The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy 1963

 

Sacrosanctum Concilium (so called from its opening words in Latin) was the first document agreed by the Second Vatican Council and was widely welcomed as setting a reforming agenda for the whole Council, as well as a blueprint for the revision of the mass. When assessing or discussing the CSL, it is important to bear in mind that it was agreed before the details of any specific reform were finalized or even formally considered. It is easy to think of it by a sort of shorthand as enacting the specific reforms of the liturgy which followed. This is an important point, as some of the most significant changes were not what the Council had envisaged or had simply not been considered by it. Such changes were said to be in the ‘spirit of the Council’, which paradoxically effectively came to mean ‘not something the Council decided or intended’. For example, the document nowhere requires celebration facing the people. 

 

The picture of the existing liturgy it implies is more negative and more schematic than the reality. This is understandable, given that the document’s function was to point the way ahead rather than to describe or analyze the past. However, those wishing to underline the full scale of the disconnection which had undoubtedly developed between the congregation and the altar in the old mass are obliged to go back a generation. Thanks mainly to the influence of the Liturgical Movement, the decades before the Council had seen a revolution in the people’s participation first through the general use of bilingual missals which encouraged the faithful to follow the mass rather than their private devotions, then the widespread availability by the 1950s of the dialogue mass.

Navigate via the menu bar for detailed consideration of the background to the CSL in the ideas of the LIURGICAL MOVEMENT, and of the CSL itself.