Liturgical Adventures

The following article appears on Catholic Online, and it’s posted here just to remind us that the development of the Ordinariate liturgy isn’t the only thing going on in the liturgical life of the Church. Of course, you already knew that…but it’s good for us to remember that the millions of Catholics who use English as their primary language of prayer will be seeing some pretty dramatic changes in just a few months. If they can do it, those of us who will be adapting to whatever changes come in the Ordinariate liturgy can certainly adjust, too. It’s all part of the great adventure of being Catholic!

Revised Roman Missal Presents a Moment of Grace for the Whole Catholic Church
By Deacon Keith Fournier

"Worship cannot come from our imagination: that would be a cry in the darkness or mere self-affirmation. True liturgy supposes that God responds and shows us how we can adore Him. The Church lives in His presence – and its reason for being and existing is to expand His presence in the world." (Pope Benedict XVI)

The implementation of the Revised Roman Missal is an opportunity for the whole Church to be authentically renewed.

CHESAPEAKE, VA. (Catholic Online) – As the implementation of the Revised Roman Missal draws near the entire Catholic Church is presented with an invitation to rediscover the heart of Catholic worship and be changed in the encounter. There is a Latin maxim that addresses the centrality of worship in the life, identity and mission of the Catholic Church; "Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi".

The phrase in Latin means the law of prayer ("the way we worship"), and the law of belief ("what we believe"). It is sometimes written as, "lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi", further deepening the implications of this truth – referring as well to the "law of life". How we worship reflects what we believe and determines how we will live.

The Church has long understood that part of her role as mother and teacher is to watch over worship, for the sake of the faithful and in obedience to the God whom she serves. How we worship not only reveals and guards what we believe but guides us in how we live our Christian faith and fulfill our Christian mission in the world.

Liturgical Worship is not an "add on" for a Catholic Christian. It is the foundation of Catholic identity; expressing our highest purpose. Worship reveals what we truly believe and how we view ourselves in relationship to God, one another and the world into which we are sent to carry forward the redemptive mission of Jesus Christ.

How the Church worships is a prophetic witness to the truth of what she professes. Good worship becomes a dynamic means of drawing the entire human community into the fullness of life in Jesus Christ. It attracts – through beauty to Beauty. Worship informs and transforms both the person and the faith community which participates in it. There is reciprocity between worship and life.

The Revised Roman Missal more completely captures the spirit of the original language and restores a depth and beauty to the Sacred Liturgy. The implementation of this revision is an opportunity for an authentic renewal of liturgical worship, which is the very heart of our Catholic faith.

In Australia, the revisions to the Liturgy were implemented last Pentecost. An article entitled "Australian parishes positive on new Mass translation" confirmed what I expected would happen. It began with these words "The new translation of the missal was used at Australian Masses for the first time on Sunday, and won praise from a priest of almost six decades and another who has just celebrated his first Mass." The article was adapted from a fuller article on the subject which appeared in "the Australian" entitled "New translation of liturgy launched to mass applause"

It continued, "Father Norris, ordained in Rome in 1955, and who said mass in Latin for his first 10 years as a priest, found the new version much easier. So many priests and people felt let down in the late 1960s – not by the loss of the Latin or the fact that the priest had to face the people, but because so much richness was lost," said the parish priest of St Kevin's Geebung, on Brisbane's northside.

"The new text will have a transformative effect, invoking a strong sense of the sacred because it is "so different from everyday speech and will turn people's minds and hearts to the mysteries of the faith". Father Morgan, one of five priests ordained in Sydney on May 20, said young priests and mass-goers he met were "nothing but positive" about the translation. "The difference between the two translations is incredible, with the new one being so rich and beautiful," said Father Morgan, who elected to use the new translation for his first mass at St Christopher's Holsworthy in southwestern Sydney."

I have spent decades in ecumenical work. Perhaps that explains why I find it odd that right when so many of our Christian friends in other confessions and communities are searching for a deeper encounter with the beauty of the Lord in formal liturgical worship; for sign, symbol and mystery, for a connection with the ancient Church in her divine worship, some parts of the Catholic Church are discarding the very treasures that make her formal liturgical worship so beautiful, full of mystery and so compelling and attractive to those seeking a deeper experience of worship and Christian life.

Sadly, what may have begun as a sincere effort to simplify – itself an invitation into beauty when properly achieved – often devolved into a form of liturgical minimalism. The liturgical minimalism I speak of begins when you enter what is sometimes called the "worship space" of some contemporary church buildings. There are very few symbols anywhere. There are few if any icons or images reflecting the heavenly touching the earth, drawing the worshipper into a transcendent encounter with the God who we receive in the Most Holy Eucharist and in whom we are invited to live and move and have our being.

I am not a "traditionalist" Catholic, although I understand and respect those who are. I am just a Christian who chooses to live my faith in its fullness, as a Catholic. I love the Tradition, with a capital "T". I am a "revert", drawn back to that fullness of Christianity that is dynamic, orthodox, faithful Catholic life and practice. I have respect for my brethren who are Protestants in each of their various confessions and communities. However, I am not one, by choice. I do not want a Protestant looking church building or a stripped down Catholicism whose worship seems more protestant than Catholic. I do not want barren liturgy and symbol-less Catholicism.

Over the last two decades, some who purported to be liturgical experts too often stripped away the richness and the depth that draws so many to the treasure that is Catholic worship and life. Their numbers and influence are dwindling. The Catholic seminaries that are full (and their number is increasing) are filled with candidates who want the vibrant, symbolic, faithful, richly liturgical, devout fullness of Catholic faith and life. The movement toward dynamic, symbolic and beautiful Liturgy is not about going "backward" but forward and toward eternal worship.

The ecclesial movements are flourishing, drawing men and women who also want the fullness of Catholic worship, faith and life in all of its rich beauty. The new Catholics, coming into full communion from other Christian communities, are flocking to the "dynamically orthodox" and faithful Catholic parishes. The symbols are coming back into our sanctuaries and new ones are emerging.

There was a movement called Iconoclasm ("Image-breaking") in the eighth and ninth centuries in the Eastern Church. It became a full scale heresy. The term has come to be associated with those who rejected icons, but it speaks to a contemporary problem, liturgical minimalism and the loss of the sense of the Sacred in our Churches. Icons are meant to put us in touch with the transcendent mysteries of our faith.

I pray with icons and have for many years. I cherish their liturgical role in the Eastern Church. In fact, one would never find an Eastern Church, Catholic or Orthodox, without icons. The contemporary "iconoclasts" are those who seek to de-mystify Christian faith, life, worship and practice. They are not the future of the Catholic Church but the past.

There are some who think that the symbols of our worship, our faith and our life are a problem. While they strip our sanctuaries and make our liturgical experiences barren, they think they have helped us by somehow making the faith more 'relevant", "meaningful" or "contemporary". They are sadly mistaken and have done the Church and her mission a disservice.

They fail to grasp that, by nature and grace, human persons are symbolic. Man (and woman) is created in the image of God, and is a divine icon. Jesus Christ is the Icon of the Father. Symbols touch us at a much deeper level than words or emotive or affective participation can. They touch us at the level where authentic religion and deep worship truly begins. It is there where we hunger the most for God.

On April 15, 2010, Pope Benedict XVI addressed the Bishops of Brazil in Rome. He told them that the Eucharist constitutes "the centre and permanent source of the Petrine ministry, the heart of the Christian life, source and summit of the Church's mission of evangelization. You can thus understand the concern of the Successor of Peter for all that can obfuscate this most essential point of the Catholic faith: that today, Jesus Christ continues alive and truly present in the consecrated host and the chalice."

He warned the Bishops that "Paying less attention at times to the rite of the Most Holy Sacrament constitutes a sign and a cause of the darkening of the Christian sense of mystery, such as when Jesus is not the centre of the Mass, but rather a community preoccupied with other things instead of being taken up and drawn to the only one necessary: their Lord".

The Pope continued "If the figure of Christ does not emerge from the liturgy, it is not a Christian liturgy. As Blessed John Paul II wrote, "the mystery of the Eucharist is 'too great a gift' to admit of ambiguities or reductions, above all when, 'stripped of its sacrificial meaning, it is celebrated as if it were simply a fraternal banquet'."

Toward the end of these remarks Pope Benedict summarized the heart of Liturgy, "Worship cannot come from our imagination: that would be a cry in the darkness or mere self-affirmation. True liturgy supposes that God responds and shows us how we can adore Him. The Church lives in His presence – and its reason for being and existing is to expand His presence in the world."

"Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi. Lex Vivendi". As We Worship, So we will believe and so we will live. The implementation of the Revised Roman Missal is an opportunity for the whole Church to be authentically renewed.

Related posts:

Anglican Catholic and Roman Catholic Mutual Liturgical EnrichmentFour Liturgical FormsMore Reflections on Liturgical LanguageMsgr. Burnham: Anglican Liturgical PatrimonyLiturgical Archaeologism Fr. Christopher G. Phillips is the pastor of Our Lady of the Atonement Catholic Church in San Antonio, Texas, where he has served for the past twenty-seven years. He is the founding pastor of the first Anglican Use parish, erected in 1983 under the terms of the Pastoral Provision. Fr. Phillips was ordained as an Anglican for the Diocese of Bristol, England, in 1975. After serving as Curate for three years at St. Stephen Southmead, he returned to the United States and served in two Episcopal parishes in the Diocese of Rhode Island. In 1981 he left the Episcopal Church and moved with his family to Texas, where he was subsequently ordained as a Catholic priest in 1983. Fr. Phillips and his wife, JoAnn, have been married for forty years. They have five children, all grown and married, and two grandchildren.

View the original article here

Msgr. Burnham: Anglican Liturgical Patrimony

This paper on Anglican Liturgical Patrimony, written by Msgr. Andrew Burnham, was distributed at the recent Anglican Use Conference.

The vigorous discussion of ‘Anglican Patrimony’, a phrase used by Pope Benedict XVI in Anglicanorum cœtibus, has established two things for sure. One is that it is not only a liturgical tradition which former Anglicans bring into the Catholic Church: there is a sense in which ‘patrimony’ is far wider than that, and includes a whole cultural mindset and experience which is no less real for being hard to define. The other thing that the discussion has established is that, whatever it is, ‘Anglican Patrimony’ certainly does include a liturgical tradition, a tradition which is powerfully Benedictine, in its continued celebration of the public office, often within buildings that were abbeys and priories. It is also a tradition which, somewhat self-consciously, has adopted the Eucharist as its mainstay. This we all owe to the Oxford Fathers as much as to the Twentieth Century Liturgical Movement, which has influenced us all.

The trouble starts when we see some of the divergent directions in which the Anglican tradition has followed. One, undoubtedly, is that of the Ritualists, those nineteenth century Anglo-catholics who, believing that the Provinces of Canterbury and York had become separated from the Holy See by secular wickedness, believed that they should adopt as much of continental faith and practice as they could, living as if they were Roman Catholics. There is a whole history here, at times moderate and at times extreme and its liturgical footprints are found in the more moderate Anglican Missal and the English Missal, more ultramontane as time went on, compromising to a greater or lesser extent with the requirements of the Anglican rubrics as they celebrated what was, at its extremity, the Tridentine Mass in the vernacular. Another whole tradition, much more obedient to the Anglican heartland, could be called Prayer Book Catholic. Not so long ago, it seems, almost everyone was a ‘Prayer Book Catholic’. One endeavoured to profess the Catholic Faith but sought to express it in ways loyal to the Prayer Book. This deep loyalty to the texts characterised much Anglo-catholicism in the States. High Church Episcopalians have almost always looked askance at English Anglo-catholics and their anomalous liturgies. But many English Anglicans have also looked askance at Anglo-catholic anomy and sought to work synodically, at least from the mid-1960s, to bring about those structures and texts and emphases which more appropriately express a Catholic eucharistic understanding. Here things have been helped, as well as complicated, by the ecumenical consensus of the Liturgical Movement and we have been bewildered as much by Scottish Presbyterians lighting candles on cuboid stone altars as by Jesuits saying Mass in mufti over a coffee table. Throw into this mix the strong movement and longing, a century and more ago, for the lost age of the Sarum Use. Whether it was Percy Dearmer and the Parson’s Handbook or various editions of plainchant, there was the feeling that the English Church needed as much to recover what it had lost in a golden age of mediæval praxis and piety as to look for the reunion of Christians. Remember, in those heady days – until, really the Church of England re-invented itself as one denomination amongst many in the 1970s – ‘the Church’ in England meant ‘the Church of England’, whatever ‘the Romans’ or ‘the non-conformists’ thought about things.

The problem about all this history – and I must apologise for the rough and ready way I have laid it out, preparatory to what comes next – is that it becomes problematic to discern quite what the Pope would mean by ‘Anglican liturgical patrimony’. Ironically, he probably means not least what he witnessed in Westminster Abbey, in September 2010, and what he knows, as a good musician, of the English choral tradition. I say ‘ironically’ because this is probably the least accessible part of the Anglican tradition in terms of his ecumenical initiative in Anglicanorum cœtibus. We are not expecting a cœtus to form in Westminster Abbey nor in any English cathedral nor indeed from any major parish church. Ironically too, as our friends on the North American scene have often remarked, the English Anglo-catholics who have responded and are likely to respond to the Pope’s offer are the successors of the Ritualists, those who for many years have used the Roman Missal in English and used the Divine Office for their formation and daily devotion. But it isn’t entirely like that: a small but significant percentage of our groups are from a more avowedly Anglican liturgical background and they are looking eagerly to see what it is from Anglican sources that the Holy See will authorise for use in the Ordinariates. Watching them are others from congregations in the Church of England who are embedded in the Common Worship tradition, that is making full use of the Catholic-style ceremonies and texts which have increasingly become a feature of English Anglican worship, albeit often under-laid with a far from satisfactory doctrinal understanding of ecclesiology and sacramental theology.

A word now about the Book of Divine Worship. We in England pay tribute to the visionary nature of this book. It was, to a considerable extent, the transplanting of the Episcopalian 1979 Book of Common Prayer into Roman Catholic diocesan life, bringing in not just the texts but much of the ceremonial dignity and infrastructure which has given such beauty to American Anglo-catholicism. The careful mixture of a ‘Catholic’ richness and obedience to official formularies had made North American Anglo-catholicism distinctive and this mixture was now being brought into the full Communion of the Catholic Church. No wonder the parishes – though small in number – flourished so wonderfully. These parishes will surely be at the heart of the new American Ordinariate. But everybody knows that the Book of Divine Worship will not quite do now. I can’t speak about elsewhere in the world, but we know that it is too North American for England, which has a different Anglican tradition, especially as regards modern liturgical revision. We also know that, with the coming on-stream of the new English texts of the Roman Liturgy, the contemporary language stream in the Book of Divine Worship would create a cacophony. And, a generation on, everyone would like a new look at the Book of Divine Worship and what should be in it.

In order to prepare for the next stage, the emergence of the Ordinariates and their worshipping life, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith convoked a working party, under the chairmanship of Mgr Andrew Burnham, one of the former Provincial Episcopal Visitors, to advise on some of these issues. The focus has been mainly on preparing for the first of the Ordinariates, the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, in England and Wales, but there has been some work on the wider questions. It is not yet entirely clear whether the highly desirable objective will be achieved of establishing an international English liturgical provision for the Ordinariates. It may be that the histories are too different, the expectations and experiences too. But it is worth continuing to strive for that. Some of the work, though painstaking, is quite straight forward. No one wishes to see the disappearance of the Coverdale Psalter. Everyone seems keen to make sure that that gem of Anglican practice, Evensong, is available to the Ordinariates, to enrich the Catholic Church. There is an expectation too that, in England, something like the marriage and funeral liturgies, broadly as revised in 1928, and reappearing as ‘Series One’, should be available to the Ordinariate. These beautiful liturgies are so in-grained that, along with Evensong, they will be a powerful tool of outreach and evangelism, in a context where something at least of Anglican Patrimony is to do with the way pastoral work is done in neighbourhoods and amidst communities. There is also an enormous wealth of English spiritual writing, hardly explored as yet in the liturgical life of the Catholic Church, which may enrich a more distinctively English Calendar. Some of this – quite a bit of it – will also be there for Ordinariates elsewhere in the world, whose Anglican origins have been informed by the liturgy and spirituality of the English Church.

You will appreciate that I am not quite in a position to unveil where the working party has got to. For one thing, it was meeting only a few days ago and its deliberations will have to be fed back to the Holy See before too much is public. What I can do is mention some of the directions in which we are heading. I think we can assume that distinct liturgical provision for the Ordinariates will be almost entirely in traditional language. That heads off the emerging difficulty of more than one idiom of contemporary liturgical English in the Catholic Church. I think too that we can assume that there will be an interim stage, when material from the Divine Office and for the marriage and funeral liturgies will be further tried and tested, with the expectation that Congregation for Divine Worship will substantially endorse and make permanent what is being done. I think we can assume too that the infrastructure of Calendar and Lectionary – in respect of the Lectionary perhaps a bit closer to the Roman Rite than that in the Book of Divine Worship, which is essentially the Episcopalian one. I think we can assume too that the Initiation rites – Baptism and Confirmation – and the rites of Ordination will be those of the Roman Rite. These are important, unitive moments and none of the corresponding rites from the Anglican Communion can adequately convey the understanding of what it is to belong to, and be an ordained minister within, the full Communion of the Catholic Church.

There are one or two lesser questions, upon which little progress has yet been made – such as ministry to the sick and dying – but the main area of work outstanding is, of course, the Mass. It is not that work has still to be begun in this area. Rather it is that the Congregation for Divine Worship, to whom the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has entrusted this task, needs to take time to study the issues carefully. Let me just remind you of what some of these issues are. One issue is the Sarum Use. At the Reformation, the Sarum Use was the predominant Use in England and, like the Ambrosian and Mozarabic liturgies, had not only local importance but also, as viewed by the criteria established by the Council of Trent, a long enough history to be regarded as having a permanent place within the Latin Rite. Now, as we know, the Sarum Use was suppressed not by the Catholic Church but by the Henrician Reformation. Broadly, does the Catholic Church regard that suppression as a final and fatal piece of iconoclasm or, in more propitious times, should something like the Sarum Use re-emerge after a long sleep? There are momentous consequences, including pastoral ones, in encouraging the adoption de novo of a liturgy largely unfamiliar to the worshippers. Then there is a second issue. What should be done about that rich Anglo-catholic tradition of using the Anglican Missal or English Missal? Here we are looking at the preferences of Continuing Anglicanism which, appalled by some of the trends in twentieth century liturgical reformulation and doctrinal revisionism, has found its liturgical life in these missals. What view should the Congregation for Divine Worship take of these missals, neither of which has been an authorised liturgical book in Britain, America or Australia, despite their frequent use in these territories. Thirdly, there are the Anglican liturgical books and resources which are authorised and used. This was broadly the area that the Book of Divine Worship has explored, taking the 1979 Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer and, essentially, dropping in the Liturgy of the Eucharist of the Roman Rite in place of the Protestant provision. That could be done with the Church of England’s Common Worship. There are no doubt similar strategies that could be adopted with regard to Australia and for former Anglicans in Africa and India. There are some obvious complications: just as the American Book of Divine Worship is often strange from an English vantage point, so Common Worship would seem strange in some other parts of the world. Or, rather, it may seem confusingly similar to the emergent English translation of the Roman Rite.

As you will see, these three issues – the Sarum Use, the Anglican and English Missals, the contemporary versions of Anglican liturgy – take us back into the early history of the Oxford Movement. There were strong arguments then for restoring the Sarum Use. There were strong arguments then for aligning faith and practice with the contemporary Catholic Church. There were strong arguments then too for attending loyally to the agreed Anglican texts and for seeking to revise them to strengthen their ability to convey Catholic teaching. The working party began work with the last two of these three issues dominant in the minds of its English members. Surely something should be built on the close co-relation of the contemporary language Eucharist in Common Worship with the Mass of Pope Paul VI: after all, here was the nexus explored and exploited by Anglo-catholics. Here was the opportunity at once to build on the Anglican liturgical experience and to align faith and practice with the contemporary Catholic Church. As became clear, however, the very similarity of eucharistic orders would lead to muddle and to the cacophony referred to earlier. It was decided also that the place of the Anglican and English Missals tradition, particularly in relation to North America and Australia, needed further study and consideration. Meanwhile the first tranche of texts submitted by the working party incorporated substantial elements from the Use of Sarum. Imagine liturgical history, so the conceit goes, had the emerging vernaculars of the Renaissance period not been vehicles of theological polemic. Imagine how things would have emerged had Dr Cranmer been a loyal servant of the Church, the Annibale Bugnini of his age. At worst, this conceit is a harmless game. At best, it might yet lead to the emergence of a fine Ordinariate eucharistic rite, including, after five hundred years’ torpor, some of the jewels of traditional Catholicism as found in the Use of Sarum.

Related posts:

Defining a Liturgical Patrimony: Cistercian Lessons for Anglican OrdinariatesAnglican Catholic and Roman Catholic Mutual Liturgical EnrichmentFour Liturgical FormsThe Other Anglican Patrimony: Anglo-Papalism and the Ecclesiae Anglicanae that Remained Within the Catholic ChurchThe Remarkable Gift of the Anglican Patrimony Fr. Christopher G. Phillips is the pastor of Our Lady of the Atonement Catholic Church in San Antonio, Texas, where he has served for the past twenty-seven years. He is the founding pastor of the first Anglican Use parish, erected in 1983 under the terms of the Pastoral Provision. Fr. Phillips was ordained as an Anglican for the Diocese of Bristol, England, in 1975. After serving as Curate for three years at St. Stephen Southmead, he returned to the United States and served in two Episcopal parishes in the Diocese of Rhode Island. In 1981 he left the Episcopal Church and moved with his family to Texas, where he was subsequently ordained as a Catholic priest in 1983. Fr. Phillips and his wife, JoAnn, have been married for forty years. They have five children, all grown and married, and two grandchildren.

View the original article here

Protected: Liturgical Principles applied to Contemporary Christian Worship

You are here: Home / Worship Articles / Protected: Liturgical Principles applied to Contemporary Christian Worship

Related posts:

Can you tell the difference b/t Sacred & Secular Music? I found this while suffering the internet.  Overall, I like...Glorify God by your life: Evangelization & the Renewal of the Liturgy Archbishop Chaput reflects on questions of evangelization and the renewal...Sing to the Lord: Music in Divine Worship (Section I – Why We Worship?) Over the next few blog posts I would like to...Our Mission When I first started getting into leading worship in college...The Seven Words of Worship In Psalm 96:4 we read: “For great is the Lord...

View the original article here