InTertio Millennio Adveniente, calling for the celebration of the Great Jubilee in 2000, Pope John Paul II asked that the Church should examine itself on the reception it had given to the Second Vatican Council. Then in the almost concluding paragraph ofNovo Millennio Ineunte, reflecting on the new millennium, he said of the Second Vatican Council:

With the passing of the years,the Council documents have lost nothing of their value or brilliance. They need to be read correctly, to be widely known and taken to heart as important and normative texts of the Magisterium, within the Church’s...

Whenever a major reform occurs it takes many years for the dust to settle. Fifty years have now passed since one of the greatest Church Councils, Vatican II, promulgatedSacrosanctum Concilium (SC),on 4 December 1963. This book commemorates that event. It has been created, designed and written by a group of liturgists who have been at the forefront of implementing the reform and have weathered the storm of change over the decades. Most have served in the Australian Church, one in the neighbouring island of Flores in Indonesia, while others have worked in the United States of America. Our...

The Second Vatican Council was an important Council for the liturgy, so much so that the Church could state that ‘the liturgical renewal is the most visible fruit of the whole conciliar effort’.¹ John Paul II affirmed this statement when he recalled that ‘ for many people the message of the Second Vatican Council has been experienced principally through the liturgical reform’.² It is not by chance that the first act willed by the Council wasSacrosanctum Concilium(SC).³

The importance of the liturgy for the Council is evident when we consider that in the entire history of the Church,...

The timing of the Second Vatican Council affects the imagery used in the first document,Sacrosanctum Concilium(SC). It is situated after the beginnings of the liturgical movement, the ecumenical movement, and the move to a historical-critical approach to biblical scholarship and reflects in its imagery many of the affirmations of these movements. It predates the rise of secularism in the West, globalisation, the sexual abuse crisis which shook the Roman Catholic world beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, and which found negative overtones in some of these images of Church. At the heart of this event...

Strong language is used about ‘full, conscious and active participation’.¹ It is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy. It is the aim to be considered before all else in the restoration and promotion of the liturgy. It is the right and duty of Christian people by reason of their baptism. It is the primary and indispensable source from which they are to derive the true Christian spirit. It is to be zealously promoted by pastors in their pastoral work (SC14).

How is the phrase to be understood? Some interpretations seem to spiritualise the notion of participation, making...

One of the central principles guiding the restoration and reform of the liturgy called for by the Second Vatican Council was the principle of ‘liturgical intelligibility’.Sacrosanctum Concilium(hereafterSC) states in paragraph 21:

Holy Mother Church desires to undertake with great care a general restoration of the liturgy itself . . . In this restoration, both the texts and rites should be drawn up so that they express more clearly the holy things which they signify; the Christian people, so far as possible, should be enabled to understand them with ease and to take part in them fully, actively...

At Blatherskite Park in Alice Springs, Northern Territory in 1986, John Paul II spoke the following words to the indigenous people of Australia—Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders:

The gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ speaks all languages. It esteems and embraces all cultures. It supports them in everything human and, when necessary, it purifies them. Always and everywhere the Gospel uplifts and enriches cultures with the revealed message of a loving and merciful God.

That Gospel now invites you to become, through and through, Aboriginal Christians. It meets your deepest desires. You do not have to be a people...

The area to be addressed in this paper is the section ofSacrosanctum Concilium¹ (SC) entitled: ‘Norms for adapting the Liturgy to the culture and traditions of peoples’,SC37–40. The Second Vatican Council used the term ‘adaptation’ six times in this four-paragraph section that offers pastoral-liturgical norms for making liturgy suitable to the genuine culture of the local faithful. Since Vati-Vatican II ‘liturgical inculturation’ has been much discussed. Anscar J Chupungco—internationally known for his writings on liturgical enculturation—describes inculturation in liturgy as the process of a pre-Christian rite being reinterpreted or reformed and celebrated as a...

This chapter focuses on leaders of liturgy who minister within complex communities. It identifies skills and attitudes required to ‘do’ liturgy in an inclusive way in the varied complexity of multicultural assemblies. In the past liturgical leaders relied on intuition, imaginative guesses or just dealt with things as they arose. This inquiry seeks to make liturgical practice more than just good guess work or intuition and so ensure that competent liturgical ministry is evident in our complex interactions. It will be argued that communication in liturgy is an important factor if the central goal of participation called for bySacrosanctum...

I recently asked a friend who was a young priest in the wake of the Council, what he could recall of the introduction of the reformed Mass. He wrote in reply: ‘In the diocese, we had a series of talks on the Council decrees: perhaps one talk on each decree given in two or three places. I do not recall anything more than that specifically on implementing the liturgical changes. There may have been daytime sessions for the clergy. My memory is that we were each on our own, expected to read and take in and implement the various stages....

This reflection onSacrosanctum Concilium¹ (SC) seeks to explore a singular excerpt on the biblical nature of worship: ‘. . . the prayers, collects, and liturgical songs are scriptural in their inspiration and their force, and it is from the scriptures that actions and signs derive their meaning’(SC24). The intention is to apply this passage to the current edition of the Roman Missal (2010) and the Mass it serves, recovering something of the biblical basis of our worship and opening up questions of our interpretation of this scriptural foundation. First some comments about the passage of the Constitution and...

Sacrosanctum Concilium¹ (SC) proclaimed the liturgy, especially the Eucharist, to be a vital means of supporting the growth of Catholics in Christian living and in their capacity to preach Christ. It was also seen as a sign by which ‘the Church was raised above the nations’. SC unequivocally recommended that changes be made ‘to adjust certain elements of the liturgy to make it more functional and its rites more appropriate to the times’.² It emphasised the ‘paramount’ importance of scripture, the need for it to be ‘more varied and suitable, and a more representative portion of it to be read...

With this brief comment, the Council began a period of searching by the pastors of the Church for the ‘intimate connection’ of confirmation within the whole of Christian Initiation. In the pastoral practice of that time, confirmation was usually celebrated as a sacrament during adolescence, often several years after the celebration of first communion. The publication of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults reflected the research that had been done on the integrity of the Sacraments of Initiation: along with all the rites of the catechumenate, this ritual includes the ‘celebration of the sacraments of baptism, confirmation and Eucharist’...

It was a simple sentence inSacrosanctum Concilium(hereafter SC): ‘The rite and formulas for the Sacrament of Penance are to be revised so that they more clearly express—or ‘give more luminous expression to,’ as another translation put it¹—both the nature and effect of the sacrament.’² However, it set off years of painstaking work resulting in powerful experiences of reconciliation for many and concern and confusion for others. Now, fifty years later, the rite and formulas have been revised but have not been fully implemented. There is still work to do if they are to give more luminous...

The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,Sacrosanctum Concilium¹ (SC), of Vatican II mandated reforms across the whole spectrum of Catholic liturgy by publishing general norms for all liturgical practice and making specific recommendations for the sacraments, sacramentals, the liturgical year, music and art. In addition,SCdevoted an entire chapter to the reform of the Divine Office, proposing some structural changes regarding the hours to be prayed, extending the Psalms over a longer period, recommending a revision of the office of readings, and calling for a richer selection of scriptural readings. Perhaps the most important statement of the chapter is...

This paper examines the liturgical cycle as set out in the documentSacrosanctum Concilium¹ (SC) where a set of overall attitudes were assumed and how these have changed over time and place. Our worldviews vary as do our relationship to liturgy and the place of the liturgical year to our sense of time and the extent to which individuals have any sense of belonging to the local worshipping community. This is examined particularly in the context of Australia and its multicultural context and its socio-cultural context where the work structure has so many different shapes. It also considers the challenges...

Chapter Six of the Constitution on the Sacred LiturgySacrosanctum Concilium¹ (SC) addressed in very broad terms the all-important role of music in worship, its purpose, and its qualities. Later documents, especially the 1967 Instruction of the Congregation of the RitesMusicam Sacram² (MS), would give more specific norms for implementing the principles given inSC. This chapter will treat the tensions surrounding the whole area of music in Christian worship before and after the Second Vatican Council and the implementation and reception of the Council’s norms. It will address in particular the important aspect of liturgical music formation and...

In December 1963 Pope Paul VI promulgatedSacrosanctum Concilium¹ (SC), thereby enacting the reform and promotion of the liturgy as envisioned by the bishops of the Second Vatican Council. Earlier in that same year the Benedictine monk R Kevin Seasoltz (1930–2013) published a remarkably prescient book entitled ‘The House of God: Sacred Art and Church Architecture’.² In ‘The House of God’, the index of which reveals the influence of the Liturgical Movement on church design, Seasoltz observed that:

Although all over Christendom one can sense a deepened understanding of the liturgy and its expression in a dynamic architecture, it...

Writing in a collection on twentieth-century developments in Christian spirituality—a collection which defines its orbit as ‘an ecumenical age’—the liturgical theologian Don E Saliers calls the Second Vatican Council ‘the most important thing to affect the Protestant traditions in the twentieth century’.¹ This essay will suggest that this large claim stands up to some scrutiny—and the following pages explore the deep, if somewhat piecemeal, appropriation of key themes in the Council’s first and perhaps most far reaching document, Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC), across a range of Protestant traditions and their ritual books. Inevitably, my reflections are selective, unsystematic,...

Sacrosanctum Concilium(SC) changed the Church. The reforms included in that document and those that flowed from it changed the shape and spirit of the Church. It was the source of those changes which most impacted on the faith and everyday lives of Catholics. It dared to envision that things could be otherwise than they were. It took up things that were already happening or being proposed; it critiqued, refined and developed these things and set a vision and task for the future.

We now live in a different time to that of the Second Vatican Council. The seeds of...

An Afterword is not another chapter. It is not so long, for a start. Mine is a few reflections from a colleague outside the Roman Catholic fold, who has however travelled these fifty years with the majority of this book’s authors, with the deepest appreciation for both them and their Church. There is one chapter by another ‘outsider’, an Anglican, Stephen Burns, and some of my responses will be parallel, but not greatly repetitive, of his. Join me for a few minutes as I remind you of some of the splendid phrases or challenging arguments you have read and marked...