“The liturgy, 'through which the work of our redemption is accomplished,' most of all in the divine sacrifice of the Eucharist, is the outstanding means whereby the faithful may express in their lives, and manifest to others, the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true Church” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 2). The Second Vatican Council also teaches that the liturgy is the source and summit of the Church’s activity. However, Mass attendance is in decline in many parts of the world. Many Catholics must not appreciate what occurs in the Church’s ritual worship and celebration of the sacraments. Even committed Mass-goers may grow weary of humdrum celebrations. It is crucial, therefore, to understand the liturgy and appreciate it. To this end, Christopher Carstens discusses in this interview the five books that he recommends on the nature and significance of the sacred liturgy.
Christopher Carstens is director of the Office for Sacred Worship in the Diocese of La Crosse, Wisconsin; a visiting faculty member at the Liturgical Institute at the University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Illinois; and editor of the Adoremus Bulletin. He is author of A Devotional Journey into the Mass (Sophia), as well as Principles of Sacred Liturgy: Forming a Sacramental Vision (Hillenbrand Books). He and his family live in Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin.
- The Spirit of the Liturgy
by Romano Guardini - The Spirit of the Liturgy
by Card. Joseph Ratzinger - Catechism of the Catholic Church
- The Wellspring of Worship
by Fr. Jean Corbon - The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origin and Development (2 vols.)
by Fr. Joseph Jungmann SJ
...and two bonus recommendations.... - The Mystery of Christian Worship
by Fr. Odo Casel OSB - Rite and Man: The Sense of the Sacred and Christian Liturgy
by Fr. Louis Bouyer
Theologians have often struggled to give a precise definition of the liturgy. Do you want to give it a stab?
Well, I agree that it is a very slippery concept. Everybody talks about the liturgy, but it is hard to put a fine point on it. The definition offered in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, at the beginning of its section on the Sacred Liturgy, is the best one: the liturgy is “the participation of the People of God in ‘the work of God’” (CCC 1069). The People of God are all the baptised, not simply the clergy. The work of God is principally the Paschal mystery of Jesus, although the Father and the Spirit are at work as well. The means of our participation is a sacramental ritual, that is made up of signs, symbols, words, and actions. The Paschal mystery of Jesus is made present through the ritual signs and symbols, and we actively participate in that saving work.
In your various apostolates you deal with the Roman Rite. Similarly, most of the books you have chosen deal prevalently with the Roman Rite. To what extent are your chosen books instructive for Eastern Rite Catholics?
True, I grew up as a Roman Rite Catholic, a member of the Latin Church. That is what I am familiar with. I read about other rites and may have gone to a handful other Catholic rites. Take, for example, the definition of the liturgy: the People of God participate in the saving work of Jesus through a liturgical ritual. That is applicable to any rite around the world, at any time. It is applicable to the Anglican use; to what was called the extraordinary form; the ordinary form; to the Maronite rite; to the Syro-Malabar rite; to Coptic celebrations. In each instance, God's baptised people engages through sacramental signs the unseen reality of the Paschal mystery of Jesus. That, at least, is applicable across the board, even though the specifics vary.
"The Council Fathers speak of the spirit of the liturgy in numerous places. They had something definite in mind."
1 & 2
The first two books on your list could be treated as a single entry. Indeed, recently they have been published together. The first is Romano Guardini’s The Spirit of the Liturgy, published in 1918; the second is Card. Joseph Ratzinger’s book of the same name, published in 2000. The latter addresses, in the wake of Vatican II’s liturgical reform, the same questions as Guardini had at the end of the First World War. Card. Ratzinger not only takes Guardini’s book as his model but credits it with having disclosed the sense and richness of the liturgy to him. You have also edited The Seven Gifts of the Spirit of the Liturgy: Centennial Perspectives on Romano Guardini’s Landmark Work. Why do these books top your list?
They set a solid foundation. They are fundamental to liturgical understanding. Their pedigree, history, and authors vouch for this too. Romano Guardini, as Pope Benedict said, founded the liturgical movement in Germany at that time. Germany especially was the source of the liturgical movement for much of the twentieth century. These two books give the fundamentals. If you take a cursory look at news stories about the liturgy, this is very much needed today. There is much debate. It is not unnecessary, but maybe it is on the finer points. The bigger picture is often lost. Each of them, but especially Guardini, lays out common characteristics or features of the spirit of the liturgy. As I wrote in the introduction to The Seven Gifts of the Spirit of the Liturgy, the Council Fathers speak of the spirit of the liturgy in numerous places. They had something definite in mind. Any liturgical practice, discussion, or debate that does not see what these fundamental features are is thin and superficial. Understanding the spirit of the liturgy is foundational for understanding all things liturgical: the Mass, the sacraments, the liturgy of the hours.
3.
Your third entry is a magisterial text: the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Why have you selected it rather than other major magisterial documents on the liturgy (Pius XII’s Mediator Dei, Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium), or the Mass (the General Introduction to the Roman Missal)? What parts of the Catechism are you recommending?
I chose it because it is in book form. Maybe we can do another interview on five liturgical documents.
Picking the books was an eye-opening exercise for me. It is like putting a mental list together of the things to pick up at the grocery store. Then, you walk into the supermarket and, all of a sudden, you cannot remember any of them. When you put this question to me, “What five books would I recommend on the liturgy?”, I thought, “Oh! I read liturgical books all the time and have done so for decades.” But when you asked me, they did not come flooding into my mind, as I thought they would.
I chose the Catechism for a couple of reasons. One, it is a magisterial text. Two, in my own work as a diocesan liturgy director, teacher, or author, I use that section of the Catechism more than anything else. There is another reason. Frankly, it is beautifully written. A dry boring section of the Catechism? Absolutely not! Amid all these debates about the liturgy, nobody seems to quibble with—although I am sure there are some—the contents of the Catechism on it. It has shown itself to be a bedrock for understanding the liturgy.
The Catechism has four principal parts or pillars. The first is on the Creed; the second, on the liturgy and the sacraments; the third is on the Church's moral life; the fourth is on the Lord's Prayer. I am embarrassed to admit that, if you were to look, not at the spine but at the fore edge of my copy of the Catechism, it is the second section that is well-worn and has tabs and sticky notes. The first, third, and fourth part, I am afraid to say, are not so well-worn. If I were trapped on a desert island and needed a liturgy book with me, I would bring along that Catechism.
You can justify that choice by saying, lex orandi, lex credendi.
Certainly. There is a gem there too. Which comes first? Is it the credendum or the orandum? Is it what you believe or how you pray? Pius XII took this up in Mediator Dei in 1947. He said that either one is fine, however the original formulation is, “Let the law of prayer establish the law of belief.” So, in a certain, real sense, there is a primacy to how we pray.
4.
The author of the fourth book on your list, The Wellspring of Worship, Fr. Jean Corbon, wrote the sections of the Catechism on liturgy and prayer. In this book he aims to help Christians overcome the separation of liturgy and Christian life. What lessons can we draw from him in this regard?
It had been a while since I last read The Wellspring of Worship. I knew that it was great and very formative in my own thinking, but thought, “Well, if I need to talk about it, I need to brush up on it.” So, I have been rereading parts of it in preparation for this interview. It is beautifully written, and I came to see how, even though I did not remember certain sections of it, by osmosis it has formed my own thought.
I did not see explicit connections between him and the part on the liturgy in the Catechism. In the book, Corbon looks at the liturgy from 35,000 feet. His is a big picture vision of the liturgy. To use another analogy, we talk about losing sight of the forest for the trees. Well, this book is about the liturgical forest. It gives the big picture of what the liturgy is. The first section is about the mystery, the true content of what goes on when you celebrate Mass, go to confession, or pray evening prayer. It is Trinitarian in its essence. It seems like most of my day is about questions such as, “What colour vestments are we going to wear? What is the best way to do the blessing of throats on the feast of St. Blaise, when we have so many people? Should we celebrate ad orientem?” Things like that. These are important questions. However, Fr. Corbon’s book opens our eyes to the reality and enormity of the liturgy. The action of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the world, creation, and the economy of salvation is present. This mystery gets sacramentalised, symbolised, or ritualised in things that human beings can see, smell, taste, touch, or here: the sacramental signs that compose the rite. Ideally, this transforms us so that we become divinized. We are transformed and live according to the mystery when we are in our families or workplaces, during our entertainment and so forth. So, I was very happy to pick up this book and read it again.
5.
Sometimes it is said that Jesuits are not into liturgy and rubrics. Proof to the contrary is your fifth book, Josef Andreas Jungmann SJ’s definitive two-volume historical study, The Mass of the Roman Rite. To what extent can his study help us understand the New Order of the Mass and not just the Roman Rite up to Vatican II?
What books should make this list? I hemmed and hawed about whether I should put this one in. I have never sat down and read it from cover to cover. Volume one is 485 pages long. The second is about the same. So, it is not the type of book with which you up to the fireplace for an evening read with a glass of sherry. But it is an invaluable resource to have at hand.
To my mind, these historical questions are among the most difficult ones. I do not know if this is a matter of history generally or liturgical history in particular, but I cannot seem to find two historians that agree on many points.
Jungmann started to write this book when the Nazi occupation of Austria closed down the university at which he was teaching. He was more of a catechist than an historian, but he took this time during the war to write to The Mass of the Roman Rite.
It became an influential book for the liturgical movement, maybe not always in a good way. Card. Ratzinger would go on to say that too much emphasis was placed on historical research and maybe not enough given—he did not put it this way— to people, parishes, and pastors. So, this book is important for its place in the liturgical movement and in the reform and restoration of the rites which we celebrate today.
Two, it has stood the test of time, even if certain elements, as he admits in the introduction, come to be understood in a different way. It is still the resource that one would turn to find historical information on the development of the Mass.
Jungmann was also one of the most influential theologians of catechetics. Is his history of the Mass of the Roman Rite connected to his work on catechetics?
This book is now seventy or eighty years old. It is not the type of language that we would associate with catechetical materials. It is an academic resource for fellow researchers. If it found any way into, say, catechetical materials or a classroom, it would be distilled by the one teaching or catechizing.
What does your work as director of the Office for Sacred Worship in the Diocese of La Crosse consist of?
It is a wonderful and rewarding job, one that, as a child or young man, I never dreamt I would have. I found myself in need of a job and ended up in this office.
We serve as a resource to the various parishes in the diocese on questions about ritual, the liturgical calendar, sacred music, or sacred architecture. How early the Easter Vigil can start? Is such and such a holy day of obligation? How to bless throats? We oversee the rite of initiation of adults for the bishop. We prepare the more significant episcopal ceremonies at the cathedral and elsewhere.
One of the things I appreciate most about it is that we are basically a liturgical catechesis office. I do a lot of adult formation on the liturgy. In the United States, there is a new translation of the Order of Penance, so I do some formation for clergy too.
Teaching people how to pray is especially rewarding. There is so much about the liturgy that is confusing and unclear. Clarifying that in the minds of parents, especially when they are trying to form their children, is very satisfying.
What led you to specialise in the study of the liturgy?
Necessity. I was hungry and I wanted a place to live. I had just graduated with a master’s degree in philosophy and had just married. In this rural part of Southwest Wisconsin, there was not a lot of need for philosophy majors. There was an opening, however, in the liturgy office. Our bishop at the time, Bishop Raymond Burke, knew my family and I ended up meeting him and others, and basically backed into the position without really having a lot of formation in the sacred liturgy.
When the Liturgical Institute opened in 2001 under Card. Francis George of Chicago and Mons. Francis Mannion, a priest of the Diocese of Salt Lake City, I was the first student to sign up. I had a wonderful liturgical formation there and years later I am still, very gratefully, occupied with things liturgical. That is how I ended up being a liturgist.
Another project in which you promote the liturgy is the Adoremus Bulletin. What is its specific aim?
The subtitle of the Adoremus Bulletin is Society for the Renewal of the Sacred Liturgy. It began in 1995 in St Louis. Among its founders were Fr. Joseph Fessio, of Ignatius Press, Fr. Jerry Pokorski, a diocesan priest in Arlington, Virginia, and Helen Hull Hitchcock, a lay woman from St. Louis. Fr. Fessio had gotten wind of a book called The Spirit of the Liturgy that the then Card. Ratzinger was writing. He had been a student of Card. Ratzinger and thought that a journal about liturgical renewal would be helpful. With support from Card. Ratzinger, it came into being in 1995. Its mission has been about accepting what was articulated by the Second Vatican Council and implement it as fully and faithfully as possible, with a long view to tradition: what Pope Benedict would eventually call a hermeneutic of reform in renewal or continuity. We read the current books not only with an eye to what contemporary men, women, and children need, but also an eye to where these books came from. They did not plop out of the sky in 1970. So, Adoremus helps priests and ministers to celebrate more faithfully, and people to pray more fruitfully.
"Card. Ratzinger says that Casel’s mystery theology is 'perhaps the most fruitful theological idea of our century”, and “not since the end of the patristic era has the theology of the sacraments experienced such a flowering as was granted to it in this century in connection with Casel's ideas.' "
6.
The first of the two bonus volumes that you have selected is Odo Casel’s The Mystery of Christian Worship. Casel retrieved the traditional understanding of the liturgy as the celebration and actualization of the mystery of Christ. However, he also argued that Christianity reached this understanding of the liturgy by drawing on Hellenic mystery religions. Scholars have long since rejected this theory and shown that the Pauline understanding of the mystery of Christ is derived from the Old Testament and Jewish worship. Why is the book still relevant?
In his collected works, Card. Ratzinger says that Casel’s mystery theology is “perhaps the most fruitful theological idea of our century”, and “not since the end of the patristic era has the theology of the sacraments experienced such a flowering as was granted to it in this century in connection with Casel's ideas.” That is high praise. I would certainly use that tagline if Pope Benedict XVI said that about anything that I had ever written or thought.
When you celebrate any liturgy, especially the Mass, it is more than just simply grace, or the recollection of Jesus, or pious and devout thoughts about Christ. There is nothing wrong with that, but, in his work, Casel tries to broaden our minds. In the liturgy, the Person of Christ, his entire saving actions, indeed, in some ways, the entire economy of salvation, is present before our praying eyes. Too many people in his time, ours too, just see the tip of the mystery of the liturgy. He helps us see the great expanse and the great reality that “God has given us the wisdom to understand fully the mystery, the plan he was pleased to decree in Christ” (Ephesians 1:9). Who sees that? Maybe, I am wondering about why that server is wearing those sneakers, or something like that? Meanwhile, I am missing the immensity of the mystery.
As you say, he relied too heavily and not entirely accurately on the Eastern mystery rites that existed at the time of Christ: rites of Persephone and Demeter, Isis and Osiris, Mithra, the sybil, and such like. He emphasised some eerie resemblances, but without the proper distinctions. This got him into hot water and he had to remove himself from the academic world. In Mediator Dei, Pius XII said some things about the school that he generated at Maria Laach. But it is entirely relevant today.
7.
Finally, there is Fr Louis Bouyer’s Rite and ‘Man: Natural Sacredness and Christian Liturgy. As the subtitle suggests, the book considers how, just as grace builds upon nature, so does the liturgy build upon man’s natural religiosity. In the introduction, Bouyer also compares “liturgical integrists” to Monphysites: they stress the divine character of the liturgy so much that they do not give due importance to man’s role in developing it. On the other side of the spectrum, there are liturgical Nestorians, who tend to reduce it to a purely human construction. Do you propose this book to underline, with Bouyer, that we must give due place to each aspect of the liturgy?
I do. The insight that he puts forward in the first chapter about liturgical Nestorianism and liturgical monophysitism is spot on. Sometimes academics speak in their own categories, lingo, and in their own stratosphere. One wonders how applicable this or that might be to what happens at Saint Mary's Parish in Wisconsin. But this idea that Bouyer puts forward is relevant.
"These heresies about Christ, Bouyer says, become heresies about the liturgy."
Nestorius championed the humanity of Christ to such a degree that he made a human person out of him. Jesus is not a human person. He has a complete human nature, but he is a divine person. Nestorius did well to emphasise the humanity of Jesus, but his view of the Incarnation and hypostasis was skewed. He neglected Christ’s divinity to some degree. The Monophysites emphasised the divinity of Christ—a very good thing to do—but to the detriment of his humanity. He ceased being human.
Bouyer applies these errors about the Incarnation to the liturgy. It is conceivable that a liturgy could be trending Monophysite. Things that are too human—the vernacular, the people’s understanding, the everyman’s participation—are considered by the Monophysite liturgist to make the celebration the too profane. They are earthly, human, natural. Meanwhile, liturgical Nestorians frown on things that are too transcendent and otherworldly. Latin, whatever lies beyond the people’s everyday understanding, or rises above the natural, profane world is wrong. These heresies about Christ, Bouyer says, become heresies about the liturgy. If Jesus is present in the liturgy, especially in the Mass—which he certainly is—then our liturgies follow this law of the Incarnation. They should do justice to Christ’s humanity and our natural human foundations, but they should also do justice to the divinity of Christ and the high calling that each of us has.
This book is not a page-turner. It was just republished by Cluny Media, so some people still see its relevance. People talk often about Bouyer these days, at least in the circles I run in. This first chapter itself is worth that gem of insight.
