The great friend of the Catholic Faith, Mrs. Randy Engel, who has done such important work on matters of marriage and the family and exposing the rot of explicit classroom instruction in matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments and, of course, the infestation of the lavender brigade in the conciliar structures, sent out an e-mail to her extensive e-mail list a few nights ago. It is with her most kind permission that it is being printed here:
Dear Friends In Christ,
On the evening of February 6, 2012,
I received a copy of an e-mail memo titled “Our Position on 1962 Missal” and dated January
30, 2012, issued by Una Voce Canada. It was marked, IMPORTANCE
VERY HIGH, and indeed it is,
especially for Traditional Catholics.
The memo concerns the further “revision of the Missal of 1962”
which is currently underway in Rome:
As has been the norm in recent years, these matters are being conducted
discreetly and only
made public when the relevant document is promulgated, viz: Summorum Pontificum and Universae Ecclesiae. The very narrow
remit given by the Holy Father
to the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei
in his Letter to Accompany Summorum Pontificum [7 July, 2007] was that: “..new Saints and some of the new Prefaces can and should be
inserted in the old Missal.” No
other changes were sanctioned. Pope Benedict also stated that “The Ecclesia Dei Commission, in contact with various
bodies devoted to the usus antiquior, will study the possibilities in this regard. [Full
text of above memo provided on request. RE]
What the end product of
this renewed tinkering with the Old Mass will be is anyone’s guess, but based
on Benedict XVI’s ecumenical/evolutionary thinking a la Teilhard de Chardin, we can make an educated guess –
the synthesis of Paul VI’s New “Mass” with the Traditional Mass will produce a
“true cosmic liturgy,” that is to say, no Mass at all.
Below,
I have provided a link to a remarkable essay by James Larson, creator of the
web-site “War Against Being,” on Benedict XVI’s vision of a futuristic liturgy.
“A Living Host: Liturgy, and Cosmic
Evolution in the Thought of Benedict XVI and Teilhard de Chardin,” is
available at http://www.waragainstbeing.com/node/40.
A copy of Benedict XVI’s homily at the celebration of Vespers at the Cathedral
of Aosta on July 24, 2009, is provided by way of confirmation, at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20090724_vespri-aosta_en.html.
Mr. Larson can be contacted at waragainstbeing@yahoo.com.
Our Lady of Fatima pray for us, Randy Engel
Several points need to be made about this Una Voce Canada "alert."
First, the Missal promulgated in 1961 by the false "pope" Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII, mistakenly referred to as the "1962 Missal" because it was in that year that the name of Saint Joseph was inserted into the Canon of the Mass, thereby, to the great delight of liturgical revolutionaries worldwide, breaking the Roman Canon that had been placed into its final form by Pope Saint Gregory the Great, who had merely rearranged nineteen words in the "Hang Igitur" section of the Canon (diesque nostros in tua pace disponas, atque ab aeterna damnatione nos eripi, et in electorum tuorum iubeas grege numerari), which had been in the present form, apart from the changes he made, for a long time prior to his accession to the Throne of Saint Peter in the year 590 A.D. (September 3 of that year to be precise, four hundred fourteen years prior to the day prior to the death of Pope Saint Pius X), is not the Immemorial Mass of Tradition.
Second, the modernized Missal promulgated by Angelo Roncalli/XXIII went beyond the revolutionary changes (the Holy Week liturgy, abolition of fifteen of eighteen octaves, the renaming of the in the Mass of the Roman Rite that were orchestrated by Fathers Annibale Bugnini, C.M., and Ferdinando Antonelli, O.F.M., and approved by Pope Pius XII in his Apostolic Constitution, Cum Hac Nostra Aetate, March 23, 1955, who accepted the false representations made by these two liturgical revolutionaries. The Roncalli/John XXIII changes included, among other things, the abolition of the feasts of ten saints and, among many other things, the suppression of the commemoration of saints on Sundays. These changes were clearly designed to incorporate the sentiments of the illegal decrees of the Council of Pistoia, conducted by Jansenists, that were condemned by Pope Pius VI in Auctorem Fidei, August 28, 1974, and condemned anew by Pope Pius XII in Mediator Dei, November 20, 1947, less than one hundred months before he approved a set of Jansenist set of changes proposed by Bugnini and Antonelli. (For a full list of the Roncalli/John XXIII changes, please see Bishop Daniel Dolan's Pre-Vatican II Liturgical Changes: Road to the New Mass and The Pius X and John XXIII Missals Compared and Father Francesco Ricossa's Liturgical Revolution. Excerpts from these excellent analyses can be found below in Appendix A below.)
Third, the modernized Missal promulgated by Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII in 1961 and 1962 was meant of its nature to be transitory, and that it is precisely what it turned out to be, a transitional bridge between the Missal of 1958 that been approved, so we are told, by the dying Pope Pius XIII on October 3, 1958, six days before his death, and that of some future liturgy conceived to be a veritable Trojan Horse into which could be loaded one Modernist presupposition after another, not the least of which is the belief that everything about the Faith (doctrine, liturgy, morals, Scripture studies, pastoral life) is in flux, in evolution, if you will. The "1962 Missal" that is extolled by the Society of Saint Pius X and Una Voce International and various communities who adhere to Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's Summorum Pontificum, July 7, 2007, was replaced by the Ordo Missae of 1965 on November 30, 1964.
The Ordo Missae of 1965 eliminated the
recitation of Psalm 42 (Judica me) at the foot of the altar at the
beginning of Holy Mass. The vernacular language could be used, except in
the Canon of the Mass, which had to be prayed in Latin (until 1967,
that is), if the priest desired. The Last Gospel, which had been
mandated by Pope Saint Pius V when he issued the Missale Romanum of 1570, thereby codifying a de facto practice that had been observed by priests in many parts of Europe as a
private devotion as they left the sanctuary at the conclusion of Holy
Mass dating back to the Twelfth Century, was eliminated. The Leonine
Prayers, which were made "optional" in the modernized version of the
Immemorial Mass of Tradition that was promulgated by Angelo
Roncalli/John XXIII in 1961 were eliminated. The
priest could also face the people, if he wished, a revolutionary change
that became institutionalized universally in the life of Roman Rite
Catholics attached to the counterfeit church of conciliarism with the
implementation of the Novus Ordo service on November 30, 1969.
The nature and the extent of the changes were bound
to--and did in fact--bewilder many ordinary Catholics. This is why the
following announcement was inserted into the parish bulletin of Saint
Matthew's Church in Norwood, Ohio, a facility that is now Immaculate
Conception Church, which operates under the auspices of the Society of
Saint Pius V, to tell the sheep just to do what they were told as a
revolution unfolded before their very eyes and with their own "full,
active and conscious participation:"
Today is the First Sunday of Advent and the
beginning of the Church's new liturgical year. Today we begin our "New
Liturgy". Beginning today many parts of Holy Mass will be said in
English. We ask each of you to do your very best to join the priest in
the prayers of the Mass. Leaflets with the official text of these
prayers were given most of your last Sunday. (For those of you who were
unable to obtain your copies last Sunday, you may obtain one at the
bulletin stands today.) For the Masses with singing (including the 9:45
a.m. High Mass), you are asked to use the cards found in the pews.
Kindly stand, sit and kneel, according to the directions on your leaflet
or the card. At the Masses today, seminarians will be on hand to help
and guide you in this new participation. We wish to thank Msgr.
Schneider, Rector of Mt. St. Mary's Seminary, for his kindness in
sending us his students; and also the young men themselves for their
generosity in helping us. We know that it will take a while (perhaps
even months) before we have this new method of participating in Holy
Mass perfected; we earnestly ask each one to cooperate loyally and
faithfully to the best of his or her ability to make the public worship
of God in St. Matthew Parish a true and worthy "sacrifice of praise."
[Historical note: the Mount Saint Mary's Seminary referred to in the
bulletin was known as Mount Saint Mary's Seminary of the West, located
in Norwood, Ohio.]
The
blitzkrieg of liturgical changes that took place from 1955 and
thereafter institutionalized impermanence and instability in the lives
of those Catholics who still bother to go to the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service, accustoming many of them to believe that doctrine can change
just as easily and just as regularly as the liturgy. If we pray in
novel ways then we are going to believe in novel things--and to be more
readily disposed to accept novelties as being part of the normal life of
the Catholic Church, which they are not. Indeed, the Catholic Church
has condemned novelty and innovation, repeatedly, something that Pope
Gregory XVI noted very clearly in Singulari Nos, May 25, 1834:
As for the rest, We greatly deplore the fact that, where the ravings of human reason extend, there
is somebody who studies new things and strives to know more than is
necessary, against the advice of the apostle. There you will find
someone who is overconfident in seeking the truth outside the Catholic
Church, in which it can be found without even a light tarnish of error.
Therefore, the Church is called, and is indeed, a pillar and foundation
of truth. You correctly understand, venerable brothers, that We speak
here also of that erroneous philosophical system which was recently
brought in and is clearly to be condemned. This system, which comes from
the contemptible and unrestrained desire for innovation, does
not seek truth where it stands in the received and holy apostolic
inheritance. Rather, other empty doctrines, futile and uncertain
doctrines not approved by the Church, are adopted. Only the most
conceited men wrongly think that these teachings can sustain and support
that truth. (Pope Gregory XVI, Singulari Nos, May 25, 1834.)
The "1962 Missal," therefore, was no "rock of stability" as I thought in my indulterer days in the 1990s into 2001. It was merely a short-term transitional bridge between the "old" and the "new," that is, between the true Faith and the synthetic one that has replaced It in the structures of a false church, one that is but a counterfeit ape of the Catholic Church.
Fourth, the misguided people at Una Voce Canada who have issued a "importance very high" alert to its membership concerning changes to the "1962 Missal" are showing themselves to be veritable "Inspectors Clouseaus" by keeping their noses glued to the text of Summorum Pontificum while, it appears, ignoring the words of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict's "explanatory letter" about it and the following the clear and consistent message he has communicated in the past five years, a message that has been reiterated by the likes of William "Cardinal" Levada, Dario Castrillon "Cardinal" Hoyos and Kurt "Cardinal" Koch. The message is simple: the "1962 Missal" is on its way out the door. So is the "1969 Missal." Ratzinger/Benedict desires there to be but one Roman rite in his counterfeit church, and it's not going to be the "1962 Missal." Here's the evidence that the veritable Clouseaus to the north cannot see even though it is right in front of their very eyes:
From this point of view,
then, the new prayer for the Jews in the liturgy in the ancient rite
does not weaken, but postulates an enrichment of the meaning of the
prayer in use in the modern rite. Exactly like in other cases, it is the
modern rite that postulates an enriching evolution of the ancient rite.
In a liturgy that is perennially alive, as the Catholic liturgy is,
this is the meaning of the coexistence between the two rites, ancient
and modern, as intended by Benedict XVI with the motu proprio "Summorum
Pontificum."
This is a coexistence that is not destined
to endure, but to fuse in the future "in a single Roman rite once
again," taking the best from both of these. This is what
then-cardinal Ratzinger wrote in 2003 – revealing a deeply held
conviction – in a letter to an erudite representative of Lefebvrist
traditionalism, the German philologist Heinz-Lothar Barth. (Sandro
Magister, A Bishop and a Rabbi Defend the Prayer for the Salvation of the Jews.)
"Neither the Missal of Pius V and John XXIII -- used by a small minority
-- nor that of Paul VI -- used today with much spiritual fruit by the
greatest majority -- will be the final 'law of prayer' of the Catholic
Church." ("Father" Federico Lombardi, Zenit, July 15, 2007.)
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI's easing of restrictions on
use of the 1962 Roman Missal, known as the Tridentine rite, is just
the first step in a "reform of the reform" in liturgy, the Vatican's
top ecumenist said.
The pope's long-term aim is not simply to allow the old and new
rites to coexist, but to move toward a "common rite" that is shaped by
the mutual enrichment of the two Mass forms, Cardinal Kurt Koch,
president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity,
said May 14.
In effect, the pope is launching a new liturgical reform
movement, the cardinal said. Those who resist it, including "rigid"
progressives, mistakenly view the Second Vatican Council as a rupture
with the church's liturgical tradition, he said.
Cardinal Koch made the remarks at a Rome conference on "Summorum
Pontificum," Pope Benedict's 2007 apostolic letter that offered wider
latitude for use of the Tridentine rite. The cardinal's text was
published the same day by L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper.
Cardinal Koch said Pope Benedict thinks the post-Vatican II
liturgical changes have brought "many positive fruits" but also
problems, including a focus on purely practical matters and a neglect
of the paschal mystery in the Eucharistic celebration. The cardinal
said it was legitimate to ask whether liturgical innovators had
intentionally gone beyond the council's stated intentions.
He said this explains why Pope Benedict has introduced a new
reform movement, beginning with "Summorum Pontificum." The aim, he
said, is to revisit Vatican II's teachings in liturgy and strengthen
certain elements, including the Christological and sacrificial
dimensions of the Mass.
Cardinal Koch said "Summorum Pontificum" is "only the beginning of this new liturgical movement."
"In fact, Pope Benedict knows well that, in the long term, we
cannot stop at a coexistence between the ordinary form and the
extraordinary form of the Roman rite, but that in the future the
church naturally will once again need a common rite," he said.
"However, because a new liturgical reform cannot be decided
theoretically, but requires a process of growth and purification, the
pope for the moment is underlining above all that the two forms of the
Roman rite can and should enrich each other," he said.
Cardinal Koch said those who oppose this new reform movement and
see it as a step back from Vatican II lack a proper understanding of
the post-Vatican II liturgical changes. As the pope has emphasized,
Vatican II was not a break or rupture with tradition but part of an
organic process of growth, he said.
On the final day of the conference, participants attended a Mass
celebrated according to the Tridentine rite at the Altar of the Chair
in St. Peter's Basilica. Cardinal Walter Brandmuller presided over the
liturgy. It was the first time in several decades that the old rite
was celebrated at the altar. (Benedict's 'reform of the reform' in liturgy to continue, cardinal says.)
It's only a matter of time and of "pacification of spirits," which the false "pontiff" has been single-minded in doing with respect to the remaining traditionalist "resistance" to his schemes to institutionalize the "correct" interpretation of the doctrinal and liturgical revolutions that he helped to unleash for many generations to come. He has told us that it is goal to "pacify" the "spirits" of those who have a "one-sided" view of the "Second" Vatican Council:
Leading men and women to God, to the God Who speaks in the Bible:
this is the supreme and fundamental priority of the Church and of the
Successor of Peter at the present time. A logical consequence of this is
that we must have at heart the unity of all believers. Their disunity,
their disagreement among themselves, calls into question the credibility
of their talk of God. Hence the effort to promote a common witness by Christians to their faith - ecumenism - is part of the supreme priority.
Added to this is the need for all those who believe in God to join in
seeking peace, to attempt to draw closer to one another, and to journey
together, even with their differing images of God, towards the source of
Light - this is inter-religious dialogue. Whoever proclaims that God is
Love 'to the end' has to bear witness to love: in loving devotion to
the suffering, in the rejection of hatred and enmity - this is the
social dimension of the Christian faith, of which I spoke in the
Encyclical 'Deus caritas est'.
"So if the arduous task of working for faith,
hope and love in the world is presently (and, in various ways, always)
the Church's real priority, then part of this is also made up of acts of
reconciliation, small and not so small. That the quiet gesture of
extending a hand gave rise to a huge uproar, and thus became exactly the
opposite of a gesture of reconciliation, is a fact which we must
accept. But I ask now: Was it, and is it, truly wrong in this case to
meet half-way the brother who 'has something against you' and to seek
reconciliation? Should not civil society also try to forestall
forms of extremism and to incorporate their eventual adherents - to the
extent possible - in the great currents shaping social life, and thus
avoid their being segregated, with all its consequences? Can
it be completely mistaken to work to break down obstinacy and
narrowness, and to make space for what is positive and retrievable for
the whole? I myself saw, in the years after 1988, how the
return of communities which had been separated from Rome changed their
interior attitudes; I saw how returning to the bigger and broader Church
enabled them to move beyond one-sided positions and broke down rigidity so that positive energies could emerge for the whole.
Can we be totally indifferent about a community which has 491 priests,
215 seminarians, 6 seminaries, 88 schools, 2 university-level
institutes, 117 religious brothers, 164 religious sisters and thousands
of lay faithful? Should we casually let them drift farther from the
Church? I think for example of the 491 priests. We cannot know how mixed
their motives may be. All the same, I do not think that they would have
chosen the priesthood if, alongside various distorted and unhealthy elements,
they did not have a love for Christ and a desire to proclaim Him and,
with Him, the living God. Can we simply exclude them, as representatives
of a radical fringe, from our pursuit of reconciliation and unity? What
would then become of them?
"Certainly, for some time now, and once again on
this specific occasion, we have heard from some representatives of that
community many unpleasant things - arrogance and presumptuousness, an obsession with one-sided positions,
etc. Yet to tell the truth, I must add that I have also received a
number of touching testimonials of gratitude which clearly showed an
openness of heart. But should not the great Church also allow herself to
be generous in the knowledge of her great breadth, in the knowledge of
the promise made to her? Should not we, as good educators, also be capable of overlooking various faults and making every effort to open up broader vistas?
And should we not admit that some unpleasant things have also emerged
in Church circles? At times one gets the impression that our society
needs to have at least one group to which no tolerance may be shown;
which one can easily attack and hate. And should someone dare to
approach them - in this case the Pope - he too loses any right to
tolerance; he too can be treated hatefully, without misgiving or
restraint. (Letter
to the Bishops of the Catholic Church concerning the remission of the
excommunication of the four Bishops consecrated by Archbishop Lefebvre, March 10, 2009.)
Fr Federico Lombardi, S.J., Director of the Holy See Press Office: What do you say to those who, in France, fear that the "Motu proprio' Summorum Pontificum signals a step backwards from the great insights of the Second Vatican Council? How can you reassure them?
Benedict XVI: Their fear is unfounded, for this "Motu
Proprio' is merely an act of tolerance, with a pastoral aim, for those
people who were brought up with this liturgy, who love it, are familiar
with it and want to live with this liturgy. They form a small group,
because this presupposes a schooling in Latin, a training in a certain
culture. Yet for these people, to have the love and tolerance to let
them live with this liturgy seems to me a normal requirement of the
faith and pastoral concern of any Bishop of our Church. There is no
opposition between the liturgy renewed by the Second Vatican Council and
this liturgy.
On each day [of the Council], the Council Fathers celebrated Mass in
accordance with the ancient rite and, at the same time, they conceived
of a natural development for the liturgy within the whole of this
century, for the liturgy is a living reality that develops but, in its
development, retains its identity.
Thus, there are certainly different accents, but nevertheless [there
remains] a fundamental identity that excludes a contradiction, an
opposition between the renewed liturgy and the previous liturgy.
In any case, I believe that there is an opportunity for the enrichment
of both parties. On the one hand the friends of the old liturgy can and
must know the new saints, the new prefaces of the liturgy, etc....
On the other, the new liturgy places greater emphasis on common
participation, but it is not merely an assembly of a certain community,
but rather always an act of the universal Church in communion with all
believers of all times, and an act of worship. In this sense, it seems
to me that there is a mutual enrichment, and it is clear that the
renewed liturgy is the ordinary liturgy of our time. (Interview of the Holy Father during the flight to France, September 12, 2008.)
Liturgical worship is the supreme expression of priestly and
episcopal life, just as it is of catechetical teaching. Your duty to sanctify
the faithful people, dear Brothers, is indispensable for the growth of the
Church. In the Motu Proprio “Summorum Pontificum”, I was led to
set out the conditions in which this duty is to be exercised, with regard to the
possibility of using the missal of Blessed John XXIII (1962) in addition to that
of Pope Paul VI (1970). Some fruits of these new arrangements have already been
seen, and I hope that, thanks be to God, the necessary pacification of spirits
is already taking place. I am aware of your difficulties, but I do not doubt
that, within a reasonable time, you can find solutions satisfactory for all,
lest the seamless tunic of Christ be further torn. Everyone has a place in the
Church. Every person, without exception, should be able to feel at home, and
never rejected. God, who loves all men and women and wishes none to be lost,
entrusts us with this mission by appointing us shepherds of his sheep. We can
only thank him for the honour and the trust that he has placed in us. Let us
therefore strive always to be servants of unity! (Meeting with the French Bishops in the Hemicycle
Sainte-Bernadette, Lourdes, 14 September 2008.)
Clinging onto a missal that was itself meant to be but one phase of the liturgical revolution while ignoring the evidence presented above is an exercise in nothing than than willful, deliberate self-delusion. Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI does not possess the Catholic Faith. He is a Modernist to the core of his apostate being (see Sixty Years of Priestly Apostasy,
To have one's spirits completely pacified, however, one needs to Play The Let's Pretend Game.
Mr. James Larson, whose excellent critiques of the writing of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI have been cited many times on this site, has explained in an article, A Living Host: Liturgy, and Cosmic Evolution in the Thought of Benedict XVI and Teilhard de Chardin, referenced in Mrs. Engel's e-mail of a few nights ago, that the man he accepts as the Sovereign Pontiff desires a "cosmic liturgy," something that has been discussed on this site in the past as well (Chesterton Contra Ratzinger). Mr. Larson's article is superb. While he rejects sedevacantism, he has the intellectual honesty to critique the thought of Joseph Ratzinger without bending himself into a pretzel to maintain that the main is possessed of the sensus Catholicus. Mr. Larson's work is very important to understand the mind of Joseph Ratzinger, and once one does that, you see, then the great analysis provided by "Gregorius" on the true state of the Church, The Chair is Still Empty.
The penchant of traditionally-minded Catholics attached to the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism to cleave to their "magna carta," Summorum Pontificum, is understandable. I clung to Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II's Inaestimabile Donum, April 24, 1980, for over a decade, waving it in the face of "disobedient" priests and presbyters who were "abusing" the liturgical abuse par excellence, the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service. As a 'conservative" Catholic, I complained about what purported to be Holy Communion given in the hand before this abominable practice was permitted by Giovanni Montini/Paul VI in 1977. I complained about altar girls for twenty years before Wojtyla/John Paul permitted them in 1994. I complained as late as 1981 about what purported to be Holy Communion distributed under both species before the Vatican said, "No problem with that. Go right ahead" (see Hook, Line and Sinker).
The same thing is happening at the present time with the "Motu Mass." The "Missal of 1962" was meant to lead to the Novus Ordo of 1969 when it was issued, and it is meant today to lead to the new cosmic liturgy of the soon-to-be eighty-five year-old Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. We do not need to be veritable Inspectors Clouseau to see understand that the Motu Madness Merry-Go-Round stops at a destination of Ratzinger/Benedict's choosing, and it won't be the "1962 Missal" (and it might even be with a frog puppet singing at Bear Mountain, New York--The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down).
As I note very frequently, pray your Rosaries. Know that the Immaculate Heart of Mary will indeed triumph. May it be our privilege to plant a few seeds for that Triumph.
We can console the good God and make reparation for our sins and for those of the whole world, including those of the conciliarists, with each Rosary that we pray.
What are we waiting for?
Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!
Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!
Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.
Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.
Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.
Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.
Saint Scholastica, pray for us.
See also: A Litany of Saints
Appendix A
The Liturgical Changes of Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII
This a thorough listing of the changes that are reflected in the "Missal of 1962."
At last
we come to "the liturgy of John XXIII," more properly called that of
"middle Bugnini." The following changes were instituted in the Mass, the
Divine Office and the Calendar:
1. The lives of the saints at Matins were reduced to brief summaries.
2. The lessons from the Fathers of the Church were reduced to the briefest possible passages, with the somewhat naive
wish that the clergy would continue to nourish their souls with
patristic writings on their own.
3. The solitary recitation of the Divine Office was no longer held to be public prayer, and thus the sacred greeting Dominus vobiscum was suppressed.
4. The Last Gospel was suppressed on more occasions.
5. The proper conclusion of the Office Hymns was suppressed.
6. Many feast days are abolished,
as being redundant or not "historical, for example: (a) The Finding of
the Holy Cross. (b) St. John Before the Latin Gate. (c) The Apparition
of St. Michael. (d) St. Peter's Chair at Antioch. (e) St. Peter's
Chains, etc.
7. During the Council, the principle of the unchanging Canon of the Mass was destroyed with the addition of the name of St. Joseph.
8. The Confiteor before Communion was suppressed.
It is
to be noted that the "Liturgy of John XXIII” was in vigor for all of
three years, until it came to its logical conclusion with the
promulgation of the Conciliar Decree on the Liturgy — also the work of
Bugnini. (See His Excellency Bishop Daniel L. Dolan, Pre-Vatican II Liturgical Changes: Road to the New Mass and The Pius X and John XXIII Missals Compared.)
Father
Francisco Ricossa described what he called the "anti-liturgical
heresies" extant in Roncalli/John XXIII's liturgical changes:
Pius XII
succeeded by John XXIII. Angelo Roncalli. Throughout his ecclesiastical
career, Roncalli was involved in affairs that place his orthodoxy under
a cloud. Here are a few facts:
As
professor at the seminary of Bergamo, Roncalli was investigated for
following the theories of Msgr. Duchesne, which were forbidden under
Saint Pius X in all Italian seminaries. Msgr Duchesne's work, Histoire Ancienne de l'Eglise, ended up on the Index.
While
papal nuncio to Paris, Roncalli revealed his adhesion to the teachings
of Sillon, a movement condemned by St. Pius X. In a letter to the widow
of Marc Sagnier, the founder of the condemned movement, he wrote: The
powerful fascination of his [Sagnier's] words, his spirit, had enchanted
me; and from my early years as a priest, I maintained a vivid memory of
his personality, his political and social activity."
Named as
Patriarch of Venice, Msgr.Roncalli gave a public blessing to the
socialists meeting there for their party convention. As John XXIII, he
made Msgr. Montini a cardinal and called the Second Vatican Council. He
also wrote the Encyclical Pacem in Terris. The Encyclical uses a
deliberately ambiguous phrase, which foreshadows the same false
religious liberty the Council would later proclaim.
The Revolution Advances
John
XXIII's attitude in matters liturgical, then, comes as no surprise. Dom
Lambert Beauduin, quasi-founder of the modernist Liturgical Movement,
was a friend of Roncalli from 1924 onwards. At the death of Pius XII,
Beauduin remarked: "If they elect Roncalli, everything will be saved; he
would be capable of calling a council and consecrating ecumenism..."'
On July 25, 1960, John XXIII published the Motu Proprio Rubricarum Instructum. He had already decided to call Vatican II and to proceed with changing
Canon Law. John XXIII incorporates the rubrical innovations of 1955–1956
into this Motu Proprio and makes them still worse. "We have reached the
decision," he writes, "that the fundamental principles concerning the
liturgical reform must be presented to the Fathers of the future
Council, but that the reform of the rubrics of the Breviary and Roman
Missal must not be delayed any longer."
In this
framework, so far from being orthodox, with such dubious authors, in a
climate which was already "Conciliar," the Breviary and Missal of John
XXIII were born. They formed a "Liturgy of transition" destined to last —
as it in fact did last — for three or four years. It is a transition
between the Catholic liturgy consecrated at the Council of Trent and
that heterodox liturgy begun at Vatican II.
The "Antiliturgical Heresy" in the John XXIII Reform
We have
already seen how the great Dom Guéranger defined as "liturgical heresy"
the collection of false liturgical principles of the 18th century
inspired by Illuminism and Jansenism. I should like to demonstrate in
this section the resemblance between these innovations and those of John
XXIII.
Since John XXIII's innovations touched the Breviary as well as the
Missal, I will provide some information on his changes in the Breviary
also. Lay readers may be unfamiliar with some of the terms concerning
the Breviary, but I have included as much as possible to provide the
"flavor" and scope of the innovations.
1. Reduction of Matins to three lessons. Archbishop
Vintimille of Paris, a Jansenist sympathizer, in his reform of the
Breviary in 1736, "reduced the Office for most days to three lessons, to
make it shorter." In 1960 John XXIII also reduced the Office of Matins
to only three lessons on most days. This meant the suppression of a
third of Holy Scripture, two-thirds of the lives of the saints, and the
whole of the commentaries of the Church Fathers on Holy Scripture.
Matins, of course, forms a considerable part of the Breviary.
2. Replacing ecclesiastical formulas style with Scripture. "The second principle of the anti-liturgical sect," said Dom Guéranger,
"is to replace the formulae in ecclesiastical style with readings from
Holy Scripture." While the Breviary of St. Pius X had the commentaries
on Holy Scripture by the Fathers of the Church, John XXIII's Breviary
suppressed most commentaries written by the Fathers of the Church. On
Sundays, only five or six lines from the Fathers remains.
3. Removal of saints' feasts from Sunday.Dom
Gueranger gives the Jansenists' position: "It is their [the
Jansenists'] great principle of the sanctity of Sunday which will not
permit this day to be 'degraded' by consecrating it to the veneration of
a saint, not even the Blessed Virgin Mary. A fortiori, the
feasts with a rank of double or double major which make such an
agreeable change for the faithful from the monotony of the Sundays,
reminding them of the friends of God, their virtues and their protection
— shouldn't they be deferred always to weekdays, when their feasts
would pass by silently and unnoticed?"
John
XXIII, going well beyond the well-balanced reform of St. Pius X,
fulfills almost to the letter the ideal of the Janenist heretics: only
nine feasts of the saints can take precedence over the Sunday (two
feasts of St. Joseph, three feasts of Our Lady, St. John the Baptist,
Saints Peter and Paul, St. Michael, and All Saints). By contrast, the
calendar of St. Pius X included 32 feasts which took precedence, many of
which were former holy days of obligation. What is worse, John XXIII
abolished even the commemoration of the saints on Sunday.
4. Preferring the ferial office over the saint’s feast. Dom Guéranger goes on to describe the moves of the Jansenists as
follows: "The calendar would then be purged, and the aim, acknowledged
by Grancolas (1727) and his accomplices, would be to make the clergy
prefer the ferial office to that of the saints. What a pitiful
spectacle! To see the putrid principles of Calvinism, so vulgarly
opposed to those of the Holy See, which for two centuries has not ceased
fortifying the Church's calendar with the inclusion' of new protectors,
penetrate into our churches!"
John
XXIII totally suppressed ten feasts from the calendar (eleven in Italy
with the feast of Our Lady of Loreto), reduced 29 feasts of simple rank
and nine of more elevated rank to mere commemorations, thus causing the
ferial office to take precedence. He suppressed almost all the octaves
and vigils, and replaced another 24 saints' days with the ferial office.
Finally, with the new rules for Lent, the feasts of another nine
saints, officially in the calendar, are never celebrated. In sum, the
reform of John XXIII purged about 81 or 82 feasts of saints, sacrificing
them to "Calvinist principles."
Dom
Gueranger also notes that the Jansenists suppressed the feasts of the
saints in Lent. John XXIII did the same, keeping only the feasts of
first and second class. Since they always fall during Lent, the feasts
of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Gregory the Great. St. Benedict, St. Patrick,
and St. Gabriel the Archangel would never be celebrated. (Liturgical Revolution)
Appendix B
The Novus Ordo Service as a Rejection of Catholic Tradition and an Effort of "Conformism" to Protestantism
"We must strip from our Catholic prayers and from the Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren that is for the Protestants." (Annibale Bugnini, L'Osservatore Romano, March 19, 1965.)
"[T]he intention of Pope Paul VI with regard to what is commonly called the Mass, was to reform the Catholic liturgy in such a way that it should coincide with the Protestant liturgy.... [T]here was with Pope Paul VI an ecumenical intention to remove, or at least to correct, or at least to relax, what was too Catholic in the traditional sense, in the Mass, and I, repeat, to get the Catholic Mass closer to the Calvinist mass" (Dec. 19, 1993, Apropos, #17, pp. 8f; quoted in Christian Order, October, 1994. The words were spoken by Jean Guitton, a close friend of Giovanni Montini/Paul VI. The quotation and citations are found in Christopher A. Ferrara and Thomas E. Woods, Jr., The Great Facade, The Remnant Publishing Company, 2002, p. 317.)
Let it be candidly said: the Roman Rite which we have known hitherto no longer exists. It is destroyed. (Father Joseph Gelineau, an associate of Annibale Bugnini on the Consilium, 1uoted and footnoted in the work of a John Mole, who believed that the Mass of the Roman Rite had been "truncated," not destroyed. Assault on the Roman Rite)
Appendix C
Rupture in the Liturgy as Found in the Words of Joseph "Cardinal" Ratzinger
What happened after the Council was something
else entirely: in the place of liturgy as the fruit of 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. Gamber, with the vigilance of a true prophet and the courage of a true witness, opposed this falsification,
and thanks to his incredibly rich knowledge, indefatigably taught us
about the living fullness of a true liturgy. As a man who knew and loved
history, he showed us the multiple forms and paths of liturgical
development; as a man who looked at history form the inside, he saw in
this development and its fruit the intangible reflection of the eternal
liturgy, that which is not the object of our action but which can
continue marvelously to mature and blossom if we unite ourselves
intimately with its mystery. (Joseph "Cardinal: Ratzinger, Preface to
the French language edition of Monsignor Klaus Gamber's The Reform of the Roman Liturgy.)
The prohibition of the missal that was now
decreed, a missal that had known continuous growth over the centuries,
starting with the sacramentaries of the ancient Church, introduced a
breach into the history of the liturgy whose consequences could only be
tragic. It was reasonable and right of the Council to order a
revision of the missal such as had often taken place before and which
this time had to be more thorough than before, above all because of the introduction of the vernacular.
But more than this now happened: the old
building was demolished, and another was built, to be sure largely using
materials from the previous one and even using the old building plans.
There is no doubt that this new missal in many respects brought with it
a real improvement and enrichment; but setting it as a new construction
over against what had grown historically, forbidding the results of
this historical growth. thereby makes the liturgy appear to be no longer
living development but the produce of erudite work and juridical
authority; this has caused an enormous harm. For then the
impression had to emerge that liturgy is something "made", not something
given in advance but something lying without our own power of decision. (Joseph "Cardinal" Ratzinger, Milestones.)
