The Liturgical Movement (1832-1963)

The restoration of a Benedictine centre

The Catholic Liturgical Movement has its historically recognized starting point in the refounding of Saint-Pierre Abbey of Solesmes by Dom Prosper Gueranger, a young priest of the diocese of Le Mans. Born on 4 April 1805 at Sable-sur-Sarthe and ordained priest on 7 October 1827^[4], Gueranger acquired in December 1832 the disused buildings of the former Benedictine priory of Solesmes, closed during the French Revolution. On 11 July 1833, feast of Saint Benedict, he established there the first post-revolutionary monastic community of Benedictine tradition in France; in 1836, the community publicly declared its intention to devote itself to restoring the Benedictine order; in July 1837, Pope Gregory XVI approved the restoration; Dom Gueranger made his solemn profession at Rome, into the hands of the abbot of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, on 26 July 1837; by a brief of 1 September 1837, the priory was erected as an abbey, head of the Congregation of France, with Dom Gueranger as its first abbot^[5].

This refounding is anything but a purely disciplinary act of returning to monastic life. For Gueranger, restoring Solesmes meant restoring in the Catholic Church of France a place where the liturgy would be celebrated in full, according to the pure Roman rite, with its antiphons, its responsories, its Divine Office sung in Gregorian chant. The context of 19th-century France was one of profound liturgical fragmentation: on the eve of the Revolution, most French dioceses still celebrated according to their own neo-Gallican liturgies — 18th-century diocesan missals and breviaries, sometimes marked by Jansenist influence, far removed from the Roman books. Gueranger threw himself into a campaign of return to the Roman rite, which he pursued through his publications and personal influence until, under the pontificate of Pius IX, unification was achieved in the 1860s-1870s.

The Liturgical Year: architecture of a masterpiece

Dom Gueranger's major work is The Liturgical Year, a vast spiritual and historical commentary on the whole Roman liturgical cycle. Publication stretched over nearly forty years: the first volume appeared in 1841, and Gueranger died in 1875 without having completed the series, which his successors extended to fifteen volumes (the first nine directly from his hand, the following six compiled from his notes by Dom Lucien Fromage and Dom Pierre Jausions)^[6]. For each liturgical season (Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, Time after Pentecost, proper of saints), Gueranger provides:

• a historical and theological introduction to the liturgical season
• for each day, the full text of the prayers of Mass and of the office (in Latin with French translation)
• notices on the saints of the day, the origins of feasts, traditional liturgical usages
• spiritual meditations extending each office with an interior reflection

The work met with considerable success. Sister Therese of Lisieux would read and love it. The future Cardinal Sarto, who would become Saint Pius X, was an attentive reader of it. The Liturgical Year became, for three generations, the reference manual of clerics and educated laypeople who wished to live the Roman liturgical year from within — long before that practice became a conciliar watchword.

Alongside The Liturgical Year, Gueranger also published the Liturgical Institutions (3 volumes, 1840-1851), a historical and polemical treatise defending the Roman liturgy against neo-Gallican usages, which is in reality the first great modern treatise on the history of Western liturgy^[7]. It is in this book that Gueranger formulates his famous denunciation of the "anti-liturgical heresy": he sees, in the rationalism, Jansenism and Gallicanism of the 18th century, a common attitude of contempt for the public prayer of the Church, to which he opposes Roman and patristic veneration for the liturgy as the theandric act of Christ and of his Church.

Solesmes and the restoration of Gregorian chant

Solesmes's second great work, continued by Dom Gueranger's disciples after 1875, is the scholarly restoration of Gregorian chant. Under the impetus of Dom Joseph Pothier (1835-1923) and above all of Dom Andre Mocquereau (1849-1930), the monks of Solesmes undertook a large-scale philological and musicological labour: collecting the oldest notated manuscripts (St. Gall, Laon, Chartres, Montpellier), critical comparison of melodic readings, restitution of the authentic melodies prior to late medieval alterations and 17th-century reforms (Medici edition).

This enterprise led to the publication of Dom Pothier's Liber Gradualis in 1883, then to the Musical Palaeography (collection of facsimiles of ancient manuscripts begun in 1889), and finally to the Vatican edition of Gregorian chant (Graduale Romanum, 1908; Antiphonale Monasticum, 1934), produced under the authority of Pius X but based essentially on the work of the monks of Solesmes. This restoration would have a direct consequence for the Liturgical Movement: it gave back to the whole Catholic Church the melodic treasure that Vatican II would call the "proper chant of the Roman liturgy" (Sacrosanctum Concilium, Section 116).

The motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini (22 November 1903)

Elected pope on 4 August 1903 in succession to Leo XIII, the Patriarch of Venice Giuseppe Sarto took the name of Pius X and published, less than four months after his accession to the pontificate, the motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini ("Among the concerns"), dated 22 November 1903 — feast of Saint Cecilia, patroness of church musicians. The document, chiefly devoted to sacred music, is the first pontifical act to lay the milestones of the future Liturgical Movement^[8].

There Pius X recalls the three pillars of authentic liturgical music: the primacy of Gregorian chant, the superiority of classical Roman polyphony (notably that of Palestrina), and the exclusion of theatrical influence. The motu proprio forbids adaptations of opera melodies (19th-century Italian parishes sometimes adapted sextets by Donizetti or quartets by Verdi to Latin liturgical texts), bans female voices from liturgical choirs (reserved to clerics and children), forbids the piano and percussion instruments, and restricts the use of the organ.

"Active participation in the holy mysteries"

Beyond its musical rules, the motu proprio contains a founding sentence that would run through the whole 20th-century Liturgical Movement. In the introduction, Pius X sets out the spiritual reason for the reforms he prescribes:

"Our most lively desire being that the true Christian spirit flourish again in every way and be maintained among all the faithful, it is necessary to provide before all else for the holiness and dignity of the temple, where the faithful gather precisely to draw this spirit from its first and indispensable source, which is active participation in the holy mysteries and in the public and solemn prayer of the Church." — Saint Pius X, motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini, 22 November 1903 (translated from the Italian)^[9]

The original Italian text uses the expression "la partecipazione attiva ai sacrosanti misteri" — active participation in the holy mysteries. It is, as far as can be traced, the first pontifical occurrence of what would become the keyword of the Liturgical Movement throughout the 20th century: the partecipazione attiva (in Latin participatio actuosa) of the faithful in the liturgical action. Pius X does not forge a systematic doctrine, but with this formula he authorizes a whole pastoral, theological and catechetical labour that would unfold over sixty years, and which would culminate in the decree of Vatican II Sacrosanctum Concilium (Section 14) taking up the expression almost word for word — to make it the fundamental principle of the liturgical reform.

Other liturgical decisions of Pius X

The pontificate of Saint Pius X (1903-1914) continued this line with several decisions of great consequence for the future Liturgical Movement:

• Decree Sacra Tridentina Synodus (1905) — recommendation of frequent indeed daily communion for the faithful, breaking with the Jansenist practice of spaced-out communion that had dominated since the 18th century
• Decree Quam singulari Christus amore (8 August 1910) — lowering of the age of first communion to the age of reason (about 7 years old), instead of the previous late practice (12-14 years old)
• Constitution Divino afflatu (1 November 1911) — reform of the Roman breviary, the first major revision of the psalter since the Council of Trent

These decisions, taken together, make up the first magisterial programme of return to the liturgy as the ordinary nourishment of the spiritual life of ordinary faithful. They prepared the ground for what would happen six years after the death of Pius X, in Belgium, at a Catholic congress held at Malines.

An unusual path

Lambert Beauduin was born on 5 August 1873 at Rosoux-les-Waremme, in the province of Liege. Ordained a priest of the diocesan clergy in 1897, he began his ministry as a working-class priest (chaplain to the Christian workers' circles of Liege), alongside a friend who later became famous, Canon Antoine Pottier^[10]. This social and pastoral experience lastingly marked his thought: for Beauduin, the liturgy was never a purely aesthetic or rubrical question, but a matter of ordinary Christian life for workers, farmers and parish children.

In 1906, he entered as a monk at the Benedictine monastery of Mont-Cesar, at Louvain, where he received the religious name "Lambert" (in reference to the patron saint of Liege). It was there that the liturgical study group was formed which would, within a few years, make this small Belgian community one of the three great European centres of the nascent Liturgical Movement, alongside Solesmes in France and Maria Laach in Germany.

The Catholic Congress of Malines (23 September 1909)

On 23 September 1909, at the National Congress of Catholic Works at Malines, convened by Cardinal Desire-Joseph Mercier (1851-1926), Archbishop of Malines, Dom Lambert Beauduin delivered a speech that would retrospectively be regarded as the birth certificate of the 20th-century Liturgical Movement^[11]. In it he pleaded for a democratization of the liturgy — not in the sense of trivialization, but in the sense of a popular reappropriation: bringing the liturgy into the life of the Christian people, for it is too precious to remain the preserve of clerics and monks, and giving the missal back to the ordinary faithful as a prayer book. This programme would be systematized in The Piety of the Church (1914)^[12].

This intervention was no isolated cry. It was borne by the authority of Cardinal Mercier, one of the great intellectual figures of European Catholicism at the time, who publicly supported Beauduin and financed the first French-language liturgical publications of Mont-Cesar.

The Piety of the Church (1914) and liturgical pedagogy

In 1914, Beauduin published The Piety of the Church: Principles and Facts — a doctrinal and programmatic exposition of the movement he had just founded. The book develops three central theses:

1. The liturgy is the public and official prayer of the Church, hence of a dignity superior to private devotions (even the most respectable)
2. The faithful must take an active part in it, in union of heart and mind with the celebrating priest
3. The liturgical texts must therefore be translated, the rites explained, children and adults formed to understand what they celebrate

To implement this pedagogy, Mont-Cesar launched from 1909-1910 a set of editorial tools:

• Les Questions liturgiques et paroissiales — scholarly review (founded in 1910)
• La Vie liturgique — popular parish leaflets explaining each Sunday's Mass to the faithful, with translated texts, antiphons and collects made accessible to laypeople
• The Missal of the Faithful — bilingual Latin-French version of the Roman Missal, the first true lay missal in the French language of the 20th century

This twofold dimension — scholarly erudition and popular apostolate — would be the hallmark of the Liturgical Movement for the whole century. Beauduin himself would later found in 1925 the Benedictine monastery of Amay-sur-Meuse (transferred to Chevetogne in 1939), specializing in ecumenical dialogue with Orthodoxy — another complementary dimension that would profoundly mark Vatican II^[13]. He died at Chevetogne on 11 January 1960, six years before seeing the conciliar crowning of all he had worked for over half a century.

Maria Laach Abbey and Abbot Herwegen

At the same time as Beauduin was launching the movement in Belgium, a parallel centre was kindled in Germany, at the Benedictine abbey of Maria Laach, in the Rhineland. The decisive turning point was the election of Ildefons Herwegen as abbot in 1913. Herwegen (1874-1946), a leading scholar and organizer, made Maria Laach a centre of liturgical research and spiritual renewal of European stature. As early as Holy Week 1914, he convened a liturgical conference for educated laypeople — an unprecedented event marking the start of a long series of annual meetings between monks, theologians and faithful eager to rediscover the meaning of the rites.

Maria Laach then housed a remarkable intellectual concentration: alongside Herwegen himself, Brother Athanasius Wintersig, the philologist Cunibert Mohlberg (future editor of the great medieval sacramentaries), and above all the two figures who would mark the liturgical thought of the 20th century — Romano Guardini and Odo Casel.

Romano Guardini and Vom Geist der Liturgie (1918)

Romano Guardini (1885-1968), Italo-German priest, theologian, philosopher and writer, published in 1918 with the Herder publishing house of Freiburg im Breisgau, at the invitation of Abbot Herwegen, a small book destined to become one of the classics of the 20th-century Catholic world: Vom Geist der Liturgie (The Spirit of the Liturgy)^[14]. Written during the First World War, the work met with immediate and lasting success: it would be translated into all the major European languages.

In it Guardini develops a phenomenological reading of the liturgy, attentive to its symbolic character (the rite as language of body and soul), to its communal structure (the liturgy as act of the Church, not of an isolated individual), and to its cosmic dimension (the liturgy as microcosm of the work of Christ reaching the whole of creation). The book, written in a limpid style accessible to educated laypeople, popularized the intuitions of the Liturgical Movement far beyond specialist circles. Eighty-two years later, in 2000, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger would publish a book of the same title — Der Geist der Liturgie — in explicit homage to Guardini, whose disciple he acknowledged himself to be.

Odo Casel and the doctrine of the mysteries

Maria Laach's other great intellect was Dom Odo Casel (1886-1948), a Benedictine monk who entered Maria Laach in 1905, professed in 1907, ordained in 1911, doctor in theology of the University of Bonn (1913) and then in classical philology (1918). Casel is the author of a doctrine of the mysteries (Mysterienlehre or Mysterientheologie) which constitutes the major theological contribution of the German Liturgical Movement^[15].

The central idea, formulated notably in The Mystery of Worship in Christianity (Das christliche Kultmysterium, 1932), is that the liturgy is not a psychological commemoration of the past (remembering the actions of Christ) nor a mere application of the fruits of salvation acquired once for all (too juridical a vision), but a Mysteriengegenwart — a presence in mystery of the saving act itself. In the Mass, it is not only the effects of the Passion that are applied to the soul; it is the paschal mystery itself (death and resurrection of Christ) that is made present under the sacramental veil, so that the praying community really takes part in it: in the classical formulation taken up by Casel's commentators, the mystery is a sacred cultic action by which a saving event becomes present in the rite, and the community performing this rite takes part in the event and finds salvation in it^[16].

Casel's doctrine was not without arousing controversy in his time: he was reproached with an excessive kinship with the pagan mysteries of Greece and Rome, with which he drew methodological comparison. Pius XII, in Mediator Dei (1947), takes care not to endorse it as such, while integrating its central intuition: the active presence of Christ in the liturgical action. In the long run, it is this intuition that would be taken up by the Second Vatican Council (Sacrosanctum Concilium, Section 7):

"Christ is always present with his Church, especially in the liturgical actions. He is present in the sacrifice of the Mass, and in the person of the minister, 'the same offering now through the ministry of priests, who offered himself then on the cross' and, in the highest degree, under the Eucharistic species." — Vatican II, Sacrosanctum Concilium, Section 7, 4 December 1963^[17]

Casel died suddenly on Easter Sunday, 28 March 1948, struck down by a cerebral congestion just after singing Lumen Christi at the Easter Vigil in the chapel of the Herstelle convent, where he was chaplain — a striking coincidence for the theologian who had spent his life showing that the paschal liturgy is the heart of Christianity.

The Austrian cradle of the "popular liturgical movement"

If Maria Laach embodies the theological and scholarly side of the movement, it is in Austria, at the Augustinian abbey of Klosterneuburg (near Vienna), that its most pastoral and popular version unfolded. The central figure is the canon regular Pius Parsch, born Johann Bruno Parsch on 18 May 1884 in Moravia, who died at Klosterneuburg on 11 March 1954^[18].

A military chaplain during the First World War, marked by pastoral experience at the front, Parsch returned to his abbey after 1918 with a clear conviction: the liturgy, as the monks celebrate it, must become accessible to ordinary faithful — not only through its translation, but through a systematic biblical and liturgical catechesis. As early as 1919, he launched Bible courses for the parishioners of Klosterneuburg. In 1921, he formed a liturgical community gathered each Sunday around the small Romanesque chapel of Saint Gertrude inside the abbey precinct.

The "community Masses" of Saint Gertrude (May 1922)

On 17 May 1922, Pius Parsch celebrated in the collegiate church of Klosterneuburg, on an altar facing the people, the first Community Mass of the Austrian Liturgical Movement, then regularly in Saint Gertrude's church: a Low Mass in Latin according to the Tridentine rite, but accompanied by the aloud recitation by all the faithful present (in German) of the texts of the proper (introit, collect, readings, communion antiphon), with brief explanations inserted by the celebrant at each stage^[19]. The Mass of Ascension Day — Thursday 25 May 1922 — celebrated at Saint Gertrude, has remained the founding public act of this Gemeinschaftsmesse. Saint Gertrude's church today bears the honorary title of Wiege der volksliturgischen Bewegung (Cradle of the popular liturgical movement).

This innovation, surprising for the time, merely puts into practice what the founders had been calling for over twenty years: the participatio actuosa invoked by Pius X as early as 1903. It would inspire in the following decades thousands of parishes in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and Italy, which adopted in various forms the practice of the "dialogue Mass" (Missa recitata, deutsches Hochamt, "parish Mass" in French).

Bibel und Liturgie (1926) and the influence of the work

Parsch founded in 1926 the review Bibel und Liturgie (Bible and Liturgy), which still appears today. It was followed in 1928 by Lebe mit der Kirche (Live with the Church), a popular parish leaflet (published until 1952) distributing, Sunday after Sunday, an accessible explanation of the liturgical proper of the week to the broad German-speaking Catholic public^[20]. His major work, Das Jahr des Heiles (The Year of Salvation), is a commentary on the whole liturgical year in the pastoral spirit of the movement — the Germanic equivalent of Gueranger's The Liturgical Year, but with a more immediately pedagogical orientation.

In 1950, Parsch founded the Klosterneuburger Bibelapostolat (Biblical Apostolate of Klosterneuburg), which published low-priced Bibles and introductions to Scripture for the popular Catholic public — thereby prefiguring a whole strand of the biblical renewal that Vatican II would promote in Dei Verbum (1965).

The Centre de Pastorale Liturgique of Paris (1943)

In France, the Liturgical Movement crystallized during the Occupation. On 20 May 1943, in Paris, in the premises of Editions du Cerf (Dominican publishing house), two Dominicans of the Province of France — Father Pie Duploye (1906-1981) and Father Aimon-Marie Roguet (1906-1991) — founded the Centre de Pastorale Liturgique (CPL)^[21].

The CPL quickly gathered a group of experts called to play a major role at Vatican II: Abbe Aime-Georges Martimort (1911-2000), soon co-director of the Centre (1946); the theologian Louis Bouyer (1913-2004), a convert from Lutheranism, Oratorian; the Dominican Pierre-Marie Gy (1922-2004); the musician Joseph Gelineau (1920-2008); the historian Bernard Botte (1893-1980); the theologian Joseph Lecuyer (1912-1983)^[22]. The review La Maison-Dieu, founded at the start of 1945, became the principal organ of the Centre and one of the great European theological reviews of the time.

The CPL organized the annual Liturgical Weeks (Vanves 1944, then in various towns of France), where the master ideas of the future conciliar reform were prepared: return to the vernacular language for certain parts of the Mass, restoration of communion under both species, universal prayer, more abundant biblical readings, simplification of overladen rites.

Louis Bouyer: constructive criticism of the movement

Alongside this committed line, the French movement also knew an important critical vein, embodied notably by Louis Bouyer. In The Life of the Liturgy (1956, in the Cerf Lex orandi collection, published in English as early as 1955 under the title Liturgical Piety)^[23], Bouyer does not reject the Liturgical Movement, but denounces certain deviations he regards as betrayals of the founding intuition: activism reducing the liturgy to doing (songs, gestures, readings) while forgetting contemplation; archaism claiming mechanically to resuscitate the usages of the first centuries; didacticism turning Mass into a catechism lesson instead of making it an act of adoration.

This critical voice would grow harsher after Vatican II, when Bouyer published in 1968 The Decomposition of Catholicism and in 1975 Religious and Clerics against God, denouncing a disastrous implementation of the conciliar reform. He nevertheless remains a major witness of the authentic 20th-century Liturgical Movement.

The other national centres

Other centres continued the work in Europe and America:

• Italy — the Benedictine abbey of Finalpia (Liguria) under the impetus of Dom Emmanuel Caronti (publication of the review Rivista Liturgica from 1914); the Benedictines of Santa Giustina of Padua; the historiographical work of Dom Mario Righetti (1882-1975), author of the monumental Storia liturgica in 4 volumes (1945-1953).
• United States — the Benedictine abbey of Saint John's of Collegeville (Minnesota), under the impetus of Dom Virgil Michel (1890-1938), a direct pupil of Beauduin at Mont-Cesar; review Orate Fratres (1926, renamed Worship in 1951).
• Great Britain — Downside Abbey, with Dom Bernard McElligott; review Liturgy launched in 1929.
• Brazil and Argentina — spread from the 1930s in the wake of emigrated European Benedictines.

The first encyclical entirely devoted to the liturgy

On 20 November 1947, Pope Pius XII promulgated the encyclical Mediator Dei et hominum ("The Mediator between God and men"), which constitutes the first pontifical encyclical in history entirely devoted to the sacred liturgy^[24]. The document is an event: for the first time, the universal ordinary magisterium takes an in-depth position on the questions raised for thirty years by the Liturgical Movement.

In it Pius XII strikes a subtle doctrinal and pastoral balance. The pope:

1. Recognizes the dignity of the Liturgical Movement and approves its fundamental intuitions — primacy of the liturgy as act of Christ and of his Church, active participation of the faithful, rediscovery of the Divine Office and the breviary, desire for a deeper liturgical catechesis
2. Warns against certain deviations observed in practice: archaeologism seeking mechanically to return to the liturgy of the first centuries by suppressing all medieval and baroque development; functionalism neglecting the contemplative dimension of rites; contempt for popular devotions (rosary, Stations of the Cross, devotions to the Sacred Heart) in the name of an excessive liturgical purism
3. Confirms the value of private devotions and personal piety as legitimate complements of public liturgy — without ever substituting for it

The pontifical definition of the liturgy

The encyclical provides what has remained the classical magisterial definition of the liturgy in the 20th century:

"The holy liturgy therefore constitutes the public worship which our Redeemer, Head of the Church, renders to the heavenly Father, and which the society of the faithful renders to its Founder and, through him, to the eternal Father; in short, it constitutes the whole public worship of the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, that is, of its Head and of its members." — Pius XII, encyclical Mediator Dei, Section 20, 20 November 1947 (translated from the Latin)^[25]

This Christological and ecclesiological definition would be taken up as such by the Second Vatican Council in Sacrosanctum Concilium (Section 7), showing the strict doctrinal continuity between Pius XII and the Council.

Practical consequences (1948-1956)

After Mediator Dei, Pius XII initiated a series of partial liturgical reforms which constitute the last great liturgical acts before Vatican II:

• 28 May 1948 — creation by Pius XII of the Pontifical Commission for general liturgical reform, chaired by Cardinal Clemente Micara then Gaetano Cicognani, with as secretary the future Archbishop Annibale Bugnini (1912-1982)
• 9 February 1951 — decree Dominicae Resurrectionis vigiliam restoring the Easter Vigil celebrated at night (instead of on Holy Saturday morning as had become the usage)
• 16 November 1955 — decree Maxima redemptionis nostrae mysteria thoroughly reforming Holy Week (Palm procession in the morning, chrism Mass, Good Friday Passion liturgy in the afternoon, Easter Vigil at night)
• 1955-1956 — simplification of the liturgical calendar and of the structure of the rubrics

These reforms were welcomed with enthusiasm by the liturgists of the movement, who saw in them the first official stage of a magisterial labour awaited for fifty years. They directly prepared the ground for the work of the Second Vatican Council.

The first document of Vatican II

The constitution on the sacred liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium is the first document promulgated by the Second Vatican Council, adopted in conciliar session by 2,147 votes to 4 and promulgated by Pope Paul VI on 4 December 1963^[26]. The fact that it is the very first of the Council's sixteen documents to see the light of day is revealing: the liturgy is treated as the gateway to conciliar reflection, a sign that the maturation of the Liturgical Movement over the previous half-century had reached its term.

The constitution gathers almost all the fundamental intuitions of the previous sixty years:

• Definition of the liturgy as exercise of the priestly office of Christ (Section 7), taken directly from Mediator Dei
• Active participation of the faithful (participatio actuosa), proclaimed as the governing principle of the whole reform (Section 14) — heritage of Pius X and Beauduin
• Restoration of certain rites obscured over the centuries
• Possible use of vernacular languages alongside Latin for certain parts (Section 36) — a framed concession
• Restoration of the prayer of the faithful (Section 53)
• Communion under both species in certain cases (Section 55)
• Concelebration restored as expression of the unity of the priesthood (Section 57)

The governing principle: participatio actuosa

The central conciliar text on this point is Section 14, which constitutes the true testament of the Liturgical Movement:

"Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful be led to that full, conscious and active participation in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy and which, by virtue of baptism, is a right and a duty for the Christian people, 'a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a redeemed people' (1 Pet. 2:9; cf. 2:4-5)." — Vatican II, Sacrosanctum Concilium, Section 14, 4 December 1963^[27]

Three keywords sum up the teaching: "full" (plena), "conscious" (conscia), "active" (actuosa). These are, in Latin, the three adjectives summing up sixty years of liturgical labour. The Council gives right to all the movement's intuitions, from Pius X to Beauduin, Parsch, Guardini, Casel and Bouyer.

Implementation: the Consilium Commission and Annibale Bugnini

On 25 January 1964, Pope Paul VI published the motu proprio Sacram Liturgiam instituting the Consilium ad exsequendam Constitutionem de sacra Liturgia ("Commission for implementing the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy"), generally called the Consilium. This commission, chaired by Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro (Archbishop of Bologna) and whose effective secretary was Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, was charged with drafting the new liturgical books. It worked for five years (1964-1969), leading notably to the promulgation of the new Roman Missal by Paul VI on 3 April 1969 (apostolic constitution Missale Romanum).

The question of whether these post-conciliar books are a faithful implementation of Sacrosanctum Concilium, or whether they constitute an overstepping or even a betrayal of it on certain points, is one of the great debates open within the Catholic Church for fifty years. That question goes beyond the scope of this article and is the subject of a specialized dossier: The Liturgical Reform after Vatican II.

The fruits of the Liturgical Movement

At the time of its conciliar crowning in 1963, the Liturgical Movement had transformed Catholic sensibility in depth, without removing anything from the doctrinal deposit. Its major fruits can be summed up in five points:

1. The rediscovery of the centrality of the liturgy as act of Christ and of his Church, and not as mere outward ceremonial. The formula "source and summit" (fons et culmen) of all Christian life, taken up by Sacrosanctum Concilium Section 10^[28], condenses this achievement (Lumen Gentium Section 11 applies the same expression to the Eucharistic sacrifice).
2. The restoration of Gregorian chant as the living heritage of the Latin Church, fruit of the patient labour of the monks of Solesmes and recognized by Pius X (1903) and then by Vatican II (SC Section 116).
3. The development of a popular liturgical catechesis (missals of the faithful, parish leaflets, prayer manuals, accessible commentaries) which enabled millions of ordinary Catholics to enter into the understanding of the rites.
4. The return to Holy Scripture as the heart of the liturgy, through the multiplication of biblical readings in the office and Mass (Vatican II would generalize a three-year cycle of Sunday readings in 1969).
5. The theological enrichment of discourse on the sacraments (Casel, Bouyer, Schillebeeckx, Rahner) — a more Christological and more ecclesiological sacramental theology, going beyond the strict juridical character of late scholastic theology.

Contemporary criticisms and current debates

The Liturgical Movement is not unanimously accepted in all its ramifications. Several critical lines remain active:

• The traditionalist line (Archbishop Lefebvre, Society of Saint Pius X, circles attached to the Tridentine rite), which holds that the post-conciliar implementation betrays the founding intuition and defends the traditional Roman liturgy as the common good of the Church
• The "reform of the reform" line (Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI, Cardinal Robert Sarah, the Adoremus movement), which receives Vatican II in full continuity but wishes to correct certain post-conciliar applications deemed excessive (motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, 7 July 2007)
• Internal critical voices (Bouyer from 1968, more recently several serious historiographical studies), which distinguish between the authentic intuition of the Liturgical Movement and some of its post-conciliar betrayals

The hermeneutic of continuity proposed by Benedict XVI in his famous address to the Roman Curia of 22 December 2005 offers the most fruitful key for reading what was at stake: Vatican II stands in substantial continuity with the tradition of the Church (and hence with Mediator Dei, Tra le sollecitudini, the work of Solesmes, etc.), even if there is a surface discontinuity in certain applications. The same method allows approaching the Liturgical Movement: receiving its founding intuitions as a gift of the Spirit to the Church, without absolutizing all the forms taken by its concrete implementation in the 20th century.

An intuition remains alive

More than a century after the foundation of Solesmes, more than sixty years after Sacrosanctum Concilium, the central intuition of the Liturgical Movement remains alive: the liturgy is the privileged place where the risen Christ acts at the heart of his Church, and the most authentic Christian life is nourished by full, conscious and active participation in this mystery. The Benedictine abbeys continue to embody this spirituality; the nuns still sing the Divine Office daily according to the critical editions of Solesmes; living parishes implement participatio actuosa through song, prayer, reading of the Word and communion. And when, among the Christian people, the desire resurges for a worship at once dignified, beautiful and alive — whether one speaks of Eucharistic adoration, Gregorian chant, careful liturgy or sacred silence — it is, in new forms, the same spirit of the Liturgical Movement that continues in the Church today.

Related Ignispedia articles

• Sacrosanctum Concilium — the constitution on the liturgy
• The Liturgical Reform after Vatican II
• Catholic Liturgical Rites
• The Liturgy of the Hours
• The Liturgical Year
• Corpus Christi (Fete-Dieu)
• The Symbolism of Liturgical Vestments
• The Symbolism of Liturgical Colours

Principal sources

• Dossier of the Conference of Bishops of France, "The Liturgical Movement as a passage of the Spirit in the Church" (Liturgie and Sacraments portal, liturgie.catholique.fr) — authorized synthesis: Solesmes, Pius X, Malines 1909, CPL, Mediator Dei, Vatican II
• Wikipedia EN, Liturgical movement — consulted as a framing synthesis, cross-checked point by point against the primary sources above
• Saint Pius X, motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini (22 November 1903), original Italian text on vatican.va
• Pius XII, encyclical Mediator Dei et hominum (20 November 1947), full text on vatican.va
• Second Vatican Council, constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium (4 December 1963), full text on vatican.va
• Dom Lambert Beauduin, La Piete de l'Eglise: principes et faits, Mont-Cesar, Louvain, 1914
• Romano Guardini, Vom Geist der Liturgie, Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1918
• Odo Casel, Das christliche Kultmysterium, Friedrich Pustet, Ratisbonne, 1932
• Pius Parsch, Das Jahr des Heiles, Klosterneuburger Verlag, Klosterneuburg, 1923 (3 volumes)
• Louis Bouyer, La Vie de la liturgie: une critique constructive du mouvement liturgique, Editions du Cerf, coll. Lex orandi, Paris, 1956
• Jean Seguy, review of Pie Duploye, Les Origines du Centre de Pastorale liturgique, 1943-1949 (Salvator, 1968), Archives de sociologie des religions, no. 29, 1970, pp. 205-206 (on persee.fr)
• "The Liturgical Movement as a passage of the Spirit in the Church", Liturgy and Sacraments dossier, Conference of Bishops of France