Resurrecting the ambo Part 1

Abstract

The use of the ambo during the celebration of Mass with a congregation was restored to the Roman rite in 1964, it seemed after centuries of absence. Limited use of the ambo during Mass, or remains of the ambo such as lecterns, had continued interrupted in some Western rite contexts from the Council of Trent until the Second Vatican Council. The reception of the ambo from 1964 was rather modest with respect to its monumental history and symbolic wealth. This was due, no doubt, to the significance and history of the ambo going unnoted in Roman documentation and liturgical books in the years after Sacrosanctum Concilium. Renewed emphasis on the significance of the ambo on the part of the Roman dicastery for divine worship appeared in the context of the Roman rite in the late 1980s and once again in the Jubilee year 2000 but seems to have been overlooked in the vast majority of local churches. The author reviews what he considers to be a gradual restoration of the ambo to its medieval heyday while seeing that same restoration as central in placing the celebration of Christ’s paschal mystery at the heart of the liturgy renewed after Vatican II.