Sacrosanctum Concilium : Fifty Years On

The ‘Liturgical Movement’

Sacrosanctum Concilium did not appear out of nowhere, but was the fruit of the ‘Liturgical Movement’ which had been gathering pace since the late nineteenth century. The ‘movement’ was not an organised campaign, but the coalescence of renewed liturgical theologies and practices in the churches of Western Europe, occurring in different times and contexts and for different reasons. The advancing processes of industrialization and secularization in European society, the Romantic culture of nineteenth century literature and art, and a renewed intellectual engagement with ecclesiology and church history, were key elements of the context in which the ‘Liturgical Movement’ spread from monastic and academic centres to parishes and churches of many traditions. Formal statements encouraging liturgical renewal were issued by the Papacy, ² and also by other church authorities such as the Anglican Lambeth Conferences and the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly. ³ Informally, a variety of pastoral associations were established in various churches to encourage liturgical renewal (for example, the ‘Church Service Society’ in the Church of Scotland, 1865; and ‘Parish and People’ in the Church of England, 1949).

Liturgical scholarship had begun to make available to many, for the first time in English, the rich treasury of early liturgical texts, such as the 2^nd century Didache and the 3^rd century Apostolic Tradition. In different ways as the twentieth century progressed, ‘liturgical movement’ scholars sought to return to such Biblical and Patristic sources in order to uncover the roots of Christian liturgy and remove some of the accretions of later centuries. By the middle of the century, the perceived result was a clearer understanding of some basic patterns and practices of earlier Christian worship. The discovery and subsequent publication of scholarship on such early Christian liturgical texts and structures meant that Christian worship could now be more closely patterned on what early Christians knew and experienced. For instance, Gregory Dix’s highly influential book The Shape of the Liturgy (1945), in which he proposed a four-fold shape based on what he believed to be ‘rubrical’ directions in the synoptic Gospel accounts of the Last Supper, led to the almost universal application of his proposed ‘Shape’ (taking, thanking, breaking, and sharing) to revised eucharistic liturgies produced the 1960s.

Sacrosanctum Concilium represented the high point of the ‘Liturgical Movement,’ and encapsulated the renewed theology of worship which had been gaining ground. The early paragraphs of that document declare that liturgical celebrations are celebrations of the Church, by which is kept alive through memory and invocation the mystery of Jesus dead and risen - the ‘paschal mystery.’ Liturgy is therefore not the preserve of a cultic priesthood, but the celebration of the gathered church. Baptism is the common identifying sign of Christian discipleship and corporate ministry. The first person plural, “we,” is the language of public prayer by a presider, never the language of private prayer, “I.” Because of Sacrosanctum Concilium’s affirmation of liturgy as a celebration of the church, we find several references in it insisting on the participation of the assembly in its worship, especially the famous sentence about “fully active, conscious participation.” ⁴

Liturgical Change

Because of this recovery and conviction, there were wholesale changes in the way Roman Catholic congregations in Britain celebrated worship. The liturgy was in the vernacular, more popular forms of music were introduced, there was more scripture and a new emphasis on preaching, responsive forms of prayer were introduced, often led by lay people, who also read scripture readings and administered Communion.

Although a theology of “fully active, conscious participation” was already the liturgical theory of the Reformation, scholars, congregations and clergy had long felt the need for its renewal in practice, that liturgical life had become atrophied in archaic language and historic formularies. Many such Protestants would be heavily influenced, and their liturgical life transformed, by the spread of Charismatic and Evangelical styles of worship and music. But for other non-Catholics the call articulated in Sacrosanctum Concilium to a renewed theology of liturgy was welcome. Together with the practical changes taking place in Roman Catholic worship, it inspired liturgical change and processes of liturgical renewal in many Protestant churches, as each tradition began or continued the process of revising its liturgies. And just as the revival of Biblical scholarship and preaching within the Roman Catholic Church was a key element in Catholic liturgical renewal, so the rediscovery of the centrality of the eucharist affected many churches of the Reformation.

In the English-speaking world almost all of the mainline denominations began to produce new liturgical texts and service books, and Catholic and Protestant liturgists jointly sought ways to rediscover a common liturgical heritage which could inform the process of revision. As a result of a century of returning to the same sources and finding the same liturgical foundations, the revised liturgies in all the churches were very similar in structure and often in wording. New translations of texts such as the Kyrie, Gloria, Creed, etc, were produced jointly by the Roman Catholic ICEL (International Commission on English in the Liturgy) and the ecumenical ELLC (English Language Liturgical Consultation), published in 1988, ⁵ and adopted by most of the churches in their Eucharistic liturgies). Even the way in which the renewed texts began to be used changed dramatically, so that contemporary eucharistic celebrations among Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and some Reformed churches, often look (architecture and vestments), sound (shared music and, often, words), essentially the same.

Another Roman Catholic change inspired by the publication of Sacrosanctum Concilium was the creation of the new Ordo Lectionum Missae in 1969, a three-year lectionary for mass in which a different synoptic Gospel became the focus of readings in each of the years. This was a new practical approach to the place of scripture in worship, and it led directly to lectionary revision in other churches, including many churches that had not previously used a lectionary at all. This produced one of the most distinctive legacies of Sacrosanctum Concilium, used in some form by most of the mainstream English-speaking denominations in the world, the ecumenically adopted Revised Common Lectionary (1983 and 1994). As one Presbyterian writer says, this “marks the first time since the Reformation that Catholics and Protestants find themselves reading the scriptures together Sunday by Sunday. … Who would have thought that four hundred and fifty years after the Reformation, Catholics would be teaching Protestants how to read scripture in worship?” ⁶

And the use of the Lectionary in many Protestant churches began to lead to the recovery of the idea of the liturgical year, and the restoration of seasons and feasts by churches known historically for their rejection of the calendar. For example, some of the churches that had not celebrated Holy Week or the Easter vigil since the Reformation, began to restore it in a variety of forms. ⁷

By the end of the twentieth century, therefore, as a result of the ‘Liturgical Movement’ and Sacrosanctum Concilium, there was in existence a rich collection of denominational and ecumenical liturgical texts, which followed common structures for many of the liturgies and common translations for most of the corporate prayers of the liturgy. And there was more agreement - even if not total agreement - about the theology of worship (the Faith and Order document of the World Council of Churches, Baptism, Eucharist, Ministry, 1982, for example, demonstrated remarkable convergence in rite and theological interpretation).

So, while there have been other strong and deeply effective influences on worship, especially the Charismatic movement and the Evangelical revival, it is clear that British Roman Catholic and Protestant churches today are in an entirely different liturgical place than they were in 1963, and that this is, in part, a legacy of the Liturgical Movement and Sacrosanctum Concilium.

Critics and Reaction

The liturgical changes of the last fifty years have not always been judged successful, but in the last decade the critical voices, especially from within Roman Catholicism, have become louder. There have always been critics who decry the whole enterprise of liturgical renewal, and Sacrosanctum Concilium in particular. ⁸ These critics lament the confusion of divine and human agencies, shift of liturgical focus away from sacred mystery to worldly manifesto, the reduction of divine transcendence to human community, the abandonment of lofty language, awesome music, and grand ritual. In the Roman Catholic Church this has led to a movement for a ‘reform of the reform’, a reconsideration of what are claimed to be the ‘unintended’ effects of Sacrosanctum Concilium on the practice of Roman Catholic worship. With the permitted return of the Latin Tridentine liturgy, there has been some perception of an attempt by Vatican authorities to ‘wind back the clock,’ not just in liturgical practice but also in liturgical theology.

The most well-known example of this retrenchment in Roman Catholic liturgy was the Vatican document Liturgiam Authenticam, ⁹ which emphasized a policy of more literal translation of liturgical texts from the Latin editio typica. This resulted in the new English translation of the Missal (2011), which used a formalized English style that is a more literal rendition of the Latin. Some have criticized this approach as favouring archaic expressions that are less accessible to ordinary English speakers. But it has also led to, or could be thought to lead to, changes in liturgical theology.

For example, the expression pro multis in the Eucharistic Prayer, in the words over the cup, is often rendered ‘‘for all’’ in many contemporary English liturgies. ¹⁰ In the 1971 English Roman Catholic version the phrase was rendered ‘‘It will be shed for you and for all men so that sins may be forgiven.’’ These are examples of dynamically equivalent translation, which seeks to render the dynamic sense rather the literal equivalent. The new translation of 2011 rendered pro multis as ‘‘for many,’’ a more literal translation of the Latin and of the Biblical Greek. It is also how other, traditional versions have rendered it. ¹¹ The translation to “for all” is intended to give the sense: in the Gospel original ‘‘many’’ is arguably an inclusive term, since Jesus came to save all people. However, the act of shifting from “all” to “many” has an unintended effect, since to replace ‘‘all’’ with ‘‘many’’ in English is a restrictive move which implies that Jesus’ saving action is focused on a narrower group of people, and this appears to change the sense. In Liturgiam Authenticam, however, faithfulness to the Latin became the over-riding consideration.

The document also, in what seemed to be a repudiation of the work of the former ICEL and ELLC, cautioned against Roman Catholics sharing translations of liturgical texts with other Christians. ¹² But, as the Lutheran scholar Maxwell Johnson has pointed out, there was an irony in this, in that many Protestant liturgical texts in English, used in common with Catholics since the 1960s, had been adapted by ELLC from original Roman Catholic translations first proposed by ICEL. ¹³ Perhaps the most well-known example of this is the response to Dominus vobiscum, ‘The Lord be with you’ - et cum spiritu tuo, which the 1971 Missal translated as ‘And also with you.’ Many non-Catholic churches resisted this translation when it was first introduced by Roman Catholics, but began to adopt it, following its advocacy by ELLC and ICEL, as a dynamically equivalent common translation of such a widely-used liturgical greeting. It was unfortunate that Liturgiam Authenticam urged Roman Catholics to retreat from this ecumenical advance, and to abandon other liturgical wording once shared with other Christians. Hence its requirement that et cum spiritu tuo should rendered literally, from the Latin, as ‘And with your spirit.’

It is too soon to say just how, indeed whether, non-Catholics will be affected by these changes to Roman Catholic liturgy. It is unlikely that there will be much further joint work by ICEL and ELLC for the time being. And English-speaking worshippers will find themselves saying different things where they had become accustomed in recent years to using the same words. In fact this had already been the case for some time, since some churches had been altering the agreed texts, for their own reasons, and now use versions that differ from the original agreed ICEL/ELLC common texts. Yet, despite this erosion of textual unanimity, the common understandings achieved about structure, the liturgical calendar, and the centrality of the eucharist and baptism, have not yet been lost. The world of liturgical scholarship has remained an ecumenical world, and academic research and debate about the history and theology of liturgy continues to be a joint enterprise among scholars of all traditions. And local churches continue to value the liturgical heritage which the ‘Liturgical Movement’ and Sacrosanctum Concilium have revealed that they hold in common.

Other Questions

The questions raised by the conservative reaction to Sacrosanctum Concilium have led to widespread response and debate within the Roman Catholic Church. ¹⁴ But that debate does not exhaust the kinds of questions that can be asked about Sacrosanctum Concilium and the changes that resulted from it. The liturgical books produced during the 1970s are now more than a generation old, and the presuppositions behind them, and the texts they contain, reflect the concerns of that time, such as issues of peace, justice and ecology. These issues continue to be urgent and current, but further challenges have increasingly impinged on the practice of Christian liturgical worship since the 1970s. These contemporary challenges include such things as: fresh insights from liturgical and anthropological scholarship; the establishment of secular and multicultural society; the presence of women in positions of liturgical leadership; the globalization of human culture, including religious culture; and, most recently, the profound effects of the massive expansion of digital media in an individualistic western culture. These shifts create a new landscape for ongoing liturgical change.

Questions from Scholarship

With the stimulus of Sacrosanctum Concilium and the ferment of liturgical renewal in the churches, liturgical study expanded and diversified greatly in seminaries and university faculties, especially in North America and western Europe. But since the 1970s research and scholarship of early texts of liturgy has begun to ask new questions of those texts. Certain critical assumptions were made in the post-Vatican II era that may no longer be historically tenable, for example the position accorded one particular text, The Apostolic Tradition, ¹⁵ attributed to Hippolytus of Rome in the 3^rd century. Its model eucharistic prayer for the ordination of a bishop became in whole or in part a standard eucharistic prayer in the revised liturgies of several traditions. ¹⁶ But in the last fifty years scholars have been asking new critical questions which are not easily answered by the manuscript and textual evidence: where did the material in The Apostolic Tradition come from? Was it in fact written in Rome, or elsewhere? Was ‘Hippolytus’ really the author? What tradition does it represent? Was it ever widely used, or was it the creation of a small pressure group or even of a single individual? Among the characteristics of early Christianity about which scholars have become clearer, is that it was hugely diverse. There was no single liturgical model in the ancient church any more than there is today. So Apostolic Tradition and other early texts are more likely to be part of a very diverse picture of early Christian liturgy. Which appears to place a question mark against the ‘Liturgical Movement’’s search for any single early Christian liturgical pattern, and against the use of Apostolic Tradition (and of other texts, such as the Didache) as an authoritative model for modern liturgical revision. ¹⁷

Another sea-change in the academic study of liturgy has come about since the 1960s, with the advent of ‘Ritual Studies’ as an inter-disciplinary approach, bringing together research and insights from religious studies, anthropology, and sociology. The development of this discipline owes much to the work of scholars such as Victor Turner, Roy Rappaport, and Catherine Bell: “Ritual is the means by which collective beliefs and ideals are simultaneously generated, experienced, and affirmed as real by the community.” ¹⁸ Ritual theory has introduced a new understanding of the dynamics of Christian liturgy as, in part, a participation in this general and universal social phenomenon of ritual. Many subsequent liturgical scholars have taken up this theme and have criticized the reforms of the last fifty years as rejecting or neglecting this dimension. ¹⁹ These criticisms and questions ask how it is possible for ancient and collective rituals, such as those in Catholic Christianity, to be changed so quickly and dramatically without doing considerable damage to the identity of those involved, even when the rationale for change may be well articulated theologically. The reflections of Nathan Mitchell are pertinent to these questions: “I suspect that the sensory impoverishment and deprivation of so much liturgy today results from our rush to make intelligibility the centerpiece of reform and renewal. The unintentional consequence is a liturgy which ‘‘explains’’ rather than evokes, speaks rather than sings, drones rather than dances, and skulks rather than soars.” ²⁰

Questions from Culture

By the 1960s cultural change had become one of the major stimuli for liturgical change in the churches. The need to respond to culture had in fact always been behind liturgical reform in the churches. Even Thomas Cranmer’s assertion that worship be in “language understood by the people”, was a response to the changing culture of the Renaissance with its emphasis on literature and education. But then the world changed so little between the sixteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries that there was not that much to do to stay relevant, until social and political change produced the urgency of the 1960s. The culture of the 1960s and following decades called for worship that was ‘in touch’. Since that culture had no tolerance for deference, liturgists wrote prayers that addressed God in more intimate terms (for example, adding “Father” language where it had not existed before in classical Latin collects). They increasingly employed inclusive language, drew on multicultural hymns and songs, and addressed concerns for social justice issues and ecological awareness. ²¹ But it has been the sheer explosion of media technology in the past fifty years which has begun to cause an even more seismic shift in world view within western culture.

Liturgy is closely related to clture, and, as a culturally-related mode of communication, it is deeply affected by changes in communication technology. As Susan White writes, “technology and the liturgy have been involved in mutual interchange in every period of human history.” ²² The advent of printing in the 15^th and 16^th centuries enabled widespread and unprecedented access to texts and education, diversity of interpretation, the centralization of political and religious authority, and the standardization of liturgical books. The Reformation and Counter –Reformation programmes of liturgical and ideological reform were made possible by this technological change. Four hundred years later, Vatican II also took place following a further period of development in communication technology, giving birth to electric and electronic media, including the telegraph, radio, film, telephone, and television. These technologies were no less powerful in bringing about cultural and social change, by bringing instantaneous communication, connection to immense audiences, and an explosion of visual and musical culture. The simplified structures, vernacular idiom, and didactic character of many of the liturgies of the post-Vatican II period, were a response to that immense technological-cultural shift which had been growing for much of the preceding century.

Today we are living at a time of further and equally far-reaching media change: the rapid and universal spread of digital information and communication technologies. We are already far enough into the digital revolution to begin to see some fundamental cultural shifts occurring as digital media transform the ways in which people socialize, learn, work, understand, find entertainment, and think about the world. Tex Sample reflects on the difference between the modern ‘literate’ culture in which, until now, liturgical renewal has grown, and the postmodern ‘electronic’ culture, in which young people in the West are being formed: “Literate culture learns primarily through the written word. Our prayer books and hymn books bear witness to that. The electronic culture of computers, Blackberries and iGadgets, which is the world of the 20s, 30s and even 40 somethings, learns best through multi-media, engaging as many senses at the same time as possible. Sight, sound, smell, and movement of the body all play a significant role in the acquisition of knowledge and transmission of the faith.” ²³

One important dimension of this cultural change is its consumer approach, not only to goods and services, but also to religious belief and practice. Bryan Spinks has written extensively about the liturgical developments being created in this consumerist context. He lays out two claims about the effect of this culture on worship. First, that religion is in competition with industries and consumerism in leisure and entertainment. And, second, the very fact that there are different trends in contemporary worship suggests that worship styles themselves are a ‘supermarket’, offered by different churches to suit personal taste or spirituality, all enticing in different ways, and in competition with one another. ²⁴

This presents new and challenging questions to the form and practice of Christian worship. In a society that is focused on individual success and gratification, how is worship affected? Are adaptations of existing liturgical models (eg the Eucharist) helpful? Or is more radical change necessary? How we can both hold that which the Church has found to be good and valuable liturgically through many centuries, and respond to the religious and spiritual needs of a generation with little or no religious memory?

Even in 1963, far-seeing liturgists were asking how traditional liturgical structures, symbols and words, even in revised and renewed forms, could survive the cultural changes that were following in the wake of world war, scientific and technological revolution, and cultural disintegration. In 1963, addressing young Catholics, the Roman Catholic liturgical theologian, Romano Guardini, was asking his famous question of whether “modern man” was even capable of performing “the liturgical act.” Guardini asked: “Is not the liturgical act … so bound up with historical background - antique or mediaeval or baroque - that it would be more honest to give it up altogether? Would it not be better to admit that man in this industrial and scientific age, with its new sociological structure, is no longer capable of the liturgical act? And instead of talking of renewal, ought we not to consider how best to celebrate the sacred mysteries so that the modern man can grasp their meaning through his own approach to truth?” ²⁵

Emerging Responses

One response to this cultural shift, identified by Guardini as the main challenge of to liturgical life in modern society, can be seen in the ‘emerging church’ movement, a ‘post-modern’ phenomenon that began in the United Kingdom and spread to Australia and New Zealand in the mid-1990s, as a reaction against a “misleading version of Christianity that pursues … the cerebral as opposed to the affective.” ²⁶ One of the marks of ‘emerging worship’ is that it often makes use of ancient symbols and rituals while at the same time employing various forms of electronic music and high-tech communication tools. People who are used to the traditional-versus-contemporary divide in Christian worship would find it difficult to place ‘emerging worship’ (also labelled ‘alternative’ or ‘fresh expressions’ worship) into either of those categories. In many such services plainchant, popular music, sophisticated sound systems, traditional vestments and symbols, incense, video projection, and different kinds of worship activity, all coexist within the same worship environment. James Smith, writing about religion and postmodernity, argues that “the postmodern church could do nothing better than be ancient, that the most powerful way to reach a postmodern world is by recovering tradition, and that the most effective means of discipleship is found in liturgy.” ²⁷

The fact that many people who have previously not been attracted to traditional Christian worship are finding that ‘emerging worship’ is making liturgy relevant to them, suggests that it may be a contemporary way of fulfilling Cranmer’s aim of offering worship ‘understanded of the people.’ The person quoted by Richard Giles seems to voice the alienation that many feel from the culture of traditional liturgy: ‘A young friend went to a church close to my home a few weeks ago – the first time since her baptism over twenty years ago. She told me that she will not go again: ‘You are asking me to change the way I speak, the sort of music I enjoy, the length of time I usually listen to a speaker, the type of people I mix with, my body temperature, the type of chair I sit on, the type of clothes I am used to seeing people wear; my sense of humour.’” ²⁸ Incorporating individuals with such cultural norms and meeting their need to worship is one of the aims of ‘emerging worship’.

However, the dilemma of an overemphasis on relevance can be that the mode of worship and the attitude and experience of the worshipper become indistinguishable from the parallel phenomena in the broader culture. If the use of contemporary music and sound and light technology in the service to provide the context for producing an intense individual experience becomes the goal of worship, then does the worshipper become just another entrant into the postmodern marketplace? If the corporate and political dimension of worship, the ecclesial and theological dimension of liturgy, are left behind, and all that is left is individual experience, then, as Friedrich Schleiermacher said, how one gets the experience would be of little consequence. This is part of a live and unfinished liturgical debate now going on in the churches in Britain. The question was expressed at a recent Church of England conference: “In an age where the most basic of Christian concepts often seem to have faded from community awareness, how can we create worship that is vital and vibrant rather than a form of religious ‘info-tainment’?” ²⁹