LITURGY

Term for the official worship of God by the Church in the West for centuries. In the East, however, the tendency to restrict the word to the Eucharist arose at an early date. This article uses the expression to designate the Church's liturgical worship as distinct from its other devotions, whether practiced by groups or individuals.

Meaning of the Term. Etymologically the word means any service done for the common welfare of the people. It is derived from the Greek λειτουργία, which is a combination of λειτóς, an adjective meaning pertaining to the people (λάος), and ἔργον, a noun meaning work.

History of the Word. For the Greeks liturgy designated any public service rendered to the community at personal expense or at least without remuneration: education, entertainment, or defense. The word referred even to forced labor done for the common good and, later, to any action that had repercussions in the social and political sphere.

The term made its way into revealed literature through the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. The translators used it almost exclusively for the chosen people's prime purpose for existence, the worship of Yahweh. The word liturgy was used also, though less frequently, for something done for state (1 Kgs 19.21; 2 Chr 17.19; 22.8).

The same practice was followed by the New Testament writers. Luke, for example, speaks of Zechariah's liturgy in the Temple (1.23). Paul calls himself "the liturgist of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles" (Rom 15.16) and also uses the word liturgy to refer to the collection taken up for the poor in Jerusalem (2 Cor 9.12) and to the services rendered to his own person (Phil 2.30). The Letter to the Hebrews employs the term for the priestly work of Jesus Christ, liturgy in its specifically Christian sense: "We have such a high priest … a minister [λειτουργóς, liturgist] of the Holies, and of the true tabernacle which the Lord has erected and not man…. But now He has obtained a superior ministry [λειτουργίας, liturgy], in proportion as He is the mediator of a superior covenant, enacted on the basis of superior promises" (8.1–6). This is properly the work of the Christian People of God, for through Christ's liturgy they are able to offer acceptable worship to God and receive from Him the fruits of Christ's redemptive work.

Whereas Christian antiquity applied the term to prayer and sacrifice in general, writers of early centuries made it serve more frequently to denote an official or community service as opposed to devotions of purely private piety [Didache 15.1 (Enchiridion patristicum, ed M.J. Rovët de Journel 4); Clement of Rome. Epist. ad Corinthios, 40.2–5. 41.1 (Patrologia Graeca, ed. J. P. Migne, 1:288–289); Synod of Antioch, chapter 4 (K. Kirch, Enchiridion fontium historiae ecclesiasticae antiquae, ed. L. Ueding 490)]. Subsequent development in the East restricted the word to the Eucharist, as in the Liturgy of Saint James or the Liturgy of Saint Basil. During the Middle Ages the West preferred terms such as ministerium, munus, servitus, and officium. It was left to the Renaissance period to adopt the word liturgy in the titles of collections describing the Church's worship. Since then the term has been thus employed consistently.

Definition. Vatican Council II in The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Dec. 4, 1963) describes liturgy as the carrying out of the work of redemption, especially in the paschal mystery (Sacrosanctum Concilium 2, 6); the exercise of the priestly office of Christ (ibid. 7); the "presentation of man's sanctification under the guise of signs perceptible by the senses" (ibid. ); and a sacred action surpassing all others because it is the action of Christ the priest and of his Body the Church (ibid. ). The liturgy is viewed as a foretaste of the heavenly liturgy (ibid. 8), "the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed"; and the "fount from which all her power flows" (ibid. 10). Liturgy is seen as the source of grace and sanctification in Christ as well as the glorification of God (ibid. ). The Council said also: "Liturgical services are not private functions, but are celebrations of the Church … the holy people united and ordered under their bishops. Liturgical services pertain to the whole body of the Church; they manifest it and affect it" (26). Thus the constitution builds upon and goes beyond the classic Thomistic definition of liturgy as "common worship that is offered to God by ministers of the Church in the person of all the faithful" (Summa theologiae 2a2ae, 83.12), as well as Pope Pius XII's definition of liturgy as the "public worship of the Mystical Body, Head and members" (Mediator Dei 20).

Nature

Sacramental Worship. All liturgical actions are sacramental; that is, they are signs and symbols that give expression to the conferring of divine life by Christ on His Church and the offering to the Father, through Christ, of the homage and worship of His people. The foundational basis of this sacramental quality of liturgical worship is the Incarnation. Christ is the first of all Sacraments. As the Word Incarnate, He clothes in visible, tangible form and shape the unseen and transcendent God; He is the dynamic embodying of the living and life–giving God. The hypostatic union means precisely that the Son of God in person unites to Himself a real human nature, in order, in it and through it, to pervade and transform all human beings with the power and glory of His divinity. Through the Incarnation, Christ's humanity becomes the direct personal instrument of God the Father's eternal plan to redeem the whole human race. Thus Christ is the Sacrament of God in the most perfect sense.

The paschal mystery is the internal content of every liturgical action, for the latter is simply an external sign enabling the worshiper to participate in that supreme act of worship in which God's plan of salvation was brought to fruition by Christ's suffering, death, and resurrection. Without this internal reality of the paschal mystery, liturgical worship would be an empty shell. Although worshippers might be quite sincere in their own interior sentiments, the objective religious action would be incapable of uniting them with God, for saving union with God comes only through Christ's redemptive work. A mere human act of the will does not suffice to make us adopted daughters and sons of God; all must participate in the resurrected body of Christ. It is precisely in the sacramental, liturgical worship of the Church that we are assimilated into Christ's risen body.

This understanding of the liturgy is beautifully expressed by Vatican Council II in its Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (5–7). After speaking of the paschal mystery as the core and kernel of the liturgy, it says that the liturgy is but a complex of "sensible signs through which the sanctification of man is signified and brought about in a way proper to each."

Priestly Worship. The worship of the Church has no meaning except as an action of Christ the Redeemer; from Him it receives its content and efficacy. It is nothing less than Christ's worship of His Father, His worship done through His Mystical Body.

According to the Epistle to the Hebrews, through His transfiguring sacrifice Christ exercised a priesthood, a priesthood that is eternal. "Because He continues forever, He has an everlasting priesthood. Therefore He is able at all times to save those who come to God through Him, since He lives always to make intercession for them"(7.24–25). Through the liturgy Christ's Priesthood becomes a continuous and living reality throughout the ages (Mediator Dei 22; Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy 7).

This priesthood He chose to share with His followers, so that they would be able to continue Him as the Sacrament of redeeming worship. In his first Epistle Peter urges Christians to draw near to Christ, "a living stone, rejected indeed by men but chosen and honored by God. Be you yourselves as living stones built thereon into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ…. Youare a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people purchased by God to proclaim the great deeds of Him who has called you out of darkness to His marvelous light" (2.4, 5, 9). The power of this royal priesthood enables all Christians to associate themselves and their lives with Christ's sacrifice, which alone can make of their act of worship pleasing to God the Father. It is this priesthood of Christ, present and active within the Church, that empowers the Church to be an efficacious sign of the redeeming worship of Christ at the instant of His dying and rising.

In its liturgical worship, then, the Church acts as one, since everything it does is done precisely as the action of the one Body of Christ, with Him as head, as priest. Christ's priesthood, present and active in the members of His body, is so essential that without it there would be no liturgy; in it the members of the Church act as the one people of God in its proper condition of the divinely chosen holy cult community, the single, unified expression of the priestly movement of Jesus Christ back to His Father.

The dignity of the liturgical assembly is no small thing, for it is the concrete realization of the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, the organ of the Mystical Body, expressing its union with its Head in His most sublime role as mediator between God and humanity. By its very nature, then, the liturgy demands full, conscious, and active participation of all the faithful; and they have a right to participation by reason of their Baptism (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy 14). Since Liturgical functions are not private actions but celebrations that pertain to the whole body of the Church, the Sacrament of unity, the Church officially desires that their communal celebration—with the full active participation of the faithful—be observed as something preferred over what might be called a "private" use of these functions (ibid. 26, 27). In order to bring out externally and more adequately the real and necessary diversity of function in the Church's worship, Vatican Council II insisted that everyone, whether cleric or laity, do all and only those parts that pertain to his or her office by the nature of the rite (ibid. 28).

That the liturgy is the source of Christian sanctity follows from its being the divinely intended means for achieving assimilation to Christ and insertion into His redemptive action. Vatican Council II was clear on this. Although the Council admitted that the liturgy does not exhaust all the activity of the Church, "as the action of Christ the priest and of His body the Church, every liturgical celebration is an action of such excellence that no other action of the Church can equal its efficacy by the same title and to the same degree … of piety…. Theliturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church tends, and the fount from which flows all her power" (ibid. 6, 13, 10).

See Also: liturgical books of roman rite; liturgical movement; liturgical rites; liturgical theology; liturgical vestments.

Bibliography: a. g. martimort, ed. The Church at Prayer: An Introduction to the Liturgy (rev. ed. Collegeville, Minn. 1992). a. a. hÄussling, ed., The Meaning of the Liturgy (Collegeville, Minn. 1994). a. j. chupungco, ed., Handbook for Liturgical Studies, 5 v. (Collegeville, Minn. 1997–2000).

[j. h. miller/

d. w. krouse/

g. austin/eds.]