In 2025, the male Benedictine abbey of Santa María de Montserrat celebrated the millennium of its foundation by Oliba, abbot of Ripoll and Cuixà and bishop of Vic.
A thousand years of monastic life. A blessing for which to give many thanks to God.
The abbey of Montserrat, and the spectacular mountain on which it stands (with its serrated shape, which gives it its name), is a reference point for the Catholic Church in Catalonia. Not in vain, the Virgin of Montserrat, together with Saint George, is the patroness of Catalonia.
One of its “milestones,” already in the twentieth century, has been to become a symbol of Catalan culture and a bastion of its language, while at the same time—and this interests us more here—it moved in liturgical vanguardism.
It is very interesting that, long before the Second Vatican Council, Montserrat joined the new winds of the liturgical movement: from July 5 to 10, 1915, the First Liturgical Congress took place in Montserrat.
A brief reflection on the liturgical movement, its origins and development, is important in order to properly frame what it implied in Montserrat.
Professor Roberto de Mattei considers that Pope Saint Pius X had outlined the lines of a program of authentic liturgical renewal, inspired by the furrow opened by Fr. Guéranguer (1805–1875), abbot of Solesmes, restorer of monastic life in France after the French Revolution, who had understood the renewal of monastic life as a return to traditional Roman liturgy.
Joseph Ratzinger and Peter Kwasniewski, among others, have highlighted how, at the beginnings of the liturgical movement, its promoters desired above all the intelligent and active participation of the faithful in the traditional liturgy of the Church—not in any other type of liturgy.
However, some of the theologians, priests, and monks involved in the movement already had from the beginning innovative or problematic ideas. In this context, one must understand the celebration of the First Liturgical Congress of 1915 held in Montserrat, which was lived, above all, from a text of Pope Pius X, “Tra le sollecitudini” (1903), dedicated to sacred music.
There, around the nuncio Francesco Ragonesi, all the bishops of the dioceses in Catalonia and more than 2,000 congress participants gathered to attend conferences and homilies in which they debated how to improve the liturgy of the Mass. They sought to foster the active participation of the people and liturgical renewal.
Wheat and tares, because, among its results, are the renewal of sacred art, the publication of euchological texts in vernacular languages, and the establishment of the doctrinal foundations that would later crystallize in the constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium of the Second Vatican Council.
Because the tares were also among the promoters of the Liturgical Movement from the beginning, as we have indicated, among some of the theologians, priests, and monks who already had innovative or problematic ideas: for some, the new liturgical movement had a substantially anti-Roman inspiration and moved independently of the indications of the Holy See and even openly against them.
Professor Roberto de Mattei explains how postmodernist liturgism had its main interpreter in Fr. Lambert Beauduin (1873–1960), a Belgian Benedictine of Mont-César, whose intervention at the Congrès National des Oeuvres Catholiques de Malines on September 23, 1909, is considered the beginning of the new movement: “The congress was an opportunity to bring together good wills, establish a program of action, concretize a plan of campaign, in short, create a liturgical movement” (in the words of Fr. Beauduin himself). During his novitiate, Beauduin had understood his idea of “liturgical renewal” in the phrase “il faudrait démocratiser la liturgie”.
To carry it out, he developed the notion of “active participation of the faithful”, a phrase that Pius X would include at the end of the third paragraph of his Motu Proprio Tra le sollecitudini. When, in 1913, Maurice Festugière, a Benedictine of Maredsous, published his study La liturgie catholique, in which he thoroughly attacked Ignatian spirituality, Fr. Beauduin defined the work as “the inauguration of the scientific basis of the liturgical movement,” of which he was a passionate defender.
“A profound struggle of ideas was prepared in the realm of piety and asceticism,” wrote Fr. Beauduin. A year later, Beauduin himself published the pamphlet La piété de l´Église: principes et faits, considered by many as the programmatic text of the nascent liturgical movement. Among Fr. Beauduin’s admirers in Italy was the Oratorian of Brescia Giulio Bevilacqua, to whom the young Giovanni Battista Montini owed his liturgical formation.
In Germany, the celebration of the “community Mass” that took place on August 6, 1921, in the crypt of the German abbey of Maria Laach, is considered the starting point of the “liturgical movement.”
The liturgical movement of Maria Laach is linked to figures such as its monk Odo Casel and Romano Guardini, who, in the early years of his activity, was in decisive contact with the abbey. At the impulse of both, in 1918 the three collections of publications of the liturgical movement were born. Fr. Pius Parsch, an Augustinian canon of the abbey of Klosterneuburg, near Vienna, began to celebrate at the beginning of the 1920s a Mass facing the people and to translate the liturgical texts into German.
His main work was taken up by the Jesuit Joseph Jungmann, expressing the idea of a “popular liturgy” that horizontalized the vertical relationship with God. The participants in the first “liturgical Masses” of Klosterneuburg came from the biblical movement which, in Germany, as in Belgium, converged with the liturgical one. Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli did not hide his criticisms of the new liturgism; also in the 1930s, the activities at the abbey of Maria Laach would be the object of severe criticisms by Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli.
The reformers tended to eliminate the substantial difference between the sacramental priesthood of presbyters and the common priesthood of the laity, so that they attributed to the community of the faithful a true and proper priestly nature; they insinuated the idea of a “concelebration” of the priest with the people; they maintained that one should “participate” actively in the Mass by dialoguing with the priest, to the exclusion of any other legitimate form of assistance to the Sacrifice, such as meditation, the Rosary, or other private prayers; they advocated reducing the altar to a table; they considered communion outside Mass, visits to the Blessed Sacrament, perpetual adoration, as extra-liturgical forms of piety; they showed little regard for devotions to the Sacred Heart and to the Virgin, to the saints, and, in general, for traditional spirituality and morality.
It was, in a word, a “reinterpretation” of the doctrine and structure of the Church in order to adapt them to the modern spirit.
Professor Kwasniewski considers that “some of the best theologians saw the destruction coming and lamented that day.”
The professor considers that, in its terminal phase, similar to that of a cancer, the liturgical movement had become a second-rate modernist theology, embedded in a prosaic and earthly spirituality and devoid of imagination, together with a tremendous naivety in matters of sociology and worship, in addition to a good dose of pure dishonesty in its unbalanced ressourcement, its partisan erudition, its narrow agendas, and a peculiarly modern form of archaism that did not seek to restore the mentality and spirituality that corresponded to the external elements supposedly recovered from primitive Christianity.
In Montserrat many events occurred in the years from 1915 and the celebration of the First Liturgical Congress until the beginning of the Second Vatican Council. The Second Republic, anticlerical, was established in Spain in 1931.
The monks continued in the monastery, and in 1932, one of them, Dom Adalbert Franquesa, was ordained a priest and in 1933 was sent to the monastery of Beuron to further his formation. Subsequently, he was sent to the German abbey of Maria Laach to complete his liturgical formation.
At that time, in the monastery church there was no lower choir for the monks, but only the upper choir, where the community prayed the Divine Office. A first change consisted in the placement, in 1934, of a lower monastic choir, around the altar, with 75 seats.
By the dates and places, we can also deduce that Dom Adalbert Franquesa then came into contact with the heterodox and disruptive drift of the liturgical movement. Years later, he established a deep friendship with Annibale Bugnini, whose letters, preserved in the Library of the Abbey of Montserrat, have been studied by Yves Chiron in the latter’s biography (recently published by the publishing house Homo Legens in Spanish).
In 1936 the Spanish Civil War broke out, and the Benedictine community was forced to abandon the monastery until 1939. Upon their return, Fr. Bernabé Dalmau, author of a brief work entitled “The Liturgical Reform in Montserrat,” considers that the resumption of monastic life in Montserrat made possible “a rebirth of the liturgical impulse that had been preparing since the First Congress of 1915”. Along the way, the community had lost no less than 23 monks during the Civil War, who attained the palm of martyrdom at the hands of the red terror.
On the political level, as the portal Germinans Germinabit highlighted in the article “A myth of Catalanism,” there was a cordial relationship with the Generalissimo that the official narrative tries to hide. It is totally understandable, although it weighs on today’s progressives, that the monks looked with concern at how events were developing during the Second Republic and that, therefore, they received with hope the military uprising of July 18, 1936, and that the religious who survived, like so many others, saw in Franco a savior of the Church from the extermination that the republic proposed, since he also returned the monastery to them.
On the liturgical level, already from the recovery of the monastery once the war was over, the new lower choir built in 1934 was always occupied for the celebration of Vespers and the conventual Mass.
In the global European context, in 1947 the encyclical Mediator Dei of Pius XII on the Sacred Liturgy had appeared, which sought to correct the deviations of the liturgical movement.
However, the Pope, influenced by his confessor, the Jesuit Agostino Bea, admitted that the biblical movement should carry forward a work of liturgical reform, already begun before Mediator Dei with the new Latin version of the psalms made from the Hebrew and begun at the Biblical Institute in 1941.
In 1948 a secret Commission for liturgical reform was appointed by the pope, with the young priest Annibale Bugnini as its secretary. In 12 years (1948–1960), the commission worked in absolute secrecy. Practically all the liturgical books were renewed, in particular the Divine Office and Holy Week.
Toward the end of the Second World War, the Center of Liturgical Pastoral of Paris, directed by Canon Aimé-Georges Martimort, and the Liturgical Institute of Trier, directed by Msgr. Johannes Wagner, made contact with the abbey of Mont-César.
In 1951 the two centers organized, at the abbey of Maria Laach, a private meeting, in which, without the presence of any representative of the Roman hierarchy, the problem of a radical reform of the Mass was treated for the first time. Jungmann, leader of the German liturgical movement, proposed structural changes to the very canon of consecration.
All the above shows that when the Second Vatican Council arrived, much experimentation with the liturgy had already taken place and ideas of radical reform had been introduced that would materialize from 1964, once the Liturgical Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium was promulgated.
In fact, the reason for its rapid approval by the conciliar Fathers, in comparison with other proposed texts, was that it already contained, in germ, many of the more radical changes that were intended to be introduced later. And that explains the experimentations and abuses of all kinds carried out during the Second Vatican Council itself.
Montserrat, meanwhile, continued to introduce innovations, in contact with the central-European protagonists of the liturgical movement and the advances of the Council: Fr. Dalmau affirms that, “the pastoral sense that the altar facing the people favored the participation of the faithful” was already quite current in Montserrat before the civil war, as can be seen in the private chapels of families in which the monastery had some influence in towns of the Catalan geography.
Recovered the abbey in 1939, all the altars were made facing the people, and in the 1950s the remodeling of the presbytery was already projected. The current high altar was consecrated on April 23, 1959. The remodeling allowed increasing the number of choir seats (from 75 to 100).
At the same time, work was being done in the monastic communities on the union of the lay brothers, who until then were not of choir, with the monks properly of choir (those who prayed the Divine Office).
In Montserrat, once the altar was built, the lay monks habitually participated in the liturgy, even occupying the first bench of the faithful in that era of a numerous community. It was also the moment to replace the two symmetrical ambos to distinguish the one for the Gospel from the one for the Epistle.
The first was built raised and taking advantage of the sculpture representing the eagle, symbol of the evangelist John, and placing it next to a fixed candlestick for the Paschal candle. At the opposite end was placed obliquely the ambo for the Epistle.
The construction of the high altar caused controversy, but from Montserrat they justified it arguing that no liturgical book prohibited the altar facing the people, that the ceremonial of bishops provides for incensing by surrounding the altar (therefore, it contemplates that it may be separated from the wall) and resorting to the example of the Roman basilicas that have it so.
This example, however, involves a fallacy, because the placement of the altar was due to the orientation of these buildings, in which the priest had to be situated looking “toward the people” because in reality he was celebrating toward the east.
But postconciliar archaeologism has built here a legend that already in antiquity Mass was celebrated facing the people and the Council did nothing more than recover that ancient tradition. The reality is quite different: the introducer of the Mass facing the people was Luther.
By the 1960s, the relationship between Montserrat and Franco changed radically. Abbot Escarré, then, went from being a supporter of the Franco regime to becoming one of its most vehement critics. He decided to embrace Catalanism and the critical position of some ecclesiastical sectors and went so far as to affirm in the French newspaper Le Monde in 1963 that “the Spanish regime calls itself Christian, but does not obey the basic principles of Christianity.”
From then on, not only distancing but confrontation occurred between the abbot and the head of state. Escarré (who went into exile and died in 1968) and his successor, Cassià Maria Just, hosted in the monastery all kinds of meetings to promote political Catalanism and erode the Franco regime.
In his reply to the memoirs of Cardinal Tarancón, Blas Piñar explains very clearly how this anti-Franco turn occurred, which was not only of Montserrat but of the entire hierarchy of the Church in Spain, by direct instruction of Paul VI, and how the Spanish episcopate approached the ideological and political left.
Of this, we will have occasion to treat another day, God willing. It is important today, however, that we retain this dynamic, known to all, of the Church in Spain, in order to understand these changes that occurred in the abbey of Montserrat.
Changes in monastic life in the monastery were also proposed in the same decade, which culminated with the forced transfer of the dissidents of the abbey to the Priory of Cuixà, which made manifest the division that was lived in Montserrat, coinciding with the exile of Abbot Escarré.
Eight monks were transferred to Cuixà in 1965, which became a meeting place for opponents of the regime and for those who defended a more radical application of the reforms initiated by the Second Vatican Council.
During the Council, Fr. Adalbert Franquesa, whose international liturgical formation since the 1930s we have already spoken of, was part of the international team that worked on the renewal of the liturgy, in the preparation of the Constitution “Sacrosanctum Concilium.”
And he was chosen as representative of the Spanish episcopate to advise the bishops on the liturgy. Dom Franquesa decidedly bet on concelebration, explains Yves Chiron in the biography of Annibale Bugnini.
At the monastery of Mont-César, in Louvain, Fr. Franquesa and the theologian Karl Rahner gave respective conferences on concelebration.
Once the Second Vatican Council was concluded, Fr. Franquesa occupied a prominent place in the Consilium, formed in 1964, presided over by Cardinal Lercaro and whose secretary was Bugnini himself.
Fr. Franquesa was elected a member of the Catalan Society of Liturgical Studies, a branch of the Institut d´Estudis Catalans, and years later was the first superior of the small Montserrat community that settled in the Ecumenical Institute of Tantur, in the Holy Land. Because Paul VI thought of the monks of Montserrat so that in said Institute there would be a monastic presence.
The pope himself received in audience the monks who would go to Tantur, accompanied by Abbot Cassià Maria Just and Abbot Gabriel Brasó.
Yves Chiron has studied the unpublished letters addressed by Bugnini to Dom Franquesa that are preserved in the library of the abbey and that, in his opinion, provide interesting data on the conciliar years and those following regarding liturgical reform.
Among them, Chiron highlights how the Consilium, in which Dom Franquesa was present, elaborated two new rites for concelebration and communion under both species. Study group XVI was in charge of this work. The relator was Dom Vagaggini and the secretary, another Benedictine, Franquesa.
Several successive drafts were elaborated and, following a practice—Chiron affirms—that would be repeated with other texts, the Consilium authorized at the same time “experiments” increasingly numerous before the definitive rite was adopted. From different sources one can reconstruct the chronology of this elaboration, which lasted from November 1963 to March 1965.
On June 26, 1964 the pope authorized celebrations of the new rite of concelebration in six Benedictine abbeys: San Anselmo in Rome, Montserrat, En-Calcat, Maredsous, Maria Laach and Collegeville, as well as in the Dominican convent of Saulchoir, in Paris.
The Benedictine abbeys that had been chosen to “experiment” with concelebration were chosen because they had one of their monks among the consultants or experts of the Consilium. They were the ones who presided over or organized the experimental concelebrations in their abbey. Thus, Dom Adalbert Franquesa, who had been secretary of the group that elaborated the schema on concelebration, directed those of the abbey of Montserrat.
In July 1964, Fr. Bugnini wrote to him: “How are the experimenta going?”, and added: “I would be glad if Montserrat prepared a nice album for the Holy See” . In fact, the abbeys and the Dominican convent where these experimental concelebrations were held—each of them carried out several—had to send a report to the Consilium and, if possible, take photographs of the ceremonies. These would be shown to the pope.
The Italian writer Cristina Campo had sent the pope a petition in February 1966, together with 37 other signatures from various parts of the world, which asked Paul VI that the Latin-Gregorian liturgy, as it had been celebrated for fifteen centuries in monastic communities, remain intact and complete, at least in those conventual churches that did not have strictly parochial functions; and that in this liturgy, including the Mass, there be no parts in the vernacular language nor music other than Gregorian chant; that in conventual churches amplifiers or other mechanical instruments that would irremediably distort the nature of plainchant and the character of the place not be used.
“This would allow – said the letter – a large part of the faithful, and non-Catholics who so desire, to continue participating in or attending the traditional liturgy and chant, without diminishing the importance of other liturgical forms recently adopted in parish churches throughout the world”.
But the monks of Montserrat, like many other monastic communities, were very far from the sentiment of Cristina Campo and the other laity who battled for the maintenance of the traditional Latin Mass. The bet on the Catalan vernacular language was very decided, as a symbol of the Catalan nationalism that the monastery represented.
The bet on Catalan in the liturgy was one of the three fundamental decisions adopted by the Montserrat community after the Council, together with its own musical repertoire and, more recently, the broadcasting of the principal offices via the internet, according to Fr. Bernabé Dalmau.
There is a very significant difference both in the disposition of the monks’ choir and the presbytery and in the “style” of monastic liturgy between the monasteries of Montserrat, Benedictine, and Poblet, Cistercian. Both, governed by the Rule of Saint Benedict. Perhaps it may be interesting to treat the liturgy at Santa María de Poblet on another occasion.
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