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.”

“The Liturgy Has Been Dismantled”: Portland Archbishop Robert Dwyer’s Assessment in 1971

Robert Joseph Dwyer (1908-76)

Those who read the works of Michael Davies will come across quotations from a wide variety of sources, and will sometimes wonder just who these people are, and what their full views might be (since Davies, like any author, seldom quotes more than a few sentences). One such figure is the American Robert Joseph Dwyer (1908-76), who was the second bishop of Reno, Nevada from 1952-66 (and in this capacity participated in all four sessions of the Council), and the fifth Archbishop of Portland, Oregon from 1966 to 1974.

Dwyer was a prolific writer, as the fine collection recently published by Arouca Press, Ecclesiastes: The Book of Archbishop Robert Dwyer—A Selection of His Writings, edited by Albert J. Steiss, makes plain: we find articles on European history and American history, lives of major Catholic figures, a fairly detailed account of his time at the Council (deserving to be mined: see pages 131–206), apologetics on behalf of the Faith, critiques of liturgical reform, reflections on the fine arts, pastoral letters, and bagatelles. In fact, he’s like a quieter version of Archbishop Fulton Sheen.

Where he differs decisively from Sheen is in his increasingly outspoken critiques of the liturgical reform. The famous quotes are those shared by Michael Davies:

The great mistake of the Council Fathers was to allow the implementation of the Constitution to fall into the hands of men who were either unscrupulous or incompetent. This is the so-called Liturgical Establishment, a Sacred Cow which acts more like a white elephant as it tramples the shards of a shattered liturgy with ponderous abandon.

And:

Who dreamed on that day that within a few years, far less than a decade, the Latin past of the Church would be all but expunged, that it would be reduced to a memory fading into the middle distance? The thought of it would have horrified us, but it seemed so far beyond the realm of the possible as to be ridiculous. So we laughed it off.

Could a bishop really have written such things? Or might this be a case of mistaken attribution or misquotation?

For the first quotation, Davies cites The Tidings of July 9, 1971 (see Pope Paul’s New Mass [Kansas City, MO: Angelus Press, 2009], 651). For the second, he cites the Twin Circle, October 26, 1973 (see Liturgical Timebombs in Vatican II [Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 2003], 65). In order to hunt the original articles down, I did what any sensible person would do: I hired Sharon Kabel as my research assistant!

Sure enough, she located both articles, and since our searching online indicates that these have never been transcribed and made available, I took the time to type them out, while attaching the originals below. If only we had a few more bold bishops like this today! (And can you imagine the newspaper of the archdiocese of Los Angeles—or any Catholic diocesan newspaper—publishing something like this today?) A piece like this, from 1971, counts as good evidence that at least some public figures were willing to state the obvious: the Catholic liturgy had, in fact, been dismantled past recognition, and this was an evil deed. Moreover, this bishop’s presence at all four sessions of the Council makes his claims about what the Council Fathers intended—at least to the extent that any on-the-ground participant could know the mens patrum from conversations, meetings, and documents—credible.

In any case, enjoy the crisp and piquant style of the good archbishop.
 

(Click to enlarge)

The Liturgy Has Been Dismantled
Archbishop Robert Dwyer
The Tidings (Catholic Newspaper of Los Angeles)
July 9, 1971

In the remote caverns of memory the image flickers in the candlelight: Marius on the Ruins of Carthage. What somber text of Ancient History this was designed to illustrate we have long forgotten, but the figure of the Roman general, triumphant at last over the Punic power, contemplating the wreckage of war, meditating upon the Dead Sea fruits of victory, has never quite faded.

The other day the image was refreshed by a re-telling of the familiar jest at the expense of a gun-and-camera tourist: “Mrs. C. Humphrey Jones on the Ruins of Carthage (the ruins are to the left).”

But another image, alas, overlays that of the baffled conqueror in our contemporary illustration. It is that of Mother Church seated amid the ruins of the liturgy. No less disconsolate is she, no less sorrowfully pensive.

Some six years ago she had reached that point in her Renewal where it seemed beyond question or cavil that she could summon to her aid, in her monumental task of re-interpreting the Christian message to the modern world, all the services of liturgical art and drama, all the treasures of biblical science and patristic lore, all the riches of music and sacred literature, to enhance the supreme act of divine worship, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Surely that was the confident expectation of the Council Fathers when they hailed with overwhelming affirmation the Constitution on the Liturgy.

In the euphoria of that moment cankerous doubt and cantankerous misgivings were cavalierly set aside. All would be well, we assured ourselves, and all things would be well, as Blessed Juliana of Norwich had so calmly predicted. All that was needed was a touch of genius to muster all the arts of expression and exposition to achieve the perfect rendering of the liturgy in every language under the sun, and for every living culture known to man. We all devoutly made our act of faith in the immediate availability of that touch of genius.

Documents Insipid

Wherein, under the blessing of hindsight undoubtedly we made our first mistake. For there are times and seasons in man’s history, the history of his culture, when genius touches the liturgy, and times, alack, when it simply does not. It is as though the lines of communication, faithfully relaying its messages, were abruptly to be cut off.

It is not necessary, in our reading of the liturgical texts which have been foisted upon us, to suspect the poisoned pen of the heretic or the velvet glove covering the mailed fist of the Communist conspiracy working through the channels of the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship. It is enough to note that the touch of genius has so far absented itself from these documents which reach us with such monotonous regularity and insipidity, as to suggest a total substitution of dross for gold.

It was not so in ages past when Basil and John Chrysostom and Gregory formulated the texts and set the patterns for the prayer of the Church, East and West. It was not so when those unknown masters of rhythmic melody devised and developed the liturgical chant, the noblest music man has ever sung, nor was it so when the flowering of polyphony enriched the musical treasury of the liturgy with works of classic dignity and grace.

The Renaissance and Trent hardened the liturgy into molds perhaps too rigid and ungiving, but the authentic note of dignity and greatness was by no means wanting. With the Baroque the liturgy left the austere confines of the sanctuary to mingle with the multitudes crowding the nave and aisles, to undergo, at least in some aspects, a process of vulgarization, but however much the liturgy stood in need of refurbishing and reform as our day approached, it was still recognizable as an original work of religious genius. It was by no means a shambles.

The malady must be reported of the rendering of the liturgy into the vernacular. To focus exclusively here upon our English experience, it is commonly recognized that only once or twice in a millennium have we any right to expect a translator of such power as Thomas Cranmer. Whatever his other merits or demerits, he possessed the gift of noble expression and haunting phrase, so as to mold the language our forebears have spoken these 400 years and more. And while he had no Catholic rivals to contest his mastery, he set a standard to which they must needs approximate or publicly confess their inadequacy.

Liturgists Incompetent

And for the most part, those commissioned or inspired to render the liturgy into the vernacular for the English-speaking Catholic world had done a commendable if not a brilliant job. [1] Why their work, present and available, was ignored and set aside, and even spoken of with contumely by the current generation of Martin Mar-Texts [2] is a mystery beyond our ken.

The liturgy needed reform by 1965; there was no call for dismantling it. It was intended that the vernacular would enhance the Latin, not supplant it. It was not, emphatically, the mind of the Council Fathers to jettison Gregorian Chant, or to encourage the banal secularization of Church music, so as now to surpass in crudity the worst aberrations of the Howling Pentecostals.

It was anticipated that the liturgical texts, along with the Biblical readings for the Mass and the Divine Office, would be so translated as to reflect the beauty and suppleness of our tongue in the praise and worship of God. If any Council Father—for this we can vouch—leaving the aula of St. Peter’s on that day when the Constitution on the Liturgy was proclaimed, had seen in vision the liturgical calamities which have befallen us in this short span of time, it is conceivable that he would have had a heart attack, then and there.

The first mistake, then, was dependence upon the Dabitur Vobis [3], a brash confidence that the touch of genius would not be lacking. The second, in uncomfortably close alliance, was to allow the interpretation and implementation of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy to fall into the hands of men who were either unscrupulous or incompetent. This is the so-called “Liturgical Establishment,” a Sacred Cow which acts more like a White Elephant as it tramples the shards of a shattered liturgy with ponderous abandon. [4]

The third mistake, fully as destructive as either of the foregoing, was the genial supposition that widespread “experimentation” could be sanctioned, with any hope of holding the line thereafter. This is not to condemn experimentation; it is useful and necessary from time to time, under certain controlled circumstances.

But the broad permissiveness granted or even encouraged by the Sacred Congregation and by various Episcopal Conference committees, has led to what must be described, without exaggeration, as a state of chaos. Everyman is now his own liturgist, just as he is his own pope; the Parish Liturgical Commission, made up, for the most part, of good and well-meaning folk whose liturgical competence is on the kindergarten level, legislates for all the world as though it were the Sacred Congregation itself. Or perhaps, what is by no means unthinkable, with far greater assurance and authority.

How long, do you suppose, will it take for another Hercules to clean up these Augean Stables?

Next week, we will publish the transcription of His Exellency’s 1973 article. 

NOTES

[1] Dwyer is referring here to the first translations from the 1960s, which were all replaced by the tawdry claptrap of ICEL when the Novus Ordo was rolled out. He may also be referring to the many translations that existed in hand missals for many decades prior to the Council.

[2] This seems to be a reference to “Martin Mar-prelate,” “the name used by the anonymous author or authors of the seven Marprelate tracts that circulated illegally in England in the years 1588 and 1589. Their principal focus was an attack on the episcopacy of the Anglican Church” (source).

[3] See Luke 11, 9: “Petite, et dabitur vobis” (Ask, and it shall be given).

[4] This is the paragraph quoted by Davies, with some minor differences that do not alter the meaning.

A young Dwyer holding a model of a church (backstory unknown)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another fellow chimed in:

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

The first person replied:

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

A third person chimed in:

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

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

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

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

A reader of OnePeterFive wrote to the editor:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Discussion on Liturgical Reform in 1980

Via a blog called Ex Laodicea, I recently stumbled across this fascinating episode of the program Firing Line, broadcast on April 22, 1980. The occasion for this discussion between the host, William F. Buckley, Michael Davies, and Fr (later Monsignor) Joseph Champlin, a priest of the Diocese of Syracuse, New York, is 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.

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 just recently 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 few 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 Michael 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. We recently passed the anniversary of Michael Davies’ death, which happened on September 25, 2004, and it really does behoove us to remember the heroic efforts which he made as a writer and speaker in defense of the traditional liturgy. Especially noteworthy here is the exchange which begins at 18:30, in which he 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. At the time, men like Davies and Fr Bouyer who spoke against the many scholarly errors that were incorporated into the reform were almost universally dismissed as cranks and ignored; today, no less a person than the Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship publicly recognizes that ad orientem worship is preferable, and the historical custom of the Church.

3. Davies also speaks (starting at 28:10) of an aspect of his work which I either never heard of before, or forgot if I did, an 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.”

The Liturgist Manifesto

By now, most of our readers have probably already seen or read about the article on the website of The Guardian, in which the actor Bill Murray commented on the post-Conciliar liturgical changes.

One new saint he does approve of is Pope John XXIII (who died in 1963). “I’ll buy that one, he’s my guy; an extraordinary joyous Florentine who changed the order. I’m not sure all those changes were right. I tend to disagree with what they call the new mass. I think we lost something by losing the Latin. Now if you go to a Catholic mass even just in Harlem it can be in Spanish, it can be in Ethiopian, it can be in any number of languages. The shape of it, the pictures, are the same but the words aren’t the same.”

Isn’t it good for people to understand it? “I guess,” he says, shaking his head. “But there’s a vibration to those words. If you’ve been in the business long enough you know what they mean anyway. And I really miss the music – the power of it, y’know? Yikes! Sacred music has an effect on your brain.” Instead, he says, we get “folk songs … top 40 stuff … oh, brother….”

As a side note, St John XXIII was actually from a small village in Lombardy called “Under-the-Mountain (Sotto il Monte)”, near Bergamo; and, as we all know very well, he promulgated Veterum Sapientia, but not one of the documents of Vatican II. It is one of the saddest testimonies to the legacy of Pope Paul VI that so many people “remember” John XXIII as the architect of changes he would never have countenanced, like celebrating Mass entirely in the vernacular. A few years ago, Italian television broadcast a docudrama about Paul VI. (In Italian, a docudrama is called, without any deliberate irony, “un fiction.”) The actor who played him, Fabrizio Gifuni, noted in an interview that,

If you go around the area of St Peter’s Basilica, you will see souvenir shops overflowing with postcards of John XXIII, John Paul I and John Paul II. But you will not find one, not a single one, of Paul VI… This is surprising, when you consider that (he) guided the Church for fifteen years, from 1963 to 1978, perhaps the most critical in its recent history.

While looking through the reportage on the Bill Murray article, I stumbled across some comments made by another fellow named Murray, on changes to the liturgy made even before the Council ended. In a letter to the Tablet published on March 14, 1964, Dom Gregory Murray, O.S.B., of Downside Abbey in England, wrote:

The plea that the laity as a body do not want liturgical change, whether in rite or in language, is, I submit, quite beside the point. … (it is) not a question of what people want; it is a question of what is good for them.

Michael Davies quotes this in his book “Liturgical Time Bombs in Vatican II”, and rightly observes that it reflects the same mentality as that of the Soviet Communist Party. Just as the Party “ ‘interpreted the will of the people,’ so the ‘experts’ interpret the wishes of the laity,” and were willing to inflict any amount of suffering on them to make them accept what they, the experts, had determined was for the people’s good. And so I find myself reminded of two stories from those troubled days.

The first was something which my mother and grandmother told me many times about the first Mass celebrated in English in their home parish in White Plains, New York. Most of the congregation left the church in tears, an episode which disturbed my mother greatly, and which my grandmother, who hated to hear any criticism against the Church, preferred not to comment on. Like many Catholics who grew up before the Council, they were both quietly but decidedly indignant at the idea, so common afterwards, that they must have been ignorant of the Mass because it was in Latin, a righteous and proper indignation which I have encountered in a great many other people since. A former colleague once told me something in a similar vein about her Catholic grammar school: “We all had our missals in Latin and English, and those sisters made darn sure that we knew how to use them!”

The second concerns this commemorative plaque from the church of All Saints in Rome,

which reads in part:

His Holiness Paul VI, as the liturgical reform decreed by the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council was beginning, was pleased to celebrate in this church the first Mass in Italian, amid the excited exultation of an entire people…

A Roman friend of mine explained to me this is actually the third version of this plaque, because, in fact, not quite all of the people were excitedly exulting about Mass in the vernacular. After the first two plaques were badly vandalized, the third was placed well out of reach, and above a statue that no one would dare climb on. (The current plaque seems however to have a stain on it, of unknown origin, not visible in the photograph.)

No intelligent person would seriously defend the claim that all Catholic liturgical practice before 1962 was always and everywhere ideal. In the 1950s, my father’s parish had ten or more Masses every Sunday between the upper church and the crypt; the only one with music was the last one in the upper church, which he described as “the one nobody went to.” To me, this is simply unimaginable, (perhaps the choir just wasn’t very good), but the preference for low Mass and the dislike of high Mass was undeniably real in many quarters. But far too many of those who (rightly, in my judgment) saw this as a problem, chose to remedy it, not with patience and charity, not by educating the faithful to a greater love of and appreciation for sacred music. They chose rather to force upon them “what was good for them”: bad but easily singable music, and a vernacular version of the Mass as ugly as it was inept.

For those who wish to remedy these failures, and give back to Mr Murray, and countless others like him, something of what they loved and lost, it is hard not to sympathize with Dom Gregory, and just impose necessary reforms immediately. In many cases, this can be done and should be done. Most parishes could probably ban some of the more truly awful hymns, for example, without anyone noticing or caring. Likewise, it is hard to imagine that when the long-overdue ban on the use of the NAB finally comes, we will see resistance and protest comparable to that seen among some Protestants over the use of any Bible other than the King James.

On the other hand, as the great Martin Mosebach recently wrote, we have to a very large degree “lost our liturgical innocence” in the Latin Church. We can no longer simply accept the liturgy as a thing that is what it is, as Mr Murray and my parents did when they were children; we are constrained by our circumstances to treat the liturgy as a thing which we collectively make, more than a thing that makes us. And this means that every Catholic has opinions about liturgy, of a sort which it would have never occurred to ordinary people like my parents to have before the reform. I have known priests who would, of their own initiative, correct some of the more grotesque errors of the old English translation of the Mass, before they were officially corrected; conversely, I have met laypeople who passionately defend some of those same errors afterwards.

Every effort to drive out bad liturgical practice with good will probably encounter some resistance; if it is to be a truly Christian reform, resistance must be overcome with patience and charity, but also with fortitude and courage. Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska, has recently given the Church an excellent example of this, by having Masses in his cathedral celebrated ad orientem on the Sundays of Advent, and the midnight Mass of Christmas. Other churches in the diocese may do the same, but are not ordered to. God willing, examples like this and proper catechesis will steer us to the day where no Catholic ever thinks that the priest is “turning his back on the people.” And God willing, by following such a model, the liturgy can be reformed without reproducing the tragic experience of the 1960s.