The final decade and a half of Pius Parsch’s life brought the People’s Liturgy through war, suppression, and criticism to achieve both vindication and a lasting influence. As Austria lost its independence to Nazi Germany and then struggled toward postwar reconstruction, Parsch’s liturgical apostolate suffered alongside the nation it had helped to form. Yet these years also brought important signs of confirmation: papal approval for elements of the People’s Liturgy, renewed connections with American liturgical reformers, and the wider ecclesial recognition that would culminate, after Parsch’s death, in the Second Vatican Council’s call for the full, conscious, and active participation of the faithful.

Symbolically, at least, Pius Parsch and the Austrian people suffered, died, and rose again during the last decade and a half of Parsch’s life. Just as Austrian independence grew uncertain, so too did the future of the People’s Liturgy, whose growing visibility brought attention and criticism from Germany to Rome. While the liturgical wars grew more intense in Germany, liturgical peace largely prevailed in Austria. Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg proposed a referendum for March 13, 1938, to obtain a popular mandate for independence, asking, “Are you for a free, German, independent and social, Christian and united Austria, for peace and work, for the equality of all those who affirm themselves for the people and Fatherland?” Germany responded with invasion and conducted its own referendum in April 1938, whose outcome was never in doubt: Austria vanished from the map, renamed “Ostmark” (Eastern Frontier).

Suffering and Death

The Anschluss—the coerced unification with Germany—posed a dilemma for Catholics: resistance or cooperation? Parsch’s fellow Canon, Roman Scholz, chose resistance by founding the first national liberation movement in 1938. Growing up a German speaker in Czechoslovakia inclined the young Scholz to German nationalism. However, after witnessing the Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg in 1936, Scholz repented of those views, diligently working thereafter to unmask the pagan nature of the Nazi regime and to struggle for civil rights and Austrian independence. Open to the possibility of cooperation, on the other hand, the older Parsch joined the “Working Group for Religious Peace” (Arbeitsgemeinschaft fur religiosen Frieden), which sought a modus vivendi with the new regime. Given the Nazi record of dishonesty and lying, on September 28, 1938, Cardinal Innitzer forbade Catholic clergy from participating, ending the initiative just a few months after the annexation.

The Nazis ratcheted up the persecution of the Church with stringent legal restrictions on Catholic organizations and press in 1939. Nazi propaganda presented the Church as a rival national community (“Volksgemeinschaft”). This propaganda could draw on centuries of anti-Catholic sentiments common among German nationalists as well as anti-clericalism, common both inside and outside of the Church in Austria. Harassment of the clergy and of religious intensified. Betrayed, Scholz was tortured and imprisoned in 1940; at his 1944 execution at the age of 32, Scholz offered his life “for Christ and Austria.”

Next, the Nazis seized all remaining property of religious communities. With the expropriation of their property on April 30, 1941—including the entire monastery and all the buildings of its campus in Klosterneuburg—the Canons were allowed to move to parishes, where they were allowed, for the moment, to minister to the faithful. Living in the parish office, three Canons remained in the Stift to serve in the parish there. The novices and juniors were drafted into the military; five were never seen again. Klosterneuburg posed a special challenge for the Nazis because the Stift represented Austrian independence, embodied in the person and the relics of its founder, St. Leopold, Margrave of Austria (1073-1136) (a margrave or marquis ruled a military frontier, a march or Mark in German). Parsch lived at the parish in Floridsdorf in Vienna’s 21st district, but traveled often to celebrate the liturgy at St. Gertrud. His publishing house, like other Catholic media, was outlawed. The Soviets only allowed him to restart his publishing house in 1949.

A New Dawn?

In the midst of this darkness, however, rays of light shone from Rome. A few months after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, Pope Pius XII published Mystici Corporis Christi (June 29, 1943). Although Matthias Scheeben is not explicitly cited, his influence is undeniable because he was the great promoter of the understanding of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ. The reader may recall from a previous installment of this series that this 19th-century German theologian inspired Parsch’s discovery of the centrality of grace in the sacramental and spiritual life of believers. The Pope cites renewed interest in the liturgy, the frequent reception of Holy Communion, and devotion to the Sacred Heart as reasons for his encyclical. The Holy Spirit animates the Mystical Body, which simultaneously shows the diversity of roles and vocations that converge on the universal goal of sanctity, union with God.

Six months later, on December 24, 1943, Pope Pius XII concluded an inquiry into alleged abuses in the People’s Liturgical Movement stemming from complaints from Germany in 1942. In his Christmas Eve rescript, the Pope both praised its fruits and warned against further innovations or strife. It should be recalled that Pope Pius XII was very familiar with Germany because he had served as nuncio to Bavaria, based in Munich, from 1917 to 1925, and concurrently as nuncio to the German Reich from 1920 to 1929, moving to Berlin in 1925. He spoke German fluently and was very well connected. The Pope approved Parsch’s three forms of the Mass—the German High Mass, the Choral Mass, and the Pray and Sing Mass—for use in the German-speaking world, and directed the Austrian and German bishops to prepare a new Ritual in German and to erect national and diocesan liturgical commissions. The rescript also opened the door to the possibility of evening Masses and a relaxation of the Eucharistic fast. The papal permission definitively transformed Parsch’s private initiative into official Church policy.

The sound of bombs exploding announced the end of the putative Thousand-Year Reich on April 8, 1945, as Soviet troops entered Klosterneuburg. Parsch interrupted his homily but finished the Mass despite the commotion at St. Gertrud. Although the fighting in Klosterneuburg was ending, the nightmare dragged on. Just three days earlier, on April 5, 1945, a Soviet soldier murdered Parsch’s confrere, Alois Kramer, the pastor in Tattendorf, because he tried to prevent the sexual abuse of the women and girls of his parish (a pervasive terror: researchers contend that Soviet troops raped as many as 2 million women and girls in territories, including Austria, under their occupation).

Resurrection

The Austrians voted for democracy and against communism in November 1945. Like Berlin, Vienna had been divided into four zones, as was the whole country. Ten years later, in 1955, the Soviets withdrew from Austria along with the other Allies—France, the UK, and the USA—leaving a whole Austria instead of a Germany divided between East and West. Neutral but Western, Austria escaped the fate of its less fortunate neighbors, the “People’s Republics” of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia.

Above all, the generosity of the United States gave Austria the funds to rebuild and to reconcile. Having suffered together the consequences of their earlier political conflicts, the Austrian People’s Party (OVP) and the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPO) wanted a new political culture. The Second Republic, therefore, embraced a consensus model favoring coalition governments over a conflict model of democracy used in the First Republic. This consensus model, moreover, institutionalized the social partnership between labor and business to negotiate collective bargaining agreements to give access to the common good for all and foster social peace.

The Marshall Plan was not only sound geopolitically, but its rationale was also deeply Christian. Resisting the understandable desire to punish the aggressors and learning from the error of the vindictiveness of the peace treaties after the First World War, the new postwar settlement showed clemency to the defeated population. The hundreds of care packages from America evinced to Parsch this goodwill, as well as the common bonds between America and Austria—namely, the social and democratic values of the People’s Liturgy. The Benedictine Father Virgil Michel of St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, MN, and Monsignor Martin Hellriegel in St. Louis, MO, exemplify this connection.

Born in 1890, just six years after Parsch, Michel came to know of Parsch and the People’s Liturgy during his visit to Europe in 1924-1925. Through his Belgian confrere and liturgical reformer, Dom Lambert Beauduin, he learned of Parsch, and thereafter introduced Parsch’s ideas in America upon his return. He shared the same concerns for the active participation of the laity, the use of the vernacular, and a community celebration of the Mass. Like Parsch, he too understood that the liturgical movement was fundamentally about education and formation. He started his theological journal, Orate Fratres—to which Hellriegel, an associate editor, contributed 63 articles—and also founded Liturgical Press in 1926.

Austria and America

Michel’s vision aligned with Parsch’s since both saw liturgical renewal as socially transformative, here and now, as well as in the life to come. Living during the Great Depression, Michel became increasingly critical of capitalism and individualism. Liturgical reformers in general viewed individualism as a negative outcome of secularization, stemming from a mistaken distinction between grace and nature in Neo-Scholastic theology, or at least from the way the Scholastic inheritance was misunderstood because of subtle but significant changes in key terms, such as “nature,” in modern philosophy. By positing the natural and supernatural realms, so goes the argument, this two-tier picture of reality inadvertently abetted secularization insofar as the supernatural became remote, dispensable, and unnecessary. The rise of the industrial working class seemed to confirm this prediction since it appeared to have no need for God or the Church.

Through liturgical renewal, therefore, clerical reformers wished to bind lay Catholics to the Church more closely, and through them the wider society. This renewal was primarily a movement inside the Church whose effects the laity communicated outside the Church; Michel expanded “lex orandi, lex credendi” with “lex vivendi” (“as we pray, so we believe, so we live”). With the modern conception of “religion” as a specific domain of “religious activities,” set apart from allegedly nonreligious activities such as politics, culture, and economics, there was a need to reintroduce “religion” into the world—hence, lex vivendi. In Austria, the social doctrine of the Church possessed a self-evident quality because it expressed the Church’s pastoral response to the “new things” (rerum novarum) and converged in some cases with political aims of the Socialists, such as the establishment of a national social security and welfare department (Sozialministerium) in 1918. In the United States, however, Catholic social doctrine remains to this day often strange and distant. Thanks to a strong and diverse Protestant majority and the extension of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause to the states, American consciousness evolved differently from its European counterpart, even from that of other Protestant countries, where a dominant state church existed alongside a myriad of other Christian denominations and “free churches.”

If Michel paralleled the People’s Liturgy Apostolate with his own magazines and publishing house, Monsignor Martin Hellriegel, Protonotary Apostolic, paralleled Parsch and the Liturgical Community of St. Gertrud. Born in Germany in the same year as Michel, Hellriegel later immigrated to America as a seminarian in 1906. As pastor of Holy Cross Catholic Church in the predominantly German neighborhood of Baden in St. Louis for 35 years, he introduced and adapted the People’s Liturgy to the American context. Through articles and reports about Klosterneuburg, he had learned about Parsch in the late 1920s and commenced his efforts in 1930. He cultivated liturgical art and Gregorian chant and composed vernacular songs such as the well-known “To Jesus Christ, Our Sovereign King.” Hellriegel and Marie Kremer, the parish organist, published the music cycle of the parish in the Holy Cross Parish Hymnal in 1964. The People’s Liturgy sustained parish life and ecumenical outreach throughout Hellriegel’s life, making it a key node in the network of liturgical renewal. Even in retirement, he served diligently until his death in 1981.

Papal Challenges

Pope Pius XII’s 1947 encyclical, Mediator Dei, disappointed Parsch. This circular letter to the bishops of the Church criticized two false tendencies: one that resists any reform of the rites, and the other that undertakes liturgical renewal recklessly. “Indeed, though we are sorely grieved to note, on the one hand, that there are places where the spirit, understanding or practice of the sacred liturgy is defective, or all but inexistent, We observe with considerable anxiety and some misgiving, that elsewhere certain enthusiasts, over-eager in their search for novelty, are straying beyond the path of sound doctrine and prudence” (Mediator Dei, 8).

Parsch acknowledged that his dialectic between a grace-piety and a commandment-piety could lead to confusion. Parsch believed that the commandment-piety mistakenly placed too much emphasis on human efforts, rather than properly focusing on the priority of God and his actions. Thus, in Parsch’s view, penance as the sacrament of commandment-piety should give way to the Eucharist as the sacrament of grace-piety. Perhaps this is what the Holy Father meant when he wrote, “Not seldom, in fact, they interlaid their plans and hopes for a revival of the sacred liturgy with principles which compromise this holiest of causes in theory or practice, and sometimes even taint it with errors touching Catholic faith and ascetical doctrine” (Mediator Dei, 8). While Parsch wished to recover the centrality of grace, he did not mean to diminish the indispensable role of rules. The liturgy needs rubrics; otherwise, it loses its very meaning. At the same time, Parsch believed that the liturgy was not reducible to rubrics and rites, because clergy and faithful together through these rites and rubrics enact the liturgy. The liturgy orders and thereby forms the congregation.

In his enthusiasm for the People’s Liturgy, Parsch fell into the trap of either-or thinking, rather than both-and thinking, which protects mystery from the danger of exaggerating one good at the expense of another. In response to Mediator Dei, Parsch reluctantly conceded that even when a priest “privately” celebrates or when multiple Masses take place at side altars simultaneously, the Mass is still ecclesial and valid. He granted also that different modes of active participation exist beyond the understanding of the People’s Liturgy. He promised nevertheless to pursue the liturgical renewal “with gentle implacability.”

Ecclesial Vindication

In 1950, the same year Parsch founded the Klosterneuburg Bible Apostolate to distribute the Word of God widely and inexpensively, a papal visitation found no basis for the charges of heresy against Parsch. His liturgical and biblical work won him respect from non-Catholics, bringing forth a welcome development after the trials of the preceding decades and the centuries of Christian division. With great joy, Parsch welcomed the permission ad experimentum for a new ordering of the Easter Vigil in 1951. Parsch had already celebrated the Vigil at night, illicitly, for more than two decades at St. Gertrud. For various reasons, the Easter Vigil had been celebrated on the morning of Holy Saturday in the Roman Rite for many centuries. In 1952, Parsch published new editions of many of his key books and was invited to give a lecture at the first International Eucharistic Congress since the Second World War.

At the initiative of the indefatigable organizer, Marie-Marthe-Baptistine Tamisier, a disciple of St. Peter Julian Eymard, these gatherings made the Church visible to the increasingly secular world. They joined Eucharistic spirituality and the mobilization of Catholic laity in mass gatherings, starting in Lille, France, in 1881. Under the theme “The Eucharist and Peace,” the 35th International Eucharistic Congress took place from May 27-June 1, 1952, in Barcelona, symbolizing Spain’s alignment with the West in the Cold War (Spain had been neutral during the Second World War). Staying with a working-class family, Parsch found himself unexpectedly, as part of the sightseeing of Barcelona, at a bullfight. Very much shocked, he later mused over the local Church’s indifference to such cruelty. The large international audience, including 30 bishops, lavishly praised Parsch’s talk, delivered in Spanish, on the Collect of Easter Monday. His frenetic pace of activity and his strenuous travel, however, took their toll. Parsch suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed and hindered his speech in late July 1952.

He died less than two years later, on Thursday, March 11, 1954, the Feria V of the first week of Lent. He did not live to see Pope Pius XII approve the reformed order of Holy Week nor the end of the Allied occupation of Austria in 1955. Thanks to the cooling of Cold War tensions and the popular Rosary Crusade of Capuchin Father Petrus Otto Pavlicek, Austria became free, democratic, and neutral. Nearly ten years after Parsch’s death, on December 4, 1963, the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC), fulfilled Parsch’s wish: “Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful should be led to that fully conscious, and active participation in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy” (SC 14). Indeed, it named this active participation as the aim to be considered before all else.

More than 60 years have elapsed since the end of the Second Vatican Council on December 8, 1965. The final installment of this series will consider Parsch’s legacy for the 21st century. He can still inspire us to fight for access to Christ, even if the circumstances have changed dramatically and the means might very well be other than those he promoted. Just as his world provided an opportunity and a challenge, so too does ours. It affords a chance to reach people in their search for answers but also requires a willingness to make these answers accessible.

The full series can be found here.