Pius Parsch

Another of the important forrunners of the liturgical reform of the Council was Pius Parsch, a Benedictine monk in the Austrian monastery of Klosterneuberg. He served as a chaplain in the First World War and observed the soldiers’ lack of understanding of the Mass. He became convinced that the Bible should be the people’s book and the liturgy the people’s work.

To this end he established a publishing center, Popular Liturgical Apostolate, to assist people with interior and exterior participation in the liturgy. He suggested some reforms that might encourage these goals, such as great emphasis on the Mass as a meal (perhaps using leavened bread), the reintroduction of communion from the cup, communion from hosts consecrated at each Mass. He was an early advocate of increased use of the vernacular which resulted in a partially vernacular Ritual for Austria in 1935 and an expanded one for Germany in 1950. As early as 1934, he pointed to the restoration of the Easter Vigil to its proper nighttime celebration, reform that Pope Pius XII included in his revision of the Holy Week liturgy.

In 1922, Parsch published a booklet on commentary on the Sunday Masses which grew into a five volume work entitled, The Church’s Year of Grace. (I have this set in my personal library and continue to consult it.)

He believed in the centrality of the parish in the Church’s renewal. “the center, the source, the focus of this growing parish communion will always be the altar, the Eucharistic-sacrifice-banquet.” To further this, he developed a combination of two forms of participation already in use, the dialogue Mass and hymn singing in the vernacular which maximized congregational participation. (In my time in the minor seminary in the late fifties, we employed these two practices, but never together, only on separate days, three days with dialogue and one day with hymns.)