Is Scholastic sacramental theology responsible?

For the loss of a proper understanding of the liturgy? Or could we not point fingers at the fact that the liturgy was in a dead language instead?

Cardinal Ratzinger, How Should We Worship,
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It is important, in this connection, to interpret the "substantial continuity" correctly. The author expressly warns us against the wrong path up which we might be led by a Neoscholastic sacramental theology that is disconnected from the living form of the Liturgy. On that basis, people might reduce the "substance" to the matter and form of the sacrament and say: Bread and wine are the matter of the sacrament; the words of institution are its form. Only these two things are really necessary; everything else is changeable. At this point modernists and traditionalists are in agreement: As long as the material gifts are there, and the words of institution are spoken, then everything else is freely disposable. Many priests today, unfortunately, act in accordance with this motto; and the theories of many liturgists are unfortunately moving in the same direction. They want to overcome the limits of the rite, as being something fixed and immovable, and construct the products of their fantasy, which are supposedly "pastoral", around this remnant, this core that has been spared and that is thus either relegated to the realm of magic or loses any meaning whatever. The Liturgical Movement had in fact been attempting to overcome this reductionism, the product of an abstract sacramental theology, and to teach us to understand the Liturgy as a living network of Tradition that had taken concrete form, that cannot be torn apart into little pieces but that has to be seen and experienced as a living whole. Anyone who, like me, was moved by this perception at the time of the Liturgical Movement on the eve of the Second Vatican Council can only stand, deeply sorrowing, before the ruins of the very things they were concerned for.

This is potentially an example of the problem of using facile historical explanations that seek a root in some simple "intellectual" cause to explain some practice or development. Fortunately, it takes the form of a waning--do not adopt a simplistic understanding of the liturgy and disregard its organic development over time. Still, it would not surprise me if there are polemicists who seek to put the blame of everything that is wrong in the Church on scholasticism and neo-scholasticism, including the Church's liturgical problems.

The problem is not the analysis, but rather the deficiencies in catechesis of the one studying scholastic theology.

Similarly, some have criticized the causal analysis of the sacraments offered by scholastic theologians as being too narrow or inadequate.

The Anaphora of Addai and Mari
Guidelines on Eucharist Between Chaldean and Assyrian Churches (Vatican.va)
The East Syrian Liturgical Tradition
Mar Thoma: The Apostolic Foundation of the Assyrian Church and the ...
SYRIAC SOURCES AND RESOURCES FOR BYZANTINISTS Sebastian Brock ...

Fr. Taft, S.J. comments on the decision regarding the Anaphora of Addai and Mari:
Mass Without the Consecration?
A reaction from the SSPX

doc

John Allen reports:

Taft calls the agreement “the most remarkable Catholic magisterial document since Vatican II.” He believes that by treating consecration as something accomplished by the entire liturgical prayer, and not by an isolated set of “magic words,” the Vatican has repudiated a quasi-mechanistic understanding that “seriously warped popular Catholic understanding of the Eucharist.”

Rome Diary #48
Fr. McBrien
On Studying the Liturgy
By Father Allyne Smith, Th.D.

Anaphoren ohne „direkte“ Wandlungsworte bereits unter Pius XI. (1922-1939)
Ein Beitrag zu einer aktuellen Diskussion
von P. Martin Lugmayr FSSP

Potpourri pdf

Still, I wonder if the ruling on the anaphora is the last word from Rome on the matter, or whether the case put forward by certain scholars that the words of consecration were originally present in the liturgy but were gradually removed from the texts has any water. Is it not a legitimate question to ask when Christ becomes sacramentally present? Either He is present or He is not--there is no middle ground (otherwise one violates the principle of non-contradiction.) And if He is present, what is the formal cause of the sacrament? (As I think about it, perhaps formal cause is not the right way to explain it--after all, is not the formal cause of Christ being present in the Sacred Species something else? I guess I'll have to study more Thomistic sacramental theology.)