Confession and Liturgy Remain Inseparable in a Healthy Church
“Confession and liturgy belong inseparably together if the church is to be healthy. Liturgy is prayed dogma; dogma is the doctrinal content of the liturgy. The placement of liturgy above dogma, for which one hears calls in the liturgical movements of all confessions with the well-known saying “lex orandi lex credendi”…, has been opposed in the Roman Church by the present Pope Pius XII] in his encyclical “Mediator Dei”, in which he points out that one can also turn this saying around and that in all circumstances dogma should be the norm for the liturgy. If that is already known in Rome, how much more should it be known in the church that makes…the right understanding of the Gospel also the criterion for the liturgy.”
Hermann Sasse, The Lutheran Understanding of the Consecration, in We Confess the Sacraments, trans N. Nagel, Concordia, 1985.
Sasse is entirely right, and the warnings and condemnations of Mediator Dei indeed should be better known among us than them for precisely the reasons he states. The encyclical specifically condemns a liturgical archaeology, in which an Apostolic and Patristic golden era discovered through modern scholarship becomes the ideal and liturgy is reworked accordingly, cutting and pasting to suit this notion, and reminds that liturgy is organic, it lives and grows and one cannot uphold the Spirit at work in the early church while rejecting its continuing work in the later church. Our only objection would be that Rome is the vehicle for this organic process, not the process itself. Mediator Dei was followed by Humani generis three years later, in which the underlying philosophy of these liturgical archaeologists, that form of Modernism called the Nouvelle Theologie, was clearly condemned.
All of which was reversed at Vatican II and the novus ordo, the leading lights of the Nouvelle theologie, who had been silenced before, becoming theological experts (periti) at the Council and many Cardinals (and I don’t mean the good kind, who play baseball) later. Which has in turn released a similar liturgical archaeology in other churches with liturgical components, in which their methodology and aims have resulted in similar cut and paste approaches to liturgy, sourcing both the Apostolic and Patristic eras toward which all look as well as their own respective sources. Which trend, unfortunately, includes us.
The Roman Church is a lost cause, but it would be tragic for those, to borrow Sasse’s words, who make the right understanding of the Gospel the criterion for liturgy, to after 500 years follow Rome back into darkness.