For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been wanting to blog on a book I read, but I wanted to quote from the book, and I can’t find the durn book (I read it on the way to and from Ann Arbor last month. I know it got home…but I can’t find it. If you saw my house you would not be surprised in the least).

So I’ll go ahead and talk a bit about it, but with not as much detail as I had hoped.

The book was The Organic Development of the Liturgy by Alcuin Reid, OSB. Reviewed here by Cardinal Ratzinger.

The book is an overview of the Liturgical Movement from the 19th century to the Second Vatican Council, within a particular framework, implied in the title: that an important principle to hold on to as we speak of liturgy is "organic development" – that the way the liturgy has developed over time is an essential aspect of what it is, and should not be viewed lightly.

(My question to theologians out there: is this a widely accepted central principle, or is this something Reid simply emphasizes? I couldn’t determine that from the text.)

I was vaguely familiar with the basic history of the Liturgical Movement, but this book fleshed it out in a helpful way. He emphasizes that the beginnings of the movement (in the 19th century) were concerned with helping Catholics understand the liturgy better and to help them make it a more integral aspect of their spiritual lives, hence the emphasis on liturgical piety – promoting the publication of missals and other prayerbooks, educating the laity on the Mass and so on – rather than changing anything.

It was in the 20th century that the movement began to shift emphasis, looking to the possibility of reforming the liturgy. Even this has nuances, Reid points out (here’s where I wish I had the book!).  There were, he says, valid reasons to make some changes in the liturgy (that wouldn’t violate the principle of organic development), but what eventually emerged was an emphasis on Ratzinger calls "archaeological enthusiasm" – oldest is best – and a kind of pastoral concern that is not about bring the people into the liturgy, but changing the liturgy to fit the people.

The details are all quite interesting, but the weird thought I had was this – and I can’t shake it (until one of you corrects me, of course)

The impetus for the most radical changes seem to have come from French and German scholars, especially in the wake of World War II. The concern, as I read it, was not just abstract. It was always that the Tridentine liturgy had failed to engage the people, had failed to bring them into fruitful relationships with Christ, and that it had to be rather radically altered  in order for the Mass to be something vital in the lived faith of the people again.

Not a word was said about this in the book, and perhaps it’s just a fancy, but…I’m wondering if this conviction reflects at all, the experience of Catholics under Nazism…that perhaps what these scholars observed were populations that, for the most part, accomodated their lives to fascism, allowed their neighbors to be taken away and killed, and found itself powerless. Perhaps there was an honest questioning about the level of faith among those peoples and whether a more "accessible" liturgy might empower people to connect with God more deeply and live, not as accomdationists, but as martyrs?

There’s, naturally enough, a great deal of work that’s been done on the response of Jewish theology to the Holocaust. Has anyone ever studied the impact of Nazism and the war on Christian theology – not during, but after the fact? Michael took a class from Josef Fuchs, and he said that the moral theology of Fuchs, who had been a pastor in Germany during the War, struck him as very accomodationist…a "do what you can do" as long as your Fundamental Option is in the right direction (Fuchs being the father of much contemporary Catholic moral theology, as you can tell), and it seemed to him that this approach was very clearly reflective of Fuchs’ position as pastor in that situation.