Fr. Robert Taft (1932-2018) on the liturgy

Fr. Robert Francis Taft, S.J., died Friday in Weston, Mass., where he had retired in 2011 after 46 years at the Oriental Institute of Rome. Born in Rhode Island, he was best known as a Roman Catholic scholar of Eastern liturgies and was in fact a priest in Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, an Eastern Rite church in communion with Rome. The Pray Tell blog posted an obituary by John F. Baldovin, S.J., a friend and colleague who stayed in touch with Fr Taft after his retirement.

Fr. Taft was a highly knowledgeable, influential and opinionated contributor to the postwar ecumenical movement that called itself “Liturgical Reform”. While for the Roman church this specifically meant bringing the liturgy into the vernacular, the broader movement sought to bring new evidence, insights and opinions to change the liturgy in the direction the reformers believed best. Over the past 70 year, this movement that impacted almost the entire swath of liturgical Western Christianity.

I knew of Taft’s work from his definitive 1986 book The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, which is on the future reading list of my ecumenical liturgy reading group. As a student of liturgy — rather than a scholar making original contributions — today I can only scratch the surface of assessing his contribution.

(For those that wonder why I spend so much time on liturgy in a music blog, please bear with me).

Pray Tell also posted the 1985 speech Fr. Taft gave upon receiving an award for his liturgical studies. From this 8,800 word speech, I will (cherry) pick some on how this priest and scholar found that a proper liturgy is important for congregational worship:

…what the Vatican II reforms initiated was a return of the liturgy to the people. … But the only way it can remain popular is if we leave it alone. … What ordinary people in ordinary parishes need is familiarity, sameness, the stability of a ritual tradition that can be achieved only be repetition, and that will not tolerate change every time the pastor reads a new article. The only way people are going to perceive liturgy as their own, and therefore participate in it, is when they know what is going to happen next.
…
So let me enunciate a liturgical principle: ritual – or call it order of worship, if you belong to a tradition that dislikes the word ritual – a certain stability in the déroulement of worship, far from precluding spontaneity and congregational participation, is its condition sine qua non, as is indeed true of any social event. Italian crowds spontaneously shout “brava” to divas at the opera – but not in the middle of an aria – because the conventions of civility dictate that there is a time and place for everything.
…
Like medieval cathedrals, liturgies were created not as monuments to human creativity, but as acts of worship. The object of worship is not self-expression, not even self-fulfillment, but God. “he must increase, I must decrease,” John the Baptist said of Jesus (Jn 3:30) and that is an excellent principle for liturgical ministers. Anyway, experience shows that most spontaneity is spontaneous only the first time around. Thereafter it always sounds the same. Furthermore, most people are not especially creative in any other aspect of the existence, and there is no reason to think that they will be when it comes to liturgy. They can, however, be drawn to participate in a common heritage far nobler and richer than the creation of anyone of us individually. What we need is not further to reinvent the wheel, not to reshape our liturgy every time we read a new article, but just to take what we have and use it very well.
…
In other words, liturgy is a common tradition, and ideal of prayer to which I must rise, and not some private game that I am free to reduce to the level of my own banality. And when the rite has something I do not understand, especially if it is something that Christians in almost every tradition, East and West, have been doing for about a millennium, then perhaps my initial instinct should be to suspect some deficiency in my own understanding, before immediately proceeding to excise whatever it is that has had the affrontery to escape the limits of my intelligence.

Requiescat in pace.