Liturgical Movement

The Liturgical Movement began as a 19th-century movement of scholarship for the reform of worship within the Roman Catholic Church. It has developed over the last century and a half and has affected many other Christian Churches, including the Church of England and other churches of the Anglican Communion, and some Protestant churches. A similar reform in the Church of England and Anglican Communion, known as the Oxford Movement, began to change theology and liturgy in the United Kingdom and United States in the mid-nineteenth century. The Liturgical Movement has been one of the major influences on the process of the Ecumenical Movement, in favor of reversing the divisions which began at the Reformation.

The movement has a number of facets. First, it was an attempt to rediscover the worship practices of the Middle Ages, which in the 19th century was held to be the ideal form of worship and expression of faith. Second, it developed as scholarship to study and analyze the history of worship. Third, it broadened into an examination of the nature of worship as an organic human activity. Fourth, it attempted to renew worship in order that it could be more expressive for worshippers and as an instrument of teaching and mission. Fifth, it has been a movement attempting to bring about reconciliation among the churches on both sides of the Protestant Reformation.

At the Reformation of the sixteenth century, while some of the new Protestant Churches abandoned the old Latin Mass, the Roman Catholic Church reformed and revised it. The split between Roman Catholic and Protestant churches was in part a difference about beliefs regarding the language to be used in the liturgy. A Mass in Latin, some argued, would be something one would primarily see and hear as a sacred event; a vernacular service, one in the language of the worshipper, would be one which the worshipper was supposed to understand and take part in. The revision of the Roman liturgy which followed, and which provided a single use for the whole Western Church, emphasized the sacramental and sacrificial nature of the Eucharist, rather than a direction urged by reformers toward lay participation. The Liturgical Movement, which originated in the work to restore the liturgy to its ancient principles, resulted in changes that have affected both Roman Catholics and Protestants of various denominations.

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