History of Worship Magazine
Worship is in the seventy-third year of publication. Formerly known as Orate
Fratres, it is published by the monks of
Saint John's Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota.
The first issue appeared on the First Sunday of Advent, 1926. It was originally edited by
Dom Virgil Michel OSB, with the help of other well-known pioneers of the modern liturgical
movement, including Gerald Ellard SJ, Martin Hellriegel, William Busch, and Justine
Ward, all from the United States, as well as Donald Attwater from England, and James
O'Mahony OFM, from Ireland. Its primary aim was to develop a better understanding of
the spiritual impact of the liturgy and to promote active participation on the part of all
men and women in the worship of the Church.
The Four Principles of Dom Virgil Michel OSB
Virgil Michel had four specific objectives in view. The first was a renewed sense of
the corporate nature of the Church, the idea that the parish is the body that can most
effectively carry the Gospel to the world, and that corporate evangelism must have
priority of expression in all activities of a congregation and in all the worship of
Christians. He maintained that through lay participation in the liturgy, congregations
could be built up into active communities of service and love.
His second insight was that the local Church must be interested in the daily lives of
men and women - in their work, in their leisure activities, and in their social concerns.
A parish must be equally interested in and responsibly engaged with national questions,
both economic and political, and in the world's problems, especially poverty and war. Its
worship must come out of human life and return people to the serious business of life
formed not only in the abstract realms of theology but in the concrete realities of
marriage and family life, work, sickness, and leisure.
His third conviction involved concern for those alienated from the economic order. It
was the realization that unemployed industrial workers in Europe felt themselves to be cut
off from all hope of a life of fulfillment that led Michel to see the necessity for new
Christian ventures. The unemployed and marginalized were the very people whom the Church,
if true to the mission of Jesus Christ, should be specially searching for and serving. He
was convinced that one thing the lonely and poor needed was to feel wanted and one thing
the Church should be able to give was a sense of belonging to a human community. Without
community there was no Christian hope for the hungry and the ragged, the oppressed and the
over-worked.
Michel felt that this corporate embrace of others was often lacking in both society and
the Church, and so he included a fourth emphasis, namely, that the corporate worship of
the laity must be renewed everywhere. Michel taught that worship is something that lay
persons must do together in order to grow into the unity of the Body of Christ. In this
way he sought to correct the religious individualism that characterized so much of the
religious activity of the Church. The worship of the Church must express and be seen to
express the fullness of the faith, and it must do so in living, material relation to the
concrete life of the people. A liturgy in which all participated fully would become a
witness in the United States to a new Christian humanism which could safeguard the dignity
of the individual person within the context of a larger community. Against the gray
landscape of widespread poverty, the breaking of bread and the sharing of the Eucharistic
Bread could challenge the selfishness and narcissism, the emptiness and frustration which
regularly result in a withdrawal from others.
Prophetic Voice
Virgil Michel was indeed a prophetic figure who had a profound sense of the essential
relationship that must exist between liturgy and life, between liturgy and social justice.
Since his sudden death in 1938, the editorial policy of the journal has carried on his
rich tradition. His immediate successor was Godfrey Diekmann, a monk of Saint John's
Abbey, who had studied at Sant' Anselmo in Rome and at the Abbey of Maria Laach in
Germany. He was the editor-in-chief for about forty-five years, was one of the prime
movers in the North American Liturgical Conference during the 1940s and 1950s, served as a
peritus at the Second Vatican Council, and was one of the founders of the International
Commission on English in the Liturgy.
Post-Vatican II
Since the Second Vatican Council the routine
management of the journal has been under the successive direction of Aelred Tegels,
Michael Marx, Allan Bouley and Kevin Seasoltz, all monks of Saint John's Abbey. In 1951,
twenty-five years after the founding of the journal, its name was changed to Worship,
an indication of the growing interest in the use of the vernacular in liturgical
celebrations.
Since the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the journal has tried to help Christian
communities internalize the meaning of the extensive liturgical changes that have taken
place in the churches of almost all Christian denominations. With a readership that has
gone far beyond the confines of the United States and has included not only Roman
Catholics but also Anglicans, Eastern Christians and Protestants, it has tried to evaluate
critically the effectiveness of liturgical reforms in light of both tradition and
contemporary developments in the arts and the social sciences, and has encouraged the
development of new rituals that enable worshipers to praise and serve God and to minister
to God's people in the midst of rapidly changing cultural patterns throughout the world.
Liturgical Theology
The journal has concentrated on a more or less theoretical approach to liturgical
issues; however, the editors have been convinced that the doctrinal study of liturgy is
usually best situated at the level of concrete ritual structures and explicit pastoral
problems. They have also been keenly aware that the positions one assumes in Trinitarian
theology, Christology, ecclesiology, moral theology, and theological anthropology have
important implications for liturgical theology and pastoral practice. The general approach
taken in the journal has been inter-disciplinary. Hence the scope of the articles that are
published has regularly been broad rather than narrowly liturgical. Before the Second
Vatican Council pastoral issues were most challengingly addressed by H. A. Reinhold in his
column "Timely Tracts" (1938-1954). More recently they have been treated by
Robert Hovda (1983-1992) and Nathan Mitchell (1992- ) in "The Amen Corner." The
journal regularly carries in-depth reviews of books and music by some of the best
contemporary scholars.
Ecumenicism
Although the journal is firmly rooted in Benedictine and Roman Catholic tradition,
its editorial policy has never been narrowly confessional, as the membership of
the editorial board, the list of authors, and the subjects addressed in the journal
indicate. The Benedictine tradition has regularly provided a hospitable context in which
the human search for God in diverse traditions can both be discussed and experienced.
Liturgy, much more effectively than systematic theology, tends to emphasize the truths
which unite Christians; hence it is important for ecumenical encounters. Since 1967 Worship
has quite consciously sought to contribute to the ecumenical movement by the appointment
of Protestant and Eastern Christian liturgical scholars to its editorial board.
Editorial Board
At the present time the following liturgical scholars constitute the editorial board:
Editor: R. Kevin Seasoltz, OSB, Associate editor: Allan Bouley, OSB, Book reviews editor: Dunstan
Moorse, OSB
Editorial consultants: R. William Franklin, Episcopal Diocese
of New York; Maxwell E. Johnson, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana; Gordon Lathrop,
Lutheran Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Irene Nowell, OSB, Mount
Saint Scholastica, Atchison, Kansas; Gail Ramshaw, LaSalle University, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania; Don E. Saliers, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia;
Robert F. Taft, Pontifical Oriental Institute, Rome, Italy.
The journal has been distinguished for its covers and design.
The first cover carried the work of Eric Gill. For almost fifty years
Frank Kacmarcik, OblSB, designed
both the covers and the layout of the journal. His objective was to provide readers
not only with an intellectual experience but with an aesthetic experience as well; his
hope was that the journal would offer subscribers excellent examples of religious/liturgical
art and design. Frank died in 2003, but much of his art work is still
used, taken from the Arca Artium collection.
Worship
