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Lay Appropriation of the Sacraments in the later Middle Ages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Eamon Duffy
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Perhaps the most crucial single utterance of the Second Vatican Council, at least in terms of impact on our shared experience as Catholics, occurs at paragraph 14 of the Council’s constitution on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. This was the first of the conciliar documents to be promulgated, and in many ways its most bloodily contested production. The paragraph in question runs like this:

Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful should be led to that full, conscious and active participation in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy, and to which the Christian people, “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a redeemed people” (1 Pet 2: 9, 4-5.) have a right and obligation by reason of their baptism.

In the restoration and promotion of the sacred liturgy the full and active participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all else, for it is the primary and indispensable source from which the faithful are to derive the true Christian spirit. Therefore, in all their apostolic activity, pastors of souls should energetically set about achieving it through the required pedagogy.

“Full, conscious and active participation”, pastoral energy and liturgical pedagogy: these were momentous notions, laden with an agenda whose implications were sketched out in the rest of the document, and which were embodied in the reforms which followed. The summons to “active participation”, indeed, a phrase which occurs sixteen times in all, was singled out subsequently as the main refrain of the document.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 77 , Issue 900 , January 1996 , pp. 53 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Sacrosanctum Concilium 14.

2 Jungmann, J A, “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy”. in Vorgrimler, H., ed., Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, New York 1967 p 17Google Scholar.

3 SC 21.

4 SC 34.

5 Bossy, J, “The Mass as a Social Institution”, Past and Present 100, p 61Google Scholar.

6 Louis, Bouyer, Life and Liturgy. London 1956 p 15Google Scholar.

7 For the importance of Jungmann’s views in determining the character of Sacrosanctum Concilium, see Annibale, Bugnini. The Reform of the Liturgy 19484–1975. Collegeville, Minnesota 1990, p 12Google Scholar.

8 Jungmann, J A. Pastoral Liturgy. London 1962 pp 1–101Google Scholar.

9 Life and Liturgy, p 31.

10 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, chapter vi.

11 Peter Cramer, Baptism and Change in the Early Middle Ages, Cambridge 1993 pp 242–3. My thinking about this whole topic owes a good deal to this lively and stimulating book.

12 The Tablet, July 1995, pp 867–8.

13 Pastoral Liturgy. p 73.

14 For which see, for example, Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi, Cambridge 1991.

15 J Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400–1700, Oxford 1985, ch 4.

16 Cramer, Baptism and Change. pp 267–290.

17 Bossy, Christianity in the West, pp 15–6.

18 Duffy, E. The Stripping of the Altars, New Haven and London 1992, chap 8Google Scholar.

19 See the discussion of the relation between “official” liturgy and the sacramentals in Scribner, R W, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany, London 1987 pp 17–47Google Scholar.

20 Pastoral Liturgy p 63

21 For all this, The Stripping of the Altars, pp 125–7.

22 For example Margaret, Aston, ”Corpus Christi and Corpus Regni: Heresy and the Peasant’s Revolt”, Past and present 143 (1994) pp 3–47Google Scholar.

23 Dobson, R B, (ed) The Peasants Revolt Of 1381, London 1983CrossRefGoogle Scholar, pp 29ff.

24 Riley, H T (ed) Gesta Abbatum Monasterii Sancti Albani a Thoma Walsingham, vol 3, London 1869, pp 308–9Google Scholar.

25 Stripping of the Altars, pp 127–8.

26 See Annibale Bugnini’s revealing remark that the liturgical movement was “a fruit produced by the thought and prayer of elite minds and then gradually shared with ever wider circles of the faithful”—Reform of the Liturgy, p 3.

27 John, Matthias (editor) Introducing David Jones: a selection of his writings. London 1980, p 31Google Scholar; reproduced by kind permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.