James Dunlop Crichton

Background

James Crichton was born on the 18th of June, 1907 in the United Kingdom.

Education

Crichton studied at Cot­ton College and Orscott College, but he never completed a degree.

In 1995, at the request of the bishops' conference, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in sacred liturgy from the Pontifical Liturgical Institute in Rome, traveling there to accept the award in person.

Career

James Crichton was ordained a priest in 1932. Before World War II he was a priest at St. Chad's Cathedral in Birmingham, followed by work at Uttoxeter, in Staffordshire, and was at Acocks Green. During the war, in 1941 he was a chaplain at a Royal Air Force flying school before obtaining an assignment at a parish in Shirley, Warwickshire. From 1947 to 1955 he served at Harvington, Worcestershire, before taking up what would be his final posting, Holy Redeemer parish at nearby Pershore, where he built a new church in 1959. He remained the priest there until 1977 and maintained an active role in the church even after that.

It was after ordination that Crichton began his exploration of the liturgy, spurred by his first post-ordination purchase, a book of sermons by Pope St Leo the Great in a Jansenist edition then on the Vatican Index. He later discovered seminal modern writings from the early years of the century, including Pope Pius X's 1903 instruction urging the renewal of the liturgy, and the works of Dom Lambert Beauduin.

A 1946 visit to France astonished him with the veritable explosion in studies of scripture, liturgy and patristics, and the early worker-priest movement. Crichton, an active member of the Society of Saint Gregory, which promoted an understanding of the place of worship in parish life, had become editor of its quarterly magazine Liturgy by the time the Vatican Council opened. He watched with a mixture of hope, that the Council Fathers would take the lead and fear that the Vatican bureaucrats would merely see their own plans rubber-stamped.

With the initial lack of reliable reports in Britain on the council's deliberations, Crichton eagerly devoured the French publication Documentation Catholique, which reproduced a wide range of council speeches and documents.

As his reputation grew in tandem with interest in changes to the liturgy, Crichton was increasingly invited to lecture in Britain, Ireland and the United States. It was not until his mid-fifties that he wrote his first book, The Church's Worship in 1964, which he completed in just 10 weeks. His accumulated years of observation and study made it an easy book to write which proved to be the first of many.

James Crichton wrote numerous books and articles on all aspects of liturgy, worship, and the sacraments. His Christian Celebration: The Sacraments was written in 1973. He was also the author of many other books, including Changes in the Liturgy in 1965, The Once and Future Liturgy in 1977, and the more recent Preparing for Christmas in 1998 and As It Was: Reminiscences and Prophecies in 1999.

Achievements

• James Crichton was particularly known as a foremost Roman Catholic liturgist, studying, musing on and explaining the liturgy to successive generations of Catholics and other Christians. Most notably known for his three-volume Christian Celebration.
  
  

Works

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  • Christian Celebration: The Sacraments 1973
  • Our Lady in the Liturgy 1997
  • Servants of the People: Today's Priest in the Light of the Second Vatican Council 1990
  • Lights in Darkness: Forerunners of the Liturgical Movement 1996
  • Christian Celebration: The Mass 1971
  • The Once and Future Liturgy 1977
  • As It Was: Reminiscences and Prophecies 1999

Views

Crichton was an enthusiastic supporter of the changes to the liturgy brought in by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). Although he openly derided Catholics who longed for the return of the 16th-century Tridentine Mass, Crichton denied claims that he hated it.

Always favoring a more participatory type of liturgy, Crichton was pleased with the updates made on the liturgy by Vatican Council II and played an important role by explaining these changes in his writings.

Quotations: "I had been doing the liturgy before theorizing about it".

"I was brought up on the Latin liturgy, I loved it and for the first half of my life as a priest, I tried to help people to understand it, to sing it and to pray it. It was a very uphill task and the results were not impressive".

"It may inform some who think that the Old Days were Good, and it will perhaps annoy those who think the Present is irremediably Bad".