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| Separated by over 100 years, with the advantage going to Fiedrowicz |
This article is a combined effort of Gregory’s and mine. - PAK
Undoubtedly Adrian Fortescue is a fascinating figure, rather eccentric in some ways (see Aidan Nichols’ biography) – a biting critic of Pius X, e.g., whom he called “an Italian lunatic” – but it must be borne in mind that his liturgical scholarship is somewhat out of date, and actually wrong in certain respects. It is thus a source of near daily frustration to find well-intentioned people online citing his book The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy from 1912 as if it were the final word on the topic, when in fact there are much better resources that have appeared in the last 114 (!) years.
The internet promised to give everyone access to all information, but interestingly, I have noticed that it actually tends in a different direction: it encourages access to what is old because it’s in the public domain, and thus promotes an odd kind of time-trapped referentiality, at least in areas where genuine progress has occurred. Recent books are copyrighted and have to be bought and studied; they can’t be downloaded and searched quite as readily, so they are neglected or not even recognized. Our cutting-edge technology has, in fact, made us lazy regurgitators of low-hanging information.
Fortescue’s gravest error – and the one that would cause the greatest mischief later – is an assumption he shares with many other scholars of his time: namely, that the “original” text and order of the Roman Canon was wildly disturbed over the course of time by any number of omissions, transpositions, rewrites, etc. deliberate or accidental. This simply flies in the face of everything that is attested in all the ancient manuscripts of the Canon, which are astonishingly consistent from one to another, and fundamentally very similar to what we find in the Gelasian Sacramentary, and thenceforth in all pertinent liturgical books of the Roman Rite.
Behind that lies the equally false and equally pernicious assumption that in ancient times, the various major churches (not just Rome) routinely trashed their older, and hence “more authentic” tradition in favor of novelties, feeding into the narrative that this is a routine occurrence and a normal procedure. It is certainly not.
Then, we have the problem that scholars assumed that X, Y, or Z thing which is attested in all the pertinent liturgical books as far back as we have them nevertheless does not represent the “original” (and hence “more authentic”) tradition. They will then be only too delighted to reconstruct that “original” and hence “more authentic” tradition on the basis of various theories. So, e.g., since the Eastern rites make a great deal of the pneumatic epiclesis, but the Roman Rite doesn’t have one, the Roman Rite must “originally” have had one and somehow lost it at some point.
(The late, great, and much-missed Fr John Hunwicke wrote a fine series on that specific topic; you can find all the links in “Reforming the Canon of the Mass: Some Considerations from Fr Hunwicke.”)
In a similar vein, we have the assumption that the Roman Mass must have had two readings before the Gospel, because some of the Eastern rites do (that is false, and there is no evidence for it), and similar extrapolations from the false premise that all rites are descended from a single early and primitive rite; therefore, what one has and another doesn’t must have “fallen out of” the other.
So the whole section in Fortescue on the “liturgical uniformity” of the first three centuries basically needs to be torn out and discarded; it is the opposite of the truth. The historical trajectory is that liturgies begin very varied and diverse, and over time, gradually assimilate to the forms of the nearest dominant see.
He accepts the error, very common in his time, that the Leonine Sacramentary is a sacramentary. It isn’t; it’s a private compilation of libelli Missarum, the Masses composed by the priests of the churches of Rome. Basically, everything they thought they knew about the so-called Apostolic Constitutions in the early twentieth century is wrong.
Anything he says anywhere about “Hippolytus” has to be dismissed if he says it in reference to Rome. The whole Hippolytus construct completely collapsed when Margarita Guarducci presented a key piece of evidence at a conference held in Rome in 1974 that demonstrated the falsity of everything patristic scholars had built up over him before then. Even a figure as progressivist as Fr. John Baldovin candidly admits that there is nothing to the Hippolytus legend on the basis of which the Second Eucharistic Prayer was cobbled together.
When it comes to evidence drawn from the Fathers, one has to check and see if the sermon that is being quoted is authentic. This is an especially big problem with St. Augustine. If a sermon of his witnesses to a particular reading in the Mozarabic liturgy, one needs to check if the sermon was actually written by him, or passed off under his name after that reading had been fixed in the Mozarabic tradition.
Having said all this, I am not arguing that Fortescue’s book on the liturgy is without value; I am simply saying that one must consult more recent and better studies, such as Fr. Uwe Michael Lang’s 2022 book from Cambridge University Press, The Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform, which covers in superb academic detail all that is known about the development of the Roman rite from antiquity to the Tridentine reform (i.e., AD 33 to 1570). The hardcover is pricey but a paperback edition is coming in February. Fr. Lang also published A Short History of the Roman Mass in 2024. These works, in their own quiet way, do more to sweep away the misconceptions held by modern liturgical reformers than Fortescue, who never lived to see the awful things done by liturgists after him.
The internet promised to give everyone access to all information, but interestingly, I have noticed that it actually tends in a different direction: it encourages access to what is old because it’s in the public domain, and thus promotes an odd kind of time-trapped referentiality, at least in areas where genuine progress has occurred. Recent books are copyrighted and have to be bought and studied; they can’t be downloaded and searched quite as readily, so they are neglected or not even recognized. Our cutting-edge technology has, in fact, made us lazy regurgitators of low-hanging information.
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| Image courtesy of Corpus Christi Watershed |
Fortescue’s gravest error – and the one that would cause the greatest mischief later – is an assumption he shares with many other scholars of his time: namely, that the “original” text and order of the Roman Canon was wildly disturbed over the course of time by any number of omissions, transpositions, rewrites, etc. deliberate or accidental. This simply flies in the face of everything that is attested in all the ancient manuscripts of the Canon, which are astonishingly consistent from one to another, and fundamentally very similar to what we find in the Gelasian Sacramentary, and thenceforth in all pertinent liturgical books of the Roman Rite.
Behind that lies the equally false and equally pernicious assumption that in ancient times, the various major churches (not just Rome) routinely trashed their older, and hence “more authentic” tradition in favor of novelties, feeding into the narrative that this is a routine occurrence and a normal procedure. It is certainly not.
Then, we have the problem that scholars assumed that X, Y, or Z thing which is attested in all the pertinent liturgical books as far back as we have them nevertheless does not represent the “original” (and hence “more authentic”) tradition. They will then be only too delighted to reconstruct that “original” and hence “more authentic” tradition on the basis of various theories. So, e.g., since the Eastern rites make a great deal of the pneumatic epiclesis, but the Roman Rite doesn’t have one, the Roman Rite must “originally” have had one and somehow lost it at some point.
(The late, great, and much-missed Fr John Hunwicke wrote a fine series on that specific topic; you can find all the links in “Reforming the Canon of the Mass: Some Considerations from Fr Hunwicke.”)
In a similar vein, we have the assumption that the Roman Mass must have had two readings before the Gospel, because some of the Eastern rites do (that is false, and there is no evidence for it), and similar extrapolations from the false premise that all rites are descended from a single early and primitive rite; therefore, what one has and another doesn’t must have “fallen out of” the other.
So the whole section in Fortescue on the “liturgical uniformity” of the first three centuries basically needs to be torn out and discarded; it is the opposite of the truth. The historical trajectory is that liturgies begin very varied and diverse, and over time, gradually assimilate to the forms of the nearest dominant see.
He accepts the error, very common in his time, that the Leonine Sacramentary is a sacramentary. It isn’t; it’s a private compilation of libelli Missarum, the Masses composed by the priests of the churches of Rome. Basically, everything they thought they knew about the so-called Apostolic Constitutions in the early twentieth century is wrong.
 |
| St. Hippolytus |
Anything he says anywhere about “Hippolytus” has to be dismissed if he says it in reference to Rome. The whole Hippolytus construct completely collapsed when Margarita Guarducci presented a key piece of evidence at a conference held in Rome in 1974 that demonstrated the falsity of everything patristic scholars had built up over him before then. Even a figure as progressivist as Fr. John Baldovin candidly admits that there is nothing to the Hippolytus legend on the basis of which the Second Eucharistic Prayer was cobbled together.
When it comes to evidence drawn from the Fathers, one has to check and see if the sermon that is being quoted is authentic. This is an especially big problem with St. Augustine. If a sermon of his witnesses to a particular reading in the Mozarabic liturgy, one needs to check if the sermon was actually written by him, or passed off under his name after that reading had been fixed in the Mozarabic tradition.
Having said all this, I am not arguing that Fortescue’s book on the liturgy is without value; I am simply saying that one must consult more recent and better studies, such as Fr. Uwe Michael Lang’s 2022 book from Cambridge University Press, The Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform, which covers in superb academic detail all that is known about the development of the Roman rite from antiquity to the Tridentine reform (i.e., AD 33 to 1570). The hardcover is pricey but a paperback edition is coming in February. Fr. Lang also published A Short History of the Roman Mass in 2024. These works, in their own quiet way, do more to sweep away the misconceptions held by modern liturgical reformers than Fortescue, who never lived to see the awful things done by liturgists after him.
A very accessible one-volume work that accomplishes less in historical detail than Lang, but more in terms of an overall assessment of the “rightness” of the traditional Roman Rite against its attempted replacement, is Patristic scholar Dr. Michael Fiedrowicz’s The Traditional Mass: History, Form, and Theology of the Classical Roman Rite, published in English translation in 2020 by Angelico Press. This is the book I always recommend to people who are looking for a scholarly introduction.
(It bears mentioning that Fortescue’s book The Orthodox Eastern Church, which has been reprinted in a newly typeset edition, remains one of the finest historical, patristic, and ecclesiological investigations of the vexed relationship between Eastern and Western Christianity, and has much to contribute to the newly volcanic apologetics world that has sprouted up online. Unlike his book on the Roman Mass, The Orthodox Eastern Church is out of date only in a charming way, namely, its description of the early 20th-century Orthodox churches, countries, and peoples, which have changed a lot since then.)
