The war over, the liturgical movement kept moving along. Special gatherings, “liturgical weeks” and days became common, as in the French cities Rouen and Lourdes and other cities. A Congress of Sacred Music in 1919 was attended by cardinals and bishops and “mitred [bishop-level] abbots.” Interest was building in high places.

Gregorian chant, approved vigorously by Pius X almost 20 years earlier, was being taught to children — a half million in New York City, to site a major effort. Lay people were being encouraged to receive communion at mass — another Pius X footprint — and were in some cases were reading Scripture at mass. Pius XI told of “lively satisfaction” at these developments.

In Holland, the best organized in these matters, every diocese clergy-staffed liturgical commissions established by their bishops.

The lights of the movement were beginning to shine — Dom Odo Casel (1886-1948), source in his Liturgy…

In 1889 at a Eucharistic Congress in Lieges, Belgium, Dom Gerard van Caloen, a trailblazing Benedictine monk, presenteda daring idea: reception of communion by worshipers at mass.

 Dom Gerard had already published a Missal for the Faithful in Latin and French and la much appreciated Little Missal for the Laity and started a publication and a study group.

 Participation was in the air. The new pope was to play catch-up.

He would be Pio Decimo, the tenth Pius, with a “Renew all things in Christ” motto –very much the parish priest from humble surroundings, a man of the people with a common touch but also a stern demeanor and willingness to take the battle to the enemy, in his case the moral (and cultural) evil as he saw it, of modernism.

He was to push frequent communion also.

As to worship in general, he was already…

In 1840 the Benedicine monk Dom Prosper Gueranger published his Les Institutions liturgiques [“liturgical institutions”] , “a closely argued attack on the neo-Gallican liturgies and a wonderful demonstration of the antiquity and the beauties of the Roman liturgy,” says Bonnetere his 1980 book (Angelus Press, 2002), The Liturgical Movement: Gueranger to Beauduin to Bugnini, Roots, Radicals Results.

 Neo-Gallican refers to newly revived separatist liturgies in northern Europe, especially in France. Neo because Pius VI had struck a mighty blow to the separatist movement Gallicanism (French-ism) with his condemnation of the Synod of Pistoia in 1794 at a time when “the whole of Europe . . . was floundering in an “anti-liturgical heresy.” (Bonneterre)

 Gueranger was on the side of traditionalist angels, standing up for the wisdom of the ages, opposing changes meant to keep up with the times, etc.

 Primarily, he wanted to bring the clergy…

Dear Jim:

In your soon to be published book, do the anti-Novus Ordo (New Mass) part, interspersing it with with the pro. Can you do that, Jim? Keep it dry and detached? If you try, yes. But will you try?

Jim: Good question.

Note, continued:

Make your posts a foreshadowing of arguments to be fleshed out along the way.

And remember: keep it flat and noncommittal. It’s only right but it’s less you might have to apologize for.

Be not overly concerned with order and sequence, but be willing to test your readers for their ability to connect things. Does that mean not concerned at all? Hardly. That would be a slatternly procedure, to be sure.

Go rather for the lasting image or hit-home phrase, the (dare I?) poetic. Absolutely. Do not shrink from the poetic. Do you dare?

Don’t overdo the explanatory or saying where you got such and…

Pius X (1903-1914) is best known for promoting frequent communion, seen by some at the time as making a sacred thing unduly common and therefore less highly regarded. 

This problem seems not to have risen until after Vatican 2, when communion became not only frequent but standard for mass-goers and everyone went — as I noted in a National Catholic Reporter essay in the 1970s, calling attention to an unsung achievement of the council, namely that it had abolished mortal sin.

In any case, this change of his and another, to teach catechism in the vernacular (!), are pretty tame stuff by today’s standards.

Let us, however, put a hold once more on this tenth Pius and his works, looking back a mere hundred or so years before him to the synod of Pistoia, a diocese in Tuscany, in 1786.

Liturgy was dying on the vine. Jansenists had made worship…