Are We Justified in Calling Paul VI’s Creation the “Novus Ordo [Missae]”?

Those who spend time in liturgical discussions are guaranteed to encounter at some point the following objection: “You shouldn’t be speaking of the ‘Novus Ordo’ or the ‘Novus Ordo Mass.’ This isn’t what it’s called. That’s a traditionalist label — a way of attacking the reformed missal of Pope St. Paul VI,” etc.

This matter deserves a closer look.

While “Novus Ordo [Missae]” is not a typical way in which the Vatican itself, post-1969, has preferred to denominate the Order of Mass created by the Consilium and promulgated by Paul VI on April 3, 1969, it is nevertheless a phrase found in a couple of official documents and does not seem to have ruffled feathers until later on.

The first thing to establish is that Paul VI constantly attached the word “new” to his ongoing liturgical reforms of the 1960s. For example, in his general audience of March 7, 1965, he spoke of a “new order [of worship],” a “new scheme of things,” “new liturgical books,” “new form,” “new liturgy,” “new habit,” and “liturgical innovation” — and all this, about changes far less drastic than those he would promulgate four years later. A fortiori, the application of novus to the missal of 1969 is entirely justified on the basis of its own promulgator’s habits of speech.

Let us not forget that many things people today would assume must have entered with the Novus Ordo in 1969 were already around prior to it, as the traditional liturgy was progressively dismantled in the 1950s and 1960s: turning the priest toward the people, which first happened with Pius XII’s lamentable Palm Sunday service; having the people say the Lord’s Prayer at the liturgy together with the priest, something never done in the Roman tradition prior to Pius XII’s new Good Friday; praying the Mass in the vernacular, which came in here and there experimentally; dropping the prayers at the foot of the altar and the last Gospel, a cropping that happened in 1965; bringing in new ad experimentum lectionaries; the admission of multiple Eucharistic Prayers; the discarding of some liturgical vestments; and so forth.

Coming nearer to our topic: in the general audience of November 19, 1969, which attempted to explain why a new missal was to be imposed, Paul VI — this time with much greater justice — referred to “a new rite of Mass” (four times), “a new spirit,” “new directions,” “new rules,” “innovation.” In the general audience one week later, he mentioned “the liturgical innovation of the new rite of the Mass” and mentioned the “new rite” seven times; he used words like “new,” “newness,” “renewal,” “innovation,” “novelty,” a total of 18 times. I comment in detail on these two general audiences in chapter 4 of my new book from TAN, The Once and Future Roman Rite: Returning to the Latin Liturgical Tradition after Seventy Years of Exile. [1]

Interestingly, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, one of the highest ranking Vatican prelates (in spite of the enormous hatred directed at him by the anti-Roman faction at the Council) and for a long time the head of the Holy Office, used the phrase “Novus Ordo Missae” 18 times in the famous “Ottaviani Intervention” of September 25, 1969 — more properly entitled Short Critical Study of the New Order of Mass — co-signed with Cardinal Antonio Bacci and submitted to Paul VI. [2] He employs the expression as if it is quite obvious, familiar, and unobjectionable, and to my knowledge no one at the time disputed the appropriateness of it, even though much else in the critical study was the subject of hot debate.

To my knowledge, the first time the expression “Novus Ordo Missae” shows up in a papal magisterial document is in an address delivered by Paul VI (text here) at a consistory for the appointment of twenty cardinals on May 24, 1976. In this address he uses the expression novus Ordo [Missae]: “usus novi Ordinis Missae” and “novus Ordo promulgatus est” (“the use of the new Order of Mass”; “the new Order has been promulgated”). [3]

In April of 2010, the Office for the Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff placed a short document on the Vatican website entitled “The Priest in the Concluding Rites of the Mass.” Surprisingly, although the text is redolent of Benedict XVI and the reign of his MC Guido Marini, and although it refers plentifully to “ordinary” and “extraordinary” forms, it still remains on the Vatican website (here). This document refers to the “Novus Ordo” (tout court) and the “Vetus” [Ordo], albeit using scare quotes for the latter term.

All of the foregoing was known to me prior to discovering an article at Pray Tell by Max Johnson dated January 14, 2010: “From Where Comes ‘Novus Ordo’?” (Would that Pray Tell had opted for the more eloquent title “Whence Cometh ‘Novus Ordo’?,” but the spirit of Comme le Prévoit has long prevailed in those quarters.) As one would expect, the article complains that the phrase has become weaponized by traditionalists into a “title” for the Mass instead of being a simple passing description, like saying “new hymnal” or “shiny new book,” that has no substantive (theological) meaning. This view would seem to be difficult to sustain in light of Paul VI’s veritable paean to innovation in the 1969 audiences mentioned above. The changes made to the Mass are not merely incidental or superficial, like a new typeface or a new binding for a missal, but cut into the bone and marrow of the rite.

The conclusion I reach is, understandably, quite different from Pray Tell’s. I think it is fair to call the Consilium’s fabrication “novus,” which means both novel and strange. Whatever is it, it is most definitely not the Roman rite, as I demonstrate on multiple grounds in The Once and Future Roman Rite. The relentless traditionalist critique has indeed made of “Novus Ordo [Missae]” a pejorative term — and that is no worse than it deserves.

NOTES

[1] That chapter itself is a revised and expanded version of a lecture whose text may be found here.

[2] Text available at EWTN here; for more on its history, see here.

[3] A note about terminology. Nowadays the phrase “Novus Ordo” has been extended to mean virtually the same thing as “the reformed liturgical rites.” Thus, one will hear people speak of the “Novus Ordo baptism,” “Novus Ordo breviary,” and the like. Although we readily understand what is meant, it would be more accurate to say the “new rite of baptism,” the “new liturgy of the hours,” and so forth, since “Novus Ordo” is just an abbreviated form of “Novus Ordo Missae”: it is specifically about the order of Mass followed in the offering of the Eucharist. However, one may justifiably refer to the “Novus Ordo lectionary” and “Novus Ordo calendar” because of how closely associated they are with the liturgical books for the Mass.

The Chop-Chop Reform and the Mass of the Ages

An altar missal ca. mid-1960s, hand-edited to reflect mandated changes

About two years ago, I was paging through my Liber, and as I looked again at the Order of Mass at the front, I thought: “Wouldn’t it be interesting... eye-opening... to make a photocopy of this Ordo Missae, and then strike out, in different colors, the things that were removed or changed or made optional by the Novus Ordo.” So I made the copy, and got out the highlighters... and then promptly lost the pages in a big pile of paper (that’s the way it goes in my office).

Fast-forward to Mass of the Ages Episode 2 (which was yanked off of YouTube by YouTube’s overlords at close to 1.8 million views because of an unjust copyright-strike from Sony, but which may now be viewed via the Mass of the Ages website here). The moment I saw, a few months before its release, a prototype of the now-famous animation sequence, I realized: “They have done it: they have succeeded in showing how much was changed, and how radically.” Most of you know by now the one-minute segment of the episode that I’m talking about. Here it is as a video clip posted at my YouTube page (with permission of MotA):

 

I’m convinced that, as the number of total views now surpasses 2 million (with the number of individuals affected being actually higher than that, since the movie-watching often takes place with families or groups of friends), this episode and its unforgettable lessons will transform mentalities and pull down idols from their high places. Even tendentious critiques of MotA 2 will not be able to stop the momentum and the effects.

(It goes without saying that this animation sequence shows only the heart of the iceberg, focusing on the fixed Order of Mass; it does not show the equally great or greater deformations that were visited upon the changing parts of the Mass, that is, the orations, antiphons, and readings. When one realizes that the entire reform — that is, of the missal in all its parts, of every other sacramental rite, of the pontifical rites, of all sacramentals, and of the breviary — shared the same character and that such animation sequences could be produced for all of them, one is perhaps for the first time in a position not only to know cognitively but to feel viscerally the magnitude of the revolution.)

A friend was telling me that his parents for a long time wondered “what’s the big deal, why are so many young people going back to the Latin Mass.” He then asked them to watch episode 2 with him. They were deeply moved by it, not to say disturbed and troubled, and felt a new openness to the old liturgy. For some, watching it confirmed what they already suspected or dimly understood; for others, it opened up a whole new way of seeing the past sixty years. For everyone it has underlined the abject failure of the 1960s reform to obey explicit provisions of the Council and, most of all, to respect tradition as the Council Fathers pledged to do and as the pope is bound by office to do.

There is nothing, nothing, the Vatican can do that will overcome the effect of the truth finally getting out in the central information/entertainment medium of our time, namely, online video. (As a writer, I’m not terribly happy that this is our society’s main medium, but in this case we can see the copious benefits Divine Providence has arranged to draw from it.)

Sure, the opponents of the Western liturgical heritage can thunder and fulminate, call names and wag fingers, ghettoize and demonize, cancel and suppress—they can try all of that, as their forebears did decades ago after the Council, and often with the same tactics. Yet they will ultimately fail, because those of us who hold on to the traditional Roman liturgy (and with it, the traditional Catholic Faith in toto) do so as a matter of principle, not as a pragmatic “take it or leave it” affair, and there are more of us all the time — far, far more than there were in the dark days of the 1970s. Moreover, our human enemies are much less diplomatic and guarded about their intentions; they have made no attempt to hide their modernist agenda. They have made it easy for us to see through their specious reasons and disdain their illicit acts.

Just recently when organizing my office papers, I happened to stumble across the aforementioned pages photocopied from my Liber and decided to post them here. What you are seeing is the fixed or unchanging parts of Mass, not the Propers (which were also, for all intents and purposes, abolished in the reform). Black means the text was removed altogether. Blue means this text was rewritten. Orange means this text is optional but typically unused.

One benefit of seeing the Ordo Missae laid out like this over seven dense pages is that it shows just how simple and brief the traditional Roman Rite of Mass actually is, compared (say) with the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, which would cover at least twice, maybe three times the number of pages. Our authoritative and venerable Roman Rite is already concise and sparse compared with all other Eucharistic rites of tradition.

It is therefore impossible to believe — rationally and with good will — that it needed to be further simplified, abbreviated, or cleared of redundancies and accretions; and the experience of priests and laity today who become familiar with it by a humble and trustful disposition can bear out the ascetical-mystical value of every one of its existing elements, from the prayers at the foot of the altar all the way to the genuflection in the last Gospel. The brutal amputations of the Novus Ordo are born of rationalistic prejudice, impatience with cultic prayer, and a grossly utilitarian activism that thinks it has something better to do than the opus Dei and would, if it could get away with it, simply replace the Mass with a communion service — preferably one in which a female is distributing the host, wearing a rainbow-colored stole.

Round-up of Articles on the 50th Anniversary of the Mass of Paul VI

Adriaen Ysenbrandt (active 1510-1551), Mass of St Gregory

In Book IV of his Dialogues, Pope St. Gregory the Great, to whom the final redaction of the Roman Canon is attributed — after which it remained virtually unchanged until 1962, when Pope John XXIII had the name of St Joseph inserted into it — stirringly says:

For, who of the faithful can have any doubt that at the moment of the immolation, at the sound of the priest’s voice, the heavens stand open and choirs of angels are present at the mystery of Jesus Christ? There at the altar the lowliest is united with the most sublime, earth is joined to heaven, the visible and invisible somehow merge into one. [1]

He asks if any of the faithful can have any doubt that an immolation is occurring; that, at the sound of the priest uttering the words of consecration, the heavens are opened and angels are present at a mystery; that the altar unites earth to heaven in the supreme atoning sacrifice. This is language redolent of the Roman Canon and the traditional Roman rite in its totality; it is language that equally describes all the authentic liturgies of East and West, in both theory and praxis.

Sadly, as poll after poll has shown, it would seem that today, fifty years after the mandatory implementation of the reformed liturgy, one would have to rephrase this question: Who among the faithful any longer believes or experiences that any of this is happening? Who among them has ever heard of it? Who can see it or hear it in the manner in which divine worship takes place? Ironically, though not at all surprisingly, it is the faithful attached to the traditional Latin Mass who encounter the mystery he describes.

On October 28, I published at NLM an article entitled “Why Is the Liturgical Establishment Not Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Novus Ordo?,” which inquired into possible reasons for the deafening silence about this golden anniversary from the quarters and parties who would be most expected to blow the trumpet in the new moon. Admittedly, though, it was late October, and the actual anniversary would not be until a month later — November 30th, to be precise. There was yet time.

That day has come and gone. Ardent partisans of the post-Conciliar reform, represented in the United States by PrayTell, have remained stone silent. I think they know better than to expose themselves to ridicule and refutation. Defenders of the Catholic liturgical tradition, meanwhile, have been boisterous and ebullient.

Most interestingly, there have been a few attempts to defend a via media, reminiscent of Newman’s prior to 1845; one has the impression that they, like him, are fighting a rearguard action, firing off a few stray shots as they run for cover.

There were, so far as I could tell, three major conservative pieces in English to mark the anniversary. Two were published back-to-back by the National Catholic Register: Fr Roger Landry’s “Celebrating the Novus Ordo as It Ought to Be” and Joseph O’Brien’s “The Mass of Paul VI at 50: Marking the Golden Jubilee of the New Order.” George Weigel’s “The Reformed Liturgy, 50 Years Later” appeared at First Things online. [2]

Fr Landry’s article is a remarkable study in innocence. The very title of his article contains an insoluble conundrum, since there is no single way that the Novus Ordo ought to be celebrated; it is open to literally thousands of realizations based on the local choices of different combinations of its modules, musical options, and inculturated adaptations. Moreover, the author apparently does not realize that Pope Paul VI from 1965 to 1969 and beyond expressly excluded a traditional style of Novus Ordo Mass (in Latin, with chant, ad orientem, etc.) as foreign to the entire project and purpose of the reform, even as the Consilium had ignored the vote of no confidence in the Missa Normativa at the 1967 Synod of Bishops. There never was any intention whatsoever to keep continuity with liturgical tradition in the actual content of the new liturgical books or in their roll-out and subsequent curial administration; yet even when so-called traditional options are chosen, they remain neither more nor less than the particular realization chosen by this priest or this worshiping community.

Those who study the records closely can readily see the incoherence in attempting to defend an amorphous and voluntaristic missal as the basis of a stable, dignified, and truly unifying liturgical life, but we are up against a triple obstacle in 2019: a profound ignorance compounded by five decades of distance; a tremendous atmosphere of indifference; and a well-intentioned but harmful indulgence in wishful thinking on the part of those who would reconnect severed limbs with adhesive bandages. Further rebuttal of Landry is hardly necessary, since, if one has the courage to open the Register comments section, one finds there a bloodbath of Napoleonic magnitude.

O’Brien’s article is more even-handed, citing in good journalistic fashion various opinions about the motives and outcomes of the reform. It still suffers from an attempt to put a good face on a revolution in Catholic worship that remains profoundly troubling and troublesome. The very title of this article is to me more revealing than anything else in it: The Mass of Paul VI. Never before 1969 had it been possible to say The Mass of (so-and-so). Not even Pius V contributed so much to the Missale Romanum that his 1570 edition could reasonably be called The Mass of Pius V. It was the Mass of the Roman Curia, the Mass of St. Damasus, St. Gelasius, St. Gregory I, Hadrian, St. Gregory VII, Innocent III, Gregory IX, and on and on — the Mass of all of them, and of none of them. [3]

Weigel’s article is . . . classic recent Weigel: brief, insubstantial, and inconsequential, with an obligatory memorial of his latest book, and an optional memorial of his favorite Ordinary Form parish, where, thanks to the wonders of the internet, one can view, from thousands of miles away in the comfort of one’s own home, one of the few places on planet Earth where the Novus Ordo is “done well,” i.e., mostly not according to the wishes of Paul VI, but with a house blend of Tridentinisms and novelties.

What is perhaps most telling is that none of these authors is capable of yielding to unqualified praise for the Novus Ordo. Positive statements are hedged about with qualifications, if-onlys, regrets, and desiderata. One is left with the impression that we are celebrating an anniversary not so much of something that exists as of something that failed to exist, or exists only in embryonic form, stalled in its gestation by hostile environmental forces. Meanwhile, the classical Roman Rite lives on, in its fully-matured form, offered according to ironclad rubrics that protect it from diminution, arbitrariness, and groupthink. [4]

New priests ordained for the old Mass: a sign of things to come

Why do traditional Catholics reject the Novus Ordo? This was the question I attempted to answer in my recent (November 13) Minneapolis lecture, the full text of which was published on November 29 at Rorate Caeli: “Beyond ‘Smells and Bells’: Why We Need the Objective Content of the Usus Antiquior.” Here is a synopsis:

I argue that the Novus Ordo Missae constitutes a rupture with fundamental elements of all liturgies of apostolic derivation, and that, as a consequence, it violates the Church’s solemn obligation to receive, cherish, guard, and pass on the fruits of liturgical development. Since this development is, in fact, a major way in which the Holy Spirit leads the Church “into the fullness of truth” over the ages, as Christ promised, so great a “sin against the Holy Spirit” cannot fail to have enormous negative consequences, as the past five decades have verified. Nor is it possible to bridge the abyss between old and new by applying cosmetics or the drapery of elegant clothing, because the problem is on the order of a genetic mutation, or damage to internal organs. The profound and permanent solution is to maintain continuity with the living liturgical tradition found in the usus antiquior.

(The audio of the lecture may be found either at YouTube or at SoundCloud.)

I consider this lecture my best effort to date in identifying the exact nature of the rupture between the preceding liturgical tradition (Eastern and Western) and the modern papal rite of Paul VI, as well as the magnitude of theological and spiritual loss inflicted on the Church by it.

Rorate contributor Ken Wolfe published a short and sweet Op Ed in the New York Daily News, also posted at Rorate. At his blog, Fr. Z shares a number of podcasts anent the anniversary.

One wonders where we will be in another 50 years’ time, at the platinum jubilee. The first golden anniversary already hints at a probable outcome. There will be even fewer articles from the ardent supporters of the reform, since, according to the cutting-edge Vatican mathematics that gave us 2 + 2 = 5, zero is less than zero; and there may not even be any ROTR-style articles, after the virtual schism between the neo-modernism of the conciliar epoch and the traditionalism of the preconciliar epoch will have become an outright parting of the ways, as it is bound to do — as, indeed, we see already happening.

NOTES

[1] Gregory I, Dialogi 4,60,3 (SC 265, 202); Dialogues, trans. by O.J. Zimmerman (New York, NY: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1959), 273.

[2] We might consider Rusty Reno’s eloquent explanation of his preference for the TLM in his December 2019 editorial as a kind of commemoration, though he doesn’t bill it as such: see the section entitled “Et Cum Spiritu Tuo.” Dr. Joseph Shaw has already gently refuted Reno’s characterization of the strengths and weaknesses of the two “forms” in a pair of articles at Rorate: part 1 and part 2.

[3] In point of fact, the Roman Rite, although sometimes called “the rite of St. Gregory the Great,” is almost unique among major historical liturgies in that it did not traditionally circulate under the name of one of its creators, unlike the liturgy of St John Chrysostom, St Basil, St James, etc., but solely on the authority of the Roman Church. Even terms like “Gelasian” and “Gregorian” sacramentary are from modern scholars.

[4] NOTE ADDED ON DEC. 12: I agree with a commentator below that my claim in this sentence is somewhat exaggerated. Certainly, in comparison with the amorphousness of the Novus Ordo, which no one seems to be able to control, even the Roman rite as of 1962 looks mature, ironclad, and well-protected by its own rubrics. But it is true that the fully-matured form of the Roman rite is that which we find before the major tinkeritis of the 20th century begins (Pius X in regard to the psalm cursus, Pius XII in regard to Holy Week, vigils, octaves, and vestments), and that in order to recover it in its undiminished form, untouched by groupthink, we will need to settle in the future on the 1920 missal in its ca. 1948 status. I have discussed this point more here and intend to return to this important question in future.

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s website for articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press (e.g., Newman, Benson, Scheeben, Parsch, Guardini, Chaignon, Leen, Roguet, Croegaert), his SoundCloud for lectures and interviews, and his YouTube channel for talks and sacred music.