"In a very real sense the whole life of the Church in the patristic period was “liturgical.” There were no Christian schools or catechism classes, no popular missions or retreats. But there were the daily assemblies for morning and evening prayer, in which the Scriptures were abundantly read and commented. On the Lord’s Day there was the vigil and eucharistic synaxis, with lessons and homilies. And there was Lent, when the bishop prepared the community’s candidates for Easter baptism with long catechetical homilies such as have come down to us from John Chrysostom, Cyril of Jerusalem, and Theodore of Mopsuestia. Even the more mundane ministries were part and parcel of the liturgical assembly. Offerings for the sick and poor were brought there and given to the deacons who saw to their distribution; it was there that catechumens were instructed and baptized, penitents reconciled, the wayward corrected.
So to say that the whole life of the Church was liturgical does not mean the Church did nothing but “say mass.” Contemporary compartmentalization of life into clearly defined and mutually exclusive categories, and the even more recent limitation of parish liturgical life to the Eucharist, were foreign to the early Church, whose life was liturgical in that it was a community whose every activity was leitourgia', a public service of the one Body of Christ."
So to say that the whole life of the Church was liturgical does not mean the Church did nothing but “say mass.” Contemporary compartmentalization of life into clearly defined and mutually exclusive categories, and the even more recent limitation of parish liturgical life to the Eucharist, were foreign to the early Church, whose life was liturgical in that it was a community whose every activity was leitourgia', a public service of the one Body of Christ."
+ Fr Robert F. Taft, "Beyond East and West: Problems in Liturgical Understanding." 2nd Rev. Ed. (Rome: Pontifical Oriental Institute Press, 2001) 145.
