The Organic Development Of The Liturgy

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.

This is a serious, scholarly analysis of liturgy combining historical, philosophical and musicological aspects.

In 1921, Anton Baumstark delivered two lectures on the development of the Roman Rite to a gathering at the Abbey of Maria Laach. Abbot Ildefons Herwegen offered to publish those lectures, but Baumstark decided to write a book on the topic instead, which was published two years later as On the Historical Development of the Liturgy. It would be another sixteen years before he produced Comparative Liturgy, for which he is better known. Together the two books lay out Baumstark's liturgical methodology. Comparative Liturgy presents his method; On the Historical Development of the Liturgy offers his model. For nearly a century, On the Historical Development of the Liturgy has been valued by specialists in the field of liturgical studies, both for its description of comparative liturgy and for the portrayal of patterns Baumstark discerns in liturgical development. Also significant are the hypotheses Baumstark proposes and the evidence he brings to bear on problems in liturgical history. In this annotated edition, Fritz West provides the first English translation of this work by Anton Baumstark.

Maximus the Confessor, saint and martyr, is the theologian of synthesis: of Rome and Byzantium, of Eastern and Western theology, of antiquity and the Middle Ages, reexcavating the great treasures of Christian tradition, which at that time had been buried by imperial and ecclesial censure. Von Balthasar was an authority on the Church Fathers-Irenaeus, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Evagrius Ponticus, Augustine, and above all, Maximus the Confessor. This masterpiece on Maximus broke new ground at that time. Subsequent editions included new material from decades of research. This is the first English translation of the latest edition of this acclaimed work. This book presents a powerful, attractive, religiously compelling portrait of the thought of a major Christian theologian who might, for this book, have remained only an obscure name in the handbooks of patrology. It is based on an intelligent and careful reading of Maximus's own writings. Here the history of theology has become itself a way of theological reflection.

Source and Summit

Based on the diaries and notes of Cardinal Ferdinando Antonelli, a key figure in the Catholic Church's liturgical-reform movement both before and after Vatican II, this book shows that the Council's vision for the Mass has yet to fully develop in the direction Vatican II mandated.

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This work attends to the organic process by which the Roman rite was built up from its foundations into a magnificent structure, marked by the accumulated riches of each age through which it passed, and characterized by order, beauty, and piety in its texts, gestures, rubrics, chants, and calendar-from the major elements to minute details.