347 - Documents on the Liturgy, 1963-1979: Conciliar, Papal, and Curial Texts

Documents on the Liturgy, 1963-1979:
Conciliar, Papal, and Curial Texts
Edited by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy
Collegeville, Minn., The Liturgical Press, 1982. 1497 pp. $45.00.

The contemporary reform of the Roman liturgy has roots going back to the nineteenth century and official beginnings in decisions of Pope Pius X and Pope Pius XII, but the principal thrust came from the constitution on the liturgy issued in December 1963 by the Second Vatican Council. The constitution is the basic document in this invaluable collection of 554 documents in English translation. Some are from the general council itself, many from Pope Paul VI, most from the agencies of the Roman Curia concerned with the official implementation of liturgical change and renewal.

The Roman liturgy is only one of the rites of the Christian Church, as Vatican II was careful to insist, but it is the rite celebrated by well over half a billion Christian believers. This suggests the overall significance of these official documents and of this collection, far superior in quality and quantity to anything thus far produced. The only comparable effort is the collection edited by Reiner Kaczynski, Enchiridion Documentorum Instaurationis Liturgicae (Turin: Marietti, 1976), with 156 documents, almost all in Latin, for the period from 1963 to 1973. The Kaczynski collection, while carefully done and extremely useful, is not nearly so exhaustive and is considerably weaker because of its entirely chronological arrangement, lack of summaries, and cross references.

Documents on the Liturgy is important for scholars and students of worship; it will facilitate study of the reformed Roman liturgy to an extent that has been nearly impossible and certainly most inconvenient until now. It should be equally useful on the pastoral level for all who plan and prepare liturgies according to the Roman rite, and in fact for ministers and others of Christian churches which do not follow the Roman liturgy. The volume is a necessity for any serious library in the field of religious studies and, at least for Roman Catholics, for commissions and departments of worship, and for parishes.

I

A word is needed about the character of the documents from the official sources mentioned in the book's subtitle. The texts are diverse, from the most significant, the conciliar decrees issued from 1963 to 1965, to the simplest notice or interpretation issued by a Roman office. (The length of the documents also differs greatly; some consist of a single paragraph, one runs to seventy pages.) Some are intended as the

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most formal and juridic documents, decreeing and determining the authentic forms of the revised Roman liturgy. These include especially the apostolic or papal constitutions and the substantial introductions to the official service books that were published gradually in the decade and a half after Vatican II. Other documents, although significant in themselves, are supplementary in character, such as instructions, directories, and the like. Still others are by way of exposition, commentary, and exhortation, such as the addresses and homilies of Paul VI on the Christian liturgy. (A very important study of the weight of Roman Catholic liturgical documents, all the way from those intended to have canonical force in the governance of the liturgy to those which are clearly ancillary and even ephemeral, is found in R. Kevin Seasoltz, New Liturgy, New Laws, Collegeville, 1980.)

Beginning in 1968, the Roman See published the reformed liturgical books with full texts of the rites, section by section. Some thirty of the introductions (praenotanda) of these books and booklets form an important part of Documents on the Liturgy, and it is useful to have the introductions, with variants in second printings or editions diligently recorded, brought together in the present form. Unlike the front matter of the preconciliar liturgical or service books of the Roman rite, which had not been greatly changed since the sixteenth century, these contemporary introductions give doctrinal, pastoral, liturgical, and other background information on the rites themselves and the rationale for reform-along with the directives for celebration. Official texts of this kind are generally well documented, as are the theoretical and historical introductions to the papal constitutions.

It would have been a major accomplishment simply to bring together this huge quantity of documents on the liturgy from the official commentary of the Holy See (Acta Apostolicae Sedis), the many volumes of liturgical books, the journal of the Roman Congregation for Sacraments and Divine Worship (Notitiae), and other places. The collection, however, is made twice as valuable by its design and arrangement. The plan follows the chapters of the 1963 constitution on the liturgy: a general chapter, then chapters on the eucharist, the other sacraments, the church's daily prayer, liturgical year, music, and art. The chapters are divided, again topically, into from two to eleven sections, each section preceded by a succinct summary of the documents that follow. Within each section, the documents are in chronological order, so that the student may easily find the topic and subtopic and then follow its development in the period since Vatican II.

The collection is much easier to use than to describe, but some features deserve special mention and praise. Although the volume has an index of more than fifty pages, even more useful is a thorough system of cross references, clearly marked and workable because of the careful pattern of numbering the parts of the documents, some very lengthy and complex. The critical apparatus is carefully designed to distinguish the original footnotes of the texts, variants in editions, supplementary

349 - Documents on the Liturgy, 1963-1979: Conciliar, Papal, and Curial Texts

unofficial responses or comments, and the like. An appendix lists all the documents chronologically, by classification, and by opening Latin words. It is hard to imagine what more could have been done to guide the user of this excellent reference tool.

Corporate credit for the collection belongs to the International Commission on English in the Liturgy and its staff. ICEL was established in 1963 and prepares both liturgical translations from Latin and original liturgical texts for the use of the churches in twenty-five countries where English is spoken; the Roman Catholic bishops' conferences of these countries participate in ICEL and determine whether to accept its work for their respective territories. Documents on the Liturgy is thus an important supplement to the English language liturgical books prepared by ICEL. Specific credit belongs to Gaston Fontaine of the Service de Documentation Pastorale in Montreal for the overall plan of the volume and for research into the lists of documents. Thomas C. O'Brien of the ICEL staff was responsible for the clear and careful translations and for the total editing of the book, a massive achievement. The volume comes appropriately from the Liturgical Press of St. John's Abbey, Collegeville, which has a lengthy tradition of fine liturgical publications.

II

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the issuance of the constitution on the liturgy by Vatican II (December 4, 1963) and is the occasion for reappraisals of the decree itself and of its implementation during the intervening years. Assessing the successes and failures of the implementation in the actual celebration of the Roman liturgy is very difficult, but for the assessment of the central Roman contribution the ICEL collection is both indispensable and sufficient.

The careful student will see, even in an overview, many hesitations and compromises in the documents themselves. Often enough, at least in secondary matters, there seems to have been a slight loss of nerve in carrying out to the full what was expected by the bishops of Vatican II. (Ironically, the traditionalists of the Roman communion still insist, without justification, that the conciliar mandate was exceeded and the "Roman" liturgy nearly destroyed.) One can note, even in the promulgation of the reformed Order of Mass (1969), efforts to placate a disaffected minority and to explain, somewhat defensively, the very traditional character of the reform. Instances could be multiplied, but they are small in proportion to the total and successful enterprise.

In fact, what the documents do reveal, at least until the mid-seventies when most of the work had been done and considerable Roman retrenchment had set in, is the breadth and depth of the liturgical reform. What might have been a matter of cold canonical decree, given the Roman juridical system, is documented as involving contemporary pastoral concerns and accommodations, vast historical inquiry into precedents and diversity of rites, a searching of the Scriptures to enrich

350 - Documents on the Liturgy, 1963-1979: Conciliar, Papal, and Curial Texts

the celebration, and serious doctrinal reflection. The task, moreover, had to be done rather quickly before ecclesiastical forces unfriendly to liturgical reform (and indeed to Vatican II as a whole) could curb or halt the development.

Much of the progress reflected in this documentation would have been impossible without the commitment of Pope Paul VI. This is evident from the documents he signed or authorized and the words he spoke. Paul VI is often pictured as wavering and hesitant, and he was surely torn by diverse pressures, but he did support the conciliar and postconciliar liturgical reform, and all but a handful of the texts in this collection belong to his period of ministry as bishop of Rome.

Documents on the Liturgy is appropriately dedicated to the memory of Annibale Bugnini, who was both architect and servant of the reform. Much maligned within and without the Roman Curia, he played a major role in liturgical renewal under three popes and had a hand in almost every document in the collection until 1975. (Archbishop Bugnini died in 1982 after seven years as pro-nuncio in Iran, where he was a courageous and compassionate friend to the American hostages.) As secretary of the preparatory commission before Vatican II, he had overseen the preparation of the constitution on the liturgy. As secretary of the postconciliar consilium of implementation and, later, the Roman Congregation for Divine Worship, he again supervised the planning and completion of all the revised liturgical books and the supplementary instructions, indeed the totality of the Roman reform.

III

One happy characteristic of this period has been the reciprocal contributions of the Christian churches. Both in Vatican II and in the consilium of implementation, the participation of liturgical scholars from other, non-Roman communions and traditions was not only symbolic but also genuinely effective. One of many instances in which the Roman reform has served as either model or starting point for other churches is the order of biblical readings for the eucharistic celebration. Prepared with careful study of the diverse traditions of lectionaries and the numerous contemporary proposals for revision, the 1969 Ordo lectionum Missae, as documented in this collection, has now been accommodated to the uses of several churches, especially in North America. Most recently, a uniform adaptation of the Roman lectionary has been completed for three-year trial use under the direction of the Consultation on Common Texts. Happy developments such as this point to the serious use of this collection by scholars and others of non-Roman churches.

The Roman liturgical reform was conceived both during and immediately after Vatican II as having two stages. The first, now complete and represented by Documents on the Liturgy in greatest detail, was a matter of direct revision of the central core of the Roman rite. The second stage, which has been barely begun and which is far from

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accepted throughout the Roman Catholic Church despite the conciliar openness and impetus, is one of ongoing adaptation to the diverse genius of peoples and regions, to cultures and subcultures. This kind of accommodation, which goes by names such as indigenization and inculturation, was evidently accomplished in the development of early Christian liturgies without the travail and uncertainties that seem to be unavoidable in our times: we are much too aware of precedents and possibilities, and perhaps we communicate too easily. Nonetheless it is a great responsibility and opportunity for which the groundwork is laid in the Roman reform, again as this is so effectively demonstrated in the present collection. The task, now in the hands of the local churches and the national and regional conferences of Roman Catholic bishops, if they will take it up, can be helped immeasurably by what has been accomplished by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy through the preparation of this significant volume.

Frederick R. McManus
The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.