The St Augustine Liturgical Atelier

Abstract

In Hungary and adjacent Hungarian-speaking territories, from the very beginning there was a conscious effort to celebrate the Eucharist worthily and with dignity according to the ‘Ordinary’ Form of the Roman Rite (as the new rite is now called by the Holy Father). At the end of the 1960s the necessary conditions for such an effort had all been prepared by a dedicated generation of liturgical experts whose knowledge of the liturgy was acquired before the Second Vatican Council, and whose work was inspired by people like Suitbert Baumer, Prosper Gueranger, Romano Guardini, and Pius Parsch. This generation heralded the liturgical constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium as a summary of all their objectives and hard labour. It might be of interest to foreign participants that we also had our own ‘Pius Parsch’, so to speak, in the person of Xaver Szunyogh OSB. In the 1950s and 1960s, students of theology, and participants of the summer schools organized for cantors and church musicians, intensively studied Pius XII’s famous encyclical Mediator Dei under the guidance of Marton Pantol, Gabor Laszlo, Sandor Kabar, and others. Moreover, Benjamin Rajeczky OCist and his associates (some of whom are still among us today) were not only committed followers of Guardini’s Geist der Liturgie but they were also well-trained musicians closely familiar with the Hungarian liturgical traditions of medieval origin.1 Thanks to their efforts, Ratzinger’s wish that the liturgy should not fall victim to excessive creativity and arbitrary changes2 was more or less realized in Hungary. I would like to explain briefly what happened in Hungary during the decades following the Council in order to implement the renewal of the liturgy. It has to be emphasized that it was accomplished — like so many other good things in the Church — as a result of personal initiatives and dedicated work on a day-to-day basis. At the time we may have felt the lack of decisions or directives from ‘above’; today, however, we are aware of the fruits of this ‘person to person’ approach, even though it was often tiresome and full of disappointments. The real guarantee of genuineness and ecclesiastical authenticity did not come from the endorsements of the hierarchy, but rather from the humble and diligent labour of scientific study. I would like to make mention of the provision for indispensable material and human resources, that is, the gradual formation of scholas and the continuous