Next year will mark the 60th anniversary of the closing of the Second Vatican Council, and although there are many who think the Council was a failure and is best ignored, I think it is important to remember that many of the greatest councils in the Church’s history have generated a lot of controversy and often took centuries to be fully understood and appropriated.

And perhaps the greatest controversies generated by Vatican II surround the reform of the liturgy, which is understandable, since the Eucharistic liturgy is of central importance in the lives of every Catholic.

Therefore, it behooves us to return to the foundational document produced by the Council on the liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium), which was the first of the many documents of the Council to be promulgated. Two questions need to be addressed in the light of a return to the actual text.

First, does the new liturgy fulfill the ultimate aims of the Council in seeking a reform of the liturgy in the first place?

Second, does the liturgy we eventually got (the so-called Novus Ordo Missae) reflect the specific principles and directives put forward by the text?

With regard to the first question, what, exactly, were the aims of the Council in its desire to initiate liturgical reform? It is clear that the Council sought liturgical reform, not as an end in its own right, but as a means toward making the Mass more efficacious as an engine of sanctification for the laity. Therefore, the repeated admonitions in the text for the faithful to be fully and actively engaged in the liturgy are the key to the whole.

But this active participation is not put forward by Sacrosanctum as a mere contrivance in order to create better “fellowship” in a superficial sociological and psychological sense. And the problem with so much of the later implementation of the new liturgy in parishes is that it proceeded in an overly horizonatalist direction with the central focus being on the utilitarian value of the liturgy for fostering a broad sense of fellowship but without a strong emphasis on our vertical relationship with God as that which creates that fellowship in the first place.

But this gets things exactly backwards. Sacrosanctum emphasizes, instead, that our bonds with one another on the horizontal plane flow directly out of a more primordial vertical relationship with the Christ who comes to us via the priesthood in the re-presentation of the entire paschal event in the sacrifice of the Mass (11). The goal of the liturgy is the ontological change of the believer from death to life and from sin to sanctification in Christ.

In other words, the difference between true and false liturgical reform is that the former focuses upon the ontological change within us that inclusion in Christ brings, while the latter ignores this central truth and replaces it with false sociological reductions. The emphasis throughout Sacrosanctum is on this ontological change that is the true purpose of the Eucharist — to get the triune life of God within us — and that all repentance, moral regeneration, and the true human solidarity that these promote flows first, and only, from this ontological change. This is why the text is so insistent on “active participation.” Not because it wants the liturgy to look more like convivial meal, but rather because it desires the faithful to fully embrace the great Mystery into which they are being called.

Therefore, moving forward, we need to understand that as far as the Council was concerned, the main point of any reform is the increase this will achieve in sanctification. Thus, any liturgical form that fosters this and makes it palpably real, is good, true and well suited to the life of the Church. But any liturgical form that works against this by deemphasizing the ontological change within us that the Eucharist seeks to impart is not suitable on any level.

The second question is more difficult to answer since the text itself, while affirming that any changes in the forms of the liturgy “should in some way grow organically from forms already existing” (23), nevertheless leaves the door open for many substantive changes.

For example, the use of Latin is to be preserved (36), and the faithful are to be taught to sing or recite in Latin those parts of the liturgy that pertain to them (54), but a wider use of the vernacular is also clearly encouraged. But this latter provision is left to the discretion of the proper ecclesiastical authorities, which clearly leaves the question of how much the vernacular is to be used left open to further development.

And this pattern of emphasizing the need for organic continuity even while opening the door to profound changes runs throughout the text. We see this with regard to sacred music when the Council affirms the central importance of Gregorian chant, even while allowing for the use of many other forms of music appropriate for a more culturally contextualized liturgy.

There is therefore an air of ambiguity in the text on many fronts, which, depending on one’s perspective, is either the fatal flaw of the document or its greatest strength. It is unfair to blame the text for all the liturgical abuses that came later, as if the Council Fathers could have envisioned or anticipated the generalized chaos and open dissent from proper liturgical rubrics that were to come. It is very clear that Sacrosanctum is trying to chart a course for real reform, but one in which a proper attention to the rubrics holds firm. In fact, the text notes that “no other person, not even a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority” (22).

In line with this, there are critics of the Novus Ordo who wish to defend Sacrosanctum as a very traditional text by distancing it from the reforms that came later as foreign to its vision. And this is true in some sense. However, it is a bit of a stretch to say that the Novus Ordo violates the specific guidelines established by Sacrosanctum when the text itself grants a wide latitude for future ecclesiastical authority to make whatever reforms it deems necessary.

Therefore, whatever the merits or demerits of the Novus Ordo, the fact remains that it was developed and promulgated by the highest ecclesial authority, which is precisely what Sacrosanctum allowed for in an open-ended way — precisely so that the reform would not be hamstrung by too many prescriptive rules in advance.

Finally, one would think that a “synodal” Church would be open to a return to the text of Sacrosanctum Concilium and its message of transfigured sanctification as the goal of liturgy. But synodality seems to have more pressing issues than for questions on the liturgy, which is both telling and sad.

In the end, therefore, there are actually many liturgical forms that can fulfill this Trinitarian Communio ecclesiology of participation in the inner life of God that is the main theological vision of Sacrosanctum. And it is sad that the reform of the reform of the liturgy seems to be stuck in neutral at the present moment, which seems to imply that the liturgical reform called for by the Council was a “one-and-done” kind of affair rather than an ongoing and evolving discernment of successes and failures.