Contemporaneity:The Mystery of Liturgical Time Roch Kereszty O.Cist. In the period after the Second Vatican Council, the balance between relevance and tradition, adaptation and conservation, inner and active participation, and dynamic and literal translation all occupied a central place in liturgical discussions, and led at times to passionate confrontations. Essential indeed were these issues in promoting an authentic liturgical renewal but, as almost always happens in history, they eclipsed, to the point of near total oblivion, a fundamental issue that, when ignored, distorts the proper understanding of liturgical participation. Faithful Catholics in the pew know that Christ becomes present on the altar, that they receive him in holy communion, and that they remember his death and resurrection in the Mass. They also know that in the other sacraments they receive Christ's grace adapted to the purpose of the respective sacrament. But they are largely unaware that in the liturgical action they enter liturgical time, the intersection of our time with eternity. If the sacrifice of Christ in the Mass remains for them a mere object of their own "liturgical imagination," and heaven is the mere object of future hope, they remain locked up within the narrow walls of their secular life. Yet, when we enter a Romanesque or Gothic cathedral or the modern chapel of Le Corbusier, we cannot help feeling that we entered another world whose dimensions enlarge and elevate our mind and heart. Is this merely an illusion imagined by the visitor, or could this world perhaps be more real than what one leaves outside? In other words, if there is liturgical space, should there not be also liturgical time? In the present article, I intend to take up a subject which had been a hotly debated topic in the first half of the twentieth century. I do not intend to provide an overview of the various theological positions in that near past, but rather to articulate and develop what seem to me their positive results. [End Page 505] Twentieth Century Reflections on Liturgical Time While in the late Middle Ages and in the post-Tridentine period the focus of theological inquiry centered on the substantial presence of Christ under the species of bread and wine, in the first half of the twentieth century a number of dogmatic theologians and liturgists began to explore the presence of the "work of our redemption" in the liturgical actions of the Church. They referred to Christ's redemptive work by the traditional term "the mysteries of Christ" or the "saving history of Christ," which includes his conception, birth, earthly life, suffering, resurrection, and ascension. Odo Casel, a Benedictine of the Belgian Abbey of Maria-Lach, was the first to study the biblical and patristic evidence for what he called the Mysteriengegenwart, the presence of the redemptive mysteries in the liturgical actions of the Church.1 The subsequent lively theological discussion centered on the apparent contradiction: Casel and followers claimed that Christ's historical acts have an abiding presence in the liturgy, but others objected that a historical act necessarily becomes past or else it is not historical. Besides Casel, the most important theologians who tried to provide an intelligible explanation of the traditional data are Gottlieb Söhngen, Johannes Betz, Brian McNamara, and Edward J. Kilmartin.2 As metaphysical studies became unpopular by the last decades of the twentieth century, the issue of the Mysteriengegenwart also disappeared from among the relevant themes of theological inquiry. I first intend to survey the data of the Tradition on the presence of the redemptive work of Christ in the liturgy, and then offer an explanation of what constitutes "liturgical time." [End Page 506] Scripture In the first half of the twentieth century, form-critical studies by K. L. Schmidt, Martin Dibelius, and Rudolph Bultmann asserted that many of the pre-Gospel pericopes that later became the building blocks of the Gospels originated in a Eucharistic setting. Recently, Denis Farkasfalvy reformulated their theory and successfully argued for the Eucharistic provenance of most Gospel pericopes. The "words and deeds of Jesus" were remembered, told, retold and shaped in the Eucharistic gatherings not as mere subjective memories of what he did and said...