THE origins of the modern liturgical movement are generally sought in L'Année liturgique (The Liturgical Year) a fifteen-volume commentary on the texts and prayers of mass and the divine office of the liturgical year, principally written from 1841-1875 by Prosper Gueranger, OSB Abbot of Solesmes and restorer of the French Benedictine Congregation.  This spiritual commentary on the liturgical seasons and feasts remains popular today.

Inspired by the work of Abbot Gueranger and his successors and confreres at Solesmes who labored on the restoration and interpretation of Gregorian Chant, Abbots Maurus and Placidus Wolter, OSB, restored Benedictine life at Beuron in Germany.  The monasteries of their congregation actively promoted liturgical prayer as a form of spiritual and doctrinal catechesis among clergy and laity.

IN 1882, a Beuronese monk of Maredsous, Dom Gerard van Caloen OSB (1853–1932), later Abbot of St. Andre, Brugge/Sintandriesabdij, restorer of the Brazilian Beneditine Congregation, published Missel des Fidèles, the first French-Latin missal for the laity. The following year he aroused controversy by recommending at a conference in Liege that the faithful receive communion during mass, rather than before or after the celebration

La communion des fidèles pendant la messe, (Mémoire présenté au Congrès eucharistique de Liège, Luik, Lefort, 1883 / Lille, Desclée de Brouwer, 1884).

In 1884, Van Caloen founded the liturgical journal Messager des fideles which in 1890 became the Revue Benedictine.

17  Luigi PALADINI, « La controversia della Comunione nella Messa », Miscellanea liturgica in honore L.C. Mohlberg t.1, Edizioni liturgichè, Rome, BEL 22, 1948, 347-371 ; Gérard VAN CALOEN, « Rapport sur la Communion des fidèles pendant la messe », Congres des oeuvres eucharistiques tenu a Liege du 5 au 10 juin 1883, Lille, J. Lefort, 1884, 140-167 ; André HAQUIN, « Le congrès eucharistique de Liège », Dom Lambert Beauduin et le renouveau liturgique, Gembloux, Duculot, 1970, 15-20.

THE first German missal with commentary on the liturgical year (Schottmissal, Das Messbuch der heiligen Kirche 1888) was the work of another Beuronese monk, Dom Anselm Schott, OSB. Various abbeys of the Beuronese Congregation, including Beuron, Maredsous, Emmaus (Prague) Seckau, and Maria Laach were similarly committed to the Liturgical Movement and to dissemination of the German Missal

PAPAL encouragement of the nascent liturgical movement was provided by Pope Pius X (b.1835, Pope 1903 -1914) in his 1903 Motu Proprio on Sacred Music De Musica Sacra:

“. . .that the laity be enabled to participate in the divine mysteries”

 participatio divinorum mysteriorum.

“Encouraged the restoration of Gregorian chant . . . so that the faithful may again participate more [actively] in the sacred liturgy, as was the case in ancient times.”

quo vehementius Christicolae, more maiorum, sacrae liturgiae sint rursus participes.)

Similar encouragement was also provided by Pope Pius XI (b. 1857 pope 1922 -1939) in his 1928 Apostolic Constitution Divini Cultus Sanctitatem  On The Ongoing Progress of Liturgy, Gregorian Chant, and Sacred Music.  His successor Pius XII (b.1876, pope1939-1958) discussed the issues of personal piety and active participation in the liturgy in his encyclical, Mediator Dei.

LAMBERT Beauduin, OSB (1873-1960), a Benedictine monk of Mont Cesar was active in the Liturgical Movement in his native Belgium.  From 1909-1913 he engaged in controversial exchanges with the Jesuit priest, Jean-Joseph Navatel, SJ, who considered the Liturgical Movement to be both too intellectual and sophisticated for ordinary Catholics, as well as a challenge to traditional Jesuit practices based on Spiritual Exercises. In his book, La Piété de L’Église, (Mont-Cesar, 1914) Beauduin asserted:

Lambert Beauduin O.S.B., Liturgy the Life of the Church (Farnborough: St. Michael’s Abbey Press, 2002), pp. 15–16;

ILDEFONS Herwegen, OSB of Maria Lach conducted a Holy week conference in 1914, including a German “dialogue mass in which the people in the congregation joined the server in offering responses

GASPAR Lefebre, OSB of St. André, Brugge (now Sint Andriesabdij, Zevenkerken) published Liturgia: Ses principes fondamentaux in 1920. He was largely responsible for the internationally famous Saint Andrew's Missal, translated and published in many languages..

ROMANO Guardini (1885 - 1968) was a German diocesan priest and Benedictine oblate of Beuron Abbey  His first major work, Vom Geist der Liturgie (The Spirit of the Liturgy), published in 1918 during the First World War, was a major influence on the Liturgical Movement in Germany and by extension on the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

ODO Casel, OSB (1886-1948) described the importance of a shift from emphasis on sacrifice to that of mystery: Das Gedächtnis des Herrn in der altchristlichen Liturgie (Freiburg 1918), Die Liturgie als Mysterienfeier (Freiburg 1922).

IN The United States Dom Virgil Michel, OSB (1890-1938), a Benedictine monk of Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, believed that liturgical renewal was linked to social justice.  He was influenced by both Guardini and Gaspar Lefebre, and he implemented the insights of his european confreres, by establishing a “Popular Liturgical Library” of books and pamphlets and an influential liturgical review, Orate Fratres, ( now Worship Magazine).

Abbot Ildefons Herwegen of Maria Laach convened a liturgical conference in Holy Week 1914 for lay people. Herwegen thereafter promoted research which resulted in a series of publications for clergy and lay people during and after World War I. One of the foremost German scholars was Odo Casel. Having begun by studying the Middle Ages, Casel looked at the origins of Christian liturgy in pagan cultic acts, understanding liturgy as a profound universal human act as well as a religious one. In his Ecclesia Orans (The Praying Church) (1918), Casel studied and interpreted the pagan mysteries of ancient Greece and Rome, discussing similarities and differences between them and the Christian mysteries. His conclusions were studied in various places, notably at Klosterneuburg in Austria, where the Augustinian canon Pius Parsch applied the principles in his church of St. Gertrude, which he took over in 1919. With laymen he worked out the relevance of the Bible to liturgy. Similar experiments were to take place in Leipzig during the Second World War.

The following is cited by Fr. Alcuin Reid, OSB in Sacred Musc 141.1, p.18,

La Piété de L’Église [Liturgy: Th e Life of the Church]. Th is small book is in many ways the foundational charter of the liturgical movement. Dom Beauduin asserted: It is impossible . . . to overemphasise the fact that souls seeking God must associate themselves as intimately and as frequently as possible with all the manifestations of . . . [the liturgy], and which places them directly under the influence of the priesthood of Jesus Christ Himself. That is the primary law of the sanctity of souls. For all alike, wise and ignorant, infants and adults, lay and religious, Christians of the fi rst and Christians of the twentieth century, leaders of an active or of a contemplative life, for all the faithful of the Church without exception, the greatest possible active and frequent participation in . . . [the liturgy], according to the manner prescribed in the liturgical canons, is the normal and infallible path to a solid piety that is sane, abundant, and truly Catholic, that makes them children of their holy mother the Church in the fullest sense of this ancient and Christian phrase.19

Bernard Bott

Pius Parsch

Damasus Winzen

THE LITURGICAL MOVEMENT
HISTORY OF THE CHURCH Ed.Hubert Jedin, Volume X, The Church in the Modern World, 300-305
 

The beginnings of the liturgical movement extend into the nineteenth century; they are related to the renewal of Benedictine monasticism. The Belgian abbey of Maredsous, founded in 1872 from Beuron, which had been established in 1863, in 1882 published a people’s missal, the Missel des Fidèles. Anselm Schott (1845-96), who had lived at Maredsous during the temporary suppression of Beuron in the Kulturkampf followed this example in 1884. By means of his Mass Book he aimed, as he said in the foreword, “to contribute a little so that the Church’s rich treasure of prayer, which is set down in its sacred liturgy, may become more and more accessible and familiar to the faithful.”

The impetus to the liturgical movement as a breakthrough of the laity to active participation in the Church’s liturgy proceeded from Belgium. It had been preceded by the decrees of Pius X of 1903 and 1904 on the chant and of 1905 on frequent and early Communion. In keeping with his motto, “To unite all things in Christ,” the Pope aspired to the renewal and consolidation of the Christian spirit of the faithful. “The first and indispensable source from which this spirit is drawn,” so Pius X stressed in the motu proprio of 1903, “is the active participation of the faithful in the sacred mysteries and the public and solemn prayer of the Church.” (ASS 36) (1903-04),  A Benedictine of Mont César, Lambert Beauduin (d. 1960), was deeply affected by these ideas of the Pope. Before his entry into the monastery—he was professed in 1907—he had been a diocesan priest at Liége and had belonged to the “Labor Chaplains,” a community of worker-priests. Accordingly, also as a monk he strove to work among the people by means of the liturgy, that is, to move out of the narrow framework of academic circles into the congregations. At the National Congress of Catholic Works, inaugurated by Cardinal Mercier, he demanded at Mechelen in 1909 that the missal itself should be disseminated as the prayerbook but at least that the complete text of the Mass and of Sunday vespers should be made available to the people in a vernacular translation. This congress became the “Mechelen Happening” (B. Fischer, “Das `Mechelner Ereignis’ vom 23.9.1909,” LJ 9 (1959), 203-19; E. Iserloh, “Die Geschichte der Liturgischen Bewegung,” Hirschberg 12, (1959), 113-22, 115.) through the enthusiastic talk of a layman, the history professor Godefroid Kurth (d. 1916). In it he traced religious ignorance back to the still greater ignorance of the liturgy. He concluded thus: “Give to the faithful an understanding and, as a consequence, a love for the mysteries which they celebrate, give them the missal to use, and with it replace the many mediocre prayerbooks.” An enthusiastic assent of the congress was given. A few weeks later there appeared in a large printing for Advent the first fascicle of La vie liturgique, a small booklet which provided the liturgical texts with the corresponding explanations.

In Germany the liturgical movement at first remained confined to academic circles. The spiritual leadership belonged to the abbey of Maria Laach under Abbot Ildefons Herwegen (1874-1946). In 1913 he celebrated Holy Week with a group of academicians—among them men such as the future Chancellor Heinrich Brüning and French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman (R. Schuman, “Ein Blatt dankbarer Erinnerung,” LJ 9 (1959), 194)3—and revealed to them the liturgy as source of piety. At Maria Laach in 1918 the first “community Mass” was celebrated as Missa recitata or, preferably, dialogata.

The Catholic youth, affected by the general German youth movement, first the Fountain of Youth under Romano Guardini, then the student movement New Germany, and finally the Association of Young Men and the Storm Band under Ludwig Wolker (1871-1955), enthusiastically adopted the new manner of celebrating the liturgy. In the liturgy these youth found a realization of their longing for community, for essential and authentic form, and for the embodiment of religion in “sacred signs.” For their part they promoted the liturgical movement with their untroubled enthusiasm to victory against resistance and abuses as well as against theological hesitations. The spontaneously growing new liturgical practice was from the start accompanied and clarified by a theology which united strictly scientific, even historicoar-chaeological investigation with proclamation and piety. Especially effective in the area of liturgical formation was Romano Guardini (1885-1968) with his Vom Geist der Liturgie (1918), Liturgische Bildung (1923), Von heiligen Zeichen (1927), and his scriptural-theological introduction, Der Herr (1937). He led to reading and reflection on Holy Scripture, but also encouraged that the world should be taken seriously and interpreted with the eyes of faith. From 1923 professor in Berlin of Philosophy of Religion and Catholic Worldview, he understood these as “the unity of that view which embraces the living reality of the world by faith.”

The texts of the Ordinary of the Mass, published by the three communities mentioned for common prayer in the “Community Mass,” give a picture of the growing liturgical and religious and pedagogical experience: The Gemeinschaftliche Andacht zur Feier der heiligen Messe, published by Guardini in 1920, provided the text of the Mass only with paraphrasing interpretive additions. The Missa ‘composed in 1924 by Father Joseph Kramp (1886-1940) for the “Union of New Germany” led to the praying aloud of the entire Mass from the prayers at the foot of the altar to the Last Gospel except for the canon, without making any distinction between the public prayers of the priest and the congregation and the private prayers of the priest. This booklet was an expression of the first excess of zeal in which people felt that the community nature of the Mass was expressed by the fact that all prayed everything, which threatened to lead to an empty, loud operation and supplied welcome material to critics. The Kirchengebet published in 1928 by Ludwig Wolker made the newer knowledge its own, especially in the later issues, and, in accord with the “High Mass Rule,” asked which prayers belonged to the priest, the reader, and the congregation respectively, and which were to be prayed quietly. The translations of the Kirchengebet, which had a circulation of several million, were transformed into new editions of diocesan prayerbooks.

This route of the liturgical movement into the congregations was first taken in the German language area by the “Popular Liturgical Apostolate” of Klosterneuburg near Vienna under Pius Parsch (18841954). In his own publishing establishment he published the texts of the Sunday liturgy-25 million down to 1930—in order to “bring the Church’s worship to the simple folk.” He revealed the meaning of the liturgy for a new biblical piety in books such as The Church’s Year of Grace (1923, 14th ed. 1952-58) in three volumes, Lernt die Messe verstehen (1931), and in the periodicals Bibel and Liturgie (1926ff.) and Lebe mit der Kirche (1928ff.).

“Popular liturgy and pastoral care” were also the supporting elements of the parish work of city pastors such as Georg Heinrich Hörle (18891942) at Frankfurt, Konrad Jacobs (1874-1931) at Mühlheim in the Ruhr, Joseph Könn (1876-1960) at Cologne, and of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri, founded at Leipzig in 1930. Starting with the axiom that all participation has to take place in accord with the capabilities of the participant, there was sought a celebration of Mass and of the Liturgy of the Hours that would do justice to both the liturgy and the congregation. Thus there came about the “Prayed Sung Mass” and the “German High Mass,” in which the texts were sung in melodies adapted to the German language, and priest, servers, choir, and congregation performed the parts of the liturgy proper to them.

With such a distribution of roles the danger of an activist industry was banned; in the liturgical happening there were periods when the individual, priest or member of the congregation listened quietly or silently sought union with the common action or assented to the effecting word of the priest. If liturgical piety meant extension of often narrow and egoistic prayer to the concerns of the Church, immersion in the movement through Christ in the Holy Spirit to the Father, it is still not a substitute for prayer in the “private room,” that is, for the intimate encounter of the individual with God. Community prayer demanded that reflective “personal” prayer should not become a soulless idling. This integration of the public congregational prayer and the prayer of the individual has still not been fully achieved. This shows the difficulty of terminology. For the latter must not be “private,” and the former must not be impersonal. It is not enough that one praying liturgically should lend only his lips to the Church for the praise of God. In the 1930s there were violent confrontations over this.

Exaggerations, narrow-mindedness, and wilfullness of overzealous circles from the liturgical movement led to anxious and passionate criticism, among other places, in the lively book of the popular missionary M. Kassiepe, Irrwege and Umwege im Frommigkeitsleben der Gegenwart (1939), and in A. Doerner’s Sentire cum Ecclesia (1941). But there was no “official short circuit,” against which R. Guardini had warned in 1940 in his “Word on the Liturgical Question,” a letter to Bishop Stohr. Instead, the conflicts led to the German bishops’ taking up the liturgical efforts, and so the liturgical movement became the liturgical renewal directed by the Church’s authority. In 1940 the Episcopal Conference formed the Liturgical Section under Bishops Albert Stohr and Simon Konrad Landersdor-fer and a Liturgical Commission of experts in theory and practice. Their work led to the 1942 “Guidelines for the liturgical structure of the parochial liturgy.”

A memorandum of Archbishop Konrad Gröber of Freiburg, which he submitted on 18 January 1943 to the Curia and his fellow-bishops, (T. Mass-Ewerd, Die Krise der Liturgischen Bewegung in Deutschland. Studien zu den Auseinandersetzungen um die “Liturgische Frage” während des Zweiten Weltkriegs auf Grund bisher unveroffentlichter Dokumente (Regensburg 1977); F. Kolbe, Die Liturgische Bewegung (Aschaffenburg 1964), 72-75.) threatened to lead to a new crisis. The seventeen points “giving occasion for uneasiness” were, among others: the imminent schism in the clergy, an “alarmingly flourishing mysticism of Christ” as a consequence of an exaggerated interpretation of the doctrine of the Corpus Christi Mysti-cum, the overstressing of the doctrine of the general priesthood, the “thesis of Meal-Sacrifice and Sacrificial Meal,” the “overemphasis of the liturgical,” the effort to make the congregational Mass obligatory, and the use of German in the Mass. “Can we German bishops,” thus concluded Conrad Gröber, “and can Rome still keep silent?” This memorandum crossed a letter of Cardinal Secretary of State Maglione, which the chairman of the Episcopal Conference, Cardinal Bertram, received on 11 January 1943. In it there was complaint against encroachments by radical representatives of the liturgical movement, a report on them was demanded, and a series of proposals was made as to how the good in it could be fostered.

In the opinion of the West German bishops of 8 April 1943 to the Roman inquiry there was expressed how very much the celebration of the liturgy had become a source of strength in the age of National Socialism and of the war. “German Catholicism has been for ten years in abnormal circumstances. An activist young clergy and an equally activist Catholic youth that is enthusiastic for the faith see themselves more and more abruptly repressed on all sides.. . . Add to this, that it is of great importance to zealous young priests to give at least to the youth in the Church an awareness and experience of community, to bind them to the Church, and thereby to deepen and consolidate them in the faith.”(T. Maas-Ewerd, loc. cit.)

On 10 April 1943 Cardinal Bertram gave to Rome a comprehensive report on the origin of the liturgical movement, on the forms of congregational participation in Mass, including the German High Mass as a “sung Mass, joined with popular singing in German,” and on the “defects and mistakes of the liturgical movement.” An indirect position on the controverted questions was indicated as early as Pius XII’s encyclical Mystici corporis, because in it the Pope acknowledged the understanding of the Church by the liturgical movement and termed the new understanding of the sacred liturgy the cause of a deeper consideration of the riches of Christ in the Church.

On 24 December 1943 Maglione made known the Roman decision to Cardinal Bertram. In it the religious and pastoral fruits of the liturgical movement were praised but a warning was lodged against arbitrary innovations, the desires made known by Bertram relative to the forms of Mass were granted, and work on a German ritual was encouraged. Finally, it was suggested to the bishops to take the leadership in hand. The final point of the Roman examination and the point of departure for the liturgical reform pursued by the Curia came in the encyclical on the sacred liturgy, Mediator Dei, of 20 November 1947. In it Pius XII made use of the keyword of “active and personal participation.” The liturgy is “the public worship which our Redeemer, the Head of the Church, gives to the heavenly Father and which the community of believers offers to its Founder and through him to the eternal Father. . . . It displays the total public worship of the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, namely, the Head and his members.”  (AAS 39 (1947), 521-95, 528f.)

A Roman commission was established in 1946-47 for the reform of the liturgical books. In the “Liturgical Institute” the German bishops created a work center at Trier. Corresponding institutions arose in other countries, such as the Centre de pastorale liturgique at Paris. In addition to liturgical congresses at Frankfurt in 1950, Munich in 1955, and Assisi in 1956, international study meetings took place. The Congregation of Rites approved the German ritual in 1950, in 1951 occurred the restoration of the Easter vigil, and in 1955 the renewal of all of Holy Week. The precept of the Eucharistic fast was greatly mitigated in 1953 and 1957 and thereby the way for the general permission for evening Mass was opened. Even after the announcement of the council and although the general reform of the liturgy was reserved to it, in 1960 a reform of the rubrics of breviary and Mass was decreed. It produced a simplification and served the real and meaningful performance of the rites and prayers. All these preliminary activities make it understandable that at the council the “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy” (1963) was the first item ready for a decree and also that the postconciliar reorganization of the liturgy could proceed quickly. The council made the active participation of the congregation, called for by Popes Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII, possible in a way that no one could have expected and thereby took up the aims of the liturgical movement for the Universal Church. Meanwhile, it had spread to other European countries—for example, to the abbey of Silos in Spain—and to America—to Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville—where it obtained a social and ethical character.

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