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.

Why the Confiteor Before Communion Should Be Retained (or Reintroduced)

The Confiteor at the start of Mass

In this article, I will defend the fittingness of the repetition of the Confiteor by the ministers immediately before their communion — sung by the deacon and subdeacon at Solemn Mass, said by the acolytes at the Missa Cantata and Low Mass. I shall argue that it not only deserves to be retained, but that it should be used everywhere in the usus antiquior, and not omitted.

Before moving to this question, let us consider for a moment why there ought to be a double Confiteor at the start of the Mass, in the penitential section at the foot of the altar, prior to the ministers’ ascending the mountain of the Lord to offer the twofold sacrifice: first, the verbal sacrifice of the readings, followed by the unbloody sacrifice of the Lamb of God.

At first glance, it might appear that there should be only a single Confiteor of priest and people together, and indeed, this is what the Novus Ordo Missae provides, having relied on scholars to purge it of “useless repetitions.”

Nevertheless, the double Confiteor is far from useless. It strongly brings out the dialogical nature of liturgical worship, where the celebrant acts as a mediator for the people, and where each member of the body is praying for the other. The doubling formalizes the mediation as well as the mutual assistance. It reinforces the humility needed in the celebrant, who confesses his sins alone coram omnibus, and also exhibits the dignity of the servant who says to the master: “May almighty God have mercy on thee, and having forgiven thy sins, lead thee to eternal life.” It reflects the truth of cosmic and ecclesiastical hierarchy and pushes against one of the dominant errors of our time, that of democratic egalitarianism, which lumps everyone together into an undifferentiated mass (or Mass).

Bishop Athanasius Schneider once told of a Low Mass he was offering in Africa at a large traditional Catholic school for girls. When he had confessed his sins, he heard all these little girls say to him, in perfect Latin, “Misereatur tui omnipotens Deus, et dimissis peccatis tuis, perducat te ad vitam aeternam.” He was overcome with feelings of humility, littleness, and joy. This experience of the priest confessing his own sins in front of the people—or, for that matter, the bishop, or the pope—is something we could use a great deal more of in the Church today, together (of course) with the confession of the people. And all of this in the humbling and strengthening presence of the saints invoked by name, twice: “Blessed Mary ever-virgin, St. Michael the Archangel, St. John the Baptist, the holy apostles Peter and Paul, and all the saints” — not (as we were just saying) lumped together in an undifferentiated mass of “all the angels and saints,” mentioned only once, for efficiency’s sake. There are no shortcuts in penance and forgiveness.

Now, moving to our main topic — the Confiteor before communion — it was not only the repetition at this moment of something that had “already been done” earlier in the Mass that the liturgical reformers objected to; it was rather the impression that the communion rite for the faithful is “tacked on to” the Mass as an extrinsic piece rather than something intrinsic to it. Eliding the communion rite(s) was a way of underlining the unity of liturgical action.

Yet the old practice makes theological sense, at least from the vantage of the dogmatic teaching of the Council of Trent. The communion of the offering priest is essential to the completion of the sacrifice in a way that the communion of no one else is. In fact, the obscuring of this point by having a single communion rite in which the priest announces “Ecce Agnus Dei” prior to receiving Christ and distributing Him to the faithful is among the many factors that have contributed to the obscuring of the difference in kind between the ministerial priesthood and the priesthood of the faithful.

Moreover, one should not evaluate this practice only from a low Mass standpoint, but also from the Solemn High Mass, the normative Mass of the Roman Rite. Seeing the priest flanked by his close companions, the deacon and the subdeacon, with the deacon chanting the Confiteor, throws into sharp relief how the sacrifice is essentially complete with the communion of the priest, who stands in for Christ the High Priest, and that the further communions are an extension of this sacrifice to the ministers and the faithful, a sacramental “rippling out” comparable to the rippling out of the Pax, the gesture of peace, passed down from on high — much as the higher angels communicate illuminations to lower angels.

The one offering brings the sacrifice to completion by himself partaking of the sacrificial Victim. No other communion is necessary for this completion, although obviously the Church rejoices in the participation of as many faithful as are in a state of grace and prepared to receive Our Lord. The scholastic distinction between intensity and extension is helpful here. For example, the separated soul in heaven fully possesses beatitude intensively, but when the body is reunited to it in the resurrection, that happiness will overflow into the flesh and so the beatitude will be greater extensively, i.e., it will have a greater extension.

The separate communions of priest and people, with the Confiteor as a visible and audible caesura, is the liturgy’s way of representing the dogmatic truth spoken of by Pope Pius XII in Mystici Corporis Christi when he distinguishes between the “objective redemption” that Christ accomplished in full on the Cross and the “subjective redemption” of Christians, which occurs through the application of the merits of His Passion to our souls in the sacraments of the Church. St. Thomas speaks of this point often, as when he explains why the faithful need not receive the chalice: “The perfection of this sacrament does not lie in the use of the faithful, but in the consecration of the matter. And hence there is nothing derogatory to the perfection of this sacrament, if the people receive the body without the blood, provided that the priest who consecrates receive both” (Summa theologiae III, q. 80, a. 12, ad 2). “Our Lord’s Passion is represented in the very consecration of this sacrament, in which the body ought not to be consecrated without the blood. But the body can be received by the people without the blood: nor is this detrimental to the sacrament, because the priest both offers and consumes the blood on behalf of all; and Christ is fully contained under either species, as was shown above (q. 76, a. 2)” (ibid., ad 3).

This aspect of the usus antiquior points unambiguously to the essence of the Mass as the re-presentation of the Sacrifice of the Cross at the hands of the ordained minister, and forcefully sets aside the Protestant conflation of the Mass and the Last Supper, i.e., the simple identification of the Eucharist with communion — an error so ubiquitous in our day that Catholics not only take it for granted but are unaware that there is any other way of thinking about the matter.

Again, at a high Mass, the faithful are usually not able to hear the Confiteor of the priest and the servers at the beginning, as these preparatory prayers in the sanctuary are muffled under the soaring sound of the Introit. Thus, when the deacon sings or the servers say the Confiteor right before communion, everyone is able to hear it and make it their own, since there is nothing else “covering over” this action.[1] Holy Mother Church offers all the faithful one final opportunity to bow low before the altar, express contrition for sins, call upon saints and angels as intercessors, and receive a minor absolution prior to approaching the Sanctissimum, the Most Holy One, before whom even the Cherubim and Seraphim veil their faces. Thus we see that this Confiteor is both theologically appropriate and spiritually profitable.

To my mind (and probably, I’ll admit, for quite incidental reasons), the suppression of this Confiteor before communion in the missal promulgated by Pope John XXIII serves as the “poster child” of all that went wrong during that strange no-man’s-land between Mediator Dei (1947) and the imposition of the Novus Ordo (1969). In this period of two decades, official papal language still paid lip service to the binding force of tradition and the non-negotiable good of continuity, while at the same time three Popes in succession permitted changes to the liturgy — at first tentatively and in smaller ways, but subsequently growing in audacity to embrace whole sacramental rituals from top to bottom — that led with a kind of inevitability to the jettisoning of the historic Roman Rite and its replacement by the “modern papal rite” (as Gamber calls the Novus Ordo).

Let there be no mistake about it: the incremental changes of Pius XII and John XXIII to the Mass and its rubrics — the abolition of most octaves and vigils, multiple collects, doubled lections, the “Benedicamus Domino,” folded chasubles, etc. — are also corruptions, even if lesser corruptions than Montini’s, and deserve to be rejected by those who care for the Roman Rite in its integrity and plenitude just as readily and easily as the more egregious novelties of the late sixties.

A last consideration, since we are on the subject of the Confiteor and the role of penitence in the rite of Mass: I read in an article at PrayTell about the proposal, fashionable among today’s “with-it” liturgists, to move the penitential rite to after the “Liturgy of the Word.” Their theory (fine on paper, as always) is that we should first hear the Word of God summoning us to faith and repentance, and then express our acceptance of the message in the Creed and a penitential rite immediately prior to the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Probably the sign of peace would be moved into this intermediate section as well, so that we can take care of all the Eucharistic preliminaries at once.

Now, I have two reactions to this idea.

First, this proposal and any other like it would make sense only if liturgy is just something we make up according to our own brilliant ideas, rather than a form of prayer we receive from those who came before us and whom we revere as our fathers in Christ, from whom we receive the faith together with its enactment in rites. And surely this is a tempting view, since modern people are seen consistently to have better ideas and to produce greater art than their predecessors. Just think of primitives like Plato and Aristotle, Dante and Shakespeare, Bach and Mozart, and compare them with Rorty and Derrida, Cummings and Kerouac, the Beach Boys and Eminem. We are clearly in a better position to design liturgy than the men who built Hagia Sophia or Notre Dame Cathedral.

What is astonishing to me is that such proposals can be made, let alone taken seriously. Do we know better than the millennia of Latin Catholics who started off the liturgy with penitential preparation—or for that matter, Eastern Christians who can’t help chanting “Lord, have mercy” from the get-go? But we can forgive them and, well, ignore them; after all, among professional liturgists, Byzantines get a pass for everything, no matter how outlandish; the more litanies, processions, blessings, and chants, the better. The East is the exotic “other” whose presence allows us to loathe ourselves in a perpetual inferiority complex, which prompts us to “act out” irrationally from time to time by lopping off another ancient feature that connects us with the East.

Second, in an irony that repeats itself on a regular basis, what the fashionable liturgists say they want is already present in the unreformed (I mean, pre-1962) traditional Mass. They say they want a moment, after the Word and before the Eucharist, in which to express our repentance. The old Mass gives us the Confiteor before communion and the threefold “Domine, non sum dignus...” with the minor absolution from the priest. The old rite, embodying a deep instinct for symmetry, has in that sense two penitential rites: the one prior to receiving the Word, and the one prior to receiving the Word-made-flesh.

The more we ponder the inherited liturgy, the more riches we find in it, and the less we are inclined to tinker with it or accept the tinkering of others, bereft of the fear of God the Father, the love of Christ the High Priest, and the unction of the Holy Spirit. We give thanks to the Most Holy Trinity for beginning to deliver His people from the seventy-year Babylonian captivity of liturgical reform (ca. 1948–2018), stretching from Pius XII’s creation of the committee that would produce the neo-Tridentine Holy Week to the year when Ecclesia Dei granted permission to the ICKSP and FSSP to return to the unreformed Holy Week. We are coming full circle at last, and there is no turning back.

(Portions of this article are excerpted from my lecture at St. Mary’s in Norwalk, “Poets, Lovers, Children, Madmen — and Worshipers: Why We Repeat Ourselves in the Liturgy.”)

Note

[1] Needless to say, if it is to serve a corporate purpose, the Confiteor needs to be heard at this point rather than mumbled or muttered into the acolyte's sleeve. No need for loudness; an articulate voice and a reasonable pacing will suffice to make the prayer audible even in a large church. For more thoughts along these lines, see my article "Two Modest Proposals for Improving the Prayerfulness of Low Mass."

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

For the Liturgical Progressives, Dialogue Means “Agreeing With”

The two healthy (liturgical) lungs of the Church 

For years, I have been reading articles at the Pray Tell blog, and when I make comments on its articles, I try to challenge readers with different ideas about the Church's liturgical direction.

An article there exactly one month ago caught my attention — this paragraph in particular:

Some Catholics (usually of the more traditional variety), upon hearing that I am an Orthodox Christian, have made it a point to proclaim their love for the Orthodox liturgy and critique the changes to the Mass after Vatican II. Mainly, they lament the loss of beauty and reverence of their experience of the Novus Ordo and long for the Tridentine Mass. I smile, but, as a scholar of liturgy, know that the Mass of Paul VI has much more in common theologically (e.g. its stronger pneumatological dimension) and ecclesiologically with the Eastern Church than the Tridentine Mass. Still, having attended a few Masses (of the post-Vatican II style) that I found (in their words) overly “informal” and/or “dry,” their concern resonates.
          Interestingly, the reform of the liturgy after Vatican II is also debated within some Orthodox circles. Some Orthodox Christians are critical of the reform of the Mass after Vatican II as well. In this case, they fail to distinguish between the greater theological and historical similarities of the Orthodox liturgy and the Mass after Vatican II while overemphasizing some of the phenomenological differences.

If ever one needed an illustration of understatement, I would submit this quotation.

The Mass of Paul VI has “more in common” with the Eastern Church only in the sense that (a) it was artificially Easternized by its architects, who had little or no respect for the Latin tradition and had a strange but ill-informed craze for all things Byzantine, and (b) it was conceived in a textual testtube which was cerebral, abstract, and academic, as Ratzinger has pointed out. For example, it was all the rage to insist on the need or the desirability of an epiklesis for the anaphoras, because the scholars were too caught up in their theories to admire the Roman Canon’s antiquity that predates the Macedonian heresy over the divinity of the Holy Spirit.

Then, the author (as if waking up to the fact for the first time) admits that some Eastern Orthodox have problems with the liturgical reform. In reality, those that are well informed understand it to be a disaster of the highest degree, a thorough disembowelment of Western tradition. This is why the Moscow patriarchate (much in the news these days) hailed Summorum Pontificum with joy.

Notice any resemblances?

The final claim — that there is greater theological and historical similarity between the Orthodox divine liturgy and the post-Vatican II Mass — is blatantly false. The opposite is not only true, but painfully true. The discrepancies between age-old Orthodox worship and the Bauhaus Novus Ordo are pushed aside as “phenomenological.” This is like saying that the difference between a traditional Requiem and a modern funeral is “phenomenological.” Yes, to be sure; but it is first and foremost theological and historical, in the profoundest possible way. And to say that the apparent differences are overemphasized is quite simply pure rationalism — as if our experience of liturgy, of the right approach to and attitude towards the numinous, were not something that comes through our senses first, and only afterwards, arrives in our intellects, in keeping with Aristotle’s sane empiricism.

I found this phrase in particular incredibly condescending: “I smile, but, as a scholar of liturgy, know…” The lure of gnosis, abundantly on offer in the pseudo-scientific mystery cult of contemporary liturgists. May the Lord in His mercy preserve us from professional liturgists!

One recalls the famous exchange between Fr. Pierre-Marie Gy and Cardinal Ratzinger concerning the latter’s book The Spirit of the Liturgy. Ratzinger had dared to criticize some of the untouchable “truths” of the liturgical reform, and Fr. Gy, whose life had been invested in this lame duck, was not amused: “How dare he write such a book — he is not a liturgist!” The same reaction, of course, greeted Pope Benedict’s intriguing if not always successful Jesus of Nazareth series, which the historical-critical gurus could not abide. In reality, with The Spirit of the Liturgy Ratzinger was doing the work of a true theologian: he was writing liturgical theology, based (it goes without saying) in a solid grasp of liturgical history and texts, but going far beyond that limited scope into more fundamental theological and philosophical principles, as well as offering a more realistic assessment of the actual cost, in souls and in sanity, of the liturgical reforms, from the vantage of one who had extensive pastoral experience, which many of our smiling theoreticians lack. It is, in truth, the specialists who are wearing blinders or suffering tunnel vision, and the non-specialists who can see deeper and farther, just as we notice today that the youth are instinctively and intuitively drawn to liturgical tradition while their elders, be they teachers or pastors, embarrassingly chase after the evanescent relevance of the new and improved whatever.

Pontiffs of the world, unite!

So… I decided that I would leave a brief and moderately-toned comment at Pray Tell indicating my disagreement with the perspective of the author. Here is what I wrote:

While there are some fine general points made in this article, it is certainly not true to say that the reformed Roman liturgy has more in common with the traditional rites of the East. This statement is often made, but it is true only in the sense that certain Eastern features were artificially, unhistorically, and unliturgically introduced into the Roman rite where they had never existed before, while many features common to both East and West — notably, the use of sacred chant, the eastward orientation, the use of a liturgical language (still preserved in Slavonic and ancient Greek), the reservation of the sanctuary to vested male ministers, and plenty more — were abolished in the 1960s and 1970s in the West.
          At New Liturgical Movement, I published a study on the ten principles that the traditional (i.e., unreformed) Roman liturgy shares in common with the Byzantine liturgy — principles that are either rarely found in celebrations of the reformed Roman rite or were even abolished from it in principle:
          1. The principle of tradition;
          2. the principle of mystery;
          3. the principle of elevated mode;
          4. the principle of ritual integrity or stability;
          5. the principle of density;
          6. the principle of adequate and repeated preparation;
          7. the principle of truthfulness;
          8. the principle of hierarchy;
          9. the principle of parallelism; and
          10. the principle of separation.
The article may be found at this link.

Shortly after posting it, I received the following email from the editor of Pray Tell, Fr. Anthony Ruff, OSB, of St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota:

Dear Peter,
          I just deleted your comment on east/west. The first reason was that it wasn’t so much a response or dialogue with the author’s main points as a promotion of your post. I’m not comfortable having posts such as that linked at Pray Tell, for it doesn’t fit our mission of promoting rich discussion and a wide variety of viewpoints among all those who support Vatican II and ecumenical liturgical reform. Secondly, your tendentious portrayal of the liturgy of the Catholic Church is, to be honest, scandalous to me by its mocking, condescending, disrespectful tone. I’m truly sorry to have to do this but I think it is better for the mission of Pray Tell and the kind of conversation and dialogue we want to promote.
          Pax,
          Fr. Anthony

I found this initially quite surprising, and said so in my reply:

Dear Fr. Ruff,
          I think this is a mistake. NLM, which of course takes a very different line, never deletes comments from people who disagree, even sharply, with the main points of the author. The only comments stifled are those that are personally insulting. I doubt if anyone reading my comment would consider it of this type. If you want PT to be an echo chamber that excludes reasoned critique of the liturgical reform, that is your prerogative, but it will increase your reputation as a one-sided progressive platform.
          Best regards,
          Peter Kwasniewski

A "phenomenological similarity"

There was no further response (not that I expected there to be). Each side had said its piece. Fr. Ruff apparently does not find differences of opinion a way of “promoting rich discussion.” In the end, “a wide variety of viewpoints” is permissible if and only if you “support Vatican II and ecumenical liturgical reform.” (Is that a reference to Paul VI’s statement that the Novus Ordo was designed to bring the Catholic Mass closer to the worship of Calvinists?)

What I learned from this exchange is that, as is so very often the case, dialogue — for liberals and progressives — means “agreeing with me.” We can see the same dynamic playing out in the various Synods that have been held under Pope Francis. Each Synod has always heard many voices, from Cardinals to laymen, dissenting from the liberal baseline assumptions and conclusions that are supposed to prevail in this exercise of “walking together,” but these voices are sidelined, padded, or suppressed in the final results, and quite simply ignored in the day-to-day implementation (as we saw in a rather dramatic way with the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, and with the grab-bag of fashionable sociological truisms bequeathed by the Youth Synod).

In short, there is no dialogue, only monologue. Or perhaps soliloquy, as would befit a liturgical reform pushed through, with many a self-doubt and self-contradiction, by the pope who compared himself to Hamlet.

No Hamlets here.