Fr. Virgil, St. John's Monks Spread Idea that Liturgy Creates Community
National Catholic Reporter,
Dec 10, 1993 by Dawn Gibeau
COLLEGEVILLE, Minn. --
The
Benedictine monks of St. John's Abbey here, beginning with liturgical pioneer
Fr. Virgil Michel, "were the founders of the liturgical movement in
English-speaking countries," said Fr. Godfrey Diekmann, who inherited
responsibility for Michel's liturgical legacy after his mentor died
unexpectedly in 1938 at age 48.
St. John's
"remains important, to some extent," Diekmann told NCR. He dates the origin of
the pastoral liturgical movement to 1924, when the first Missa recitata, or
dialogue Mass, was celebrated in a crypt of Maria Laach Abbey in Germany. The
dialogue Mass, in which the entire congregation joined altar servers in the
responses, "spread like wildfire," he said. That first dialogue Mass expressed
something that was really started by Fr. Lambert Beauduin, a Belgian, "who was
personally responsible for the liturgical movement in France," Diekmann said.
From
Beauduin came the idea that liturgy creates Christian community, that it is
the source and center of all Christian life -- an idea that later made its way
into the Vatican Council's constitution on the liturgy. That idea included the
concept that social justice cannot be separated from liturgy, Diekmann said.
Michel, in
Europe on a sabbatical from St. John's, met Beauduin, whose ideas inspired
him.
"Beauduin
did not find an audience in Europe for his thought about liturgy as the source
of social justice," Diekmann said, but Michel "brought it to St. John's, and
it was part of his campaign from the outset."
Michel
worked with Msgr. Moses Coady of Halifax, Nova Scotia, on cooperatives and
credit unions. He brought Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin to Collegeville to
share their ideas. He paved the way for Catherine de Hueck to send black
students from Harlem to St John's University, which thus became the first U.S.
Catholic college to accept blacks, "as far as I know," Diekmann said.
In 1926,
Michel founded the liturgy magazine Orate Fratres, later renamed
Worship. Simultaneously he founded Liturgical Press at St. John's and
published his first two pamphlets, "Liturgy in the Life of the Church" and
"Liturgy and Life."
In 1926,
"the first article on the body of Christ that appeared in the English language
for hundreds of years was in Orate Fratres. At that time, the best-known
theologian at Catholic University stated publicly that he hoped this heresy
would soon be condemned as it deserves."
Instead, the
concept "body of Christ" gained momentum, earned a papal seal of approval in
Pius XII's encyclical, Mystici Corporis Christi, issued about 1940. By then
Michel was dead, and his mantle fell upon the shoulders of Diekmann, then 30
years old.
In A
Monk's Tale, Kathleen Hughes' biography Diekmann, he recalls the day
Michel died: "I was desperate. ... By no means was I the giant that he was --
and I knew it. So I walked to the chapel the night when he hovered near death,
praying God to take my life and to spare Virgil's."
Diekmann had
studied one year at Maria Laach, but his principal education at St. John's
University and at Sant' Anselmo in Rome prepared him to be a patristics
scholar, not a liturgist.
Much of his
education about liturgy seeped in almost by osmosis when he worked under
Michel, much the way he learned to collect mushrooms. Diekmann is passionate
about mushrooms -- he rues he can identify only 54 of about 2,000 varieties --
and he is passionate about good liturgy. For a quarter century, he promoted it
as editor of Worship.
From the
Stearns County soil where he was born and became a monk, Diekmann blossomed
into a national and international liturgical leader, teaching at workshops and
summer schools, meeting in Europe with other liturgists. He is well-aware that
he had a long tether for a monk with a vow of stability.
By 1956 the
Vatican was convoking a meeting of the world's pastoral liturgists in Assisi,
Italy. Diekmann, along with Holy Cross Fr. Michael Mathis of the University of
Notre Dame, organized the American contingent. "We got to know each other, to
exchange ideas, to develop a common front about what most needed to be
emphasized," Diekmann recalled.
At that
meeting, "we were given strict orders not to broach the vernacular," he said.
Even as late as 1962, Diekmann was banned from Catholic University of America
(along with Frs. John Courtney Murray, Gustave Weigel and Hans Kung) "because
-- as the rector explained to my abbot -- Catholic University, as a pontifical
university, cannot hope to identify with the radical views Father Godfrey is
known to have in regard to the vernacular."
"For Virgil
Michel, the theological basis of this entire movement was the body of Christ,"
Diekmann said. "And it basically means the same thing as the vine and the
branches. We'd almost forgotten about the body of Christ during four centuries
when the church was viewed as an institution, the perfect society."
He was
appalled at the decline of prayer among priests, who were obliged to read
their breviaries daily in Latin. Most did not understand what they were
reading, he said, but spent so much time doing it that they had no time for
other prayer.
From the
liturgists' meeting at Assisi, Diekmann went to Rome, where he knocked on
doors of congregation after congregation, explaining the plight. He was
rebuffed. The 55 international liturgists at Assisi, however, soon became the
55 members of Vatican II's preparatory commission on the liturgy, and that
made all the difference.
Today,
vernacular is taken for granted around the world. Worship magazine has become
more academic because other publications arose after the council to take over
its task of popularizing liturgy. The Liturgical Press at St. John's has
expanded, recently incorporating Michael Glazier Books and Pueblo Books.
Diekmann,
85, remains as enthusiastic as ever. He recollects significant milestones and
amusing sidelights. Never forgetting how it all began, he typically guides
visitors to a hill above Lake Sagatagan, to the grave of Benedictine Fr.
Virgil Michel, mentor to a movement.
© COPYRIGHT 1993 National Catholic Reporter