I have made yet another discovery, of a blog on the liturgy with a difference – Canticum Salomonis, a blog for liturgical ressourcement. I was brought to this blog by my stats page which tells me which sites link to my blog when someone clicks on that link.

I am particularly impressed by the article Claude de Vert’s Simple, Literal, and Historical Explanation of the Ceremonies of the Mass: A Watershed of the Catholic Enlightenment.

In his Institutions Liturgiques, Dom Guéranger objected that what lacked in many of the Enlightenment attempts to produce a simplified and rational liturgy was unction, a sense of the sacred. However, Guéranger’s remedy was not a return to medieval standards of liturgy but adopting the Tridentine rite and the Ultramontanist papal ideology.

I see in this blog a serious attempt to recapture the spirit of medieval liturgy rather than the “1950’s” approach of many political traditionalists.

One published book that shows a similar attitude is Geoffrey Hull, The Banished Heart, Richmond (Australia) 1995. I have already published an article by Hull in this blog at The Proto-History of the Roman Liturgical Reform. Dom Alcuin Reid also shows this viewpoint of “liturgical ressourcement” in his book The Organic Development of the Liturgy and his edition of the T&T Clark Companion to Liturgy, an anthology to which I have myself contributed.

The more we study the liturgy, the more we are dissatisfied with the angry disputes between “traditionalists” and “liberals”. The malaise goes back much further, and this is the major reason for seeking the spirit of the medieval liturgy.