Cardinal Müller to keynote at Society for Catholic Liturgy conference

The Society for Catholic Liturgy has announced that its 2018 conference will be held September 27–29 at the Cathedral of St. Mary in Miami, Florida. The theme is the centenary of the publication of Romano Guardini’s Spirit of the Liturgy  in 2018.

Guardini was a leader in the 20th-century liturgical movement. He was especially concerned that the laity understand and participate in the liturgy. In the 1920s he involved students in singing the Latin chant of the liturgy, although he also wrote early on in favor of a spoken liturgy because “the somewhat sophisticated Gregorain chant is ever the possession of only a certain number; by contrast, the word is accessible to all.” (Ruff, Sacred Music and Liturgical Reform, 229)

The conference of the Society for Catholic Liturgy will feature a keynote addresses by Cardinal Gerhard Müller, “Lex orandi – lex credendi.” Cardinal Müller was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 2012-2017, at which point Pope Francis did not renew his term. He is known for a positive appreciate of liberation theology, but also for his conservative stance on the question of communion for the divorced and remarried or for Protestant spouses of Catholics in Germany. He is said to have been less than supportive of a reconciliation with Rome of the Lefebrvrist Society of St. Pius X, which does not accept all the teachings of the Second Vatican Council on religious liberty, ecumenism, and liturgicalreform.

The conference will also have addresses by Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami and a representative of the the Secretariat of the USCCB’s Committee on Divine Worship.

Cardinal Müller will celebrate a solemn Mass in the post-conciliar form, and Archbishop Wenski will celebrate a solemn pontifical Mass in the pre-conciliar “extraordinary form.”

A list of speakers and papers to be delivered can be found at the conference website.

The Society for Catholic Liturgy was founded by Msgr. M. Francis Mannion in 1995. Mannion has since expressed his “disappointment” that “the agenda of the ‘reform of the reform’ has taken over” the society and that “some elements of Tridentine restorationism have crept in.”