A Short Essay on the Reform of the Liturgy

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In order to gain an understanding of any mediaeval liturgical text, but especially the Roman Rite, which was the central liturgical text for the Latin West, it is essential to realise that the liturgy of the Middle Ages, unike the liturgy of today, was embedded in a culture which was ritual in character. The world of commerce, for example, was sacralised through its management by the economic guilds, whose liturgical basis ensured that production was perpetually crossed out by being offered in worship. This was a time when the Offertory gifts were not disconnected from the produce of everyday life; indeed, the category itself of ‘everyday life’ was perforce a thoroughly liturgical category. For the community was not seen as a given, existing prior to, or in separation from, its reception of the Eucharist. Rather, the community as such was seen as flowing from eternity through the sacraments. The historian John Bossy has shown this by stressing the sacramental nature of all social bonds in the mediaeval period.3 Supremely, the Church as ‘body of Christ’ was ceaselessly recreated through receiving the gift of the Eucharistic body of Christ. Because of this reciprocal link between life and liturgy, any liturgical reform must take into account the fact that the liturgy which it seeks to revise is as much, or more a cultural and ethical phenomenon, as a textual one. Now, criticisms of liturgical reform, such as those implicit in what I have just said, are often dismissed as conservative or nostalgic.