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Sarum Missal in English

• Part I: http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924092460033
• Part II: http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924092460041

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THE “RESTORED” HOLY WEEK

Msgr Léon Gromier, Papal Master of Ceremonies of Pius XII

a conference given in Paris in July 1960 (original in French)

Translated by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Referring page

 

Translator’s note: Msgr Gromier uses the term pastoral in the substantive, or pastorals in the plural, meaning a person with pastoral ideals. In the context of this conference, the term denotes someone who wishes to modify the liturgy on a pastoral pretext. One may also speak of pastoralism, the notion according to which the liturgy is absolutely irrelevant to modern man and must therefore be reformed. It is a fact that a rite extremely similar to the Novus Ordo was already being discussed and marketed in 1948, the very year Bugnini was appointed to the Congregation of Rites. We can conclude that the reforms of Pius XII and John XXIII are a part of the Novus Ordo. Msgr Gromier immediately saw through the charade.

 

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The “restored” Holy Week was to begin with a question of timetable. It was a question of restoring the use of the Paschal Vigil, based on the pastoral dogma of the Resurrection at precisely midnight. This dogma is not easily defended, for why insist on this when evening Masses, in practice, admit celebration at any time of the day or night, even after the singing of Vespers, when Conventual Mass is celebrated indifferently after Terce, Sext or None? Another problem, the rules of worship are governed not only by the movement of the earth, but also by the discipline of fasting that has been considerably slackened. It results from this that the restored edifice looks like a house of cards. Pastoral zeal extends from Saturday, the culminating point, to the whole Week from Palm Sunday.

The progressive anticipation of the three last days, then their relegation to the original evening opens for us a debate. The introductory general decree affirms that, towards the end of the Middle Ages, the above mentioned solemnities had been anticipated in the morning. Now, the bull of St Pius V, Ad cuius notitiam, of 29^th March 1566, therefore 113 years after the end of the Middle Ages, prohibited what was still done, by permission or custom, in cathedral, collegial, conventual and other churches – to celebrate, the evening or towards the time of sunset, Holy Saturday and other solemnities. The goal is obvious: the Church’s pastoral office must restore, repair damage; the more they were serious, the more the restoration would be welcome; God alone knows if the restoration to be done, before any other, was not to abolish the bull of St Pius V leaving to Bishops the longed-for freedom, to choose the most advantageous afternoon time for the offices of Holy Week: also allowing, for those who desired it, to make their communion; something that had been abolished for fear that the fast was not kept during the hours of the afternoon – when the celebrant was still fasting.

Its terminology deserves attention; for an apologist maintains us in ignorance. Up to now we knew the Passion Sunday, Palm Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of Holy Week, Maundy Thursday In Cæna Domini in Latin, Good Friday In Parasceve in Latin and Holy Saturday. Since we want to amplify the solemnity of the Procession of the Palms, why place this Sunday under the dependence of the Passion, instead of leaving its old name of Palm Sunday, that everyone understands, and that deceives no-one? If Holy Saturday is so-called, Good Friday can be called in just the same way [Vendredi Saint in French], by all the Christians of the world. We have called in in Parasceve (Preparation) for nearly two thousand years; the name alone shows the antiquity of this rite. So, why replace it by Passion and Death of the Lord; a useless renaming, non-traditional, unknown in the Canon of the Mass? In ecclesiastical style, passion means suffering until death inclusively. If the substantive death was so necessary, common sense would demand that it should be added to the word passion in the title of the Gospel: Passio Domini nostri Jesu Christi, now called history of the Passion.

The occasion presents itself to examine the juridical capacities of the pastorals. It is not enough to speak about a thing to create it. Office in choro means a liturgical place where ecclesiastics act according to liturgical rules. Office in communi designates neither a place nor a person. It is a group of people reunited without any mandate, without legal entity and who has the pleasure of saying the private Office collectively. The Breviary distinguishes in choro and extra chorum, there is no third term.

To omit Vespers of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday – that is the height of the arbitrary, above all when the reason is given: Mass takes the place of Vespers, taking first place! Now, between Mass and Vespers, there is no rivality: Vespers enjoy equal dignity with other liturgical services. According to times and places, Vespers have disappeared after the Mass of Holy Saturday, as after the Masses of Thursday and Friday. They were never intended to be abolished. The hour fixed by the pastorals fully agrees with the historical fact – fasting until Vespers, preceded by Mass and communion. Vespers of Holy Saturday are in the afternoon, before the nocturnal Mass – but there is no reason to abolish Vespers of Thursday and Friday, after the Mass that is nocturnal by definition. Holy Saturday without Compline is inexplicable. Maundy Thursday and Good Friday with Compline and without Vespers defy reason, for even if we go to bed late, we still go to bed and need to say our prayers.

To qualify the Procession of Palms, the Good Friday service and the Paschal Vigil, the pastorals use the adjective solemn, whilst they do not for all the rest. Now, the solemnity of liturgical services is not an optional decoration; it is of the nature of the service – resulting from all these constitutive elements, not only from some of them. All the manuals explain which functions are solemn or not solemn. Outside of this, so-called solemnity is not an amplifying enticement, to impress and score the goal. It informs us that, by a recent habit, we made a prodigious use of the word solemn even for necessarily or intrinsically solemn acts. We use words, believing we can put more solemnity into the Procession of Palms than into that of Candlemas (Purification), more solemnity into the Procession of Maundy Thursday than that of Good Friday (abolished as we shall see). Always on the same slippery slope, we learn that the Passion of Good Friday is sung solemnly, as if it could be sung in another fashion.

Worthy of admiration and power, pastorals manifest themselves by the abolition of the sad and unfortunate canon 1252 §4, on the fasting of Holy Saturday.

On this day, it is said that, under the symbol of the Paschal Candle, representation is made of our Redeemer, light of the world, who by the grace of His light, chased away the darkness of our sins, etc. This was surrounded by a measure of mystery, without risk for teaching. Now, one insists on crossing all our t‘s, causing no small incertitude. The various times and places gives us a kaleidoscope of rites, where we have to discern what they have in common. Like in primitive times, fire produces – whether hidden in a place where it is conserved, lit by rays of the sun and a magnifying glass or by a flint – a means of light for the Paschal night. This is the Paschal Candle, accompanied by the proclamation of the Paschal Mystery. The simultaneous and historical presence of two paschal candles does not go at all well with the thesis of the pastorals. The lighting of the Candle is the act of first necessity against darkness, and must evoke the living Christ – but excessively anticipates the announcement of the Resurrection. The amplification the Candle receives from the pastorals makes it resemble an end more than a means. Formerly incensed after its blessing, and even consecrated according to some authors, to-day simply blessed, the Paschal Candle becomes an object that occupies a place between a cross, a gospel book and a relic. All this will become clearer when we get to the day of Holy Saturday.

oOo

During the whole Holy Week, all the texts sung by the deacon, sub-deacon or singers are omitted by the celebrant, who has not to read them. It is of little importance how the celebrants sing (often badly), if they get themselves heard and understood through their loud-speakers. People must listen. What a victory! They revel in this as a return to antiquity, a pledge for the future, a foretaste of reforms to come. This can be of interest to faithful accustomed to using a book, who – with their faces buried in their missals – are isolated from the community, sic! Distinction is made between reading with the eyes or with the lips. It is not admissible, they say, to read with the lips something that someone else is singing. But, reading with the eye can be defended; it has a respectable age, began by necessity, continues by utility, is esteemed; it is part of the pontifical assistance of the Pope and the Bishop.

To forget nothing, we are told that the altar of repose of Maundy Thursday has a solemn character – something the Missal has never said, better written than certain rubrics. These express two prescriptions and one prohibition: the clergy holds lighted candles, to begin with during the singing of the Exsultet, then during a dialogue between the celebrant and the faithful before Mass. It is forbidden to hold the palms during the singing of the Passion. Overall, they pretend to create two obligations for two novelties; they abolish an ancient practice, that finds its explanation explication in Saint Augustine (homily at matins of Saturday before Palm Sunday) : “The leaves of palms are praises meaning victory; for the Lord was at the point of conquering death by dying, and triumphing over the devil by the trophy of His cross”.

The vigil of Pentecost is stripped of its baptismal character, and has become a day like any other, and makes the Missal tell a lie in the canon. This vigil was an annoying neighbour, a formidable rival! Instructed posterity will certainly be more severe than is opinion in regard to the pastorals.

Whether we like it or not, the communion of the clergy, desired at the Mass of Maundy Thursday, will always be in conflict with permissions given to celebrate Mass in private.

The pastorals call on Christ the King to give a strong meaning to their solemn procession of Palms; as if this was needed to perfect a situation to which the author of the Gloria, laus et honor wrote sufficiently, but not in the new fashion. Certain modifications of tradition, so well-known, are just as dishonest as they are daring.

The sprinkling of holy water is a paschal rite that is done every Sunday. Palm Sunday is no less a Sunday than any other. When Candlemas [ed. Feast of the Purification] falls on a Sunday, it does not impede the Asperges me. This has never involved sprinkling water onto a table placed somewhere with palms or other objects on it. It is a matter of sprinkling the altar, the clergy, the church and the faithful. Except for the Bishop, unless impossible, the proper place for blessings – as for consecrations – is the altar, or yet within a short distance, the credence table for example.

For centuries, the consecration of the oils is done at the altar, before it was done on a table as to-day, and not in conspectu populi. What have the pastorals to show the people here, those who have stripped the blessing of palms to the bone? A collect, sign of the cross, sprinkling of holy water and incensing; an uninteresting show. Those who abolish the Sunday Asperges, a real liturgical mistake, willingly admit that the celebrant should wander around the church to sprinkle the palms held by the faithful, then makes the same journey to incense them.

A pastoral, professor of a Swiss seminary, announced one day that red is the colour of triumph. He should have been answered by saying: you are very much mistaken, whilst white is the colour of Easter, Ascension, Corpus-Christi. But no, as soon as it is said, it is done; the colour of Palm Sunday will be red, violet remaining for Mass. Not everyone thinks like the professor. The Roman Rite has used violet since it appeared. The Parisian rite, et the uses of so many dioceses, used black until the middle of the 19th century. A few rites used red, for the blessing of Palms and Mass. Some insisted on mourning, others on the bloody sacrifice. Each kept the same colour: no-one had the idea of changing it. The whole office of Palm Sunday is a mixture of triumphal and passion hymns. From Matins to Vespers inclusive, including Mass, we find that the number of passion hymns goes beyond that of triumphal pieces. When these two things are thus mixed, no separation should be brought to bear. The Swiss professor thought he could take example from the reasonable change of colour for Candlemas; but its pastiche is a mere imitation of the modern feast of Christ the King.

The distribution of the Palms, as we read, is done according to custom. Whatever the pastorals think, there are rules to observe before custom. As the celebrant, if he is not the only priest, received the ashes and his candle at the hands of the highest cleric, he is to receive his palm in the same way. If he does not receive it, he will be without his palm at the procession. About this, rubricists have asked whether the pastorals wanted the celebrant not to carry a palm at the procession, because he would have represented Christ who did not carry one. Logically, the hypothesis would have the celebrant on the back of a donkey. Happily, the pastorals stopped there, allowing him to carry a palm.

The pastorals, who reduced the blessing of palms to its simplest expression, did not pass up the chance of extending the distribution, given the superabundance of chants intended for this action. Whilst the length of the blessing seems enormous, this added plethora seems not to satisfy needs.

The subdeacon normally carries the processional cross, each time the celebrant does not need him, carrying the Blessed Sacrament or for the Baptismal Font. An additional subdeacon for carrying the cross is necessary only when the subdeacon has something else to do, as above.

For two weeks, the altar cross remains veiled. Even veiled, it is incensed and revered by genuflection or profound bow. It is forbidden to unveil it for any reason. On the other hand, the processional cross – unlike the altar cross – is carried unveiled at the procession; from departure to return. Two crosses are seen, one veiled and the other unveiled. What do we gather from this?

The disorder augments from the end of the procession. Going before an important personality, accompanying him to the closed doors of the town, stopping to compliment and acclaim him, finally opening the doors with great pomp in his honour – all this has always been one of the greatest possible forms of homage; but it is not good enough for the creative genius of the pastorals.

We can only qualify as vandalism the fact of tearing the Gloria, laus et honor away from its place at the church door, to mix it up with the baggage of processional music that has nearly tripled in length. Stinginess and waste of time go hand in hand. Therefore, no stopping in front of the door, closed then open; the processional cross unveiled to magnify it, it is cheapened by refusing it the virtue of opening the door. All that despite ancient and modern ceremonial, and for what good? The pastoral rubrics make much ado of the expression, nothing impedes, nihil impedit quominus. Here they are used to unleash the faithful who can sing the hymn Christus vincit or something else in honour of Christ the King. This tolerance has naturally its consequences; the faithful make pawns of the clergy, they have a whole choice of chants à la carte. If they are for Christ the King, they like to sing to his Mother who is Queen. So many desires and eminently pastoral wishes.

The Roman rubric said: when the procession enters the church, Ingrediente Domino is sung; the pastoral rubric says: when the procession enters the church, when the celebrant goes through the door, Ingrediente Domino is sung. The door is ignored during the return from the procession – now we watch for the celebrant coming through the door, who seems to be identified with Christ entering Jerusalem.

Between the procession and Mass, they give us a final and recapitulary collect, with defectuous modalities; the celebrant has no need to go up to the altar, above all turning his back to it, just to sing a collect and come back down just after. Have we ever seen that apres Rogation processions? Finally, holding the book in front of the celebrant is proper to the deacon and subdeacon, not to a simple cleric.

Previously, we called the singing of the Gospel Passion the Passion, and the Gospel at the end of the sung Passion was sung in the usual manner of the Gospel. To-day, both parts put together are called the history of the Passion, or yet the Gospel of the Passion and death. Such pastoral progress is worth it! Folded chasubles are one of the oldest characteristics of the Roman Rite; they go back to the time when all the clergy wore chasubles, and were the expression of austere penance. Their abolition makes nonsense of the painting in the Catacombs – an immense loss and an outrage to history. The pastorals simply say the folded chasubles are not easy to find. To the contrary, violet chasubles are found everywhere – and can be folded – whilst violet dalmatics are not as widespread [ed. Violet dalmatics are used during the time of Septuagesima before the beginning of Lent]. It has always been allowed to serve in alb.

oOo

The pastorals like cutting something off the beginning or end of Mass. Their being cut off, apart from the few moments of time saved, are insignificant. What is more important is that they are used as “spring boards” for more important reforms. Thus, neither the psalm Judica me nor the confession are said before the Palm Sunday and Holy Saturday Masses, because some other ceremony takes place. The same goes for the Masses of Candlemas, Ash Wednesday, weddings, funerals and Masses preceded by Communion. On Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Holy Saturday, the undesirable Last Gospel is omitted; perfect, but in the name of what principle? On Maundy Thursday, the Blessing is omitted, because the ceremony is not finished – the same goes for Corpus-Christi and any Mass followed by a procession of the Blessed Sacrament.

When the usage of three extra deacons singing the Passion is introduced, in the form of a lesson rather than that of a Gospel, the end of the Passion is reserved for singing in Gospel form by the celebrant’s deacon – to avoid falling into the absurdity of the deacon not singing the Gospel. The three deacons begin and finish the Passion without ceremony, as for lessons; only the deacon does the habitual ceremonies for the Gospel. This was logical, coming from the Papal Chapel. Thus the deacon is eclipsed by the three of the Passion. He then recites the Munda cor meum and received the blessing before singing the Gospel, incensing of the book, kissing of the book and incensing of the celebrant. These three gestures succumb to the pastoral mentality; for the Passion is no longer the Gospel but only a history, history of the Passion. Lacking the Gospel, there is no Gospel book. Consequently, the book of history is not incensed or kissed – what is not kissed is not incensed.

To continue, the passion-gospel books are carried around in any old fashion; they are mentioned only on Good Friday. The pastorals have forgotten how to carry a Gospel book; why there must be three acolytes accompanying it instead of two, that the deacon kneeling to say Munda cor meum has not to bow. They repeat again and again that the passion-gospel is sung or read. Their rubrics are written to make us think that we can read at a sung office and sing in a read office as we like. Half the office can be read and the other half sung, mixing both. This is one of the scourges of the liturgy, as is the vernacular language. This is not new, and was recently encouraged [by Pius XII] in sung ordinations where the ordaining bishop interrupts the singing of the preface to say the essential words. It seems that singing harms the required attention!

The Passion according to the four Evangelists included the institution of the Eucharist, for it introduces the Gospel and takes its place in the Mass. The pastorals, in a hurry when they want, think differently – abolishing the institution of the Eucharist narrative. This is consequently excluded from the liturgy in the Roman Church, without doubt to give a better instruction to the faithful.

The omission of the Psalm Miserere at the end of the Hours relieves the poor clergy and unhappy faithful. This psalm could remain only after Lauds and Vespers or only in choir, or even optional. The pastorals would benefit by reading what Cardinal Wiseman, first Archbishop of Westminster, said about the singing of this psalm at the Office of Tenebræ in the Papal Chapel.

oOo

The Missa Chrismatis, a Pontifical Mass celebrated with 26 priests in chasuble remind us of concelebration, celebrated without any relation with fasting, in which is it forbidden to give Communion, forms a curious problem that is difficult to solve. Its proper preface, in the ferial tone, is found among other curiosities.

In the Roman Rite, the use of the stole is limited by rules; no-one can wear it without a reason. It is put on at the required moment, not before and not after. It is a sacred vestment, and has nothing to do with choir dress, either for individuals or the body of the clergy. Priests have no more the right to wear the stole during Mass where they will communicate than during an ordination Mass where they will impose hands. Saying the contrary, the pastorals abuse their unmerited latitude.

At the Maundy Thursday Mass, the celebrant solemnly begins the Gloria in excelsis. How would he do it differently? Here we find a transposition, perhaps not of great importance, but at least of great pastoral significance. Until now, after the singing of the Good Friday Passion, the liturgy allowed a sermon on the Passion. We had compassion for Christ who died on the Cross, before adoring both. Now, there is no longer any question of this, and it is no longer mentioned. On the other hand, after the Maundy Thursday Gospel, a homily is strongly recommended for us to marvel at Christ washing feet.

Ancient documents show that Mass was never the place or the time for the Mandatum. The washing of the feet was separated from Mass, generally followed by a clergy get-together. The king or emperor participated in the Mandatum, not at Mass. The Cæremoniale Episcoporum situates the Mandatum in a suitable place, in the chapter house or in church, but not in choir. The Missal specifies no place, supposing neither the choir nor the altar. From the moment of the reconciliation of penitents being done in the nave, common sense could not admit laymen into choir. The pastorals want the Mandatum within Mass, only tolerating it out of Mass. They hardly notice that we can wash the feet of clerics – real or considered as such.

A remark is necessary about the distribution of roles. The deacon and subdeacon are charged with introducing the twelve chosen men (no longer thirteen) into the choir, then to lead them back to their previous places. This job is that of a verger or sacristan. It expresses very well the pastoral mentality impregnated with a populist attitude, unfavourable to the clergy. There was a time when each candidate for having his feet washed was carried by force by worthy men before the sitting Pope to have his feet washed. The pastorals, not daring to push “fraternal charity” to this point, are content to use the deacon and subdeacon for introducing lay candidates into choir, then to lead them back afterwards. Some miss the ancient usage mentioned, for not only sport but also the social and pastoral activity of the clergy would have drawn benefit.

We find a big obstacle without any possible dissimulation. By decree of 4th December 1952 the Holy Congregation of Rites censured the incongruity of the fact that the Bishop puts on his shoes and takes them off in the church. Following this, it forbids such a use of liturgical shoes. This had always to be done outside the church, despite the former rules in force. This decree is excessively disputable, for it is based on ambiguity, attributing things that have never been said to the Cæremoniale Episcoporum. Let us not discuss them and be content with forbidding them. The Bishop, outside Mass, receives his shoes and buskins on legs and feet that are not bare, since they are covered with socks. These shoes are sacred vestments, just as much as the mitre and gloves, blessed, received with the episcopate, accompanied by a prayer and reverence. This practice has existed for centuries. On the other hand, 12 men in choir, during Mass, take their shoes off, strip their right feet bare, and put their shoes back on before going back to their places. In summary, twelve bare feet are less incongruous than the two of the Bishop with his shoes on, without counting other differences.

The concern for eliminating the word pax from the Maundy Thursday Mass, since the kiss of peace is not given, extends to a collect, to the Confiteor, etc., to the kissing of the Bishop’s hand, to the Ite missa est, the blessing and the Last Gospel. But we do not know if they tolerate other kisses, of the hand and the object; for they could not proscribe them as mechanically. The knowledge of the pastorals is still at the point of confusing the kissing of the hand and the kissing of the ring.

The sparing of the Confiteor at Communion of Maundy Thursday, an exchange that takes the unnoticed Confiteor said in private by the celebrant at the beginning of Mass, so that it takes the place of a collective Confiteor, sung by the deacon before Communion, is, we can say, far-fetched. The subtlety of bartering does not suffice to hide the enormous difference between the two uses of the Confiteor. Too much finesse can be harmful.

Setting out on the procession to the altar of repose and the return give patent proof of the ceremonial dexterity of the pastorals. At the beginning, the celebrant takes the ciborium helped by the deacon, and clumsily; arriving he puts it down with or without the deacon’s help, and just as badly. The reforms require from those who do it to be trained, and many are not. From Palm Sunday, we know nothing about the processional cross or the altar. Are they bare or veiled, and in which colour? No-one knows anything.

oOo

The Good Friday service takes the form of Mass in its main lines. This service received its early inspiration from the Orientals. The Mass of the Presanctified took its rightful place, above all if we observe that the Roman Rite had the “dry mass” for many centuries. Despite all, a cry of alarm broke out among the pastorals – it was the death warrant. The alarm was given by a Belgian Benedictine abbot crying out: “The Good Friday ceremony has taken on terrible appearances of a Mass”. No more was needed by the pastorals. With an effort worthy of a better goal, they have fulfilled this programme: get rid of the fundamentally Roman elements, adopt foreign elements, restore inferior and obsolete Roman elements, exclude everything that can in any way remind us of a Mass. On this point, their fixed idea was to sing the refrain Delenda est Carthago. The Mass of the Presanctified succumbed under misunderstanding, victim of a kabbal. The liturgical dictionary, in the Migne edition, said in 1844: “The Roman Rite seems to us, as for the adoration of the cross, more grave and edifying than the rite of various dioceses of France”. Advice to the pastorals for their entire construction, become a simple exercise of piety, under the name of “Singular and solemn liturgical action for the passion of death of the Lord”, an action which, despite its qualification, gives no nobility to its subject.

The Roman Pontifical teaches us that we do not greet a new altar before having placed its cross. The altar itself is not the object of veneration, but the cross that dominates it, and to which all prayers are addressed. There was a time when the cross and candles were brought to the altar on entering the sanctuary, and they were carried away after Mass. This leaving the altar always uncovered is not permitted to-day. This is why I address the pastorals: “On Palm Sunday, you have uncovered the processional cross by pretext of emphasising it. On Good Friday when it is covered, you take the cross from the altar, send it to the sacristy and then have it brought back. How do you explain such a contradiction?” No creative or organisational genius here! We finally note that the cross on the altar brings to mind a Mass.

The pastorals divide the solemn action into four sub-titled parts, of which the second and third are solemn, but not the first and fourth. These doses are just as intelligent and admirable as their authors.

Chasubles – no question of them; they smack of the Mass. Then the poor celebrant has to be happy to be in an alb, as in a country church, despite the ultra-proclaimed solemnity – a contradiction the Roman Rite spared him.

The altar without a cross, if it is worthy of being kissed, has no right to a bow or genuflection, and even less to be prayed to – for an altar is not invoked. In the Roman Rite, when we kneel or make a double genuflection, or a bow, the bow must be slight and not profound. This ancient rule has been confirmed about a half century ago. It is scary to see the liturgy caught between two powers mutually ignoring each other.

The pastorals enrich Good Friday with an introductory collect and three concluding prayers. They abolish with one hand and lengthen with the other. They fall between two stools and are caught in their own net. The celebrant sings the introductory collect at the foot of the altar, for he will go up to the altar only for the great prayers. At the altar, the celebrant does not spread his hands unless he is in a chasuble at Mass and that Delenda est Carthago, hands spread gives place to joined hands. The second lesson takes the place of an epistle sung by the subdeacon, since the name of Mass is rejected and the deacon does not sing the Gospel.

The pastorals have the three deacons say the Munda cor meum and bidding the blessing on Palm Sunday. On Good Friday, the three do not say Munda cor meum and do not bid the blessing, but they go before the celebrant who addresses them a wish in a clear voice. Until now, the Munda cor meum has always come before the Gospel, at all the four Passions. Even the pastorals kept it before their gospel-history of the Passion – but they have excluded it on Good Friday. Why? Perhaps on this day the Passion is less of a Gospel than a history. With the loss of Munda cor meum, the Gospel is not announced. As he gives the blessing, the celebrant speaks media voce, but saying the formula he speaks clara voce. The new formula is without doubt better than the old. Finally the three deacons of the Passion who kneel to bid and receive the blessing do not have a reason to bow to hear the celebrant – we do not bow to respond to Dominus vobiscum.

Now begins the second period with a change of vestments, followed by two others, four in all. This is the punishment by the puritans who blame the Roman Rite for changing vestments too often. The pastorals, mitigating their anti-Mass prejudice, have the celebrant vest to go up to the altar. But, they have him in a cope, at the middle of the altar instead of the epistle corner, with the ministers each side of him, not behind. They have the priest with hands apart despite being in a cope.

They are more concerned with the dimensions of the cross than with its characteristics – a reliquary cross, the wood of the cross is of no interest to them, despite the origin of the rite. They have little knowledge or understanding of the Roman Rite. They transfer the cross from the sacristy to the altar where it was missing, where it should have its fixed place whether or not Mass is celebrated. Keeping the cross veiled does not mean hiding it, relegating it to the sacristy, depriving the altar of it – where it should more than ever be in a place of honour on this Friday. The pastorals should know that the veil should cover the whole cross, not just the crucifix, for it is the cross that is shown.

Other novelties await us. The notion of the pastorals about processions: the deacon between two acolytes brings the exiled cross from the sacristy – a procession. The faithful queue up to adore the cross – a procession. The deacon brings the Blessed Sacrament from the altar of repose – this is not a procession. We are now completely confused. We did not use lighted candles before transporting the Blessed Sacrament, of which the cross is not jealous. Now the pastorals use lighted candles for the cross. It results, among other things, that the celebrant uncovering the cross finds himself among four persons, a lot of people for little space! The cross, brought by the deacon then uncovered by the celebrant, now remains delivered to the hands of two acolytes who should not have this role, above all at the altar – which is not their place.

For centuries and rightly, Catholics have adored not only the cross but also the crucified body of Christ on the floor of the church. This is why we spread a carpet, a cushion, a white and violet veil for a shroud. This goes beyond the ideas of the pastorals, who have the Crucified standing upright. They have thus discarded the showing-adoration of the cross – not an exaltation but bringing it to adorers who prostrate themselves. The adoration of the cross is no less misunderstood – it was done as for the Pope, three genuflections spaced out before kissing the cross or the Pope’s foot. But this Friday, the three genuflections are changed into three double genuflections of adoration. It is through this reverence to the Pope that the genuflection became part of the Roman Rite.

At the uncovering of the cross, after each of the Ecce lignum crucis, the action was together with the invitation – we kneeled and adored, responding Venite adoremus. The adoration in silence took place during the three double genuflections before the kissing. The pastorals move the silent adoration of the three destroyed double genuflections, they are associated with each Venite adoremus. In this way it wastes time rather than saving it – again, the pastorals have the adorers go one by one instead of two by two. They probably believe that singing is not good for adoration, attention and recollection.

The problem with the collective adoration of the cross was for a long time solved by the use of several crosses, presented to the faithful for kissing or exposed for adoration in several places. After the adoration, the altar cross is put in its normal place, from where it was taken to the sacristy. Its return gives place to a strange rubric.

Then they change colour. White and black are the original colours of the Roman Rite, but the pastorals prefer violet to black, the most recent colour. They reinforce the mourning of Good Friday by calling it the day of the Lord’s death, but reject the black colour of death. They, who exterminate the Mass of the Presanctified, who until now had the celebrant in a black cope, have him wear a violet chasuble. But not for the ministers – they are disguised in dalmatics. Can there be more of a contradiction? If the pastorals saw a clash between communion and black, they should have considered that the Requiem Mass is said in black, and communion is given there even with previously consecrated hosts given as communion just before or after the Mass in black.

I ask the pastorals: what need, what opportunity do you feel to put a chasuble on the celebrant just to give communion? The distribution of communion has never required a chasuble outside Mass. You exterminate the Mass of the Presanctified, you obstinately eliminate the least detail that smacks of this, then you dare to put a chasuble on the celebrant – that you refuse for the ministers. Nothing warrants the celebrant to be vested for Act IV of your production, for you leave him simply in alb for Act I. Your discretionary powers are vast, as are the abuses.

oOo

The procession of Maundy Thursday, definitively instituted by Sixtus IV (+ 1484), and that of Good Friday, instituted by John XXII (+1334), therefore by the same authority, have the same object, same purpose, same solemnity, except the festive character of the first and the mourning of the second. Why abolish one and keep the other? The arrival of the Blessed Sacrament is accompanied by singing of the three antiphons in honour of the cross, in the place of Vexilla Regis having the same purpose, but without doubt un-pastoral.

In the Roman Rite, the celebrant sings the Pater noster alone, entirely or at the beginning and end saying the middle part in a quiet voice. The best proof is that the congregation, having said nothing, responds sed libera nos. All the same, the pastorals had to reform this, and here is the result of their prowess: the Pater noster said and not sung, said by all, said in a sung service, a sad mixture of Latin and Oriental rites, recited solemnly (sic), but stripped of the solemnity of singing, said with joined hands, whilst the Libera nos is said with hands apart. The pitiful explanation given is that the Pater, since it is a prayer for communion, has to be recited by everyone. Two questions: is the Pater more for communion than the other days of the year? Is the Pater more for communion than the other prayers before communion?

The writing of the rubrics is naturally at the same level. Thus we read that the celebrant takes a host with the right hand – so does he strike his breast with the left hand? We don’t know if the left hand rests on the corporal or on the ciborium. We read that as he strikes his breast, instead of a medium bow, parum incinatus, the celebrant makes a profound bow – a posture impeded by the height of the altar.

It is disrespectful to the liturgy and the celebrant to abolish the chalice and the large host. A small people’s host is ridiculous. The chalice once served as a ciborium, and this could continue. There was a time and place when the Good Friday communion was taken in both kinds, having been reserved, therefore with the chalice. Of this we should be aware. The chalice served for the purification of the celebrant, and opened the way for the clergy. One did not eat without drinking. All this imitated the Mass, did not deceive anyone, did not even oppose general communion – but this is of little importance.

The pastorals introduced three postcommunions, sung by the celebrant with joined hands, at the middle of the altar, between his ministers, and during which all stand. Another curiosity: during Compline the candles are snuffed out. Therefore the cross, now uncovered, can do without light. Now, why were lighted candles needed before its uncovering and during the adoration? A game of compensation: they give the cross light it had not had, and they take away the incensing from the Blessed Sacrament, the cross and the altar.

The Church mourns and weeps during the three days during which the Lord remains in the Sepulchre. During this time of the obsequies of the dead Christ, all the Hours of the Office end with the collect Respice quæsumus, which is exactly the prayer super populum at the Mass of Holy Wednesday. The pastorals break this continuity and unity by a replacement – at the end of the Hours of Saturday they insert a prayer that gives the aspect of a banal vigil, clashing with the rest, above all with the ancient Christus factus est. If the pastorals were logical with themselves, they would see that this prayer, not being in the tone of the three days, had no longer to be said kneeling and with a silent conclusion. This was of finishing Vespers is no less strange.

As for Mass, finishing in the late evening, was the cause of doing away with Vespers, at another time Mass, finishing late into the night, did away with Matins of Easter. The three Nocturnes were reduced to a single one, and this for the whole Octave. With less cause, the pastorals went further by abolishing Easter Matins, but did not dare to extend this to the rest of the Octave. As for the Vigil of Pentecost, massacred, its Octave continues to enjoy a single nocturne.

oOo

As already seen, the pastorals continue the burial of folded chasubles with that of Christ. On the other hand, and with the same deftness, they resurrect some minimal ceremony that is less ancient and abandoned. Also, they answer a question that has never been resolved. The celebrant blessed the new fire to obtain blessed light, with which the deacon lit the paschal candle before which he sang the Præconium. This lighting and singing passed for the blessing of the Paschal Candle. Now there is no doubt, everything is clear – the deacon has only to carry it and sing. The candle brought from I don’t know where, under the watchful eyes of the congregation, is subjected to incisions and inscriptions, with explaining formulas, as well as pushing the five grains of incense into the five holes in the candle, which would represent the five wounds of Christ. This brings us back to the symbolism of William Durandus, whose ideas were once in fashion then fell into desuetude. The grains of incense are explained by the relation between fire and the resin of incense. The inscriptions had degenerated into a large tablet suspended on the candle and its candlestick, perhaps imitating the sign INRI of the cross, since the candle had to symbolise Christ.

Here, the Paschal Candle lit and blessed, the pastorals have the lights of the church put out. The Breviary had already done this at the end of Lauds of Maundy Thursday, but this concerned the lamps, electric lights, extinguished until Saturday. They probably want, without saying it clearly, to extinguish all the lights, have the church in darkness, which will be dissipated by the candles of the clergy and people. This brings out the Paschal Candle, something oriental, reminding us of a Candlemas around a big candle.

Whilst the light was given to light the candle already in place, now they carry the lighted candle to put it into place. One of the promoters of the Paschal Vigil was enthusiastic about the imposing proportions of the massive candle, and the majesty of paschal candlesticks. They did not suspect that their sectaries would have reduced everything to the proportions of a village church. When candle and candlestick took on a monumental development, and the candle was no longer transportable, it disappeared from the procession. Light had to be brought to it with the triple candle. Thus it happened that the hero of the triumphal cortege was not carried. We note that with the triple candle and reed, the light of Christ was no less adored.

In the hands of the pastorals, their solemn procession for the carrying of the candle became the negation of reasons principles, a liturgical monster. Their whim of having the deacon and the celebrant walk directly behind the subdeacon and the cross, at the head of the clergy, is the same thing as putting the cart before the horse. One of them excuses this with two stupidities. Firstly, in the proper order the clergy would turn their backs to the candle. Answer – in any procession where a relic or the Blessed Sacrament is carried, backs are turned as praises are sung. The contrary has never been done. The second: in the proper order, the clergy would sing the Lumen Christi turning their backs to the candle. Answer: there is no evil in this, for the genuflection is not made to the candle carried behind, but to Christ who is everywhere. We need to distinguish Christ as light and the light of Christ. Lumen Christi means that the light of Christ is in the lighted candle, not that Christ-light be there.

Reading the pastoral rubrics, we are led to believe that everybody – clergy and people – makes for the candle to light his own candle, which he holds during the singing of the Exultet. We remind ourselves with amazement of not being allowed to hold our palms during the singing of the Passion.

The right place for singing the Exultet and situating the Paschal Candle has always been where the Gospel is sung, the customary place in choir, or on the ambo or choir screen where the paschal candlestick is situated. The position of the candle in the middle of the choir, on a small support, is purely arbitrary. This give rise to fleeting and false interpretations, and does away with the majestic paschal candlestick.

The deacon, holding the book, bids the blessing, then incenses the book as for the Gospel. Why this? The reason is that the Exultet has always been in the Gospel book. Another reason is that the deacon incenses the book containing the praise of the candle that he is going to sing. The direct purpose is not to incense the candle, of less worth than the Gospel book. By incensing the book, the deacon incenses, per modum unius, the candle places against the reading desk. The pastorals could dispense with a new incensing, above all made by turning one’s back to the candle.

The pastorals have officiated before an altar without a cross on Friday, but on Saturday, the altar and its cross no longer suffice for them. They want a centre towards which they turn – the Paschal Candle – rivalling the altar. The place for the singing of the Gospel has its symbolism, once disputable. Their place for the Paschal Candle, at the centre of the choir, entirely lacks symbolism. The way the desk is turned, and the deacon singing the Exultet, the reader singing the lessons, with the altar to his right and the nave to his left, shows the charm of the profile position unlike that of the pastorals.

According to the pastorals, the celebrant vests in four ways on Friday, but on Saturday, he is spared from vesting. He remains in a cope instead of putting on a chasuble. Is eludes them that the Prophecies, Tracts and Collects are part of the Mass, and that the Pope once baptised in chasuble.

oOo

The baptistery was an edifice annexed to the church, a kind of hallway, neutral territory, where a person entered as a pagan and emerged as a Christian. Used in a particular way, it was not made to contain the whole congregation. The baptistery has been succeeded by the baptismal font, often badly situated and just as badly constructed, but by whose fault? These faults should never be a reason to abandon them. Baptismal fonts, baptismal water and Baptism go together as one. A spectacular innovation that deliberately separates them, installing substitutes for the font in the choir and baptising in them, then using this recipient for transferring the baptismal water to the font – is an insult to history, to discipline, to the liturgy and common sense. Thus people are baptised in the choir, the place for the clergy, a pagan with those accompanying him. Thus the baptismal water resembles the person brought in pomp to it, from where he was expelled. It was to preserve the baptismal water over the whole year that sumptuous baptisteries were constructed with artistic and majestic fonts. To-day, the pastorals make baptismal water and baptise in a basin, and in this container they carry it to the font, singing the song of a thirsty deer, which has already drunk, and which is going towards a dry font.

The Litany, once repeated so often, is an supplication for the catechumens, before or after their baptism. It is normally sung on the way to the font and coming back from it. As the pastorals introduced a substitute for the baptismal font into the choir, they have the first half of the Litany sung, then the blessing of the water, always under the protection of the Paschal Candle. This time the celebrant faces the people, no longer his profile. What subtlety! Not the return, but the transport of the water to his home raises a thorny question. Whose role is it to play the walking reservoir – the deacon, acolytes, and how many of them? Our task that can arouse jealousies, above all during the obsolete singing of Sicut cervus. Suppose our church has a separate baptistery, the pastorals still dare to give the choice between the liturgical method and their sad invention.

The renewal of baptismal vows, taken from the First Communion for children, is a massive para-liturgy, a purely pastoral creation and un-liturgical, an occasion to insert the vernacular into the liturgy. It is a boring repetition of what has just been done if there has been a baptism. They could go on to renew marriage vows for people at a wedding. Finally it causes an empty space between the transport of the water and the second half of the Litany, therefore a waste of time by returning in silence.

The Paschal Candle finishes by being taken off its little temporary support and put on its candlestick on the Gospel side, ignored until now. Flowers have never been prescribed for the altar. Now the pastorals need them to make it more pleasant.

Monsignor GROMIER

* * *

Semaine Sainte Restaurée

Referring page

La Semaine Sainte restaurée fût en premier lieu une question d’horaire. Il s’agissait de remettre en usage la veillée pascale, basée sur le dogme pastoral de la Résurrection à minuit sonnant. Ce dogme ne se soutient pas facilement ; car pourquoi s’y soumettre quand les messes vespérales, pratiquement, admettent la célébration à toute heure du jour et de la nuit, même après le chant des vêpres ; quand la messe conventuelle se célèbre indifféremment après tierce ou sexte ou none ? Autre opposition les règles du culte ont pour fondement, outre le cours du soleil, la discipline du jeûne, qui s’est fortement adoucie ; d’où il suit que l’édifice restauré a l’air d’un château de cartes. Le zèle pastoral s’est étendu, depuis le samedi, point culminant, à toute la semaine partant des rameaux.

L’anticipation progressive des trois derniers jours, puis le renvoi au soir originaire nous ouvre un débat. Le décret général préambule affirme que, vers la fin du moyen-âge, on avait avancé au matin les solennités susdites. Or la bulle de Saint Pie V, Ad cujus notitiam, du 29 Mars 1566, donc 113 ans après la fin du moyen-âge, prohibe ce qu’on faisait encore, par permission ou par coutume, dans les église cathédrales, collégiales, conventuelles et autres, c’est-à-dire célébrer, le soir ou vers le coucher du soleil, le samedi saint et les autres solennités. Le but est évident la pastorale doit restaurer, réparer les dégâts ; plus graves ils étaient, plus sera bien venue la restauration ; Dieu sait si la restauration à faire avant toute autre n’était pas d’abolir la bulle de Saint Pie V, en laissant aux évêques la liberté tant désirée, de choisir l’heure de l’après-midi la plus avantageuse pour les offices de la Semaine Sainte : en permettant aussi, à qui voulait, de faire la communion ; laquelle avait été abolie par crainte qu’on ne fût plus à jeun aux heures de l’après-midi où le célébrant la faisait encore.

Sa terminologie mérite attention ; car un apologiste, patenté pour le reste, nous maintient ici dans l’obscurité. Jusqu’à présent on connaissait le dimanche de la Passion, le dimanche des Rameaux, les lundi, mardi et mercredi de la Semaine Sainte, le Jeudi Saint, in Coena Domini en latin, le Vendredi Saint, in Parasceve en latin et le Samedi Saint. Puisqu’on veut amplifier la solennité de la procession des Rameaux, pourquoi mettre ce dimanche en dépendance de la Passion ; et ne pas lui laisser son vieux nom de dimanche des Rameaux, que tout le monde comprend et qui ne trompe personne ? Si le Samedi Saint s’appelle ainsi, le vendredi peut bien s’appeler de même, chez tous les chrétiens du monde. Il y aura bientôt 2000 ans qu’on l’appelle in Paravesce ; le nom seul en démontre l’antiquité. Alors pourquoi le remplacer par Passion ou Mort du Seigneur ; locution inutile, non traditionnelle, inconnue au canon de la messe ? En style ecclésiastique passion signifie souffrances jusqu’à la mort inclusivement. Si le substantif mort était si nécessaire, le bon sens voulait surtout qu’il fut ajouté au mot passion dans le titre de l’Evangile : Passio D.N.J.C. appelé maintenant histoire de la Passion.

L’occasion s’offre d’examiner les capacités juridiques de la pastorale. Il ne suffit pas de parler d’une chose pour la créer. Office in choro veut dire un lieu liturgique ou des ecclésiastiques se comportent suivant des règles liturgiques. Office in communi ne désigne ni lieu ni personne ; c’est un groupe de gens réunis sans mandats sans entité légale, et auxquelles il plaît de dire collectivement l’office privé. Le bréviaire distingue in choro et extra chorum ; il n’y a pas de moyens termes.

Que les vêpres du jeudi et du vendredi saint soient omises, supprimées, voilà qui atteint le comble de l’arbitraire, surtout quand on allègue ce motif : la messe tient lieu de vêpres, car elle est le principal. Or, entre messe et vêpres, il n’y a aucune rivalité ; les vêpres ont la même principalité que les autres fonctions liturgiques. Suivant les temps et les lieux, les vêpres ont été écourtées après la messe du samedi ; elles le furent aussi après la messe du jeudi et du vendredi ; jamais on ne pensa à les abolir. L’horaire rétabli par les pastoraux s’accorde en plein avec le fait historique, c’est à dire jeûne jusqu’aux vêpres, qui sont précédées de la messe et de la communion. Les vêpres du samedi sont dans l’après-midi, avant la messe qui est nocturne ; mais quelle raison peut interdire les vêpres du jeudi et du vendredi, après la messe qui n’est pas nocturne par définition ? Le samedi saint sans complies est inexplicable ; le jeudi et vendredi saints, avec complies mais sans vêpres, défient le raisonnement ; car on a beau se coucher tard, le coucher n’en a pas moins lieu et exige sa prière.

Pour qualifier la procession des Rameaux, la fonction du vendredi saint et la veillée pascale, les pastoraux emploient l’adjectif solennel, tandis qu’ils s’en privent pour tout le reste. Or la solennité des fonctions liturgiques n’est pas une décoration facultative ; elle tient à la nature de la fonction ; elle résulte de tous ses éléments constitutifs, non seulement de quelques uns. Tous les manuels expliquent quelles sont les fonctions solennelles et les non-solennelles. En dehors de là une sois disant solennité n’est qu’un appât amplificatif, pour faire impression et mieux frapper au but. Il faut savoir que, par habitude assez récente, on fait un usage prodigieux du mot solennel, même pour des actes nécessairement solennels, inséparables de solennité. On se paye de mots en croyant mettre plus de solennité dans la procession des Rameaux que dans celle de la Chandeleur, plus de solennité dans la procession du jeudi saint que dans celle du vendredi (abolie comme nous verrons). Toujours sur la même pente, nous apprenons que la Passion du vendredi saint est chantée solennellement comme si elle pouvait l’être d’autre façon.

Digne d’admiration est la puissance des pastoraux qui se manifeste par l’annulation du malheureux et triste canon 1252 §4, sur le jeûne du samedi saint.

Ce jour-là on nous dit que, sous le symbole du cierge pascal, est représenté notre Rédempteur, lumière du monde, qui, par la grâce de sa lumière, a chassé les ténèbres de nos péchés, etc… Là-dessus planait jadis un peu de mystère, sans risque pour l’enseignement. Maintenant on tient à mettre les points sur les i, ce qui suscite un peu d’incertitude. Les différents temps et lieux nous fournissent un amas chaotique de rites, où il faut chercher le fil conducteur. Comme suite du primitif lucernaire quotidien, le feu produit, soit retiré d’une cachette qui le conservait, soit allumé par les rayons de soleil et la loupe, soit transmis par le briquet, allume un moyen d’éclairage pour la nuit pascale ; c’est le cierge pascal, accompagné de la proclamation du mystère pascal. La présence simultanée, et historique, de deux cierges pascaux ne cadre nullement avec la thèse des pastoraux. L’allumage du cierge est l’acte de première nécessité contre les ténèbres ; par cela même, s’il doit évoquer le Christ vivant, il est fort anticipé, il devance trop l’annonce de la Résurrection. L’amplification reçue des pastoraux par le cierge le fait ressembler plus à un but qu’à un moyen. Jadis censé bénit, et même consacré selon les auteurs, aujourd’hui bénit, le cierge pascal devient un objet qui tient un milieu entre une croix, un évangéliaire et une relique. Tout cela se verra mieux quand nous arriverons au jour du samedi saint.

Pendant toute la semaine sainte, tous les textes chantés par le diacre, le sous-diacre et les chantres sont omis par le célébrant, qui n’a pas à les lire. Peu importe comment chantent les officiants (souvent mal), s’ils se font entendre et comprendre, si les haut-parleurs sont intelligibles. On doit écouter. Voilà une victoire ! On s’en délecte comme d’un retour à l’antiquité, d’un gage pour le futur, d’un avant goût des réformes à venir. Si cela peut intéresser les fidèles habitués à se servir d’un livre, qui, le nez dans leur paroissien, s’isolent de la communauté, sic ! On distingue la lecture seulement oculaire et la lecture labiale. Lire des lèvres ce qu’un autre chante ne se soutient pas. Mais la lecture oculaire peut se soutenir ; elle a un âge respectable ; elle a commencé par nécessité, continuée par utilité, abouti en marque de dignité ; elle fait partie de l’assistance pontificale du Pape et de l’Evêque.

Pour ne rien oublier, on nous apprend qu’est solennel même le reposoir du jeudi saint ; ce que n’a jamais dit le Missel, mieux rédigé que certaines rubriques. Celles-ci expriment deux désirs et une interdiction : le clergé fera bien d’abord de tenir les cierges allumés pendant le chant de l’Exultet, ensuite pendant un dialogue entre le célébrant et les fidèles avant la messe. Défense de tenir les palmes pendant le chant de la Passion. Au total, elles prétendent créer deux obligations pour deux nouveautés ; elles abolissent une pratique ancienne, qui trouve son explication dans saint Augustin (homélie à Matines avant les Rameaux) : ” les rameaux de palmier sont des louanges signifiant la victoire, car le Seigneur était sur le point de vaincre la mort en mourant, et de triompher du diable par le trophé de sa croix. “

La vigile de la Pentecôte n’a plus rien de baptismal, devenue un jour comme un autre, et faisant mentir le missel dans le canon. Cette vigile était un voisin gênant, un rival redoutable ! La postérité instruite sera probablement plus sévère que ne l’est l’opinion actuelle à l’égard des pastoraux.

Bon gré ou mal gré, la communion du clergé, souhaitée à la messe du jeudi saint, sera toujours en lutte avec les permission données de célébrer la messe privée.

Les pastoraux appellent le Christ Roi en renfort de leur solennelle procession des Rameaux ; comme si on les attendait pour perfectionner une situation à laquelle l’auteur du Gloria laus et honor a pourvu suffisamment, mais pas à leur manière. Certaines retouches à le tradition, qu’on invoque tant par ailleurs sont aussi mesquines qu’audacieuses.

L’aspersion de l’eau bénite est un rite pascal devenu dominical. Le Dimanche des Rameaux n’est pas moins dominical que les autres. Quand la Chandeleur arrive un Dimanche elle n’empêche pas l’aspersion. Celle-ci n’a jamais consisté à jeter de l’eau sur une table placée quelque part et portant rameaux et autres objets. Elle consiste à asperger l’autel , le célébrant, le clergé, l’église et les fidèles. Exception faite pour l’évêque, et sauf impossibilité, le lieu propre des bénédictions, comme de la consécration, est l’autel, ou encore son voisinage, comme par exemple la crédence.

Pendant des siècles la consécration des huiles se faisait à l’autel, avant de se faire sur une table comme aujourd’hui, et non in conspectu populi. Qu’est-ce que les pastoraux ont ici à montrer au peuple, eux qui de pléthorique qu’elle était, ont rendu squelettique la bénédictions des rameaux ? Une oraison, un signe de croix, un jet d’eau bénite et un encensement ; spectacle peu attrayant. Eux qui suppriment l’aspersion dominicale, véritable méfait liturgique, admettent volontiers que le célébrant parcours l’église pour asperger les rameaux tenus par les fidèles, puis refasse le même chemin pour les encenser.

Un pastoral professeur de séminaire suisse, proclame un jour que le rouge est la couleur du triomphe. On devait lui répondre : vous vous trompez beaucoup, tant que le blanc sera la couleur de Pâques, de l’Ascension, de la Fête-Dieu. Mais non aussitôt dit aussitôt fait ; la couleur pour les rameaux sera le rouge, le violet restant pour la messe. Tout le monde ne pense pas comme le professeur. Le rite romain employait le violet depuis qu’il s’en sert. Le rite parisien et celui de maints diocèses, employait le noir jusqu’au milieu du XIX siècle. Quelques rites employaient le rouge pour les rameaux et la messe. Les uns insistaient sur le deuil les autres sur le sacrifice sanglant. Mais chacun gardait la même couleur : personne n’eût jamais l’idée d’en changer. Car tout l’office du dimanche des rameaux est un mélange de pièces triomphales et passionnelles. Depuis mâtines jusqu’à vêpres incluses, y compris la messe, on trouve que le nombres de pièces passionnelles surpasse de peu celui des pièces triomphales. Quand deux choses sont ainsi mélangées, aucune séparation ne s’impose. le professeur suisse a cru s’illustrer en imitant le raisonnable changement de couleur qui se fait à la chandeleur ; mais son pastiche n’est qu’une chétive succursale de la moderne fête du Christ Roi.

La distribution des rameaux, lisons-nous, se fait suivant la coutume. N’en déplaise aux pastoraux, avant la coutume, il y des règles à observer. Comme le célébrant s’il n’est pas l’unique prêtres, reçoit les cendres et son cierge des mains du plus digne du clergé, ainsi doit-il recevoir son rameau. S’il ne le reçoit pas il sera sans rameau à la procession. Là-dessus de graves rubricistes se sont demandés si les pastoraux voulait que le célébrant ne portât pas de rameaux à la procession, parce qu’il aurait représenté le Christ qui n’en portait pas. L’hypothèse, en tout logique, conduisait à faire monter le célébrant sur une ânesse. Heureusement la pastorale s’est reprise en consentant au rameau oublié.

Elle, qui réduit à sa plus simple expression la bénédiction des rameaux, ne s’est pas privé d’en allonger la distribution, attendu la surabondance des chants destinés à cette action. Tandis que la longueur que la longueur de la bénédiction paraissait énorme, cette pléthore ajoutée est censée pourvoir ne pas suffire au besoin.

Le porteur normal de la croix de procession est le sous diacre, toutes les fois que le célébrant n’a pas besoin de lui, en portant le Saint Sacrement, ou pour les fonts baptismaux. Un sous-diacre supplémentaire en qualité de porte croix n’a de raison que si le sous-diacre est empêché comme ci-dessus.

Pendant deux semaines, la croix de l’autel reste voilée ; bien que voilée on l’encense, on la révère par génuflexion ou inclination profonde. Il est défendu de la dévoiler sous aucun prétexte. Au contraire la croix de procession, succédanée de la croix d’autel, se porte dévoilée à la procession ; au départ et au retour de celle-ci on voit deux croix, l’une voilée, l’autre dévoilée. Que peut-on y comprendre ?

Le désordre augmente au retour de la procession. Aller au devant d’un grand personnage, l’accompagner aux portes de la ville qui sont fermées, s’y arrêter pour le complimenter et l’acclamer, enfin ouvrir pompeusement les portes en son honneur, voilà qui a toujours été un des plus grands hommages possibles ; mais il ne convient pas au génie créateur des pastoraux.

On ne peut qualifier que de vandalisme le fait d’arracher le Gloria laus et honor de sa place à la porte de l’église, pour le mêler à tout le bagage musical processionnel presque triplé de longueur, car lésinerie et gaspillage du temps vont de pair. Donc point d’arrêt devant la porte, fermée puis ouverte ; la croix de procession dévoilée pour la magnifier, on la galvaude en lui refusant la vertu de faire ouvrir la porte. Tout cela en dépit du cérémonial ancien et moderne et puis avec quel profit ? Les rubriques pastorales affectionnent l’expression : rien n’empêche que, nihil impedit quominus. Ici elles s’en servent pour lâcher la bride aux fidèles qui pourront chanter l’hymne Christus vincit, ou autre chant en l’honneur du Christ Roi. Tolérance qui aura naturellement ses suites ; les fidèles dament le pion du clergé, ils ont le choix des chants et de langue ; s’ils chantent au Christ Roi, ils aimeront à chanter à sa mère qui est reine. Autant de désirs, de souhaits éminemment pastoraux.

La rubrique romaine disait : quand la procession entre dans l’église, on chante Ingrediente Domino, la rubrique pastorale dit : quand la procession entre dans l’église, au moment où le célébrant franchit la porte, on chante Ingrediente Domino. On ne fait nul cas de la porte au retour de la procession ; maintenant on guette le passage de la porte par le célébrant qui semble identifié avec le Christ entrant à Jérusalem.

Entre la procession et la messe on nous enrichit d’une oraison finale et récapitulative, avec des modalités défectueuses ; le célébrant n’a pas besoin de monter à l’autel, surtout en lui tournant le dos, exprès pour chanter une oraison et redescendre aussitôt. A-t-on jamais vu cela après les processions des rogations ? Enfin dans le cas présent, tenir le livre devant le célébrant appartient au diacre et sous diacre, non à un clerc.

Autrefois on appelait Passion le chant évangélique de la Passion, et évangile la fin de la Passion chantée à la manière de l’Evangile. Aujourd’hui les deux parties réunies s’appellent histoire de la Passion, ou encore Evangile de la Passion et de la mort. Un tel progrès pastoral en vaut la peine ! Les chasubles pliées sont une des caractéristiques les plus anciennes du rite romain ; elles remontent au temps où tout le clergé portait la chasuble, et furent conservées […] la plus austère pénitence. Leur abandon fait mentir les peintures des catacombes : c’est une perte immense, un outrage à l’histoire et à […] toraux, dit-on, on aurait donné cette explication proportionnée au méfait : on ne trouve pas facilement des chasubles pliées. Or c’est juste le contraire : on trouve partout des chasubles violettes, qui peuvent se plier, tandis que les dalmatiques violettes sont beaucoup moins répandues. En outre on a toujours la ressource de servir en aube.

Les pastoraux aiment retrancher quelque chose au début ou à la fin de la messe. Leurs coupures outre le peu d’instants qu’elles font gagner, sont plutôt insignifiantes, mais surtout elles leur servent de tremplin pour de nouveaux bonds sur leur voie réformatrice. Ainsi donc ni le psaume Judica me, ni confession avant la messe des Rameaux et du samedi saint, parce que précédée d’une autre cérémonie ; mais on voudra autant la messe de la Chandeleur, des Cendres, une messe de mariage, de funérailles, une messe précédée de communion. Du début passons à la fin. Aux Rameaux, aux jeudi et samedi saints, l’indésirable dernier Evangile est omis ; parfait, mais en vertu de quel principe ? Au jeudi saint la bénédiction est omise, parce que la cérémonie n’est pas achevée ; on voudra autant la Fête Dieu, et chaque messe suivie d’une procession du Saint Sacrement.

Lorsque s’introduit l’usage de faire chanter la Passion dialoguée par trois diacres supplémentaires, plutôt en forme de leçon qu’en forme d’Evangile, on réservera la fin de la Passion pour être chantée, sous forme d’Evangile, par le diacre du célébrant, afin de ne pas tomber dans l’absurdité du diacre qui ne chante pas l’Evangile. Les trois diacres commençaient et terminaient la Passion sans cérémonies, comme aux leçons ; le seul diacre au contraire faisait les cérémonies habituelles de l’Evangile. Cela tenait debout, venait de la chapelle papale. Ainsi le diacre est évincé par les trois de la Passion, laquelle ne fait plus qu’un avec l’Evangile ; le munda cor meum et la bénédiction d’avant l’Evangile passent avant la Passion ; encensement du livre, baiser du livre, encensement du célébrant disparaissent. Ces trois gestes succombent à la mentalité pastorale ; car pour elle il n’y a pas d’Evangile, il y a seulement une histoire, histoire de la Passion ; or à défaut d’Evangile, il n’y a pas d’évangéliaire ; par conséquent on n’encense pas le livre d’histoire, on ne le fait pas baiser, on n’encense pas qui ne l’a pas baisé.

Continuons à glaner. Les livres de la passion-évangile viennent comme ils peuvent ; on n’en parlera que le vendredi saint. Les pastoraux ignorent comment se porte l’évangéliaire ; pourquoi il doit y avoir trois acolytes d’accompagnement, au lieu de deux ; que le diacre agenouillé pour dire le Munda cor meum n’a pas à s’incliner ; ils nous répètent à satiété que la passion-évangile est chantée ou lue. Du reste toutes leurs rubriques sont rédigées de manière à faire croire que, à volonté, on peut lire dans un office chanté ou chanté dans un office lu, on peut choisir ce qu’on veut chanter et laisser ce qu’on ne veut pas, on peut faire des offices à moitié chantés, à moitié lus, on peut amalgamer chant et lecture. Tel est un des fléaux redoutables en ce moment, avec celui de la langue vulgaire. Il n’est pas très nouveau et reçu même un appui par les décisions prise ces dernières années, que dans les ordinations chantées, l’évêque ordinant interrompe le chant des préfaces pour dire sans chanter les paroles essentielles ; car, paraît-il, le chant nuit à l’attention requise.

La Passion selon les quatre évangélistes englobait l’institution de l’Eucharistie, tant parce qu’elle y sert d’introduction, tant parce qu’elle ne peut trouver sa meilleure place que dans la messe. Les pastoraux pressés quand ils veulent, pensent autrement, ils expulsent l’institution de l’Eucharistie. Celle-ci par conséquent, est toute l’année exclue de la liturgie dans l’Eglise romaine, sans doute pour meilleure instruction des fidèles.

L’omission du psaume miserere à la fin des heures soulage le pauvre clergé et les malheureux fidèles. Ce psaume pouvait rester après laudes ou vêpres seulement ou même au chœur seulement, ou même facultatif seulement. Les pastoraux auraient lus avec profit ce que le cardinal Wisemann, premier archevêque de Westminster, écrivit sur le chant de ce psaume à l’office des ténèbres dans la chapelle papale.

La Missa Chrismatis, messe pontificale célébrée avec 26 parés rappelant la concélébration, célébrée sans aucun rapport avec le jeûne, dans laquelle il n’est pas permis de donner la communion, forme un curieux problème difficile à résoudre. Sa préface propre sur le ton férial, se range parmi d’autres curiosités.

Dans le rite romain l’emploie de l’étole est limité par des règles ; personne ne peut la porter sans motif ; elle se met au moment voulu, ni avant ni après ; elle est un vêtement sacré, n’a aucun rapport avec le vêtement choral, soit pour les individus, soit pour un corps du clergé. Les prêtres n’ont pas plus le droit de porter l’étole pendant une messe, où ils communieront, que pendant une messe d’ordination, où ils imposeront les mains. En disant l’inverse les pastoraux abusent de leur latitude imméritée.

A la messe du jeudi saint le célébrant commence solennellement le Gloria in excelsis ; comment ferait-il pour le commencer autrement ? Ici nous trouvons une transposition, sinon de grande importance, du moins de haute signification pastorale. Jusqu’à présent après le chant de la passion du vendredi saint, la liturgie donnait place à un sermon sur la Passion ; on s’apitoyait sur le Christ mort en croix, avant d’adorer l’un et l’autre. Maintenant il n’est plus question de cela, on n’en parle plus. En revanche après l’évangile du jeudi saint une homélie est fort conseillée pour qu’on s’émerveille du Christ lavant les pieds.

Des documents anciens il ressort que la messe ne fut jamais ni le lieu ni le temps du Mandatum. Celui-ci en était séparé, était généralement suivi d’une réfection du clergé. Le roi ou empereur participait au mandatum, non pas à la messe. Le Ceremoniale Episcoporum situe le Mandatum dans un local convenable, ou dans la salle capitulaire, ou dans l’église mais pas dans le chœur. Le missel ne spécifie aucun lieu, ne suppose ni chœur ni autel. Du moment que la réconciliation des pénitents se faisait dans la nef, le bon sens ne pouvait admettre dans le chœur des hommes du laïcat. Les pastoraux veulent le Mandatum dans la messe, ne font que le tolérer en dehors ; ils s’aperçoivent à peine qu’on peut laver les pieds à des clercs, véritables ou tenus pour tels.

Une remarque s’impose sur la distribution des rôles. Le diacre et le sous-diacre sont chargés d’introduire les douze hommes choisis (non plus treize) dans le chœur, puis de les reconduire à leur place d’auparavant. Ce service est celui d’un bedeau ou d’un sacristain ; mais il exprime bien la mentalité pastorale imprégnée de démagogie peu avantageuse au clergé. Il fut un temps où chaque candidat au pédil[…] était porté, à force de bras, par des hommes idoines, devant le pape assis pour laver les pieds. Les pastoraux, n’osant pas pousser à ce point la ” charité fraternelle “, se contentent d’employer le diacre et le sous-diacre à introduire les candidats, puis à les reconduire dehors. Certains regretteront l’antique usage signalé, car non seulement le sport mais aussi l’activité sociale et pastorale du clergé en aurait profité.

Nous rencontrons un gros obstacle sans dissimulation possible. Par décret du 4 Décembre 1952 la Sacré Congrégation des Rites censurait l’incongruité du fait que l’évêque se chausse et se déchausse, prend et quitte chausse et sandales dans l’église ; par suite elle prohibait un tel emploi des chaussures liturgiques, lequel devait toujours se faire hors de l’église, malgré les règles jusqu’alors en vigueur. Ce décret est excessivement discutable, car il se base sur l’inexactitude, en attribuant au Ceremoniale Episcoparum des choses qu’il n’a jamais dites. Ne le discutons pas, et limitons nous à sa prohibition. L’évêque, hors de la messe, reçoit chausse et sandales sur jambes et pieds non dénudés, puisque couverts des bas. Ces chaussures sont des vêtements sacrés, autant qu’une mitre et une paire de gants, bénits, reçus simultanément avec l’épiscopat, accompagnés d’une prière, mis en œuvre avec toute la bienséance possible ; la pratique existant depuis des siècles. Au contraire 12 hommes dans le chœur, pendant la messe, se déchaussent, mettent à nu leur pied droit, et se rechaussent avant de se retirer ; la pratique étant d’invention moderne. En résumé douze pieds nus sont moins incongrus que les deux de l’évêque chaussés, sans compter les autres différences.

Le souci d’éliminer le mot pax de la messe du jeudi saint, parce que le baiser de la paix ne se donne pas, s’étend à une oraison, au Confiteor, etc…, au baiser de la main de l’évêque, a l’Ite missa est, à la bénédiction et au dernier évangile. Mais on ne sait pas si ils tolèrent les autres baisers, de main et d’objet ; car ils pourraient les proscrire aussi machinalement. La science des pastoraux en est encore au point de prendre le baiser de la main pour le baiser de l’anneau.

L’épargne d’un Confiteor à la communion du jeudi saint, c’est à dire un échange qui prend le Confiteor inaperçu dit privatim par le célébrant au début de la messe, pour qu’il tienne lieu du Confiteor collectif, chanté par le diacre avant la communion, est peut-on dire, tirée par les cheveux. La subtilité du troc ne suffit pas à masquer l’énorme dissemblance de deux emplois du Confiteor. Trop de finesse peut nuire.

Le départ et l’arrivée de la procession au reposoir donnent une preuve patente de la dextérité cérémoniale des pastoraux. Au départ le célébrant prend le ciboire avec l’aide du diacre, et maladroitement ; à l’arrivée il le dépose avec ou sans l’aide du diacre, et mal également. Les réformes exigent de ceux qui les font une formation que beaucoup n’ont pas. Depuis le Dimanche des Rameaux, nous sommes sans nouvelles tant de la croix de procession que celle de l’autel. Furent-elles découvertes ou voilées, et de quelle couleur ? Personne n’en sait rien.

Le culte du vendredi saint comporte communion […] tout en ayant les grandes lignes extérieures d’une messe. Ce culte appris […] fut de bonne heure emprunté par le rite romain aux orientaux, qui en font large emploi toujours en vigueur. La messe des présanctifiés avait ainsi de qui et de quoi s’autoriser, surtout si l’on observe que le rite romain eut pendant des siècles la messe sèche ; une véritable parodie. Malgré tout un crime d’alarme éclata parmi les pastoraux ; c’était un arrêt d’extermination. L’alarme fut donnée par un abbé bénédictin belge s’écriant : ” la cérémonie du vendredi saint a pris des allures de messe insupportables “. Il n’en fallait pas plus aux pastoraux. Avec un acharnement digne d’un meilleur but, ils ont rempli ce programme : retrancher des éléments foncièrement romains ; adopter des éléments étrangers ; reprendre des éléments romains inférieurs et désuets ; exclure tout ce qui peut, de près ou de loin, faire penser à une messe. Sur ce point leur idéefixe est un émule du refrain Delenda est Carthago. La messe des présanctifiés a succombée sous l’incompréhension, a été victime d’une cabale. Le dictionnaire de liturgie, édition Migne, disait en 1844 : ” Le rite romain nous semble, quant à l’adoration de la croix, bien plus grave et plus édifiant que le rite de divers diocèses de France “. Avis aux pastoraux pour leur construction toute entière, qui est devenue un exercice de piété, sous le nom de ” Singulière et solennelle action liturgique pour la passion et la mort du Seigneur ” ; action qui, malgré son qualificatif, n’ennoblit pas son objet.

Le Pontifical romain nous apprend qu’on ne salue pas un nouvel autel avant d’y avoir placé sa croix. Car on salue non pas l’autel lui-même, mais bien la croix qui le domine, et à laquelle s’adressent toutes les prières. Il fut un temps où l’on apportait la croix et les chandeliers à l’autel en y arrivant, et on les remportait en partant. Cela aujourd’hui, n’est pas plus permis que de tenir l’autel découvert en permanence. C’est pourquoi je m’adresse aux pastoraux : ” Le dimanche des Rameaux vous avez découvert la croix de procession sous prétexte de la magnifier ; le vendredi saint où elle est couverte vous enlevez la croix de l’autel, l’envoyez à la sacristie, où vous l’enverrez chercher ensuite ; comment expliquez-vous pareille contradiction ? ” Renions tout génie créateur ou organisateur. Notons enfin que la croix sur l’autel rappelle une messe.

Les pastoraux divisent la solennelle action en quatre parties sous-titrées, dont la deuxième et la troisième sont solennelles, mais la première et la quatrième non. Ces dosages sont aussi savants et admirables que leur auteurs.

De chasuble il n’en est pas question ; elles sentiraient la messe. Alors le pauvre célébrant doit se contenter d’être en aube, comme dans une église de campagne, malgré la solennité ultra proclamée ; c’est un affront que le rite romain lui épargnait.

L’autel sans croix, s’il mérite toujours d’être baisé, pour lui-même, n’a pas le droit d’être salué, et encore moins d’être prié ; car on n’invoque pas l’autel. Dans le rite romain lorsqu’on se trouve à genoux, ou qu’on fait la génuflexion à deux genoux, et que l’on s’incline, l’inclination doit être médiocre, non profonde. Cette règle ancienne a été confirmée il y aura un demi siècle environ. On s’effraye en voyant la liturgie entre deux pouvoirs, ou seulement deux conduites, qui s’ignorent réciproquement.

Les pastoraux enrichissent le vendredi saint d’une oraison d’introduction et de trois oraisons de conclusion ; ils abrègent d’une main et allongent de l’autre, ayant le monopole du juste milieu ; on verra qu’ils sont pris entre deux feux, […] , dans leur propre filet. Le célébrant chante l’oraison d’introduction au pied de l’autel parce qu’il n’y montera que pour les grandes oraisons. Puisque, à l’autel, le célébrant ne tient les mains écartées qu’étant en chasuble dans la messe et que Delenda est Carthago, les mains écartées devraient faire place aux mains jointes ; mais la pastorale abdique. On se demande pourquoi la deuxième leçon tenant lieu d’épître est chantée par le sous diacre, vu que le nom de messe est rejeté, et que le diacre ne chante pas l’évangile.

Avec les pastoraux les trois diacres disent le Munda cor meum et demandent la bénédiction, cela aux Rameaux ; le vendredi saint les trois ne disent pas Munda cor meum, et ne demandent pas la bénédiction, mais vont devant le célébrant, qui leur adresse à haute voix un souhait. Jusqu’à maintenant le Munda cor meum a toujours précédé l’évangile, aux quatre passions. Même les pastoraux l’ont conservé avant leur évangile histoire de la Passion ; mais, ils l’ont exclu le vendredi ; pourquoi ? Peut-être que ce jour là et pour eux, la Passion est moins un évangile qu’une histoire. A la perte du Munda cor meum supplée une acquisition : une formule de bonne augure ou l’évangile n’est pas nommé. De plus, en donnant la bénédiction le célébrant parle media voce ; mais en disant la formule il parle clara voce ; la nouvelle formule est sans doute meilleure que l’ancienne. Enfin les trois diacres de la Passion qui s’agenouillent pour demander et recevoir la bénédiction, n’ont pas motif de s’incliner pour entendre le souhait du célébrant ; on ne s’incline pas pour répondre à Dominus vobiscum.

Ici commence la deuxième période vestimentaire, suivie de deux autres, quatre en tout. C’est la punition des puritains qui blâmaient le rite romain de faire trop souvent changer de vêtements. Les pastoraux mitigeant leurs préjugés contre-messe, ils font habiller le célébrant et le font monter à l’autel. pourtant sans capituler, il lui mettent un pluvial ; le place au milieu de l’autel, non au coin de l’épître ; avec les ministres à ses côtés, non derrière lui ; lui font tenir les mains écartées malgré le pluvial.

On ne s’occupe plus des dimensions de la croix que de sa complexion ; une croix reliquaire, le bois de la vraie croix ne les intéresse pas ; en dépit de l’origine du rite. On connaît mal et on n’a pas compris le rite romain. On a copié ailleurs le transport de la croix depuis la sacristie jusqu’à l’autel, où elle manque, où elle a sa place fixe, aussi bien sans messe qu’avec messe. Tenir la croix voilée ne signifie pas la cacher, la reléguer à la sacristie, en priver l’autel où elle doit, plus que jamais trôner ce vendredi. Sache la pastorale que le voile doit couvrir toute la croix, non seulement le crucifix ; car on montre la croix principalement.

D’autres nouveautés nous attendent. Notions des pastoraux sur les processions : le diacre entre deux chandeliers ramène la croix exilée à la sacristie, c’est une procession ; les fidèles défilent pour adorer la croix, c’est une procession ; le diacre entre deux chandeliers apporte du reposoir le Saint Sacrement, ce n’est plus une procession. Comprenne qui pourra. On n’employait pas de lumière avant le transport du Saint Sacrement, dont la croix n’est pas jalouse ; maintenant les pastoraux emploient la lumière pour la croix. Il en résulte, entre autres, que le célébrant, en découvrant la croix, se trouve au milieu de quatre personnes ; beaucoup de monde pour peu de place ! La croix, apportée par le diacre puis découverte pas le célébrant, reste désormais livrée aux mains des acolytes dont ce n’est pas le rôle, surtout à l’autel où il n’ont jamais place.

Depuis des siècles et justement, on a voulu, en plus de la croix, adorer le corps du Christ mort, gisant sur sa croix couchée. Voilà pourquoi on l’étendait sur un tapis, un coussin, un voile blanc et violet en fonction de linceul. Cela dépassait la conception des pastoraux, qui font tenir debout un mort suspendu par les bras. Ils ont également écarté l’ostension-adoration de la croix, qui n’est qu’une exaltation c’est sa mise à la portée d’adorateurs qui se prosternent. Non moins incomprise est l’adoration de la croix ; elle se faisait comme celle due au pape, par trois génuflexions espacées, avant le baiser de la croix ou du papier ; sauf que, ce vendredi, les trois génuflexions étaient changées en trois agenouillements d’adoration. C’est en passant par le pape que la génuflexion est entrée dans le rite romain.

Au découvrement de la croix, après chacun des trois Ecce lignum crucis, on joignait l’action à l’invitation, on s’agenouillait, et on adorait en répondant Venite adoremus. L’adoration en silence avait lieu durant les trois agenouillements préalables au baiser. Le génie pastoral déplace l’adoration silencieuse des trois agenouillements détruits, il le transporte après chaque Venite adoremus. De cette manière il fait plutôt perdre que gagner du temps ; ce qu’il réitère en envoyant les adorateurs un à un au lieu de deux à deux. Il croit probablement, et n’est pas le seul, que le chant nuit à l’adoration, à l’attention, au recueillement.

Le problème de l’adoration collective de la croix était depuis longtemps résolu par l’emploi de plusieurs croix, soit présentées au baiser des fidèles, soit exposées à leur adoration en plusieurs places. Après son adoration la croix de l’autel récupère sa place normale, d’où elle était partie à la sacristie. Son retour donne lieu à une rubrique étrange.

Alors on change de couleur. Le blanc et le noir sont les deux couleurs originaires du rite romain, mais les pastoraux préfèrent au noir le violet, couleur la plus récente. Eux qui renforcent le deuil du vendredi saint en l’appelant jour de la mort du Seigneur, ils rejettent le noir couleur de la mort. Eux qui exterminent la messe des présanctifiés, qui jusqu’à présent ont mis un pluvial noir au célébrant, ils lui mettent une chasuble violette, n’en mettent point à ses ministres, et les déguisent avec des dalmatiques ; peut-on se contredire plus grossièrement ? Si les pastoraux voyaient un désaccord entre la communion et la couleur noire, ils auraient du considérer que la messe des morts se dit en noir, qu’on y donne la communion, même avec des hosties consacrées précédemment, qu’on donne la communion en noir aussitôt après ou avant la messe en noir.

Je demande aux pastoraux : quel besoin, quelle opportunité sentez-vous de mettre une chasuble au célébrant seulement pour donner la communion ? La distribution de celle-ci n’a jamais comporté la chasuble hors de la messe. Vous exterminez la messe des présanctifiés, vous éliminez obstinément le moindre détail qui puisse la remémorer, et vous osez mettre une chasuble au célébrant quand vous la refusez à ses ministres. Rien n’autorise le célébrant à être vêtu pour l’acte numéro 4 de votre représentation puisque vous le laissez dévêtu, en aube, pour votre acte numéro 1. Vos pouvoirs discrétionnaires sont vastes ; l’abus ne l’est pas moins.

La procession du jeudi saint, instituée définitivement par Sixte IV (E 1484), et celle du vendredi saint, instituée par Jean XXII (E 1334), donc par la même autorité, ont même objet, même but, même solennité, sauf que la première a caractère de fête, la deuxième caractère de deuil. Pourquoi donc abolir l’une en conservant l’autre ? L’arrivée du Saint Sacrement est accompagnée par le chant des trois antiennes en l’honneur de la croix, à la place de l’hymne Vexilla regis ayant même objet, mais sans doute non pastorale.

Dans le rite romain le célébrant chante seul partout le Pater noster, soit en entier, soit au début et à la fin, avec le milieu à voix basse. La meilleure preuve en est que l’assistance n’ayant rien dit, répond sed libera nos a malo. Néanmoins la pastorale doit réformer, et voici le bilan de ses prouesses : le Pater noster récité au lieu de chanté ; récité par tout le monde ; récité dans un office chanté ; funeste mélange de rite latin et oriental ; récité solennellement (sic), mais dépouillé de la solennité du chant ; récité les mains jointes, tandis que le libera nos est récité les mains écartées. Pitoyable explication suivant laquelle le Pater, parce que prière pour la communion doit être récité par tout le monde à la fois. Deux demandent surgissent : ce vendredi, le Pater est-il plus pour la communion que les autres jours de l’année ? Le Pater est-il plus pour la communion que les autres prières avant la communion ?

La rédaction des rubriques se trouve naturellement à la même hauteur. Ainsi nous lisons que le célébrant prend une hostie avec la main droite ; alors se frappera-t-il la poitrine avec la main gauche ? On ignore si la main gauche s’appuie sur le corporal ou sur le ciboire. Nous lisons qu’en se frappant la poitrine, au lieu d’une inclination médiocre, parum inclinatus, le célébrant s’incline profondément ; posture empêchée par la hauteur de l’autel.

C’est manquer de respect à la liturgie et au célébrant de supprimer le calice et la grande hostie ; une petite le rapetisse. Le calice a servi de ciboire autrefois, et peut encore continuer. Il fut des temps et des lieux ou la communion du vendredi se faisait sous les deux espèces réservées, donc avec le calice ; précieux souvenir à conserver. Le calice servait à la purification du célébrant, et ouvrait la voie à celle du clergé ; rite vénérable non aboli ; on ne mangeait pas sans boire. Tout cela imitait convenablement une messe, ne trompait personne, ne s’opposait pas à la communion générale ; peu importe.

La pastorale introduit trois postcommunions, chantées par le célébrant les mains jointes, au milieu de l’autel, entre ses ministres, et pendant lesquelles on est debout. Autre curiosité : pendant complies les cierges sont éteints ; donc la croix après son découvrement peu se passer de lumière ; alors pourquoi lui en donner avant son découvrement et pendant son adoration ? Jeu de compensation ; on donne à la croix des lumières qu’elle n’avait pas ; on ôte au Saint Sacrement, à la Croix et à l’autel l’encensement qu’ils avaient.

L’Eglise pleure et gémit pendant les trois jours que le Seigneur resta au tombeau ; pendant ces trois jours de funérailles du Christ mort, toutes les heures de l’office se terminent par l’oraison Respice quaesumus, qui est justement l’oraison super populum à la messe du mercredi saint. Les pastoraux rompent cette continuité et unité par un remplacement ; à la fin des heures du samedi ils mettent une oraison qui leur donne l’aspect d’une banale vigile, qui jure avec le reste, surtout avec l’antienne Christus factus est. Si la pastorale était logique, elle verrait que son oraison, n’étant plus dans le ton des trois jours, n’a plus de motifs d’être dite à genoux et avec conclusion silencieuse. Sa manière de terminer les vêpres n’est pas moins étrange.

Comme la messe, finissant tard dans la soirée, fut cause qu’on abrégea les vêpres, ainsi à une autre époque la messe, finissant tard dans la nuit, fit abréger les matines de Pâques, réduire les trois nocturnes à un seul, et cela durant toute l’octave. Avec beaucoup moins de raison les pastoraux prennent goût à l’expédient, et le perfectionnent en supprimant les matines pascales ; mais ils n’osent pas l’étendre aux jours de l’octave. Quand au samedi de la Pentecôte, massacré sous le rapport baptismal, son octave continue à jouir de l’unique nocturne.

Comme déjà vu les pastoraux continuent l’ensevelissement des chasubles pliées avec celui du Christ ; par contre avec la même facilité, ils ressuscitent quelques minime cérémonie bien moins ancienne et abandonnée. En outre ils tranchent une question jamais résolue. Car le célébrant bénissait du feu nouveau pour avoir une lumière bénite, avec quoi le diacre allumait le cierge pascal dont il chantait le panégyrique ; cet allumage et le chant passait pour être la bénédiction du cierge pascal, sans grand mal à cela. Maintenant plus le moindre doute à tout cela, tout est clair comme du feu ; le célébrant bénit cierge et feu ; le diacre n’a qu’à le porter et à chanter. Le cierge apporté on ne sait d’où, sous les yeux scrutateurs du public, est soumis à des incisions et inscriptions, avec formules explicatives, en plus de l’enfoncement des cinq clous d’encens dans cinq trous du cierge, qui seraient les cinq plaies du Christ. Voilà qui nous reporte à la symbolique de Guillaume Durand, qui eut son temps de vogue puis de désuétude. Les grains d’encens eurent plus de chance à cause du quiproquo entre chose allumée et résine d’encens. Du reste les inscriptions avaient dégénérées en une volumineuse tablette, qu’on suspendait au cierge ou à son chandelier, peut-être à l’imitation de la tablette INRI de la croix, puisque le cierge devait symboliser le Christ.

Ici le cierge pascal étant allumé et bénit, les pastoraux font éteindre les luminaires de l’église. Le bréviaire l’avait déjà fait à la fin des Laudes du jeudi saint ; mais il s’agissait des lampes, du luminaire liturgique, éteint jusqu’au samedi. On veut probablement, mais sans le dire clairement, éteindre toutes les lumières, mettre l’église dans l’obscurité, qui sera chassée par les cierges du clergé et du peuple, venus on ne sait comment ; cela fait ressortir le cierge pascal ; cela a un air oriental, a l’air d’une Chandeleur autour du cierge principal.

Tandis qu’on transportait la lumière pour allumer le cierge déjà mis en place, maintenant on transporte le cierge allumé pour le mettre en place. Un des promoteurs de la vigile pascale s’enthousiasmait des proportions imposantes du cierge massif, et de la majesté des chandeliers pascals, soutien du cierge ; il ne soupçonnait pas que ses sectateurs auraient réduit le tout au proportions d’une église de village. Lorsque cierge et chandelier prirent un développement monumental, et que le premier ne fut plus transportable, il disparut de la procession ; on dut lui porter la lumière au moyen d’une canne à trois flammes. Ainsi arriva que le héros du cortège triomphal n’y fut pas porté. Notons que, même alors, avec la canne, la lumière du Christ n’était point acclamée, le Christ lumière n’était point adoré.

En passant par les mains des pastoraux, leur solennelle procession pour le transport du cierge est devenue la négation de principes raisonnés, un monstre liturgique. Leur caprice de faire marcher, dans une soi-disant procession le diacre et le célébrant directement derrière le sous-diacre et la croix, c’est à dire en tête du clergé, équivaut à mettre la charrue avant les bœufs. Un de leur porte voix a taché d’excuser leur malfaçon avec deux maladresses. La première en marchant comme il faut le clergé tournerait le dos au cierge porté en arrière. Réponse : dans toute procession où l’on porte un relique ou le Saint Sacrement, on lui tourne le dos quoiqu’on chante ses louanges ; on n’a jamais fait le contraire. La seconde : si l’on marchait comme l’on doit le clergé chanterait Lumen christi en tournant le dos au cierge. Réponse : aucun mal à cela ; car la génuflexion ne se fait pas au cierge qui est derrière mais au christ qui est partout. Il faut distinguer Christ lumière et lumière du Christ. Lumen Christi signifie que la lumière du Christ est dans le cierge allumé, non pas que le christ lumière y soit.

En lisant les rubriques pastorales, on a lieu de croire que tout le monde, clergé et peuple, se précipite sur le cierge pascal pour y allumer son propre cierge ; également que chacun tient son cierge allumé pendant le chant de l’Exsultet. On se rappellera avec stupeur l’interdiction de tenir son rameau pendant le chant de la Passion.

La bonne place pour chanter l’Exsultet et situer le cierge pascal a toujours été celle où se chante l’Evangile, c’est à dire au lieu accoutumé dans le chœur, ou bien à l’ambon ou au jubé, où se trouvait habituellement le chandelier pascal. La position de celui-ci au milieu du chœur, sur un petit support est purement arbitraire ; elle tient à de fausses interprétations passagères ; elle donne congé au majestueux chandeliers pascals.

Le diacre, tenant le livre, demande la bénédiction, puis encense le livre, comme pour l’évangile. Pourquoi cela ? Une raison en est que l’Exsultet a toujours été mis dans l’évangéliaire ; l’autre, que le diacre encense le livre qui contient l’éloge du cierge qu’il va chanter. Le but direct n’est pas d’encenser le cierge, qui vaut moins que l’évangéliaire. Par l’encensement du livre le diacre encensait, per modum unius, le cierge placé contre le pupitre. La pastorale pouvait se dispenser d’un nouvel encensement, surtout pratiqué en tournant le dos au cierge.

Les pastoraux ont officié devant un autel sans croix le vendredi ; mais le samedi, l’autel et sa croix ne leur suffisent plus ; ils veulent un centre vers lequel on se tourne, qui sera le cierge pascal en rivalité avec l’autel. Le lieu pour le chant de l’évangile a son symbolisme, jadis très discuté ; leur lieu du cierge pascal, au centre du chœur, en manque absolument. La façon dont sont tournés le pupitre, et par suite le diacre chantant l’exsultet, le lecteur chantant les leçons, avec l’autel à sa droite et la nef à sa gauche, montre le charme que la position de profil exerce sur les pastoraux.

Suivant les pastoraux le célébrant s’habille de quatre manières le vendredi ; mais le samedi, un habillement lui est épargné ; on le laisse en pluvial au lieu de lui mettre la chasuble. Il leur échappe que les prophéties, traits et oraisons font parties de la messe, et que anciennement le pape baptisait en chasuble.

Le baptistaire était un édifice annexe de l’église, sorte de vestibule, de terrain neutre, où l’on entrait païen, d’où l’on sortait chrétien. D’un emploi particulier, il n’était pas fait pour contenir toute l’assemblée des fidèles. Au baptistère ont succédé les fonts baptismaux, souvent mal situés et mal construits ; mais à qui la faute ? Que l’autorité y pourvoie ! Leurs défauts ne seront jamais une raison de les désaffecter. Fonts baptismaux, eau baptismale et baptême forment un tout ; une innovation spectaculaire qui les sépare délibérément, qui installe dans le chœur des fonts postiche et y baptise, qui transporte aux fonts baptismaux l’eau baptismale faite ailleurs, ayant déjà servi ailleurs, est une insulte à l’histoire et à la discipline, à la liturgie, au bon sens. Ainsi on baptisera dans le chœur, enceinte du clergé, un païen venu avec ses accompagnateurs. Ainsi l’eau baptismale ressemble à une personne ramenée pompeusement chez elle, d’où elle était expulsée. En faveur de l’eau baptismale, et dont la quantité doit durer toute l’année, furent érigés de somptueux baptistères, des fonts baptismaux artistiques et majestueux. Aujourd’hui la pastorale fait l’eau baptismale et baptise dans une cuvette, un baquet, puis, dans cet appareil elle porte l’eau à la fontaine, en chantant le cantique d’un cerf assoiffé, qui a déjà bu, et qui se dirige vers une fontaine à sec.

La litanie, jadis répétée à profusion, est une imploration pour les catéchumènes, soit avant, soit après le baptême ; on la chante normalement en allant aux fonts et en en revenant. Comme la pastorale introduit dans le chœur une contrefaçon de fonts baptismaux, elle y fait chanter une première moitié de la litanie, ensuite la bénédiction de l’eau, toujours sous la protection du cierge pascal, mais cette fois le célébrant montre sa face au peuple, non plus son profil. Quelle subtilité ! Non pas le retour, mais le transport de l’eau à son domicile soulève une épineuse question : à qui incombe le rôle de réservoir ambulant, au diacre, ou à des acolytes, et à combien ? Noble tâche qui mérite de faire des jaloux, surtout pendant le chant périmé du Sicut cervus. Supposé que l’église ait son baptistère, les pastoraux ont encore l’audace de donner le choix entre la seule méthode liturgique et leur triste invention.

Les rénovations des promesses du baptême, puisée à la première communion des enfants, est un acte de paraliturgie la plus massive, création d’autant plus pastorale que moins liturgique, excellente occasion tant recherchée, d’insérer la langue vulgaire dans la liturgie ; elle est une répétition oiseuse de ce que l’on vient de faire si l’on a baptisé ; elle pourra mener à la rénovation des promesses conjugales parmi les personnes réunies pour un mariage. Enfin elle cause un vide entre le transport de l’eau et la seconde moitié de la litanie ; donc perte de temps pour un retour en silence.

Le cierge pascal finit par quitter son petit support provisoire, et par gagner son chandelier du côté de l’évangile, tenu ignoré jusqu’à présent. Des fleurs n’ont jamais été prescrites sur l’autel, maintenant la pastorale en a besoin pour se rendre plus agréable.

Monseigneur GROMIER

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The reader is advised to print this essay in order to read it with the attention it deserves.

The Proto-History of the Roman Liturgical Reform

Dr Geoffrey Hull

Referring Page

Traditionalist objections to the Roman liturgical reform of 1969 were, until very recently, not taken at all seriously by most thinking Catholics who prided themselves on the orthodoxy of their faith and religious practice. Conservative Catholics would answer the traditionalist charge that the Novus Ordo Missæ of Paul VI was partly or largely Protestant in spirit by pointing out that the new Mass rite followed very closely the form of the eucharistic liturgy used in the early Roman Church up until the ninth century. In any case, they argued, the Council had explicitly ordered a return to the ancient Roman Mass in recommending that “elements… which have suffered injury through accidents of history are now to be restored to the earlier norm of the holy Fathers”, and. these reformed rites were to be “distinguished by a noble simplcity », « short, clear and free from useless repetitions”. ¹ Like the Mass of the primitive Church, the new service was brief and sober, having been stripped of the ornate Gallican additions of the late Middle Ages. And certainly its more informed opponents had to concede that the rite of Paul VI, whatever its omissions and additions, retained all the essential elements of the Catholic Mass. Conservative apologists of the reform could add that even if the new rite was arguably a less forceful statement of Catholic eucharistic teaching than the old one, any such inadequacies were amply compensated by the consistently orthodox statements of recent Popes on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the Blessed Sacrament, for example Paul VI’s Mysterium Fidei of 1965, his Credo of the People of God of 1968, and John-Paul II’s Inaestimabile Donum of 1984.

No serious student of the liturgy could therefore subscribe to the view that the Novus Ordo Missæ celebrated strictly according to the rubrics of the Latin text promulgated by Pope Paul VI, was quasi-protestant, Even Michael Davies, one of the most eloquent and outspoken critics of the reform: had shown in his trilogy Liturgical Revolution, that whereas the Protestant liturgy-makers of the sixteenth century had systematically expunged from the traditional rites everything that clearly denoted the sacrificial nature of the Mass and transubstantiation, in the Mass of Paul VI the sacrificial language had been reduced or toned down but not eliminated, the result being in certain cases (for example when the second anaphora was used) an ambiguous but valid rite merely capable of a possible Protestant interpretation.² Any analogy between the Pauline reform and the Reformation liturgies was thus at best partial.

Howeler, not everyone outside the initially small traditionalist camp accepted the clerically-imposed liturgical reform without stopping to analyse the intentions of its authors. John Eppstein, an English Catholic, had a clear understanding of the two forces at work in the creation of the new liturgy whom he identified in 1972 as “the liturgical purists who were inclined to suppress every prayer and action which was not found in the most primitive post-apostolic texts, and the modernists who were for scrapping everything that was not congenial to contemporary sentiment”.³ As reasonable as such reforming projects may have appeared to Catholics of a modern scientific cast of mind, the fact remains that the idea of an arbitrary restructuring of the sacred liturgy has always been alien to orthodox Catholic instinct and practice. Paul VI’s unprecedented attempt to pass off as ‘authentic tradition’ a reform which was on his admission “a law… thought out by authoritative experts of sacred liturgy” was therefore profoundly shocking to many tradition-conscious Catholics.⁴ For them it was unthinkable that a committee of liturgical experts could change the traditional rites of the Church at will and then impose them on the grounds that their creations were, amongst other things, theologically orthodox.

The great irony of the Pauline reform was that Pope Pius XII in his encyclical of 1947, Mediator Dei, had condemned outright its main characteristic: liturgical antiquarianism or ‘archeologism’, the desire to restore the Roman liturgy to its primitive form:

‘It is true that the Church is a living organism and therefore grows and develops in her liturgical worship; it is also true that, always preserving the integrity of her doctrine, she accommodates herself to the needs and conditions of the times. But deliberately to introduce new liturgical customs, or to revive obsolete rites inconsistent with existing laws and rubrics, is an irresponsible act which We must condemn. (…) The liturgy of the early ages is worthy of veneration; but an ancient custom is not to be considered better, either in itself or in relation to times and circumstances, just because it has the savour of antiquity. More recent liturgical rites are also worthy of reverence and respect, because they too have been introduced under the guidance of the Holy Ghost… …. the desire to restore everything indiscriminately to its ancient condition is neither wise nor praiseworthy. It would be wrong, for example, to want the altar restored to its ancient form of a table, to want black eliminated from the liturgical coloufs, and pictures and statues excluded from our churches; to require crucifixes that do not represent the bitter suffenngs of the divine Redeemer…⁵

Here the Pope criticizes as simplistic the mentality which regards the worship of the age of the Fathers and the Apostles as purer than that of any other, as an absolute norm to be restored after every period of so-called liturgical decadence. Such an anachronistic outlook dismissed as irrelevant or detrimental the historical development of the liturgy; in setting up an ecclesiastical ‘golden age’ for perpetual emulation it was radically opposed to the ‘living’ notion of tradition. A century earlier the much-maligned Dom Guéranger had drawn up a syllabus of such tendencies and condemned them collectively as the ‘anti-liturgical heresy’.⁶ Similarly, Pius XII did not simply censure liturgical antiquarianism as misguided but actually passed a negative moral judgement on it as “a wicked movement, that tends to paralyse the sanctifying and salutary action by which the liturgy leads the children of adoption on the path to their heavenly Father”.⁷

Since I am repeating the charge that the New Order of Mass is an artificial creation antiquarianist in conception, it will be useful to consider for a moment the manner in which Catholic eucharistic rites have developed. Basically it is a dual process. As the Church’s appreciation of its liturgical treasure deepened over the centuries, the rite grew organically by the gradual addition of new elements (such as the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar, the Offertory and pre-Communion prayers and the Last Gospel, originally private devotions of the celebrant) and the abandonment of others (such as the Bidding Prayers after the Creed, Communion under both species and Communion in the hand). In either case, the change grew out of popular piety, was long in developing, and may be attributed to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. In every case one is dealing either with new customs slipping almost imperceptibly into the existing fabric of the rite or old ones disappearing from it; there was never novel and sudden legislation from above.⁸ Before 1969 in the entire history of the Catholic Mass the ecclesiastical authorities had intervened in the growth of the sacramental rites only by ratifying or condemning particular customs and normalizing the changes in new official editions of the liturgical books. The process of liturgical development actually parallels that of the canonization of saints: popular cults arise spontaneously and at a later date the hierarchical Church passes authoritative judgement on them.

As Italian canonist Count Neri Capponi puts it in his study of the juridical status of the liturgical reform:

“What must be emphasized (…) is the absolute spontaneity of the development of the liturgy – and in particular that of the Eucharist – presided over by various bishops. There was no uniform legislation or imposition from above, but a body of custom developed by free invention of the celebrant and, especially, by imitation of forms in use in the older and more authoritative churches, round the central core of the Eucharist which, as of divine origin, was unchangeable”.⁹

In the Roman rite this guided development of the liturgy through the growth and ratification or condemnation of custom was halted by the post-Tridentine reform which permanently fixed the basic form of the Mass. The common Christian experience has shown that in each of the other historical rites of Christendom, the Mozarabic, Milanese, Antiochene, Byzantine, Edessene and Alexandrine, what those for whom evolution is progressive improvement contemptuously term ‘liturgical fossilization’ or ‘freezing’, occurred well before the end of the Middle Ages. Thus in traditional Christianity it would seem that the organic growth of the liturgy is not perpetual, but has a natural term. Before Vatican II it was generally accepted that the form of the Roman Mass had reached the end of its formal development in the year 1570. This is naturally far from meaning that a mature rite cannot undergo renewal in the ordering and length of its component parts, in the manner of its celebration or in such externals as music or ornaments. In any case the Missal of 1570 was no arbitrary revision of the existing rite like the reform of 1969, but rather (as Paul VI freely admitted in his Apostolic Constitution Missale.Romanum of 3^rd April 1969) a new edition of the traditional service-books characterized by the customary inclusion or exclusion of a small number of recent or variable elements.¹⁰

If the foregoing theory of ritual maturation is to be taken as the only orthodox one (and it should be recalled at this point that none of the Eastern churches, dissident or uniate, would entertain any other view), then it is necessary to explain how, in the mid twentieth century, the Roman Church could repudiate it in the name of Catholic orthodoxy. Indeed it is clear from his Apostolic Letter Ecclesia Dei Adflicta of 2^nd July 1988 that Pope John Paul II, who condemns Archbishop Lefebvre and his followers for their supposedly ‘static’ notion of tradition, implicitly rejects the concept of spontaneous liturgical growth by identifying ‘Living Tradition’ with the post-conciliar liturgical reform. There can thus be no doubt that John Paul II, no less than Paul VI, has aligned himself with those who claim that organic liturgical development did not end in 1570 and that the unprecedented reform four hundred years later was merely the resumption of the evolutive process after a freakish period of stagnation. The disturbing conclusion is inescapable: the antiquarianism that Pius XII condemned as unorthodox yesterday, his successors impose as orthodoxy today.

In order to discover the prototype of the Novus Ordo Missae one need not go as far back as the Reformation; its antiquarianist rather than Protestant ethos and the strictures of Mediator Dei indicate that its immediate ancestry is more recent. The authors and apostles of the new rites have, in fact, readily acknowledged their great debt to the ideas and liturgical experiments of a network of eighteenth-century Catholic reformers. Unequivocally rejected as “pernicious errors” by Pius XII, these tendencies culminated in the infamous Synod of Pistoia of 1786 which, writes the same Pope, “the Church, in her capacity of watchful guardian of the deposit of faith entrusted to her by her divine Founder, has rightly condemned » ¹¹ It is worthy of note that many of the leading figures of the eighteenth century movement for liturgical reform in France, Germany, Austria and Italy were also adherents of Jansenism, which the teaching Church has always condemned as heretical and which may be loosely described as a form of Catholic puritanism.

The Jansenist movement was characterized not merely but its extreme doctrinal Augustinianism, which related it to Calvinism, but also by its contempt for the dogmatic authority of the Holy See. This orientation inevitably affected the attitudes of the Jansenists towards the public worship of the Church. Their habit of regarding Saint Augustine as a theological oracle led them to idolize the Church of the age in which he lived, the fifth century. If Catholics ought to follow the teachings of Saint Augustine (or rather the Jansenists’ extreme interpretation of them), then they should also seek to emulate in their churches the worship of this golden age of Christianity. Hence the heretics’ contempt for the theology and liturgy of the Middle Ages. And since the Holy See was abusing its centralized organization by teaching error (in the Jansenists’ view, semi-pelagianism), more stress needed to be placed on the authority of the local Church, which as a small unit could be more easily purified in its doctrine and worship.¹²

In all these ideas the Jansenists leaned towards the antiquarianist and rationalist ideas of the Hussite, Lutheran and Anglican liturgists of an earlier age. Just as the Protestant Reformers had been supported by secular authorities, so too these reformers who refused to break openly with the Church found powerful allies and avid imitators among the Gallicans of France and the Febronians of’Austria and the Italian States. In Austria, the Emperor, Joseph II, even gave his name to a new form of erastianism: Josephism. “To Joseph II, the Church”, writes Philip Hughes, “was primarily a department of state whose office was the promotion of moral order”.¹³ In the 1780’s the Sacristan Emperor, as he was nicknamed by his contemporaries, initiated his reform by placing the Church under strict state surveillance and suppressing the contemplative orders. He then went on to outlaw such traditional practices as the Litany of Loreto and the rosary, banned sermons on Christian doctrine, abolished all prayers and hymns ‘offensive’ to the State and forbade certain feasts. He fixed by imperial decree the number of masses to be said in each church, and even the number of candles to be lit on the high altar.¹⁴ Within a few years his brother Pietro Leopoldo, ruler of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, was putting similar reforms. into effect with the help of Scipione Ricci, the bishop of Pistoia and Prato.

In considering the Jansenist liturgical reform it is most important to bear in mind that the partisans of the condemned heresy initially aspired to orthodoxy in their eucharistic theology: their over-scrupulous discouragement of frequent Communion and their insistence on preparation through the sacrament of penance are evidence enough of their fervent belief in the Real Presence. Unlike the Protestants, therefore, the Jansenists intended to uphold the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, though in their pedantic zeal to be patristic they rejected transubstantiation as an adequate explanation of the eucharistic mystery. Moreover, they stopped short of imitating the public worship of protestants to the extent that the Reformation liturgies were unpatristic. They did not, for instance, replace the altar with a table and celebrate facing the people, most of them retained the use of liturgical Latin. They were not iconoclasts, nor did they place the Eucharist in the hands of standing communicants or abolish the ritual distinction between priest and people.

In Austria and Tuscany, where the Tridentine missal was in common use, the heretics tampered little with the existing texts and rubrics of the Mass. By contrast, the French Jansenists had more scope for ritual reform because the Tridentine Mass was not widely celebrated in their country: most of the dioceses of France, including the archbishopric of Paris, clung to the indigenous Gallicano-Roman liturgies of the High Middle Ages that had survived the general reform of 1570 by virtue of the indult of St. Pius V. In these liturgically non-Roman dioceses of France new breviaries, and sometimes new missals, were composed by prominent Jansenist priests and laymen and imposed in place of the traditional ones by local bishops sympathetic to the reformers’ ideals. And since in most cases it was the ‘revision’ of a legitimate local rite, the Holy See did not have the immediate right to intervene.

What shape, exactly, did the Jansenist liturgical reform take? Inspired as it was by rationalism, the prevailing tendency of the age, this movement subjected the traditional liturgical texts to the most relentless criticism. As the work of revision progressed, no element thought to be post-Patristic was suffered to survive, so that propers, prayers and hymns composed in the Middle Ages were all replaced by texts from the Bible, especially those thought to favour Jansenist interpretations of dogma. While not giving formal adherence to the Lutheran doctrine of the priesthood of all baptized believers, the reformers tended to reduce the role of the ordained priest to that of president of the Christian assembly. Consequently they attacked private masses at which members of the laity were not present, discouraged votive Masses and anniversary requiems, and took a subjectivist view of the Real Presence in contending that one did not truly receive Christ in Holy Communion administered outside Mass. Attacking the extra-eucharistic cult of the Blessed Sacrament, Joseph II saw fit to ban the use of the monstrance and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament; while in Tuscany Grand Duke Leopold forbade the laity to hear Mass in monastic churches so as to stress the essentially communitarian nature of the Eucharist.¹⁵

In France this new approach to the Mass as a communal sacrifice of the Christian people was further emphasized by such reforms as placing a white cloth, cross and lights on the altar only when Mass was to be celebrated. Sanctuaries were not to be encumbered with vases of flowers. Each church was to have only one altar; side-altars were demolished. Instead of reciting the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei by himself in a low voice while the choir sang, the priest now sang along with the people. The role of the people in the offering was highlighted by the revival of such supposedly meaningful acts as the obsolescent offertory procession and the placing on the altar of seasonal fruits and vegetables for blessing at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, as in the early Roman rite. Instead of the traditional ‘veiling’ of the mystery and the deliberate cultivation of a numinous atmosphere, the new rites were to be distinguished by a clarity and openness which required the abolition of all silent prayers: the Canon was now to be recited aloud, the congregation responding with an Amen to each of is prayers. Laymen were allowed to read the epistle in the vernacular in some places; in one Jansenist parish a woman read the gospel of the day in French before Vespers.¹⁶

Orthodox churchmen throughout France were alarmed. Not only were the Jansenists destroying the traditional liturgy, but they had launched a savage attack on popular piety as well. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Parisian Oratorian Pierre-François d’Arères de la Tour complained how:

‘They do everything to diminish the cult of the Blessed Virgin, to weaken the respect due to the Pope. They pride themselves on using only Scripture in their liturgies, and in declaring themselves followers of Christian Antiquity, they frequently quote the canons of that age, boldly criticize everything, attack the legends, visions and miracles of the saints, affect elegance of literary style, valuing only their own productions and despising the works of others, and generally set themselves up as reformers… In the liturgical books being produced today they do not attack Catholic dogma, but subtly undermine it, uprooting the tree little by little…”17

Canon De La Tour equally deplored the worldly attitudes of the reformers, whose mania for modernity amounted to an eighteenth Century version of aggiornamento, irresistible to lovers of novelty and symptomatic of a cultural cringe towards Enlightenment England:

“Such is the frailty of human nature that involuntarily and without even suspecting it, people are taking on the tastes, fashions, language and idiom of the country and age in which they live… Our century is the age of Anglomania. It is the dominant strain in the agnostic movement, which rails against the superstition of the populace, the credulity of the devout, the excesses of the cult of the Blessed Virgin and the Saints, the despotism of the Pope, the neglect of Sacred Scripture and the Church Fathers, and so on. They would deprive religion of all its flesh if they could, leaving just the skeleton. To this end they abolish, polish, simplify, reduce to nothing the little that has been preserved.”¹⁸

Ironically the reform-minded bishop who tried in 1736 to impose an antiquarianist missal on the diocese of Troyes was the nephew of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, and bore the same name. Bossuet’s cathedral chapter protested to the Archbishop of Sens, Mgr. Fan-Baptiste Languet de Gergy, who issued a condemnation of the missal of Troyes in which he remarked that:

“If it were necessary to suppress everything in the liturgy that does not go back to the earliest days of the Church, one would have to abolish the Gloria in excelsis, which, in the time of Saint Gregory, was only recited by the bishop..:’¹⁹

Bishop Bossuet refused to take the condemnation lying down, and in a letter to his metropolitan appealed to a canon of the provincial council of Sens of 1528 which gave local bishops the right to “correct and reform the breviary and the missal”. Archbishop Languet’s reply to him is interesting:

‘The intention of that council was certainly not that each bishop should, on the pretext of acting more wisely than the universal Church, tamper with every part of the Mass, and thereby violate with dubious novelties the uniformity of the liturgy, hallowed by ancient and continuous custom over so many centuries. The council would certainly not have passed such a law if it had been able to foresee how, in the future and in the name of the reform it was prescribing, people would do such things as replace hymns going back to Christian antiquity with texts from Scripture that have been mutilated, altered and twisted so as to take on new meanings, to the great detriment of holy doctrine”.²⁰

The Archbishop reminded his Jansenist suffragan that the provincial service books of council of 1528 had in mind simply the removal from the “superfluous things injurious to the dignity of the Church”. This was a very far cry from, for instance “…changing the prayers of the Canon of the Mass, and suppressing .a substantial part of the public rites”. On that precedent one could go on to “order the singing of vespers in the morning or the celebration of Mass at eight in the evening; and abolish the law of Communion under one kind or the rule prescribing the reception of the sacrament fasting. Why not then allow the people to receive Communion after supper, as in the days of Saint Paul?”²¹

By 1794 when Pope Pius VI published his bull Auctorem Fidei, the mind of the Jansenist reform movement, impoverished by its hard, anxious rationalism and its divorce from authentic, living tradition, was moving in an increasingly modernist direction. One of the five propositions of the Synod of Pistoia condemned in the bull was the typically antiquarianist conviction that “in these recent centuries there has been a general ignorance about truths of the faith and of the moral teaching of Jesus Christ”.²² But in refuting the Pope’s condemnation of their work, the Jansenists insisted that their beliefs, unlike those expressed in the offending bull, were impeccably orthodox. Some of them even refused to believe that the Pope could have freely endorsed such an obviously uncatholic document, and the bishops of the Dutch Jansenist church lamented that “this astonishing Bull [is] an injury done to the See of St. Peter (…) and dishonours the Pope who has been constrained to adopt it”.²³

Anticipating the twentieth-century Modernists, the Jansenists strove to establish their sectarian views as Catholic orthodoxy and spared no effort in reforming the Church from within according to their lights, rather than abandoning it as the Protestants had done. Similarly, just as many Catholic theologians today deny the very existence of the modernist heresy as exposed by Pope Pius X, the liturgical experts responsible for the post-conciliar reform have also done their best to whitewash the eighteenth century Jansenist liturgies which they readily claim as the blueprint of their own revolutionary programme. In his introduction to a book on the new liturgy published in 1970, English liturgiologist Lancelot Sheppard who, like all revolutionaries, takes it for granted that the old order was defective and corrupt, wrote:

“The present reform has obviously been wanted for some time. Its need was felt for example, in the eighteenth century when some dioceses of France and Germany set about reforming their liturgies along lines that have now become familiar to us in the recent changes. It was unfortunate that the lack of authorization gave them a bad name which probably retarded the eventual refonn”. ²⁴

Fr. Louis Bouyer, another prominent liturgist who had served on the Papal committee which manufactured the new rite of Mass between 1964 and 1969, found much to commend in the antiquarianist eucharistic rite invented by Father Jacques Jube, the early eighteenth century parish priest of Asnières, a village near Paris: “we of today can see in most of [these changes] intelligent and healthy improvements” They ought, however, to have been “introduced with the consent of proper authority”.²⁵

In his historical work The Mass in the West, Lancelot Sheppard shares Fr. Bouyer’s admiration of Jubé’s experiment, but omits to inform his readers that the French abbé was no ordinary Catholic crank with a penchant for innovation, but a staunch Jansenist.²⁶ He also fails to mention that this reformed liturgy was not merely Jubé’s creation, but the fruit of close collaboration with a certain Nicolas Petitpied (1665-1747), a prominent Jansenist theologian who had been banished in 1703 to Holland where he associated himself with the Jansenist Church of Utrecht. Petitpied, incidentally, was later employed as Bishop Bossuet’s propagandist in the latter’s dispute with Archbishop Languet, while Fr. Jubé resigned his parish in 1717 to go to Russia on an-ecumenical mission organized by doctors of the Sorbonne working for a reunion of the Roman, Orthodox and Anglican Churches based on a common Jansenistic formula of belief.²⁷

Whereas Louis Bouyer flays the Catholic liturgical outlook of the medieval, baroque and romantic periods in his study of 1956, La Piété liturgique, he does not hesitate to assert that “the beginnings of a true liturgical movement… are to be found during the sixteenth century”, even though “sad to say, it was among the adherents of this nascent liturgical movement that the Protestant Reformation found its adherents”.²⁸ For Fr. Bouyer, then, certain Jansenists and protestants have been the modern Church’s best teachers in matters liturgical: and indeed “the worst of heretics may sometimes have very useful truths to tell us, truths which need only to be put back in a Catholic setting to take on their full value”. ²⁹

The authors of the Pauline missal were extremely critical of contemporary traditionalists who, in their view, wrongly viewed the existing Roman liturgy as a sacred cow. “There is no longer any question of considering the liturgy as something set once and for all in the forms now established” wrote Father Bouyer ³⁰ The mentality that excludes the possibility of radical and rational liturgical change on a sound theological basis was, in his view, essentially pagan, since only to the pagan mind “sacred means untouchable, something to be preserved intact at any price”. »³¹

Liturgists under the influence of another member of: the Papal Consilium, Father Josef Jungmann, attempted on the other hand to demolish the traditionalist position by characterizing it as a by-product of the nineteenth century theory of evolution, indeed the liturgical counterpart of Newman’s theory of the development of doctrine. According to Jungmann the essentials of the Catholic liturgy did not grow organically; rather, the ritual tradition, like the apostolic deposit of faith, was passed on perfect by the inspired Church Fathers who had fashioned it. In the following centuries it suffered gradual degeneration, and it was the duty of the official Church to prune away periodically the foreign matter that had crept into it. Fr. Jungmann went so far as to claim that the primary aim of Pius V’s revision, as expressed in the bull Quo Primum of 1570, was to restore the primitive Roman rite by removing medieval accretions, and that “the self-evident idea that the development which had taken place meanwhile, separating the present from the pristina sanctorum Patrum norma [“the ancient norm and rite of the holy Fathers”] should not be put aside as long as it did not disturb the ground-plan but rather unfolded it- that idea was never once expressed. »32

Now while it is undoubtedly true that Pius V had no idea of liturgical development as we understand it today, the fact is that the commission entrusted with the revision of the Roman missal codified a rite that was still essentially medieval. Jungmann, however, claims that their failure to restore the primitive Roman rite was largely due to a faulty scholarship which was unable to distinguish between medieval and ancient elements.³³ But it is precisely here that the antiquarianist argument falls down, for if the liturgists of the sixteenth century did in fact have an historically inaccurate idea of the Mass rite of the Patristic age, one can hardly argue that Pius V envisioned an exhumation of such unknown quantities as the Eucharist of Saint Hippolytus or the Mass of Saint Leo. Furthermore, it now seems fairly clear that what the Pontiff meant by the “the ancient norm and rite of the Holy Fathers” was not indeed the ordinary of the Mass, that is, its basic structure, but the propers, or changeable prayers that went with it, since the most ancient sacramentary extant in his day (viz. the so-called Sacramentarium Leonianum of the seventh century) did not contain the ordinary.³⁴ The things that were excised from the Roman rite in 1570 were in fact particular examples of standard variable elements like introits, prefaces and sequences.

Fr. Jungmann was probably the greatest expert on the history of the Roman liturgy, but like so many scholars, he fell into the trap of believing that analysis of a thing necessarily implies its reform. In this error, which was to wreak such havoc in the Latin Church, he resembled those nineteenth-century philologists who, having analysed English in the most rigorously scientific fashion, went on to advocate the ‘purification’ of our originally Germanic language through the elimination of all its French, Latin and Greek ‘accretions’. The promoters of ‘Saxonism’ were doomed to failure, for language, no less than liturgy, is a living organism that cannot be radically reshaped by those whose special knowledge leads them to pass particular judgements on history. Grammarians can influence to some extent the evolution of a language, but they can never alter its historical course.

In the last analysis if must be admitted that the very idea of returning to the ancient form of the Mass is a delusion: since it is obvious that the structure of the rite grew from the days of the Apostles until the coronation of Charlemagne, and that there was never in the Patristic period a liturgical codification with the same permanency and juridical force as that of Pius V, what precise phase in the development of the liturgy are we to canonize as the ideal form of the Mass? The obvious result of such a wild goose chase is to give up the search altogether and ‘return’ to the ritual of the Last Supper, a logical conclusion that has inspired the coffee-table Eucharists of our day. The rationale of the Novus Ordo Missae is thus, like the mentality of its authors, unquestionably antiquarianist. In justifying his reform to Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1976 Pope Paul VI stated that “the present reform derived its raison d’être and its guidelines from the Council and from the historical sources of the Liturgy”, and on another occasion he actually described his anti-historical innovations as “a step forward in the Church’s authentic tradition”.³⁵ The Pope was obviously of the same mind as Fr. Bouyer who had recommended in 1956 that “the true [i.e. Patristic] tradition… be disengaged from all spurious and unhealthy additions, and thus renewed in its primitive freshness, in order to be re-expressed in a frame which should make it accessible to the people of [to]day ».³⁶

If traditionalists today are at variance with the Holy See, it is because they are convinced that the modern Popes have done exactly what the Jansenists wanted Pope Pius VI to do on the eve of the French Revolution. But the dilemma of traditionalists is that there is absolutely no appeal against Papal legislation on liturgical matters, as far as the modern Vatican is concerned.³⁷ Indeed Mediator Dei, so often cited by traditionalists, makes it clear that the Pope “alone has the right to permit or establish any liturgical practice, to introduce or approve new rites, or to make any changes in them he considers necessary”.³⁸ The tragedy is that in making this forceful statement with the evident intention of safeguarding our liturgical inheritance, Pius XII set before the Church a Pandora’s box which his successors were tempted to open, and did. Gone forever are the days when one could serenely subscribe to this teaching in the knowledge that the Roman Popes, whatever their failings, always uphold and protect liturgical tradition from the wanton vandalism of would-be reformers. Whereas the traditional rites of the Church had been constructed by apostles and saints, Roman-rite (and Ambrosian-rite) Catholics have today a Mass which is the work of theorists and committees of ‘experts’.

Considering much of what has taken place in the sanctuaries of the Latin Church since Mediator Dei, Pius XII’s reversal in that encyclical of the historical principle legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi, i.e. “let the rule of prayer establish the rule of belief”, is no less disturbing:

“Indeed if we wanted to state quite clearly and absolutely the relation existing between the faith and the sacred liturgy we could rightly say that the law of our faith must establish the law of our prayer:’³⁹

This liberty taken with a theological tradition going back to apostolic times has been considered by some a most serious flaw in an otherwise excellent exposition of Catholic teaching on the liturgy.⁴⁰ The maxim quoted above was first expressed in the fifth century by Prosper of Aquitaine in an anti-Pelagian treatise entitled Indiculus de gratia Dei, and it is commonly shortened to the aphorism lex orandi, lex credendi. As this work is based largely on the sayings of previous Popes, Dom Cipriano Vagaggini notes that it “certainly reflects the thinking of the Roman curia of that era, and has notable theological authority because the Roman See has since then always considered it as the exact expression of its point of view in the matter under discussion and, subsequently, has often appealed to it”.⁴¹

The basic meaning of the teaching is that in the traditional liturgy we have the oldest witness to what the Church believes, since Christians were worshipping God in public well before the first theological treatises were composed. Living tradition is bipartite, its two aspects distinct yet interrelated. ‘The rational aspect of Catholic Tradition consists of the Magisterium which interprets Sacred Scripture and apostolic teaching, while the sacred liturgy constitutes its symbolic and mystical aspect, and the latter has a chronological primacy over the former. Given, therefore, that the sacred liturgy is not something arbitrarily devised by theologians but theologia prima, the ontological condition of theology, the Church’s teachings must always be in harmony with the beliefs that the traditional liturgical texts express.⁴² This is of course very different from George Tyrrell’s modernistic abuse of Prosper’s maxim, by which doctrines are valid only insofar as they are found in the liturgical texts and have produced practical fruits of charity and sanctification.⁴³ However, given the normative and testimonial nature of the liturgical tradition whose historical growth hag its own dynamic, there can be absolutely no question of artificially restructuring sacred rites to make them reflect new doctrines or new doctrinal emphases, which is precisely the Protestant approach to liturgy.

This rigorously conservative attitude on the question of ritual reform is also the constant teaching of the Eastern Churches. The Russian Orthodox theologian George Florovsky makes the same point rather more bluntly when he says that “Christianity is a liturgical religion. The Church is first of all a worshipping community. Worship comes first, doctrine and discipline second”.⁴⁴ It is the Christians of the East, Uniates and dissidents alike, who have best preserved the classical Catholic approach to worship and who consequently have preserved their litugical traditions intact in modern times. The present liturgical chaos in the Western Church is due in no small part to the emphasis that Latin Christians have always placed on dogma, with the consequent tendency to regard the liturgical texts as a mere locus theologicus, a means to an end, rather than a living source of doctrinal truth. Thus orthodoxia, which originally meant ‘right worship’, gives way to orthopistis ‘right believing’, or orthodidascalia ‘right teaching’.⁴⁵ When taken to the extreme, this exclusive emphasis on the rational culminates in that heresy which rejects the living components of tradition in favour of the written records of the Early Church, the Bible and Patristic writings, and which we know as Protestantism and full-blown Jansenism. The rejection of the liturgical tradition thus implies a rejection of the Church itself.

In the light of this typically Western aberration one can understand the Orthodox jibe that Protestantism was hatched from the egg that Rome had laid. For according to Timothy Ware,

“The Orthodox approach to religion is fundamentally a liturgical approach, which understands doctrine in the context of divine worship: it is no coincidence that the word ‘Orthodoxy’ should signify alike right belief and right worship, for the two things are inseparable. It has truly been; said of the Byzantines: ‘Dogma with them is not only an intellectual system. Apprehended by the clergy and expounded to the laity, but a field of vision wherein all things on earth are seen in their relation to things in heaven, first and foremost through liturgical celebration’”⁴⁶

A similar outlook is by no means absent in the Latin West today, even if it is a minority view. Commenting on Pius XII’s reversal of Prosper of Aquitaine’s dictum, American Benedictine liturgist Dom Aidan Kavanagh notes that:

“To reverse the maxim, subordinating the standard of worship to the standard of belief, makes a shambles of the dialectic of revelation. It was a Presence, not faith, which drew Moses to the burning bush, and what happened there was a revelation, not a seminar. It was a Presence, not faith, which drew the disciples to Jesus, and what happened there was not an educational program but His revelation to them of Himself as the long-promised Anointed One, the redeeming because reconciling Messiah-Christos”.⁴¹

Indeed the radical impulse to destroy the entire liturgical tradition and go back to Eucharists in the manner of the Last Supper is the inevitable consequence of applying the criteria of theological analysis to the sacred liturgy which, as a slowly growing humanly-ordered thing, cannot possibly have “come from the Lord complete and perfect” as Bossuet the elder said of the deposit of faith.

I come finally to the other immediate cause of the liturgical revolution, a new and particularly destructive form of ultramontanism, which in my view is the only way of explaining how recent Popes could have made such an astonishing about-turn on the question of liturgical tradition. The term ‘Ultramontane’ first coined by the French Gallicans of the seventeenth century, normally refers to those who supported the definition of the dogma of Papal Infallibility in 1870. However, on the popular level ultramontanism has manifested itself in the cult of the person of the Pope, which hardly existed before Pius IX, but is still very much with us today. In the nineteenth century the enemies of the Ultramontanes were the Liberal Catholics; the Ultramontanes of today, who abide loyally by all the decisions of the Papacy, rejecting criticism and even discussion of any of them, are opposed not only by the heirs to the Liberal Catholic tradition, but also by the Traditionalists. Fully aware of the consequences of their action, traditionalist Catholics feel bound in conscience to criticize certain aspects of the Second Vatican Council and to reject the official and unofficial liturgical reforms that ostensibly issued from it.

To the Ultramontane mind, which is also the mind of the Popes of our day, one cannot adopt the traditionalist stance and remain authentically Catholic. It is often not appreciated that in the discussions preceding the dogmatic formulations of the First Vatican Council, Pius IX strongly favoured the interpretation of Papal Infallibility as meaning Papal inerrancy in matters of Church discipline as well as in dogmatic definitions, an exaggerated claim at odds with the teaching of the Church. But when – so the story goes – Fr. Guidi, Superior General of the Dominicans, pointed out to the Pope that his idea of Papal infallibility was against Tradition, Pius IX angrily reminded him that “La tradizione son’io!” – ‘I am Tradition’, a symptom of Papal megalomania providentially checked by the Holy Ghost.⁴⁸

Unfortunately, there is ample evidence today that the modern Popes consider themselves the infallible arbiters of disciplinary and liturgical tradition rather than its respectful custodians. John Paul II, for example, has been known to act arbitrarily and inconsistently in contravention of established liturgical law. One famous episode was during his visit to West Germany in 1980 when, in contradiction to the firm Papal policy of not giving Communion in the hand, he administered the Sacrament in this manner to a small boy by way of exception, thus establishing an irrevocable precedent.⁴⁹ On another occasion, I am told, the Pope incorrectly knelt during a Papal ceremony in Rome, and when his Master of Ceremonies discreetly directed him to rise, John Paul remained on his knees and retorted pointedly: “II Papa s’inginocchia!” – “the Pope is kneeling!”. With such a subjective attitude towards liturgical tradition, unthinkable in any of the Eastern Churches, it is understandable that the modern Popes and the ultramontanist Curia should view traditionalist rejection of the liturgical reform as incompatible with Catholic orthodoxy which they narrowly understand as right belief and right morals.

From the traditionalist standpoint, it is an abuse of power for the modern Papacy; however orthodox in its dogmatic teaching, to Command the faithful to accept an anti-traditional liturgy in the name of obedience to the supreme ecclesiastical authority. If the Papacy, in an official document, can reverse a fundamental teaching of orthodox Christianity by totally subordinating the liturgy to the interests of new ‘orientations’, one is forced to conclude that recent Popes, in turning their backs on their own past for whatever noble motives, have placed themselves above Tradition and abused their position as the supreme legislators in disciplinary matters. For a Catholic to make such an admission is painful, and from the ultramontanist point of view disloyal, not to say actively schismatical.

There is unlikely to be agreement on this question until the Holy Father comes to a deeper understanding of his own action in re-legalizing the traditional Roman liturgy, which logically considered, entirely contradicts his thinking on the post-conciliar reform, which is substantially that of Paul VI and of the episcopal conferences. Yet this contradiction which has created a dynamic tension in the Church must ultimately be resolved, and we may optimistically regard it as a sign of hope for the eventual restoration of the patrimony of which Latin Catholics have been unjustly deprived. In the meantime, as Archbishop Lefebvre remarked shortly after his audience with Pope John Paul II in 1978: “We can at least pray to the Blessed Virgin that when he becomes aware of the enormous difficulties he will meet in the exercise of his power as Pope, he will reconsider his stance and perhaps conclude that he must return to Tradition ».

___________________________________

1The Documents.of Vatican II, -Sacrosanctum Conciliun (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy), articles 50, 34.

2. Liturgical Revolution, Vol. I: Cranmer’s Godly Order (Devon: Augustine Publishing Company, 1976), and Vol. III: Pope Paul’s New Mass (Dickinson, Texas: The Angelus Press, 1980).

3. Eppstein, Has the Catholic Church Gone Mad? (London: Tom Stacey, 1971), p. 58.

4 Papal General Audience speech of 19 November 1969, quoted in The Teachings of Pope Paul VI 1969 – 2 (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1970), p. 288.

5 Mediator Dei, 63, 65, 66.

6 Institutions liturgiques. (Le Mans: Fleuriot/Paris: Débécourt, 1840), I, 405-423; II, pp 252-255.

7 Mediator Dei, § 68.

8 See especially Davies Cranmer’s Godly Order, cit, Chapter 9, pp. 63-71.

9 Some juridical Considerations on the Reform of the Liturgy (Edinburgh: Una Voce, 1979), p. 10.

10 The relevant passage in the Apostolic Constitution of 1969 reads as follows: “innumerable holy men have abundantly nourished their piety towards God by its [the 1570 missal’s] readings from Sacred Scripture or by its prayers, whose general arrangement goes back, in essence, to St. Gregory the Great” (first paragraph; emphasis added).

11 Mediator Dei, § 68.

12 John Parsons, The History of the Synod of Pistoia, paper read to Campion Fellowship Conference, Sydney, 1982, pp. 2-3.

13 A Popular History of the Catholic Church (London: Burns and Oates, 1939 p.-194.

14 Ibid., pp 194-195.

15 Guéranger, op.cit., I, pp. 176-188; Parsons, op.cit., pp. 5-6.

16 Gueranger, op.cit., II, pp. 250-253.

17 Marie-Madeleine Martin, Le latin immortel (Chiré-en-Montreuil: Diffusion de la Pensee Française, 1971), p. 172.

18 Martin, op.cit., p.173.

19 Guéranger, op.cit., II, p. 191.

20 Ibid., II, p. 217.

21 Ibid., II, pp. 215-216.

22 Parsons, op.cit., P·14.

23 Ibidem.

24 L. Sheppard. ed., The New Liturgy (London: Longman & Todd, 1970), p. 4. 25 Liturgical Piety [later reprinted as Liturgy and Life ] (London: Sheed and Ward 1956), p. 54.

26 The Mass in the West, London: Burns L Oates, 1962), pp 97-98.

27 Gueranger, op.cit., II, pp. 251-252.

28 Bouyer, op.cit., p. 41.

29 Ibid., p. 44.

30 Ibid., p. 68.

31 Ibid., p. 52.

32 The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origin and Development (Missarum Sollemnia 1951, tr. Francis A. Brunner, C.SS.R. (Westminster, Maryland: Chnstian Classics, Inc., 1986), I, p. 137.

33 Ibid., pp. 136-7.

34 Adrian Fortescue, The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912), p. 118.

35 Michael Davies, Apologia pro Marcel Lefebvre II (1977-1979), (Dickinson: The Angelus Press, 1983), p; Pope Paul’s New Mass, cit, p, 557.

36 Bouyer, op.cit., P. 46.

37 Thus Cardinal Franjo Seper, Prefect of the former Holy Office, wrote to Archbishop Lefebvre in January 1978: “A Catholic, in fact, may not cast doubt on the conformity with the doctrine of the faith of a sacramental rite promulgated by the Supreme Pastor” (Davies, Apologia, II, p107). Now while it may be true that there exist no grounds for calling into question “the legitimacy and doctrinal exactitude” of the 1970 Missal (Quattuor abhinc annos, 1984), such an arbitrary division (typical of the post-Reformation Roman Church) between the doctrine of the faith and its practice represents, in my view, a dangerous departure from the genuine Catholic tradition. (The sacred liturgy cannot be considered on a merely rational level, in isolation from the way of life and religious culture that produced it. If tradition is a living thing, validity and licitness cannot be the central issues. The central issue is authenticity, without which validity and licitness – factors of undeniable importance – are simply mechanical considerations. Authenticity is the guarantee of validity and legitimacy). Nor does the admission that the new Missal is free from heresy preclude one’s stating that it is inferior to the traditional rite liturgically, doctrinally and aesthetically, or one’s asking for its abrogation.

38 Mediator Dei, § 62.

39 Ibid., § 52.

40 See P. De Clerk, “Lex orandi, lex credendi”: Sens originel et avatars historiques d’un adage equivoquel, in: Questions liturgiques 59 (1978) pp. 208-211; and Dom Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology. The Hale Menotial Lectures of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, 1981 (New York: Pueblo, 1984), pp. 92-93.

41 Cypnan Vagaggini, tr. L.J. Doyle and W.A. Jurgens, Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1976), p. 529. While it is generally admitted today that this theological axiom is not in fact directly founded on the pertinent passage in Indiculus de gratia Dei (Prosper’s point was that the Church’s custom of praying to God for our various needs proves the necessity of grace), the centrality of its received interpretation to the Catholic tradition can hardly be underestimated.

42 Kavanagh, op.cit., pp. 75-79.

43 G. Tyrrell, Lex orandi, or Prayer and Creed (London, 1903), and Through Scylla and Charybdis or the Old Theology into the New (London, 1907); Pius XII alludes indirectly to this theory in Mediator Dei, § 50.

44 Quoted in Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 271.

45 Kavanagh, op.cit., pp. 82-83.

46 Ware, op.cit., ibidem.

47 Kavanagh, op.cit., p. 92.

48 John C. Dwyer, Church History: Twenty Centuries of Catholic Christianity (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), p. 345.

49 After wavering for some years, in 1990 Pope John Paul finally capitulated on the question of Communion in the hand by permitting the abuse in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome and consenting to it at all his own celebrations of Mass.

50 Davies, Apologia, II, p. 268.

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