Liturgical Devices
Missale Romanum ex Decreto Ss. Concilii Tridentini Restitutum Summorum Pontificum
Cura Recognitum, editio typica 1962 (Monumenta Liturgica Piana 1)
reprint and introduction by Manlio Sodi and Alessandro Toniolo
Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2007
(1,114 pages, €59.00, hardcover)
Il Messale di Pio V: Perché la Messa in Latino nel III Millennio?
by Manlio Sodi
Edizioni Messagero Padova, 2007
(48 pages, €3.50, paperback)
reviewed by Richard Upsher Smith, Jr.
In Dostoevsky’s Demons, the revolutionary Verkhovensky tells his comrade Kirillov that “it was not you who ate the idea, but the idea that ate you.” Just as the revolutionary idea of absolute self-determination ate Kirillov, so the revolutionary idea of history has devoured two liturgical scholars and “experts”: Manlio Sodi, a Salesian priest, and Alessandro Toniolo, a layman who works at the Institute for Pastoral Liturgy in Padova, Italy.
Sodi and Toniolo hold as an article of faith that the pure liturgy of the early Church, an action of the entire Christian people, became an instrument of alienation of the people during the Middle Ages and in the period after Trent. Just as revolutionary thinkers present the human story as a series of struggles between the weak and the strong, so Sodi and Toniolo see the history of the liturgy as the clergy’s progressive usurpation of the laity’s role, not as the gradual unfolding of God’s will in the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Like so many experts involved in the Liturgical Movement of the twentieth century (and not only in the Catholic Church), they would, in Pope Pius XII’s words in his encyclical Mediator Dei (1947), “reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device.”
Sodi and Toniolo are general editors of the new series Monumenta Liturgica Piana ( MLP) ( Liturgical Monuments of Pius XII), of which this edition of the 1962 Roman Missal (the last in Latin) is the first volume. The Rituale Romanum (1952), the Pontificale Romanum (1961–1962), the Breviarium Romanum (1962), and a volume of indices are to follow. This series complements the Monumenta Liturgica Concilii Tridentini ( Liturgical Monuments of the Council of Trent), also edited by Sodi.
Evolution, Not Growth
The reprint of the Missale Romanum contains an introduction by the editors, and the text of the editio typica (“standard edition”) with certain useful editorial additions, including two sets of marginal numbers in the Missal itself to facilitate reference to the text by scholars, and a general table of contents. The editors will also supply an index of “forms of expression” in the final volume of the series.
The editors intend the MLP to enable scholars to compare the last texts of the Tridentine tradition, namely, the texts of the Reform of Pius XII (which include the 1962 missal, though it appeared during the pontificate of John XXIII), with the texts published after Vatican II. In their view, the Second Vatican Council both continued and broke with the tradition.
They employ the metaphor of evolution for the development of the liturgy, rather than the metaphor of organic growth used by Pius XII in Mediator Dei and by the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council in Sacrosanctum Concilium. The image of organic growth suggests the transformation of a single body by an inner logic, while the image of evolution implies the replacement of one species by another in a process driven by external forces.
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