I have always thought that the history of liturgy was too important to be left to liturgists, since they tended to have too much skin in the game and so shaped their narratives in teleological ways that argued from and for their own standpoints. However, Fr Lang, an Oratorian priest and liturgist of distinction, has proved me wrong. Fr Lang's curial experience, combined with his longstanding knowledge of, and deep familiarity with, early Christian theology and worship, has clearly made him alive to the organic ways in which the Roman Mass has developed from the time of Ambrose's Eucharistic Prayer in the fourth century CE to arrive at the Missale romanum of 1570. The latter, for Lang, does not represent either the inevitable outcome of previous developments or a liturgical straightjacket that was imposed by Rome at the expense of local and regional practices—but rather was adopted often alongside the latter, which continued to persist not only in such distinct forms as the Ambrosian rite at Milan or the Mozarabic rite at Toledo, but also more widely wherever such local traditions could be shown to have at least a 200-year history.
This was no less true for Lang as it was for his mentor Joseph Ratzinger, who the former quotes with approval when the future Benedict XVI, in response to attempts to derive the Eucharistic liturgy from the Last Supper, observed: “the Last Supper is the foundation of the dogmatic content of the Christian Eucharist, not of its liturgical form. The latter does not yet exist” (37, italics added). As Lang puts it pithily later in the same chapter, “The search for the origins of the Christian liturgy certainly vindicates Newman over Erasmus” (48). In other words, given the fragmentary nature of the surviving evidence, ad fontes is less appropriate than the insight of Lang's fellow Oratorian, encapsulated in the very title of John Henry Newman's Essay on the development of Christian doctrine. One particular occasion, according to Lang, where twentieth-century liturgical scholarship has allowed itself be led astray relates to the misattribution of the so-called Apostolic tradition (a Eucharistic prayer in the Church order) to Hippolytus of Rome, which would thus be seen as representative of liturgical practice in early third-century Rome, when in fact it was not written by a single author but was a compilation of Near Eastern (likely Egyptian or Syrian) origin. As Lang drily observes in an unanswerable footnote (82n9; picked up again in 106n8), this invented tradition—though he prefers the more polite adjective “reconstructed”— “has had significant impact on liturgical reform after the Second Vatican Council.”
Similarly, far from returning ad fontes, post-Vatican II liturgical reform did away with any remaining vestiges of early medieval Roman stational and processional liturgy, which were still to be found in the Mass formulary for specific days in the temporal cycle of the Tridentine missal. Lang concludes his scrupulous analysis of the pope's stational liturgy by reminding us that the so-called Ordo romanus I, which gives us the oldest available description of the ritual shape of the Roman Mass, is a script for liturgical actors who were mostly clerics. After problematizing attempts to “essentialize” and identify a specifically “Roman” character to the Roman Mass, Lang moves on to argue in two capstone chapters (6 and 7), respectively, that the experiences of Frankish and Franciscan appropriations and adaptations of the Roman rite immeasurably enriched their source. In due course, the “mixed Roman-Frankish Rite was established in the papal city itself and became the foundation for further liturgical development in the Latin Church” (255) before the mendicant Franciscans provided the more mobile papal court with a liturgy better adapted to its needs than the stational one was. However, Lang notes that for liturgists of the mid-twentieth century, such adaptations were disapproved of, anachronistically, as not corresponding to a “pristine Roman tradition” (255).
By contrast, Lang considers that this mutually beneficial dialectic between prescription and experience continued in the later Middle Ages, which accordingly should definitely not be seen as representing a period of decline. Instead, Lang treats the reader to a sprightly and well-informed survey of the literature that has done so much to help us recover the participative role played by the laity—whose “liturgical literacy” was more developed than hitherto thought—as well as to appreciate the degree to which the Roman Mass was a synaesthetic experience, engaging all the senses. Lang also makes the crucial point that the advent of print actually brought about an even greater diversity, rather than uniformity, in liturgical books, since diocesan bishops did not have effective control over local printers.
The book closes with a very well-informed treatment of the immediate context to the publication of the revised Missale romanum of 1570. It is perhaps indicative of the hegemony enjoyed by the scholars who have quietly imposed a post-Vatican II liturgical “consensus” on the historiography that Lang's footnotes are mainly to primary sources. One important detail that does not feature in the invariably negative coverage of the Trent's treatment of liturgy, which had previously eluded me, was that in early April 1562 the Spanish bishops presented a memorandum to the papal legates who oversaw proceedings that suggested: “a unified breviary and missal ‘used in all churches’ with a separate proper of saints for each diocese” (346, emphasis added). Although this initiative did not get anywhere at the Council, the promulgation of its decrees within Spain and its overseas empire did explicitly allow for the continued celebration of existing local cults.
In his lucid discussion of the shape of the Tridentine mass, Lang notes that although it stood in continuity with the rites used by the papal curia in the thirteenth century and even, in parts, with the earlier papal Stational Mass of Ordo Romanus I, it also embraced, indeed gave priority to, the so-called low Mass, which, as its Latin name, Missa lecta, suggests, was spoken rather than sung by the celebrant. This emphasis on the low Mass better suited the liturgy in places that lacked the liturgical infrastructure—singers and assistants—for celebration of high Mass, which of course included not only the extra-European missionary lands but also the “other Indies” in the rural backwaters of the Old World. This final chapter also includes an excellent discussion of the architectural, spatial, and sonic contexts within which the authoritative contribution of Carlo Borromeo, Cardinal-archishop of Milan, whose influence was global in scope, rightly receives the lion's share of the author's attention. In conclusion, I believe that this volume represents a major achievement.
