AJV has ably provided the history I would have sketched in answer to the OP’s question and the rather ill-informed fuming against the EF; namely, the elimination of the OT reading is a
late antique development held in common with almost every other Christian church. We don’t know exactly why they were dropped, but we can tell this much: it is not a “deficiency” peculiar to the Roman Rite. One could, then, turn the question back on the detractors of the practice. If nearly all the Christian world in its diverse expressions persevered in a millennium and a half of agreement that the nature of the Eucharistic Liturgy does
not require a reading from the OT, how is it that the liturgists of the 20th century managed to convince the world’s Latins that 1) the Mass is one of our prime loci for the study of Scripture and 2) centuries of Catholics have been remiss for not including the OT on their Eucharistic syllabi?
I happen to be one of those who do not believe the OF lectionary has offered dramatic improvement over the EF. For starters, there are the points adduced above that
- The new lectionary simply provides too much to take in in one Mass;
- The one-year cycle provides greater scriptual anchors to feasts and seasons, as opposed to hearing the same reading only every third year. It’s already hard enough to form that anchor with just a one-year cycle.
To that I would add that
3) The readings are, *pace *LilyM, not synchronized for most Sundays, let alone weekdays, and thus preachers have to make hard choices. They can stretch the texts beyond what they were meant to bear in order to integrate all three, or they can ignore one reading/theme in favor of another. Thus preaching does not in fact benefit from the expansion of lectoins.
4) The OF lectionary overturns a cycle with roughly a millennium of fixed use, for reasons that have yet to be proven justified.
The last is the kicker. As I’ve said, everyone suddenly realized that we “needed” both the OT and more extended readings in the Mass, but the same everyone made that realization on the assumption that the readings are meant not only didactically but didactically in a privileged sense - the Liturgy of the Word as a sort of Sunday School. This may be true. The earliest accounts of the liturgy, such as those of Justin or the great catechists, certainly do suggest that the readings at that point were meant to expose the people to the sacred writings and teach them therefrom. But by the time we get to the actual creation of the lectionaries in roughly the 6th century, the game has changed. Some modern Byzantines claim that their liturgy as it took shape at this time and continues to the present employs the readings
doxologically, much as the Psalms of the Office are sometimes viewed as our prayer
to God. Whatever the readings of the medieval Roman Rite were, and they may have been this, readings in Latin
versus Deum and without an integrated homily most certainly were not understood as a didactic moment.
So the question everyone needs to ask in the debate over the lectionaries is “Why are we reading the lections to begin with?” We can’t know which lectionary is doing a better job of accomplishing the aims of the Roman Rite until we establish what those aims are. This is an ecclesial project, because I propose that
none of us really have an answer to that right now. We worked off of assumptions, and still have yet to ask the question so that we can do the research to settle it. As is, the two lectionaries are, I would suggest, somewhat incomparable because they are trying to do two different things. It’s like faulting a doctor for not clearing up your headaches when he has in fact been trying to improve your digestion, or vice versa.
