More than fifty years ago, the Catholic Church gave itself a new Mass which broke in a way never seen before with the tradition of the Church. The reformers, however, did not expect the traditional Mass to continue for them. They were even convinced of the contrary. abolition of the traditional Roman mass ^. commit themselves, as prayers, as seminarians, to celebrating and bringing to life this form of the Roman rite. The latter are often accused of being troublemakers, nostalgics, identity seekers, and above all, crime of lèse-majesté, of being against the Second Vatican Council, which one no longer separates from one's own spirit; this spirit of the council which we feast on without ever really qualifying it, as for 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 the source of the life of the Church, as the last council reminds us, and the liturgy is tradition. To resolve the crisis of the liturgy that she carries within her, the Church will have to reweave the threads of damaged and wounded tradition, even and above all, if the time urges her not to do so.

Which Vatican II?

"The new Ordo Missae, if we consider the new elements, susceptible to very different appreciations, which seem implied or implied therein, departs in an impressive way, as a whole as in detail, from the 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 impassable barrier against any heresy which could undermine the integrity of the Mystery” ² Cardinal Ottaviani, prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith addressed Paul VI on September 3, 1969, we were a few weeks away from the entry into force of the new mass. In a way, this concluded the Second Vatican Council which had however closed its doors for four years! Let's dwell a little on the figure of Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani: the son of a baker, from the poor neighborhoods of Rome, he turned out to be a very good student at the Roman pontifical seminary, and obtained three doctorates, in theology, philosophy and canon law. . Secretary of the Holy Office, then proprefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he worked the four years preceding the council to prepare the themes to be treated and pronounced the habemus papam for the election of John XXIII. This month of October 1962 will see the masks fall and positions, progressive or modernist, appear. John XXIII, in his opening speech of the Council, will display a certain contempt for the curial team of Pius XII by declaring: "The Spouse of Christ prefers to resort to the remedy of mercy, rather than brandishing the weapons of severity . She believes that, rather than condemning, she responds better to the needs of our time, by emphasizing the riches of her doctrine. » ³ There is in this sentence a dichotomy which inaugurates and prefigures the whole Second Vatican Council: can there be mercy if there is no condemnation of an act? Why should there be a remedy if there is no wound before? Didn't we see the will to put sin under the rug like a troublesome dust? The tone used where leniency asserts itself as the supreme authority will become the leitmotif of the Second Vatican Council. Therefore a sling is organized. The texts prepared by the curia are rejected. Notably De fontibus revelationis , on the sources of revelation, and De Ecclesia . An absolute majority was needed to ratify this rejection, John XXIII gave his agreement and was satisfied with the relative majority. “Thus was carried out a veritable coup d'etat, by which all the liberal tendencies, in the process of organizing themselves into a 'conciliar majority', snatched doctrinal power from the Curia inherited from Pius XII. » ⁴ . From then on, and since the working texts had been trampled on and discarded, work began on the liturgy. We thought the unifying subject. The progressives had an agenda as usual, which the conservatives almost never have. Cardinal Ottaviani, on October 30, 1962, took the floor, he was not yet blind and was going to show clairvoyance, he asked that the rite of the Mass not be treated "like a piece of cloth that is put back fashionable according to the fancy of each generation”. It seemed to the audience that it was too long in its development. He was interrupted without regard to his rank. His microphone was cut 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 like the traditional Roman mass? The question has been haunted for fifty years. Even today, any lover of the Tridentine Mass finds himself sent back to the ropes if he seeks to support his position. As if the love of the traditional rite was enough to demonstrate the 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 Mass in Latin, the celebration with the back to the people, and communion in the mouth. And that number, no matter how large, would be wrong. A Council which 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 by mutual agreement drawn a limit between them that nothing and no one will want or will be able to cross! During Vatican II, a flurry of ideas sprang up. 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. All the prelates assembled were not revolutionaries, far from it. And to sum up Vatican II to that would miss the truth. Beginning therefore 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 brought out the constitution on the holy liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium , which completed the past studies as Mediator Dei of Pius XII, recalling in strong terms what the liturgy may or may not be. The status of Latin was renewed and guaranteed; many forget that the entire Second Vatican Council takes place in Latin, that all the prelates gathered follow the Tridentine Mass since there is no other! But, in the French translation of Sacrosanctum Concilium , we can already see the progressive spirit which will enter through the slightly too open windows of the Vatican and which will blow with ever-renewed ardor in France during the implementation of the liturgical reform. 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 to make another one. Not even to make it “progress”… ⁶ ” Sacrosanctum Concilium affirms by taking up the theme of active participation (already highlighted by Pius X and taken up by Pius XII), respect for the sacred language (I quote: “the 'use of Latin will be preserved in the Latin rites'), and nothing will be found there concerning communion in the hand nor on the orientation of the priest... If the current of air can refresh for a moment, it can also provoke torticollis, all sorts of collateral damage where a closed window would have just made us sweat. As the Second Vatican Council wanted to be a restorer of ancient things forgotten or buried under the successive layers of tradition (moved, all the same, by a hatred of the Middle Ages), it also tended to marry its time as closely as possible, even if it meant lowering the fathom of its requirements. Clerics drawing from another tradition, sometimes anti-liturgical, sometimes coming from the Liturgical Movement , were preparing to show their cards and play with this dichotomy and, it must be said, a certain collapse of the hierarchy and the sacred to dismantle the liturgy.

We know that all the revolutions that 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. We can thus 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 seek absolutely that the rite be understood? Isn't the sacred shrouded in mystery? Isn't mystery part of the amazement of the faithful? How many faithful endowed with healthy habits have been shaken up, to put it mildly, by the reform of the liturgy? How many have been violated that their property is stolen from them by depriving them of the recitations in Latin of the prayers of Saint Ambrose or Saint Gregory the Great? But he is the faithful, 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 by so many novelties! The new fire, the faithful found it in the custom that is not yet called the rite, as Pascal sums it up so well ⁷ . The Protestant Reformation at the beginning of the 16th century chiseled away this hatred of what is called Christianity, by only pointing out its faults, and the Council of Trent had stopped the bleeding by undertaking to refound the shaken Catholic faith. Dom Prosper Guéranger, the refounder of the Abbey of Solesmes, restorer of the order of Saint-Benoît, 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 din passed by there, 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 in the center of the village, 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 away more and more in their intentions as in their actions. In 1680, Dom Henri Leclercq wrote about the reform of the Bréviaire de Paris : "We set out to cut down without moderation, where it was enough to weed, we mowed, under the pretext of making disappear all that could have the appearance of a superstition. The reformers of the liturgy follow and resemble each other. This anti-liturgical tradition had therefore been running for four centuries when it found the playground of the Second Vatican Council. Progressives have this way of passing off old lanterns for new things when conservatives are incapable of magnifying their heritage, too decent and too modest that they are. Dom Leclercq continued thus: “The Sanctoral was ravaged like the Temporal… We allowed ourselves reductions in the rite of the Marian feasts, which testified as little to good taste as to common sense and piety (…) On this slippery path , we went too far. The lessons of the feasts of the Virgin, the benedictions of her particular Office suffered alterations and deletions that were at the very least inopportune. It was disrespectful to Mary to delete this beautiful and ancient formula: Gaude, Maria Virgo, cunctas haereses sola interemisti (Rejoice, Virgin Mary, you alone have overthrown all heresies), as it was ill-sounding not to say this invocation to him henceforth: Dignare me laudare te, Virgo Sacrata; da mihi virtutem contra hostes tuos (Allow me to praise you, Holy Virgin; give me the strength to fight your enemies). The names of some festivals were changed. » Where we will discover in the missal of Paul VI that the liturgists had continuity in their ideas since thus they changed the solemnity of March 25 which was 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 thus treated, her vicar in this world was not spared. The answer: 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 affirm prophetically: « The modern liturgies of the Churches of France (were) composed much more often by party men than by saints. » The Benedictine monk tries his hand at a telling comparison ⁸ : « 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 esthete, he will find that there are many faults in taste, that the styles are too mixed, that the rooms are too cluttered, etc. If we visit an archaeologist, he will find that it is a pity not to restore this old residence in its primitive state of a 17th century manor house and that we should eliminate everything that clashes with the style of the great century. 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 there and live there. Personalities that betray in the thousand and one obscure arrangement details for a stranger to the family. It is probably too early to judge whether our modern Reformers have grasped the "spirit" of the house, but we can believe Dom Guéranger when he says that those of the 17th and 18th centuries did not understand it, no less. still tasted. » It was therefore necessary to do something new, and the liturgists of Vatican II will work on it, 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 ajar by Sacrosanctum Concilium will be swept away by the "rioters" who expected no less. To use our metaphor of the draft, which has never seen in a house the will of the mistress of the place to ventilate a room of the house, and not to prevent the violent gust which awaited the opening of this window ? Collateral damage is always calculated a posteriori. The Revolution plays on training and the sequence of facts that prove the attackers right, never the defenders. Now at this stage of the Council, at the very beginning, a phenomenon of the Estates General of 1789 begins. The men named by Paul VI put themselves in battle order. The secretary of the commission is called Annibale Bugnini, he will have the fierce 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 magnitude. It included about fifty members, with in addition one hundred and fifty expert advisers, seventy-five expert advisers without counting those who were consulted from time to time” ⁹ The Council continued its course and the reform was deployed 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 meant to be final. The procrastination of the Holy Father, numerous, gave even more power to the commission which decided when it did not decide. We had to move forward, because only the movement, this purification of the “old church”, wanted to be necessary. The progressives convinced themselves of a contradictory mission, at the very least: to rediscover the freshness of the primitive Church and stick to the spirit of the times. In other words: to restore the air of youth to the Church and refill the naves which had begun to desert some time ago. It is easy to see that she failed in both. In many places in Europe, the spirit of the times had already won against tradition. This gave the reformers a taste for victory. Liturgical initiatives abounded. The preface and the canon concentrated the first interests. Out loud, in the vernacular… It was like a survival of Luther in the Catholic Church. A thousand reasons were found to enlarge the concelebration. We relied on Sacrosanctum Concilium which had opened the door by its vagueness on the number of authorized concelebrants. Everyone seemed to agree to restrict their number so that the dignity of the liturgy would not be affected, yet nothing and no one came to say what this number should be, so everyone did what they wanted and that therefore the excess was crowned. When the pastoral wants to be authority, we go head over heels! But in fact, the Church already corresponded completely to its time, it gave credence to the idea that authority no longer had the right of citizenship 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.

“We had 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 himself with in the exercise of his priesthood in order to worship the Father and sanctify man ^. adherents of clericalism? The priest in persona christi became the problem. But we never say the reason, and we still confuse authority and authoritarianism. We mixed everything as usual. We had forgotten that the outfit, the uniform, said the identity, but above all obliged to this identity. Called back to himself, he who wears the uniform knows how this garment stifles his passions to transform him into another, bigger than himself. But they wanted to force us to be what we were, without bringing anything of our own, without raising ourselves up and submitting ourselves to the authority of God, since we were all ministers of Christ, without even trying to imitate him, without any efforts, 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, note that nowhere in the New Mass does Saint Paul's warning appear to those who communicate in an unworthy manner ¹¹ . Thus during the Mass of Paul VI there is never any confession, and yet everyone receives Communion, almost without exception. “The body of Christ is a due! I come to mass, I'm entitled to it! we could hear if we strained our ears. And everything about communion has become miserable somewhere in the new mass. Long queues, single queues , to take the sacred body of Jesus in your hand! For, looking elsewhere and having apparently no knowledge of who is resting in the hand, without any smoothness as Dom Guéranger would have said... To, pitifully and mechanically, end up stepping aside, moving from in front of the priest, and , keen to show his devotion in an improbable gesture never enacted by anyone, but copied on everyone, to prostrate himself stupidly before the empty tabernacle and swallow up the holy host. O Desolation! What a loss of meaning! A holy priest of Ars would go mad to see the faithful receive communion in this way, who have become robots thanks to the liturgical reform of Paul VI! Only robots can fail to realize 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 thus declared, speaking of the Protestants, that they “found themselves led to cut off from worship all the ceremonies, all the formulas which express mysteries. So… there are no more altars, just 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 them12 ^: –
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, puts it on the head; immediately he lowers it on the neck so that the collar of his clothes is covered, passes the cords under the arms, then behind the back, etc. (…) The priest having put on the ornaments, takes the chalice with his left hand, as it has been prepared as it has been said, which he wears raised in front of the chest, the 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, extracts the corporal from the purse, which he extends 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, hands clasped in front of his chest, fingers clasped and extended, right thumb crossed over left thumb (which he must always do when he joins his hands, except after the consecration), bareheaded, having first made a deep bow or genuflexion towards the cross or the altar if the Blessed Sacrament is in the tabernacle, he begins the mass standing, Etc. (…) When he says Aufer a nobis , the celebrant with folded hands goes up to the altar, etc. (…) Reclining in the middle of the altar, hands clasped placed on the altar in such a way that the little fingers touch the front of it, while the ring fingers are placed on the table (something that must always be observed when the clasped hands are placed on the altar), etc. (…) When he says “the bodies whose relics are here”, he kisses the altar in the middle, his hands outstretched placed at equal distance on each side, etc. (…) At solemn mass, he puts incense in the censer three times, 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 put on 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 by going around it. (…) Then, turned towards the people and with outstretched hands, the priest greets them with suggested formulas…” The whole 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, we do not attend the same mass, it depends on the priest, the bishop sometimes, but so rarely. One could almost think that we are giving far too much power to the priest by allowing him to decide things that are beyond his control. One could almost find, and certain saints of the past would not be mistaken, that there is clericalism in letting the priest thus decide on the essential: the form of the road to be taken by the faithful to reach God. The priest takes on a whole new dimension in the Mass of Paul VI, because the Mass will often be remembered for his homily, and it will often be said of the new liturgy that it was beautiful by the grace of the priest's homily. Thus we come very close to clericalism at all times 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 was only thanks to 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 escalation of choice also causes another flaw that does not exist in the Tridentine Mass, relativism. What causes too much choice. Who am I to choose? became a way of growing for the modern world which was preparing for the great schism foreseen by Father Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange: "The Church is intransigent on principles, because she believes, and tolerant in practice, because she likes. The enemies of the Church are, on the contrary, tolerant in principle, 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 has been weakened. We can say one or two Kyrie to choose from, there we said three to honor the three people of the Trinity! The Confiteor was reduced from the nominative intercession of patron saints. In 2021, an update of French translations took place, which were often calamitous, sometimes heretical. Much was drawn from the old missal to return to clearer words. We handed over the Orate fratres that Paul VI had urged to keep, but which in French had been forgotten. And those faithful who were to actively participate with this battery of new measures? Well they don't participate or else like robots when everyone knows exactly what to do during a Tridentine Mass. When everyone actively participates in inner prayer by following the priest who walks quietly towards the Good Lord. As a Benedictine monk put it: "And here, perhaps, in fact, is how someone who has practiced the old Missal for years feels out of place in the new: the formulas often recall Christian Antiquity and its beauty of source, but the spirit is not always ancient; it emerges from preoccupations that are neither ancient nor medieval[7]. This is how Abbé Barthe defines the authority of the Mass of the Mass of Paul VI: "one could say that the new liturgy is lex orandi , not in itself, but for what it contains the ancient liturgy. Now, 13% of the old missal remains in the new one.

You have to understand that all of this takes shape at a time when we often say everything and its opposite. Paul VI in his speech of November 26, 1969 indicates that the mass will be said in the national language whereas the Council through Sacrosanctum Concilium had indeed requested the opposite except for very rare exceptions. Again where the Council said that the Gregorian should occupy the main place in the chants of the Mass, it was agreed that by suppressing Latin, one suppressed Gregorian. Bugnini, mastermind of the reform, will go so far as to declare that it would be really 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 . Should we specify that it will disappear in the latest version of the missal. The destruction of the liturgy imposed the destruction of the divine office. Here again the commission set about it with extraordinary zeal. It was considered that certain offices were duplicates, they were reduced, they were simplified. Prime was suppressed, on the stupid pretext that Lauds existed. We openly thought we were smarter than our predecessors in the Church. A lectionary was put together, the complexity of which never ceases to amaze, and understanding was destroyed by the annual rhythm that the traditional Mass offered. Liturgy and catechism have been confused. We cut badly, the readings are sometimes of a length that prevents any comprehension. The decisions of the little rationalist professors on the commission so much resembled what Dom Guéranger called "a lack of unctuousness", there was no longer anything unctuous in the new mass or only what existed prior to it and s was still there for some unknown reason. “The need to find different readings over three years leads to aberrant choices. Thus the Gospel of the Ascension for the year A… does not evoke the Ascension. For Pentecost year A it is worse. The Gospel is that in which Jesus appears to the apostles on Easter evening and breathes on them, saying to them: “Receive the Holy Spirit”. Proclaiming this pericope at the Mass of Pentecost can only engender 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 the sequel, which is what happens the following Sunday, therefore this Sunday after Easter (Saint Thomas). And here it is clear that this gift of the Holy Spirit is distinct from that of ^Pentecost . "To stick to the mentality of the time and to the prophecy of John XXIII, The Spouse of Christ prefers to resort to the remedy of mercy, rather than brandishing the weapons of severity , the story of Ananias has been deleted. and Sapphire, and the report of the suicide of Judas has been cut off… Whereas the new lectionary makes an almost complete reading of the Acts of the Apostles! These passages describing scenes too difficult to bear for the modern faithful certainly. The “judgment of Solomon” (1 Kings 3,16-28) has been 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 at their expense. Vatican II and its revolutionary din are seen as the new master standard of Catholicism and it is clear that anyone who thinks otherwise is snubbed and mocked, in public if necessary[12]. The traditionalists as they are called are the new public penitents and one can imagine in the near future that they will be treated as the public penitents were in the Middle Ages! The Canticle of the Canticle, which in a magnificent premonition said the birth of the Virgin Mary, has been almost entirely suppressed. Dom Alcuin Reid, founding prior of Saint-Benoît ¹⁴ at 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 them will go down in history: that in charge of fundraising. Lauren Pristas, Professor of Theology in the Department of Theology and Philosophy at Caldwell College in the United States, has written an exciting book (again only in English, is that a surprise?), The collects of the roman missal . It shows that the Reformers acted as if they were shooting The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Frankenstein references . The reformers went to seek a prayer from the sacramental 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 is not by chance that it didn't fit and was gone, 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 an Ascension collection and a secret of the month of September of the sacramentary of Verona. A collection and a secret to shape a post-communion! And yet the collections commission claimed to want to “respect literary genres and liturgical functions (collections, offertory, postcommunion)”. The postcommunion of the 2nd Sunday of Advent says this: Satisfied with this food of spiritual nourishment, supplicants, Lord, we pray that you will teach us, by participation in this mystery, to despise the things of the earth and to love the things from the sky …. 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 time 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 participation in this mystery, to despise the things of the earth and to love the things of heaven , by teaching us the true meaning of the things of the earth and to love the things of heaven ? The 1970 missal abounds with approximations in the doctrine to which are added French translations of great poverty or great ideology, we will choose what seems most appropriate. "The suppression of the opposition between the search for things of earth and the search for those of heaven is systematic throughout 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 ¹⁵ . Thus, what was true for past generations was no longer quite so ^.

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 sling rose. It took many forms, it made mistakes, some backed down, there were betrayals, most felt helpless. The spirit of the 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, besides nothing was identifiable, everything was vague, we were no longer sure of anything. The churches which had already begun to empty themselves completely emptied. We had thought about this reform so much that we had not thought of the faithful or as sort of undifferentiated entities having to follow the Church in all its turpitudes… The desertion of the churches was confirmed and intensified. Almost everything that had been foreseen by the reformers did not happen. After decades of turmoil, the beloved Pope Benedict XVI published his motu proprio, Summorum Pontificum , which was to allow a greater place to be given to the traditional rite, called extraordinary, which it really is, in the dioceses. To say that it was followed very little by all the bishops is an understatement. In the Church which saw people more or less advanced in age stop being Catholics one after the other, the motu proprio of the German pope made it possible to see that the Church could remain young. As the progressive ideology was still in everyone's minds and in some hearts, it was hidden as much as possible. The bishops worked to bury this retrograde motu proprio. We still find priests today to revile the action of the pontiff! Since the end of the Council, we could be satisfied with a few elderly personalities, such as Josemaría Escrivá, to whom we granted the grace to use the old rite (Confer. L'indult Agatha Christie ¹⁷ ), but that young people give in to the usus antiquior was too much to be tolerated! The fruits of the reform did not correspond to what the experts had expected. Summorum Pontificum was promulgated 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 by the supporters of the institution, the bishops. The Pastoral and the synodal for everyone except for the elder. The count was good, about 5% of the French faithful, at the 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 each more than a hundred seminarians. It's 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! Again, we innocently omit the 5000 pilgrims from the Society of Saint Pius X. That does not seem like a lot compared to the number of French people? Who still walks 100 kilometers in three days for their faith these days? We can note here the desire of young Catholics diligent at traditional Mass, they are also diligent in renewing their lives with the Gospel! At a time when it is common to hear people appear 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 exactly, the morality of their time and who think that this is what it is to be Catholic!

Appeared a visible attitude in all the revolutions throughout the world, when the utopia which gave rise to the establishment of the revolution collides with reality. The attitude inevitably hardens. All those who praised the supposed fruits of the reformation without seeing that it had only hastened the rout in the open country of the Church of God, became hardened. Planned by men from the Vatican, by priests, by the University of Saint-Anselm in Rome, a veritable landmark of progressives of all kinds, of whom we will avoid relating how he treated Benoit XVI before and even after his election, they were waiting for power emerge from the shadow into which Summorum Pontificum . They came to light when Pope Francis was elected and they managed to “advise” him. Their herald, Andrea Grillo, wrote about the contents of Pope Francis' motu proprio in multiple articles several years before the motu proprio was official. No one familiar with the shenanigans of the progressive liturgists who make up the Pontifical University of Saint-Anselmo was surprised by the tenor of the motu proprio of Francis waving whip and stick to drive out the "tradis" from the temple, as — labeling would be more appropriate, often practiced by priests who only know lovers of the Tridentine Mass by the hours they spend on the Internet — making it possible to make a big bag of extraordinarily diverse life profiles. The bellows were violent, for the faithful attached to the traditional Roman mass, but also for the humble servant of the vineyard that was Benoit 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 being reproached for having acted improperly, and people were glad that this had been corrected ¹⁸ . It is easy to learn about Andrea Grillo and note that in his works he was able to differ 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 always existed and especially in the time of Saint Pius V who, when he published his Roman missal, had not authorized the old missals since they had more than two hundred years of existence, but which prohibited the latter from changing because their legitimacy was rooted! Paul VI will act exactly in the opposite way and will grant himself the power to ban the old mass, the mass of all the saints for almost 2000 years! What was needed to prohibit the Tridentine rite? Did he really believe in the merits 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, endorsed by Pope Francis himself? Another example is given by the Anglo-Catholic form of the Roman rite, the “Divine worship” missal ¹⁹ 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 rests on authoritarianism. It was like that fifty years ago, it is the same with their children or their heirs, as you like. Professor Grillo, who rails in the press, a sort of armed arm of Pope Francis and Cardinal Roche, defends and claims Traditionis custodes (a title that adds insult to injury in a certain way) with anyone who casts doubt on the validity of said motu proprio ²⁰ He scrapped with Dom Alcuin, and with Dom Pateau, Abbot of the Benedictine abbey of Fontgombault. In his response to the interview that Dom Pateau had given to Famillechristian ²¹ , Grillo retorted the Reverend Father as follows: "What Francis is asking, with Traditionis custodes , is to build bridges 'between people' in the unique ordinary common rite , and not “bridges between two forms of the Roman rite”. The Reverend Father de Fontgombault answered him by beginning his missive with: “In fact the liturgy is the place par excellence to build 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 will to find the solutions here below by oneself in a horizontal way and on the other the understanding that we owe everything to the grace of God and that everything must bring 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 ²² . On the one hand, the Pelagian way which suits the modern world so well, on the other hand, the Catholic way, entirely Catholic, respecting the whole history of the Church and all its tradition. This battle has only just begun.

Article written on Ember Friday of Pentecost.²³