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The 1996 Frederick R. McManus Award was presented to Godfrey Diekmann, O. S. B., in Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 12, 1996 by Msgr. Frederick R. McManus.

The following is the text of Msgr. McManus’ presentation to Father Godfrey.

In Providence last year I was humbled, even embarrassed, and certainly felt unworthy of the naming of the FDLC annual award—but, more deeply, I was pleased, flattered, and honored. A year later I am again pleased, flattered, and honored to present for the award Godfrey Diekmann, my friend and, for more than four decades, my colleague. 

Tonight we honor Godfrey for his extraordinary service and achievement in matters liturgical and pastoral. We also celebrate the sixty-fifth anniversary of his presbyteral ordination, the seventieth anniversary of his monastic profession. I have always maintained that he was professed immediately after Christian initiation and that he was indeed a child-monk. To this moment he has remained young at heart.

 Last June, at one of those huge papal audiences in Rome, Pope John Paul came over and asked Godfrey: “Aren’t you that Benedictine monk I met the other day?” Of course, Godfrey had attracted the pope’s attention by wildly waving his multicolored cane, a kind of Joseph’s cane of many colors. And from the June ICEL meeting in Rome, some of us treasure a photograph in which Godfrey seems to be lecturing the Bishop of Rome.

Godfrey is the monk of the 1991 biography, The Monk’s Tale, written by Kathleen Hughes. The volume is scholarly, but also warm and loving. I mention the book partly in the hope that most of you have read it and so I need not go into specifics about all the Diekmann accomplishments. Even more, it gives me the chance to report that in the five years since The Monk’s Tale was published, Godfrey has continued to be young at heart, to repeat my cliché, in things liturgical and ecclesial, social and ecumenical. At the meetings of the ICEL Advisory Committee, where Godfrey and I served even before ICEL was formally set up in 1963, his remains a fresh and strong voice. An example: he recalls a patristic passage that he came upon just last week and that he now applies to younger generations and today’s circumstances. This he does with all the vigor and enthusiasm he has always had—unlike some few liturgical pioneers who have become liturgical curmudgeons.

Godfrey Diekmann was the first, I think, to point out that the new constitution on the liturgy was inadequate in its almost passing reference to “all the works of charity, piety, and the apostolate.” He offered this stricture because his whole liturgical enterprise had been bound up with liturgy-and-life intertwining, with the Hillenbrands and Reinholds and Hovdas, with those committed to interracial justice and family life undertakings, not to mention the biblical and ecumenical movements on the eve of the council or that Liturgical Week theme of the mid-fifties, Liturgy and Social Order. Thus for a quarter century he was a major and faithful architect of The Liturgical Conference’s programs.

Godfrey is best known as the editor who brought new life and breadth—including the catechetical and pastoral and social—to Orate, Fratres, now Worship, where he succeeded the great pioneer, Virgil Michel. But he was and is a patristic scholar and a theologian of distinction. Until this very fall, he was a university and college teacher through more than six successful decades. One of his triumphs was when he was honored by a disinvitation to lecture and teach at The Catholic University of America. Later his generosity of spirit let him rejoin our summer and adjunct faculty at the University, and we did try to make slight amends with an honorary degree.

His lectures, many of them published over the years, have always been presented in compelling and moving language and tone, with all that enthusiasm and eagerness. His massive achievements as editor—he even managed to polish the rough outpourings of H. A. Reinhold’s genius—were sometimes surpassed by the talks which best revealed his whole Christian life of faith and hope and love.

I have to tell you that Godfrey is, among many other things, a mushroom fancier and a mushroom specialist. To return to somewhat profounder matters, I am sure you know that Godfrey served effectively on the preparatory commission that drafted Sacrosanctum Concilium and, at the instance and intervention of the heroic Paul Hallinan of Atlanta, on the conciliar liturgical commission as it finished its work in the second year of the council. What you may not know is that, at a meeting in Washington, the subcommittee of Diekmann, Quasten, and Hofinger had earlier drafted the first text of the articles of Sacrosanctum Concilium on cultural adaptation, now inculturation. As a member of ICEL’s Advisory Committee with a lifetime term, today he is even more committed to liturgical inculturation and growth.

This tribute, which could go on much further, is an expression of esteem and affection and gratitude. I am now happy to present Dom Godfrey Diekmann of the Order of Saint Benedict to the Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions for its annual award.

Now, a postscript and a personal bonus from me to Godfrey. It is a 1963 photograph, retrieved after careful archival research by my good sister-in-law. The photograph was taken outside Saint Peter’s after a general congregation of Vatican II. There are three happy people in the picture—happy over the liturgical constitution, happy over all the mighty deeds of the Holy Spirit of God at work in the Church, at work in the Church then assembled in council.