Boniface Luykx’s Critique of the Novus Ordo as Defective Ritual (Part 1 of 2)

A keen-eyed diagnosis of where Paul VI's reform went wrong

Unfinished painting: “Altar in a Baroque Church” by Adolph Menzel

In my post “Damning Exposé of Bugnini in Prominent Liturgist’s Rediscovered Memoirs,” I said that I’d save for another time Archimandrite Luykx’s critique of the Novus Ordo as a deficient religious ritual. This I did mainly to keep that original article at a manageable length.

Today, therefore, I will continue with Luykx’s keen insights into what went wrong in the 1960s, while recognizing up front that none of today’s “camps” in the liturgy wars can really claim him as their own—he is almost as stern a critic of the preconciliar Tridentine rite as he is of the Novus Ordo. Perhaps the best way to characterize him is as a Byzantine triumphalist, whose motto is “the Christian East has never deviated, and the more thoroughly the West comes to its senses and imitates the East, the better.”

There’s plenty of material here for two substantial posts. Look for the concluding part on Monday. As will become quickly apparent, Fr. Luykx was not a man to pull his punches: he has some of the fiercest criticisms of the reform that I’ve ever seen in print (and that’s saying a lot).

Numbers in parentheses refer to the pages of the book A Wider View of Vatican II: Memories and Analysis of a Council Consultor (Angelico, 2025), from which these extracts have been taken. As a reminder for readers who might not have read that earlier article, Boniface Luykx was an influential member of the preconciliar Liturgical Movement, a world-renowned scholar, a contributor to the preparatory phase of Vatican II, an expert at all four sessions of the Council, and a member of Bugnini’s Consilium, the group that constructed the new rite. So, he’s a man whose opinion is utterly worth taking seriously.

Distributing the blame

I’d like to begin by emphasizing that Bugnini is not the only “villain” in Luykx’s narrative. Another towering figure is Johannes Wagner, whom he calls outright “a modernist.” After having praised the beauty of the liturgy at the abbey of Maria Laach in Germany, Luykx writes:

After some years, however, a group of German liturgists, mostly secular priests, came to feel that Maria Laach’s orientation was not pastoral enough. Led by the activistic Monsignor Johannes Wagner, they loudly proclaimed that “liturgy is to be led by the priest; hence priests, not monks, should run the movement.” With the support of some German bishops, they set up in the city of Trier the Liturgisches Institut, mainly a school for higher liturgical teaching, which became a center of activity rather than prayer and contemplation.

From the outset, there was painful rivalry between Trier and Maria Laach, largely due to the bad character of the Institut’s leader. It was especially distressing that the Institut made public statements against Maria Laach, Father Pius Parsch, and others including me, because a beautiful characteristic of the renewal was its members’ friendship, mutual support, and respect, which this jealousy ridiculed or destroyed. (Monsignor Wagner later became a major force behind the Novus Ordo and was perhaps the most outspoken modernist in the liturgical commission after the Council.) (26–27)

Elsewhere he says: “[Bugnini] was heavily influenced by the modernists who broke from fidelity to CSL, the most outspoken of whom was Johannes Wagner from the Trier Institut in Germany” (86).

(source)

Deterioration of the Eucharist

On page 104 of A Wider View of Vatican II, Luykx begins his analysis of the Novus Ordo as released in 1969/70. Not one to mince words, he “tells it like it is”:

The steamroller of man-centered horizontalism (as opposed to God-centered verticalism) has flattened all liturgical forms after Vatican II, but its main victim is the Novus Ordo. Its creators made a grievous mistake by pushing a “return to simplicity” to the point of impoverishing the ritual and destroying the sense of celebration and mystery. In modern Western thought and practice, the horizontal dimension of celebration seems to exclude the vertical dimension of reverence. Yet true liturgy and true celebration are exactly the reconciliation of both: the active involvement of the faithful sharing in common in their ascent to God, and in integrating God’s descent to men in faith.

The element of true celebration has essentially departed from the Novus Ordo. The main reason for this bookish (and talkative) removal of the soul from the Mass is what Norbert Höslinger rightly referred to as “man putting himself forward as the prime mover instead of God.” The main loser in this process is the mystery, which should be, on the contrary, the main object and content of the celebration. Our primary attitude vis-à-vis the mystery must be reverence and awe, its fitting milieu. When these are lacking, the celebration, or what is left of it, speeds on to its undoing.

Only when given a reverent setting and a sufficient amount of time can the worshipper gradually penetrate into the hidden meaning of the mystery, by a religious acceptance and not just a mental understanding. In total neglect of this fact, the authors of the Novus Ordo, who had no interest whatsoever in the field of religious anthropology, stripped the new Mass almost as much as possible of all anthropological patterns proper to true ritual. They apparently considered rituals to be gratuitous and useless activities because they are not utilitarian and productive. (104)

Perhaps the worst result of ignoring the principles of religious anthropology, as evidenced in the Novus Ordo, is the deterioration of the Eucharist….

The duration of the Mass must be sufficient. Anthropologists emphasize that religious activities of great importance — and the Eucharist is the center of all Christianity— need, first of all, a certain duration, to show their full advantage. So the element of time must be considered here. In his mind, man can jump from one concept to another, just as the body can change quickly from one movement to another. But in his spirit — in his heart — man, in his God-filled ritual, needs the slow rhythm of reverence, in which each ritual complex moves unhurriedly to the next and each ritual flows organically out of the one preceding it, as it was from ages past. The whole eucharistic rite of the Novus Ordo, however, is deeply distorted by rattling off the Word service, smuggling away the preparation of the gifts, and rushing through the Anaphora and Holy Communion. The duration of twenty minutes or even less for daily Mass is but a parody of the divine and sacred. Hasty modern Western man needs calm and respect to respond from his self-centered ego to the holiness and otherness of God….

The entrance and exit rites of the Eucharist must be given sufficient time and explicitness. The anthropological law of discontinuity between “the world” and the sacred action requires a certain amount of time for worshippers to step over from our secular lives to the Sacred at the beginning of the liturgy (in the entrance rite). Similarly, at the end of the liturgy, we need sufficient time to return, “fully charged,” from the intensely sacred back to the secular world (in the exit rite). In the Novus Ordo these rites are largely inadequate…. (105)

A longer dialogue before and after the readings is necessary, as is surrounding the gospel reading with more solemnity as the real presence of the Word (meaning Jesus) speaking to his people. (106)

Needless to say, all the things Luykx describes here were, and are, already present in the Vetus Ordo, the authentic Roman Rite, and were stripped away from it in the “reform.”

Defending the Embodied Anaphora

Turning to the centermost feature of the Mass:

The Anaphora (the Eucharistic Prayers or canons [in the new rite]) especially needs a totally new approach or, rather, a return to the pre-Vatican II arrangement. The second canon [viz., the pseudo-Roman pseudo-Hippolytan pseudo-anaphora] should be abandoned altogether as much too schematic: it was originally meant as a schema for free elaboration by the bishop….

The omission of gestures is a more important flaw. Gestures were introduced during the Carolingian reform, precisely to make it easier for the faithful to follow this long solitary prayer. As soon as the Roman Canon spread from Rome to become the rite of the Western Patriarchate under the Carolingians, one of the first documents on liturgical and pastoral accommodation was the Ordo qualiter cruces, containing extensive gestures. This Ordo was followed all over the West — until, ironically, after Vatican II, the Council of active participation!

Psychologically seen, such a long prayer as the Anaphora, even in the vernacular, can be helpful as an expression of mystical ecstasy. But as soon as it becomes ritual and has to express the theological content of the words, ritual acts must be added. Thus the sacred gestures and blessings of the celebrant express, on the one hand, the personal involvement of the minister in the sacramental action. But on the other hand they express in rites the often abstract or figurative contents of the Anaphora prayer in order to bring this sublime content over into the mostly-silent, but nevertheless active, participation of the faithful. (106)

In other words, the traditional praying of the Roman Canon with a multitude of gestures was right after all. (We will see a little later why Luykx thinks that the return of the Tridentine rite after the liturgical reform is a very good and important work of the Holy Spirit, even if in his ideal world the best rite would be the Tridentine vernacularized and opened up to congregational “involvement.”)

Three Cheers for the Carolingians

In a wonderful segment of his book the archimandrite defends the high medieval Romano-Gallican rite as the mature form of the Western liturgy (pp. 106–9):

Another major error of the Consilium’s subcommissions was their narrow and lopsided historical approach. I must be very brave indeed to dare disagree with their prestigious historians and their inventions in the postconciliar documents! Yet I am qualified to comment in some of these fields, for I specialized in them and made a lifelong study of the original liturgical sources, under the aegis of great scholars, in the most distinguished European academic centers….

The subcommissions, however, [in their privileging of primitive witnesses like Justin and Hippolytus] overlooked a fundamental fact. These second- and third-century authors describe only a very schematic and rudimentary rite, one celebrated for a small group of people in a small space (mostly the catacombs), during or under threat of persecution. These circumstances forcibly reduced the celebration element of the liturgy to a minimum, that is, to an austere framework; examples are Justin’s schematic description of the Eucharist and Hippolytus’s Anaphora [sic—when Luykx was writing in the 1990s, this attribution was still accepted by many] (the second canon of the present Roman liturgy). Neither of these was meant for a full-fledged celebration, nor is either one suitable for such a celebration in our day. Yet the liturgical experts took these abbreviated texts as the model for the new Roman Mass rite.

An even more serious error is this: by limiting themselves to this rudimentary early pattern, the subcommissions excluded consideration of all further development and growth of this primitive nucleus from the catacombs all the way into its massive style suitable for the basilicas. They especially discarded the later Carolingian maturity: a fully-grown, adult liturgy. Yet it was this mature liturgy—not the primitive so-called Roman model of the Early Church— that was at the basis of the Roman liturgy until Trent and beyond.

When thinking of the “Roman rite,” we should keep in mind that the “primitive Roman liturgy” was a small, insignificant rite limited to one city that was subject to constant abuse and attacks by Germanic warlords…. It was Carolingian liturgists who, in the eighth century, preserved the Roman documents, both the different Ordines Romani and the books for readings, singing, ordinations, et cetera. With this material, in the eighth to ninth centuries the Carolingian liturgists of the Aachen School, aided by a worldwide network of monasteries, rebuilt the Roman liturgy. But as this material was quite incomplete, they had to use many elements, especially prayers, from the pre-existing Gallican (Eastern) liturgy from Gaul and Spain, with which they filled out the Roman framework that was too poor and schematic. Thus grew a new type of liturgy, composed of three key elements. It was an organic blending of the old Roman framework, enlivened with numerous wonderful devotional prayers for celebrant and faithful from the Gallican liturgy, and structured according to the model of the Eastern liturgies (especially for their support of the gestures and postures by private or common prayers).

This new Carolingian liturgy was introduced into Rome by the reform of the Germanic emperors in AD 962–65 and reached its acme in the eleventh century. I coined the term “Rhenish liturgy” for this mature Carolingian liturgy of the eleventh century because it reached its adulthood in the great monastic and cultural centers of the Rhineland. (Recall from Chapter 1 that Father Josef Jungmann accepted my scholarship on this topic and revised his Missarum Sollemnia accordingly.) This new type of Mass liturgy was accepted in Rome in the twelfth century as the true Roman liturgy, as the manuscripts show.

The same process took place with the whole Carolingian liturgy: calendar, Divine Office, sacraments, “Great Rites” (rites of the liturgical year and ordinations), and music. The Rome-oriented Franciscans spread this liturgy throughout the West in the thirteenth century. Finally, it was this further-developed Carolingian liturgy that the Council of Trent promulgated as the official Roman liturgy in the sixteenth century.

This noble and rich pedigree was destroyed by the new liturgy after Vatican II. Its authors had a special aversion to the second and third elements of the Carolingian liturgy: the devotional prayers and the “private” prayers supporting the ritual gestures. That they should have such an aversion was very strange, because it was exactly these two elements that made the cerebral celebration flow over into the total active participation, body and soul, of the faithful, and thus made the objective celebration an event of prayer. Was this not precisely the deeper purpose of the liturgical reform of Vatican II? And must not elements that foster the worshippers’ total involvement be especially important for any promoters of active participation?

I have discussed this point at length because it is perhaps the best proof of how the postconciliar reform “missed the boat” by a mistaken historical approach. Such a mistake draws in its wake of incompetency and exclusivism some other flaws. The lack of appreciation for the devotional and prayerful side of the liturgy resulted in a cold and horizontal loosening-up of ritual without expressed and prayed-out connections in the very rhythm of celebrations. This was a lack which the Carolingian liturgy had remedied quite fortunately and successfully, producing an enormous monument of Christian religious culture for all ages. The recent reformers dared to destroy this monument because they mistook the particular ancient Roman liturgy to be a model of “noble simplicity.” And they made of it a pedestrian, marketplace liturgy, where nobility has been banished.

Mass Facing the People: a “Serious Theological Flaw”

Having thus essentially condemned the entire forma mentis of the radical reformers who ran the show with Paul VI’s backing, Fr. Luykx then launches into a mighty apologia for ad orientem and a scathing rejection of versus populum, once again citing Jungmann as his primary support:

I mentioned earlier that Father Josef Jungmann vigorously opposed the priest and altar facing the people. His reasons were many, and the West would do well to consider them anew; I will mention five.

1. First, the great importance of “easting”: that everyone—faithful and priest—celebrate facing the east, whence the Risen Lord returns among his people-at-worship. This had been the general practice in all the liturgies of East and West from the very beginning of the Church. [Here, Fr. Luykx includes a footnote: “Exceptions are four Roman basilicas that were oriented differently for non-liturgical reasons.”]

2. The highly important theology of both the ministerial priesthood and the general priesthood of the faithful, joined together in a common vertical ascent to God under the leadership of the ordained minister.

3. The distraction (and horror) of celebrant and people constantly looking into each other’s eyes.

4. The impropriety of the people watching every detail of priestly rubrics that are not meant to be watched or vivisected.

5. The danger of horizontalizing a most holy (vertical) celebration, destroying reverence and awe and turning the Holy Mass into a social party.

Until the end of his life, Father Jungmann desperately battled against the growing monopoly of the altar facing the people and the destructive consequences that were already becoming generalized. He died in 1975 in deep sadness, powerlessly witnessing the systematic demolition of his realistic dream, the main work of his long and saintly life: a real liturgical renewal and restoration based upon the authentic sources, as opposed to some passing novelty. When his last letter to me arrived, a few days before his death, I wept as I read of his great disappointment — it seemed it sent him to his grave — which would gradually become the great disappointment of so many of us in the Church. (110)

The altar facing the people…is perhaps the most serious flaw and expression of the incorrect approach to true worship so common in the changes after the Council…. A theological flaw is at the base of this change and of the whole new liturgy: the notion that liturgy is the “work of the people” and hence horizontal (...the true meaning of the Greek word leitourgía is a vertical “work for the people,” an entirely different meaning.)¹ In this notion, celebration is a horizontal gathering of the people around the altar; hence “eye contact” between priest and faithful is essential. Prayer to God, and an attitude of being totally oriented toward God in adoration and praise, is considered outdated and boring. This weakening or even destruction of the vertical dimension has become perhaps the basic counterfeit of the new liturgy as well as the undoing of the true Church. One might say that therein lies the original sin of the new liturgy and the corruption of what the Council had intended. (111)

The great German liturgist, Monsignor Klaus Gamber, has clearly shown what I have experienced and written here: the Novus Ordo is manifestly contrary to the intent of CSL and would not have been approved by the Council Fathers. Rather, it was forced upon the Western Church by the order of Pope Paul VI, to assure the goodwill of our Protestant brethren. As Gamber wrote: “Much more radical than any liturgical changes introduced by Luther . . . was the reorganization of our own liturgy— above all the fundamental changes which were made in the liturgy of the Mass. It also demonstrated much less understanding for the emotional ties which the faithful had to the traditional liturgical rite.” (111–12)

Overall, I am convinced that the Novus Ordo is generally a failure: it suffers from a manifold inherent infirmity. The Consilium’s subcommission that created it faced a very difficult task, in which it failed. So we must accept the consequence: the Western Church needs a new rite of the Mass. (112)

To this final comment, and in light of his lengthy hymn of praise to the medieval Roman Rite, one truly wonders why Fr. Luykx could not simply have said: “the Western Church needs its old rite of the Mass again.” But as we’ve said, he seems discontented with both the old and new Latin rites. Of such disgruntled people, I often think: “Go, go freely to the Byzantine Divine Liturgy and be at peace, and do not try to ‘fix’ our Western tradition.”

Bring Back Pluralism

The archimandrite outlines his own solution to the disaster: a welcoming of liturgical pluralism, as once was the case in the West; the reintroduction of the Tridentine rite, albeit possibly in the vernacular; a reform of the reform (where the prayers at the foot and the old Offertory are restored); even the new availability of Fr. Jungmann’s Missa Normativa (!?), for which he shows an odd favoritism.² He judges that

pluriformity may well prove a necessity or advantage for the Church, because we now live in an open society where everyone is accustomed to deciding for himself. My feeling is that someday pluriformity will indeed return in the West, with like-minded people bonding together to worship according to various rites. (114)

Whatever we might think of “pluriformity,” most of the proposals in this section will satisfy exactly no one: they are too traditional to be taken up in the mainstream, and too disrespectful of tradition to be taken seriously by the traditionalists. As is so often the case, the pars destruens (critique of mistakes) in Luykx’s memoir is stronger than the pars construens (the proposal for what to do instead).

Pursuing his grand argument, Fr. Luykx eventually arrives at the question of the re-introduction of the Tridentine Mass, which he attributes to John Paul II’s Ecclesia Dei. Was this revival a good thing—despite Vatican II’s call for a reform of the old rite? Overall, he thinks it is good, in the circumstances:

The pope’s decision was not a questionable concession to the pressure of traditionalists, but rather a wise decision perfectly fitting the Roman liturgical tradition and the real needs of the Church…. Cardinal Ratzinger has also given his support, declaring that the old Mass is a living and, indeed, “integral” part of Catholic worship and tradition, and predicting that it will make “its own characteristic contribution to the liturgical renewal called for by the Second Vatican Council.”…

This Mass has been restored to use in the Western Church by her highest authority and for serious reasons. The most important reasons are, I believe, restoration of the faithful’s eucharistic devotion and their sense of reverence and the holiness of the eucharistic mystery—and hence the enhancement of their true active participation, one of the primary goals of CSL…. Bishops should not require repeated beseeching as though being asked for a harmful privilege; in fact, episcopal refusal to permit celebration of the Tridentine Mass would be a painful abuse of power. (114–15)

A primary reason the faithful flock to the Tridentine Mass is their need for the reverence, holiness, and prayerfulness that emanate from the Presence of God in its very celebration. This Mass is a prayerful, true, and sacred ritual, a holy acting out of a mystery before the face of God, in holy language, and directly facing him. One feels in the Tridentine Mass a reaching out to the Holy One and a living contact with him, an opening-up to the unspeakably Sacred, expressed in symbols and rituals (of which the Novus Ordo was purposefully “cleansed”). This Mass has become so popular in America and Europe because it restores reverence as the primary “element” of celebration. (117–18)

Abbot Boniface then launches into a mini-treatise on reverence and beauty that rewards careful study:

The need for reverence explains the phenomenal success of recordings of Gregorian chant, such as the one from Santo Domingo de Silos in 1991, wherein millions of people all over the world, especially young people, have rediscovered the God of beauty who was still singing in their hearts. Gregorian chant is the musical expression of the age-old reaching out to the transcendent….

The hunger for the Tridentine Mass and Gregorian chant shows the great necessity of good music for good worship. Yet in our day countless celebrants, music directors, and “liturgy commissions” continue to impose banal, low-quality music on faithful souls Sunday after Sunday. The typical Western celebration has so thoroughly abandoned reverence and beauty that most clergy and laity no longer even realize what they are missing. (118)

Reverence, the mother of all virtues, is greatly extolled by Dietrich von Hildebrand, who has profoundly stated: “The depth and plenitude of being and, above all, its mysteries will never reveal themselves except to the reverent mind.” This general principle of daily experience applies especially to worship, which is the channel for reaching out to God as he is and as he reveals himself.

Hence, the faithful’s common-sense demands for the Eucharist in the form of the Tridentine Mass, and for reverence in general, reveal the overall flaw of the postconciliar “renewal” endeavor, as opposed to the genuine renewal proposed by the Council itself. The present lack of reverence in the Western Church— and the need for it— is the main reason why the entire postconciliar “renewal” must be overhauled.

The destruction of the Sacred is the deepest assault on man’s dignity in his thinking and living. This is true because the Sacred is the highest value and reference in human thinking and living, which in turn is true because the Sacred is God’s direct impact upon his creation. The consequences of this assault are enormous and all-pervading. For instance, it imposes upon man, who is made for the Beyond, the naturalization of the supernatural and the supernaturalization of the natural, by making the Diesseits-man [the man of this present world] the norm of all values….

With the waning or destruction of the Sacred, Beauty is also starved. Beauty is the reflection of the Divine, as is Truth, the guarantee of the Reality of this impact of God upon his creation; and it is through Ritual that man celebrates the Sacred as source of Grace and life. This means that, when the Sacred is thrown out by lack of reverence, the ultimate reference to the principale analogon and norm is thrown out, so the whole fabric of values of knowing and living disintegrates. As a result, worship as the primary source and guarantee of the Sacred in our lives turns into the ridiculous, the great enemy of the Sacred; and social life is built on lies.

From this death of the Sacred in worship flows the death of respect for authority, truth, and beauty, and the resultant breakup of families and a proliferation of evils in society. In general, the respect for life dies, as is seen in the acceptance of abortion and euthanasia and all kinds of violence. These evils originate, ultimately, from the death of reverence, especially in its origins in worship. When reverence is gone, all worship becomes only horizontal entertainment, a social party. (118–20)

In the next post, we’ll look at Fr. Luykx’s account of what he calls, rather strikingly, the “Erroneous Theological Foundations of the New Liturgy,” and his analysis of “desacralization and desymbolization.” Like Fr. Aidan Nichols, he believes the reform ignored the axioms of religious anthropology and, as such, runs continually against the grain of human nature.

1. Later, Luykx emphasizes this point: “the primary meaning of the word liturgy (leitourgía) is ‘work for the people’ (from the Greek leiton ergon) by the public authority. The subjective involvement of people and ministers is crucial in liturgy. Indeed, it includes the whole area of active participation. But the objective (vertical) dimension— the ‘work [of God and the Church] for the people’— is the first and proper characteristic of true Christian worship” (136). For more on this topic, see my article “Refuting the Commonplace that ‘Liturgy’ Means ‘Work of the People.’”

2. Fr. Luykx seems to think the 1967 Missa Normativa is significantly different from the 1969 Novus Ordo. It is not. Let’s put it this way: these two rites are far closer to each other than the Missa Normative is even to the 1965 denuded Tridentine rite, let alone the 1962, let alone the pre-55.