Walking the Cycle – Liturgies I

This week I have been mostly looking at liturgies.

This does not, I grant you, sound thrilling or valuable. But it was an unknown unknown to me until about six months ago. So the process of developing some sense of what it’s all about has been interesting and, if you like that kind of thing, fun. Briefly, the story is this. A liturgy, or liturgical rite, is a record of When and How Things Should Be Done in a church. This, very occasionally, comes to the fore in public discussion: what promises should be said during a wedding, for instance, comes – to some extent – back to a liturgical question. Can the content be changed for individuals, or at times of social change? (Answer: yes. The Christian religion has always been a flexible and responsive social process for aligning a faith community with different social, economic, and political communities.)

Now, most of you will know that the Catholic Church is a unified, single church because (pretty much) the same thing happens in all of its services and buildings. It’s like going to a chain pub: you know what you’re getting, even if the quality of service and décor varies a bit. This is because, over more or less precisely my period (ca. 600 – ca. 1200) and through a huge range of different processes, Rome came to dominate western European Christianity to such an extent that its particular liturgical form – the Roman Rite – became more or less the only one. Before that, there were several different forms knocking around.

If you think that doesn’t matter, glance at the Brexit debate. One of perhaps two hearts of the Leavers’ position is the desire to escape foreign dominance, regardless of what actual impact that has on daily life or cultural or economic experience. It would take an entirely different blog to properly reflect on this, but I think that the (Roman) Catholic Church was the EU of the medieval world – and I mean that in both positive and negative terms. Choosing to adopt the Roman Rite (as England did, with a particular focus on the date of Easter, in the seventh century) is to take a specific, Euro-centric (if you like) position.

Before the Roman Rite completely ruled the roost, there were some specific regional forms. These are sometimes collectively called ‘the Gallican Rites’, but as one of them is itself specifically called ‘the Gallican Rite’, I haven’t found that especially helpful. So I go with the problematic term ‘pre-Roman Rites’; problematic because the Roman Rite existed at the same time, and the name gives the impression that they were primitive – feeding into a view of history which believes that Time Eternally Progresses, and also because it’s a pretty ugly term. The ‘pre-Roman Rites’ I know about are the Gallican Rite (French), the Celtic Rite (Irish, but exported to everywhere an Irish bar now exists), the Ambrosian Rite (north Italian, centred on Milan), and the Hispanic, or Visigothic, or Mozarabic Rite (Spanish, centred on Toledo close to Madrid).

That’s a lot of rites.

Next time, I’ll try to explain one or two examples of what I’ve found that’s interesting in this maze of rituals.