NEWS FEATURE: Forty Years After Vatican II, Revised Lectionary an Ecumenical Resource

c. 2003 Religion News Service (UNDATED) On Dec. 4, 1963, the Second Vatican Council issued “The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,” a document outlining far-reaching reforms for Catholic liturgical life. It allowed for the vernacular rather than only Latin to be used at Mass and, among other directives, urged an immediate revision of the lectionary. […]

c. 2003 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) On Dec. 4, 1963, the Second Vatican Council issued “The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,” a document outlining far-reaching reforms for Catholic liturgical life. It allowed for the vernacular rather than only Latin to be used at Mass and, among other directives, urged an immediate revision of the lectionary.

“The treasures of the Bible are to be opened up more lavishly so that a richer fare may be provided for the faithful at the table of God’s word,” it declared.


A committee of scholars set to work.

Forty years later, the three-year Sunday lectionary _ the biblical texts read during worship _ they devised remains “the most successful of all the innovations after Vatican II,” according to Dr. Regina A. Boisclair, Cardinal Newman Chair of Catholic Theology at Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage.

“It has created an enormous amount of Scripture (use) among Catholics,” said Boisclair, a New Testament scholar whose work has focused on lectionary hermeneutics. “That, in fact, is still bearing fruit.”

Bear fruit it has, agree liturgists and theologians, Catholic and Protestant alike.

By the time Vatican II convened in 1962, many Catholics were calling for a reform of the lectionary as part of the wider liturgical renewal on the council’s agenda.

The Roman Missal then in use contained a one-year cycle of Scripture selections for Sundays and feast days, largely unrevised since 1570. There were two readings for each liturgy, the “Epistle” and the Gospel. Only three Old Testament selections, apart from psalms, were used in the space of a year.

The lectionary committee combed through all previous Latin lectionaries, in addition to lectionaries used by Eastern rites and Protestant denominations.

Drawing too upon ecumenical biblical scholarship and research of early Christian practice, the committee boosted the amount of Scripture used at Mass by crafting a three-year cycle of readings for Sundays and feast days and by adding an additional reading, usually from the Old Testament, to the liturgical lineup for those days.

The changes were dramatic: Whereas the previous version of the Roman Missal offered a total of 138 Scripture passages, the new Sunday and Feast Day Lectionary, approved in 1969 by Pope Paul VI, contains 529 readings _ almost a third of which are from the Old Testament, and which were allowed to be read in the language of the land, rather than Latin.


“It brought far more Scripture in a much more coherent way to American Catholics,” said Boisclair. “It tied in the Scriptures very clearly with the liturgical year.”

Although the Catholic committee drew partly upon Protestant scholarship, they could not have foreseen the hefty ecumenical impact of their work.

Soon after it appeared, Protestants began adopting the Catholic Sunday lectionary, sometimes leading to a liturgical renewal of their own.

Some have since called the lectionary “Catholicism’s greatest gift to Protestant preaching.”

“Vatican II, you might say, also precipitated a kind of reformation in the Protestant churches,” said Dr. James F. Kay, the Joe R. Engle Professor of Homiletics and Liturgics at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Kay noted that because the lectionary is correlated with the church year, many mainline Protestants have increased observances of the Christian calendar beyond Christmas and Easter, now marking Ash Wednesday, Pentecost Sunday and All Saints Day, for example. The church year begins with the first Sunday of Advent, this year on Nov. 30.

“It fostered some common liturgical observances that before the lectionary might have been observed only if the minister were inclined,” Kay said.


In the early 1980s, ecumenical efforts by a band of American and Canadian Protestant churches produced the Common Lectionary. An updated version appeared 1992, and that Revised Common Lectionary is now used by more than a dozen denominations ranging from the American Baptist Churches in the USA to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) to the United Church of Canada.

The Revised Common Lectionary follows the Catholic Sunday lectionary closely, with Gospel readings in Year A taken from Matthew, from Mark in Year B, and, this year, from Luke in Year C.

Protestant pastors and liturgists who use the lectionary say it makes their jobs easier and congregational life richer.

“It gives a real shape to the church year, and by doing that it also provides a biblical shape for people’s faith,” said the Rev. Patrick Willson, pastor of Williamsburg Presbyterian Church in Williamsburg, Va.

“It’s not just `here are some ideas that the preacher has come up with in the past week,”’ he added, saying that music ministers, for example, can plan in advance if they know what Scripture readings or themes will be.

Willson, whose 1,400-member church is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA), said the lectionary broadens a pastor’s use of Scripture in Sunday worship, even if only one or two of the selections are used on a given Sunday.


“Every pastor knows some parts of the Bible better than others,” he said. “What the lectionary does is it places before our eyes passages of Scripture we would not choose to read in worship otherwise, or that we would forget about.”

“It’s really a matter of encouraging both the community and the preacher to subject themselves to a disciplined spiritual grid,” said the Rev. Clayton L. Morris, liturgical officer for the Episcopal Church.

Morris said that the Revised Common Lectionary, which he helped shape, is authorized for use in his denomination _ although many Episcopal congregations still use the Anglican-specific lectionary in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.

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Lectionary resources now include much more than commentaries on the texts, said John A. Thomas, director of Liturgy Training Publications, a publisher owned by the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago.

Thomas said LTP also offers workbooks for lectors and related catechetical resources as well as lectionary-based devotionals for personal use.

“We’re always looking for new ways to make the lectionary texts and the Scripture texts come alive for people,” he said, adding that those resources foster “the active participation in the liturgy that Vatican II talks about.”


Religious publishers are also seeing spikes in ecumenical crossover, according to the Rev. Martin Seltz, general manager for worship at Augsburg Fortress Publishing.

Since their parent church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, adopted the Revised Common Lectionary in 1995, he said, “increasingly other churches are able to use the resources that we produce.”

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Despite their broad usage and appeal, the lectionaries are not without critics.

“There are many points in the (Catholic Sunday) lectionary that (scholars) would prefer otherwise,” said Boisclair, citing concerns about the treatment of the Old Testament and the exclusion of many Scripture passages dealing with women _ two issues addressed by the updates of the Revised Common Lectionary.

Some scholars would also like to see even more Scripture included, perhaps modeled along a four-year cycle.

But, Boisclair added, “when compared with the preceding lectionaries there is universal consensus that the three-year lectionary is a blessing.”

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