The Roman Mass: Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform
Uwe Michael Lang
Cambridge University Press, £89.99, 456 pages
The Liturgical Movement and reforms of the Second Vatican Council sought a repristination of the textual sources and ritual practices of the Roman Rite. In Missale Romanum, his apostolic constitution promulgating the 1970 Roman Missal, Paul VI explained how progress in liturgical studies from the Council of Trent to the eve of Vatican II led to a rediscovery of, and renewed appreciation for, “more ancient sources” of the Church’s liturgy. These advances, together with a more profound appreciation for the liturgy of the Eastern Churches, opened the way to a reform of the Roman Rite in the latter part of the 20th century.
Pius XII had already praised the Liturgical Movement and its results in his 1947 encyclical Mediator Dei. This renewal of the liturgy, in academy and parish alike, contributed not only to a greater appreciation of the rites themselves, making them “better known, understood, and appreciated”, but gave “[b]older relief to the fact that all the faithful make up a single and very compact body with Christ for its Head”.
This eminently ecclesial view of the liturgical renewal also caused Pius XII to insist that the liturgy of his own day was the result of legitimate developments, mandated and regulated by the Church. The consequence of such a statement was to urge restraint in the criticisms formulated of its contemporary forms. The sacred liturgy is the action of Christ the High Priest, who entrusts the exercise of his sanctifying office to his mystical body, the Church. The liturgy authorised by the Church thus belongs to the Church, and so to the Church in every time and place.
This historical and ecclesial vision also sought to avoid excessive reverence for any single period of the Church’s life, preferring to view all authentic liturgical development as consonant with the Church’s flourishing under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in every generation. As Pius XII made clear: “The liturgy of the early ages is most certainly worthy of all veneration. But ancient usage must not be esteemed more suitable and proper, either in its own right or in its significance for later times and new situations, on the simple ground that it carries the savour and aroma of antiquity.” He continued: “More recent liturgical rites likewise deserve reverence and respect. They, too, owe their inspiration to the Holy Spirit, who assists the Church in every age even to the consummation of the world.”
Liturgical scholarship since the council has not always followed the careful path mapped out by Pius XII. With some notable exceptions, it has largely focused on early textual sources, studying them in a necessarily clinical way, apart from evidence of their actual use in liturgical celebrations.
Several years ago, Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, the Archbishop of Colombo in Sri Lanka, observed that in the immediately post-conciliar period “[a]n exaggerated sense of antiquarianism, anthropologism… and, indeed, the tendency to look down upon some aspects of the development of the liturgy in the second millennium – were increasingly visible among certain liturgical schools”.
This led, all too often, to an idolising of what (allegedly) happened in the worship of the early Church, and the view that the dozen or so centuries since represent little more than an embarrassing deviation from the true purpose, intention and form of the Church’s liturgical prayer.
In his latest book, The Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform, Father Uwe Michael Lang of the London Oratory provides an important corrective to this tendency. By offering a characteristically carefully-crafted, thoroughly historical, and properly theological treatment of the liturgy from the Last Supper, through the early centuries of the Church, the Carolingian reforms, the Middle Ages, and up to the Council of Trent, he demonstrates – after the pattern of Pius XII – the essential continuity that has always existed in what became known as the Roman Rite. In doing so, he has also brought to English audiences some of the most significant contributions of recent German liturgical scholarship. Nowhere is this reassessment more apparent than in the book’s account of the early liturgy in chapter two. The author takes his cue from the critique offered by Joseph Ratzinger of the “basic form” (Grundgestalt) of the Eucharist. This alleged “basic form” suggests that the Church’s Eucharistic liturgy is a merely ritual development of the essentials, all of which were already present at the Last Supper.
Accordingly, after the plates were cleared from the apostolic table on the first Maundy Thursday, almost everything that followed in the development of the liturgy was part of a centuries-long process of moving further and further from the Lord’s intentions, imposing more and more textual and ritual accretions on the “pure” rite described in the New Testament. It’s a view also found in Thomas Cranmer’s preface to the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer. By contrast, Ratzinger explains, the Last Supper was not the source of the Eucharist’s ritual form, but its dogmatic content.
As Lang shows, the “basic form” theory has fuelled the disproportionate weight given to the worship of the early Church, thereby avoiding sufficient consideration of the cultural and theological developments taken up into the Church’s worship, not least in the medieval period. In his provocatively titled chapter, “Decline and Vitality in the Later Middle Ages”, Lang in a sense articulates for liturgical studies what Eamon Duffy did three decades ago for Reformation studies; namely, to correct excessively negative distortions, apply much-needed nuance, and highlight neglected and often surprising evidence of real pastoral, liturgical and theological sense, from a period that has all too frequently been characterised as a time of dearth.
This most recent addition to the author’s impressive publications on the liturgy will find its way swiftly onto the bookcases of scholars who take seriously the idea, well-articulated by Benedict XVI, that the reform of ecclesiastical institutions depends for its authenticity on real continuity with the past. The book’s hefty price tag may cause others to hesitate, and for a more general readership Cambridge University Press would do well to prepare quickly to meet the demand for a paperback edition that is surely to follow.
The Revd Dr James Bradley is Assistant Professor of Canon Law at The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC
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