by Robert Taft, S.J.
Eastern Catholicism at Vatican II
This is the intellectual context in which I would like to consider the role of early and eastern liturgy in the Roman rite liturgical reforms carried out under the mandate of Vatican II. Anyone old enough to remember those heady days knows of the role played by the Melkite Catholic bishops at the Council. Courageous, intelligent, innovative leadership was of course not limited to the Melkite bishops.
Two things were, however, peculiar to the Melkites at Vatican II: first, the disproportion between the conciliar leadership they exercised and their numbers–one patriarch and a mere sixteen bishops awash in a Latin sea; second, the truly remarkable imaginative and universal vision they showed.
In addition to being among the first to state categorically that the Council should avoid definitions and condemnations, the list of important items of general import on the Vatican II and postconciliar agenda that the Melkite bishops were the first to propose is simply astonishing: liturgy in the vernacular; eucharistic concelebration and communion under both species in the Latin liturgy; the permanent diaconate; the establishment of what ultimately became the Synod of Bishops held periodically in Rome; the Secretariat (now Pontifical Council) for Christian Unity; new attitudes and a less offensive ecumenical vocabulary in dealing with non-Catholic Christians, especially the Orthodox churches; the recognition and acceptance of eastern Catholic communities for what they are, distinct churches,” not just Indian reservations called “rites,” an ecclesiology ultimately canonized by the Council documents concerning the eastern Catholic churches.’ (2)
The rest is, of course, history.
But it would not have been history had the Council fathers, overwhelmingly Roman, not eastern Catholic bishops, not been receptive to these proposals. How they became so is the result of a long process of maturation, comprising two fundamental phases: a perceived need, and the search for solutions consonant with tradition.
The first, the perceived need for liturgical change and renewal, is obvious to anyone who was alive at that time. Present-day nostalgia for what is inaccurately referred to as the Tridentine rite is the luxury of those who, not having been around at that time, do not have their thought processes inconvenienced by such things as facts. The need for liturgical renewal was obvious to everyone at Vatican II except the foolish. What interests me here is the second point: the strategies the reformers used as they went about it, and especially the role played by eastern liturgy in this process.
The first thing to note is that the Vatican II “preferential option” for the east was by no means something one could have automatically anticipated. A prime mover of the modern Catholic liturgical movement, Prosper Gueranger of Solesmes (1805-1875) treated eastern liturgy with derision and contempt.
Chapter IX of his monumental Institutions liturqiques is full of outrageous statements like: “One must note in the Greek liturgy a particular quality which admirably denotes the degradation of the Church that employs it. This quality…is a crude immobilism that renders it impervious to any progress. The Greek Church has become impotent at renewal in its own core, since schism and
heresy have paralyzed it at the heart. (3) In brief, the eastern rites are the liturgical “families of a degenerate Christianity.” (4)
Gueranger’s tirade, of course, had nothing to do with the east, as is clear from the peroration of his indictment of all things eastern: “In the light of the evils of Christianity in the east, the churches of the west should hold strongly to the liturgical unity which alone has been able not only to deflect, but even render impossible, the schism and heresy which led to those evils.” (5) That gives away the game: Having decided that the dioceses of France should abandon their particular neo-Gallican liturgical usages in favor of the Roman rite, Gueranger chose to slander the east in order to firm up his plaidoyer for uniformity
