The Sanctoral Killing Fields: On the Removal of Saints from the General Roman Calendar

Saints defaced by Protestsant iconoclasts, church of Saint Martin, Utrecht

At the London Oratory on December 13, 2013, the founder of the Benedictine monastery in Norcia and a professor of liturgy at Sant’ Anselmo in Rome, Fr. Cassian Folsom, O.S.B., delivered a paper entitled “Summorum Pontificum and Liturgical Law,” in which he said the following:

The history of the Roman Missal from 1570 until 1962 is one of organic growth and development. The fundamental content and structure remain the same, while minor corrections, additions, and subtractions are made in order to respond to the needs of the Church at that particular historical moment. The 1970 Missal, however, is in a totally different category. The three basic elements of the Roman Missal are radically changed: that is, the orations, the readings, and the chants. The corpus of orations is modified in two ways: greater recourse is made to the euchological tradition of the ancient sacramentaries, and texts are edited to reflect contemporary theological positions. The lectionary is radically altered to respond to the expressed wish of SC 51 that the treasures of the Bible be opened up more lavishly to the faithful. Whether such radical changes were necessary in order to respond to SC 51 is a question open for debate. The chant texts were not altered to the same extent as the readings and the orations, but in practice, the chant repertoire has been almost universally abandoned.

He continues:

The other important elements of the Roman Missal are the Ordo Missae, the calendar, and the rubrics. The Ordo Missae of the 1970 Missal was radically changed: in fact, we call it the “Novus Ordo [Missae].” Concerning the calendar, and especially the superabundant growth of the sanctoral cycle, there has always been need of periodic pruning. But in the 1970 Missal, the pruning was so radical that the original plant is sometimes unrecognizable. The protective fence of the rubrics, carefully developed over centuries in order to guard the Holy of Holies, was taken down, leading to unauthorized “creativity” and liturgical abuse.

Fr. Cassian claims that the pruning of the sanctoral cycle was “so radical that the original plant is sometimes unrecognizable.” This complements a rather more brusque description offered by Fr. Louis Bouyer in his Memoirs:

I prefer to say nothing, or little, about the new calendar, the handiwork of a trio of maniacs who suppressed, with no good reason, Septuagesima and the Octave of Pentecost and who scattered three quarters of the Saints higgledy-piggledy, all based on notions of their own devising! Because these three hotheads obstinately refused to change anything in their work and because the pope wanted to finish up quickly to avoid letting the chaos get out of hand, their project, however insane, was accepted!

It is a little hard to know which three maniacs Bouyer is referring to; there were so many involved in the project. The Consilium Coetus for the calendar comprised Bugnini, A. Dirks, R. van Doren, J. Wagner, A.-G. Martimort, P. Jounel, A. Amore, and H. Schmidt, though we know that Jounel was the leading spirit. That the thinning out of the sanctoral cycle had long been on Bugnini’s mind is evident from his 1949 article in Ephemerides Liturgicae, “Per una riforma liturgica generale” (“Towards a General Liturgical Reform”). Bugnini pressed the need for “a reduction of the Sanctoral . . . which requires not only a reduction of the present calendar, but also fixed and prescriptive norms to prevent new Saints’ days from piling up again.” Yves Chiron summarizes:

A list of thirteen saints or groups of saints was already drawn up for elimination from the universal calendar, with no justification for any of them (Saint Martin for example), whereas the calendar was supposed to abbinare (“pair together”) fourteen more Saints “because their life and work were alike or close to it,” for example Saint Thomas Becket and Saint Stanislaus or Saint Peter Canisius and Saint Robert Bellarmine. (Annibale Bugnini: Reformer of the Liturgy, 34)

Just how bad were the casualties of the Battle of the Calendar, 1964–1967?

An article published on May 10, 1969, in The New York Times bears the headline: “200 Catholic Saints Lose Their Feast Days.” It’s worth a look:

Yet The Times, as it turns out, was in error. The toll was higher.

My NLM colleague, archivist, and data cruncher extraordinaire, Matthew Hazell, ran the numbers, using the 1969 editio typica of the Calendarium Romanum. A total of 305 saints, plus unknown companions, were removed from the calendar. (Groups such as the famous Forty Martyrs of Sebaste on March 10 and the Seven Maccabees on August 1, present on the calendar for many centuries, sometimes for over a millennium in East and West, are counted as 40 saints and 7 saints respectively.) As a matter of procedure, Hazell did not count the removal of “duplications” (e.g., the commemoration of the Apostle Paul on the Chair of St Peter; the commemoration of St Agnes on 28 January; the commemoration of the stigmata of St Francis on 17 September), or feasts of Our Lord or the Blessed Virgin Mary which were removed. This is because although some of their feasts or commemorations have been deleted, these saints (along with Our Lord!) are still on the calendar in one way or another. He also made no attempt to calculate which saints in the 1961 calendar were converted into optional celebrations in the 1969 calendar, which would obviously have much bearing on the way their cultus is conducted liturgically.

It deserves to be pointed out that, since very few Catholics today are utilizing the Martyrology either for study or in a liturgical setting, the cultus of saints was dealt a severe blow through this loss of hundreds of saints whose intercession was asked, whose merits were expressly leaned upon, whose example was set forth, whose accidental glory was augmented; moreover, the integrity of tradition, guarded up until the 1960s, was sorely compromised by the loss of many of the most ancient commemorations in the Roman rite.

The list of casualties is presented below, which is, as far as I am aware, the first time this information has been collected in such a useful manner.

In the table:

• “removed” equates to terms like expungitur or deletur used in the 1969 CR;
• “particular calendars” means that the 1969 CR says something like Calendariis particularibus relinquitur, i.e. the saint has been removed from the universal calendar but Coetus I considered them suitable for inclusion on local calendars where appropriate;
• “titular basilica only” is the equivalent of Calendario eius basilicae titularis relinquitur in the 1969 CR, i.e. Coetus I has removed the saint from the universal calendar and recommends they be celebrated only on the particular calendar of their basilica/titular church.

We are greatly indebted to Mr. Hazell for this detailed work, which, like his invaluable Index Lectionum, furnishes yet another tool for the growing critique of the reform and another incentive for the restoration of our Roman tradition.

The Mysterious Meaning of “Ordinary Time”: Guest Article by Michael P. Foley

We are very grateful to Dr. Foley for sending to NLM a two-part article that definitively explains where the term “Ordinary Time” came from, debunking along the way a number of persistent myths about it, while presenting (in part 2) a deeper critique than has hitherto been available.

The Mysterious Meaning of “Ordinary Time”

By Michael P. Foley

Ordinary Time is here again, and with it the usual confusion and finger-wagging over the meaning of its name. “Abolish Ordinary Time,” insists K. E. Colombini in an article by that title. “In the Christian life and in this age,” he asks, “how can any time honestly be deemed ordinary?” George Weigel agrees: Ordinary Time, he laments, is a “terminological abomination.” David Warren goes further. “Ordinary Time” is not only an abominable name for a liturgical season but a sadly appropriate description of the failure of the liturgical reforms following the Second Vatican Council to renew the life of the Church. “We have been living through decades of ‘Ordinary Time,’ in which the Church was subjected to humanly calculated ‘reforms,’” Warren writes. “Let us earnestly pray they will be over—that we may soon resume the practice of the extraordinary.”

Of course, all these critiques assume that the adjective in the title “Ordinary Time” refers to that which is mundane, unexceptional, and humdrum. But are they right?

To answer this question, we must first determine what this “green season” is in the 1969/2002 Roman Missal and then examine the extra-liturgical origin of the term “ordinary time.” For one of the peculiarities facing us is that “Ordinary Time” appears nowhere in the Latin typical edition of the new Missal.

Tempus per annum

Rather than a Tempus ordinarium (“ordinary time” in Latin), the 1969 Missal mentions a Tempus per annum—literally, a “season throughout the year.” This in itself is a novel departure from Roman liturgical tradition. The phrase tempus per annum appears fleetingly for the first time in the 1960 General Rubrics and then in the 1962 Missal, but the green seasons after Epiphany and Pentecost are still called the Time after Epiphany and the Time after Pentecost. Although both periods shared much in common, they were nonetheless treated as virtually two different seasons that were imbued by the spirit of the great feast that each followed. One indication of their relative integrity is that each season was numbered separately: the Sundays after Epiphany were counted from the Feast of the Epiphany, and the Sundays after Pentecost were counted from the Feast of Pentecost.

The 1969 Missal, on the other hand, introduces three novelties:

1. It eliminates the Times after Epiphany and Pentecost, which are the oldest recorded demarcations for these periods of the year that we have (the Gelasian sacramentary lists the Sundays after Theophany and after Pentecost).

2. It treats the new Tempus per annum as one continuous season interrupted by Lent and Easter: in the words of Annibale Bugnini, it is now one “block” (un blocco unico) that occurs in two phases (fasi). Cementing this “single block” is a new method of counting the Sundays within it. The new season begins on the Monday after the Sunday following January 6 and begins again on the Monday after Pentecost, and when it begins again, the count is resumed from where it had left off, that is, from the Sunday before Ash Wednesday.

3. The goal of this new season is to have Sundays that are as nondistinctive as possible. According to the 1969 Normae Universales, whereas other seasons “have their own proper character” with a focus on a particular mystery of Christ, the Sundays of Tempus per annum are supposed to recall “the very mystery of Christ in its fullness.” How? By being, in the words of Msgr. Pierre Jounel (the 1967-1969 relator of the Consilium subcommittee responsible for the new calendar), “the ideal Christian Sunday without any further specification… a Lord’s Day in its pure state.”

“Ordinary Time”

But where is “Ordinary Time” in all this? It is not, as I have mentioned, in the Latin, nor is it in the very first vernacular editions of the Missal: The 1970 English edition of the new Lectionary, for example, translates Tempus per annum as “Season ‘of the Year.’” It is mentioned on occasion in Annibale Bugnini’s Reform of the Liturgy, but I suspect that he added these only later, perhaps when he was editing his book in the late 1970s and after the term had become popular in the early to mid-1970s (he uses the term Tempus per annum more than twice as much as Tempo Ordinario).

The creator of this term, as far as I can tell, is Bugnini’s collaborator, the relator Pierre Jounel. In a 1969 French article about the new calendar in the journal Maison-Dieu, Jounel casually introduces the new Tempus per annum as Temps Ordinaire. Here is my translation:

The notion of Ordinary Time [temps ordinaire] (Tempus "per annum") was introduced in the time of Pius X to designate the weeks from Epiphany to Septuagesima and from Trinity Sunday to Advent (Time after Epiphany and after Pentecost). The novelty introduced today is to consider this Ordinary Time as a unit of thirty-three or thirty-four weeks, "in which no particular aspect of the mystery of Christ is celebrated. Instead, the very mystery of Christ is commemorated in its fullness, especially on Sunday" (1969 Normae Universales). Thus the Christocentric character of the liturgical year is clearly affirmed.

Prescinding from Jounel’s misleading claim that Pius X introduced a new concept for the Times after Epiphany and Pentecost, let us turn to his implicit definition of temps ordinaire, beginning with what he does not mean.

Ordinal Time?

We are often told to interpret Ordinary Time as Ordinal Time because of the ordinal numbering of its Sundays and to think of the season as “ordered time,” “counted time,” “numbered time,” or “growing time.” The latter concept has the most credibility because it is currently supported by the USCCB; but as we will see later, this interpretation is at odds with both the 1969 Normae Universales and the later GIRMs, and it is nowhere to be found in Jounel’s writings. Further, in French—as in Latin and English—there are different words for “ordinary” (ordinarius) and “ordinal” (ordinalis). If Jounel or his colleagues wanted to designate an “Ordinal” Time, they could have done so.

Mundane Time?

The second possibility, which seems to upset thoughtful Catholics the most, is viewing Ordinary Time as Mundane or Run-of-the-Mill Time. They are right to be alarmed, for there would indeed be something disjointed about a liturgical year centered on the sacred mysteries of Christ having a “time-out” section where we forget, even for a moment, how all time and history have been forever changed by the Resurrection, especially when that “time-out” takes up 50% of the year. Happily, this was not Jounel’s intention either; at least, there is no evidence that it was.

Ordinary of Seasons?

Rather, by “Ordinary Time” Jounel appears to have envisioned an “Ordinary of Times,” that is, a standard season in contrast to the special seasons of Christmastide and Eastertide. Just as the calendar’s Temporal Cycle of special seasons is the Proper of Seasons (Proprium de Tempore), Tempus per annum is now to be the Ordinary of Seasons. Just as there is an Ordinary of the Mass (Ordo Missae) and an Ordinary of the Divine Office (Ordinarium divini Officii), now there is an Ordinary of the Year. Masses during this time function as a basic template for divine worship: “profoundly restored” to “their pure state” (to use Jounel’s words), they serve as “the ideal” onto which more proper elements are added at other times in order to make a distinctive season. In French, Ordo Missae and Ordinarium Divini Officii are both translated with the noun Ordinaire, and so when the francophone Jounel coined Temps Ordinaire he may have been thinking of the meaning of ordinaire in its form as a noun. This notion of an Ordinary of Seasons is implicitly corroborated by Bugnini’s explanation mentioned above and by the GIRM, both of which contrast the “proper” seasons with the common or “ordinary” season, not unlike a contrast between the changing propers of the Mass and its relatively unchanging parts like the Kyrie or Gloria.

So there you have it. But although Catholics may be relieved to learn that “Ordinary Time” does not mean “Mundane Time,” they are not out of the woods yet. There are lingering problems both with the term “Ordinary Time” and with the new Tempus per annum. To these we will turn in tomorrow’s post.

This article is a summary of a more extensive and scholarly treatment: “The Origins and Meaning of Ordinary Time,” Antiphon: A Journal of Liturgical Renewal 23.1 (2019): 43-77.

Paul VI’s Contempt for Catholics Who Did Not Welcome the Liturgical Reform

“A little shy one, aren’t you? — but you can’t hide yourself from Active Participation!”

As we approach the melancholy 50th anniversary of the going-into-effect of Pope Paul VI’s Apostolic Constitution Missale Romanum with the first mandatory celebration of the Novus Ordo Missae on the first Sunday of Advent, November 30, 1969, it is worthwhile to recall how frequently this vexed and vexing pope felt the need to address the “naysayers” of his day who were complaining about the stream of ever-increasing changes to the Roman liturgy implemented throughout the 1960s. Some readers will already be familiar with the astonishing general audiences of March 1965 and November 1969 (on which I have offered a detailed commentary: “A Half-Century of Novelty: Revisiting Paul VI’s Apologia for the New Mass”), but few, perhaps, will be aware of other public addresses in which he continued his tirade against the reform’s non-enthusiasts.

Pope Paul had a curious way of speaking, as if a rapturous majority of laity and clergy were rushing to embrace the new form of the Mass with zeal for active participation, like happy citizens of a Communist Workers’ Paradise. Evidence both published and anecdotal, together with an ever-more precipitous decline in church attendance throughout the 1960s and 1970s, suggest that no more than a tiny minority felt the “good vibrations” of the Bugnini Boys. [1] Paul VI’s contempt, therefore, was directed not only at the majority of his coreligionists (which would have been unsaintly enough); it was, in reality, directed against centuries of traditional Catholic practice that, in spite of whatever faults it may have had, kept large numbers attached to the Church and to their Faith, with a piety and seriousness that could rarely be found, and never surpassed, outside of Catholicism. The advice of Louis Bouyer in 1956 had gone unheeded: “We must not try to provide an artificial congregation to take part in an antiquarian liturgy, but rather to prepare the actual congregations of the Church today to take part in the truly traditional liturgy rightly understood.” [2]

In this article, I would like to offer some quotations from Paul VI, courtesy of that enormous doorstopper called Documents on the Liturgy 1963–1979 — a book that would enjoy a more accurate acronym if its title were Documents Undermining Liturgical Life 1963–1979 — that reveal the full amplitude, or better, narrowness, of the pontiff’s mind as to the meaning of participatio actuosa and the flagitious behavior of those who stubbornly resisted the march of progress.

Address to Italian Bishops, 14 April 1964 (DOL 21)
“The liturgical reform opens up to us a way to reeducate our people in their religion, to purify and revitalize their forms of worship and devotion, to restore dignity, beauty, simplicity, and good taste to our religious ceremonies. Without such inward and outward renewal there can be little hope for any widespread survival of religious living in today’s changed conditions. … [P]romote sacred song, the religious, congregational singing of the people. Remember, if the faithful sing they do not leave the Church; if they do not leave the Church, they keep the faith and live as Christians.”

General Audience, 13 January 1965 (DOL 24)
“Through your [sc., laity’s] own endeavor to put the Constitution on the Liturgy into exact and vital effect you show yourselves to have that understanding of the times which Christ recommended to his first disciples (see Mt 16:4) and which the Church today is in the process of awakening and recognizing in adult Catholics. . . . You show that you understand the new way of religion which the current liturgical reform intends to restore . . . The Church’s solicitude now broadens; today it is changing certain aspects of ritual discipline that are now inadequate and is seekingly boldly but thoughtful to plumb their ecclesial meaning, the demands of community, and the supernatural value of ecclesial worship. To understand this religious program and to enjoy its hoped-for results we must all change our settled way of thinking regarding sacred ceremonies and religious practices as calling for no more than a passive, distracted assistance. We must be fully cognizant of the fact that with the Council a new spiritual pedagogy has been born. That is what is new about the Council and we must not hang back from making ourselves first the pupils and then the masters in this school of prayer now at its inception. It may well happen that the reforms will affect practices both dear to us and still worthy of respect; that the reforms will demand efforts that, at the outset, are a strain. But we must be devout and trusting: the religious and spiritual vista that the Constitution opens up before us is stupendous in its doctrinal profundity and authenticity, in the cogency of its Christian logic, in the purity and richness of its cultural and aesthetic elements, in its response to the character and needs of modern man.”

Address to Pastors and Lenten Preachers, 1 March 1965 (DOL 25)
“Here are some of the issues: to change so many attitudes that in a number of respects are themselves worthy of honor and dearly held; to upset devout and good people by presenting new ways of prayer that they are not going to understand right away; to win over to a personal involvement in communal prayer the many people used to praying — or not praying — in church as they please; to intensify training in prayer and worship in every congregation, that is, to introduce the faithful to new viewpoints, gestures, practices, formularies, and attitudes, amounting to an active part in religion than many are unused to. In a word, the issue is engaging the people of God in the priestly liturgical life. Again, we say that it is a difficult and delicate matter, but adding that it is necessary, obligatory, providential, and renewing. We hope that it will also be satisfying.”

General Audience, 17 March 1965 (DOL 27)
“What do people think about the reform of the liturgy? . . . First, there are those that give evidence of a degree of confusion and therefore of uneasiness. Until now people were comfortable; they could pray the way they wished; all were quite familiar with the way the Mass proceeded. Now on all sides there are new things, changes, surprises: it has even gone so far as to do away with ringing the Sanctus bell. Then there are all those prayers that no one can any longer find; standing to receive Communion; the end of the Mass cut off abruptly after the blessing. Everyone makes the responses; there is much moving about; the prayers and the readings are spoken out loud. In short, there is no more peace, things are understood less than before, and so on. We shall not criticize these views because then we would have to show how they reveal a poor understanding of the meaning of religious ceremonial and allow us to glimpse not a true devotion and a true appreciation of the meaning and worth of the Mass, but rather a certain spiritual laziness which is not prepared to make some personal effort of understanding and participation directed to a better understanding and fulfillment of this, the most sacred of religious acts, in which we are invited, or rather obliged, to participate.”

(You couldn’t make this stuff up!)

Homily at Parish in Rome, 27 March 1966 (DOL 33)
“The Council has taken the fundamental position that the faithful have to understand what the priest is saying [3] and to share in the liturgy; to be not just passive spectators at Mass but souls alive . . . Look at the altar, placed now for dialogue with the assembly; consider the remarkable sacrifice of Latin, the priceless repository of the Church’s treasure. The repository has been opened up, as the people’s own spoken language now becomes part of their prayer. Lips that have often been still, sealed as it were, now at last begin to move, as the whole assembly can speak its part in the colloquy . . . No longer do we have the sad phenomenon of people being conversant and vocal about every human subject yet silent and apathetic in the house of God. How sublime it is to hear during Mass the communal recitation of the Our Father! In this way the Sunday Mass is not just an obligation but a pleasure, not just fulfilled as a duty, but claimed as a right.”

Quite possibly the most fantastical and least realistic Pope in history

Paul VI was prophetic about contraception, but he was no prophet when it came to liturgy:

General Audience at Castelgandolfo, 13 August 1969 (DOL 45)
“Through an intense and prolonged religious movement, the liturgy, crowned, and, as it were, canonized by Vatican II, has gained a new importance, dignity, accessibility, and participation in the consciousness and the spiritual life of the people of God and, we predict, this will continue even more in the future.”

Note how, three years after his complaints in 1966, Paul VI is still harping on the theme of resistance to reform, and the vices it indicates:

General Audience at Castelgandolfo, 20 August 1969 (DOL 46)
“A second category, whose ranks have swelled with troubled people after the conciliar reform of the liturgy, includes the suspicious, the criticizers, the malcontents. Disturbed in their devotional practices, these spirits grudgingly resign themselves to the new ways, but make no attempt to understand the reasons for them. They find the new expressions of divine worship unpleasing. They take refuge in their moaning, which takes away their ancient flavor from texts of the past and blocks any taste for what the Church, in this second spring of the liturgy, offers to spirits that are open to the meaning and language of the new rites sanctioned by the wisdom and authority of the postconciliar reform. A not very difficult effort at acceptance and understanding would bring the experience of dignity, simplicity, and newfound antiquity in the new liturgies and would also bring to the sanctuary of each person’s self the consolation and life-giving force of community celebrations. The interior life would yield a greater fullness.”

General Audience, November 26, 1969 (DOL 211)
       “A new rite of the Mass: a change in a venerable tradition that has gone on for centuries. This is something that affects our hereditary religious patrimony, which seemed to enjoy the privilege of being untouchable and settled. It seemed to bring the prayer of our forefathers and our saints to our lips and to give us the comfort of feeling faithful to our spiritual past, which we kept alive to pass it on to the generations ahead.
       “It is at such a moment as this that we get a better understanding of the value of historical tradition and the communion of the saints. This change will affect the ceremonies of the Mass. We shall become aware, perhaps with some feeling of annoyance, that the ceremonies at the altar are no longer being carried out with the same words and gestures to which we were accustomed — perhaps so much accustomed that we no longer took any notice of them. This change also touches the faithful. It is intended to interest each one of those present, to draw them out of their customary personal devotions or their usual torpor.
       “We must prepare for this many-sided inconvenience. It is the kind of upset caused by every novelty that breaks in on our habits. We shall notice that pious persons are disturbed most, because they have their own respectable way of hearing Mass, and they will feel shaken out of their usual thoughts and obliged to follow those of others. Even priests may feel some annoyance in this respect. So what is to be done on this special and historical occasion? First of all, we must prepare ourselves. This novelty is no small thing. We should not let ourselves be surprised by the nature, or even the nuisance, of its exterior forms. …
       “It is Christ’s will, it is the breath of the Holy Spirit which calls the Church to make this change. A prophetic moment is occurring in the mystical body of Christ, which is the Church. This moment is shaking the Church, arousing it, obliging it to renew the mysterious art of its prayer.
       “It is here that the greatest newness is going to be noticed, the newness of language. No longer Latin, but the spoken language will be the principal language of the Mass. The introduction of the vernacular will certainly be a great sacrifice for those who know the beauty, the power and the expressive sacrality of Latin. We are parting with the speech of the Christian centuries; we are becoming like profane intruders in the literary preserve of sacred utterance. We will lose a great part of that stupendous and incomparable artistic and spiritual thing, the Gregorian chant. We have reason indeed for regret, reason almost for bewilderment. What can we put in the place of that language of the angels? We are giving up something of priceless worth. But why? What is more precious than these loftiest of our Church’s values?
       “The answer will seem banal, prosaic. Yet it is a good answer, because it is human, because it is apostolic. Understanding of prayer is worth more than the silken garments in which it is royally dressed. Participation by the people is worth more — particularly participation by modern people, so fond of plain language which is easily understood and converted into everyday speech.”

General Audience, 3 November 1971 (DOL 53)
       “The Church praying (Ecclesia orans) has received at the Council its most splendid idealization. We must not forget that regarding the stirring reality of liturgical reform. Great weight, even regarding the spiritual conditions of today’s world, is due to that reform because of its originating, pastoral intent to reawaken prayer among the people of God. This is to be a pure and shared prayer, that is, interior and personal, yet at the same time public and communal. Its meaning is not simply a matter of ritual, pertaining to the sacristy or an arcane and merely liturgical erudition. Prayer is to be a religious affirmation, full of faith and life: an apostolic school for all seekers of the life-giving truth; a spiritual challenge thrown down before an atheistic, pagan, and secularized world.”

*       *       *

From our vantage fifty years later, as we watch the liturgical reform either imploding on itself or being slowly undone by an ever-stronger traditionalist movement, we can benefit from the hindsight of knowing what not to do to one’s precious inheritance, and energetically commit ourselves to doing the opposite. For the great irony is that it is not, and was never, the “new” liturgy that serves as “an apostolic school for all seekers of the life-giving truth; a spiritual challenge thrown down before an atheistic, pagan, and secularized world.” Instead, more and more, we see how aptly this description suits the classical Roman rite, risen as a phoenix from its ashes.

The choice before us: a Roman Missal from 1948, or . . .

NOTES

[1] The Beach Boys’ hit “Good Vibrations” appeared in 1966, the year in between the provisional 1965 missal and the Missa Normativa of 1967.

[2] Life and Liturgy (1956), pp. 14-15, cited by Alcuin Reid in the Introduction to Beauduin’s Liturgy, the Life of the Church.

[3] This claim is, of course, a bald lie on Paul VI’s part, since the Council took no such position, and in fact took a different one. It was a lie he repeated on dozens of occasions.

Visit www.peterkwasniewski.com for articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press (e.g., Newman, Benson, Scheeben, Parsch, Guardini, Chaignon, Leen).

Why Is the Liturgical Establishment Not Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Novus Ordo?

An article published at NLM last Thursday (“Lessons from the Sixties: Selective Synodality and Princely Protests”) begins thus: “It is actually astonishing how little of Paul VI’s liturgical reform, especially his Novus Ordo Missae, which he promulgated fifty years ago, is being commemorated this year.” That has been on my mind, too, for the whole of 2019.

It should strike us as exceedingly odd, at least prima facie, that liturgy committees, Vatican dicasteries, theology departments, chanceries, religious orders, and every other sort of postconciliar bureaucratic apparatus is not engaged in a huge song and dance about the golden anniversary of the new Mass promulgated by Pope Paul VI on April 3, 1969, and effective in most countries on the first Sunday of Advent of that year, November 30. (In the same way, Summorum Pontificum was promulgated on 7/7/07 but did not take effect until the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on September 14).

Certainly, one might think, if there is anything postconciliar that deserves to be toasted, fêted, and proudly clapped on the back, it would be this monumental modern makeover. Yet the number of events, nay, the number of mentions on the part of the Pauline rite’s friends and supporters could be counted on one hand. The total number of events celebrating Summorum Pontificum’s rather modest anniversaries (5 years, 10 years…), in contrast, already go up into double digits. Perhaps the most high-profile piece — and it wasn’t particular high-profile — was an article in L’Osservatore Romano on April 6, 2019, by Fr. Corrado Maggioni, S.M.M., Under-Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, published in English at PrayTell on April 17. [1]

Can we understand this perplexing silence? I think the answer can be summed up in an alternative title that I considered using for this article: “Memory Hole: On the Destruction of the Knowledge of Tradition.”

What got me thinking along these lines was an interesting exchange at Facebook, of which I will now reproduce the most valuable segments. It began this way:

I have met plenty of people who call themselves Catholic who have never had the slightest idea there ever were any changes, and have no idea what the term “Novus Ordo” even means, the rewriting of history has been so complete.

Another fellow chimed in:

When I was first at University I was vaguely aware that before Vatican II Mass was in Latin, but I thought it meant the liturgy exactly as we had it in the Steubenville chapel, but in Latin. Then I went to a TLM just out of curiosity and discovered just how wrong that idea was.

The first person replied:

I assumed precisely the same thing. The idea that they would simply brazenly concoct something new by committee was something that I had to be forcibly convinced of. It wasn’t until I had put the two texts side by side that I began to realise how we had been utterly swindled all our lives. Then I started reading Michael Davies and it was all over.

A third person chimed in:

I converted from Anglicanism, having read my way to Catholicism. The Novus Ordo (though I didn’t know it was called that at the time or for many years) was a bit of a shock, but I just thought that’s how it was, and I had to get on with it. I never even knew the Latin Mass still existed. I lapsed, came back, and I will always believe it was no coincidence that the weekday Mass I happened to stay for after my confession was a TLM. Usual stuff after that — read Michael Davies, etc., went through the whole anger, “I’ve been cheated” thing — and out the other side. Praise God.

A question was raised: “Why among Catholics is there so much ignorance not just of history in general, but even of our recent history? Fifty years ago isn’t that much time… You’d think that a Church 2,000 years old would want its members to know how great it was that the bad old dusty-musty liturgy was replaced by a shiny new model.” And to it, there came this reply:

The answer to the puzzle is that there is no longer supposed to be any knowledge that the “Novus Ordo,” as such, exists at all. It is supposed only to be “the Mass,” full stop. The fact that there were ever any changes made to the liturgy is supposed to be sliding down the Memory Hole with each passing year. The people who remember the old Mass well, who would have known just how radically different the new is from the old, and who remember how violently the changes were made — these people are dying off. That is, the ones who didn’t simply give up and leave long ago. Catholics who still practice the Faith are not supposed to know there ever was an “old rite” or that there is a “new rite” at all. The entire project of the Revolution at this stage is to deny there ever was such a thing as the Old Faith.
          Anyway, all this is why they are as furious as a bag of feral cats that there are still Traditionalists, and that the traddie movement is gaining ground. That lot was supposed to have died out or been driven out, and the fact that there are new ones, people like me who never knew the old rite in the wild, and the families now having twelve kids and going to the Missa Cantata, and all the homeschooling and whatnot... Combine that with the internet’s ability to let everyone know what’s really happening, and plenty of beautiful pictures besides, and it must be making them absolutely apoplectic.

Apoplectic, perhaps; but also strangely silent. How many websites are there that pursue a strongly reformist line? Not that many. Maybe just one: PrayTell. How many websites pursue a strongly traditionalist line? Quite a few. It seems, in short, that the progressives have run out of steam, or run out of confidence, or run out of on-board personnel, or think that talking about it too much risks introducing still further Catholics to the forbidden subjects — and thence, to possible defections.

A reader of OnePeterFive wrote to the editor:

I was already looking for God when I went to school, but the fullness, reality, and beauty of the Church and her Tradition was unknown to me until I discovered 1P5 … I say my encounter with Tradition was a second conversion because my experience immediately following my baptism and confirmation within Francis’ church was segregated from any knowledge that the Church before the 1960’s had been different than it is today.

Exactly. The success of the “transformation of all forms” ultimately depends on as many people in the Church not knowing what came before 1969, or thinking that our worship and our life could, or should, be any different from that which the Vatican, the USCCB, the chancery, or [fill in the blank] would have us think it must be.

At the moment, I am copyediting a manuscript of a translation of a very fine book by Michael Fiedrowicz, Die überlieferte Messe: Geschichte, Gestalt und Theologie des klassischen römischen Ritus, which will be published by Angelico under the title The Traditional Mass: History, Form, and Theology of the Classical Roman Rite. The following paragraph eloquently summarizes the points I have been making:

The celebration of the liturgy in its traditional form thus constitutes an effective counter-weight for all levelings, reductions, dilutions, and banalizations of the Faith. Many who are unfamiliar with the classical liturgy and are acquainted only with the re-created form believe that what they see and hear there is the entirety of the Faith. Scarcely anyone senses that central passages have perhaps been removed from biblical pericopes. Scarcely anyone notices if the Church’s orations no longer expressly attack error, no longer pray for the return of those who have strayed, no longer give the heavenly clear priority over the earthly, make the Saints into mere examples of morality, conceal the gravity of sin, and identify the Eucharist as only a meal. Scarcely anyone even knows what prayers the Church said over the course of centuries in place of the current “preparation of the gifts,” and how these prayers demonstrated the Church’s understanding of the Mass as a sacrifice, offered through the hands of the priest for the living and the dead.

As I discovered the traditional Latin Mass in my late teens and early twenties, I distinctly remember stumbling on important truths of the Faith — truths taught by the Bible, the Church Fathers, the Councils, and, of course, the Tridentine missal — that had become muted, invisible, or even extinct in the Novus Ordo. And subsequent study has only confirmed the extent of that systematic bias. This is why I like to say (admitting it’s a bit of an exaggeration): “my daily missal made me a traditionalist.”

Catholics who do not give themselves trustingly to the 2,000-year tradition of the Church will not be in contact with the whole doctrine and morality of Catholicism. This is hard to hear, but so is much of the teaching of Our Lord: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matt. 16, 24). The same is true, in a way, of tradition: we have to deny our modern prejudices, take up the blessed burden of our tradition, and follow it, in order to be integrally Catholic.

Joseph Ratzinger famously and repeatedly said that forgetfulness of God is the major problem of the West. In his Foreword to Dom Alcuin Reid’s The Organic Development of the Liturgy, he wrote:

If the liturgy appears first of all as the workshop for our activity, then what is essential is being forgotten: God. For the liturgy is not about us, but about God. Forgetting about God is the most imminent danger of our age. As against this, the liturgy should be setting up a sign of God’s presence. Yet what is happening, if the habit of forgetting about God makes itself at home in the liturgy itself, and if in the liturgy we are only thinking of ourselves?

The same theologian, as Pope Benedict XVI, wrote in his letter concerning the remission of the excommunications of the four SSPX bishops:

In our days, when in vast areas of the world the faith is in danger of dying out like a flame which no longer has fuel, the overriding priority is to make God present in this world and to show men and women the way to God. Not just any god, but the God who spoke on Sinai; to that God whose face we recognize in a love which presses “to the end” (cf. Jn 13:1) — in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. The real problem at this moment of our history is that God is disappearing from the human horizon, and, with the dimming of the light which comes from God, humanity is losing its bearings, with increasingly evident destructive effects.

It is still difficult for many in the Church today to realize — either because they are totally ignorant of the past (as the revolutionaries intended), or because, being aware of it, they are afraid to do their homework and connect the dots — that the changes in the liturgy have actually contributed, profoundly and lastingly, to the crisis of our forgetfulness of God, and that the primary cure for this amnesia will be the restoration of the classical Roman rite.

From the ordination of a priest of the Fraternity of St. Peter in 2017

Visit www.peterkwasniewski.com for articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press (e.g., Benson, Scheeben, Parsch, Guardini, Chaignon, Leen).

Lessons from the Sixties: Selective Synodality and Princely Protests

NLM is pleased to offer readers a translation of a thought-provoking article that appeared at the German site Motu-proprio: Summorum-Pontificum.

The Ottaviani Intervention

Clemens V. Oldendorf

It is actually astonishing how little of Paul VI’s liturgical reform, especially his Novus Ordo Missae, which he promulgated fifty years ago, is being commemorated this year. The isolated contributions and initiatives that remind us of it come from the criticizing corner. [1] But it is noticeable that yesterday, September 25th (as of the original writing), as far as we can see, passed completely unnoticed. [2]

On this date, Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci transmitted to Pope Paul VI the Brief Critical Examination of the “Novus Ordo Missae,” which had previously been prepared by a working group of tradition-oriented theologians. This was greatly enhanced by the signatures of the two princes of the Church who made this criticism their own, especially since Ottaviani was at the time the supreme guardian of the purity of the doctrine of faith, and could have been referred to as “the Panzerkardinal” far earlier than Joseph Ratzinger, who would later follow him in the same position.

If the advocates of liturgical reform and the representatives of university-based liturgical studies overlook and ignore this jubilee with almost complete silence, perhaps it is because they do not want to unnecessarily remind people today, in a time that is forgetful of history, that the liturgy of the Church was ever celebrated in a manner visibly different from what is now the common practice, and is, in principle, also prescribed in such a way as to be normative.

With the keyword “normative”, we are referring to the Missa normativa, which at the Synod of Bishops in 1967 was presented, as it were (not to say demonstrated) as the prototype of the Novus Ordo, and which was broadly rejected by the Synod Fathers. The votes and decisions of a Synod of Bishops do not bind the Pope in his decisions, and since the Novus Ordo, which came two years later, corresponded almost perfectly to this Missa normativa, one could already see back then what “synodality” means if its tendency does not actually fit in with the Holy Father’s agenda.

But back to the Brief Critical Examination. This document criticized above all a softening of the doctrine of the Eucharistic Real Presence and sacrificial character of the Mass as seen in the liturgical texts and gestures, both in details and in totality, of the rite as Paul VI had presented it. The Cardinals therefore implored the Pontiff not to deprive the Church of the possibility of offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass according to the former Missale Romanum. Looking at the ecclesiastical constellation at that time, this action was, in point of fact, much more explosive and massive than, for example, what the Dubia to Amoris laetitia represent today. Above all, the process was more remarkable than the interventions that Cardinal Burke and Bishop Schneider have been submitting at regular intervals, since the Dubia remained unanswered.

The investigation — later also called the Ottaviani Intervention — was, by the way, not momentous in effect, yet not completely without consequences, inasmuch as Paul VI had the entire first edition of the Novus Ordo Missae books pulped (!). Nevertheless, in the next edition, only the definition of the Holy Mass contained in [the introduction to] this Ordo was half-heartedly “improved” by the insertion of an addition [with Tridentine language]; nothing more changed in the rite itself.

What remains to be recorded, and what should one perhaps learn from the events of that time for today?

The critique mounted by the Brief Critical Examination did not hinge upon liturgical abuses. The object of criticism was a Novus Ordo in Latin, at the high altar, without altar girls or communion in the hand. In the eyes of the authors and signatories, this already deviated considerably from the doctrine of the Council of Trent on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and yet such a celebration today, in circles that were close to or still hope for the idea of a Reform of the Reform, would certainly already be regarded as an expression of the continuity of the contemporary liturgy with the traditional Roman practice. In theory, this form is probably also most likely to be the so-called usus ordinarius, which in purely theoretical terms is to be the reference point for liturgical celebrations according to the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. With this motu proprio in 2007, at least what Ottaviani and Bacci requested in 1969 — but did not then receive — was finally made possible.

And to be historically fair, it must be said that Ottaviani later celebrated exclusively in the Novus Ordo and even in Italian alone — despite the fact that, due to his position, and also on account of his blindness, he could undoubtedly have easily obtained the special indult to adhere to the earlier missal, an indult that was intended from the start for old, handicapped, and frail priests, as long as that they celebrated privately with one altar boy, and none other present. Later, Ottaviani never again spoke a word of criticism against what the liturgical scholar Klaus Gamber described as “the new papal rite,” to distinguish the Novus Ordo from the Ritus Romanus that had been passed down from Gregory the Great and Pius V to Paul VI.

After a footnote in Amoris laetitia and before the Amazon Synod [3], it is certainly instructive to remember Ottaviani’s silence, though whether it would be a model for Burke and Schneider to follow suit I leave open; but such silence would surely be more consistent for the circles of people who, at least under John Paul II and Benedict XVI, considered papalism to be, in principle, in conformity with tradition. Under Francis, of course, we experience a papolatry of emotions which is now completely uncoupled from theology, and that would have been utterly unthinkable even under Pius IX.

NOTES

[1] See, e.g., “The Strange Birth of the Novus Ordo”; “The New Mass: Fifty Years of Problems”; “Hyperpapalism and Liturgical Mutation”; “Lament for the Liturgy”; “Critique of the Novus Ordo in Two Recent Books”; “A Half-Century of Novelty: Revisiting Paul VI’s Apologia for the New Mass.”

[2] See, however, this article: “The Ottaviani Intervention Turns 50: A Perceptive and Still Relevant Critique,” which was published on the date the study bears (June 5) rather than the date it was delivered to Paul VI (September 25).

[3] This article was published on September 26, prior to the opening of the current Synod.