A Recorded Version of My Recent Articles in Response to Dr Brant Pitre

For the benefit of those who might prefer to listen to such a thing all at one go, Dr Kwasniewski has made a recording of my recent articles in response to Dr Brant Pitre’s video about active participation in the liturgy. (Links below.) There are just a few small editorial changes to turn them into a single presentation, and a few comments at the beginning and end. We hope you find this useful.

part 1: https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2024/12/historical-falsehoods-about-active.html

part 2: https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2025/01/historical-falsehoods-about-active.html

part 3: https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2025/01/historical-falsehoods-about-active_18.html

part 4: https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2025/01/historical-falsehoods-about-active_25.html

part 5: https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2025/01/historical-falsehoods-about-active_30.html

Historical Falsehoods about Active Participation: A Response to Dr Brant Pitre (Part 5)

This is the fifth and final part of my series in response to a video by Dr Brant Pitre of the Augustine Institute about active participation in the liturgy. The previous installments may be read at the following links. (Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4)

Having substantially and systematically mispresented the history of the liturgy, and of the laity’s participation in it, for almost 38 minutes, the remainder of his presentation is devoted to extolling the virtues of the post-Conciliar reform specifically vis-à-vis active participation.

It hardly needs saying that he builds his case by repeating some of his earlier errors. He twice repeats (38:10 and 46:22) the erroneous English translation of Sacrosanctum Concilium which he had cited earlier, “In the restoration and promotion of the sacred liturgy, this full and active participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all else.” (my emphasis). As I noted in the first part of this series, what it really says is that “active participation … is to be given the greatest attention.” And of course, no hint is given of the myriad ways in which, by hook and by crook, the inventors of the post-Conciliar Rite trampled on the letter of Sacrosanctum Concilium in executing the reform.

He also repeatedly claims that this goal has been achieved by “restoring” to the faithful things which were never really taken away from them. He does, however, deserve credit for acknowledging that this has also been done by giving them things to do which were never previously theirs. The assertion that this is a perfectly fine and reasonable procedure, in no way problematic despite the ghastly results, falls neatly under the rubric, “Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.”

As I noted in the first part of this series, Dr Pitre does not fall into the fatuous excesses that so many others have fallen into when writing or speaking about this topic, by claiming that “active participation”, however defined, is incompatible with the historical Roman Rite. He acknowledges that active participation of the lay faithful was part of the traditional rite in its earlier history, although he grossly misrepresents that earlier history. Indeed, he builds his historical case, such as it is, on this very claim.

Likewise, he fully acknowledges (45:50, “I have no doubt in my mind”) that active participation was certainly to be found among many of the faithful interiorly (in silent prayer and adoration, etc.) even after the changes which took place “in the second millennium”, changes which he describes incorrectly and incompletely, and to which he wrongly attributes the subsequent lack of such participation, both real and imagined. This essential distinction between exterior and interior participation, introduced so late in his presentation, is required by the many historical falsehoods which he has previously brought forth, which amount to the claim that the faithful were deprived of all exterior participation, i.e., that they did not make any of the responses, did not sing any of the chants, heard no sermons, read no hand missal, etc.

This is why, as he says (46:15), “an ecumenical council of the Church … called for the missal to be revised precisely on this point (i.e. active participation) above all (his emphasis)”. Although, as noted above, he is wrong on this point about Sacrosanctum Concilium, he is right about the liturgy of Paul VI. The men who invented it were indeed guided in their work by the principle that they must give the people more to do exteriorly, and that this consideration must trump all others. From this principle, they arrogated to themselves carte blanche to do anything to the Roman Rite: to mutilate or suppress any text; to change or remove any custom, no matter how ancient or widespread, no matter why it was instituted in the first place; to violate any dictum of the very constitution on which they claimed to base their work, as long as doing so created exterior participation.

The past fifty-six years and counting have made it painfully clear that this principle is a foundation of sand. In theory, it was supposed to be applied to redress an imbalance between the role of the priest in the liturgy and that of the laity. In practice, it has been applied in such a way that it lays all the emphasis on “active” and none on “participation”, and by so doing, mistakes activity for achievement. In practice, the reformed liturgy takes it for granted that as long as the laity are doing something, they are actively participating, and it doesn’t really matter what exactly they are doing or how they are doing it. Indeed, it does not even consider whether what they are doing might adversely affect interior participation, even though it is the sine qua non of actual participation.

On the left, a page full of mute spectatorship; on the right, a page full of active participation. 

In the previous article of this series, I noted that several of Dr Pitre’s historical mistakes seem to derive from the inexplicably naïve and totally erroneous assumption that if something wasn’t officially mentioned in a liturgical book, it didn’t exist. He bases his claim that there was no full, conscious and active exterior participation of the laity in the liturgy in the Tridentine period precisely on this fact, that there is barely any mention of the laity at all in the rubrics of the Missal of St Pius V.

Conversely, in his telling, it is a great achievement of the Missal of Paul VI that it has a great many explicit rubrical directives as to what the faithful are supposed to do during the liturgy, because this has supposedly “restored” the full conscious and active participation desired by Vatican II. This is no less naïve and erroneous an assumption. Active participation was not created in the ancient world by non-existent directives in liturgical books, it was not ended by their supposed disappearance, and it has not been restored by their putative return.

Participation literally means “taking a part” in something. It hardly needs saying that Dr Pitre does not give the slightest hint of the catastrophic pastoral failure of the post-Conciliar reform. I repeat that I most certainly do not attribute to him any conscious dishonesty. Nevertheless, anyone who claims that the reform restored full, conscious and active participation in the liturgy will at some point have to ask himself WHY in its wake countless millions simply stopped exercising the baptismal priesthood of the faithful altogether, because they stopped taking part in Mass altogether.

I therefore conclude with some of the final words of an article that he should have read and studied on the topic of participation, “The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200-1700”, by the British historian John Bossy. (Past and Present; Aug. 1983, no. 100) They were written about the early protestant reformers, but mutatis mutandis, they apply just as well to Paul VI, to the members of the Consilium ad exsequendam, and to the rite they invented.

“Without disparaging their ambitions, one may feel that the object they had in view was more remote when they had finished their work than it had been in the fifteenth [read ‘nineteenth’] century. Speaking for the more traditional Reformers, Hooker put his finger on one flaw in the more advanced (i.e. reformed) eucharistic rites, a lack of otherness: ‘No nation under heaven either doth or ever did suffer public actions which are of weight … to pass without some visible solemnity, the very strangeness whereof and difference from that which is common, doth cause popular eyes to observe and to mark the same.’

A sense of fatality, of results achieved which were the opposite of those intended, hangs over their efforts: as if the current of social and cultural evolution which was carrying them forward was at the same time pushing them aside into shallow waters. … At least one success may be set against them. In the practice of the vernacular hymn [read ‘vernacular liturgy’] the Reformers did surely achieve something of the immediate and unproblematic unity at which they aimed: a congregational homophony which for Luther himself, and for European civilization in general, did not entirely exorcize nostalgia for the polyphonic mysteries of the Mass.”

Historical Falsehoods about Active Participation: A Response to Dr Brant Pitre (Part 4)

This is the fourth part of my response to a video by Dr Brant Pitre of the Augustine Institute about popular participation in the liturgy. (part 1; part 2) At the conclusion of the third part, I stated that in any defense of the post-Conciliar reform, it is necessary to mispresent the history of the liturgy in the Tridentine period, and Dr Pitre begins to do this at the 31:00 mark. In matters of history, precision matters, and this part of the presentation is very lacking in precision.

His essential contention is that because the liturgical books of the Tridentine period contain no clear directives for lay participation (31:12), there was no lay participation. As I have explained in the previous articles of this series, the liturgical books never had any directives for lay participation, either before or after the Tridentine reform. This lack “in the five-hundred years after the Council of Trent” is unfavorably contrasted with the active lay participation that supposedly predominated “in the first thousand years of the Latin Rite.” (Five hundred years have not passed since the beginning of the Council of Trent in 1545; indeed, the four-hundredth anniversary of its closing, Dec. 4, 1963, was the day the first documents of Vatican II were formally promulgated, including, most ironically, Sacrosanctum Concilium.)

His chosen example (31:20) of this lack of participation is taken from a letter written by an English bishop named Stephen Gardiner which “describes what the liturgy was like in the wake (n.b.) of the Council of Trent and the promulgation of the Tridentine Missal (n.b.).” Dr Pitre quotes this letter from the book Roman Catholic Worship: Trent to Today by James F White, who in turn quotes it from an edition of Gardiner’s letters published in 1933. “The people in the church took small heed what the priest and clerks did in the chancel, but only to stand up at the gospel and kneel at the sacring [bell], or else every man was occupied himself severally [individually] in several prayers. And therefore it was never meant that the people should indeed hear… the Mass but be present there and pray themselves in silence.”

But this letter was written in 1547. By the end of that year, only ten of Trent’s eventual twenty-five sessions had been held; of these ten, the last three were concerned solely, and very briefly, with administrative matters. The Missal imprecisely known as “the Tridentine Missal” would not be promulgated for another 23 years. What then does the liturgical situation which Bp Gardiner describes have to do with the so-called Tridentine Missal? Nothing. 1547 is also the year in which Henry VIII died, which means that at the time that Gardiner wrote, the vast majority of the faithful in England were still used to the Sarum liturgy, not the liturgy of the papal court and the Franciscans, which Dr Pitre accuses earlier of removing the participation of the laity.

The frontispiece of a Sarum Missal printed at Paris in 1555.

This would have been the perfect place to mention at least one example of the better scholarship which has corrected these tendentious and overly simplistic claims about lay participation in the liturgy before the modern era. The most obvious example, because it is concerned directly with Gardiner’s place and period, would be Eamon Duffy’s famous book The Stripping of the Altars. Another would be Fr Augustine Thompson’s Cities of God, which deals with the religious life of the medieval Italy from which emerged the villains of Dr Pitre’s presentation, the Franciscans. Another still would be John Bossy’s very interesting article The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200-1700 (Past and Present; Aug. 1983, no. 100), or the Italian scholar Gian Luigi Beccaria’s Sicut Erat, a study of the influence of the Latin Bible and liturgy on the Italian language, which shows that ordinary Italians in post-Counter Reformation Italy absorbed a great deal more from the liturgy than modern liturgists know.   

Ignoring all such scholarship, Dr Pitre declares this state of affairs to be normative for the entire period after Trent until the 20th century, although he does acknowledge that “in solemn High Masses and other forms of liturgy you might have more participation of the faithful.” And the next witness he adduces to this effect is the Belgian liturgist Dom Bernard Botte OSB (1883-1980).

With all due respect, it is unpardonably sloppy to treat the entire post-Tridentine period as if it were all of one piece. No mention is made of the massive social upheavals which began in the mid-18th century with the so-called Enlightenment, leading to the French revolution, and a crescendo of further revolutions and wars, and culminating in two horrifically destructive world wars. No mention is made of the damage which these wars and revolutions did to the Church in Europe and South America by closing down or destroying an incalculably large number of its institutions. And no mention is made of the impact which the destruction of so many churches had on the Church’s liturgical life.

The cathedral of St Donatianus in Bruges (now part of the modern state of Belgium) in 1641; destroyed in 1799 by the occupying French Revolutionary Army. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

We therefore get a long quote from Dom Botte’s book Silence and Participation (34:15), the usual dreary litany of complaints from the early cancerous phase of the liturgical movement, that the laity recite private devotions while the priest says Mass, and usually receive communion outside of Mass, etc. But in Dr Pitre’s telling, this has nothing to do with the social and cultural conditions of early 20th central Belgium specifically, or post-revolutionary Europe generally. It is due solely to an absence of rubrics in the Tridentine Missal ordering the faithful to actively participate.

This would have been a good place to at least give a nod to the fact that the later leaders of the liturgical movement, especially between the world wars, were often highly tendentious in their presentation of the then-current state of the liturgy, exaggerating the most negative aspects, while downplaying or ignoring the more positive ones. This tendentiousness, in turn, comes from a shift in attitude which marks them off from the first among them, Dom Prosper Guéranger, a shift which I have described elsewhere.

In brief, Dom Guéranger believed that the Church possessed in its liturgy a treasure of inestimable value, but one which had come to be widely neglected in many ways. The goal of the liturgical movement, as he saw it, was primarily educational, to reacquaint the clergy and the laity with that very treasure. In the interwar period, the attitude of many liturgists changed towards the belief that the liturgy was in many ways flawed, and that the laity cannot be educated up to its level. Therefore, in this view, the liturgy needed to be purged of its flaws and reformed down to the presumed level of the laity, which is why I referred above to this period as “the early cancerous phase.”

Dom Guéranger

The first part of the quote from Dom Botte begins with a reference to the sung Masses in his hometown as “a dialogue between the clergy and the cleric organist.” Dr Pitre interrupts (34:25) to give us another historical error: “In our own day, the choir will often consist of lay people, for many centuries after Trent, the choir often consisted of clerics.” This is an error per suppressionem veri; the choir very often consisted of clerics for centuries before Trent as well. This is consistently attested by the very same class of documents, the Ordines, which he had previously cited as witnesses to popular participation. The Ordo Romanus Primus, which he had brought in earlier as a witness to lay participation, refers to the clerical schola more often than to the people.

He then mentions the famous (or infamous) restriction of St Pius X’s motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini on women singing in the liturgy, specifically, as part of the liturgical schola. There has been a lot of debate, and legitimately so, about the application of this motu proprio; personally, I agree with the joke that “tra le sollecitudini” is Italian for “too much of a good thing.” Dr Pitre, however, makes it sound as if in practice, women were systematically excluded from singing at Mass for centuries, and as if Tra le sollecitudini were an expression of long-standing and post-Tridentine policy, which is categorically false on both counts. In reality, Pius X issued it thinking of the places where the same professional singers, including women, who performed at the opera house on Friday and Saturday also performed in church on Sunday, and in much the same style. This was especially common in Italy, which is why the document is named by its opening words in Italian, not Latin. It should be noted as well that in other writings, Pius X made exceptions for congregations of female religious; and, in any case, his successor Pius XII made it clear that women were permitted to sing if they were not part of a clerical schola that sang near or in the sanctuary.

A recording of the Regina Caeli by the Italian composer Paolo Giorza (1832-1914), made at the “Anglo-Catholic” church of St Magnus the Martyr in London. The video helpfully includes a quotation from a document issued by the Society of St Gregory of America, following a convention which the society held in May of 1922, a blacklist of music held to be not in accordance with the motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini. “All compositions by P(aolo) Giorza should be eliminated from the repertoire of the Catholic choirs. The composer ... did not change his style one iota when he put sacred words to these utterly secular melodies. The worst example of the ‘Ballet’ style in church is the setting of the Regina Coeli, which, sad to relate, is still sung in many of our churches.”

Under all this, there seems to lie an assumption which would be charming in its naiveté, did it not lead to such a betrayal of historical facts; namely, that the Church’s life is described wholly and solely by whatever the Holy See puts into its documents. If the Missal makes no mention of what the people are supposed to do at Mass, they must not be doing anything at Mass. If a motu proprio says that women are not to be part of the liturgical schola, this means that “for centuries” women did not sing at Mass at all.

I make bold to say this because at 36:35, Dr Pitre introduces yet another historical error, the claim that because vernacular missals, with or without the Latin, were forbidden by the Holy See, they did not exist. “There was no missal to read.” (To this effect, he cites the book Liturgy: An Illustrated History, by Fr Keith Pecklers SJ.)

Here again, some very pertinent information is omitted. Before the Industrial Revolution, paper was far more expensive to produce than it is now, and therefore books were as well. Moreover, a much larger percentage of humanity’s collective energy had to be devoted to satisfying what anthropologists call primary needs: food, clothing, shelter, and the arms necessary to keep your neighbors from taking your food, clothing and shelter. As a result, relatively speaking, far fewer people were educated to such a degree that they could make any use of a hand missal, and far fewer people could afford one.

Nevertheless, for those who could read, and could afford them, they did in fact exist. I am greatly indebted to Mr Nico Fassino, the creator of The Hand Missal History Project, for the following summary.

“What we think of as a modern hand missal was not put into the hands of a majority of the laity until rather late, but there were an astonishing number of books which were very close to modern hand missals which were published in large numbers, already in the 1600s in France, and even in English. There was a huge variety of books which contained the Ordinary (including the Canon), the Sunday readings, collects and other parts, and these were published in all sorts of editions and binding options, from cheap paper copies to luxurious leather. In short, there were many more such books in circulation than is commonly assumed, even accounting for literacy rates and cost, and stretching back to the 1600s.

There are obvious cases of Church authorities being wary of vernacular liturgical translations, and these are cited by the existing scholarship over and over. But they do not seem to align with or explain the facts on the ground when compared with the number of titles, the number of copies, the number of editions, and the continuous printing history of such books across so many different geographical areas.” (Images following courtesy of Mr Fassino.)

The beginning of the Canon in a hand missal for the laity, translated into German; this book was published within a decade of the end of the Council of Trent.

Another in English, from roughly 1660.

A French example from the first decade of the 17th century.

Historical Falsehoods about Active Participation: A Response to Dr Brant Pitre (Part 3)

This is the third part of my response to a video by Dr Brant Pitre of the Augustine Institute on the subject of popular participation in the Mass. In the previous part, I explained the errors of his claims about the nature of the Roman stational Masses, and of an ancient document which describes them, and then, the erroneous contrast which he draws between them and the Masses celebrated in the papal chapel. By repeatedly calling the latter “private Masses”, without further qualification, he gives the false impression that these were exclusively low Masses, which had no place for the participation of the lay faithful. In this telling, such low Masses were then adopted by the Franciscans when they took on the specific form of the Roman liturgy used in the papal chapel.

At 26:10, Dr Pitre says about this liturgical form that it doesn’t have “any clear directive for how the people are supposed to be engaged, because the people by and large were not present at private Masses in the papal chapel.” Therefore, when the Franciscans spread this specific form of the liturgy throughout Europe, they effectively injected into the Church’s bloodstream a habit of lay non-participation in the Mass. (This is my metaphor, not his.)

As noted by Fr Uwe Michael Lang in the very book of his which Dr Pitre cites, liturgical books properly so-called (the ancient sacramentaries, the missals which derive from them, chant books, lectionaries etc.), have never contained directives for the people’s participation. The document to which Dr Pitre hitherto referred as a witness to popular participation, the Ordo Romanus Primus, is not a liturgical book properly so-called, but an early form of ceremonial manual, and the contrast which he draws between it and the liturgical books of the papal court (adopted by the Franciscans) is a category error. (As I noted in the previous article, he also greatly exaggerates the degree to which it is concerned with the people’s participation.)

Secondly, we must stop for a moment to contemplate the manifest absurdity of these claims about the Franciscans; above all, the claim that as a “missionary order”, they set out to evangelize the people by giving them a liturgy which excluded them from the active participation in the liturgy to which they had hitherto been habituated for centuries. I do not ascribe to Dr Pitre any deliberate falsehood; I am certain that he has been led astray by the bad scholarship on the liturgy and its history which has reigned supreme for centuries. Objectively, however, this is an atrocious calumny against one of the Church’s greatest religious orders.

Part of a fresco by Cimabue, painted between 1285 and 1288 in the lower basilica of St Francis in Assisi; this is one of the oldest likenesses of Francis that exists, and is held by many to be the closest known representation of what he actually looked like.

And this in turn leads to a greater question: if this were really how things developed, how did the Franciscans and their liturgy come to be so popular in the first place, “spread(ing) like wildfire throughout Europe”? (26:20) Like the other mendicant orders, they were established almost entirely in large cities. This means that their congregations had plenty of other churches they could attend, churches where (even if this fictitious history were true) the high degree of popular participation which they had known hitherto would have remained.

In reality, the papal liturgy was already beginning to spread before the Franciscans were founded. As noted by Dr Donald Prudlo in a forthcoming publication (A Companion to the History of the Roman Curia, chapter 7), permission to use it was granted to two orders before them, the Hospitaler Order of the Holy Spirit and the Augustinian hermits, and it was imposed upon the canons of Genoa cathedral. In 1204, it was adopted by the bishop of Assisi for his whole diocese, which is how St Francis himself had come to know it, long before he ever laid the foundation of what would become his order.

The choir of the cathedral of St Lawrence in Genoa. Not designed for low Mass. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Benjamin Smith, CC BY-SA 4.0.)

Dr Pitre says very little about the Franciscans’ supposed motives for doing as he claims they did, a point which he certainly ought to have explicated further, given its central importance to his narrative. But he does say, immediately after mentioning their adoption of the papal liturgy (25:44), that they were “a missionary order, they don’t stay in one place.” Said thus, without further qualification, this is a grotesque exaggeration. It is true that the mendicant orders did not formally keep the Benedictine rule of stability, but nevertheless, the great majority of their members spent their whole lives in their order’s house in or near their native place. Only the cream of their crops, great scholars like St Thomas Aquinas or great preachers like St Bernardine of Siena, traveled widely, and even then, most itinerant preachers were limited to their own province.

Dr Pitre then goes on to claim that “the Mass which most people are going to experience and become familiar with after the great missionary efforts of the Franciscans is a private (his verbal emphasis) Mass in which the priest and server (note the singular) would be able to celebrate anywhere at any chapel as they are traveling throughout Europe spreading the Gospel.” Of course, the Franciscans’ liturgical practice certainly exercised some influence on the liturgical culture of the Roman Rite in general outside their own churches. But to claim that it became what “most people experienced” is a gross oversimplification. However large and widespread the mendicant orders may have been, they were always vastly outnumbered by secular clergy and monks.

The upper basilica of St Francis in Assisi. Also not designed for low Mass.

Note also how the emphasis on the term “private” gives the impression that what the Franciscans were doing was mostly low Mass, a false impression, reinforced in its falsehood by the reduction, within a minute, of “just the priest and whatever servers or ministers (plural) might be assisting” (26:02) to “the priest and server (singular).” (27:05)

Of course, no anti-history of the liturgy would be complete without a substantial misrepresentation of the role of the Council of Trent. (27:22) “And it’s going to be that private form of the Mass that will be ultimately adopted by the Council of Trent in 1570, whenever (sic) it publishes its official Missal of Pope St Pius V.” The Council of Trent ended in 1563, having issued as its sole directive on the reform of the liturgy that this was a matter to be left to the Holy See. Dr Pitre claims that this explains why all the editions of the Missal between Trent and Vatican II contain rubrics for the clergy and “server” (again, in the singular), but contains no mention of the people. This is also false. The so-called Tridentine Missal makes no mention of the people’s role in the liturgy because, as noted above, the liturgical books never mentioned it.

Starting at 28:10, Dr Pitre lays the parts of the Mass out in a chart, and notes how the Missal of St Pius V and subsequent editions assign them to the priest and the “server”, again in the singular, reinforcing the false impression that this Missal is concerned only with low Mass. No mention is made of the many rubrics that pertain to the solemn or sung Mass, which was still the daily norm in thousands of churches of the Roman Rite when that Missal was published. 

A page of the rite of Mass in the rubrics of the Missal of St Pius V; the section in italics at the lower right describes the beginning of the solemn Mass.

This error in genere is compounded with several other errors in specie. Dr Pitre notes that the Confiteor is said by the priest and server, without mentioning that it had never been an audible part of the normative, i.e. sung form of Mass. He draws particular attention to the fact that the readings were said facing the altar because there were no people present to read them to in the papal chapel. “It’s a private Mass.” But the readings were never done facing the people per se, and while there may not have been lay people present for the services in the papal chapel, there were still plenty of members of the papal household present.

He claims that there is no sermon in the Missal, because there is no one to preach to. This is also wrong; then as now, the papal household had its own full-time preacher, and often hosted guest preachers. But even as he says this, a citation appears on the screen from Fr Joseph Jungmann’s Mass of the Roman Rite that a rubric was added in the first revised edition (issued by Clement VIII in 1604) which specified the place of the sermon. Again, the liturgical books never specified the place of the sermon before this; even his putative model of popular participation, the Ordo Romanus Primus, makes no mention of it at all.

The simple truth is this: the notion that the sermon is an intrinsic part of the Mass is a conceit of the post-Conciliar reform. One can debate whether it has been a fruitful conceit or not, but any claim that it has a solid tradition behind it is false.

The nave of the church of the Holy Name of Jesus in Rome, commonly known as ‘il Gesù’, the principle Jesuit church in the city. Note the position of the preaching pulpit, which is nowhere near the sanctuary. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Finoskov, CC BY-SA 4.0.)

Just as Dr Pitre previously claimed that the readings were anciently done facing the people, without, apparently, looking at the placement of the ambos in the ancient Roman basilicas, he seems to have made a claim about sermons in the Counter-Reformation period without looking at the placement of the pulpits in the churches of that era. Many Counter-Reformation churches have pulpits out in the nave because the sermons were often quite long and delivered with great rhetorical energy, such that on a practical level, the preacher could really only do them once. The church would therefore have two Masses, with the sermon between them, so that the faithful could come for Mass and stay for the sermon, or come for the sermon and stay for Mass. (Perhaps we should ask the harried priests today who say five Masses in three churches on a weekend, and have to deliver the same sermon five times, whether this custom might have had some merit to it.)

This goes on for a couple of more minutes, but what it all amounts to is that the Missal of St Pius V does not do a thing which no liturgical book of the Roman Rite had ever done, namely, to formally define the role of the faithful in liturgical participation. This long series of errors culminates in the claim that this form of the Mass, which he has thus far mispresented on almost every count, was “spread throughout Europe by the Council of Trent.”

As an aside, this contradicts his earlier claim that it has already been spread throughout Europe by the Franciscans: “the Mass which most people are going to experience and become familiar with after the great missionary efforts of the Franciscans…” More importantly, the Missal which was produced by St Pius V (not the Council of Trent) was not imposed on any church (be it a cathedral, a canonry, a monastery, etc.) which could demonstrate that its own liturgical usage was at least 200 years old. As the wise Fr Hunwicke beatae memoriae explained many times, all such institutions were permitted to pass over to the use of the new Roman books, but only with the unanimous consent of the bishop and chapter. They were not required to do so, and many did not, including the other most influential mendicant order, the Dominicans. So I will simply add that in regard to popular participation, the Missal of St Pius V is just as silent as the local Missals which it did replace were (e.g. that of Sarum), and had always been.

In any defense of the post-Conciliar reform, it is of course necessary to mispresent the history of the liturgy in the Tridentine period, and on this score, Dr Pitre continues to disappoint. His remaining false claims will be addressed in the next part of this series.

“Messe Dialoguée en Français”: A Glimpse into the Devolution of Liturgy in the 1940s

It is understandable that many would see liturgical disaster as a unique product of the last Council, and particularly of the implementary body headed by Annibale Bugnini, the Consilium ad exsequendam. Others who have read more widely will understand that it is linked to the gradual radicalization of the Liturgical Movement, as it went from the restorationist and educational model of Dom Guéranger to the pastoral utilitarianism of the postwar period. Relatively few, it seems to me, recognize that the roots of this disaster go far back to (in varying ways) the Protestant Revolt, the Enlightenment, and the age of industrialization.

Lately, a number of fine studies have been published that help us to see these more remote pretexts and premises of the liturgical reform of the 1960s, when the program of the Synod of Pistoia finally entered every suburban parish.

Nico Fassino’s recent article in the The Pillar, “The surprising history of the Children’s Mass” tells us:

It is commonly believed that Children’s Masses are a unique development of the modern liturgical reforms, a direct outgrowth of the Second Vatican Council. In reality, however, special Masses for children – including what might now appear to be shocking liturgical innovations – stretch back more than a century before the Second Vatican Council.
     These Masses began as a 19th century attempt to grapple with dramatic social changes and challenges wrought by the modern world. They gained widespread popularity and even gave rise to the creation of vernacular participatory Mass methods for adults years before Vatican II.
     In total, hundreds of editions of these methods for children and adults were published, running to millions of cumulative copies, between 1861 and 1961. They were published with approval, printed for decades, and used with permission around the world.
     This is the story of the surprising origins of “Children’s Masses” in the early 1800s, their widespread popularity around the world, their sudden fall from favor immediately before the Second Vatican Council, and their rebirth during the initial years of the revised Roman Missal of Paul VI.

While Fassino shows us how deeply the rot of bad liturgical ideas had already set in well before the Council, it also happily shows how men of principle strongly resisted this literally juvenile mentality. One does not have to question the good will of these would-be reformers in order to see that such efforts at promoting “participation” are bought at the expense of “dumbing down”—a superficialization that subtly implies that liturgy is a thing for children to grow out of, not a thing to which we are apprenticed in a lifelong process of assimilation.

Similarly, John Paul Sonnen relates the story of “The First Permanent Altar Facing the People in the United States,” which, as it happens, was installed as early as 1938, at a time when it would have been officially forbidden!

Archbishop John Gregory Murray (1877-1956), a native of Connecticut, became the Archbishop of St. Paul (Minnesota) in 1931. During his 24-year tenure he became a frequent visitor to the monks of St. John's Abbey in nearby Collegeville, Minnesota. In those years St. John’s was the largest Benedictine Abbey in the world and they had made a name for themselves as the American epicenter of the Liturgical Movement and what came to be called the liturgical apostolate, coming into fashion after the First World War. 

       In 1938 Archbishop Murray laid the cornerstone of the new English Gothic Revival church of the Nativity, under construction in a beautiful new residential neighborhood in St. Paul’s Groveland neighborhood. The architect of the church was a non-Catholic by the name of James B. Hills. It was during this time that Archbishop Murray approved a plan that was heretofore unheard of: the altar in the basement crypt chapel was to be set permanently facing the people.

       In those days this represented a forbidden stratum of liturgical experimentation that was not yet conceived by most, or sanctioned with approval by the Holy See. An innovation in its day, such a thing had not been tried anywhere in the country. Proponents of the Liturgical Movement in northern Europe had been slowly promoting the idea of Mass facing the people, but it was still a novelty concept in the rest of the world. 

Here is the altar John is talking about, in the only photo that has survived of it (today the room is a recreational space):

We can see this sort of thing in a 1930 photo from the Abbey of Maria Laach in Germany, a hotbed of progressive liturgism. Note that here, there is a more deliberate effort to make the altar look like a meal table:

Returning now to Fassino’s statement that “vernacular participatory Mass methods for adults” were being promoted “years before Vatican II,” I thought readers of NLM would appreciate seeing the photos of a section contained in a Missel-Vespéral Romain edited by the redoubtable Dom Gaspar Lefebvre, OSB, and published in 1946. The reader who kindly shared these photos noted that she also has another edition of the same missal from 1942, which contains the same section.

The photos were sent page by page; I cropped them and combined them for ease of viewing, which explains the mismatches from left to right. (As always, click to enlarge.)

Title page and copyright page

What is most striking about this entire method, which, as Yves Chiron describes, was also practiced by (indeed, pioneered by) Bugnini in Italy, is how much blathering is going on. Throughout the Mass there is “Une Voix,” presumably a layman, who acts as the reader or “commentator” in some cases; and there are many short texts and some long texts that “Toutes” (All) are supposed to say.

The priest, meanwhile, is doing his part at the altar in Latin, so there is a parallel Mass: his in Latin and everyone else’s in French.

A rather heavy-handed attempt is made to bring out the Trinitarian structure of everything: the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Credo... Yes, of course, it’s there and it’s important, but whatever happened to not hitting people over the head with a didactic shovel?

There is a lot of chatter DURING the Roman Canon, as Une Voix laboriously explains to Toutes that now we are praying for the Church militant, now we are offering the Victim, now we are praying for the dead... What strikes me the most is how the pious paraphrase being spoken throughout by the people is so much akin to the “methods of hearing the Mass” that the same Liturgical Movement held in such disdain! It’s as if they simply transferred private devotion into a public mode. This was surely a far cry from Pius X’s “don’t merely pray at Mass, pray the Mass!”

It is actually refreshing to see the act of Spiritual Communion placed right where it is, as a gentle reminder that not everyone should go up to Communion, but only those properly disposed to do so. And thankfully, this act is left... unannounced and unrecited by Toutes. Sadly, even the Last Gospel has to be paraphrased and simplified.

Even the thanksgiving after Mass is corporate and vocal.

It is very difficult to read a method like this and not to wonder, “What in the world were they thinking?” Just because you recite a lot of pious phrases about the Mass all along does not mean you are participating in the holy oblation, the ultimate sacrifice. In fact, you might just miss it altogether by skating on the surface and having no opportunity for recollection, assimilation, and self-offering from the depths of one’s soul.

In his 1975 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii, Pope Paul VI—who only six years earlier had unleashed on the world a Mass that was patterned after this kind of “Messe Dialoguée en Français”—lamented: “Modern man is sated by talk; he is obviously tired of listening, and what is worse, impervious to words.”

Physician, heal thyself.

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s Substack “Tradition & Sanity”; personal site; composer site; publishing house Os Justi Press and YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify pages.

Historical Falsehoods about Active Participation: A Response to Dr Brant Pitre (Part 2)

This article is the second part of my response to a video by Dr Brant Pitre of the Augustine Institute, on the subject of popular participation in the liturgy. The first part covered up to the 20:50 mark, the point at which Dr Pitre begins his would-be explanation of how and why popular participation was lost in the high Middle Ages, and putatively recovered by the post-Conciliar reform. This is done by contrasting an ancient description of a Roman stational liturgy known as the Ordo Romanus Primus, the “First Roman Order”, with the later medieval manner of celebrating the Mass in the papal chapel which gave us the so-called Tridentine Missal. The supposed contrast is, however, based on a genuinely astonishing amount of historical error. 

He begins by introducing the Ordo Romanus Primus (henceforth ORP) as a description of a papal stational liturgy “from the 7th century”, without further qualification. This gives the impression of a greater and more certain antiquity to the text than is really the case. The earliest manuscripts of the ORP are from the first quarter of the 9th century, but most are from the 10th or 11th. However, as noted by Michel Andrieu in his exhaustive critical edition of the Ordines Romani, the ORP contains many references to customs which are certainly later than the 7th century, such as the Agnus Dei, which was added to the Mass at the very end of the eighth. (Note added on Feb. 11, 2025: this was a typo on my part; it was added at the very end of the seventh century. Liturgical customs often take some time to be generally accepted, and the Agnus Dei is still not mentioned in the Old Gelasian Sacramentary, the oldest of its kind for the Roman Rite, ca. 750 A.D.) Furthermore, the manuscripts of it are not Roman, and most of them are not even Italian, a fact which raises a whole series of complicated questions about modifications made to the text over the centuries. The ORP is unquestionably a valuable witness to the liturgical customs of the Roman Church in late antiquity, but it is neither comprehensive nor wholly reliable. [note]

More to the point, Dr Pitre’s presentation gives a false impression of the degree to which the ORP is concerned with the people’s participation in the liturgy, which is minimal. In Andrieu’s edition, the text occupies 42 pages; at least half of every page is filled with critical notes in a smaller font. The total number of references to “the people” in the text and all the notes is fifteen. Six of these refer not to what the people are doing, but to the celebrant turning towards them at specific points, because, of course, the Mass it describes was not celebrated versus populum.

In point of fact, the ORP is almost entirely about the roles of the clergy and the various officials of the papal court. To give just two simple examples, there are over 50 references to the subdeacons in the main text, and dozens of variations on them in the critical notes, while the acolytes are mentioned more than twice as often as the people.

At 21:33, Dr Pitre incorrectly states that the ORP says that the people sing the Gloria; it actually says that the schola sings it. He also states that when the pope says, “Peace be with you,” the people respond (i.e. “And with thy spirit”); the ORP does not say this. In both cases, it is certainly possible, even likely, that the people did sing along with the schola. But in light of the contrast which Dr Pitre will draw later between the ORP and the liturgy of the high to late Middle Ages, this becomes a much more serious historical misrepresentation.

At 21:38, he states, “the Scriptures are read to the people from the ambo (this is important), they are facing the people when they are reading the Scriptures. We’ll see that’ll change in the second millennium.” But the ORP does not say anything to suggest that the ambos faced the people, because they didn’t. (See picture below.) This would be a minor mistake, but for the fact that later, much is made of this point vis-à-vis further erroneous claims about changes supposedly made to the liturgy in the high Middle Ages.

The choir of the basilica of St Clement in Rome is typical in having an ambo for the epistle facing the altar, and another for the Gospel facing north. The lower ambo on the Epistle side is for the director of the choir; it was formerly mistakenly understood to be evidence of the mythical lost Old Testament reading.

The rest of this section (to 22:25) is basically accurate, although again, we are left with a false impression that the ORP says a lot about the people’s role in the liturgy, where it really says very little. This false impression is then reinforced by Dr Pitre’s description of it as if it were fully representative of “the Roman tradition well into the Middle Ages,” and the “active participation of the laity” as “part and parcel” of that tradition. And all of this is aimed at setting up a series of false claims that will be made about how this tradition changed in the 13th century.

Later, Dr Pitre will unfavorably contrast the ORP’s few references to the people with the almost complete absence of any reference to them in the Missal of St Pius V and its high medieval predecessors. And in turn, this will supposedly show that the introduction of rubrics for the laity in the Missal of the post-Conciliar Rite is a return to an earlier tradition, and therefore a great achievement. We must therefore mention here that the earliest Roman sacramentaries, which are older than the oldest manuscripts of the ORP, have even less to say about the people’s role in the Mass than the ORP. This is important because the sacramentary, not the ordo, is the ancestor of the missal, and the comparison of ordo with missal which Dr Pitre makes is based on a serious category error.

The beginning of the Canon in the Gellone Sacramentary, ca. 780. Search in vain through this manuscript or others like it for references to the people’s participation.

Now (23:00) we come to the 13th century, and the development of a new form of papal liturgy alongside that of the stations, the daily liturgy of the pope’s “private” chapel. After referring to this once in passing as “quasi-private”, Dr Pitre then repeatedly calls it the “private liturgy” or “private Mass” without further qualification, in a matter where further qualification is absolutely necessary.

To the modern ear, the expression “private liturgy” or “private Mass” gives the impression that the pope was routinely celebrating low Mass in a small chapel, perhaps attended by a secretary or two, much like any other priest’s low Mass.

The private chapel used by St John XXIII in his summer residence.

This impression is false. The pope’s “chapel” was private, in the sense that it was not open to the public like a cathedral or a parish; not just anyone could walk in to attend the services held there. But it was nevertheless the home of a corporate body of clergymen, and quite a large one at that, who sang the Divine Office and Mass together on a regular basis, just like the canons of a cathedral or the monks of a monastery. These clerics were known as “cappellani – chaplains”, from which position derives the official title of monsignori to this very day, “chaplain of His Holiness.”

Furthermore, the pope was not by any means the only major prelate in the high Middle Ages who had such a “private” chapel with its own clerical staff. Such institutions existed within the households of many bishops, and heads of large religious houses such as the abbey of Cluny, as well as within many noble courts. Some of the greatest composers of sacred music that the Church has ever known, such as Josquin des Prez and Palestrina, worked as choirmasters for chapels of this sort, including the papal chapel, and it doesn’t take much to figure out that their works were not intended to be sung as background music for low Mass.

Josquin des Prez’s signature on the wall of the choir gallery of the Sistine Chapel, where he was a member of the choir from June 1489 until at least April of 1494. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Dr Pitre goes on to contrast the liturgy of the papal court as it was in the early 13th century with the “communal, stational Masses of the pope that we see in Ordo Romanus I.” This part is full of really grave historical errors; I will explain why in detail, but the simple version is that his essential contention is completely wrong. There was no substantive difference between the Mass of the Papal court on the one hand, and any other version of the Mass on the other, including that which is described in the ORP, such that it would per se exclude the participation of the laity.

At 23:45, as he speaks about the liturgy of the papal chapel, a citation appears at the bottom of the screen from Christian Worship in East and West, by Herman Wegman. “Beginning in the eleventh century and especially in the twelfth, the popes began to withdraw from direct pastoral work in the city… the pope… had his own chapel where he celebrated the liturgy isolated and closed off from the clergy and faithful of the city.” This quote (which Dr Pitre does not himself repeat) is itself very misleading. Beginning in the middle of the 11th century, the popes became very active in the great reform movement that was sweeping through the Church, and as a result, spent a great deal of time traveling. Over the 250-year span from 1050 to 1300, they were out of Rome for about 180 of those years. When they were in Rome, however, they did continue to celebrate major feast days in the city’s great churches, as attested by e.g. the eleventh Ordo Romanus (1134-43) and the ordinal of Innocent III (ca. 1200). Moreover, many members of the Roman clergy were also members of the papal chapel.

Part of the papal residence in the city of Viterbo (roughly 52 miles to the north-northwest of Rome), built by Pope Alexander IV from 1257-66. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Sailko, CC BY-SA 4.0)

This is then contrasted with the stational Masses, the supposed focus of popular participation, without ever mentioning that stational Masses were never celebrated every day. The temporal cycle of the Missal of St Pius V has about 80, several of which were not on the list in the days when the ORP was first written, so call it seventy. There have never been stations for the Sundays per annum. The pope also kept stations at some of the major basilicas on their titular feasts or other pertinent occasions; there is no reason to think this was done with the same consistency and frequency as with the Masses of the temporal cycle. The Gellone Sacramentary, ca. 780 AD, gives one station for a feast in the sanctoral, the Purification at St Mary Major. Granting for the sake of argument, and with absurd generosity, that there were fifty such occasions, this gives us a total of 120.

This means that even the most devout among the Roman faithful, those who attended Mass every single day, could attend a stational Mass with the Pope for one-third of the year at most. Therefore, ALL of the Roman faithful were used to attending Masses without the pope, i.e. in a manner on some level different from what is described in the ORP, and thus, the Mass of the ORP, even if it were as fully participatory as any modern liturgist could desire, cannot ever have been normative to begin with.

Now (23:50) the villains, as it were, of the cause of popular participation are introduced, the Franciscans. “When St Francis of Assisi goes to Innocent III and asks for his blessing on the missionary work of this new order of Franciscans (sic), … the Franciscan order is going to adopt as its liturgy … not the communal, station Masses of the Pope that we see in Ordo Romanus I, but the private (sic) liturgy of the papal chapel.” I say “villains” because, in Dr Pitre’s telling, their use of the papal liturgy spreads all over Europe a form of the Mass in which there was no provision made for the people’s participation.

Everything that follows for the next several minutes is a gross distortion and oversimplification.

At 24:25, Dr Pitre adduces a passage from Fr Uwe Michael Lang’s book The Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform, which purportedly “summarize(s) this shift very nicely”, i.e. from the stational liturgy described by the ORP to the “private” liturgy of the papal chapel. And he quotes Fr Lang as follows: “Beginning with the pontificate of Innocent III (r. 1198-1216) popes increasingly used the Vatican… ‘chapel’ (his vocal emphasis) for liturgical celebrations. However, these ceremonial spaces were relatively small, and did not allow for the processional elements that characterized the stational liturgies in the churches of the city.”

Dr Pitre comments on this by saying “…think here of the communal participation of the people.” This is a very tendentious explication. What Fr Lang says here is specifically and solely about the lack of processions in the liturgy of the papal chapel. He says nothing at all about changes to the manner of celebrating Mass, much less about changes which exclude popular participation.

Furthermore, the ellipsis in the quote seriously misrepresents what Fr Lang says. The full quote is as follows; I underline the words which Dr Pitre omits. “Beginning with the pontificate of Innocent III (r. 1198-1216) popes increasingly (n.b.) used the Vatican palace as a residence, and its ‘great chapel’ (no emphasis) (cappella magna) for liturgical celebrations. However, these ceremonial spaces were relatively (n.b.) small, and did not allow for the processional elements that characterized the stational liturgies in the churches of the city.”

First, we should note the word “increasingly”, because until the popes moved to Avignon at the beginning of the 14th century, papal stational liturgies continued to be celebrated in Rome all along, when the popes were there. As noted earlier, they often were not in Rome in this period, a fact which Fr Lang also mentions, and which unquestionably played a significant role in diminishing that aspect of the tradition.

But much more important here is the way Dr Pitre omits the word “great” where Fr Lang talks about the “great chapel”, and vocally emphasizes “chapel” where Fr Lang does not emphasize it. Once again, this creates the false impression that what we are talking about is a privately celebrated low Mass, a false impression which Dr Pitre’s subsequent statements reinforce. (25:35: “This has a dramatic effect on the whole history of the Roman liturgy for the next thousand years. (sic: a thousand years have not elapsed even since the birth of St Francis.) … the form of the Mass that they adopt is a private (his emphasis) Mass from the Pope’s private chapel … organized primarily around just the priest and whatever servers or ministers might be assisting him in the chapel.”)

But the “great chapel” was in fact a great chapel; “relatively small”, as Fr Lang says, which is to say, compared to the major basilicas like the Lateran or St Peter’s, but still not small. The version of it at the Vatican known to Innocent III and St Francis no longer exists, but this is what the popes built as its equivalent when they moved to Avignon.

Image from Wikimedia Commons by Holger Uwe Schmitt, CC BY-SA 4.0

And its modern equivalent, the Sistine Chapel, consecrated in 1483, is also not small.

Again, neither of these spaces is designed for low Mass. (I can personally attest that they both have magnificent acoustics.) “(W)hatever servers or ministers might be assisting (the pope) in the chapel” is a large group of clergy, and a full-time professional liturgical choir, who regularly and solemnly celebrated both the Mass and Divine Office. Dr Pitre’s presentation creates the false impression that the Mass which the Franciscans copied from the papal chapel was a low Mass served by a priest and altar boy, to the exclusion of the people.

The next article in this series will examine Dr Pitre’s claims made about the supposed absence of popular participation in the papal/Franciscan Mass.

[note] Fr Lang writes the following about the Ordo Romanus Primus in the very book which Dr Pitre adduces in favor of his own contentions about popular participation. (p. 213): “Interpreting the extant sources of the papal stational liturgy presents us with a fundamental problem, since they are prescriptive texts that communicate how the rite should be enacted. As historical scholarship has made us increasingly aware, however, we cannot simply assume that such prescriptions are identical with the way in which the liturgy was in fact carried out. Ordo Romanus I was originally designed for the solemn papal mass on Easter Sunday, Monday and Tuesday; as a template for other occasions it was likely to be adapted to the spatial arrangements, local resources and (quite possibly) particular observances of the stational church chosen for the day. Moreover, it is a script for liturgical actors who were, for the most part, clerics (the papal court included also lay officials). As such (it) can easily give the impression of a ‘clericalized’ liturgy, but such a view would be misleading since it abstracts from the genre and purpose of the document. Liturgical books in the strict sense are not concerned with how people in general participated in the rite, let alone how they experienced it.” (my emphasis)

Historical Falsehoods about Active Participation: A Response to Dr Brant Pitre (Part 1)

Just over two weeks ago, on the anniversary of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the YouTube channel of Catholic Productions published a video by Dr Brant Pitre, who is the Distinguished Research Professor of Scripture at the Augustine Institute Graduate School. The video is part of a series called “The Mass Explained”, which was published a bit over a year ago through the Catholic Productions website. This specific video is now being offered on YouTube as an encouragement to explore the full series; its subject is the much-debated concept of active participation in the liturgy.

Dr Pitre is a Biblical scholar, and by far the most successful part of this video is his attempt to give a solid Scriptural foundation to the concept; a useful endeavor, given the hopeless ambiguity of so much of Sacrosanctum Concilium. Unfortunately, his presentation is marred by a considerable number of really drastic historical errors, including one on which the whole narrative arc, so to speak, of his presentation rests. The errors are in fact too many to describe in a single post, and this response will have to be presented in more than one part.

I wish to be clear that I certainly do not ascribe to Dr Pitre any conscious dishonesty. There are plenty of liturgists and people who have written about the liturgy who can be excused of the charge of deliberate lying only if one grants that before attempting to deceive others, they have first gone to enormous pains to deceive themselves. (I wish I could take credit for this bon mot, but it comes from Sir Peter Medawar’s brilliantly savage review of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man.) I see no reason to think that Dr Pitre is among them; indeed, I think it very likely that he himself is among those whom others have deceived.

Nor does he fall into the fatuous excesses that so many others have fallen into when writing or speaking about this topic specifically, and claim that “active participation”, however defined, is incompatible with the historical Roman Rite. Indeed, he acknowledges that active participation of the lay faithful has been a part of it in the past. His gigantic historical error lies in his would-be description of when, how, why and to what degree this changed, leading the Second Vatican Council to call for its restoration. (I will cover most of what he says about this in part 2 of this article.)

He begins (2:55) with the first occurrence of the term “actuosa participatio – active participation” in Sacrosanctum Concilium, paragraph 14, saying that it is “arguably the most important topic of the Second Vatican Council.” Unfortunately, the translation of Sacrosanctum Concilium which he cites contains a very significant mistake, which is no less of a mistake for being repeated on the Vatican’s own website. The English version which he gives is as follows: “In the restoration and promotion of the sacred liturgy, this full and active participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all else.” (His emphasis.)

But the Latin original does not say that active participation “is to be considered before all else,” which would be a license for doing anything and everything in the liturgy, provided the claim were made that it fostered active participation. And of course, in the so-called “spirit” of Vatican II, many people, including the very men who invented the post-Conciliar Rite, have taken it as just such a license, in order to excuse their ignoring significant parts of Sacrosanctum Concilium itself, and all of the Church’s earlier magisterial teaching on the liturgy, to say nothing of others justifying the most appalling abuses in the actual celebration of the liturgy.

Much active. Very participation.

The Latin words of the Constitution are “actuosa participatio … summopere attendenda est”, which would be properly rendered “active participation … is to be given the greatest attention.” And it is in fact so rendered in the Italian, French, Spanish and German translations also available via the Vatican’s website. (I cannot vouch for the Arabic, Chinese, Swahili or various Slavic versions.)

This would have also been the perfect place to add that there is a solid case to be made that “actual participation” is a better translation of the words “actuosa participatio” than “active participation.” This case was laid out very thoroughly by Fr Peter Stravinskas in a paper which he delivered to the CIEL conference in Paris in 2003, and graciously allowed NLM to reprint in 2016. (Part 1; Part 2) For of course, as we all know, the word “active” has deceived many within the Church into confusing activity with achievement, and thus taking it for granted that as long as the laity are doing something, they are actively participating, and it doesn’t much matter what exactly they are doing or how they are doing it.

In regard to the Council’s statement that the people’s participation in the liturgy should be “full”, Dr Pitre very rightly points out (6:45) that this means fully participating in the parts which properly belong to them, “and only those parts which belong to them, and the people shouldn’t be doing what is exclusive to the priest, and vice versa.” For of course, it was the furthest thing from the Council Fathers’ minds to foster the participation of the laity by blurring this necessary distinction. This would have been a good place, therefore, to point out that “active” participation in the modern liturgy has been brought about in no small part by redefining “what is exclusive to the priest”, and giving to the laity liturgical roles that the tradition of the Church has always given to the clergy: the reading of the Scriptures, and the distribution of Communion. Perhaps this comes up elsewhere in the series.

At 7:50, Dr Pitre very rightly notes that the phrase “actuosa participatio” goes back to St Pius X’s famous motu proprio Tra le sollicitudini on sacred music in the liturgy, and that singing the parts proper to them is above all the most important way in which the faithful actively participate in the liturgy. Perhaps some other part of the series points out that in practical terms, Tra le sollicitudini has been completely overthrown by the post-Conciliar reform, since the confusion between activity and achievement, a confusion which the word “active” positively invites, often leads to the replacement of good music with bad music or no music, because it is easier for the congregation to sing bad music than good, and easier still to recite than to sing.

It would also be worth mentioning somewhere along the line that Sacrosanctum Concilium itself does not cite Tra le sollecitudini, because in the last phase of its redaction, the numerous citations of the Church’s prior magisterial teaching on the liturgy qua liturgy, and particularly those related to sacred music, were expunged. This includes not only multiple references to Tra le sollecitudini, but also to Pius XI’s 1928 Apostolic Constitution Divini cultus, Pius XII’s encyclicals Mediator Dei (1947) and Musicae sacrae disciplina (1955) as well as the instruction issued by the Sacred Congregation for Rites in 1958, De musica sacra et sacra liturgia. (This removal was documented by Susan J. Benofy in an article entitled “Footnotes for a Hermeneutic of Continuity: Sacrosanctum Concilium’s Vanishing Citations”, published in the Adoremus Bulletin in 2015.)

At 9:30, Dr Pitre introduces a few key Biblical texts that refer to active participation in the liturgy, and as I stated earlier, this really is the strongest part of the video. The first of these is a description of the assembly in Nehemiah 8, which he describes as “actively listening” to the word of God read to them by the priests. This passage occupies a prominent and very ancient place in the historical Roman Rite, as the second reading of the Ember Wednesday of September. With the suppression of the Ember days in the post-Conciliar Rite, it has been assigned to a Sunday of Ordinary time in year C, and a Thursday in year 1. (This might have been the place to mention that the books of Ezra and Nehemiah refer much more often to the organization of trained cantors among the ministerial orders of the Temple, since the use of professional choirs will later be noted as one of the developments within the Church which putatively detracted from the participation of the laity.)

The second quotation is a foundational passage for the priesthood of all the baptized, 1 Peter 2, 9, which is cited in the aforementioned paragraph 14, and this is followed by the passages which describe the heavenly liturgy in the Apocalypse, and the various ways in which all of the different orders of the Church participate, including silent participation. And since the “heavenly model provide(s) the template for what worship should look like on earth, if all of the members of the mystical body of Christ are actively engaged (in the liturgy) in heaven, then the same thing should be true of the liturgy on earth.”

At 18:00, Dr Pitre begins to adduce examples from the history of the Church which show that “for the first thousand years or so of Christian worship, this is precisely what we’re going to find.” Unfortunately, this is precisely the point where he begins to run his ship aground. For his reference to the “first thousand years or so” implies that a change took place after that point, a change which he will later explicate very wrongly; wrongly enough that, as I said earlier, I will need a second part of this article to explain it all. (The words “or so” are also being made to do far too much work here.)

There follow six examples of things in which the people fully participated in the liturgy during those first thousand years: in his order, the Sanctus, the giving of the peace, the responsorial psalm (sic), the Amen at the end of the prayers, including the Canon, the Creed and the Our Father. Regarding the last of these, he correctly acknowledges that it has always been the Roman custom for the priest to sing it alone (except, of course, for the final words), and just as correctly notes that in some other Western liturgies, it was sung by everyone, as it still is in the Byzantine Rite.

First of all, I note that with four of these, the Sanctus, the Amens, the Creed and Our Father (i.e. the end of it), it has always been possible for the faithful to sing them. It has always been possible for the faithful to pray the Our Father silently along with the priest. There are of course ways of singing them in which not all the faithful can participate, such as the very rich polyphonic settings of the Lord’s Prayer composed for the Byzantine Divine Liturgy. There have been specific sociocultural and historical circumstances in which the faithful did not sing them, although apologists for the post-Conciliar reform have habitually exaggerated the degree to which this is true, and regrettably, Dr Pitre falls into this trap. Nevertheless, the faithful have never been excluded from singing them in principle.

A polyphonic setting of The Lord’s Prayer in Church Slavonic, by the Ukrainian composer Maxim Berezovsky (1745 ca. - 1777).

Concerning the Sanctus, he cites the statement of the Liber Pontificalis that it was instituted by the eighth Pope, St Sixtus I, who reigned from roughly 115-125. But the liturgical notices in the Liber Pontificalis, the statements that “Pope so-and-so instituted such-and-such a custom”, are notoriously anachronistic, the more so the earlier they go. For example, the very next entry attributes the institution of Christmas to Sixtus’ successor St Telesphorus (125-36 ca.); all scholars recognize that the feast dates to about two centuries later. It is not per se impossible that St Sixtus instituted the Sanctus, but we have no real evidence that he did in fact do so.

Secondly, the Liber Pontificalis has come down to us in very rough condition, and is full of textual problems. The relevant part of the entry for St Sixtus says, “Hic constituit ut intra actionem, sacerdos incipiens populo hymnum decantare, ‘Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabahot’, et cetera.” As written, the infinitive “decantare” (to sing) is a grammatical error, and the passage is marked in modern editions as corrupt; an easy emendation has been proposed, “decantaret.” If this is correct, the passage would mean, “This one (viz. Pope Sixtus) established that within the action (i.e. the saying of the canon, as is written above the Hanc igitur in the Missal) the priest as he begins should sing to the people (‘populo’ in the dative case; my emphasis) the hymn ‘Sanctus…’ ” etc.

One might object that it makes no sense to say that the priest sang the Sanctus and the people did not. But there is some evidence that this was in fact a custom of the Ambrosian Rite on certain penitential days, on which the priest alone sang the Sanctus as part of the preface. But even if this custom was never observed in the Roman Rite, this text does not say that the people sang the Sanctus; quite the opposite.

After references to the giving of the peace, Dr Pitre goes on to say that “in the fifth century, St Augustine tells us that the people would sing the responsorial psalm,” and the video cites The Confessions, book 9, 8.15, as given in Lawrence Johnson’s Worship in the Early Church: An Anthology of Historical Sources (3:12). But this passage does not refer to the people’s participation in the Mass. It refers to an event of St Ambrose’s episcopacy for which Augustine and his mother were present, when the Empress Justina planned to turn one of the basilicas in Milan over to the Arians. The Catholic faithful occupied the church, and the custom was therefore established that the people should hymns and psalms “after the manner of the eastern regions, lest the people pine away in the tediousness of sorrow…”

Augustine does go on to say that this custom, “retained from then till now, is now imitated by many, and nearly all of (the Lord’s) flocks throughout the rest of the world.” But nothing about it suggests that it was a specifically liturgical custom, much less that it involved anything like what we now call a responsorial psalm.

After a mention of what St Isidore of Seville says about the readings being for the instruction of the people, i.e., that they are meant to be actively listened to by the faithful, Dr Pitre now turns (at 20:50) to a text known as the Ordo Romanus Primus, the “First Roman Order”, an ancient description of a Roman stational liturgy. This text is presented to set up a supposed contrast with the later medieval manner of celebrating the liturgy in the papal chapel which gave us the so-called Tridentine Missal. This contrast, however, is so thoroughly and so badly misconstrued that it must be described in another part of this article.