“But what is sad …is the very basis, a mental attitude, a pre-established position, namely, that many of those who are influential in the reform…and others, have no love, no veneration for what has been transmitted to us. Right from the start they despise everything which exists at present. This is an unjust and poisonous negative mentality. Unfortunately even Pope Paul VI has something of this attitude. They all have the best of intentions, but, given this mentality, they are bound to demolish, not to restore.”

– Fr. Ferdinando Antonelli (later Cardinal Antonelli), July 1968 (emphasis mine)

One man was and is directly responsible for the degredation of the Mass and that man is Pope Paul VI. That may seem like stating the obvious; after all, it isn’t called the Missal of Paul VI for nothing (Bugnini’s influence aside). But “reform of the reform” types who say that the Mass as it has been performed in most parishes since its promulgation is an aberration of what the Council Fathers intended do not seem willing to grapple with the fact that it is, in essence if not the particulars, what Pope Paul VI, who had the final word, did intend.1

Say the Council Fathers: “Particular law remaining in force, the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites. But since the use of the mother tongue, whether in the Mass, the administration of the sacraments, or other parts of the liturgy, frequently may be of great advantage to the people, the limits of its employment may be extended.”

Says Pope Paul VI: “No longer Latin, but the spoken language will be the principal language of the Mass. The introduction of the vernacular will certainly be a great sacrifice for those who know the beauty, the power and the expressive sacrality of Latin. We are parting with the speech of the Christian centuries; we are becoming like profane intruders in the literary preserve of sacred utterance.”

Say the Council Fathers: “The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services.”

Says Pope Paul VI: “We will lose a great part of that stupendous and incomparable artistic and spiritual thing, the Gregorian chant.”

“Sacrifice” and “loss” do not follow the logic of profane intrusion. One does not sacrifice what is actually being taken by force. One does not lose what was deliberately forsaken. This profane intrusion, as the violent nature of the term implies, did not stop, as we know, with Latin and Gregorian chant. Liturgical violence here begot more violence there -ripped-out altar rails, denuded sanctuaries, the frontal assault of ad populorum, etc. etc. – all of it given episcopal sanction or acquiesence, every condescending explanation for it given the patina of scholarship and echoing in some way Pope Paul VI’s original, feeble rationale: Because it is human. Because it is apostolic.

Says Tracey Rowland: “The primary reason from the U-turn on this issue was…not a rejection of any of the arguments given by Pius XI or John XXIII, but rather a judgment that the these ‘goods’ were not as necessary as the deference to the modern preference for ‘plain language’. Pastoral pragmatism had demanded that ‘modern man’s’ preferences for the plain and profane be indulged.”

What had Pius XI and John XXIII said?

Pius XI: “For the Church, precisely because it embraces all nations and is destined to endure to the end of time …of its very nature requires a language which is universal, immutable, and non vernacular.”

Pope John XXIII: admonishing to bishops to be on their guard, “lest anyone under their jurisdiction, eager for revolutionary changes, writes against the use of Latin in the teaching of the higher sacred studies or in the liturgy.”

Whether it was a primary or a secondary motivation, Paul VI’s DID reject these arguments – though they are not really arguments seeking to persuade, they are declaratory statements demanding adherence. Paul VI broke definitively with the protection and cultivation of the sacred (the loss of Latin being one highly significant example of that break) that his predecessors deemed necessary for the life of the Church. Thus, he created a rupture, a wound in the Body of Christ that festers to this day. 2

An Intent to Disfigure
What may have seemed like “pastoral pragmatism” at the time appears to be simply bald accomodation, acquiescense to the modern spirit, a spirit antithetical to traditional Catholicism. But there may have been more to Paul VI’s motivations than mere pragmatism.

Thomas Molnar perceives an apocalyptic aspect to Paul VI’s view of the church in the modern world. In his book The Church: Pilgrim of Centuries, Molnar states, “The issue for the church is to occupy a new place in the world, a place that Paul VI, a very sensitive man, summed up while he was still Mgr. Montini, archbishop of Milan, and then repeated toward the end of his pontificate: ‘The church will continue to open and conform itself to the world, thus to disfigure its own nature…”

The Pope goes on to speak of a “remnant” in the church that will preserve its “supernatural subtance,” one that has become limited to a “residual minimum.” Says Molnar: “The apocalyptic mood is extremely dangerous; it shows that one man sets himself against Christ’s promise and thus demoralizes, from his high position, the rest of the men and women entrusted to his pastoral care.”

One can see the characteristics of a “residual minimum” reflected in the contours of the Novus Ordo itself. But how has the supernatural been preserved as Paul VI expected it to be?

Said then-Cardinal Ratzinger: “After the Council… in place of the liturgy as the fruit of organic development came fabricated liturgy. We abandoned the organic, living process of growth and development over centuries, and replaced it, as in a manufacturing process, with a fabrication, a banal on-the-spot product.”

Better to have said, “Paul VI, and we, his liberal-minded ecclesiastics, abandoned…” That is the truth of the matter, since there were those who resisted “fabricated liturgy” and who were marginalized in the process. Clearly, in Paul VI’s desire to “disfigure” the church, including its sacred liturgy, he bequethed to my generation something far from a preservation of the supernatural.

Says Martin Mosebach: “In the ancient world, if a ruler broke a tradition he was regarded as having committed an act of tyrannis. In this sense Paul VI, the modernizer with his eyes fixed on the future, acted as a tyrant in the Church.”

A Bitter Legacy
Like observing a ruin of a once-great cathedral or monastery, we can detect traces of the traditional Latin Mass’ former glory in the Novus Ordo but the viewer, if he he knows the Latin Mass and longs for the sacred, is left with an overwhelming feeling of sadness and regret at what has been lost. 3 The well-intentioned attempt on the part of conservative-minded priests to “traditionalize” the ordinary form in their parish is a stab at revitalization, but the imposing, hollowed-out structure, that enduring handiwork of our profane intruders, remains despite the touch-up. 4

Pope Paul VI later lamented how the smoke of Satan had entered the church, referring, according to Cardinal Noe, to liturgical abuse. Others may have supplied him the kindling, the match, but it was Pope Paul VI who lit the fire, not with diabolical intent, but with astounding imprudence nonetheless, especially since he had been warned and yet chose not to heed that warning.

For many traditional-minded Catholics, it becomes a matter of survival, in terms of faith, to avoid the emasculated (and emasculating) Novus Ordo. It becomes a matter of survival to make that long drive to the seedy side of town at an unusual hour for the sake of attending the Latin Mass. Still, it is hard to avoid the perception, despite Pope Benedict’s recent motu proprio, of being a disobedient child compared to the many, many more “obedient” children who have grown into their maturity fully integrated into the Novus Ordo worldview and who are therefore suitably suspicious of any remnant of that “pre-Vatican II” dark age. Or who might say politely of the Latin Mass that it is “just not for them,” as if it were a piece of cabbage, and not the vital sustenance it was for countless saints over the centuries and still is in our day.

Division. Alienation. Profanation. Rupture. This is the legacy of Paul VI, Profane Intruder.

* * *

1. Some could argue that the Council Fathers and Pope Paul VI were not really far apart with regard to the use of Latin and chant in the Mass. If the Pope decides that it would be best for modern man if Latin were not the “principal” language of the Mass, he is merely determining those “limits of its employment” for which the Council allowed, or that while chant ought to be given “pride of place,” nonetheless a “great part” of its use will still be (must be?) lost in favor of contemporary music (“others things being equal” after all).

2. Notwithstanding Paul VI’s later and unsuccessul attempt to regain for Gregorian chant its “due place” in the Mass with Voluntatis Obsequens, published by the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship in 1974. It recommends a minimal repertoire of Gregorian chant and states, “Those who are trying to improve the quality of congregational singing cannot refuse to Gregorian chant the place which is due to it.” By then, a “great part” of the Gregorian chant had already been lost, just as Paul VI said it would be, so great a part that it was in effect eliminated from regular use. The new liturgical genie he unleashed could not be put back in the bottle.

3. The charge of “nostalgia” against those who love the Latin Mass, a common accusation made by the progressives, clearly does not apply to those of my generation who never experienced the Latin Mass pre-Novus Ordo (and is unjust to the older generation as well). And while there may have been abuses then that deserve criticism (the priest garbling the Latin, rushing through the Mass, etc), that correctable problem did not require for its solution the wrecking ball that was the Novus Ordo. Moreover, that lamentable situation does not apply to the Latin Mass today as said by such exemplary orders as the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter.

4. To the extent that the Novus Ordo is celebrated with a sense of the sacred, it begins to resemble the Traditional Latin Mass, which may be all to the good, but such an approach is clearly at odds with Pope Paul VI’s stated intention, and 40 years of ecclesiastically-approved practice, to move away from that mode of worship (so, abrogated in practice, if not in law as Pope Benedict recently made clear).

Pope Benedict’s recent “two forms of the same rite” formulation is therefore a departure from Pope Paul VI. While a positive development, it is a half-measure. Pope Benedict still leaves in place the deforming influence of the “Ordinary” form, apparently hoping that a gradual change for the better will take place as a result of a sort of cross-pollenization of the two forms over time. Shades of thesis, antithesis, synthesis.