How does one discuss liturgical matters in the Church of today? Doing so as part of a culture war between conservatives and liberals leads to stalemate and divisiveness. What is needed, Liam G. Walsh believes, is to see liturgy, first and foremost, as the work of God, a work humans receive and respond to in acts of grace and creative gift. It is to draw on the accounts of how the liturgy was divinely given in Scripture and Apostolic Tradition. It is to recognize the range of approaches towards appropriating the divine gift that have occurred in the history of the Churches of East and West. Against this background, this work examines the major phases in the development of the Mass of the Roman Rite – the scriptural/apostolic, the patristic, the medieval, the era of Trent and Pius V, and the era of Vatican II. In each era, it identifies four important ecclesial factors that helped shape how the Mass was celebrated and understood – assembly, worship, doctrine, and authority. The purpose is to help readers come to a mindfulness about the Mass that takes them beyond seeing it as holy ceremonial to be regulated by rubrics, beyond seeing it only in aesthetic terms, beyond making it a way of aligning themselves to ‘progressive’ or ‘traditionalist’ camps. Liturgy, for all its humanity, is primarily God’s doing. Thinking rightly about it requires thinking about what God is doing in it, the kind of thinking done in this book.
