The Reform of Holy Week in the Years 1951-1956

[Stone]

An excerpt by Evelyn Waugh  from The Spectator [1962] speaking from a layman's perspective on the effects of the Holy Week changes of 1955: 

‘During the last few years we have experienced the triumph of the ‘liturgists’ in the new arrangement of the services for the end of Holy Week and for Easter. For centuries these had been enriched by devotions which were dear to the laity—the anticipation of the morning office of Tenebrae, the vigil at the Altar of Repose, the Mass of the Presanctified. It was not how the Christians of the second century observed the season. It was the organic growth of the needs of the people. 

Not all Catholics were able to avail themselves of the services but hundreds did, going to live in or near the monastic houses and making an annual retreat which began with Tenebrae on Wednesday afternoon and ended about midday on Saturday with the anticipated Easter Mass. During those three days time was conveniently apportioned between the rites of the Church and the discourses of the priest taking the retreat, with little temptation to distraction. Now nothing happens before Thursday evening. All Friday morning is empty. There is an hour or so in church on Friday afternoon. The Easter Mass is sung at midnight to a weary congregation who are constrained to ‘renew their baptismal vows’ in the vernacular and later repair to bed.
The significance of Easter as a feast of dawn in quite lost [...].

I have noticed in the monastery I frequent a marked falling-off in the number of retreatants since the innovations or, as the liturgists prefer to call them, the restorations. It may well be that these services are nearer to the practice of primitive Christianity, but the Church rejoices in the development of dogma; why does it not also admit the development of liturgy?’ 

See Scott Reid, ed., A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Carmel Cardinal Heenan on the liturgical changes (London: St Austin Press, 1996) pp24-25