Announcing a Comprehensive Canonical Critique of “Traditionis Custodes”

As readers of NLM are too well aware, Pope Francis's apostolic letter Traditionis Custodes aimed at a drastic reduction of the use of the traditional Roman liturgy. In a letter to the bishops published on the same day, the pope explained at length the reasons for his decision. The harsh measures, in tandem with the violent and accusatory tone of the accompanying letter, have aroused consternation among the faithful who are attached to the usus antiquior. The Responsa ad Dubia issued in December of 2021 by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, so far from clarifying matters, only intensified the growing dismay and debate.

The inaccuracies, difficulties of interpretation, and problems of concrete application of Traditionis Custodes have meanwhile raised many questions among canonists, pastors, and institutes whose proper law binds them to the liturgical forms of the Latin tradition.

It was time for a competent canonist to write a full critique of the letter. This was done by canon lawyer Fr. Réginald-Marie Rivoire, F.S.V.F., who in a lengthy French article undertook a careful canonical reading of these documents, chiefly from the point of view of their "juridical rationality." It is well known that rationality is one of the essential characteristics of a legal norm, such that strictly speaking, an irrational norm is not a norm and does not bind.

I am happy to share at NLM that an authorized English translation of this tract has now been published as part of the "Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition" series launched by my publishing house, Os Justi Press. The work is entitled (simply enough): "Does Traditionis Custodes Pass the Juridical Rationality Test?" 

First, Fr. Rivoire considers the legal status of the documents; then, the affirmation at the heart of this whole legal apparatus and its raison d’être, namely, that the liturgical books promulgated by Paul VI and John Paul II are the sole expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite; and finally, the way in which numerous fundamental principles and precepts of canon law are undermined by the new norms. Nearly every point I have seen made piecemeal elsewhere by canonists is found here, integrated within a total structure. It's just under 100 pages.

The book is available in paperback or electronically, either from the publisher directly (here) or from Amazon.com (here) and its affiliates around the world. I see other online sites carrying it as well.

This tract would make a good gift for a sympathetic priest, a friendly bishop, a canon lawyer, a local Una Voce chapter, etc. The Table of Content and the Introduction may be found as a PDF here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Fr. Réginald-Marie Rivoire of the Fraternity of St. Vincent Ferrer is a graduate of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques of Paris and holds a doctorate in canon law from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. He is the Master of Novices at the Friary of St. Thomas Aquinas in Chémeré-le-Roi and Defender of the Bond and Promoter of Justice at the ecclesiastical Tribunal of Rennes. He teaches canon law in various religious institutes.

Os Justi Press also publishes works like:

• Guardini's Sacred Signs
• Parsch's The Breviary Explained
• the pocket Roman Martyrology
• the Benedictine Martyrology
• A Missal for Young Catholics
• John Henry Newman on Worship, Reverence, & Ritual: A Selection of Texts
• Latin in the Church: The History of Its Pronunciation

and others of liturgical, dogmatic, and literary interest. Please take a moment to visit the new website. All Os Justi titles are also available via Amazon.

The Legal Achievement of Summorum Pontificum : Reprint from 2017

In recent days, with the rumors of a possible suppression or rollback of Summorum Pontificum, there has been a great deal of discussion about its status and meaning. I therefore thought it might be useful to reprint this consideration of the matter, originally published on the tenth anniversary. The short version is that the motu proprio is not a document about the history of the liturgy, but a legal provision, and should be read and understood as such.

UPDATE: I also happened to remember today this statement on the subject by a French Dominican, Fr Thierry-Dominique Humbrecht, which is very well worth considering. “The liturgical pluralism of the two states of the Roman Rite is perhaps harmful, but it is the consequence of a savage rupture in the liturgy, which is even more damaging, and the official light which has been put on it is still too timid.” (Le pluralisme liturgique des deux états du rite romain est peut-être dommageable, mais il est la conséquence d’un éclatement liturgique sauvage, plus dommageable encore, sur lequel la lumière officielle est encore trop timidement faite.)”

I propose here to consider what Pope Benedict XVI meant, and what he achieved, by categorizing the traditional Roman Mass and the post-conciliar reform of it as two Forms of the same Rite, the one Extraordinary and the other Ordinary. Before doing that, I believe it is necessary to establish a distinction between the terms which have historically been used to describe variations within a liturgy or liturgical family, namely, Rite and Use.

To the best of my knowledge, the distinction between Rite and Use has not been officially laid out anywhere in law by the Church; this is therefore purely my take on the matter.

For clarity’s sake, the variants of the same Rite should properly be called Uses, like the Sarum Use or Carmelite Use; this is what they were most commonly called before the Tridentine reform. For example, the frontispiece of the Sarum Missal says “Missale ad usum insignis ecclesiae Sarisburiensis – the Missal according to the Use of the famous church of Salisbury.”

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

It is true that even before Trent, there was some confusion between these terms, and Rite was occasionally said instead of Use; after Trent, the term Use became rare. The terminology was certainly never uniform, and many liturgical books do not use either term, and have just an adjective modifying the words Missale, Breviarium etc. The Dominicans said either “according to the Sacred Order of Preachers,” or “according to the Rite of the Sacred Order of Preachers.”

On the left, the beginning of the pre-Tridentine Missal “according to the Use of the renowned church of Liège.” On the right, the frontispiece of a post-Tridentine edition of the “Breviarium Leodiense - Breviary of Liège”; “Leodiensis” is the adjectival form of the city’s name in Latin, Leodium. In French, this could be translated more literally as “Bréviaire Liégeois.” 

However, if we wish to establish a distinction between different liturgies on the one hand, and variants within a given liturgy on the other, while still keeping to some kind of historical terminology, it seems obvious that Rite is the more appropriate for the former, and Use for the latter. It would be absurd to describe the liturgies of the Eastern churches as “the Byzantine Use, the Coptic Use etc.,” when comparing them to “the Roman Use”; they are clearly and entirely different Rites. “Use”, on the other hand, was the predominant term for variants of the Roman Rite when there were many such variants celebrated throughout Western Europe.

All of the essential characteristics of the Roman Rite, such as the Ordo Missae and the structure of the Office, are the same from one Use to the other. They are not the same in other Rites. This applies not just to the Canon, but the whole structure of the Mass: Introit, Kyrie, Gloria, Collect(s), Epistle, Gradual, Alleluia etc. With minor variations, which are more variations of order than of wording, the bulk of the liturgical texts is the same as well. Searching through every missal or antiphonary of every Use of the Roman Rite, one will find the Introit Ad te levavi on the First Sunday of Advent, Populus Sion on the Second, etc. It is true that some of the later features of the Rite, mostly notably the Offertory prayers and the Sequences, differ considerably from one Use to another. These variations are nevertheless confined within certain clearly recognizable limits, have much in common with one another, and can therefore be grouped into families.

Furthermore, any proper Mass or Office written for one Use can be transposed into any of the others with no difficulty at all. (The same is true for any set of Offertory prayers or any Sequence.) For example, St Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican, and wrote the Office and Mass of Corpus Christi according to the medieval French Use followed by his order. (The Office had nine responsories at Matins, rather than eight as in the Roman Use, a versicle between Matins and Lauds, etc.) Almost nothing needed to be done to adjust these texts for the Missal and Breviary according to the “Use of the Roman Curia”, which in the Tridentine reform became the Missal and Breviary of St Pius V.

However, when the Mass of Corpus Christi was added to the Ambrosian Rite, all kinds of adjustments had to be made: the addition of a first reading, the antiphon after the Gospel, the Oratio super sindonem, and the Transitorium, none of which exist in the Roman Rite, and the removal of the Sequence, which has never existed in the Ambrosian Rite. Vice versa, if one wanted to take the Ambrosian Mass of St Ambrose, for example, and transpose it into the Roman Rite, one would need to change it very considerably, adding a psalm verse and Gloria to the Ingressa to make an Introit, and removing the first reading, the antiphon after the Gospel, the Oratio super sindonem, and the Transitorium.

If we accept these definitions of Rite and Use, it seems to me very clear that neither of them is appropriate to describe the relationship between what we now call the two Forms of the Roman Rite. On the very basic level of what we usually see and hear in a Mass of the Ordinary Form and a Mass of the Extraordinary Form, they immediately appear to be two different Rites. The liturgist Fr Joseph Gelineau SJ famously declared à propos of the reformed Mass, “This needs to be said without ambiguity: the Roman Rite as we knew it no longer exists. It has been destroyed.” A statement of this sort cannot be glossed over as just the opinion of a single man; Fr Gelineau was a prominent figure in the liturgical reform, and highly esteemed by its most famous architect, Archbishop Annibale Bugnini. Similar statements, pro and con, have been made by many others. I cannot imagine any serious liturgical scholar applying similar language to any previous change within the Roman Rite.

On the basis of my transposition argument given above, (texts can easily be moved from one Use to another, but can be moved from one Rite to another much less easily, or not at all), it can be said that the EF and OF do share a certain identity. Most of any given block of Mass texts can be moved from one to the other fairly easily, or at least, much more easily than they could be moved between the Byzantine and Ambrosian Rites. However, considering that the post-conciliar reform was a far greater displacement of liturgical texts than had ever taken place before in the Roman Rite, and the significant ritual differences, it is much harder to argue that the EF and OF share an identity. Historically, this is an absolutely anomalous situation; there has never been a case of two Rites or Uses which shared so much and yet were so radically different.

Because of this, the identity of the two Forms of a single Rite as established by Summorum Pontificum has sometimes been described as a “legal fiction.” I submit that this is a wholly appropriate way of describing the situation, that the identity of the two Forms as a single Rite IS a legal fiction, and that this is a good thing.

A legal fiction is not the same thing as a lie. Adoption, for example, is a legal fiction, which states that in terms of law, this person is the child of that person. This is most emphatically not a false statement, even though the adopted child is not the natural offspring of the parent. The law’s recognition of the bond between a parent and child is perhaps the least significant thing about it, precisely because it does not create such a bond and cannot dissolve it. In this sense, adoption simply declares that the absence of a genetic relationship between two specific people is legally irrelevant, and that a parent-child relationship exists between them.

In a similar way, Pope Benedict’s action in creating two “Forms” was not intended to speak to the relationship between the EF and OF as a matter of liturgical or historical scholarship, but solely as a description of the relationship between them in law. It simply declares that the tenuous relationship between the two Forms is legally irrelevant.

As a matter of law, a priest of one Rite needs special faculties to celebrate Mass in another. This is a useful and perfectly sensible legal provision for a variety of reasons, and a long-standing one, but hardly a moral necessity per se; where deemed pastorally useful, the Church has been fairly flexible in granting such faculties. However, the whole point of Summorum Pontificum was to establish that a priest of the Roman Rite does not need any special faculty or permission to say the Mass according to the traditional Missal, as was the case under the indult Ecclesia Dei. I believe that Pope Benedict acted very wisely and conscientiously in adopting a completely different category from any other previously used, Form instead of Use or Rite, to get around an important legal problem, namely, that by any other solution, he would have made the vast majority of Catholic priests “bi-ritual.” That would have been a legal abomination without precedent.

Divini Cultus, Pope Pius XI’s Apostolic Constitution on Sacred Music

Today marks the 90th anniverary of the publication of Divini Cultus, an Apostolic Constutition issued by Pope Pius XI to commemorate the 25th anniversary of St Pius X’s motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini. Although the post-Conciliar reform was effected with almost total disregard for earlier legislation and magisterial pronouncements on the liturgy, as an Apostolic Constitution, this remains part of the law of the Church to this day, no less than the motu proprio which inspired it. It is very much to be hoped that when the time comes to reform the liturgy properly (which it most surely will, though we know not the day nor the hour), the Church will take the wisdom of this document into serious consideration, particularly in regard to the importance it lays on the training of the clergy in the field of sacred music, and the importance of the public celebration of the Divine Office. We here present some excerpts from an English translation published on the website of the Adoremus Bulletin, where you can read the complete text; the Latin original is available on the Vatican website. (h/t Nicola.)

Public domain image from Wikipedia

“... No wonder, then, that the Roman Pontiffs have been so solicitous to safeguard and protect the Liturgy. They have used the same care in making laws for the regulation of the Liturgy, in preserving it from adulteration, as they have in giving accurate expression to the dogmas of the faith. This is the reason why the Fathers made both spoken and written commentary upon the Liturgy or “the law of worship”; for this reason the Council of Trent ordained that the Liturgy should be expounded and explained to the faithful.

In our times too, the chief object of Pope Pius X, in the Motu Proprio Tra Le Sollecitudini which he issued twenty-five years ago, making certain prescriptions concerning Gregorian Chant and sacred music, was to arouse and foster a Christian spirit in the faithful, by wisely excluding all that might ill befit the sacredness and majesty of our churches. The faithful come to church in order to derive piety from its chief source, by taking an active part in the venerated mysteries and the public solemn prayers of the Church. It is of the utmost importance, therefore, that anything that is used to adorn the Liturgy should be controlled by the Church, so that the arts may take their proper place as most noble ministers in sacred worship.

Far from resulting in a loss to art, such an arrangement will certainly make for the greater splendor and dignity of the arts that are used in the Church. This has been especially true of sacred music. Wherever the regulations on this subject have been carefully observed, a new life has been given to this delightful art, and the spirit of religion has prospered; the faithful have gained a deeper understanding of the sacred Liturgy, and have taken part with greater zest in the ceremonies of the Mass, in the singing of the psalms and the public prayers. ...

It is, however, to be deplored that these most wise laws in some places have not been fully observed, and therefore their intended results not obtained. We know that some have declared that these laws, though so solemnly promulgated, were not binding upon their obedience. Others obeyed them at first, but have since come gradually to give countenance to a type of music which should be altogether banned from our churches. ...

In order to urge the clergy and faithful to a more scrupulous observance of these laws and directions which are to be carefully obeyed by the whole Church, We think it opportune to set down here something of the fruits of Our experience during the last twenty-five years. ...

We wish, then, to make certain recommendations to the bishops and ordinaries, whose duty it is, since they are the custodians of the Liturgy, to promote ecclesiastical art. ...

Holy Thursday in the Sistine Chapel in the reign of Pope Pius XI

All those who aspire to the priesthood, whether in seminaries or in religious houses, from their earliest years are to be taught Gregorian Chant and sacred music. At that age they are able more easily to learn to sing, and to modify, if not entirely to overcome, any defects in their voices, which in later years would be quite incurable. Instruction in music and singing must be begun in the elementary, and continued in the higher classes. In this way, those who are about to receive sacred orders, having become gradually experienced in chant, will be able during their theological course quite easily to undertake the higher and “aesthetic” study of plainsong and sacred music, of polyphony and the organ, concerning which the clergy certainly ought to have a thorough knowledge.

In seminaries, and in other houses of study for the formation of the clergy both secular and regular there should be a frequent and almost daily lecture or practice — however short — in Gregorian Chant and sacred music. ... Thus a more complete education of both branches of the clergy in liturgical music will result in the restoration to its former dignity and splendor of the choral Office, a most important part of divine worship; moreover, the scholae and choirs will be invested again with their ancient glory.

Those who are responsible for, and engaged in divine worship in basilicas and cathedrals, in collegiate and conventual churches of religious, should use all their endeavors to see that the choral Office is carried out duly — i.e. in accordance with the prescriptions of the Church. And this, not only as regards the precept of reciting the divine Office “worthily, attentive and devoutly”, but also as regards the chant. ...

... it should be observed that, according to the ancient discipline of the Church and the constitutions of chapters still in force, all those at least who are bound to office in choir, are obliged to be familiar with Gregorian Chant. ...

We wish here to recommend, to those whom it may concern, the formation of choirs. These in the course of time came to replace the ancient scholae and were established in the basilicas and greater churches especially for the singing of polyphonic music. Sacred polyphony, We may here remark, is rightly held second only to Gregorian Chant. We are desirous, therefore, that such choirs, as they flourished from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, should now also be created anew and prosper especially in churches where the scale on which the Liturgy is carried out demands a greater number and a more careful selection of singers.

Choir-schools for boys should be established not only for the greater churches and cathedrals, but also for smaller parish churches. The boys should be taught by the choirmaster to sing properly, so that, in accordance with the ancient custom of the Church, they may sing in the choir with the men, especially as in polyphonic music the highest part, the ..., ought to be sung by boys. Choir-boys, especially in the sixteenth century, have given us masters of polyphony: first and foremost among them, the great Palestrina. ...

The traditionally appropriate musical instrument of the Church is the organ, which, by reason of its extraordinary grandeur and majesty, has been considered a worthy adjunct to the Liturgy, ... We wish, within the limits prescribed by the Liturgy, to encourage the development of all that concerns the organ; but We cannot but lament the fact that, as in the case of certain types of music which the Church has rightly forbidden in the past, so now attempts are being made to introduce a profane spirit into the Church by modern forms of music; which forms, if they begin to enter in, the Church would likewise be bound to condemn. Let our churches resound with organ-music that gives expression to the majesty of the edifice and breathes the sacredness of the religious rites; in this way will the art both of those who build the organs and of those who play them flourish afresh and render effective service to the sacred liturgy.

A Mass coram Summo Pontifice at the Dominican church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, celebrated on the occasion of Pope Pius XII’s proclamation of Ss Catherine of Siena and Francis of Assisi as the Patron Saints of Italy. (Courtesy of the Liturgical Arts Journal, via their Facebook page.)

In order that the faithful may more actively participate in divine worship, let them be made once more to sing the Gregorian Chant, so far as it belongs to them to take part in it. It is most important that when the faithful assist at the sacred ceremonies, or when pious sodalities take part with the clergy in a procession, they should not be merely detached and silent spectators, but, filled with a deep sense of the beauty of the Liturgy, they should sing alternately with the clergy or the choir, as it is prescribed. If this is done, then it will no longer happen that the people either make no answer at all to the public prayers — whether in the language of the Liturgy or in the vernacular — or at best utter the responses in a low and subdued manner.

Let the clergy, both secular and regular, under the lead of their bishops and ordinaries devote their energies either directly, or through other trained teachers, to instructing the people in the Liturgy and in music, as being matters closely associated with Christian doctrine. This will be best effected by teaching liturgical chant in schools, pious confraternities and similar associations. Religious communities of men and women should devote particular attention to the achievement of this purpose in the various educational institutions committed to their care....

We are well aware that the fulfillment of these injunctions will entail great trouble and labor. But do we not all know how many artistic works our forefathers, undaunted by difficulties, have handed down to posterity, imbued as they were with pious zeal and with the spirit of the Liturgy? Nor is this to be wondered at; for anything that is the fruit of the interior life of the Church surpasses even the most perfect works of this world. Let the difficulties of this sacred task, far from deterring, rather stimulate and encourage the bishops of the Church, who, by their universal and unfailing obedience to Our behests, will render to the Sovereign Bishop a service most worthy of their episcopal office.”

Traditional Clergy: Please Stop Making “Pastoral Adaptations”

The Gospel being read in French, versus populum, at the Solemn Pontifical Mass

Over the past twenty-five years, I have assisted at traditional Latin Masses in many states and countries. What I have seen has largely been edifying: clergy who love the liturgy, offering it in accord with its Roman spirit and the appropriate rubrics, and faithful who are grateful to have access to this powerhouse of sanctity.

But there are some shadows as well.

A friend shared with me the video of the traditional Pontifical Mass celebrated by Robert Cardinal Sarah in Chartres cathedral. It was going along magnificently, as one would have every reason to expect from this crown jewel of the Latin liturgy — until we reach the Lesson and the Gospel (the Epistle may be found at the 1:08:50 mark, the Gospel at 1:17:40, of the above video). At this point, the subdeacon faced the people rather than the East, chanted only the title of the reading in Latin, and proceeded to speak aloud a French translation. The Latin reading was never chanted ad orientem in its ancient and thrilling tone. Then along came the deacon, and instead of chanting the Gospel in Latin facing northwards, he again faced the people, and after singing the title, proceeding to read the Gospel in French.

This practice is contrary both to the spirit of the ancient Roman liturgy and to the rubrics that govern its celebration. Most recently, in 2011, the Instruction Universae Ecclesiae of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei states:

26. As foreseen by article 6 of the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, the readings of the Holy Mass of the Missal of 1962 can be proclaimed either solely in the Latin language, or in Latin followed by the vernacular or, in Low Masses, solely in the vernacular.

Only in a Low Mass, therefore, is it permitted to substitute vernacular readings for Latin — and note, it is permitted, not required or recommended. In fact, it is always better practice to read the lessons in Latin first, and then read them in the vernacular from the pulpit if it is judged pastorally wise. But at a High Mass, a fortiori a Solemn High Mass, a fortiori a Pontifical Mass, the readings are always to be sung in Latin, with the correct ceremonial and orientation. What we saw in the Chartres Mass is a liturgical abuse, no different in kind from the host of abuses with which the Novus Ordo is plagued.

This violation of rubrics was no doubt intended as a “pastoral adaptation” or “accommodation.” Nevertheless, it is an example of exactly what we must be careful not to do. Many of the worst aberrations and deviations in the 1960s, when the old Mass was already being subjected to torture and dismemberment, and subsequently the ruinous missal of Paul VI, arose exactly from such supposedly “pastoral considerations.” Fr. Louis Bouyer, who worked at the Bugninian abattoir before regretting his complicity, already caught the whiff of a weird pastoralism in the 1950s. For Bouyer, liturgy is first of all

a given, a traditional given. From a material point of view it is a precisely circumscribed object: the whole of the rites and ceremonies, of readings and prayers that are written down in the books called the Missal, the Breviary, and the Ritual. It is something we can desire to enrich, as every living Christian generation enriches Christian spirituality, Christian morals, even dogma; but it is something that has first to be received, received from the Church.[1]

A major difference between the theology of the classical Roman Rite and that of Paul VI’s modern rite is the difference in how lections are understood. The lections at Mass are not merely instructional or didactic. They are an integral part of the seamless act of worship offered to God in the Holy Sacrifice. The clergy chant the divine words in the presence of their Author as part of the logike latreia, the rational worship, we owe to our Creator and Redeemer. These words are a making-present of the covenant with God, an enactment of their meaning in the sacramental context for which they were intended, a grateful and humble recitation in the sight of God of the truths He has spoken and the good things He has promised (in keeping with Scripture’s manner of praying to God: “Remember, Lord, the promises you have spoken!”), and a form of verbal incense by which we raise our hands to His commandments, as the great Offertory chant has it: “Meditabor in mandatis tuis, quae dilexi valde: et levabo manus meas ad mandata tua, quae dilexi.”

The chanted Latin lection is an expression of adoring love directed to God before it is a communication of knowledge to the people, and the form in which it is done should reflect this primacy. In the ancient liturgy, always and everywhere God enjoys primacy. Nothing is done “simply” for the people. Holy Communion, which is clearly for the benefit of the people, is treated with adoration, reverence, care, and attentive love, being distributed exclusively by the anointed hands of the ordained, on the tongues of the kneeling faithful, with a paten held underneath, and, perhaps, a houseling cloth. All eyes are thus fixed on the Eucharistic Lord, giving Him the primacy that is His due. It should be no different with the utterance of the divine words, in which we find a symbolic incarnation of the Word of God which nourishes our souls in preparation for the divine banquet of the Most Holy Sacrament.[2]

Vernacularization and recitation of the lessons at High Mass betrays the rationalism and utilitarianism of the Synod of Pistoia. The chanting of the Word of God is not just for instruction but also a quasi-sacramental action in and of itself (as Martin Mosebach argues with regard to the use of incense, candles, and the prayer “Per evangelica dicta, deleantur nostra delicta”).[3] It is part of the activity of worship, and like the other prayers of the Mass, it should be set apart by words of a sacral register, hallowed by tradition. No one will complain if this formal liturgical chant, which takes only a few minutes in any case, is followed up with a recitation of the vernacular texts before the homily. But the latter should never be substituted for the former.

I have learned about priests in France and Germany who, in keeping with this cavalier pastoral attitude, also change the “Ecce Agnus Dei” and “Domine non sum dignus” into the vernacular. Seriously: has it ever really caused difficulty for the faithful to understand what is meant by these phrases, which are repeated at every Holy Mass? Additionally, some clergy in Germany, who have apparently learned nothing from the past fifty years, persist in recycling the old saccharine Schubert Masses and other German paraphrases, which they fob off on the people instead of sharing with them the riches of Gregorian chant, as every Pope has urged from 1903 to 2013.[4]

Then there are practical concerns, those stubborn little things known as facts. Congregations who attend the usus antiquior today are often made up of faithful of diverse linguistic backgrounds, because in many locales only a single Latin Mass is available, and all the people of the surrounding territory gather for it. I was recently visiting St. Clement’s in Ottawa, in which about 40% of the faithful are Francophone and 60% are Anglophone. Latin is the common liturgical language that unites them. In the United States, when Hispanic Catholics attend a Latin Mass, the Latin is closer to their native tongue than English. In another city parish of which I am aware, there are families who speak English, Romanian, Polish, Russian, Czech, Italian, and Spanish. Quite apart from fidelity to the rubrics, such situations present a genuine “pastoral” reason for the consistent use of Latin!

In this respect, the Chartres Mass afforded us a spectacular lack of pastoral common sense. This is an international pilgrimage of people for whom French is certainly not a common language. To read the lessons only in French reveals a nationalist, regionalist, and culturally imperialist attitude. As Pope John XXIII noted in Veterum Sapientia, only the use of the venerable and universal Latin tongue is exempt from such problems.

It would be opportune for the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, as well as religious congregations and societies of apostolic life that utilize the usus antiquior, to monitor such liturgical abuses and correct them before they spread. How can clergy expect the faithful to show due obedience to their fathers in Christ, if these same fathers are not faithful to the inherited liturgy? Is it too much to ask that priests follow the spirit and the letter of the Roman Rite as it has been passed down to us, without introducing the deviations and creative adaptations of the Liturgical Movement? We have seen where those ended up: the Novus Ordo.

The faithful deserve and have a right to a traditional Mass offered in accordance with the wise slogan “Say the Black, Do the Red.” After decades of confusion, the Church is being given an unparalleled opportunity to restart the celebration of the liturgy with a correct attitude and praxis. If we mess it up this time with short-sighted pastoral adaptations, we will have no one to blame but ourselves when we slide into a second liturgical reform, from which Divine Providence may not rescue us.

[1] “Après les journées de Vanves. Quelques mises au point sur le sens et le rôle de la Liturgie,” in Études de pastorale (Paris: Cerf, 1944 and Lyon: Abeille, 1944), 383, cited in John Pepino, “Cassandra’s Curse: Louis Bouyer, the Liturgical Movement, and the Post-Conciliar Reform of the Mass,” Antiphon 18.3 (2014): 254–300, on 270.

[2] For a more extensive treatment of the topic, see my article “In Defense of Preserving Readings in Latin.”

[3] Another confirmation of this thesis is found in the traditional rite for the ordination of deacons, as a commenter at Fr. Zuhlsdorf noted (and here I quote):

After the bishop vests the new deacon in the stole and dalmatic, he presents the Gospel book and says: “Accipe potestatem legendi Evangelium in Ecclesia Dei, tam pro vivis, quam pro defunctis. In nomine Domini.” “Receive the power of reading the Gospel in the Church of God, both for the living and for the dead. In the name of the Lord.” The part about reading the Gospel for the dead would be nonsense if the reading were merely a practical instruction for those members of the Church Militant who happen to be present at a particular Mass. (The rite for subdeacons has a similar formula withe the Book of Epistles, with reference to power to read them both for the living and the dead.)

[4] I would not necessarily object to vernacular hymns being sung at a High Mass, provided that the Gregorian Ordinary and Propers were sung first, and the hymn functioned as a kind of popular motet. But to supplant what is liturgical with what is non-liturgical is Protestant, not Catholic or Orthodox.

New Motu Proprio on Translations

The complete text of the new motu proprio on liturgical translations issued today, Magnum principium, is now available on the Vatican Bolletino in a variety of languages: Latin, English, Italian, and Spanish. A commentary from the CDW on the changes instituted thereby accompanies it.

From the very first post on NLM, August 1, 2005, a report by Stratford Caldecott on a liturgical conference held in June of that year in Oxford.

“Don’t fear anarchy ... Anarchy is what we have already. The law of the Church has been so widely disregarded that it is now in disrepute: if respect for law is to return there must be an end to the pretense that everything is under control.”

The Legal Achievement of Summorum Pontificum

I propose here to consider what Pope Benedict XVI meant, and what he achieved, by categorizing the traditional Roman Mass and the post-conciliar reform of it as two Forms of the same Rite, the one Extraordinary and the other Ordinary. Before doing that, I believe it is necessary to establish a distinction between the terms which have historically been used to describe variations within a liturgy or liturgical family, namely, Rite and Use.

To the best of my knowledge, the distinction between Rite and Use has not been officially laid out anywhere in law by the Church; this is therefore purely my take on the matter.

For clarity’s sake, the variants of the same Rite should properly be called Uses, like the Sarum Use or Carmelite Use; this is what they were most commonly called before the Tridentine reform. For example, the frontispiece of the Sarum Missal says “Missale ad usum insignis ecclesiae Sarisburiensis – the Missal according to the Use of the famous church of Salisbury.”

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

It is true that even before Trent, there was some confusion between these terms, and Rite was occasionally said instead of Use; after Trent, the term Use became rare. The terminology was certainly never uniform, and many liturgical books do not use either term, and have just an adjective modifying the words Missale, Breviarium etc. The Dominicans said either “according to the Sacred Order of Preachers,” or “according to the Rite of the Sacred Order of Preachers.”

On the left, the beginning of the pre-Tridentine Missal “according to the Use of the renowned church of Liège.” On the right, the frontispiece of a post-Tridentine edition of the “Breviarium Leodiense - Breviary of Liège”; “Leodiensis” is the adjectival form of the city’s name in Latin, Leodium. In French, this could be translated more literally as “Bréviaire Liégeois.” 

However, if we wish to establish a distinction between different liturgies on the one hand, and variants within a given liturgy on the other, while still keeping to some kind of historical terminology, it seems obvious that Rite is the more appropriate for the former, and Use for the latter. It would be absurd to describe the liturgies of the Eastern churches as “the Byzantine Use, the Coptic Use etc.,” when comparing them to “the Roman Use”; they are clearly and entirely different Rites. “Use”, on the other hand, was the predominant term for variants of the Roman Rite when there were many such variants celebrated throughout Western Europe.

All of the essential characteristics of the Roman Rite, such as the Ordo Missae and the structure of the Office, are the same from one Use to the other. They are not the same in other Rites. This applies not just to the Canon, but the whole structure of the Mass: Introit, Kyrie, Gloria, Collect(s), Epistle, Gradual, Alleluia etc. With minor variations, which are more variations of order than of wording, the bulk of the liturgical texts is the same as well. Searching through every missal or antiphonary of every Use of the Roman Rite, one will find the Introit Ad te levavi on the First Sunday of Advent, Populus Sion on the Second, etc. It is true that some of the later features of the Rite, mostly notably the Offertory prayers and the Sequences, differ considerably from one Use to another. These variations are nevertheless confined within certain clearly recognizable limits, have much in common with one another, and can therefore be grouped into families.

Furthermore, any proper Mass or Office written for one Use can be transposed into any of the others with no difficulty at all. (The same is true for any set of Offertory prayers or any Sequence.) For example, St Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican, and wrote the Office and Mass of Corpus Christi according to the medieval French Use followed by his order. (The Office had nine responsories at Matins, rather than eight as in the Roman Use, a versicle between Matins and Lauds, etc.) Almost nothing needed to be done to adjust these texts for the Missal and Breviary according to the “Use of the Roman Curia”, which in the Tridentine reform became the Missal and Breviary of St Pius V.

However, when the Mass of Corpus Christi was added to the Ambrosian Rite, all kinds of adjustments had to be made: the addition of a first reading, the antiphon after the Gospel, the Oratio super sindonem, and the Transitorium, none of which exist in the Roman Rite, and the removal of the Sequence, which has never existed in the Ambrosian Rite. Vice versa, if one wanted to take the Ambrosian Mass of St Ambrose, for example, and transpose it into the Roman Rite, one would need to change it very considerably, adding a psalm verse and Gloria to the Ingressa to make an Introit, and removing the first reading, the antiphon after the Gospel, the Oratio super sindonem, and the Transitorium.

If we accept these definitions of Rite and Use, it seems to me very clear that neither of them is appropriate to describe the relationship between what we now call the two Forms of the Roman Rite. On the very basic level of what we usually see and hear in a Mass of the Ordinary Form and a Mass of the Extraordinary Form, they immediately appear to be two different Rites. The liturgist Fr Joseph Gelineau SJ famously declared à propos of the reformed Mass, “This needs to be said without ambiguity: the Roman Rite as we knew it no longer exists. It has been destroyed.” A statement of this sort cannot be glossed over as just the opinion of a single man; Fr Gelineau was a prominent figure in the liturgical reform, and highly esteemed by its most famous architect, Archbishop Annibale Bugnini. Similar statements, pro and con, have been made by many others. I cannot imagine any serious liturgical scholar applying similar language to any previous change within the Roman Rite.

On the basis of my transposition argument given above, (texts can easily be moved from one Use to another, but can be moved from one Rite to another much less easily, or not at all), it can be said that the EF and OF do share a certain identity. Most of any given block of Mass texts can be moved from one to the other fairly easily, or at least, much more easily than they could be moved between the Byzantine and Ambrosian Rites. However, considering that the post-conciliar reform was a far greater displacement of liturgical texts than had ever taken place before in the Roman Rite, and the significant ritual differences, it is much harder to argue that the EF and OF share an identity. Historically, this is an absolutely anomalous situation; there has never been a case of two Rites or Uses which shared so much and yet were so radically different.

Because of this, the identity of the two Forms of a single Rite as established by Summorum Pontificum has sometimes been described as a “legal fiction.” I submit that this is a wholly appropriate way of describing the situation, that the identity of the two Forms as a single Rite IS a legal fiction, and that this is a good thing.

A legal fiction is not the same thing as a lie. Adoption, for example, is a legal fiction, which states that in terms of law, this person is the child of that person. This is most emphatically not a false statement, even though the adopted child is not the natural offspring of the parent. The law’s recognition of the bond between a parent and child is perhaps the least significant thing about it, precisely because it does not create such a bond and cannot dissolve it. In this sense, adoption simply declares that the absence of a genetic relationship between two specific people is legally irrelevant, and that a parent-child relationship exists between them.

In a similar way, Pope Benedict’s action in creating two “Forms” was not intended to speak to the relationship between the EF and OF as a matter of liturgical or historical scholarship, but solely as a description of the relationship between them in law. It simply declares that the tenuous relationship between the two Forms is legally irrelevant.

As a matter of law, a priest of one Rite needs special faculties to celebrate Mass in another. This is a useful and perfectly sensible legal provision for a variety of reasons, and a long-standing one, but hardly a moral necessity per se; where deemed pastorally useful, the Church has been fairly flexible in granting such faculties. However, the whole point of Summorum Pontificum was to establish that a priest of the Roman Rite does not need any special faculty or permission to say the Mass according to the traditional Missal, as was the case under the indult Ecclesia Dei. I believe that Pope Benedict acted very wisely and conscientiously in adopting a completely different category from any other previously used, Form instead of Use or Rite, to get around an important legal problem, namely, that by any other solution, he would have made the vast majority of Catholic priests “bi-ritual.” That would have been a legal abomination without precedent.