Indicating efforts to reflect the heavenly, to bring peace to the living and the dead, and to operate under sacred canopies in cathedrals, abbeys, and churches, the study of liturgy appears as innocuous as explorations of the arcane, of varying forms of rite and rubrics. Rather like stamp collecting, many curiosities were found, ranging from directions for complex processions in the Sarum rite to the number of beats of a thurible deployed for incensing a deputy lord-lieutenant on the sanctuary but with the bishop absent, never mind the variations and settings of choral music. So hermetically sealed, the title of the above work would have puzzled liturgists in the nineteenth century so used to treating their craft in dusty archives.
Certainly, these innocent past liturgists would have been astonished at the warfare, division, anger, hurt, and annoyance occasioned by the reforms of Vatican II that brought their theological specialism into disrepute. Exhaustion, indifference, and a sense of anomie (the disjunction between structure and norm) mark the cessation of liturgical wars. After the Council, a meeting on the introduction of the vernacular at a cathedral would have drawn an audience in hundreds; now it would be lucky to find 10 attendees. Contrary to Conciliar hopes, no renewal seems to come to redeem a sullen silence amongst the laity. Reflecting on the strife of half a century, an Anglican liturgist wondered whether the reforms were pointless. With so many burnt hands, few now write on liturgy. Maybe this is why White’s study is of interest, not least for its topicality. There are other reasons to welcome this study. At a time when Catholic publishers in the United Kingdom are virtually extinct, following the fate of a number of university presses, the emergence of St Mary’s University Press is much to be welcomed. This edited study bodes well for its future. It is handsomely produced, with a good index and a certain neatness.
The study works in three parts. The first deals with the legacies of Vatican II, notably around the marginalisation of ad orientem rites, which, as a concession, became the Extraordinary Forms, with a part Tridentine inheritance. These rites had the celebrant facing East. They were strong on reverence and silence. Vertical in orientation, sacrificial in emphasis, they were much geared to the pursuit of salvation. By contrast were novus ordo rites, as governed by the General Instructions to the Roman Missal. This form reflected the ambitions of the Council, to maximise active participation, to pare down rubrics to essentials, to deny symbols their complex opacity, and to enhance the communal. Thus, rites became horizontal in form, symbolised by the celebrant facing the people. The Last Supper supplied a mandate for this form.
Responses to these forms by the laity, largely in Cambridge, supplied testimonies, the views from the pews, gathered on a webinar at a conference held in June 2022, and reproduced in chapter 3. The Synod in Rome 2025 was the model for listening. Five theologians were present contributing to the study, who responded accordingly. Written and video testimonies in what White terms ‘the most sociological part of the book’ seem mainly directed to the Latin Mass, or the Old Rite as some term it. They are of variable length and quality, but each shows a strong sense of commitment and alertness to the sacred, to reverence and silence. Chapter 3 has a perceptive memorandum from Joseph Shaw of the Latin Mass Society (pp. 35–40). The study has a separate bibliography for each contribution, listing works and documents cited.
The second facet of the study relates to the contributors. Two are from the Orthodox Tradition and are former Anglicans. Chapter 4 is odd, as the contributor indicates that he is not concerned with battles between Old and New Rites in the Latin Church. Rather, he wishes to give witness to settling down to a diversity of rite and to its further study. There is little if anything on sacred architecture in the essay. The second essay, chapter 6, is much better, though again, its relevance to the collection is unclear. It is good on the vertical, the evolution of Orthodox forms of rite and misplaced mandates of active participation. The two essays from women are the better contributions. In chapter 5, Volpe supplies an imaginative, sensitive multisensory response to liturgy. Her model is the Good Shepherd, and the sense of the Mass is of being led. Her essay generated a rich discussion and was clearly directed to the concerns of the people in the pews (pp. 68–73). A French Dominican nun, Sister Marie Trainar, in chapter 7, provides a beautifully written meditation on the liturgy, which she treats as a memorial of the immemorial (p. 93). She deals with the sense of mystery and light rites generate. These supply a distinctive sense of being caught up in what is to shape those present. But it is the third strand by White that occasions much critical interest. It relates to the novel features of the collection and how they are to be interpreted.
Apart from editing, he supplies chapters 1 (with Liam Hayes) and 8–10. A sharp, independent critical mind is revealed. Throughout the study, the ambiguity of reconciliation arises. In the first form, it emerges over the prohibition of Pope Francis on the use of the Old Rite in churches, but with complex exceptions allowed. White finds this indefensible. Others find it brutal, not least as many new traditional orders, especially in the United States, found a liturgical rug pulled from under them. Reflecting a conventional sociological understanding, they have re-invented tradition so that what seemed archaic emerges as novel. White is too polite to say that the late pope was hypocritical in his selective synodal listening by ignoring voices of those so hurt by his prohibition. He seemed oblivious to a realisation that the countercultural had moved from the progressive left to the traditional right. The claims to modernisation and opening to liturgical experiments rendered the former tolerable, whereas the latter seemed regressive, prone to nostalgia, and in denial of the need for Conciliar demands to treat symbols as of noble simplicity and not of complexity. For White, these matters suggest that ‘in part this book is an exercise in sociology of religion’ (p. xii). But it could have gone further, for the tenor of sociology is to treat the latter forms as credible and the former as decidedly incredible. Anyhow, he is rightly sceptical of the whole synodal strategy, noting the way traditional sectors withdrew as liberals imperialised its agenda. This synod had an unfortunate ancestry in the National Pastoral Congress held in Liverpool in 1980, where something similar happened when liberal Tablet sympathisers secured dominance in deliberations. Orthodox Catholics drifted away. But it is in the second facet of reconciliation that sociological interests emerge.
These concern how the enigma and mystery of rite, so out of kilter with a postsecular culture, are to be reconciled with it. It is no solution for notions of relevance to be set to mirror the shambles of this era where resistance, not capitulation, is demanded if liturgical forms are to survive. It is here that sociology presents itself as vital for liturgical understanding. The trouble is that the few sociological ventures into liturgy and theology often baffle, for they fixate on matters of seeming trivia that suggest a borderline between scruple and paranoia. While recognising identity as a facet of liturgy to be explored, White misses the issue of identification. In turn, it relates to perception and reception. What was never understood were the implications that a strategy of inculturation, based on recognising local customs, opened out a plethora of sociological issues when extended to Europe. There, a multiplicity of forms could claim mandates for the inculturation of rite, such as a revival of the Sarum rite in England as exemplary of its cultural identity. What was not realised was that Benedict’s fear of a dictatorship of relativism had found a comfort zone in liturgy itself. He had a further problem that the switch in orientem from East to West had no warrant in the liturgical documents of the Council, or in the history of liturgy. Unfortunately, he felt this innovation could not be changed for pastoral reasons. The Mass had become a gathering for a sacred meal and the dark side of liturgy, as of sacrifice, had slid off into invisibility. The anomaly so generated was exhibited at the recently restored Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, where an egg-shaped small altar was placed at the crossing. It looked like a cosmic deposit wholly out of place in a building whose Gothic architecture was expensively restored. The altar looked like something of an afterthought.
Ever since the Council, forms of rite have been subject to incremental change, either by corrective instructions from Rome, or capitulations to demands to render rites more representative of the times. White seems to recognise that the new form of rite of Vatican II was more prone to secularisation than the Old Rite (pp. 144–5). The outcome is a drift towards acceptance of inclusion as the virtual religion of the times. This confuses theological efficacy with inclusive equity. The outcome can be a destabilisation of rite. Such was the case with the washing of the feet on Maundy Thursday. Pope Benedict, following tradition, stipulated only men for such a ritual; in 2013, Pope Francis overturned this ruling by including women but also a Muslim; in 2026, Pope Leo returned to rightful custom and washed only the feet of 12 priests. This illustrates the perils of virtue signalling in liturgy but also the limitless basis of gender engineering in that context. Something similar occurs over the introduction of females to serving at the altar. The outcome is that the boys depart, their noble tradition becoming ignoble. Not surprisingly, the dismantling of a crucial ingredient in the reproduction of vocations only becomes apparent a generation or two later. These processes of advance have no known reverse gear. Lay perceptions of rite are caught up in the politics of representation that threaten the integrity of rites where what is seen is confused with populist demands for what should be seen. These matters are embedded in what White conceives of as a liturgical anthropology. Unfortunately, for this new outlet, White depends on Mary Douglas’ Natural Symbols.
It dealt with the Friday Fast and only occasionally with liturgy. White’s use of her is odd, as he fails to note the much more important work of Victor Turner, a Catholic convert. As an anthropologist, he did much to recognise pilgrimages. He also coined the term liminality. In a famous essay, he claimed that the Tridentine Mass was wholly consistent with anthropological understandings of ritual. White is oddly inconsistent in his passing references to sociology and his preference for anthropology as the discipline of choice for new thinking on liturgy. This is not to draw him into the turf wars between both disciplines, which have their complement in the rivalry between theology and religious studies. Many of the issues he raises regarding gesture, symbol, silence, and rivalry between forms of rite in the post-conciliar era were explored in Sociology and Liturgy: Re-presentations of the Holy (1991). After all, the inheritance for the study of symbols, the sacred, and rituals comes from Durkheim, the sociologist anthropologists seek to follow.
Although some will quibble over how representative his sample of lay opinions is, the collection is nevertheless valuable in marking out a dimension of the rite that is often neglected: the lay experience of its reception. The outcome is to free up liturgy from its encasement in rubrics and to open out its cultural and sociological context, where readings of rite change remarkably over how its enactments are perceived or to be so. For that reason alone, the study has much to commend in marking out the need for a new beginning of understanding of rite.
