"The true celebration of the Sacred Liturgy is the centre of any renewal of the Church."

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The excerpt from Dom Alcuin's 2014 presentation affirms the fundamental orientation needed for an effective and authentic renewal in the Church.

We are blessed in the Ordinariates, established by the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, to be able to honour with enthusiasm and dedication the renewal sought by the Fathers of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council. In Divine Worship, the Mass of the Ordinariate, we are blessed with an abundance of riches, of poetry - signs or gestures and spoken prayers, music - that corroborate the sage perspective expressed in the following excerpt.

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Elements of the New Liturgical Movement

Dom Alcuin Reid

St Mary’s Norwalk, CT & Holy Innocents’, New York

June 2014

[Highlights and comments added by blog editor]

Let us begin with Cardinal Ratzinger’s 1997 assertion that:

The Church stands and falls with the Liturgy. When the adoration of the divine Trinity declines, when the faith no longer appears in its fullness in the Liturgy of the Church, when man’s words, his thoughts, his intentions are suffocating him, then faith will have lost the place where it is expressed and where it dwells. For that reason, the true celebration of the Sacred Liturgy is the centre of any renewal of the Church whatever.2

“The Church stands and falls with the Liturgy... . The true celebration of the Sacred Liturgy is the centre of any renewal of the Church whatever.” If you go away from this presentation with just two sentences, they would be good ones to take with you. “The Church stands and falls with the Liturgy... . The true celebration of the Sacred Liturgy is the centre of any renewal of the Church whatever.”

Now there are plenty of people around who would say that such concern about the liturgy is too introspective, if not introverted, in an age where the Church has so much to do and so many problems to face. “What need have we of ‘sacristy-rats’ or of ‘candle-counting thurible-swingers?” they might retort.

But let us be clear: Christianity is not humanitarian activism, it is a faith — faith in the person of God the Son incarnate, who suffered and died for our salvation and who established a Church to continue His saving ministry to the end of time. This the Church does through the Sacred Liturgy. If we think about it: original and actual sin are remitted and we are joined to the Body of Christ through the sacrament of Baptism, we are given the Gift of the Holy Spirit to strengthen us in the rite of Confirmation, our Christian initiation is completed and we are continually nourished for Christian life through the Holy Eucharist, we are healed when we fall into sin through the Sacrament of Penance, and are healed when we are sick through the Sacrament of Anointing. We are given specific graces for our particular vocations in the sacraments of Matrimony and Holy Orders. We celebrate salvation history and the triumphs of the saints in the liturgical year, in times of grief we take our beloved dead to the altar, and we continually beg God’s blessing on ourselves, our homes and other created things that we use through liturgical rites.

All of this is liturgical. And it is right that we give it priority. For it is here that we encounter Christ living and acting in His Church today. For without the Sacred Liturgy we have no ecclesial connection with Christ. And without this Christianity is at risk of becoming an ideology rather than a faith—hopefully a benevolent ideology, but an ideology nevertheless—and the works of its followers, mere activism.

1. The Spirit of the Liturgy, pp. 8-9.
2. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, preface to Franz Breid, ed., Die heilige Liturgie, papers from the “Internationale Theologische Sommerakademie 1997” of the Priests’ Circle of Linz, Ennsthaler Verlag, Steyr 1997.

Later in the same presentation, Dom Reid adds "a series of pithy statements that accurately reflect the content of Sacrosanctum Concilium", the chief document of the Council that mandated liturgical renewal.

The following statements are useful to focus discussions, to separate the chaff of distractions of one kind or another from the wheat of substance.

An authentic interpretation of the Second Vatican Council’s mandate for liturgical reform.

1. Active participation means actual participation not activist participation. A vital distinction that, unfortunately, has been and continues to be lost on those preoccupied with fiddling with the Sacred Liturgy, those who attempt to fashion it in their own image. Therein lies a serious concern: if people assume they can do with the Liturgy what they will, they are in a very real sense violating the First Commandment. An imposition upon the Mass may very well be the placement of a graven image - an act or object - in the place that properly belongs to God.
2. Widespread formation and immersion in the Church’s liturgical life and tradition is an essential prerequisite to actual participation and is a far greater priority than ritual reform. The ever increasing number of college-age people deprived of identity, now hungry for history and depth of experience in aid of self identification, and engaging in a fact finding mission by seeking out traditional liturgy, heralds opportunity for the wider Church to foster engagement in authentic formation.
3. That “there must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them; and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing” means exactly that. Members of the Anglicanae  Traditiones Interdicasterial  Commission  embodied the patrimony. Faithful stewards of the English and Latin Christian theological, liturgical, spiritual and cultural legacy, they communicated their lived knowledge of the Patrimony that binds together the Ordinariates and offers renewal in continuity with the past works of the Holy Spirit that have given direction and shape to the Church. The lens preserved in the Ordinariates is exactly that for which the Council called. That lens allows us to see how the Spirit is working now, so that we may conform our actions to the will of God.
4. Giving a suitable place to the vernacular does not mean totally vernacularising the liturgy to the exclusion of Latin. The vernacular of Divine Worship is of an hieratic kind. That is, the English is of an elevated kind suitable for the communal public worship of Almighty God.
5. That the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites suggests that Latin should be something with which all our congregations are familiar from regular use. One typically hears the following chanted in Latin at Ordinariate Masses: Gloria, Sanctus/Benedictus, Agnus Dei.
6. Allowing the extended use of concelebration is not about forming generations of priests who do not know how or even why one would celebrate Mass privately, let alone how to behave as concelebrants. When the Bishop/Ordinary is present, concelebration occurs in Divine Worship. Concelebration with the head shepherd is entirely appropriate. It images the Lord Jesus (Bishop) and the apostles (concelebrants).
7. Judging that Holy Communion may be administered under both species on certain occasions does not mandate the creation of legions of extraordinary ministers, unworthy vessels for the Precious Blood or questionable if not downright sacrilegious practices in respect of their of their purification. The Ordinariate in America, for example, institutes acolytes in harmony with Ministeria Quaedam, the document issued by Pope Saint Paul VI to facilitate reverential ministration of the Blessed Sacrament. https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/ministeria-quaedam-9006
8. Providing a richer fare for the faithful at the table of God's word does not mean destroying a truly ancient order or readings, nor does it authorise the excising of uncomfortable portions of Sacred Scripture from the lectionary.
9. Singing the liturgy, not singing at the liturgy, is what is required. Given the emphasis in Ordinariate communities received from the experience of former protestant parishioners and pastors, an average Ordinariate community tends to be much more vocally engaged that your average diocesan community. Music is much more than cover or accompaniment for liturgical actions in Divine Worship. Music (hymns, anthems, Anglican Chant) is prayer, a vehicle for the worship of God.
10. Noble simplicity does not mandate simplicity being ignobly visited upon the liturgy.
11. Revising the liturgical books does not authorise the wholesale recasting of their calendars, the ideological purging of their proper prayers, or the insertion of liturgical texts reconstructed according to insufficiently tested scholarly fashions.

The last word goes to Reid: "The Council mandated reform, certainly, and it did so authoritatively, but what it called for was for widespread liturgical formation to facilitate actual participation in liturgical tradition moderately reformed, not a wholesale or radical ritual reformation. We need to be very clear about this distinction if we are not to deny the nature or indeed the authority of an ecumenical council of the Church."