The Banished Heart: Origins of Heteropraxis in the Catholic Church

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This is a critical assessment of the Liturgical Reform after the second Vatican Council that seeks the origins of failure in pre-conciliar developments. If the suppression of the traditional Roman liturgy against the wishes of the Second Vatican Council was, in the words of Silvio Cardinal Oddi, 'a crime for which history will never forgive the Church', why, at the end of the 1960s, did the vast majority of Latin Catholics abandon, with little or no regret, their time-hallowed forms of worship "The Banished Heart" seeks to account for this cultural and spiritual catastrophe by demonstrating what will surprise many: how the present mainstream Catholic Church, with its modernistic and secular aura, grew directly from the official conservatism of the Church as it was before the Council. T Clark Studies in "Fundamental Liturgy" offer cutting edge scholarship from all disciplines related to liturgical study. The books in the series seek to reintegrate biblical, patristic, historical, dogmatic and philosophical questions with liturgical study in ways faithful and sympathetic to classical liturgical enquiry. Volumes in the series include monographs, translations of recent texts and edited collections around very specific themes.

Reviews

This book is an eloquently written, passionate and scholarly account of the secularisation and desacralisation of the Roman Catholic liturgy from the 1960s, through the combination of an interdenominational body of liturgical experts, of the hierarchies of Germany, France and neighbouring countries, and of Roman authority under Paul VI, determined to 'modernise' the Church's worship at any costs. The impoverishment of the liturgy through the sacrifice of two thousand years of symbolism, and the loss of the dimension of mystery in the name of didacticism and man-centredness, are also strikingly described as rooted in a reaction against the defects and rigidities of an overcentralised and authoritarian pre-Vatican II Catholicism. The author gives a detailed and authoritative narrative of the destruction of traditions held in common by Latin Christians and the Eastern Orthodox and of the disgraceful persecution by Latin liberals of Eastern Rite Christians in communion with Rome. Far from being a simply reactionary work, appealing to an imaginary golden age before the 1960s, this book is an historically-informed challenge to restore the very God-centred character of the liturgy itself. -- Sheridan Gilley, Durham University, UK.
There are some books whose breadth is so impressive, whose depth is so astonishing and whose lucidity is so sharp that writing a review of them seems as pointless as penning programme notes for a Wagner opera. Geoffrey Hull's The Banished Heart is just such a book. * Usus Antiquior *
There are lessons here for Anglicans as well as Roman Catholics, important questions about culture and liturgy, and challenges to acts of uniformity of many kinds... a defence of traditional liturgy which is at the same time critical of an authoritarian papacy is an unusual challenge. * The Church Times *
Reviewed in Commonweal Magazine
Hulls historical narrative convincingly demonstrates that well before the Second Vatican Council, the Vaticans growing theology of its own power led it to efforts to forcibly standardize liturgy across the Roman Communion in both the East and West...an important contribution to our historical understanding of liturgical change. -- Aaron Klink, Duke University * Religious Studies Review *

Author Bio

Associate Professor Geoffrey Hull is a philologist and linguist who has taught and researched European and Pacific languages and cultures at several Australian universities since 1978. He has long been concerned with the liturgical and cultural problems resulting from the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.