Renewing the liturgy-again

...The truth is rather that the LC brought about a reconfiguring of the liturgy's symbolic dimension, thereby creating a shift in the way the "mystery" was to be perceived...

...2. The concept of participation in its theological and ascetic-al dimensions, and how this is intrinsically linked to the sacrificial character of the liturgy in general and the Eucharist in particular (par...

...That is why paragraph 59, as we noted, refuses to separate the sanctifying action of the sacraments from their social dimensions, from the upbuilding of the Body of Christ...

...30) as effective signs of this inner mystery...

...The result was the juxtaposition in the document of irreconcilable demands...

...It is in the structured liturgical assembly that the trinitarian economy of salvation is most visibly worked out...

...This puts the responsibility on the parish to become an adequate sign of the presence of God-in-Christ both for itself and for the larger society...

...the editors invited Mark Searle to reflect on the document, to assess our failures and achievements in implementing it, and to point to areas where continuing renewal is needed...

...So also with the return of the prayer of the People of God to their own languages...

...It was because the church's awareness of Christ's presence in the liturgy had become so narrowed, and because the church wished to restore the symbolic plenitude of such sacramental signs as the assembly, the Word, the altar, and the ministries, that the LC ordered the rites and language of the Mass to be revised...

...3:27...

...To this end, the movement would have to work particularly closely with four broad groups of people: Parish ministers: not only to improve their liturgical skills, but to help them reflect on how the liturgy might serve as the "source and summit" of all parish functions and ministries...

...3. The concept of "sacrament" in all its ramifications, but especially as it relates to the sign-value of the faithful as co-constituents of the "wondrous sacrament" deriving from the passion of Christ and anticipating the final union of all things in Christ...

...In any case, if it was a major weakness in the reform that it was not adequately prepared from below, then it must be at the grassroots level that the renewal of the liturgy must begin again...

...14-20) mandated such a program, and it provided a biblical-theological rationale along with its directives for reform...

...More serious, its commitment to continuity was not always accompanied by any adequate discrimination of the means by which continuity should be assured...

...The fuller implication of this approach to the church in the Liturgy Constitution would later be worked out in Lumen gentium (the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), but not until the preparatory commission's draft of a constitution on the church had been rejected by the council as incompatible with the perspectives first adopted in Sacrosanctum concilium...

...Even at the main Mass, a certain symbolic minimalism seems to reign...

...In light of the experience of these past twenty years or more of implementing the LC, and especially in view of the present climate in Rome, it is unlikely that any new impetus toward breaking out of our present liturgical stalemate is going to come from above...

...5. What Guardini called "the liturgical act," or the pragmatics of an active participation that is also contemplative...

...Neither the worship of God nor sanctifying participation in the divine life occurs outside history, or without reference to it, as it unfolds, indivisibly secular and sacred, in the interminable hubbub of the human race...

...Twenty-five years after its promulgation, Sacro-sanctum concilium, like many historic documents, is often cited but seldom studied...

...The time has come, surely, to relaunch the liturgical movement...

...There was also the expectation that the reformed rites, which were to be "within the people's powers of comprehension and should normally not require much explanation" (par...

...One complaint commonly lodged against the LC, and even more commonly against those responsible for implementing it, is that we have been left with a symbolically impoverished liturgy, bereft of the sense of mystery...

...This same sense of the concreteness of the church as a communion of churches, each gathering into one the faithful of its own region and culture, also underlay two other major innovations in the Liturgy Constitution: (1) the formal embrace of the principle of cultural adaptation (and hence of cultural pluralism within the Roman communion) and (2) the first move to establish episcopal conferences...

...In Michel's words: "If the first purpose of the liturgical movement is to lead the faithful into a more intimate participation in the liturgy of the church, then the further objective must be that of getting the liturgical spirit to radiate forth from the altar of Christ into every aspect of the daily life of the Christian...

...By this, Guardini meant recovering in the church at large a capacity for what he called "the liturgical act" or "liturgical-symbolic" actions: a capacity for uttering and understanding words and gestures in such a way as to recognize them as corporal expressions of spiritual realities...

...One wishes the constitution had said a little more on the role of the Spirit in the liturgy and the life of the church...

...Any revival of the liturgical movement must seek to reopen the dialogue with systematic theology...

...Few even raised the question directly at the time...

...These were later endorsed by Lumen gentium, but were first suggested here in the form of "competent territorial bodies of bishops, legitimately established" (par...

...Fortunately, the experience of the Rite for the Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) is beginning to bring home to us what anyone familiar with patristic baptismal catechesis should have known from the start, namely, that understanding the liturgy is not a matter of simplified rites and intelligible explanations, but of conversion sustained by evangelization, catechesis, and ongoing enrichment in our grasp of the core mysteries of our religion: God, Trinity, creation, salvation...

...Unfortunately, while Lumen gentium and Dei verbum both contributed mightily to developing the theology of the church and of the sacramental economy, Gaudium et spes failed even to mention the church's sacramental and liturgical life...

...Despite popular rhetoric about the people's "ownership" of the liturgy (an unfortunate term), and despite the LC's emphasis on the liturgy as the action of the whole assembly, the "new" liturgy remains in many ways as clerical as the old...

...RISKY BUSINESS Time has shown what an enormously risky undertaking it was to attempt a wholesale reform of the church's life of worship...

...22,2...

...In celebrating this twenty-fifth anniversary...

...Since the council, theology has gone off in a multitude of directions with little apparent connection to the worship life of the church, while liturgical studies have, with a few exceptions, become theologically impoverished...

...many essential aspects of the renewed liturgy elude our practice and the hope of the council: "In order that the sacred liturgy may produce its full effect, it is necessary that the faithful come to it with proper dispositions, that their thoughts match their words, and that they cooperate with divine grace lest they receive it in vain...

...And of that inner mystery the gathered church itself is the outward sign, the basic sacrament of which all sacramental rites are articulations...

...EFFECTIVE SIGNS The council's failure to underline this connection had the effect of eroding one significant goal of the liturgical reform: the whole notion of participation, which needed, and still needs, a much deeper and broader application...

...A couple of months after the promulgation of the LC, he wrote his famous open letter to the German liturgical congress at Mainz in 1964:' 'The question is whether the wonderful opportunities now open to the liturgy will achieve their full realization...

...and above all, to recognize in them the reality of Christ's presence among and to his people...

...GOALS & LIMITS Any serious assessment of the LC will have to judge its effectiveness against the goals that it set for itself...

...Not that these things of themselves constitute the "active participation" the council had in mind, but that they are intended to "promote" it (par...

...The primary task of a new liturgical movement would be the same as that of the old movement: to improve the quality of our common prayer, especially in parishes, so that our liturgies expose us to the transforming fire...

...Many rejoiced at joining in a Mass said in their own language by a priest whose face and gestures they could clearly sec...

...It is for this reason that the council encouraged all the faithful "to take part by means of acclamations, responses, psalmody, antiphons, and songs, as well as by actions, gestures, and bodily attitudes...

...Even now, the fundamental problems of the reform are still with us, and the renewal that the council hoped for remains elusive...

...In other words, liturgical celebration is a participation in the very life and activity of the triune God, representing and accomplishing the outreach of God toward creation and return of creation to God in Christ by the action of the Holy Spirit...

...It left the way open for the often scurrilous attacks not only on the reformed rites but on the members of the Concilium and on Paul VI himself...

...That is unfortunate, for the Liturgy Constitution (LC) not merely authorizes our present practices...

...It is probably not unfair to say that, despite the enormous educational effort that accompanied the "new liturgy," it rarely achieved the depth which Guardini warned was necessary: that of relearning a forgotten way of doing things and recapturing lost attitudes...

...THE LOCAL CHURCH It is also significant that the church is itself redefined in terms of its concrete realizations in local assemblies of the faithful: "The church most fully reveals herself when a full complement of God's holy people, united in prayer and in a common liturgical service (especially the Eucharist) exercise a thorough and active participation at the very altar where the bishop presides in the company of his priests and other assistants" (par.41...

...The limitations of carrying out the letter of the reform without much sense -of its spirit are evident in people's responses to questions about the purpose of the parish, the priorities of parish life, and their sense of what the church is...

...it also supplies a corrective for most of what is still wrong with our liturgy...

...Even so...

...But these groups would have to agree very firmly on the agenda of such a movement and act in concert to promote it...

...Paragraph 114 directs that the heritage of "sacred music" be "preserved and fostered," even though most of this music could not meet the constitution's own criteria (including those laid down in the same paragraph...

...The liturgical movement, however, despite the tireless efforts of Virgil Michel and his successors in this country, had only limited impact in the English-speaking world...

...This would be the starting point for developing a "liturgical spirituality" capable of regenerating such widely divergent concerns as contemplative prayer, ecology, married life, and peace and justice issues...

...THE EDITORS MARK SEARLE, an associate professor of liturgy at the University cf Notre Dame, is currently on sabbatical in the Netherlands...

...When parishioners were asked about their image of the church, only one in four responded in terms of the sort of organic union among the faithful which the new liturgy was designed to promote...

...Any critical function the liturgy might play vis-a-vis the life of the church (and vice-versa) is overlooked...

...Finally, a new liturgical movement would have to make a' serious effort to interact with the theological community...

...the successful encouragement of more frequent Communion...

...A new liturgical movement cannot avoid such issues as they arise in liturgical practice...

...Thus, liturgical participation is more than just "joining in": it is first and foremost a conscious and willed participation in the acting out of the relationship of Christ to the Father, expressed in worship of God and the sanctification of human beings, both of which are inseparable dimensions of the Paschal mystery of self-sacrificial submission to the will of God...

...The celebration of the sacraments calls the community to recognize and live out the sacramentality of all aspects of its life...

...On the surface, it is a curious mix of broad vision and almost picayune detail (such as the directive removing the canonical "Hour" of Prime from the Divine Office...

...A new liturgical movement would have to look for leadership to bodies such as the Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions, the Liturgical Conference, the National Pastoral Musicians, as well as to the various liturgical centers around the country, including the Bishops' Committee on the Liturgy and the International Commission on the English Liturgy...

...Some have criticized the new lection-ary's use of the Hebrew Scriptures and the particular editing of some of the passages selected, but the provision of such a vastly expanded repertoire of biblical readings, and the decision to have them proclaimed in the vernacular, have had a major and irreversible impact on Catholic life...

...A similar lack of appreciation for the "givenness" of the liturgy as the work of Christ at the heart of the church's life is evident in the neglect of liturgy shown by postconciliar renewal movements...

...In the Mass, for example, practices such as stationing the presider with his back to the assembly, reciting the Canon in silence, performing multiple signs of the cross, and ending it all with the "Last Gospel" (to name just a few) have admittedly been done away with...

...This lack of preparation manifested itself not so much in opposition to the changes-never very extensive in this country-as in failures of implementation...

...GAINS & LOSSES Admittedly, the constitution was from the start a very uneven document...

...The reform of the liturgy, especially the way in which Mass is celebrated, touched die lives of ordinary Catholics in the most concrete and far-reaching way...

...That was why, at its best, the liturgical movement was also an ascetical movement, a return to the sources of the common spiritual life...

...In general, liturgical practice reveals a widespread failure to grasp the theological import of the concept of participation...

...Gospel processions are virtually unknown...

...This omission meant that a sense of the intrinsic link between liturgy and social action, so characteristic of the American liturgical movement, was largely lost in the post-conciliar period...

...Much of the music selected for singing at Mass appears to be chosen because it is singable rather than because it is suited to its liturgical function...

...All who are involved in promoting what might be broadly called the "spiritual life" at a level beyond the parish through retreats and missions, renewal movements, prayer workshops, publications, etc...

...It is hard to say, however, exactly what these usages had symbolized, what spiritual meaning they had conveyed: mystification, perhaps, but not mystery...

...After twenty-five years, the reform, though still incomplete, is now the norm...

...Consequently, as liturgical reforms were introduced, there was a great deal of pulpit rhetoric about "building community," but too little appreciation of the fact that the community (or, better, "communion") is something already given in baptism...

...The profound spiritual meaning of liturgical participation was overshadowed by the problem of how to get everybody to join in the singing...

...The opening paragraph of the LC suggests that to vote for reform was to take a practical step toward realizing the overall purpose of Vatican II, the deepening and broadening of the Christian sense of a collective identity and mission...

...One of the strengths of the old liturgical movement was its close association with the best systematic theology of its time in the Roman Catholic church...

...Similarly, about the same number thought that celebrating the liturgy was the most important thing their parish did...

...These inconsistencies in the constitution created great practical difficulties for those entrusted with the work of revising the liturgy...

...Research into the liturgical life of American parishes, such as that of the Notre Dame Study of Catholic Parish Life, confirms the impression that the liturgical life of the American church is pretty much in the doldrums...

...Indeed, the freedom of choice built into the revised Ordo missae has meant that congregations have experienced an increase in the idiosyncrasies of the presider and whoever else may be in position to impose their personal tastes on the style of celebration...

...Through its reforms the LC set out to create rituals that would recover the real presence of Christ in the Word and in the assembly itself, alongside the established sacramentality of the ordained priest and the eucharistic species (par...

...If the new liturgy could not presuppose a conversion of mind and heart, it was hoped it might provoke one by calling Catholic Christians back to the basics of their common life in Christ...

...On Sunday] the faithful should gather together in one place so that, by hearing the Word of God and taking part in the Eucharist, they may call to mind the passion, the resurrection, the glorification of the Lord Jesus, and may thank God 'who has begotten us again, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead as a living hope' (1 Peter 1:3...

...So the new rites came into use in a church whose people were not attuned to them and whose buildings and music were designed on the basis of a different theology and a different conception of church...

...For one thing, there is hardly any serious theological issue which does not surface, in one way or another, in the liturgy: theological epistemology, God-language, theological anthropology, ecclesiology, salvation history, even the issues of critical theology, shaped as they are by particular cultural contexts...

...For better or worse, the present climate is not favorable to such undertakings...

...Similarly, the retrieval of the liturgical year from its previous domination by feasts of saints, minor and major, mythical or real, has redirected attention, especially on Sundays, to sustained reflection on more central religious truths...

...It is their duty also to ensure that the faithful take part knowingly, actively, and fruitfully...

...A minority continue to feel that essentials have been lost, although the rote and ritualistic performance of so many preconciliar Masses seems to have faded from memory...

...Whether targeted at the individual or working within the parish, they rarely advert to the liturgical life of the church, still less draw their inspiration from it...

...Of all the constitutions, decrees, and declarations of the council, The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy has had the most direct and dramatic impact on the life of the church...

...In other words, God is not worshiped except when people are drawn into the divine life, and neither worship nor sanctification is authentic unless the divine purpose for the reintegration of the human race is thereby furthered...

...the active engagement of the assembly in the rites, and the development of other ministries and functions alongside that of the presid-er-all must be counted as achievements of major significance in the life of the church...

...Those goals were precisely the same as the goals of the liturgical movement: not liturgical change as such, but the transformation of the faithful through conscious participation in the redemptive work of Christ represented in the sacred mysteries...

...The LC (par...

...It is this liturgically based vision of the church as a sacramental realization of the history of salvation-a church which is the whole body of the faithful before it is differentiated into roles and functions-that underlies the legislative sections of the LC...

...34), would speak for themselves...

...In approving the reform program outlined in the LC, the bishops were neither succumbing to pressure from "liturgists" nor merely engaging in a little aggiornamento...

...In retrospect, one wonders whether the problems of reception were taken seriously enough...

...In particular, religious education needs to be more closely related to the church's liturgical life, without subordinating the one to the other...

...While one can sympathize with the reluctance of candidates for the priesthood to be identified solely with sacramental-liturgical functions, narrowly conceived, it is to the ministry of Word and Sacrament that ordination calls them and for which they chiefly need to be prepared...

...Nonetheless, these basic theological perspectives found in the LC set the tone and provided direction for the other three "pillars" of Vatican II, the later constitutions on the church (Lumen gentium), on divine revelation (Dei verbum) and on the church in the world (Gaudium et spes...

...The directive that all distinctions of persons, other than those based on liturgical functions and sacred orders, be banished from the liturgy (par...

...In part, this may be the result of the very process of introducing changes which, despite the catechetical effort led by Paul VI himself, tended to focus popular attention on the practical aspects of liturgical change rather than on the mystery at the heart of the liturgical event...

...Most parishes make some effort with one of their Masses, but Saturday evening Masses and the other Sunday Masses are usually rather soulless affairs...

...the restoration of a genuine process of Christian initiation for adults culminating in the Easter sacraments...

...One who did was Romano Guardini...

...This covers the whole range of liturgical action- speaking and listening, singing and keeping silence, moving arid gesturing-but the issue of "ritual music" is particularly pressing...

...The task today, a quarter century after the promulgation of Sacrosanctum concilium, seems rather to be that of returning to the vision that prompted the reforms in the first place and taking it more closely to heart...

...As a result, we were ill-prepared for the reforms when they came...

...Much of what it first told us in 1963, a quarter century ago, is still not widely understood or fully implemented...

...Thus the "grammar" of the rite, and the texts and actions which it governs, were intended to rehearse the faithful in that mystery which is Christ among us...

...Instead the LC tends to speak in terms of already realized eschatology ("by way of foretaste we share in the heavenly liturgy") and thus to ignore the ethical imperatives implied in the gap experienced, both in liturgy and in life, between the "already" and the "not yet...

...These two visions meet in the figure of the contemporary church as itself a sacrament: a visible sign of the hidden presence and liberating action of God in human history...

...whether we shall be satisfied with just removing anomalies, taking new situations into account, giving better instructions on the meaning of ceremonies and liturgical vessels or whether we shall relearn a forgotten way of doing things and recapture lost attitudes...

...Here a new liturgical movement would need to supplement the LC with the social justice dimension promoted by Virgil Michel and others...

...32) was at least a start toward more clearly manifesting the sacramentality of the gathered people of God, even if it does fall short of St...

...Paragraph 36, for example, mandates the continued use of Latin but prepares the way for its passing...

...All who are involved in the work of ministerial formation, both for lay ministers and, as the council insisted, in seminaries...

...There are still a number of seminaries in this country whose provisions for the liturgical formation of their candidates are almost nonexistent, and virtually none where the study and practice of the liturgy play the kind of integrating role among the various theological disciplines envisaged by the Liturgy Constitution, paragraphs 16 and 17...

...Christ indeed always associates the church with himself in the truly great work of giving praise to God and of making people holy" (par...

...Needless to say, the hostility shown in certain quarters in Rome to both these developments has complicated episcopal leadership in liturgical matters, as it has in other areas of church life and discipline...

...And the same is true of parish assemblies, "for in a certain way they represent the visible church as it is established throughout the world" (par...

...A NEW LITURGICAL REFORM Clearly, we are far from realizing the hopes which the council placed in the liturgical renewal...

...To this end, the council made it clear-even in the somewhat ungainly shape of the document-that it was set on changing not only the way Catholics did the liturgy, but the way we thought about the liturgy, and thus the way we thought about ourselves as church...

...nevertheless, it is clear that the reform rests on a strongly trinitarian account of the economy of salvation...

...That already existing communion in Christ and the Spirit (a communion of life into which baptism admits us) is both the source of the possibility of any liturgical celebration and something which continually seeks adequate expression in the structures and lifestyle of the local community...

...5-8, especially...

...the making available of both bread and wine at Communion...

...If the preconciliar movement derived its energy from the recovery of patristic sources, perhaps the new liturgical movement will find its inspiration in the intersection between tradition and contemporary culture as this occurs in the experience of millions of American Christians every Sunday...

...And so, to a church largely conditioned by a fragmented view of the Christian life deriving from the catechism and from a devotional life that was, by and large, only peripherally related to the central mysteries of faith, the LC proposed a total vision of the sweep of salvation history and a richer, more integrated vision of the mystery of the church (par...

...The revised liturgy has proved highly susceptible to the individualism of our culture, rather than becoming, as the promoters of the liturgical movement had hoped, a bulwark against it...

...Another sign of neglect is that most writings on prayer manage to ignore the question of liturgical prayer and of the particular skills it requires...

...To launch the new liturgy in a church without such a process in place was indeed an enormous risk...

...Paul's ' 'For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ" (Gal...

...To succeed, the reform would have to be accompanied by an unparalleled educational effort, targeted especially at the clergy in whose hands the success of the reform clearly lay...

...Some sense of eschatological tension might have been helpful...

...There is need for a new praxis-based theology of the liturgy, a critical theology with the tools to interpret our own liturgies to us...

...It is thus, preeminently though not exclusively, in parish life that Vatican II's close identification of sanctification, worship, and social relations must be read: ' "The purpose of the sacraments is to sanctify people, to build up the Body of Christ, and finally, to give worship to God" (par...

...Nevertheless, whatever its weaknesses, and whatever the admitted shortcomings of some of the revised rites, the LC is responsible for the remarkable transformation of the church's worship life that we have witnessed in the past twenty-five years...

...There are, of course, a number of areas in which the revised rites could benefit from further consideration and, perhaps, revision...

...The same principles, further elaborated in these later documents, also provide the key to a proper understanding and implementation of the liturgical reform...

...Among the items for such an agenda, I would suggest a return to the basic principles of the Liturgy Constitution, and a development of the following themes in particular...

...Communion continues to be administered quite regularly from the tabernacle, for example, and Communion from the cup is not always available...

...4. The concept of the church in the world...

...There are few, surely, who would not rejoice at the resulting exposure of Catholic Christians to the Scriptures on a scale hitherto unknown...

...Pastors of souls must therefore realize that, when the liturgy is celebrated, more is required than the mere observance of the laws governing valid and licit celebration...

...HOPES ft VISIONS Why was it taken...

...For the work of the liturgy engages the church at the deepest level of its collective identity as Body of Christ, where it is already and irreversibly one and holy in the Spirit of Christ...

...It was not the intention of the revisers of the Ordo to undermine what Guardini called the "objectivity" of the rite, but that is largely what has happened...

...Pius XII had established a commission of cardinals to consider a general reform of the liturgy, but then thought better of it...