Abstract
The T&T Clark Companion to Liturgy is not the broad-ranging survey of liturgical scholarship one would expect from the title. Though respectful of non-Catholic scholars and indeed including essays by some of them, this is a book about how the Roman Catholic Church understands its liturgy, and it has a particular case to promote. Its message is that the implementation of the liturgical reforms of the latter part of the twentieth century have had a negative impact and need to be challenged. The opening words of the Introduction by Dom Alcuin Reid are accurate: ‘In some way this is a peculiar book’ (p. xvii). Even a catholic-minded Anglican finds himself looking in on a very Roman world very much from the outside. It is Reid’s view ‘that, insofar as Western Catholic liturgy has deviated from its nature and tradition (and from the genuine reform called for by the Second Vatican Council), remedial measures are urgently necessary’ (p. xviii).
Alcuin Reid, a monk and scholar at the Monastère Saint-Benôit, himself contributes five of the essays as well as being the book’s editor. His editing appears to be fairly light. Especially in Part III, the Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council, there is a good deal of repetition occasioned by a variety of authors. Immensely scholarly, with nearly 1400 footnotes, this is a book for research students, with long bibliographies at the end of every chapter. There are too many typographical errors, three within five pages (pp. 52–6) with the unfortunate misprint in a liturgical context of ‘incluturation’ on page 52.
I was struck particularly by Reid’s chapter on the twentieth-century liturgical movement, not least because it reminded me that the movement was not initially about changing the texts or actions of the liturgy, but about the centrality of liturgical piety. He quotes Dom Bernard Botte: ‘The liturgical movement, at its beginning, was not a reformist movement. Dom Beauduin knew very well that there were some cobwebs on the venerable monument called Liturgy. One day or another these would have to be dusted away. But he did not consider this essential and, at any rate, not his business … He regarded the Liturgy as a traditional given which we first of all had to try to understand’ (p. 161). A major theme of the book is that post-conciliar liturgical reform has not been true to the movement or to the Council that sought to enact its insights.
The book is not entirely one-sided. In Chapters 12 and 13 Dom Anscar Chupungco gives a spirited defence of the Council’s Constitution on the Liturgy. Chupungco does not share the explicit and implicit criticisms that are found on almost every other page of this book. At one point a cry of frustration produces an unexpected exclamation mark: ‘Leave the liturgy of Vatican II alone!’ (p. 283), or, more fully, ‘We should leave the reformed liturgy alone and insist rather on how to foster greater interiority in its celebration’ (p. 284).
Although most of the book engages with text, there are two chapters on liturgical music (and Gregorian chant in particular) and there is one on church architecture. The final chapter allows Ben Gordon Taylor to add an Anglican perspective in which he gives a fascinating account of the tensions between the English and Western usage in the early decades of the twentieth century, but does not have the space to explore the striking coalescence of the Anglican and Roman rites in the last 50 years.