The “Latin Novus Ordo” Is Not the Solution

Please stop saying this is "just as good as" the TLM you are taking away from us

REMINDER: From December 1, Tradition & Sanity will makes it home at the the newly-launched traditional Catholic media platform Pelican+. Between now and then, posts will be published at both places. After that point, the Substack will stay online but the full content will be over there. In this transitional phase, I encourage you to check out the new site, of which I am excited to be a founding collaborator. —PK

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In the wake of Traditionis Custodes, it seems that not a month passes without some presumably well-intentioned prelate or pastor suggesting that a satisfactory substitute for canceled traditional Latin Masses is “doing the Novus Ordo in Latin.” Most recently, we saw this proclaimed in a humiliating homily from the pulpit of a basilica in Chattanooga.

Well-meant or not, this idea is an absolute non-starter, for several reasons.

The rites themselves are profoundly different

First, the old and new missals have surprisingly little overlap. All one has to do is compare them side-by-side to see that both the Order of Mass and the Propers of the Mass are largely divergent. The classic article here is Matthew Hazell’s, demonstrating that only 13% of the orations of the old missal are found intact in the new one (and not 17%, the already-low figure at which Fr. Anthony Cekada had arrived, but which turns out on closer inspection to be too generous).¹

As I demonstrate in The Once and Future Roman Rite, we are dealing here not with two versions of the Roman rite but with two rites: the Roman rite and whatever one must call the other: let us say, the “modern rite of Paul VI.” If someone happens to enjoy the modern rite in Latin, by all means let him have it; but that’s not an adequate substitute for the TLM, and no one who is even a little bit familiar with the TLM would be able to perceive it to be such.

An acquaintance of mine explained to her ten-year-old son, an avid altar server, that the local bishop, when he announced the end of the TLM, offered to substitute for it a Novus Ordo in Latin, ad orientem, with chant. The boy replied: “Ohhhh, so they’re trying to pretend!” It’s insulting to be offered something that kinda-sorta looks like the TLM but isn’t, as if experienced attendees are ignorant of the fact that the TLM and the Novus Ordo are two separate rites — indeed, as if all we care about is eye-candy.

A virtuous man looks for a wife who is beautiful on the inside as well as on the outside, with the former — the internal character — valued most of all. He’s not interested only in the externals, and neither are traditional Catholics. Speaking and acting as if we were is a not-so-subtle disparagement.

At the same time, we understand that the externals ought to match the internal reality — Mosebach says there is no shame in being “one of those naïve folk who look at the surface, the external appearance of things, in order to judge their inner nature, their truth, or their spuriousness”² — and we object to any rite that disconnects them, leaving their relationship to free choice, as if we we ought to be reliant on the chance intersection of local politics and subjective good taste. (I will return shortly to the question of aestheticism.)

The new rite’s architects wanted only vernacular

Second, the new liturgy was never designed by its architects and implementers to be said in Latin. Pope Paul VI bade adieu to Latin (and Gregorian chant along with it) in his infamous general audiences of March 1965 and November 1969, as I discuss in the aforementioned book.³ On November 19, 1969, he declared:

The introduction of the vernacular will certainly be a great sacrifice for those who know the beauty, the power, and the expressive sacrality of Latin. We are parting with the speech of the Christian centuries; we are becoming like profane intruders in the literary preserve of sacred utterance. We will lose a great part of that stupendous and incomparable artistic and spiritual thing, the Gregorian chant. We have reason indeed for regret, reason almost for bewilderment. What can we put in the place of that language of the angels? We are giving up something of priceless worth. But why? What is more precious than these loftiest of our Church’s values? The answer will seem banal, prosaic. Yet it is a good answer, because it is human, because it is apostolic. Understanding of prayer is worth more than the silken garments in which it is royally dressed. Participation by the people is worth more — particularly participation by modern people, so fond of plain language which is easily understood and converted into everyday speech.

This is the same pope who noted only five years later, in a melancholy observation that called into question the most obvious characteristic of the new rite, its vernacular verbosity: “Modern man is sated by talk; he is obviously tired of listening, and what is worse, impervious to words.”⁴

In the giant doorstopper of a book Documents on the Liturgy 1963–1979, one can find hundreds of references to Mass in the vernacular, and scarcely any reference to Mass in Latin. The Latin editio typica of Paul VI’s Missale Romanum [sic] was understood by all, except perhaps Opus Dei clergy, as a launching-point for the multitudinous vernacular versions. One can tell because the new missal’s very Latinity, as numerous Latinists have explained to me, is clunky and clumsy throughout; it’s a committee product intended for practical extrapolations.

The new rite is built for easy verbal comprehension

Third, and moving more deeply into the heart of the matter, the Novus Ordo is in fact built for a kind of immediate rational comprehension and active engagement that is foreign to traditional liturgy conducted in an archaic sacral language, where much that is said and done is not being said and done for or towards the congregation at all, and where being caught up in the larger liturgical action is the main point: the “creation of a presence,”⁵ or, in Newman’s words, “not the invocation merely, but . . . the evocation of the Eternal.”⁶

No one has analyzed the stark differences between the rites, as far as language goes, better than Joseph Shaw. In a masterful five-part series published from February 23 to 27, 2014 at his blog LMS Chairman, Shaw explains why the “reform of the reform” was dead in the water even before it started (and before it was euthanized for good effect by Pope Francis).⁷ Here I would like to take up a few of the major points he makes.

In Part 1, “The Death of the Reform of the Reform?,” Shaw introduces his main argument:

While I am in favour of Latin, worship ad orientem and pretty well everything the ROTR promotes, it is clear to me that the difficulty of imposing them on the Novus Ordo is not just a matter of parochial habits. The problem with the texts and ceremonies, in terms of bringing them closer to the Traditional Mass, is not just a matter of how many changes you would need to make. The problem is that the Novus Ordo has its own ethos, rationale and spirituality. It encapsulates its own distinct understanding of what liturgical participation is. It is to promote this kind of participation that its various texts and ceremonies have been done as they are. If you put it in Latin, ad orientem, and especially if you start having things not currently allowed, like the silent Canon, then you undermine the kind of participation for which the Novus Ordo was designed. This means that there is a danger, in promoting something which amounts to a compromise between the two Missals, of falling between two stools.

In Part 2, “The Liturgical Movement,” Shaw notes that the movers and shakers of the Liturgical Movement were frustrated that the people before the Council were not more “into” the liturgy (according to presumably enlightened notions of what such “into-ness” should look like). The poor folks did not understand its content as well as the experts themselves did, being fluent in Latin as they were and having lots of time to study and so forth. Having grown impatient with educational approaches, they tried a blunter method:

Some liturgists made a final effort to get the wonderful texts of the ancient liturgical tradition across to the Faithful. They experimented with having Mass facing the people, so everyone could see what was going on. Then they realised that, if you want people to understand the texts, you really are a lot better off having the texts read aloud, and in the vernacular. It stands to reason! But things were moving on. Even aloud, and in English, the texts were too long, too complicated. In fact, putting them into the vernacular simply served to emphasise that these texts were unsuitable for repetitive use in the congregation’s mother tongue. Furthermore, the order in which things happened was confusing and (apparently) illogical. And then there were other theological fashions which disliked the emphasis on sin, penance, and the saints. It all had to go.

What we got instead was a Missal which the Faithful could follow word by word, without the need (after a while) of hand-missals. The prayers were simple, the ceremonies short and cut down to the bone, and (apparently) logical. It was in the vernacular. It faced the people. The translation used words of one syllable wherever possible. It all fitted together.

When the ROTR folks look at the result of this process, they sense, quite rightly, that there’s a great lack:

Something is missing from the Mass, the sacrality has gone. So they want to put some sacrality back. They see the things which seem most associated with it in the Traditional Mass, and they want to put them back. So they propose, and actually practice, the use of Latin, celebration ad orientem, Gregorian Chant and so on. These are all good things. But when the reformers said that they had to be sacrificed for the sake of comprehensibility, they weren’t entirely wrong. Thinking about word-by-word understanding, verbal communication, it is perfectly true that, unless you are a superhuman Latinist, it is harder to follow the Canon in Latin than it is in English. Unless you are lip-reader, it is harder still if it is silent. Unless you have X-Ray eyes, it is harder still if the priest has his back to you. Pope Paul VI famously said, using a phrase of Jungmann’s, that Latin was a “curtain” which obscured the liturgy, it had to be drawn back. Yes: if you have a very narrow understanding of participation.⁸ But that is the understanding of participation upon which the entire reform was based.

In Part 3, “Falling Between Two Stools,” Shaw makes explicit the assumptions of the reformers and why they are mistaken:

I described the historical process by which we ended up with a liturgy from which drama, gesture, mystery, awe, and beauty have been systematically removed. There is still some left, but less than before; the point is that their removal was not accidental, but deliberate and systematic. There was a principle at work: Mass should be readily comprehensible. Drama, poetry, anything which is hidden from sight or in a foreign language: these are inevitably harder to understand. And who can argue with the principle? What the reformers took for granted was the presupposition that we are talking about verbal communication. So let’s get this assumption out in the open: Mass should be readily comprehensible at the level of verbal communication.

Suddenly it looks less obvious. Might it be possible that what is more readily comprehensible at the verbal level is actually less readily comprehensible, or, to use another term favoured by liturgists, meaningful, taking verbal and non-verbal forms of communication together? Listen to what Fr. Aidan Nichols OP observed (Looking at the Liturgy, 59): “To the sociologist, it is by no means self-evident that brief, clear rites have greater transformative potential than complex, abundant, lavish, rich, long rites, furnished with elaborate ceremonial.”

When you put it like that, it is clear enough. It is perfectly possible that the effort to make Mass more meaningful at a verbal level has had such a deleterious effect on its non-verbal aspect that we’ve ended up with something which is less meaningful, all things considered.

He then explains what happens when you try to “mix ‘n’ match”:

The Novus Ordo is geared towards verbal comprehension. It may be lacking in other things — certainly the Reform of the Reform people tell us so — but in terms of understanding the liturgical texts it must be said it is pretty successful. They are read nice and clearly, usually amplified, in one’s mother tongue (at least for those of us who have a major language as a mother tongue, and live where it is an official language); the vocabulary (at least until the new translation [of 2011]) is not challenging. Yes, we get the message, at the intellectual, word-by-word level.

To say the Vetus Ordo operates at another level is to state the obvious. You can’t even hear the most important bits — they are said silently. If you could hear them, they’d be in Latin. And yet, somehow, it has its supporters. It communicates something, not in spite of these barriers to verbal communication, but by means of the very things which are clearly barriers to verbal communication. The silence and the Latin are indeed among the most effective means the Vetus Ordo employs to communicate what it communicates: the mysterium tremendum, the amazing reality of God made present in the liturgy. If you take the Novus Ordo and make it verbally incomprehensible, or take the Vetus Ordo and take away the Latin and the silence, you are not creating the ideal liturgy. You are in grave danger of creating something that is neither fish nor fowl: that doesn’t work at either level.

In Part 4, “Novus Ordo in Latin?,” Shaw ties together his various points:

A compromise missal, with “the best” of the Ordinary Form and of the Extraordinary Form, could turn out to be something which doesn’t allow the Faithful to engage with it effectively, in either the typical traditional fashion or the typical Novus Ordo fashion. The idea that you can make the Traditional Latin Mass easier to participate in by making various changes— using the vernacular, having [formerly] silent prayers [said] aloud, having the priest face the people—is based on the idea that there is only one kind of meaningful participation, and that is an intellectual, verbal participation: a comprehension of the liturgy by a grasp of the liturgical texts word by word, as they are said. But, as I argued, this is not so. . . .

I also warned that something similar can happen from the other direction. If you take the Novus Ordo and put it into Latin, for example, you instantly take away much of the intellectual, verbal engagement for which the 1970 Missal was designed. Will you create a sense of the sacred to compensate? Perhaps. But the whole rite has been set up wrong, from that point of view, and most Catholics in the pew will not find it at all obvious how to allow themselves to engage with it in the appropriate way, in the context of the mixed signals they are getting from the ceremonies and texts . . . .

If we are going to talk about the future, of what there is some chance of really working with the bulk of ordinary Catholics, the Reform of the Reform is based on a terrible mistake. The mistake is to assume you can preserve what is attractive about one Form while combining it with what is attractive about the other. You can’t, because they are incompatible. In the EF it is precisely those things which impede verbal communication which facilitate non-verbal communication: Latin, silence, worship ad orientem and so on. An attempt to ramp up verbal communication in the EF will destroy what makes it attractive. Similarly, an attempt to bring in more “sense of the sacred” in the OF will radically reduce its big selling point: the ease of verbal communication.

Shaw has astutely recognized that you can’t have every possible good simultaneously, and that some goods exclude other goods. It is well to bear this in mind, for it also applies to defenders of the Eastern rites, who in their laudable enthusiasm for their own traditions often prove to be blind and deaf to the distinctive perfections of Western tradition.⁹

The reproach of aestheticism

Fourth and finally, devotees of the TLM are often reproached for having too “aesthetic” a view of the liturgy and for thinking too much in terms of “devotion” and “reverence” (as if these attitudes could ever be a problem to worry about!).¹⁰

But the truth is, the TLM is inherently aesthetic and devotional, and the Latin language is an important component in its genetic makeup. Victor Hugo has a marvelous observation: “Form is the substance rising to the surface.” That is what you see at the Latin Mass: the external form in all its complexity arising from the depths of its inherent theology.

Those, on the other hand, who, knowing that the Novus Ordo was meant by Paul VI (et al.) to be in the vernacular, now seek for it to be in Latin — they are indeed guilty of a kind of aestheticism. For, in this scenario, the Latin becomes a decoration and a mystification, like other “smells and bells” that give the illusion of continuity in our liturgical worship and smudge the profound differences in content between old and new.

Andrew Shivone astutely observes that there is a ruthless logic built into the new rite that militates against traditional forms:

The Ordinary Form . . . perpetually communicates the disunity of spiritual intent and external gesture. The plethora of options for both laity and priests in the liturgy contributes to the sense that physical gestures and symbols are merely sentimental adornments to real internal worship. While one could celebrate it quite reverently with the Proper chants, reciting the Roman Canon, and in Latin, the very fact that all these forms are optional suggests that they are unnecessary aesthetic accoutrements for elitist retrogrades rather than integral parts of a whole.¹¹

It’s that dragon of “optionitis” rearing its ugly head once more. The TLM basically has to be in Latin: the language is bone of its bone, flesh of its flesh. It is written on its birth certificate and its passport.¹² Yes, I know: the Iroquois ended up getting some of the old liturgy in their own language, and there’s a Glagolitic Mass, and the high-church Anglicans did up a Cranmerized Roman Missal, etc. But 99.9% of the time, the old Roman liturgy was offered in Latin — and the same thing is true today in thousands of Mass locations across a hundred countries.

In the Novus Ordo, however, even the language used is an option, like so much else. As a result, somebody has to choose to do the new Mass in Latin. This choice, like other choices, instantly creates polarization, in a way that something inevitable, something simply given, does not do. Further, whenever anything traditional but optional in the Novus Ordo is done, it thereby becomes a personal accomplishment posited by the pastoral discretion, intellectual conviction, and good taste of the celebrant, and thus reflective of his personality or “ars celebrandi.” That is my own primary critique of the “reverent Novus Ordo” and the ROTR (as discussed in my article “Why the Reform of the Reform Is Doomed”).

In fact, there is a still deeper level to consider. The traditional Roman liturgy is based upon the pontifical liturgy in its solemn form. Every other version— Solemn High Mass, High or Sung Mass, and Low Mass— is a pragmatic reduction for pastoral exigencies. It’s as if, in theory, you’d always want to have a pontifical Mass (since the bishop is Christ par excellence, as the Church Fathers insistently say, and the primordial Mass is the whole Church gathered around its bishop), but since that’s impossible, you take the next achievable level.¹³

This paradigm was rejected by the liturgical reform, which took the indi- vidual priest’s liturgy as the fundamental form and made anything else a matter of adding things on to the parish Mass template.¹⁴ That is a major reversal of organic liturgical development. It explains why, whenever a priest does the liturgy in keeping with our Roman traditions, he is thought to be an “aesthete,” since all those additions are, in the Bugnini perspective, unnecessary additions. The reformers, at least to this extent, were trapped within the Low Mass culture and the excessive prioritization of validity, to the neglect of authenticity and fittingness.¹⁵

In short, the Latin Novus Ordo is not a solution for our woes. It is an awkward misfit that will confuse some, disappoint others, and inspire no one. The one and only solution, in both the short term and the long term, is a principled, inflexible adherence to the great Latin liturgical tradition, which no one on earth has the authority to outlaw, and which it would be spiritual suicide to surrender.

1. Matthew Hazell, “‘All the Elements of the Roman Rite’?”

2. Mosebach, Heresy of Formlessness, 2. This author is certainly right to say that the external beauty must be sought for, and that the willed absence of it is evil: “The doctrine of supposedly ‘inner values’ hidden under a dirty and decrepit shell is something I find highly suspicious. I already believed that the soul imparts a form, a face, a surface to the body, even before I learned that it was a truth defined by the Church’s teaching authority. Consider me a Mediterranean primitive, but I do not believe a language that is untrue, full of deceit, and lacking in feeling can contain ideas of any value. What applies in art must apply to a far higher degree in the public prayer of the Church; if, in ordinary life, ugliness shows us the presence of untruth, in the realm of religion it may indicate something worse” (ibid.).

3. See “Revisiting Paul VI’s Apologia for the New Mass” in Kwasniewski, Once and Future Roman Rite, 109–43.

4. Paul VI, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi, no. 42.

5. Mosebach (Heresy of Formlessness, 186) used this phrase to describe the traditional ceremonial for reading the Gospel, but it readily lends itself to the way the entire classical liturgy works, as Joseph Shaw explains in Sacred and Great: A Brief Introduction to the Traditional Latin Mass (Os Justi Press, 2023).

6. Kwasniewski, ed., Newman on Worship, 386.

7. See my article “Why Restricting the TLM Harms Every Parish Mass,” Crisis Magazine, August 13, 2021; cf. chapter 7.

8. For Shaw’s extended treatment of this topic, see “Understanding Liturgical Participation” in Joseph Shaw, The Liturgy, the Family, and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays of a Traditional Catholic (Os Justi, 2023), 57–85.

9. Shaw’s final article in the series, “Part 5: 1965?,” falls outside the current discussion. I return to the 1965 interim missal in chapter 13.

10. See Dietrich von Hildebrand, Liturgy and Personality (The Hildebrand Project, 2016).

11. Andrew Shivone, “The Glorious Form of the Liturgy,” Humanum Review, Language: Issue Two.

12. For a defense of this claim in relation to the Roman liturgy’s shift from Greek to Latin, see “Was Liturgical Latin Introduced As— and Because It Was— the Vernacu- lar?,” in Kwasniewski, ed., Illusions of Reform, 114–22.

13. This, incidentally, shows that the Missa cantata should be privileged in traditional circles a great deal more than it tends to be. The read Mass (Missa lecta) or Low Mass is understandable for reasons of devotion and convenience, but its prevalence in parishes is partially the result of a subtle form of Western liturgical minimalism that sees many of the normative “externals” of the Roman rite as dispensable or even distracting/detracting from spirituality — an attitude dangerously akin to Protestant iconoclasm. In reality, the gestures, postures, vestments, music, and architecture are icons of the wedding feast of the Lamb. In the East there is a Sunday annually celebrated as the “Triumph of Orthodoxy,” commemorating the victory of the iconophiles and exalting the holy icons. In the West, we are still fighting for our triumph over iconoclasm.

14. Bugnini (Reform of the Liturgy, 340) is explicit about this: “The point of departure for the reform should not be ‘private’ Mass but ‘Mass with a congregation’; not Mass as read but Mass with singing. But which Mass with song— the pontifical, the solemn, or the simple sung Mass? Given the concrete situation in the churches, the answer can only be: Mass celebrated by a priest, with a reader, servers, a choir or cantor, and a congregation. All other forms, such as pontifical Mass, solemn Mass, Mass with a deacon, will be amplifications or further simplifications of this basic Mass, which is therefore called ‘normative.’”

15. See my article “The Four Qualities of Liturgy: Validity, Licitness, Fittingness, and Authenticity,” NLM, November 9, 2020.