Liturgy

Liturgy, body of rites prescribed for formal public worship. Although the term is sometimes applied to Jewish worship, it is especially associated with the prayers and ceremonies used in the celebration of the Lord's Supper, or Eucharist. During the first three centuries of the Christian era, the rite of the Church was comparatively fluid, based on various accounts of the Last Supper. In about the 4th century the various traditions crystallized into four liturgies, the Antiochene, or Greek, the Alexandrian, the Roman, and the Gallican, from which all others have been derived.

The Antiochene family of liturgies includes the Clementine liturgy of the Apostolic Constitutions, which is no longer used; the Syriac liturgy of St James, used by the Jacobite Church and Syrian Eastern Rite Churches; the Greek liturgy of St James, used once a year at Jerusalem; the Syriac liturgy of the Maronites; the Syriac liturgy used by the Nestorian Church; the Malabar liturgy, used by the St Thomas Christians of India; the Byzantine liturgy, used in various languages by the Orthodox Churches; and the Armenian liturgy, used by the Georgians and the Armenian Eastern Rite Churches.

The Alexandrian liturgies include the Greek liturgy of St Mark, no longer used; the Coptic liturgy, which is used by the Copts in Egypt; and the Ethiopian liturgy, used by the Ethiopian Church.

The Roman liturgy is used almost universally by the Roman Catholic Church. From it were derived various medieval liturgies, such as those of Sarum, Paris, Trier, and Cologne, which are no longer in use.

The Gallican liturgy was used in north-western Europe from the 4th century; it was superseded in France about 800 by the Roman liturgy. From it developed the Ambrosian liturgy, now used principally in the see of Milan; the Mozarabic or Isidorian liturgy, which was the liturgy of the Church in Spain from the 6th to the 12th centuries and is now used only in Toledo and Salamanca; and the Celtic liturgy, which was superseded in the Celtic Church in the 7th century by the Roman liturgy. In the Roman Catholic Church the use of the vernacular, rather than Latin, was approved during the second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Pope Paul VI subsequently directed that vernacular forms of the Mass would be obligatory after December 1971. Beginning with the 19th-century Oxford movement, Protestants developed a greater awareness of formal liturgy in their worship and have increasingly adopted liturgical forms of worship abandoned during the Reformation. The liturgy of the Church of England and the American Episcopal Church is given in the Book of Common Prayer.