Liturgy

General Information

Liturgy, from two Greek words meaning "people" and "work," refers to the formal public rituals of religious worship. In the Christian tradition, it is used as a specific title for the Eucharist and in general designates all formal services, including the Divine Office. Both the written texts of the rites and their celebration constitute liturgy. Among Protestants, the term describes a fixed form of worship, in contrast to free, spontaneous prayer. Outside the Christian church, liturgy is also used to designate the form of prayer recited in Jewish synagogues.

The historic Christian liturgies are divided into two principal families: Eastern and Western. The Eastern liturgies include the Alexandrian (attributed to Saint Mark), the Antiochene (Saint James, Saint Basil, Saint John Chrysostom), and the East Syrian (Assyrian) or Chaldean (Addai and Mari), as well as the Armenian and Maronite rites. The Byzantine liturgies (those attributed to Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Basil) are used today by all Orthodox Christians in communion with Constantinople.

The Western liturgies are the Roman and the Gallican. The only Gallican liturgy still in use is the Ambrosian Rite of Milan, although the Mozarabic (Spanish), the Celtic, and the Franco - German Gallican were widely used until the 8th century.

Traditional Anglican and Lutheran liturgies have been based on the local uses of the Roman rite revised according to 16th century Reformation principles. Reformed (Calvinist) churches made a conscious attempt to replace historic liturgies with the forms of worship of the early Christian communities.

In the 20th century a movement arose among the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches to revise the liturgies to make them more contemporary and relevant while retaining the basic beliefs of the church. In the Roman Catholic church the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council substituted the use of vernacular languages for Latin in the Mass and allowed the participation of the laity in public worship. The Anglican (Episcopalian) church revised the book of Common Prayer, and the Lutheran churches issued a new Lutheran Book of Worship. Revised liturgies also are contained in Methodist, Congregationalist, and Presbyterian church hymnals.

L L Mitchell

Bibliography
L H Dalmais, Eastern Liturgies (1960); G Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (1945); T Klauser, A Short History of the Western Liturgy (1979); H Schultz, The Byzantine Liturgy (1986); C Vogel, Medieval Liturgy (1987); J White, Protestant Worship (1987).

Liturgy

The Liturgy is the body of rites prescribed for formal public worship. Although the term is sometimes applied to Jewish worship, it is especially associated with the prayers and ceremonies used in the celebration of the Lord's Supper, or Eucharist. During the first three centuries of the Christian era, the rite of the church was comparatively fluid, based on various accounts of the Last Supper.

In about the 4th century the various traditions crystallized into four liturgies,

• the Antiochene, or Greek,
• the Alexandrian,
• the Roman,
• and the Gallican,
  

The Antiochene family of liturgies includes the Clementine liturgy of the Apostolic Constitutions, which is no longer used; the Syriac liturgy of Saint James, used by the Jacobite church and Syrian Eastern Rite churches; the Greek liturgy of Saint James, used once a year at Jerusalem; the Syriac liturgy of the Maronites; the Syriac liturgy used by the Nestorian church; the Malabar liturgy, used by the Saint Thomas Christians of India; the Byzantine liturgy, used in various languages by the Orthodox churches; and the Armenian liturgy, used by the Georgians and the Armenian Eastern Rite churches.

The Alexandrian liturgies include the Greek liturgy of Saint Mark, no longer used; the Coptic liturgy, which is used by the Copts (Coptic Church) in Egypt; and the Ethiopian liturgy, used by the Ethiopian church.

The Roman liturgy is used almost universally by the Roman Catholic church. From it were derived various medieval liturgies, such as those of Sarum, Paris, Trier, and Cologne, which are no longer in use.

The Gallican liturgy was used in northwestern Europe from the 4th century; it was superseded in France about 800 by the Roman liturgy. From it developed the Ambrosian liturgy, now used principally in the See of Milan; the Mozarabic or Isidorian liturgy, which was the liturgy of the church in Spain from the 6th to the 12th centuries and is now used only in Toledo and Salamanca; and the Celtic liturgy, which was superseded in the Celtic church in the 7th century by the Roman liturgy. In the Roman Catholic church the use of the vernacular, rather than Latin, was approved during Vatican Council II (1962-65). Pope Paul VI subsequently directed that vernacular forms of the Mass would be obligatory after December 1971. In the United States, the bishops approved use of English translations of the Mass on or after March 22, 1970. Beginning with the 19th-century Oxford movement, Protestants developed a greater awareness of formal liturgy in their worship and have increasingly adopted liturgical forms of worship abandoned during the Reformation. For the liturgy of the Church of England and the Episcopal church, see Book of Common Prayer.