Influential liturgical scholar and teacher
A memorial service will be held on Sunday, Oct. 8, for Aidan J. Kavanagh, a renowned liturgical scholar, who died July 9 at his home in Hamden, Connecticut. He was 77.
The service will be at 5 p.m. in Marquand Chapel, 409 Prospect St. The Reverend John Baldovin S.J. will preside and the Reverend Jaime Lara will assist. A reception will follow in the Divinity School common room.
A Benedictine monk, Kavanagh was one of the first faculty members hired at Yale's Institute of Sacred Music (ISM), soon after its move from Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1973. Kavanagh, who later served as acting director of the institute, was professor of liturgics there. He was the first Roman Catholic to lead the Yale Divinity School while serving as its acting dean 1989-1990.
Kavanagh's 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, Kavanagh wrote that liturgy should be "festive, ordered, aesthetic, canonical, eschatological and, above all, normal." For him, 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 ISM in 1994, his former student Thomas Schattauer, now a professor at Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa, recalled Kavanagh's imaginary "Mrs. Murphy," who represented the common parishioner: "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, added Schattauer, continually taught that "the holy things of the liturgy did not 'drop from Heaven in a Glad Bag.'"
Kavanagh's "Elements of Rite: A Handbook of Liturgical Style" has been a primary study guide for priests and other ministers.
Kavanagh was born in Mexia, Texas, on April 20, 1929, the son of Joseph and Guarrel Suttle. Born Joseph Michael, he later adopted the surname of his foster father, Joseph Kavanagh. He attended the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and later, St. Meinrad Seminary in Indiana, where he earned his undergraduate degree in 1957 and made a vow of obedience to a Benedictine superior. His abbot chose to send Kavanagh to the Theologische Fakultaet at Trier, then in West Germany, to study liturgy; he earned an S.T.D. degree there in 1963. He also received an S.T.L. degree from the University of Ottawa in Canada.
Kavanagh began his academic career teaching liturgy at St. Meinrad's in the School of Theology . In 1966 he was named an associate professor of liturgy at the University of Notre Dame. He rose to the rank of professor in 1971. In 1972-1973 he was a visiting professor at the Yale Divinity School, and in 1974 he left Notre Dame to become acting director of ISM.
In "On Liturgical Theology," Kavanagh described himself as "a living paradox," explaining, "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."
Kavanagh was buried in the Saint Meinrad Archabbey Cemetery.
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