On occasion, I receive an email like the following (in this case, from a seminarian): “Do you happen to know of any sources/authoritative references which you could point me to that explain why praying the Pre-55 Breviary definitely satisfies the canonical obligation for clerics or religious? As I am strongly desirous of the Pre-55 Liturgy, I wanted to check all my p’s and q’s.” (The same question could be asked,
mutatis mutandis, about taking up a pre-Pius X breviary as well.)
My Initial View
In the past, my standard line has been: There is no official statement that you can do this. If one can do it, it is because “what earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place.” It can be done because it is the Church’s venerable and immemorial
lex orandi. If you are confident that this is true, then you have sufficient certainty that by fulfilling the obligation as it was fulfilled by countless saints before you, you too are fulfilling it today, in a way that is supererogatory inasmuch as it goes above and beyond the minimum that is required by current law.
However, I thought it best to solicit a variety of opinions from experts. I will now share their responses. As you’ll see, opinions differ, but a certain majority consensus emerges.
Expert Opinion #1 (a secular priest from an Ecclesia Dei institute)
“I am a bit more cautious when it comes to using an older version of the Office than an older version of the Missal, because I see a distinction between, on the one hand, something being the public prayer of the Church and, on the other, something fulfilling a positive obligation imposed by the Church through the power of the keys.
“I would say that if one were to pray the Office using an older version, it would still be the public prayer of the Church. But because the obligation to recite the Divine Office and its binding under the pain of mortal sin is something produced by positive ecclesiastical law, if the requirements as set forth by the law are not fulfilled, then the penalty is incurred. This is different from the Missal as there is, in general, no
obligation under penalty to celebrate Mass—an exception being if it is required for the faithful to fulfill an obligation of attendance. For example, I would say that if Pius X had decided that secular clergy or clergy with pastoral responsibilities were bound to recite only Lauds and Vespers, they would fulfill their obligation and avoid sin by doing so, while if they went
beyond this, it would still be part of the public prayer of the Church.
“Touching on this topic, ‘Art. 9 §3 of the Motu Proprio
Summorum Pontificum gives clerics the faculty to use the
Breviarium Romanum in effect in 1962, which is to be prayed entirely and in the Latin language’ (
Universae ecclesiae, 32). This expresses that the obligation can be fulfilled using the ’62 Breviary. This does not really answer the question definitively, but it might help shape the direction the discussion might go and the points which need to be considered in answer the question.”
Expert Opinion #2 (a Benedictine monk)
“Would the praying of the pre-55 Breviary constitute a mortal sin if ecclesiastical discipline established that one must pray the 1962 Breviary? Frankly, I think this is the sort of positivist nonsense that got us into trouble in the first place.
“The promise at ordination is
to pray the Divine Office. Period. The Paul VI Liturgy of the Hours is so edited and short that I do not know how someone could possibly incur sin by saying the John XXIII breviary instead, as it is much longer and more demanding. (Imaginary confession: ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I have prayed 150 psalms in the Office this week rather than 62.25!’) So too, the older versions are still more demanding. (‘Bless me, Father, I have prayed the Octave of All Saints and enjoyed it! Can this really be a sin?’) Give me a break!
“In the early days of the Ecclesia Dei Commission, Cardinal Mayer was asked by a priest for permission to say the old breviary. His response was that no permission was needed because it is longer than the Breviary of Paul VI. Enough said. So too, the policy of positivism falls, for now
Summorum Pontificum is abrogated. The Missal of 1962 is mandated by
Summorum; yet it and all its predecessors are forbidden by
Traditionis Custodes. Et cetera. Are we supposed to change our liturgical and devotional life with each new pontificate? Come on!
“If a seminarian wishes to pray more, let us thank God and concern ourselves with those who don’t pray the breviary at all.”
My response to the monk:
I am in full agreement. Thank you for your rant. Really, we should say this: The obligation of the cleric or religious is to honor God by praying the Divine Office, consisting of the psalms and other texts. As long as he is doing this in a manner “received and approved,” he is fulfilling that task.
However, it must be recognized that the stranglehold of legal positivism is very powerful, and St. Pius X mightily contributed to it with his over-the-top language when promulgating his own new breviary:
Therefore, by the authority of these letters, We first of all abolish the order of the Psaltery as it is at present in the Roman Breviary, and We absolutely forbid the use of it after the 1st day of January of the year 1913. From that day in all the churches of secular and regular clergy, in the monasteries, orders, congregations and institutes of religious, by all and several who by office or custom recite the Canonical Hours according to the Roman Breviary issued by St. Pius V and revised by Clement VIII, Urban VIII and Leo XIII, We order the religious observance of the new arrangement of the Psaltery in the form in which We have approved it and decreed its publication by the Vatican Printing Press. At the same time, We proclaim the penalties prescribed in law against all who fail in their office of reciting the Canonical Hours every day; all such are to know that they will not be satisfying this grave duty unless they use this Our disposition of the Psaltery.
We command, therefore, all the Patriarchs, Archbishops, Bishops, Abbots and other Prelates of the Church, not excepting even the Cardinal Archpriests of the Patriarchal Basilicas of the City, to take care to introduce at the appointed time into their respective dioceses, churches or monasteries, the Psaltery with the Rules and Rubrics as arranged by Us; and the Psaltery and these Rules and Rubrics We order to be also inviolately used and observed by all others who are under the obligation of reciting or chanting the Canonical Hours. In the meanwhile, it shall be lawful for everybody and for the chapters themselves, provided the majority of the chapter be in favor, to use duly the new order of the Psaltery immediately after its publication.
This We publish, declare, sanction, decreeing that these Our letters always are and shall be valid and effective, notwithstanding apostolic constitutions and ordinances, general and special, and everything else whatsoever to the contrary. Wherefore, let nobody infringe or temerariously oppose this page of Our abolition, revocation, permission, ordinance, precept, statue, indult, mandate and will. But if anybody shall presume to attempt this, let him know that he will incur the indignation of Almighty God, and of His Apostles, Sts Peter and Paul.
Given at Rome at St. Peter’s in the year of the Incarnation of the Lord 1911, on November 1st, the Feast of All Saints, in the ninth year of Our Pontificate.
So, it seems to me, there must be a theological rationale for maintaining that something like this decree is null and void from the get-go. Not that Pius X’s breviary is thereby invalidated or rendered illegal, but his attempt to prohibit all contrary customs no matter how venerable seems like it would have to be null and void, if we take serious the concept of tradition and do not think it is totally subject to the will of the reigning pontiff (cf. Benedict XVI’s comments about the limits of the pope’s authority: “The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law.... The Pope knows that in his important decisions, he is bound to the great community of faith of all times...,” etc.). If Benedict XVI is right, then the “sacred and great” principle takes precedence over attempts to thwart it.
One may sympathize with the hesitation of clergy or religious to take the line: “I am expressly disobeying the dictate of Pope N. in doing what I’m doing, because it rests on deeper and better principles than his.” One would, at very least, need moral certainty that one had properly understood the nature of the obligation owed to tradition in contrast with that owed to papal legislation. I am reminded here of an exchange at the trial of St. Thomas More: “What, More, you wish to be considered wiser and of better conscience than all the bishops and nobles of the realm?” To which More replied, “My lord, for one bishop of your opinion I have a hundred saints of mine; and for one parliament of yours, and God knows of what kind, I have all the General Councils for 1,000 years, and for one kingdom I have France and all the kingdoms of Christendom.”
The monk’s reply:
“Yes, moral certainty is what one needs. But that comes easily enough when positive law twists and turns back on itself every few years. Pius X was a little over-the-top on authority, perhaps understandably so. Today, when authority changes the teaching of the Church on the definitive revelation of God in Christ, on marriage, on Holy Communion, on the death penalty, on the “blessability” of same-sex unions, etc., it is hard to say that using a fuller, older breviary can be considered grave matter, let alone mortal sin. Trads often lack ecclesial, historical and theological perspective, alas. Following rules—even stupid ones—is often easier than thinking.”
Expert Opinion #3 (diocesan priest and canon lawyer)
“At first glance, it would seem that the command to pray the office must be fulfilled by the use of an edition that has been promulgated and proposed for its fulfilment. From this perspective, only the Paul VI office
or the John XXIII office would fulfil the obligation, especially from the vantage of ‘public prayer of the Church,’ i.e., not something done out of personal devotion.
[i]“However, while it is true that the legislation (in
Summorum Pontificum Art. 9 n. 3) only specifically mentions the 1962, I still think there is room for the pre-conciliar breviary. Two aspects argue in favor of this: antinomy and
lacuna legis.
“Some would argue that this matter falls into an issue of antinomy—two laws or norms belonging to the same juridical ordering, which take place in the same space and attribute incompatible legal consequences to a certain factual situation, which prevents their simultaneous application; in other words, a factual situation with two or more legal consequences that are incompatible because of two rules. So, one might look for a ‘legislative silence’ that would speak in favor of the freedom to use an older breviary. Silence is of far greater canonical value than most people realize.
“Moreover, a failure to specifically
proscribe the recitation of the pre-55 breviary would lend support to its use based on the well-established canonical practice of respecting custom; indeed, the elucidation of this issue should be based on analogous situations, e.g., what happens with the missal. Even in this iconoclastic period we are living in, the Church has allowed the use of pre-’62 ceremonies, and even though there is no
obligation to celebrate Holy Mass, nevertheless, one could say that the (at times) explicit and (at other times) implicit approval of pre-’62 ceremonies suggests that the breviary could also fall into this approval, even with silence on the subject.
“I would also argue that odious and dishonest things are not to be presumed in law, and since the prayer of an older, at one time normative breviary is certainly not odious, and the use of it in no way bespeaks a desire to contravene the
mens legislatoris, one could in good conscience pray the pre-55 breviary.
“Furthermore, I would add that in the modern legislation for the preconciliar liturgy—
Summorum Pontificum,
Traditionis Custodes, etc.—there is no explicit prohibition of the use of the earlier breviaries, and one could argue that this falls into the well-established legal principle of ‘odiosa sunt restringenda, favores sunt amplianda’: odious laws—in other words, those that restrict a right or freedom—must be interpreted strictly, in favor of those who are subject to them; while favorable laws must be interpreted broadly.
“Finally, we should take into consideration the actual state of affairs in the mess of the postconciliar world. After Vatican II, monastic communities were allowed to experiment and make up their own divine office. You can find this out by visiting almost any community at random: they are all doing different things. There is a principle in the Church: ‘office for office.’ I was visiting an abbey in another country and I noticed that their monastic office was different. I wondered aloud to the prior if praying it would suffice to fulfill my obligation, and he said: ‘office for office,’ meaning, I could substitute the office prayed in common in the abbey for the office I would have prayed from the breviary (so, their morning prayer for my morning prayer, etc.). I do not know how far this notion of ‘office for office’ could be taken, but it seems to suggest that the Church regards it as sufficient if a priest or religious offers the daily round of prayers and praises in any accepted (or even tolerated) form.”
Expert Opinion #4 (another Benedictine)
“I was not convinced by the Benedictine’s first opinion. When he calls the priest’s opinion ‘legal positivism,’ is he denying that this
is a matter of positive law? Or is he saying that
even though it is a matter of positive law, it should be obvious that this particular law (requiring the Pius X office or the ’62 office) is beyond the authority of the legislator?
As far as I can see, the only real argument he gives (in his first response) is that the old office is much longer than that of Paul VI. To me, this is not convincing. If I am bound by a lawful superior to go to Texas, I don’t fulfill my duty by going to China on the grounds that it is a harder trip. The comparison is not simply ‘more’ in the sense that option 2 includes everything option 1 includes, plus some. That would be different. For the question is not, can a priest pray the whole Paul VI office and
then pray the pre-’55 in addition, but rather, can he replace the one with the other? If the Church is a visible body with a visible head who has a real legislative authority, one must allow that positive laws can exist and should be obeyed, even when they are bad laws (I don’t mean sinful, but just mistaken or dumb, or otherwise flawed).
“The monk’s second reply (to your implied objection from Pius X) is more to the point. As far as I can see, the moral certainty that we can stick to the old stuff arises predominantly from the evidence that the new stuff is not simply ‘less,’ or that it does away with a 1,000-year-old tradition, but that it is really somehow against the faith. I don’t mean that the breviary itself of Paul VI contains heresies. Rather, I think one can look at the whole shebang since Vatican II, look at the current pontificate, and reasonably conclude that there is an evil and anti-Catholic trend which encompasses, more or less clearly,
all the reforms in the past several decades. The result would be a strong doubt about the obligation to comply, and at least a reasonable guess that sticking to pre-reform prayer is safe, despite what the pope says.
“I don’t want to downplay the importance of tradition, but the fact stands that there is no
clear teaching (as far as I know) about the limits of papal authority. For instance, we have no council that says ‘if anyone says a pope can change a tricentennial liturgical custom, let him be anathema.’ And, in fact, the texts we do have tend in the opposite direction.
“As far as I can see, there is no way to know with certainty that Pius X overstepped his authority and that his decree was null. And, as a side note, I am not convinced that this is a purely post-Vatican I problem either. Gregory VII tried aggressively to replace the Mozarabic liturgy with the Roman Liturgy, invoking his papal right to do so. At the same time, I think there is a good deal of evidence to reasonably conclude—notice, I do not say conclude with certainty—that the traditions prior to Vatican II can be safely used, based on the overwhelming evidence that the Church has tended in an anti-Catholic direction since that time.
“The diocesan canonist’s opinion is more convincing to me as well, but for different reasons. It acknowledges that this
is a matter of positive law but seeks to answer the question within the framework of positive law. I am not qualified to assess the argument canonically but it seems reasonable. As the aforementioned moral argument is sufficient (in my mind at least), I don’t really bother with trying to find solutions within the letter of the law.”
My response to the last (and in general):
I think the logically possible approaches are well summarized in the expert opinions 1, 2, and 3.
Does a pope have authority to require a certain form of prayer? I think the question is ambiguous. If the form he requires represents a radical break with the form required for centuries and centuries, then we might have a problem on our hands—one that could result in a true crisis of conscience. This is where the fateful combination of legal positivism and ever-expanding ultramontanism presses comes in, for the question is rendered easy if you say the pope has absolute authority over everything liturgical (except for a highly distilled “form and matter” of sacraments), and that the only duty of the subordinate to obey his will (or his whims).
But since this is not the way the Church has behaved throughout her history—in fact, it is the opposite of the way she has behaved—and there are sound theological, anthropological, and moral reasons to think that this cannot be right, one may arrive at the position of the Benedictine monk who says it is absurd to believe that praying a traditional “received and approved” form of the liturgy could be wrong, or ruled out as sinful.
The Texas/China analogy fails because, in fact, we are talking about different forms or versions of the same thing, namely, the divine office by which the hours of the day are to be sanctified through the recitation of psalms and prayers. A form that is both
more ancient and
more extensive would satisfy a requirement that one must do something of the same kind that is
more recent and
more restricted. The only way it could be maintained that a later form
must replace an earlier form is if there was something wrong with the earlier form.
Indeed, this is why, when Urban VIII changed all the breviary hymn language, the religious communities (Benedictines, Cistercians, Dominicans, some others too) simply begged off and said they were content with the language of the hymns as they existed in their own offices. The new language and the old could exist side-by-side. Nor did that pope, or any other, dare to force the matter. That’s because there once
was respect for autonomy and diversity, as opposed to now, when everyone talks about these things but no one actually respects them.
The fact that there is no explicit statement that the pope cannot cancel out “received and approved rites” of venerable standing is because it would have seemed ridiculous to our forebears to think that he
could. You might remember the episode at Vatican I:
Now before the final vote on Pastor Aeternus at Vatican I, several Council Fathers were concerned that they would be voting for a doctrine that would give the pope absolute and unqualified jurisdictional authority. Various (documented) discussions were given by members of the Deputation of the Faith assuring the Council Fathers that this was not a correct understanding of the doctrine. That is, they (the Relators of the Deputation) stated that the pope, in his jurisdictional authority, does not have absolute and unqualified jurisdictional authority. One Council Father, however, an American named Bishop Verot of Savannah, apparently was not convinced, and requested that specific qualifying statements (to the effect that the pope’s jurisdictional authority is qualified) be inserted into the texts of the schemas. He was told that the Council Fathers had not come to Rome “to hear buffooneries.” In other words, if this bishop had understood the theological context of the schema, he would not have put himself in such an embarrassing situation. (Brill, Great Sacred Music Reform, 47n25)
I rather regret that it seemed so obvious to the fathers of Vatican I, because I think the qualifying language that Bishop Verot wanted would have been exceedingly useful at present. Of course, when the
German bishops got around to explaining Vatican I to Prussia, they did add a number of valuable clarifications, though again, their document suffers from vagueness (just what does “human arbitrariness” amount to? What does it look like? How do we know it when we see it?—assuredly, it seems that
today we know it when we see it, because popes have gone so far off the deep end in this or that instance). I tried to bring some clarity to this topic in my lecture “
The Pope’s Boundedness to Tradition as a Legislative Limit: Replying to Ultramontanist Apologetics.” Fr. Réginald-Marie Rivoire also discusses this point in his tract
Does “Traditionis Custodes” Pass the Juridical Rationality Test? (to which the answer is, no).
Now, if it could be shown
that anything demanded by a pope was contrary to the faith or to sound morals, that in itself would be a reason to say no to it and to stick with what was there before. This, evidently, is what we must do with something like
Amoris Laetitia. But it seems also true to say that if something demanded by a pope is followed by a period of uninterrupted institutional chaos or decline, it becomes suspect by that very fact; or (perhaps this is to say the same thing) that in a period of institutional chaos or decline, it is legitimate to maintain the “status quo ante,” much as Lefebvre maintained that he realized he had to stick with the missal prior to the deformations of the 1960s that led to the Novus Ordo of 1969. (Sadly, neither he nor the Society has ever quite figured out that the changes in the 1950s were part of the same process of deformation, and therefore should have been rejected for exactly the same reason. It was the same people with the same principles who were behind both phases, before and after the Council.)
This is really all the light I have, and it may not be much. It seems to me that at
this time in particular, when the postconciliar autodemolition of the Church is plain for all to see, there is no reason to doubt anymore that the liturgical revolution—which had its ill-starred conception in Pius X’s hyperpapalist revamp of the breviary, its ominous childhood in Pius XII’s rewriting of Holy Week, and its monstrous adulthood in the ruptures of Paul VI—is something that cannot be of God, cannot be truly “of the Church,” and cannot be for the good of souls.
Granted, each stage is worse than the one before, such that, as I argue in chapter 12 of
Once and Future Roman Rite, there are
fewer objections one can make to earlier stages and
more to later ones, which also implies that adhering to the earlier is less problematic than adhering to the latter (e.g., praying the breviary of Pius X is not as bad as using the Holy Week of Pius XII, and using the Holy Week of Pius XII is not as bad as using the missal of Paul VI). But since there is a real continuity of principles, one is fully justified in taking the whole series as a single process, and saying, as a matter of coherent traditionalism:
I will pray the breviary and the missal as they existed prior to this revolutionary process.
Benedictines are fortunate in this regard, as they have the unchanged
cursus psalmorum of St. Benedict, nice editions of their choir books, and an altar missal from the first half of the 20th century. All this is “ready to go” in a way that makes the Roman situation look terribly messy by comparison. That’s why I’m not surprised that a number of secular clergy have become or seek to become Benedictine oblates: it gives them a direct channel to a full set of traditional liturgical books still in use in a fair number of abbeys in communion with the Holy See.
NOTE
[i] A clause in
Rubricarum instructum of Pope John XXIII seems intended to close the lid on the issue (mind you, only for those with an obligation to the Divine Office): no. 3, “Item statuta, privilegia, indulta et consuetudines cuiuscumque generis, etiam saecularia et immemorabilia, immo specialissima atque individua mentione digna, quae his rubricis obstant, revocantur.” However, the pope left an exclusion clause in no. 3: “quae his rubricis obstant.” What exactly this amounts to would need further investigation.
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