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.

Lessons from the Sixties: Selective Synodality and Princely Protests

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

The Ottaviani Intervention

Clemens V. Oldendorf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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

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

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

Surprising Convergences between an Anti-Catholic Textbook and the Liturgical Reform

Luther points the way?

The claim that the liturgical reform under Paul VI was “Protestant” or “Protestantizing” is one that is both frequently made by its critics and strenuously resisted by its defenders. To some traditionalists, it is enough to point to the presence of Protestant observers at the Consilium; others find support in the striking admission of the pope’s close friend Jean Guitton, a well-respected philosopher, who stated:

The intention of Pope Paul VI with regard to what is commonly called the Mass, was to reform the Catholic liturgy in such a way that it should almost coincide with the Protestant liturgy… There was with Pope Paul VI an ecumenical intention to remove, or at least to correct, or to relax, what was too Catholic, in the traditional sense, in the Mass and, I repeat, to get the Catholic Mass closer to the Calvinist service.

But as Yves Chiron notes in his biography of Bugnini, the observers at the Consilium played a fairly minor role, taking the limelight only during discussions of the expanded lectionary; and one should not accept without scrutiny a man’s interpretation of his friend’s motives.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to deny the basic agreement between the historical vision of the liturgical reformers and that of the Protestant Reformers. Both regarded the post-Constantinian history of the Catholic Church as one of progressive darkening and pagan relapsation, a deviation from the pure, simple, authentic springtime of the early Christians who met in homes to “break bread” and remember Jesus, the wonder-working carpenter from Nazareth. This deviation reached its nadir in the Middle Ages, which then transmitted a superstitious cult to succeeding centuries, embellished along the way by the courtliness of the Baroque, until the clericalist dumb-show known as the Tridentine Mass achieved its frozen perfection. The fiery breath of the Pentecostal spirit melted this paradigm and replaced it with forms of worship more in tune with the living faith of Christians: first in the Reformation, then, much later, in the period of Vatican II and the sweeping reforms it ushered in.

There is practically no mainstream book on liturgy from about 1965 to about 1985 that does not express something like this viewpoint, with varying degrees of mockery for the past and confidence for the future of vernacular, accessible, lay-inclusive worship. It simply becomes the unquestioned summary of where the Church has been and where she is going.

Now, this is a Protestant account if ever there was one. A friend pointed out to me the following passage from a popular Protestant homeschooling textbook, World History and Cultures in Christian Perspective, published by Abeka:

The pagans who flooded the imperial church [after the Edict of Milan] inundated it with heathen beliefs, practices, and traditions. Public worship was described by Justin Martyr in the second century as a simple meeting of believers on the Lord’s Day to hear the Scriptures read and explained along with the singing of hymns, the offering of prayers, the celebrating of the Lord’s Supper, and the receiving of gifts.
       The influence of paganism began to change the worship service into elaborate rites and ceremonies with all the trappings of heathen temple worship. The presbyters now became sacerdotes who offered up the Lord’s body and blood as a sacrifice for the living and dead. Little by little, these errors and distortions grew and developed into the false teachings and practices of the medieval church. … Some devout followers even purchased and worshipped relics.…
       The demands of their religion led the people to regard Christ as a stern and merciless Judge rather than a compassionate and loving Savior. They sought to placate the Son’s wrath against their sins by praying to His mother, the Virgin Mary, and seeking her intercession. Because even Mary sometimes seemed unapproachable, they also prayed to the long-departed apostles and other saints (deceased Christians officially recognized by the Church as holy because of martyrdom, miracles, or other merits). But the Bible clearly teaches that there is only one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ (1 Tim. 2:5).

We may wince and groan at this caricature of ancient Catholicism, but it is sobering to discover similar sentiments strewn throughout the books of Liturgical Movement authors writing in the twentieth century, paving the way for Sacrosanctum Concilium and the Pauline reform. In their different ways, Cardinal Ottaviani and Cardinal Bacci fifty years ago in their Short Critical Study, and Cardinal Ratzinger in his lecture at the Fontgombault conference of July 2001, recognized this powerful Protestantization of Catholic liturgical thinking. (Ratzinger noted that almost no academic theologian in Europe defends anymore the notion of the Mass as a true and proper sacrifice; even Catholics have come around to agreeing with Martin Luther.)

Ultimately, the Pauline liturgical reform rests on a Protestant understanding of Church history and liturgy. To accept it is to accept, to a greater or lesser extent, its foundation in the textbook Protestant vision of Catholicism as a history of obscurantism, mystification, ritualistic clericalism, and systematic exclusion from the liberties of the Gospel — in a word, a history of corruption.

The Dark Ages by Vladimir Manyukhin

Could we say that a recurrent problem within Protestants (admittedly I paint here with a broad brush) is that they do not place a positive value on the working of the Holy Spirit in history, over time? There seems to be no inherent weight to the witness of time, the sum total of the contingent, the course of development. Anything good about time or history is purely coincidental or extraneous. For example, in a certain year, say, 1780 or 1843 or 1921, there may be a camp revival somewhere, and that’s great as far as it goes, but it has nothing to do with the Christian religion as such. For Protestants, all dynamism takes place at the level of the individual man, inside the heart, where the Spirit moves; there is no relationship between the Spirit and a visible Church as a temporal/transtemporal whole.

The Catholic, on the other hand, sees the Faith as an historical, social, visible, incarnate reality, living a life that develops and unfolds, and that retains its earlier phases within itself while it grows beyond them. This is why the view John Henry Newman arrived at in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine is so profoundly un-Protestant:

The following Essay is directed towards a solution of the difficulty which has been stated,—the difficulty, as far as it exists, which lies in the way of our using in controversy the testimony of our most natural informant concerning the doctrine and worship of Christianity, viz. the history of eighteen hundred years. The view on which it is written has at all times, perhaps, been implicitly adopted by theologians, and, I believe, has recently been illustrated by several distinguished writers of the continent, such as De Maistre and Möhler: viz. that the increase and expansion of the Christian Creed and Ritual, and the variations which have attended the process in the case of individual writers and Churches, are the necessary attendants on any philosophy or polity which takes possession of the intellect and heart, and has had any wide or extended dominion; that, from the nature of the human mind, time is necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas; and that the highest and most wonderful truths, though communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers, could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients, but, as being received and transmitted by minds not inspired and through media which were human, have required only the longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation. (Introduction, §21)

In fairness, we may assume that many or most of the Catholics involved in the liturgical reform would not have agreed with a purely Protestant view; but it can escape no one’s notice that their attitude is at best semi-Protestant, in the sense that they think and act on the basis of a profound skepticism about most of the history of the Church, from the middle of the first millennium to the end of the second millennium — the period from which they felt free to discard whatever features they deemed “corrupt” or “redundant” or “obscure” or “outmoded.”

In other words, their conception of faith is not the incarnational and pneumatological confidence in the unfolding of tradition that Catholics have always held, but, like Protestants looking for the stirring up of the heart in the revival tent meeting, they bring to bear a set of subjective criteria based on what they deem “effective” or “relevant.” In this way they have a basic stance of skepticism towards tradition that is incompatible with Catholicism.

Cardinal Journet quotes a passage from Soloviev that is remarkably pertinent:

How unreasonable is he who, seeing in the seed neither trunk nor branches, neither leaves nor flowers, and hence concluding that all the other parts are only applied later and artificially from the outside, and that the seed has not the force to issue forth these parts, totally denies that the tree will appear in the future, admitting only the existence of the single seed. Just as unreasonable is the person who denies the most complex forms or manifestations in which divine grace appears in the Church and wants absolutely to return to the form of the early Christian community. (Theology of the Church, 145)

It is only apparently paradoxical that antiquarianism and modernism go hand-in-hand. Cardinal Newman perceived this connection when he claimed that dogmatic Protestantism, which took as its justification the proclamation of the “original uncorrupted” Gospel, has a tendency, due to hermeneutical subjectivism, to degenerate into liberal Protestantism, which in turn tends to degenerate into ethical rationalism, agnostic naturalism, and atheistic secularism. In short, Protestantism has a way of self-destructing. Once one starts down this path, one will reach the end of it, short of a miraculous divine intervention. Hence, if the liturgical reform adopted the same mental framework toward historical and traditional Catholicism that dogmatic Protestantism did in the sixteenth century, it is only a matter of time before this newer version of Catholicism will enter its liberal mid-life, and move on from there to ethical, agnostic, and atheistic decrepitude.

In fact, a good case can be made that, like a time-lapse film of a tree losing its foliage in the fall, the Church (in the main) has already passed through the second phase and is well advanced in the final one. When a pope prioritizes environmental ethics, give interviews to atheist-communist journalists, and eviscerates Scripture of its supernatural sense, we are already looking at the Church of Latter-day Socinians. It took our separated brethren centuries to separate themselves from Christ as God, God as real, and, at last, man as man. Catholics, goaded by an inferiority complex, have done it in a matter of decades.

The Modernists against whom Popes Pius X and Pius XII battled had, of course, their own version of the “corruption claim.” For them, however, it was not the inadequacy of the medieval church, but the inadequacy of premodern Christianity as a whole, from the death of the last Apostle to the advent of the first paleontologist, that compelled a fundamental shift in understanding and practice. In response to a defrocked priest whom he calls “Fr. G.,” Teilhard de Chardin wrote on October 4, 1950:

Basically I consider — as you do — that the Church (like any living reality after a certain time) reaches a period of “mutation” or “necessary reformation” after two thousand years; it is unavoidable. Mankind is undergoing a mutation, how could Catholicism not do the same?

This mutation of Catholicism from its dogmatic-liturgical essence to a loosely-defined moral therapeutic deism in symbolic pantomime has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen, for as long as the Protestant distrust of incarnational ecclesiology and the Modernist skepticism of divine revelation and apostolic tradition continue to exercise their sway in the Vatican, the academies, the chanceries — and upon the altars of our parishes.

There is, however, a solution as obvious as it is simple: to embrace, once again, the fullness of Catholic tradition in its century-striding grandeur, doing away with the real corruption that threatens us: the faux ancien, crypto-Protestant, congenially modern papal rite of Paul VI.

The solution is at hand.

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