The Hidden History of the New Mass

Few laymen are acquainted with the development of the Novus Ordo Mass they pray and which many – to include this author – for years mistakenly assumed was the same liturgy prayed in antiquity. It isn’t.

A few facts from history.

1. In 1960, Pope John XXIII named Fr. Annibale Bugnini Secretary of the Preparatory Commission for Vatican II's document on sacred liturgy. Fr. Bugnini had served in similar roles under Pius XII’s Congregation of Rites and led the reform of the Holy Week liturgy promulgated in 1955 with the decree Maximus Redemptionis.

2. In 1962 John XXIII removed Bugnini from his position as Consulter to the Sacred Congregation of Rites and Professor of Sacred Liturgy in the Lateran University.

3. In the same year Pope John XXIII promulgated the 1962 edition of the Missale Romanum. In February of the same year, he promulgated the Apostolic Constitution Veterum sapientia (on the wisdom of Latin as the universal tongue of the Church). These two promulgations give no indication that radical change of the sacred liturgy was in the mind of Pope John; tragically, Veterum sapientia was overcome by events just a few short months after it’s issuance.

4. During the 2nd week of the Second Vatican Council, the Rhine Fathers (German and French episcopal conferences) rejected the Pope's prepared schemata and demanded that the reform of the liturgy be considered as the first item of business. Pope John yielded to their demands and threw away three years worth of prepared schemata. The only prepared schema not rejected by the Rhine Fathers was Bugnini’s draft of Sacrosanctum concilium. It was introduced as the first document for discussion at Vatican II.

5. According to eyewitness Jean Guitton, Pope John XXIII cried out on his death bed, "stop the council!"  The Pope was laid to rest (and with him, the Council) in June 1963; he had not signed a single document.  Pope Paul VI reconvened it in the fall of 1963 and named Bugnini Secretary for the Council's document on sacred liturgy.

6. The president of the Council’s Preparatory Commission on the on the Liturgy was Cardinal Gaetano Cicognani. In order for the draft to be presented to the full council, his signature was required. Knowing what it would do to the liturgy, Cardinal Cicognani did not want to sign it.  According to Fr. Ralph Wiltgen, “an expert of the preconciliar Commission on the liturgy stated that the old Cardinal was on the verge of tears and waved the document saying, ‘They want me to sign this and I don’t know what to do!’ Then he put the text on his desk, took a pen and signed. Four days later he was dead.” (Wiltgen, Rhine Flows into the Tiber)

7. Sacrosanctum Concilium (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy) was signed by Pope Paul VI on 4 December 1963. Following its promulgation, a period of wild liturgical experimentation immediately took off in the West. The wide variety of experimentation with the 1962 Missal eventually resulted in a 1965 interim version that allowed the omission of the prayers at the foot of the altar, the last gospel, and the entire Mass to be prayed in the vernacular – contrary to the Council of Trent’s condemnation in Session 22, Canon IX. While nothing in the CSL addressed or even mentioned turning altars around and celebrants facing the people, this experiment spread like wildfire and soon signified the primary emblem of the reforms. Pope Paul VI himself offered Mass in Italian and facing the people in 1965. Soon there were Masses on coffee tables, “folk masses” with guitars and tambourines, and in the US a new hymnal styled “Peoples Mass Book” was published in 1966 featuring pop-folk songs as liturgical accompaniment. All these things occurred well before Pope Paul’s Novus Ordo Missae was promulgated in 1969.

Pope Paul VI celebrates Mass in Italian facing the people, 1965.

8. The CSL’s orientation can best be summed up in article 14: "In the restoration and promotion of the sacred liturgy, this full and active participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all else; for it is the primary and indispensable source from which the faithful are to derive the true Christian spirit; and therefore pastors of souls must zealously strive to achieve it, by means of the necessary instruction, in all their pastoral work." (emphasis mine) The phrase “active participation” became the rallying cry of the reformers who were less concerned about pure doctrine than religious experience. The Latin is rendered participatio actuosa which means “actual participation” and not “active participation.” This played directly into the hands of the subjectivist philosophers who rejected St. Thomas’ scholastic philosophy and sought to locate the divine in man (immanentism) and not in the Traditional method of gospel preaching and through the administration of the sacramental economy.

The 1965 interim Missal graphics show the priest behind a table
altar 4 years before the Novus Ordo was promulgated. The
terminology 'liturgy of the Word' and 'liturgy of the Eucharist'
are already in usage.

9. Bugnini's Commission developed the prototype for a new Mass called the Missa forma normativa.  The prototype was shown to a synod of Roman bishops in 1967 which voted to reject it. Bugnini’s reforms were temporarily halted by the unwillingness of the Synod Fathers to accept it’s radical retooling of the 1965 interim missal. Years later, Cardinal Ratzinger would comment,

"What happened after the Council was totally different: in the place of liturgy as the fruit of development came fabricated liturgy. We left the living process of growth and development to enter the realm of fabrication. There was no longer a desire to continue developing and maturing, as the centuries passed and so this was replaced—as if it were a technical production—with a construction, a banal on-the-spot product." (preface to the French edition of The Reform of the Roman Liturgy by Klaus Gamber, 1992)

10. Fr. Louis Bouyer upon his resignation from the liturgical commission chronicled the following account of his intercourse with Pope Paul VI:

Father Louis Bouyer: I wrote to the Holy Father, Pope Paul VI, to tender my resignation as member of the Commission charged with the Liturgical Reform. The Holy Father sent for me at once (and the following conversation ensued):

Paul VI: Father, you are an unquestionable and unquestioned authority by your deep knowledge of the Church’s liturgy and Tradition, and a specialist in this field. I do not understand why you have sent me your resignation, whilst your presence, is more than precious, it is indispensable!

Father Bouyer: Most Holy Father, if I am a specialist in this field, I tell you very simply that I resign because I do not agree with the reforms you are imposing! Why do you take no notice of the remarks we send you, and why do you do the opposite?

Paul VI: But I don’t understand: I’m not imposing anything. I have never imposed anything in this field. I have complete trust in your competence and your propositions. It is you who are sending me proposals. When Fr. Bugnini comes to see me, he says: "Here is what the experts are asking for." And as you are an expert in this matter, I accept your judgement.

Father Bouyer: And meanwhile, when we have studied a question, and have chosen what we can propose to you, in conscience, Father Bugnini took our text, and, then said to us that, having consulted you: "The Holy Father wants you to introduce these changes into the liturgy." And since I don’t agree with your propositions, because they break with the Tradition of the Church, then I tender my resignation.

Paul VI: But not at all, Father, believe me, Father Bugnini tells me exactly the contrary: I have never refused a single one of your proposals. Father Bugnini came to find me and said: "The experts of the Commission charged with the Liturgical Reform asked for this and that". And since I am not a liturgical specialist, I tell you again, I have always accepted your judgement. I never said that to Monsignor Bugnini. I was deceived. Father Bugnini deceived me and deceived you.

Father Bouyer: That is, my dear friends, how the liturgical reform was done!

(Mémoires, posthumous, published 2014 by the Éditions du Cerf)

11. Pope Paul VI disregarded the decision of the 1967 Roman Synod and promulgated the Novus Ordo Missae in April 1969. In the notification Instructione de Constitutione (14 June 1971) Pope Paul VI ordered the practical suppression of the 1962 Missal with one exception: an elderly or infirm priest could continue to offer it in private with no one else present – not even an altar server. In a bizarre and confused address given on 26 November 1969 he calls his new liturgy a novelty, an inconvenience, an innovation, a cause of upset to the faithful and annoyance to priests, and yet justifies all on the basis of the utilitarian value of vernacular liturgy.

12. In 1974 Paul VI would remove [then] Archbishop Annibale Bugnini from all positions dealing with liturgy and appointed him as an auxiliary bishop to a diocese in Iran.

Archbishop Annibale Bugnini

So we may see that the five and a half years between December 1963 and April 1969 were a period of tumult and often gratuitous experimentation with the Roman Rite. Some commentators believe that the Novus Ordo was necessary to stem the abuses of the more extravagant forms of experimentation that were rampant during this period. The desacralization and destruction of the Roman Rite occurred much earlier than April 1969 and it is useful for laymen to understand the hidden history of the new Mass which did not spring up ready made at the time of its promulgation. Pope John XXIII dismissed Annibale Bugnini from having anything to do with liturgical reform for the Church and the Second Vatican Council. Pope Paul VI brought Bugnini back and put him in charge of the reform of the liturgy. Twelve years later, he too would remove Bugnini from having anything to do with the liturgy, but by then the damage was done.

Fifty years hence, we may conclude that the reform of the liturgy was not something clamored for by the laity, but something devised by an influential minority within the hierarchy. The theological impetus driving reform was identified by St. Pius X in his encyclical Pascendi gregis: modern man would no longer accept God as the direct object of science and history, and therefore men must locate Him in their own subjective experiences. The ancient liturgy with its reliance on the supernatural order, external authority, and objective reality would no longer suffice; modern man would need a liturgy that would facilitate the attainment of religious experiences through “active participation.”

Thus, as St. Pius X teaches,

"How far off we are here from Catholic teaching we have already seen in the decree of the [first] Vatican Council. We shall see later how, with such theories, added to the other errors already mentioned, the way is opened wide for atheism. Here it is well to note at once that, given this doctrine of experience united with the other doctrine of symbolism, every religion, even that of paganism, must be held to be true. What is to prevent such experiences from being met within every religion? In fact that they are to be found is asserted by not a few. And with what right will Modernists deny the truth of an experience affirmed by a follower of Islam? With what right can they claim true experiences for Catholics alone? Indeed Modernists do not deny but actually admit, some confusedly, others in the most open manner, that all religions are true." (Pascendi gregis #14)