Gamber’s
case for organic
gradualism
The Modern
Rite: Collected Essays on the Reform of the Liturgy gathers together in one volume
an English translation of eleven articles written by the German liturgist, Mgr
Klaus Gamber, and originally published in various journals between 1964 and
1971. A slender volume of less than 100 pages, the collection nevertheless
addresses a wide spectrum of issues arising from the project of liturgical
reform launched within the Catholic Church in the 1960s by the Second
The
connecting theme of Mgr Gamber’s articles is how liturgies change. It is clear
that Gamber himself is in favour of liturgical change. Anybody looking to this
volume for a ringing endorsement of the immobilist liturgy of the "Tridentine"
era will be disappointed. Gamber describes the Roman liturgy as it was performed
in the period before Vatican II as a congealed, ossified mass of rubricism,
rigidly controlled by the Congregation of Rites, long overdue for reform.
Indeed, he assigns a large portion of the blame for the disaster that overtook
the liturgical life of the Church to bureaucratic obstruction of change
sustained over four centuries such that, when movement was at last again
permitted, the pent-up pressure blew the liturgy apart.
Gamber
notes that, while Vatican II’s Constitution on the Liturgy of 1963
corresponded to what was needed for the renovation of the liturgy, the academic
discipline itself of liturgical studies had not reached a sufficiently advanced
stage to be able to provide any reliable conclusions about how fruitfully to
implement the principles mapped out in the Constitution. Consequently, the
business of liturgical reform in the 1960s was driven along by the private
opinions of a small group of liturgists who were not sufficiently grounded in
the theological purpose and historical development of liturgy and who were
oblivious of spiritual, psychological, anthropological and sociological factors
of capital importance affecting the complex interrelationship between people,
faith and ritual. What the Church ended up with is an endless and aimless quest
for ever more subjectively exciting experiences and sensations. Gamber speaks
aptly of "production-line liturgy” in which change becomes an
intoxicating end in itself. He presumes that the reforming zealots responsible
for this state of affairs have been well intentioned but he judges that the
results have been very disappointing, if not calamitous, especially with regards
to young people who, ironically, were supposed to be the main beneficiaries of
the new liturgical outlook. The jettisoning of ancient, welltried rituals and
customs in favour of an unceasing round of innovation and experimentation has
produced, not only a great deal of silliness, but real dangers in that constant
change in forms of worship tends to instill in the faithful a sense of
insecurity which spreads out from the liturgy to the very foundations of the
faith itself.
Gamber’s reform
The kind
of liturgical change recommended by Gamber is a gradual, organic, evolutionary,
almost imperceptible development. This middle way between rubricist rigidity and
the endless pursuit of vacuous novelty is the mode of change that actually
prevailed in the Church throughout the greater part of its history, from its
beginnings until the end of the medieval period. Convinced that there was no
satisfactory solution in sight to the liturgical dilemmas of his day and that a
lasting reform was not then possible because of the lack of the necessary
preconditions, Gamber proposed as a way out of the morass a return to the
organic model of change.On the grounds of the impossibility of creating an
entirely new rite out of nothing, he argued for the retention of the old Latin
liturgy alongside with, and on an equal footing to, the new vernacular liturgy,
combined with a prudent and discrete provisional reform inspired by the
classical liturgy of the fourth and fifth centuries and based on the latest
scholarly liturgical research and scrupulous respect for the fundamental
principles of liturgical theology and practice. He believed this would be a long
and difficult road. The pastoral and evangelizing dimensions should be paramount
in that there should be no changes in the liturgy at all unless they clearly
nourish the faith of the people, energize the Church in its mission and make it
attractive to outsiders.
Judgements
As well as
its general sweep, this volume also deals with a range of specific issues.
Gamber asks whether it is really possible to apply the notion of
"relevance", which by definition suggests the ephemeral, to something
as timeless as the liturgy. He thinks that the Novus Ordo Missae,
spurned by traditionalists and innovators alike, is not up to the task of
providing a truly satisfactory renovated liturgy, although he approves of some
of its features: the use of the vernacular languages (while deploring the
nearuniversal suppression of Latin against the clear directive of Vatican II),
the richer and fuller selection from sacred scripture, the intercessions, the
extra eucharistic prayers and ritual simplification. He laments that the balance
between the ideas of sacrifice and meal in the understanding of the Mass that
was achieved in the early Church was lost in the medieval centuries when an
overemphasis on sacrifice came to the fore provoking a reaction in recent years
towards an equal overemphasis on the meal aspect. For Gamber, sacrifice and meal
belong together. He shows that the notion of Mass "facing the people"
has no justification whatsoever either in table custom observed at the Last
Supper or in the ritual thinking and practice of the early Church as found in
the literary sources and archeological evidence of Christian antiquity. It
originated with Luther and is associated with a loss of belief in the idea of
the Mass as a sacrifice, not only in Luther’s eucharistic theology but also in
the thinking of many Catholics in the post-Vatican II period. Gamber
sees "active participation" as integral to liturgy provided there is a
balance between inert passivity and unrelenting over-activity. He notes that
silence and being still do not necessarily mean that one is uninvolved and
enters a plea for individuals being allowed to decide the manner of their
participation. On the question of communion in the hand, Gamber observes that
any practice which for several centuries had been in general use in the Church
cannot be simply rejected in itself but concludes that its reintroduction in
modern times is pastorally imprudent. Communion in the hand represents such a
stark contrast with the previous very strict, centuriesold discipline that it
causes doubts to arise in the minds of the faithful as to whether the Church
still believes in the doctrine of the real presence. Another, very worrying
aspect of this problem is that the priest cannot be sure anymore what is going
to happen to the Sacred Host.
Klaus Gamber’s scholarly and prophetic insights into the problem of liturgical reform as displayed in this collection of essays are just as fresh and apposite today as they were thirty years ago. The issues which he identified are still with us and one wonders whether any progress at all has been made since these essays first appeared. However, Mgr Gamber (who died in 1989) would surely have approved of two recent developments within the Church which correspond closely to his own proposed path out of the liturgical mess: firstly, the revival of the traditional Roman rite (especially since the decree Ecclesia Dei adflicta), even if this rite has not yet been accorded canonical parity with the Novus Ordo; and, secondly, reconnecting liturgical change organically to the previous ritual forms (as advocated by the Adoremus movement), even if the "reform of the reform" has yet to make much impact on the life of the Church at the parish level.
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