Gratitude, Traditio, and Mission

By Bernadette Gasslein, Last Amen Corner, from the Last Issue of Worship, for October 2026

It was a warm, sultry summer day in Hamilton, Ontario, when our parish
organist, Mrs. Florence Lovering, gave me my first organ lesson at the age
of 15. Having just passed some advanced piano exams with flying colours,
she had deemed me ready.

I perched on the organ bench. Mrs. Lovering said to me, “Turn around.”
Reluctantly I turned away from the manuals. “Now,” she said, “listen to me.
From now on you will serve God’s people at prayer.”

I had no idea who “God’s people” were. I just wanted to play the organ. But
Mrs. Lovering took me under her wing. She had been travelling to the U.S.,
she explained, where she had been attending something called “the Liturgical
Weeks.” And one had even been held in London, Ontario, just a couple of
hours away from my hometown. Vatican II had happened, but as yet had had
minimal effect on my diocese.

For several years, she provided me with a weekly—and sometimes daily—
conversation about what she had been learning in those pivotal gatherings of
the liturgical movement for which at that point I knew no name. It was my
first experience of Paul’s description of tradition: “I received from the Lord
what I also handed on to you” (1 Cor 11:23).

Florence Lovering not only educated me musically; she was my first teacher
of the liturgy, and what an educator! She planted, nourished, and promoted
my love for and deep interest in the liturgy, and through her I received what,
in hindsight, was nothing short of a vocational call: “To serve God’s people
at prayer.”

Mrs. Lovering also subscribed to a little publication that was about the same
size as a Reader’s Digest. For someone raised on 1950s devotional Catholicism,
its covers opened a new world to me. She told me she got a lot of her under
standing from that book which she received monthly but I never got to read.

Never did I imagine that one day I would become its editor.

Having been appointed its editor, I hoped that I would never have to lay it to
rest. As that time has now come, I do so with gratitude and with hope.

GRATITUDE, THANKSGIVING: EUCHARIST
The liturgical movement into which Florence Lovering initiated me taught
me that Eucharist means “thanksgiving.” As a church, we often fall short,
perhaps not on thanking God, but on thanking God’s people. It is, therefore,
truly right and just, and my duty (though not necessarily my salvation) to give
thanks and praise to these men and women who have sustained Worship over
the last century:

• The Benedictine monks of Saint John’s Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota.
  For the last quarter century, as the fortunes of liturgical publications
  began to shift, the monks have compensated for Worship’s financial
  shortfalls until that investment became no longer feasible. Worship, like
  Liturgical Press, belongs to Saint John’s Abbey. When then-Abbot John
  Klassen first met with me, he made clear that Worship was the work of
  the Abbey. It has been a privilege to participate in their work, and I thank
  the monks for entrusting this work to me for the last thirteen years.
  
• Among the monks of Saint John’s, my special thanks go to Br. Dunstan
  Moorse, OSB, Worship’s book review editor since 1989, who has been a
  trusted collaborator since I was appointed editor in 2013. Not only has
  he kept me on the straight and narrow when it comes to book reviews,
  the favourite section of many readers, but he has also shared with me
  some of the best recipes in his vast collection. His grandmother’s
  rhubarb pie is now well loved here.
  
• The leadership team of Liturgical Press: now retired director, Peter Dwyer;
  current director, Therese Ratliff; Hans Christoffersen, my immediate
  boss, whose support during our monthly meetings has been invaluable.
  The third Wednesday of the month won’t be quite the same, but then,
  Hans is retiring at the end of this year. I know that he has nurtured many
  of the authors who read this journal, and I join you all in wishing Hans
  a happy and healthy retirement.
  
• The editorial consultants. Many scholars’ names have appeared on the
  C-2 over the years, and we owe all of you a debt of gratitude. To those
  who have been named there since 2013: your generosity with your time,
  knowledge, and insight have made my job so much easier. Your love for
  Worship, your passion for the liturgical life of the churches, and your
  deep and respectful ecumenical perspectives have helped Worship remain
  a foremost resource among liturgical publications. Among these consul
  tants, I must mention the late Robert Taft, SJ, who was always ready with
  an insightful (and not infrequently acerbic) comment.
  
• The authors. All the authors, even those whose submissions were rejected.
  Reading your work has expanded my horizons and stoked my passion for
  the many different facets of liturgical scholarship. Without authors,
  there is no publication. To those whose submissions came too late to be
  published in these pages, I apologize. Some have wondered where you
  will be able to publish. To those who continue to wonder about that, let
  me send you to Kimberly Belcher and her editorial team at Lex Orandi
  https://lexorandijournal.org/index.php/lo. I wish this stellar group of
  scholars every success in their new endeavour.
  
• The readers. To the small but mighty remnant that has continued to sub
  scribe to Worship, and to those who read it in a local institutional library,
  our thanks.
  
• The production team at Liturgical Press. Many readers have commented
  on the quality of the layout, the look of Worship, its covers, and its
  “hand feel.” Behind the scenes are the production editors, copy editors,
  and graphic designers who have labored lovingly over the manuscripts of
  Worship. Mark Warzecha has worked on the inside of the journal since
  1990, longer than any editor! To them: thank you for your consistent
  attention to detail and to the quality of production that has mirrored
  in print the “noble simplicity” and excellence that our liturgy calls for.
  You too have served God’s people at prayer well.
  
  NOTABLE MOMENTS
  
  Over these decades, we have celebrated many moments—and mourned a few. To name just a few:
  
• The first National Liturgical Day in the United States, at Saint John’s
  Abbey, Collegeville, July 25, 1929;
  
• November 26, 1938, death of Virgil Michel, OSB;
  
• The first liturgical week held in Chicago, October 21–25, 1940,
  “The Living Parish”;
  
• The publication of Mystici Corporis in 1943, highlighting the notion of
  the mystical body of Christ;
  
• The renewal of Holy Week in 1955;
  
• The promulgation in 1963 of Sacrosanctum Concilium;
  
• The establishment in 1963 of ICEL;
  
• The 1969 publication of the first translation of the Roman Missal for use
  in parishes;
  
• The publication in 1982 of the Lima document, Baptism, Eucharist and
  Ministry (BEM);
  
• In the same year, the publication of Fulfilled in Your Hearing:
  The Homily in the Sunday Assembly;
  
• The invitation in 1989 by Patriarch Demetrios to make September 1
  a day of prayer for creation;
  
• The first edition of the Revised Common Lectionary published in 1994;
  both it and BEM point to the growing ecumenical convergence in the
  liturgical world;
  
• The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification by the Lutheran
  World Federation and the Catholic Church in 1997;
  
• The 1998 translation of the Roman Missal, agreed to by all the English
  language episcopal conferences, which was subsequently “cancelled” by
  Rome with the publication of Liturgiam Authenticam in 2001;
  
• The publication, in 2007, of Summorum Pontificum allowing, under certain conditions, a wider use of the pre-conciliar liturgy. Many liturgists
  anticipated the divisions that would bedevil the church because of this
  document, which Pope Benedict XVI had hoped would heal the divisions in theology, ecclesiology, and acceptance of the authority of Vatican II manifested through the liturgy;
  
• The publication, in 2011, of the first English translation of the Roman
  Missal according to the principles of Liturgiam Authenticam;
  
• The 2015 Declaration on the Way prepared by the USCCB and the
  Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and, in 2023, a statement from
  a seminar of the same name of the North American Academy of Liturgy;
  
• Joint Commemoration in 2017 of the 500th anniversary of the
  Reformation;
  
• The publication, in 2023, of Pope Francis’s Apostolic Exhortation on the
  liturgy, Desiderio Desideravi;
  
• The publication in 2024–25 in the pages of this journal of several articles
  reflecting on the new relationship between Pentecostal Charismatic
  Churches and the Roman Catholic Church represented by the United
  States Conference of Catholic Bishops;
  
• The 2024 eucharistic revival sponsored by the USCCB and held in
  Indianapolis, Indiana. This four-year process was in response to a
  2019 Pew survey of US Catholics that attempted to determine the
  level of belief in the Real Presence. Subsequent research indicates that
  the original survey itself to which this revival responded may have been
  problematic.
  
  Although the evidence is largely anecdotal, many practitioners in the North
  American liturgical world have observed a loss of interest in and enthusiasm for liturgical formation since the 2011 introduction of the new translation of the Roman Missal. Observed as well are the loss of graduate programs in liturgy, particularly those summer programs that allowed diocesan and parish ministers to earn qualifications without leaving employment to study full time.
  
  Added to this is the impact of online liturgical formation and deformation.
  
  In an environment of acrimonious, if not downright uncharitable, debates,
  many people quietly stopped doing liturgical formation. My ministry in communities large and small, across Canada, has taught me that much liturgical formation—spiritual, mystagogical, and catechetical—remains to be done in contemporary communities. American friends and colleagues tell me they face the same challenges. Fifteen years—perhaps two generations—is a long time to neglect liturgical formation, without which it will be almost impossible to implement the liturgical reforms of Vatican II.
  
  HOPE: WORK THAT STILL REMAINS
  Decades after I wondered who God’s people were, I am blessed to be part of
  that community that continues to serve God’s people at prayer. Having spent
  much of my professional and ministerial life involved in liturgical formation in various ways, I am acutely aware that the vigorous formation that my generation both received—even if haphazardly—and offered, now must be renewed in word and action for current generations. Pope Francis’s Desiderio Desideravi raised the question; Pope Leo XIV’s Wednesday catecheses on Sacrosanctum Concilium that began May 20, 2026, highlight the need for this formation.
  
  Pope Leo notes that Sacrosanctum Concilium was nourished by the liturgical movement whose insights were incorporated into that seminal document of Vatican II. I see three essential areas where formation must be undertaken today, and one essential strategy.

1. Fostering baptismal identity: “The Church, therefore, earnestly desires
   that Christ’s faithful, when present at this mystery of faith, should not
   be there as strangers or silent spectators; on the contrary, through a good
   understanding of the rites and prayers they should take part in the sacred
   service conscious of what they are doing . . . by offering the immaculate
   Victim, not only through the hands of the priest, but also with him,
   they should learn to offer themselves as well . . .” (48).
   
   This crucial passage from SC requires that the faithful live and cele
   brate Eucharist out of a consciousness of their baptismal identity. Of the
   twenty-four or so descriptors of what baptism does offered in Christian
   Initiation: General Introduction, included with the Rite/Order of Baptism
   of Children (Ottawa: Concacan Inc., 1989, CCCB Publications, 2020)
   and the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (Concacan Inc., 1989),
   three stand out as necessary for understanding and assuming our role in
   liturgical celebration as set out in SC 48: participation in trinitarian life,
   membership in the mystical body of Christ, and consciousness of our
   baptismal priesthood. These could be labelled “high” understandings of
   baptism, in contrast, for instance, to “brings us into the church” or
   “washes away original sin.” Yet in too many instances Ms. and Mr.
   Murphy have never heard of these aspects of baptismal life that are the
   foundation on which authentic participation in the liturgy is built.
   
2. The two epicleses. If there is concern about Catholics’ inadequate under
   standing of the Spirit’s transformation of the bread and wine into the
   body and blood of Christ, there should be exponentially greater concern
   about the widespread lack of understanding of the Spirit’s work of transformation of the community that shares in the sacrament. This is one of the great unassumed—at the parish level and perhaps at higher levels as
   well—aspects of eucharistic theology. Perhaps it is because it takes greater
   faith to believe that the Holy Spirit transforms this rag-tag bunch that
   assembles for Sunday eucharist more deeply into the ecclesial body of
   Christ than to believe that the Spirit transforms the bread and wine into
   the sacramental body of Christ? (Or, perhaps our catechesis has been
   lazy and thus partial?) These conjoined transformations are, however,
   intimately linked to the Church’s mission. We share in the Eucharist, not
   for our own private edification, but that the world may be transformed.
   
   While the Prayer after Communion frequently focuses our thoughts
   towards the heavenly banquet, the Dismissal focuses our energy here.
   We are missioned each and every Sunday, at each and every eucharistic
   celebration, to announce the gospel of the Lord, to glorify the Lord by
   our lives in the world in which we live, move, and have our being. We are
   sent out, as the ecclesial body of Christ, to be broken and poured out for
   the life of the world, to the poor, the excluded, the refugee and immi
   grant, the unemployed, the lost, the unhoused, the broken, the hungry,
   those whose human dignity has been trampled.
   
   If the dismissal rites are not to be gratitude for the end of another
   Mass, then we urgently need to take seriously the transformation of the
   community for the life of the world, and educate our congregations to
   how they have been transformed by sharing in communion and the
   responsibility that flows from this transformation.
   
3. Closely allied to this mission is the need to form Christ’s ecclesial body
   to a sacramental vision of the world. Kevin Irwin, in his What We Have
   Done, What We Have Failed to Do (Paulist, 2013), describes this vision:
   “Sacramentality is a prism, a theological lens through which we look at
   creation and all that is on this good earth as revelations of God’s presence
   and action among us here and now. The premise of sacramentality means
   that in fact we do not live in two different worlds, the sacred and the
   secular, but that we live in one graced world named ‘good’ by God in
   Genesis 1:3” (91). At a time in history when many are attempting to
   build an impermeable wall between individual faith and corporate faith
   filled action for the common good, a sacramental vision tears down that
   wall. There is no doubt that proclaiming this principle may be costly to
   the prophets who call us to live it, but without it our mission as the
   baptized may well fail. Preaching, teaching, and celebrating through this
   sacra mental vision is integral to our service of God’s people at prayer.
   
   HANDING ON WHAT WE HAVE RECEIVED
   
   These three essential areas—concerns that Virgil Michel would find very
   familiar— demand urgent attention. How, then, do we continue to hand on
   what we have received? I propose the process of mystagogy, not the final stage of the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults, but the process of pondering and deepening our participation in the paschal mystery of Christ by exploring the words, symbols, rites, actions, and silences in all the elements of the liturgy that we experience. For this I recommend to all readers, scholars, and practitioners alike, the 2020 Directory for Catechesis, published this time by the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelisation, not the Vatican Congregation for Clergy. Centering all aspects of catechetical formation—including liturgical formation—around the call to mission, the Directory takes seriously the need for people of all ages and at all stages of life to probe their experience of liturgical action, word, symbol, and rite.
   
   I believe that only with this kind of ongoing exploration—week by week, year by year, homily by homily, sacramental formation program by sacramental formation program—will these elements yield their riches. This kind of exploration has the capacity to draw participants ever more deeply into the mystery of their own identity in the trinitarian paschal life of God. It demands that all of us involved in liturgical formation become mystagogues, guides who will take our people deep into the mysteries they are celebrating.
   
   AMEN!
   
   It will be one hundred years in November of this year that Virgil Michel, OSB, founded Orate Fratres, which would become Worship, to spread the liturgical renewal that he handed on from Europe to North America. Sixty-three years later, the council fathers promulgated the first document of Vatican II, Sacrosanctum Concilium, and handed on that renewal to the whole church.
   
   And now we lay to rest one of the principal agents of that liturgical renewal in North America. We do so confidently. We know that we who have received that work of liturgical renewal and serve God’s people at prayer—the organists and guitarists, the cantors, the lectors, the presiders ordained and lay, the homilists, the extraordinary ministers of communion, the scholars, the translators, the artists, and architects—will continue to hand it on to God’s people whom the Spirit gathers for praise and thanks.
   
   Therefore, in gratitude for what we have received from Worship, and in loving assent to the ongoing mission to hand on its riches to God’s people, let us proclaim, for one final time, “Amen.”
   
   Bernadette Gasslein, widely serving writer and editor, has served as the final editor of the historic journal of liturgical renewal, Orate Fratres/Worship. She can be reached at bernadette@bernadettegasslein.ca.