Church attachment and the celebration of the liturgy. The role of 19th century liturgy booklets

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Benedikt Kranemann
• Subject Area: Roman Catholic Theology
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 397767460

In the 19th century, a series of small, popular liturgy booklets was published. They were meant to support the liturgical education of the faithful. These booklets were dedicated either to individual liturgical celebrations, mostly to mass, or introduced, more comprehensively, the liturgy and its foundations. The booklets emerged in the context of dramatic changes in church and society, and derive their significance from this: they were meant, by making the liturgical celebrations and its theory accessible, to further the attachment of the faithful to the Church, and to foster an intensive liturgical praxis. Liturgy with its texts and rites is understood to be the "face" of the faith of the Catholic Church. The person who participates in liturgy knows themselves to be closely connected to the church and its faith. The liturgy booklets can be seen as an attempt to counteract drops in inner-church praxis and temporary participation in the Church. During a time of great change, which is perceived to endanger the Church, such "people's liturgies" were meant to support the attachment of the faithful to the Church and to foster liturgy as one of its foundational practices.This project will chart these liturgical booklets for the time between the middle of the 19th century to the year 1884 (first edition of the "Schott" missal) bibliographically, describe their content and design, and explore what can be said about the writers and their possible intentions. On the basis of these sources, the project will ask who the audience of these booklets was and what the intention of the booklets was with regards to their readers. One working hypothesis is that, through these books, the faithful were to be won over for an understanding of liturgy that would strengthen their attachment to the Church and its liturgy in a time of great change (industrialisation, culture war etc.) and to work against a distancing of individual groups from the Church and from its services. For this, the contemporary environment in which the sources were written will be described. With a view to the content that the liturgy booklets were meant to convey, as well as to its possible effect on religious practice, some selected topics of the theology of liturgy will be analysed. The concept of liturgy of each of them, the meaning of symbolic acts and their physicality, the options for participation and the description of roles, the function of singing and music, and the methods of teaching liturgy are to be explored. These aspects are meaningful if the attachment to the liturgy and the church can be strengthened, and fluid participation can be counteracted. In this, the question as to what level of significance was assigned to liturgy in the face of the changed participation (partial participation in the liturgical life, discontinuity by distancing from the Church) that was seen as a danger for the attachment to the Catholic Church will also arise.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants