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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
The transformation of the liturgy of the Catholic Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council was, by any standard, a landmark event. It represented the unfreezing of a liturgical tradition which had seemed to many to be sacrosanct and immemorial, beyond question or change. Almost a century ago the greatest of all English liturgists, Edmund Bishop, could write without a hint of irony that “With the Missal and Breviary of St Pius V ...the history of the Roman liturgy may be said to be closed”.
Bishop himself was too good an historian to harbour romantic illusions about the timelessness or changelessness of liturgy. He had a highly developed sense of the historical evolution of worship and in fact he was a strong sympathiser and fellow-traveller with the Modernist movement, and its attempt to demythologise the doctrinaire nonhistorical orthodoxy of post-Tridentine Catholicism. But neither Bishop nor the two generations of liturgists who laboured after him to reclaim for the present the forgotten riches of the Latin liturgical tradition could have dreamed of the cultural and theological revolution which would come upon the Church in the late 1960s and 1970s, a revolution which swept away not only many of the accretions of medieval and baroque liturgical and para-liturgical practice which they so deplored, but many of their own most treasured convictions about the nature of liturgy and liturgical theology. They hoped that the liturgy, duly cleansed of accretion and distortion, would become, in Joseph Jungmann’s words, “a school of faith”. In the ancient prayers and ceremonies of the Church, Jungmann believed, would be found an endless resource, a great well of wisdom and truth.
This is the text of a paper read at the conference Beyond the Prosaic at Westminster College Oxford in July 1996. Edited extracts from the paper were printed in The Tablet of 6th July 1996, pp. 882–3.
2 Bishop, Edmund, Liturgica Historica, (Oxford 1918) p 17Google Scholar.
3 Jungmann, Joseph, Pastoral Liturgy, (London 1962) p 335Google Scholar.
4 International Commission on English in the Liturgy. The Sacramentary, Segment Three: Order of Mass 1. (August 1994) p 29.
5 For a highly influential discussion of the “defects” of the Roman Canon, see Vagaggini, Cipriano, The Canon of the Mass wid Liturgiccil Reform. (London 1967) pp 90–107Google Scholar.
6 Vagaggini, The Canon of the Mass und Liturgical Reform, p 88.
7 For convenience, both the Latin texts and the 1973 ICEL versions are taken from The Gregorian Missal for Sundays. Solesmes 1990.
8 et recordabor foederis mei vobiscum, et cum omni anima vivente quae carnem vegetat.
9 The draft Sacramentary here is undistinguished, but once again registers the crucial point:
The insertion here of “and cause us” seems to me to weaken but does not obliterate the parallelism with “sit tibi munus acceptum”.
10 Once again, the draft sacramentary is an improvement:
If one were minded to quibble, it could be argued that “weak md cenain to fall” is not an exact rendering of the starker “nihil potest mortalis infirmitas”, but the overall success of the translation seems clear.
12 O'Keefe, Martin D S.J., Oremus. Speciking wirh God in the Words of the Roman Rite (Institute of Jesuit Sources, St Louis, 1973) p 84Google Scholar.
13 The draft Sacramentary is disappointing here
The trouble with this is that “in nomine dilecti Filii tui” becomes here simply the name in which we do our good works, whereas in the Latin it is because of his Name and its saving power that we are able to do the good works.
14 I quote the text as edited by Wilson, H A, The Gregorian Sacramentary under Charles the Great. (London, Henry Bradshaw Society, 1915) p 169Google Scholar, but have modernised the punctuation.
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