I was having a chat with a CAF friend and we were speaking of organic development. I was saying that changes in the liturgy through organic development are fine, but not when they are abrupt and jarring.
In return, he asked me “What IS organic development” and commented that a lot of developments start out as innovations or liturgical abuse.
This statement is extremely interesting to me.
How exactly does organic development occur?
Does anyone who really understand that care to explain it to me?
100 years down the line, which liturgical abuses will be considered organic development?
Looking forward to your answers.
The important thing to note is that organic changes
were “just a lot of unapproved innovations” – because there was no centralized system for approving changes. Eight or twelve hundred years ago, there was no curial office dedicated to the “discipline of the sacraments,” no
editio typica of the missal, no GIRM or
Sacrosanctum Concilium with a line saying that no one, even if he be a priest, may add to, subtract from, or otherwise modify the liturgy.
Thus when people first started doing things like chanting a sequence after the alleluia, or reciting the beginning of John’s Gospel after Mass, or distributing Communion primarily outside of Mass, or dividing the Sanctus and the Benedictus because the music was too long, no one could say, “Hey! That is an abuse!” And when such innovations caught on and were perpetuated, similarly they could not say, “Even if the bishop approves, this is just the fruit of disobedience!” It just
was, in somewhat the same way that when people started speaking Italian and the other Romance languages no one was there pointing a finger saying, “Hey! You are speaking terrible Latin! Look at this official Latin dictionary; you’re getting it all wrong!” That came to an end with the standardization and bureaucratization of the liturgy during the Counter-Reformation, as has been well-documented.
There are two other misconceptions about organic change that seem facile but are apparently widespread, and ought to be pointed out. The first is the idea that organic change was possible in the past because it is shrouded in history and we generally don’t know know who was responsible for it – typically it is pinned either on something vague like “monks,” or on some saint (e.g., Ambrose) whom it’s hard to argue with. Under this conception, change cannot really be organic today because it is just the whim of a certain Father Smith or Bishop Jones in a particular parish or diocese, and not really something that arises out of the Church writ large or its saints. Or at the absolute minimum, change can be imputed to a semi-defined group like “liberals” or “the disobedient,” who by virtue of their status are equally incapable of doing anything legitimate.
The second misconception insists that any change is actually a “rupture,” and, since rupture is (we are urged to believe) by definition
inorganic,
no change can be organic change. Thus if, to take one example, people start holding hands during the Our Father, the argument runs, “There was nothing like that in the past! It is a huge and unprecedented change! Indeed, that makes it a rupture, because there is no continuity whatsoever with the past! So it is obviously not an organic change.”
Those misconceptions are highly intertwined, so arguments often go like this:
Alice: How do you feel about Glorias with a refrain?
Bill: That is a massive change. Unprecedented. A clear rupture.
Alice: But then wouldn’t you say it was a rupture to do something like split the Sanctus and Benedictus?
Bill: You don’t understand – that is wrapped up in history. It was done by holy monks, not hippies and the big publishing houses.
If you would like an example of organic change that will very likely be accepted in the future, the best one I can think of is the giving of blessings to noncommunicants in the Communion line. And incidentally, I surely agree that such ought not be done by Eucharistic ministers, even though it is perhaps an open question whether it could be done
through them by virtue of a liturgical power delegated
ad hoc by the priest. All the same, I have never been able to figure out why the very existence of such a blessing should be such a bugbear for some people. I find it ironic in the extreme to hear the same people saying “It is pointless, because everybody gets a blessing at the end of Mass!” who would be the first, if a blessing had been removed in the Novus Ordo, to complain, “Graces are being diminished by the wanton removal of extra blessings! This is ‘noble simplicity’ run amok!”
