THE DAY THE MASS CHANGED

 A 1930’s shrine anticipating the 1970’s and the 1970’s mentality in the 1970’s:

Adoremus had an excellent article in 2010 on the changes in the Mass after Vatican II. But many changes were in the works in the 1930’s. Below is an excerpt from the longer article HERE.

Removal of altar rails, standing to receive Communion

Introducing the practice of standing to receive Communion and removing altar rails also preceded the Council. One notable example is the Benedictine abbey church at St. John’s in Collegeville, Minnesota.

During the 1950s, Father Godfrey Diekmann, a monk at St. John’s, participated in developing the plans for a new abbey church. Father Diekmann, a prominent liturgist and editor of Worship, served as an expert (peritus) at the Second Vatican Council (as did Father McManus), and was also a consultor to the Consilium group formed to implement the Council’s liturgical reforms (as was Father McManus).

Some details of the plans for the new church are given in The Monk’s Tale: A Biography of Godfrey Diekmann, OSB (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1991), by Sister Kathleen Hughes, RSCJ, who taught liturgy at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and served on the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL). She writes:

The plans represented a stunning departure from certain “inherited prejudices” about what a church should look like.…

The abbey church at St. John’s is remarkable in many respects. Planned in the decade before the Second Vatican Council was announced, and dedicated before the convocation of the first session, the church in nearly all respects anticipated the liturgical reform that it would soon house. (Monk’s Tale p. 169, 170. Original emphasis.)

Among other innovations, the new abbey church had no Communion rail. Father Diekmann gave reasons for this in a letter to Dominican Father Pierre Marie Gy, of the Liturgical Institute of Paris, who was also an expert at Vatican II and consultor to the Consilium.

We have definitely planned to eliminate the Communion rail. We figure that it has come to denote in people’s minds not merely the distinction between sanctuary and nave, that is between priest and people, but actually separation. And we feel this is most undesirable, particularly because Communion itself is the sacrament of union, and for it to be distributed at a symbol of separation seems most inappropriate. We know that it could be of a very slight and unobtrusive character, but de facto it has come to mean separation from the sanctuary and the altar in the minds of the people. We therefore propose to indicate the distinction by three steps, basing ourselves on the paragraph in the Holy Father’s allocution after Assisi in which he says that the Head and the body are not to be considered as two separate entities, but form one unit which together is operative in worship. Instead of the customary communion rail, we plan to have four small “tables”, only about a foot wide and about four feet long, and about three feet high. The celebrant will be standing on one step higher than the people who will receive, and the latter will receive standing. There are several such tables in a neighboring diocese and my own experience with them has been very satisfactory.… (Monk’s Tale, pp. 171-172.)

Father Frederick McManus was another advocate of standing for Communion. In 1960, Father McManus wrote a commentary on new rubrics for the Mass promulgated by Pope John XXIII (Handbook for the New Rubrics, Baltimore; Helicon press, 1960). These new rubrics made only small changes in the Communion rite, and made it clear that Communion was to be distributed at the proper time during Mass, not begun at the Offertory, as was done in some places.

Read the rest there.