Restoring The Sacred Getting Our Liturgical History Right
By JAMES MONTI So much of modern and post-modern liturgical thought centers on the premise that for the liturgy to be authentic it must be “neo-primitive” — that it must replicate as closely as possible what the very earliest liturgies were supposedly like, fantasized as liturgies of undogmatic, free-spirited, casual spontaneity, and that the liturgy must also be purged of medieval and Baroque era accretions that allegedly dogmatized, ritualized, and solemnized in a heretofore unprecedented manner the forms of Christian worship. This fundamentally flawed premise was masterfully critiqued by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2000 book, The Spirit of the Liturgy: “As I see it, the problem with a large part of modern liturgiology is that it tends to recognize…Continue Reading