Liturgy News

JOHN CALVIN was born a middle-class Catholic five hundred years ago this year and lived for fifty-five years. We may take this birthday anniversary as an opportunity to remember the half century of his life. In 1509, Martin Luther was a twentysix year old, recently ordained as an Augustinian priest and just appointed as a lecturer at the University of Wittenburg. Ulrich Zwingli was twenty-five, a priest for three years and pastor at Glarus in Switzerland. Thomas Cranmer was a twenty-year old student at Jesus College in Cambridge, a decade off ordination. Martin Bucer was only eighteen but had already been a Dominican for three years. In 1509 the Christian world in the West still held together but all that would change drastically in the decades of Calvin’s lifetime.

Antonio Ghislieri was a five-year old shepherd boy in 1509. He would become Pope Pius V twenty months after Calvin’s death and would work strenuously to implement the reforms of the Council of Trent, producing the Roman Catechism in 1566, the Roman Breviary in 1568, and the Roman Missal in 1570. But by this time the horse had well and truly bolted. Western Christianity was bitterly divided and dozens of church leaders had been beheaded or burned at the stake.

The pope in 1509 was Julius II. He had been made a cardinal and given a handful of bishoprics by his uncle at an early age and he fathered three daughters. As pope, he was a bellicose ruler of the papal states and a great patron of the arts, notably of Raphael, Michelangelo (whom he had paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling) and Bramante (who began St Peter’s Basilica for him). His successor, Leo X, a polished Renaissance prince, spendthrift and pleasure-loving, had been made a cardinal at thirteen years of age and pope at thirty-eight. He promoted the funding of St Peter’s by the sale of indulgences. After Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenburg, Leo condemned and excommunicated him, and granted Henry VIII the title of Defender of the Faith for writing a book on the sacraments against Luther, but there was no real engagement with the theological issues or understanding of the revolution which was beginning.

In his brief pontificate, the ascetic Dutch pope, Hadrian VI, was ostracised as a foreigner and so failed to reform the culture of the Roman Curia which he saw as a primary cause of the Reformation. His successor Clement VII (1523- 1534), again a cultivated Medici prince and patron of the arts, was paralysed by his vacillating political alliances and procrastination. He evinced no support for renewal or reform in the Church and during his pontificate England moved into schism and Switzerland and Scandinavia adopted the Protestant reform. It was at this time that the new theological thinking began to find expression in sweeping liturgical reforms written into local Church Orders, city by city, principality by principality. Martin Luther simplified the Roman Mass and truncated the canon in the Formula Missae of 1523, taking it further in 1526 with the Deutsche Messse. In these two years, he produced baptismal rites, the first a cautious revision, the second eliminating most of the ceremony. Likewise in Switzerland, Zwingli’s first liturgical reform of the Mass appeared in a 1523 pamphlet which was again followed up in 1525 by a more radical proposal. He produced two corresponding baptismal rites in the same years, the second, as he said, removing all the additions which have no foundation in the word of God. In the Mass rites, the vernacular was used, the canon was condensed to the biblical narrative of institution, and communion was given from the cup. Zwingli, wary of any symbols, settled for the preaching service as the regular Sunday worship with communion offered quarterly, while Luther tried to maintain weekly Eucharist and communion though this was not ultimately successful. We should remember that, while the Medieval Church celebrated Mass very frequently, annual communion was the norm.

Pope Paul III who reigned for the rest of the 1530s and the 1540s was in many ways another typical Renaissance pope – he was a cardinal at twenty-five, fathering four children, given to worldly pleasures, indulging in scandalous nepotism, and a patron of letters and the arts. Yet at last we see a pope who supported the inner reform of the Church – establishing reform commissions, approving new orders such as the Jesuits (1540) and fighting for the General Council which opened in Trent in 1545. However his political interventions in Europe, complicated by his family ambitions, were unable to check the spread of Protestantism and the work of the Council of Trent, although combining dogma and reform, was reactive rather than proactive.

During these years the liturgical reforms in Protestant areas continued unabated. In England, under the auspices of Thomas Cranmer, editions of the Book of Common Prayer appeared in 1549 and 1552, the second a more radical revision of the Sarum Rite than the former, due in part to the advice of Martin Bucer who spent the last few years of his life in England. Bucer had become the leader of the Reformed churches in Switzerland and southern Germany after Zwingli’s death. After more than a decade of liturgical revision in Strasbourg, Bucer produced his Psalter mit aller Kirchenübung in 1539, a complete service book of church practice with a moderate and simple, if quite didactic, eucharistic rite.

John Calvin was greatly influenced by this rite in his three years with the French-speaking community in Strasbourg. When he was recalled to Geneva, it became the basis of his 1542 Form of Church Prayers which was his attempt to capture the liturgy in its primitive simplicity and to replace the ‘childish and theatrical follies’ of the medieval liturgy. Calvin, like Luther, maintained weekly Eucharist and communion, with Word and Sacrament the regular Sunday pattern of worship. However, while Luther and Cranmer’s principle of reform was to change only those things which were contrary to the word of God as they read it, Calvin required the liturgy to demonstrate only those things which the word explicitly set forth. Calvin’s was thus the more radical reform (for example, Luther retained the elevation of the host, an element of ‘popular religion’, because it helped people pray and did no harm). Authoritarian and disciplined, austere and ascetic, scholarly and precise, Calvin established in Geneva a culture in extreme contrast to the luxury of the Renaissance papacy. His reputation and influence was widespread and his writing has continued to shape Christian theology for five hundred years.

One-sentence summaries hardly do justice to the protagonists in the turbulent and tragic halfcentury of Calvin’s lifetime. It was a time of energetic ideas and action but it was also the time when Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall. After five hundred years we’ve not managed to put poor Humpty together again. Today we need more than ever to respect the good faith of other Christians, listen to one another and work together, and this not just between Christian churches but indeed within the Catholic Church as well. In the words of one of our Eucharistic Prayers, we urgently need to pray: Keep your Church alert in faith to the signs of the times and eager to accept the challenge of the gospel…