We understand reality through the stories we tell. I understand myself through the remembered narrative of my life thus far, through the story of my family history, and even through the larger secular history of my community and nation. This is no less true in the liturgical life of the Church. The liturgical year itself trains us to see time narratively as salvation history: creation, fall, promise, fulfillment, redemption, and consummation. To be a Christian is to inhabit that story and to interpret everything within it accordingly.
It should not surprise us, then, that contemporary liturgical disputes are rarely simply about rubrics. They are almost always embedded within broader narratives about the Church: how she has developed, where she has flourished or faltered, and what constitutes fidelity to her identity. These narratives function interpretively, determining how developments are judged, and what counts as authentic reform or lamentable decline.
Yet here we encounter a difficulty: there is not a single narrative, but multiple, often competing, narratives. Some describe liturgical history as a story of organic development leading to increasing perfection, followed by a period of loss and corruption. Others propose a golden age—often located in late antiquity—followed by decline and decadence, and then a necessary reform or recovery.
These differing accounts are not merely academic. They can shape how one approaches the Church’s liturgical rites themselves—both those that preceded the Second Vatican Council and those promulgated after it. If one adopts a narrative of rupture, the reformed rites may appear suspect, products of discontinuity or theological compromise. If one adopts a narrative of necessary reform, earlier forms may seem bound to a past moment, expressions of rigidity, clericalism, or pastoral limitation now superseded.
In either case, the risk is the same: the implicit or explicit villainizing of some portion of the Church’s liturgical tradition. When newer liturgical books are treated as fundamentally deficient, participation in them can become strained. If one is persuaded that the rite one attends is somehow contrary to the Church’s authentic tradition, then prayer itself becomes difficult. A subtle—or sometimes overt—contempt for the Church’s prayer can take root. Conversely, if earlier liturgical forms are dismissed wholesale as theologically suspect, one risks severing oneself from a significant portion of the Church’s lived tradition forged over centuries and deepened through the prayer of generations. Thus, both the extraordinary form and the reformed rites demand reverence, not because they are beyond all critique, but because they belong to the one Church.
There is, of course, an important place for ongoing discussion about liturgical development, reform, and the nature of tradition. These questions cannot simply be naively set aside. The future of the liturgy depends, in part, on how we interpret the past and understand the present. The narrative matters. But alongside these legitimate debates, two practical problems emerge.
First, what is the non-expert to do? The Catholic in the pew is rarely a liturgical historian or theologian, and the arguments are often technical and historically layered. The average parishioner encounters these debates, if at all, through fragments and social media sound bites presented with a sense of urgency: the integrity of the Church’s worship, the continuity of tradition, even fidelity to Christ himself are said to be at stake. It can feel like entering a dense forest without a map.
Second, there is a subtle but more dangerous problem: the absolutizing of one’s preferred narrative can foster an attitude of judgment over the Church’s prayer. One begins to stand over the liturgy, rather than within it—evaluating, critiquing, measuring it against an idealized standard. Whether that judgment falls upon pre-conciliar rites or post-conciliar reforms, the effect is similar: a persistent dissatisfaction, and sometimes even disdain, toward part of the Church’s heritage.
This is not a merely theoretical concern. It touches directly on the spiritual life. The liturgy is the privileged place of encounter with Christ. If that encounter is mediated through suspicion or even contempt, its fruits are inevitably diminished. On a more personal level, this conviction shapes my own teaching as a seminary professor. While I recognize the theoretical merits of the so-called “reform of the reform,” I do not make it a focus in my seminary classes. My aim is that my students—future priests—be drawn into the spiritual depths of the Church’s liturgical books as they are, rather than habitually approaching them in search of points of hypothetical future reform.
How, then, might one proceed? Without denying the need for study, reflection, and even debate, it may be helpful to adopt what could be called a “providential” approach to the liturgy. Such an approach begins with a conviction articulated with characteristic clarity by St. Thomas Aquinas. While commenting on the Church’s liturgy—whether the Church observes a suitable rite in baptizing—he affirms: “The Church is ruled by the Holy Ghost, Who does nothing inordinate” (ST III, q. 66, a. 10, s.c.).
This is not a claim that every liturgical development is equally perfect in every respect. Nor does it preclude the possibility of reform or improvement. The Church herself has always engaged in reflection, correction, and renewal in her liturgical life. But it is an attitude of fundamental trust: that the Church’s authorized rites are not arbitrary, nor are they fundamentally disordered, because the Holy Spirit always remains operative in the Church, ordering her public worship according to divine wisdom.
This conviction has practical consequences. It means that one need not resolve every historical question or adjudicate every scholarly dispute in order to approach the liturgy with confidence. One can receive the Church’s prayer as it is given, trusting that it is a reliable means of sanctification.
What I am calling a providential approach also reframes one’s immediate situation. Whatever the broader narratives—whether one finds them compelling, problematic, or simply bewildering—God has providentially placed each of us here, now, within a particular liturgical context. One may find oneself at a solemn pontifical Mass according to the more ancient usage; or at a weekday celebration of the reformed Roman Rite; or at a low Mass of the extraordinary form; or at the Novus Ordo Easter Vigil. In each case, the fundamental task remains the same: to pray that liturgy as fruitfully as possible, to perceive its hidden profundity, and to encounter Christ who is always truly present and active in the Church’s worship.
For the priest, this entails a corresponding responsibility: to celebrate the rite entrusted to him at that moment with authenticity, reverence, and fidelity—to allow the liturgical books themselves to speak, and to lay before the faithful the fullness of the riches they contain.
For all of us, it means allowing ourselves to be shaped by that prayer rather than standing at a distance as its evaluator. It means receiving what the Church offers in her rites, rather than approaching them primarily in terms of perceived deficiencies. It means cultivating a posture of receptivity, an openness to the grace that is objectively and unfailingly offered.
Such an approach does not resolve all disputes, nor does it require intellectual disengagement. One may still study, read, and form considered judgments about liturgical questions. One may recognize historical contingencies, pastoral challenges, and areas of legitimate disagreement. But the goal of the Christian life cannot be to settle every liturgical question and dispute. It is to glorify God and to be sanctified—to be drawn more deeply into communion with God through the means his Church provides.
The liturgy is not first an object to be mastered or a problem to be solved. It is an act of worship, a gift to be received, and a mystery to be entered. And that mystery made present in the liturgy—whatever its complexities—is not merely something we analyze, but something we inhabit. In the end, this approach does not yield a resolution to every debate. But in the midst of ongoing discussions—some fruitful, some less so—the ordinary lay Catholic, and indeed the priest himself, is called to something both simple and demanding: to enter more deeply, here and now, into the Church’s prayer, to participate with greater reverence and understanding, and to allow the liturgy to bear its proper fruit.
