Uwe Michael Lang is a young German patristic scholar of enormous promise who, from a Lutheran background, was received into the Catholic Church while at Oxford and is now a priest of the London Oratory. In this book he adds his voice – a considerable one in terms of not only Teutonic erudition but also feeling for the Liturgy – to the increasing number of those who seek a reconsideration of the hasty introduction, in the later 1960s, of Eucharistic celebration ‘towards the people’, versus populum. Theologically speaking, the Eucharistic Oblation is not offered by the priest to the people. It is offered by the people, through and with the priest, to the Father by the mediation of Christ, our Great High Priest, in the Holy Spirit. Which spatial arrangement makes this theological doctrine more visible – celebration versus populum or celebration versus apsidem, where celebrant and assembly face together in the same direction? One might well reply that to have asked this question is already to have answered it, and nothing more remains to be said.
Lang, however, shows that much more can be said, and in the first instance about the history of liturgical orientation in the ancient Church, to which often ill‐informed reference was made in the almost over‐night revolution of chipping, hacking and joinery. A critical analysis of copious patristic materials shows that sacred direction– specifically, to the East – was the most important spatial consideration in early Christian prayer. Its significance was primarily eschatological (the East was the direction of the Christ of the Parousia, cf. especially Mt 24:27 and 30) and, naturally, it applied to all the faithful, including their ministers. Now, where the archaeological evidence is concerned, it must be noted that the great majority of ancient churches have an oriental apse. Granted that the altar was the most honoured object in such buildings, the only safe inference is, accordingly, that the celebrant stood at the people's side, facing East, for the Anaphora. In the minority of buildings (notably at Rome and in North Africa) that have, by contrast, an oriented entrance, the position is less clear. Lang, however, argues persuasively – if with a degree of tentativeness – that the celebrant in such a case prayed facing the doors (and thus the people) but did so with hands and eyes alike raised to the ceiling of the apse or arch, where the decorative schemes of early Christian art are focussed. In any case, all the faithful are likely to have prayed with arms and faces upward turned – and not in eyeball‐to‐eyeball contact with the sacred ministers. Lang's conclusion is inevitable. ‘The celebratio versus populum in the modern sense was unknown to Christian antiquity, and it would be anachronistic to see the Eucharistic liturgy in the early Roman basilica as its prototype’.
Even more anachronistic is the notion that the celebrant when facing the people mimes the role of Jesus at the Last Supper. In late antiquity, the seat of honour at table was not placed centrally but on the far right. And in any case what the Lord commanded to be enacted ‘in memory of me’ was not the Jewish meal as such but the new reality of the Sacrament of the Oblation he was instituting.
The remainder of Lang's study, theological and anthropological in character, explains how, even when sacred direction to the geographical east has been lost in later church building (as was the case in the West by the end of the Middle Ages), the principle of common direction needs to retain its importance. A surprisingly wide range of commentators, Protestant as well as Catholic, argue convergently in this regard. In the modern cultural conjecture, celebration versus populum can constitute a dangerous symbolic reversal where the gathered church considers primarily itself as community– and not the triune Lord at the end of history towards whom it is progressing.
The introductory endorsement of Lang's book by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger reports that ‘among the faithful there is an increasing sense of the problems inherent in an arrangement that hardly allows the liturgy to be open to the things that are above and to the world to come’. Anyone who cares for the full dimension of the Church's worship can only hope this estimate is correct. Meanwhile, it would be useful to have from some quarter an essay on the relation between the common orientation of priest and people on the one hand, and lively consciousness of Eucharistic sacrifice on the other. As Lang remarks, it is surely intuitive that between the two some connexion exists, and this receives negative corroboration in the diminution of the sense of oblation pari passu with the extension of versus populum celebration. Such a book, or substantial article, would need to combine a phenomenological study of the symbolics of orientation with a good grasp of the theology of the Mass as sacrifice. This is a challenge someone suitably qualified ought as a matter of urgency to take up.
Of course the issue of liturgical direction is only one of a number of issues pertinent to the continuity of the worshipping tradition in the Latin Church. In The Organic Development of the Liturgy, Dom Alcuin Reid, monk of Farnborough, enables us to situate Lang's chosen topic in a wider context. Alcuin Reid is also a young scholar, and more specifically an historian of the modern development of the Roman rite. His book began life as a doctoral thesis at King's College, London, but entering into the swim of its argument is a good deal more exhilarating than most experiences of ‘doctoralese’. The book starts slowly, with a necessarily selective overview of the development of the Roman rite up to the beginning of the 20th Century. The emphasis lies on discerning principles at work not only in the mainstream of that development but also in proposals to channel or divert it, whether these emanate from popes, bishops or (after that breed arose in the 17th century) professional liturgists. Though much of this material is readily available elsewhere, something is new. And that is the quality of the intelligence brought to bear in an attempt to discern criteria for judging the homogeneity of organic development. Not only is such development the de facto hallmark of the worshipping life of Western and Eastern Christendom over time. A Catholic view of the economy of the Spirit in the Church requires from us de iure commitment to the principles involved just as it does – by universal consent – in the analogous case of the providential development of doctrine.
For it is the remaining two chapters of this study which, along with its copious bibliography, make it an invaluable guide to its sources. Here we have a richly documented overview of the thought of the major (and some minor) figures of the Liturgical Movement, along with an account of the principal liturgical Congresses and Roman commissions that sought to give that thought practical effect. Reid's provision of copious citations (in English in the body of the text, with original language versions in footnotes), together with his own analytic summaries, enable us to see what is going on. His research confirms the view of those who have maintained that the predominant orientation of the Liturgical Movement shifted seismically in the later 1940s. In its earlier phase the Liturgical Movement had sought above all the engaged participation of the faithful in the received Liturgy, for enhanced fruit‐bearing in life. In its later phase, the Movement became revisionist; not in the benign sense of seeking occasional judicious pruning and careful augmentation of the rites, but in a sense far more radical that placed homogeneous development at risk. ‘Organic development can include a proportionate measure of simplification and change’: this, and not the root‐and‐branch measures of the post‐Conciliar Consilium, is all the Second Vatican Council mandated. But by 1969 many liturgists were minded to find ‘the quickest and easiest route to liturgical participation, regardless of objective liturgical tradition’. The periti who worked to this end had two supreme instruments at their disposal: ‘selective scholarly antiquarianism’ and Ultramontanism. Their combination was all too effective. Mining the work of the liturgical scholars, they lit the fuse at the desk of the Pope.
Reid makes the valid point that the Liturgy is not a fit subject for reconstruction precisely because it is not a suitable target for deconstruction. In matters of defining doctrine we are all, since Vatican I, Ultramontanes now. But the charism of infallibility does not underwrite prudential decisions in questions of the Liturgy, while the pastoral office of the Pope is concerned with, above all, the guardianship of the rites, not their manipulation.
As those responsible for the re‐translation of the Roman Missal into English are discovering, dumbing down may take generation change to clear up. Meanwhile, we still await the actual ‘organic’ reform the Council Fathers requested.
