LITURGY
The liturgies of the Christian churches, ancient and modern, are as the sands of the sea, multitudinous but easily washed away by the tides of change or dispute. But go back far enough, and we have to speak in a single, unitary mode. There was one Church, not yet split into warring denominations, despite intermittent troubles with heresies. And within the fold, there evolved, from rudimentary beginnings, a uniform practice of worship that was standardized everywhere.
That uniformity, however, did not last very long. Local variations sprang up all over, some of them winning widespread adherence. Associated with these variants were differences of theology and ecclesiastical organization. The resulting friction led, eventually, to the Great Schism, which separated the Eastern Churches from the Western Church.
In the East, there was then, and there has continued to this day, much liturgical diversity. The same was true, for a while, in the West. But as the influence of the papacy rose, Western Christendom became more and more Rome-oriented; and in due course, at the behest of Charlemagne, the Roman rite became the compulsory norm of worship throughout the West. That rite persisted, basically unchanged, for a millennium. From time to time, there were accretions, as ceremonials became more and more elaborate. And sometimes there were excisions, as reform-minded popes purged the services of their over-elaboration. On the whole, though, from Charlemagne day to the Second Ecumenical Council of the nineteen-sixties, there was no fundamental change in the worship of Roman Catholics: what was done, what was said, what was sung, all this conformed, in outline and in detail, to regulations long since established by Rome.
The merit of such a systemic uniformity was that it bolstered the Church’s claim to be universal: wherever priests went, or members of the laity, they could count on finding the same familiar services as anywhere else. The flaw in the system was that the services were largely incomprehensible to lay people, if they were not fluent in Latin: they were taught to understand the spirit of the proceedings, and to parrot the creed in Latin, as well as the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary; but they were essentially deprived of a full congregational access to the meaning and purpose of worship, which is only possible through a vernacular liturgy. The need for that, among other needs, was what prompted the sweeping reforms instituted in the second half of the twentieth century.
The result has been a curious, but on the whole successful, blend of uniformity and diversity. The Vatican has issued a slightly revised text of the Mass, for example, for compulsory and uniform use in every country. But it has decreed that the text be everywhere translated into the mother tongue of the faithful; so the Mass is now celebrated, in a kaleidoscopic diversity of languages.
The drawback is that worshippers, when travelling abroad, cannot attend Mass with the same feeling of full participation as they have at home. They can follow the general outline of the celebration well enough, for the structure of the ceremonial is identical, wherever they go. But the actual sense of the text, word by word, is lost on them. And that is an increasingly common experience, for we live in a shrinking world, and more people travel than ever before, on business or for pleasure.
An incidental loss, mourned by many and not all of them diehard conservatives, is the disappearance of the Latin Mass. Certainly it was impenetrable by those who did not understand Latin. But those who did, however few in number, loved it for its eloquence and strength. Grieving over its abolition, they can only hope that those charged with the task of creating vernacular texts for the Mass, in any language, will be able to match the Latin with equivalent strength and eloquence.
That is not necessarily a forlorn hope. The English text of the Mass in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer need not fear comparison with the Latin: it is a masterpiece in its own right. That most Anglican parishes, shamefully, have discarded it, in favour of a pallid and clumsy modern substitute, is a sad witness to the failure of those in charge to remember that the prime duty of a liturgist is to offer God, in worship, nothing but the best. But that is another story.
Within the English-speaking realms of the Roman communion, the vernacular text of the Mass answers the need for which it was created: it is clear, comprehensible, and straightforward; and it does not sacrifice dignity by stooping to the banality of pop language. Yet it is certainly no masterpiece. For the spoken parts of the Mass, however, it is at least serviceable.
But not everything in the Mass is spoken, except in a Low Mass. In a High Mass, portions of the text are chanted: some of the prayers by a priest or deacon; and various versicles and responses by the officiant and the people. These passages are set to simple chants substantially the same as the traditional chants in the Latin Mass. But there are other places in the Mass where more complex music used to be involved, at least in churches that had competent choral resources at their disposal. Here, there is a problem.
The Introit, for example, at the beginning of the Mass, in the Latin of the old Liber Usualis, was set to a Gregorian melody that was very ornate and difficult, and it could only be chanted by singers quite expert in plainsong. Under the new dispensation, the vernacular Introit is not much different textually. But the English words cannot be well fitted to the ornate chant in the Liber. In fact, the English language is ill-suited to use with elaborate Gregorian melodies: too many a complex and long melisma would co-incide with the neutral vowel which is such a common feature of English, to clumsy effect (example: it would be absurd to assign a dozen notes to the second syllable of the word Blessed). Simpler melodies, as in the Gregorian hymns and psalms, are easily adaptable to English words. But the English text of the Introit, and similarly of the Gradual, requires the provision of new music suited to it, music that is consonant with its actual properties as language.
New music, designed to fill that need, has been composed, and officially distributed for use, in many provinces of the English-speaking Church. In an attempt to be consistent with the other chanted passages in the revised Missal, this music is of a simple style modelled on the Gregorian tradition. It has not been everywhere accepted with unqualified approval by lovers of liturgical music, or by Gregorian experts, or by critics who are good judges of word-setting. Nevertheless, these officially endorsed settings of the Introit and Gradual texts do serve their purpose pretty well: they communicate the meaning of the words simply and accessibly, and they do not fall into the self-indulgent trap of writing music for music’s sake — the whole point of liturgical music, after all, is not the glorification of musical art, but the edification of the people of God. In that regard, the new Introits and Graduals are a useful contribution to the celebration of the Mass in modest parish churches that lack the resources to mount the kind of grandiloquent celebration proper to a cathedral.
Monasteries are another matter altogether. In monasteries, especially in the contemplative Orders, the life of prayer is a central fact of the religious vocation. It is referred to as the Opus Dei, the work of God. And liturgy functions as a formal expression of communal prayer. It does not exist, like a parish liturgy, to speak for an attending congregation of lay people. Rather it exists, apart from the world, to serve the worship needs of the resident religious. Obedient to Rome, most monastic liturgies use the new Missal without demur, using the official chants without bemoaning the loss of the ancient Gregorian heritage. But there are exceptions. A notable one is the liturgy that has evolved, in recent years, in Westminster Abbey at Mission, in British Columbia. There, the greater part of the Mass is celebrated according to the reformed Missal, in English, and is chanted, where chanting is called for, in a style that not only approximates to the style of the officially disseminated new chants, but also evokes the style of the Gregorian chants used by the Benedictine Order for over a thousand years. The Introit and the Gradual, however, have not been forced into the mould of the new rubrics: instead, they have retained the old Latin texts and are sung to the old Gregorian melodies, by a Schola Cantorum of monks expert enough to tackle the musical difficulties involved. Thus, Westminster Abbey offers its community an interesting and valuable compromise: a Mass that heeds the present and looks to the future in modern language; but one, too, that enshrines and honours the past in ancient music of surpassing beauty and eloquence.
While Mass is the central feature of any Roman Catholic liturgy, there are other services also that fill out the system of worship. In many parish churches, Vespers is quite regularly scheduled, and there are other occasional devotions, like the Stations of the Cross. But it is in monastic churches that a full horarium of services supplements the Mass. In Westminster Abbey, four such services are sung daily: Lauds at dawn, Sext at noon, Vespers before supper, and Compline in the late evening. All four use modern text. In English — exceptionally, the final antiphon of Compline, to the Virgin, retains the Latin text and is chanted to the traditional Gregorian melody. The psalms are chanted to the Gregorian psalm-tones, as are the canticles. All the rest of the music, for the psalm-antiphons and the responsories, is derived from the Gregorian originals, skillfully adapted to English text by the resident expert, Father Basil Foote, O.S.B. who also composes Gregorian-style melodies in an authentic manner, wherever in the liturgy a need for them arises. In a long monastic life devoted to this enormous task, among his other duties, Father Basil has produced a body of work that covers all the Abbey’s liturgical needs, regular or occasional, year round. It is an extraordinary and unique achievement. In one monk’s lifetime, a complete liturgy has been produced that matches, in its scope, any one of the mediaeval liturgies produced by generations of monks over several centuries. One of the most famous of such complete mediaeval liturgies is the Sarum Use, so called because it originated in the Benedictine Abbey at Sarum. The liturgy that has evolved among the Benedictines of Westminster Abbey, in Mission, deserves to go down in history as the Westminster Use.
