The Reign of Novelty and the Sins of the Times: Why the Novus Ordo Is Solely Modern in Content (Part 4 - Conclusion)
In the last part, we refuted the notion that the Novus Ordo is “more ancient” or that it resembles early Christian liturgies; on the contrary, its (1) construction out of freely chosen materials, (3) filtered via committee, (2) all of them reworked, makes it ultramodern. In fact, the assumptions behind the reform negate its claim to being traditional in any sense. (To understand the premises on which I will draw my conclusions today, I strongly recommend reading the preceding parts: 1, 2, and 3.) — PAK
Conforming our language to the truth
Nothing produced by a committee that operated according to progressivist principles could ever be truthfully given the same name as something traditional.
Thus, the term “Roman Rite” can be applied only to the Tridentine rite in its bimillennial continuity; the Novus Ordo is not and could not ever be the “Roman Rite” except for an adherent of nominalism or positivism for whom language does not name realities but only invented concepts. In that case “Roman Rite” is no more than a flatus vocis.1
A Church that adheres to the real created order as the bedrock of human knowledge and desire; a Church built on the historical inbreaking of divine revelation and its historical continuation in the community formed by that revelation; a Church that confesses the enfleshment of the Word as the ultimate scandal of the particular, reflected in the particularities of Christian tradition — this Church cannot accept that nominalism and positivism without committing a suicidal inconsistency that would vitiate all of its claims. Put differently, if the modern liturgists are correct, then historic confessional Catholicism itself is false; but if the modern liturgists are incorrect, then the traditionalist position follows of necessity, as the only alternative.
Having seen what we have seen, it also follows that we cannot correctly speak of a “liturgical reform” (as I have hitherto done in line with convention), but only properly of a “liturgical revolution.” A “reform” presupposes something to return to as a base, that is, a form to which one can be newly conformed. Martin Mosebach has often said that “reform” implies “return to form,” that is, return to the reign of form over matter, quality over quantity. So, for instance, governmental reform will keep the constitution, the laws, the offices, but will try to follow or implement them better, or remove whatever is obstructing their best operation. A revolution, in contrast, overturns the existing order and replaces it with a new constitution, new laws, and new offices, even when it retains some of the material elements of the old order such as palaces now converted into the party’s headquarters.2
In like manner, while there is not a material overturning of every aspect of the old liturgy — for example, the Church still has priests and deacons serving at the altar, and 13% of the orations of the old missal did, amazingly, find their way intact into the new missal (though only 13%!) — nevertheless, the old liturgy, including its symbology, its music, its rubrics, is repudiated by Paul VI as a form and a norm, inasmuch as anything retained was retained only by passing through the self-consciously modern filter of the new rite’s authors, who were given a nearly-unlimited power of evaluation, selection, redaction, and composition.3 As Fr. John Baldovin puts it:
Since the reform was clearly intended to update anachronistic aspects of the Roman liturgy (SC 23, 50) it was certainly part of the brief of the reformers that they select and edit prayers to suit the changes in theology and spirituality experienced in the late twentieth century. Any other course of action would have been irresponsible. Therefore when more positive motivations are substituted for a rather negative spirituality, the reformers were performing their task.4
In short: the liturgical revolution rests on an error in first principles that vitiates the soundness of any and all structures built upon it. It was, and is, an act of unprecedented hubris, an incurable rupture, a sin of infidelity against Divine Providence, an injustice against the souls purchased with the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ.
We may draw three conclusions.
First, it is impossible to “celebrate the Novus Ordo well,” if by “well” is meant “in continuity with Catholicism.” The observation of Andrew Thompson-Briggs — originally made about fine art — may be applied to the Reform of the Reform and other such fantasies:
We cannot receive the tradition by standing outside the tradition, appropriating what we will. That is what tourists do. It is an inorganic approach, a postmodern approach, bound to fail. Rather than grafting ourselves onto the venerable tree, we would be assembling a bundle of sticks. When, in the old poetic world, the young received the tradition, they received it whole from a master.5
That is the nature of tradition: “received whole from a master.” And that is why the only road forward is an uncompromising restoration of the Roman Rite in its Tridentine (i.e., pre-1955) fullness.6
Second, we must admit, lamentably, that, thanks to the expenditure of vast quantities of ultramontanist capital, it was possible for Paul VI and his successors to impose a pseudo-liturgy on the Latin-rite Church in such a way that it has become artificially established as a pseudo-tradition; in other words, it has become emotionally and socially normative, even if it cannot ever be metaphysically, epistemologically, and morally normative. As the great French traditionalist Jean Madiran observed:
There are now two traditions in the Church, two heritages vying for the Catholic name... They do not have the same titles, the same value, the same authenticity... One draws its legitimacy from the system of values recognized by the contemporary world, the other from the witness of the Church until [Pius XII]... The revolution became tradition, the revolution created its own tradition — no longer outside the Church, but within it.7
That is how a pseudo-tradition is created: the elements in their new constellation are established by decree, accepted by “obedience,” and harden into custom. The conciliar revolution established the elements all at once (it took about a decade, which is a flash in the pan in Church history — hence, the language of “a new Pentecost”). One thinks of a civil constitution that goes into force on such-and-such a date. Remember that it was the influential Cardinal Suenens of Belgium who stated: “Vatican II is the French Revolution in the Church” — a claim vindicated by Pope Francis’s explicit inclusion of the motto “liberty, equality, and fraternity” in his encyclical letter Fratelli Tutti. The revolutionary program has installed itself in the Holy See, much as Christ spoke of the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place (cf. Mt 24:15) — that is, a false image of God in a commandeered temple with a pseudo-liturgy based on a faux tradition.
Thanks to the hypnotizing power of hyperpapalism, it is the traditionalists who now look like the revolutionaries: we appear to be overthrowing a constitution. We are; but it is the defective constitution of the pseudo-tradition. Why should we respect an arbitrary constitution formed by a group of theological Jacobins when there was already a constitution present — one that issued from the totality of Church history, from the age of the Fathers, from the Apostles, back to the Heart of Christ?
No matter how long the Novus Ordo lasts, it can never become traditional, for the same reason that rock music played 500 years from now — God forbid — would still be contemptible for anyone with knowledge of the art of music and the paragons of supreme musical achievement, or even of healthy traditional folk music. The reason Palestrina, Bach, Haydn, and Chopin can be called great composers is, quite simply, that they write inherently great music according to all the norms by which one can objectively judge that art form; and, although tastes will vary and the fortunes of composers will rise and fall, anyone who knows music will be able to recognize that greatness as an intrinsic, universal, timeless attribute of their work. The same is true in the sphere of liturgy: if there is still a Novus Ordo Mass being said somewhere 500 years from now, it will not cease to be a slap-dash product of the lame-brained ideas of twentieth-century committees operating on faulty assumptions and perverse principles. To make this claim more concrete: the versus populum position of the celebrant will never cease to be wrong no matter how long it is wrongly practiced.
Third, our argument sufficiently demonstrates that the Novus Ordo cannot but be illicit.8 The sacred rites of the Church are not raw material in the hands of human laboratory technicians, they are a godly inheritance that must be received with humility and gratitude. No pope has the authority to do what Paul VI did, and no result of such an abuse of authority can have legality or legal force; no pope has the authority to put himself above the entirety of ecclesiastical tradition as its judge. Therefore, the creation of a new rite is illicit. Such a fabricated rite cannot be binding in conscience because its construction was wrong in itself.9
It follows from this that no priest can be required to use Paul VI’s books, and, indeed, if he understands the nature of liturgy, he will not use them, but will see himself as under obligation to use a traditional rite of the Church, be it Roman, Dominican, Sarum, Ambrosian, or one of the Eastern rites. I would say it is an intuitive awareness of the unlawfulness of the new rite that gives rise to the strong conviction in the minds of TLM-only priests (e.g., members of the FSSP or the ICKSP) that they should never say the new rite or even concelebrate it. Many laity have a similar intuition and conviction, which obviously has ramifications for the question of the Mass obligation, since one cannot be obliged to assist at that which is illicit.
The principles of the reform shattered the “taboo” of altering the rites of divine worship. It was precisely this hubristic act of rupture with tradition, this elevation of modern man’s judgment or desire as the principle of principles, that unleashed six decades of monstrous liturgical abuse, of sacrilegious manipulations, permutations, and “adaptations,” of subordinating the divine mysteries to the whims of individuals or committees. The sins of the fathers of the new rite were visited upon the children.10
The combination of liturgical inauthenticity, unfittingness, lawlessness, and sacrilege does more to explain the disastrous state of the Church in the West than any other possible explanation, for the reasons given in John Lamont’s essay “Is the Mass of Paul VI Licit?”:
It is likely that a wish to avoid drawing any such conclusion [viz., that the Novus Ordo is illicit] explains the general failure to examine the question of the liceity of the missal of Paul VI. But although this conclusion is unwelcome, it is also illuminating. In his address to the Plenary Meeting of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in January 2012, Benedict XVI observed accurately that “in vast areas of the earth faith risks being extinguished, like a flame that is no longer fed. We are facing a profound crisis of faith.”
The mysteriousness of this crisis has rarely been sufficiently emphasised. It is not as if the Church is confronted with enemies that have a real although twisted spiritual appeal and a powerful message, as was the case with the first Protestants; or an enemy supported by brilliant minds and literary talents, like the Enlightenment; or an enemy with slogans and goals that appeal to serious and self-sacrificing persons, like the French Revolution with its “liberté, égalité, fraternité.”
The Church [today, in contrast,] is being defeated by a secularist hedonism whose aims and slogans are consumerist greed, abortion, contraception, fornication, euthanasia, the legitimation and celebration of sexual perversion, atheism, and the rejection of any difference between man and brute animals. These are all pure diseases of human society, rather than twisted forms of the pursuit of legitimate objectives such as justice and knowledge — twisted forms that did exist in such anti-Catholic movements as the French Revolution and Communism, and that gave these movements their strength. [The diseases of secular humanism] do no more than cripple and destroy their adherents. They are a source of weakness to the enemies of the Church, rather than a basis of real strength. It is thus strange that these enemies, advancing these positions, have been triumphing over the Church all across the board. Such weak, corrupt, and decadent opponents should not present a serious challenge to the Church.
The fact that the Novus Ordo is illicit, however, largely explains this triumph. If the divinely established form of worship of God has been suppressed in by far the larger part of the Catholic Church, that means that the duty of worshipping God is not being fulfilled in this part of the Church. The fruits produced by the worship of God have as a result largely been lost to the Church; her members are not sanctified by their participation in worship that is pleasing to God, and the grace and mercy that God provides in response to such worship are lost.
This explains the current internal decline of the Church — a decline without parallel in history — and her defeat by intrinsically weak enemies. The preponderance of unnatural vice over fornication in the sexual sins of the Catholic clergy, and the important role of sexual perversion in the ideology of the enemies of the Church — themselves also things without a parallel in history — may also be linked to the abandonment of the proper worship of God. Such perversion is identified by St. Paul as a consequence of failing to give God the honour and praise that is due to him (Romans 1:21, 24–27), and this honour and praise is given primarily by the celebration of the liturgy.
We are confronted today by a situation that can only be called apocalyptic, in the literal sense: it reveals or unveils the way things truly are, and this is a tremendous grace in itself — to have the veils torn off of illusions and lies, while paradoxically revealing or unveiling the truth about that which is inherently mysterious and veiled: the mysteries of faith that infinitely transcend the capacity of human reason and the reach of human technē, the inscrutable origins of divino-apostolic rites with their millennial fecundity, their power to reach and to claim even us victims of revolution and to bring us healing and peace.
And this is why we must not compromise, swallow half-truths, tolerate the rigged terms of false peace offered by the prison-guards of treachery (custodes traditionis), or depart one millimeter from the program of restoration. As long as the tradition is under attack by the wolves that would tear it to pieces, we must be vigilant, fully committed and engaged, ready to suffer and even to die for “the most beautiful thing this side of heaven,” which emanates from and returns in praise to the fairest of the sons of men (cf. Ps 44:3 [45:2]), Jesus Christ, King of kings and Lord of lords.
“A breath of the voice,” i.e., “a mere name, word, or sound without a corresponding objective reality” (source).
In his famous address to the Roman Curia on December 22, 2005, Benedict XVI spoke of how progressives believed they could give the Church a new constitution: “The nature of a Council as such is therefore basically misunderstood. In this way, it is considered as a sort of constituent that eliminates an old constitution and creates a new one. However, the Constituent Assembly needs a mandator and then confirmation by the mandator, in other words, the people the constitution must serve. The Fathers had no such mandate and no one had ever given them one; nor could anyone have given them one because the essential constitution of the Church comes from the Lord and was given to us so that we might attain eternal life and, starting from this perspective, be able to illuminate life in time and time itself.”
I have asserted many times in this series that the new liturgy selectively and ideologically edits whatever it takes from the tradition. There is by now a veritable mountain of scholarship that substantiates this assertion. See, for example: Lauren Pristas, The Collects of the Roman Missals; Michael Fiedrowicz, The Traditional Mass; Daniel Graham, Lex Orandi (a goldmine of information, even if the commentary is of uneven quality); Anthony Cekada, Work of Human Hands (invaluable for its research, though gravely flawed in its theological conclusions); the books of Matthew Hazell (1, 2, 3, 4); my lecture “Christian Militancy in the Prayer of the Church”; my articles “A Tale of Two Collects: Different Worldviews in Old and New Prayers”; “Fiddling with the Collects of Ss Henry II and Louis IX: Wokeness Avant la Lettre”’; “Comparison of Old and New Prayers for Blessing of Ashes”; “A Comparison of the Old and New Blessing of Candles on Candlemas.” There are dozens more like these, all showing the same thing.
John Baldovin, SJ, Reforming the Liturgy: A Response to the Critics (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2008), 125.
C.A. Thompson-Briggs, “Two Hundred Years of Strangulation: Reviving Form in a Formless Age.”
Madiran says “until 1958,” meaning the death of Pius XII; but surely the overhaul of Holy Week was the same kind of false reform or revolution, in a restricted part of the missal, that Paul VI’s revolution was for the entirety of the Church’s liturgical life. The fact that Paul VI’s was quantitatively more extensive is quite beside the point. Pius XII violated the principle of tradition as form and norm, and Paul VI pointed to this (and to Pius X’s dismantling of the breviary) as the precedents for his own much larger project.
Read with care: I say illicit (i.e., lawless, illegal), not invalid. Few traditionalists have ever denied the bare sacramental validity of the Novus Ordo; I certainly have never called it into question. Indeed, I maintain that its validity makes the impiety of its construction, the unfittingness of its rubrics, and the frequent sacrileges that accompany its celebration all the more offensive. The difficulty nowadays is that most Catholics have been schooled (without realizing it) in a rigid neoscholastic reductionism — much lamented by Joseph Ratzinger — according to which the only relevant property of a liturgy is whether it is “valid” or not. Such Catholics then instantly believe that any critique of the Novus Ordo is a rejection of its “validity.” In reality, validity is only one of the four qualities that any God-pleasing liturgy should have. For a full explanation, see my lecture “The Four Qualities of Liturgy: Validity, Licitness, Fittingness, and Authenticity.” It will be evident to the attentive reader that my view in some particulars has developed, but the overall analysis of the four qualities remains true. In a revised version of this lecture given more recently, the section on licitness is more refined (see the video here).
Fr. Joseph Fessio — no traditionalist — implicitly acknowledges this wrongness: “The liturgists after the Council tried to construct a more perfect liturgy. But you know something? When you’ve grown up in a house and a room is added on and a story added on, a garage is added on, it may not be architecturally perfect, but it’s your home. To destroy it and try to construct a new one out of steel and glass and tile because that’s the modern idea, is not the way you live a human life. But that’s what’s happened to the liturgy” (“The Mass of Vatican II,” Catholic World Report, December 7, 2023; originally 1999). The contrast here between one’s home — in the ideal sense, an inherited place, in continuity with one’s ancestry, where one can dwell secure — and a modern construct that thwarts the “living of a human life” is a contrast between what is in accord with divine and natural law and what is discordant with them.
The liturgical revolution began prior to the Novus Ordo. When I speak of the “new liturgy” here, I include the changes of the 1950s and 1960s that paved the way for Paul VI’s new rite. Experimentation, the lust for the new, is a phenomenon that can be found across the twentieth century; it is a telltale sign of its spiritual decadence and mental debility.
A friend of mine sent this comment privately and I'd like to share it here:
"I really believe that the lust for the new in the mid 20th century was fallout from the horrors of WW1 and WW2. The generation that came of age in the 1950s was taught to scorn everything that came before as somehow tainted and responsible for the horrors they heard about and saw. Modern art, architecture, medicine, science-- was sold to them and subsequent generations as superior and indicative of a more elevated, educated age. The Church was both an active participant and a proponent of this gigantic fallacy. Today the Church is disintegrating because of this."
Great series, Peter. Thank you. I have often wondered why the current pontiff, bishops and others have led such a concerted attack on the TLM and have sought vainly to eliminate it. I have come to the inescapable conclusion that at some point, like Martin Luther, Thomas Cranmer and other 16th century heretics, they could no longer bring themselves to believe in the Real Presence. For them, the Mass is just an empty ritual, a task to be completed. The TLM doesn't allow you to lapse into such heresy with its emphatic reminders of the most sacred truths of the faith concerning the Eucharist, especially in the prayers of the Offertory and the Roman Canon. The replacement of the beautiful Offertory prayers by a faux Jewish table prayer and the virtual elimination of the Roman Canon with artificially constructed replacements has sapped their faith in the fundamental beliefs of Holy Mother Church. Unfortunately they hold all the high ground in the Church and are prepared to exert their will in a tyrannical fashion.