Pope Paul’s New Mass
Recently reprinted by Angelus Press, Pope Paul’s New Mass is the famous critique by Michael Davies of the new liturgy. As a sample, and to demonstrate its relevance still today, we here reproduce Chapter Four, entitled “A Successful Revolution.”
It was then that falsehood came into our Russian land. The great misfortune, the root of all the evil to come, was the loss of faith in the value of personal opinions. People felt that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing the same tune in chorus, and live by other people’s notions, the notions which were being crammed down everybody’s throat.—Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago
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Chapter 13
There was definitely no widespread desire for liturgical change in English-speaking countries before Vatican II among the laity, the parish clergy, or the bishops. Even where desire for change did exist it rarely envisaged more than a greater use of the vernacular. Those who advocated change were looked upon as cranks by most of the faithful. Writing in 1964, Evelyn Waugh commented on the fact that proponents of the changes then being imposed had been “with us in parts of the United States and northern Europe for a generation. We had looked upon them as harmless cranks who were attempting to devise a charade of second-century habits. We had confidence in the abiding Romanità of our Church. Suddenly we find the cranks in authority.”1 The late Archbishop Paul Hallinan of Atlanta also noted that: “We have come to the end of an era. What used to be uncharitably called the ‘way out ideas’ of the ‘way-out litniks’ are now universal Church law.”2
In an editorial on page six of the Spring 1962 issue of Catholic Truth, official journal of the Catholic Truth Society, its editor, Fr. Francis J. Ripley, made the following remarks:
We firmly believe that most priests in this country will have sighed with relief when they read the Apostolic Constitution Veterum Sapientia issued by the Pope on 22 February forbidding attempts to supplant Latin as the language of the Church. In its editorial comment, The Tablet wrote “some sentences in this document seem to indicate that even the campaign for the vernacular is to be considered over, at any rate as far as Ecclesia Docens is concerned; that Roma locuta est causa finita est .” This is one of the revolutions that will not be made by a militant minority. For the past few years the vernacularists have been extraordinarily vocal in certain sections of the Catholic press. Even when the late Pope said that there are many and grave reasons for retaining Latin in the Mass, they did not cease to continue their agitation. As I travelled round the country coming into contact with hundreds of priests from every diocese, I formed the impression that a generous estimate of the strength of the vernacularists amongst the clergy would be not more than one in ten. This authoritative document from the Holy Father demonstrates how superficial and misleading the arguments against the use of Latin are. We hope and pray that the corpse of vernacularism will not be disturbed.
The proportion of laity wishing for a vernacular liturgy was probably far smaller than among the clergy. This is admitted by Fr. Clifford Howell, a leading member of the small clique of English clerics which has succeeded in imposing its foibles upon the entire Church in that country. According to Father Howell, the lack of interest in the vernacular among the laity derives from their ignorance:
In this country the people at large have not desired to have English in the liturgy because our liturgical movement has lagged far behind that of the Continent. Until very recently only a small minority knew enough about liturgy to realise that full, active, and intelligent participation in it cannot be attained by the use of Latin alone.3
If this is the case it seems strange that the Fathers of Vatican II did not order the use of the vernacular in at least certain parts of the Mass in order to make such participation possible. Father Howell himself admits that Vatican II gave no such order: “The Council has granted powers to the various hierarchies to permit the introduction of the mother tongue within certain limits, but has by no means ordered them to do so.”4
Writing in The Universe of 28 March 1969, Douglas Woodruff summarised the attitude of the faithful to the liturgy: “To judge by The Universe editor’s mailbag, the great majority of the readers of The Universe have felt no need for liturgical experiments, and were deeply happy in the Church as She was up to three or four years ago.”
The truth is that not the least account was ever taken of whether or not the laity wanted change. Clerical bureaucrats had evolved a theory of what the liturgy ought to be like and this was what it was going to be like, even if it emptied the churches. Dom Gregory Murray typified the attitude of these bureaucrats perfectly when he wrote in The Tablet: “The plea that the laity as a body do not want liturgical change, whether in rite or in language, is, I submit, quite beside the point.” He insisted that it is “not a question of what people want; it is a question of what is good for them.”5
Father Bouyer had been one of the most enthusiastic members of the liturgical movement before the Council. He is now one of the most severe critics of the post-conciliar revolution. He has noted that there is a qualification to the frequently reiterated claim that “It is now the laity’s time to speak.” The qualification, Father Bouyer explains, is that if the laity speak it is on “condition that they keep docilely repeating what they are told. If they protest and want, for example, to retain at least the familiar chants of the ordinary of the Mass in Latin, they are told that their protest is worthless. They are not ‘trained’. There is no reason to take account of what they say! (Which is all the more curious since they are asking precisely for what the Council recommended.)”6
Apologists for the reform claim that it has been a pastoral success because the majority of those who assisted at Mass before the Council still do so. On the contrary, as the next chapter will show, the reform has been a pastoral disaster and in some countries less than half of those who assisted at Mass before the reform now do so. However, in English-speaking countries active opponents of the reform have been in a small minority when compared to the large numbers who still attend their parish churches on Sundays, stand up when told, sit down when told, and read whatever their missalettes tell them to read.
Many of those who are heart-broken at the destruction of the Roman Rite, and the banality of what has replaced it, are scandalised at the spectacle of so many of their fellow Catholics accepting the reforms without complaint, if without enthusiasm. Those who are scandalised by such a situation are clearly unfamiliar with the manner in which revolutionaries operate. Revolutionaries do not require massive support to succeed, they require only minimal opposition. This is particularly true of those who are able to impose a revolution from a position of legitimate authority—an apparent paradox but a fact of contemporary society. No objective observer could deny that there has been a revolutionary change in accepted standards of public morality during the past two decades. Let one example suffice. Twenty years ago a doctor who performed an abortion would have been prosecuted by the State, apart from very rare cases where it was considered necessary to save the life of the mother. Now, Catholic doctors who are unwilling to perform abortions are finding that there is no future for them in the public health service. This is a truly revolutionary turn-about and indicates that respect for the sanctity of life, which once characterised the average non-Catholic citizen, no longer exists. There are many non-Catholics who do not approve of this development, many who are worried about it, but very few who are prepared to take an active part in the pro-life movement. Sadly, the number of Catholics prepared to take an active part in the pro-life campaign is also relatively small, which shows the extent to which religious minorities are affected by the prevailing standards in society.
The Catholic faithful provide the ideal subject for a revolution imposed from above. In his monumental work, The Great Terror, Robert Conquest notes: “It was one of Stalin’s most constant principles that most minds are not critical.”7 The average man in the street or the pew does not think deeply about such matters as politics or religion. The percentage of adults who have actually read a book on these subjects is very small indeed. Such people are thus very susceptible to propaganda emanating from an accepted authority or those they consider to be experts. Thus, when the English bishops initiated their campaign to impose Communion in the hand upon the faithful, an editorial in Britain’s largest-circulation Catholic paper, The Universe, told its readers: “Pope Paul has given permission for Holy Communion in the hand because he believes, as do the bishops, that it will emphasise the sacred nature of the communicant as a temple of the Holy Spirit, as well as the sacred nature of the Eucharist as the Body and Blood of Our Lord.”8
The ordinary reader would not ask: “Is this true?” He would assume that it was true because it had appeared in The Universe and this presumption would be reinforced when he heard the same statement from his pulpit. The statement, in fact, is false. Pope Paul had urged Catholics to retain the traditional manner of reception on the tongue. But effective propaganda is not based on truth, it is based upon what the majority of those it seeks to influence can be made to believe. The propaganda for the liturgical reform had the added advantage of an habitually docile audience. Writing in the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, Fr. Rawley Myers observed:
Also we must remember that parishioners were never asked at all about what they might like or if they were satisfied with most of the old ways, and when changes were handed down from on high don’t feel involved. They tolerate these things mostly because they think the clergy want them, and many were brought up to go along with the clergy.9
All that was needed to initiate a successful liturgical revolution within the English-speaking countries was that the innovations should be authorised by the Pope. The bishops proved to have a totally bureaucratic mentality and passed on any directives they received without the least thought as to whether they were beneficial or harmful. Many of the parish clergy didn’t like the changes, but the idea of questioning anything ordered by the bishop didn’t occur to them. And as for the laity, well, their duty was to accept what their parish priest told them to accept.
These remarks are not intended to be patronising or even critical, at least where the parish clergy and the laity are concerned. They are statements about the manner in which Catholics thought and behaved at the close of Vatican II. There was a great deal to be said in favour of docility; a long line of prudent and holy popes stretching back for generations had given the impression that Catholics could and should have absolute confidence in anything coming from Rome. The situation of Catholics as a minority in English-speaking countries implanted a special sense of loyalty to the clergy and to the Holy See, there was a natural closing of ranks and reluctance to “rock the boat”. It is not surprising that there was so little opposition to the reforms; it is surprising that there was so much.
It must be stressed at this point that the phenomenon of large-scale public dissent from official teaching had not then manifested itself. As the next chapter will show, the liturgical reform was instrumental in destroying the stability of Catholicism. The ordinary Catholic had accepted that the Church was right on such matters as contraception (even if he did not practice Her teaching) because he saw the Church as the stable, unchanging, inerrant rock upon which his life was based. In most cases the only contact the ordinary Catholic had with the Church was at Sunday Mass. Sunday Mass was always the same, the Church was always the same. Then, suddenly, the stability vanished. About the only thing you could be sure of at Mass on Sunday was that something would be different from the week before. The psychological impact of such a break with tradition should have been foreseen: it wasn’t, at least not by the mainly orthodox bishops who imposed the changes. The liturgical reform thus prepared the ground for the disintegration of Catholic life which followed so soon afterwards.
The imposition of the new liturgy was accomplished by a sustained barrage of propaganda from the pulpit and Catholic press. The faithful were told that these changes were for their good and for the good of the Church; that they would welcome and enjoy them; that, in fact, they had been clamoring for them for decades; and that, to clinch the matter, the unquestioning acceptance of these changes would be the acid test of their loyalty to the Pope. The minority of Catholics, often converts, who recognised the dangers implicit in the changes, had no opportunity of presenting their case. A few letters did get into the Catholic and secular press, but their effect, in comparison with the sustained barrage of propaganda from the official media, the pulpit in particular, was minimal. The average reaction was: “Father says it’s good for me so it must be good for me.” It is a fundamental axiom of the advertising world that if you tell people they enjoy something often enough, they will enjoy it—and now there is certainly a large proportion of Mass-goers who have convinced themselves that they do like the changes and would certainly object to any attempt to reverse the process. Thus there is a ready audience for the type of propaganda churned out to justify Communion in the hand: that it is more mature and adult, in keeping with the dignity of modern man.
It is also important to stress the effect of introducing the revolution by stages. This was precisely the policy pursued by Cranmer, who, at the beginning of his liturgical revolution, avoided any drastic changes “which would needlessly provoke the conservatives and stiffen the attitude of that large class of men who, rightly handled, could be brought to acquiesce in ambiguity and interim measures”.10
The shallowness of the propaganda intended to induce the Catholic people to accept or at least not to resist change was obvious to the discerning layman from the very beginning. Writing in The Tablet in March 1966, Christopher Sykes, the biographer of Evelyn Waugh, observed:
The average Catholic layman is most aware of the Aggiornamento movement in the Church by the experience of going to church and attending Mass in the new liturgy. We love it; we are deeply grateful for it; we have never had it so good; so we are repeatedly told. Those who don’t like it are a small unintelligent minority who would cling to anything, good or bad, just because it happened to be old. We are repeatedly told this too. We are also told by many of our clergy that we were most dissatisfied with the Mass as it was; that when attending it we paid no heed to its significance but, on the contrary, regarded it as the priest’s business and nothing to do with us laymen, to whom it was merely a meaningless gabble in a language we particularly disliked. We were all very happy, so we are told, to have done with the old Mass. The propaganda in favour of the new rite, which I have not caricatured above, strikes me as being particularly weak in respect of the alleged general dislike of Catholics for the former rite. It is weak as a propaganda point, because the same clergy told us for years, certainly since I can remember first hearing a sermon or a religious instruction, that the Mass bound us into a fellowship because [doctrine apart] love of the Mass was an emotion which we shared….[The vernacular] would weaken that majestic unity of the Church reflected in its ceremony. We were told that such a custom would offend far more people than it would please, and do far more harm than good. When the same people turn round and congratulate us on having got rid of the bad old liturgy, and promise us more vernacular and less and less of the Mass as we were said to love it, what are we to believe? Were they consciously talking nonsense all those years or are they really sincere in their criticisms [which sometimes amount to denigrations] today? Either way, the clergy who indulge in this propaganda are weakening their authority in the minds of people who can remember.11
Sadly, very few people were as discerning as Mr. Sykes. I recollect, to my shame, travelling to another parish for Mass on these early Sundays because in my retrograde parish there was no vernacular, no offertory procession, and no Mass facing the people. My parish priest had failed to “keep up with the times” and, I felt, keeping up with the times was a top priority. There is nothing surprising about my attitude. My only source of information was the Catholic press, and the Catholic press was united in extolling the merits of the innovations. These innovations were endorsed by our bishops, originated with a General Council, and came with the authority of the Pope. It would, in fact, have been presumptuous of me to question them in any way. I wonder how many readers actually felt uneasy at that time, 1964, ’65, and ’66? I am sure that there were few who spoke out against the changes. It needs to be stressed again and again that docility to legitimate authority was the most notable characteristic of English-speaking Catholics in those days. It still persists among many orthodox Catholics today. They will accept changes they detest without active opposition simply because they would not oppose their parish priest, let alone the Pope.
Added to this attitude of docility is the fact that the vast majority of ordinary parishioners were not and are not “active” parishioners in the sense the term is used today. The average Catholic would assist at Mass on Sundays, send his children to Catholic schools, give money for special collections, and attend parish fund-raising functions (but not help to organise them). Apart from this, his life did not differ significantly from that of his non-Catholic neighbours. This is a subject which will be examined in detail in the next chapter, where it will be shown that one of the great psychological blunders of the Conciliar Church is the attempt to turn every parishioner into an activist.
Thus, there was no more chance of the ordinary parishioner’s taking an active part for or against liturgical changes than there was of his playing an active role in his political party or trade union. He voted at elections, he paid his union dues—and that was that. The number of Catholics who have been prepared to fight for the traditional liturgy is small, but understandably small. The same can be said of Catholics prepared to fight for orthodox catechetics, a point which conservative detractors of the traditionalist movement conveniently overlook.
On the other hand, the number of Catholics who have displayed any active support for the changes is infinitesimal. Liberals are acting dishonestly when they interpret attendance at Mass as a vote in favour of the changes. Most of those still attending Mass would have been attending anyway. The reality of the situation is that, following the Liturgical Revolution, millions have stopped assisting at Mass throughout the English-speaking world.
Opposition to the reforms began to arise when it became obvious that the pastoral benefits which had been confidently prophesied, did not materialise. The police did not need to be called to Catholic churches each Sunday to hold back the hordes of lapsed Catholics whose faith had been rekindled at the prospect of saying the Confiteor in English. The initial interest, which anything new is bound to evoke, soon began to wear off. English in the liturgy became a matter of routine and the liturgy began to appear banal. It eventually became clear to me that the changes had been detrimental. One day at school I asked my eleven-year-old pupils to write an essay on the changes in the Mass, without indicating my own preference in any way. Almost all preferred the Latin Mass—and gave sound reasons for their preference. I then joined the Latin Mass Society. I am sure that like most of those joining at the time this was for aesthetic reasons. The innovations were affecting the ethos of the Mass. We did not see them as undermining Catholic Eucharistic teaching.
Then, suspect translations began to appear. This immediately added a doctrinal dimension to the reform. The direction in which those who had taken control of the implementation of the reform wished the liturgy to move was clear. There was to be a playing down of all those aspects of the Mass which were unacceptable to Protestants. Prayers referring to the Real Presence or sacrifice would be considerably toned down—this was made particularly clear with the publication of the ICEL translation of the Canon in 1969. I well remember my own priest, Fr. Desmond Coffey, listing its serious omissions, mistranslations, distortions, and outright heresies. But, by the time this Canon appeared, there had been so many changes, clergy and people had become so used to accepting them, that this additional change was accepted with very little protest. The pattern of compromise described in Chapter XVI of Cranmer’s Godly Order had become firmly established. Indeed, many clerics like my own parish priest who did make a protest were regarded as a nuisance by most of the clergy. If the bishop had approved it why should they make a fuss? And priests like Father Coffey, with a zeal for orthodoxy, had an alternative to open conflict with their bishops—they could continue to use the Latin Canon. When the New Mass came they could go on using the Roman Canon in Latin. They were thus kept within the system and their presence did far more to induce concerned laymen to accept the changes than any amount of liberal propaganda. All this was unwitting, of course. They imagined that by remaining within their parish rather than resigning, as Fr. Bryan Houghton did, they were protecting the faithful from liberalism. All that they were doing, in fact, was to postpone the liberal triumph until they died or were forced to retire. With hindsight it is easy to see what they should have done. They should neither have resigned, as did Father Houghton, nor remained to celebrate the New Mass in as traditional a manner as possible, as did Father Coffey. They should have emulated Fr. Oswald Baker and simply carried on using the Tridentine Mass. Had a sufficient number done this, the revolution might have been thwarted. But all this is written with hindsight. The revolution had been won even before the New Mass was introduced. It had, in fact, been won in 1967. It had been won when the clergy first agreed to celebrate some portions of the unchanged Mass in English and the people were induced to accept this innovation. And, in the circumstances prevailing in 1964-1965, it would clearly have been unthinkable for the clergy to so much as question this innovation.
Notes 1 The Tablet, 15 February 1964, p. 195. 2 Emmanuel, October 1975, p. 419. 3 The Liturgy and the Future (Worcestershire, 1966), p. 94. 4 Ibid., p. 102. 5 The Tablet, 14 March 1964, p. 303. 6 DC, p. 30. 7 The Great Terror (Pelican Edition), p. 740. 8 Editorial in the 21 May 1976 issue. 9 Homiletic and Pastoral Review, February 1978, p. 26. 10 ESR, p. 194. 11 The Tablet, 12 March 1966, p. 297.
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