For a long time after gaining independence from the Dutch in 1830, Belgium was one of the world’s most ardently Catholic countries, producing such luminaries as St. Damien of Molokai (1840-89), the missionary priest who died ministering to lepers, and Father Georges Lemaître (1894-1966), the priest and physicist who proposed the Big Bang theory. This article concerns another illustrious Belgian—Dom Lambert Beauduin (1873-1960), the Benedictine monk who is widely regarded as the father of the 20th-century Liturgical Movement. Not only did he launch an important movement to place the liturgy once more at the center of Catholic life, but his ideas about liturgical renewal, ecumenism, and ecclesiology make him one of the great precursors of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). What follows is a general introduction to Dom Lambert’s life and thought.¹

Born on August 5, 1873, near Liège in the east of Belgium, Octave Beauduin was the fifth of nine children born to Jean-Joseph and wife Lucie Lavigne. Like all good Catholic parents, Jean-Joseph and Lucie did their best to instill Christian virtues in their children and to pass on the Catholic Faith. The family prayed the Rosary together every evening, and often the boys play-acted the Mass. Whether or not Octave’s decision to enter the minor seminary of Saint-Trond was expected, it seems to have been accepted without question.

In 1891 Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) published the encyclical Rerum Novarum as the Church’s response to the conditions created by the Industrial Revolution. It was a charter for contemporary Catholic social teaching, especially regarding issues of labor and the right to a just wage, and its message struck a chord with Beauduin. After his ordination as a priest of the Diocese of Liège in 1897, Abbé Beauduin took a teaching position at Saint-Trond. Two years later, he joined the diocesan Society of Labor Chaplains, a young congregation of priests founded to minister to the de-Christianized masses of the working class. For reasons that are not entirely clear, he left the Labor Chaplains in 1906 and entered the Benedictine monastery of Mont-César in Louvain (Dutch: Leuven), Belgium, where he was given the name of Liège’s patron saint, Lambert.

A Different Octave

Although Dom Lambert was a formed priest with experience and ideas of his own, he was not impervious to the influence of others. Mont-César’s Irish prior at the time, Blessed Columba Marmion (1858-1923), also a former diocesan priest, brought about a profound shift in Dom Lambert’s spiritual outlook. So, too, did the writings of Dom Prosper Guéranger (1805-75), the late abbot of Solesmes in France.² So, what changed? In a 1913 journal article, Beauduin frankly admits that before coming to Mont-César nothing in his spirituality was liturgically oriented: “The liturgical acts properly speaking were for me a formality of worship that had no appreciable influence on the direction of my piety.”³ But he was not long a monk before the splendor of the liturgy captivated his heart.

Dom Lambert saw in monasticism, precisely on account of its rich liturgical life, a potentially powerful agent of (re-)evangelization. After all, it was the monasteries that birthed and shaped the fusion of Christian faith and culture known as Christendom. “We [monks] are aristocrats of the liturgy,” he lamented; “everyone should be able to nourish himself from it, even the simplest people: we must democratize the liturgy.”⁴ The notion that the treasures of the liturgy needed to be opened up to the faithful bred another insight: the liturgy is “the piety of the Church, the very dynamo of ecclesial vitality.”⁵ Catholics, therefore, should be able to find in their parish church and its liturgical celebrations the epicenter of the Christian life itself.

For Beauduin, the key to understanding the liturgy was ecclesiology—the branch of theology concerning the nature and mission of the Church. Since the Church is essentially a communion of members, hierarchically ordered with Christ as its head—the Mystical Body of Christ—the liturgy too must be both hierarchical and communal.⁶ “The Christian does not walk alone on the path of his pilgrimage,” Beauduin wrote. “The Catholic is […] a member of a visible organism.”⁷ Liturgical worship is all about communion; for when we unite ourselves to the priestly action of Christ in the liturgy, we share more fully in Christ’s life and are more deeply bonded to his Mystical Body, and this communion with the whole Christ is what makes possible our life within the eternal communion of the Holy Trinity.⁸

From Monastery to Movement

Beauduin would have an opportunity to garner support for his ideas at the National Congress of Catholic Works held at Malines (Dutch: Mechelen), Belgium, in September 1909. There, he presented a groundbreaking paper on the liturgy, La vraie prière de l’Église (“The true prayer of the Church”), expounding what Pope St. Pius X (1903-14) meant by active participation in the liturgy being “the primary and indispensable source” of “the true Christian spirit.”⁹ At the close of the Congress, proposals Beauduin had made for making Catholic piety more liturgical were incorporated into resolutions and enthusiastically passed.¹⁰ It was resolved (among other things) to popularize the Latin texts of each Sunday’s Mass and Vespers by translating them into the vernacular in hand missals; to highlight the importance of the parochial sung Mass on Sunday; to work for a wider use of Gregorian chant, so as to displace the theatrical style of music that was turning all too many churches into opera halls; to orient all devotions toward the liturgy; and to encourage annual retreats for church choirs at centers of liturgical life such as the monasteries at Mont-César and Maredsous.

Thus began the modern Liturgical Movement,¹¹ which burgeoned and spread over Europe and across the Atlantic. The movement promoted people’s editions of the Missal and other liturgical books, published liturgical periodicals, organized “liturgical weeks,” established schools of sacred music and institutes of academic liturgical study. Beauduin believed that the education and formation of the clergy was the necessary first step toward renewing liturgical piety, and so it was toward the clergy that he directed most of his educational efforts. In 1911 Mont-César inaugurated the journal Questions liturgiques (later Questions liturgiques et paroissiales), with Beauduin as editor. Its articles sought to form parish priests liturgically and keep them abreast of developments in the field. Many were of an historical nature, tracing the development and significance of different rites and customs, both in the Western and the Eastern Churches.

In response to critics of the Liturgical Movement, Beauduin published in 1914 his only monograph, La Piété de l’Église (translated into English in 1926 as Liturgy, the Life of the Church).¹² In it, he set forth his theological vision of the liturgy and specified his goals for liturgical renewal: popular participation in the Mass and sacramental rites; emphasis on sung Mass, with liturgical singing by the people; parish celebrations of Sunday Vespers and Compline; and restoration of the Liturgy of the Dead to a place of honor.

Ecumenical Expeditions

During the German occupation of Belgium in World War I, Beauduin was active in the resistance under the alias “Oscar Fraipont,” a wine merchant, until he was forced to flee to England. There, he established friendships with members of the “Anglo-Catholic” party within the Church of England, including some leading Anglican ecumenists. After the war he returned to Mont-César in 1919. From 1921 to 1925, he taught theology at Sant’Anselmo College (Benedictine) in Rome. These years saw the development of his interest in the Christian East.¹³

To foster the healing of the schism between Rome and the Orthodox Churches, Pope Pius XI (1922-39) encouraged the Benedictines to establish monasteries especially dedicated to Christian unity.¹⁴ In response, Dom Lambert founded, in 1925, the priory of the “Monks of Unity” at Amay-sur-Meuse (since 1939 at Chevetogne) in Belgium. The monastery was unique in that it was divided into two choirs, one of the Latin Rite, the other of the Byzantine Rite.¹⁵ Although the monks of both choirs were Catholic, it was hoped that the common monastic life (work, studies, meals, etc.) would help the Latins and Byzantines to better understand and appreciate each other’s tradition; this would in turn strengthen ties with the Orthodox. Since 1926 the community has published Irénikon, a French-language journal that focuses on matters of ecumenical interest.

Beauduin’s contacts with Anglicans extended his vision of Church unity westward as well. From 1921 to 1926, a series of unofficial “dialogues” or “conversations” between Catholic and Anglican scholars took place in Malines under the patronage of Cardinal Mercier.¹⁶ At the fourth of these Malines Conversations (May 1925), Mercier presented a paper by Beauduin (but without revealing the author’s identity)¹⁷ which aroused strong disapproval in both English Catholic and Roman circles. Dom Lambert argued that corporate union rather than individual conversions was the best solution to the problem of Christian disunity. Moreover, he proposed that any reunion between the Sees of Rome and Canterbury should preserve certain Anglican traditions even as it restored the large measure of autonomy that characterized the Church of England before the Reformation. In effect, the Anglican Church would be united to but not absorbed by Rome, with the Archbishop of Canterbury as its patriarch.¹⁸

Ecumenist in Exile

Pius XI’s prohibition, in 1928, of further Catholic participation in ecumenical encounters¹⁹ precipitated Beauduin’s resignation as Amay’s prior.²⁰ Over the next two years he visited Eastern Europe, Egypt, the Holy Land, and the Orthodox monasteries of Mount Athos in Greece. When the identity of the real author of the “united not absorbed” proposal was revealed in 1930, the criticism that was initially directed toward the late Cardinal Mercier (d. 1926) and the Malines Conversations turned against Beauduin and his work at Amay.

Opposition to Beauduin’s ecumenical methods (from both Roman authorities and Benedictine superiors) resulted in the monk’s eventual “exile” from Belgium. In January 1931 he was subjected to an ecclesiastical hearing in Rome, and in March 1932 ordered to live for two years at En-Calcat Abbey in the south of France.²¹ Having made the best of his time there, Dom Lambert was then dealt another blow: he was prohibited from returning to Belgium. His new exile, this time in Paris, would last 17 years. As it unfolds, we find him serving as chaplain to two convents, receiving many guests, mixing with Orthodox and Protestant scholars, writing many liturgical and ecumenical articles,²² and traveling widely to preach retreats.

In 1943 Beauduin presided over the foundation of the Centre de Pastorale Liturgique (CPL) in Paris, for the pastoral and liturgical formation of the clergy.²³ Initially the reform promoted by the Liturgical Movement “was of people’s manner of approaching, and the clergy’s celebration of, the liturgical rites.”²⁴ By the middle decades of the 20th century, however, there was increasing agitation to reform the rites themselves, whether for reasons of pastoral expediency or antiquarian enthusiasms. In the inaugural issue (January 1945) of the CPL’s periodical, La Maison-Dieu, Beauduin cautions against (in Dom Alcuin Reid’s words) “zealous liturgists who, operating on the assumption that the current Liturgy of the Church is an impoverishment and a deformation of Christian worship which has long since lost its ancient evangelical dynamism, can become audacious reformers.”²⁵ He was greatly encouraged when Pope Pius XII (1939-58) issued the encyclical Mediator Dei in 1947, for it gave official underpinning to the Liturgical Movement while explicitly rejecting liturgical “archeologism”—that is, a preference for more ancient rites and practices simply because they are more ancient.²⁶

Vatican II Visionary

Beauduin’s years in France made possible a blossoming of his friendship with a man he had first met two decades earlier: Msgr. Angelo Roncalli (later John XXIII, 1958-63), who came to Paris as papal nuncio at the end of 1944.²⁷ Beauduin was finally permitted to return to Belgium in 1951. Now at the age of 78, he retired to the community at Chevetogne and lived there until his death on January 11, 1960. How gratified he must have felt when, a few years earlier, Roncalli (then Patriarch of Venice) publicly opined that the best method of working for the reunion of the churches was that of Dom Lambert Beauduin.

At this point we can better appreciate Beauduin’s influence on Vatican Council II. His true legacy, which he did not live to see, is the endorsement and sponsorship of the Liturgical Movement by an ecumenical council of the Church. More than a few French bishops at the council were impacted by Beauduin’s liturgical retreats and his work with the CPL, and several council periti (theologians who consulted the bishops) had been his friends or admirers. To facilitate people’s participation in the liturgy, the council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (1963) called for the liturgical formation of both clergy and laity. Half a century earlier, Beauduin understood that formation in the spirit of the liturgy is the necessary precondition for realizing St. Pius X’s call for more active participation.²⁸

Beauduin saw an important link between the nascent liturgical and ecumenical movements. At the heart of the liturgy is the unity in faith and charity of the Mystical Body, effected and intensified through Eucharistic communion.²⁹ In his day the Catholic Church viewed Christians outside her fold only as individuals. At Vatican II she came to grips with the collective reality, in theological terms, of Christian communities separated from the Church of Rome. The conciliar Decree on Ecumenism (1964) recognizes these communities as ecclesial realities, even while it assesses them as more or less defective in view of all that Christ has entrusted to his Church.³⁰ Consequently the door was opened for official discussions, on an equal footing, between the Catholic Church and other Christian bodies. Had he lived just a few more years, Beauduin would have delighted to see theologians from different Christian traditions place age-old controversies in a new light as they explore paths to reconciliation.³¹

Assessments and Achievements

Some remarks are in order concerning the chief cause of Beauduin’s ecclesiastical troubles: his approach to ecumenism. What is problematic about Beauduin’s vision of reconciliation was not his contention that reunion need not demand absorption. We need only point to (as he himself did) the Eastern Churches that are in full communion with the Church of Rome but do not belong to it; that is to say, they are distinguished from the Latin Church, or the Roman patriarchate, by their different liturgical rites (Byzantine, Coptic, Armenian, etc.), traditions, disciplines, laws, and hierarchies. The real problem, it seems, is that Beauduin turned a blind eye to the Protestant elements in Anglicanism.³² While reintegration does not mean an absolute suppression of all that might apparently be distinctive of Anglicanism (or, for that matter, Eastern Orthodoxy), it does mean the purification of that which is a mixture of truth and error, for the greater glory of God and his Church.

Like most intellectual and spiritual movements in the history of the Church, the Liturgical Movement was subject to excesses and aberrations. Dom Lambert remained open to the possibility of changes in the liturgy, but he did not equate renewal with reform, either by advocating the restoration of ancient rites (real or imagined) or by unauthorized experimentation. He based his liturgical work on the principle that the liturgy belongs to the Church, and so “he took it as she offered it and urged that it be known, understood, and carried out as it was—that is, as it was meant to be.”³³ Thus, to his credit, the Liturgical Movement in Belgium “never gave into romantic antiquarianism or wild innovationism.”³⁴

Although Dom Lambert Beauduin died before Vatican II opened in 1962, he knew what lay on the ecclesiastical horizon. In January 1959, one year before the monk’s death, Beauduin’s old friend, Papa Roncalli, announced his intention to convoke an ecumenical council to renew the life of the Church. Whatever Beauduin might have made of that council and its aftermath, he was like a Moses who saw the Promised Land from afar but could not enter it.

1. My principal source is the biography by Sonya A. Quitslund, Beauduin: A Prophet Vindicated (New York: Newman Press, 1973).
2. Like Beauduin and Marmion, Guéranger was a secular priest before becoming a Benedictine monk. After the destruction wrought by the French Revolution, he restored Benedictine life at Solesmes in 1833. Guéranger’s historical research on the liturgy, together with the abbey’s liturgical practice (which included a renewal of Gregorian chant), prepared the ground for the Liturgical Movement. His multivolume work on the liturgical year, L’Année liturgique (published between 1841 and 1901), has been frequently reprinted and translated.
3. Quitslund, Beauduin, 11. To elaborate, Beauduin says (ibid., 10-11) that his Eucharistic piety was related more to the Real Presence than to the sacrificial action of the Mass itself, since “the missal was for me a closed and sealed book.” While he rightly valued such practices as visits to our Lord in the tabernacle, adoration of the Blessed Sacrament exposed on the altar, and Benediction, he gave little thought to the idea of offering oneself in union with Christ’s sacrifice sacramentally represented on the altar. As for the Divine Office, “I have no memory of having recited my breviary with understanding and love; the psalms, the readings, the prayers were without resonance in my soul.” His library “contained neither missal, nor ritual, nor pontifical, nor ceremonial of bishops, nor martyrologies, nor commentaries on these; all these books in which circulates the traditional interior life of the Church were for me obscure books.”
4. Quitslund, Beauduin, 16.
5. Quitslund, Beauduin, 16; emphasis in original.
6. Implicit in this is what is termed “eucharistic ecclesiology,” which posits a foundational connection between the Church and the Eucharist. Christ’s Mystical Body, the Church, is generated from his Eucharistic Body; thus, liturgical participation brings about a deeper participation in the life of Christ, above all through the worthy reception of Holy Communion, which in turn strengthens the unity of the Mystical Body. The recovery of eucharistic ecclesiology in the West is one of the good fruits borne of Catholic contact with Orthodox theologians who emigrated to Western Europe after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Beauduin traveled in these circles, first in Rome and later in Paris.
7. Lambert Beauduin, O.S.B., Liturgy, the Life of the Church, trans. Virgil Michel, O.S.B. (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1926), 12; emphasis in original. The idea of the Church as Mystical Body fell out of favor in Counter-Reformation Catholicism and was recovered largely through Johann Adam Möhler (1796-1838). It entered magisterial teaching in the pontificates of Leo XIII (Divinum Illud, 1897) and Pius XII (Mystici Corporis Christi, 1943), and strongly influenced the Liturgical Movement.
8. Beauduin, “Essai de manuel fondamental [II],” Questions Liturgiques 3 (1912-13): 271-79.
9. St. Pius X, Motu Proprio Tra le Sollecitudini (1903).
10. The proposals were actually given voice by the historian Godefroid Kurth, although “[t]here is no doubt as to the real author of Kurth’s moving words” (Quitslund, Beauduin, 24). Aware that Kurth’s past efforts to promote the liturgy were better known than his own, Beauduin secured the historian’s collaboration in advance of the Congress.
11. For a brief overview of the movement’s prehistory (which dates back to the 18th-century Enlightenment), see Aidan Nichols, O.P., Looking at the Liturgy: A Critical View of Its Contemporary Form (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 11–48.
12. The translator was Dom Virgil Michel (1890-1938) of Collegeville, Minnesota. Michel gave the Liturgical Movement great impetus in the United States and throughout the anglophone world through his journal Orate Fratres (later Worship) and other publications.
13. Owing in part to his friendship with another ecumenical pioneer, the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky (1865-1944). Sheptytsky was a strong advocate for the rights and traditions of Eastern Christians (e.g., he opposed the Second Polish Republic’s policy of forced conversion of Byzantine-rite Catholic and Orthodox Ukrainians to Latin-rite Catholicism) and worked tirelessly for improved relations with the Orthodox.
14. Pius XI, Apostolic Letter Equidem Verba (1924) to the Abbot Primate of the Benedictine Order.
15. The Byzantine church was consecrated in 1957 and the Latin church in 1996. In 1990 the monastery was raised to an abbey.
16. Désiré-Joseph Cardinal Mercier (1851-1926), Archbishop of Malines and Primate of Belgium from 1906. The initial impetus for the conversations came from the “high church” Anglican layman Charles L. Wood, 2nd Viscount Halifax (1839-1934), and the French Vincentian priest Fernand Portal (1855-1926). After the cardinal’s death in January 1926, the energy of the Malines Conversations greatly diminished.
17. Dom Lambert was never present at these meetings. He participated indirectly (through Cardinal Mercier) and discreetly. His paper, L’Église Anglicane Unie non Absorbée (“The Church of England United Not Absorbed”), was written in collaboration with Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky and presented as the work of an anonymous canonist.
18. Before its separation from Rome in 1534 the English Church was in the Roman patriarchate, although the liturgy used throughout the British Isles was the Sarum Rite, a medieval recension of the Roman Rite with an admixture of other, principally northern French customs.
19. Pius XI, Encyclical Mortalium Animos (1928). Apparently as a rebuke against the Malines Conversations (which at first he tacitly supported), the pope stated that Christian unity “can only be promoted by promoting the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it, for in the past they have unhappily left it” (no. 10).
20. Without rejecting altogether the work for individual conversions, the Monks of Unity did not make active convert-seeking a part of their monastic life. From the start, Dom Lambert opposed proselytizing tactics, especially when aimed at Russian émigrés in the midst of the moral and physical sufferings of exile. The ecumenical method adopted at Amay was “psychological,” seeking first of all the creation of an atmosphere of understanding and mutual esteem. However, the Sacred Congregation for the Eastern Church (as it was then called) intended Amay to be a lynchpin of Rome’s longterm plan for the conversion of Orthodox Russians to Eastern Catholicism.
21. On orders to leave Amay in 1930, Beauduin moved to the monastery of Tancrémont. In July 1931 he accepted exile from Belgium, and in November went to Strasbourg in the east of France. Just four months later, he was banished to En-Calcat, “a particularly strict monastery in an isolated setting suitable for receiving difficult cases” (Quitslund, Beauduin, 178).
22. Since restrictions on his writings had been imposed, some of the articles of an ecumenical nature were attributed to someone else or simply signed “XXX.”
23. Dom Alcuin Reid, in The Organic Development of the Liturgy: The Principles of Liturgical Reform and their Relation to the Twentieth Century Liturgical Movement Prior to the Second Vatican Council (Farnborough, UK: St Michael’s Abbey Press, 2004), 134, expresses the central idea of “pastoral liturgy” (and not simply “liturgy”) as being “wherever necessary the Liturgy is to be adapted in order to accommodate the perceived needs of the people.” See also: Guido Rodheudt, “Pastoral Liturgy and the Church’s Mission in Parishes—The Dangerous Hermeneutic of a Concept,” in Sacred Liturgy: The Source and Summit of the Life and Mission of the Church, ed. Alcuin Reid (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014), 273-89; Alcuin Reid, “Pastoral Liturgy Revisited,” in T&T Clark Companion to Liturgy, ed. Alcuin Reid (London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 341-63.
24. Alcuin Reid, “The Twentieth-Century Liturgical Movement,” in T&T Clark Companion to Liturgy, 156.
25. Reid, Organic Development, 124.
26. Pius XII describes liturgical archeologism (also called “antiquarianism”) as an agenda of reform that would “restore everything indiscriminately to its ancient condition” while denying the value of historical developments in the liturgy.
27. The two had first met at the Greek College in Rome in March 1925, soon after Roncalli’s appointment as apostolic delegate to Bulgaria. In 1930 Roncalli went to Amay to see Beauduin again and to visit the young monastery. Thus began a long friendship.
28. Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), no. 14: “Yet it would be futile to entertain any hopes of realizing this [actuosa participatio] unless the pastors themselves, in the first place, become thoroughly imbued with the spirit and power of the liturgy, and undertake to give instruction about it.”
29. See Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 1398.
30. This recognition is the basis for Catholic involvement in ecumenism. As per the Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio, the communities to which other Christians belong are called “churches” if they have retained the apostolic succession of bishops and so enjoy a full sacramental life; otherwise they are “ecclesial communities.”
31. For an overview of these bilateral and multilateral dialogues, see Frederick M. Bliss, S.M., Catholic and Ecumenical: History and Hope (Franklin, WI: Sheed & Ward, 1999).
32. Geoffrey Hull, in The Banished Heart: Origins of Heteropraxis in the Catholic Church (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 267, alleges that Beauduin subscribed to the Anglican “branch theory” of the Church, which holds that the one Church of Christ is composed of three main branches or communions, all Catholic in essentials: Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Eastern Orthodox. Quitslund (whom Hull cites) does not explicitly support this claim; however, for all intents and purposes Beauduin did place the Anglican Communion on the same footing as the Orthodox Churches. Which means he would at least have had to consider the Protestant errors in Anglicanism as capable of a Catholic interpretation. Moreover, he could not have made the branch theory his own without dismissing Pope Leo XIII’s declaration (in the 1896 Bull Apostolicae Curae) that Anglican ordinations are “absolutely null and utterly void.” Whether he did or not, it is possible that Beauduin thought the question would soon be moot, for at the 1920 Lambeth Conference the Anglican bishops appeared willing to submit to conditional ordination so as to place beyond all doubt the validity of their ministry.
33. Quitslund, Beauduin, 20; emphasis in original. For corroboration, see Reid, Organic Development, 68-76.
34. Romey P. Marshall and Michael J. Taylor, S.J., Liturgy and Christian Unity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 128. Cf. Quitslund, Beauduin, 20.