Liturgical Reform After Vatican Ii

Sacrosanctum Concilium opened the door to all Christians to understand the contemporary challenge to their life and health, and it started with the reform of the liturgy. In the words of Paul VI the liturgy is the 'first source of life communicated to us, the first school of our spiritual life, the first gift we can give to Christian people by our believing and praying, and the first invitation to the world.' That is surely true for all of us.

2009 Catholic Press Association Award Winner! Perhaps no liturgical scholar of our time is better ale than John Baldovin to write with clarity and accuracy about the meaning of the church's liturgy and the history of its development in the last half century. In this summary volume on the reform of the liturgy since the Second Vatican Council, Baldovin pinpoints and assesses 'both sympathetically and critically 'the objections to changes in the liturgy since the council, focusing on philosophical, historical-critical, and theological questions. After addressing each criticism in turn, in a final chapter he assesses the critique of post 'Vatican II liturgy as a whole, affirming what is accurate and necessary, rejecting what is backward looking, and proposing a set of principles to guide future development. No one who studies or participates in liturgical action in the twenty-first century can afford to overlook this book. John F. Baldovin, SJ, is professor of historical and liturgical theology at Boston College School of Theology and Ministry. His most recent books include Bread of Life, Cup of Salvation and The Urban Character of Christian Worship.

Sheds light on and invites discussion about the experience in which Catholics have been engaged since the Second Vatican Council in implementing and praying the liturgy as reformed after the council.

Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC) was the first document promulgated by the Second Vatican Council. The impact of this document was broad and ecumenical—the liturgical reforms approved by the Council reverberated throughout Christendom, impacting the order and experience of worship in Reformed and Orthodox Churches. Unrecognized in most studies, the Orthodox Churches were also active participants in the liturgical movement that gained momentum through the Catholic and Protestant Churches in the twentieth century. This study examines Orthodox liturgical reform after Vatican II through the lens of Catholic-Orthodox ecumenical dialogue. After establishing the retrieval of the priesthood of the laity and active liturgical participation as the rationales for liturgical reform, the study presents the history of liturgical reform through four models: the liturgical reforms of Alexander Schmemann; the alternative liturgical center in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR); the symposia on liturgical rebirth authorized by the Church of Greece; and the renewed liturgy of New Skete Monastery. Following a discussion of the main features of liturgical reform, catechesis, ars celebrandi, and the role of the clergy, Denysenko concludes with suggestions for implementing liturgical reform in the challenges of postmodernity and in fidelity to the contributions of Catholic-Orthodox ecumenical dialogue.

How has the Liturgy of the Roman rite developed and changed in history before and after the Council of Trent? What principles have determined the boundaries of legitimate liturgical reform over the centuries? What was the Liturgical Movement? Did Guéranger, Beauduin, Guardini, Parsch, Casel, Bugnini, Jungmann, Bouyer and the Movement's other leaders know and respect these principles? And what is to be said of the not insignificant liturgical reforms carried out by Saint Pius X, Popes Pius IX and Pius XII and Blessed John XXIII in the course of the twentieth century? In The Organic Development of the Liturgy, Dom Alcuin Reid examines these questions systematically, incisively and in depth, identifying both the content and context of the principle of "organic development"-a fundamental principle of liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium-making a significant contribution to the understanding of the nature of the Liturgical Movement and to the ongoing re-assessment of the reforms enacted following the Council.

The aim of The Proper of Time in the Post-Vatican II Liturgical Reforms is to allow easy comparison of the work of the Consilium ad exsequendam Constitutionem de Sacra Liturgia on the prayers of the Roman Missal with those found in the 1962 Missal and the 1970/2002 Missal. The Consilium ad exsequendam Constitutionem de Sacra Liturgia, better known as the Consilium, was the body that, during the Second Vatican Council, was made responsible for the reform of the liturgy that was desired by the Constitution on the Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium). One of the various documents of Group 18 of the Consilium, Schema 186, deals with the reform of the various prayers (collects, prayers over the gifts, etc.) contained in the Proper of Time of the Roman Missal, and gives draft texts for each day in this section. The prayers of the Ordinary and Extraordinary Forms of the Roman Rite are, in many places, very different. In recent years, these differences and the work of the Consilium have increasingly been the object of scholarly study and enquiry. Now, in The Proper of Time in the Post-Vatican II Liturgical Reforms, the corpus of orations in Schema 186 are readily available for the first time, and have been arranged side-by-side in parallel with those of the 1962 and 1970/2002 Missals for easy comparison. Various tools and indices are also provided in the book to aid further study and research into this important aspect of the post-Vatican II liturgical reforms.

The first document enacted by the Second Vatican Council was its Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, and the liturgical reform mandated by that document has probably had a greater impact on the average Catholic than any other action of the Council. That this liturgical reform has not in every respect been the unalloyed success hoped for by the Council Fathers, however, has only been grudgingly recognized. The liturgists and other Church officials responsible for implementing the reforms have had a vested interest in claiming success, even where there was evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, the many and sometimes abrupt liturgical changes made were bound to affect long-established modes of worship and devotion - not to speak of the drastic move from Latin to the vernacular, which came shortly after the Council, and which necessarily entailed radical change in the Church's worship. In July 2007, Pope Benedict XVI signaled that the liturgical question needed to be revisited when he issued a motu proprio that allowed, some fortyplus years after the end of the Council, a wider celebration of the unreformed pre-Vatican-II Mass in Latin as an "extraordinary" form of the Roman rite. While the pope's motu proprio was not a repudiation or cancellation of the Vatican II liturgical reforms - as some liturgists feared (and some tradition-alists hoped) - it did indicate a sane and sensible papal recognition that liturgy must be developed organically, not "manufactured" by a "committee." Above all, the pope recognized that the question of the liturgy must be approached realistically in the light of how the reforms have actually worked out, not of how some have imagined that they might or should have worked out. This book by Kenneth D. Whitehead, who has written extensively both on Vatican II and on the liturgy, explains Pope Benedict's action in its proper context and describes the reactions to it, while making special reference to some of the pontiff's own extensive previous writings on the liturgy. The author then doubles back to evaluate the Vatican II liturgical reforms generally - how and why they were enacted, what has actually come about as a result of them, and how and why a "reform of the reform" is now called for. Book jacket.