Is the Mass of Paul VI licit

Is the Mass of Paul VI licit?

Dr John Lamont

This paper will address an important but somewhat neglected question; that of the liceity of the new order of the Mass promulgated by Paul VI in 1969 to replace the former Roman Missal, and commonly referred to as the Novus Ordo. This is of course a different question from that of the validity of the Novus Ordo. There is no doubt about the possibility of validly confecting the sacraments using the Novus Ordo and the other revised sacramental rites promulgated by Paul VI and John Paul II, and the validity of sacraments properly celebrated with these rites will be taken as a given. But of course it is not the case that a valid ritual must be a licit ritual; and it is the question of liceity that will be considered here. The term ‘licit’ will be understood as meaning ‘legally established and legally permitted’. There is no doubt that the Novus Ordo was established using the proper legal forms, in the apostolic constitution ‘Missale Romanum’ of 1969 promulgated in due order by Paul VI. The question is whether or not the act of establishing the Novus Ordo using this form was an act that fell within the legal powers of the Pope, and hence of whether or not the legal form that established the Novus Ordo actually had its intended effect of making the Novus Ordo licit.

Fr. Jean-Michel Gleize SSPX has argued that it did not, on the grounds that the law of the Church has the object of upholding the common good of the Church, and that the theological flaws of the Novus Ordo make it intrinsically destructive to that common good.[1] I want to look at a different reason for denying the liceity of the Novus Ordo. This reason will emerge from a consideration of these two questions:

1. Does the Pope have the authority to establish a ritual that is not a form of the Roman Rite or of any other traditional rite of the Church?

2. Is the Novus Ordo of Paul VI a form of the Roman Rite?

It will be argued that the answer to both these questions is ‘no’, and hence that the Novus Ordo is not licit. The undoubted fact that the Novus Ordo is not a form of some traditional rite of the Church that is not the Roman Rite will be assumed; if it is a form of a traditional rite, it can only be a form of the Roman Rite, and that is what it is claimed by its defenders to be. The Roman Rite is of course not identical with the Latin Rite, but a particular form of it. The arguments for the non-identity of the Novus Ordo with the Roman Rite given below work equally well as arguments for the non-identity of the Novus Ordo with any form of the Latin Rite, so for purposes of ease of exposition we will only discuss the question of the non-identity of the Novus Ordo with the Roman Rite.

It will be helpful to clarify the difference between this argument and that of Fr. Gleize. He argues that the Novus Ordo is illicit because its theological purpose and content is objectionable. While not disagreeing with the truth of his premises or the validity of his inferences, I do not make use of these premises; instead, I argue for the illicitness of the Novus Ordo purely from its non-identity with the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church.

The question of the liceity of the Novus Ordo should be put in the context of the liceity of the liturgical changes of Paul VI and John Paul II as a whole. These changes extended to the entire Roman Rite, which is not limited to the Roman Missal, but also includes the Pontificale Romanum, the Rituale Romanum, the Caeremoniale Episcoporum – all of which contain various rites and blessings – the Roman Martyrology, the Roman Breviary, and the Graduale Romanum (which contains the music for the rite). The Roman Missal has a certain centrality in the Roman Rite, as being the component that is devoted to the highest liturgical action. If the Novus Ordo is in fact a form of the Roman Missal, it could be claimed that the Roman Rite as a whole has survived the changes of Paul VI and John Paul II, despite any changes to the other elements of the Rite; whereas if it is not a form of the Roman Missal, it cannot be maintained that the Roman Rite as a whole has survived these changes, even if the other elements of the Rite preserved their identity through the changes. The conclusion of this paper will thus mean that the promulgation of the Novus Ordo was an attempt to do away with the Roman Rite, as well as being illicit.

The question of the liceity of the other rituals promulgated by Paul VI and John Paul II deserves separate examination even after the illicitness of the Novus Ordo has been determined, since such an examination will determine whether or not it is licit to use those rituals. There is no space for such an examination here, but I will remark that the differences between the Roman Breviary, the Pontificale Romanum, the Rituale Romanum, and the Caeremoniale Episcoporum on the one hand, and the revised books that replaced them on the other hand, are on the whole as great as – or greater than – the differences between the Roman Missal and the Novus Ordo.[2] I do not know that the extent of these differences has ever been seriously disputed, or that the intention of abandoning the old liturgical forms and replacing them with new ones was ever really disguised in the case of these books; whereas the greater sensitivity of the issue of changes to the ritual of the Mass meant that this intention has sometimes been denied in the case of the Novus Ordo. This feature of the changes to the other elements of the Roman Rite casts light on the intentions behind the Novus Ordo itself.

The extent of papal authority over the liturgy

We can start our consideration of this question by setting forth some basic principles. The fundamental one is expressed in Sacrosanctum Concilium, the document on the liturgy produced by the Second Vatican Council:

In order that the Christian people may more certainly derive an abundance of graces from the sacred liturgy, holy Mother Church desires to undertake with great care a general restoration of the liturgy itself. For the liturgy is made up of immutable elements divinely instituted, and of elements subject to change. These not only may but ought to be changed with the passage of time if they have suffered from the intrusion of anything out of harmony with the inner nature of the liturgy or have become unsuited to it.

The fact that the liturgy contains divinely instituted elements explains the limitations of papal power over it that are described in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

The Church’s faith precedes the faith of the believer who is invited to adhere to it. When the Church celebrates the sacraments, she confesses the faith received from the apostles – whence the ancient saying: lex orandi, lex credendi (or: legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi, according to Prosper of Aquitaine [5th cent.]). The law of prayer is the law of faith: the Church believes as she prays. Liturgy is a constitutive element of the holy and living Tradition.

For this reason no sacramental rite may be modified or manipulated at the will of the minister or the community. Even the supreme authority in the Church may not change the liturgy arbitrarily, but only in the obedience of faith and with religious respect for the mystery of the liturgy.

The catechism does not as such have any teaching authority, but these statements are accurate expressions of the authoritative teaching of Catholic tradition. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger describes Catholic tradition on the liturgy as follows:

The pope is not an absolute monarch whose will is law; rather, he is the guardian of the authentic Tradition and, thereby, the premier guarantor of obedience. He cannot do as he likes, and he is thereby able to oppose those people who, for their part, want to do whatever comes into their head. His rule is not that of arbitrary power, but that of obedience in faith. That is why, with respect to the Liturgy, he has the task of a gardener, not that of a technician who builds new machines and throws the old ones on the junk-pile [Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, preface to Alcuin Reid, The Organic Development of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), p. 10.]

These principles are not in dispute among those who accept Catholic teaching, and they are not the object of our inquiry. What we seek to determine is a specific aspect of the nature of the distinction between the divine and the human in the liturgy.

There is no known general principle for determining the difference between the divine and the human in the liturgy. This in itself furnishes an argument for rejecting any major liturgical change: since we do not have a general rule for judging whether a section of the liturgy is of divine origin or not, the presumption must be against changing any part of the liturgy. Only those portions of the liturgy that can be shown beyond a reasonable doubt to be of human origin can be changed by any authority in the Church. This argument is the reason why only modest changes to the liturgy were undertaken before Paul VI.

This argument could be extended as follows. We could say that when it is not known whether or not a part of the liturgy is of divine origin, it is wrong and illicit for the Church to alter or remove that part of the liturgy. Since the alterations to the liturgy made by the Novus Ordo were so substantial that they included changing or removing parts of the liturgy that are not known to be of human rather than divine origin, these alterations are wrong and illicit, and the Novus Ordo itself is illicit.

This argument is sound. However, it is not the argument that will be advanced here. Instead, a stronger argument will be advanced. It will be argued that we can know that the Novus Ordo did in fact remove aspects of the liturgy that are of divine origin, and that it is illicit for that reason.

The basis for this stronger argument is the fact that despite the lack of any general principle for precisely identifying the divine and human elements in the liturgy, it is possible to arrive at an answer to a narrower question about the divine element in the liturgy. This is the question of whether the divine elements in the liturgy are merely components of the Roman Rite (and of the other traditional rites of the Church), or whether the rites themselves are of divine institution. We can attempt to settle the question of whether or not the Roman rite itself is of divine institution, because although we have no general test that can determine whether every component of the liturgy is of human or divine origin, it is nonetheless sometimes possible to identify the divine origin of particular aspects of the liturgy. If the pope were to attempt to abolish the liturgical celebration of Easter, for example, it is clear that he would not have the legal power to do so; this celebration is undoubtedly a component of the liturgy that is of divine origin.

If the divine elements of the liturgy are merely components of the Roman Rite, we will assume that the replacement of that rite by a different ritual is within the legal power of the pope, provided that the divinely established elements of the Roman rite are preserved in the new ritual. If on the other hand the rite itself is of divine origin, the pope does not have the legal power to replace it with something else. It will be argued that the Roman Rite itself, not just some of its components, is of divine origin; that the Novus Ordo is not the Roman Rite; and hence that the Novus Ordo is illicit.

It would be possible to contest this assumption, and to deny that the pope has the legal power to change any and all human elements of the liturgy or of Catholic tradition generally. The basis for this contestation would be the claim that even human elements of Catholic liturgy and tradition can become permanent components of the well-being – the bene esse – of the Church, and that the pope’s authority is given to him to uphold this bene esse, and to preserve rather than to replace the human as well as the divine patrimony of the Church. This claim has been admitted by theologians. Fr. J. Steiger asserts that ‘the power of the pope is not unlimited; not only is he unable to change anything of divine origin, as, for example, by suppressing episcopal jurisdiction, but, placed as he is to build up and not to destroy, he is bound by the natural law to not throw confusion into the flock of Christ.’[3] Since the natural law is ultimately of divine origin, the natural law must also limit papal authority that is established by divine positive law. But this line of argument will not be pursued here; it will be assumed that only the divinely instituted aspects of the liturgy are beyond the scope of papal authority. Making this assumption produces a stronger argument against the liceity of the Novus Ordo, since fewer premises have to be advanced and proven to establish the soundness of the argument.

The divine origin of the Roman Rite

It is desirable to address at the outset of our discussion the most significant arguments against the divine origin of the traditional liturgies of the Church. We may not reject the position that the traditional rites themselves are of divine origin on the grounds that all the rites contain changeable elements that are admitted to be of human origin. These elements can be accounted for by saying that God designed into the rites a certain number of options or areas for enlargement that could be provided for and altered by human initiative. This idea of the rites containing options for variation and addition in conjunction with an invariable core that has been received and that cannot be altered is the one that has always been held within the Church.

Nor can we claim that the right to replace the Roman Rite is claimed by an ecumenical council in Sacrosanctum Concilium, the constitution on the liturgy of the Second Vatican Council, and hence that this rite cannot be said to be of divine origin itself. For one thing, even an ecumenical council does not have the power to alter divine tradition. For another, the council clearly rejected the idea of replacing the Roman Rite. The constitution on the liturgy twice states that any liturgical changes must preserve the substance of the Roman Rite (in paras. 38 and 50). The intent of this document is obscured by the English translation that is found on the Vatican website. This translation refers in many places to the ‘reform’ of the liturgy. However, the Latin original nowhere refers to ‘reform’; the Latin word that is given in English as ‘reform’ is ‘instaurare’, which means not ‘to reform’ but ‘to restore’ – a fact that is recognised in some places in the English translation, where ‘instaurare’ is correctly translated by ‘restore’. Obviously a conciliar directive to restore the Roman rite cannot justify the replacement of this rite by something else.

Nor can the existence of changes in the Roman Rite over time be used as an argument for the rite being of human origin. This argument would only work against the claim that every component of the Roman Rite is of divine origin, a claim which no-one has ever made. The claim that the rite as a whole, and some but not all of its elements, are of divine origin, is obviously compatible with the fact of some change in the rite over time. The changes in the Roman Rite that have occurred in the past would have had to have been so drastic as to have ruled out the preservation of the substance of the rite, in order to serve as an argument for the human origins of the rite. Liturgical historians all agree that no such changes occurred prior to the promulgation of the Novus Ordo, and a simple inspection of the texts shows that this is so.

Nor can we argue that the legitimacy of organic development in the liturgy permits the replacement of the Roman Rite by a new development. The term ‘organic development’ suffers from an ambiguity that is not usually clarified in discussions of the organic development of the liturgy. It can refer to the development of a single organism from youth to maturity, or it can refer to the development of one kind of organism from another, of the kind postulated by evolutionary theory. The latter kind of development permits a fundamental change in kind from one sort of organism to another, but the former does not. It is only the former change that is permitted by Catholic tradition on the liturgy, as the above discussion makes clear. The latter form of development permits radical transformation, a form of transformation which excludes the possibility of divinely established and immutable elements.

The idea of the development of a single organism from youth to maturity – the idea applied by St. Vincent of Lérins to the development of doctrine – is indeed a useful analogy for the development of Catholic liturgy. It explains the changes that can be observed over time in the Roman rite and the various Eastern rites. These rites took some time to reach the forms that they possess today. The development of a single biological organism involves the emergence and increase of its capacities, and is completed when these capacities reach their mature state. The development of a single organism is not indefinite, but works towards maturity, after which it ends. Something like this increase and eventual maturity is to be seen in the history of all the rites of the Catholic Church; there is an early period of development, which largely stops once the full form of the rite has been reached. The Roman rite, for example, essentially reached its mature form under St. Gregory the Great. With biological organisms, the mature form exists in potency from the beginning, and its realisation occurs through the actualisation under the right circumstances of the already existing powers and tendencies of the organism. One may speculate that something analogous is the case with the traditional rites of the Church, and that the divine establishment of the liturgy involves the creation of these initial potencies at the beginning of the Church, together with their actualisation by the action of the Holy Spirit on the Church; but the theology of this area is still too undeveloped for these speculations to be anything but very tentative and general. The realisation of these potencies would of course not involve any addition to the deposit of faith, since such an addition could not occur after the death of the last apostle; it would instead involve a growth in the means of communicating and acting upon this deposit.

The difference between the two kinds of development can however serve to make an important point about the liturgy. Evolutionary development of one form of life from another is supposed to occur as an adaptive reaction to the external environment; the change from the old to the new form occurs and succeeds because the new form has an advantage in coping with its environment. This evolutionary goal was explicitly upheld by the designers of the Novus Ordo, who stated that the liturgy needed to adapt to modern circumstances. But the idea that a liturgical rite should be developed to fit people’s needs, understanding, and circumstances involves a fundamentally mistaken assumption about the purpose of the liturgy. With respect to its purely human participants, the purpose of the liturgy is to bring about their sanctification. This sanctification operates precisely through changing people’s understandings, desires, and actions. Adapting the liturgy to the people is a negation of its purpose of sanctification. The whole point of the liturgy is that it should adapt people to itself, not vice versa. The organic development of a single organism, on the other hand, has the function of fully developing the powers of that organism to act on its environment. This latter form of development is in harmony with the fact that the liturgy is intended to act upon Christians, not to be acted upon by them.

It cannot be asserted that the existence of several traditional rites of the Church shows that these rites as such are not of divine origin. The assumption behind this assertion would be that different rites were developed by human initiative in order to adjust the worship of the Church to different circumstances; it might also be assumed that the divine elements in the liturgy are only those common to the different rites.

The fact that there is more than one traditional rite in the Church is not a reason for saying that these rites are of human and not divine origin, any more than the fact that there are several gospels is a reason for saying that the gospels are of human and not of divine origin. It is true that the Fathers claim that an element of the liturgy that is found universally in all the rites of the Church must be of divine origin. But this is not the same as the claim that only those elements of the liturgy that are found in all the rites of the Church are of divine origin. The differentiation between the rites did not arise from the purpose of adaptation to particular circumstances, and there is not in fact a fit between the different rites and the varied circumstances of the Church. Every Catholic rite has existed in a great variety of circumstances. One can think for example of the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, originally celebrated in the cathedral of the imperial Roman capital, and now being celebrated in Australia and rural Ukraine.

One can identify a role played by external circumstances in the development of the rites of the Catholic Church. The abandonment of the persecution of Christianity by the Roman Empire, for example, was a necessary condition for the mature development of these rites, because it permitted their secure public celebration. The difficulties of such celebration prior to the Edict of Milan are indicated by the dearth of written evidence for Catholic liturgy prior to that date. The conversion of the Latin-speaking nobility to Christianity in the West from the late 4th century onwards made available the cultural resources necessary for the development of a mature liturgy in the Latin language. But these circumstances made available preconditions for the development of the Latin liturgy rather than producing it directly. Such circumstances could be preconditions brought about by divine providence in order to permit the development of the divinely established aspects of the liturgy, just as, for example, the development of the Greek and Hebrew languages was a human process brought about by divine providence as a necessary precondition for the production of the Scriptures. They thus cannot serve as reasons for taking elements of the liturgy to be of human rather than divine origin.

The explanation of the differences between Catholic rites are rather to be sought in their origin and in the purpose of the liturgy. The rites are all ultimately descended from three basic rites, which are the liturgies of the great apostolic sees of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch. Their foundation is in the apostolic tradition of those sees, and their goal is to preserve and pass on that tradition. The reason for having a diversity of rites in the Catholic Church is no doubt because such a diversity permits a fuller presentation of this tradition. This is in a way linked to the different circumstances of Catholics, but the link does not consist in an adaptation to those circumstances.

We can see an analogous process in the composition of the Scriptures. The cultural, linguistic and literary resources belonging to particular peoples in particular circumstances – the Hebrew culture and language of the Jews at various times, and the Greek culture and language of both Jews and Gentiles – were made use of for the expression of divine revelation. But this did not exemplify a universal principle of adapting divine revelation to cultural circumstances by expressing it in the terms of every culture in which it is made known. It was instead a process of selecting a few elements from a few cultural environments because of their suitability for the expression of divine revelation, and thus making these elements permanently normative for all Christians until the end of time. The same process operated in the formation of the liturgy; certain cultural elements were selected and made use of for the purpose of the worship of God and the sanctification of Christians. In the case of the divine elements of the liturgy, the selection was done by God, but even when the selection was made by men, the cultural elements chosen were judged by the standard of worship and sanctification, not vice versa. As with the Scriptures, so with the liturgy. The process of selection entirely ignored many cultures and cultural forms, even ones that by purely natural standards were superior to the elements that were chosen. They were not even necessarily selected from the highest forms of the culture in which they originated; the Greek of the New Testament, for example, was inferior in natural terms to the highest forms of ancient Greek. The elements selected could be strange, initially incomprehensible, or off-putting to people outside the context from which they came. This is not however at all incompatible with the purpose for which they were selected, and indeed to some extent was necessary for that purpose. A liturgy whose components were all familiar and appealing to people would be one from which they could never learn anything significantly new.

The most strongly felt objection to the claim that the traditional liturgies of the Church are of divine origin is likely to be based on the fact that these liturgies were produced over many centuries, largely after the times of the Apostles, and were the fruit of human efforts of many different kinds, that originated in many different sources. It will be claimed that nothing produced in this way can be a permanent divine institution.

The first point to be made about this objection is that although some components of the liturgy were originally the personal productions of individuals, the liturgy as such is the work of the Church, and anything that is included in it thereby becomes part of the worship of the Church and not simply an individual creation. If the liturgy cannot be of divine institution simply because it is a largely post-apostolic construction that developed over hundreds of years, then nothing that is done by the Church over a period of centuries after the time of the apostles can be of divine institution. But this is obviously false. It implies that, for example, the conciliar definitions of doctrine about Christ are not divinely established and immutable. Of course the content of these definitions is not post-apostolic, but the definitions themselves are. And these definitions themselves are of divine institution. They do not require the assent of faith only because they happen to coincide with divine revelation – as if they might have done otherwise – but because they are the work of the Holy Spirit, which guarantees that they teach this revelation. The fact of their divine origin is implied by their infallibility, since infallibility about divine truth is an attribute that cannot belong to created things as such, and can only be produced by God (asserting their divine origin is of course not the same as asserting that their production is itself a direct act of divine revelation.) The traditional liturgies of the Church are of course different in kind from her conciliar definitions. The comparison between them does not deny this; it simply establishes that it is false to deny that the Holy Spirit was active in the Church during the post-apostolic centuries to produce results that are divinely established and immutable.

When this point has been established, we can see that it is not only possible but suitable for the liturgy as such to be of divine institution. The Church inherits and exercises the threefold office of Christ as prophet, priest, and king. His kingship is exercised by her through the divinely established hierarchical structure of the Church established by Him, and his prophetic office is exercised through her divinely established infallible magisterium proclaiming the revealed truth taught by Him; it is thus quite proper for his priestly office to be exercised through a divinely established form of worship. And the matter and form of the sacraments, things which every Catholic admits to be divinely established, do not suffice for the worship of God. The matter and form of the Eucharist, for instance, can be present in a blasphemous and sacrilegious (but valid) celebration that is the opposite of an act of worship, and hence is not a liturgical event. The things that the Church adds to the matter and form of the sacraments in order to make their celebration an act of worship of God just are her liturgy.

In addition to the point about the office that the liturgy carries out, we can add a point about the effect that it has on its human participants. This effect is their sanctification. But sanctification is something that is done only by God. It is thus fitting that the liturgy by which this effect is produced be a divine rather than a merely human work. This point was grasped by the disciple in Luke 11:1 who asked Christ to teach his disciples how to pray.

After these possible misapprehensions about the divine institution of the liturgy have been cleared away, it is not difficult to see that the Roman Rite itself, and not simply some of its parts, is of divine origin. We can give three arguments which suffice to establish this conclusion, without wanting to imply that these are the only arguments that can be advanced for it.

The view that the liturgy is of divine origin is universally held by the Fathers of the Church, and is taught very extensively by them. A good example of this is the following passage from the letter of Pope St. Clement I to the Corinthians, composed around 92 A.D.:

Since then these things are manifest to us, and we have looked into the depths of the divine knowledge, we ought to do in order all things which the Master commanded us to perform at appropriate times. He commanded us to celebrate sacrifices and services, and that it should not be done thoughtlessly or disorderly, but at fixed times and hours. He has himself fixed by his supreme will the places and persons whom he desires for these celebrations, in order that all things may be done piously according to his good pleasure, and be acceptable to his will. So then those who offer their oblations at the appointed seasons are acceptable and blessed, for they follow the laws of the Master and do no sin. For to the High Priest his proper ministrations are allotted, and to the priests the proper place has been appointed, and on Levites their proper services have been imposed. The layman is bound by the ordinances for the laity.[4]

St. Clement’s assertions ought not to be read as a purely historical claim about Christ’s having settled all the details of the liturgy prior to his Ascension; such a claim would not have been compatible with the existence of variations in the liturgies of the Church, which would have been well known to Pope Clement, as to the other Fathers. His point is that the general structure and basic features of the liturgy are not human constructions, but are the work of divine authority, and this is the point made by the Fathers as a whole. Since the universal consensus of the Fathers is a sufficient indication that the subject of their consensus is a part of the Catholic faith, their view on this question must be accepted.

Since it is accepted that some elements of the liturgy are of divine origin, if the Roman Rite as a whole is not of divine origin it must be the case that some parts of it, but not the whole, are of divine origin. But it is primarily the rite as a whole that carries out the function of worshipping God and sanctifying the Christian faithful. The components of the rite are subordinate to the rite as a whole, and exist to contribute to its carrying out this function. But it is absurd to suppose that components of divine origin should be subordinate parts contributing to the end of a whole of human origin.

Under the Old Covenant, the Jews had a liturgy that was of divine origin. This is shown by the fact that this liturgy was prescribed in detail in the divinely inspired Scriptures. The importance of this liturgy is shown by its place in the book of Exodus. After the first occasion when God calls Moses up to the top of Mt. Sinai, Moses returns to the people of Israel and the covenant with God is made. Moses is then called up to Mt. Sinai for the second time along with Joshua, and God devotes all of this second meeting to a detailed exposition of the form of worship that he prescribes for his people. (see Exodus, chapters 24 – 31). Of course this liturgy used elements of human origin that had existed prior to its divine institution, but that does not mean that these elements did not become of divine institution once they were incorporated into the liturgy of the children of Israel. But it is absurd to suppose that the worshippers under the Old Covenant would enjoy a form of worship and sanctification that was of divine origin, whereas Christians under the New Covenant would have to content themselves with a form of worship that was a mere human development, albeit one that incorporated divine elements.

One cannot rebut this argument by saying that as the Jews under the Old Covenant had a divinely revealed civil law but Christians under the New Covenant do not, so the Jews under the Old Covenant had a divinely revealed form of worship but Christians under the New Covenant do not. A civil law is designed for the natural situation and character of a single civil polity and its circumstances. For this reason it was suitable for the Jews, a single people and civil polity, to have a divinely revealed civil law, and it was not suitable for Christians, who extend to the whole human race and belong to different civil polities in different circumstances, to have a divinely revealed civil law. Moreover, the work of worship and sanctification that is the goal of the liturgy is not aimed at the natural good of one or more civil polities. Its purpose is a supernatural one. The supernatural gifts that it is intended to communicate are the same for the whole human race. The divine sacrifice that it contains is one and the same in every Mass. The Body of Christ that it creates and builds up is a single body.

We can therefore conclude that the Roman Rite itself, not just some of its components, is of divine institution. If the Roman Rite itself is of divine origin, it is clear that not only does the pope not have the legal power to abolish it, he also does not have the legal power to permit the use of a ritual of human origin in its place. If God has gone to the trouble of providing a liturgy of divine origin for the Church, it is because he intends that this liturgy should be used for his worship, and no-one, including the pope, has the right to attempt to frustrate this intention by replacing it with a ritual that is a human invention.

The non-identity between the Novus Ordo and the Roman Rite

We have thus established that the Roman Rite as such is of divine origin, and that the pope does not have the legal authority to establish an alternative form of worship that is of purely human origin. If the Novus Ordo is not a form of the Roman Rite, it follows that the pope does not have the authority to permit it as a form of Catholic worship, and hence that it is not licit, regardless of the fact that it was promulgated using the correct legal forms. It remains then to be determined whether or not the Novus Ordo is a form of the Roman Rite. In objective terms there is not really any case to be made for the Novus Ordo’s being a form of the Roman Rite, but because of the sensitivity of the issue this fact is often vehemently denied; hence it is worth while setting out some of the reasons that demonstrate it to be the case. The discussion below deals of course with the Latin original of the Novus Ordo, not with any of its translations into the vernacular.

Before embarking on this discussion, it is helpful to address a common misconception about the nature of the Catholic liturgy. This misconception has been described and criticised by Cardinal Ratzinger:

The author [Alcuin Reid] expressly warns us against the wrong path up which we might be led by a Neo-scholastic sacramental theology that is disconnected from the living form of the Liturgy. On that basis, people might reduce the “substance” to the matter and form of the sacrament and say: Bread and wine are the matter of the sacrament; the words of institution are its form. Only these two things are really necessary; everything else is changeable. … Many priests today, unfortunately, act in accordance with this motto … They want to overcome the limits of the rite, as being something fixed and immovable, and construct the products of their fantasy, which are supposedly “pastoral”, around this remnant, this core that has been spared and that is thus either relegated to the realm of magic or loses any meaning whatever. The Liturgical Movement had in fact been attempting to overcome this reductionism … and to teach us to understand the Liturgy as a living network of Tradition that had taken concrete form, that cannot be torn apart into little pieces but that has to be seen and experienced as a concrete whole. Anyone who, like me, was moved by this perception at the time of the Liturgical Movement on the eve of the Second Vatican Council can only stand, deeply sorrowing, before the ruins of the very things they were concerned for.[5]

Cardinal Ratzinger’s reference to ‘magic’ helps us to understand his point. A magical view of the sacraments sees them as producing their effects independently of the nature and dispositions of their subjects. Such a view is of course contrary to Catholic teaching; the dispositions and actions of the subjects that receive the sacraments must satisfy certain necessary conditions in order for them to exist and operate, and the graces received by those who receive the sacraments will vary once these conditions have been satisfied. The degree of grace received in the sacraments will vary according to the individual dispositions and actions of the recipient, and will be absent if some necessary dispositions and actions are absent.

But the state of the individual recipient is not the only thing that determines the degree of grace granted in the sacrament. The sacraments are brought into being in an action of the Church. Christ acts in this action of the Church, and the individual faithful act in it as well according to their respective roles, but the sacraments do not come into existence without the action of the Church, and this action is the means by which they are brought into being. This action of the Church includes prayer and worship; the liturgy is the prayer and worship of the Church. The prayer of the Church asks for graces to be given through the sacraments, and the worship of the Church is an external sign that is among other things an action manifesting belief by the Church in the graces to be given, belief in the glory and mercy of God that is involved in giving these graces, and the commitment of the will to God that is required for reception of these graces. These actions can be done dishonestly, without the belief and commitment of the will that they express, but the converse is not true. We cannot, in normal circumstances, possess the belief and the commitment of the will necessary to receive graces from God unless we voluntarily act in a way that manifests this belief and commitment. That is why a liturgical celebration of the sacraments is necessary, and why the matter and form of the sacraments are not the substance of the liturgy, with everything else being dispensable or subject to change.

This point having been made, we can set forth two arguments for the non-identity of the Novus Ordo with the Roman Rite.

Most of the content of the Roman Rite was removed from the Novus Ordo, and replaced with new content that was radically different in its message and intent. 760 of the 1182 orations contained in the Roman Rite were dropped entirely from the Novus Ordo; that is 64%. Of the remaining 422 orations, over half were significantly changed, leaving only 17% of the original orations.[6] These originals exist in a greatly expanded whole in the Novus Ordo, which contains several hundred more orations than its predecessor. The lectionary of the old missal was abolished and a new, three-year cycle of readings was introduced that had no resemblance to the previous lectionary. The calendar of saints was completely altered, and the temporal cycle was changed in important ways; the Octave of Pentecost was abolished, and the two seasons following Advent and Pentecost were replaced by a single ‘ordinary time’ that is not related to any feast. The private prayers of the priest and almost all of the offertory prayers were removed from the Mass. Three new eucharistic prayers were added to the Roman Canon, which thereby became a (seldom used) option rather than the centre of the Roman Rite. Eucharistic Prayer II, the most commonly used one, was fabricated by Fr. Louis Bouyer and Dom Bernard Botte from some fragments of ancient texts in a farcical episode over the course of an afternoon in a bistro in Trastevere (as Fr. Bouyer himself testified in his memoirs). Fr. Joseph Gelineau S.J. and a small team wrote Eucharistic Prayer IV over a night or two.

The new prayers and the changes to the old prayers that survived were motivated by a radically different theological outlook that was designed to be acceptable to Protestants and to the modern world (as the modern world was understood by the architects of the new missal); hence, their content differs from that of the original prayers in essential respects. In his defence of the liturgical changes instituted by Paul VI, John F. Baldovin S.J. accepts that there are deep theological differences between the missal of Paul VI and its predecessors. Commenting on The Problem of the Liturgical Reform,[7] a study by theologians of the Society of St. Pius X, he says:

The Problem of the Liturgical Reform is an extremely useful book, not because its authors are correct, but because nowhere else have I seen what is at stake with the post-Vatican II reform of the liturgy so clearly outlined and so well understood. … Nothing seems to escape their attention: the concept of mystery, the role of the Trinity in the sacraments, the nature of grace, the meaning of representation (repraesentare), the biblical and patristic notion of memorial, the analogical meaning of the word ‘sacrament’, the nature of Scripture vis-à-vis the magisterium. … In all of this, they are completely on target. That is, these are the issues that are at stake in the reform of the liturgy. The reformed liturgy does represent a radical shift in Catholic theology and piety.[8]

Fr. Baldovin continues; ‘But their charge is that it also departs from orthodox Roman Catholic doctrine, and here I must disagree.’

We need to distinguish three different questions here: 1) whether the central theological principles of the traditional Latin liturgy are not contained in the Novus Ordo, 2) whether the central theological principles of the traditional Latin liturgy are contradicted by the Novus Ordo, and 3) whether the central theological principles introduced into the Novus Ordo depart from the Catholic faith. An affirmative answer to any of these three questions will imply that the Novus Ordo is not a form of the traditional Latin liturgy, since the theological principles of the latter liturgy are essential to it. We are not here considering the theological content of the Novus Ordo from the point of view of its truth, so we will restrict ourselves to question 1). On Fr. Baldovin’s own showing, this question should be given an affirmative answer; the reformed liturgy is a radical shift in Catholic theology. Since the theology of the traditional Latin liturgy is not contained in the Novus Ordo, the latter cannot be a form of the traditional Latin rite. This conclusion can be rejected only if it is maintained that the theological content of the traditional Latin liturgy is not an essential attribute of that liturgy. But this claim is absurd.

Although Fr. Baldovin’s observations suffice in themselves to show that the theology of the Novus Ordo is not that of the traditional Latin liturgy, neither he nor the traditionalist authors he criticises do full justice to the degree to which the Novus Ordo rejects the theology of the traditional rite. In addition to the theological topics that he mentions – which are central enough in all conscience – references to sacrifice, sin, guilt, penance, punishment, hell, the necessity of grace, and divine anger have been almost entirely removed from the Novus Ordo, and the subordination of this world to the next is no longer emphasised or clearly presented in it. Frs. Antoine Dumas and Mathias Augé, who were both involved in the production of the prayers of the Novus Ordo, have described this new theological outlook, and scholars such as Prof. Lauren Pristas have documented its existence by careful analysis and comparison of the old and new prayers.[9] This amounts to a complete removal of the theology of the traditional rite, since the expressions of this theology that are preserved in the Novus Ordo have their meanings fundamentally changed by the new context in which they are inserted. The meaning of God’s love, for example, is entirely different in a context where sin, guilt, divine punishment, expiation, and hell are present, as opposed to a context in which they are absent. There is thus no doubt at all that the theology of the traditional liturgy is not present in the Novus Ordo, and hence that the Novus Ordo cannot be a form of the traditional Latin rite.

The claim that the Novus Ordo is not the Roman Rite has been made by eminent liturgists who were actually involved in the construction of the Novus Ordo. Joseph Gelineau S.J., the principal compositor of Eucharistic Prayer IV, stated: ‘Let them compare it with the Mass we now have. Not only the words, the melodies and some of the gestures are different. To tell the truth, it is a different liturgy of the Mass. This needs to be said without ambiguity: the Roman Rite as we knew it no longer exists. It has been destroyed.’[10] Fr. Louis Bouyer described the missal of Paul VI as a misshapen runt (‘un avorton’), and excused his participation in its drafting on the grounds that he had only taken part in order to avoid worse evils. Fr. Bouyer’s testimony on this topic is particularly significant, as in addition to his close involvement in the production of the Novus Ordo he was the most important progressive liturgist prior to the Second Vatican Council. Fr. Annibale Bugnini, the main architect of the Novus Ordo under Paul VI, stated his goals in this way: ‘It is not simply a question of restoring a valuable masterpiece but in some cases it will be necessary to provide new structures for entire rites … it will be a truly new creation.’[11]

There is thus not the remotest doubt that the Novus Ordo is not a form of the Roman Rite. It could only be claimed to be a form of the Roman Rite if it is assumed that the Roman Rite is simply anything that the pope chooses to call the Roman Rite, and that the content of what is given this name by the pope is irrelevant to its identity. But we have already seen that this is not the case. This conclusion is made certain by the drastic differences between the Novus Ordo and the previous Roman missals, and by the intent of destroying the Roman Rite expressed by the drafters of the Novus Ordo. One can imagine a case where a liturgical revision would have been far-reaching, but not extensive enough to make it certain that the result was no longer the Roman missal; such a result would exist in a grey area, where neither its identity nor its non-identity with the Mass of the Roman rite was clear. Some of the transitional liturgical forms that were introduced between the 1962 missal and the 1970 missal may have fallen into this category, but it is worth underlining that because of the extent of the differences between the Novus Ordo and the Roman missals of 1962 and earlier, the Novus Ordo is not a borderline case of this sort. It is not in a grey area, but is a wholly new production – as its designers intended it to be, and said that they intended it to be. We can therefore conclude that the promulgation of the Novus Ordo by Missale Romanum has no legal force, and that the Novus Ordo is illicit. It is not permitted for any Catholic priest to say it, and it is not permitted for any Catholic to attend it, except perhaps under the most exceptional circumstances (as perhaps at a funeral, where it is clear that attendance at it is not intended to be an act of worship but is simply an act of respect for the dead). Nor, according to the current Code of Canon Law, can attendance at the Novus Ordo satisfy the Sunday obligation; that obligation requires attendance at a Mass of a Catholic rite, and the Novus Ordo does not belong to a Catholic rite.

Since the Novus Ordo is celebrated by the overwhelming majority of Latin-rite Catholics, this is an alarming conclusion. It is likely that a wish to avoid drawing any such conclusion explains the general failure to examine the question of the liceity of the missal of Paul VI. But although this conclusion is unwelcome, it is also illuminating. In his address to the Plenary Meeting of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in January 2012, Benedict XVI observed accurately that ‘in vast areas of the earth faith risks being extinguished, like a flame that is no longer fed. We are facing a profound crisis of faith.’[12] The mysteriousness of this crisis has rarely been sufficiently emphasised. It is not as if the Church is confronted with enemies that have a real although twisted spiritual appeal and a powerful message, as was the case with the first Protestants; or an enemy supported by brilliant minds and literary talents, like the Enlightenment; or an enemy with slogans and goals that appeal to serious and self-sacrificing persons, like the French Revolution with its ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’. The Church is being defeated by a secularist hedonism whose aims and slogans are consumerist greed, abortion, contraception, fornication, euthanasia, the legitimation and celebration of sexual perversion, atheism, and the rejection of any difference between man and brute animals. These are all pure diseases of human society, rather than twisted forms of the pursuit of legitimate objectives such as justice and knowledge – twisted forms that did exist in such anti-Catholic movements as the French Revolution and Communism, and that gave these movements their strength. They do no more than cripple and destroy their adherents. They are a source of weakness to the enemies of the Church, rather than a basis of real strength. It is thus strange that these enemies, advancing these positions, have been triumphing over the Church all across the board. Such weak, corrupt, and decadent opponents should not present a serious challenge to the Church.

The fact that the Novus Ordo is illicit, however, largely explains this triumph. If the divinely established form of worship of God has been suppressed in by far the larger part of the Catholic Church, that means that the duty of worshipping God is not being fulfilled in this part of the Church. The fruits produced by the worship of God have as a result largely been lost to the Church; her members are not sanctified by their participation in worship that is pleasing to God, and the grace and mercy that God provides in response to such worship are lost. This explains the current internal decline of the Church – a decline without parallel in history – and her defeat by intrinsically weak enemies. The preponderance of unnatural vice over fornication in the sexual sins of the Catholic clergy, and the important role of sexual perversion in the ideology of the enemies of the Church – themselves also things without a parallel in history – may also be linked to the abandonment of the proper worship of God. Such perversion is identified by St. Paul as a consequence of failing to give God the honour and praise that is due to him (Romans 1:21, 24-27), and this honour and praise is given primarily by the celebration of the liturgy.

There is a final point to be made in this discussion, that will address problems that Catholics may have with the assertions that have been made about the Novus Ordo. Although we are not directly concerned here with the theological content of the Novus Ordo as such, there is an important connection between the claim of this paper and the claim that the Novus Ordo is radically theologically defective. Fr. Baldovin’s statement above, about the radical theological differences between the Novus Ordo and the traditional liturgy, casts doubt on his assertion that nothing in the Novus Ordo is at odds with Catholic doctrine. If we assume, as we must, that nothing in the traditional liturgy was at odds with Catholic doctrine, how can it be the case that the changes to the theology that Fr. Baldovin himself admits to have taken place did not involve a rejection of Catholic doctrine? How can radical changes to ‘the concept of mystery, the role of the Trinity in the sacraments, the nature of grace, the meaning of representation (repraesentare), the biblical and patristic notion of memorial, the analogical meaning of the word ‘sacrament’, the nature of Scripture vis-à-vis the magisterium’ not involve rejection of Catholic doctrine, if the previous views were themselves in agreement with Catholic doctrine? This question becomes more pointed when we take into account the further theological changes documented by Prof. Pristas. If ‘Catholic doctrine’ is respected by both the old and the new, then this doctrine must be almost void of content; or it must be governed by historical relativism, with its content being a function of changing historical circumstances rather than a realist account of how things are. But neither of these alternatives is acceptable. It thus seems very plausible to claim that the theology of the Novus Ordo is incompatible with Catholic doctrine. It is not sufficient to respond to this claim by saying that the theological elements of the old liturgy that are rejected by the Novus Ordo are simply excised, rather than explicitly contradicted. For the liturgy has as one of its functions the teaching of the whole faith. For an important theological position to be absent from the liturgy is thus for it to be implicitly presented as not part of the Catholic faith. The excision of the theological teachings of the old liturgy by the Novus Ordo is thus an implicit assertion that they are not part of the faith.

But this raises a severe problem. It has been held as theologically certain that the infallibility of the Church extends to her general discipline, and that this means that she ‘can never sanction a universal law which would be at odds with faith or morality or would be by its very nature conducive to the injury of souls’.[13] The bull Auctorem Fidei taught that the proposition that ‘the Church which is ruled by the Spirit of God could have established discipline which is not only useless and burdensome for Christian liberty to endure, but which is even dangerous and harmful and leading to superstition and materialism’ is ‘false, rash, scandalous, dangerous, offensive to pious ears, injurious to the Church and to the Spirit of God by whom it is guided, at least erroneous’. A similar assertion was made by Gregory XVI in Quo Graviora. The theological content of the Novus Ordo, especially its deliberate and almost complete removal of the concepts of sin, guilt, punishment, and the necessity of grace, is by its very nature conducive to the injury of souls. Why then is not the promulgation of the Novus Ordo a disproof of the Church’s claim to infallibility? Fr. Gleize’s assertion that the Novus Ordo is illicit because of the harm it does to the common good is not helpful in answering this question. His position risks making the assertion of the Church’s disciplinary infallibility a circular and therefore vacuous one; the Church is infallible in her discipline because she cannot sanction a universal law that would by its very nature conduce to the injury of souls – and we can be certain that this is true, because a law’s being of its nature conducive to the injury of souls makes it illicit, and therefore not sanctioned by the Church.

The claim of the present paper offers a solution to this problem, because it provides a reason for holding that the Novus Ordo is illicit that is independent of the theological problems of its content. The Novus Ordo is illicit simply because it is a human fabrication and not a form of a traditional liturgy of the Church. It is to be expected that such a fabrication would be severely problematic theologically, but the theological problems with the Novus Ordo are not the reason for its being illicit. A humanly fabricated liturgy could be theologically unobjectionable, but would still be illicit. The illicit status of the Novus Ordo follows from its prior character as a human fabrication, so that the questions of the implications of its theological contents for its liceity as a liturgy of the Church, and for the Church’s infallibility, do not even arise.

It might be objected that this is a poor defence of the infallibility of the Church in disciplinary matters, because the liceity of the Novus Ordo has in fact been almost universally accepted, and the damage to souls resulting from the Novus Ordo has consequently taken place just as if this infallibility did not exist. What is the use of the disciplinary infallibility provided by God to the Church, when neither the hierarchy who determine and enforce discipline nor the rest of the Church that is governed by it can tell the difference between a law that is protected by this infallibility, and an illegal measure bearing on the most important activity of the Church that is not so protected?

To answer this objection we must distinguish the senses in which neither the hierarchy nor the laity can tell the difference between a legitimate rite of the Church and an illicit form of worship. In one sense, they can do this; that is, if they make a faithful and responsible inquiry into the nature of the Novus Ordo, they will discover that it is at least unfit to be used to celebrate the Eucharist. Many Catholics in fact did this, as witness the works of Michael Davies and the Ottaviani Intervention. In another sense, they are not able to do this. They have not made such an inquiry into the Novus Ordo, and are often not willing to do so. The divine guarantee of infallibility to the discipline of the Church does not extend to protection from culpable error about what this discipline actually consists in.

Unlike many catastrophes, the problem of the Novus Ordo is susceptible of a clear and simple solution; it is for priests of the Latin rite to stop saying it and start exclusively using the legitimate Latin rite instead. The ostensible reason for the introduction of the Novus Ordo and the de facto, illegal suppression of the traditional Latin rite was the promise that the Novus Ordo would bring about a deepening in faith, an increase in Mass attendance, a flood of new Catholics hastening into the Church, and a great renewal generally. What in fact occurred was a collapse in faith, Mass attendance, and Church membership that is absolutely unprecedented in the history of the Church. This collapse was not shared by the small communities that persisted in using the traditional Latin rite, despite severe difficulty and discouragement. This result, which is what one would expect from the adoption of an illicit form of worship, makes the abandonment of the Novus Ordo obviously desirable and urgent.

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Dr. John R.T. Lamont is a Canadian Catholic philosopher and theologian. He has taught philosophy and theology in Catholic universities and seminaries. He is the author of Divine Faith (Routledge, 2004) and, with Claudio Pierantoni, of Defending the Faith against Present Heresies (Arouca, 2021). He has published widely on theological questions, in journals that include New Blackfriars, Nova et Vetera, Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales, and The Thomist.

[1] “Elle ne saurait faire l’objet d’une loi obligeant comme telle toute l’Eglise. En effet, la loi liturgique a pour objet de proposer avec autorité le bien commun de l’Eglise et tout ce qui est requis. La nouvelle messe de Paul VI représentant la privation de ce bien ne saurait faire l’objet d’une loi: elle est non seulement mauvaise mais illégitime, en dépit de toutes les apparences de légalité dont on a pu l’entourer et dont on l’entoure encore.” Abbé Jean-Michel Gleize, Vatican II en débat (Versailles: Courrier de Rome, 2012), p. 63.

[2] The profound differences between the theology and content of the Rituale Romanum and the revised blessings are helpfully discussed in Fr. Uwe Michael Lang’s paper ‘Theologies of Blessing: Origins and Characteristics of De Benedictionibus’, Antiphon 2011, 15 (1); it is available online at http://liturgysociety.org/JOURNAL/Volume15/Antiphon15.1Lang.pdf.

[3] Fr. J. Steiger, ‘Causes majeures’, Dictionnaire de théologie catholique vol. II, cols. 2039-40. Fr. Steiger goes on to assert that ‘rather than consider whether an arbitrary papal measure that would throw the Church into confusion would be invalid, theologians have preferred to consider that Christ would never permit such a disaster; history has shown their position to be correct.’ He does not name these theologians, whose position would hardly be compatible with the rebuke of Pope Gregory XI by St. Catherine of Siena, or that of St. Peter by St. Paul for that matter (Galatians 2:11; ‘when Cephas came to Antioch I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned’). These episodes sufficiently disprove Fr. Steiger’s claims about history; they could be multiplied.

[4] 1 Clement 40, tr, Kirsopp Lake, in The Apostolic Fathers, vol. I (London: Heinemann, 1919), pp. 77-79.

[5] Ratzinger, in Alcuin Reid, The Organic Development of the Liturgy (Ignatius Press, 2005), p. 11.

[6] See Fr. Anthony Cekada, Work of Human Hands: A Theological Critique of the Mass of Paul VI (Philothea Press: West Chester, Ohio, 2010). Abp. Arthur Roche claims that the Novus Ordo retains 90% of the texts of the missal of Pius V (‘The Roman Missal of Saint Paul VI: A witness to unchanging faith and uninterrupted tradition’, Notitiae 597 (2020)). This claim is a pure fabrication.

[7] The Problem of the Liturgical Reform: A Theological and Liturgical Study (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 2002); the authors are not identified.

[8] John F. Baldovin S.J., Reforming the Liturgy: A Response to the Critics (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2008), pp. 138-139.

[9] See Lauren Pristas, ‘The Orations of the Vatican II Missal: Policies for Revision,’ Communio 30 (Winter, 2003), and “Theological Principles that Guided the Redaction of the Roman Missal (1970),” The Thomist 67 (2003). Some of these papers are available at Dr. Pristas’s webpage at http://faculty.caldwell.edu/lpristas. Her book The Collects of the Roman Missals: A Comparative Study of the Sundays in Proper Seasons before and after the Second Vatican Council (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013) expands on her previous work. She discusses the theological outlook of Frs. Dumas and Augé on the basis of their own statements.

[10] Joseph Gelineau S.J., Demain la liturgie: essai sur l’évolution des assemblées chrétiennes (Paris: Cerf, 1977). pp. 9-10.

[11] La Documentation Catholique, no. 1493, 7 May 1967.

[12] https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2012/january/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20120127_dottrina-fede.html.

[13] Van Noort, Castelot, and Murphy, Dogmatic Theology vol II: Christ’s Church (Cork: The Mercier Press, 1958), p. 115.