Liturgical Movement - Development

Development

The movement had a number of elements: Liturgical Scholarship, Pastoral Theology, and Liturgical Renewal. As to the first of these, in his influential book Mysterium Fidei (1921), Maurice de la Taille argued that Christ's sacrifice, beginning from his self-offering at the Last Supper, completed in the Passion and continued in the Mass, were all one act. There was only one immolation – that of Christ at Calvary, to which the Supper looks forward and on which the Mass looks back. Although Taille was not a liturgist, his work created a huge controversy which raised interest in the form and character of the Mass. His argument, whilst not yet congenial to Protestants, removed the objection that each mass was a separate and new 'immolation' of Christ, a repeated and thus efficacious act.

Pastoral considerations played a major part. Such motives lay behind the tone of the papacy of Pius X. In 1909 he called a conference, the Congrès National des Oeuvres Catholiques in Mechelen in Belgium, which is held to have inaugurated the Liturgical Movement proper in the Catholic Church. Liturgy was to be the means of instructing the people in Christian faith and life; the mass would be translated into the vernacular to promote active participation of the faithful. One of the leading participants in the conference, Dom Lambert Beauduin of Louvain, argued that worship was the common action of the people of God and not solely performed by the priest. Many of the movement's principles were based in Beauduin's book, La Pieté de l'Eglise.

At almost the same time, in Germany Abbot Ildefons Herwegen of Maria Laach convened a liturgical conference in Holy Week 1914 for lay people. Herwegen thereafter promoted research which resulted in a series of publications for clergy and lay people during and after World War I. One of the foremost German scholars was Odo Casel. Having begun by studying the Middle Ages, Casel looked at the origins of Christian liturgy in pagan cultic acts, understanding liturgy as a profound universal human act as well as a religious one. In his Ecclesia Orans (The Praying Church) (1918), Casel studied and interpreted the pagan mysteries of ancient Greece and Rome, discussing similarities and differences between them and the Christian mysteries. The conclusions of Casel were studied in various places, notably at Klosterneuburg in Austria, where the Augustinian canon Pius Parsch applied the principles in his church of St. Gertrude, which he took over in 1919. With laymen he worked out the relevance of the Bible to liturgy. Similar experiments were to take place in Leipzig during the Second World War.

In France, in spite of the publication of the Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne de de liturgie, it was only through contact with German and Austrian movements that practical experiments were begun. Most changes occurred after the Second World War. In 1943 the Centre National de Pastorale Liturgique was founded and the magazine La Maison-Dieu began publication.

The idea of liturgy as an inclusive activity, subversive of individualism, while exciting to some, also raised anxieties in Rome. In 1947 Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Mediator Dei which warned of false innovations, radical changes and protestantizing influences in the liturgical movement. At the same time he encouraged the "authentic" liturgical movement, which promoted active participation of the congregation in chant and gestures.