Abstract
It is surprising how often even relatively recent events in the life of an institution can quickly be forgotten, and people can imagine that things have always been the way they are now. The author of this book has therefore done a valuable service in documenting the development of the modern celebration of Holy Week within the Liturgical Movement. The account is primarily focused on the Episcopal Church in the USA, although a little attention is also given to the Church of England and the rest of the Anglican Communion, and, of course, to the 1950s revision of the Holy Week rites in the Roman Catholic Church, from which other Churches took their lead. The book begins with a chapter outlining the evolution of Holy Week in early Christianity with its eventual decline and disappearance at the Reformation, and another sketching the history of the Liturgical Movement.
What makes Moore’s account of the revision of Holy Week rites in the Episcopal Church particularly interesting is that it is not limited to official documents – minutes of meetings, draft texts, and so on – but also tries to discern what churches were actually doing. How far were local experiments already going on? How eagerly were the proposals taken up? Obviously, it was not possible to examine the archives of every parish in the country, and so Moore has chosen just four churches in the New York metropolitan area to illustrate the process, along with references in the church press. Two of the churches were urban, two suburban; two were Anglo-Catholic, the other two leaning in the opposite direction.
This number is obviously much too low to have any statistical significance, and one wishes that a larger and more diverse sample had been chosen, but at least a corner of the picture begins to emerge. Not surprisingly, some parishes anticipated the official developments, others did not. Some disliked the Good Friday Three Hours’ service, which was the common fare in many places, and others supported it. When the new liturgies were authorized, some took them up eagerly, while others did not. What we do not learn is what proportions of the Episcopal Church these various factions represent. Anecdotal evidence is insufficient for this.
Overall, however, in spite of that limitation, the book does make a useful contribution, perhaps as much for reference purposes as for continuous reading.