On the Roman Mass, Don’t Take Your Cue from Fortescue

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X, e.g., whom he called “an Italian lunatic” – but it must be borne in mind that his liturgical scholarship is somewhat out of date, and actually wrong in certain respects.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.
 

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 original hardcover was very pricey but a paperback edition has finally come out.) 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.)

“Traditionis Custodes, or Competing Concepts of Unity” — Guest Article by Dr. Tomasz Dekert

We are pleased to publish this insightful essay by Dr. Tomasz Dekert, who wrote the original in Polish and then translated it for NLM. Dr. Dekert is a religious scholar who received his PhD at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow with a thesis on the concept of apostasy in Irenaeus of Lyons' Adversus Haereses. He works as an assistant professor at the Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow and is also a member of the editorial board of the Christianitas quarterly, a Polish journal for Catholic tradition. The original text of this article in Polish may be found here.

Mark Searl, a well-known American liturgist, in one of his books wrote that someone who was theologically formed, or more precisely, accustomed to thinking about liturgy in the first place in terms of sacramental “matter and form,” can approach real rituals from the position of one who “already knows what is significant and what is not,” and who views “the rest, whether it be the rite or people, as dispensable.” [1] These words came to mind when I reflected on the Motu Proprio Traditionis Custodes and its background. Well, I have the impression that they say something very important about the deep causes of the present situation, causes that are in no way limited to Rome’s usual reaction to the alleged destruction of the Church’s unity by the presence and development of groups centered around the liturgy in the classical Roman Rite, but that are stuck in a kind of mental alienation of parts of the Church elites, both academic and hierarchical. And not only the present ones, but above all those from half a century ago.

Early critics of the post-conciliar liturgical changes, who, in addition to being Catholic, were also prominent figures in sociology and anthropology – I mean Mary Douglas and Victor Turner – pointed out that from their professional perspective, the way in which the reform was carried out was burdened with the error of misdiagnosing the true needs of the masses of believers in terms of things such as the consistency, repetitiveness, and archaic nature of the ritual. As in the famous case study of “bog Irish” in Douglas’ Natural Symbols, the elites turned out to be insensitive to “dense” and ritualized symbolic communication, which in turn built a whole world of religious references, not necessarily conceptualized, for people from classes of lower cultural capital. Therefore, the changes in the structure of the Catholic ritual system forced by intellectuals and hierarchs constituted, as in the parable of the prophet Nathan, taking the poor man’s last sheep. The point, however, is not to reduce the problem to the relationship between different social classes. It is more about noticing the fact that the beginning of a specific split in the Church lies at the moment when her elites began to think of themselves as omnipotent regulators of the life of this huge and very internally diversified social body, based on their own intellectual competences and possessed power.

In an article from 1969, Yves Congar describes in an almost surprising way the importance of the permanence and traditionality of the liturgical ritual:

The conservative character of the liturgy makes it possible for it to preserve and transmit intact the values whose importance one epoch may have forgotten, but which the next epoch is happy to find intact and preserved, so that it can live from them again. Where would we be if this liturgical conservatism had not resisted the late medieval taste for sensory devotions, the eighteenth century’s individualistic, rational, and moralizing imperatives, the nineteenth century’s critique, or the modern period’s subjective philosophies? Thanks to the liturgy everything has been retained and transmitted. Ah! Let us not expose ourselves to the reproach sixty years hence that we squandered and lost the sacred heritage of the Catholic communion as it is deployed in the slow flow of time. Let us keep a healthy awareness that we carry in ourselves only a moment, the tip of the iceberg in relation to a reality which is beyond us in every way.[2]

I would add one more to these values. Wherever ritual is a widely accepted medium and – at the same time – an object of traditio (a content handed on) in which all members of the community participate, regardless of social class, political affiliation, cultural capital, etc. (which does not mean that it has to be the same everywhere) there the foundations of unity are so deep that they transcend all particularisms that are abundant in such a vast social organism. The necessary condition, however, is not the “uniformity”, that is, by the way, often mythologized in traditionalist thinking, but precisely the traditionality, a certain “organicity” (at least on the perception level) of the relationship between the community and its ritual system. In the circumstances in which this relationship found itself in the Roman Church after the reforms of St. Pius V, the above-mentioned condition required that a possible reform process should not in any way violate the visible and experiential traditional liturgical forms. At the level of the Conciliar Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium, the awareness of this fact was expressed in one of the sentences of section 23: “there must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them; and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing.”

As we know, in the end the liturgical reform proceeded in a way that differed greatly from the fulfillment of this condition. Fr. John Baldovin, S.J., an ardent supporter of reform and critic of traditionalist tendencies, expressed it with endearing and at the same time brutal simplicity: 

The implementation of the reform, under Bugnini’s tutelage and involving dozens of experts in the fields of history, theology and pastoral practice, resulted in the complete vernacularization of the liturgy, reorientation of the presiding minister vis-à-vis the assembly, an extensive and even radical reform of the order of Mass, and a major overhaul of the liturgical year, not to mention a complete revision of every sacramental liturgy and daily liturgical prayer.[3]

It should be added that the liturgy subjected to such a total “makeover” could not be introduced in the entire Church solely on the basis of the authority of the professors’ titles or even the cardinal hats of its creators, but it required the involvement of the supreme authority, i.e. the Pope. Paul VI, although there are known cases when he vetoed the proposals of the Consilium, was himself actively involved in the reform process, and willing to use his power to this end. The reformed Roman Rite was proclaimed, and the Church was obliged to accept it, with the simultaneous – administratively ordered and almost non-exceptional – suspension of the functioning of the previous ritual. And this was precisely the situation in which the Church elites, or at least some of the dominant part of them at the time, manifested their sense of omnipotence as regulators of religious life throughout the Church from the position of those who “know better” and “can do more”. The Church as a whole was to embody in her new liturgy a series of concepts and beliefs of a certain particular group of her members about what she and her liturgy were to be.

The founding sin of the breakdown of unity, for which Francis declares such concern in Traditionis Custodes, is the very fact of the reform understood and carried out in this way. Introducing into the bloodstream of the Church rituals that are “non-traditional” in a very visible and experiential way, but enforced by the power of the highest authority (in fact, as a result of the transition from a certain range of self-steering to manual control, this act made the rites dependent on this authority and its bureaucratic agendas) has practically abolished the “naturally” and profoundly unifying influence of the liturgy. In a sense, the liturgy itself was problematized; it put before each of the faithful the need to respond to the proposal of a new ritual submitted to him – albeit in an “irrefutable” mode.

Of course, for a large part of the members of the Church, the mandate of the papal seal was enough for them, and the fact that today they participate in rituals other than the day before yesterday, became the order of the day. Many elements of this new liturgical reality were attractive to some Catholics, and even gave a sense of a new quality of participation. But there were also those who deeply understood and felt the meaning and importance of the traditional Catholic liturgy, and who saw in the Vatican’s “proposal” a number of things that were dubious or even wrong, and the fact that, as Archbishop Bugnini argued, the actions of the reformers were accompanied by “the scrutiny of hundreds of experts and of the Church’s hierarchy,”[4] and that everything had been approved by the Pope, did not provide sufficient justification in the eyes of tradition-loving faithful. Here, in fact, we have a whole spectrum of attitudes, from trust in Church authority, saturated with deep sadness and the more or less rationalized submission to authority’s orders, to the complete refusal of such submission in the name of the “true Roman Church” and other products of overwhelming cognitive dissonance. Finally, there were those who could be described as victims of the Church’s modernization process, that is, people who simply drifted away in the post-conciliar period, or at least stopped attending church. It is not known just how many people in this large crowd who, during and after the Council, in one way or another departed from the Church[5] did so because of the liturgy. In this very group the motivations were certainly varied. Some people were affected by the loss of the sense of the Church’s credibility, others by fatigue with destabilization and permanent fluctuations, others by disgust due to the invasion of pop culture in the liturgical space or other such phenomena. Some of the faithful have also fallen victim to the discouragement resulting from an excessively progressive approach (interestingly described by James Hitchcock),[6] that is, the inability to find “something” appropriately “relevant” in ever new experimental para-ritual forms. Nevertheless, although the post-conciliar losses of the Church have never been comprehensively established, it is difficult to imagine that the liturgical factor would be irrelevant here; in fact it seems to have played a key role.

Since history is written by the victors, the dominant narrative in the post-conciliar Church makes reform a providential, even theological movement, and a great pastoral success, proclaimed in probably every subsequent document on the liturgy. There is no doubt that, in the scale of the entire Church, the reform campaign was successful. As a result, a new face of “unity” was obtained, which is not rooted in the organic totality of the traditional ritual – this is practically non-existent in the reformed liturgy – but which is based on trust and obedience to the ecclesiastical authority (especially the Pope) and the post-conciliar liturgical order introduced by it. In the victors’ narrative, the fraction of the dissatisfied or dissenters and their activity are either ignored in silence or accused of schism, that is, for nothing but active disobedience. However, from the perspective of the above-presented argument, one has to look at it differently. Opposition does not simply arise from disobedience, as if the opponents were just rude brats or prideful hotheads, but from a different understanding of the fundamental principle of unity itself. And the fact that there has been a radical change in this area and the controversy it sparked was not caused by “traditionalists,” but by the post-conciliar reform itself. It was what destroyed, or at least greatly violated, the foundations of the unity of the Church. This fact tends to be overlooked in current Catholic discourse.

Traditionis Custodes consciously operates within the strictly narrowed framework of the above-mentioned new face of “unity,” which it elevates to the rank of absolute, central value. The projects of the “post-conciliar” Church and liturgy, precisely because of their foundation in acts of power, are understood here as a reality without alternative – ultimately (“in due time”, as Francis puts it in his letter to the bishops), one who will not accept them (= who will not obey), has no right to be in the Church and call himself Catholic – even if he or she was baptized, believes in all dogmas, leads a full prayer life and sacramental life, tries to do works of mercy and live the gospel. Sounds absurd? But that’s what the Pope announced to us.

NOTES

[1] Mark Searle, Called to Participate. Theological, Ritual, and Social Perspective, eds. Barbara Searle, Anne Y. Koester (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2006), 20.

[2] Y. Congar, O.P., „Autorité, Initiative, Coresponsabilité”, La Maison-Dieu 97 (1969), 55.

[3] John F. Baldovin, “The Twentieth Century Reform of the Liturgy: Outcomes and Prospects,” Institute of Liturgical Studies Occasional Papers 126 (2017): 4–5.

[4] Annibale Bugnini, “The Consilium and Liturgical Reform,” The Furrow 19, no. 3 (1968): 177.

[5] Two sociological works on France and the English-speaking world, respectively, have been recently devoted to this topic: Guillaume Cuchet, Comment notre monde a cessé d'être chrétien. Anatomie d'un effondrement (Paris, Éditions de Seuil, 2018, 95-141); Stephen Bullivant, Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019)

[6] See James Hitchcock, Recovery of the Sacred: Reforming the Reformed Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1974).

Traditional Liturgy and the Shaping of the Self

If one were looking to mount a theological defense of the Church’s longstanding practice of ensuring rich vestments and paraments, splendid vessels, glorious architecture, elaborate ritual, and so forth for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the Divine Office, one might consider this passage from St. Thomas Aquinas:

The chief purpose of the whole external worship is that man may give worship to God. Now man’s tendency is to reverence less those things which are common, and indistinct from other things; whereas he admires and reveres those things which are distinct from others in some point of excellence. Hence too it is customary among men for kings and princes, who ought to be reverenced by their subjects, to be clothed in more precious garments, and to possess vaster and more beautiful abodes. And for this reason it behooved special times, a special abode, special vessels, and special ministers to be appointed for the divine worship, so that thereby the soul of man might be brought to greater reverence for God. (Summa theologiae I-II, q. 102, a. 4)

“Greater reverence for God”: allow me to go beyond the letter of the Angelic Doctor by suggesting that we fallen human beings, in order to be moved to this reverence, need to be shaken out of our complacency by means of a certain assault on the comfortable confines and suppositions of our egos. Especially in modern times, we have managed to surround ourselves with a cocoon of assumptions and soothing lies about life, death, love, and the meaning of it all. As John Paul II said, the liturgy must be not only inculturated but also countercultural, since the culture we live in is anti-Christian and, needless to add, anti-sacramental, anti-liturgical, anti-sacral.

If the Mass, as we celebrate it, is a reflection of who and what we already are or what we already think and feel, it will not unsettle us; it may even cause our mental habits to ossify. When “inculturation” is carried too far, it ends up being accommodation to the pure present, which, in the today’s world, is likely to be a culture of suburban narcissism.

What must be re-ordered is not the sanctuary, the altar and tabernacle, the architecture and ornamentation, the readings, prayers, gestures, and customs. No, it is we ourselves, again and again, who must be reordered by the Lord whom we encounter in His sacraments. It is we who are out of date, old in our sins, antiquated in our stubborn resistance to spiritual renewal. And our external busyness, our pastoral teams and committees, our redesigning of churches and liturgies, are some of the many subtle ways in which, by remaining active and in charge, we can escape the life-and-death confrontation between the Pelagian ego and the crucified Savior.

In the spiritual life, peace comes to us through a relentless reshaping of the self. For this reshaping to occur, one does not need liturgical shock tactics, techniques for social consciousness-raising, or novelties to fabricate occasions for lay involvement. Quite the contrary: these things remain at a superficial level and do not penetrate into the murky depths of the soul where the first origins of desire and aversion faintly shimmer.

Good liturgy does not, in and of itself, set people in the right direction. More is required: a clergy devoted to prayer and zealous for souls, adequate catechesis for the people, hearts ready to receive the seed of the word. Liturgy has been done well at many places and in many historical periods, but at some places and in some periods it has produced what seem negligible good effects in the faithful. There is no magical recipe for success, but there is an instrument, namely, traditional liturgy, that we neglect at our peril, at the risk of a deadening of our sensitivity to the sacred and the transcendent. It is a congenial context for representing and assimilating the richness of the Christian mystery.

The Mass, in its hieratic formalism, is the optimal school of prayer. One would only need to add that all the aspects of liturgy have to be taken into account for this schooling of the Christian heart: the ritual, the music, the architecture, must evoke the distinctively sacred and shadow forth the mysteries of faith, and must do so with a searing intensity of seriousness. 

It isn’t as if saints are a guaranteed product of solemn liturgy. Formal, beautiful liturgy might be spiritually empty, while a threadbare liturgy could be the vehicle through which God sanctifies souls. Nothing argued here would require a complex liturgy, but only one which is taken seriously, a motivation quite compatible with simplicity and poverty. As Fr. John Baldovin acknowledged in a 2002 article in Antiphon, seriousness is, in a sense, the key question for the liturgy—the seriousness of purpose revealed in a spirit of adoration, in earnest pleading, signs of sacred dignity, augmentations of otherness and the proclamation of an ungraspable intimacy.

Hence, my observation does not touch upon the important question of novus ordo versus vetus ordo, but it does support the eastward stance of the celebrant, as well as the use of a hieratic, formal language, because these things augment the “otherness” of the liturgy, which in turn demands of us a deep and personal response, outside of our comfort zone. Let us put it this way: if everything in the liturgy is done in a way that is comfortable, contemporary, relevant, and socially sensitive, it doesn’t matter if we sing and clap and greet neighbors and get involved in all sorts of ways and exhibit a super-active participation; we will be looking in a mirror of our own making, and at the end of the day we will have offered worship to ourselves and our community, while the true God—the mysterious, hidden, demanding, and yet indescribably (and uncomfortably) intimate God—will have escaped unnoticed, patiently awaiting souls who will adore Him in spirit and in truth, souls mature enough to suffer the silence within themselves and to enter into a rhythm and ritual that stretches beyond them on all sides.

We are asleep and we must be awakened. It was with a keen instinct for spiritual realities that our forefathers, over many centuries, gently built up a liturgy that challenges our minds and hearts at every turn, confronting us with the known in the unknown, the unknown in the known, the impenetrable, inscrutable, and ineffable in the melismas of jubilation and the silences of searching prayer. I am grateful to countless saints and to the Holy Spirit, their guide, for having bequeathed even to us, in the desert of modernity, a liturgy that is inexhaustibly rich and profound, ever more life-giving, younger and fresher, as the worshiper comes to know it. And I am grateful to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI for having liberated this treasure of the Catholic Faith, “so that thereby the soul of man might be brought to greater reverence for God.”