LONG OVERDUE REFORM ?

A claim is often made that such a reform was delayed until the 20th Century due to the numerous afflictions which beset the Holy See requiring the Popes to focus on other priorities. If it really had been intended to reform the liturgy, but other matters had prevented this, it is indeed remarkable that the aims of the liturgical movement were so successfully prosecuted during the cataclysmic wars of the 20th Century and the period of anti-Catholic totalitarian rule in Nazi Germany and the countries which fell under the rule of atheistic communism. It would have been expected then that during such a time changes in the liturgy would scarcely have been contemplated. However, that was certainly not the case. One of the most astonishing examples of the urgency to promote active participation is also given by Father Ellard: “Christmas Eve 1943 brought from the Sacred Congregation of Rites a decree of approval addressed to Cardinal Bertram, as president of the Fulda Conference, for the uniform and largely vernacular (!) form for the Dialogue Mass and the largely vernacular German singing at High Mass where that was in vogue” (p153). This was at the height of the Second World War which was then beginning to turn against Germany. Only one year later Cardinal Bertram’s cathedral city of Breslau would be besieged by the Red Army and destroyed with tens of thousands killed and the rest of the population fleeing as refugees. Even Rome itself was not free from the danger of destruction at a certain time; yet liturgical reform continued unabated! Breslau Cathedral 1945

After Dialogue Mass there was nothing left to reform except the rite itself and/or render it in the vernacular. This was, in fact, the direction of liturgical scholarship before the Council. The most authoritative work on the Mass produced during these years is Joseph Jungmann’s epic work “Missarum Solemnia”, published in 1949 with several later additions. Here is what Jungman has to say about the Tridentine form of Mass: “After fifteen hundred years of unbroken development in the rite of the Roman Mass, after the rushing and the streaming from every height and out of every valley, the Missal of Pius V was indeed a powerful dam holding back the waters or permitting them to flow through only in firm, well-built canals. At one blow all arbitrary meandering to one side or another was cut off, all floods prevented, and a safe, regular and useful flow assured. But the price paid was this, that the beautiful river valley now lay barren and the forces of further evolution were often channelled into the narrow bed of a very inadequate devotional life instead of gathering strength for new forms of liturgical expression……In fact someone has styled this period of Church history as the epoch of inactivity or of rubrics.”

posted on the Feast of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary by grandfellow.