"This is one of the most important books on the post-conciliar reform of the liturgy..."

... to have appeared in the last ten years. It is particularly valuable for venturing and achieving an overview of modernity, a secularising view of the world all but taken for granted in the contemporary West, with philosophical origins in the thought of Kant, Hegel, Hume and Comte.

So writes Archbishop Augustine di Noia, the current Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship, in his Preface to the Italian edition of Fr. Jonathon Robinson's book, The Mass and Modernity: Walking to Heaven Backwards (published in English by Ignatius Press in 2005).  A translation of the Archbishop's Preface has been posted on the New Liturgical Movement site. It continues:

The author of The Mass and Modernity is Father Jonathan Robinson, founder and provost of the Congregation of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri in Toronto and sometime professor and Chairman of the Faculty of Philosophy at McGill University in Montreal. His background explains the rigour and clarity with which his analysis unfolds. Modernity, as Fr Robinson presents it, denies the presence of Incarnate Truth within temporal and historical change. In this sense, modernity accords with modernism: a restricted conception of the ‘modern’ which builds exclusively upon the ‘new’ and refuses what is unchanging.

As The Mass and Modernity shows, this philosophy has become a social and cultural commonplace, with profound consequences for our understanding of the liturgy of the Church. We no longer worship God as one who is objective, independent of our understanding or experience; God has been made subjective, reflecting only what we want him to be. The implementation of the post-conciliar liturgical reforms has contributed to this loss of objectivity. As Pope Benedict XVI has suggested, the new Missal “was understood as authorizing or even requiring creativity, which frequently led to deformations of the liturgy which were hard to bear.” St Peter’s Successor, the Supreme Pastor of the Church, has voiced his grave concern for the “arbitrary distortions of the liturgy” that have inflicted so many wounds on the People of God.

According to Robinson, modern philosophy has generated conceptions of ‘community’, ‘science’, ‘reason’ and what it means to be ‘modern’ which have shaped contemporary self-understanding and, having entered Catholic consciousness, have contributed to the present deformations of Catholic liturgy. One of the book’s particular strengths lies in its masterful disclosure of how deeply rooted such conceptions are in the development of modern Western thought.

Read the entire Preface. And if you have any interest at all in matters liturgical, this book can hardly be recommended strongly enough (especially when it is on sale for only $7.00!). Also see my 2005 interview with Fr. Robinson:

Comments

[Sharon]

Any chance that this book will be made available as an e-book? Postage charges to Australia are prohibitive unfortunately.