Maria Laach & the Liturgical Laboratory

Dom Prosper Gueranger had shown what liturgical renewal looked like when it was faithful: recover what was lost, preserve what was received, deepen the Church’s worship without altering its essential forms. His twin legacies—L’Annee Liturgique and the restoration of Gregorian chant—built up the Roman Rite from within. By the early twentieth century, however, a different kind of renewal was taking shape in the German-speaking world. Its center was a Benedictine abbey on a volcanic lake in the Rhineland: Maria Laach.

What happened there between 1914 and 1948 was not a betrayal of Gueranger’s vision—not yet. It was something subtler and, in hindsight, more consequential: a gradual reframing of what liturgical renewal meant. The vocabulary shifted from recovery to experimentation, from receiving tradition to interrogating it. Maria Laach produced genuine scholarship and sincere devotion. It also produced the intellectual tools that later reformers would use to dismantle the very rite its monks loved.

Herwegen and the Institutional Vision

Ildefons Herwegen became abbot in 1913 and immediately set about making Maria Laach a center of liturgical scholarship. He organized academic conferences, attracted leading intellectuals, and established the “Ecclesia Orans” publication series—a vehicle for the new liturgical theology emerging from his abbey. Herwegen was a gifted organizer with a talent for institutional networking, and under his leadership Maria Laach became the hub connecting scattered liturgical thinkers across German-speaking Europe.

His instinct was not wrong. The liturgy deserved serious intellectual engagement. But Herwegen’s approach carried a risk that Gueranger’s had not: it placed the liturgy under the authority of academic analysis rather than simply receiving it as the Church’s inheritance. The scholars at Maria Laach did not merely study the rite—they began to theorize about what it should become.

The Shadow of 1933

Any honest account of Maria Laach must reckon with Herwegen’s conduct under National Socialism. In 1933, he welcomed Adolf Hitler to the abbey and delivered a speech praising the “new Germany.” He was not alone among Catholic leaders in misjudging the regime early on, but the episode is more than an embarrassment—it reveals a pattern. The same institutional pragmatism that made Herwegen an effective organizer of liturgical conferences also made him susceptible to ideological capture when the political winds shifted.

Herwegen was eventually forced to resign as abbot in 1945. The parallel to the broader liturgical story is hard to miss: an institution built for good ends proving vulnerable to co-option by forces its founders did not foresee. If Maria Laach could be captured politically, the intellectual tools it forged could be captured liturgically—and were.

Odo Casel and the Mystery Theology

The most influential thinker at Maria Laach was not Herwegen but the monk-scholar Odo Casel, whose “Mystery Theology” (Mysterienlehre) attempted to explain the Mass through the lens of ancient mystery-religion categories. Casel argued that in the liturgy, the saving events of Christ’s life are made genuinely “present”—not merely commemorated but re-actualized in the sacramental celebration.

There was genuine insight here. The Church has always taught that the Mass makes Christ’s sacrifice sacramentally present. But Casel’s framework drew on pagan mystery cults—Mithraism, the Eleusinian mysteries, Isis worship—as interpretive parallels, which alarmed traditional theologians for good reason. If the Mass is understood primarily through the category of “mystery-presence” borrowed from comparative religion, the sharp distinction between the Mass as sacrifice and the Mass as communal ritual celebration begins to blur.

This is precisely what happened. Casel’s framework, however carefully he himself stated it, gave later reformers a theological vocabulary for de-emphasizing the sacrificial character of the Mass in favor of its communal, participatory, “mystery” dimension. The road from Casel’s Mysterienlehre to the Novus Ordo’s emphasis on the “paschal mystery” and the assembly’s role is not a straight line, but it is a clear one.

Guardini and the Question of Form

Romano Guardini was not a monk of Maria Laach, but his ideas were nurtured there. His 1918 work “The Spirit of the Liturgy” (Vom Geist der Liturgie) became one of the most widely read liturgical texts of the century. Much of it was genuinely beautiful—a meditation on the liturgy as the Church’s corporate prayer, the “play” of worship before God.

But Guardini also introduced a dichotomy that would prove explosive. He suggested that the Mass carried an unresolved tension between two forms: the meal and the sacrifice. The form of the meal, he argued, was “constantly frustrated” by the form of the sacrifice. This framing—meal versus sacrifice—would become the engine of the post-conciliar reforms.

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“The Mass has no clear form because the form of the meal is constantly frustrated by that of the sacrifice.”

— Romano Guardini

Consider what followed from this premise: if the Mass is a meal frustrated by sacrificial accretions, then “reform” means liberating the meal. The freestanding altar, the priest facing the people, the de-emphasis of the offertory, the elimination of sacrificial language from the prayers—all of this flows directly from Guardini’s dichotomy. When Paul VI’s Consilium restructured the Mass in the late 1960s, they were, in effect, resolving the tension Guardini had identified—by choosing the meal.

The Laboratory: Dialogue Mass and Versus Populum

Maria Laach was not merely a place of theory. It was a laboratory where new liturgical practices were tested. The first “Dialogue Mass” (Gemeinschaftsmesse) was celebrated there in 1921—a Mass in which the congregation spoke the server’s responses aloud. In parallel, Pius Parsch at Klosterneuburg introduced freestanding altars and versus populum celebration.

These were presented as pastoral improvements, not doctrinal changes. Individually, none was heretical. But taken together they represented a quiet revolution in the liturgy’s orientation: from the priest leading the people toward God to the priest facing the people as the presider of a communal action. The theological shift Casel and Guardini were articulating in print, Maria Laach and its allies were enacting in stone and ritual.

Mediator Dei: The Last Course Correction

By the 1940s, the movement’s trajectory had attracted Rome’s attention. In 1947, Pius XII issued Mediator Dei, the first encyclical devoted entirely to the sacred liturgy. It was simultaneously an affirmation and a warning.

Pius acknowledged the good in the liturgical movement—the desire for deeper understanding, the call for genuine interior participation. But he explicitly condemned the archaeological tendency to strip the liturgy back to imagined primitive forms, warned against treating the congregation as co-celebrants with the priest, and insisted that the Mass is fundamentally a sacrifice, not a communal meal. He was drawing a line: this far and no further.

He was ignored. Within fifteen years, every practice Mediator Dei cautioned against would be not merely tolerated but mandated. The encyclical remains the clearest marker of the moment when the Liturgical Movement’s trajectory could have been corrected—and was not.

The Pattern of Capture

Maria Laach’s story is not a story of villainy. Herwegen, Casel, and Guardini were sincere Catholic scholars who loved the liturgy. Their work contained genuine insights. But the institutional pattern they established—academic theorizing about what the liturgy should be, pastoral experimentation in controlled settings, and a vocabulary of “renewal” that could mean either recovery or revolution depending on who wielded it—created the infrastructure that progressives would later seize.

By 1948, when Herwegen died and Annibale Bugnini was appointed secretary of the Commission for Liturgical Reform, the tools were ready. The Dialogue Mass had normalized lay responses. The Mystery Theology had reframed the Mass around communal participation. Guardini’s dichotomy had positioned the sacrificial rite as an obstacle to authentic worship. And the precedent had been set that academic experts—not organic tradition—should determine the shape of the Church’s prayer.

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“What Gueranger built up, the movement he inspired would eventually tear down—using the very language of renewal he had given it.”

— On the trajectory of the Liturgical Movement

The laboratory had done its work. What remained was to move the experiments from the abbey into the universal Church.