Sacrosanctum Concilium As a Companion and Catalyst for Anglican Liturgical Reform

Sacrosanctum Concilium as a Companion and Catalyst for Anglican Liturgical Reform

Kevin J Moroney

Abstract

DESPITE nearly five hundred years of estrangement, Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches have always shared a passion for liturgy as a primary expression of the Christian faith. Both traditions were active participants in the Liturgical Movement of the twentieth century even though such involvement did not lead to significant institutional contact prior to the Second Vatican Council.

By the 1960’s liturgical scholars had developed significant points of consensus regarding changes to the liturgy with only one need remaining: for ecclesial bodies to embrace the consensus and revise their liturgies in accordance with them. For Anglicans this occurred at the Lambeth Conference of bishops in 1958 and for Roman Catholics this occurred with the publication of the first document of Vatican II, Sacrosanctum Concilium (The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy), in 1963. A comparison of these two documents shows a remarkable congruence of concerns and recommendations. This is largely due to what Massimino Faggioli identifies in True Reform: Liturgy and Ecclesiology in Sacrosanctum Concilium as the principle of “ressourcement,” a return to the scriptures and liturgies of the early Church that Faggioli describes as underlying Sacrosanctum Concilium and which is equally evident in the report on the Prayer Book from Lambeth 1958. In this sense the Constitution is very much a companion with other documents that articulated the concerns of the Liturgical Movement and supplied recommendations for implementation.

Faggioli identified a second principal as integral to the Constitution, that of “rapprochement,” which he defined as a “reaching out” that the Roman Catholic Church offered to each of its estranged siblings following Vatican II. Regarding liturgical matters, this led to the foundation of ecumenical bodies concerned with providing liturgical revision work from which all the churches could benefit. Bodies such as the International Consultation on English Texts (ICET) and the English Language Liturgical Consultation (ELLC) published ecumenically agreed upon translations of texts such as the Gloria, the Lord’s Prayer, the Creeds and other commonly used texts. Additionally, in 1969 the Catholic Church published a three year lectionary which was then taken up by ecumenical bodies, revised, and is the basis of the current Revised Common Lectionary (RCL). These texts and readings were adopted as part of many liturgical revisions in recent decades, including those by the Church of Ireland. Thus Sacrosanctum Concilium served as a catalyst for liturgical reform generally, providing the ecumenical outreach and organizational structure to accelerate the work of revision.

It is difficult to imagine how the incredible volume of liturgical revision work that has been accomplished in the last fifty years would have been possible without the spark provided by the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy and the organizational systems set in place by the Roman Catholic Church. And while the recent decision to revise the Roman Missal based on more literal translations of the Latin, rather than the ecumenically agreed upon texts, strikes many liturgical scholars as a form of retrenchment rather than ressourcement or rapprochement, nonetheless the gains over the last fifty years are significant and should not be obscured in light of what has happened most recently. We are more alike on Sundays and work more closely during the week than at any time since the sixteenth century. And a Colloquium like this, with both Anglican and Roman Catholic Archbishops in attendance, simply would not have happened in 1963.