Some 60 years on, the reform of the liturgy following the Second Vatican Council is at an inflection point. At this critical juncture, how shall we find a way forward that will help the Catholic liturgy to fulfill its mission of helping us to live the Gospel? Understanding how God brings us together in worship—in other words, the priority of God’s action and invitation—can help. The synodal and liturgical vision of Pope Francis is also key.
Let me begin by outlining what I see to be five different approaches that Catholics take when seeking to understand the liturgy today. (I confess I am writing from a North American perspective and cannot speak for other areas, like the Global South, which bring with them a number of different issues, especially with regard to popular piety.) So, what are these five approaches?
1. Support the current reformed liturgies of the Roman Rite. The reforms of the Mass and other liturgies by and large have been enthusiastically received. They may have taken some getting used to, especially the change to the vernacular and the change of the position of the priest at the altar, which were indeed radical. The reforms also included the vast enrichment of the readings at Mass and a fairly significant restructuring of the liturgical year.
This was not the only important reform. Others included the transformation of the rite of baptism of children into one that paid attention to the condition of children and the responsibility of the parents. Further, an order for the Christian initiation of adults was introduced. It was now possible to celebrate penance in three different forms, with communal penance becoming perhaps the most popular. And finally, the rite of anointing of the sick was no longer reserved for the deathbed but could be used in the circumstances of any life-threatening illness, as well as advanced age.
2. Reject the reforms. Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2007 apostolic letter “Summorum Pontificum,” explicitly granted permission for the wider use of the pre-Vatican II liturgy to those relatively rare groups that were attached to it. That liturgy is often referred to as the traditional Latin Mass or the extraordinary form (or sometimes, by aficionados, the ususantiquior [older rite]). The extraordinary form received an enthusiastic reception by a number of groups, particularly younger priests and younger people in general.
3. Reform the reforms. This approach represents somewhat of a mediating position. It can be characterized as a “strict constructionist” reading of “Sacrosanctum Concilium,” the Vatican II “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.” An examination of the writings on liturgy by Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, shows that this was the position he favored.
Proponents of the “reform of the reform” object to many of the changes found in the 1970 Missal of Pope Paul VI. Not every proponent wants all of the same things, but most would like to see a restored entrance rite to the Mass with prayers at the foot of the altar. Most proponents favor having the readings in the vernacular, but many among them would like a return to a one-year cycle of readings, as in the pre-Vatican II Missal. Most would like to see chant as the only music allowed at Mass. Most want the restoration of the Pentecost octave and the season of Septuagesima (i.e., the former calendar’s three Sundays preceding Lent).
Further, most seem to argue for having only one Eucharistic prayer, the Roman Canon, which is currently Eucharistic Prayer No. 1. Some would like to see that prayer said in Latin and recited quietly. Many would like to see the return of Communion rails and receiving Communion on the tongue while kneeling. Some would claim that this is exactly what Pope Benedict XVI was referring to in his letter accompanying “Summorum Pontificum,” in which he stated that he hoped that the ordinary and extraordinary forms of the liturgy would mutually influence each other.
4. Pick up the pace. Many in this category show impatience with the pace of inculturating the liturgy, including showing a good deal of dissatisfaction with the current English translations of the liturgical rites. As is well known, the fifth instruction “For the Right Implementation of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council,” titled “Liturgiam Authenticam,” reversed the approach to translation advocated by the reformers that is characterized by “dynamic equivalence,” which gives preference to making the original intelligible in the receiver language. “Liturgiam Authenticam” represents a wholesale rejection of that translation strategy in favor of what can be called “formal correspondence.” The latter requires that every lexical and syntactical element of the original Latin be accounted for in a translation, as opposed to giving priority to rendering the thought of a prayer in a way that people can easily understand.
Many who favor further inculturation appeal to Paragraph 40 of “Sacrosanctum Concilium,” which allows for a more robust cultural adaptation of the rites. A good example (although not very radical) is the Roman Missal for Use in the Dioceses of Zaire (now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo) that was approved by the Vatican in 1988. Recently the Vatican approved several other adaptations for liturgical use by certain dioceses in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. Some Catholics were quick to condemn this rite—often inappropriately called the Mayan Rite—as a capitulation to pagan practices. However, this viewpoint fails to account for the many adaptations of the liturgy made in Christian antiquity in accordance with the surrounding cultures of the time.
Another example of significant cultural adaptation is the Missa Terra Spiritus Sancti, which incorporates certain elements of Aboriginal culture, approved by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference for the Diocese of Broome in Northwest Australia in May 2024. This Mass awaits approval by the Vatican.
5. Reject the rules. This approach is really more of a series of practices at variance with the official books of the Roman Rite. I would characterize these practices as prioritizing informality and “creativity.” It is no secret that at the end of the 1960s and through the ’70s, the official liturgical reform was taken as a license to exercise a great deal of freedom with the liturgy. This is unsurprising for two reasons.
First, the reform was experienced like opening the gasket of a pressure cooker. It let off a lot of steam. Second, some flexibility (“in these or other words” and various introductions) was built into the various rites. For example, some freedom could be used in the introduction to the liturgy; some commentary could be given at the beginning of the readings; the priest was/is allowed to introduce the Eucharistic prayer; and comments/announcements could be given after the post-Communion prayer. These were all intended to be very brief and in the spirit of the liturgy itself.
But brevity is in the eyes of the beholder. Often enough, priests offer descriptions of the weather or some other form of cheerful introduction intended to warm up the assembly. Such practices, well intended as they might be, are not helpful in a communal ritual act like the liturgy. The theologian M. Francis Mannion astutely pointed this out in a 1988 essay in Worship, titled “Liturgy and the Present Crisis of Culture.” One of the challenges that Monsignor Mannion identified was the “intimization of society”—in other words (as he put it), “warmth is God.” Only intimacy is authentic. But it is a misunderstanding or a category mistake to think that a ritual activity like liturgy should be intimate.
In addition to this misconstrual of the intent of the post-Vatican II reform, there were also unfortunate attempts to make the liturgy more relevant. Examples would include replacing the Scripture readings with non-scriptural texts, idiosyncratically composed Eucharistic prayers (of dubious value and questionable theology) and the use of popular music. There were also well-intended but ill-conceived attempts to replace parts of the role of the ordained minister, not to mention substituting more “relevant” food and drink for the required bread and wine.
Many of the practices of this last approach are relatively rare today, but they do persist in some small circles. As I asserted at the outset, the first approach—support for the Vatican II “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy” and subsequent reform—predominates today, but the other approaches certainly exist. It seems, at least anecdotally, that the traditionalist approach is growing, especially among the young who have been told that Vatican II was a mistake and that we need to return to “real Catholicism.” One can find this attitude in the occasional disparagement of synodality.
These divergent interpretations of the liturgy indicate that we have not done a very good job of putting the reforms of Vatican II into practice. I should also note here that these debates are, in my experience, most prevalent among white Catholics. Among the crucial and growing Hispanic, African and Asian communities in the United States, it seems to me there are two factors that complicate the picture. The first is the natural desire of a community to retain connections to language and to national or ethnic identity. The second, which is very much tied to the first, is the relation to the liturgy of popular piety and devotions.
A Complicated Picture
The current popularity of a traditionalist approach to the liturgy, especially among some young Catholics, is troubling, but it is not without some foundation. In the first place, among many young people, to identify oneself as a Catholic is countercultural. It is not that the majority of their peers are anti-Catholic so much as that they do not give formal religious belonging much thought at all. The traditional liturgy is at least in some part attractive because it is so different. It is similar to the way we knew we were Catholics before the council because we did not eat meat on Friday. That practice may seem trivial today, but it did set people apart.
Much of the current enthusiasm can feel like nostalgia for a time that many of the young traditionalists never knew, but it certainly does at least seem more compelling than the garden-variety uninspired liturgy that they have been accustomed to. People of my age who experienced the pre-Vatican II liturgy know very well that the older liturgy was frequently humdrum and minimalistic in its own way, but there was little doubt that it was serious and disciplined—not to mention that you were going to go to hell if you missed Mass on Sunday. At the same time, the old Mass could be celebrated beautifully, with an elaborate choreography and sometimes with marvelous music—chant and/or polyphony.
So, what is the problem? After all, aren’t we today sensitive to the need for diversity? Why not let people who want to be attached to the extraordinary form simply have their way? After all, there are different rites in the one Catholic Church—Byzantine, Coptic, Armenian, Syrian and now the Anglican Ordinariate, to name a few. Why not just consider the extraordinary form another rite? This was Pope Benedict XVI’s basic argument in “Summorum Pontificum,” when he claimed that the one lex orandi of the Roman Rite existed in two forms: ordinary and extraordinary. Why rob a significant minority of Catholics of a liturgy that they find spiritually nourishing?
Nevertheless, I believe that the pre-Vatican II liturgy should be definitively abrogated, for three reasons. These reasons are theological rather than purely aesthetic. In a very perceptive article that appeared in Worshipin 2012, “Summorum Pontificum and the Unmaking of the Lay Church,” the theologian Georgia Masters Keightley argued that “because the pre- and post-Vatican II liturgies of the Eucharist rest upon different understandings of the Church, particularly in regard to the Church’s priesthood and its mission, each enacts a different ecclesial form.”
She identified three areas in which the post-Vatican II Eucharistic liturgy embodies a significantly different understanding of the church than that embodied by the older rite. First, the Universal Prayer (a.k.a. the Prayer of the Faithful); second, the exchange of peace; and third (and perhaps most important), the presentation of the gifts by the people. Each of these embodies a vision of the church that is in line with the insistence in “Sacrosanctum Concilium” on “full, conscious and active participation” by the faithful as well as the attention given in “Lumen Gentium” (“The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church”) to the church as the people of God before dealing with the church’s ecclesiastical constitution (pope, bishops, priests, deacons).
I agree with Dr. Masters Keightley’s position. But, second, I think that there is something even more serious at issue. Many people say that they are attracted to the beauty and the reverence they find in the traditional liturgy. This is no doubt true. However, the heart of the liturgy is always about more than the liturgy itself. Liturgy is about the very nature of the church, as well as Christian anthropology.
If one seriously reads critics of the reform like the writer Peter Kwasniewski, one finds an underlying anthropology and ecclesiology that reject modern Catholicism altogether. For Dr. Kwasniewski and many of his fellow traditionalists, modernity is a disaster for the Christian faith, and Vatican II is a perfect instantiation of that disaster. Rejecting the liturgical reform goes hand in hand with rejection of the church’s encounter and dialogue with modernity (“Gaudium et Spes,” the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World”), of ecumenism, of interreligious dialogue, of religious freedom, of the relation between Scripture and tradition, and of an ecclesiology rooted in the common baptism of Christians as the people of God. In other words, Vatican II and all that follows must be rejected as a whole. No half-measures are allowed.
This is precisely why Pope Francis severely restricted the use of the older liturgy in his letter accompanying the landmark motu proprio letter of 2021, “Traditionis Custodes.” Allow me to quote him at length:
I am saddened by abuses in the celebration of the liturgy on all sides. In common with Benedict XVI, I deplore the fact that “in many places the prescriptions of the new Missal are not observed in celebration, but indeed come to be interpreted as an authorization for or even a requirement of creativity, which leads to almost unbearable distortions.” But I am nonetheless saddened that the instrumental use of Missale Romanum of 1962 is often characterized by a rejection not only of the liturgical reform, but of the Vatican Council II itself, claiming, with unfounded and unsustainable assertions, that it betrayed the Tradition and the “true Church.”
Further, Pope Francis wrote:
The path of the Church must be seen within the dynamic of Tradition “which originates from the Apostles and progresses in the Church with the assistance of the Holy Spirit” (Dei Verbum, No. 8). A recent stage of this dynamic was constituted by Vatican Council II where the Catholic episcopate came together to listen and to discern the path for the Church indicated by the Holy Spirit. To doubt the Council is to doubt the intentions of those very Fathers who exercised their collegial power in a solemn manner cum Petro et sub Petro in an ecumenical council, and, in the final analysis, to doubt the Holy Spirit himself who guides the Church.
Pope Francis went on to “declare that the liturgical books promulgated by the saintly Pontiffs Paul VI and John Paul II, in conformity with the decrees of Vatican Council II, constitute the unique expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite.”
My third reason for wanting to abrogate the old rite is the fact that its use takes time, resources and energy away from the need to do better catechesis and implementation of the “unique expression” of the church’s lex orandi, the current Roman Rite.
At the same time, however, I do not think it is sufficient simply to reject what attracts people to the pre-Vatican II liturgy. We must find a way to recover reverence and an appropriate sense of mystery. That way is by emphasizing the priority of God’s action in the liturgy.
Gathered by His Love
To get to the heart of the matter, let me use two prayers from the current Roman missal. (I am doing this with the conviction that as the ancient adage goes, “lex orandi, lex credendi”—the rule of prayer inspires the rule of faith.) The first prayer is taken from what immediately follows the “Holy, Holy, Holy” in the Eucharistic Prayer for Various Occasions:
You are indeed Holy and to be glorified, O God, who love the human race and who always walk with us on the journey of life. Blessed indeed is your Son, present in our midst when we are gathered by his love, and when, as once for the disciples, so now for us, he opens the Scriptures and breaks the bread.
This prayer articulates beautifully the Liturgy Constitution’s affirmation in “Sacrosanctum Concilium” (No. 7) that Christ is the primary actor in the liturgy. Indeed, the whole Christ, head and members, celebrates the liturgy, but the liturgy is always primarily an act of Christ the priest. Christ is acting now in our celebration.
The second prayer is easily passed over, since it is a Prayer Over the Gifts which is used only twice a year—on Holy Thursday and on the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time. It is, in fact, quoted in both “Sacrosanctum Concilium” and in the General Instruction of the Roman Missal.
Grant us, O Lord, we pray, that we may participate worthily in these mysteries, for whenever the memorial of this sacrifice is celebrated the work of our redemption is accomplished.
This is quite an astounding proposition. The liturgy is a real participation in Christ’s saving act for us. This is at the heart of what we mean by the Mass as a sacrifice. Sacrifice here does not mean that we are doing something to Christ, but rather that Christ himself is uniting us to his own act of total self-giving. That is the point of the Eucharist, after all—that we live out in our own lives this act of self-giving. As St. Augustine famously said: “There is your mystery on the altar. Become what you receive.”
It seems to me that these two prayers are excellent examples of what it means to say that God acts first in the liturgy. We have become accustomed to saying that liturgy is the work of the people. That is true, but the origin of the Greek word leitourgia lies in the fact that a liturgy is first of all a work for the people, a benefaction. What we do in the liturgy is always a response to what God has done for us.
That is why the first major part of the liturgical celebration always consists of a Liturgy of the Word. Everything else that happens in liturgy is a response to God’s prevenient revelation and grace. (This is the case, ideally, even in the celebration of the sacrament of penance for a single individual.)
Let me suggest that priority be given to the awareness that God is actually convoking us. God is speaking to us in the Scriptures; God is associating us with the act of our salvation. Let us be honest: This awareness is often lacking in our liturgies. We live in a society in which consumerism and individualism are the air that we breathe. The Jesuit Byzantine scholar Robert Taft captured (albeit somewhat caustically) what I am trying to say in an essay called “Sunday in the Byzantine Tradition.” He reported that people sometimes told him: “I don’t go to church because I don’t get anything out of it.” His response: “What one gets out of it is the inestimable privilege of glorifying God.”
Now, glorifying God is serious business, very serious business, and it means a lot more than nourishing my spiritual and moral life, as important as that is: “For whenever the memorial of this sacrifice is celebrated, the work of our redemption is accomplished.” The liturgy is always and first and foremost our participation in Christ’s redeeming and saving act for the life of the world.
It is precisely the serious nature of liturgy that I think is so often lacking in the way we celebrate, not with the post-Vatican II liturgy itself, but in the casual and friendly manner in which it is celebrated. I do not mean here that we should embody a robotic stiffness. Formality and warmth are not mutually exclusive. For example, despite rather clear instructions about brevity and the introduction of the Mass of the day, it is very difficult for many presiders to exercise proper self-discipline. In addition, even though it is necessary to recognize many cultural variables, the music chosen is often enough unsuitable for the particular function it is to play in the liturgy or for the depth of its content. Perhaps chant in the vernacular should be the default mode, at least for the Eucharistic liturgy.
Reverence and Wonder
The core of my argument is very much inspired by and in line with Pope Francis’ excellent apostolic letter on liturgical formation, “Desiderio Desideravi,” of 2022. In it, the pope reaffirms the priority of the liturgy as an encounter first of all with Christ, saying, “Here lies the powerful beauty of the liturgy” (No. 10). Although he insists that rubrics and other elements that the church requires must be carefully observed, he also points out that the liturgy is “not the search for a ritual aesthetic” (No. 22). Thomas P. Rausch, S.J., made this very point in an excellent essay in America (1/31/25).
For Francis, who shows great appreciation for one of his own favorite theologians, Romano Guardini, the key to liturgical formation is to be found in an appreciation of the gift of Christ’s presence for us in the paschal mystery, which is made real for us in liturgical celebration. To emphasize the power of this encounter he uses words like amazement, astonishment and wonder. He writes:
Wonder is an essential part of the liturgical act because it is the way that those who know they are engaged in the particularity of symbolic gestures look at things, It is the marveling of those who experience the power of symbol, which does not consist in referring to some abstract concept but rather in containing and expressing in its very concreteness what it signifies. (No. 26)
My interpretation of this is that through the very serious and careful performance of the liturgy, and respect for its symbolic power, we are brought into contact with who Christ is (the real presence) and what he has done for us, his saving act. For Francis, recovering the capacity for appreciating and celebrating symbols is the essential factor in liturgical formation.
Another way of saying this is that liturgical reform is unsuccessful without liturgical renewal. I think it is fair to say that we have gone only part way in this liturgical renewal and that we need to put more energy and resources into liturgical formation. Some 60 years after Vatican II, we can say that, to paraphrase what G. K. Chesterton said of Christianity, it is not that the reform has been tried and failed so much as it has not been thoroughly digested and interiorized.
In part a great deal of the responsibility for this formation falls on priest presiders. Although the pope recognizes the fact that all celebrate the liturgy, he notes how crucial the priest’s leadership role is. I must admit that one of the greatest challenges of the liturgical reform has been to prevent the priest from becoming the center of attention. Francis has a remedy for this when he writes in “Desiderio Desideravi” that: “to preside at the Eucharist is to be plunged into the furnace of God’s love” (No. 57).
Allow me to conclude with just one aspect that I consider crucial for liturgical formation at this particular moment: silence. Reverent silence is central to the liturgical experience, as is clear in the addition of a paragraph on it to the most recent edition of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (No. 45). Of all the particular directives of the General Instruction, it seems to me that the necessity of silence is the one most honored in the breach. Silence should be observed after the invitation to recognize our sins, between the invitation to the opening prayer and the people’s prayer articulated by the priest, after each reading, after the homily, in attentive listening to the Eucharistic prayer (Nos. 78, 147), and after all have received holy Communion.
We must be conscious that the liturgy is not first of all our activity but rather our response to God, who acts first, to Christ who makes himself present among us. Before anything else, the liturgy is a gift that we receive from God. Christ is the supreme gift we receive from God, and for that gift we should be endlessly grateful.
