The Lugano Congress
In a Swiss lakeside town, a study congress resolved for the vernacular and a reformed Holy Week — and the men who carried those resolutions to Rome were already there.
Lugano, in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino, where the international Congress of Pastoral Liturgy met from 14–18 September 1953 — the third of the postwar study congresses. Photo: Alexey M., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Event 17 of 57
From the fourteenth to the eighteenth of September 1953, an international Congress of Pastoral Liturgy gathered at Lugano, on the Alpine lake in the Italian-speaking corner of Switzerland. It was the third in a remarkable chain of postwar study congresses — Maria Laach in the Rhineland in 1951, Mont Sainte-Odile in Alsace in 1952, and now Lugano — through which the leading liturgical scholars of Europe argued out, among themselves, the shape of a reform the wider Church had not yet seen. Lugano was the meeting that turned, more openly than its predecessors, to the question of the vernacular. And among the priests in attendance, not yet famous, was a Vincentian named Annibale Bugnini.
Lugano was a scholarly congress, not a council and not a law. But its resolutions — for the people to sing and pray in their own tongue even at a sung Mass, and for the whole of Holy Week to be reformed like the restored Easter Vigil — read in hindsight like a table of contents for the next twenty years. The men who framed them were the men who would draft what followed.
A congress of weight, not of outsiders
What set Lugano apart from a private study week was who came. The assembly drew two cardinals — Alfredo Ottaviani of the Holy Office and Josef Frings of Cologne — together with roughly fifteen archbishops and bishops, members of the Congregation of Rites, and hundreds of priests, including the activists who were pressing hardest for change. This was no fringe gathering of enthusiasts; it sat squarely inside the Church’s life, with prelates of the first rank in the room. That weight is exactly why its conclusions mattered: when such an assembly resolved for reform, the resolutions traveled.
The impulse behind Lugano was, at its root, the impulse Pope St. Pius X had named half a century before — that the faithful should actively take part in the Church’s worship, drawing the true Christian spirit from its primary and indispensable source. The scholars who gathered there genuinely wanted the people to enter the liturgy rather than merely watch it. The question this site presses is not whether that desire was good, but how far the means they chose could go before the inheritance itself was altered.
What Lugano resolved
The congress devoted itself to pastoral liturgy, and its conclusions pushed the vernacular further than earlier meetings had dared. According to surviving accounts, the assembly called for increased active participation of the laity; for permission for the people to pray and sing in their own tongue even during a Missa Cantata, the sung Mass that had been the stronghold of Latin and chant; for the Scripture readings to be proclaimed in the vernacular; and — taking up the thread from the year before — for all the ceremonies of Holy Week to be revised in line with the Easter Vigil that Pius XII had restored in 1951. The vernacular at the sung Mass was the decisive new step. Until then the dialogue and the vernacular had been argued chiefly for the Low Mass; Lugano carried the claim into the solemn liturgy.
Increased active participation of the laity; that the people be permitted to pray and sing in their own tongue even during a Missa Cantata; that the Scripture readings be in the vernacular; and that all the ceremonies of Holy Week be revised in conformity with the recently restored Easter Vigil.
— as summarized in accounts of the 1953 Lugano congress
To a reader today these proposals are not hard to place. The larger room given to the vernacular and to congregational song, the readings turned toward the people, the comprehensive overhaul of Holy Week — each would arrive, in some form, within a few short years. That is the pattern the traditional reader keeps meeting across these congresses: the broad lines of the later reform drawn in advance, in a hall of scholars, before the Church at large had been asked.
Rome’s blessing — and Rome’s reformers
Lugano was not a rogue assembly. Pope Pius XII sent a signed message, dated 9 September 1953, which was read to the congress; a word of support also came from Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, then the rising Substitute at the Secretariat of State and the future Paul VI. The papal greeting was warm but, as such greetings are, general — a blessing on a scholarly gathering, not an endorsement of any particular resolution.
Our good wishes go with the proceedings of this scholarly assembly and We warmly extend Our Apostolic Blessing to all and each one of the participants.
— Pope Pius XII, signed message to the Lugano congress, 9 September 1953
The deeper point is the cast of characters. The Pian commission for liturgical reform, set up quietly in 1948, was already at work; its secretary, from 1948, was Father Annibale Bugnini, who was present at Lugano. The same year as the congress, his commission’s first great fruit — the restored Easter Vigil of 1951 — was being woven into the very resolutions on the floor. Lugano shows the machinery and the movement in contact: the academic congresses generating proposals, the Roman commission turning a chosen few of them into law, and one man increasingly placed at the hinge between them. Within two years the Holy Week reform the congress had asked for would be decreed; within a decade Bugnini would be drafting the Council’s liturgy schema.
By 1953 a working consensus among the reforming scholars had settled, in congress after congress, on changes the universal Church had never debated and the faithful had never been consulted upon. None of this touches the validity of the Mass — then or in the reform that followed; the reformed rite is valid and licit and owed reverence, and nothing here is sedevacantism or a denial of any Pope’s authority. But validity is not the same as prudence. When the vernacular at the sung Mass and the wholesale revision of Holy Week were resolved by a congress before the Church at large had weighed them, the later claim that the reform merely unfolded a felt need deserves to be read against the record of what had already been decided, and by whom.
The road from Lugano
The series did not end on the Swiss lake. The meeting at Mont-César in Belgium in 1954, at Dom Lambert Beauduin’s own abbey, drew the international liturgical centers into a single network; the congress at Assisi in 1956 would gather under open papal patronage and mark the high tide of the movement’s confidence. But Lugano’s most concrete legacy came fast. The reformed Holy Week the congress had asked for was promulgated in 1955 — Bugnini’s commission its engine — and the comprehensive revision of the Roman Rite’s most ancient week of the year was underway. The quiet congresses had begun to legislate.
- Alcuin Reid, The Organic Development of the Liturgy (2nd ed., 2005) — on the postwar liturgical study congresses, 1951–1956, and the Lugano congress
- Annibale Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy 1948–1975 (Eng. trans., 1990) — on the Pian commission (1948) and the preparatory liturgical movement
- Carol Byrne, “Liturgical Anarchy Increases under Pius XII” (Tradition in Action) — summary of the Lugano congress attendees and resolutions, and the Pius XII message of 9 September 1953 (attribution; verify quotations against the primary text)
- Pope St. Pius X, Tra le sollecitudini (1903) — “active participation… the primary and indispensable source of the true Christian spirit”
- New Liturgical Movement and contemporary surveys of the 1951–1956 congresses (attribution only) — dating the Congress of Pastoral Liturgy of Lugano to 14–18 September 1953