Against the Robots

More than fifty years ago now, the Catholic Church adopted a new Mass that broke with Church tradition in a way never before seen. The reformers, however, did not foresee that the traditional Mass would outlive them. They were even convinced of the opposite. And they used all the means at their disposal to achieve their ends: the suppression of the traditional Roman Mass. ¹ Yet, it is clear that this Mass continues to attract many faithful, and among them, young people who commit themselves, as prayer leaders, as seminarians, to celebrating and keeping alive this form of the Roman rite. The latter are often accused of being troublemakers, nostalgic, identity-based, and above all, a crime of lèse-majesté, of being against the Second Vatican Council, which is no longer separated from its own spirit; this spirit of the council on which we feast without ever really qualifying it, as with almost all important things. In the Church, as elsewhere, progressives act by essentializing their opponents in order to discredit them. The liturgy is the summit and source of the Church's life, as the last council reminded us, and the liturgy is tradition. To resolve the liturgical crisis it carries within, the Church will have to reweave the threads of damaged and wounded tradition, even and especially if the times press it to do nothing.

Which Vatican II?

"The new Ordo Missae, if we consider the new elements, susceptible to very diverse assessments, which appear to be implied or implied in it, departs impressively, in the whole as well as in detail, from the Catholic theology of the Holy Mass, as it was formulated at the XXII session of the Council of Trent, which, by definitively fixing the "canons" of the rite, raised an insurmountable barrier against any heresy which could harm the integrity of the Mystery" ² Cardinal Ottaviani, Prefect Emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, addressed Paul VI in this way on September 3, 1969, we were a few weeks before the entry into force of the new Mass. This concluded, in a certain way, the Second Vatican Council which had nevertheless closed its doors for four years! Let us dwell a little on the figure of Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani: the son of a baker, from the poor districts of Rome, he proved to be a very good student at the Pontifical Roman Seminary, and obtained three doctorates, in theology, philosophy and canon law. Secretary of the Holy Office, then propefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he worked for the four years preceding the Council to prepare the themes to be addressed and would pronounce the habemus papam for the election of John XXIII. This month of October 1962 would see the masks fall and the positions, progressive or modernist, be displayed. John XXIII, in his opening speech of the Council, would display a certain contempt for the curial team of Pius XII by declaring: "The Bride of Christ prefers to resort to the remedy of mercy, rather than brandish the weapons of severity." She believes that, rather than condemning, she responds better to the needs of our time, by highlighting more fully the riches of her doctrine. ³ There is in this sentence a dichotomy which inaugurates and prefigures the entire Second Vatican Council: can there be mercy if there is no condemnation of an act? Why would there be a remedy if there is no previous injury? Wasn't the desire to sweep sin under the carpet like an inconvenient dust seen? The tone used, where meekness asserts itself as the supreme authority, will become the leitmotif of the Second Vatican Council. From then on, a rebellion is organized. The texts prepared by the curia are rejected. In particular, De fontibus revelationis , on the sources of revelation, and De Ecclesia . An absolute majority was required to ratify this rejection; John XXIII gave his agreement and was satisfied with the relative majority. "Thus was achieved a veritable coup d'état, by which all the liberal tendencies, in the process of organizing themselves into a 'conciliar majority,' seized the doctrinal power inherited from Pius XII from the Curia." ⁴ From then on, and since the working texts had been trampled underfoot and discarded, work began on the liturgy. It was thought that the subject would unify. The progressives had, as usual, an agenda, which conservatives almost never have. Cardinal Ottaviani, on October 30, 1962, spoke; he was not yet blind and was about to show clairvoyance; he asked that the rite of the Mass not be treated "like a piece of fabric that is brought back into fashion according to the whim of each generation." It seemed to those present that he was taking too long in his development. He was interrupted without regard for his rank. His microphone was cut off to the applause of a large number of Fathers. The Second Vatican Council could begin.

Reformers at work

Are we against the Council if we love the traditional Roman Mass? The question has been debated for fifty years. Even today, any lover of the Tridentine Mass finds himself sent to the ropes if he tries to support his position. As if love of the traditional rite were enough to demonstrate rejection of the new Mass. Essentialization, again and again. A large number of people would agree with this assertion, and an equally large number would affirm that Vatican II put an end to the Latin Mass, to celebration with one's back to the people, and to communion in the mouth. And this number, however large, would be wrong. A Council that announces almost from the beginning that it will be pastoral can engender a form of mistrust. And it seems quite naive to believe that the pastoral and the dogmatic have jointly drawn a line between them that nothing and no one will want or be able to cross! During Vatican II, a profusion of ideas emerged. This is what will impress minds as diverse as Cardinal Ratzinger, Cardinal Journet or Father Congar. Vatican II saw with the fall of the Curia the last limits weaken. A new wind was blowing into the Church, it was the wind of the world and the taste for novelty infected everyone, but it also created an unknown intellectual and spiritual emulation. Not all the prelates gathered were revolutionaries, far from it. And to reduce Vatican II to that would be lacking in truth. Beginning thus with the liturgy, the spirit of the Council began to exist and came to believe that everything was possible. Was it the breath of the Holy Spirit or the fumes of Satan ⁵ The commission produced the constitution on the sacred liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium , which completed past studies like Mediator Dei , recalling in strong terms what the liturgy can be or not be. The status of Latin was renewed and guaranteed; many forget that the entire Second Vatican Council took place in Latin, that all the prelates gathered followed the Tridentine Mass since there was no other! But, in the French translation of Sacrosanctum Concilium , the progressive spirit that would enter through the rather too open windows of the Vatican and that would blow with ever-renewed ardor in France during the implementation of the liturgical reform is already apparent. Thus, we read for the verbs, instaurare and fovere : the constitution sets itself the goal of "restoration and progress of the liturgy." If Instaurare can be translated as restore, fovere has little to do with any progress! Fovere rather means to favor, to encourage. "Thus, the clearly stated goal (in Latin and in faithful translations) was to restore and promote the liturgy. Not to destroy it in order to create another one. Not even to make it “progress”… ⁶ » Sacrosanctum Concilium affirms, by taking it up again, the theme of active participation (already highlighted by Pius X and taken up again by Pius XII), respect for the sacred language (I quote: “the use of Latin will be preserved in the Latin rites”), and we will find nothing there concerning communion in the hand or the orientation of the priest… If the draft can refresh for a moment, it can also cause a stiff neck, all sorts of collateral damage where a closed window would simply have made us sweat. As the Second Vatican Council wanted to be a restorer of ancient things forgotten or buried under successive layers of tradition (driven, all the same, by a hatred of the Middle Ages), it also tended to embrace its time as closely as possible. The reformers at work

Are we against the Council if we love the traditional Roman Mass? The question has been debated for fifty years. Even today, any lover of the Tridentine Mass finds himself sent to the ropes if he tries to support his position. As if love of the traditional rite were enough to demonstrate rejection of the new Mass. Essentialization, again and again. A large number of people would agree with this assertion, and an equally large number would affirm that Vatican II put an end to the Latin Mass, to celebration with one's back to the people, and to communion in the mouth. And this number, however large, would be wrong. A Council that announces almost from the beginning that it will be pastoral can engender a form of mistrust. And it seems quite naive to believe that the pastoral and the dogmatic have jointly drawn a line between them that nothing and no one will want or be able to cross! During Vatican II, a profusion of ideas emerged. This is what will impress minds as diverse as Cardinal Ratzinger, Cardinal Journet or Father Congar. Vatican II saw with the fall of the Curia the last limits weaken. A new wind was blowing into the Church, it was the wind of the world and the taste for novelty infected everyone, but it also created an unknown intellectual and spiritual emulation. Not all the prelates gathered were revolutionaries, far from it. And to reduce Vatican II to that would be lacking in truth. Beginning thus with the liturgy, the spirit of the Council began to exist and came to believe that everything was possible. Was it the breath of the Holy Spirit or the fumes of Satan ^? The commission produced the constitution on the sacred liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium , which completed past studies like Mediator Dei , recalling in strong terms what the liturgy can be or not be. The status of Latin was renewed and guaranteed; many forget that the entire Second Vatican Council took place in Latin, that all the prelates gathered followed the Tridentine Mass since there was no other! But, in the French translation of Sacrosanctum Concilium , the progressive spirit that would enter through the rather too open windows of the Vatican and that would blow with ever-renewed ardor in France during the implementation of the liturgical reform is already apparent. Thus, we read for the verbs, instaurare and fovere : the constitution sets itself the goal of "restoration and progress of the liturgy." If instaurare can be translated as restore, fovere has little to do with any progress! Fovere rather means to favor, to encourage. "Thus, the clearly stated goal (in Latin and in faithful translations) was to restore and promote the liturgy. Not to destroy it in order to create another." Not even to make it “progress”… ⁸ » Sacrosanctum Concilium affirms, by taking it up again, the theme of active participation (already highlighted by Pius X and taken up again by Pius XII), respect for the sacred language (I quote: “the use of Latin will be preserved in the Latin rites”), and we will find nothing there concerning communion in the hand or the orientation of the priest… If the draft can refresh for a moment, it can also cause a stiff neck, all sorts of collateral damage where a closed window would simply have made us sweat. As the Second Vatican Council wanted to be a restorer of ancient things forgotten or buried under successive layers of tradition (driven, all the same, by a hatred of the Middle Ages), it also tended to embrace its time as closely as possible even if it meant lowering the gauge of its requirements. Clerics drawing from another tradition, sometimes antiliturgical, sometimes coming from the Liturgical Movement , were preparing to lay down their cards and play with this dichotomy and, it must be said, a certain weakening of the hierarchy and of the sacred in order to dismantle the liturgy. to lower the gauge of its requirements. Clerics drawing from another tradition, sometimes antiliturgical, sometimes coming from the Liturgical Movement , were preparing to lay down their cards and play with this dichotomy and, it must be said, a certain weakening of the hierarchy and of the sacred in order to dismantle the liturgy.

We know that all the revolutions the world has known had only one goal: power. The discourse of the revolution relies on the people, but only the people derive no benefit from it. Thus, we can read in Sacrosanctum Concilium : "The rites must be simple and brief and adapted to the faithful"... Is there only one type of faithful? And why absolutely seek to ensure that the rite is understood? Isn't the sacred shrouded in mystery? Isn't mystery an integral part of the wonder of the faithful? How many faithful endowed with healthy habits have been shaken up, to say the least, by the reform of the liturgy? How many have been violated by having their property stolen from them by taking away the Latin recitations of the prayers of Saint Ambrose or Saint Gregory the Great? Now, the faithful is he, the peasant of the Garonne, as Maritain calls him in his eponymous book. And the peasant often did not see or understand the "new fire" of the Council, which, on the other hand, turned him away from the Church with so many novelties! The faithful found the new fire in the custom that was not yet called the rite, as Pascal summed up so well ⁹ . The Protestant Reformation at the beginning of the 16th century chiseled away this hatred of what is called Christianity, by pointing out only its faults, and the Council of Trent had stopped the hemorrhage by undertaking to refound the shaken Catholic faith. Dom Prosper Guéranger, the refounder of the Abbey of Solesmes, restorer of the Order of Saint Benedict, a holy man if ever there was one, wrote an edifying book: The Liturgical Year . We are in the 19th century, the French Revolution and its upheavals have passed by, the memory of Gallicanism and Jansenism ("French Protestantism" said Dom Guéranger) reigns in the dioceses whose liturgies are all different from each other. Dom Guéranger puts the church back at the center of the village by favoring the Roman missal. It is sometimes said that The Liturgical Year marks the beginning of the Liturgical Movement, this book and the movement will however move further and further apart in their intentions as in their actions. In 1680, Dom Henri Leclercq writes about the reform of the Breviary of Paris : "We took it upon ourselves to cut back without moderation, where it was enough to hoe, we mow down, under the pretext of making disappear everything that could have the appearance of a superstition." The reformers of the liturgy follow one another and resemble one another. This anti-liturgical tradition had been running for four centuries when it found the playground of the Second Vatican Council. Progressives have this way of passing off old lanterns as new things when conservatives are incapable of magnifying their heritage, too decent and too modest as they are. Dom Leclercq continued thus: "The Sanctoral as well as the Temporal were ravaged... Reductions were allowed in the rite of Marian feasts, which showed as little good taste as good sense and piety (...) On this slippery path, they went too far. The lessons of the feasts of the Virgin, the blessings of her particular Office underwent retouching and suppressions that were at the very least inopportune. It was disrespectful to Mary to suppress this beautiful and ancient formula: Gaude, Maria Virgo, cunctas haereses sola interemisti (Rejoice, Virgin Mary, it is you alone who have overcome all heresies), as it was disgraceful to no longer say to her this invocation: Dignare me laudare te, Virgo Sacrata; da mihi virtutem contra hostes tuos (Allow me to praise you, Sacred Virgin; give me the strength to fight your enemies). The names of certain feasts were changed. " Where we will discover in the missal of Paul VI that the liturgists had consistency in their ideas since thus the solemnity of March 25 was changed from the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin and it became Annontiatio Domini , a feast of the Lord. Dom Leclercq ends on this point: "We went against a distant tradition by suppressing the proper office of the Visitation. If the mother of God was treated in this way, her vicar in this world was not spared. The responsory: You are the shepherd of the sheep, you who are the prince of the Apostles and the antiphon: When he was Sovereign Pontiff he did not fear the earthly powers... were condemned to disappear." Dom Guéranger will prophetically affirm: "The modern liturgies of the Churches of France (have been) composed much more often by party men than by saints." The Benedictine monk attempts a telling comparison ¹⁰ : "In thinking of the current Reformation, the comparison of an old family home has often come to mind. If we show it to a purist aesthete, he will find that there are many faults of taste, that the styles are too mixed, that the rooms are too cluttered, etc. If we show it to an archaeologist, he will find that it is a shame not to restore this old residence to its original state as a 17th-century manor house and that we should eliminate everything that clashes with the style of the grand siècle. No doubt they are scientifically right and yet they do not see the essential: that a house has its soul and that this soul is made up of the personalities of all those who have lived in it and live in it. Personalities that betray in the thousand and one details of arrangement obscure to a stranger to the family. It is undoubtedly too early to judge whether our modern Reformers have truly grasped the “spirit” of the house, but we can believe Dom Guéranger when he says that those of the 17th and 18th centuries had not understood it, let alone appreciated it. "It was therefore necessary to do something new, and the liturgists of Vatican II will work on this, helped in this by the new Pope Paul VI who takes over from John XXIII, the latter, eager for the ideas of his time, particularly appreciates the Liturgical Movement .

Dom Guéranger by his clairvoyance, said about the liturgists that they wanted to profane the sacred language, and strong of his experience and his understanding of Protestantism and Jansenism of which he explains the intentions to want "to cut off in the worship all the ceremonies, all formulas that express mysteries. They taxed with superstition, with idolatry all that did not seem to them purely rational, thus restricting the expressions of faith, obstructing by doubt and even negation all the ways which open on the supernatural world. Thus… no more sacramentals, blessings, images, relics of saints, processions, pilgrimages, etc. There is no more altar but simply a table, no more sacrifice, as in any religion, but only a supper; no more churches, but only a temple like the Greeks and Romans, no more religious architecture, since there is no longer any mystery; no more Christian painting and sculpture, since there is no longer any perceptible religion; finally more poetry in a cult which is fertilized neither by love nor by faith. A century later, the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council had not read Dom Guéranger, or had forgotten him at the very least. They were preparing to reform, transform and therefore "progress" the "Holy Mass, as it was formulated at the XXII session of the Council of Trent, which, by definitively fixing the canons of the rite, raised a barrier impenetrable against any heresy that could undermine the integrity of the Mystery. They were soon to move against Latin, the first stage of their reform. Fascinated by novelties, they no longer knew that they were the continuators of the sinister constitutional clergy of Year V during the French Revolution when the arguments in favor and against Latin as the language of the Church had already been formulated... But that was ask modern people to have memory. A Protestant leaving his country no longer understood anything at the celebration when a Catholic could follow Mass anywhere in the world thanks to Latin. The Catholic first derived his universality from his language. He was Roman Catholic. Is it still?

The door left ajar by Sacrosanctum Concilium will be swept away by the "rioters" who expected nothing less. To return to our metaphor of the draft, who has never seen in a house the mistress of the house's desire to air out a room, and not prevent the violent gust of wind that was waiting for the opening of this window? Collateral damage is always calculated after the fact. The Revolution plays on the training and the chain of events that prove the attackers right, never the defenders. However, at this stage of the Council, at the very beginning, a phenomenon of the Estates General of 1789 is triggered. The men appointed by Paul VI get into battle formation. The secretary of the commission is called Annibale Bugnini, he will have the ferocious and efficient manners of the Phoenician warlord whose first name he bears. "This 'constituent assembly' (...) in charge of the overhaul of the entire Roman liturgy, was of considerable size. It included about fifty members, with in addition one hundred and fifty expert consultants, seventy-five expert advisors, not counting those who were consulted episodically." ¹¹ The Council continued its course and the reform unfolded in parallel to achieve a power superior to the congregations of the Curia. Paul VI was questioned from time to time for a decision that was intended to be final. The procrastinations of the Holy Father, numerous, gave even more power to the commission that decided when he did not decide. It was necessary to move forward, because only the movement, this purification of the "old church," was necessary. The progressives convinced themselves of a contradictory mission, at the very least: to rediscover the freshness of the primitive Church and to stick to the spirit of the times. In other words: to give the Church a youthful air and to fill again the naves that had begun to desert for some time. It's easy to see that it failed in both. In many places in Europe, the spirit of the times had already won out over tradition. This gave the reformers a taste of victory. Liturgical initiatives abounded. The preface and the canon concentrated the primary interests. Aloud, in the vernacular... It was like a throwback to Luther in the Catholic Church. A thousand reasons were found to expand concelebration. They relied on Sacrosanctum Concilium , which had opened the door with its vagueness regarding the number of authorized concelebrants. Everyone seemed to agree to restrict the number so that the dignity of the liturgy would not be affected, yet nothing and no one came forward to say what this number should be, so everyone did what they wanted and thus excess was crowned. When pastoral care claims to be authority, we walk head over heels! But in fact, the Church already corresponded completely to its time, it accredited the idea that authority no longer had the right to exist because it no longer knew that authority was a matter of love, and that it confused, like the world, power and authority, authority and authoritarianism.

The Mass of Paul VI

The revolution was seen everywhere. François Mauriac wrote in a beautiful plea on his “Bloc-Notes” of the Figaro Littéraire in November 1966: “They (the seminarians from the provinces who write to him) have found television, tobacco, the film club, leisure activities in the seminary: “(…) Clerics are no longer black, Gregorian chant exists in the form of memory. Before meals, we no longer hear a few verses from the Bible… In short, we stop talking about it, we had no right to say it, the soldier never knows that he is surrendering.” (...) This disarray among seminarians, after two years of seminary, will be neither hot nor cold, I suspect, for those of their elders who, at the same time as the cassock, got rid of what torments these demanding young hearts. We wanted to be in tune with the times and stick to our time, but not to people; people, we would impose on them what we thought was good for them. We deviated from it, therefore. Little by little, all the popular traditions often compared to superstitions were suppressed. Too great a part was given to the saints, it was remedied. It must be said that there were a number of Protestant “advisers” in or around the commission. The supernatural, in general, occupied the minds of the progressives, it was adapted. If necessary, we invented, we tinkered, and we tinkered a lot. We rediscovered the anti-liturgical roots that had run through the world for more than four centuries, those that we would have thought accomplished with the Protestant Reformation. Well no, we had to continue to run through this vein like the hatred of private masses, the saints... No one, studying the Second Vatican Council and its reform of the liturgy, can deny in all good faith that a Protestantization of the liturgy took place. Dom Guéranger always, Father Abbot of Solesmes, liked to say that Protestants “separated from unity in order to believe less. During those 1960s, it would have seemed to any saints of the past that the Church believed less.

"It was necessary to make the liturgy less clerical, more ecclesial and open to participation. In this participation, Christians will more easily realize that they are the Church that Christ associates with in the exercise of his priesthood to worship the Father and sanctify man. ¹² A liturgy that is too clerical due to priests who are followers of clericalism? The priest in persona christi was becoming the problem. But the reason was never explained, and authority and authoritarianism were still confused. Everything was mixed up as usual. We had forgotten that the attire, the uniform, expressed identity, but above all obliged us to this identity. Recalled to himself, the one who wears the uniform knows how this habit stifles his passions to transform him into another, greater than himself. But they wanted to force us to be what we were, without bringing anything of ourselves, without elevating us and submitting ourselves to the authority of God, since we were all ministers of Christ, without even trying to imitate him, without any effort, therefore. We see that the themes do not change from one era to another. If we want an example of the loss of the supernatural and therefore of the sacred, we note that nowhere in the New Mass does Saint Paul's warning to those who receive communion in an unworthy manner appear ¹³ Thus, during the Mass of Paul VI, there is never any confession, and yet everyone receives communion, without exception or almost. "The body of Christ is a right! I come to Mass, I have a right to it!" one could hear if one listened carefully. And everything concerning communion has become somewhat miserable in the New Mass. Long queues, queues one after the other , to take the sacred body of Jesus in the hand! For, looking elsewhere and apparently having no knowledge of what lies in the hand, without any unctuousness as Dom Guéranger would have said... To, piteously and mechanically, end up taking a step aside, moving from in front of the priest, and, scrupulous about showing his devotion in an improbable gesture never decreed by anyone, but copied from everyone, stupidly prostrate himself before the empty tabernacle and swallowing the holy host. O Desolation! What a loss of meaning! A holy curate of Ars would go mad to see the faithful receiving communion like this, who have become robots thanks to the liturgical reform of Paul VI! Only robots can fail to realize that they have the Lord of lords in their hands, which already borders on sacrilege! Fortunately, the ignorance that presides over this new way partially exonerates the faithful! Dom Guéranger declared thus, speaking of the Protestants, that they "found themselves led to remove from worship all the ceremonies, all the formulas which express mysteries. Thus... there are no more altars, but simply a table; no more sacrifice, as in any religion, but only a supper, no more church, but only a temple . We were there.

Let us compare the beginning of the celebration of the Mass in the two “forms” to understand what separates them ¹⁴ :
– In the traditional Roman Missal: “First the celebrant takes the amice by the ends of the cords, kisses it in the middle on the Cross, places it on his head; immediately he lowers it on the neck so that the collar of his vestments is covered, passes the cords under the arms, then behind the back, etc. (…) The priest having put on the vestments, takes the chalice in his left hand, as it has been prepared as has been said, which he carries raised in front of his chest, his right hand holding the purse on the chalice and, after having made the inclination to the cross or to the image (of the cross) which is in the sacristy, he goes to the altar preceded by the minister, etc. (…) He goes up to the middle of the altar, where he places the chalice towards the side of the Gospel, takes the corporal out of the purse, which he spreads in the middle of the altar, places the chalice covered with the veil there, while he puts the purse on the left side, etc. (…) He goes back down to the pavement, turns towards the altar where he remains standing in the middle, his hands joined in front of his chest, his fingers joined and extended, his right thumb crossed over his left thumb (which he must always do when joining his hands, except after the consecration), head bare, having first made a deep inclination towards the cross or the altar or a genuflection if the Most Holy Sacrament is in the tabernacle, he begins the Mass standing, Etc. (…) When he says Aufer a nobis , the celebrant with joined hands goes up to the altar, etc. (…) Bowing in the middle of the altar, with his joined hands placed on the altar so that his little fingers touch the front, while his ring fingers are placed on the table (something that must always be observed when his joined hands are placed on the altar), etc. (…) When he says “the bodies whose relics are here,” he kisses the altar in the middle, with his outstretched hands placed at an equal distance on each side, etc. (…) At the solemn Mass, he puts incense three times in the censer, saying at the same time: Ab illo benedicaris , “Be blessed by him,” etc.
– In the missal of Paul VI: “In the sacristy, according to the various forms of celebration, the liturgical vestments of the priest and his ministers will be prepared: for the priest, the alb, the stole and the chasuble. (…) All those who wear the alb will use the cord and the amice, unless another arrangement has been made. (…) The priest goes up to the altar and venerates it with a kiss. Then, if he sees fit, he incenses it while going around it. (…) Then, facing the people and with outstretched hands, the priest greets them with proposed formulas…” The entire Mass has thus become a rite bristling with options! The missal of Paul VI makes so many parts and prayers of the ceremony optional that from one church to another, people do not attend the same Mass, it depends on the priest, sometimes on the bishop, but so rarely. One could almost think that we are giving too much power to the priest by allowing him thus to decide on things that are beyond him. One could almost find, and certain saints of the past would not be mistaken, that there is clericalism in allowing the priest to decide the essential: the form of the road to be taken by the faithful to reach God. The priest takes on a completely new dimension in the Mass of Paul VI, because we will often remember the homily of the Mass, and we will often say of the new liturgy that it was beautiful by the grace of the priest's homily. Thus we border on clericalism at every moment in the new Mass. The priest who was only a servant and who slipped into the clothes of the ultimate priest, Jesus Christ, could change nothing, take nothing away, add nothing, to a rite that was beyond him. It is only by the grace of a metamorphosis that he dared to proceed and follow in the footsteps of Christ, priest of priests. There is no personalization of the priest as in the Mass of Paul VI. And The overabundance of choice also causes another flaw that does not exist in the Tridentine Mass: relativism. What too much choice causes. Who am I to choose? became a way of growing for the modern world, which was preparing for the great schism anticipated by Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange: "The Church is intransigent on principles, because she believes, and tolerant in practice, because she loves. The enemies of the Church, on the contrary, are tolerant on principles, because they do not believe, but intransigent in practice, because they do not love. The Church absolves sinners, the enemies of the Church absolve sins." So yes, there is a bit of Saint Pius V left in Paul VI, but so little. The pomp, the sacred, the meaning have been weakened. We can say one or two Kyrie at will, but here we used to say three to honor the three persons of the Trinity. ! The Confiteor has been reduced to the nominative intercession of patron saints. In 2021, there was an aggiornamento of the French translations, which were often calamitous, sometimes heretical. Much was drawn from the old missal to return to clearer words. The Orate fratres , which Paul VI had urged to be kept, was reinstated, but which in French had been forgotten. And these faithful who were supposed to participate actively with this battery of new measures? Well, they don't participate, or they do like robots, when everyone knows exactly what they have to do during a Tridentine Mass. When everyone actively participates through interior prayer, following the priest who advances with muffled steps towards the Good Lord. As a Benedictine monk says: "And this, perhaps, is how someone who has practiced the old Missal for years feels disoriented in the new one: the formulas often recall Christian Antiquity and its source beauty, but the spirit is not always ancient; it emerges from concerns that are neither ancient nor medieval[7]. » This is how Abbé Barthe defines the authority of the Mass of Paul VI: « one could say that the new liturgy is lex orandi , not in itself, but for what it contains of the ancient liturgy. » Now, 13% of the old missal remains in the new one.

It must be understood that all this is taking shape at a time when everything and its opposite are often said. Paul VI in his speech of November 26, 1969 indicated that the Mass would be said in the national language, whereas the Council, through Sacrosanctum Concilium, had indeed requested the opposite, except for very rare exceptions. Here again, where the Council said that Gregorian should occupy the principal place in the chants of the Mass, it was agreed that by eliminating Latin, Gregorian would be eliminated. Bugnini, the architect of the reform, would go so far as to declare that it would be truly unpleasant if in the final restoration this little pearl had disappeared from the Ordo Missae . He was speaking of the antiphon Introibo ad altare dei . It should be noted that it would disappear in the final version of the missal. The destruction of the liturgy required the destruction of the divine office. Here again, the commission worked on it with extraordinary zeal. Some offices were considered to be duplicative, they were reduced, they were simplified. Prime was eliminated, under the stupid pretext that Lauds existed. People openly believed themselves to be more intelligent than our predecessors in the Church. They created a lectionary whose complexity never ceases to amaze, and they destroyed understanding through the annual rhythm that the traditional Mass offered. They confused liturgy and catechism. They cut badly, the readings are sometimes so long that they prevent any understanding. The decisions of the petty rationalist professors of the commission so resembled what Dom Guéranger called "a lack of smoothness," there was nothing smooth in the new Mass, or only what existed before it and was still there for some unknown reason. "The need to find different readings over three years leads to absurd choices. So the Gospel of the Ascension for year A… does not mention the Ascension. For Pentecost year A it is worse. The Gospel is the one where Jesus appears to the apostles on Easter evening and breathes on them, saying: “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Proclaiming this pericope at the Pentecost Mass can only cause confusion among the faithful. For what good is Pentecost if the apostles have already received the Holy Spirit? In the traditional missal, it is the Gospel of the first Sunday after Easter, with what follows, which is what happens the following Sunday, therefore this Sunday after Easter (Saint Thomas). And there it is clear that this gift of the Holy Spirit is distinct from that of Pentecost ¹⁵ . »To stick to the mentality of the time and to the prophecy of John XXIII, The Bride of Christ prefers to resort to the remedy of mercy, rather than brandishing the weapons of severity , the story of Ananias and Sapphira was removed, and the account of the suicide of Judas was cut… While the new lectionary makes an almost complete reading of the Acts of the Apostles! These passages describe scenes too difficult to bear for the modern faithful certainly. The “judgment of Solomon” (1 Kings 3,16-28) was removed, because it could have shocked some… A king who threatens to cut a baby in two, Great God! It is therefore, as Dom Nocent said, a “new religion”. It should be noted that the current Prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Arthur Roche, confirms this in almost all of his interviews for several months. Those who thought that the only revolution that ever took place was the coming of Christ into this world are in for a shock. Vatican II and its revolutionary uproar are understood to be the new benchmark of Catholicism and it is clear that anyone who thinks otherwise is rebuked and mocked, in public if necessary[12]. The so-called traditionalists are the new public penitents and one can imagine in the near future that they will be treated as public penitents were in the Middle Ages! The Song of Songs, which in a magnificent premonition spoke of the birth of the Virgin Mary, has been almost entirely suppressed. Dom Alcuin Reid, founding prior of the Monastery of Saint Benedict ¹⁶ in La Garde-Freinet, through his articles and his book (available in English only), Liturgy in the Twenty-fist Century , details in detail the abuses of the Bugnini Commission, aided in this by a myriad of sub-commissions, one of which will go down in history: the one in charge of the collections. Lauren Pristas, Professor of Theology in the Department of Theology and Philosophy at Caldwell College in the United States, has written a fascinating book (again only in English, is that a surprise?), The Collects of the Roman Missal . She shows that the reformers acted as if they were filming The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with obvious references to Frankenstein . The reformers sought out a prayer from the sacramentary called Gelasian when what was before their eyes did not suit them, but when what they found at the source did not suit them either (and it was not by chance that it was not suitable and that it had disappeared, but because its quality was in question), they tampered with it! Plenipotentiaries! The book deciphers and displays all the exactions of the reformers. Example? The postcommunion of the first Sunday of Advent is composed of a collect from the Ascension and a secret from the month of September from the Verona sacramentary. A collect and a secret to fashion a postcommunion! And yet the commission of the collections assured that it wanted to “respect the literary genres and the liturgical functions (collects, offertory, postcommunion)”. The postcommunion of the 2nd Sunday of Advent says this: Satiated with this food of spiritual nourishment, suppliants, Lord, we pray you to teach us, by participating in this mystery, to despise the things of the earth and to love the things of heaven …. The end has been transformed and says this: teach us the true meaning of the things of this world and the love of eternal goods …. Love always, but which one? And especially this type of formula, an idea in the air would have said Claude Tresmontant, as our era gargles so often and for too long, because, what is the true meaning of things, why change the sentence: Lord, we pray you to teach us, by participating in this mystery, to despise the things of the earth and to love the things of heaven , by teach us the true meaning of the things of the earth and to love the things of heaven ? The 1970 missal is full of approximations in doctrine, to which are added translations into French of great poverty or great ideology; we will choose what seems most appropriate. "The suppression of the opposition between the search for the things of the earth and the search for those of heaven is systematic in all the neo-liturgy, whereas this opposition is omnipresent in the traditional liturgy, and in traditional spirituality, because it is omnipresent in the Gospels and in the Epistles ¹⁷ ." Thus, what was true for past generations was no longer entirely true for us ¹⁸

Of our time

Lauren Pristas denounces the sacking of the ancient liturgy by reformists and the ideology that guided it. She shows that “every nuance of the Advent collections of 1962 expresses without ambiguity this Catholic doctrine of grace, in the rather subtle and non-didactic way proper to prayers. Although the 1970 Advent collections do not explicitly contradict Catholic teaching on grace, they do not express it and, more worryingly, they do not appear to assume it. The tricky question is how to sum this up fairly, for, since the 1970 Advent collections cannot legitimately be understood or interpreted in a way inconsistent with Catholic truth, it must nevertheless be recognized that they are likely to be misunderstood by those who are not sufficiently instructed in Catholic truth. The influence of Pelagianism is omnipresent. At the same time as the reform led by Bugnini, Paul VI agreed with his minister and this commission and abolished five of the six traditional orders leading to priestly ordination (porter, reader, exorcist and acolyte and sub-deacon). Since society was becoming secularized, religion had to be secularized. Fifteen centuries of tradition crossed out in a few minutes (the list of orders can be found in the prayer for Good Friday of the fifth century). Similarly, Septuagesima and Ember Days have been suppressed… On February 17, 1966, Paul VI wrote an apostolic constitution, Pænitemini , explaining that fasting was not just physical fasting, that it could be replaced by acts of charity! Everyone remembers Matthew (17, 21), But this kind of demon is driven out only by prayer and fasting , and it is obvious, or at least it has been for 2000 years, that Christ speaks precisely cannot different fasts … Ash Wednesday owes its narrow salvation to the pope unhappy that Septuagesima has been abolished… The teaching on the Last Ends became optional, and like everything that was optional and was not in line with the reform, it disappeared into the dustbin of history. For at least a decade, society had begun to unravel, the Church, instead of remaining a magnifying glass for this desolate world, preferred to reject its foundations rather than affirm them. The world and the Church, as Gustave Thibon described it, had the same ambition, that of being in the wind, like a dead leaf.

The rebellion arose. It took many forms, it made mistakes, some backed out, there were betrayals, most felt helpless. The spirit of reform was blowing everywhere and had transformed everything, from top to bottom, not only the liturgy, the divine office, but also the sacraments, revised from top to bottom and again not for the better, everything, absolutely everything! The priests were no longer identifiable, moreover nothing was identifiable, everything was vague, nothing was certain anymore. The churches that had already begun to empty emptied completely. This reform had been thought through so much that the faithful had not been thought of, or only as a kind of undifferentiated entities that had to follow the Church in all its turpitudes… The desertion of the churches was confirmed and intensified. Almost everything that had been predicted by the reformers did not happen. After decades of turmoil, the beloved Pope Benedict XVI published his motu proprio, Summorum Pontificum , which was intended to give greater prominence to the traditional rite, called extraordinary, which it truly is, in the dioceses. To say that it was very little followed by the bishops as a whole is an understatement. In the Church, which saw people of varying ages ceasing to be Catholic one after the other, the motu proprio of the German pope made it possible to see that the Church could remain young. Since the progressive ideology was still in everyone's minds and in some hearts, this was hidden as much as possible. The bishops worked to bury this retrograde motu proprio. There are still priests today who despise the action of the pontiff! Since the end of the Council, one could be satisfied with a few elderly figures, such as Josemaría Escrivá, who was granted the grace to use the old rite (Confer. L'indult Agatha Christie ¹⁹ ), but for young people to indulge in the usus antiquior was too much to be tolerated! The fruits of the reform did not correspond to what the experts had predicted. In ten years, from 2007, the date of the promulgation of Summorum Pontificum , to 2017, the number of traditional cults had doubled in the world (not counting the expansion of the Society of Saint Pius X)! And without any help on the ground from the upholders of the institution, the bishops. Pastoral and synodal for everyone except for the elderly. The count was correct, roughly 5% of the French faithful, with a very young average age providing between 15 and 20% of French priests! Ask a diocesan priest still authorized to celebrate in both forms what he thinks. He will always tell you the same thing: the fruits of the Tridentine Mass are unparalleled. And since Traditionis Custodes , the seminaries of the Fraternities of Saint Peter and Saint Pius X are overflowing with more than a hundred seminarians each. It is a bit as if the motu proprio had created the opposite (once again!) of its intention. The Chartres Pilgrimage had to close its registrations and with 16,000 participants has never been as successful as this year! Even then, the 5,000 pilgrims of the Society of Saint Pius X are innocently omitted. That doesn't seem like much compared to the number of French people? Who still walks 100 kilometers in three days for their faith these days? Here we can note the desire of young Catholics who attend traditional Mass regularly, they are also diligent in renewing their lives with the Gospel! At a time when it is common to hear people appearing in the media by declaring for example: "I am Catholic and I am for abortion.", that is to say, people who follow their own morality or, more precisely, the morality of their time and who think that this is what it means to be Catholic!

An attitude has emerged that is visible in all revolutions around the world, when the utopia that prompted the establishment of the revolution clashes with reality. The attitude inevitably hardens. All those who praised the supposed fruits of the reform without seeing that it had only accelerated the rout in the open country of the Church of God, hardened. Conjured up by men from the Vatican, by priests, by the University of Saint Anselm in Rome, a veritable haven of progressives of all kinds, whose treatment of Benedict XVI before and even after his election will be avoided, they were waiting in awe to emerge from the shadows into which Summorum Pontificum had thrust them . They came out into the light when Pope Francis was elected and they succeeded in "advising" him. Their herald, Andrea Grillo, wrote the contents of Pope Francis's motu proprio in multiple articles several years before the motu proprio was official. No one familiar with the machinations of the progressive liturgists who make up the Pontifical University of Saint Anselm was surprised by the content of Francis's motu proprio, which used both whip and stick to expel the "tradis" from the temple. This term—labeling would be more appropriate—is often used by priests who only know lovers of the Tridentine Mass from the hours they spend on the Internet, making it possible to make a large bag of extraordinarily diverse life profiles. The slap was violent, for the faithful attached to the traditional Roman Mass, but also for the humble servant of the vineyard that was Benedict XVI. But what are these considerations in the face of the revolution that must pass? The Pope Emeritus, who had restored peace to the faithful, was reproached for having acted improperly, and people were delighted that this had been corrected . ²⁰ It is easy to learn about Andrea Grillo and note that in his works he was able to diverge considerably from Church law. So much so that he declared that transubstantiation was not a dogma. But many dogmas, and among the most important, the most elementary, the most decisive, are not written down. Andrea Grillo thus affirmed that it was abnormal that there were two forms of the rite… For a professor of liturgy, one would like to tell him that this has existed at all times and especially in the time of Saint Pius V who, when he published his Roman Missal, had not authorized the old missals since they were more than two hundred years old, but who forbade them from changing because their legitimacy was rooted! Paul VI would act in exactly the opposite way and grant himself the power to prohibit the old Mass, the Mass of All Saints for almost 2000 years! Why did he need to ban the Tridentine Rite? Did he really believe in the validity of his action? Why didn't he let the two rites evolve in parallel, like Saint Pius V? And besides, isn't there an "extraordinary" rite of the Roman Rite for Zaire, ratified by Pope Francis himself? Another example is given by the Anglo-Catholic form of the Roman Rite, the "Divine Worship" missal, ²¹ the latter having many points in common with the Tridentine Missal. We see in the repeated action of the reformers that their mode of action is based on authoritarianism. This was the case fifty years ago, and it is the same with their children or their heirs, as you will. Professor Grillo, who is fighting in the press, a sort of armed wing of Pope Francis and Cardinal Roche, defends and claims Traditionis custodes (a title which adds insult to injury in a certain way) with anyone who casts doubt on the validity of the said motu proprio ²² He fought with Dom Alcuin, and with Dom Pateau, Father Abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of Fontgombault. In his response to the interview that Dom Pateau had given to Famille chrétienne ²³ , Grillo rebuffed the Father Abbot, acting as the arm of the late Argentinian Pope: "What Francis is asking, with Traditionis custodes , is to build bridges "between people" in the single ordinary common rite , and not "bridges between two forms of the Roman rite". » The Reverend Father de Fontgombault replied to him by beginning his missive with: "In fact, the liturgy is the place par excellence for building bridges: a bridge with Christ in order to find in him all the members of the people of God." Fifty years of pitched battles summed up in one sentence. On the one hand, the desire to find solutions here below by oneself in a horizontal manner and on the other the understanding that we owe everything to the grace of God and that everything must lead us back to this grace! On the one hand, a hermeneutic of rupture and on the other, the hermeneutic of continuity, dear to Pope Benedict XVI ²⁴ . On the one hand, the Pelagian way that suits the modern world so well, on the other, the Catholic way, entirely Catholic, respecting the entire history of the Church and all its tradition. This battle has only just begun.

Article written on Ember Friday of Pentecost.²⁵