Little Liturgical Catechism

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Originally published after Dom Prosper Gueranger completed his three-volume Liturgical Institutions (1840-1851) yet prior to his final (ninth) volume of The Liturgical Year (1841-1875), Abbe Henri Dutilliet's Little Liturgical Catechism (1860) bridges his master's two monumental achievements in a comprehensive distillation of the Roman liturgy and the Church's annual cycle of worship.

Despite his encyclopedic effort, however, his book fell out of print within two decades; that is, until the famous decadent-novelist-turned-Benedictine-oblate Joris-Karl Huysmans discovered this pamphlet in a bookshop in the early 1890s and saw it back into print in 1896 as a remedy for the universal "ignorance of the Sacred Liturgy" he had observed among the faithful of his diocese. Nor has the need for education ceased 130 years later, when the traditional rite so beautifully expounded in this catechism has returned to more and more churches. It is thus fitting to bring Dutilliet's marvelous catechism to light for our times, even as Huysmans did for his.

Expanded with notes that explain unfamiliar terms or point out differences between the Tridentine rite about which this catechism speaks and the twentieth-century modified versions of it, this first-ever English translation of Dutilliet's text intends to offer the faithful "the enduring enchantment of the admirable year of the Church" and the understanding that "all in her worship is full of meaning; nothing is left to hazard; no detail, however minute, is without purpose." Reading this catechism is not only a painless way to acquire much learning in a short time, but a haunting reminder of just how much has been lost in the postconciliar Church-and how much we stand to gain by its restoration.