By way of preface, the purpose of Abbé Celier's article is to investigate the operative principles of many liturgists in the immediate wake that came after the Second Vatican Council, specifically as it related to its impact on the liturgical ordering and architecture of our churches.
Since the Second Vatican Council, many have debated the Council's actual intentions. Some have understood the Second Vatican Council to be a kind of line, a Rubicon that was crossed, seeing it as a purposeful rupture from the Catholic past and the advent of a new and different church. This is the particular perspective you will encounter here being espoused by these liturgists -- and they celebrate and embrace this idea. In a certain sense their notions will be already quite familiar, in other instances, however, you might find the extent of some of their ideas downright shocking. It must also be noted that these liturgists maintain certain interpretations (for example the idea that the Council demanded 'versus populum') that have long since been challenged and proven to be, at very least, highly questionable. However, what is most important here is less the question of the accuracy of their ideas than the mere fact of them.
Whether their particular ideas about the official intentions for the liturgical reform (and its corresponding, downstream impact on Catholic architecture) were misguided, even willful misinterpretations, or whether they were actually 'on point' is an important discussion to have of course, but in order to fruitfully have that conversation, we first need to understand that these interpretations did in fact exist -- and were frequently acted upon. In our own day, much has recently been made of statements made by Arthur Cardinal Roche, current Prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship, who came out in opposition to the continued existence of the traditional Roman rite of liturgy, celebrated for so much of the Roman rite's history, on the premise that it represented a fundamentally different ecclesiology and, as such, there was no room for it at the inn; it is something needing to be stamped out as incompatible with the new ecclesiology. Many rightly took issue with this idea, but what you will find here in this survey is that this is precisely what is espoused by these particular post-conciliar liturgists. It does, in fact, represent a particular post-conciliar school of thought -- one that Cardinal Roche and some others clearly adhere to and continue to attempt to impose.
Right or wrong, these were (and are) principles held to by some in positions of power within the Church in the decades following the Second Vatican Council. It is the 'schema' that defines their own particular approach toward the Church, her liturgy, the liturgical reforms, and yes, even the art, architecture and ordering within our churches.
What this should also reveal is that the popular, dismissive charge of "aestheticism" that is so often bandied about when matters of liturgy and architecture are raised is misguided and should be dropped. Form and content are indeed related. Externals do indeed matter. The medium is, at least in part, the message.
Many will already be aware of this relationship of course, but we can thank Abbé Celier for performing the invaluable service of collecting together these various sources for our consdieration It is certainly a topic that would benefit from further, in depth study.
[NOTE: The images accompanying this article were not a part of the original article, nor were they selected by the author. These have been selected by LAJ purely for illustrative purposes.]
-- LAJ
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THE CHURCH OF THE NEW LITURGY
“It is quite certain that our beautiful elongated churches, filled with a forest of pillars, are more conducive to solitary prayer than to the gathering of people; the new churches, on the contrary, prevent us from isolating ourselves” (Henri Denis, L'esprit de la réforme liturgique, Société nouvelle des imprimeries de la Loire Républicaine, 1965, p. 27).