Dominus Vobiscum: 19th Century Rediscoveries: The Mass as Experience Not a lecture, not even a prayer meeting.

Being moved by the Spirit

In 1840 the Benedictine monk Dom Prosper Gueranger published his Les Institutions liturgiques ["liturgical institutions"] , described as "a wonderful demonstration of the antiquity and the beauties of the Roman liturgy," by Didier Bonnetere 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 Benedicine in 1948, 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. It's far more than that. I have to think of the old pop spiritual 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 fifty years 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 it's being a sacred event, a sacrifice? Is it to be valued in itself. Not for which the priest is "presider," as at a committee meeting, not even the not-quite-there "celebrant," or even one who "says" the mass or even prays it (close), but its central performer or agent, his function captured in "priest," one who does the sacrifice?

 Major issue here, on which more later. The concept was 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.

Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground

New Mass, good, bad, indifferent? Its history with comments public and private, the latter based on sometimes unsettling experiences

In worship, who comes first, God or the faithful? More than a conundrum.

In 1889 at a Eucharistic Congress in Lieges, Belgium, Dom Gerard van Caloen, a trailblazing Benedictine monk, presented a daring idea: reception of communion by worshipers at mass.

 Dom Gerard had already published a Missal for the Faithful in Latin and French and la much appreciated Little Missal for the Laity and started a publication and a study group.

 Participation was in the air. The new pope was to play catch-up.

He would be Pio Decimo, the tenth Pius, 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 a stern demeanor and willingness to take the battle to the enemy, in his case the moral (and cultural) evil as he saw it, of modernism.

He was to push frequent communion also.

As to worship in general, he was already highly supportive of participation and recognized the need for liturgy to match that goal of his, to bring the faithful to warm belief in the glory that was worship and the grandeur that was God.

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

 With the pioneering Benedictine, Dom Gueranger, he considered liturgy “essentially theocentric, existing for the worship of God rather than for the teaching the faithful,”  said Bonneterre.

 But this position was hard to uphold under pressure of pastoral considerations.

 Another Benedictine, Dom Lambert Beauduin (1873-1960), an early supporter of the God-first approach, found himself “unable to maintain . . . this hierarchy of ends” — worship first, teaching second,” wrote Bonneterre.

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, he entered Mont Cesar, a Benedictine Abbey and center of liturgical study and innovation.

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

From Bonneterre’s standpoint, he began to stray from the Pius X way of doing things. Not that Pius ignored the faithful, but he wanted to keep the cart behind the horse, the engine of sanctification as propelling betterment of worshipers.

It was not a means to an end anyhow, but an end in itself, owed by worshipers to The Almighty, and it had to show that. From it good things would come. Without it you are 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” — his famous, much-quoted expression.

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

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

 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, and it seems unlikely that the conflict disappeared completely. The time-worn, probably no longer applicable sardonic comparison — as lost as a Jesuit in Holy Week — was not entirely unfair. 

A good thing came out of the squabble, in Bonneterre’s view, generating publicity for the still not widely know 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 did they do so during the sad war years,” wrote Bonneterre, including, surprisingly, in the occupied part of France.

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