19th Century Rediscoveries: The Mass as experience not lecture, not even a prayer meeting. Being moved by the Spirit . . .

In 1840 the Benedictine monk Dom Prosper Gueranger . . .

. . . a major pioneer of liturgical reform, published his Les Institutions liturgiques , "a closely argued attack on the neo-Gallican liturgies and a wonderful demonstration of the antiquity and the beauties of the Roman liturgy," says Bonnetere in his 1980 book The Liturgical Movement: Gueranger to Beauduin to Bugnini, Roots, Radicals Results.

Neo-Gallican refers to newly revived separatist liturgies in northern Europe, especially in France. Neo because Pius VI had struck a mighty blow to the separatist movement Gallicanism (French-ism) with his condemnation of the Synod of Pistoia in 1794 at a time when "the whole of Europe . . . was floundering in an “anti-liturgical heresy.” (Bonneterre)

Gueranger was on the side of traditionalist angels, standing up for the wisdom of the ages, opposing changes meant to keep up with the times, etc.

Primarily, he wanted to bring the clergy back to the Roman rite. By the time of his death in 1875, all the French dioceses had abandoned their separatist ways. Their liturgy, wrote a fellow Benedictine in 1848, was replete with "confession, prayer and praise, rather than instruction." He had "rediscovered the liturgy . . . discerned [its] essence" as worship that "sings to God its faith, its hope, and its charity."

It formed and educated worshipers, but was "lyrical rather than didactic . . . essentially God-centered." As if, participating in it as good in itself, the worshiper, throwing himself into it, is only secondarily if truly improved, we might say.

Sanctification of the worshiper and his or her supernatural education is accomplished in due course as worshipers "raise themselves up so that the devotion they offer to God is more worthy of Him." People are changed by the experience. It's a sort of osmosis. You can't plunge into it week after week without reacting.

It's an experience not to be compared to a lecture, for instance, being far more than that. I have to think of the pop song of the 1940s, with its refrain, "When that spirit moves you, you will shout hallelujah/ it hits you, you'll holler/ yes indeed!"

Or as Pius X said a generation later, the liturgy was "essentially theocentric . . . for the worship of God rather than for the teaching of the faithful."

Crucial theme here, with a provocative question. Is the mass a teaching moment, to the exclusion or diminution of its being a sacred event, a sacrifice? Is it to be valued in itself, nothing for which the priest is "presider," as at a committee meeting, or even the not-quite-there "celebrant," but its central performer or agent, who does the sacrifice, in short, the priest.

Major issue here, on which more later. The concept had been affirmed by the Council of Trent and the entire Counter-Reformation gestalt, in stark contrast to that primary structure of the Reformation, whereby the central figure in worship became not the priest-sacrificer but the preacher and leader of prayer.