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Turner on ‘Operative Rituals’: A Sociological Response
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Extract
In a rather bleak essay, Charles Davis observed in 1970 that ‘the general verdict upon liturgical reform is that it has failed to solve the problem of worship in a secular age’ and ‘that the chief effect of the reforms has been to uncover an insoluble problem’. Any sociological response to liturgical renewal came after the late sixties as a critical reaction to changes implemented as a result of Vatican II. There was certainly no sociological participation in the demands for liturgical change prior to 1963. As a result the Conciliar reforms did not so much answer a sociological scepticism as generate one that has developed increasingly since. The attempt to relate the shape of rite, to what were perceived as the cultural and social needs of a secular modem society, merged with a wish to maximise the active participation of the laity in the liturgy, whose simplicity and clarity of form, would enable a worshipping community to develop as a witness to an increasingly sceptical society.
Pre-Conciliar forms of rite were rigid in shape, objectively secured in complex rubrics, but were considered as implausible and irrelevant to contemporary needs. The tenor of the new rites was a mixture of looser simplified rubrics, in the General Instruction ol the Roman Missal, 1969, matched to a sensitivity to pastoral and cultural needs. But this wish for some degree of adaptability (that satisfied neither radicals nor conservatives) pre-supposed some criteria of assessing changes in form as affecting local situations. If indigenization was to occur some form of systematic evaluation seemed desirable. Initially, the changes were met with indifference by sociologists of religion, who have displayed little interest in the social nature of liturgy since.
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- Copyright © 1983 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
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