Liturgy in the Twenty-First Century
edited by Alcuin Reid, Oremus, £16.99
‘The reform of the reform” – in other contexts the phrase could have an absurd ring to it, the sound of thinkers disappearing down a plughole of their own making. But when it comes to the liturgy, the stakes are genuinely high.
The Second Vatican Council document Sacrosanctum Concilium tells us that the liturgy is “the outstanding means whereby the faithful may express in their lives, and manifest to others, the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true Church”. Yet many of the faithful are faithful no more. The new liturgical practices that followed in the wake of Vatican II do not seem to have bound the people more closely to their Church. Something is not right.
This collection of papers, presented at the Sacra Liturgia conference held last year in New York and broadly advocating “the reform of the reform”, opens with Cardinal Raymond Burke’s essay on changes in the understanding of beauty. Along with truth and goodness, beauty was once seen as a “transcendental” – a fundamental quality of being which is found in God in its fullness and perfection, but which is discovered also “in all being coming forth from the hand of God in Creation”. Now, however, beauty has been “stripped” of its metaphysical meaning.
Indeed, we have reached a point, argues Cardinal Burke, where beauty is treated as “suspect”. The cloud of suspicion has made its way into the Church. One of the purposes of the Sacra Liturgia movement is to dispel this cloud, restoring beauty to its rightful place in the liturgy.
Yet might this not lead to true faith and Christian charity playing second fiddle to mere aestheticism? Several contributors meet this line of argument head-on, most memorably perhaps when Abbot Philip Anderson invokes Romano Guardini, who wrote that the liturgy “has something in it reminiscent of the stars, of their eternally and even fixed course, of their inflexible order, of their profound silence, and of the infinite space in which they are poised”, while showing how the “profound contemplative beauty of the liturgical prayer is the best stimulus for courageous action on the part of those who live in the world”.
Nevertheless, eloquent, sincere appeals from thoughtful, hard-working scholars, bishops and priests may not be enough to convince all to abandon their suspicion of where Sacra Liturgia might lead. Would “the reform of the reform” not produce a haughty Church, lurching back to the esoteric, sumptuous trappings of a time when its authority and repute among the faithful were dangerously unquestionable?
It helps, then, that Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco can quote Dorothy Day on the subject of the city’s St Mary’s Cathedral: “There are many kinds of hunger. There is a hunger for bread, and we must give people food. But there is also a hunger for beauty and there are very few beautiful places that the poor can get into. Here is a place of transcendent beauty and it is as accessible to the homeless in the Tenderloin as it is to the mayor of San Francisco.”
Liturgy in the Twenty-First Century mixes methodical, dispassionate scholarship, practical suggestions and satisfyingly philosophical discourse. A huge amount of ground is covered: music, Holy Week, the lectionary and much else.
When recently reviewing the Companion to Liturgy, from the same editor and publisher, in these pages, Fr Hugh Somerville-Knapman wrote of a book presenting views “in a scholarly yet accessible way, allowing a voice to contrary arguments”. Much the same could be said of this volume. Yes, there are one or two contributions that might be called acerbic or trenchant (such as Fr Richard Cipolla’s impassioned plea for seeing the Mass as a sacrifice, with all this implies for the role and identity of priests). But there is little in the way of bitter polemic or outright intransigence.
Occasionally, the air circulating in these pages starts to feel a bit rarefied for the general reader. But I recommend gulping it down and carrying on. The rewards are worth it. The very wise-seeming Abbot Anderson writes of “finding that arduous middle path between two extremes, which allows the Church to put out into the deep of the postmodern world and to flourish”.
Hearteningly, the collection concludes on an entirely humble note with a short homily in which Fr Jordan Kelly addresses a new priest of 10 days saying one of his first Masses: “It is easy to be humble and filled with gratitude when one celebrates in such splendour: every rubric perfect; angelic music; splendid vesture; a Church full of people filled with zeal and faith. But your humility will be every greater, your gratitude more complete, your conformity to our Eternal High Priest more perfect, when the vesture is moderately beautiful, the cantor is struggling to find pitch, and the people are numbed from the realities of work and family. In fact, that celebration may have more to do with your eternal salvation than this.”
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