New and Old Catholic Liturgy

Vic Biorseth, http://www.Thinking-Catholic-Strategic-Center.com

Question to keep in mind as you read: who's liturgy is it?

As background information leading into the explanation and description of the 1962 Mass, we need to touch lightly on events related specifically to liturgical changes, and the “Liturgical Reform” that took place during the pre-Vatican II, Vatican II and post-Vatican II periods.

Once upon a time, all Catholic Churches were laid out and built so that anyone standing inside facing the altar would be facing East, toward Jerusalem. The Council of Trent, which firmed up and formalized Latin liturgy, changed that, and facing the altar no longer necessarily meant facing East. However, the Tabernacle containing the sacred Body and Blood remained on the altar, and remained the focal point of the whole architectural design of the Church. The priest, and the people, continued to face the Tabernacle.

Early on, the VC II changes in liturgy were described by many experts, including such luminaries as Dietrich von Hildebrand and Fr. Kenneth Baker SJ of Homiletic and Pastoral Review as a liturgical revolution rather than any sort of liturgical reform. The late Archbishop Annibale Bugnini figured most prominently in these changes, from the beginning. A specialist in liturgical studies, Fr. Bugnini was appointed in 1948 by Pius XII to Secretary of the Commission on Liturgical Reform. Then in 1956 he was appointed Consultant to the Sacred Congregation of Rites, and then in 1957 to Professor of Sacred Liturgy in the Lateran University.

In 1960 Fr. Bugnini was appointed Secretary to the Preparatory Commission for the Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council, a position that enabled him to exert a major influence on the whole of universal Catholic liturgy. His essentially personal draft of the new liturgical schema, which would come to be known as the Bugninin Schema would later be the one placed before the Council Fathers, despite the severe objections and criticism of Cardinal Gaetano Cicognani, President of the Commission. It was a great triumph for Fr. Bugnini.

Suddenly, and without public comment or explanation, John XXIII summarily dismissed Fr. Bugnini from his office on the Commission and from his University Chair. Although the reason has never been disclosed it had to have been of a very serious nature; two Cardinals, Lercaro and Bea, strongly intervened on Fr. Bugnini’s behalf, but did not succeed.

The Bugnini Schema, which would ultimately become the Constitution on the Liturgy, contained many generalized, vague and ambiguous terms. While likely to be viewed by the faithful in the most orthodox light, the door of ambiguity was left open to too broad interpretation, perhaps purposely so. Those working on the wording were not Bishops, but “periti” (experts), many appointed by Bugnini, tasked by the bishops to work out the details. Many warned of the danger of allowing the periti free reign over such broad liturgical areas. Cardinal Heenan of Westminster complained that the Coucil Fathers only had opportunity to discuss very general liturgical principles, and that the periti were really doing it all. He later wrote that the periti had done far more changes than John XXIII had intended, and was sure that John, before his death, was not aware of just how extensive these changes were.

Cardinal Heenan further alleged that the periti had purposely left wording vague, that interpretations were open to modernism, and that he feared that that might be their actual intention. (Much later five commissions would be appointed, to interpret and implement the Council's very general liturgical decrees. The members of these commissions would be chosen, for the most part, from the ranks the Council periti.)

What happened next is very hard to understand. It is extremely doubtful that Paul VI knew whatever it was that John XXIII knew about Fr. Bugnini. John XXIII’s successor, Paul VI, appointed Fr. Bugnini to the very post from which John XXIII had summarily dismissed him: Secretary to the Preparatory Commission for the Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council. Fr. Bugnini went back to work with his friends on the vague Bugnini Schema. The Commission was theoretically without real power, since everything it developed would eventually need to be ruled on by a curial Congregation. For reasons not clear, Paul VI dissolved the Commission and incorporated it into the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship. And, he appointed Fr. Bugnini as Secretary of that Congregation. Fr. Bugnini was now far more powerful than ever, and able to work the liturgical “revolution” of his original design completely unhindered.

In 1972 Fr. Bugnini was consecrated Archbishop. In 1974 he made his now famous boast that his reform of Roman Catholic liturgy had been a “major conquest of the Catholic Church.” He also publicly announced the last phase of his liturgical reform, which involved the “adaptation or ‘incarnation’ of the Roman form of the liturgy into the usages and mentality of each individual church.” Meaning: infinitely variable liturgy. Catholic liturgy in India, for instance, might be nearly indistinguishable from Hindu liturgy.

Suddenly, again, in July 1975, Paul VI, like John XXIII, without public explanation, summarily dismissed Archbishop Bugnini from his post; again, there was no public reason given. His entire congregation was dissolved, and those retained were merged into the Congregation for the Sacraments. Bugnini’s dismissal raised howls of outrage and protest from liberals all over the world. The Archbishop was appointed to the “exile” post of Apostolic Pro Nuncio to Iran.

Rumors surfaced and were widely published that Paul VI had been given evidence that Bugnini was involved in Freemasonry, and was in fact a Mason. The volume ratcheted up to a scandalous roar, with broad and loud publication, but the Vatican would neither confirm nor deny the rumor. The fact that a consecrated Prince of the Church was so publicly pilloried as a Mason, and that the Holy See did not come to his defense, speaks volumes.

Yet, no reason has ever been given for the dismissal and exile of Archbishop Bugnini. Fr. Joseph Gilineau, SJ, was one of Bugnini’s periti, an extreme version of the so-called liberal Catholic, and a staunch supporter of the Bugnini Schema and liturgical direction. He wrote of the Mass as most Catholics knew it at that time, with great pride and unusual honesty, this: "To tell the truth it is a different liturgy of the Mass. This needs to be said without ambiguity: the Roman Rite as we knew it no longer exists. It has been destroyed." It looks like that was the intent all along. It’s hard to imagine anyone intending to reform something by destroying it.

Since then we have all witnessed and been through (or read about) the great Liturgical Wars that resulted from all of this. We’ve seen the Clown Mass and the Balloon Mass and the Cowboy Mass, and hopefully that’s all permanently done. Lingering on here and there are the disgusting displays of portly nuns in leotards prancing around the altar doing their invented Liturgical Dance routines.

The most potentially harmful and seemingly permanent liturgical change involves loss of lay respect for Jesus Christ’s actual presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. It’s not only the priest turning his back on Him, but the whole notion of the people receiving Him in the hand, while standing. Lay men and lay women just handing Him to each other, as an absolutely common, ordinary, every-day, routine. There appears to be absolutely nothing extraordinary about the every Sunday practices of the lay so-called “extraordinary” Eucharistic ministers.

But the pendulum has been swinging in the conservative direction for some time now. Today, you can find quite a diversity in precisely how the Novus Ordo (New Order) Mass is offered in America; Bugnini’s dream lives on, I suppose, in the fact that the way the Mass is offered appears to be almost entirely a function of the nature of the individual Pastor cooperating with an overall consensus of his congregation. An individual Catholic church may thus be seen to have a unique liturgical personality, much like all Protestant churches.

There are, and maybe always will be, churches in which a major fraction of the congregation regularly act as “extraordinary” Eucharistic ministers, almost to the point of outnumbering the people attending Mass. There are, and perhaps always will be, churches in which the exchange of the Gift of Peace turns into an aisle-crossing, back-slapping, cheerful hug-fest, and a major, ten-minute or more Party Time, just before Holy Communion.

Of course, most (I think) individual churches cannot be accurately described that way. Ordinary and quite common use of “extraordinary” ministers is minimal; the Gift of Peace is just done without fanfare and major interruption; and there is more of a sense that people are there less to get something out of it than to give God His due. We really are supposed to offer the Mass for Him, not for us; and in return, He gives us His sacred Body and Blood. Liturgy allows us to do that in a fixed, recognizable, customary way.

For an excellent example of the Novus Ordo Mass said in Latin, go to the Assumption Grotto Church in Detroit, Michigan. There, you will see how far to the conservative side it is possible for the pendulum to swing. It’s the New Mass, but not as Bugnini and the periti intended it to be. The whole thing, except for the readings and the homily, is in Latin, with a little Greek. There are no lay lectors, and no extraordinary Eucharistic ministers. There is no exchange of the Gift of Peace; that’s always been just a Pastoral option, like everything else. The Priest faces the Altar, and God, rather than the people. Communion is received on the tongue while kneeling at the Communion Railing. All altar boys, no altar girls. The music is Latin chant, and it is exceedingly well done.

Again, what I have just described is the Novus Ordo Mass, but done in a manner in which I’m sure a majority of the Council Fathers would have approved, if they had been given the chance. So, even when the nature of the practice of the Divine Liturgy is left up to chance encounters between the personality of a Pastor and the consensus of his flock, sometimes something good will come out of it. You might still have to shop around a little, wherever you live, to find the more conservative individual parishes. But the search is worth it.

In general, the more conservative an individual Church’s liturgy is found to be, the more likely it is for that Pastor to be a strong and decisive leader as well as a traditionalist. The large numbers of parishioners commonly found at highly orthodox parishes is not so much of a reflection of how the Pastor compromises with the flock so much as it is a reflection of how lay Catholics need and seek and even hunger for strong, traditional clerical and Pastoral leadership. We actually hunger for it.

In a previous article, On Straying, Right or Left, from the Catechism, I partially addressed the Catholic traditionalists who actually went schismatic over post-Vatican II liturgical abuse as follows.

We have today in America many Catholic clerics and theologians whose over-emphasis of Social Justice issues and promotion of Liberation Theology reveals a streak of underlying Secularist Marxism, which is antithetical and antagonistic to Catholicism and to Americanism. I'm sure we're not alone there; Protestant denominations, too, have their own clerical and theological political activists of varying stripe and spot. We are Americans, living in America. Part of being a good American means using our intellect and cognitive abilities to separate the wheat from the chaff, and the secular from the ecclesial parts of a message, whether from the Ambo or from the Bully-Pulpit.

But what today causes the most arguments, spiritual stress, drop-off in attendance and parish-shopping among older practicing Catholics in America involves radical changes in church design and radical changes in liturgy. The changes always seem to be at the expense of ancient tradition, which is apparently seen and presumed, in most American diocesan quarters, as somehow being bad and not preferred. The absolutely radical and quite sudden liturgical changes witnessed in American Catholic churches after Vatican II caused a major disruption in American Catholic prayer life, to say the very least.

Among other problems, it precipitated the St. Pius X split, or schism, of the Lefebvre-ites, from the Catholic Church. The Society of St. Pius X, founded by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, sought to continue the Old Mass in accordance with the old 1962 missal and the pre-1962 missals. The Lefebvre-ites and other schismatics continue the Tridentine Mass and consider the Novus Ordo Mass to be heretical, partially because of changes in actual liturgical words, and partially because Pius V, in 1570, strongly reinforced the Tridentine Mass and Missal in his Apostolic Constitution "Quo Primum", in which he established the ipso facto excommunication of any future violators.

However, we must remember, no matter how much we might come to love it, Church liturgy still comes under the heading of small-t tradition, as opposed to large-T Tradition, as represented by articles of the Creed, or dogma, or the strongest and longest held doctrines of the Church, which come out of the unchanging Depositum Fidei. The exact rubrics of the Tridentine Mass were not used by Christ at the Last Supper, nor were they used by the Apostles and the other disciples when they came together on Sundays (Acts 20:7) for the breaking of the bread and the prayers. And Pius V left an exception, in saying without Our approval and consent, in which the "Our" is interpreted to be the Royal Our, meaning the reigning pontiff. Who [Paul VI] granted approval. The Church (meaning, the Magisterium) and the Church alone establishes correct liturgy; not you, not me, and not Lefebvre. Unlike America, the Church is not a Democracy; we do not get to vote on this.

These schismatics claim that all the popes since Vatican II are anti-popes and that the Church is in some sort of suspended animation or something until a real pope comes along. And all of this is based on nothing more than liturgy. These people are almost as off-base as the wildest of the new liturgists who brought about the worst of the liturgical abuses we've all seen. We all just need to get over it. The Novus Ordo Mass is quite beautiful when properly offered. There is only one Church, and one ultimate authority, and if we don't like the new liturgy, then we are called to adhere to the new liturgical teaching with a submission of faith. Put your faith in the Church He founded, and guides. You can still find a lot of decent Catholic churches here, and you can still participate in a perfectly valid Catholic Mass. And I can testify that after you've participated enough times, it will become your fixed tradition. Hopefully, they won't change it again for awhile.

Again, liturgy is small-t tradition; it didn’t come out of the unchanging Depositum Fide. Our Lord Jesus Christ did not wear any special Roman vestments at the Last Supper. Over time, despite any original evil intent of some among the designers, the Novus Ordo Mass has settled down and become more fixed and less variable. While some Masses offered in some Catholic Churches still have the look and feel of anything goes liturgy, they are becoming exceedingly rare. When you find a consistently orthodox Novus Ordo Mass, you will have gone a long way toward finding a consistently orthodox Pastor.

The terrible thing about the post-Vatican II liturgy is the near absence of the Tridentine Mass. The liberals very nearly succeeded in eliminating it completely; as I write these words, you have to hunt far and wide to find a church that offers it. When you do find one, it will be crowded, and much of the crowd will be young people. Surprise. We are blessed to have one Tridentine Mass every Sunday at one of our four parish-cluster churches. Not many people can say that in America today.

We pray that now, with Benedict XVI’s new motu proprio, that will begin to change, the sooner the better. I predict that EWTN will begin televising the old Mass at the first date they can legitimately offer it. May it be the beginning of a major trend.

Viva il Papa!

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Date: Mon Mar 23 18:01:24 2009
From: C Timmons
Email: ct195291@hotmail.co.uk
Location: Coatbridge
Comment:

You say that EWTN will begin televising the old Mass at the first date they can legitimately offer it...

What do you mean by this, why can't they screen it? Do you [see] it being screened soon?

Thanks

Date: Tue Mar 24 12:31:06 2009
From: Vic Biorseth
Comment:

C. Timmons:

That was just guess-work on my part, and perhaps wishful thinking.

Churches say the Mass that is authorized by their diocesan bishop, and the ordinary Mass is the Novus Ordo, or New Mass. The Latin Mass is the extraordinary Mass. We’re not watching too much TV these days, but I’ve seen two Latin Masses on EWTN since I wrote this article. Unfortunately, most of the Masses I’ve seen have been of the New Order, which isn’t bad when done as on EWTN.

Some few years back EWTN was forced by their bishop to modify the Novus Ordo as said on TV so that the celebrant faced the congregation instead of the Blessed Sacrament. I was hoping, and still hope, that Mother would be able to get some sort of dispensation to allow the whole program to move to the Latin Mass. I pray something like that might be in the works, but have no way of knowing.

Regards,

Vic

Date: Sun Mar 07 19:48:58 2010
From: Nomad Nat
Email: Nomadnat@me.com
Location: Missouri, USA
Comment:

It may be of interest to note that the SSPX are not sedevacantists, have continued to honor the Pope- and most recently as last Nov have had their Bishops ordinations normalized by Pope Benedict XVI. While there had been much struggle and media rumor regarding the group- no formal eclesiastic actions had ever been fulfilled against them.

Date: Mon Mar 08 05:21:26 2010
From: Vic Biorseth
Comment:

(I looked this up for reader’s information: sedevacantist derives from the Latin term sede vacante meaning the seat is vacant; a sedevacantist believes that the current pope is not a valid pope due to heresy, violation of dogma or invalid succession.)

Date: Sun Mar 07 19:57:19 2010
From: Nomad Nat
Email: Nomadnat@me.com
Location:
Comment:

I've been reading your site in free moments for two days. I've recommended it to a wide range if people. Truly rich content and thought provoking--

Date: Mon Mar 08 05:43:13 2010
From: Vic Biorseth
Comment:

Nomad Nat:

Thank you so much, and may the Lord bless you.

Regards,

Vic

Date: Tue Jun 22 14:55:34 2010
From: BJE
Email:
Location: Madison, Wis.
Comment:

The term "extraordinary Eucharistic minister" in your article is incorrect. Only a priest is a "Eucharistic Minister" or "ordinary minister". An "Extraordinary minister of Holy Communion" is a person deposed to assist in the distribution of Holy Communion.

Date: Tue Jun 22 19:59:13 2010
From: Vic Biorseth
Comment:

BJE:

Yes, yes, I suppose so. Extraordinary minister of Holy Communion may be more pedantically correct than Extraordinary Eucharistic Minister.

Regards,

Vic

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