What is this place where we are meeting?

Only a house, the earth its floor,

walls and a roof sheltering people,

windows for light, an open door.

Yet it becomes a body that lives when we are gathered here,

and know our God is near

                                                                           Huub Oosterhuis

In early summer 1969, I attended a Saturday evening Mass at  a Catholic University chapel in Amsterdam. Two things made the service unusual. The students were deeply involved in the celebration.  More notable however, was the form of the celebration itself.  Rather than traditional vestments, the priest wore a black and gray choir gown, and used a large glass goblet as a chalice.  Accompanying the service was a small jazz orchestra. The Mass seemed unusual, but at the time I was more confused than disturbed.

I later learned that the priest celebrating the Eucharist was the internationally renowned Dutch poet, musical lyricist, and liturgist, Huub Oosterhuis. The  text of the Mass that day, including the Eucharist Prayer, had been composed by him. Oosterhuis was a towering figure in Dutch intellectual life, and many of his hymns, such as “What is this Place,” are still sung in churches today.  

But something seemed fundamentally wrong with the service he had created. Catholics have traditionally viewed the Mass as not the property of the priest, but of the Universal Church.  Little is known of the liturgies of the first Christian communities. But by the fourth century, texts had already been received at from the more prominent churches such as Toledo, Milan, Alexandria, Lyon, Antioch, and were being assembled into liturgical books.  These show further development over time, but new prayers were weighed carefully and adopted slowly. It would be another 800 years before the form of the Roman Rite Mass was largely set in its present form. In the Catholic mentality, fidelity to tradition has always been regarded as important. Mass prayers were viewed as akin to scripture: a treasure of the church to be passed from one generation to the next. The notion that a priest would create his own Mass text was unthinkable.  

This mindset differed sharply from the attitudes of fifteenth century Protestant reformers whose services heavily depended on the charisma of the minister. Often such rites were pared down to a few prayers, a reading from scripture, and an extended homily. 

In response to the turmoil of the 1500’s, the Council standardized the prayers and readings of the Mass, but otherwise focused on doctrinal rather than pastoral issues.  The result, was that for the next three centuries, the  involvement of the laity in liturgical worship was minimal.  Catholics “attended” Mass, but largely  occupied themselves with devotional prayers. The activity at the altar, with Latin prayers mostly rendered in an inaudible voice, was considered the priest’s domain. Apart from the elevation of host and chalice little attention was paid to what the priest was doing.  It was not until the mid 1920s that the Mass prayers of the priest became accessible in English to American Catholics. But it was always the Mass of the Church, never of the priest.

The understanding of the Eucharist celebration as the preserve of the clergy, however, was changing. Beginning in the late 1800s, a combination of papal initiatives and liturgical reform groups had renewed interest in merging popular Catholic piety with the spirit of the liturgy. These efforts bore fruit at the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), where the assembled bishops sought to restore the liturgy that churchgoers were “enabled to understand them with ease and to take part in them fully, actively, and as befits a community.” In the process, they drew from classic church documents, particularly the liturgies of eastern communities in union with Rome, that had been unavailable to the Council of Trent. The Council insisted that whenever changes were made, they “should in some way grow organically from forms already existing.”

The result of this effort was the authoritative statement, Sacrosanctum Concilium, approved by of 2,147 bishops in favor and only 4 opposed and promulgated by Pope Paul VI on  December 4, 1963.  The document, in turn, provided the foundation for long-overdue revision of the Roman Missal. Commissioned by the Council, the updated Missal was not completed until 1969. 

Vatican Council II, in  its deliberations, made clear that “Liturgical services are not private functions,” the Council fathers had declared,” but are celebrations of the Church, …the holy people united and ordered under their bishops.” It had insisted that “no other person, even if he be a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority…” But not everyone was reading the fine print. 

Invoking the “spirit” rather than the letter of Vatican II, reform-minded Catholics soon moved far beyond what the Council had envisioned.  Many felt that the Council opened a fresh chapter in the life of the Church: the new was in and the old was out.  An American writer recalls “those first parish `folk masses’ back in the 1960s…. At the entrance they sang `Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.’ At the Offertory there was `Kumbaya.’ . . . Hands clapped. Guitars twanged… the sandals, guitars, and hugging — seized the day, easily.” Liturgical innovations were vividly described in the secular press: Priests were reported celebrating Mass in business suits: a Diocesan liturgical commission, complained of “sensation-minded priests” offering Masses in “laundries, bedrooms, barrooms, and other indecorous places.”

Parts of Europe, the Netherlands above all, were also caught up in the euphoria. In Amsterdam, the chaplains at the university students’ chapel, announced that they would ignore the directives of their bishop and make their worship a place where “things could be said or done, that could not be said or done anywhere else.”  Some Dutch bishops had gone along with this effort and obtained from Rome a three-year breathing space, for the student chapel to develop liturgies as it saw fit. 

My visit to Amsterdam had come just at the end of this trial period. But it had not been a success. Shortly thereafter, the experimental Masses were terminated, Huub Oosterhuis announced his intention to marry, and  formed a new community not affiliated with the Catholic church. By the late 1970s, the quest for liturgical transformation had ebbed.  In hindsight, the quest for radical rupture with the past was a summer storm that sprang up from nowhere and just as quickly receded. 

A half century has passed since these tumultuous times, but the longer, deeper efforts to implement Vatican II’s teachings on the liturgy continue.  “It is not a matter of rethinking the reform…”  Pope Francis noted in a 2017 address to Italian liturgists, “but of knowing better the underlying reasons, through historical documentation, as well as of internalizing its inspirational principles.” He points out that, “today, there is still work to be done in … rediscovering the reasons for the decisions taken with regard to the liturgical reform, by overcoming unfounded and superficial readings, a partial reception, and practices that disfigure it.” 

Though much work remains to be done, the Eucharistic celebration is perceived  today by Catholics as the center point of Catholic spirituality,  broader and deeper than the insights of a single individual or movement. It is the real presence of Christ on our altars but much more. When the Eucharist “is celebrated on the humble altar of a country church” he explains, “the Eucharist joins heaven and earth…. The world which came forth from God’s hands returns to him in blessed and undivided adoration.”  It is the source and center of Catholic existence. ”The liturgy is precisely entering into the mystery of God,” Pope Francis writes.” Let yourself be led to the mystery and be in the mystery.”