Fr. Gerald Ellard, S.J., and the Liturgical Movement

Today marks the death of Father Gerald Ellard (1894-1963), a Jesuit liturgical scholar. Born in Wisconsin, he and his brother joined the Jesuits in 1912. Two of his sisters entered religious life. Ordained in 1926, he pursued doctoral studies in medieval history and liturgy at the University of Munich. For over thirty years he taught Jesuit seminarians liturgy at St. Mary’s College, Kansas. In addition to his teaching, Ellard was a leading figure in the Liturgical Movement, a movement to recapture the ancient treasures of the liturgy and highlight the social dimensions of the liturgy. Together with Monsignor Martin Hellriegel and Father Virgil Michel, O.S.B., he helped found the journal Orate Fratres. The three men became the most prominent proponents of liturgical reform in the United States. His 1933 book, Christian Life and Worship was the major American work in the field through the 1950s.

For Ellard the liturgy was the worship of the entire body of Christ. One of the big problems he saw in American Catholic life was a strong individualism that inhibited the Church’s communal life. For Ellard, the whole Liturgical Movement rested on the notion of the Mystical Body of Christ, an ancient Pauline notion that stressed the connectedness of all believers. During the 1940’s, he found support at the highest level when Pope Pius XII issued encyclicals on the Mystical Body (Mystici Corporis, 1943) and the liturgy (Mediator Dei, 1947). His 1948 book The Mass of the Future, which anticipated the future form of the Mass as it emerged from the reforms of Vatican II, was considered radical at the time. But by the 1950’s, the ground for liturgical change had been broken with Pope Pius XII’s reforms of the Holy Week liturgy.

Ellard died eight months before Vatican II’s liturgical constitution was promulgated, but as one biographer writes, a “small but well-informed and well-formed band of American Catholics did understand the rationale of liturgical renewal and were able to use their preparation to help others to understand.” Ellard’s eulogist said: “To many he was a symbol—a symbol of liturgical life and growth… He traveled with us to the threshold of a new day. He led us toward that day.”