THE LITURGICAL MOVEMENT

THE DIALOGUE MASS

The introduction to a best-selling missal first published in United States in the 1930s[9], describes itself as arranged for the dialogue or community mass and includes a succinct section on ‘How to PARTICIPATE ACTIVELY ’ (Upper case in original). Referring to Pope Pius X, it provides the answer: A layperson actively participates principally by offering the ‘Divine Victim’ to the Father with the priest.^[10] It is interesting to note that the missal explains active participation in terms of the sacrificial aspect of the mass, which was to be relatively downplayed by the Council. However, it also stresses the priesthood of all believers conferred through baptism, which was to be one of its major themes.^[11] Here, participation means joining in the prayer offered by the celebrant. Drawing on the authority of Pius X, the missal's editor, Father Stedman, reminds his readers in words also used in the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of 1963, that the mass is the source of the ‘true Christian spirit’, ahead of all other spiritual exercises and devotions. ^[12] This also applies, he continues in what reads like exacerbation, to the preference of devotional material preparing for Holy Communion, such as Acts of faith, love, humility, and contrition, over the prayers of the missal.^[1 However, this same missal with its clearly expressed, uncompromising embrace of participation in the collective experience of the mass, including Holy Communion, nonetheless hedges its bets by including no less than twelve pages of prayers  for before and after Communion. Missals still routinely included many pages of such prayers into the early sixties^[14]  No doubt readers expected them, although Father Stedman does urge his readers to say them before or after mass, not during it. The principal way in which the user of the missal could demonstrate participation was, he adds, by playing his or her part in the dialogue mass.

PAPAL SUPPORT

During the twentieth century successive popes, although keeping a tight grip on liturgical developments (which meant ensuring there were very few), asserted direct papal power over the mass in largely benevolent ways, responding positively to some of the proposals and priorities associated with the Liturgical Movement. Since Pius V the liturgy had been reserved to the pope, all that had changed was that his successors were inclined to use this personal power to encourage liturgical development and even change, where Pius V had used it to prevent any change at all. Apart from encouraging frequent Communion, Pius X (1903-1914) in his Motu Proprio on music in the liturgy Tra le sollecitudine (1903) gave the movement its slogan of  'active participation’, a phrase which was to have a long life and which was later used to support and justify changes which would have shocked its unwitting provider. The eventual success of the papal initiative on frequent Communion removed part of the superstructure of the medieval mass, restoring Eucharistic devotion centred on the frequent reception of the sacrament in place of its contemplation.

Two decades later in 1922, Pius XI responded positively to the dialogue mass. Not only did he give permission for it, he endorsed it by celebrating one. He also permitted partly, or even completely, vernacular masses, for example in Czechoslovakia (1920) and Croatia (1927), and vernacular Rituals (books for the other sacraments such as baptism) were in place in France, Germany and Belgium. In 1947, Pius XII (1939-1958) issued the encyclical 'Mediator Dei ', giving a warm if qualified endorsement to the Liturgical Movement. Deeds followed his words: the next year saw a commission on the reform of the liturgy, set up on papal initiative, begin its work in secret with Fr Annibale Bugnini as secretary. It was to continue meeting right up to the eve of the Council in 1960, when it was immediately absorbed into the Council’s preparatory Liturgy Commission.

The 1950s were characterised by limited but significant liturgical initiatives, with the initially experimental restoration of the Easter Vigil (1951), then of the other Holy Week liturgies (1955), in a way a ‘dry run’ for a comprehensive review of the liturgy. These restorations involved structural changes to the renewed Easter Vigil mass.  All the prayers at the foot of the altar at the beginning of the mass were left out and the Last Gospel discarded, the mass beginning with the Kyrie and Gloria and ending with the blessing and dismissal. These changes, primarily made out of ‘pastoral consideration’ for the congregation, given the length of the Vigil,  also happened to be among those desired by many liturgical reformers for every mass, as these items were originally not part of the mass itself, but rather private prayers of the celebrant. The changes were duly implemented for all masses a couple of decades later as part of the reform. Two of the main 'pastoral' objectives of the Liturgical Movement, the introduction of evening masses and a shorter period of fasting before receiving Communion, were also enacted in this period (in 1953), as was one of its minor goals, the elimination of the extra recitation of the Confiteor before Communion (1958).

The Pope’s support came with a warning against 'archeologism’,^[15]  the widespread tendency of liturgical scholars at that time to value highly whatever was oldest including the desire to restore discontinued parts of the mass from the first five centuries. It was often accompanied by the dismissal of medieval and modern developments as inherently inauthentic and unworthy.

THE LITURISTS' WISH-LIST

Liturgists proposed modernising and simplifying the mass in the name of pastoral concern for the faithful. There is a hint of complacency, and even of condescension in the claim of the leading English liturgical reformer of the 1950s and 60s, Father JD Crichton, that the Liturgical Movement had been trying for fifty years to bring the liturgy to the people but the rite was so obscure that it was impossible to understand.^[16]  Crichton wrote enthusiastically about what he referred to as a ‘creative liturgy’. Eventually, he anticipated bishops and clergy consulting the faithful so that the mass could express ‘their needs and desires’.^[17] This is a striking example of what Baldovin calls, ‘the narcissistic notion’ that the mass exists for us.^[18] It is an extreme form, in fact the logical conclusion, of the ‘pastoral’ trend in the Liturgical Movement’s programme, a mass tailored to what people wanted and needed (or rather what liturgists think they needed and ought to want).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Academic liturgists were given their head in an unprecedented way during the 1950s, with its unique combination of:

●      active if discreet papal encouragement, including

●      the pope’s initiative in restoring the Easter Vigil on an experimental basis and then all the Holy Week liturgies, also

●      the continuing work in over 80 secret sessions throughout the decade until it was absorbed into the preparatory work for the Council, of the papal (‘Pian’) Commission set up in 1948 and guided by a 342-page document with a restricted circulation drafted at the direct request of Pius XII with the unambiguous title ‘Memoria sulla riforma liturgica’;

●   and the series of international conferences and meetings, mostly in private, which succeeded each other through the 50s and brought together in particular leading French and German liturgists ^[20]

All indicated uniquely favourable circumstances and liturgical reformers rightly felt that the tide was running their way. So what did they want? We can see that most were largely modest and sometimes obscure proposals, many of a technical nature, but which did not involve radical change. Unlike the major changes introduced by Pius XII during the 1950s, which looked ahead to the reforms which were to be implemented by the Second Vatican Council, these were typical of the adjustments made earlier in the history of the mass while some others were clearly of significance to scholars, such as the restoration of the Bidding Prayers, or Prayer of the Faithful, specifically mentioned in the Constitution for the Sacred Liturgy (see CSL 53), or in some cases priests, such as concelebrated masses (see CSL 57). They were undeniably of much less relevance or interest to the laity (such items are marked with an asterisk in the list which follows)...

Ideas regularly aired during the 1950s included:

1.     The restoration of the Bidding Prayers*;

2       ensuring the hosts distributed at a mass are consecrated at that mass, rather than taken from the tabernacle (a formalistic requirement, reflecting the idea of the mass as a meal )*;

3       providing a large loaf for the celebrant, which would be more recognisable as bread and which could be more easily broken, with pieces included among the hosts distributed at communion (again, driven by the desire to restore the meal-aspect of the mass)*.

4       Ending the mass with the actual words of dismissal Ite missa est, and leaving out the Last Gospel, a medieval addition coming after the closing blessing which meant a stuttering, incoherent end to the mass  (a commonsense restoration);

5       deleting the introductory prayers at the foot of the altar;

6       ... and the ‘Leonine’ prayers after the mass; ^[23]

7       abolishing the ancient requirement that priests recite prayers even when they were sung by the choir*;

8       Restoring the rite of concelebration.*;

9       ... and the Offertory procession.*

10   Preparation of the altar table only at  the start of the Liturgy of the Eucharist and not before:  for the mass up to that point the celebrant should not be at the altar  but elsewhere in the sanctuary (after all, the mass is a meal ... )*

11   Abolition of the second recitation of the Confiteor immediately before Holy Communion (an example of a meaningful minor change).

12   Fewer genuflections during the mass.

13   Singing the Communion Verse during communion;

14   A shorter formula such as ‘Corpus Christi’ (the body of Christ) to replace ‘Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam’ as the priest distributes Holy Communion to each communicant.

15   Finally, a more substantial proposal, but one anticipated by the dialogue mass: that readings should be in the vernacular rather than Latin (It was assumed, even by most of those who wished it, that the Canon could be neither changed nor even translated).

In the event, every one of these ideas, great and small (and some it must be said were small indeed) articulated by liturgical scholars was implemented in the mass of 1970, with point 15 proving to be far too modest.

Among the various proposals commonly aired at the time with reference to historical research, and/or pastoral concerns were:

1.      the celebrant should face the people  (wrongly thought to have been the practice in the early church);

2.     the mass needed reforming because it was ‘decayed’; 

3.     which made it necessary to cut out later ‘accretions’ and return to the ‘primitive simplicity’ of the early church  (a common idealistic, if vague, element in programmes of reform, such as that of St Francis in the twelfth century and the Protestant reformers in the sixteenth);

4.     in particular, the radical reconstruction of the Offertory was regarded as both desirable and permissible because it was a ‘late’ (medieval) addition to the mass, and because of its perceived ‘anticipation’ of the Canon;

5.     there should be a three-year cycle of readings so the people would be exposed to a fuller   and more varied scriptural diet than that of the existing one-year lectionary;

6.     to be able to participate actively, the congregation needed to be able to see everything that happened on the altar (strangely enough, the medieval congregation’s desire to see what was happening at the consecration was dismissed)

7.     similarly, the mass should be said aloud throughout (the end of the ‘silent Canon’)

8.     there should be consequent changes to make clear that ‘the mass is a meal’, such as celebration facing the people and receiving Communion in the hand

9.     the structure of the mass should be changed so as to be clear to all;

10.  the mass as currently (1950s) celebrated spoke more to the cultured than to the simpler faithful and should consequently be simplified;

11.  the church should ‘bring the mass to the people’, rather than as hitherto, the opposite, which meant ‘pastoral’ adaptation to the ‘needs’ of modern men and women (for example the availability of evening masses, and the reduction of the fast before Communion, both introduced in the mid-1950s).

12.  To achieve all these goals, the mass needed to allow for greater creativity.