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IMPLEMENTING THE REFORM 1964-1975
MANY CHANGES TO DIGEST
The most obvious reform, mass in the vernacular, was phased in. Transitional half-vernacular versions of the mass based the familiar liturgy but with the celebrant behind the altar, facing the congregation, were ready in time to for the First Sunday of Advent in November 1964. The Canon remained in Latin for the moment. The final, definitive Latin edition typica was approved in 1969. It was then handed over to bodies such as ICEL (the International Committee on English in the Liturgy) to be translated. It was introduced during the mid-1970s, the exact date varying according to when the translations were completed. There were however many other changes, and the following summarises them in the order of their likely impact. The changes are considered in greater detail in sub-pages via the menu bar.
1. The entire mass in the vernacular (a massive cultural and psychological change).
2. The priest facing the congregation (another major symbolic change).
3. The redesign of the interior layout of churches, including moving the altar to permit celebration facing the people;
4. ...and often, the removal of the tabernacle from the altar.
5. Communion received in the hand, with the communicants standing, ...
6. ... usually involving the removal of Communion rails;
7. Communion more widely available under both kinds,
8. . and (from 1973) distributed by lay ministers, including women. .
9. Readings, except for the gospel, delivered by lay ministers, including women
10. Women allowed in the sanctuary ... .
11. … although female altar servers were not permitted for another 20 years.
12. The Canon of the mass spoken out loud throughout (another highly significant change).
13. Three newly-written alternative Eucharistic Prayers available in addition to the Roman Canon, and more added later.
14. The celebrant also able to choose from alternatives at the opening of the mass and at the dismissal.
15. Most of the Offertory prayers removed and two new prayers substituted.
16. Other categories of prayer discarded: those which originally had been private prayers of the priest before and after the mass (the Last Gospel, and the Prayers at the foot of the altar); most of those said by the celebrant using the first person singular, particularly ‘apologies’ (expressions of personal unworthiness).
17. A radical reorganisation of the lectionary, replacing the ancient one-year cycle of readings with a new three-year cycle for Sundays and a separate two-year cycle on wee
18. A total reorganisation of the liturgical calendar, with the disappearance of the Sundays after the Epiphany and the Sundays after Pentecost, and their replacement by ‘Sundays of the Year’ not tied to any season.
19. The elimination of the pre-Lenten season and of Passion Sunday (the Sunday before Palm Sunday), giving a clerer focus on Lent and Holy Week.
20. . also a major revision of the calendar of saints.
21 The Offertory Procession, which had dropped out of the mass in the Middle Ages when the congregation no longer provided bread and wine from their homes, is restored;
22. .. also the Prayer of the Faithful (Bidding Prayers), which had become redundant in the fifth century,
23. ... and the Kiss of Peace, another feature of the earliest liturgies which disappeared during the Middle Ages.
A LITURGICAL REVOLUTIONARY
It is no exaggeration to refer to the revision of the mass as constituting a revolution, and it was intended to be one. The principal revolutionary was the Secretary to the Consilium, Father (from 1972, Archbishop) Annibale Bugnini (1912-1982), whose remarkable career was fostered under three successive popes, two of whom also saw fit to dismiss him without explanation. Appointed secretary to the commission on the reform of the liturgy set up secretly by Pius XII in 1948, a post he held throughout the 1950s, he moved straight on in 1960 to run the preparatory commission on liturgy before the Second Vatican Council under John XXIII. He was therefore ideally equipped and positioned to influence and direct the reform. It was probably his combination of radical views and real power that lay behind his sudden and unexplained removal by Pope John XXIII from both the direction of the Commission and from his university post as a Professor of Liturgy in January 1962. In his memoirs, he claims that he was regarded as being a ‘progressivist’, an ‘iconoclast’ and ‘pushy’. The first two indicate radical theological and presumably liturgical views, while the third suggests professional jealousy. You would have thought Bugnini’s fall sensational enough to have been terminal, only for him to be rehabilitated in February 1964, and entrusted by the new Pope Paul VI with the powerful position of Secretary of the Consilium, the new body entrusted with implementing the Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, which he himself had largely drafted. Given the confidence of the Pope, his unique experience in liturgical matters, allied to a high level of administrative competence, meant that he effectively had a free hand in devising and implementing the new liturgy. The result was more radical than envisaged in the CSL.
The Consilium completed its task in just four years. It is now generally accepted that this haste had negative consequences. Nonetheless, it was made permanent in 1969, being merged with the body to which it was previously answerable, the Congregation for Divine Worship, effectively taking it over. This body was in turn merged in 1975 into a new Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. This time it was a sign of the weakening of Bugnini’s position and in January 1976 he was yet again dismissed without explanation. He was exiled from Rome with immediate effect, appointed the church’s representative in Iran. Whatever the nature and truth of what must have been the serious allegations made against him, this second fall of the principal author of the CSL and designer of the new mass at the very moment that it was being introduced in vernacular translations was clearly the work of people opposed to further reform. In over three decades of working for liturgical renewal, Bugnini had made many enemies, who were aware that he did not regard his work as finished. His declared priority for its next phase was to adapt the mass to the cultures of the various peoples of the world (‘inculturation’, still a goal of many liturgical reformers). In his biography, he gives his account of what it had brought him down: a Cardinal told him he had seen a dossier on the Pope’s desk accusing him of being a secret Freemason
REFERENCES
BUGNINI 30, 91
PECKLERS 26-37