Dear All,
Now that I have been released from my destiny as the Sheen of the 21 st century, I can get back to my interrupted treatment of the liturgy of Vatican II.

First, a bit of liturgical history. Except for a brief time when all Christians spoke Aramaic, it is probably true that there was never a single language that was used in Christian worship; worshippers spoke to God in the language they spoke. Even the diversity of languages paled, however, in the face of the divergence of rites, roles of ministers and understanding of the meaning of the rites performed. A careful and neutral reading of the New Testament bears yields lots of odd little bits of information that underlie this assertion. It was a mere accident of history that Latin – and liturgical Latin, at that – became the worship tongue of nearly all of the Western World.
So, when Vatican II initiated the possibility of a vernacular liturgy, it was actually just resetting the clock – or, more accurately, universalizing a practice that had been current in a full half of the Church for well over a thousand years.
Although Pope Pius X had urged every parish to have and use a repertoire of Gregorian Chant for use at the ‘high’ Mass of Sunday, that had not had much effect in most of the Church. So, musical participation was a striking novelty for most folks.
Turning altars around was, admittedly a more contestable change. It was not known in the East and was pretty rare in the West – except for the Papal churches in Rome. When the Pope said Mass at any of the ancient basilicas, he did so facing the people. You can check that out by looking for videos of Pius XII at the altar of Saint Peter’s. The ‘why’ of this is probably more pragmatic than theological, just as the ‘why’ of Mass oriented away from the people was. But that pragmatism did not keep people from theologizing on their experience and, so, generating a ‘mindset’ on liturgy, priesthood and Mass, itself.
People’s experience, though, was usually of a pretty stripped-down, ‘low’ Mass, with almost no interaction between the sanctuary and the nave.
For better or worse, the post-council commission charged with implementing the directives of
Sacrosanctum Concilium had chosen as it’s model for liturgical life in the Western Church, the Papal liturgies of the fifth century. This choice was not without merit. The fifth century was a time of remarkable peace in the Church. East and West were still one. Northern migrations into Southern Europe had not become catastrophic. The remnants of the Roman Empire still lent a veneer of calm and uniformity to its old territories. And, so, the Church at Rome was able to be the Church of Rome. Since Vatican II was a council of the Church of Rome, it made a certain sense to use the oldest form of her liturgy as a scaffold on which to build a ‘roman’ liturgy that could serve the whole world.
That is largely what we got … and then some!
Really and truly and historically yours, tm