Tuesday 6 October 2009

Presentation on the 1911 - 13 Reform

This morning I delivered a short presentation giving an overview of the changes to the Roman Liturgy during the period 1911 - 13 as part of a study day under the auspices of the Society of St. Catharine of Siena and the Parish Priest of Our Lady of the Rosary, Blackfen.

A pdf of the presentation may be found by following this link.

The file is over 5MB so may take a little while to download.

I very much enjoyed giving the presentation, I trust those present found it of interest.

7 comments:

Fr Michael Brown said...

It looks like it was a fascinating talk. Sorry I couldn`t be there. I`d be interested to know what conclusions were reached.

Rubricarius said...

Fr. Brown,

I rather ran out of time and had to speed up for the last five minutes, so no conclusions were reached. I posed the question of whether such a radical re-structuring of the liturgy by committee work set a precedent for future reform.

A participant asked, during the excellent lunch Fr. Finigan provided for us, whether I agreed that the 'Pius X' rubrics were more complex than those that preceded them. They most certainly are more complex and we speculated that in the face of such complexity many clergy would have embraced the 'simplification' of the rubrics some 40 years later.

Even Archbishop Lefebvre, when consulted in 1956 about proposed reforms, was in favour of some simplification as his response indicates in the '1948' Commission for General Liturgical Reform's documentation.

Fr. Durham said...

I regret not having been able to attend your presentation. I am glad that you have put a powerpoint presentation online -- it is quite fascinating and very informative. God bless you for the valuable work that you are doing.

Rubricarius said...

Thank you Fr. Durham for your kind words.

I am hoping that it may be possible to deliver an improved version at another venue in due course.

Father John Boyle said...

Fascinating for me, relative ignorant of the evolution of the Divine Office. Modifying the liturgy is clearly not a new thing in the Church! Thanks for a very enlightening presentation.

Rubricarius said...

Thank you Fr. Boyle,

The 1911-13 reform was quite a shake up. Running out of time we didn't really have time to discuss implications but it certainly demonstrated that the Church was capable of making significant changes - be they good or otherwise.

Mark said...

Well, I'm very glad to have finally read this, and just a bit miffed I could have been there in person!!