Summary
Introduction
1 Historical Steps of the Liturgical Movement
1.1 Pre-history of the Liturgical Movement
1.2 Beginning and Theology of the Liturgical Movement
1.3 Development of the Liturgical Movement
1.4 The Liturgical Movement in Brazil
2 The Contestation of the Liturgical Movement
3 New Phase of the Liturgical Movement
Conclusion
References
Introduction
With a brief look at the history of the liturgy, we realize that there have always been historical periods in which the liturgy was recognized with particular attention, so much so that it was characterized in the entire life of the Church and in all ages as the source and summit of Christian life.
In the early 20th century, a great movement of liturgical renewal gained strength in the Western Church. This is the so-called Liturgical Movement, which had its pre-history in the period of the Enlightenment (18th century) and the Catholic restoration (19th century). The Liturgical Movement was born out of the Church’s need to reclaim its identity. Suffering from the influence of modern individualism and rationalism, the Church’s worship, its forms of celebration, and its Theology had been relegated to a secondary plane.
After the storm of the French Revolution and the failure of Enlightenment ideas, the subsequent period, Romanticism, had a positive influence on the liturgy. Indeed, this period awakened a historical sense and led many clerics and ordinary faithful to research the origin and meaning of the gestures, vestments, rites, objects, and feasts in the liturgy.
The desire for renewal soon spread to the European churches. In Germany, theological studies were promoted by the professors of the University of Tübingen. The theological reflection of these professors, centered on the Church as the mystical body of Christ, was a precious preparation for the Liturgical Movement. Here we will essentially consider some characters, events, and problems that characterized the Liturgical Movement and the advent of Vatican II. We will dwell on the thought of some individuals whose theological reflection had important implications for the understanding and conception of the liturgy and continues to influence it today.
1 Historical Steps of the Liturgical Movement
1.1 Pre-history of the Liturgical Movement
In the 17th century, the philosophical-cultural movement called the Enlightenment was inaugurated, in clear opposition to the vision and affirmations of the Baroque, which was opulent and theatrical in its forms. The Enlightenment privileged the essential and sobriety: “In the Enlightenment view of the time, events are examined in the light of reason, without exceeding in feeling and fighting against ignorance and superstition” (CONTE, 1992, p. 61). The Enlightenment was against all forms of popular piety, seen by it as full of superstitions and fanaticism. It also severely criticized pompous celebrations and called for a more sober and essential liturgy, attentive to fostering the participation of the faithful. These requests were not always welcomed by the ecclesiastics, who, instead of renewal, preferred anything that did not disturb the tranquility of their lives.
During this period, a great interest in the study of ancient liturgical sources, which were denied by the Protestant reformers, was also born. Among the great figures, the Theatine cardinal Giuseppe Maria Tomasi (1649-1713), known as the “prince of the liturgy of the West,” deserves special attention. He wished to bring back to their “original form, the offices and rites in general of the Church” (cf. DI PIETRO, 1986, p. 11).
The Enlightenment also had a great influence on the liturgy. This movement triggered a process against Tridentine centrality and exaggerated Baroque externalization. Catholics demanded a simpler liturgy that would adapt to the reality of the people and be understood by them. The problem was that the clergy saw the liturgy more as a function of educating the people than as a celebration of the mystery of Christ, which compromised the work of reform. In any case, this movement can be seen as the beginning of the Liturgical Movement, which would culminate in the liturgical reform of Vatican II. And from there we will understand that the liturgy is the primordial source of Christian life.
However, as such, the Liturgical Movement can be considered a very recent phenomenon, both in its name and its content. The expression “Liturgical Movement” first appears in Germany, in the Vesperale of A. Schott, published in 1894, and was adopted to indicate a historical-cultural phenomenon typical of our time, although, throughout history, there have always been movements that successively led to a transformation of the liturgy. It is arduous, if not impossible, as with any movement, to give it a synthetic and complete definition. Perhaps the best is what we find in the words of Neunheuser:
a current that brings together vast circles in the search for a renewal, first of all, of their own spiritual life, allowing themselves to be touched by the force of the liturgy and, secondly, of the liturgy itself, starting from a deeper understanding of its spirit and the intimate laws that govern it. (NEUNHEUSER, 1992, p. 787)
From this, we can, to simplify, indicate two objectives of the Liturgical Movement: to make the liturgy the nourishment of Christian life; and to answer the question: “What is the liturgy?”.
One can speak of two instances: the historical-hermeneutical instance and the spiritual instance. Implicit in them, and to be considered, are the theological instance and the pastoral instance.
The Tridentine liturgical restoration resulted in a tenacious attachment to the forms inherited from a Middle Ages in which the liturgy had become a clerical matter, distant from the people. The theology of Christian worship, that of the Fathers, had been forgotten, and the event of salvation, operative in the liturgical action, remained completely absent.
1.2 Beginning and Theology of the Liturgical Movement
We do not intend to enter into the discussion of the periodization of the Liturgical Movement; for our scope, we accept the phases indicated by R. Guardini: “The Liturgical Movement first developed a restorative phase; then an academic one; finally, a realistic one” (cf. GRILLO, 2007, p. 31), but we are of the opinion that the Liturgical Movement continues.
The beginning of the 20th-century Liturgical Movement—prepared in monastic environments and, above all, in Solesmes with Abbot P. Guéranger—generally coincides with the so-called “event of Malines,” a conference held on September 23, 1909, during the Congrès National des Oeuvres Catholiques, by Lambert Beauduin (1873-1960), a Benedictine from the Mont César Abbey in Belgium, on “The True Prayer of the Church” (cf. BEAUDUIN, 2010). In this conference, L. Beauduin observed that religious individualism reigned in divine worship, that liturgical assemblies had lost their community character, and that the faithful sought God only in a devotional form, which is why the liturgy was becoming increasingly impoverished. Referring to a statement taken from the motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini, in which Pope Pius X described the liturgy as the most important and indispensable source of the Church, L. Beauduin stated that it was necessary to undertake a path of liturgical renewal, through which the community celebration of the liturgy would reacquire its profoundly ecclesial meaning. The Church as Corpus Christi mysticum, which L. Beauduin had placed in relation to liturgical renewal, would become the dominant theme in the ecclesiology of the first half of the 20th century (cf. GOPEGUI, 2008, p. 18-26).
The advent of the papacy of Pius X (August 4, 1903) signaled to the LM the beginning of a first official reception of the requests for renewal. With his first encyclical, the pope announced the program of his pontificate: Instaurare omnia in Christo, and, in the meantime, with different interventions, he began a first reform of the liturgy.
In the motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini, of November 22, 1903, the pope declared:
Since it is indeed our most ardent desire that the Christian spirit flourish again in every way and be maintained among all the faithful, it is necessary to provide, first of all, for the holiness and dignity of the temple, where the faithful gather precisely to draw that spirit from its primary and indispensable source: the active participation in the most holy mysteries and in the public and solemn prayer of the Church. (PIUS X, 1903, in the Introduction)
The action of Pius X in favor of the liturgy was considered a very important contribution to the challenge carried forward by the Liturgical Movement. The repeated interventions for the revision of liturgical songbooks, for the reform of the psalter, and on frequent communion, decisively guided the Church in the direction of a liturgy that began to recover its rightful place. Rousseau also affirms this:
To rebuild the community of the faithful around parish life; to awaken the fervor of the people through active participation in the holy sacrifice of the mass; to appreciate the richness of ecclesial feasts, the value of the sacraments, of the sacramentals; to give Christians a taste for the holy mysteries, restoring them in the atmosphere of the golden age of faith, drinking them in abundant gulps from all the channels of grace: this was, par excellence, his apostolate program. This phrase has often been quoted: It is not necessary to sing or pray during the mass, but we must sing and pray the mass, which already contains an attitude of liturgical piety that his subsequent acts only amplify. (ROUSSEAU, 1961, p. 236)
Few managed to grasp the theological content of the pope’s words on the active participation of the faithful in the public and solemn prayer of the Church. Perhaps even for Pius X, the issue was much more on the external than the theological plane. With his discourse, the pope sought to overcome the passive participation of the Christian people in liturgical celebrations. The fact remains that his statements, thanks to some theologians of the Liturgical Movement of the time, had a notable repercussion on the life of the Church.
Precisely from the statements of Pius X, the Liturgical Movement—which was inserted into a renewed vision of the Church carried forward by some theologians, among whom especially J. A. Möhler—proposed essentially three objectives: 1) to favor and increase the active participation of the faithful in the liturgy; 2) to revalue sacred art; 3) to rediscover the theological vision of the liturgy and its pastoral dimension.
The liturgy had to free itself from the juridical image, overcome the historicist phase to reach a theological basis on which pastoral-type reforms were grafted. Therefore, a new vision of the Church characterized the beginnings of the Liturgical Movement. The whole climate of political, philosophical, theological, and historical-cultural transformation that was created between the period of Romanticism and the Enlightenment helped Catholic laity to acquire a greater awareness of their belonging to the Church.
That historical, cultural, and religious situation that had created and spread the image of the Church as a juridically perfect society was already outdated. It was the Liturgical Movement, along with the flourishing of studies on the Church Fathers, that contributed decisively and profoundly to rediscovering images, models, and interpretations of the Church to which, until that moment, no attention had been given. With the underlying conviction that the divorce between the people and the Church came mainly from disaffection with the liturgy, P. Parsch and his collaborator J. Casper dedicated themselves to promoting the Volksliturgie in parishes frequented by intellectuals and the general public. Their work would later be continued by the Jesuits H. Rahner and J. A. Jungmann, through the so-called kerygmatic theology. In particular, Jungmann, with the rediscovery of the centrality of the paschal mystery, would concentrate his reflection on the kerygmatic character of the liturgy, combined with a conception of the Church as plebs sancta, in which the idea of the Church as a mystical body is led in the direction of a strongly communal and Eucharistic ecclesiology (cf. PAIANO, 1993, p. 72).
The Liturgical Movement presented to the people of its time
Not a new face of the Church, but rather a face that had long remained in the shadows; in effect, it sought to bring them as close as possible to what the Church was in its deepest nature, that is, to its sacramental being and its liturgical celebrations, while teaching them that the Church is the “mystical body” of Christ, that is, the mystery of Christ who prolongs his human existence. And of this new ecclesial community rediscovered in the circunstantes (bystanders), who are precisely the participants in the celebration, the central point is the altar (NEUNHEUSER, 1987, p. 22).
Romano Guardini understood the relationship between the Liturgical Movement and the Church, describing the former as a very vigorous current of the ecclesial movement, going so far as to state that it was “the ecclesial movement on its contemplative side. There the Church is inserted as a religious reality into the life of prayer. Personal life will become part of ecclesial life” (GUARDINI, 1989, p. 39). The vital interpenetration between the Church and liturgy is emblematically highlighted in this way: “the liturgy is the redemptive and prayerful creation, because it is the praying Church” (GUARDINI, 1989, p. 39).
This new order of ideas was increasingly asserted, especially in Belgium, thanks to the work of L. Beauduin who, together with the monks of the Mont César monastery, promoted the famous Semaines et conférences liturgiques, with the emergence of major liturgical journals. Among the many, we particularly recall the journal Les questions liturgiques, of which Beauduin was the founder, and which very quickly became Les questions liturgiques et paroissiales.
The program of liturgical restoration of Pope Pius X became, to some extent, the program of Dom L. Beauduin. He understood that for the sanctification of the people of God, it was necessary to start with an adequate formation of the clergy who, in turn, would work pastorally in the parishes, the place where the people of God are gathered and organized (cf. BEAUDUIN, 1914).
In the introduction to the collection of L. Beauduin’s works, published on the occasion of his 80th birthday, three fundamental merits of the Belgian Benedictine monk’s work were mentioned: having initiated the Liturgical Movement thanks to the richness of the initiatives he promoted; having provided a program and a doctrine to the same movement, which demonstrated his commitment to ensuring that the activities developed could have an impact on the properly pastoral ground; his interest in ecclesiology along with a great sensitivity and ecumenical openness, resulting from an intense theological reflection on the liturgy.
For Beauduin the liturgy is the worship of the Church
The entire innovative force of this simple definition lies in the word “church,” which specifies in a formally Christian sense the “worship.” This, in effect, receives from the “church” its “public” and “community” character, not, however, in such a way as to make Christian worship similar to any other worship, coming from any “society” that would establish it by law, but rather, in the sense that the “church,” being the continuation of Christ in the world, exercises that very special and perfect worship that Christ gave to the Father in his earthly life. The worship of the church is, therefore, first and foremost, Christian worship in an eminent sense, because in it is expressed the proper nature of the church, which is a community visibly gathered around Christ. (MARSILI, 1992, p. 640)
In Beauduin’s definition of liturgy, ecclesiality stands out as the dominant aspect of the liturgy. It is liturgy, therefore, everything and only that which the Church recognizes as its own in acts of worship, because the Church is the continuation of Christ. In fact, the unique and universal subject of the Church’s worship is the risen and glorious Christ. It is He who exercises our worship and fulfills here on earth our entire liturgy. And it is precisely by virtue of this active presence of Christ in history, through his Church, that the liturgy can be defined as the exercise of the priesthood of Christ, a moment by which He constitutes us into his community and transforms us into his mystical body. This priesthood
a) is personal, and this means that it is the personal priesthood of Christ that acts through those who are his ministers by virtue of a sacrament; b) is collective (we would say “communitarian”) as Christ, gathering in himself all redeemed humanity, exercises “a collective and solidary priestly action, for the benefit and with the profit of all his community”; c) is hierarchical, that is, although it is “Christ himself who exercises his priesthood here on earth,” nevertheless, wanting to make it visible, he chooses for himself “ministers, instruments that act in his name and with his power, and this is the Catholic priesthood, the sacramental transmission of the unique priesthood of Christ.” (MARSILI, 1987, p. 91)
Marsili observed that “today it is easy to evaluate this synthesis of the theology of the Liturgy presented in the distant 1912-1920, (…), but at that time it was a truly extraordinary fact and not everyone understood it in its full value” (MARSILI, 1987, p. 91-92).
In light of current liturgical and ecclesiological reflection, however, a critique can be made of the explanation of the priestly nature of the liturgy offered by Beauduin. When he speaks of the liturgy as the exercise of the priesthood of Christ in the Church, here the church is only the hierarchy. Christ does exercise a priestly action in favor of and for the benefit of all his community, but he does this through his ministers. From the premise about the collective nature of the priesthood of Christ, Beauduin does not reach the conclusion that all the faithful act in Christ, exercising their common priesthood. He clearly stated that one should be very cautious in saying that in Christ all have a true priesthood – universal priesthood – and this is because, due to the Protestant movement, which denied the ministerial priesthood, confusion could be created in the mind (BEAUDUIN, 1954, p. 87).
Although Beauduin did not go on to deepen the theological reflection on the common priesthood of the faithful, it is necessary to recognize that his thought was what penetrated most deeply into the Liturgical Movement and this “perhaps due to its traditionalism and novelty together, perhaps due to its openness to the ecclesiological dimension, perhaps due to its ability to ‘unite’ the sanctifying and cultic moment of the liturgy, perhaps due to the evident ‘repercussions’ of such a vision on the plane of spirituality and pastoral care” (CATELLA, 1998, p. 32). It was precisely the theological-liturgical reflection of Beauduin that favored the rethinking of the liturgy, giving it a theological character, and further increased its connection with Christology and with ecclesiology
Providing – consequently – the vision of the intrinsic relationship between Christ-Church-Liturgy and the idea of a rediscovery/revelation/reform of liturgical praxis and spirituality would have produced a reform/rebirth of the same church. Not only that, but this synthesis will be welcomed in the encyclical Mediator Dei (1947) by Pope Pius XII which will be felt as the magna charta of the liturgical movement. (CATELLA, 1998, p. 32)
Another relevant point of L. Beauduin’s liturgical vision is his thought on the relationship between ecclesiology and the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the conjunction of heaven and earth, it is a symbol of the Church being incessantly built up. When the Christian authentically lives the liturgy and, in a particular way, the celebration of the mass, at that moment, they develop the spirit of belonging to the Church. The rediscovery of liturgical theology presupposes and entails a new conception of the Church.
In the Rhineland, the monastery of Maria Laach sought to continue the path initiated, dedicating itself first and foremost to the formation of the university environment, professors, and clergy – in the hope that the latter could carry forward the ideal of a Christian life as a liturgical life – transforming itself into a center of German liturgical formation and reform. In 1913, before being appointed abbot, Dom Ildefons Herwegen met a small group of lay people (with H. Brüning and R. Schumann) who expressed the desire for greater participation in liturgical celebrations. The following year, the young abbot invited a slightly larger group to the monastery for Holy Week of 1914 in which, for the first time, the dialogued mass was celebrated. Under the guidance of Abbot Herwegen, with two other monks, Cunibert Mohlberg and Odo Casel, and in collaboration with Romano Guardini, F. R. Dolger, and Anton Baumstark, they paved the way for the German Liturgical Movement. In 1918, they organized a triple series of publications: the first volume of the collection Ecclesia orans appeared, the series Liturgiegeschichtliche Quellen and Liturgiegeschichtliche Forschungen (1919). Three years later, they started the periodical Jahrbuch fur Liturgiewissenschaft (NEUNHEUSER, 1987, p. 25).
Within this new order of ideas, the contribution of O. Casel, a philologist of ancient classical languages, was great. A lover of the sources, he built his entire theological doctrine on the Holy Scripture and on the Church Fathers.
For Casel, the Church is the mystical body of Christ that realizes itself in the worship it offers to the Father. The subject of each liturgical action is, therefore, the body of Christ. And it is precisely this that gives the liturgy superiority over other devotions or pious practices. It is in the liturgy that the active and life-giving presence of the risen Lord happens. Through the liturgy, in fact, the mystery of Christ becomes the mystery of the Church, and the Church exists in time and space as the mystery of Christ. Thus, in the liturgy, the Church not only announces salvation but also actualizes it, making it present to the people gathered today for the celebration of the divine mysteries. This happens especially during the celebration of the Eucharist. It is in Il mistero della Chiesa that the author clearly expresses this line of thought:
this is the sacrifice of Christians: we, the many, are one body in Christ. The ecclesia celebrates this sacrifice in the mystery of the altar well known to the faithful; here it is shown to her how, in the thing she sacrifices, she herself is sacrificed. […] The head first sacrificed himself, so that the body could unite with him. By virtue of his sacrifice, we can now also sacrifice; in the eucharist we sacrifice ourselves with Christ, who presents to the Father his human nature and all of us in it. This sacrifice of the ecclesia, the eucharist is the daily presentation of the mystery of the sacrifice of Christ which includes in itself the sacrifice of all the members. The ecclesia offers herself through Christ and in Christ; she sacrifices not by her own power, nor in her own way, but through the Lord; more precisely, she offers herself thus in all her essence, because she is included in the reality of the Lord, that is, in his immolated and glorified body. (CASEL, 1965, p. 408-409)
It does not seem risky to us to affirm that it was precisely because of this vision of the Church, and in particular of the mystery of the active presence of Christ in the liturgy, that it became the central idea of the liturgical Constitution. This would constitute – after a period of harsh opposition, also from the magisterium – a very high recognition of the reflection and work of the Benedictine monk.
1.3 Development of the Liturgical Movement
Liturgical renewal was not a current of thought limited only to Belgium, Germany, and France, but spread to other parts.
In 1911, the liturgical congress that led in 1912 and in 1914 to the founding of the Liturgical Society of the dioceses of Haarlem and Utrecht, respectively, and of the Dutch Liturgical Federation in 1915, took place in Breda, in the Netherlands.
In Austria, the Liturgical Movement developed under the guidance of the Augustinian Pius Parsch of Klosterneuburg, who published Das Jahr des Heils (1923), a commentary on the missal and breviary for the entire liturgical year, and the journal Bibel und Liturgie (1926).
The Liturgical Movement also began to take shape in other European countries with different emphases according to the cultural and ecclesial climate of each country. There was a significant evolution in Spain, led mainly by the monastery of Montserrat, in Portugal, in Switzerland, in England, in what was then Czechoslovakia, in Hungary, and in Poland.
In Italy, there was no lack of people and environments that around those years lived and participated in the ongoing liturgical and ecclesiological awakening. However, according to the judgment of E. Cattaneo, the Liturgical Movement in Italy did not have the same success as in other countries. There are two reasons for this circumstance:
The first was constituted by the spiritual traditionalism anchored in an old catechism and a devotional piety […], the second was the absence, in the movement, of the Italian bishops – except for a few exceptions […] – explainable by the custom in our house of waiting for the word from Rome as a tribute to the Primate of Italy, the Supreme Pontiff, and by a marked dependence on the organs of the Roman curia. (CATTANEO, 2003, p. 505-506)
Despite this consideration, in our opinion, the work of the Liturgical Movement in Italy should be considered important, both on a theological and pastoral level. On the theological level, the work developed by M. Righetti was notable, as he dedicated himself, above all, to increasing theological-liturgical reflection, publishing scientific studies of particular interest. Also of relevance is the Revista Liturgica, founded in 1914 at the Benedictine monastery of Finalpia (Savona), which had Dom E. Caronti as its first director. A distinguished contributor to the journal was the monk Dom I. Schuster, who later became bishop of the archdiocese of Milan. Schuster enriched the journal with the publication of his studies which, collected and organized, became a fundamental part of his work Liber sacramentorum. From a pastoral point of view, the liturgical weeks organized, above all, on the initiative of G. Bevilacqua of the Oratory of Brescia, were relevant. The first week took place in Brescia in 1922.
In the same year that the Rivista Liturgica was founded, the bishop of Ivrea, Dom Matteo Filippello, published the pastoral letter on La liturgia parrocchiale (Parish Liturgy), “one of the most significant testimonies of the Italian liturgical movement” (CATTANEO, 2003, p. 497). In this letter, the bishop invited the faithful of his diocese to become aware of their ecclesial belonging and to live the life of the Church which, being “essentially a religious society,” expresses itself in a special way in the liturgy. And in the liturgy the people should participate not only with their physical presence, “but with their voice, with their mind, with their heart, with their whole soul” (CATTANEO, 2003, p. 498).
Christ – Church – liturgy: this is the trinomial on which the reflection of the also Benedictine Salvador Marsili is concentrated. The liturgy is the salvific moment through which the action of Christ continues in the world and in each person, an action that is redemptive for men and glorifying in relation to God. Thus understood, the liturgy acquires an essentially Christological basis. And, in this light, the Church results directly as an effect of the liturgy, even before being its executor:
From the liturgy is born and from the liturgy lives the Church. […] The sacraments have bound the church together. Coming from the tormented and quartered body of Christ, they formed a mysterious body for Christ, capable of bearing all his divine life. […] From the liturgy the Church, a logical and ontological consequence, if it is true that the sacraments realize and call the Church into practical existence. It is the liturgy that sanctifies society, that makes society holy, that is, the Church. (MARSILI, 1938, p. 232)
From his theological vision of the liturgy, Marsili brings forth a conclusion of notable theological consideration: the liturgy is not an accidental reality in relation to the Church, it is, in turn
The basic and constitutive principle, so that without the liturgy there can be no Church […]. Not in the sense that the existence of the church claims a liturgy to satisfy its duty of worship in relation to the divinity, but in the very different sense that without the liturgy the Church cannot, in the current Christian economy, exist. […] The liturgy is not alongside the Incarnation. The liturgy is the “Mystery of Christ” always alive and active. (MARSILI, 1939, p. 73-78)
In even more explicit terms, Marsili states that “to understand the liturgy is to understand the Church, and the misunderstanding of one fatally leads to a false valuation of the other” (MARSILI, 1939, p. 17).
The Liturgical Movement also spread to the Americas: the monk Virgil Michel founded the Liturgical Movement in the United States in 1925, at the monastery of Saint John, in Collegeville. He is also the founder of the journal Orate frates, which in 1951 changed its name to Worship (cf. NEUNHEUSER, 1987, p. 30).
1.4 The Liturgical Movement in Brazil
In Brazil, the Liturgical Movement emerged in 1933, in Rio de Janeiro, and its exponent was the Benedictine monk Martinho Micheler. Recently arrived from Germany, he was tasked with teaching a course on Liturgy at the Catholic Institute of Higher Studies, founded under the inspiration and leadership of Alceu Amoroso Lima, with the aim of offering theology courses to Catholic university students. His classes had a great impact in university and Catholic intellectual circles. They discovered with admiration that the Liturgy is much more than a set of rubrics, gestures, or rites: it is the life of Christ in us, the action of the Trinity, the life of the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ. Within the Catholic University Action, a Center for Liturgy was then formed. The work of this center was inaugurated with a retreat for a group of six young men, led by Dom Martinho, on a farm in the interior of the State of Rio, with the name “six days of community.” In the small group, we will have the figure of the future continuer of the Liturgical Movement, with the liturgical reform, Dom Clemente Isnard. There he celebrated the first mass versus populum. The mass was dialogued, and this was also a novelty. In those days, those young men also discovered the riches of the Divine Office. But, the important thing was not the innovations in the practice of celebration, which may seem insignificant to us today, but the spirit they presupposed: the rediscovery of spirituality centered on the prayer of the Church. It was this spirit that Dom Martinho cultivated, in a weekly mass celebrated at the Monastery of São Bento for a group of university students. In 1935, Catholic Action was founded, with Alceu Amoroso Lima as president, which would become the great protagonist and diffuser of the Liturgical Movement throughout Brazil. Both in Brazil and in the United States, the movement had a strong pastoral inclination, with particular attention to the social dimension of celebrating (DA SILVA, 1983, p. 40-74).
It was all very new: the liturgy was presented beyond rubrics, much more than allegorisms. A theology of the liturgy began to be discovered in Brazil. After Dom Martinho Michler, a series of monks like Dom Beda Keckeisen in Bahia, Dom Polycarpo Amstalden in São Paulo, Dom Hidebrando Martins in Rio de Janeiro, and the abbess Luzia Ribeiro de Oliveira at the women’s monastery in Belo Horizonte, carried forward the ideas of the active participation of the faithful in the liturgy, aware, evidently, that nothing can be placed before Christ, the liturgist par excellence. We will also have Fr. Gregório Lutz, who can be considered one of the pioneers of the liturgical reform. Although he had studied and been ordained before the Second Vatican Council, the discovery of the liturgy during the 1960s opened a new world to him. With Dom José Clemente Isnard (1917—2011), they can be considered the true promoters of the Liturgical Reform of the Second Vatican Council in Brazilian lands (Cf. GOPEGUI, pp. 21-22).
2 The Contestation of the Liturgical Movement
The contestation of the Liturgical Movement was not long in coming. The controversy arose around the problem of liturgy-spirituality, on the one hand, and liturgy-Christian commitment, on the other. It would reappear repeatedly, reaching down to our days.
As early as the years 1913-1914, a vehement debate arose between the Benedictine Festugière, a defender of the Liturgical Movement, and the Jesuit Navatel, a challenger of the Movement.
In Brazil, this discussion was reflected in the prolonged controversy between Catholic Action, supported by the Benedictines, and the Marian Congregations, supported by some Jesuits. In this whole issue, the Eucharistic Heart Seminary of the Archdiocese of Belo Horizonte played a prominent role (DA SILVA, 1983, p. 163-199).
The discussion would continue until the publication of the encyclical Mediator Dei in 1947, which officially adopted the great ideas of the Liturgical Movement. But, as happens in some writings of the Magisterium, by mixing praises for the Liturgical Movement with warnings about its possible exaggerations, it would not prevent the continuation of the controversy, fueled by divergent readings of the papal encyclical.
What is at stake in the discussion is the conception of the Liturgy. For the challengers of the Liturgical Movement, the liturgy is just the ceremonial and decorative face of the mass, the sacraments, and the sacramentals, and this is still present in the minds of many people. For the defenders of the Liturgical Movement, the Liturgy is the sacramental presence of the salvific action of God in human history, it is the prayer of Christ with his Church. Understood in this way, the Liturgy cannot represent any threat to personal piety, which cannot be conceived without it.
The other aspect that led to questioning the Liturgical Movement was the relationship between liturgical celebration and commitment to the transformation of earthly realities. This confrontation took place within Catholic Action. In Brazil, this opposition occurred in a very radical way, in step with the growing awareness of the urgency of an action capable of transforming the situations of injustice in which the vast majority of the population lived. If, in some, this awareness led to a loss of enthusiasm for liturgical life, in the more conscious it was the cause of its deepening, instigating the Liturgical Movement to make the concrete life situations of men and women shape the form of the celebration. Thus, the Liturgical Movement was moving from a phase focused preferably on the past to a phase in which deeper reforms began to be postulated, to make the liturgical celebration an expression of the anxieties and hopes of human beings today.
3 New Phase of the Liturgical Movement
While in the years 1903-1914 the reforms of Pius X had preceded and sparked the Liturgical Movement, from the Second World War onwards it was the developments of the liturgical pastoral movement that Pope Pius XII ratified, by taking up the project of Pius X and adapting it to the new conditions. Whereas before 1940 it was a matter of making the existing liturgy accessible to the people and promoting Gregorian chant, afterwards, the need for a profound reform of the rites and a partial introduction of the vernacular language in the celebrations would be seen more clearly (BUGNINI, 2018, p. 40-44).
In 1947, even before dedicating the Encyclical Mediator Dei to the liturgy, Pope Pius XII established, within the Congregation of Rites, a commission charged with preparing a general reform of the liturgy. Moreover, he had already taken specific measures to relax the law of the Eucharistic fast, in order to facilitate the celebration of Mass at night and communion in countries at war, measures he generalized in 1953 with the Apostolic Constitution Christus Dominus. Henceforth, the use of natural water no longer broke the Eucharistic fast in any case, and this, in relation to any other food, was fixed for three hours before communion (CATTANEO, 2003, p. 508-515).
The first fruit of the reform desired by Pius XII was the authorization to celebrate the Easter Vigil during the Holy Night (1951). Four years later, it was the turn of the reform of Holy Week (1955). After some time, with the development of the biblical movement, more attention began to be paid to the word of God and its liturgical use. But for everyone to have access, during the celebration, to the table of the Word, it was necessary for it to be proclaimed in the vernacular language. Pius XII did not believe the issue was sufficiently mature to take a general initiative, contenting himself with offering partial authorizations to read the Epistle and the Gospel during the solemn liturgy (1953). He did, however, permit the publication of bilingual rituals, especially in German and French (1947). As a first step towards the reform of the Breviary, he carried out a simplification of the rubrics (1955) and had a Code of rubrics drawn up, which John XXIII published in 1960. It was also John XXIII who published the simplified rite of the Dedication of churches and altars (1961). But he had already decided to present to the Council in preparation the principles of the general reform of the liturgy (CATTANEO, 2003, p. 508-515).
This period constitutes for theology a very unique moment, characterized by an intense fervor of research and studies in various areas. It is the phenomenon, so called at the time by Romano Guardini, of the “awakening of the church in souls” (GUARDINI, 1989, p. 21). The Church, in the multiple aspects of life, was linked to the center of religious and theological interests. One witnesses “a kind of collective maturation of what in the 19th century had only been the intuition of someone, but in a new historical context that would gradually require a new reworking of the institutional face of the Church” (FRISQUE, 1972, p. 214). And for this very reason, the Liturgical Movement must also be thought of in conjunction with other movements that at the same time sought to rethink other aspects of ecclesial practice: the theological and Christological movement with the quests for the historical Jesus, the catechetical movement, and the biblical movement are some of the many that were attempting changes.
Conclusion
The path of the Liturgical Movement was not at all easy. There was no lack of attacks or discussions from the faithful and bishops who did not agree with some trends and choices made by those who promoted the movement:
But the most important controversy (with, however, very positive consequences) was the one that developed on both the theological and spiritual planes, around the “mysterial” vision of the liturgy, as proposed and defended by the German Benedictine O. Casel. (NEUNHEUSER, 1992, p. 797)
The benefits and prophetic intuitions are evident today in light of the liturgical reform triggered by the Second Vatican Council. Firstly, the rediscovery of the active participation of the people in the liturgical celebration, the centrality of the Paschal Mystery, the heart of all liturgical life, and the need for the liturgical formation of pastors and the people, all based on a solid ecclesiology and on a serious and profound research of the theological and pastoral nature of the liturgy. Hence the need to make the celebration of the Mass and the sacraments understandable to the faithful, through the simplification of rites and the use of the local language. With the Liturgical Movement, the desire to return the Divine Office to the faithful was reborn to favor the knowledge of the Word of God and the prayer of the Church, and to increase the spiritual life of the clergy with the daily commitment of the Divine Office. The Movement did not neglect the great field of arts, delineating the principle of beauty, sobriety, and simplicity.
Brovelli wrote that the Liturgical Movement, today, is for the Church
an important heritage: it instigates the search for the meaning of the liturgy in the life of the Church and the understanding of its specific functions in the overall development of the mission. In this light and from this perspective, we believe it has been definitively clarified the statement that speaks of a liturgical movement as a reality that is not only partially incorporated into the conciliar reform; in effect, it passes through and surpasses it, offering the conciliar deliberations and future requests of interest to all Christians. (BROVELLI, 1987, p. 74)
Washington da Silva Paranhos. FAJE. Original Portuguese text. Submitted 10/10/2020. Approved: 11/30/2021. Published: 12/30/2021.
Abbreviations
TS = Tra le sollecitudini
LM = Liturgical Movement
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