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In Memoriam: Aidan
Kavanagh
Memorial Service
Sunday October 8 | 5pm
Marquand Chapel
The Rv. John Baldovin, S.J., presiding
The Rev. Jaime Lara, assisting
Reception follows in the Common Room
Aidan J. Kavanagh, professor emeritus of liturgics
at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School,
died July 9 at his home in Hamden, CT. He was 77. A Benedictine
monk, Kavanagh was among the first faculty hired at the Institute
soon after its founding at Yale in 1973 following the close of the
School of Sacred Music at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
During his tenure at Yale, Kavanagh served as acting director of
the Institute and in 1989-90 was acting dean at Yale Divinity School,
the first Roman Catholic priest to lead the School.
Though a renowned liturgical scholar himself, Kavanagh was not
one to leave development of liturgical forms to the academic elite
or to church leaders. For Kavanagh, it was the interaction of everyday
Christians with the world that gives rise to liturgies that reflect
and sustain a public order of life and meaning within the chaos
of human existence. His influence was critical in the United States
to the appropriation of the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican
Council.
On the occasion of Kavanagh’s retirement from the Institute
in 1994, Kavanagh’s former student Thomas Schattauer, now
a professor at Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, IA, recalled
the imaginary and commonplace “Mrs. Murphy” who stood
at the center of the Kavanagh universe. “In the world according
to Aidan,” Schattauer noted, “she (Mrs. Murphy) possesses
more liturgical wisdom than any liturgical scholar or reformer and
more liturgical authority than any priest or pope.” Kavanagh,
said Schattauer, continually taught that “the holy things
of the liturgy did not ‘drop from Heaven in a Glad Bag.’”
Kavanagh was born in Mexia, TX, on April 20, 1929, the son of Joseph
and Guarrel (Mullins) Suttle. Born Joseph Michael, he later adopted
the surname of his foster father, Joseph Kavanagh. He attended the
University of the South in Sewanee, TN from 1947-49. He later attended
St. Meinrad Seminary, a German Catholic seminary in southern Indiana,
from which he earned an A.B. degree in 1957, the year he was ordained
to the priesthood. His passion at the time was moral theology—a
passion that often found its way into his teaching of liturgy. However,
it was Kavanagh’s vow of obedience to a Benedictine superior
at St. Meinrad that set him on his life’s course, when his
abbot chose to send him to the Theologische Fakultaet at Trier,
in then West Germany, to study liturgy. He earned an S.T.D. degree
there in 1963, graduating with highest honors. Along the way, he
had also received an S.T.L. from the University of Ottawa in Canada.
Kavanagh began his academic career teaching liturgy in the school
of theology at St. Meinrad’s. In 1966 was named an associate
professor of liturgy at the University of Notre Dame. He rose to
the rank of professor in 1971. In 1972-73 he was a visiting professor
at Yale Divinity School, and in 1974 he left Notre Dame to become
acting director at the Institute of Sacred Music.
His seminal work, On Liturgical Theology, has been viewed
as significant for establishing what came to be called his “theology
of the congregation,” illuminating the experience of people
in the pews and the way they worship. In that book, he wrote that
liturgy should be “festive, ordered, aesthetic, canonical,
eschatological and, above all, normal.” His Elements of
Rite: A Handbook of Liturgical Style, continues to be used
as a primary study guide for priests and other ministers.
Kavanagh described himself in On Liturgical Theology as
“a living paradox.” He wrote, “The creature of
a deeply sacramental tradition who works professionally in the symbolic
liturgical expression of that tradition, he tries to affirm and
commend the embrace of the world which that tradition and its liturgical
expression would convey to others of Christian faith met for worship.
Simultaneously, however, his own monastic engagement whispers in
his ear that such an embrace must be undertaken not with reluctance
but with a certain wariness. He is one in whom the tension between
love of God's world and adamant critique of what we have made of
it has taken on living form, reinforced by professional commitment
to both sides of the tension.”
A funeral Mass was held on July 14 in the church at the Saint Meinrad
Archabbey, Indiana. Burial in the Archabbey Cemetery followed the
Mass.
On July 13 a procession to the Archabbey Church with the Office
of the Dead will took place, followed by a public visitation time
in the church.
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