New Oxford Notes: An All-New 'New Liturgical Movement'?

But the Pope isn’t so skeptical. He is determined, it seems, to will into an ecclesial reality the mutual enrichment of the two Masses. If, by a working of the Holy Spirit, his vision of a mutually enriched Roman rite someday comes to fruition, then what? Well, then we might be looking at an altogether new Mass, a third form that blends the best of both the ordinary and extraordinary forms.

This notion isn’t as farfetched as it might seem. This May, at a conference on Summorum Pontificum held in Rome, Kurt Cardinal Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, hinted that the motu proprio is “only the beginning” of a “new liturgical movement.” The Holy Father, he said, “knows well that, in the long term, we cannot stop at a coexistence between the ordinary form and the extraordinary form of the Roman rite.” In the future, says Cardinal Koch, the Church “naturally will once again need a common rite.” This new common rite doesn’t figure to be either of the two extant forms of the Mass. It would instead be the result of a “process of growth and purification” — and a lengthy one at that, if the process is to be organic and not synthetic, as many have characterized the “development” of Pope Paul’s New Mass. The first phase of this process, the cardinal suggests, is the present one, in which “the two [current] forms of the Roman rite can and should enrich each other.” Perhaps now we are getting an inkling of what Pope Benedict has in mind — and it is a vision on a grander scale than any of us had imagined.

Could the two main streams of Benedictine liturgical thought — the “reform of the reform” and the “restoration of tradition” — one day flow together into as-yet uncharted waters? That a third form of the Mass could be drawn from the two current forms sounds fantastical. But really, how improbable is it? After all, who could have imagined half a century ago that in the space of five short years the Church would jettison the pageantry and majesty of a centuries-old Mass in Latin in favor of a stripped-down, folksy, “on-the-spot product” (as Benedict himself once described the New Mass) in the vernacular?