As the Church marks fifty years since the promulgation of Vatican II’s first document, Sacrosanctum Concilium, a new website has just been launched within the last 2 weeks, FONTES Commissionis Liturgicae (www.fontescl.com). This site contains all of the preparatory materials and documentation of the Constitution, an invaluable resource for the history of the liturgical reform.
Sandro Magister has a brief article by the Italian scholar Don Nicola Bux, describing the site and its contents.
Sandro Magister has a brief article by the Italian scholar Don Nicola Bux, describing the site and its contents.
Fifty years after December 4, 1963, when the liturgical constitution of Vatican II was promulgated, the statement of a scholar of that Council comes back to mind: “The fathers did not want a liturgical ‘revolution.’ ”
How can this be proven? A brand-new website is making available the documentary sources concerning the preparation, drafting, and composition of Sacrosanctum Concilium.
The objective is to make the documents known for the sake of an impartial history of the liturgical reform and therefore also for an authentic understanding of Vatican II, in continuity with the other councils of the Church, in the route of navigation marked out by Agostino Marchetto:
“In recent decades, the question of the correct celebration of the liturgy has become more and more one of the central points of the controversy surrounding Vatican Council II, or how it should be evaluated and received in the life of the Church.”
The new website, free and easy to access, finally makes a very valuable resource available to all.
One must simply get one’s bearings a bit in consulting it. The home page of the website, which is still under construction, says the following:
“In the next few weeks transcriptions will be presented of the documentation necessary for understanding how before the Council the liturgical commission came to draft the schema of the constitution on the liturgy proposed at the ecumenical Council Vatican II and how, during the two conciliar sessions, this schema was modified according to the wishes expressed by the fathers.”
