The Reign of Novelty and the Sins of the Times: Why the Novus Ordo Is Solely Modern in Content (Part 2)

Santa Maria in Trastevere: an ancient Roman basilica-style church with columns taken from the Baths of Caracalla, a Baroque coffered ceiling, and other marks of its long history — an architectural analogy to the long-matured liturgy once celebrated within its walls. (Trastevere is also where Bouyer & Botte finished writing Eucharistic Prayer II on a napkin at a cafe.)

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In the first part, I spoke about the humility Catholics should feel in the presence of “the cumulative piety of our precursors” and the gratitude we should have for an “irreplaceable inheritance that is simultaneously and inseparably doctrinal, catechetical, ascetical, mystical, sacramental, liturgical, and cultural.”

The fairest fruit of a unique civilization

To see why “irreplaceable” is an apt word in this connection, consider the sheer monumentality of spiritual and physical resources and the vastitude of time that go into the gestation and maturation of a Christian liturgy.

In an important essay,¹ John Lamont entertains a thought-experiment proposed by Thomas Pink, namely: Would it have made any difference if Paul VI, instead of signing off on ragtag rites of yawnful banality, had instead sourced a dreamteam of contemplative monks who produced a new rite of “eloquent orthodoxy and piercing beauty”?

Lamont responds that a rite is the fairest fruit of a well-matured civilization, and not something that can be manufactured ad nutum. Summarizing his argument, civilization is built up of components resulting from conscious and deliberate efforts, often successful, to reach the highest level of human attainment; to do so collectively and to preserve the results. When this occurs, the civilization achieves universal status, which those around it seek to enter into and be a part of. Now, a fully developed civilization will have both religion and philosophy—the one to represent the human race to the cosmos and its ruler, the other to give a rational understanding of the human race, the cosmos, and man’s place therein. In his own words:

Christianity was from the first a civilized religion — that is, a religion that used and incorporated the resources of civilization in its belief and practice . . . [and] was intended to be suited to civilized people and to be capable of functioning as the religious part of their civilization. This was dictated by the logic of Christian theology: the human nature redeemed by Christ should be shown to reach its highest potential; the divinely revealed message should be expressed with the greatest power and majesty possible; the worship of God should be carried on using the highest forms of human culture.

The civilization in which Christianity took being is Hellenistic civilization, which includes Latin and Syriac branches as well as Greek…. In the New Testament, we can see that St. Paul and St. Luke both mastered the literary skills of a civilized man, and their works could not have been written without these skills. The works of the Fathers of the Church, and the teachings of the ecumenical councils, were products and components of a civilization. The councils use philosophical concepts that were developed by Greek philosophy….

The character of Christianity as a civilized religion includes its liturgy. The development of Christian liturgy as a form of civilization was hindered by the legal persecution of the religion by the Roman Empire in its first three centuries, but after Christianity was legalized by the Emperor Constantine in 313 AD, this development was rapidly undertaken. The traditional Latin Mass is the civilized liturgy produced by Latin Christian civilization, as the Byzantine Rite is the civilized liturgy produced by Greek Christian civilization. The TLM, together with the music and architecture developed to accompany it, is indeed the central part of Latin Christian civilization, which would not exist if these things were removed from it.

This gets us part way towards an answer to Prof. Pink’s question. The idea that a pope could replace the TLM by a new rite composed of texts of even more eloquent orthodoxy and piercing beauty is absurd. The richness of the TLM is the product of an entire civilization, and required a civilization to produce it…. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote the office for the feast of Corpus Christi at the behest of Pope Urban IV. This office was a success, but it took one of the greatest saints and doctors of the Church to write the liturgy for a single feast…. St. Thomas used an established liturgical structure and established models of prayer and hymnody to produce the office of Corpus Christi. The framework within which he worked was the product of a civilization with millennial roots. An equivalent Christian civilization cannot be produced at will…

But there is more. Even if a new rite of immense beauty and orthodoxy could be constructed, it cannot compete with, much less outweigh, the standing of a rite that we receive from the past. There are three reasons for this.

First, loyalty to the traditions of our fathers:

The TLM was produced by our fathers in the faith — St. Damasus, St. Gregory the Great, and others — building on the liturgical foundations laid by Christ and the apostles. The fourth commandment [Honor thy father and thy mother], and the implications of belief in the communion of saints, require that we follow and keep the religious traditions established by these fathers who built up the Roman church, and from whom the members of the Roman Catholic Church have received the Faith…. We cannot be dispensed from this obligation. To reject it is to cut ourselves off from communion with these fathers, and hence from the Church.

A second reason is that Latin civilization existed at the time of Christ, and that Our Lord and the apostles were in contact with it and interacted with it. Latin Christian civilization thus provides us with a direct link to the life and activity of Christ and the apostles, as do the Greek and Syriac civilizations of the other traditional rites of the Church. This connection to the milieu of Christ and the apostles is an invaluable and irreplaceable feature of the traditional Christian rites.

A third reason is the fact noted above, which is that the TLM is not of purely human origin. It contains divinely established elements, and these elements include both particular liturgical texts and actions and broader principles that govern the liturgy as a whole. We do not have sufficient independent knowledge of these divinely established broader principles to design a new rite that would be [guaranteed to be] governed by them. The only way for us to [know that we] follow these principles is to adhere to the traditional Latin rite that we actually possess.

It is reasonable to hold that Divine Providence directly willed, for the Church’s good, the specific families of liturgical rites that developed in the apostolic and postapostolic periods, and, moreover, willed that they should mature, in their broad lines, in analogous ways — as all of them in fact did, in spite of being separated by such great distances and linguistic boundaries. Thus, for instance, all rites worshiped eastward or ad orientem; all were chanted with modal melodies; all involved densely hierarchical ceremonial, marked by a ritual and architectural separation between the ordained minister offering sacrifice and the congregation that unites spiritually with him; all featured actions that could not be seen, and words that could not be heard, by the people; and so forth (I have gone into all this in detail in my book Once and Future Roman Rite).

But quite apart from lacking certainty about what exactly are the liturgy’s divine and apostolic elements, we simply do not have “the civilizational resources to create anything that would even come close to the human elements of the TLM.” Lamont maintains that traditionalists themselves tend to underestimate the bond that unites the liturgy with civilization, and both with Catholicism itself:

During the twentieth century, the notion of civilization as an ideal was replaced by the ideal of an “advanced” society — an “advanced” society being one that is strong in science and technology, and in consequence wealthy. This new ideal was understood to require the rejection of the old one. The elements of civilization in Western societies — e.g., education in classical languages, art and architecture in classical styles, formation in high literary culture — atrophied, or were deliberately attacked and eradicated…

Developments in the Church from the 1950s onwards thoroughly implemented this destruction of civilization, with the intent of adhering to the new, anti-civilizational model. Traditional religious art and architecture ceased to be commissioned and were physically destroyed as far as possible; it was often secular governments that prevented the coup de grâce. The TLM was totally suppressed, and the music developed for it ceased to be performed (at least in a religious context). The Latin language and the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas were removed from clerical formation. The collapse of religious orders, and the eradication of the tradition of Latin scholasticism and liturgy in the remnants that remained, meant that the scholarly study of Latin Christian philosophy and theology also collapsed…

The Novus Ordo is part of this anti-civilizational project; this leaps to the eye when the ritual of Paul VI is examined in the setting of the architecture and music [expressly] produced for it…. Since Catholicism is a civilized religion, destruction of Catholicism and destruction of civilization went together.²

To sum up Lamont: it takes countless individuals (among them not a few geniuses) and many centuries of patient labor to build up a civilization. The matured liturgical rites of Christendom are in part the result, and in part the driving force, of Catholic civilization in toto.³ The Roman Rite, like the Byzantine rite, is the fruit of the Incarnation standing at the crossroads of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome; it is the refined liquor that has passed through the distillery of the apostolic and patristic age, the Middle Ages, the Baroque, down to our times. Whatever changes it has seen — the developments in Gaul, for instance, that later returned to Rome with the Romano-Gallican missal, or the particular feasts added each century by devout pontiffs — such changes have been engrafted into the totality it represents and embodies, while yet the character of the tradition has dominated, has been allowed to dominate, and has been protected in its domination.

The Roman Canon: heart of the Roman Rite. From a northern Italian missal, c. 1320-1350, with an added southern German miniature, c. 1450-1500. By this time, the text of the Canon was already a thousand years old. (source)

Liturgical conservatism and “good sense”

The liturgist Bernard Botte, who eventually went over to the dark side, still had the common sense in 1953 to make this observation about the Roman Canon:

We should be grateful to the people of the Middle Ages for having preserved the canon in its purity, and not having allowed their per­sonal effusions or theological ideas to pass into it. One can imagine the complete sham we would have today if each generation had been permitted to remake the canon to the measure of their theo­logical controversies or novel forms of piety. We can only hope for a continuing imitation of the good sense of these people, who had their own theological ideas but who understood that the canon was not their playground. To their eyes, it was the expression of a venerable tradition, and they felt that it could not be touched without opening the door to every sort of abuse.⁴

Naturally what Dom Bernard says about the Canon can be said about the entirety of the liturgy: it was, it always will be, the expression of a venerable tradition, the violation of which has opened and will always open the door to every sort of abuse. The testimony of Fr Yves Congar in the late 1960s is no less forceful, given that he was no traditionalist:

The conservative character of the liturgy makes it possible for it to preserve and transmit intact the values whose importance one epoch may have forgotten, but which the next epoch is happy to find intact and preserved, so that it can live from them again. Where would we be if this liturgical conservatism had not resisted the late medieval taste for sensory devotions, the eighteenth century’s individualistic, rational, and moralizing imperatives, the nineteenth century’s critique, or the modern period’s subjective philosophies? Thanks to the liturgy everything has been retained and transmitted. Ah! Let us not expose ourselves to the reproach sixty years hence that we squandered and lost the sacred heritage of the Catholic communion as it is deployed in the slow flow of time. Let us keep a healthy awareness that we carry in ourselves only a moment, the tip of the iceberg in relation to a reality which is beyond us in every way.⁵

We are reading these words almost sixty years after Congar penned them, and what he warned against has exactly come to pass. Whatever his other faults and errors may have been, here Congar perfectly expresses the Catholic idea of submission to the totality of tradition as it comes to us, stands before and above us, and measures us.

Joseph Shaw argues that this idea, or its rejection, yields quite important consequences:

We may usefully contrast the pre-modern conception of tradition with a modern one. Liturgists who regard themselves as conservatives, as well as progressives, often say, in effect: I will pass on to the future those parts of what I have been given which I choose. After a few generations of such choices, subject to changing intellectual fashions, continuity will have worn extremely thin. The pre-modern conception is: I will pass on to the future the whole of what I have been given, insofar as it is in my power to do so: both what I understand and appreciate, and also things I do not understand fully, things which offend the aesthetic fashions of my time, and things which touch painfully the favourite sins of my generation.⁶

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In Part 3, I will take up the standard line that the Novus Ordo “restores” ancient elements that were “lost over time,” and that it is, in fact, “more traditional” because it resembles more closely certain descriptions given of primitive liturgies. We will discover that it is, on the contrary, radically untraditional — and theologically untenable — to leapfrog over centuries in quest of a putative pure form, a quest that cannot avoid being arbitrary, political, ideological, and impious.

1. John Lamont, “Dominican Theologian Attacks Catholic Tradition: Defending Kwasniewski against Donneaud’s Positivist Reductionism” (published at Rorate Caeli, September 2023).

2. Lamont continues: “We may add that opposition to civilization was to some extent a distinct motivation for this orgy of destruction. Some people are barbarians. They hate civilization as such, because it makes them feel inferior, presents them with standards they are unwilling and unable to meet, excludes them from status and importance. Such barbarians were important auxiliaries in the modernist war against the Faith.”

C.S. Lewis perfectly encapsulated the difference between the “wise men of old” and the “magicians and applied scientists” of modernity; Fr. Bugnini was both victim and agent of the latter. When in his memoirs Fr. Louis Bouyer referred to Bugnini as “uncultured,” the force and depth of the word are not to be lightly set aside; it was no casual insult!

3. As John Senior famously wrote: “Whatever we do in the political or social order, the indispensable foundation is prayer, the heart of which is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the perfect prayer of Christ Himself, Priest and Victim, recreating in an unbloody manner the bloody, selfsame Sacrifice of Calvary. What is Christian culture? It is essentially the Mass. That is not my or anyone’s opinion or theory or wish but the central fact of 2,000 years of history. Christendom, what secularists call Western Civilization, is the Mass and the paraphernalia which protect and facilitate it. All architecture, art, political and social forms, economics, the way people live and feel and think, music, literature―all these things when they are right are ways of fostering and protecting the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

“To enact a sacrifice, there must be an altar, an altar has to have a roof over it in case it rains; to reserve the Blessed Sacrament, we build a little House of Gold and over it a Tower of Ivory with a bell and a garden round it with the roses and lilies of purity, emblems of the Virgin Mary—Rosa Mystica, Turris Davidica, Turris Eburnea, Domus Aurea, who carried His Body and His Blood in her womb, Body of her body, Blood of her blood. And around the church and garden, where we bury the faithful dead, the caretakers live, the priests and religious whose work is prayer, who keep the Mystery of Faith in its tabernacle of music and words in the Office of the Church; and around them, the faithful who gather to worship and divide the other work that must be done in order to make the perpetuation of the Sacrifice possible—to raise the food and make the clothes and build and keep the peace so that generations to come may live for Him, so that the Sacrifice goes on even until the consummation of the world.” The Restoration of Christian Culture (Norfolk, VA: IHS Press, 2008), 16–17.

4. Bernard Botte, “Histoire des prières de l’ordinare de la messe,” in L’Ordinaire de la messe: Texte critique, traduction et ètudes, ed. B. Botte and C. Mohrmann, Études liturgiques 2 (Paris: Cerf, 1953), 27; trans. Zachary Thomas. See Kwasniewski, Once and Future Roman Rite, 259–60.

5. Yves Congar, “Autorité, Initiative, Coresponsabilité,” La Maison-Dieu 97 (1969), 55, cited by Innocent Smith, “Vagaggini and Congar on the Liturgy and Theology,” Questions Liturgiques 96, no. 3–4 (2015): 206n72.

6. Joseph Shaw, The Liturgy, the Family, and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays of a Traditional Catholic (Lincoln, NE: Os Justi Press, 2023), 40.