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THE EMERGENCE OF THE ROMAN RITE
Rome and the Barbarians
Strangely enough, at the outset of its long history, the Roman mass was in Greek, the common language of the cosmopolitan Mediterranean. Latin was not fully adopted until the second half of the fourth century. The Canon or Eucharistic Prayer remained in Greek for a while even after the first part of the mass was celebrated in Latin, the local vernacular. In fact, North Africa had a Latin liturgy before the capital of the Empire. Apart from the related Roman and African liturgies, there was another family of Latin liturgies, including the Ambrosian Rite in Milan and Northern Italy, and the Gallican rite in France, the immediate source for many prayers and practices originally imported from Eastern (Byzantine and Syrian) traditions.
Circumstances conspired to give the Roman rite a dominant position. Paradoxically, the final collapse of the Roman Empire in the West during the fifth century had positive consequences for the Church, as afterwards it remained the sole representative of ancient Roman civilisation in half of Europe, making it attractive to the various largely pagan peoples, which had established new kingdoms on the territory of the Empire. The popes’ strategy, the only realistic one in the circumstances, was to cultivate and convert them. The policy was successful in the first place with the Franks, who had settled in the Northern part of what had been Gaul, giving it their name, France (baptism of King Clovis c 495 AD). The culmination of the church’s policy came among the monuments and ruins of ancient Rome on Christmas Day in 800 AD, when Pope Leo III placed an imperial crown on head of Clovis’ greatest successor as ruler of this once 'barbaric’ Germanic people which had once helped to bring about the collapse of the Roman Empire. As he listened to the acclamation, we can imagine the pride and satisfaction the new Emperor Charlemagne (768-814) must have felt at being the recognised successor of the great men responsible for the city and its achievements. It must also have been a moment of satisfaction to the pope who had just crowned the King of the Franks Emperor as successor to the Caesars, as it symbolised and guaranteed the position of the church in a world without security. It also marks the end of the transition from the ancient to the medieval world.
Rome and Constantinople
The second factor strengthening the position of the Roman liturgy was the effective elimination by Islamic conquest of the seventh century of the two great liturgical centres and seats of patriarchs (who exercised autho000rity over the dioceses of a region, as the pope did from Rome), Antioch in Syria and Alexandria in Egypt. The territory of the new patriarchate of Jerusalem and the former Roman provinces of North Africa, a great centre of Latin liturgy, also fell as Islamic armies swept on, establishing by the eighth century an empire stretching from Syria to Spain. These developments left Rome by default the dominant Christian centre in the West and Constantinople in the East. Religious rivalries were added to political tensions as they grew apart, including liturgically. The great movements of people were not over, however, and its results were to have continuing significance for liturgical developments especially in Eastern and Central Europe. After the Germans, the next set of ‘barbarian’ newcomers to Europe were the Slavs, who mostly adopted the Eastern or Orthodox form of Christianity and the Greek liturgy, translated into their own languages.
This period of political and cultural turbulence has had long-lasting implications, as Greek-speaking Byzantium and most of the Slavonic world (but without the territories which were to become Croatia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland, where the church wasband still is, Western, or Latin) asserted a distinctive identity, eventually consisting of a set of separate, mostly national churches.The final break with Rome came in 1054 and, despite all they have in common and various attempts at reconciliation, it has lasted ever since. It remains one of the basic cultural divisions in Europe. In the West, its position as the cultural successor to the Roman Empire meant that the Catholic Church developed in the opposite direction, as an explicitly international church, and the Latin language was the most significant element in this identity.
Emergence of the Roman Rite
The Roman mass as we know it owes its distinctive character to the combination of the typically conservative, restrained traditional Roman style of liturgy with the more expressive Eastern style, usually imported via the Latin liturgy of Gaul/France, always much more open than Rome to Eastern influences, possibly because the South of France was originally Christianized by missionaries from Asia. The Gallic liturgy gets its name from the name of the territory in Latin Gallia ‘Gaul’, later called France, from the Franks, the Germanic tribe who conquered most of it later. It was the immediate source of all of the significant single items inserted into the framework of the Roman mass after 700 AD, such as the Confiteor (11th century), Gloria (12th century as a regular part of the Roman mass), Credo (11th century), and Agnus Dei (7th century) Individual freestanding items such as these as could be inserted into the existing framework of the mass without disturbing the overall pattern by filling places in the text referred to as ‘soft spots’ (for example where there was a procession but no accompanying prayers, as was true at that time of the opening of the mass)
There is reliable information from this period on because copies of the liturgical books have survived. The term ‘liturgical books’ is used because at this stage there was no overall missal: for example, the readers, the deacon, and the choir each had a book containing only the items in the proper (changing parts of the mass) pertaining to them. The celebrant had a sort of script with ‘stage directions’ called the Ordo missae for coordinating the contributions of all the participants. There are Orders of the Mass bearing the names of two popes of the late fifth century, Leo I (440-461) and Gelasius (492-496) and of Gregory I a century later (559-604). The earliest complete Ordines date from the seventh century, but incorporate older material. Pope Gregory the Great also gave his name to the restored form of liturgical singing, still known as Gregorian chant. He moved the Pater Noster to its present, prominent position, immediately after the end of the Canon, and is personally credited with finalising the Canon, probably first written down in the fourth century, having up to then been improvised. The need for dogmatic consistency in the disputes over the identity and person of Jesus in the fourth and fifth centuries was one of the factors leading to it being committed to writing