Sacred Art and Authentic Liturgical Tradition
The Enigmatic Contributions of the Liturgical Movement
The Liturgical Movement began as an effort to combat the secular rationalism of the Enlightenment and the sentimentalism of Romanticism in the 18th and 19th centuries. According to Denis McNamara, the movement emphasized the grounding of the liturgy and sacred art in theology (rather than emotion, utility or popular trends), the active participation of the laity “by sharing in the exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ”[1] and an authentically Catholic harmonization of continuity with tradition and the sanctification of contemporary culture. Dr. Peter Kwasniewski delineates three phases in the development of the Liturgical Movement corresponding to the ideas explained by McNamara.[2] The first phase, predominantly taking place in the Victorian era and led by Dom Prosper Guéranger, “aimed at a better understanding and celebration of the inherited Roman liturgy” through proper catechesis in liturgical theology and prayerful interior contemplation, “to take the treasures we already had and get to know and love them intimately.”[3] In sacred architecture, this phase sanctified the Romantic love of medieval art and rejuvenated many parishes with neo-Gothic adornments, as in the image below:
The second phase, in the early 20th century up to the 1950s, extended this emphasis by seeking to counteract the Romantic emotional preoccupation with particular artistic styles – whether Gothic, Classical or modern – without guiding theological principles.[4] Romano Guardini, Pius Parsch and others sought to clarify the legibility of the altar as the center of the liturgical action and the end-goal of the church as a whole by detaching altars from devotional statues and Gothic reredoses and hierarchically ordering devotional art by moving icons to appropriate niches or chapels, inspiring Vatican II’s call for “noble simplicity” and “noble beauty,” as well as teaching the faithful to participate more fully in the liturgy through Gregorian chant, Latin-vernacular hand missals and the prayers of the Mass.[5] These phases sought to properly dispose the faithful for the reception of divine life in the Sacraments.[6] Despite their intentions, even in these early decades, the foundational principles of liturgical piety and reaction against rationalism and sentimentalism, as established by Pope St. Pius X, were already branching into reformist tinkering whose effects would soon lead to much more ostentatious innovations.
Pope Pius XII, in his encyclical Mediator Dei, approved of the fundamental intentions of the Liturgical Movement, especially to see the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ,[7] but sharply criticized its tendencies toward a false archaism which rejected the Holy Spirit’s guidance of developments since the early Church and an uncritical use of modern art.[8] One example of this was the second phase’s “experiments” with liturgical practices such as Mass facing the people which were erroneously considered to be more primitive and thus more “authentic.”[9] Nevertheless, while the third phase codified the movement’s central aims in Vatican II, it subsequently ignored the warnings of Pius XII and instead frequently broke with tradition by removing most or all sacred art from churches,[10] detaching tabernacles from altars which “is to separate two things which by their origin and their nature should remain united”,[11] building churches which lacked the claritas of their ontological reality as sacraments of the Heavenly Liturgy and abandoning Gregorian chant, Latin as a sacred and universal language, the eschatological ad orientem posture of worship and the sense of mystical reverence and hierarchical order proper to the liturgy. Ironically, “many of those things which Pius XII warned against became almost universally normative in the time after the Council… and remains operative in the Church today.”[12]
[I]t is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device. Thus, to cite some instances, one would be straying from the straight path were he to wish the altar restored to its primitive tableform; were he to want black excluded as a color for the liturgical vestments; were he to forbid the use of sacred images and statues in Churches; were he to order the crucifix so designed that the divine Redeemer's body shows no trace of His cruel sufferings; and lastly were he to disdain and reject polyphonic music or singing in parts, even where it conforms to regulations issued by the Holy See.[13]
This trend was not universal, but it quickly became the general norm, as it remains today, leading to “liturgical instability, disarray, excess creativity, liturgical casualness, and even in some cases open rebellion in matters of faith and praxis.”[14] As Cardinal Ratzinger observed, “After the Second Vatican Council, the impression arose that the pope really could do anything in liturgical matters, especially if he were acting on the mandate of an ecumenical council. Eventually, the idea of the givenness of the liturgy, the fact that one cannot do with it what one will, faded from the public consciousness of the West.”[15] He also warned, “The pope’s authority is bound to the tradition of faith, and that also applies to the liturgy. It is not ‘manufactured’ by the authorities... The authority of the pope is not unlimited; it is at the service of sacred tradition.”[16] In other words, during this ignominious conclusion to the Liturgical Movement, the great motivating force was Ultramontanism, the idea that the pope is superior to Tradition and can create, modify or forbid it arbitrarily. This resulted in the fashioning of a new Mass, what would be called the Novus Ordo, in order fully to reflect the trends of liturgical reformists in the 1940s and 1950s which, as Bugnini and others knew, could not be fitted to the existing traditional Latin Rite without replacing it completely.
Just as the Holy Spirit allowed the liturgical rationalism of the Jansenists and the reactionary excesses of the Victorian age only to subsequently address them through the Liturgical Movement, it could be said that He has allowed the abuses Pius XII warned against in order to remind the Church of the value of Tradition and the beauty of the Roman liturgy which had once been taken for granted by many. Indeed, the post-conciliar ruptures with Tradition have today inspired a deeper liturgical piety and doctrinal orthodoxy in reaction against them than many Catholics possessed in times of past complacency, creating what has been called a New Liturgical Movement. As Dom Alcuin Reid explains, “the uses antiquior is a living liturgical rite in which people – indeed significant and growing numbers of young people – participate fully, actually, consciously and fruitfully in a manner that would have brought great satisfaction to the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council and to the pioneers of the twentieth-century liturgical movement which preceded it.”[17] Just as the Tradition of the Church addressed the “signs of the times” of each century in the past without fundamentally changing, it can do so again today. If the revival of Tradition can be guided by the principles of Vatican II and remain obedient to the Magisterium, the Latin Church can be transfigured into the “strong, virile Christianity” envisioned by the Liturgical Movement.[18]
(Cover image source: https://www.liturgicalartsjournal.com/2023/01/what-if-liturgical-movement-had-stayed.html)
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[1] Denis R. McNamara, Catholic Church Architecture and the Spirit of the Liturgy (Chicago: Hillenbrand, 2009), 172.
[2] Peter Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico, 2020), 48.
[3] Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright, 48.
[4] McNamara, Catholic Church Architecture, 175.
[5] McNamara, Catholic Church Architecture, 176.
[6] McNamara, Catholic Church Architecture, 171-173.
[7] McNamara, Catholic Church Architecture, 180.
[8] McNamara, Catholic Church Architecture, 183-184.
[9] Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright, 49; cf. Alcuin Reid, The Organic Development of the Liturgy, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005), loc 1962. Kindle.
[10] McNamara, Catholic Church Architecture, 173.
[11] Pope Pius XII, Allocution of to the Assisi Liturgical Congress (1956), at Latin Mass Society, https://lms.org.uk.
[12] McNamara, Catholic Church Architecture, 181, 183.
[13] Pope Pius XII, Encyclical on the Sacred Liturgy Mediator Dei (20 November 1947), §62.
[14] McNamara, Catholic Church Architecture, 168.
[15] Joseph Ratzinger and Romano Guardini, The Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2018), loc 1900. Kindle.
[16] Ratzinger and Guardini, Spirit of the Liturgy, loc 1907.
[17] Alcuin Reid, “The Older Form of the Roman Rite is Alive and Well,” The Catholic World Report (3 April 2020), quoted in Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright, 52.
[18] McNamara, Catholic Church Architecture, 173.
Excellent, thank you Kaleb. Looking forward to future articles.
Kaleb, I have very little knowledge of this, so thank you once again. I do remember owning a wonderful Missal with Latin and English side by side. I think I received it as a confirmation gift. Sadly it is gone. I also recognize the stark design of the newer churches, saddened by their lack of inspiration. I thought perhaps born of budgetary concerns, but perhaps designed purposely as such? To what end? My own lack of knowledge has me craving a 'part two' to this: a 'wrap-up' and 'call to action'; a 'movement to join'! I think it would help many of us. Thank you either way. Appreciate all you do!