Principles for a just reform

by Gianni Cardinale

Alcuin Reid OSB, The Organic Development of the Liturgy, Saint Michael's Abbey Press, London 2004. 350 pp.

The text by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger printed here is a review of the book The Organic Development of the Liturgy (350 pp.) by Dom Alcuin Reid, published by the Saint Michael’s Abbey Press, from the Benedictine abbey of Saint Michael’s in Farnborough, England. The review, published here for the first time, was written for the German theological magazine Forum Katholische Theologie, which will print it in its first 2005 issue.
Dom Reid, a 41 year-old Australian, entered Saint Michael’s Abbey in 2000. In 2002 he took a degree at the University of London with a dissertation on the “Nature of the liturgical movement and the principles of the liturgical reform” that was the basis of the book reviewed by the Dean of the Sacred College. The Abbey of Saint Michael (www.farnboroughabbey.org) is a foundation (1985) of the French Abbey of Solesmes, and is currently a part of the Benedictine Congregation of Subiaco.