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Books For liturgy, reform means looking back but moving
forward
THE UNREAD VISION:
THE LITURGICAL MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: 1926-1955 By
Keith F. Pecklers The Liturgical Press 1998, 333 pages,
$24.95 |
By PAT MARRIN
Lucien Deiss, the legendary French liturgical composer whose
simple psalm melodies helped a whole generation of Catholics taste and see the
beauty of the Mass in the vernacular following the Second Vatican Council,
offered some wise counsel to fellow composers at a February 1998 meeting in St.
Louis.
Deiss warned them not to use Vatican II as a finished blueprint
for renewal and reform. The council itself was clear about this, Deiss said.
The church of the 90s should not be looking back to the 60s for
guidance or inspiration. What we have achieved since then, and the subsequent
instructions that have brought new insights, should be the source of our
evaluations. Even if the dreams of Vatican II have not been realized, Deiss
said, we should not stay locked in the past.
The challenge of reform and renewal has always had a dynamic
double focus. Look to your roots, recover the original charism, but then adapt
it to contemporary need. Tradition itself means what we hand
on.
It is not surprising that the greatest reformers knew both
tradition and history, have identified their essential currents, have seen the
convergence of social, economic and cultural patterns that indicate watershed
moments.
There are no crystal balls, no magical signs that can predict the
future, but history does offer the discerning eye a kind of careful map of
potential pathways waiting to be affirmed by our collective decision-making. In
the end, we write history by the way we live now.
Jesuit Fr. Keith Pecklers, a professor of liturgical history at
the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, has assembled just such a map for
the American church in his comprehensive history, The Unread Vision: The
Liturgical Movement in the United States of America: 1926-1955. The title,
taken from T.S. Eliots Ash Wednesday, defines the challenge
of knowing this crucial history as our chance to Redeem the unread vision
in the higher dream.
The higher dream is the image of the church as the body of Christ,
the dream that first seized and blinded Paul on the road to Damascus, then
became the core of his mission. The same dream seized the early liturgical
reformers, from the European Benedictine monks Gueranger, Herwegen, Casel, and
later, Beauduin, the Belgian monk whose influence reached the American church
primarily through Dom Virgil Michel.
The dream inspired a powerful re-evangelization of a church that
had lost consciousness of its deeper identity, withdrawn from the world into a
post-Reformation juridical and hierarchical fortress.
While the reforms focus was on liturgy, its most dramatic
result was to recover the profound ecclesiology of the early church as captured
in the gospels and conveyed in the early patristic writings.
Everything else we have come to take for granted because of
Vatican II -- collegiality, full and active participation by all in worship, a
focus on the local church, lay charisms and ministries, an urgent ecumenism, an
essential commitment to social justice and structural transformation and, above
all, the gift of divine life flowing into us as a community -- comes from our
identity as the body of Christ.
The revolution these liturgical pioneers set in motion was not an
assault from without but the reassertion of the churchs own ideals, a
revolution from within. Pope Pius XII was only catching up with the liturgical
movement when he issued his encyclicals Mystici Corporis and Mediator
Dei. Vatican II was the culmination, not the start, of this dramatic shift
in ecclesiology.
Deiss is correct in warning us not to cling to the past. In a real
sense, Vatican II narrowed the scope and energy of decades of creative thinking
and modeling for a church that has still not fully emerged. What Pecklers
captures in his rich chronicle of early reformers is the vibrant spirit and
radical fidelity they brought to education, liturgical music and art, Catholic
action, social criticism, ecumenical and philosophical dialogue, long before
such possibilities were even imagined by much of the church, especially the
hierarchy.
Like all good history, Pecklers book is as much about the
present as the past. For those who fear that the reforms of the 1960s have
hopelessly stalled out in the 1990s, that we cant go back but dont
know how to move forward, Pecklers offers a valuable history lesson. Some of
that historys most eloquent voices are still with us, including Lucien
Deiss, Godfrey Diekmann, John Egan, Eileen Egan, Fred McManus and Ada
Bethune.
The reform and the renewal of the church is the unfinished agenda,
the unread vision waiting to be redeemed in the higher dream. To understand the
goals that fueled the liturgical movement of this century, and the pastoral,
educational and social justice movements that flowed from it, is to recover our
footing for the task of transformation before us. If we want models, prophetic
energy, sound theological and biblical foundations, we need only look
back to the future to find them.
Pecklers book comprises a powerful story that itself is
largely unknown, even by many active in liturgy. The Unread Vision
should be required reading in every seminary, every rectory and in every
liturgy office in every diocese. As the church, and every other global
institution, stands at the crossroads to many possible futures, we will do well
to know the maps that history offers us.
Pat Marrin is editor of Celebration, NCRs sister
publication.
National Catholic Reporter, July 31,
1998
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