Learned Blunders: The Impact of Flawed Scholarship on the Liturgical Reforms of the Twentieth Century

Most of the debates about the liturgical reforms of the twentieth century are understandably concerned with theological or ideological elements. Critics of the 1962 Missal worry that the old Mass is too hierarchical and too aligned with an outdated political ideology, a relic of the days of the Ancien Régime. Critics of the 1969 Missal, on other hand, wonder if the new Mass is too egalitarian, modernist, Protestant, Masonic, etc. My goal in this essay, however, is to focus on the role that honest mistakes about historical facts may have played in the formation and implementation of the 1969 Missal.

Honest mistakes about history are different from theological and ideological convictions, although there can be a thin line between the two, and they often influence each other. It is one thing to believe that Mass facing the people is a better way to worship because it is less alienating and more inclusive; it is another thing to believe that the early Church celebrated Mass facing the people. One is a theological opinion that may or may not be true and may be contingent on circumstances; the other is a historical claim that either did or did not happen – period.

But if I believe that the early Church celebrated Mass facing the people, then I might be more inclined to conclude that the Church today should do so as well: in this case, my grasp of the facts shapes my opinion. On the other hand, if I fervently believe that the Church today should have Mass facing the people, I may become predisposed to interpret some archeological data as evidence that the early Church celebrated Mass facing the people; in that case, my opinion shapes my grasp of the facts.

Granted, the adjective “honest” makes my task more complicated, for it presumes to assess the purity of another person’s intention. To avoid any cynical presumption, I will simply assume that the scholars involved in the following blunders acted in good faith.

1. A Patristic Golden Age

A common feature of twentieth-century liturgical scholarship is the conviction that the liturgies of the Patristic era, from the second to the fifth centuries A.D., constitute a Golden Age of sacred worship. I do not know if this belief is an honest historical mistake or a theological conviction or both, but either way it must be mentioned because it influenced and gave great weight to the other mistakes that I will discuss: indeed, it influenced the Council itself. Paragraph 50 of Sacrosanctum Concilium states:

The rite of the Mass is to be revised in such a way that the intrinsic nature and purpose of its several parts, as also the connection between them, may be more clearly manifested, and that devout and active participation by the faithful may be more easily achieved. For this purpose the rites are to be simplified, due care being taken to preserve their substance; elements which, with the passage of time, came to be duplicated, or were added with but little advantage, are now to be discarded; other elements which have suffered injury through accidents of history are now to be restored to the vigor which they had in the days of the holy Fathers, as may seem useful or necessary.

The Latin is even stronger: instead of the “vigor” of the holy Fathers, the document states that certain liturgical elements are to be restored to the “pristine norm” (pristina norma) of the holy Fathers.

While this passage does not explicitly state that the Patristic era, i.e., the time of the Church Fathers, was a Golden Age, it can easily be used to support such a belief, and as such it stands in tension with Pope Pius XII’s 1947 Mediator Dei, which warns precisely against this lens of interpretation:

The liturgy of the early ages is most certainly worthy of all veneration. But ancient usage must not be esteemed more suitable and proper, either in its own right or in its significance for later times and new situations, on the simple ground that it carries the savor and aroma of antiquity. The more recent liturgical rites likewise deserve reverence and respect. They, too, owe their inspiration to the Holy Spirit, who assists the Church in every age even to the consummation of the world. They are equally the resources used by the majestic Spouse of Jesus Christ to promote and procure the sanctity of man (61).

Pope Pius XII lists examples of decisions that would be wrong-headed: the return of the altar to a primitive table form as well as the suppression of black vestments, sacred images, statues, crucifixes of Christus passus, and polyphony (see 62).

The Holy Father offers a theological reason for rejecting Golden Ageism, namely, that it discounts or even denies the ongoing inspiration of the Holy Spirit on liturgical development—that is, it discounts a providentially guided organic development. Golden Ageism is, at the end of the day, an arbitrary attachment, not a historical fact. Objectively and dispassionately speaking, how do we know that one age is better than another, liturgically or otherwise? I had a wise liturgical studies professor who once said that the difference between Protestant fundamentalists and Catholic fundamentalists is that fundamentalist Protestants try in vain to leapfrog over history and return to the first century while Catholic traditionalists try in vain to leapfrog over history and return to the thirteenth century. Fair enough, yet did not so many twentieth-century liturgical reformers try in vain to leapfrog over history and return to the third or fourth century? Perhaps we all need to stop leapfrogging and recognize that we are the beneficiaries of an ongoing and inspired sacred history.

The tug to the Patristic era was strong. The general consensus in the early- to mid-twentieth century was that the early Church was more communitarian, more egalitarian, and more participatory, and that later developments were misguided and alienating “barnacles” on the Barque that obscured the liturgy’s original vision and purpose. Although there are still stalwart proponents of this view (even in the highest echelons of Church leadership), few dispassionate and serious scholars hold it today. In the understated assessment of Albert Gerhards and Benedikt Kranemann:

This idea was often based on the hypothesis of a degeneration in which the “golden age” of patristics was followed by the “dark Middle Ages” leading to a “rigid standard liturgy” in the period between Trent and Vatican II. This way of looking at the history of liturgy is being radically called into question today. [1]

2. Liturgical Orientation

Because of Golden-Ageism, with its myth of a pristine Patristic norm, any mistake made about how the early Church worshiped was given undue weight by scholars in their reconstruction of the past and in their recommendations for the present.

That is certainly true of the orientation of the priest at Mass. The consensus of scholars in the 1930s was that the Church originally had Mass “facing the people”. This consensus was no doubt influenced by ideology, some of it egalitarian and some of it anti-sacrificial – the idea being that “when” the Church thought of the Eucharist as a meal, it had Mass facing the people, and when it came to think of the Eucharist as a sacrifice, it had Mass facing the apse. [2]

But at least two archeological data also shaped opinion: the existence of free-standing altars in ancient churches, and the fact that some of these churches were built on a west-east axis, with the entrance and façade on the east and the sanctuary on the west. In the latter churches, if the priest were to face East to confect the Eucharist, he would have to “face the people” to do so. What they did not consider (which later scholarship discovered) was the possibility that during the Consecration, the people turned around and faced the East, with the Sacrifice taking place behind them. At that moment the priest and congregation resembled sailors on a ship, with the captain at the helm in the rear as they sailed to meet their Lord, who is to come again from the East. Perhaps that is why a church nave takes its name from the Latin word for ship, navis.

The Second Vatican Council only states that future churches should be built with free-standing altars, and the General Instructions for the (new) Roman Missal presupposes that the priest is turned towards the Lord and not the people during the Consecration. Nevertheless, “Mass facing the people” has been treated as a cornerstone of liturgical renewal, with bishops forbidding priests from celebrating in the traditional manner.

Scholarly doubt about the versus populum position began to emerge shortly after Vatican II. The prominent liturgist Fr. Josef Jungmann dismissed it as “a legend” in 1966. That same year, a member of the Concilium that created the Novus Ordo, Fr. Louis Bouyer, rejected the meal vs. sacrifice dichotomy, pointing out that in antiquity “the communal character of a meal was emphasized…[by] the fact that all the participants were on the same side of the table.” [3] Moroever, Monsignor Klaus Gamber’s Die Reform der römischen Liturgie (The Reform of the Roman Rite) includes a scathing critique of both the theological and historical arguments favoring versus populum. But the definitive treatment of the subject came in 2009 with Fr. Uwe Michael Lang’s Turning towards the Lord, which demonstrates that there has always been a tradition of facing East during liturgical prayer and never a tradition of priest and people facing each other. The book received the approval of Pope Benedict XVI. More recently, Luisella Scrosati has a series on the orientation of Christian worship in Italian that was translated last year into English for the New Liturgical Movement website (see here).

3. Concelebration

Twentieth-century liturgists were so convinced that the early Church has Masses regularly concelebrated by two or more priests that the Second Vatican Council was moved to make the following changes:

Concelebration, whereby the unity of the priesthood is appropriately manifested, has remained in use to this day in the Church both in the east and in the west. For this reason it has seemed good to the Council to extend permission for concelebration to the following cases (Sacrosanctum Concilium 57.1).

The Council goes on to allow concelebration for both the Chrism Mass and evening Mass on Holy Thursday, for Masses during Bishops’ meetings, and for Masses for the blessing of an abbot. It also gives Bishops the authority to allow concelebration at parish Masses, and it calls for a new rite for concelebration to be drawn up and inserted into the Missal and the Pontifical (58). The Council Fathers declare that “each priest shall always retain his right to celebrate Mass individually” (57.2), but many priests today feel pressure to concelebrate every Mass they attend.

There was no definitive or extensive study of concelebration prior to the Second Vatican Council; one wonders how everyone was so confident about a conviction based on so little research. Finally, in 1982, Carmelite Father Joseph de Sainte-Marie published an almost 600 page book entitled L’eucharistie salut du monde, which in 2015 appeared as The Holy Eucharist – The World’s Salvation: Studies on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, its Celebration and its Concelebration (Leominster: Gracewing, 2015). The magnum opus covers a range of topics, such as the sacrificial character of the Eucharist, but it is especially concerned with separating fact from fiction regarding concelebration.

Sainte-Marie’s conclusion, as the back-cover puts it, is that the “present practice of daily concelebration, especially among simple priests without their Ordinary presiding, far from being a return to an ancient norm, is in fact a new development.” Earlier liturgists made a crucial mistake, failing to distinguish between ceremonial concelebration and sacramental concelebration, when two or more ministers confect the same sacrament. Sacramental concelebration happened on occasion, especially with a Mass led by a bishop, but in both the East and the West, the preference was for ceremonial concelebrations and for individually celebrated Masses, which multiplied graces flowing into the world.

Sainte-Marie researched the debates the Council Fathers had about concelebration, and he shows how the Council Fathers were unaware of this distinction. If concelebration remains “in use to this day in the Church both in the east and in the west” as the Council claims, then why do most Orthodox churches refuse sacramental concelebration on principle, and why are the only Eastern Churches that practice sacramental concelebration the ones that are in union with Rome, and even then only beginning in the eighteenth century and only under Western influence?

The World’s Salvation did not come out in time to stop the campaign to make concelebrated the Masses norm, especially in religious communities, but it was able to stop further damage. I am told that plans were being made to make it a requirement of Canon Law that all members of a religious community concelebrate the same Mass, but Sainte-Marie’s scholarship changed their minds.

Unfortunately, the Vatican has recently doubled down on this flawed scholarship by forcing the Anglican Ordinariate to adopt concelebration. For recent treatments on the subject, see here.

4. Ordinary Time

Contrary to a popular misconception, Ordinary Time in the new calendar is not “Ordinal” Time but an Ordinary of Times. [4] Ordinary Time was designed to be a generic season in contrast to the special seasons of Christmas and Easter. The architect of this new schema was Fr. Pierre Jounel, who believed that the Masses of the early Church outside the Christmas and Easter cycles had no special “theme” and that the modern Church should return to that model. Each of the new Sundays in Ordinary Time, he writes, “is a Lord’s Day in its pure state as presented to us in the Church’s tradition,” that is, the state in which the primitive Church celebrated it.

The problem with this thesis is that we do not know for certain what the primitive Church did. Second, Jounel linked indistinction with purity and purity with the early Church, but both assumptions are questionable. Third, he is guilty of archeologism or Golden Age-ism, for Jounel wanted to return to a third-century practice and ignore seventeen hundred years of valid development. Fourth, Jounel is also guilty of novelty (ironically), for the way he endeavored to return to “the Lord’s Day in its pure state” was to invent an entirely new season that not a single soul in the Patristic era would have recognized, for no liturgical calendar prior to that of the Novus Ordo had a single-block season that is “interrupted” by the Easter cycle and that then picks up where it left off. Fifth, despite Jounel’s claim that the new season is indistinct, the final Sundays of Ordinary Time retain the distinctive theme that they had in the previous calendar, that of the End Times.

The 1962 Missal

My criticisms have centered on the scholarship that shaped the 1969 Missal, but that does not mean that the 1962 Missal is flawless. I will mention three, though no doubt there are more.

First, the feast day of Pope St. Felix I (269-274) was mistakenly assigned to May 30 instead of December 30 (the day of his martyrdom) because a medieval scribe wrote “III Kal. Jun.” (third day to the calends of June) instead of “III Kal. Jan.” (third day to the calends of January).

Second, according to tradition, September 14, 326 is the date that St. Helen discovered the True Cross during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and September 14, 335 is the anniversary of the consecration of her son Constantine’s basilicas of the Holy Sepulchre and Calvary in Jerusalem. September 14 was thus celebrated as the Feast of the Finding of the Holy Cross. May 3, on the other hand, was the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, celebrating the return of the Cross to Jerusalem in 629 after the Persians had stolen it. Over time, however, the two dates were confused and May 3 became the Feast of the Finding of the Cross and September 14 the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. The May 3 feast was dropped in 1960, and both the 1962 and 1969 calendars still have September 14 as the Feast of the Exaltation or Triumph of the Cross.

Third, the Tridentine Missal’s use of the Vulgate for its biblical readings is not without controversy, for although we have it on the authority of the Council of Trent that the Vulgate is “authentic,” we also know that “authentic” does not mean “infallible,” nor did Trent tell us which edition of the Vulgate was authentic, and there were several competing versions at the time. In the 1962 Missal, the Epistle reading for Low Sunday (1 John 5, 4-10) is different than what are considered the most reliable Greek manuscripts of that passage, particularly verse 7, which does not exist in the oldest manuscripts. [5]

What I find interesting about the errors in the 1962 Missal is that they seem to be mostly the result of failed efforts to retain, while the aforementioned mistakes from the twentieth century are the result of failed efforts to rediscover. The latter is by its nature more fraught with risk and uncertainty, and so it is not surprising that the failures, when they happen, are more egregious.

Conclusions

Two final clarifications are in order.

First, in and of themselves scholarly mistakes do not disqualify a liturgical practice. It is entirely possible that even if something was done in error, it could turn out to be providential, a sort of felix culpa. That said, when new discoveries expose old mistakes, they should be used to consider – with a grain of salt, of course, lest we keep the same slavish mentality to the “experts” – how to move forward. At any rate, since the cure always begins with an accurate diagnosis of the disease, we need to admit that we live in a world of liturgical upheaval, as Peter Jeffrey puts it, “with its own excesses of competing and fanciful historical claims.” [6]

Second, we should not banish scholarship from liturgical decision-making simply because of these mistakes. Scholarship may have been the rope with which we used to hang ourselves, but it is also the same rope that can pull us out of the ditch. Every example of flawed scholarship that we have mentioned has been brought to light by good scholarship, so scholarship per se is not the problem. Scholarship is simply a form of human inquiry, and like any other temporal good, it is subject to abuse, especially in the hands of the proud. And even if it does succeed in creating an accurate view of the past, that does not necessarily mean that it should be used to overthrow later developments or practices. Let the Holy Spirit and not the absent-minded professor have the final say on what goes on in Christ’s Church.

We will look at more learned blunders at a later time.

This article originally appeared in The Latin Mass magazine 35:1 (Spring 2025), pp. 38-42. Many thanks to its editors for allowing its republication here.

Notes

[1] Albert Gerhards and Benedikt Kranemann, Introduction to the Study of Liturgy (Liturgical Press, 2017), pp. 81-82. Gerhards and Kranemann argue that Vatican II avoided “Golden Age-ism” by quoting SC 21, that the liturgy “is made up of unchangeable elements divinely instituted, and of elements subject to change.” One can hold this view, however, and still believe that the Patristic era was the high watermark of liturgy. Moreover, the authors ignore the implications of SC 50’s language of the pristine norm of the Church Fathers.

[2] Such is the contention of Otto Nußbaum, but it is false. The earliest references to the Eucharist, from the second century, refer to it as a sacrifice.

[3] Louis Bouyer, Eucharistie: Theologie et spiritualite de la priere eucharistique (Tournai, 1966) [trans. Charles Underhill Quinn as Eucharist: Theology and Spirituality of the Eucharistic Prayer (Notre Dame, Ind., and London: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968)], p.55-56, quoted in Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger Collected Works: Theology of the Liturgy.

[4] See my “The Origins and Meaning of Ordinary Time,” Antiphon: A Journal of Liturgical Renewal 23:1 (2019), pp. 43-77. A revised version in two parts also appears on this website, here and here.

[5] Quoniam tres sunt, qui testimonium dant in caelo : Pater, Verbum, et Spiritus Sanctus : et hi tres unum sunt. “And there are three who give testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one.”

[6] Peter Jeffrey, “Eastern and Western Elements in the Irish Monastic Prayer of the Hours,” in The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages, eds. Margot A. Fassler and Rebecca A. Baltzer (Oxford University Press, 2000), 134.

Against Concelebration: The Remarkable Intervention of Archbishop Paul-Pierre Philippe OP at Vatican II

Bishops Yves Ramousse and Paul Tep Im concelebrate at Kep Benedictine Monastery in the 1970s (source)

Bishop Athanasius Schneider is to be thanked for recovering and publicizing, in his fine book The Catholic Mass: Steps to Restore the Centrality of God in the Liturgy, a particularly well-argued speech against concelebration that was given by Dominican archbishop during the Second Vatican Council’s debate on the liturgy.

Paul-Pierre Philippe was, it should be noted, no minor figure; later he was created a cardinal and made prefect of the Congregation for Oriental Churches.

I agree that the faculty of sacramental concelebration should be extended in the Latin Church to the Chrism Mass, on Thursday of the Lord’s Supper, as well as, for example, to the Mass celebrated by the bishop during the diocesan synod or on the occasion of a pastoral visit or spiritual exercises of diocesan priests, because in this way the union of the priests with the bishop in the one priesthood of Christ is manifested.
       This reason, however, is not valid for extending concelebration to the daily Conventual Mass of religious, which some Fathers have called for. For the union of many concelebrating priests comes about only as a consequence of the union of each priest with Christ the Priest, whose sacred person he represents at Mass. For the priest, as Pope Pius XII says in the encyclical Mediator Dei, “by reason of the sacerdotal consecration which he has received, is made like to the High Priest and possesses the power of performing actions in virtue of Christ’s very person. Wherefore in his priestly activity he in a certain manner ‘lends his tongue and gives his hand’ to Christ” (AAS 1947:518). In fact, the action of Christ who sacrifices and offers himself through the sacramental action is manifested more expressively in the Mass celebrated by one priest than in a concelebrated Mass, and is better perceived both by the celebrant himself and by the faithful who see in this one priest “the image of Christ” the Priest (cf. ST III, Q. 83, art. 1, ad 3).
       Priestly spirituality is principally based on this doctrine and through it the Eucharistic devotion of priests is nourished. Now, however, if many priests habitually concelebrate, it is to be feared that they will gradually feel less like an “alterChristus” and that their Eucharistic piety will diminish. Religious who concelebrate daily may run into this danger in a particular way.
       Certainly, it has been said that the freedom of individual celebration must be safeguarded, but in reality, the insistence of superiors and confreres as well as external difficulties and the force of custom will impede that freedom. Moreover, too frequent or daily concelebration can lead to a certain contempt for the so-called “private” Mass. For every Mass, according to the doctrine of the Council of Trent, is truly public, since it is celebrated by the public minister of the Church for all the faithful belonging to the Body of Christ.
       Finally, the doctrine of Pius XII on the fruits of the Mass must be recalled (cf. AAS 1954:669). In this matter one must consider not only the fruit produced by a devout and fraternal celebration, but first and foremost the nature of the action taking place, that is, the sacramental sacrifice of Christ. Indeed, the objective fruit of the Mass, that is, the fruit of propitiation and impetration for the living and the dead, is the principal fruit. And because this fruit is not the same in a concelebrated Mass and in many Masses celebrated by many priests, if the use of frequent concelebration becomes widespread it is to be feared that right doctrine will be obscured and the faithful will no longer take care that many Masses be celebrated for the living and the dead.
       Therefore, practical convenience is not acceptable as a reason or criterion in favor of extending concelebration, but only the sometimes appropriate manifestation of the unity of the priesthood through concelebration with the bishop or religious superior. [1]

It cannot be said that the good archbishop was in any way mistaken, either in his theological synopsis or in his prognostication of the spiritual and liturgical effects of routine concelebration.

It is appropriate to add to this conciliar speech a more recent (1994) critique of concelebration mounted by Fr. Enrico Zoffoli—also conveniently included in Bishop Schneider’s The Catholic Mass. Schneider rightly praises Zoffoli’s “keen observations on the doctrinal, pastoral, and spiritual disadvantages of this modern celebratory practice”:

Habitual concelebration of the Mass facilitates a shift toward the heretical conception of the Mass as a banquet, and leads to losing sight of the Mass as a sacrifice; thus the altar yields to the table; the single minister who operates in persona Christi is replaced by the many diners; the substantial reality of Christ the Victim is dissolved into consecrated bread that is reduced to a mere symbol of His presence among the guests, and to His spiritual union with all.
       Concelebration fatally leads to a reduction in the number of individual Masses with seriously negative consequences.
       First, the Church is less frequently united with her Head in the “sacrifice of praise, thanksgiving, propitiation, and expiation” that constitutes every Eucharistic celebration, thus failing in the fundamental duty of worship owed to God through Christ; and, consequently, she suffers a halt in her process of development.
       Second, if concelebration reveals the unity of the Catholic priesthood in the many ministers of worship (as in some circumstances is appropriate), nevertheless, the fact of being together and the need for each one to conform to the others in gestures, formulas, tone of voice, etc., over time reduces the intensity of a priest’s personal, unique, and irreplaceable union with God in Christ, to the detriment of his interior life. . . .
       Against this, many justify concelebration by claiming that it does not reduce the number of Masses, which they say would be equal to the number of concelebrating priests. But this is false, (1) first because every Mass consists essentially in the consecration, whose formula is one and indivisible, even if it is recited by many. (2) Second, several instrumental causes cannot multiply the work of the Principal Cause. That is to say, in each Mass Christ sacramentally immolates himself only once. St. Paul’s “quotiescumque” cannot have any other meaning. . . . Third, it is not the number of priests with their personal intentions that essentially conditions the sacrificial rite, but the consecration, which, if it is one, constitutes a Mass. Now, as noted above, the consecration of several concelebrants is one. Therefore, the Mass concelebrated by them is also one. In reality, the Mass, by the very fact that it is concelebrated, can only be (sacramentally) one. If several priests come together to celebrate, it is only because they intend to perform a single liturgical action, otherwise each would celebrate on his own. For this reason, everyone knows that many diners do not multiply a meal, and — again by analogy — many singers make up a single choir, etc.
       On March 7, 1965, with the decree Ecclesiae semper, the Holy See dispelled all doubts, declaring that when a Mass is concelebrated, the many priests, in virtue of the same priesthood and in the person of the High Priest, act at the same time with one will and one voice, and offer a single sacrifice at the same time by a single sacramental act. [2]

Bishop Schneider then comments: “The truth that the Mass is the source of salvation is demonstrated in a more expressive manner by the practice of its frequent celebration,” and quotes Zoffoli again:

It is right to insist on an ever more conscious, well-considered, and intense participation in the Mass. Who could ever doubt it? But this duty — a serious one for priest and faithful — has nothing to do with the infinite objective value of every Mass; which, being celebrated by Christ, the Priest who offers, is in itself the supreme act of worship of the Mystical Body and an inexhaustible source of grace for all, even when the minister is unworthy, and when the faithful are ignorant, distracted, or completely absent. [3]

Journet asserts: “If Christ in each Mass accomplishes the work of redemption, it is easy to see the need to multiply Masses.” [4]

As an aside, it seems to me that the doctrine of the infinite value of Christ’s sacrifice as present in the Mass can lead logically in only two directions: either you need to say that there is no need to repeat Mass at all, since even one celebration of it would be of infinite value—indeed, the Protestant will go further and say that no Mass is necessary because of the one supreme sacrifice of Calvary itself, all-sufficient and “once for all” (as Catholics, we understand the flaw in that view, which does not see how the Mass is a re-presentation, a making-present-anew, of the one selfsame sacrifice of the Cross)—or you need to say that Mass should be repeated as many times as it is fitting to do so, which the Church has deemed to be once a day for each priest, apart from well-defined pastoral exceptions. To do less than this is precisely not to acknowledge the intrinsic value of the Mass as a sacrificial offering.

Thus, Bishop Schneider continues with a quotation from Fr. Zoffoli that develops this line of reasoning:

The numerical reduction of Masses (one would like to arrive at a single Sunday Mass) has its understandable justification only in the context of the Protestant liturgy; which, having denied the sacrifice, transubstantiation and the real presence, only knows a “banquet,” which is obviously celebrated by several diners independently of the exercise of a “ministerial priesthood”; hence it is taught — even in some Catholic circles — that the true “celebrant” is not the “priest,” but the “community of the faithful” and indeed each believer.

While the error he mentions is not as frequently met with today as it used to be in the ferment of the immediate post-council period, nevertheless one may truly say that the appreciation of the priest’s offering of the Mass as such, independently of the presence of a community or of communicants, is something that is found only in the ambit of traditional liturgy—in which I include younger clergy shaped by the theology of Joseph Ratzinger (inter alia) and the presence of the old rite in lands graced by Summorum Pontificum.

NOTES

[1] Source: Concilii Vaticani II Synopsis, 1053, in Schneider, The Catholic Mass, 224–26.

[2] Questa è la Messa. Non altro!, Udine: Segno, 1994, 90–92, cited in Schneider, The Catholic Mass, 229–30. Zoffoli cites the text of the decree: “In hac ratione Missam celebrandi plures sacerdotes, in virtute eiusdem sacerdotii et in persona Summi Sacerdotis, simul una voluntate et una voce agunt, atque unicum sacrificium unico actu sacramentali simul conficiunt, idemque simul participant” (AAS 57 [1965]: 411).

[3] Zoffoli, Questa è la Messa, 93, in Schneider, The Catholic Mass, 231.

[4] Charles Journet, Oeuvres complètes XIV (1955–1957), Annexe I, sec. III, in Schneider, The Catholic Mass, 231.

Guest Article: Who Actually Delegitimizes the “Novus Ordo Missae”?

The following detailed analysis of the Responsa ad dubia of the Congregation for Divine Worship by Clemens Victor Oldendorf was published in two parts, “The Fundamental Theoretical Question” and “The Preparedness for Concelebration,” on December 25 and 29, at kathnews.de (here and here). The following translation, prepared by Peter Kwasniewski, has been approved by the author.

The fundamental theoretical question

If one recalls the motives for which the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum legally established a bifurcation of the one Roman Rite, and stated that the older of these expressions had never been abrogated by Pope Paul VI or any of his successors, and had therefore always remained permitted in principle, it is clear that there was an abstract theoretical construct and legal fiction aimed precisely at justifying, formally and above all substantively, the post-conciliar liturgical reform of 1969 and Pope Paul VI, who had decreed and implemented it.

For my own part, I have often argued that the coexistence of different editiones typicae of the Missale Romanum (and other liturgical books) need not in itself pose a compelling problem if, as in our specific case, one edition is the latest one based on the reform mandate of the Council of Trent (1545–1563), and the other is the most recent one based on or following the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). Here, an evaluation of the origins and liturgical structure of the rite in each case remains out of consideration for the time being, as do the advantages or disadvantages in the rite’s expression of Eucharistic dogma.

Traditionis Custodes, however, now says that the liturgical books promulgated by Paul VI and John Paul II after the Second Vatican Council are the “sole expression” of the lex orandi in the Roman Rite. Note: this is to say more than just that the Missale Romanum of Paul VI replaced the Missale Romanum of 1962, and replaced it completely. What is says is that the Tridentine missal or celebrations according to it are no longer even part of the Roman Rite; above all, that they are no longer an expression of the Latin-rite Church’s lex orandi.

At this point, it is not merely about the problem that, if this were true, then—despite protestations to the contrary—logically the Church’s lex credendi must have changed. But if the Tridentine rite is no longer Roman, and the rite resulting from the liturgical reform of Paul VI binds the entire Latin Church, a Tridentine Mass celebrated after July 16, 2021, finds itself in an ecclesiastical vacuum, both in terms of its ritual affiliation, and ultimately, in terms of ecclesiology.

It must be made very clear that given the nature of such claims, it will not be possible to comply with the new regulations in force from July 16 if one desires to hold on to the liturgical tradition with deliberation and conviction or to maintain one’s connection to it.

Funeral of Paul VI

Rome now openly claims the post-conciliar liturgical reform as a breach

It is not the traditionalists who are using Traditionis Custodes to question the legitimacy of Paul VI’s post-conciliar liturgical reform. Quite apart from the fact that Benedict XVI had built golden bridges to this legitimacy in Summorum Pontificum, one could easily concede—even without necessarily having to use the new liturgical books oneself on account of this concession—that a newer usus of the Roman Rite, where it has meanwhile been observed for decades in a manner faithful to its own prescriptions, could develop some legitimacy and a justification of its own, even if one thinks that it did not originally possess them, or at least is open to the possibility that it might have lacked them at the start.

All previous old-rite indults, and likewise the Motu Proprio of 2007, could be understood in a such a way that one could make these concessions if it was important to be in tension-free agreement with the ecclesiastical authorities, despite one’s own adherence to the Tridentine Mass and liturgy, and if one wanted to do everything correctly in purely formal canonical terms.

The premises that have now been established with Traditionis Custodes and reaffirmed by the Responsa of the Congregation for Divine Worship are for the first time clearly unacceptable to anyone who has hitherto preferred the liturgical books of 1962 for reasons other than preference or a sympathy of mentality. Indeed, now the liturgical tradition up to the Second Vatican Council is quite blatantly relegated to an allegedly deficient, even lacking, conformity with the Church’s lex orandi, and pushed out of the realm of what is to be henceforth considered the Roman Rite.

Thus, the liturgical reform of Paul VI is claimed, not by obscure or extremist critics of Vatican II, but by the highest authority itself, to be a rupture. This must, at least in strict theory, deprive it of the legitimacy it may have originally had formally, or may have gained in the meantime through long-continued use in the numerically predominant part of the Church.

Those who felt obliged by ecclesiastical obedience to accept the post-Conciliar liturgical reform, and yet endeavored not to make use of the new rite of Mass in conscious opposition to the previous one, are equally challenged, by the interpretation given to the liturgical reform in Traditionis Custodis and the related explanations from the Congregation for Divine Worship, to reconsider their previous attitude and liturgical practice.

Concelebration: an indispensable gesture of communion or of acceptance of the liturgical reform?

From its treatment in the Responsa ad dubia, it is quite clear that this document of the Congregation for Divine Worship is by no means addressed only to local bishops in whose dioceses Masses have already been celebrated according to the Missale Romanum of 1962, nor only to diocesan priests who have already celebrated them, those who are to be commissioned to do so in the future, or those who would like to celebrate in the future according to this missal. The answers clearly also concern the former “Ecclesia Dei” communities and the priests who belong or will belong to them. In this regard, it is worth recalling what Pope Benedict XVI wrote in 2007 in the letter accompanying his Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum: “In order to experience full communion, the priests of the communities adhering to the former usage cannot, as a matter of principle, exclude celebrating according to the new books. The total exclusion of the new rite would not in fact be consistent with the recognition of its value and holiness.”

This willingness in principle, however, has until now been a purely theoretical one that has never materialized or had to be demonstrated in practice. Incidentally, it is striking in Benedict XVI’s formulation that it is not even specifically about concelebration according to the new liturgical books. The dubium here under examination asks: “If a priest who has been permitted to use the 1962 Missale Romanum does not recognize the validity and legitimacy of concelebration—refuses to concelebrate, especially at the Chrism Mass—can he continue to avail himself of this permission?” The answer to this question of doubt is a resounding no.

But priests of the former Ecclesia Dei communities are obviously among those who have been “permitted to use the 1962 Missale Romanum.” What is interesting in the wording of the question is the talk of recognizing the validity and legitimacy of concelebration, and the implicit presupposition that such recognition can consist only in occasionally concelebrating in person, and especially at the Chrism Mass with the local bishop in whose diocese one resides and ministers. The explanatory note speaks of the validity and legitimacy of the liturgical reform, so “concelebration” and Pope Paul VI’s post-conciliar “liturgical reform” are, as it were, used synonymously. In other words, the practice of concelebration is seen as an exquisite achievement of this liturgical reform, like an emblem. And although current canon law guarantees the right to individual celebration, as is well known, one should not be surprised at such an interpretation, since in St. Peter’s itself, individual celebrations even according to the post-conciliar missal have been de facto abolished in favor of concelebration.

In this dubium on concelebration in particular, with the answer and explanatory note, it is therefore clearly a question of priests who up to now have exclusively used the old Missal and were allowed to do so.

Evidently, the vast majority of diocesan priests or religious priests who celebrated indult Masses or, after 2007, have used the 1962 Missale Romanum on the basis of Summorum Pontificum, have predominantly celebrated (and, where appropriate, concelebrated) in the post-conciliar renewed rite of Paul VI, and have already thereby sufficiently demonstrated that they recognize the validity and legitimacy of the post-conciliar liturgical reform.

The members of the earlier Ecclesia Dei communities also did so in theory, for, like all others who made use of Summorum Pontificum, they thereby accepted, at least by implication, that the one Roman Rite had two forms and even, de iure, that the newer form enjoys a certain primacy of place, as it had emerged from Paul VI’s liturgical reform following the Second Vatican Council.

But if one now considers that Traditionis Custodes can logically address itself only to traditionalists who have already claimed, as the basis of their adherence to the liturgical tradition, the papal indults or the preceding motu proprio of Benedict XVI, and who, with the local bishops’ approval, have developed and continue to develop their activity mostly in regular places of worship where they have celebrated and continue to celebrate as guests with the approval of the pastor, then it is once again questionable why they should have to offer additional proofs of the validity and legitimacy of the liturgical reform by concelebrating in person.

Although there is the exception of the Archdiocese of Vaduz, where the diocesan bishop has celebrated the Chrism Mass according to the old liturgical books for several years in the past (which will no longer be possible in the future, unless he is willing to ignore the prohibition), concelebration is not the only way to express one’s hierarchical communion with the bishop.

Practical signs of accepting the validity and legitimacy of the reformed rites

By receiving from the local ordinary the sacred oils consecrated in the new rite, a priest also accepts its validity, and furthermore—with the exception of the Apostolic Administration of the Holy Curé of Ars in Campos, Brazil—none of the former Ecclesia Dei communities have their own bishops, consecrated according to the old Pontifical. Even if the priests themselves have been ordained according to the old Pontifical up to now, from this point of view, none of the priests of these communities is, so to speak, “purely Tridentine” because the prelates ordaining them were ordained using the 1968 Pontifical; and even the SSPX accepts into its ranks priests ordained in the new rite, or at least collaborates with them. (Only if there are doubts about validity in a concrete individual case and the priest in question explicitly draws attention to the possible problems can there sometimes be a discreet conditional re-ordination, at the priest’s explicit request.)

Furthermore, it can be pointed out that probably the majority of the Masses celebrated on the basis of Summorum Pontificum using the Tridentine Missal were celebrated in churches and chapels where otherwise the post-conciliar Missal is predominantly used, and moreover, that at such Masses, in the Vetus Ordo, Communion for the faithful may be taken from ciboria in the tabernacle whose hosts were consecrated in celebrations according to the new missal. Such a thing would certainly not be possible if there was a denial of the validity and legitimacy of the new rite.

In the dubium about concelebration under closer consideration here, therefore, an unrealistic construct is present, one which, strictly speaking, cannot have existed in the case of anyone who has ever applied to benefit from an old-rite indult, or who, from September 14, 2007 to July 16, 2021, celebrated Masses on the basis of Summorum Pontificum according to the Missale Romanum of 1962, or assisted at Masses celebrated on this legal basis. In short: a much higher threshold of evidence than could possibly be necessary has been introduced, which gives the response a punitive character.

The traditionalists whom Traditionis Custodes is targeting have never asked for “permission” to hold on to the traditional liturgy—they consider it a patrimony prior to and deeper than the whim of the pope—and will not now suddenly allow it to be taken away and forbidden by Pope Francis. However, many of those who, until now, have attached importance to the requesting and receipt of such permission may now start to think it over again, and, possibly even more, to rethink the basic legitimacy of the liturgical reform, including the Pauline Pontificale Romanum of 1968 and the Pauline Novus Ordo of 1969—especially since the post-conciliar liturgical books have now been claimed to be the sole (!) expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite. Such unreality handicaps this declaration that it compels a re-examination of the delicate (and, some might say, unsustainable) peace on which Summorum Pontificum was constructed.

The faithful who feel committed to the liturgical tradition of the Latin Church and who want to be nothing but Roman Catholics are thus pushed out, and it becomes clear: Pope Francis and the Congregation for Divine Worship are obviously not really concerned with the high good of genuine ecclesial unity, but at most with a positivist loyalty to authority.

“Eucharistic Concelebration: Theological, Historical, and Liturgical Aspects” — Guest Article by Bishop Athanasius Schneider

New Liturgical Movement is pleased to be able to publish online the following incisive text by Bishop Athanasius Schneider, which also appears in print in the latest issue of Latin Mass magazine. In the first part, His Excellency looks at the historical roots and theological implications of Eucharistic concelebration, while in the second part he makes a concrete proposal for how concelebration might be rarely but appropriately used and how its ceremonial ought to unfold. This rich presentation comes at a critically important time, as concelebration has once again been much in the news.—PAK

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Papal Mass (1832)

Eucharistic Concelebration:
Theological, Historical, and Liturgical Aspects

Bishop Athanasius Schneider

I. The Theological and Historical Aspect

1. The first Holy Mass was celebrated by Our Lord in the cenacle. This Mass did not have the form of a sacramental concelebration because the apostles did not pronounce the words of consecration; only the Lord pronounced them. The apostles participated in the Eucharist, celebrated by the Lord, by sacramentally receiving His Body and His Blood. We could say they “concelebrated” in the first Mass in the form of a non-sacramental concelebration.

2. From the earliest times, the universal Church (both in the East and in the West) conserved faithfully this original form of Eucharistic concelebration with these two characteristics:

1. The main celebrant alone pronounces the words of consecration;
2. The main celebrant is always and exclusively the “high priest,” i.e. the bishop (and in Rome the Pope).

3. In the beginning of the Middles Ages, in the Papal Liturgy in Rome there was a development of the original form by the fact that the concelebrants pronounced the words of consecration together with the Pope (cf. Ordo Romanus III, 8th century).

4. However, down to the present, the most ancient Oriental churches—the non-Catholic Greek Byzantines, the non-Catholic Copts, and non-Catholic Nestorians—have conserved the norm that only the main celebrant pronounces the words of consecration.

5. Until recent times in the universal Church, a priest never presided as the main celebrant of a Eucharistic sacramental concelebration.

6. From the seventeenth century on, the Byzantine Catholic churches introduced an innovation, that is, the form of concelebration among priests without a bishop as the main celebrant. Thereby the concelebration among priests became usual (cf. the article “Le rituel de la concélébration eucharistique” of Aimé Georges Martimort in Ephemerides Liturgicae 77 [1963] 147–168).

7. Such a form of Eucharistic concelebration only among priests was alien to the universal and constant tradition of the Church. Therefore the Roman Church forbade such concelebration among priests (cf. can. 803 of the Code of Canon Law 1917).

8. Only the Catholic Oriental churches adopted the custom that all concelebrants pronounce the words of consecration.

9. Until the Second Vatican Council, in the Latin Church a Eucharistic sacramental concelebration, where all concelebrants pronounce the words of consecration, was practiced only on three occasions:

1. Episcopal consecration: only the main consecrator and the newly consecrated bishops concelebrated.
2. Priestly ordination: only the bishop and the newly ordained priests concelebrated.
3. Chrism Mass on Holy Thursday in the Cathedral of Lyons (France): the bishop concelebrated with six priests.

10. For the Chrism Mass, the Roman Church conserved until the Second Vatican Council however the most ancient form, i.e. the words of consecration pronounced only by the bishop, although twelve priests assisted him clothed with all the vestments required for Mass. With this form, the Roman Church perhaps wished to recount the first Holy Mass on Holy Thursday, where the main celebrant, Jesus the High Priest, alone pronounced the words of consecration while the twelve apostles concelebrated non-sacramentally, since they did not pronounce together with the Lord the words of the sacramental consecration.

11. In the millennial tradition of the Roman Church, sacramental Eucharistic concelebration constituted always an extraordinary solemn act, which occurred on:

1. Ecclesiastically important circumstances, which reflected the hierarchically ordered constitution of the Church, such as in the aforementioned episcopal consecrations and in priestly ordinations;
2. When the bishop celebrated Mass in a most solemn and hierarchically structured form, such as was the case in the Chrism Mass of Lyons, or when the Pope (in the first millenium) celebrated solemnly on the four highest feasts in the year: Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, Ss. Peter and Paul (a custom that ceased in Rome in the high Middles Ages).

P. Villanueva, Blessing of the Chrism on Holy Thursday in the Lateran Basilica (ca. 1900)

Continue Reading this Article. . .

In Defense of Side Altars

Side altars in a splendid German neo-Baroque church: St. Anna in Altötting (built 1910-12)

A reader of NLM wrote to me:

I attended a conference in Rome in which a respected liturgist gave a talk about church art. He criticized the phenomenon of “side altars” as a deviation from early Christian practice. I’m not sure if there’s something online that defends not only private Masses for priests but also the architectural phenomenon of side altars, and why, further to that, it is okay for different Masses to be happening simultaneously in one church — say, the parish Mass and a priest’s (or priests’) private Masses.

The critique of side altars is, like so much else, an expression of unsophisticated antiquarianism and misplaced Byzantinophilia.

It is true that the Christian East has held on tightly (as they have done with so many features of worship) to the original architectural plan of a sanctuary centered on a single altar, which signifies Christ, the one and only High Priest and Mediator between God and Man. This is why the altar is dedicated and anointed, and later, kissed and incensed. Liturgy is celebrated solemnly in song once a day at this altar.

The symbolism is magnificent, yes, but it is not exhaustive of the possibilities of the cult of the saints and devotional liturgy, which were to develop prodigiously in the West. In the first millennium, side altars developed as a way to house the relics of the saints. Most side altars, even to this day, are associated with a particular saint or devotion, while the high altar retains an obvious primacy, prominence, and centrality for the solemn conventual Mass. As Enrico Finotti comments:

The side altar keeps its liturgical function intact and it is rather harmful to transmit to the faithful the idea that the emergence of the side altars is the sign of a decadent and incorrect phase of liturgical development. The side altars celebrate with amazing artistic expressions the wonderful fruits of the only Sacrifice of Christ: the Saints and their works. Their memory, erected in connection with the altar, affirms that from the Sacrifice of Christ they received the grace of their holiness and the efficacy of their witness. Wanting to deprive such monuments of the table [i.e., the mensa for offering Mass] is to disrupt them theologically from their divine source. The multiplicity of the side altars is the visual manifestation of the infinite prism of the fruits of the one Altar and of the only Sacrifice, Christ Jesus. This is why the side altars cannot be “museified,” but must remain “alive” with all their own signs, open to the exercise of their liturgical function.

In the West, with the general absence of concelebration, and with the proliferation of monastic and cathedral clergy, the custom arose of priests offering their own daily low Mass, a Missa lecta or Missa recitata or Missa privata — as still occurs in a number of traditional religious and clerical communities today. Therefore, quite apart from the cult of the saints, which requires suitably beautiful repositories for their relics, the essential defense of side altars rests on the legitimacy in itself, and the value for the Church, of the priest’s daily, individual, “devotional” offering of the Mass, over against the postconciliar imposition of the alien custom of concelebration in a feeble imitation of the East.[1]

Nor should it cause any surprise to recall that the claim that there should only be one altar in each church was specifically condemned by Pope Pius VI in the Bull Auctorem Fidei as one of the numerous errors of the Synod of Pistoia:

Propositio Synodi enuntians, conveniens esse, pro divinorum officiorum ordine et antiqua consuetudine, ut in unoquoque templo unum tantum sit altare, sibique adeo placere morem illum restituere: temeraria, perantiquo, pio, multis abhinc saeculis in Ecclesia, praesertim Latina, vigenti et probato mori iniuriosa.
       [The proposition of the synod enunciating that it is fitting, in accordance with the order of divine services and ancient custom, that there be only one altar in each church and, therefore, that it is pleased to restore that custom: rash, injurious to the very ancient pious custom flourishing and approved for these many centuries in the Church, especially in the Latin Church.] (Denzinger 2631)

In response to the reader’s question, let me mention that the definitive study has been written by the Carmelite priest Joseph de Sainte-Marie, OCD, The Holy Eucharist—The World’s Salvation. Studies on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, its Celebration, and its Concelebration (reviewed here). I have defended the fittingness of the daily private Mass in chapter 10 of my book Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis (“The Loss of Graces: Private Masses and Concelebration”) and in two articles at NLM (“Celebration vs. Concelebration: Theological Considerations” and “The Mounting Threat of Coercive Concelebration”). Dr. Joseph Shaw has also made a contribution on this topic (“What Are Side Chapels For?”).

Once one admits the legitimacy of a priest offering his Mass each morning (when not otherwise engaged for public Mass), the existence of side altars is basically unavoidable, for the clergy cannot be reasonably accommodated otherwise.

In the monastery . . . 

. . . and during retreats or workshops . . .

. . . and at times of pilgrimage or international events.

From a symbolic point of view, it may not seem appropriate to have many priests offering many Masses at many altars in a church, as if this detracts from the unity of Christ, His priesthood, and His sacrifice. On the other hand, since symbolism cuts many ways, a counterargument can be made that the many offerings symbolize the multiplication of Christ’s priestly power in His ministers and into His Mystical Body, which has many members, all of which, being persons, are temples of the Holy Spirit. The very fact that the one all-sufficient sacrifice is renewed unbloodily at many altars glorifies and exalts the priestly power of Christ, who sanctifies all places and all times, giving rise to many springs from one reservoir, gathering all streams together in a measureless ocean. Moreover, it emphasizes the subordinate nature of the ministers and of the liturgy as compared with the one Mediator Himself and His heavenly self-offering “beyond the veil” in the true Holy of Holies. In other words, as we can see to be typical of Western liturgy, it both welcomes Christ into our midst and emphasizes, in obvious and subtle ways, the distance between the earthly realm and the heavenly kingdom, unlike the Eastern liturgy which tends to see the earthly liturgy as a direct reflection of and immediate participation in the heavenly kingdom.

I do not want to overemphasize this contrast, as one can find features of the Eastern liturgy that deeply express man’s fallen condition and his exile from heaven, just as there are aspects of the Western liturgy that symbolize or enact the union of earth with heaven (most notably, the “Supplices te rogamus” of the Roman Canon). We also find Sacrosanctum Concilium giving prominence to this point, in a paragraph that would become all but unintelligible in the wake of the Consilium’s reform:

In the earthly liturgy we take part in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the holy city of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God, a minister of the holies and of the true tabernacle; we sing a hymn to the Lord’s glory with all the warriors of the heavenly army; venerating the memory of the saints, we hope for some part and fellowship with them; we eagerly await the Savior, Our Lord Jesus Christ, until He, our life, shall appear and we too will appear with Him in glory. (n. 8)

Two, then, can play this game of symbolism. A symbolic argument will never, by itself, be sufficiently determinate to decide between two conflicting practices. One has to justify any liturgical practice based on theological, spiritual, pastoral, and aesthetic arguments — not simply on the basis of archaic practice or Eastern practice or a modern penchant for simplicity, which usually comes out as horizontal, democratic, undifferentiated, and plain, when not ugly.

As for side altars, we may well say: in the East, anathema sit; in the West, “multiply and fill the earth.”

Stift Wilten (Norbertine) in Innsbruck

St. Gallus, Bregenz (h/t Fr Jerabek)

NOTE

[1] Additionally to the question of relics, there is another major motivator for the creation of side-altars, which really takes off in the age of the canons regular (who emerge as a major force within the Church in the 12th century) and the mendicants (13th century): since they were largely an urban phenomenon, and did not have stable foundations based on owning land, as monks did, canons regular and mendicants had to provide for themselves from their apostolic works; as St Paul says in 1 Timothy 5:18, “the worker is worthy of his wage.” Within a large house of (e.g.) Dominicans like Santa Maria Novella in Florence, each side-altar was privately owned by a family, who paid for everything, including all the accoutrements necessary for saying Mass, and the priest’s salary. All the Masses were therefore said for that family’s intentions. This was one of the things that made the apostolic ministry of such communities possible, and in addition, gave us a lot of really amazing art, since the families that could afford their own chapel could generally also afford to hire the best artists to decorate it.

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

Resisting the Lowest Common Denominator: A Priest’s Cri de Coeur

Jesus did not settle for the LCD

A priest shared with me some insights from a meeting he attended of diocesan priests with their bishop. In what follows, I will be drawing upon what he told me.

In the meeting, the bishop said that the clergy should work against the temptation to settle for the “LCD,” the lowest common denominator. For, if we allow every member of the clergy to “roam free,” as it were, and aspire to no diocesan-wide standards of excellence, the principle of entropy, or we could just say man’s fallen nature, tells us that things will tend to roll down hill and decay over time, and eventually — at some point not too far down the road — every parish will face immense pressure to conform to this LCD: whatever options are least confrontational, most politically correct, and most socially acceptable will eventually win the day. It takes real vision to see this inevitable outcome and to combat it from the start. Free choice can be attractive, but ultimately results in division and degradation.

The priest then reflected: this is exactly what I and many brother priests have seen clearly happening with the liturgy. Because of the equivocal nature of the Missal of Paul VI, which leaves so much at the disposal of the celebrant, we have quickly slid to the LCD in every area where there is legitimate free choice. In other words, there is no free choice within the system.

For example:

1. A priest is free to celebrate ad orientem or versus populum — in fact, the Missal presumes celebrating ad orientem, which would put us in harmony with the rest of Tradition. But because of the LCD factor, only versus populum is acceptable. Any priest who chooses to celebrate ad orientem is seen as divisive, and is eventually pressured into conforming, unless he wants to be ostracized not only from the faithful, but even from his bishop and brother priests. But is it the priest who is the source of division? Or is it the freedom to choose either option that creates the division? It is the inevitable result of the LCD factor. Priests are accused of fighting what are called “the liturgy wars,” but are they to be blamed, or does the blame not rest squarely on the shoulders of Paul VI and his ambivalent Missal?

2. A priest is free to incorporate as much Latin as he would like. But because of the LCD, de facto only the vernacular is possible — despite the anathema from the Council of Trent: “If anyone says . . . that the Mass ought to be celebrated in the vernacular tongue only . . . let him be anathema.”

3. A priest is free to incorporate the Extraordinary Form into his parish, or his ministry, but again because of the LCD factor, this is seen as extreme and rigid, and is frowned upon to the point where it is de facto nearly impossible.

4. A priest is under no obligation to concelebrate and is perfectly free to choose to assist in choir so as to be able to celebrate his own Mass, a custom hallowed by many centuries of tradition in the Roman Rite and clearly allowed by the new Code of Canon Law. But de facto, there is immense pressure upon him to concelebrate because of the LCD factor, and to not conform results in receiving the label of being “not community-minded.” At some large gatherings for retreats or conventions or meetings, there is literally no possibility of a private Mass unless you bring your own altar, since such things are no longer even contemplated.

5. A priest is supposed to use a communion paten and not use EMHC’s except under extraordinary circumstances, but because of systemic habitual abuse in the American Church and the LCD factor, doing either of these things would be seen as extreme. The pragmatic norm, on the contrary, is to not have a communion paten but to insist on having EMHC’s.

6. The faithful are encouraged to receive Holy Communion on the tongue which is the traditional custom and still the universal norm as per the Vatican; meanwhile, they are permitted to receive in the hand as long as certain serious conditions are met. But because of the LCD factor, somewhere between 95–98% of the faithful receive in the hand. And everywhere, children receiving First Communion are not even taught the traditional practice, in spite of it still being “on the books.”

7. The same can be said of sacred music, church architecture, sacred vessels, vestments, preaching, etc., etc., etc. We are all now forced by social pressure to conform to the LCD. And what happens when a priest doesn’t want to conform to the LCD but wants to raise the bar? Well, typically the choice is either: conform to the LCD, or hit the highway. The dynamic subtly eats away at the bishop’s own integrity, because when he is confronted with complaints about a “difficult” or “demanding” priest — as identified promptly by Susan from the Parish Council — he must either stick his neck out and risk his reputation to defend the priest, or take the quieter path of pressuring the priest to conform to the LCD or be removed.

It is as if everyone is under the spell of the LCD. Such is the division that has been sown into the heart of the Church, and especially into the heart of the priesthood and religious life, by the Missal of Paul VI.

Order — or Disorder?

The laity need to understand this phenomenon if they wish to grasp why so many faithful priests who want to celebrate in harmony with tradition, and want the faithful to experience the fullness of this rich treasure that we have as Catholics, are afraid to do so, or perhaps suffer a crisis when the tension between their ideals and the LCD reality becomes too intense. Some think that there is a huge conspiracy that planned all this, and certainly this may be true, since no doubt the cunning of the devil is involved. But it can also be explained as the result of societal entropy. Because of original sin, everything tends towards decay, as we see in the movies, music, and media of our culture. The Church is immune from this decay only in her divine element; she is by no means immune to it in her human element, unless her members fight consciously and vigorously against it. The traditional liturgy had long been a barrier against this natural process, but the new Mass has let this process into the Church like a flood.

This “Trojan horse in the City of God” (to use the expression of the great Dietrich von Hildebrand), this Trojan horse in the sanctuary in the form of a new Mass, did not spring up out of nowhere. Its principles had been brewing among modernist theologians and their heirs, the theologians of the nouvelle théologie, expressed in the false distinction made by Fr. Yves Congar between the “unalterable structures” of the Church and the “accessory, changeable superstructures.”

But this mentality is nothing less than a betrayal of a mystical person, as one lover of tradition so poetically expressed it:

I do not love a skeleton nor vital organs, I love Her face, Her sparkling clothes and even Her sandals, Her entire being. With the spiritual canticle I will sing of the hair on Her neck that charmed us as well, her children, as it ravished the heart of her Spouse. Oh, may those who love the Church understand! In her features and her slightest gestures, something indescribably exquisite enraptures us to the summit of her essential Mystery. The liturgical movements, the hymns, the ornamentation of churches, the words of the catechism and the sermon, this flesh, this manner of walking, the sound of the voice, the color of the eyes, revealed the very soul, immediately, and we were struck, intoxicated by it, for Her ancient and universal soul, Her intimate life that came to comfort us, was the Holy Spirit in Person! [1]

This is the reverence that a Catholic should have towards the received rites that come down to us from tradition, and all of their ornamentation. But the new Mass incarnates the false principle of Fr. Congar by deliberately tossing all of this out of the window in a massive overhaul, giving the impression to faithful Catholics and to the world that the Catholic Faith can change its entire appearance. Since changing the so-called “accessory, changeable superstructures,” we have become painfully aware that they were instead an important part of the solid rock that formed our sure foundation, or to use the above imagery, the beautiful wedding garments of Holy Mother Church, so visibly radiant in her sacred rites. And now we find ourselves upon a foundation of sand, always shifting, and — if we are willing to be honest with ourselves — a foundation always eroding down to the LCD, again and again, like a bird with a broken wing that can only manage to throw itself a few inches, or an airplane with faulty engines that rises up from the runway only to crash just beyond it.

My correspondent concluded with this cri de coeur:

If other priests want to accept the status quo, the tyranny of the LCD, that is their decision, between them and God. Perhaps not everyone needs to fight on the front lines and resist usque ad sanguinem. But for us whose hearts belong to the Church of all times, and to her traditional rites, we seek nothing more than to access them in freedom, nothing else than to live and die with them, nothing other than to nourish the faithful with this potent food and drink. May God raise up more and more priests with such a heart.

NOTE

[1] From the Abbé Georges de Nantes’s “Letter to My Friends,” no. 178, August 6, 1964. Like Padre Pio, de Nantes was reacting to the devastation already being visited on the Tridentine Mass in the mid-sixties, prior to the coup de grâce of 1969. See here for the quotation as well as the mention of Congar.

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

The Mounting Threat of Coercive Concelebration

I have been hearing from clergy who are telling me that, within their religious communities, in schools or houses of formation, in parishes, and in other situations, the campaign is intensifying to forbid priests from offering their own daily Masses (when they are otherwise free of obligations to celebrate Mass with and for a congregation) and to compel them to concelebrate with confreres. We first got wind of this back in July 2017 when a document circulating around Colleges in Rome attempted to intimidate clergy into concelebrating, contrary to their canonical rights. The inimitable Fr. Hunwicke commented on it and related matters extensively in a series called “Concelebration in the Roman Colleges.”

Clearly, the modernists and progressivists are fuming and plotting against the young priests going to side altars to “say Mass,” or the parochial vicars who set up dignified altars in their rooms for their day off, or the clergy who with curious consistency absent themselves from the sacramental jamborees that pass for special occasions like the Chrism Mass. They can see the writing on the wall. There comes a time when the threat of tradition becomes felt in earnest, and all kindness, real or simulated, is laid aside. It is indeed a threat to the postconciliar house of cards that many have substituted for the rock-solid Church of Christ and its perennial doctrine and liturgy.

The older generation, still paddling and sputtering in a lake of Kool Aid, wants to thwart the revival of private Masses [1] above all because these Masses are so often in the usus antiquior. Thus, two canonical offenses are committed at once: an action against the Code of Canon Law, and an action against the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum and its authoritative applications in Universae Ecclesiae.

Let us, them, be as clear as we can be. It is impossible to force a priest to concelebrate, even to establish that he should “as a rule” do so. It is still more impossible to exclude the usus antiquior for a priest’s “private” Mass — that is, when he is not scheduled to offer Mass in public with a congregation. [2]

1. Canon 902 guarantees the right of each priest to celebrate individually with the sole condition that the individual offering of the Holy Mass not take place in the same church or oratory in which another concelebration is taking place. (NB: Some English translations simply say “in which another celebration is taking place.” The Latin, however, is clear: non vero eo tempore, quo in eadem ecclesia aut oratorio concelebratio habetur.) Thus, having many simultaneous Masses at side altars is fully permissible even according to the 1983 Code.

2. Canon 904 recommends the daily offering of the Holy Mass by priests “since, even if the faithful cannot be present, it is the act of Christ and the Church in which priests fulfill their principal office [munus].” The standard English translation of the 1983 Code translates munus as “function” in this canon, which translation is not felicitous.

3. Canon 906 prohibits a priest from offering the Holy Mass “without the participation of at least some member of the faithful” — “except for a just and reasonable cause.” It is clear from context that the fulfillment of the recommendation of Canon 904, that is, the recommended daily offering of the Holy Mass by priests, is a just and reasonable cause.

4. These canonical points are well supported by n. 31 of the Encyclical Letter Ecclesia de Eucharistia of John Paul II, which says, inter alia:

If the Eucharist is the center and summit of the Church’s life, it is likewise the center and summit of priestly ministry. For this reason, with a heart filled with gratitude to our Lord Jesus Christ, I repeat that the Eucharist “is the principal and central raison d’être of the sacrament of priesthood, which effectively came into being at the moment of the institution of the Eucharist.” … We can understand, then, how important it is for the spiritual life of the priest, as well as for the good of the Church and the world, that priests follow the Council’s recommendation to celebrate the Eucharist daily: “for even if the faithful are unable to be present, it is an act of Christ and the Church.” In this way priests will be able to counteract the daily tensions which lead to a lack of focus and they will find in the Eucharistic sacrifice — the true center of their lives and ministry — the spiritual strength needed to deal with their different pastoral responsibilities. Their daily activity will thus become truly Eucharistic.

5. They are also supported by n. 80 of the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis of Benedict XVI:

The Eucharistic form of the Christian life is seen in a very special way in the priesthood. Priestly spirituality is intrinsically Eucharistic. … An intense spiritual life will enable him [the priest] to enter more deeply into communion with the Lord and to let himself be possessed by God’s love, bearing witness to that love at all times, even the darkest and most difficult. To this end, I join the Synod Fathers in recommending “the daily celebration of Mass, even when the faithful are not present” (Propositio 38). This recommendation is consistent with the objectively infinite value of every celebration of the Eucharist, and is motivated by the Mass’s unique spiritual fruitfulness. If celebrated in a faith-filled and attentive way, Mass is formative in the deepest sense of the word, since it fosters the priest’s configuration to Christ and strengthens him in his vocation.

Both of these magisterial documents renew the recommendation of the daily offering of the Holy Mass even when a member of the faithful cannot be present. It is, of course, important always to bear in mind that the Holy Mass is never in fact offered “alone,” for there is always the participation of the choirs of angels and of the communion of the saints.

6. In connection with the Mass of Paul VI, The General Instruction of the Roman Missal provides rubrics for the offering of Holy Mass when only one minister participates (nn. 252–272), and for the offering of Holy Mass without the participation of a minister (n. 254). There would be no point in furnishing such rubrics were this situation not anticipated as a normal occurrence in the life of clergy.

Priests who find themselves victims of the attempt to exclude private Mass or to require concelebration should resist by respectfully — and, if necessary, repeatedly, and in writing [3] — pointing out the provisions in Church law, as summarized above, avoiding attribution of motives or rancor, and leaving the judgment of hearts to Almighty God. Since we know there are wicked men in high places, at times this self-defense may precipitate a larger confrontation. Such confrontations are never pleasant affairs but they can be occasions of greatly-needed clarification on the limits of authority and obedience, and even moments of grace in discerning whether a given pastoral or community situation is sustainable over the long term.

A number of good men in high places have given this advice to individuals: Be strong and stand your ground: esto vir, esto sacerdos Christi. No one ever has a right to contradict universal legislation. As long as that legislation remains in force, and no exceptions have been expressly granted by law, it is binding on all without exception. This has always been the mind of the Church.


NOTES

[1] I am aware of the limitations of the term “private Mass,” especially because any Mass is a social and public act by its very nature, but it is still a useful term, the meaning of which everyone readily grasps.

[2] The recent letter of the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta similarly violates the rights of laity and clergy.

[3] Bullies rarely want to write anything down on paper, because they either know or have an intuition that if they write down their demands, they can be challenged canonically, and defeated or embarrassed. So a key defense is to insist that any demand or request be put into writing, so that one can be certain of what is being requested and why. If they will not do so, then one can claim one did not understand what they were asking or had not been given a sufficient reason or had doubts in one’s conscience about the validity of their requests, etc.

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