Liturgical Changes to the Roman Rite-10
The liturgical movement spread to other countries, and in Belgium another step in liturgical development leading to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council may be discerned in the thought of the Benedictine monk Dom Lambert Beauduin.
In 1909, he delivered an address at the Congress of Catholic Workers in Belgium, where he identified the liturgy as the heart of the Church’s spiritual life, and he called for the active participation of all God’s people in the liturgy. Among the most prominent of his ideas which found expression in the Second Vatican Council are: an ecclesiology of the Mystical body of Christ, a priesthood of the people, laity’s liturgical participation beyond an “interior participation”.(42)
In Germany, the Liturgical movement was spearheaded by Pius Parsh and Romano Guardini. For Parsch, two ideas guided his vision: the realization that the Bible is the people’s book, and the liturgy is the people’s work.(43) His most important contribution to the liturgical movement can be stated as the emphasis on the essential and intimate connection between liturgy and scripture.(44) In 1918, Romano Guardini wrote The Spirit of the Liturgy. In his book he underpinned much of the activity of the Liturgical Movement.(45) His views on the liturgy were applied not to the monastery, but to a community of young people in Tothenfels, Germany, up until it was disbanded by the Nazis in 1939. He saw in the life of the church the problem of a lack of participation in the central point of the Liturgy as twofold: a movement away from Christian culture, and the liturgy’s emphasis for the clerical action. For Guardini, liturgical reform faced two options: change the world, or change the Liturgy.(46) According to Karl Rahner: “It is a widely known fact the Rothenfels experience was the immediate model for the liturgical reforms of Vatican II.”(47)
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Notes:
42. William Barden. “Phases of the Liturgical Movement.” The Furrow Vol. 5, No. 11, p. 12.
43. Robert Tuzik, Leaders of the Liturgical Movement, p. 30.
44. Ibid., p. 32
45. Alcuin Reid, The Organic Development Of The Liturgy, loc. 1306.
46. Ibid, 1345-1346
47. Robert Tuzik, Leaders of the Liturgical Movement, p. 48
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