Further work needed on the changes in the liturgy after Vatican Council II

Cardinal Ferdinando Antonelli’s memoirs show that the enthusiasm for aggiornamento, which the Council encouraged, led many of the periti (experts) ass

Aug 25, 2016

Q: Were the changes in the liturgy after Vatican Council II definitive?

A: Cardinal Ferdinando Antonelli’s memoirs show that the enthusiasm for aggiornamento, which the Council encouraged, led many of the periti (experts) assigned to the liturgical project to call for far too rapid changes, in his opinion. Antonelli singles out Archbishop Bugnini as the prime example of this tendency. It greatly disturbed the cardinal that many decisions that previously had been openly and minutely evaluated and discussed, were often farmed out to committees and, often, to what appeared to be committees of one, by Bugnini, and then implemented without full-scale discussion or voting by the entire group.

Many documents and directives were promulgated in this manner, especially those representative of progressive sentiments, with little concern for opposing views.

But Bugnini was seen as a man who got things done, and, in the heady days after the Council, he was the man of the hour. Cardinal Antonelli was somewhat bitter about this. He thought that some of the changes had not been as carefully wrought as those of the Easter Vigil in the previous decade. This left him convinced that the changes to the liturgy in the wake of Vatican II would not be definitive but that further work would be required.

Years afterward, in 1975, Bugnini, who had been a rising star in the curia, ended his days as the papal pro-nuncio to Iran. He remained at that post until his death in 1982. His fall from grace has never been fully explained. For a former Vatican insider, this was an obvious demotion, if not a humiliation. From that point onward, he would have no further influence on the liturgy of the Catholic Church.

Despite his misgivings about the outcome of the post-conciliar liturgical reforms, Cardinal Antonelli did believe that they were a positive step forward. Furthermore, while more conservative churchmen, Al fredo Cardinal Ottaviani, for example, questioned the orthodoxy of some of the changes, the meticulous and scholarly Antonelli insisted that they were, in fact, orthodox. He and other like-minded experts fought very hard, in those later meetings, to make sure of this.

In the end, Cardinal Antonelli was fondly remembered by those who worked with him as a scholar whose profound love for the Catholic Church and her liturgy was reflected in his service to the cause of liturgical reform over a period of thirty years. His meticulous memoirs allow us to see into the workings of Catholic liturgical reform from its inception in the 1940s until its ultimate fruition in the 1970s. It shows that true liturgical reform was not an innovation proposed by Vatican II, but an ongoing project that preceded the Council and was moved forward more rapidly thanks to the impetus of the Council. Even more important, we find that true liturgical scholarship, and not merely some unbridled desire for change for change’s sake, lay behind the reforms.

After forty years of the Pauline missal since Vatican II, another phase in the reform of the liturgy has taken place with the Third Typical Edition of the Roman Missal of 2002 and its English translation of 2011. -- By Nicola Giampietro & Arthur C. Sippo

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