophany to the Modernist New Order have been expunged entirely.]


THE LITURGICAL MOVEMENT

PART I:  ITS ORIGINS TO WORLD WAR II

If we want to gain a true picture of the scope of today’s “vocations crisis,” 
we would do well not to compare the number of seminarians now to the number 
of seminarians in the 1950’s, but to the number of priests and religious 
populating the monasteries and canonries of Europe in the 12th and 13th 
centuries.

At that time a monk could travel on foot through France and have no need to 
pass a night away from the shelter of some monastery or religious house. 
Since the liturgy is the special care of priests and monks, it should come as 
no surprise that the radical decay of religious life, spanning the course of 
centuries, was accompanied by the decay of the liturgical life of the whole 
Church.

Dom Guéranger writes of the golden age of the liturgy: “For upwards of a 
thousand years, the Church, who prays in her temples seven times a day and 
once again during the night, did not pray alone. The people kept her company, 
and fed themselves with delight on the manna which is hidden under the words 
and mysteries of the divine liturgy. Thus initiated into the sacred cycle of 
the mysteries of the Christian year, the faithful, attentive to the teachings 
of the Spirit, came to know the secrets of eternal life; and, without any 
further preparation, a Christian was not unfrequently chosen by the bishops 
to be a priest, or even a bishop, that he might go and pour out on the people 
the treasures of wisdom and love, which he had drunk in at the very 
fountainhead.”

In a word, the whole of the liturgy, with its complex of words and gestures, 
was the primary source of instruction and nourishment for the Christian 
faithful.

The ruined or deserted churches of medieval Christendom bear witness to what 
the liturgy of the Church once was. In France, not far from where Charles 
Martel turned back the invading hosts of Islam, stands an ancient abbey, the 
Abbey of Our Lady of the Assumption of Fontgombault, established at the 
beginning of the 12th century, shut down by the French Revolution, and 
restored as a daughter house of the Abbey of St. Peter of Solesmes in 1949. 
In this ancient Abbey, numbering some 60 monks, at 10:15 AM every day the 
Mass is solemnly chanted according to the Missal of St. Pius V. This chanted 
Mass finds as its precious setting the chanting of all the canonical hours, 
from Matins to Compline. Within a distance of 15 miles or so lies one ruined 
abbey and another abbey that operates today as a simple parish church. Today, 
only one of these three abbeys is thriving, alive with the full splendour of 
the Roman liturgy, but in the 12th and 13th centuries all three of them would 
have been filled with monks chanting the praises of God and offering the Holy 
Sacrifice with fitting solemnity.

Another striking monument of the liturgical life that once nourished the 
Church can be found in the ruins of the once great Abbey at Cluny. Founded in 
the 10th century, it was soon the greatest Abbey of Christendom, and its now 
ruined church was once the largest church in Christendom, larger even than 
St. Peter’s. In its heyday it was filled with 1000 monks chanting the praises 
of God, in a sort of tag-team fashion, day and night. On the eve of the 
French Revolution there were some 50 monks left in the Abbey. Destroyed 
during the Revolution, its ruins stand as a witness to the past glory of 
Christendom, a glory that was rooted in the public worship of the divine 
majesty— the sacred liturgy.

While it is true that these are witnesses only of monastic worship, we could 
well expect that where monastic worship was so abundant, some-thing of this 
same spirit must have influenced the secular clergy and the laity. Indeed, 
not only was Europe filled with monasteries, but it was filled with large 
churches, populated with numerous clergy, who were accustomed to assemble 
together not only for the solemnities of the Mass but also for the chanting 
of the divine praises in the Divine Office. The lay faithful, upon entering 
these Churches, would not have found deserted tabernacles, but the joyful 
sound of the “new song.” As late as the 14th century a cultured layman, Dante 
Alighieri, in composing his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, fills his work 
with allusions to the music of the liturgy.

While the contemplative spirit of the liturgy—nourished in a special way by 
the monks, but the birthright of all the baptized—declined through the 
centuries leading up to the French Revolution, the Revolution dealt a near 
deathblow to the Order of St. Benedict—the Order that had, through the 
centuries, always been the special guardian of the liturgy in the West. 
Beginnings of the Liturgical Movement If we want to trace the history of what 
in the 20th century was named “The Liturgical Movement,” we would do well to 
set that movement in the light of what the liturgy once was in Christendom so 
that we might see what was lost and what stood in need of being restored. 
Perceived in this light, it would not be unreasonable to see in Dom Prosper 
Guéranger—the founder of the Abbey of Solesmes (1833) and the great restorer 
of Benedictine monasticism after the destruction wrought by the French 
Revolution—the true beginning of the liturgical movement.

A later author wrote of Dom Guéranger: “Love for the Scriptures, a sense of 
their traditional interpretation in the theology of the Fathers, a thorough 
understanding of tradition and its indefectible continuity, supreme fidelity 
to the ordinary magisterium of the Church—all of these qualities were to be 
found in him... These same qualities, though in different degrees, have 
marked every true inheriter of his thought; they are the cardinal points of 
the ‘liturgical movement’.” (Dom Oliver Rousseau, The Progress of the 
Liturgy, page 12.)

Dom Guéranger wrote that prayer is “man’s richest boon,” and liturgy (the 
prayer of the Church) is “the most pleasing to the ear and the heart of God, 
and therefore the most efficacious of all prayers.” Then, after lamenting the 
decline of the liturgy in the centuries following the Reformation, he notes 
that “this liturgical prayer would soon become powerless were the faithful 
not to take a real share in it, or at least not to associate themselves to it 
in heart. It can heal and save the world, but only on the condition that it 
be understood.”

Within the womb of his monastery was born the great renewal of Gregorian 
chant led by Dom Pothier and Dom Moquereau—a renewal that was sanctioned and 
adopted by St. Pius X, leading to a restoration of all the books containing 
chants used in the Latin liturgy. Active Participation of the Faithful St. 
Pius X himself is recognized by many as the author of the liturgical renewal, 
and certainly his great Motu proprio “Tra le Sollecitudine” (1903) on sacred 
music marked the moment when the liturgical renewal was first taken up and 
vigorously promoted by the Magisterium of the Church.

It is notable in this regard that the Magisterium’s first effort was to 
purify churches of the rather secular sounding music that was turning 
churches into opera halls and to restore the great treasure that so 
characterizes the Roman liturgy: Gregorian chant.

In that Motu Proprio he wrote the now famous lines, “Filled as We are with a 
most ardent desire to see the true Christian spirit flourish in every respect 
and be preserved by all the faithful, We deem it necessary to provide before 
anything else for the sanctity and dignity of the temple, in which the 
faithful assemble for no other object than that of acquiring this spirit from 
its foremost and indispensable font, which is the active participation in the 
most holy mysteries and in the public and solemn prayer of the Church.”

Besides restoring Gregorian chant, St. Pius X revised the Roman breviary, 
shortening the length of the offices and changing the way feast days were 
celebrated so as to allow for a fuller use of the entire psalter.

Active participation in the most holy mysteries reaches its highest point in 
sacramental communion, and so it is not surprising that St. Pius X was famous 
for promoting frequent communion after many centuries in which the faithful 
in the West had become accustomed to receiving communion only a few times a 
year at most.

From Dom Guéranger to St. Pius X, the two hinges of the liturgical movement 
(i.e. a renewed understanding of the liturgy and the promotion of active 
participation of the faithful) were well established. The renewal of 
Gregorian chant was seen by Rome as one of the key elements in promoting the 
participation of the faithful—hence the importance of St. Pius X’s Motu 
Proprio.

The liturgical movement was born in monasteries dedicated in a special way to 
the celebration of the liturgy. Its first great proponents—Dom Guéranger, Dom 
Maurus Wolter (founder of the monastery of Beuron), Dom van Caloen, and Dom 
Gaspar Lefebvre, to name a few—were all monks. Another Benedictine, Dom 
Virgil Michel of St. John’s in Collegeville, Minnesota, is given credit for 
bringing the liturgical movement to the United States in 1925.


The Liturgical Movement in Catholic Parishes

So long as the liturgical movement remained a purely monastic movement, it 
was content to seek a deeper understanding of the liturgy, and various 
efforts at scholarship flourished. These were assisted by the discovery, 
towards the end of the 19th century, of important documents that had a 
bearing on the liturgy, such as the “Didache,” dating from the end of the 
first century, the canons of St. Hipploytus, and the “Anaphora” of Serapion.

The understanding of the liturgy was nourished by the thought of the great 
German theologians of the 19th century, J.A. Moehler and Matthias Scheeben, 
both of whom drew inspiration from their study of the Fathers of the Church 
and from the thought of the Oxford movement in England, led by Cardinal 
Newman, another great devotee of the Fathers. Moving into the 20th century, 
the German monastery at Maria-Laach shone with the splendour of its Abbot Dom 
Ildephonse Herwegen and the works of Dom Odo Casel, who departed from this 
life after chanting “Lumen Christi” at the paschal vigil, summing up his life 
in his death.

In the measure that the liturgical movement departed from the cloister, 
however, education was felt to be an insufficient means to foster the active 
participation of the lay faithful. The first translation of the missal for 
the laity had already been completed in the 19th century by the monks of 
Maredsous, a daughter house of Beuron. Dom van Caloen from Maredsous founded 
the monastery at Saint-Andrè, where Dom Gaspar Lefebvre published his famous 
missal. It appeared in many editions, in many languages, and sold hundreds of 
thousands of copies. Another daughter house of Maredsous was Mont-Cesar near 
the great university of Louvain. It was a monk of Mont-Cesar, Dom Lambert 
Beauduin, who sought in a special way to bring the liturgical movement out of 
the monasteries and into the parishes, making the parish liturgy the center 
and starting point of a complete parochial renewal.

Two names merit special mention in the popularization of the liturgical 
movement: Fr. Doncoeur, a French Jesuit who, after World War I, sought to 
promote the liturgy among the youth by means of the “Dialogue Mass,” and Pius 
Parsch, an Austrian priest, a canon regular who was uncomfortable with his 
great abbey church and sought a smaller, simpler church. He is known as the 
first great popularizer of the liturgical movement. As this work of 
popularization advanced, liturgists began more and more to advocate reform of 
liturgical structures while the movement, whose origins were so bound up with 
the renewal of Gregorian chant, became divided between those who would 
continue to promote the sacred chant among the faithful and those who wished 
to substitute vernacular hymns in order to promote congregational singing.

Yet for all the growth and development of the liturgical movement, up to 
World War II it had remained a sort of small group within the Church which, 
as of yet, had had little impact upon the vast majority of the faithful. 
Though small, the liturgical movement had already been involved in a few 
controversies. Dom van Caloen had raised protests when he suggested that 
communion should be distributed to the faithful during the Mass rather than 
after the Mass, as had been the custom at the time. The groundwork needed for 
any true liturgical renewal, reaching to the whole Church, had been laid. 
Attention had been called to the centrality of the liturgy for the life of 
the Church, to the whole of the divine office as the fitting setting for the 
sacrifice of the Mass, to the importance of sacred chant, to the need for 
active participation by the lay faithful, which would lead them to a deeper 
understanding of the liturgy. Moreover, and even more importantly, the 
liturgical movement thus far was not a matter of mere sterile scholarship. It 
had born abundant fruits in the renewal of the monastic life that inspired 
and accompanied the liturgical movement. Nevertheless, trouble was looming on 
the horizon. Bringing the liturgical movement to a vast body of faithful who 
were far removed in their way of thinking from a truly liturgical mentality 
raised difficult questions, and some of the proposed solutions were lacking 
in prudence and, at times, due submission to ecclesial authority. At the same 
time, the very attempt to rouse the faithful from general torpor in regard to 
the liturgy was bound to provoke opposition.

In Part I ... we saw that this movement began in the early 1800’s from a desire 
to restore an understanding of and participation in the liturgy that had once 
been at the heart of Catholic life. Arising from the Abbey of Solesmes in the 
1840’s, this movement is considered to have been founded by the Benedictine monk 
Dom Guéranger. It was there at Solesmes that both the study and practice of the 
liturgical movement began, the fruits of which included the 12-volumn tome 
entitled The Liturgical Year, written by Dom Guéranger, and a renewal of 
Gregorian chant, led by Dom Moquereau.

In 1903 the liturgical movement was taken up and vigorously promoted by the 
Magisterium of the Church under the leadership of Pope St. Pius X. This holy 
pope made the liturgical movement the cornerstone of his pontificate, calling 
attention to the centrality of the liturgy in the life of the Church, the 
importance of sacred chant, and the need of active participation by the lay 
faithful so as to deepen their life of prayer.

By the time of Pope Pius XII the groundwork for a true liturgical renewal had 
been laid. However, it was during his pontificate that the issues became more 
complex and the proponents of the liturgical movement began to take the 
liturgy in varying directions.


PART II:  WORLD WAR II TO VATICAN II

In recent decades we have witnessed mixed results of the liturgical movement—
some positive, some not so positive, some the result of a movement carried 
away by excesses.

Like most intellectual and spiritual movements in the history of the Church, 
the liturgical movement has indeed been subject to excesses. However, though 
many have viewed this as having begun with Vatican II, the liturgical 
movement was subject to excesses even before the opening of the Council.

During the period between the Second World War and Second Vatican Council, 
two chief examples of excess in the liturgical movement come to mind. First, 
there was an attack on private devotions. The liturgical movement had brought 
to men’s attention the great truth that the liturgy, as the public prayer of 
the Church and the worship of the whole Mystical Body of Christ, was vastly 
superior to any form of private prayer or devotion. Its proponents had also 
observed that certain popular devotions that had come to characterize the 
lives of Catholic faithful—the Rosary, devotion to the Sacred Heart, or 
adoration of the Blessed Sacrament to name a few—had grown up and developed 
in the measure that the life of the faithful had grown distant from the 
liturgy. As a consequence, some of those zealous for reform went to the 
extreme of rejecting private piety altogether and even attacked as being 
unliturgical these beautiful devotions which, in the minds of the faithful, 
had come to be identified with the Catholic spirit.

Second, there were other proponents of the liturgical movement who, enthused 
by their studies of ancient liturgies, sought to restore former practices 
without regard for their fittingness in present circumstances and 
contemptuous of the growth and development that had taken place over 
centuries.

For all this, neither the Church nor the liturgical movement was lacking in 
men of prudence. Such men always recognized the need for private piety if the 
faithful were to participate in the liturgy with a true interior spirit. They 
recognized that the Rosary had developed as a substitute for the Psalter, 
that devotion to the Sacred Heart was nothing other than one aspect of the 
piety of the Mass separated from the ritual of the Mass, that adoration of 
the Blessed Sacrament grew up when reception of Holy Communion became less 
frequent. They also recognized that rejecting these devotions was in no way 
going to lead the faithful to a more liturgical based piety. Since the 
faithful could draw fruit from such devotions, it was necessary to highlight 
the connection these devotions had to the liturgy and to use them as certain 
paths leading back into the liturgy, which is the source and summit of 
Catholic worship. Nor did these men give way to the seduction of 
‘antiquarianism’, but saw instead that priority needed to be given to a 
deeper understanding and more adequate practice of the liturgy received from 
our forefathers, integrating any needed changes with caution and with 
approval by ecclesiastical authority.

Shortly after World War II, Pope Pius XII gave an official voice to these 
counsels of prudence when he intervened with his great encyclical “Mediator 
Dei”, whereby he sought to reign in the excesses while encouraging a true and 
solid liturgical movement, laying the basis himself by means of solid 
doctrinal teaching. He writes, “While We derive no little satisfaction from 
the wholesome results of the movement... duty obliges Us to give serious 
attention to this ‘revival’ as it is advocated in some quarters and to take 
proper steps to preserve it at the outset from excess or outright perversion” 
(Mediator Dei 7). But he also warns, “Let not the apathetic or half-hearted 
imagine that We agree with them when We reprove the erring and restrain the 
overbold. No more must the imprudent think that We are commending them when 
we correct the faults of those who are negligent and sluggish” (Mediator Dei 
10).

For the most part the emphasis of the encyclical was conservative. It warned 
against theories that exaggerated the importance of the external element of 
the liturgy to the detriment of a true interior participation. It warned 
against theories that emphasized the objective character of liturgical piety 
to the detriment of the ‘subjective’, personal piety. It emphasized that, 
while the liturgy is subject to growth and development, the introduction of 
new practices was dependent entirely on the authority and regulation of the 
Holy See, warning against an indiscriminate ‘antiquarianism’ that sought a 
return to ancient practices that would ignore modern circumstances and reject 
the influence of the Holy Spirit in the development of the liturgy in the 
Church. Though conservative in nature, the encyclical gave a great impulse to 
the liturgical movement, providing a solid definition of the liturgy that 
made evident its great importance for the life of the Church. Pius XII wrote:

“The sacred liturgy is the public worship which our Redeemer as Head of the 
Church renders to the Father as well as the worship which the community of 
the faithful renders to its Founder, and through Him to the Heavenly Father. 
It is, in short, the worship rendered by the Mystical Body of Christ in the 
entirety of its Head and members” (20).

The Holy Father also furnished a thorough explanation of the manner in which 
the faithful can offer the sacrifice ‘with the priest’, and should offer 
themselves with the sacrifice. Furthermore, in order to promote this interior 
union with the sacrifice of the Mass, he encouraged active participation, 
whether by means of the ‘Dialogue Mass’, the singing of suitable hymns, or by 
chanting the responses in the High Mass.

The reign of Pope Pius XII also saw the introduction of significant reforms 
in the liturgy: a new Latin translation of the Psalter, a reduction of the 
Eucharistic fast to three hours, a revision of the Holy Week liturgy, and a 
simplification of the rubrics for the Divine Office.

[In hindsight it appears that these "reforms," shepherded by the same 
Hannibal Bugnini who was the Chief Architect of the Novus Ordo Missae, were 
actually the first volleys of the Modernistic New Order and were slipped by 
Pius XII.  Except for the new Latin translation of the Psalter, which was to 
be used only in the recitation (not chanting) of the Divine Office by priests 
in private -- and was entirely optional in lieu of St. Jerome's traditional 
Vulgate Psalter, all of these changes were engineered by Bugnini in the last 
years of Pius XII's papacy, while the pope was gravely ill.  In fact, the 
most objectionable "reform," that of changing the rites of Holy Week in the 
Missale Romanum, was done even without the pope's signature and was commonly 
ignored in France, Italy, and many other countries of Europe.  --TRADITIO]

During this period after World War II three influences tended to shape a 
concrete program of reform that was beginning to characterize the liturgical 
movement: a desire to foster the active participation of the lay faithful, 
the rise of the ecumenical movement, and an increased emphasis on biblical 
studies.

Paradoxically this program of reform took on an appearance very similar to 
the liturgical reforms of the Enlightenment of the 18th Century. At that 
time, motivated by the rationalistic spirit of the age, many sought to empty 
the liturgy of mystery, thus making it more acceptable to the prejudices of 
human reason.

The liturgical movement, however, had been born from the revival of 
Benedictine monasticism in the 19th century, drawing its original inspiration 
from the example of the Middle Ages and nourished by the climate of 19th 
century Romanticism. Consequently, there had been a strong emphasis on the 
expression of the sacred in the liturgy and on the liturgy as a means of 
participating in the transcendent mystery of God.

More that a half a century later, however, after World War II, the practical 
reforms that were promoted by this movement seemed very like the practices 
promoted by the would-be reformers at the time of the rationalistic age of 
Enlightenment.

When the proponents of the liturgical movement began talking about such 
things as an increased use of the vernacular, Mass facing the people, and a 
single altar in the church which would be kept completely bare when Mass was 
not being celebrated, they were advocating the very things that had been 
advocated by the Enlightenment reformers. However, Dom Guéranger, universally 
hailed as the founder of the liturgical movement, had labored against these 
very things because he had seen the cold and sterile piety produced by the 
work of these reformers.

Still, some proponents of the liturgical movement sought to justify their 
reforms. They argued that while the Enlightenment reformers favored similar 
reforms, they favored them for very different reasons. The motivations of the 
Enlightenment reformers, they said, were democratic and rationalistic, 
opposed to both symbolism and mystery. The motivations of the liturgical 
reformers after World War II were supposed to have been rooted in a renewed 
understanding of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ and of the liturgy 
as an extension of Christ’s function as Mediator. They argued that the same 
practices promoted in the 18th century from rationalistic motives had a very 
different significance seen from the standpoint of the ‘mystery theology’ of 
the 20th century.

There was, however, a resurgence of new democratizing and rationalizing 
influences in the post-war period. New biblical studies had become so fixed 
upon the literal sense of Scripture that the mystical sense, so vital for the 
use of Scripture in the liturgy, began to be disregarded or even rejected 
outright. Historical-critical studies had cast a rationalistic chill over 
anything regarded as ‘legendary’ and led to embarrassment with the 
miraculous. Ecumenism led to a desire to minimize the differences between 
Catholic and Protestant worship. This served as a pretext for abandoning the 
medieval inspiration that so characterized the liturgical movement of the 
19th century and seeking a return to a supposedly purer, simpler, more 
ancient view of the liturgy.

Two other important influences should be mentioned here. The liturgical 
movement had grown up in the stately surroundings of the monasteries of 
France, Germany, and Belgium, but the experience of World War II had led many 
to identify the ‘real’ and the ‘authentic’ with the trappings of poverty and 
suffering that had so characterized the war and, in many places, the post-war 
period. A solemn liturgy seemed to them pretentious and false, removed as it 
was from the grim reality of people’s daily lives. Hence, we begin to see the 
construction of simple, barren churches, the stripping of all liturgical 
ornamentation, as well as the longing for smaller, less anonymous 
communities.

The other important influence came from the foreign missions. The liturgical 
movement had grown up in Europe, in countries that had a millennial tradition 
of Christianity. Even if those countries had abandoned that tradition, 
bringing Europeans to a deeper understanding of and participation in the 
traditional liturgy of the Church meant bringing them into a deeper contact 
with the roots of their own national cultures. Many involved in the foreign 
missions, however, whether in Asian countries possessing sophisticated 
cultures of great antiquity or in African countries possessing more primitive 
cultures, felt that imposing the traditional liturgy of the West upon these 
peoples was an act of violence, especially when seen in relation to the 
European political hegemony in these same regions. As the European nations 
unburdened themselves of their overseas colonies, the missionaries that were 
left behind felt embarrassed by anything that associated their work with the 
‘colonial oppressors’. Hence, the hue and cry of ‘inculturation’ was raised, 
accompanied by its ideal of a liturgy rooted in the customs and manners of 
the native peoples rather than in the traditions of a once-Christian Europe.

All this while, in countless parishes in Europe and America (North and South) 
the celebration of Mass, devotional practice, parish events, went on pretty 
much in the manner they had in previous generations, and those practices were 
identified with the millennial tradition of the Church. If anything of what 
was going on elsewhere came to their ears, it could only have been a cause 
for shock and scandal.

It is important to see, however, that between World War II and Vatican II the 
liturgical movement had become something quite varied and diverse, subject to 
many influences. From those who simply continued the sort of work that had 
been done earlier by promoting Gregorian chant, sung Mass and Vespers, to 
those who engaged in novel experiments, heedless of the prohibitions of the 
Holy See, there were myriads of different positions and, no doubt, any one 
proponent of the liturgical movement was subject to his own peculiar 
combination of influences. Many supported the same program of reform but for 
different reasons. Many who were anxious to see changes take place would 
later be shocked when they saw what had actually happened.


PART III:  VATICAN II AND ITS AFTERMATH

Up to the opening of the Second Vatican Council, many had arduously worked to 
continue the efforts made by Pope Pius X in the liturgical movement.

Much of the effort [of the Liturgical Modernists] had been directed toward 
bringing about the active participation in the holy mysteries, whereby the 
faithful are able to imbibe the true Christian spirit as from its foremost 
and indispensable font.  By the opening of Vatican II, however, these efforts 
had met with little success. When one attended Mass in large parish Church on 
any typical Sunday, one was likely to find not a robust liturgy with the 
faithful joining in chanting the Kyrie, but rather a silent congregation with 
many of the faithful practicing private devotions as the priest quietly went 
through the ceremonies of the Mass from a distant altar.

[It is a common misconception that Pope St. Pius advocated "active 
participation" of the congregation in the Sacred Liturgy.  Actually, he used 
the Latin term, "participatio actuosa."  Although no English translation can 
capture the distinction clearly indicated in the Latin, what the pope was 
describing was a kind of "actuated" participation, that is, an internalized 
understanding and participation, not an "active" participation of external 
words and movements.]

In part one of this series on the history of the liturgical movement, we saw 
that the movement was born with a revival of Benedictine monasticism in the 
early 19th century. From the very beginnings of this movement, there had been 
a strong emphasis placed on both the expression of the sacred in the liturgy 
and on the liturgy as a means of participating in the transcendent mystery of 
God.

In part two we saw that, in the period between World War II and Vatican II, 
the liturgical movement had become something quite varied and diverse, 
subject to many influences from those who simply continued the sort of work 
that had been done earlier by promoting the Gregorian chant, sung Mass and 
Vespers, to those who engaged in novel experiments, heedless of the 
prohibitions of the Holy See. Many different parties supported the same 
program of reform but for different reasons.  In this article we shall 
consider the liturgical movement during the time of Vatican II....


The Document on the Liturgy

The first part of the Council's document sets the tone for the remaining 
description of the nature of the liturgy and its importance for the Church. 
There the liturgy is described as an extension of Christ's redemptive work,
given to His Bride, the Church. The section concludes with a definition of 
the liturgy: The liturgy, then, is rightly seen as an exercise of the 
priestly office of Jesus Christ. It involves the presentation of man's 
sanctification under the guise of signs perceptible by the senses and its 
accomplishment in ways appropriate to each of these signs. In it full public 
worship is performed by the Mystical Body of Christ, that is, by the Head and 
Members (SC 7). The document continues, [The liturgy is] a foretaste of that 
heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the Holy City of Jerusalem towards 
which we journey as pilgrims (SC 8). The relation that the liturgy has to all 
the life and activity of the Church is then described in this way: the 
liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; it 
is also the font from which all her power flows (SC 10).

Continuing on the path opened up by St. Pius X, the document speaks of active 
participation as the aim to be considered before all else in the restoration 
and promotion of the sacred liturgy. In this section there occurs a famous 
proclamation, which perhaps some have overemphasized and others 
misunderstood: Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful should 
be led to that full, conscious, and active participation in the
liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy, 
and to which the Christian people, a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy 
nation, a redeemed people have a right and obligation by reason of
their baptism. The accomplishment of this goal requires, in the first place, 
adequate liturgical instruction, first of the clergy, then of the whole body 
of the faithful.

The final section of the first chapter is, perhaps, the pivotal section of 
the entire document. There the document descends from theory [of the 
Liturgical Modernists] to practice. It sets forth, as an overarching 
principle, the distinction between the elements of the liturgy which are 
divinely instituted and unchangeable and the elements which ought to be 
changed if they have suffered from the intrusion of anything out of harmony 
with the inner nature of the liturgy or have become less suitable.  Finally, 
it sets forth as a goal a greater clarity of expression in liturgical texts 
and rites. There follows a lengthy treatment of concrete norms. The actual 
liturgical reforms promulgated by the [Conciliar] Holy See in the wake of the 
Council could be traced back, in one way or another, to this section of the 
document. For example, the new lectionary for Mass was an implementation of 
one of the norms taken from the educative and pastoral nature of the liturgy, 
namely, that in order to make more clear the intimate connection between word 
and rite in sacred celebrations a more ample, more varied, and more suitable 
reading from Sacred Scripture should be restored (35,1). The remainder of the 
document provides guidelines for the reform of particular areas of the 
liturgy: The Mass, other sacraments and sacramentals, the Divine Office, the 
liturgical year, sacred music, and sacred arts and furnishings.


What Went Wrong?

...We are all too familiar with the lamentable confusion that has afflicted 
the Church's liturgy since the Council. We are left wondering what went wrong 
and why the hopes of the Council were not realized. How did we get from the 
triumph of the liturgical movement at the Council to the serious problems 
that followed in its wake? This question has led some to ask if the Council 
itself was not to blame for all this.

Three things are worth considering here: the work of the Consilium for the 
Implementation of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy; the growing climate 
of rebellion and disobedience that was beginning to afflict the life
of the Church; and the Holy See's de facto loss of control over liturgical 
practice.

The Council had laid down norms according to which the liturgical books were 
to be revised; it had mandated that certain concrete changes be made (e.g. 
restoration of the prayer of the faithful at the celebration of Mass;
introduction of a rite for concelebration of Mass); it had provided for a 
limited use of the vernacular. Nevertheless, most of this needed to be put 
into practice by means of concrete legislation and the actual revision of the 
liturgical books. For this reason Pope Paul VI established early in 1964 a 
committee of Cardinals, assisted by experts in the liturgy, to carry out the 
revision of the liturgical books. This committee was called the Consilium for 
the Implementation of the Sacred Constitution on the Liturgy.

[This was the committee that was controlled by Hannibal Bugnini, the Chief 
Architect of the Novus Ordo.  Bugnini had already been on the preparatory 
committee since 1947 and had engineered the preliminary stages of the 
Liturgical Modernists' revolution that broke out at Vatican II.]

The reform envisioned by the Council foresaw a reform not just of the Mass, 
but also of the entire liturgy, the other sacraments and sacramentals, as 
well as the Divine Office. The Consilium had been given an unprecedented task 
and also given a rather vague power to pursue that task. The Council had laid 
down certain principles, but there is always the realm of prudential judgment 
when applying general principles to actual practice....  Excessive enthusiasm 
for the spirit of the Council or ideological motives ... influenced the work 
of members of the Consilium....

In many ways the Consilium represented the liturgical movement, in its 
current state of [Modernist] development, with its strengths and weaknesses, 
thrust into a position of power and authority. The liturgical movement, such 
as it was, had not sufficiently matured so as to be ready for such a position 
of leadership, nor did the large body of clergy and faithful have the 
understanding and prudence necessary to successfully bring about the major 
liturgical reform which the Consilium had mandated.

The second point to consider regarding the passage from the Council document 
to the actual liturgical reform is the growing climate of disobedience and 
rebellion that was afflicting the Church at the time. Already, while the 
Council was in session, major errors regarding the Blessed Sacrament, 
including denials of the Real Presence and transubstantiation, began 
spreading abroad to such an extent that Pope Paul VI found himself obliged to 
write a major encyclical letter, Mysterium Fidei, published in September of 
1965, for the purpose of correcting those errors. A little later, in 1968, 
before the Novus Ordo Missae was promulgated, the Holy Father¹s condemnation 
of artificial contraception in his famous encyclical Humanae Vitae was met 
with widespread and open rebellion. Many bishops' conferences of powerful 
nations throughout the world, for example, openly and officially dissented on 
the Holy Father¹s teaching. A decade earlier such a rebellion against the 
Papacy would have been unthinkable. Now it was becoming increasingly evident 
that the Holy Father could no longer simply give commands and expect 
Catholics, priests and even bishops, to obey. This encyclical marked a great 
parting of ways within the Church. By this time also, the great exodus from 
the priesthood and religious life was shaking the Church, as thousands of 
priests and religious abandoned their vocations, with or without seeking a 
proper dispensation.

Some question the prudence of having pushed ahead with the liturgical reform 
in the midst of such a climate of rebellion. This question, however, revolves 
around the much larger question, which we do not have time to go into here, 
of whether this wave of rebellion was the consequence of the Council, or was 
already in the offing, Council or no. Put in another way: Did the Council 
give rise to new problems, or did it merely allow already existing problems 
to manifest themselves?

A final factor to consider is that, because of the ongoing rebellion, the 
Holy See had de facto lost control over the liturgical life of the Church 
well before the promulgation of the New Mass....

Thus, the [Modernist] liturgical movement, which had already begun to show 
both its weakness and divisions before the Council, triumphed at the Council 
insofar as its basic doctrine about the nature and importance of the liturgy 
was adopted. This was a great good for the Church. Yet, as a result of a 
combination of factors, namely, the immaturity of the liturgical movement as 
it was thrust onto center stage, the growing climate of rebellion in the
Church, and the Holy See's de facto loss of control over the liturgy, the 
liturgical crisis of our own time was born.