In the November issue of Adoremus Bulletin, Father Thomas Kocik gives a brief biography of Dom Lambert Beauduin: The Moses of the 20th-century Liturgical Movement. To accompany that biography, Adoremus provides the following brief excerpt from Dom Lambert’s 1914 book, Liturgy, The Life of the Church.

Chapter I: The Fundamental Principle

The superabundant source of all supernatural life is the sacerdotal power of the High Priest of the New Covenant.

But this sanctifying power Jesus Christ does not exercise here below except through the ministry of a visible sacerdotal hierarchy.

Hence close union with this hierarchy in the exercise of its priesthood is for every Christian and Catholic soul the authentic mode of union with the priesthood of Jesus Christ, and consequently the primary and indispensable source of supernatural life.

The truth expressed in the second statement above is the keystone of the arch of every Catholic edifice. This cannot be insisted upon too strongly. Universal Teacher and King of all times, Christ has transmitted all His power of teaching and of spiritual government to His visible hierarchy. Grand as this truth is, there is one still more sublime: The Eternal Priest has communicated to this hierarchy the very energies of His sanctifying power; through it he realizes the sanctification of the new humanity.

Hence there is in our midst, in the spiritual society of which we are members, a visible organism enriched by the priesthood of Jesus Christ, whose supernatural function it is to lead Christian souls to live superabundantly the life of God. Undoubtedly the immediate action of God upon souls is not restricted by this new dispensation. But the soul that is desirous of living under the sanctifying influence of Christ—and is not that the intense desire of every interior soul?—will have nothing so much at heart as the maintenance of an intimate and continuous contact with the priestly acts of the visible hierarchy.

What are these priestly and hierarchical acts, the primary and indispensable source of the Christian life?

From what has been said above, the answer should be readily found. It is the sanctifying mission of the Catholic hierarchy (munus ministerii—the mission of the ministry) to make of us living and holy oblations, offered daily unto the glory of the Father, in union with the unique sacrifice of Jesus Christ—a mission that is destined to extend all the divine energies of the eternal priesthood unto all generations.

Conscious of the primary importance of this mission, and solicitous of giving it full efficacy, the hierarchy has organized here below a sublime group of sacred functions in which the priesthood of Christ finds its full expression. This group of functions embraces every priestly act of the visible hierarchy. It is, in a word, the Liturgy. What a wonderful work when viewed in all its full import! Let us describe it briefly.

Central in it, dominating and unifying all the rest, is the Eucharistic Sacrifice, by virtue of which the faithful assembled in brotherly love daily assimilate to themselves the work of the Redemption. In this work the priestly power does not leave them to their own devices. A series of pious readings, of praises, of supplications, of rites and chants, inculcate the supreme importance of the great Mystery, and place it within the grasp of their souls. From the altar, the center of the supernatural life, radiate the other sacraments, which the priestly power dispenses to them by means of various acts of worship.

Centering around this hearth of divine life is the Divine Office, which establishes an uninterrupted exchange of praise and blessings between heaven and earth, associates the Christian people, through their priests, with the Liturgy of eternity, and diffuses the blessings of the morning sacrifice over all the hours of day and night.

Next to the sacraments, the mysteries of the life of our divine Savior are destined for the sanctification of men. Hence the priestly power of the Church, by means of the liturgical cycle, revives in our mind the great events of the Gospels, and at every liturgical season presents, so to speak, a new aspect of the life of the divine Savior.

In order to intensify this sanctifying action in souls, the sacred hierarchy groups the people of God in families, or parishes, and confides the care of these to co-operators in its priesthood. These families each have their own central hearth, “house of God and gate of heaven,” where everything, from vestibule to apse, from floor to roof, speaks of holy purifications and anointing. They all have their priest, who “offers, blesses, presides, instructs and baptizes;” their holy meetings, where all the brethren transform themselves into Christ through the action of the visible priesthood; their patron saints, their feasts, their anniversaries of joy and sorrow! i.e., their parish life, the soul of which is the Liturgy, the common source of supernatural and hierarchical life.

Finally, inferior in rank, but also of great importance, are the many sacramentals, by means of which the priestly powers communicate a sacred character to the very world in which the brothers of Christ dwell. Blessed by the hand of the minister of Christ, our natural life loses its profane character and is permeated by the supernatural. Places, times, individuals, dwellings, elements, years, days and hours—all, even our food and our sleep, are blessed and in some way share with us the supernatural economy. Being “new creatures,” the members of the risen Christ are placed by the creative priesthood of the Church into an anticipated springtime of eternal glory.

Such, viewed in its entirety, is the wonderful sanctifying activity of the visible priesthood of Jesus Christ, which everywhere and at all periods of time extends its supernatural influence over the whole Christian world. To designate it more exactly still, it is the totality of acts performed at the instance of the priests according to the fixed formulas of the liturgical books.

The traditional language of the Church expresses it by one word: the Liturgy.

_{Image Source: AB/Lawrence OP on Flickr. Detail from the 13th-century apse mosaic of St John Lateran}