GETTING IT RIGHT

'BEWILDERMENT'

As the new mass was arriving in the parishes, the German liturgical scholar Klaus Gamber warned that the reform failed to take into account the degree to which the old mass constituted for so many Catholics a familiar and beloved spiritual Heimat (homeland).⁴ It is now conceded that the people were not prepared for the changes and that a more gradual implementation would have been better. In her generally highly positive review of the reform forty years on, Ferrone accepts that changes were implemented without proper explanation.⁵ In a similar appraisal, Pecklers condemns the haste in which the Consilium worked.⁶ Reviewing the reform at the end of the 1990s, Torrevell stresses its scale and speed, concluding that the dislocation of the sort experienced by Catholics in those years had inevitably resulted in ‘bewilderment’.⁷

AUTHORITY CHALLENGED                                                                                                                                                           

Implementation of the reform also coincided with a general crisis of authority.The church was particularly vulnerable, having just begun to question itself after centuries of certainty. Among its manifesations was a proliferation of unauthorised ('experimental') Eucharistic Prayers,⁸ and masses, including one notorious example in which a parish priest in Boston marked April Fools' Day 1978 by saying mass in a clown’s costume. The gospel was accompanied by a mime performed by a group dressed as clowns and there was a special Eucharistic Prayer composed by the celebrant.⁹ Calls for adherence to liturgical norms (Tres abhinc annos, 1967) and warnings against desacralisation had to be issued. The ferment did not last long but left scars which have taken longer to heal.

'RUPTURE AND CONTINUITY'                                                                                                                                              

The newly-elected Pope Benedict XVI used an address to the Curia to give his view of what had gone wrong. It came down, he said, to how the documents of the Council were interpreted:                                                                                              

It all depends on the correct interpretation of the Council or - as we would say today - on its proper hermeneutics, the correct key to its interpretation and application. …On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call "a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture". On the other, there is the "hermeneutic of reform", of renewal in the continuity of the church.                                   The latter followed the text of the Council documents,while the former claimed their true meaning lay in the ‘spirit of the Council.¹⁰

POPE BENEDICT AND THE RESTORATION OF HOLINESS         

  So much of what was written during the longstanding, bitter and in the end wearisome, disputes about the qualities of the new mass of 1970 and the related matter of continuing access to the mass of 1962 is inevitably partisan. This ‘debate’, in its previous form at least, is now over thanks to the elegant initiative of Pope Benedict in his 2007 Motu Proprio  Summorum Pontificum, in which he ruled that the traditional 1962 missal is still valid and represents the Extraordinary Form of the Roman rite, while the 1970 missal is the Ordinary Form Pope Benedict revealed in Summorum Pontificum his hope for a growing together of the two forms,  and it is clear in which direction he thought any beneficial influence would mainly flow: ‘The Mass according to the Missal of Paul VI will be able to demonstrate, more powerfully than has been the case hitherto, the sacrality which attracts many people to the former usage. There is now a consensus around  Pope Benedict's view that the mass lacks holiness.¹¹ The ‘Commentary on the Order of Mass of the Roman Missal’ puts it simply: ’something went missing’ in the course of the revision of the mass,¹² while Aillet and Taylor speak of the implementation of the reform as having been accompanied by ‘systematic desacralization’, to counter which they propose reinstating ritual, extending the definition of ‘active participation’ to include participation in the mystery present in the mass¹³ A metaphor used by more than one writer is that the mass had been thrown out of kilter by the way the reform had been implemented, and that the new mass needs rebalancing to achieve a greater sense of holiness.¹⁴

NOTES

2  De THOREY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AILLET M and TAYLOR H

‘The Old Mass and the New. Explaining the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum of Pope Benedict XVI’ San Francisco 2010

BUX N            'Benedict XVI’s Reform. Liturgy between Innovation and Tradition' San Francisco 2012     

CROUAN D   'The History and the Future of the Roman Liturgy' San Francisco 2005

DAVIES M      ‘Pope Paul’s New Mass. Liturgical Revolution – Volume 3’ Kansas City 2009

DOBSZAY L   (1) ‘The Bugnini-Liturgy and the Reform of Reform’ the Fort Royal VA 2003                        

            (2) ‘The Restoration and Organic Development of the Roman Rite’ London 2010

FAGGOLI M     ‘True Reform. Liturgy and Ecclesiology in Sacrosanctum Concilium’ Collegeville 2012

FERRONE R    ‘Liturgy: Sacrosanctum Concilium’ Mahwah NJ 2007

KOCIK T            ‘Reform of the Reform? A Liturgical Debate’ San Francisco 2003

MANNION F       “The Catholicity of the Liturgy. Setting a New Agenda” in                                                                                                   CALDECOTT S (ed) ‘Beyond the Prosaic: Renewing the Liturgical Movement ‘Edinburgh 1998

Mc CARRON RE    “EPs R1 and II. History of the Latin Text and Rite’ in FOLEY 2011  

MONTI J                ‘A Sense of the Sacred. Roman Catholic Worship in the Middle Ages’ San Francisco 2012   

TORREVELL D      ‘Losing the Sacred. Ritual, Modernity and Liturgical Reform’ London 2000

PICKSTOCK C        ‘