Jesuit Fr. Robert F. Taft, an internationally acclaimed authority on the history of Eastern liturgies, has been teaching at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome for almost 40 years and also serves as a consultor for the Vatican’s Congregation for the Oriental Churches. He holds the honorary title of archmandrite, conferred upon him by more than one Eastern church for his extraordinary contributions to liturgical studies and church unity....
Liturgical pioneers drew inspiration from Russian Orthodox emigrés to France, who had fled from their homeland after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. These contacts proved crucially important because the Orthodox church, Fr. Taft notes, had preserved the liturgical spirit of the early church and continued to live by it.
Liturgists in the West, however, did not attempt simply to imitate existing Eastern usage, but interpreted and applied it in the light of the needs of Latin Christianity. And that is why the liturgical movement, which Vatican II essentially validated, was so successful.
But there were things that Vatican II “failed to do well or did not do at all,” Fr. Taft writes. He mentions three items: the process of initiation, the Liturgy of the Hours, and Communion from the tabernacle.
He underscores the irony that one of Pope Pius X’s most celebrated and enduring reforms, namely, the lowering of the age of first holy Communion from adolescence to the age of reason....“This destroyed the age-old sequence of the rites of Christian initiation,” Fr. Taft insists....
Fr. Taft argues, secondly, that the Liturgy of the Hours, despite its title, “is no liturgy at all, but still a breviary or book of prayers.”....
Finally, the distribution of pre-consecrated hosts at Mass was “totally unthinkable in the early Christian East and West ... [and] is still inconceivable in any authentic Eastern Christian usage today.” Indeed, “Communion from the tabernacle is like inviting guests to a banquet, then preparing and eating it oneself, while serving one’s guests the leftovers from a previous meal.”
As always, Fr. Taft
tells it like it is.
