Elements of Rite
A Handbook of Liturgical Style
1st Edition
Published on 28. February 2017
128 pages
978-0-8146-6326-4 (ISBN)
Description
Keeping in mind two pastoral considerations - the liturgy itself and the assembly that worships - Father Kavanagh looks not beyond rubrics but deep into their historical and pastoral existence in order to develop rules of style which articulate this existence in current Roman liturgical usage. From this research has come a pastoral manual for clergy who preside at liturgical celebrations.
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Person
Aidan Kavanagh, OSB, (1926-2006) founded the doctoral program in liturgical studies at Notre Dame and served as professor of liturgics at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School. His texts on liturgy, rites of initiation, and liturgical theology made him a significant figure in American Catholic liturgiology. He is the author of Elements of Rite, On Liturgical Theology, and The Shape of Baptism published by Liturgical Press.
Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Epigraph
- Introduction
- Elementary Rules of Liturgical Usage
- 1. Avoid disorder and last-minute makeshift.
- 2. Keep the various liturgical ministries clearly distinct.
- 3. The liturgical minister must serve the assembly.
- 4. Ministers must not clericalize the liturgy.
- 5. Liturgies for special groups are done rarely and for very special reasons.
- 6. The church building is both shelter and setting for the liturgical assembly. Nothing more, but nothing less.
- 7. Find the most serviceable places for altar, font, and chair, and leave them there.
- 8. As its name implies, the lectern is a reading stand rather than a shrine competing with font and altar.
- 9. The altar and the baptismal font are the primary spatial foci of the liturgy.
- 10. Liturgical things are designed for the assembly's purpose.
- 11. Churches are not carpeted.
- 12. Furniture is significant and kept to a minimum.
- 13. Banners are decorative images, not ideological broadsides or opportunities for tricky piety.
- 14. The bearing of liturgical ministers conforms to the scale of the space and the ceremony.
- 15. Not every liturgical word must be heard by all, but words that need to be heard should be clearly audible.
- 16. The calendar of the liturgical year is to be followed.
- 17. "Missalettes" are kept out of the sanctuary.
- 18. Audio-visual aids, especially moving pictures, are never used in the liturgy.
- 19. The homily is always on the gospel of the day, and one never preaches unless one has something to say.
- 20. The liturgy is never used for ulterior motives such as education.
- 21. Repetition and rhythm in the liturgy are to be fostered.
- 22. Words and ceremonies overlap like shingles on a roof
- they entwine like vines on a wall, themes in a fugue.
- 23. Liturgy must never take on a tentative or dubious air.
- 24. To be consumed with worry over making a liturgical mistake is the greatest mistake of all.
- 25. One sings at celebrations.
- 26. Choir and cantor are servants of the assembly, not surrogates for it.
- 27. Solo dance performances in the liturgy are to be avoided.
- Some General Laws Of Liturgy
- 1. Because liturgy is a complex act in which many people participate in many different ways, it is by nature conservative and resistive to change.
- 2. At times of high religious intensity in particular, liturgy tends to retain archaic structures.
- 3. Psalmody, which is native in Jewish and Christian liturgical worship, recedes as composed music expands.
- 4. The Roman Liturgy tends to resist metrical hymnody except in its liturgy of the hours.
- 5. As the kinetic arts of ceremony decline in the liturgy, the sonic arts of liturgical oratory and music change in nature or disappear altogether.
- 6. Since liturgical ministry is a service function, its existence corresponds to need.
- 7. Liturgy is essentially antistructural.
- 8. Discipline breaks down and accretion occurs most often at the beginning and end of liturgical events.
- 9. The liturgy is not a single service but a complex of services which structures the Lord's Day from beginning to end.
- 10. Liturgy is not fundamentally prayer but rite.
- 11. The liturgical assembly is less a gathering of individuals than a dynamic coordination of orders.
- 12. The Sunday liturgy of Christians addresses itself primarily to the object of the assembly's ministry, the world.
- Principles For Putting Liturgy Together
- 1. A liturgical event, like a sentence, contains parts which function in different ways. It also belongs to units larger than itself.
- 2. As does any art form, the liturgy gives enlarged room for imagination, for investment in and appropriation of values, and for freedom.
- 3. Liturgy is canonical.
- 4. Liturgy is not adapted to culture, but culture to the liturgy.
- 5. Liturgy has more in common with an act of declamatory rhetoric than with scientific analysis or a classroom lecture.
- 6. In liturgy as in poetry, rhetoric, and music, meaning is as often communicated by rhythm and scale as by words alone.
- 7. Choose a liturgical style and hold to it.
- 8. All possible liturgical options do not have to be implemented all at once.
- Some Matters of Form
- Stoles
- Concelebration
- Incense
- Jewelry
- Devotion
- Money
- Announcements
- The Sign of Peace
- Children
- Hands
- Postures
- Processions
- Altar
- Some Common Mistakes
- Gratuitous concelebrations of the eucharist
- Proliferation of ministers for reasons other than need
- Disorderly practices at communion time
- Breaking the bread at the words of institution
- Confusing or ignoring the role of the deacon
- Using secular greetings in the liturgy
- Clericalizing the sign of peace
- Changing texts well known to the assembly
- General intercessions which are inaudible or polarize the assembly
- Ignoring the liturgical year
- Minimalism and pontificalism
- An Approach to Liturgical Style
- Literary analogies
- 1. Place yourself in the background.
- 2. Do things naturally.
- 3. Know the assembly's liturgical tradition thoroughly.
- 4. Do the liturgy with directness and vigor.
- 5. Beware of particularizing the liturgy.
- 6. Beware of liturgical fundamentalism.
- 7. Do not over-ceremonialize.
- 8. Do not affect a loose informality.
- 9. Do not explain too much.
- 10. Strive for simplicity.
- 11. Do not get too relevant.
- 12. Learn to live with symbol.
- 13. Adapt culture to the liturgy rather than liturgy to culture.
- Bibliography
