“We are not justified by our wisdom, intelligence, piety, or by any action of ours, however holy, but by faith, the one means by which God has justified men from the beginning.” (St. Clement I, Pope, “Letter to the Corinthians”)
“There is this much to be said for the impossible ideal of rigid uniformity of rite, that without it Christians unconsciously grow to pray and so to believe somewhat differently, and mutual charity becomes increasingly difficult.” (The Shape of the Liturgy, Dom Gregory Dix, London: Dacre Press, 1945, p. 121)
“…for it is now plain that despite all the deference to critical methods which liberal scholars sincerely endeavoured to pay, their conclusions were as often dictated by their presuppositions as by their actual handling of the evidence.” (The Shape of the Liturgy, Dom Gregory Dix, London: Dacre Press, 1945, p. 70)
“Whenever and wherever the eucharistic action is changed, i.e., whenever and wherever the standard structure of the rite has been broken up or notably altered, there it will be found that some part of the primitive fulness of the meaning of the eucharist has been lost. And–in the end–it will be found that this has had equally notable results upon the Christian living of those whose Christianity has been thus impoverished. It may sound exaggerated so to link comparatively small ritual changes with great social results. But it is a demonstrable historical fact that they are linked; and whichever we may like to regard as the cause of the other, it is a fact that the ritual change can always be historically detected before the social one.”
Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, London: Dacre Press, 1945, p. xii.
This presents congregations that engage in thorough reconfigurations and prunings of the classic liturgy of the Church with a testable hypothesis. It may take the span of decades for the evidence to become clear, but it would be a novelty if this moment in history were to prove to be the exception to the pattern, rather than merely, and tragically, a further confirmation of that pattern.
“It is especially necessary that listening to the word of God should become a life-giving encounter, in the ancient and ever valid tradition of lectio divina, which draws from the biblical text the living word which questions, directs, and shapes our lives.” (Apostolic Letter Novo Millennio Ineunte, Pope John Paul II, Jan. 6, 2001, Art. 39)
