The Barbarians Have Taken Over

Part III

Michael Davies

- Part I -                               - Part II -

In the third article of his series on the Liturgical Barbarians, Michael Davies examines what the Second Vatican Council mandated on the subject of the sanctuary. He finds that although the Constitution on the Liturgy did not command or even authorize specifically any of the changes that have been made in the sanctuary, it made them possible by ambiguous phrases inserted into its text by liberal "experts." This article will probably provide a startling insight in to the Council for those who have not read his book, Pope John's Council,  or Father Wiltgen's The Rhine Flows into the Tiber. Both these books are avilable from the Angelus Press and are essential reading for anyone wishing to know the truth about Vatican II.

In the March issue of The Angelus it was shown that never in the history of the Church in East or West has Mass ever been celebrated facing the people as an act of conscious pastoral policy. It was shown that in the few cases of churches possessing altars apparently designed for a celebration facing the people, the real reason was to permit a celebration facing the East, as in these churches the altar was at the west end. The inescapable conclusion of any objective study of Mass facing the people in the history of the Church is that the practice is not sanctioned by and is incompatible with Tradition, and that even if mandatory legislation had been promulgated since Vatican II ordering that Mass should be celebrated facing the people, any priest would have ample justification for refusing to implement such a flagrant and unprecedented breach with Tradition. In this article we shall examine what the Council itself mandated concerning the sanctuary.

The Least Important Council

Before discussing what Vatican II and the post-conciliar legislation had to say on the subject of Mass facing the people, it will be helpful to examine the Council itself. There had been twenty councils prior to Vatican II, but anyone reading the Catholic press today, or listening to the typical bishop or theologian, would imagine that no other general council had ever been held, or even that the Church had begun with Vatican II. From a dogmatic standpoint, Vatican II is the least important of all the councils. It settled no disputed question, it promulgated no dogmatic definitions binding upon the faithful, it deliberately refrained from investing any of its teaching with the note of infallibility. It is legitimate to wonder why precisely the Council was called, and what exactly its purpose was. Pope John XXIII claimed that he convoked it as a result of an inspiration from the Holy Ghost, but no Catholic is obliged to believe that this was the case. Cardinal Heenan, Primate of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, explained in the second volume of his autobiography that Pope John could not possibly have foreseen the results of his decision to call a council. He was, the Cardinal testifies, under the impression that the bishops had come together in Rome for a short convivial meeting, but its sessions continued for five years. God was indeed merciful in allowing the old Pope to die before he saw the extent to which his Council, as Cardinal Heenan put it, "provided an excuse for rejecting so much of the Catholic doctrine which he wholeheartedly accepted."¹

Note that Cardinal Heenan did not accuse the Council of rejecting the teaching of the Church, but claimed that it provided an excuse for this to be done. How did it happen? All of us are, to a certain extent, children of our times. Catholics are supposed to live in the world but not be of the world. We have no abiding city here, our vocation is to be citizens of heaven. But living in the world we are bound to be influenced by the world, and by its prevailing trends. The predominant tendencies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been totally incompatible with the Catholic ethos. The fundamental principle of Catholicism is that it is a God-centered religion. He is our Creator, we are His creatures, and the primary purpose of our life here on earth is to do His will so that we can spend an eternity of happiness with Him in heaven. But the prevailing trend today is to make man the measure of all things, to make the building of a paradise on earth his primary concern. The Catholic approach to any problem is to ask how it relates to the will of God; the contemporary approach is to ask how it conforms to the material well-being of man. Thus, when confronted with a problem such as artificial contraception, the question asked is not: "Does God forbid it?" but: "Will man find it inconvenient?" Catholic intellectuals, academics in particular, had long been embarrassed at the extent to which the contemporary world found Catholicism unacceptable. There was a great desire among them to make it acceptable, and not necessarily for malicious motives. Many believed sincerely that the future of the Catholic religion depended upon its being presented in a way that the contemporary world would accept, not realizing that if the contemporary world found Catholicism acceptable it would not be the religion founded by Jesus Christ. Condemned proposition 80 in the Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX was that: "The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization." Such a reconciliation was, if only subconsciously, the goal which many of the more influential figures at Vatican II had set themselves, and, I will repeat, in most cases it was with the idea of helping and not harming the Church. This had also been the ambition, at least in its initial stages, of the Modernist movement which had been repressed but not extinguished by Pope St. Pius X. The great saint pointed out in his Encyclical Pascendi, that the inevitable outcome of Modernism is atheism. Christianity is not a religion which can compromise and survive; its Founder died upon the Cross; thousands of its first members were expected to die a cruel death in the Roman arenas rather than burn a small bowl of incense before the statue of the emperor. One can well imagine many of those now claiming to interpret "the spirit of Vatican II" condemning these martyrs for their lack of ecumenical spirit.

The "Spirit" of Vatican II

Note here that, just as Cardinal Heenan did not accuse the Council of rejecting the teaching of the Council, I have not referred to those quoting the Council but to those interpreting its "spirit." The documents of the Council were far from perfect, as I will demonstrate, but the great damage done by the Council was the spirit it created. Some American bishops testified with the zeal of born-again Christians that the Council had transformed them, that the beliefs they brought to the Council were not those they returned home with. How did this happen? The answer is that the men with the greatest influence at the Council were not the bishops who voted for the documents but the experts who drafted them, and on whose advice the bishops came to rely. There is a parallel here with secular governments whose leading ministers often rely on the advice of professional experts. The conciliar experts (periti in Latin), were the intellectuals and theologians most likely to have been affected by contemporary thinking through their contacts with non-Catholic academics. These men not only drafted the documents that were to contain the teaching of the Council, but they gave lectures to the bishops—the great recycling process which followed the Council had begun. They also had the ear of the principal reporters covering the Council, men who were almost entirely anti-authoritarian liberals, and these reporters praised and publicized those who echoed their own ideas, and denigrated or ignored those who did not. Father Louis Bouyer, one of the orthodox experts (there were some), and one of the greatest scholars in the French Church today, lamented the fact that the Council had surrendered itself to the dictatorship of the journalists. He was referring to the fact that many of the bishops and their experts prepared speeches not so much with a view to upholding the teaching of the Church but with getting good press coverage.

Much of what I have written may seem wildly exaggerated and sensational, almost incredible, in fact. This will be particularly true for Catholics who derived their impression of the Council from such journals as Time, Commonweal or the New Yorker. Most people read their journals too uncritically, and presume that why they are reading is objective reporting. There is thus a received view of the Council, in which the liberals are the good guys, and such conservatives as Cardinal Ottaviani are the bad guys. This view is now so firmly established that anyone who challenges it is considered to lack any credibility.

The Heresy of Inevitability

The view that Vatican II was the greatest event in the history of the Church, and brought it out of darkness into an era of renewal and enlightenment, is constantly reiterated in almost every official Catholic journal in the English-speaking world, and the odds against anyone who challenges this consensus getting a hearing, let alone being taken seriously, are minimal—if they exist at all. Paul Hallett, the most outstanding lay journalist in the U.S.A., was recently kind enough to provide an introduction for a book I had written on Modernism. In it he remarks:

Andrew Greeley has noted with great satisfaction that each time American Catholics are polled on the issue of women priests, the percentage in favor increases significantly. The reason is clearly that the ordination of women is beginning to appear to be inevitable. This impression of inevitability also answer the question posed by Msgr. Kearney, which was posed in the first article in this series, i.e., why was his parish alone in resisting the removal of the tabernacle from the high altar when every parish should have done so? It was happening everywhere, it was inevitable, so what was the point of resisting?

The Vatican II Bandwagon

The euphoric spirit of Vatican II generated a bandwagon effect during the Council itself, and when a bandwagon rolls along it takes tremendous strength of character to avoid jumping aboard. Those who do resist the temptation must face the prospect of appearing isolated and irrelevant as they are left behind while the bandwagon thunders away on its triumphant progress, overflowing with passengers, ecstatic at their sense of relevance. What a lonely figure Archbishop Lefebvre must have made when he let the conciliar bandwagon pass him by; but the despised and hunted Athanasius was a lonely figure too, and there was no bishop more lonely than St. John Fisher when he placed his head upon the block for failing to board the episcopal bandwagon that proclaimed Henry VIII as Supreme Head of the Church in England. But who, it is interesting to reflect, appears relevant today: the bandwagon bishops of the fourth and sixteenth centuries, or Saints Athanasius and John Fisher?

If it takes moral courage to resist climbing onto an accelerating bandwagon, it takes even more courage to jump off when it has gathered momentum and is carrying all before it. This is just what Archbishop R. J. Dwyer of Portland, Oregon, did. He admitted that, at the time the Council was all good fun; that he voted as the other bishops did without thinking; and that in this way he saved himself a great deal of trouble. Archbishop Dwyer was as orthodox a bishop as Archbishop Lefebvre. He would never have voted for anything which he imagined might harm his beloved Church, and yet he voted for documents which, to quote Cardinal Heenan's remark apropos Pope John XXIII, "provided an excuse for rejecting so much of the Catholic doctrine which he wholeheartedly accepted." Why then did he vote for the documents? In order to answer this question we must return to the subject of the conciliar experts, the periti.

Time Bombs in the Texts

The periti, the theologians who wished to bring the Church into line with contemporary thought, knew that there was no hope whatsoever of persuading a majority of bishops to vote in favor of their more radical objectives. They thus inserted what Archbishop Lefebvre has described as "time bombs" into the texts of the documents. Much of the teaching of the Council is very traditional, some passages are even inspiring, and this fact more than anything else contributed to the success of the time bomb strategy of some periti. They decided to insert ambiguous phrases into the documents which they would be able to interpret in the way they wanted after the Council, when they obtained influential positions on the commissions which would be set up to implement it. Pope John XXIII had stated clearly that the teaching of his Council was to conform with that of its predecessors, and the only legitimate manner to interpret an ambiguous text is in accordance with Tradition. Pope John Paul II has said that it is his intention that the Council should be interpreted in this way, and Archbishop Lefebvre has affirmed that if the Council is interpreted in this manner he would have no difficulty in accepting it. But, in practice, those infected with the spirit of Vatican II do not have the remotest interest in Tradition. Where they are concerned, the Council means whatever those driving the bandwagon say that it means, and in the U.S.A. at present such men as Charles Curran, Raymond Brown, Richard McBrien, and Andrew Greeley, are firmly in the driver's seat with such prelates as Hunthausen and Weakland and Gerety and Sullivan of Kansas City and Sullivan of Richmond, riding shotgun to protect them from the isolated orthodox Catholic who might try to impede its progress. Commentators of every viewpoint, liberal and conservative, have testified to the existence of ambiguities in conciliar texts. I list a good number in Chapter VI of my book, Pope John's Council. Professor Oscar Cullman was the most respected of the Protestant Observers, and he accepted that the conciliar documents were "compromise texts" which were "formulated in such a manner that no door was closed." Msgr. George Kelly, in his now classic book, The Battle for the American Church, states that: "The documents of the Council contain enough basic ambiguities to make the postconciliar difficulties understandable" (p. 20). Cardinal Heenan expressed concern at the manner in which: "A determined group could wear down opposition and produce a formula patient of both an orthodox and modernistic interpretation." He warned of the power of the periti being allowed to interpret the mind of the Council to the world: "God forbid that this should happen!" he exclaimed. But it is precisely what did happen, and the results were disastrous.

What did the Council Command?

This brings us to the precise points under discussion in this article, i.e., what the conciliar documents and post-conciliar legislation made mandatory concerning Mass facing the people, redesigning sanctuaries, and moving the tabernacle. We will first examine the legislation of the Council itself. This is found in the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 4 December 1963). The possibility of Mass being celebrated facing the people is not so much as mentioned anywhere in this Constitution, and so to talk of the practice being introduced as an act of obedience to the Council is either a deliberate lie or denotes culpable ignorance. Similarly, there is not so much as a word hinting that tabernacles should be torn from their place of honor on the high altar, which is what has happened in almost every church in the English-speaking world. The very thought of such an outrage would have horrified most, if not all, of the bishops. The idea that the ambiguous passages would be used in the way they have been never so much as occurred to the over whelming majority.

The Latin Connection

The case of Latin in the liturgy provides a helpful parallel with what has happened in the sanctuary. The intention of the Liturgy Constitution is clear: Latin is to remain the norm but the vernacular can be introduced into parts of the Mass where it is thought pastorally desirable. Most bishops imagined that such exceptions would only be during the first part of the Mass, now usually referred to as the Liturgy of the Word. Xavier Rynne, the ultra-liberal commentator on the Council, concedes that this was the impression the bishops were given. Cardinal Heenan testifies that when the bishops voted for the Constitution they did not foresee "that Latin would virtually disappear from Catholic churches." Archbishop Dwyer of Portland remarked: "The very thought of it would have horrified us, but it seemed so far beyond the realm of the possible as to be ridiculous. So we laughed it off." But within a few years a few ambiguous phrases appearing to do no more than allow a limited use of the vernacular in certain parts of the Mass had been utilized to banish Latin from the liturgy throughout the Latin Rite.

The Barbarians' Charter

Paragraph 128 of the Liturgy Constitution could well be described as a charter authorizing the liturgical barbarians to enter the sanctuaries of our churches to wreak havoc at their will. It reads as follows:

I am sure that the first reaction of the reader will be to insist that describing this passage as a charter for liturgical barbarism is not simply unfair but ridiculous. Nonetheless, if you ask a bishop who has vandalized the sanctuary of his cathedral, or has ordered a parish priest to vandalize the sanctuary of his church, how he can claim the sanction of Vatican II for such barbarism, he will almost certainly refer you to this paragraph. Read it carefully once more, look for one little word which the bishops would hardly have noticed when glancing through the draft of the Constitution before casting their almost unanimous vote in its favor: "location." Yes, reference is made to the location of the tabernacle. There is not a word in the Constitution which says tabernacles should be removed, let alone a direct command to do so, but that one little word—"location"—has been used to justify the greatest act of disrespect to our Eucharistic King since the Protestant Reformers banished Him from the churches they had appropriated in the sixteenth century. To a certain extent I have more respect for them than for the pseudo-Catholic bishops who claim to believe in the Real Presence, and then thrust the Blessed Sacrament aside from Its traditional position of honor on the high altar.

It would be most unjust to censure the many orthodox bishops who voted for the Liturgy Constitution for failing to notice the time bombs it contained. If you had described what has happened in almost every sanctuary since the Council to one of the bishops in 1963, he would have laughed at you. As Archbishop Dwyer said concerning the possibility of Latin vanishing from the Mass, "it seemed so far beyond the realm of the possible as to be ridiculous." There also appeared to be more than adequate safeguard in the Constitution itself to prevent the possibility of abuses. Article 23 stated: "There must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them; and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing." Could anyone in his right mind even suggest that the universal vandalism of Catholic sanctuaries was genuinely and certainly demanded by the good of the Church? And just before Article 128, the Barbarians' Charter, Article 123 had stated: "In the course of centuries the Church has brought into existence a treasury of sacred art which must be preserved with every care." Article 124 stated: "When churches are to be built, let great care be taken that they be suitable for the celebration of services and for the active participation of the faithful." Note carefully that this article refers only to the building of new churches; there is no reference to adapting existing ones. Article 126 commands bishops to insure that "sacred furnishings and works of value are not disposed of or destroyed, for they are ornaments in God's house." With such safeguards included in the Constitution, how could any bishop possibly have foreseen that Article 128 could serve as a charter for barbarism?

The Liturgical Establishment

Before leaving the subject of Vatican II it must be stressed once more that its Liturgy Constitution definitely does not order, recommend, or even hint, that Mass should be celebrated facing the people, or that the tabernacle should be removed from its place of honor on the high altar. But at the same time, it included some ambiguous terminology which those wishing to destroy the Catholic ethos of our sanctuaries could twist to suit their purposes. After the Council five commissions were established as a result of pressure from Liberals who, "feared that the progressive measure adopted by the Council might be blocked by conservative forces near the Pope once the Council Fathers had all returned home." The members of these commissions were "chosen with the Pope's approval, for the most part, from the ranks of the Council periti. The task of the commissions is to put into effect the Council decrees concerned with the co-ordinating commission to co-ordinate their work and, when necessary, to interpret the Council constitutions, decrees and declarations." God forbid that the periti should ever obtain the power to interpret the Council, Cardinal Heenan had warned. But happen it had! Archbishop Dwyer observed, with hindsight, that the great mistake of the Council Fathers was "to allow the implementation of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy to fall into the hands of men who were either unscrupulous or incompetent. This is the so-called 'liturgical establishment,' a Sacred Cow which acts more like a white elephant as it tramples the shards of a shattered liturgy with ponderous abandon." The final testimony to the factual nature of the process I have described comes from Cardinal Heenan: "Subsequent changes were more radical than those intended by Pope John and the bishops who passed the decree on the liturgy. His sermon at the end of the first session indicates that Pope John did not know what was being planned by the experts."

Nothing could be clearer than this. The experts drafting the constitution were planning changes more radical than those envisaged by the Pope and the bishops, and after the Council, they secured the implementation of those changes.

So much for Vatican II itself. We have established that it mandated no changes whatsoever in the sanctuary. Now we must examine the post-conciliar legislation to see what it recommended or permitted, and what it made mandatory.

1. Full documentation for every statement made in this article can be found in my books Pope John's Council and Pope Paul's New Mass, both available from The Angelus Press.