The Proto-History of the Roman Liturgical Reform

Dr Geoffrey Hull
Traditionalist objections to the Roman liturgical reform of 1969 were, until very recently, not
taken at all seriously by most thinking Catholics who prided themselves on the orthodoxy of
their faith and religious practice. Conservative Catholics would answer the traditionalist
charge that the Novus Ordo Miss of Paul VI was partly or largely Protestant in spirit by
pointing out that the new Mass rite followed very closely the form of the eucharistic liturgy
used in the early Roman Church up until the ninth century. In any case, they argued, the
Council had explicitly ordered a return to the ancient Roman Mass in recommending that
elements which have suffered injury through accidents of history are now to be restored to
the earlier norm of the holy Fathers, and. these reformed rites were to be distinguished by a
noble simplcity , short, clear and free from useless repetitions. 1 Like the Mass of the
primitive Church, the new service was brief and sober, having been stripped of the ornate
Gallican additions of the late Middle Ages. And certainly its more informed opponents had to
concede that the rite of Paul VI, whatever its omissions and additions, retained all the
essential elements of the Catholic Mass. Conservative apologists of the reform could add that
even if the new rite was arguably a less forceful statement of Catholic eucharistic teaching
than the old one, any such inadequacies were amply compensated by the consistently
orthodox statements of recent Popes on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the Blessed
Sacrament, for example Paul VIs Mysterium Fidei of 1965, his Credo of the People of God
of 1968, and John-Paul IIs Inaestimabile Donum of 1984.
No serious student of the liturgy could therefore subscribe to the view that the Novus Ordo
Miss celebrated strictly according to the rubrics of the Latin text promulgated by Pope Paul
VI, was quasi-protestant, Even Michael Davies, one of the most eloquent and outspoken
critics of the reform: had shown in his trilogy Liturgical Revolution, that whereas the
Protestant liturgy-makers of the sixteenth century had systematically expunged from the
traditional rites everything that clearly denoted the sacrificial nature of the Mass and
transubstantiation, in the Mass of Paul VI the sacrificial language had been reduced or toned
down but not eliminated, the result being in certain cases (for example when the second
anaphora was used) an ambiguous but valid rite merely capable of a possible Protestant
interpretation.2 Any analogy between the Pauline reform and the Reformation liturgies was
thus at best partial.
However, not everyone outside the initially small traditionalist camp accepted the clericallyimposed liturgical reform without stopping to analyse the intentions of its authors. John
Eppstein, an English Catholic, had a clear understanding of the two forces at work in the
creation of the new liturgy whom he identified in 1972 as the liturgical purists who were
inclined to suppress every prayer and action which was not found in the most primitive postapostolic texts, and the modernists who were for scrapping everything that was not congenial
to contemporary sentiment.3 As reasonable as such reforming projects may have appeared to
Catholics of a modern scientific cast of mind, the fact remains that the idea of an arbitrary
restructuring of the sacred liturgy has always been alien to orthodox Catholic instinct and
practice. Paul VIs unprecedented attempt to pass off as authentic tradition a reform which
was on his admission a law thought out by authoritative experts of sacred liturgy was
therefore profoundly shocking to many tradition-conscious Catholics.4 For them it was
unthinkable that a committee of liturgical experts could change the traditional rites of the

Church at will and then impose them on the grounds that their creations were, amongst other
things, theologically orthodox.
The great irony of the Pauline reform was that Pope Pius XII in his encyclical of 1947,
Mediator Dei, had condemned outright its main characteristic: liturgical antiquarianism or
archeologism, the desire to restore the Roman liturgy to its primitive form:
It is true that the Church is a living organism and therefore grows and develops in her
liturgical worship; it is also true that, always preserving the integrity of her doctrine, she
accommodates herself to the needs and conditions of the times. But deliberately to introduce
new liturgical customs, or to revive obsolete rites inconsistent with existing laws and rubrics,
is an irresponsible act which We must condemn. () The liturgy of the early ages is worthy
of veneration; but an ancient custom is not to be considered better, either in itself or in
relation to times and circumstances, just because it has the savour of antiquity. More recent
liturgical rites are also worthy of reverence and respect, because they too have been
introduced under the guidance of the Holy Ghost . the desire to restore everything
indiscriminately to its ancient condition is neither wise nor praiseworthy. It would be wrong,
for example, to want the altar restored to its ancient form of a table, to want black eliminated
from the liturgical coloufs, and pictures and statues excluded from our churches; to require
crucifixes that do not represent the bitter sufferings of the divine Redeemer5
Here the Pope criticizes as simplistic the mentality which regards the worship of the age of
the Fathers and the Apostles as purer than that of any other, as an absolute norm to be
restored after every period of so-called liturgical decadence. Such an anachronistic outlook
dismissed as irrelevant or detrimental the historical development of the liturgy; in setting up
an ecclesiastical golden age for perpetual emulation it was radically opposed to the living
notion of tradition. A century earlier the much-maligned Dom Guranger had drawn up a
syllabus of such tendencies and condemned them collectively as the anti-liturgical heresy.6
Similarly, Pius XII did not simply censure liturgical antiquarianism as misguided but actually
passed a negative moral judgement on it as a wicked movement, that tends to paralyse the
sanctifying and salutary action by which the liturgy leads the children of adoption on the path
to their heavenly Father.7
Since I am repeating the charge that the New Order of Mass is an artificial creation
antiquarianist in conception, it will be useful to consider for a moment the manner in which
Catholic eucharistic rites have developed. Basically it is a dual process. As the Churchs
appreciation of its liturgical treasure deepened over the centuries, the rite grew organically by
the gradual addition of new elements (such as the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar, the
Offertory and pre-Communion prayers and the Last Gospel, originally private devotions of
the celebrant) and the abandonment of others (such as the Bidding Prayers after the Creed,
Communion under both species and Communion in the hand). In either case, the change grew
out of popular piety, was long in developing, and may be attributed to the guidance of the
Holy Spirit. In every case one is dealing either with new customs slipping almost
imperceptibly into the existing fabric of the rite or old ones disappearing from it; there was
never novel and sudden legislation from above.8 Before 1969 in the entire history of the
Catholic Mass the ecclesiastical authorities had intervened in the growth of the sacramental
rites only by ratifying or condemning particular customs and normalizing the changes in new
official editions of the liturgical books. The process of liturgical development actually
parallels that of the canonization of saints: popular cults arise spontaneously and at a later
date the hierarchical Church passes authoritative judgement on them.

As Italian canonist Count Neri Capponi puts it in his study of the juridical status of the
liturgical reform:
What must be emphasized () is the absolute spontaneity of the development of the liturgy
and in particular that of the Eucharist presided over by various bishops. There was no
uniform legislation or imposition from above, but a body of custom developed by free
invention of the celebrant and, especially, by imitation of forms in use in the older and more
authoritative churches, round the central core of the Eucharist which, as of divine origin, was
unchangeable.9
In the Roman rite this guided development of the liturgy through the growth and ratification
or condemnation of custom was halted by the post-Tridentine reform which permanently
fixed the basic form of the Mass. The common Christian experience has shown that in each
of the other historical rites of Christendom, the Mozarabic, Milanese, Antiochene, Byzantine,
Edessene and Alexandrine, what those for whom evolution is progressive improvement
contemptuously term liturgical fossilization or freezing, occurred well before the end of
the Middle Ages. Thus in traditional Christianity it would seem that the organic growth of the
liturgy is not perpetual, but has a natural term. Before Vatican II it was generally accepted
that the form of the Roman Mass had reached the end of its formal development in the year
1570. This is naturally far from meaning that a mature rite cannot undergo renewal in the
ordering and length of its component parts, in the manner of its celebration or in such
externals as music or ornaments. In any case the Missal of 1570 was no arbitrary revision of
the existing rite like the reform of 1969, but rather (as Paul VI freely admitted in his
Apostolic Constitution Missale.Romanum of 3rd April 1969) a new edition of the traditional
service-books characterized by the customary inclusion or exclusion of a small number of
recent or variable elements.10
If the foregoing theory of ritual maturation is to be taken as the only orthodox one (and it
should be recalled at this point that none of the Eastern churches, dissident or uniate, would
entertain any other view), then it is necessary to explain how, in the mid twentieth century,
the Roman Church could repudiate it in the name of Catholic orthodoxy. Indeed it is clear
from his Apostolic Letter Ecclesia Dei Adflicta of 2nd July 1988 that Pope John Paul II, who
condemns Archbishop Lefebvre and his followers for their supposedly static notion of
tradition, implicitly rejects the concept of spontaneous liturgical growth by identifying
Living Tradition with the post-conciliar liturgical reform. There can thus be no doubt that
John Paul II, no less than Paul VI, has aligned himself with those who claim that organic
liturgical development did not end in 1570 and that the unprecedented reform four hundred
years later was merely the resumption of the evolutive process after a freakish period of
stagnation. The disturbing conclusion is inescapable: the antiquarianism that Pius XII
condemned as unorthodox yesterday, his successors impose as orthodoxy today.
In order to discover the prototype of the Novus Ordo Missae one need not go as far back as
the Reformation; its antiquarianist rather than Protestant ethos and the strictures of Mediator
Dei indicate that its immediate ancestry is more recent. The authors and apostles of the new
rites have, in fact, readily acknowledged their great debt to the ideas and liturgical
experiments of a network of eighteenth-century Catholic reformers. Unequivocally rejected
as pernicious errors by Pius XII, these tendencies culminated in the infamous Synod of
Pistoia of 1786 which, writes the same Pope, the Church, in her capacity of watchful
guardian of the deposit of faith entrusted to her by her divine Founder, has rightly
condemned 11 It is worthy of note that many of the leading figures of the eighteenth century

movement for liturgical reform in France, Germany, Austria and Italy were also adherents of
Jansenism, which the teaching Church has always condemned as heretical and which may be
loosely described as a form of Catholic puritanism.
The Jansenist movement was characterized not merely but its extreme doctrinal
Augustinianism, which related it to Calvinism, but also by its contempt for the dogmatic
authority of the Holy See. This orientation inevitably affected the attitudes of the Jansenists
towards the public worship of the Church. Their habit of regarding Saint Augustine as a
theological oracle led them to idolize the Church of the age in which he lived, the fifth
century. If Catholics ought to follow the teachings of Saint Augustine (or rather the
Jansenists extreme interpretation of them), then they should also seek to emulate in their
churches the worship of this golden age of Christianity. Hence the heretics contempt for the
theology and liturgy of the Middle Ages. And since the Holy See was abusing its centralized
organization by teaching error (in the Jansenists view, semi-pelagianism), more stress
needed to be placed on the authority of the local Church, which as a small unit could be more
easily purified in its doctrine and worship.12
In all these ideas the Jansenists leaned towards the antiquarianist and rationalist ideas of the
Hussite, Lutheran and Anglican liturgists of an earlier age. Just as the Protestant Reformers
had been supported by secular authorities, so too these reformers who refused to break openly
with the Church found powerful allies and avid imitators among the Gallicans of France and
the Febronians ofAustria and the Italian States. In Austria, the Emperor, Joseph II, even gave
his name to a new form of erastianism: Josephism. To Joseph II, the Church, writes Philip
Hughes, was primarily a department of state whose office was the promotion of moral
order.13 In the 1780s the Sacristan Emperor, as he was nicknamed by his contemporaries,
initiated his reform by placing the Church under strict state surveillance and suppressing the
contemplative orders. He then went on to outlaw such traditional practices as the Litany of
Loreto and the rosary, banned sermons on Christian doctrine, abolished all prayers and
hymns offensive to the State and forbade certain feasts. He fixed by imperial decree the
number of masses to be said in each church, and even the number of candles to be lit on the
high altar.14 Within a few years his brother Pietro Leopoldo, ruler of the Grand Duchy of
Tuscany, was putting similar reforms. into effect with the help of Scipione Ricci, the bishop
of Pistoia and Prato.
In considering the Jansenist liturgical reform it is most important to bear in mind that the
partisans of the condemned heresy initially aspired to orthodoxy in their eucharistic theology:
their over-scrupulous discouragement of frequent Communion and their insistence on
preparation through the sacrament of penance are evidence enough of their fervent belief in
the Real Presence. Unlike the Protestants, therefore, the Jansenists intended to uphold the
Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, though in their pedantic zeal to be patristic they rejected
transubstantiation as an adequate explanation of the eucharistic mystery. Moreover, they
stopped short of imitating the public worship of protestants to the extent that the Reformation
liturgies were unpatristic. They did not, for instance, replace the altar with a table and
celebrate facing the people, most of them retained the use of liturgical Latin. They were not
iconoclasts, nor did they place the Eucharist in the hands of standing communicants or
abolish the ritual distinction between priest and people.
In Austria and Tuscany, where the Tridentine missal was in common use, the heretics
tampered little with the existing texts and rubrics of the Mass. By contrast, the French
Jansenists had more scope for ritual reform because the Tridentine Mass was not widely

celebrated in their country: most of the dioceses of France, including the archbishopric of
Paris, clung to the indigenous Gallicano-Roman liturgies of the High Middle Ages that had
survived the general reform of 1570 by virtue of the indult of St. Pius V. In these liturgically
non-Roman dioceses of France new breviaries, and sometimes new missals, were composed
by prominent Jansenist priests and laymen and imposed in place of the traditional ones by
local bishops sympathetic to the reformers ideals. And since in most cases it was the
revision of a legitimate local rite, the Holy See did not have the immediate right to
intervene.
What shape, exactly, did the Jansenist liturgical reform take? Inspired as it was by
rationalism, the prevailing tendency of the age, this movement subjected the traditional
liturgical texts to the most relentless criticism. As the work of revision progressed, no
element thought to be post-Patristic was suffered to survive, so that propers, prayers and
hymns composed in the Middle Ages were all replaced by texts from the Bible, especially
those thought to favour Jansenist interpretations of dogma. While not giving formal
adherence to the Lutheran doctrine of the priesthood of all baptized believers, the reformers
tended to reduce the role of the ordained priest to that of president of the Christian assembly.
Consequently they attacked private masses at which members of the laity were not present,
discouraged votive Masses and anniversary requiems, and took a subjectivist view of the Real
Presence in contending that one did not truly receive Christ in Holy Communion
administered outside Mass. Attacking the extra-eucharistic cult of the Blessed Sacrament,
Joseph II saw fit to ban the use of the monstrance and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament;
while in Tuscany Grand Duke Leopold forbade the laity to hear Mass in monastic churches
so as to stress the essentially communitarian nature of the Eucharist.15
In France this new approach to the Mass as a communal sacrifice of the Christian people was
further emphasized by such reforms as placing a white cloth, cross and lights on the altar only
when Mass was to be celebrated. Sanctuaries were not to be encumbered with vases of
flowers. Each church was to have only one altar; side-altars were demolished. Instead of
reciting the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei by himself in a low voice while the
choir sang, the priest now sang along with the people. The role of the people in the offering
was highlighted by the revival of such supposedly meaningful acts as the obsolescent
offertory procession and the placing on the altar of seasonal fruits and vegetables for blessing
at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, as in the early Roman rite. Instead of the traditional
veiling of the mystery and the deliberate cultivation of a numinous atmosphere, the new
rites were to be distinguished by a clarity and openness which required the abolition of all
silent prayers: the Canon was now to be recited aloud, the congregation responding with an
Amen to each of is prayers. Laymen were allowed to read the epistle in the vernacular in
some places; in one Jansenist parish a woman read the gospel of the day in French before
Vespers.16
Orthodox churchmen throughout France were alarmed. Not only were the Jansenists
destroying the traditional liturgy, but they had launched a savage attack on popular piety as
well. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Parisian Oratorian Pierre-Franois
dArres de la Tour complained how:
They do everything to diminish the cult of the Blessed Virgin, to weaken the respect due to
the Pope. They pride themselves on using only Scripture in their liturgies, and in declaring
themselves followers of Christian Antiquity, they frequently quote the canons of that age,
boldly criticize everything, attack the legends, visions and miracles of the saints, affect

elegance of literary style, valuing only their own productions and despising the works of
others, and generally set themselves up as reformers In the liturgical books being produced
today they do not attack Catholic dogma, but subtly undermine it, uprooting the tree little by
little17
Canon De La Tour equally deplored the worldly attitudes of the reformers, whose mania for
modernity amounted to an eighteenth Century version of aggiornamento, irresistible to lovers
of novelty and symptomatic of a cultural cringe towards Enlightenment England:
Such is the frailty of human nature that involuntarily and without even suspecting it, people
are taking on the tastes, fashions, language and idiom of the country and age in which they
live Our century is the age of Anglomania. It is the dominant strain in the agnostic
movement, which rails against the superstition of the populace, the credulity of the devout,
the excesses of the cult of the Blessed Virgin and the Saints, the despotism of the Pope, the
neglect of Sacred Scripture and the Church Fathers, and so on. They would deprive religion
of all its flesh if they could, leaving just the skeleton. To this end they abolish, polish,
simplify, reduce to nothing the little that has been preserved.18
Ironically the reform-minded bishop who tried in 1736 to impose an antiquarianist missal on
the diocese of Troyes was the nephew of Jacques-Bnigne Bossuet, and bore the same name.
Bossuets cathedral chapter protested to the Archbishop of Sens, Mgr. Fan-Baptiste Languet
de Gergy, who issued a condemnation of the missal of Troyes in which he remarked that:
If it were necessary to suppress everything in the liturgy that does not go back to the earliest
days of the Church, one would have to abolish the Gloria in excelsis, which, in the time of
Saint Gregory, was only recited by the bishop..:19
Bishop Bossuet refused to take the condemnation lying down, and in a letter to his
metropolitan appealed to a canon of the provincial council of Sens of 1528 which gave local
bishops the right to correct and reform the breviary and the missal. Archbishop Languets
reply to him is interesting:
The intention of that council was certainly not that each bishop should, on the pretext of
acting more wisely than the universal Church, tamper with every part of the Mass, and
thereby violate with dubious novelties the uniformity of the liturgy, hallowed by ancient and
continuous custom over so many centuries. The council would certainly not have passed such
a law if it had been able to foresee how, in the future and in the name of the reform it was
prescribing, people would do such things as replace hymns going back to Christian antiquity
with texts from Scripture that have been mutilated, altered and twisted so as to take on new
meanings, to the great detriment of holy doctrine.20
The Archbishop reminded his Jansenist suffragan that the provincial service books of council
of 1528 had in mind simply the removal from the superfluous things injurious to the dignity
of the Church. This was a very far cry from, for instance changing the prayers of the
Canon of the Mass, and suppressing .a substantial part of the public rites. On that precedent
one could go on to order the singing of vespers in the morning or the celebration of Mass at
eight in the evening; and abolish the law of Communion under one kind or the rule
prescribing the reception of the sacrament fasting. Why not then allow the people to receive
Communion after supper, as in the days of Saint Paul?21

By 1794 when Pope Pius VI published his bull Auctorem Fidei, the mind of the Jansenist
reform movement, impoverished by its hard, anxious rationalism and its divorce from
authentic, living tradition, was moving in an increasingly modernist direction. One of the five
propositions of the Synod of Pistoia condemned in the bull was the typically antiquarianist
conviction that in these recent centuries there has been a general ignorance about truths of
the faith and of the moral teaching of Jesus Christ.22 But in refuting the Popes
condemnation of their work, the Jansenists insisted that their beliefs, unlike those expressed
in the offending bull, were impeccably orthodox. Some of them even refused to believe that
the Pope could have freely endorsed such an obviously uncatholic document, and the bishops
of the Dutch Jansenist church lamented that this astonishing Bull [is] an injury done to the
See of St. Peter () and dishonours the Pope who has been constrained to adopt it.23
Anticipating the twentieth-century Modernists, the Jansenists strove to establish their
sectarian views as Catholic orthodoxy and spared no effort in reforming the Church from
within according to their lights, rather than abandoning it as the Protestants had done.
Similarly, just as many Catholic theologians today deny the very existence of the modernist
heresy as exposed by Pope Pius X, the liturgical experts responsible for the post-conciliar
reform have also done their best to whitewash the eighteenth century Jansenist liturgies
which they readily claim as the blueprint of their own revolutionary programme. In his
introduction to a book on the new liturgy published in 1970, English liturgiologist Lancelot
Sheppard who, like all revolutionaries, takes it for granted that the old order was defective
and corrupt, wrote:
The present reform has obviously been wanted for some time. Its need was felt for example,
in the eighteenth century when some dioceses of France and Germany set about reforming
their liturgies along lines that have now become familiar to us in the recent changes. It was
unfortunate that the lack of authorization gave them a bad name which probably retarded the
eventual reform. 24
Fr. Louis Bouyer, another prominent liturgist who had served on the Papal committee which
manufactured the new rite of Mass between 1964 and 1969, found much to commend in the
antiquarianist eucharistic rite invented by Father Jacques Jube, the early eighteenth century
parish priest of Asnires, a village near Paris: we of today can see in most of [these changes]
intelligent and healthy improvements They ought, however, to have been introduced with
the consent of proper authority.25
In his historical work The Mass in the West, Lancelot Sheppard shares Fr. Bouyers
admiration of Jubs experiment, but omits to inform his readers that the French abb was no
ordinary Catholic crank with a penchant for innovation, but a staunch Jansenist.26 He also
fails to mention that this reformed liturgy was not merely Jubs creation, but the fruit of
close collaboration with a certain Nicolas Petitpied (1665-1747), a prominent Jansenist
theologian who had been banished in 1703 to Holland where he associated himself with the
Jansenist Church of Utrecht. Petitpied, incidentally, was later employed as Bishop Bossuets
propagandist in the latters dispute with Archbishop Languet, while Fr. Jub resigned his
parish in 1717 to go to Russia on an-ecumenical mission organized by doctors of the
Sorbonne working for a reunion of the Roman, Orthodox and Anglican Churches based on a
common Jansenistic formula of belief.27
Whereas Louis Bouyer flays the Catholic liturgical outlook of the medieval, baroque and
romantic periods in his study of 1956, La Pit liturgique, he does not hesitate to assert that

the beginnings of a true liturgical movement are to be found during the sixteenth
century, even though sad to say, it was among the adherents of this nascent liturgical
movement that the Protestant Reformation found its adherents.28 For Fr. Bouyer, then,
certain Jansenists and protestants have been the modern Churchs best teachers in matters
liturgical: and indeed the worst of heretics may sometimes have very useful truths to tell us,
truths which need only to be put back in a Catholic setting to take on their full value. 29
The authors of the Pauline missal were extremely critical of contemporary traditionalists
who, in their view, wrongly viewed the existing Roman liturgy as a sacred cow. There is no
longer any question of considering the liturgy as something set once and for all in the forms
now established wrote Father Bouyer 30 The mentality that excludes the possibility of radical
and rational liturgical change on a sound theological basis was, in his view, essentially pagan,
since only to the pagan mind sacred means untouchable, something to be preserved intact at
any price. 31
Liturgists under the influence of another member of: the Papal Consilium, Father Josef
Jungmann, attempted on the other hand to demolish the traditionalist position by
characterizing it as a by-product of the nineteenth century theory of evolution, indeed the
liturgical counterpart of Newmans theory of the development of doctrine. According to
Jungmann the essentials of the Catholic liturgy did not grow organically; rather, the ritual
tradition, like the apostolic deposit of faith, was passed on perfect by the inspired Church
Fathers who had fashioned it. In the following centuries it suffered gradual degeneration, and
it was the duty of the official Church to prune away periodically the foreign matter that had
crept into it. Fr. Jungmann went so far as to claim that the primary aim of Pius Vs revision,
as expressed in the bull Quo Primum of 1570, was to restore the primitive Roman rite by
removing medieval accretions, and that the self-evident idea that the development which had
taken place meanwhile, separating the present from the pristina sanctorum Patrum norma
[the ancient norm and rite of the holy Fathers] should not be put aside as long as it did not
disturb the ground-plan but rather unfolded it- that idea was never once expressed. 32
Now while it is undoubtedly true that Pius V had no idea of liturgical development as we
understand it today, the fact is that the commission entrusted with the revision of the Roman
missal codified a rite that was still essentially medieval. Jungmann, however, claims that their
failure to restore the primitive Roman rite was largely due to a faulty scholarship which was
unable to distinguish between medieval and ancient elements.33 But it is precisely here that
the antiquarianist argument falls down, for if the liturgists of the sixteenth century did in fact
have an historically inaccurate idea of the Mass rite of the Patristic age, one can hardly argue
that Pius V envisioned an exhumation of such unknown quantities as the Eucharist of Saint
Hippolytus or the Mass of Saint Leo. Furthermore, it now seems fairly clear that what the
Pontiff meant by the the ancient norm and rite of the Holy Fathers was not indeed the
ordinary of the Mass, that is, its basic structure, but the propers, or changeable prayers that
went with it, since the most ancient sacramentary extant in his day (viz. the so-called
Sacramentarium Leonianum of the seventh century) did not contain the ordinary.34 The
things that were excised from the Roman rite in 1570 were in fact particular examples of
standard variable elements like introits, prefaces and sequences.
Fr. Jungmann was probably the greatest expert on the history of the Roman liturgy, but like
so many scholars, he fell into the trap of believing that analysis of a thing necessarily implies
its reform. In this error, which was to wreak such havoc in the Latin Church, he resembled
those nineteenth-century philologists who, having analysed English in the most rigorously

scientific fashion, went on to advocate the purification of our originally Germanic language
through the elimination of all its French, Latin and Greek accretions. The promoters of
Saxonism were doomed to failure, for language, no less than liturgy, is a living organism
that cannot be radically reshaped by those whose special knowledge leads them to pass
particular judgements on history. Grammarians can influence to some extent the evolution of
a language, but they can never alter its historical course.
In the last analysis if must be admitted that the very idea of returning to the ancient form of
the Mass is a delusion: since it is obvious that the structure of the rite grew from the days of
the Apostles until the coronation of Charlemagne, and that there was never in the Patristic
period a liturgical codification with the same permanency and juridical force as that of Pius
V, what precise phase in the development of the liturgy are we to canonize as the ideal form
of the Mass? The obvious result of such a wild goose chase is to give up the search altogether
and return to the ritual of the Last Supper, a logical conclusion that has inspired the coffeetable Eucharists of our day. The rationale of the Novus Ordo Missae is thus, like the mentality
of its authors, unquestionably antiquarianist. In justifying his reform to Archbishop Marcel
Lefebvre in 1976 Pope Paul VI stated that the present reform derived its raison dtre and its
guidelines from the Council and from the historical sources of the Liturgy, and on another
occasion he actually described his anti-historical innovations as a step forward in the
Churchs authentic tradition.35 The Pope was obviously of the same mind as Fr. Bouyer who
had recommended in 1956 that the true [i.e. Patristic] tradition be disengaged from all
spurious and unhealthy additions, and thus renewed in its primitive freshness, in order to be
re-expressed in a frame which should make it accessible to the people of [to]day .36
If traditionalists today are at variance with the Holy See, it is because they are convinced that
the modern Popes have done exactly what the Jansenists wanted Pope Pius VI to do on the
eve of the French Revolution. But the dilemma of traditionalists is that there is absolutely no
appeal against Papal legislation on liturgical matters, as far as the modern Vatican is
concerned.37 Indeed Mediator Dei, so often cited by traditionalists, makes it clear that the
Pope alone has the right to permit or establish any liturgical practice, to introduce or approve
new rites, or to make any changes in them he considers necessary.38 The tragedy is that in
making this forceful statement with the evident intention of safeguarding our liturgical
inheritance, Pius XII set before the Church a Pandoras box which his successors were
tempted to open, and did. Gone forever are the days when one could serenely subscribe to
this teaching in the knowledge that the Roman Popes, whatever their failings, always uphold
and protect liturgical tradition from the wanton vandalism of would-be reformers. Whereas
the traditional rites of the Church had been constructed by apostles and saints, Roman-rite
(and Ambrosian-rite) Catholics have today a Mass which is the work of theorists and
committees of experts.
Considering much of what has taken place in the sanctuaries of the Latin Church since
Mediator Dei, Pius XIIs reversal in that encyclical of the historical principle legem credendi
lex statuat supplicandi, i.e. let the rule of prayer establish the rule of belief, is no less
disturbing:
Indeed if we wanted to state quite clearly and absolutely the relation existing between the
faith and the sacred liturgy we could rightly say that the law of our faith must establish the
law of our prayer:39

This liberty taken with a theological tradition going back to apostolic times has been
considered by some a most serious flaw in an otherwise excellent exposition of Catholic
teaching on the liturgy.40 The maxim quoted above was first expressed in the fifth century by
Prosper of Aquitaine in an anti-Pelagian treatise entitled Indiculus de gratia Dei, and it is
commonly shortened to the aphorism lex orandi, lex credendi. As this work is based largely
on the sayings of previous Popes, Dom Cipriano Vagaggini notes that it certainly reflects the
thinking of the Roman curia of that era, and has notable theological authority because the
Roman See has since then always considered it as the exact expression of its point of view in
the matter under discussion and, subsequently, has often appealed to it.41
The basic meaning of the teaching is that in the traditional liturgy we have the oldest witness
to what the Church believes, since Christians were worshipping God in public well before the
first theological treatises were composed. Living tradition is bipartite, its two aspects distinct
yet interrelated. The rational aspect of Catholic Tradition consists of the Magisterium which
interprets Sacred Scripture and apostolic teaching, while the sacred liturgy constitutes its
symbolic and mystical aspect, and the latter has a chronological primacy over the former.
Given, therefore, that the sacred liturgy is not something arbitrarily devised by theologians
but theologia prima, the ontological condition of theology, the Churchs teachings must
always be in harmony with the beliefs that the traditional liturgical texts express.42 This is of
course very different from George Tyrrells modernistic abuse of Prospers maxim, by which
doctrines are valid only insofar as they are found in the liturgical texts and have produced
practical fruits of charity and sanctification.43 However, given the normative and testimonial
nature of the liturgical tradition whose historical growth hag its own dynamic, there can be
absolutely no question of artificially restructuring sacred rites to make them reflect new
doctrines or new doctrinal emphases, which is precisely the Protestant approach to liturgy.
This rigorously conservative attitude on the question of ritual reform is also the constant
teaching of the Eastern Churches. The Russian Orthodox theologian George Florovsky makes
the same point rather more bluntly when he says that Christianity is a liturgical religion. The
Church is first of all a worshipping community. Worship comes first, doctrine and discipline
second.44 It is the Christians of the East, Uniates and dissidents alike, who have best
preserved the classical Catholic approach to worship and who consequently have preserved
their litugical traditions intact in modern times. The present liturgical chaos in the Western
Church is due in no small part to the emphasis that Latin Christians have always placed on
dogma, with the consequent tendency to regard the liturgical texts as a mere locus
theologicus, a means to an end, rather than a living source of doctrinal truth. Thus
orthodoxia, which originally meant right worship, gives way to orthopistis right believing,
or orthodidascalia right teaching.45 When taken to the extreme, this exclusive emphasis on
the rational culminates in that heresy which rejects the living components of tradition in
favour of the written records of the Early Church, the Bible and Patristic writings, and which
we know as Protestantism and full-blown Jansenism. The rejection of the liturgical tradition
thus implies a rejection of the Church itself.
In the light of this typically Western aberration one can understand the Orthodox jibe that
Protestantism was hatched from the egg that Rome had laid. For according to Timothy Ware,
The Orthodox approach to religion is fundamentally a liturgical approach, which
understands doctrine in the context of divine worship: it is no coincidence that the word
Orthodoxy should signify alike right belief and right worship, for the two things are
inseparable. It has truly been; said of the Byzantines: Dogma with them is not only an

intellectual system. Apprehended by the clergy and expounded to the laity, but a field of
vision wherein all things on earth are seen in their relation to things in heaven, first and
foremost through liturgical celebration46
A similar outlook is by no means absent in the Latin West today, even if it is a minority view.
Commenting on Pius XIIs reversal of Prosper of Aquitaines dictum, American Benedictine
liturgist Dom Aidan Kavanagh notes that:
To reverse the maxim, subordinating the standard of worship to the standard of belief,
makes a shambles of the dialectic of revelation. It was a Presence, not faith, which drew
Moses to the burning bush, and what happened there was a revelation, not a seminar. It was a
Presence, not faith, which drew the disciples to Jesus, and what happened there was not an
educational program but His revelation to them of Himself as the long-promised Anointed
One, the redeeming because reconciling Messiah-Christos.41
Indeed the radical impulse to destroy the entire liturgical tradition and go back to Eucharists
in the manner of the Last Supper is the inevitable consequence of applying the criteria of
theological analysis to the sacred liturgy which, as a slowly growing humanly-ordered thing,
cannot possibly have come from the Lord complete and perfect as Bossuet the elder said of
the deposit of faith.
I come finally to the other immediate cause of the liturgical revolution, a new and particularly
destructive form of ultramontanism, which in my view is the only way of explaining how
recent Popes could have made such an astonishing about-turn on the question of liturgical
tradition. The term Ultramontane first coined by the French Gallicans of the seventeenth
century, normally refers to those who supported the definition of the dogma of Papal
Infallibility in 1870. However, on the popular level ultramontanism has manifested itself in
the cult of the person of the Pope, which hardly existed before Pius IX, but is still very much
with us today. In the nineteenth century the enemies of the Ultramontanes were the Liberal
Catholics; the Ultramontanes of today, who abide loyally by all the decisions of the Papacy,
rejecting criticism and even discussion of any of them, are opposed not only by the heirs to
the Liberal Catholic tradition, but also by the Traditionalists. Fully aware of the consequences
of their action, traditionalist Catholics feel bound in conscience to criticize certain aspects of
the Second Vatican Council and to reject the official and unofficial liturgical reforms that
ostensibly issued from it.
To the Ultramontane mind, which is also the mind of the Popes of our day, one cannot adopt
the traditionalist stance and remain authentically Catholic. It is often not appreciated that in
the discussions preceding the dogmatic formulations of the First Vatican Council, Pius IX
strongly favoured the interpretation of Papal Infallibility as meaning Papal inerrancy in
matters of Church discipline as well as in dogmatic definitions, an exaggerated claim at odds
with the teaching of the Church. But when so the story goes Fr. Guidi, Superior General
of the Dominicans, pointed out to the Pope that his idea of Papal infallibility was against
Tradition, Pius IX angrily reminded him that La tradizione sonio! I am Tradition, a
symptom of Papal megalomania providentially checked by the Holy Ghost.48
Unfortunately, there is ample evidence today that the modern Popes consider themselves the
infallible arbiters of disciplinary and liturgical tradition rather than its respectful custodians.
John Paul II, for example, has been known to act arbitrarily and inconsistently in
contravention of established liturgical law. One famous episode was during his visit to West

Germany in 1980 when, in contradiction to the firm Papal policy of not giving Communion in
the hand, he administered the Sacrament in this manner to a small boy by way of exception,
thus establishing an irrevocable precedent.49 On another occasion, I am told, the Pope
incorrectly knelt during a Papal ceremony in Rome, and when his Master of Ceremonies
discreetly directed him to rise, John Paul remained on his knees and retorted pointedly: II
Papa singinocchia! the Pope is kneeling!. With such a subjective attitude towards
liturgical tradition, unthinkable in any of the Eastern Churches, it is understandable that the
modern Popes and the ultramontanist Curia should view traditionalist rejection of the
liturgical reform as incompatible with Catholic orthodoxy which they narrowly understand as
right belief and right morals.
From the traditionalist standpoint, it is an abuse of power for the modern Papacy; however
orthodox in its dogmatic teaching, to Command the faithful to accept an anti-traditional
liturgy in the name of obedience to the supreme ecclesiastical authority. If the Papacy, in an
official document, can reverse a fundamental teaching of orthodox Christianity by totally
subordinating the liturgy to the interests of new orientations, one is forced to conclude that
recent Popes, in turning their backs on their own past for whatever noble motives, have
placed themselves above Tradition and abused their position as the supreme legislators in
disciplinary matters. For a Catholic to make such an admission is painful, and from the
ultramontanist point of view disloyal, not to say actively schismatical.
There is unlikely to be agreement on this question until the Holy Father comes to a deeper
understanding of his own action in re-legalizing the traditional Roman liturgy, which
logically considered, entirely contradicts his thinking on the post-conciliar reform, which is
substantially that of Paul VI and of the episcopal conferences. Yet this contradiction which
has created a dynamic tension in the Church must ultimately be resolved, and we may
optimistically regard it as a sign of hope for the eventual restoration of the patrimony of
which Latin Catholics have been unjustly deprived. In the meantime, as Archbishop Lefebvre
remarked shortly after his audience with Pope John Paul II in 1978: We can at least pray to
the Blessed Virgin that when he becomes aware of the enormous difficulties he will meet in
the exercise of his power as Pope, he will reconsider his stance and perhaps conclude that he
must return to Tradition .
___________________________________
1 The Documents.of Vatican II, -Sacrosanctum Conciliun (Constitution on the Sacred
Liturgy), articles 50, 34.
2 Liturgical Revolution, Vol. I: Cranmers Godly Order (Devon: Augustine Publishing
Company, 1976), and Vol. III: Pope Pauls New Mass (Dickinson, Texas: The Angelus Press,
1980).
3 Eppstein, Has the Catholic Church Gone Mad? (London: Tom Stacey, 1971), p. 58.
4 Papal General Audience speech of 19 November 1969, quoted in The Teachings of Pope
Paul VI 1969 2 (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1970), p. 288.
5 Mediator Dei, 63, 65, 66.

6 Institutions liturgiques. (Le Mans: Fleuriot/Paris: Dbcourt, 1840), I, 405-423; II, pp 252255.
7 Mediator Dei, 68.
8 See especially Davies Cranmers Godly Order, cit, Chapter 9, pp. 63-71.
9 Some juridical Considerations on the Reform of the Liturgy (Edinburgh: Una Voce, 1979),
p. 10.
10 The relevant passage in the Apostolic Constitution of 1969 reads as follows: innumerable
holy men have abundantly nourished their piety towards God by its [the 1570 missals]
readings from Sacred Scripture or by its prayers, whose general arrangement goes back, in
essence, to St. Gregory the Great (first paragraph; emphasis added).
11 Mediator Dei, 68.
12 John Parsons, The History of the Synod of Pistoia, paper read to Campion Fellowship
Conference, Sydney, 1982, pp. 2-3.
13 A Popular History of the Catholic Church (London: Burns and Oates, 1939 p.-194.
14 Ibid., pp 194-195.
15 Guranger, op.cit., I, pp. 176-188; Parsons, op.cit., pp. 5-6.
16 Gueranger, op.cit., II, pp. 250-253.
17 Marie-Madeleine Martin, Le latin immortel (Chir-en-Montreuil: Diffusion de la Pensee
Franaise, 1971), p. 172.
18 Martin, op.cit., p.173.
19 Guranger, op.cit., II, p. 191.
20 Ibid., II, p. 217.
21 Ibid., II, pp. 215-216.
22 Parsons, op.cit., P14.
23 Ibidem.
24 L. Sheppard. ed., The New Liturgy (London: Longman & Todd, 1970), p. 4. 25 Liturgical
Piety [later reprinted as Liturgy and Life ] (London: Sheed and Ward 1956), p. 54.
26 The Mass in the West, London: Burns L Oates, 1962), pp 97-98.
27 Gueranger, op.cit., II, pp. 251-252.

28 Bouyer, op.cit., p. 41.

29 Ibid., p. 44.
30 Ibid., p. 68.
31 Ibid., p. 52.
32 The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origin and Development (Missarum Sollemnia 1951, tr.
Francis A. Brunner, C.SS.R. (Westminster, Maryland: Chnstian Classics, Inc., 1986), I, p.
137.
33 Ibid., pp. 136-7.
34 Adrian Fortescue, The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy (London: Longmans, Green
and Co., 1912), p. 118.
35 Michael Davies, Apologia pro Marcel Lefebvre II (1977-1979), (Dickinson: The Angelus
Press, 1983), p; Pope Pauls New Mass, cit, p, 557.
36 Bouyer, op.cit., P. 46.
37 Thus Cardinal Franjo Seper, Prefect of the former Holy Office, wrote to Archbishop
Lefebvre in January 1978: A Catholic, in fact, may not cast doubt on the conformity with the
doctrine of the faith of a sacramental rite promulgated by the Supreme Pastor (Davies,
Apologia, II, p107). Now while it may be true that there exist no grounds for calling into
question the legitimacy and doctrinal exactitude of the 1970 Missal (Quattuor abhinc
annos, 1984), such an arbitrary division (typical of the post-Reformation Roman Church)
between the doctrine of the faith and its practice represents, in my view, a dangerous
departure from the genuine Catholic tradition. (The sacred liturgy cannot be considered on a
merely rational level, in isolation from the way of life and religious culture that produced it.
If tradition is a living thing, validity and licitness cannot be the central issues. The central
issue is authenticity, without which validity and licitness factors of undeniable importance
are simply mechanical considerations. Authenticity is the guarantee of validity and
legitimacy). Nor does the admission that the new Missal is free from heresy preclude ones
stating that it is inferior to the traditional rite liturgically, doctrinally and aesthetically, or
ones asking for its abrogation.
38 Mediator Dei, 62.
39 Ibid., 52.
40 See P. De Clerk, Lex orandi, lex credendi: Sens originel et avatars historiques dun
adage equivoquel, in: Questions liturgiques 59 (1978) pp. 208-211; and Dom Aidan
Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology. The Hale Menotial Lectures of Seabury-Western
Theological Seminary, 1981 (New York: Pueblo, 1984), pp. 92-93.
41 Cypnan Vagaggini, tr. L.J. Doyle and W.A. Jurgens, Theological Dimensions of the
Liturgy (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1976), p. 529. While it is generally
admitted today that this theological axiom is not in fact directly founded on the pertinent

passage in Indiculus de gratia Dei (Prospers point was that the Churchs custom of praying
to God for our various needs proves the necessity of grace), the centrality of its received
interpretation to the Catholic tradition can hardly be underestimated.
42 Kavanagh, op.cit., pp. 75-79.
43 G. Tyrrell, Lex orandi, or Prayer and Creed (London, 1903), and Through Scylla and
Charybdis or the Old Theology into the New (London, 1907); Pius XII alludes indirectly to
this theory in Mediator Dei, 50.
44 Quoted in Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p.
271.
45 Kavanagh, op.cit., pp. 82-83.
46 Ware, op.cit., ibidem.
47 Kavanagh, op.cit., p. 92.
48 John C. Dwyer, Church History: Twenty Centuries of Catholic Christianity (New York:
Paulist Press, 1985), p. 345.
49 After wavering for some years, in 1990 Pope John Paul finally capitulated on the question
of Communion in the hand by permitting the abuse in St Peters Basilica in Rome and
consenting to it at all his own celebrations of Mass.
50 Davies, Apologia, II, p. 268.