The previous entry of this series discussed the Breviarium Romanum of 1568 and the Missale Romanum of 1570. These new editions were only the first steps towards an unprecedented standardization of the Latin liturgical tradition. In 1588, as part of his reform of the papal curia, Pope Sixtus V created the Sacred Congregation of Rites, which was to ensure the observance of liturgical norms and to give binding answers to questions arising in liturgical practice. For celebrations of bishops, Pope Clement VIII promulgated the Pontificale Romanum in 1596 and the Caeremoniale Episcoporum in 1600. In 1614, Pope Paul V issued the Rituale Romanum for sacraments and sacramentals that were not reserved to bishops.¹ Unlike in the late medieval period, the printing of liturgical books at this time was now effectively controlled by ecclesiastical authorities, and this meant that a single set of liturgical books could be produced and distributed in a global Church.

It is important to recall that St. Pius V did not make the new Missale Romanum compulsory for dioceses or religious orders that could legitimately claim a particular liturgical tradition older than 200 years. However, the desire to strengthen the visible unity and cohesion of the Catholic Church, which had already been strongly felt at Trent, led to the adoption of the Roman books even where an older tradition existed, with notable exceptions that included the Ambrosian Rite in Milan, the Mozarabic Rite in Toledo, and the particular uses of the Carmelite and Dominican Orders. This liturgical unification was not forced by the papacy but was widely thought to be an appropriate step taken for the good of the Catholic Church at the time. The English historian and liturgical scholar Adrian Fortescue (1874–1923), who had considerable misgivings about this course of events, conceded that “the Protestant revolt of the sixteenth century had its natural result in increased centralization among those who remained faithful.”²

The turn towards early modernity was a decisive moment in the long shift from oral to written culture, with profound consequences for the actual celebration of the liturgy. The more supple observance of oral customs and traditions had gradually given way to the rigor of detailed written instructions. The codification of ritual reached a climax in the widely received second edition of the Ordo Missae (1502) of the papal master of ceremonies Johann Burchard, which fed into the Ritus servandus of the missal of 1570.

Unity and Diversity

Subsequent editions of the Missale Romanum added new feasts of saints but only made very minor revisions to the existing prayers, readings, chants and rubrics. However, normative liturgical books do not simply produce uniformity in the ways in which the liturgy is celebrated. The Tridentine reforms had to be implemented locally, and this happened to varying degrees and at different speeds. Particular customs and traditions not only persisted but even gained new vigor where dedicated and attentive pastors applied the council’s decrees.³ Within the unity of the rite, each celebration of the Mass is to some extent conditioned by its particular settings and circumstances. As Joseph Ratzinger observed, “A liturgy in an Upper Bavarian village looks very different from High Mass in a French cathedral, which in turn seems quite unlike Mass in a southern Italian parish, and again that looks different from what you find in a mountain village in the Andes, and so on.”⁴

The study of liturgy in its formative period is rightly focused on normative sources, such as sacramentaries, lectionaries, chant books, and ordines. These sources are prime witnesses for the development not only of liturgical rites but also of theological concepts, pastoral attitudes, and religious mentalities. Because of the remarkable stability of the rite, writing liturgical history after Trent requires a different approach. For a fuller picture, we need to look at a wider range of sources that convey an idea of how the liturgy was performed and experienced, including spiritual and pastoral treatises, architectural and artistic monuments, and literary works. Such work largely remains to be done.

People’s Participation

The question of the lay faithful’s participation in the sacred liturgy became ever more urgent in the early modern period. In the previous entry, I have tentatively suggested that the 1570 missal accelerated the late medieval shift towards the said or low Mass as the basic liturgical form.⁵ There were no doubt practical reasons in favor of the low Mass: above all, it was better suited to the demands of pastoral care in places that were not able to muster the human and material resources needed for the solemn Mass, especially in the countryside. Moreover, the simpler form of the Mass proved to be enormously useful in the worldwide missionary expansion of the Catholic Church at the time.

However, the increasing prevalence of the simplified, spoken ritual meant that the sensory dimensions of the liturgy and hence the stimuli for meditative and affective participation on the part of the laity were curtailed. The structure of the solemn Mass is not a linear sequence but rather a complex fabric of different ritual actions that are performed simultaneously and offer the laity various ways of engaging with it, unlike the said Mass, which shifts emphasis to the spoken word.

The noted liturgical scholar Aidan Kavanagh identifies a reduction of liturgy to text in the Renaissance and Reformation periods and connects it with the invention of printing: “A Presence which had formerly been experienced by most as a kind of enfolding embrace had now modulated into an abecedarian printout to which only the skill of literacy could give complete access. … The truth lies now exclusively in the text; no longer on the wall, or in the windows, or in the liturgical activity of those who occupy the churches.”⁶

The festive culture of the Baroque period saw a great flourishing of sacred music, art, and architecture, which engaged the senses of the faithful and had the capacity of leading them to a profound understanding of the mysteries celebrated in the liturgy. Still, as a result of the shift from ritual complexity towards the spoken word and the retention of almost exclusive use of Latin, a gap was perceived between the “official” liturgy that was performed by the priest at the altar and the devotional exercises the laity used to follow it.

There were different ways of addressing this gap. For example, in German-speaking territories, vernacular singing, which had already been introduced in the medieval period, was continued after Trent. In 17th-century France, translations of liturgical texts were published with the approval of local bishops to make this spiritual treasure accessible to the growing number of literate faithful. Bilingual missals were introduced to encourage liturgical participation and to counter Protestant polemics against Catholic worship. Such editions were also intended to accommodate “new Catholics” (nouveaux catholiques), that is, former Calvinist Huguenots who joined the Church after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.⁷ Some of these French translations were rendered into English, and in the first half of the 18th century a complete Roman Missal in Latin and English was published.⁸

A particular impetus for liturgical reform came from Jansenists, who advocated a return to early Christian liturgical practice to instill a more restrained piety and seriousness in the moral life. The Jansenists considered it essential for the spiritual benefit of the congregation that they should be able to participate consciously in liturgical celebrations, and some of them supported the praying of the Canon of the Mass in an audible voice. The question became highly controversial at a time that also saw the flourishing of historical liturgical studies, for example, in the writings of the French Oratorian Pierre Lebrun (1661–1729) and the Benedictine Edmond Martène (1664–1739).

On a similar note, in the Catholic Enlightenment of the 18th century, there were demands to introduce the vernacular language, the celebration “facing the people,” and, in general, to simplify rites in order to promote the people’s understanding of and partaking in the liturgy. Some of these demands were supported by the rationalist zeitgeist, which saw Christian worship above all as a useful exercise for the moral edification of the individual and for the building up of society. They also coincided with agitation for national churches under the patronage of the monarch and with greater independence from the papacy, as is evident by two movements which sought to achieve these goals, Josephism and Febronianism, in the German-speaking states.

Liturgical Space

Church architecture has a significant impact on how the liturgy is celebrated and experienced, especially by the lay faithful. The typical interior of a late medieval church was not a unified space but was structured by a complex system of limits and barriers. Larger churches often featured a rood screen that divided the chancel with the high altar from the nave. Cathedral, collegiate, and monastic churches generally had an altar in front of the rood screen where Masses were offered for the laity. By contrast, Renaissance architecture proposed a unified space that would allow an unobstructed view of the main sanctuary from the nave, with its focal point on the high altar and, increasingly, on the reserved Eucharist.

The unified church interior gave the liturgical rites in the sanctuary greater visibility and so enhanced their potential for engaging the congregation. At the same time, the pastoral functions of the nave were brought into greater relief by the installation of a monumental pulpit and of confessionals, which highlighted the importance of preaching and Christian living (which was exemplified in biblical and hagiographical imagery). Such transformations would come to full fruition in the Tridentine reform, not only in the building of new churches but also in the re-ordering of medieval churches, which included the removal of rood screens.⁹ Historians even speak of a new appreciation for the laity being reflected by the church architecture of the period.¹⁰

In the final entry of this series I will attempt to answer the question I raised in the first installment: how does the liturgical reform initiated by the Council of Trent compare to that initiated by the Second Vatican Council?

Click here to read previous entries in this series.

_{^{Image Source: AB/The Interior of an Italian Church (1830), by Johann Nepomuk Schödlberger}}

1. The Rituale Romanum was not obligatory in the same way as the other liturgical books of the Tridentine reform but was intended as a model to be adapted in local rituals. See Neil J. Roy, “The Development of the Roman Ritual: A Prehistory and History of the Rituale Romanum,” in Antiphon 15 (2011), 4–26.
2. Adrian Fortescue, The Early Papacy to the Synod of Chalcedon in 451, 4th ed. by Alcuin Reid (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 36.
3. See Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular, Cambridge Studies in Italian History and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and “Giving Tridentine Worship Back its History”, in Continuity and Change in Christian Worship, ed. Robert N. Swanson, Studies in Church History 35 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999), 199–226. Ditchfield’s work concentrates on the breviary and the cult of the saints, but is also relevant to the history of the Mass.
4. Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, in Theology of the Liturgy: The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence, ed. Michael J. Miller, trans. John Saward, et al., Joseph Ratzinger Collected Works 11 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014), 127.
5. For a different reading, see now Sven Leo Conrad, Kult und Form: Einführung in die römische Liturgie aus der Sicht des Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzils (Augsburg: Dominus-Verlag, 2024), 90.
6. Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology: The Hale Memorial Lectures of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, 1981 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1984), 104.
7. See Hélène Bricout and Gilles Drouin, “Liturgie in Frankreich in der nachtridentinischen Epoche,” in Geschichte der Liturgie in den Kirchen des Westens: Rituelle Entwicklungen, theologische Konzepte und kulturelle Kontexte. Band 2: Moderne und Gegenwart (Münster: Aschendorff, 2018), 7–50.
8. The Compleat Office of the Holy Week. With Notes and Explications: Translated out of Latin and French (London: Matthew Turner, 1687); The Roman Missal in Latin and English, 4 vol. (s.n., 1737); see Sheridan Gilley, “Roman Liturgy and Popular Piety: The ‘Devotional Revolution’ in Irish Catholicism,” in The Genius of the Roman Rite: Historical, Theological and Pastoral Perspectives on Catholic Liturgy. Proceedings of the 2006 Oxford CIEL Colloquium (Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2010), 216–234, at 228–229.
9. In the Baroque period, the interior of Catholic churches underwent considerable changes. Medieval furnishings and decorations can still be seen in cathedrals taken over by Lutherans (such as Halberstadt in Germany), who were not iconoclasts (like the Calvinists) and made only few changes.
10. See Ralf van Bühren, “Kirchenbau in Renaissance und Barock: Liturgiereformen und ihre Folgen für Raumordnung, liturgische Disposition und Bildausstattung nach dem Trienter Konzil,” in Operation am lebenden Objekt: Roms Liturgiereformen von Trient bis zum Vaticanum II, ed. Stefan Heid (Berlin: be.bra wissenschaft, 2014), 93–119.