Employing the Right Arguments to Defend the Traditional Mass
Those who devote themselves to the defense of all things traditional (liturgy, catechism, resistance to deleterious doctrines) are often reluctant to say that we are currently faced with an atypical ecclesial situation, especially when it comes to liturgy. Even if they assert that it is not for reasons of sensibility but of faith that they celebrate the old liturgy, they esteem that they can most effectively defend their position against the proponents of the new liturgy by conceding the latter to be a legitimate free choice. It is true that arguments of this kind can work quite well with the Catholic opinion in general, for which liberalism has become an unsurpassable horizon; but while it may be permissible to take tactical advantage of this state of mind, this does not imply that we must justify it.
Sometimes, paradoxically, such proponents even twist traditional doctrine to defend the traditional Mass. One such instance is the extreme dwindling of the doctrine of obedience which is due to ecclesiastical authorities and their teachings. Given that, with regard to many matters at the present time, submission to the authorities is untenable in conscience, they practically come to assert that free examination was the common doctrine of the Church, with each person deciding what is Catholic in the name of the “tradition” of which each is ultimately the custodian. Or they proceed to disembowel the doctrine of Roman infallibility by asserting that the First See has frequently issued heterodox doctrines. In other words, the abnormality of what is happening now is transferred to the Church of always.[1] And so, those who were anti-modern are made to become modern.
In what follows, we would like to examine only arguments in defense of the traditional Mass. In particular, we would like to consider two that are often used to justify the free choice in favor of the traditional missal:
- the invocation of the Quo primum bull of 1570, insofar as it states that the missal it promulgates may be used “in perpetuity”;
- and the fact that the Church has always recognized the legitimacy of a diversity of rites.
In principle, these arguments are perfectly pertinent, but on condition that we avoid employing them as if the circumstances which necessitate their habitual usage were those of today:
“This missal [the Tridentine missal] may be followed […] in perpetuity.” (Quo primum bull)
St. Pius V’s prescription must be seen in context. His two bulls concerning the breviary and missal, issued in application of the decisions of the Council of Trent, were intended to establish the pre-eminence of the books of the Roman Curia over all the particular usages of the Latin world, which could nevertheless remain provided they could attest to a venerability of at least 200 years. “In perpetuity”, every Roman cleric was to use the missal and breviary promulgated by the Pope. Or, if he was in a local church where a particular missal or breviary had been used continuously for at least two hundred years, he could still use the Roman book “in perpetuity” (with the precision that, if the Office was to be chanted in the choir, a common rule had to be laid down by the bishop and canons).
In fact, most dioceses and congregations in the Latin world could establish that their own books, notably in cathedrals and collegiate churches, dated back beyond the 14th century. However, most bishops and chapters preferred to align themselves with the breviary and missal, partly for reasons of economy and convenience for publication purposes, as it was difficult and expensive to publish diocesan books. Roman books were therefore generally adopted, even in France at first (it was only in the last third of the 17th century that the right was invoked to publish diocesan books proper to France, later described as “neo-Gallican”, starting with the Vienna Breviary in 1678).
Apart from the Visigothic, or Mozarabic rite, preserved in a few places in Spain, could one truly speak of non-Roman Latin rites in the diocesan or religious churches which preserved their customs? Only the Ambrosian rite, though very close to the Roman rite, had sufficiently significant particularities to qualify as a specific rite. This was not the case for the Rite of Lyon,[2] or for the Carthusian, Dominican, and Premonstratensian rites. Nor was this the case with the practices of many cathedrals, sanctuaries and religious orders, which had a certain number of their own masses, prefaces, hymns and sequences proper to them.
The two texts of Saint Pius V therefore stipulate the following:
- the Bull Quod a nobis, dated 7 July 1568, with respect to the publication of the Roman Breviary: “Except for the aforesaid institution or custom exceeding two hundred years of age […], all those who are to say and chant the canonical Hours, according to the custom and rite of the Roman Church […] shall henceforth be absolutely bound in perpetuity to say and chant the Hours by day and by night, according to the prescriptions and ordinance of this Roman Breviary.”
- the Quo Primum Bull, dated 14 July 1570, with respect to the publication of the Roman Missal: “We concede and grant that this same Missal may be followed in its entirety in the Mass, sung or read, in any church whatsoever, without any scruples of conscience and without incurring any punishment, condemnation or censure, and that it may validly be used freely and licitly, and that in perpetuity.”
But if the supremacy of the use of the Breviary and the Roman Missal was established “in perpetuity”, and in spite of the clause by which the Pope stipulated “that nothing be added, subtracted or modified” to the Missal he had just edited, Rome always held itself to be free to revise the books it thus gave to all Latin priests, such revisions always being minor modifications. Despite these modifications, the breviary and missal were considered to remain essentially the Tridentine editions of St. Pius V, to which the bulls Quod a nobis and Quo primum, always printed as prefaces, attested. The text of the Quo primum bull only ceased to be printed as preface of the missal in 1965, in the first missal of the reform instituted by Paul VI.
Pius V’s immediate successors, Clement VIII, who became pope in 1592, and Urban VIII, who became pope in 1623, introduced revisions (including the Vulgate Latin for epistles and gospels, as well as for new offices). In addition to the feasts of new saints, new Masses and prefaces were added on various occasions (i.e. the preface of the deceased, that of St. Joseph, that of the Sacred Heart, that of Christ the King and, under Pius XII, that of the Chrism Mass on Maundy Thursday). Also worth noting is the fact that a large body of Latin liturgical creations (masses, proses, hymns) continued to exist until the French Revolution, and were easily integrated into local liturgies. The Cardinal de Bérulle, for example, composed an Office of Jesus for 28 January, the feast day he instituted for the Congregation of the Oratory of Jesus, and for the octave of this feast day, without anyone deeming this objectionable. Not until the 19th century did liturgical additions and modifications come under the exclusive jurisdiction of Rome.
The most significant changes to the breviary and missal took place in the 20th century: St. Pius X overhauled the distribution of the psalms, returning to the recitation of 150 psalms per week, and more firmly established the primacy of the temporal over the sanctoral (which also affected the missal); and Pius XII reformed the Holy Week by simplifying the ceremonies and re-establishing the “truth of the hours” (the Maundy Thursday mass in the evening, the Good Friday ceremony in the afternoon, and the Easter Vigil ceremony during the night of Saturday to Sunday, instead of celebrations on Thursday morning, Friday morning and Saturday morning respectively), enabled by the relaxation of the discipline of Eucharistic fasting. While the two reforms of Pius X and Pius XII may have led to the regrettable disappearance of some venerable texts and usages, no one ever claimed that, in terms of form and substance, the Breviary and Missal ceased to be Tridentine books.
The fact that the books of 1568 and 1570 were granted “in perpetuity” did not prevent variations, some of which were significant, though without being revolutionary. The justification for the non-usage of the new Mass can therefore only be a substantive one, underlining that it constitutes an upheaval:
- A theological justification, arguing that the new Mass weakens the expression of the Eucharistic sacrifice and especially the expression of the doctrine of the Mass as a propitiatory sacrifice.
This is also, in fact, the reason why Joseph Ratzinger legalized the subsistence of the old liturgy, sanctioned by the texts of 1984 (Quattuor abhinc annos), 1988 (Ecclesia Dei adflicta), and 2007 (Summorum Pontificum). Without thoroughly explaining himself, he criticized the violent and radical manner in which the transformation had been carried out: “An old edifice is demolished to build a new one, certainly making extensive use of the material and plans of the old one.”[3] - A juridical justification, explaining that the new Ordo Missæ is not strictly speaking a lex orandi, a law in the strict sense of the term, quite simply because modelled, all things being equal, on the pastoral approach of the Second Vatican Council; this new Ordo, highly fluid and as little ritualized as possible, only recognizes for itself a relative authority (which is in itself a fundamental problem). In fact, it includes an infinite number of possible variations and choices in its rites and formulas, including for the most important, such as the Eucharistic prayer.
Essentially, we are in the presence of another Mass, different from the traditional Roman Mass in significant respects. With this truly fundamental clarification, it is perfectly possible to use the traditional Roman missal “in perpetuity”, albeit in a completely different context from that of 1570, and in a way that Quo primum had obviously not foreseen (except for the use of traditional missals of other Latin rites or usages, such as the traditional Ambrosian, Lyonnaise, Mozarabic and Dominican missals, etc.).[4]
It is highly probable that Summorum Pontificum, in 2007, by qualifying the ancient liturgy as usus antiquior, is implicitly referring to the rule laid down by the bull Quo primum, which authorized the survival of usages that could attest to two hundred years of existence, except that it was not a matter of the survival of a usage belonging to a particular Church or group of particular Churches, but virtually the whole Roman Church. Thus, it was the missal promulgated by Quo primum that itself benefited from the exception of antiquity provided for by this bull…
The Church has always recognized the legitimacy of a diversity of rites
This argument, which is ultimately similar to the previous one, is based on the fact that there has always been a diversity of rites, all of which are recognized as Catholic, even if they lack the normativity of the rite of the Church of Rome, exempt of all error.
The reasoning consists in stating that, just as the Roman rite has always coexisted with distinct Eastern or Latin rites (Mozarabic, Ambrosian), and that, indeed, after the promulgation of the 1570 missal, some Churches retained missals provided they could prove that they had been in usage for more than two centuries, so the missal of Paul VI can coexist with the Tridentine missal.
However, this coexistence of the same rite in its anterior and posterior states is without precedent in history, unless we were to acknowledge that the liturgy of the reform instituted by Paul VI is a new rite, or something other than a rite. Indeed, any reform of a rite normally causes the new state to take the place of the old one, if the new state is given as obligatory.[5] Thus, in the Roman rite and in modern canon law, since the Tridentine editions, the books used for divine worship must conform to those printed by the competent Congregation and promulgated by decree. These are referred to as typical editions, which are like benchmarks, with a new typical edition simply replacing the previous typical edition. In the traditional liturgy, the latest typical edition of the Breviary is dated 4 February 1961, that of the Missal 23 June 1962, that of the Ritual 1952, that of the Bishops’ Ceremonial 1886, and that of the Pontifical 1961 and 1962, depending on the volume.
As the changes from one typical edition to the next were minimal (with the exception of the 1911 breviary and the 1951-1955 Holy Week, mentioned above, the scope of which did in fact prepare minds for a far more extensive reform), they were easily imposed: no one would have imagined refusing to celebrate Christ the King on the last Sunday in October after Pius XI instituted this new feast of the Lord. And never would it have occurred to anyone to consider a Roman missal published under Leo XIII as distinct from those published under Pius XI or Pius XII.
To qualify these assertions, it may nonetheless be conceded that a kind of eclectic traditionalism may be useful in order to recover the vast swathes of local customs, compositions, texts and interpretations that were lost sight of as a result of Tridentine Romanization and, above all, of the post-French Revolution restorations. The reconstruction of the 19th century was based solely on Romano-Solesmian books. It is assuredly an excellent idea to revive this treasure trove of traditional cathedral and abbey musical compositions, practices and repertoires. Thus, the Hungarian musician Laszlo Dobszay (1935-2011), an outspoken critic of the new liturgy,[6] worked with the Capitulum Laicorum Sancti Michaelis Archangeli (CLSMA) to recover forgotten treasures of the Hungarian Latin liturgy. It is within this framework that, in certain places, the prudent revival of Holy Week prior to the 51-55 reform may take place.
In any case, until the present liturgical situation, the new replaced the part of the old that it modified, once again very modestly and in perfect continuity with the old. Yet again, any perfectly coherent justification of the possibility of choosing the missal anterior to the Council, must be grounded in the substance:
- Theologically, by recognizing that the new Ordo Missæ, “if we consider the new elements, susceptible to widely diverging assessments, which seem to be implied or implicated in it, diverges in an impressive manner, both in general and in detail, from the Catholic theology of the Holy Mass as formulated at the 20th session of the Council of Trent;”[7] or, at least, by acknowledging with Joseph Ratzinger that “the old edifice” has been demolished “in order to build a new one.”[8]
- Juridically, by pointing out that the new Ordo Missæ is no more intended to be an intangible clarification of the lex orandi than Vatican II is to be an indisputable explicitation of dogma.
We can therefore invoke the traditional existence of the coexistence of various rites in the Church, with the caveat that in the present case we are in the presence of a new liturgy which intends to replace the old liturgy by diminishing the expression of substantial doctrinal points in the rites and in the texts. This means that Paul VI’s reform has created an atypical liturgical situation, insofar as the progress it sought to achieve has, on the contrary, led to a kind of involution of the lex orandi, the new cultic expression of the Eucharistic sacrifice constituting a regression in relation to that which Trent had enshrined.
Abbé Claude Barthe
[1] For example, Fr. Jeffrey Kirby, in an article entitled “The Rise of the Ultramontanists”, published in The Catholic Thing on 14 April 2024, paradoxically echoes the words of anti-infallibility liberals, who caricatured ultramontanism as asserting that everything a pope says is true, and went so far as to say that the decree Pastor Æternus had actually limited the scope of the pope’s infallibility.
[2] Until the 18th century, the Lyonnaise usages, like those of other French churches, may not have represented a non-Roman Latin rite like the Mozarabic rite, but rather a remnant of the historical state of the Roman liturgy in Carolingian times, when it incorporated specific features of the Gallican liturgy which it had replaced. Lyonnaise practices largely disappeared when “neo-Gallican” books were adopted in Lyon in the 18th century. But when the latter were replaced by the Roman books in the 19th century, a particularist reaction arose in Lyon, and the Cardinal de Bonald, archbishop from 1839 to 1870, although very ultramontane, obtained the preservation of a certain number of Mass usages proper to Lyon (confession prayers, numerous proses, proper offertory prayers, particular solemnity of the pontifical mass, pontifical concelebration of Holy Thursday by the archbishop with six canons-priests, Venite populi as a chant of fraction, etc.). These Lyonnaise practices give an idea of what the rich customs of cathedrals were like under the Ancien Régime.
[3] Joseph Ratzinger, Ma Vie. Souvenirs 1927-1977, Fayard, 2005, p. 134.
[4] All these missals have either been purely and simply replaced by the Paul VI missal, or have undergone a thorough reform along the lines of that applied to the Roman missal. For example, the Montinian reformers reformed the Mozarabic missal used in some Spanish chapels. In this rite, preserved in a part of the Hispanic peninsula that had been isolated from the Frankish churches by the Muslim conquest, and had therefore not adopted the Roman rite in Carolingian times, there was a set of prayers equivalent to those of the Roman offertory, with a name that would make our reform experts shudder: Sacrificium; this Mozarabic rite, reformed after Vatican II, subsequently underwent a kind of “reform of the reform”. Today’s Mozarabic celebrations follow this missal, not the Mozarabic missal edited by Cardinal Cisneros in 1500.
[5] However, this is not always the case. The Psalterium pianum, also known as “Cardinal Bea’s version of the psalms”, was allowed, but not required, to be used for private recitation or psalmody in the Office choir by the motu proprio In quotidianis precibus of 24 March 1945. This new version, abandoned de facto since then, adopted a classical Latin style, certainly of very good quality, but more Ciceronian or Virgilian than in keeping with the ecclesiastical language of late Antiquity. One might use it or not. Among the “traditionalists” who preferred the ancient version was Fr. Congar.
[6] The Bugnini-Liturgy and the Reform of the Reform, published in 2003 by the Church Music Association of America.
[7] Supplication on the part of Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci, 5 June 1969, presenting the Brief Critical Examination of the Novus Ordo Missæ.
[8] Joseph Ratzinger, Ma Vie, quoted above.