What Happened in the Search for Liturgical Catholicity?

2001

Jaarboek Voor Liturgie Onderzoek, 2008

The past century has seen an extraordinary recovery and renewal by the Christian church in general of its worship, and the understanding of that worship as central to its life and work. The name usually given to the means by which this recovery and renewal has been brought about is the "Liturgical Movement". Originating in the late nineteenth century within the Roman Catholic Church, its influence on that church not only culminated in the reforms of Vatican II's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (1963), but has had an impact on virtually all Christian traditions, several of which have experienced liturgical movements of their own. In its origins, it sought to end the practice of ordained ministers alone actively engaged in its words and actions, and doing so for rather than with the people present, who had been treated more as passive spectators than as active participants. Above all it sought to spread the ownership and participation in the liturgy to the whole gathered assembly, so that clergy and laity would pray the prayer of the church together. Effectively, this pastoral motivation, together with the growth of the churches stemming from the Reformation and the development of their own liturgical traditions, were the precursors of a diffusion of the twentieth century Liturgical Movement. Although the Liturgical Movement is often spoken of as if it were monolithic with effects only within the Roman Catholic tradition, it is at last clear that not only have there been multiple expressions of the movement as a whole, but the movement has happened in various stages and taken various shapes.

European Journal of Theology, 2014

In recent decades, an increasing number of theologians have discussed the consequences of the Western world’s transition from an era of Christendom to an era of post-Christendom. This transition implies that the Christian church in Western society now appears as a distinct people with a distinct way of life and viewing the world. This article demonstrates the significance of liturgy to the life of the church in a post-Christendom society by focusing on four central aspects of Christian liturgy, namely gathering, sermon, sacrament and sending, and thus contributes to a theological understanding of the church’s liturgical life in the modern world.

New Blackfriars, 1987

Archer has written a timely sociological analysis of the present state of Catholicism in the United Kingdom. It is a ruthless, honest, almost clinical account of the ironic and paradoxical effects of the flabby liberal rhetoric that has shaped the practice of the post-Conciliar Church in Britain. It is unevenly written; some of its liturgical conclusions are a bit odd; and many will find it cynical and unconstructive. Yet it is a book that deserves debate. My interpretation of his text suggests he is arguing as follows. A slow process of ecclesiastical embourgeoisement has been the main product of the theological hopes of the seventies, an ironic result for a rhetoric of egalitarianism that reached its most ludicrous level of cant amongst radical theologians, whose slant sent many out of the Church. One fringe developed another, and a 'charismatic chicanery' (to use Archer's apt phrase) came to pass, apolitical and ecstatic, making natural friends with the house groups and other Evangelical sects beloved of sociological study. English Catholicism was caricatured, and the debates these fringes generated obscured the social conditions of religious practice of the silent majority. Archer's book gives a sociological expression to their existence, and far that reason is of immense theological value. He presents an image of a liberal Catholic Church developing Anglican traits and increasingly hopeful of slipping into the Establishment, a denomination amongst others in a safe part of the political landscape. A 'safe' set of house theologians are allowed to roam out, some producing a liberation theology that has inadvertently become an instrument of recruitment to Protestant Fundamentalism. Some sociologists started to notice that the weak, the disadvantaged, and those in whose name these theologians spoke, were slipping away. Workingclass Catholic communities that had withstood persecution and hostility were starting to fall apart. Somehow theologians had managed to accomplish what those hostile to the Church had never managed: a climate of despair and disenchantment that unchurched the less well educated, the less theologically sophisticated, and the simple but pious. Urban renewal, poverty, unemployment, and competing forms of association have all contributed to Archer's embourgeoisement thesis. But the implications of his analysis go deeper. The rhetoric of Vatican 11's document Gaudium et 5 '

This article considers two recent debates about the reform of the liturgy in the light of the principle of lex Orandi lex Credendi. Liturgy is important because it nourishes and sustains belief, but a didactic approach to liturgy does not do full justice to the dynamic nature of the liturgy and its relation to the community. It examines the development of the canon of scripture from a phenomenological perspective, as a paradigmatic example of the dynamic relationship between the liturgy and the community. As "full, active and conscious" participants in the liturgy, the faithful also has a part to play in the recognition and acceptance of these reforms.

2016

This short paper offers a critical assessment of the historical method in the recent "Liturgical Subjects" by D. Krueger, and extends the discussion into wider reflections on methodology of the studies of Christian liturgy and how they reflect larger shifts in early Christian studies. It is argued that thinking in terms of 'grand narratives' and unchanging liturgical patterns is ultimately rooted in the academic agendas of the nineteenth century. It is also suggested that the quest for innovative approaches to liturgical research should account for both new methodologies introduced and the historical insights of traditional scholarship.

International journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 2013