Updating the principles of the liturgical movement for a new liturgical movement

The author is a Benedictine monk of L’abbaye Sainte-Madeleine du Barroux in France. The original paper (in French) was delivered in July 2001 at a Liturgy Conference held at the Abbey of Notre Dame, Fontgombault, France,
in the presence of the then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger when Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and was later published in the English translated proceedings of the conference edited by Dr Alcuin Reid, Looking Again at the Question of the Liturgy with Cardinal Ratzinger:
Proceedings of the July 2001 Fontgombault Liturgical Conference (St Michael’s Abbey, Farnborough, 2003). The paper here published is revised and translated from the original French especially for The Priest by Professor David Birch (Deakin University, Melbourne) at the invitation of the Editor, with the cooperation of Dom Charbel. The full set of footnotes is available in Reid (Ed.) (2003). Where passages are quoted from Magisterial texts, the Vatican website English translation is given rather than a translation of the French version used in the original paper. Sub-headings are due to the Editor.

From site to text : Australian Aborigines and the origin of the family

Missions were not simply sites of modernity, they were also the source of key data for the modernist theories of human progress. The idea that so called “primitive peoples” provided a window to the origins of human institutions seemed axiomatic to nineteenth-century theorists of human society who sought evidence for these ideas from settlers, administrators and particularly missionaries. The 1870s and 1880s were the high point of missionary engagement with study-bound anthropologists, as questionnaires and letters were sent from the centres to the edges of empires. Missionary responses, augmented with settler and explorer observations, became the footnotes in early anthropological texts on “primitive” societies. These analyses were then mined for the foundation texts of the other social sciences in the late nineteenth century. Along with many other scholars, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels read the anthropology of the period and slotted the findings into their analyses of human society.