1880's and Eucharistic congresses. Pius X. Frequent communion. Jesuit-Benedictine squabble. Liturgy God-centered or "pastoral"?

The movement gets legs.

The first Eucharistic congress , in Lille, France, in 1881, was not well attended, but the next gatherings grew yearly in numbers and influence — Avignon in 1882, Liège in 1883. Fribourg, Switzerland, in 1885, when “thousands of Catholics from all over Europe,” came, including civic officials both local and regional, army officers, and judges.

The next, Toulouse in 1886, had some 1,500 ecclesiastics and 30,000 laymen at its closing exercises.

In 1889 at a second Lieges conference, Dom Gerard van Caloen, a monk of Maredsous presented a daring thesis, that worshipers might receive communion at mass. Participation was in the air. The new pope was to pick up on all this.

He was Pius X, with a "Renew all things in Christ" motto, very much the parish priest from humble surroundings, a man of the people with a common touch but also possessed of a stern demeanor and willingness to take the battle to the enemy, in his case the moral (and cultural) evil as he saw it, modernism in the church.

In 1903, the first year of his papacy, he restored the centuries-old Gregorian chant -- what we may respectfully call liturgical mood music, that sets a tone and contributes to a meditative state of mind. He assigned top priority to "active participation" in liturgical services. He was also a promoter of frequent communion.

With Dom Gueranger, he considered liturgy "essentially theocentric, existing for the worship of God rather than for the teaching the faithful," wrote Bonneterre, in his The Liturgical Movement: Gueranger to Beauduin to Bugnini.

It was a conviction that an early supporter of the God-first approach found "unable to maintain.” This was another Benedictine, Dom Lambert Beauduin (1873-1960), who no longer endorsed the “hierarchy of ends, worship first, teaching second," Bonneterre put it.

Beauduin was a priest of the diocese of Liege, a "workers' missionary" under Pope Leo XIII, the pope of the working man and author of the seminal economic justice encyclical Rerum Novarum.

In 1906, at thirty-three, Beauduin entered Mont Cesar, a Benedictine Abbey and a center of liturgical study and innovation.

He had been immersed in pastoral work and approached liturgy from that viewpoint, finding it ideal for achieving pastoral goals and passing lightly over the divine-worship priority.

He began to stray from the Pius X way of doing things. Not that Pius ignored the faithful, but he wanted to protect liturgy as worship, the engine of sanctification propelling the betterment of worshipers.

It was not properly a means to an end anyhow, but an end in itself, owed by worshipers to The Almighty, and it had to reflect that. From it good things would come. Without it you would be missing the point entirely.

The issue was bothering some. In 1913 a noted Benedictine wrote about Pius's seeing liturgy as the “primary and indispensable source of the spiritual life.”

A Jesuit took offense and "violently retaliated," maintaining in an article that "to all intents and purposes," piety was quite possible "without liturgy." Thus he "tended to contradict" the pope, Bonneterre wrote.

The Benedictine replied with fervor, defending Pius and arguing "the educative and apostolic value" of liturgy" while still respecting its "theocentricity."

The war came and people had more to worry about, and these combatants calmed down. Another Jesuit saw his opening and wrote to argue, peacefully, that there was no opposition between Ignatian spirituality and liturgy.

It's a revealing conflict nonetheless. The time-worn, probably no longer applicable sardonic comparison -- as confused as a Jesuit in (liturgy-heavy) Holy Week -- was not entirely unfair.

A good thing came out of the squabble, in Bonneterre's view, generating as it did publicity for the still not widely known liturgical movement. This "renewal," launched by Pius X but still largely a matter of workshops, lectures, and academic discussions, was acquiring legs.

Indeed, priests and seminarians continued with their liturgical weeks and retreats in Belgian monasteries and returned to their work with a desire to restore liturgy in their churches — especially so in “the sad war years," wrote Bonneterre, including, surprisingly, in the occupied part of France.

Next, a post-war boom for the liturgy movement . . .