The Liturgical Movement In Catholicism

Bible schools and chorale performances brought parishioners together in a more casual setting (Schneider 13).
Many of these changes can be attributed to the Liturgical Movement in Catholicism, a 19th-century movement for the reform of worship within the Roman Catholic Church. Receiving inspiration from the Oxford Movement, a similar effort in which devotees of the Church of England argued for the reinstatement of some older Christian traditions of faith and their inclusion in Anglican liturgy and theology , and the work of Dom Prosper Gueranger, a French Benedictine monk and priest who founded the French Benedictine Congregation , the movement took hold in America in the early 1900s. Headquartered in the Benedictine Abbey of St. John, Collegeville,
According to religious historian Martin Marty, “Instead of assuming a single nonreligious style of rationality and life, as some predicted they would, [turn-of-the-century] citizens kept inventing protean ways to pursue their spiritual questions (Marty 2).” Protestant denominations amassed with schisms among the Baptists, Disciples of Christ, Methodists, and several new religious movements including Pentecostalism, Seventh-day Adventism, Christian Science, New Thought, Mormonism, Spiritualism, and Theosophy. Many eastern religions also took foothold in American culture, such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. The awareness of this pluralism was garnered through the World Parliament of Religions at the 1893 Columbian Exposition . With pluralism flourishing, religion was defined in relation to personal subjectivity rather than to institution and doctrines (Schwain 5). Protestant leaders throughout the 19th century leaned heavily on images to encourage religious feeling. Two general forms of popular religious art appeared through the 1800s: didactic imagery and devotional imagery. The former instructed and taught, employed to facilitate conversation, while the latter was contemplated by the viewer and intended to nurture and aid in character formation. While both were employed in the period, by the end of the century there was a shift toward
Compared to its predecessors, the imagery was far more blatantly religious. Previously, American portraits, for example, relied heavily on emblematic tradition to communicate with viewers, while religious historical paintings demanded knowledge of allegorical, scriptural and typological interpretation to convey meaning. But, turn of the century artists employed techniques to create images of the natural world, and encourage viewers to consider them as a permanent presence, rather than a historical record or instruction object. In doing so, they drew upon philosophical systems that declared an intimate relationship between art, nature, and religion. English art critic John Ruskin