The Word in the Liturgy

Extract

The people who write in English about the liturgy have mostly read about it in French or German. The great movement of reform in the Church which has as its centre the revival of the liturgy is arriving in England rather late and with a noticeable foreign accent. There are important studies in the liturgy by English writers but none of them are by Catholics. The Catholic who is dissatisfied, as any educated and normally critical man must be, with what was taught him as Religious Instruction at school gets in touch with the new life in the Church usually through translations of continental books or else through second-hand works based on continental originals.

Readers of Blackfriars will presumably not need a detailed account of the manifestations of this new life. Like every other movement of reform within the Church, it has been essentially a return to sacred Scripture. There have been a good many other motives and movements, some good and some not so good, connected with the change: there has been a concern for the reverent and meaningful performance of the ceremonies of the Church; there has been a certain nostalgia for the past—whether the thirteenth or the fifth century—there has been a weariness with a certain kind of seminary textbook theology in which the great rivers of the Fathers and the Scholastics have been reduced to so much damp sand; there has been a characteristically twentieth century emphasis upon the social and communal as against the private. But in the first place it has been a matter of the Scriptures.