On the face of it, the liturgical movement is one of the big religious success stories of the twentieth century, a paradigm case of the movement of the Holy Spirit in the Churches. From small beginnings, Pius X’s encouragement of frequent communion, his reform of the breviary and his interest in Church music on the one hand and the renewed scholarly concern with ancient liturgical texts, manifested by men like Edmund Bishop, on the other, sprang up in Benedictine monasteries like Mont-César and Maria Laach a movement to rediscover and revive the principles embodied in the great liturgies of the patristic period. These principles have gained wider and wider acceptance and the official seal of approval was placed on them, first of all in a rather grudging manner by Pius XII in his encyclical Mediator Dei (1947) and then wholeheartedly in the Liturgical Constitution of the Second Vatican Council promulgated in 1963. Parallel movements in the Church of England and among the Lutherans only confirm the authentic character of liturgical developments.

Yet, despite the evident signs of the movement of the Spirit, there are some disquieting features in the present situation. A substantial minority on the right remains stubbornly unreconciled to any change, while on the left there are some who are preoccupied with ‘underground’ or domestic liturgies and others who question any special concern with liturgical forms as, in effect, a gigantic irrelevance and a distraction from the Christian’s primarily political role. Consequently, it is worth the effort to distance ourselves from the liturgical movement and its principles and enquire if, among the many sound intuitions into the nature of worship which it has promoted, there are some attitudes and approaches which are of more doubtful value.