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Katharine Harmon explores the intersection of the interwar Liturgical Movement with three forms of female lay initiative, the National Council for Catholic Women, the Catholic intellectual revival promoted by Maisie Ward and the Grail. The development of the theology of the Mystical Body of Christ served as a means by which Catholic laywomen, hitherto confined to a restricted sphere of religious activities at the parish level and in the family home, were able to enter upon a much wider sphere of action. The Liturgical Movement thus helped promote greater freedom of action for Catholic women and paved the way for their greater participation in later initiatives such as the Christian Family Movement.

This chapter presents an overview of the twentieth‐century liturgical movement and the fruit of that movement in the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962‐65). Of particular importance was the nineteenth‐century recovery of the theology of the church as the Mystical Body of Christ which provided the needed theological foundation for liturgical renewal.

This chapter articulates and explores the underlying dynamic of liturgical change in Western Anglicanism. At its origins in the nineteenth century, the ‘Liturgical Movement’ was concerned with the renewal of the classical patterns of each tradition, Anglican, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic. At first, within Western Anglicanism, impulses for liturgical renewal were necessarily contained within use of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. When the focus of liturgical scholarship developed beyond the models of a divided Christendom to early Church sources as the common heritage of all Christians, liturgical renewal became associated with ecumenical renewal. This union had far-reaching consequences for Anglican liturgical developments.

This chapter argues that the roots of Vatican II must be pushed back into the eighteenth century in order to fully understand the council. It profiles the existence and achievements of the “Catholic Enlightenment,” a now well-established phenomenon that spanned the entire European Catholic world, and argues that it was an attempt at aggiornamento. A variety of eighteenth-century movements, many of them later condemned or marginalized by the Church’s official magisterium, are then profiled, including Gallicanism, Richerism, Febronianism, and Josephinism. The chapter then examines a complex and misunderstood reform movement, Jansenism, which especially shaped Scipione de’ Ricci and the Pistoian circle. Finally, it examines a loose “Third Party” of moderate Catholic reformers (who were neither Jansenists nor traditionalist zelanti), focusing on Lodovico Muratori. The chapter shows that both radical Jansenists and moderate “Third Party” Catholics attempted ressourcement, especially in advocating liturgical and devotional reform and encouraging Bible reading.

In the nineteenth century, pressures that strained the boundaries of Anglican Christianity, in so far as the Prayer Book defined them, came largely from the advanced “high-church” movement known as Anglo-catholicism, which sought to recover or re-introduce liturgical practices that had been abolished at the Reformation. An attempt to deal with the nonconformity of Anglo-catholic “ritualists” led to a proposed revision of the Book of Common Prayer that Parliament declined to endorse. Nevertheless, revision gathered momentum, with the result that by the end of the twentieth century the “classical” Prayer Book had been superseded by other, modernized liturgies throughout the Anglican world. While it remains a venerable book, the Book of Common Prayer may be revered for what it once was more than for what it is.