Christian Life and Worship

Fr. Gerald Ellard’s Christian Life and Worship, originally published in 1933 with a last and expanded edition in 1950, is being republished today for its value as a once-popular and revelatory document of the Liturgical Movement’s middle phase, between the original phase inaugurated by Dom Guéranger (who emphasized education in existing, inherited rites) and the radical phase of the postconciliar “reform” (which rewrote all of the rites according to modern presuppositions).

On the one hand, Fr. Ellard movingly sings the praises of the traditional (Tridentine) sacramental rites as practiced in the Roman Church at the time of the book’s composition, drawing on Scripture and the Church Fathers to illuminate their meaning and increase the faithful’s fruitful participation. In keeping with the movement’s appeal to the Christian imagination, the chapters are adorned with simple but expressive drawings by a well-known artist of the time, Adé de Bethune. The running commentaries on the texts of the Mass and the other sacraments are unquestionably edifying.

On the other hand, the book is filled with confident historical assumptions and assertions that would, later on, come under intense critical scrutiny and often be refuted by better research-alas, not before they had been enthusiastically adopted in wave after wave of reforms culminating in the creation of new rites in the 1960s, which marked so radical a departure from tradition that even a relatively “avant garde” book like Ellard’s became practically irrelevant overnight.

Christian Life and Worship thus serves as a reminder both of the Liturgical Movement’s often noble aims and of the catastrophic effects of reformatory zeal unchecked by profound respect for what is given and received.