Don Alcuin Reid: Elements of the New Liturgical Movement

I had the pleasure of meeting Dom Alcuin Reid a few years ago and hearing him speak at the Toronto Oratory following the introduction of The Organic Development of the Liturgy. Intentionally, Dom Reid did not deal with the post Vatican II liturgical changes but up to that point. Reading it one could see clearly how organic development of the liturgy desired by the Fathers of the Council was jettisoned for innovation and fabrication. In this dissertation, Dom Reid covers what many of us have been saying for years. 

The liturgical banality that now exists and the apparent and real shelving of the "Reform of the Reform" is of a temporary nature. The current climate in Rome is not friendly to this or to the traditional rites. 

This will not last forever; in fact, it will not last very long.

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Elements of the New Liturgical Movement

Dom Alcuin Reid

St Mary’s Norwalk, CT & Holy Innocents’, New York

  June 2014

Introduction

This presentation is not an academic paper on an area of liturgical study. Rather, it is intended as a reflection on some elements of what is loosely grouped together under the title of “the new liturgical movement” — and not so much the important website that uses this title, as the many different initiatives throughout the world taking their inspiration from the call of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in his seminal book The Spirit of the Liturgy for “a movement toward the Liturgy and toward the right way of celebrating the Liturgy, inwardly and outwardly.”

I hope that these reflections will promote further thought and discussion on this--and indeed that we shall have time for at least some discussion together later. Let us begin with Cardinal Ratzinger’s 1997 assertion that:The Church stands and falls with the Liturgy. When the adoration of the divine Trinity declines, when the faith no longer appears in its fullness in the Liturgy of the Church, when man’s words, his thoughts, his intentions are suffocating him, then faith will have lost the place where it is expressed and where it dwells. For that reason, the true celebration of the Sacred Liturgy is the centre of any renewal of the Church whatever.

Read all of the dissertation here at academia.edu.