Why Louis Bouyer Is Delightful and Frustrating to Read

One experience I think many of us have had with liturgical authors who wrote prior to the Council and/or the imposition of the Novus Ordo is that we find in their works so many wonderful insights, mingled with passages of excruciating naivete, baffling optimism about the possibilities of reform-in-continuity, strange flights of reformatory fancy, embarrassingly erroneous theories (such as “the canon of Hippolytus” and “early Christian clergy celebrated versus populum”), and the like. It can feel a bit schizophrenic to go from a glowing paragraph on the glories of tradition to another paragraph about how this and that have to be rethought and reworked. One suffers from intellectual whiplash.

This experienced plays itself out with a wide variety of authors: Romano Guardini, Pius Parsch, Ildefonso Schuster, Joseph Jungmann, Joseph Ratzinger, Yves Congar, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, A.-M. Roguet, J.D. Chrichton, and others less famous. But the whiplash author par excellence must surely be Louis Bouyer—a theologian who, let’s say on page 35, was capable of dismissing as buffoons the squadrons of tinkering liturgists, and then on page 37 of declaring that Baroque excrescences had to be purged from the liturgy (presumably, by specialists like himself). His soaring lyricism about traditional aspects of the liturgy is matched only by his acerbic criticism of just about everything to do with the concrete liturgical life of the preconciliar era.

A good example of the mingling of true, dubious, and erroneous may be found in his important 1963 work Rite and Man, recently republished by Cluny Media. In what follows, I will first present an overview of major themes, then look at Bouyer’s take-away for the liturgical reform taking place at the very time he was writing, and lastly, discuss why Bouyer shows the fracture-lines he does.

What Is Required for Ritual Activity

Essentially, this work is an extended prelude to Guardini’s Sacred Signs that tries to explain the natural religious presuppositions of Catholic liturgy. Unless we deeply understand the roots of liturgy in human nature and Christian tradition, we are destined to misunderstand, misappropriate, and deform it even further.

Bouyer draws on recent discoveries of depth psychology and comparative religion to show how man, naturally religious, has expressed his religious experience in history. He shows empirically what we confess in faith: that the Christian religion is the fulfillment of all natural religion. He shows the origin of religious rituals, their relation to divine word, developing notions of sacred time and space, showing in each case how Christian rituals recapitulate and consummate these universal features of natural religion. Finally, he suggests how this study might inform the Liturgical Movement.

Primitive Rites and Natural Sacramentality. In its earliest stages, religious man felt himself surrounded by divine hierophanies: fire, mountains, woods, the rhythmic seasons. Each of these was a manifestation of divine power in which man participated out of reverence and fear. Thus, rites developed spontaneously as man’s attempt to participate in these divine revelations (e.g., fertility rites) and attain union with the divine powers. Each natural object had its hierophanic meaning (water, fire, earth, etc). Men understood these rites to be somehow divinely instituted—actions of the gods in which man was privileged to participate. 
 

Rite and Divine Word. These rites naturally gained expression in priestly prayers and in myths. Myths exist to justify the divine institution of primitive rites—this is a fascinating point: rites actually precede myths and give rise to them, but, at the same, thereby dangerously objectify them. Priestly prayers, too, though necessary for human participation in the ritual, can devolve into mere magic: a human arrogance that believes a set rite or prayer in a sacred language may obligate the deity. One may think of the Carmina Saliaria, the ossified antique Latin prayers used in religious rites even in the Late Republic: no one understood them anymore, but their supposed magical powers made them last.

Thus, the natural relationship between rite and divine word is essential to the survival of genuine cultus. The rite is established by divine word, because it is divine action. Only when clothed in the living divine word can the rite be what it really is: the gratuitous re-enactment for us by God of a divine action. If the divine word does not constitute the rite, then the rite devolves into magic: a collection of formulae and gestures whose validity binds the divine agent to confer certain boons. The Bible makes copious protest against such magic-making, when it insists on the radically conditional presence of God among His people. The sense of divine theophany is lost, and the rites become a mere instrument—a work of human hands.

Here is a marvelous passage that makes for painful reading when we think about the liturgical reform and the extent to which it falls afoul of the fundamental law Bouyer discerned:

This is why at all times and in all places rites are considered to be the work of the gods. The men who celebrate these rites would not celebrate them as they do if they thought that they were themselves their authors. And, in fact, the rites soon cease to be observed when men get the idea that they were instituted by other men before them…. Far from being an exception to this rule, Christianity is a transcendent realization of it…. Where this conviction fails or becomes obscured, the sacraments are emptied of their substance, just as in any case where rites come to be regarded as simple human actions, as pious means of teaching the people invented by theologians. In such a hypothesis, the theologians themselves have no need of these rites since they are supposed to have already been in substantial possession of the religion itself and to have later created the rites as a means of transmitting it to the people…. This aspect of the matter should be pointed up in more detail since it is so fundamental that if sight of it is once lost, the very possibility of a substantially religious ritual is also lost. (p. 69)

Bouyer also tarries for two chapters on the nature of sacred space and sacred time. He concludes by drawing several practical applications for the liturgical movement.

Applications to Liturgical Reform

First, he maintains that a sense of natural religion must be restored. This is where one feels the kinship with Guardini the most: we must “not attempt to rationalize [liturgy], to empty it not only of its mystery but also of its expressions that are not strictly rational. They should, on the contrary, seize again upon the chords in the heart of modern man which respond to these eternal expressions in order to restore to them their maximum efficacy. At the same time, we must do everything in our power to revive modern man’s atrophied faculties…and to bring back to our contemporaries a religious culture….,” that is, one rooted in the natural sacramentality of the world. Otherwise, there is no hope for man to live the liturgy.

A photo I took in Wyoming years ago at a ranch

This point has major implications in all kinds of spheres: family life, parish life, education. For example, ideally, schools should educate in natural religion, in two phases: first, students should be immersed in literature and poetry that fascinate with their beauty and indeed their superintelligibility, which escapes what the rational mind immediately grasps; then, they should be immersed in the wilderness, which will create a great void of silence and a sense of grandeur. (It could go in the other order, too; indeed, best of all would be some alternation between poetry and the wilderness.) With these experiences in place, the traditional liturgy is capable of capturing the soul with its beauty, transcendence, seriousness, and holiness. This is the process all students of the college should go through, because it is the true end of a liberal education: being truly free to worship God as He planned. Everything falls into line behind this supreme final goal!

Second, we should restore the primacy of the divine word. In Bouyer’s view, current liturgical practice—when the congregation stands silently by, either subjected to rationalistic commentaries on the sacred action or devoutly praying their private devotions—is a clear devolution into the sort of white magic that, according to his historical analysis, is an ever recurring danger in established rites when the ceremony is seen as a formulaic means of binding the divinity’s power. The Divine Word in the Eucharist is made present through the divine words of consecration as a consummation of the divine words of Scripture. Thus, according to Bouyer, the faithful should hear the Scripture (and much of the Canon) proclaimed in the vernacular, so that the liturgy is sufficiently manifest as divine word, rather than seeming to be a distant apotropaic relic.

Here, of course, is where red flags should be popping up. It seems like Bouyer, though he cites the dogma of ex opere operato efficacity, does not fully appreciate the objectivity of it; on his own account it might be criticized as magic (a description Sebastian Morello would take as a compliment). Bouyer is right to take a dim view of a liturgical minimalism content with validity and rubrical correctness, but surely there is quite a bit of terrain lying between magical thinking and the view that immediate verbal comprehension is the only way to see the liturgy as God speaking to us and accomplishing His salvation.

Third, purging the rites of “dramatic” substitutes for living rites clothed in the divine word. He is reticent about giving particulars in this book, but elsewhere he complains about certain elements of pomp and circumstance, the accumulation and duplication of ceremonial gestures that could seem fussy or superfluous, the importation of allegories, and other elements that seem to belong to a staged religious drama. This emphasis on “the word” as the be-all and end-all might prompt one to wonder if the old Protestant pastor in Bouyer has not quite let go of his grip.

Fourth, Bouyer approves of a certain adaptation of liturgy to modern man. At the same time, he explicitly condemns rationalizing the liturgy, turning altars around (!), etc. But he remains vague. What does he mean that the liturgy must be “adapted to modern man with his technical and rational outlook”? Is he too confident about the work specialists can do? How exactly is a technical and rational outlook compatible with the wellsprings of natural religion he so eloquently canvased? How is it compatible with spiritual perception of the divine word that brings Christian man into being? One might think, rather, that the Church needs somehow to work against the technical and rational outlook in order to prevent it from undermining liturgy altogether.
 

Modernity does not seem especially conducive to liturgy.

An Insoluble Contradiction

Bouyer was very influential in his day, yet he expressed himself in ways that were easily misconstrued and exaggerated. He regretted all this later when it was much too late; he could have made his own the words of Joseph Ratzinger:

Anyone like myself, who was moved by this perception [viz., that liturgy is a living network of tradition that cannot be torn apart] in 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.

Case in point: Bouyer generally criticizes liturgy from the late medieval period through the Baroque as “theatrical” and “courtly,” but doesn’t seem to recall that Scripture heavily uses the language of God as a King surrounded by His court (as I discuss here). He criticizes the Tridentine liturgy for being too privatized, ritualistic, and intellectual, but does not see that it connected people consistently with the numinous, with the real presence of our Lord, and spoke to their souls—the souls of very common people, of farmers, artisans, laborers, as well as the educated and sophisticated. That is, he was overlooking strengths that are obvious to us in retrospect, now that a banal fabrication has been substituted in its place. Again, he lamented the rationalization and verbalization of the Mass, but all too late.

It seems to me that Bouyer, like Guardini, was trapped in an insoluble contradiction. For them, religion begins in something primeval, natural, essential, vital; and yet modern man is trapped in technology, subjectivism, egoism, calculative reason, and is cut off from his natural roots. So how do we build a bridge? Well, we can either try to awaken man to what is natural and primordial, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, or we can adapt and modify liturgy to his peculiar condition in an effort to educate him “as he is” and “where he is.”

The problem is that doing the latter—judging and reworking the liturgy, in other words, in contrast to submitting to a liturgy handed down from tradition—puts man in the pseudo-divine position of fabricating rites, when this is contrary to the very notion of a rite; or, one might say it implicitly makes him a god, the measure of all things, even of the sacred. Hence it compounds his alienation from the divine and makes the overall situation even worse. In contrast, the principle of tradition—namely, that one should have immense respect for what is given as a result of long centuries of organic development—has at least the merit of taking a man out of himself, out of his age and its limitations, and connecting him with, or at least confronting him to, something greater, deeper, broader, other than himself and his age.

Bouyer, it seems to me, is caught on the horns of this dilemma, which is why he will say in one chapter the sort of things traditionalists say, and then in the next chapter, the sort of things Bugnini or Lercaro say. Ultimately, I do not think his liturgical theology is altogether coherent, and yet it is extremely thought-provoking. It exercised a seductive power over the minds of men who genuinely wanted the faithful to be enthusiastic participants in the Church’s liturgy. The irony is that, in the effort to move away from “magic” to “word,” we ended up with a Protestantized “liturgy of the word”—and here I include the Canon inasmuch as it is said aloud in the vernacular—that lacks the dimension of mystery at the heart of the authentic notion of the word: the mysterion, the secret both hidden and revealed. Thus, we departed not merely from the Tridentine heritage of the preceding four centuries, but from the most ancient heritage of the Fathers, who already speak of the liturgy as something fearful, awesome, tremendous (as verified in this article).

It is true that Bouyer considered the experts of his day to be well-qualified for the work of revising the liturgical books, but as John Pepino recounts in his superb article “Cassandra’s Curse: Louis Bouyer, the Liturgical Movement, and the Post-Conciliar Reform of the Mass” (Antiphon 18.3 [2014]: 254–300), already as early as the 1950s Bouyer was complaining about would-be reformers impatient to replace the genuine liturgy of the Church with a pastoral construction of utilitarian aims. Like many churchmen, I genuinely believe Bouyer did not think it was possible or conceivable that the liturgy could or would be jettisoned in the manner in which it actually was jettisoned. He would have instinctively viewed it as monolithic, permanent, dominant, almost immovable, so that the reformers would have functioned more like men who were simply cleaning off the old mosaics or repositioning the pillars—not removing or replacing them. When things turned out differently, he was among those most surprised at the wreckage.

It is fair to say that Guardini and Bouyer would have heartily approved of what students at Wyoming Catholic College are doing: climbing mountains, memorizing poems, and learning Latin as a spoken language, among other full-immersion activities. By taking seriously the senses, the imagination, the poetic, the literary, in confrontation with God’s First Book, their souls are opened to receive the powerful divine message of the sacred liturgy. Perhaps this is the principal reform that needs to take place: a reform of our minds and hearts, so that the revelation of God will not fall on deaf ears.

The 20th Anniversary of the Death of Michael Davies

Today is the 20th anniversary of the death of Michael Davies, who is, I trust, well known to our readers, and especially in the English-speaking world, as one of the great defenders of the traditional Roman liturgy in the mad years immediately after the most recent ecumenical council. It is no exaggeration to describe as heroic the efforts which he made, both by writing and frequent lecturing, to expose how the liturgical reform betrayed that council. His most thorough and effective works in this regard are the three volumes published under the umbrella title The Liturgical Revolution: Cranmer’s Godly Order, Pope John’s Council and Pope Paul’s New Mass.

After 60 years of scholarly research and publication, it is now generally understood that most of the scholarly premises which underpin the reform were simply flat-out wrong. Indeed, this has become such a commonplace, at least among the more honest, that we have perhaps forgotten, (or perhaps the younger among us have never known), that in those mad years, men like Davies and Fr Bouyer who spoke against such errors were almost universally dismissed as cranks. (Fr Bouyer’s 20th anniversary, by the way, is less than a month away, on October 22.)

It may be instructive, and hopefully a worthy tribute to Mr Davies, to look back at this fascinating episode of the program Firing Line, broadcast on April 22, 1980. The occasion for this discussion between the host, William F. Buckley, Davies, and Fr (later Monsignor) Joseph Champlin, a priest of the Diocese of Syracuse, New York, was Pope St John Paul II’s “disciplinary” action against Fr Hans Küng; the previous December, the Pope had decreed that the University of Tübingen, where Küng was then teaching, could no longer refer to him as a “Catholic” theologian. The conversation quickly turns to a general discussion of the state of things in the Church, with much said about the liturgical reform.

Especially noteworthy is the exchange which begins at 18:30, in which Mr Davies refutes the canard, stated by Fr Champlin, that anciently the Church celebrated Mass “facing the people,” citing Fr Bouyer among others. Faced with the evidence, Fr Champlin has no response to make at all, and none has been found in the subsequent quarter of century either.

At the time, of course, the Novus Ordo was only 11 years old; in the United States, as in many other countries, the more outlandish sorts of liturgical experimentation and abuse were still very common, and the almost total prohibition on any celebration of the traditional Mass still very much in effect. De facto, if not de jure, this unjust prohibition was very often extended to any attempt to celebrate the reformed liturgy according to something resembling the mind of the Council. Buckley’s magazine National Review republished electronically an article which he wrote about the Latin Mass in 1967; almost two-and-a-half years before the Novus Ordo was promulgated, a priest dared not celebrate in Latin the wedding Mass for a member of his family, for fear that the bishop find out. Whatever difficulties we face today in the quest to improve the Church’s liturgical life, we must never allow ourselves to forget that enormous strides have been made since those days, a fact which should be an encouragement to all, and a cause for tremendous gratitude. These labors have not been in vain.

A couple of other points of interest.

1. Buckley rightly points out in his introduction, “the practical effect (of the Pope’s actions) on Fr Küng is barely noticeable; he continues to teach theology...” Nevertheless, as Davies says later (12:27), the reaction among Küng’s supporters was ferocious, with the Anglican Church Times calling the Pope the “ayatollah of the West.” The viciousness of this language may perhaps be difficult for some of our younger readers to appreciate; at the time of this broadcast, 52 Americans were being held hostage in the American embassy in Tehran, under the Ayatollah Khomeini’s government. (Archbishop Bugnini, then in his second career as nuncio in Iran, had just celebrated Easter Mass for them in the embassy two weeks before.) In his second memoir, published in 2008, Küng himself refers to this act of defamation in an approving quote from the American novelist and sociologist Fr Andrew Greeley; his chapter is titled Roma locuta, causa non finita, in a booked called, with no sense that the irony is deliberate, Disputed Truths. I will of course not be the first to note that pleas for civility and deference to Papal authority are a relatively new phenomenon among the more (can we say?) daring voices in the Church.

2. Davies also speaks (starting at 28:10) of a specific aspect of his work which affords a perfect example of the kind of dishonesty actively present in the reform which led Fr Bouyer to call Abp Bugnini (with classic French restraint) a man “as devoid of learning as he was of honesty.” It is a well-known fact that a group of six Protestant ministers were “consulted” by the Consilium ad exsequendam in the process of reforming the Mass. Bugnini would later claim in Notitiae that they only intervened once, and were merely observers; this led Davies to write to one of the six and ask to what degree they were involved, “and he said ‘Oh no, we played a very active part, and we were given all the documents same as the Catholic observers, every morning there was a discussion, a great free-for-all in which we put forward our opinions.’ That sort of thing has happened again and again.”

Muphry’s Law Comes After Mass of the Ages (Part 2)

This is the second part of my response to a video which attempts and fails to “challenge” the second installment of the Mass of the Ages documentary series. As I noted in the first part, this video makes one fully legitimate critique, but attempts to do almost all the rest of its “work” by stating only a part of the pertinent information, a process known by the Latin term “suppressio veri – suppression of what it true.” And as it begins, so it goes on. Once again, this is not by any means a complete list of the mistakes of the remainder of the video; such a list would be as exhausting for you to read as it would be for me to write. If you want a quick-take which shows just how utterly shoddy the research that went in to this really is, scroll down to the last paragraph.

The video objects (5:50) to an image which compares the post-Conciliar Rite of Mass to a tree which has had most of its limbs lopped off, by stating that “practically all of the old form elements are still there, or at least available in the new.” suppressio veri: it does not acknowledge that many of these elements are available in theory, but in practice, usually not available, and in many places, ruthlessly or even unlawfully prohibited. It does not acknowledge that some of them (e.g. the Mass lectionary) were radically changed, and in many ways very much for the worse. It does not acknowledge that it was in no way the intention of Sacrosanctum Concilium for such elements to become completely optional, and in many places, ruthlessly or even unlawfully prohibited. There is no point in saying “the Novus Ordo can also be said in Latin” if many priests dare not do so for fear of punishment from their superiors. There is no point in saying that “you can still have chant and polyphony” if the schola was replaced by a guitar band 50 years ago and has never been reformed.

The video objects that MOTA “ignores the fact that in other eras, elements were taken on and left out of the liturgy.” MOTA is not about this, but I can assure our readers that I know personally several of the people who appear in it, and they would never deny such a thing. The video’s account of the post-Tridentine liturgical reform squeezes a truly remarkable amount of gross over-simplification into less than a minute, and makes several mistakes. Of these, the most inexcusable is to claim that it introduced a new calendar. The Tridentine reform kept the Roman ordo temporalis, a stable part of the rite for many centuries, completely intact, and lightly pruned the calendar of Saints. It falsely claims that it took out the “Prayers of the Faithful”, more properly known as bidding prayers. These did exist in some pre-Tridentine rites, by no means all, and in any case, have no relationship to the free-for-all Prayers of the Faithful of the post-Conciliar rite. It repeats the canard that other forms of the Roman Rite were largely prohibited after 1570, another gross over-simplification. In more than one place, it asserts that the Dominican Use did not have the offertory prayers of the Roman Rite. suppressio veri: the Dominican Use has offertory prayers which are much shorter than those of the Roman Missal, but in this regard, is very much an outlier among medieval uses.

There follows an attempt to provide a definition of “organic growth”, which I will not contest, because “organic growth” is not a useful way of describing how the liturgy changes. The video then falsely imputes to MOTA the following “faulty premises”:

“1. Everything added to the liturgy must stay.” MOTA does not say this. suppressio veri: of course, the post-Conciliar reform went far beyond the letter and spirit of Sacrosanctum Concilium, and took out of the Roman Rite many things that ought not to have been taken out, some of which are attested in every pertinent liturgical book of that rite as far back as we have them.

Folio 214r of the Gellone Sacramentary, ca. 780 AD, with the prayer “Deus honorum omnium” in the rite of episcopal consecration. (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Latin 12048.) This prayer appears in every single pertinent liturgical book of the Roman rite from the so-called Leonine Sacramentary in the mid-6th century until 1968, when it was replaced by another prayer from the pseudo-Apostolic tradition of pseudo-Hippolytus, which has no historical relationship to the Roman Rite.

2. “Restoration of ancient custom is not legitimate”. MOTA does not say this either. suppressio veri: almost none of the putative restorations of ancient customs in the Novus Ordo restored them in their integrity, that is to say, as they are actually found in the ancient liturgical books. With few exceptions, they were almost all rewritten according to the bright ideas of the members of the Consilium, who at the same time, gave the lie to their own work by throwing out completely many aspects of the Roman Rite of the greatest possible antiquity. And of course, many such “restorations” (the canon of Hippolytus, the epiclesis, the Old Testament reading, the Solemnity of Mary on Jan. 1) are not “restorations” at all, because they never existed.

3. “The substance and accidental elements of the Mass are equally important”. MOTA does not say this either. suppressio veri: the creators of the post-Conciliar liturgy clearly had no good sense at all as to which accidental elements of the liturgy best express the substance of the Mass. If they had, they would not have subjected the prayers of the Mass and the Bible itself to the ruthless campaign of ideological censorship which took out so many expressions of what the Church wants us to receive from the Mass and know about the Faith.

The video then attempts to defend the indefensible by claiming that MOTA misrepresents how much was taken out of the Mass, since many such things are present in “modified or unmodified forms.” suppressio veri: the word “modified” is yet another gross oversimplification, and does not address how badly so many of those modifications were done, or the atrocious historical scholarship on the basis of which they were done. For example, the “proper chants” are counted as “still present” because they are an “option”, without saying that they are an option that is almost totally disused, and that this is the diametric opposite of what Sacrosanctum Concilium wanted to happen, and what Paul VI himself originally claimed would happen.

The Gloria, the preface, the Pater etc, can all still be sung, and in Latin, and indeed, the whole Mass “including the canon may be sung!” suppressio veri: it is also completely licit, and very much more common, for them all to be said in the vernacular at any Mass, however, “solemn”, even on the most important feast days. The Offertory prayers are declared to be “made more applicable” in their newer form, a meaningless statement and another suppressio veri, since this change was not asked for by Sacrosanctum Concilium, and serves no good purpose. Yes, the Roman Canon “may always be used”. suppressio veri: it may also never be used. Etc.

At 9:04 there begins a section introduced by the header, “False Ideas of Vatican II”, which purports to explain MOTA’s false ideas about “the Vatican II liturgy.” suppressio veri: the post-Conciliar reform is not the liturgy of Vatican II. It accuses MOTA once again of a failure to acknowledge that a priest can say the Mass with nearly all of the elements of the pre-conciliar rite, and shows footage of some exemplary Masses from churches like St. James at Spanish Place in London and St John Cantius in Chicago, (suppressio veri), without mentioning how few such churches are and how far between.

suppressio veri: at no point does the video even hint at the fact that while the liturgy has indeed changed in the past, never before did it undergo so many changes and so rapidly as it did in the post-Conciliar reform.

At 11:40, the video degenerates into a parody of itself when it effectively reproves the Tridentine Mass for being, of all things, too enculturated, because it could be celebrated with Baroque music in the 18th century, Gothic-revival vestments in the 19th etc. This is especially hilarious, considering that it is said in defense of a liturgy that was deliberately designed to be subject to constant change, based on the constant change of the surrounding culture. suppressio veri: the objective forms of the old liturgy meant that, whether for good or ill, the culture was put to the service of it, whereas enculturation in the post-Conciliar rite means that the liturgy is put to the service of the culture.

This is followed by the even more absurd contention that the post-Conciliar reform represents, through Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Church’s embrace of the pre-Conciliar liturgical movement. suppressio veri: the post-Conciliar liturgy is the betrayal and overthrow, not the fulfillment, of both the liturgical movement and Sacrosanctum Concilium. Ironically, it quotes Sacrosanctum Concilium to the effect that it is the wish of the Church to undertake a careful general reform of the liturgy. suppressio veri: everyone who has read the memoires of people like Fr Bouyer or Cardinal Antonielli knows that the post-Conciliar reform of the liturgy was careless in the extreme.

Weirdly enough, the video does finally get around to saying something useful when it claims that “we’re obviously still at the stage where most people have very limited and rather distorted ideas about the Mass.” proclamatio veri: yes, the liturgical reform has indeed absolutely failed to achieve what Vatican II wanted it to achieve. We already knew that. It also quotes the recent apostolic letter on the liturgy to the same effect, because when the Pope says that he “would like this letter to help us to rekindle our wonder for the beauty of the truth of the Christian celebration, to remind us of the necessity of an authentic liturgical formation, and to recognize the importance of an art of celebrating that is at the service of the truth of the Paschal Mystery and of the participation of all of the baptized in it, each one according to his or her vocation”, he acknowledges, whether he means to or not, that the post-Conciliar reform has achieved none of this.

This is followed immediately by seven pictures of the post-Conciliar Rite: a boy’s choir, a beautiful missal, a beautiful vestment, the elevation of the host at a Mass celebrated ad orientem, a beautiful altar set, a picture of a Gregorian chant, the minor elevation at another Mass, by a priest wearing a beautiful vestment. These do exactly what the beginning of the video accuses MOTA of doing: presenting the new liturgy at its best, without acknowledging that these things do not represent the experience of many ordinary Catholics. It is hypocritical in the extreme to reprove MOTA for presenting the traditional Mass at its best because the traditional Mass was often not celebrated at its best, and then show the post-Conciliar Mass at its best, when that best is far rarer than it ever was in the traditional rite, as everyone knows.

Just to end by adding insult to injury, the video then exhorts us to put an end to the “damaging liturgical wars”, a few seconds after citing a text by the person most responsible for inflaming them in recent times.

The last three minutes are occupied by a series of informational slides which are, of course, chock full of mistakes and falsehoods. At 15:37, we are treated to the comically absurd contention that the traditional liturgy is not a really a bulwark of orthodox belief, because it is also used by some communities which are wildly heretical (e.g. the Old Catholics.) suppressio veri: these communities are all tiny, and there is a tiny number of them. A caption at the bottom says that something called the “Gallican schism” has been using the “traditional” rite (sneer quotes theirs) for 700+ years. This “information”, which is all completely wrong, was garnered from the website of a woman named Cherry Chapman, whose principal interest in it comes from the fact that a certain church in Paris allows her to attend Mass with her dog. The fact that the video repeats information from a random personal webpage without fact-checking any of it demonstrates better than anything else how fundamentally unserious the whole project actually is.

Yes, of course I made a screen shot...

Muphry’s Law Comes After Mass of the Ages (Part 1)

Muphry’s Law is the principle, well-known to copy-editors, that in the coarse of correcting someone else’s errors, one inevitably makes a few of one’s own. The parameters of this law are stretched almost to their furthest limits in this attempt by an Australian group of Dominican sisters (see note in following paragraph) to challenge the second part of the Mass of the Ages documentary series. In a quarter of the run-time, it manages to commit a genuinely astonishing number of mistakes about and misrepresentations of the history of the liturgy and the post-Conciliar reform. Perhaps that is why, unlike Cameron O’Hearn, the producer of MOTA, the good sisters, in the truest spirit of the Listening Church™ (formerly known as the Dialoguing Church™), have not allowed comments on the video. (MOTA part 2 has been removed from YouTube because of a fair-use challenge involving ten second of soundtrack, as Mr O’Hearn explains here, but comments are open on all his channel’s videos. You can watch it here on its own site: https://latinmass.com/watch)

UPDATE: thanks to Mr Eamonn Gaines for pointing out in the combox that the sisters who produced this video are a diocesan congregation, not formally affiliated to the Dominican Order.

Before all else, I must state that I do not attribute to the sisters any deliberate lying. Some of the mistakes which they make result from an evident failure to do very basic research; this is regrettable, but does not make for proof of mendacity. But many of the others are simply articles of faith among the defenders of the post-Conciliar reform, much as “Constantine made Jesus into a god at the Council of Nicea” is an article of faith among certain kinds of new atheists. And just like “Constantine made Jesus into a god at the Council of Nicea”, they rest on very sandy foundations, but have been repeated so long and so often that many people have no idea how sandy those foundations really are.

However, while I do not impute to them any suggestio falsi (with one exception), it is impossible to avoid the charge of a massive suppressio veri. In this regard, the video winds up committing so many errors that I can hardly hope to document them all without writing far more than you are likely prepared to read. I therefore will limit myself to explaining only the most egregious among them, which are more than sufficient.

At 0:18 there occur the terms “Extraordinary Form” and “Ordinary Form.” At no point does the video acknowledge that this terminology has been officially suppressed, as part of a doomed (but for that, no less pastorally harmful) attempt to save face over the post-Conciliar reform’s failure to produce any of the fruits which Sacrosanctum Concilium looked for in its opening paragraph.

At 0:55, we are presented with the classic canard that the old Mass was often celebrated very badly before Vatican II. As a friend of mine once observed, “The TLM was celebrated poorly; we needed a new liturgy!” but somehow, “Just because the Novus Ordo is nearly ubiquitously celebrated poorly doesn’t mean we that we need a new liturgy!”

First, we see footage of traditional Masses being done well nowadays. (I pause to say, “Good job, lads! Way to fulfill the Council’s vision for liturgical renewal!”) Then we are told that “we should note that before Vatican II, the liturgical practice was largely that of the Low Mass.” This is a perfect suppressio veri, which fails to make the all-important distinction between “before Vatican II”, which is more than 95% of the Church’s history, and “immediately before Vatican II”, which is, um, less. It therefore also fails to acknowledge that the best of our liturgical culture, from the cathedral of Chartres to the music of Palestrina (which is to say, everything that Vatican II wanted to thrive, and which has in the ensuing decades conspicuously failed to thrive), is also a product of the Roman Rite, and that the post-Conciliar rite has inspired almost nothing to match any of it.

‘Charles,’ said Cordelia, ‘Modern Art is all bosh, isn’t it?’ ‘Great bosh.’

It also fails to acknowledge that by abolishing the formal and prescriptive distinction between low, sung and high Mass, the Novus Ordo has normalized the low Mass with hymns, not improved it.

“The Mass … was often said in quite ordinary settings.” This is simply not true; most Masses were said in churches, and most churches, even when not very good artistically, made an effort to be beautiful, and in any case, distinctly church-like. I say “most” advisedly, because in the period immediately before Vatican II, especially after World War I, there was an emerging trend to build ugly churches totally devoid of any sense of the sacred. The video does not acknowledge that this harmful trend was normalized after the Council, and still flourishes in much of the world.

“the people in the pews were often involved in their own personal prayers”: another suppressio veri, which again ignores the crucial distinction between “before Vatican II” and “immediately before Vatican II”, and the fact that this phenomenon was realized very unevenly through the Church. My father used to say that it was quite common in the ethnically Italian churches he grew up in (of which two out of three are now not just closed, but gone), while an Irish former co-worker of mine who went to Catholic school in the same city at the same time used to say, with great indignation at the idea that she was “ignorant” of the Mass, “We ALL had our own missals, and those sisters made darn sure that we knew how to use them!”

Card. Ratzinger once wrote that if the point of the liturgical reform was popular participation, it was not necessary at all in Catholic Germany. In 1884, a Benedictine monk named Anselm Shott published a hand-missal which became so popular that German Catholics to this very day still use the term “Schott-Meßbuch” to mean a hand-missal for the Novus Ordo. In other words, the video sums up a very complex and lengthy aspect of the Church’s history, which would itself be worthy of its own documentary, as if one tiny part of it were representative of the whole.

At 1:36, we see footage of Richard Cardinal Cushing, the archbishop of Boston, saying President Kennedy’s funeral Mass in 1963. (This is captioned “A Mass prior to Vatican II…”, which had begun over thirteen months earlier.) This Mass is, frankly, bizarre; His Eminence doesn’t just say the quiet parts aloud, but does so in a weirdly affected stentorian voice. Another suppressio veri: it is not mentioned that he was doing so against the rubrics of the Missal, which had not yet been modified. (Sacrosanctum Concilium had not yet even been issued.) And another: it is not mentioned that the combined effect of saying rather than singing the Mass, the vernacular, versus populum, and standing at the people’s eye-level, has made the Novus Ordo a hostage to the priest’s personal quirks 1000 times more than was ever the case before the reform.

At 2:12, under the heading, “Coincidence = Cause Fallacy”, the sisters take MOTA to task for suggesting that “the new form of Mass as such caused the decline in faith practice (sic) over the past fifty years.” It is another article of faith among the post-Conciliar Rite’s defenders that this decline is in no way attributable to what Catholics were actually experiencing when they went to church, but rather to the secularization of society. I have never seen how this claim made any sense. “Post hoc ergo propter hoc” is a fallacy in logic; the fallacy lies in the “ergo”, but that doesn’t change the fact that causality moves forward in time.

Another suppressio veri: the Church’s authorities did not present the liturgical reform as if it would have no effect in halting the slide of Catholic societies into secularism. They presented it as if it were exactly what was needed to strengthen the faith of practicing Catholics, bring back those who had fallen away, and reconvert secularized Western man to Christ. And when that not only didn’t happen, but practicing Catholics began abandoning the Faith in droves, they assured their dwindling congregations that all was well, or soon would be. Only when it became too obvious to hide that all was not well did the official line change to, “Well, it’s all just too bad, but there was nothing to be done about it, because of secularism.”

At 3:03 begins a section of “the Bugnini myths”, and it is here that, after more suppressio veri, the sisters finally make their one and only genuinely serious criticism.

First, they attempt to downplay the importance of then-Monsignor Annibale Bugnini’s role as the gate-keeper and coordinator of the activities of the Consilium ad exsequendam. Yes, the Novus Ordo “is not a one-man production”, but it is a production in which the influence of that one man was not merely significant, but determinative. This fact is sufficiently well demonstrated by the memoires of Bugnini himself and of Fr Bouyer, among many others, as to require no further comment here.

They go on to say that the Consilium worked for four years, as if four years were not an outrageously short time in which to do a top-to-bottom radical reform of a liturgy into which the Church had poured some 15 centuries of wisdom and experience. They state that the Consilium worked in consultation with the bishops of the world, which is true as far as it goes, and say nothing about how little satisfied many bishops were with their work. But later on (11:02), they criticize MOTA for “not drawing our attention to the fact that the worst destruction of the Novus Ordo was done by priests and bishops formed in the years prior to the Council. Obviously there were flaws in their theological and liturgical formation…” The question is, of course, neither asked nor answered whether these flaws ALSO affected their consultation with the Consilium.

They say that the Consilium worked with the Congregation for Worship, without noting that that Congregation was completely sidelined, reduced by the Pope to rubber-stamping all its decisions. (Mons. Piero Marini, a colleague and admirer of Bugnini, documents this very well in his book “A Challenging Reform.”) And they say that they worked with the Pope, without mentioning Fr Bouyer’s well-known story of how Bugnini routinely deceived the Pope, or how the Pope himself did not bother to even look at their work in inventing a new lectionary.

Myth no. 2 touches the vexed question of Bugnini’s reputed Masonic affiliation. Here, I readily declare my agreement with Dom Alcuin Reid, who says in MOTA (54:30) that his work should be judged above all by its fruits. However, the sisters make a legitimate suggestio falsi when they asked why Paul VI then “promoted” him, rather than defrock or excommunicate him. To take a man who had been at the head of the liturgical reform for over a decade, someone with no diplomatic experience whatsoever, and make him nuncio to the tottering regime of the Shah of Iran, which has a Catholic population of less than 3 hundredths of a percent, is most unmistakably NOT a promotion. And of course, if they had done any research on Paul VI at all, the sisters would have known that if he had made such a grave mistake as to entrust such an important reform to a mason, he would never have admitted it by defrocking or excommunicating him.

Thus far, the suggestio falsi, but we also should not ignore the suppressio veri of the fact that, despite the supposed perfection and magnificence of their work, there has been suspiciously little celebration of ANY of the members of the Consilium since they finished it and went home lo these many years ago.

At 4:21, we come to the video’s one serious and substantive critique. Starting at 31:06, MOTA gives a quote famously but incorrectly imputed to Bugnini: “The road to union with our separated brethren – the protestants – is to remove every stone from the liturgy, every prayer from the Mass that could (even remotely) be an obstacle or difficulty.” (Osservatore Romano, March 19, 1965)

This should be given in a fuller form and translated as, “And yet, the love of souls and the desire to help (or ‘make easier’) in every way the road to union for the separated brethren, by removing every stone that could even remotely constitute an obstacle or source of difficulty, have driven the Church to make even these painful sacrifices.” And furthermore, this was said, not in reference to a general reform of the liturgy, but specifically, to the revision of one of the solemn orations of Good Friday.

A photograph of the relevant page of the Osservatore Romano, provided to Dr Kwasniewski by a reader, which is admittedly not easy to read, even when enlarged. The relevant article is titled “Ritocchi ad alcune preghiere...”, the third header on the left side of the page.

The video correctly notes that this is a very serious flaw in MOTA, one which should without question be corrected. I urge Mr O’Hearn and his team not only to do so as quickly as possible, but to formally acknowledge the mistake, which undermines the credibility of their otherwise excellent work.

However, as Dr Kwasniewski rightly pointed out to me, the statement is nevertheless a fair summary of the ethos of the reform as a whole. The reformers unquestionably saw their mission not as the restoration of the liturgy which the Council had asked for, but the remaking of it in their own image and likeness. Ferdinando Cardinal Antonelli, who was a member of the Consilium, and in principle very much in favor of reform, stated this outright in his memoirs. And furthermore, this remaking did unquestionably consist in the reformers identifying, each according to his own personal ideas, what in the liturgy constituted an “obstacle”, whether it be to the comprehension of the faithful, ecumenical progress, or some other hazily identified but unquestionably desirable goal, and taking it out. And this is why they took advantage of the highly imprudent ambiguity of Sacrosanctum Concilium’s statement that “elements which … , were added (to the liturgy) with but little advantage are now to be discarded”, and discarded any number of elements that are attested in every single pertinent liturgical book of the Roman Rite as far back as we have them.

From this point forward (5:50), the sisters’ video behaves very much like a badly outclassed prize-fighter who, having landed one very solid punch on his opponent, has completely exhausted himself. But as one begins, so must one go on, and go on it does, with a long string of half-truths which will be enumerated in the 2nd part of this article.

In Defense of Cluttered Calendars

A few weeks ago, on July 12th to be precise, I mentioned on Facebook that it was the feast, on the traditional Roman calendar, of St. John Gualbert, Abbot, with a commemoration of Saints Felix and Nabor, martyrs who were praised by St Ambrose and enshrined by him in Milan. I noted that the Collect for the commemoration of the latter is very interesting:

Praesta, quæsumus, Domine: ut, sicut nos sanctorum Martyrum tuorum Naboris et Felicis natalitia celebranda non deserunt; ita jugiter suffragiis comitentur. Per Dominum... [Grant, we beseech Thee, O Lord, that just as the celebration of the birth of Thy holy Martyrs Nabor and Felix never abandons us, so may they always accompany us by their prayers. Through our Lord…]

Nearly every time I post a comment in praise of a “lesser” saint’s feast on the traditional Roman calendar for the Mass, or publish a blog article along those lines, inevitably several comments arise: “We should get rid of a lot of these obscure or territorial saints and leave more room for more local or modern saints.” The ones who make these comments love the traditional liturgy, but they seem to agree with the rationale that led to the removal of over 300 saints from the general calendar in 1969.

I would like to suggest, in all kindness, that this gigantic overhaul was excessive, disproportionate, harmful, and uncharacteristic of liturgical history, which tends to prune rather than to purge, and which prefers to add more than to cut away. Yes, I’m quite aware that St. Pius V removed quite a few saints from the Roman calendar, but even his cuts could not compare with Paul VI’s — and besides, his successors pretty quickly began adding back ones that Pius had removed.

A university student once wrote the following note to me:

In my liturgy class, we discussed the calendar. What you wrote at Rorate about St. Felix of Valois — “Who is this obscure saint, and why is he cluttering our calendar?” — was the exact mindset the professor strove to pound into students’ minds that day. He described how over the centuries, “certain elements crept into the calendar” (his words), and these elements had clouded over the meaning of Sunday, plus many saints and feasts days held no meaning for us anymore and sometimes were mythological. But, he said, as if to clinch his point, “other popes have cleaned out the calendar before.”
         Thank you for being willing to defend the old calendar and its rich sanctoral cycle and prayers. Any time I’ve tried to defend the beauty of the traditional rites in class, the things I’ve pointed to have been declared “unnecessary for modern man.” Well, to that I respond, the Mass should not have changed for modern man; modern man should have changed for the Mass.

That’s what all the modern liturgists said and still say: “The calendar was too cluttered, it needed a lot of pruning.” I used to think so, too — until I got to know the traditional missal well, over years of daily Massgoing, and came to love the richly-encrusted cycle of saints, famous and obscure, ancient and modern, and how they crowd into certain clusters, sometimes even forming “octaves” of a sort.

My appreciation of the density of the old calendar grew still more when I began attending Mass with the Institute of Christ the King, whose clergy follow (somewhat inconsistently, but with growing conviction) a sanctoral calendar of circa 1948. In this calendar there are even more saints, and frequently double commemorations. I have to say: so far from seeming cluttered, it’s like a big Catholic family with kids all over the place, and everyone happy. The multiple orations enrich the liturgy’s prayerfulness and power, rather than detracting from a “simplicity” or “focus” conceived in rationalist terms. Anyone who knows great works of art knows that they achieve their cumulative effect through multiple simultaneous means, and that unity and coherence are not foreign to but actually reliant upon a carefully balanced harmony of many parts, including tiny and seemingly insignificant details. Multiplicity and complexity are not the problem; pointless multiplication and a random or confused complexity are the problem.

I am reminded of the insight of Martin Mosebach:

It was the new Western way of perceiving the “real” sacred act as narrowed down to the consecration that handed over the Mass to the planners’ clutches. But liturgy has this in common with art: within its sphere there is no distinction between the important and the unimportant. All parts of a painting by a master are of equal significance, none can be dispensed with. Just imagine, in regard to Raphael’s painting of St. Cecilia, wanting only to recognize the value of the face and hands, because they are “important,” while cutting off the musical instruments at her feet because they are “unimportant.” (Heresy of Formlessness, rev. ed., p. 185)

Doubtless, we cannot say of the details of the sanctoral cycle that all are of equal importance; this claim would be easier to sustain of the fixed Order of Mass. Nevertheless, we love our saints — especially that somewhat “arbitrary” group that our tradition, in its slow meandering, has put right in front of us in the missal. The combination of famous and obscure saints, and the concentration of martyrs and confessors of antiquity, is itself a resounding lesson: we do not pick and choose our saints at Mass to reflect our preoccupations or favoritisms; the saints pick us, as it were, by coming to us down through centuries of devotion. It is another expression of the “scandal of the particular” in which the very essence of Christianity consists. No matter how wonderful a more recent or more local saint may be, this quality, in and of itself, does not justify the suppression of another saint who has been liturgically venerated by countless Christians for many centuries.

The solution we should favor is to let saints pile up on a given day, but decide which one gets the Mass (so to speak) and which one gets the Commemoration. The main cause of the purge in 1969 was a positive dread of having more than one set of orations per Mass, since evidently Modern Man™ is too stupid to follow more than one thread at a time. How differently we think in the era of emails, texting, and social media.

And even if, as the liturgists say, calendric simplification has happened before in the history of the Roman Rite, was it necessary to do so between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s? Who was clamoring for it? The People of God? The parochial clergy? Truth be told, it was no one but the professional liturgists, lovers of “clear and distinct” Cartesian modernity, with its glassy, steely mien, as of hygienic instruments, silver aeroplanes, and whirring time-saving appliances. The resulting empty-headedness of Catholics regarding their own heroes is, needless to say, not caused exclusively or even primarily by the loss of a rich sanctoral cycle, but surely we cannot avoid seeing a connection.

Consider the following exchange between two art historians, Martin Gayford and Philippe de Montebello, in a book called Rendez-vous with Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2014):

MG: Some would say that putting a religious work in a museum removes its most crucial meaning. It wasn’t intended — or at least only intended — to be appreciated as a painting; it was made to be prayed before, to stand on an altar while a priest performed Mass.
         PdM: Well, the meanings are in danger of disappearing anyway. The modern public by and large no longer reads the Bible, no longer knows the stories represented in the pictures. The role of museums in re-educating people in sacred stories and doctrines is very large. One could almost make the case that museums fill a gap that the churches are increasingly leaving in teaching the lives of the saints, Christ, and the Virgin, plus the stories of the Old Testament. All of the pictures and sculptures in most museums carry a label briefly telling the story, something that you do not find in church. 

“The pictures and sculptures . . . carry a label briefly telling the story, something that you do not find in church.” Yet this is exactly what my St. Andrew’s Daily Missal (reprint of the 1948 edition) and countless other hand missals did and still do for the laity: they tell us something about every saint, and make them beloved companions of the journey.
 

Note that this banishment of the cultus of saints goes hand in hand with the ecumenical downplaying of all that is distinctive, the pseudo-purity of “focusing on Christ” when even He is pushed away from the closed circle, and the utter ineffectiveness of the verbal didacticism of reading so much Scripture. The people in the old days knew more about the saints and the stories of the Bible than modern believers, who are so much more “literate” and “educated.” However many causes there are of the stygian vacuity of the modern Catholic mind, we can say without hesitation that the traditional Roman liturgy emphasizes the saints vastly more than the modern liturgy does, and was capable, accordingly, of serving as a crucial pillar in a culture that saturated with the cultus of the Virgin and the saints. As Dom Guéranger writes in the general preface to The Liturgical Year:

In order that the divine type may the more easily be stamped upon us, we need examples; we want to see how our fellow-men have realized that type in themselves: and the liturgy fulfils this need for us, by offering us the practical teaching and the encouragement of our dear saints, who shine like stars in the firmament of the ecclesiastical year. By looking upon them we come to learn the way which leads to Jesus, just as Jesus is our Way which leads to the Father. But above all the saints, and brighter than them all, we have Mary, showing us, in her single person, the Mirror of Justice, in which is reflected all the sanctity possible in a pure creature.

I have to say, in passing, that the older Roman calendar reminds me much more of the Byzantine calendar, which expressly names saints in the liturgy practically  every day. Of course, it works differently because their daily liturgy is not nearly as shaped and “governed” by the saint as the Roman one is — there is no concept of a “Mass of a Virgin” or a “Mass of a Confessor” in the Divine Liturgy: it has a few special antiphons sprinkled throughout for the saint, and then the rest is generic. Still, the Eastern and Western traditions bear witness to the norm throughout Christian history until the Protestant revolt: “the more saints, the merrier.” The presence of saints on the calendar augmented the glory of Christ rather than detracting from Him, as indeed the original placement of the feast of Christ the King, right before the feast of All Saints, emphasized.

Twenty-five years of working under both Roman calendars, old and new, gave me a vivid experience of the truth of Louis Bouyer’s acerbic estimation of the reform:

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! (The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer, trans. John Pepino [Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2015], 222–23) 

To return, then, to our starting point, Saints Nabor and Felix. For many centuries the Church at prayer told her Lord that the birthday of these martyrs “never abandons us” and saw this recurring date as a promise that their intercession, too, would always be ours. Every time I encounter these “obscure” saints, I thank God for making them part of my life, for connecting me to the memory of their triumph and the power of their living intercession. Nor will this grand old calendar of saints ever cease to be followed within the Catholic Church, notwithstanding the feeble fulminations of faded flower-children.

A page from my 1838 Ordo from Baltimore

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 Memoirs of Fr Louis Bouyer Available Again

Quite a number of NLM readers were dismayed when it looked as if the new English translation of Bouyer's Memoirs had gone out of print. Happily, Amazon has the Memoirs back in stock again, ready for immediate delivery.

Apart from being a prime source of eye-witness information about how the liturgical reform was conducted (and, I assure you, the details are as unedifying as episodes from the lives of certain Renaissance princes of the Church), the Memoirs is, more importantly, a witty, engaging, and beautifully told story of a life spent in service of Christ and the Church. Now, more than ever, we need to learn from Bouyer and we need to emulate his virtues.

Link to product page.

Just Published: Fr Bouyer's Memoirs in English

This is momentous news indeed. Many have been waiting for this day and now it is here. Having read the manuscript, and knowing Bouyer's eminence as a theologian, observer, and writer, I can vouch for the importance of this book. It is one of the few publications about which one can simply say: just get it and read it. You are in for quite a treat (or maybe I should say, quite a ride). We have John Pepino to thank for a superb translation.

From the publisher, Angelico Press:

261 pages
$19.95 / £13.00
978-1-62138-142-6 (paper)

At Amazon.com
At Amazon.uk.co

LOUIS BOUYER was a major figure in the Church of the last century. These memoirs, which Bouyer wrote in a humble and humorous vein — though without withholding his notoriously sharp pen when needed — allow the reader to enter with him into the great events that shook the Church and the world during the era of upheavals and transformations through which he lived. They amount to an intelligent, sensitive, and pious man’s fascinating chronicle and deep reflection on Christianity’s life and travails in a world committed to modernity. Bouyer here tells us the full and varied story of a life devoted to the discovery of the sources and Tradition of the Church in doctrine, spirituality, liturgy, and scripture.

We follow Bouyer’s journeys from his inherited Protestantism to the fullness of the Catholic Faith, from his position as a Lutheran pastor to the priesthood in the Oratory of France, from humble parish life to the Olympian heights of his official theological and liturgical collaboration (and difficulties) before and after the Council with such influential figures as Congar, Daniélou, de Lubac, Bugnini, and … Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI). Bouyer paints the lush landscape of a century’s illusions and disenchantments; his memoirs are essential for understanding the history of the Church during that momentous time.

“It would be impossible for anyone to speak knowledgeably about liturgical developments in the past 50 years without being cognizant of the work done by Louis Bouyer. His Memoirs, which feature his outspoken opinions and profound intelligence as well as a personality deeply imbued with the true spirit of the Catholic liturgy, can serve as a balance and perhaps an antidote to misinformation about the post-Vatican II developments in the Sacred Liturgy of the Latin Rite. A careful perusal of these Memoirs, now available in English in an excellent translation by John Pepino, also can serve as a corrective to the sometimes unbridled and euphoric optimism that marked liturgical studies in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I cannot recommend strongly enough the reading and study of this work.”

— BISHOP (EMERITUS) FABIAN BRUSKEWITZ, Lincoln, NE

“While Father Louis Bouyer was a prolific author in many fields of theology, his most lasting legacy may well be his contribution to liturgical renewal, including his collaboration in the post-conciliar reform of the Roman rite. Bouyer is a sharp observer, and his retrospective is frank and at times caustic. Here is the authentic voice of a key witness to momentous developments in twentieth-century Catholicism. The publication of these important memoirs makes a real contribution to writing the history of the Church in our times.”

— FR. UWE MICHAEL LANG, Cong. Orat.; Heythrop College, University of London

“Louis Bouyer was, according to his former student Cardinal Lustiger, “the least conformist and yet among the most traditional” of theologians — a reality borne out in these memoirs, which reveal Bouyer sinking ever-deeper roots in Catholic tradition as well as his ever-present ability to look at matters with a fresh, critical eye. Expertly translated and edited with additional notes for English readers, The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer not only provides important historical details hitherto unpublished — particularly regarding the liturgical movement and post-conciliar reform—but also offers a lesson in the nature of living Catholic Tradition: one that Bouyer would insist that we learn, and learn well.”

— DOM ALCUIN REID, Monastère Saint-Benoît, La Garde-Freinet, France

“Louis Bouyer in his Memoirs gives us a gripping, witty, firsthand account of a world of variously amiable and offensive people, revolving around the immense intellectual fermentations, social upheavals, and spiritual battles that preceded and succeeded the Second Vatican Council. No one serious about the Church’s contemporary history and the fate of her tradition can afford to be unacquainted with this book.”

— PETER KWASNIEWSKI, Wyoming Catholic College

“In this work, Louis Bouyer describes the lectures of one of his teachers as dizzyingly brilliant, with unbridled asides coming fast and furious, leaving students enriched by his knowledge and broadened by his culture. The same could be said for these memoirs. My favorite ‘aside’ was Bouyer’s description of Annibale Bugnini as ‘a man as bereft of culture as he was of basic honesty.’ Bouyer’s paths crossed with all the great names in 20th-century theology. These pages read like a literary Who’s Who.”

— TRACEY ROWLAND, Dean of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute (Melbourne, Australia)

“The long-awaited English edition of the Memoirs of Fr. Louis Bouyer is now available thanks to Dr. John Pepino. The blunt French Oratorian theologian is both famous and little known, especially in his native country. Yet he was a reference for Joseph Ratzinger and for the founders of the review Communio, and his teachings have influenced many, particularly in the U.S. This work casts a new light on a major ‘shadow theologian’ before and after the Second Vatican Council. May the struggle of Louis Bouyer to spread the Gospel without sugar-coating it be an inspiration for the Church in this century.”

— LUC PERRIN, University of Strasbourg, France