THE SLOW AND METHODICAL DESTRUCTION OF THE TRADITIONAL LITURGY

                   
 
This article well summarizes the significance of what has happened to
the Church in the last century, as well as how the disaster came about.  
It should definitively answer all those Catholics who ask "how could it
have happened?  If only the Pope or Vatican knew what was going on,"
etc.  At the very least the article informs the reader what changes
were made to rubrics of the Breviary and Missal in the years leading up
to the Novus Ordo Missae.  And it does not shrink from passing judgment
upon such changes.


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The Liturgy, considered as a whole, is the collection of symbols,
chants and acts by means of which the Church expresses and manifests
its religion towards God.

In the Old Testament, God Himself is the liturgist: He specifies the
most minute details of the worship which the faithful had to render to
Him. There was an awesome importance attached to this worship, a form
of worship which was but the shadow of that sublime worship in the New
Testament which Christ the High Priest wanted His Church to continue
until the end of the world.

In the Liturgy of the Catholic Church, everything is important,
everything is sublime, down to the tiniest details, a truth which moved
St. Teresa of Avila to say: "I would give my life for the smallest
ceremony of Holy Church."

Our devotion for the True Mass, the Apostolic Mass, cannot fail to be
strengthened by an understanding of the Liturgy of the Church, and the
use and meaning of those sacred rites by which this most solemn of all
religious actions is accomplished.

The Church tells us, in the Decrees of the Council of Trent, that the
ceremonies of Holy Mass are designed precisely to promote the reverence
and edification of the faithful. Another very important object is to
impress the ministers of religion themselves with a sense of the
greatness and majesty of the work in which they are engaged. An
incidental result of the care which the Church bestows upon the
externals of religion, and which is obviously a part of her end in
providing for them, is the preservation, in all its integrity, of the
great doctrines to which these ceremonies are evidently subservient.

Let us look first on the effect the ceremonies have upon the people. We
naturally form a high esteem for actions which we see done with care
and attention. This principle is well understood by kings and the great
men of the world, who, whenever they appear in public, entrust their
marshals and ushers with the care of arranging their processions and
receptions according to a prescribed ceremonial. The Church, fearing
the curse of those who perform the work of God negligently (Jer.
48:10), and animated by that spirit of loyalty which inclines us to
execute every labor of love with careful exactness, abhors nothing more
than a perfunctory and slovenly performance of religious actions. We
know how disedified we are by such events, and how we walk away from
such ceremonies with confusion of spirit. Likewise, attending a Mass
devoutly said does much to uplift our souls.

Another end of the liturgical ceremonies is to fix in the mind of the
priests and ministers of religion a sense of the greatness of the work
in which they are engaged. Our outward gestures have the greatest
effect upon the disposition of our minds. For this reason, in well-
regulated families, children are brought up to observe an outward
demeanor of respect and affection to their parents as the best, or
rather the only, security for keeping themselves habitually in those
dispositions. What prudent teacher or ruler would ever think of
dispensing with ceremonial proprieties and etiquette saying that true
love and duty are not connected with such minutiae? We well know that
the certain consequence of neglecting such outward signs of regard is
to cool, in the end, even the most fervent affection. It is for these
reasons that the Church binds her priests and ministers, even under
pain of grievous sin, to an exact performance of all the most important
ceremonies of Mass.  They may not deviate from the ritual, nor can they
invent ceremonies of there own or invite the faithful to write up their
own ceremonial.

Thirdly, considering what vital doctrines are wrapped up in the Holy
Sacrifice of the Mass, and how intimately many of its ceremonies are
connected with these doctrines, it is obvious that the Church has other
still higher reasons for the attention she bestows upon the ceremonial
of religion. It cannot be doubted that these ceremonies have materially
contributed to preserve the doctrines of the Incarnation, Redemption,
the Holy Eucharist, and other great mysteries of our Faith. There is
not one of these ceremonies which does not spring from reverence
towards the Holy Eucharist, while many of them directly imply the great
truth of Transubstantiation.

It is important for us to understand that not one of the seemingly
least of all these ceremonies is, as the enemies of the Church assert,
idle and insignificant.

With an understanding of the sacred nature and provenance of the
Liturgy then, can it be wondered that the enemies of the Church would
seek to attack its sacred mysteries and so undermine the entire
fortification of this sacred establishment?  Perhaps the only source of
wonderment would be that such enemies worked within the Church rather
than from without, as was the case with the Protestant heretics.  That
clerics and prelates of the Church should have hatched a nefarious and
treacherous conspiracy while entrusted with the highest offices of the
institution they so obviously hated might seem bewildering to faithful
and loving sons and daughters of the Church and Tradition.  But the
faithful ought not be bewildered.  There are historical precedents for
perfidy, apostasy, heresy and all manner of treachery within the
Church, precedents that begin with St. Peter, first pope, and his
denial of our Blessed Lord.

Courageous and inspired popes have battled with innovators within the
Church for centuries.  Popes have fought for the faith and for the
preservation of a pure Liturgy, a Liturgy which had been entrusted to
them as conservators and custodians by the Apostles themselves.  
Conspicuous among these true Defenders of the Faith, warriors against
the innovators and destroyers of Tradition, are Pope St. Pius V, and
Pope St. Pius X.  St. Pius V was able to use the new invention of the
printing press to codify and publish the Apostolic Roman Mass for all
eternity, in a supreme effort to combat scattered and widespread forces
within the Church, proto-modernist agents, that had sought to renovate
the sacred Liturgy according to heretical principles that can now be
interpreted as humanist, relativist, illuminist, Jansenist, and
Protestant.  Pope St. Pius X was a brilliant exemplar of orthodoxy
against powerful heresiasts at work inside the Church.  Pius X clearly
saw heterodox and dangerous agents working methodically in Vatican
offices, and in seminaries across the Catholic world, seeking to
destroy the Church by infiltrating the establishment and contaminating
young minds of future leaders, debasing the very treasure they had been
entrusted to guard. Pius X valiantly endeavoured to root out these
infiltrating enemies, and condemned in the very strongest terms all the
errors and evils within the Church, giving the name "modernism" to this
great plague attacking Catholicism, and defining it as the "synthesis
of all heresies."  Pius X attempted to enforce a rigorous discipline of
orthodoxy on teachers, liturgists, and theologians, recognizing that
many among them had become corrupted by modernist heresies.  The Oath
Against Modernism, the mandatory profession of which Pius established,
is evidence of the immanent threat modernism already had within the
Church.

Between Pius V and Pius X, many, many popes recognized and condemned
modernist infiltrators.  It should come as no surprise to knowledgeable
Catholics, then, that these diabolical forces have for many years been
among us, and that it is our duty always to defend and protect the
faith against all attack and from any quarter -- as St. Isidore said,
even if an angel from Heaven should preach contrary to the Tradition
which has been entrusted to us from the Apostles:  that angel "shall be
called anathema".

This article seeks to show how the present corruption of the New Order
Church, epitomized by its reformed worship service, the Novus Ordo
Missae, is the culmination of centuries of contention within the Church
between orthodox followers of Tradition and heretical infiltrators.  It
is very important for Traditional Catholics to understand very clearly
that the NOM did not originate holus bolus after the 2nd Vatican
Council, that this council  was not a crisis within the Church (that is
to say, a turning-point or abrupt change of direction within the
Church), but rather that the NOM is the final triumph of clerical
agents who have strenuously laboured for centuries against the Liturgy,
and that the council was simply the conspicuous affirmation of a now
public agenda of conspirators and revolutionaries who at long last had
secured unchallenged control of Church government.

The question as to why, in the Providence of God, this apparent victory
of our enemies ought to have happened is not for us to know with any
certainty. If, however, we as faithful adherents of Tradition seek to
understand how the reformed church came to be, how the Sacred Liturgy
was assailed for centuries by its perfidious guardians, we should come
to a better understanding of how our enemies ought to be resisted, and
that they must be given no quarter in our battle against the dark
forces arrayed against Tradition.

The Church's enemies were all too well aware of the importance of the
Liturgy — heretics corrupted the Liturgy in order to attack the Faith
itself. Such was the case with the ancient Christological heresies,
then with Lutheranism and Anglicanism in the 16th century, then with
the Illuminist and Jansenist reforms in the 18th century, and finally
with the Modernism, beginning with the Liturgical Movement in the early
20th century, and culminating in the Novus Ordo Missae, created by
Vatican II's Liturgical Commission.

No defender and adherent of Tradition would accept the heterodoxy of
the New Order, and similarly all ought to reject out of hand the
liturgical corruption of the fifties and sixties spread by Fr. Bugnini,
who was himself the ultimate fruit of the internecine modernist heresy
festering in the Church for decades, and the principal architect of the
New Order.

Those responsible for replacing our Holy Mass with a community
celebration were content for years to work slowly — very slowly, and
the heretical impulses which motivated the innovators within the
Vatican itself from 1945 on are traceable back several centuries
through Church history.

The Church was stricken towards the end of the eighteenth century with
the blight of Illuminism. Clerical proto-modernists were dissatisfied
with the traditional liturgy, because they felt it did not correspond
with the concrete problems of the times.

Emperor Joseph II, the Gallican bishops of France, and some bishops of
Italy, meeting together for the Synod of Pistoia, carried out reforms
and liturgical experiments which resemble to an amazing extent the
corrupt innovations of the New Order; they are just as strongly
orientated towards Man and social problems, as is the humanist-
socialist New Order.  The deepest roots of the present liturgical
desolation, therefore, began to grow with this movement.

Jansenism, a virulent and stubbornly persistent heresy which flourished
in many parts of France for years, can also be seen as the inspiration
and model for the modern liturgical innovations.

The Jansenist aversion against tradition, its frenzy for novelty and
reformation, its desire to replace Latin gradually by the vernacular,
its efforts to replace ecclesiastical and patristic texts by Scripture
alone, its diminution of the cult of the Blessed Virgin and the saints,
its suppression of liturgical symbolism and mystery, and finally its
shortening of the Liturgy where it judged the sacred ceremonies to be
excessively and uselessly long and repetitive, all these elements of
the Jansenist liturgical reforms are found in the present New Order.

The Church at the time condemned the innovators: thus, Clement IX
condemned the Ritual of the Diocese of Alet in 1668, Clement XI
condemned the Oratorian Pasquier Quesnel (1634-1719) in 1713, Pius VI
condemned the Synod of Pistoia and Bishop Scipio de' Ricci in his bull
Auctorem Fidei in 1794.

Many years later, after the liturgical restoration of Pope St. Pius X,
little by little, the so called "Liturgical Movement" came to embrace
the theories which it had been founded to combat. All the ideas of the
anti-liturgical heresy were now taken up again in the 1920s and 30s by
important and influential churchmen, liturgists like Dom Lambert
Beauduin (1873-1960) in Belgium and France, and by Dom Pius Parsch and
Romano Guardini in Austria and Germany.

The "reformers" of the 1930s and 1940s introduced the "Dialogue Mass,"
because of their deliberate misapprehension and false interpretation of
"active participation" of the faithful in liturgical functions. In may
youth and student organizations, Catholic scouting organizations and
such like, the innovators succeeded in introducing Mass in the
vernacular, the celebration of Mass on a table facing the faithful, and
even concelebration. Among the young priests who took a delight in
liturgical experiments in Rome in 1933 was the chaplain of the Catholic
youth movement, a certain Father Giovanni Battista Montini.  The
innovators specifically and intentionally targeted the most vulnerable
and innocent minds within their charge, knowing they they were thereby
sowing the seeds of their nascent revolution which a later generation
of revolutionaries would reap.

In Belgium, Dom Beauduin gave the Liturgical Movement an ecuмenical
purpose, theorizing that the Anglican Church could be "united to the
Catholic Church." He also founded a "Monastery for Union" with the
Eastern Orthodox Churches, which resulted in many of his monks
"converting" to the eastern schism.

Rome intervened: the Encyclical against the Ecuмenical Movement,
Mortalium Animos (1928) resulted in Dom Beauduin being discreetly
recalled. The great protector of Beauduin, however, was Cardinal
Mercier, the founder of "Catholic" ecuмenism.  By sheltering his
protege, and by promoting his program of revolution, Mercier, a
prominent and powerful prince of the Church, a cardinal and member of
the sacred Consistory, was well described at the time by discerning and
concerned churchmen as the "friend of all the betrayers of the Church."

In the 1940s liturgical saboteurs had already obtained the support of a
large part of the hierarchy, especially in France (through the "Center
for Pastoral Liturgy") and in Germany.

Not all prelates, however, were asleep or unaware of, or complicit with
the vipers that the Church had long nursed at its breast. On January
18, 1943, the Archbishop of Freiburg, Conrad Grober wrote a long letter
addressed to his fellow bishops, in which he gathered together
seventeen points expressing his criticisms of modernist plan to re-
architect the Church.  He criticized the theology of the charismatics,
the Schoenstatt movement, but above all the Liturgical Movement,
involving implicitly also Theodor Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna.

Representatives of the modernist heresy reacted quickly to Archbishop
Grober, among them Fr. Karl Rahner, SJ, who then lived in Vienna, as
well as Hans Küng and Schillebeeckx, who were all to be the German
hierarchy's conciliar “experts” at the Second Vatican Council.

This dispute ended up in Rome. In 1947 Pius Xll's Encyclical on the
liturgy, Mediator Dei, while it ratified the condemnation of the
Liturgical Movement, it tragically contained no effective measures to
be taken against the modernist innovators; Pius XII did not suppress
the French CPL, and he did not prohibit the many heretical publications
written and distributed within the Church by heterodox and modernist
clerics.

Pius XII underestimated the seriousness of the liturgical problem: "It
produces in us a strange impression," he wrote to Bishop Grober, "if,
almost from outside the world and time, the liturgical question has
been presented as the problem of the moment."

Additionally, the pope was terribly afraid that any actions stamping
out the innovators would have resulted in an open conflict with a
French hierarchy that was already thoroughly diseased with modernism
and heterodoxy.

Sensing the weakness of Rome, the reformers recognized that they could
move forward with impunity: from unofficial experiments they now passed
to official Roman reforms.

The reformers hoped to bring their Trojan Horse into the Church through
an unguarded gate, and in fact they were helped by the very persons
charged with manning the defences against such breaches, clerics very
close to the Pontiff, such as his own confessor Agostino Bea, future
cardinal and "super-ecuмenist."

The following testimony of Annibale Bugnini is enlightening:

"The Commission (for the reform of the Liturgy instituted in 1948)
enjoyed the full confidence of the Pius XII, who was kept informed by
Mgr. Montini, and even more so, weekly, by Fr. Bea, the confessor of
Pius XII. Thanks to this intermediary, we were able to arrive at
remarkable results, even during the periods when the Pope's illness
prevented anyone else getting near him."

Fr. Bea was involved with Pius XII's first liturgical reform, the new
liturgical translation of the Psalms, which replaced that of St.
Jerome's Vulgate, so disliked by the protestants, since it was the
official translation of the Holy Scripture in the Church, and declared
to be authentic by the Council of Trent.

By design the liturgical changes from the time of Pius XII to those of
the present followed each other every few years until the clergy were
accustomed to living in an atmosphere of constant change, so that most
of them inevitably gave in to the confusion. They no longer considered
themselves bound to know and apply properly the body of rubrics. In the
name of "simplification," the rules and principles which governed the
liturgy for centuries were slowly exchanged for the constant state of
flux which presently obtains in the Conciliar Church.

The innovators' method is one of gradualism, the very same one employed
by Satan in slaying souls. This was as much as admitted by Cardinal
Heenan of Westminster who said the changes had to be made gradually, or
the people would never have accepted them.

This work of gradual change began inside the Vatican on May 28, 1948 by
the appointment of a Commission for Liturgical Reform with Father
Antonelli as General Director, and Father Bugnini as Secretary, the men
who respectively imposed and composed the Novus Ordo Missae.

Two years later on November 22, 1950, Cardinal Liénart, in his capacity
as head of the French assembly of bishops, formally petitioned the Holy
See for permission to celebrate the Easter Vigil at night rather than
in the morning for "pastoral reasons." He got more than he bargained
for.

Under the guise of a simple change of times, a substantially rewritten
rite was slipped in, even as later the "English Mass" was imposed in
the name of the vernacular, with little reference to that fact that
only thirty percent of the text of the traditional Mass remains.

The first jarring, discordant strains of the "New Order Symphony" were
already heard in this new Easter Vigil:

1. The principle of optional rites used experimentally was introduced.

2. For the first time, the vernacular was introduced into the liturgy
proper. (This was Cranmer's first step as well in 1548)

3. The rubric directing the celebrant to "sit and listen" (sedentes
auscultant) to the lessons rather than reading them at the altar is
introduced for the first time and is immediately interpreted as
justifying the exclusive use of the vernacular in this part of the
liturgy.

In 1953 the immemorial midnight eucharistic fast was mitigated to three
hours under certain conditions as a concession to modern weakness. The
modernist liturgists, however, saw in this the beginning of the gradual
destruction of the Church's sacramental discipline, which would end
with Paul VI's "15 minutes."

Rumblings of liturgical anarchy were heard even louder after these
changes, and Pope Pius XII warned priests in an allocution not to
change anything in the liturgy on their own authority. But still
modernist innovators were at work in his Vatican, and the changes
continued and were promulgated by his authority.

The whole of the Church's venerable Holy Week got the axe in 1955 with
the publication of Maxima Redemptionis. The lie is repeated and
extended:  this is merely a change of times. Proof that this early
period of modernist infiltration was working the very same diseased
agenda of the post-conciliar period and its New Order is contained in
the very words of Paul VI when he promulgated the New Mass on April 3,
1969:

"The liturgical renewal has clearly demonstrated that the formulae of
the Roman Missal had to be revised and enriched. The renewal was begun
by the same Pius XII with the restoration of the Easter Vigil and the
Order of Holy Week, which constituted the first stage of the adaptation
of the Roman Missal to the needs of our times."

Maxima Redemptionis, which introduced the new rite in 1955, speaks
exclusively of changing the times of the ceremonies of  Maundy
Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, to make it easier for the
faithful to assist at the sacred rites, now transferred after centuries
to the evenings those days.

But no passage in the decree makes the slightest mention of the drastic
changes in the texts and ceremonies themselves. In fact, the new rite
of Holy Week was a nothing but a trial balloon for post-Conciliar
reform which would follow. The modernist Dominican Fr. Chenu testifies
to this:

"Fr. Duploye followed all this with passionate lucidity. I remember
that he said to me one day, much later on. 'If we succeed in restoring
the Easter Vigil to its original value, the liturgical movement will
have won; I give myself ten years to achieve this.' Ten years later it
was a fait accompli."

In fact, the new rite of Holy Week is an alien body introduced into the
heart of the Traditional Missal. It is based on principles which occur
in Paul VI's 1965 reforms.

1. Paul VI suppressed the Last Gospel in 1965; in 1955 it was
suppressed for the Masses of Holy Week.

2. Paul VI suppressed the psalm Judica me for the Prayers at the Foot
of the Altar; the same had been anticipated by the 1955 Holy Week.

3. Paul VI (following the example of Luther) wanted Mass celebrated
facing the people; the 1955 Holy Week initiated this practice by
introducing it wherever possible (especially on Palm Sunday). Key rites
were performed by the priest with his back to the altar, facing the
people: the Blessing of Palms, the final prayer of the Palm Sunday
Procession, the Holy Saturday Blessing of the Baptismal Water, etc.

4. Paul VI wanted the role of the priest to be diminished, replaced at
every turn by ministers; in 1955 already, the celebrant no longer read
the Lessons, Epistles, or Gospels (Passion) which were sung by the
ministers --even though they form part of the Mass. The priest sat
down, forgotten, in a corner.

5. Paul VI suppressed the offertory in his new worship service, which
was replaced by a Jєωιѕн grace before meals. Following the same
principle, the New Rite of Holy Week in 1955 had suppressed the
Epistle, Offertory and Preface.  Palm Sunday, lost its ancient rite of
blessing which incorporates many prayers of the Mass, thus associating
the sacramental palm with the Blessed Sacrament. The seven collects
were reduced to one, the Fore-Mass of the Blessing entirely
disappeared, as did the ceremony of the Gloria Laus at the door of the
Church. The Passion account was shortened, omitting the Anointing at
Bethany and the Last Supper.

6. Paul VI, challenging the anathemas of the Council of Trent,
suppressed the sacred order of the subdiaconate; the new rite of Holy
Week, suppressed many of the subdeacon's functions. The deacon replaced
the subdeacon for some of the prayers (the Levate on Good Friday) the
choir and celebrant replaced him for others (at the Adoration of the
Cross).  It can be presumed that the innovators, in their attack upon
the subdeaconate, were assaying an initial attack upon the ordained
priesthood itself, as part of a coherent and consistent effort to
establish and consecrate a “priesthood of all believers.”

As can be seen from these parallels, the foundation stone of the Novus
Ordo Missae was first laid by the New Rite of Holy Week, established in
1955 by Bugnini.

Other innovations of the 1955 Holy Week included:

1. The Prayer for the Conversion of Heretics became the "Prayer for
Church Unity"

3.  The new rite suppressed much important symbolism (the opening of
the door of the church at the Gloria Laus, for example).

4.  The new rite introduced the vernacular in some places (renewal of
baptismal promises).

5.  The Pater Noster was recited by all present (Good Friday).

6.  The prayers for the emperor were replaced by a prayer for those
governing the republic, imbued with political modernism.

7. In the Breviary, the very moving psalm Miserere, repeated at all of
the Office, was suppressed.

8.  For Holy Saturday the Exultet was changed and much of the symbolism
of its words suppressed.

9. Also on Holy Saturday, eight of the twelve prophecies were
suppressed.

10. Sections of the Passion were suppressed, even the Last Supper
disappeared, in which our Lord, already betrayed, instituted the
Blessed Eucharist.

11. The ancient Mass of the Presanctified on Good Friday was abolished
and replaced with a simple Communion Service for the people on Good
Friday, contrary to the tradition of the Church, and condemned by St.
Pius X when petitioned by innovators to initiate this practice

12. All the rubrics of the 1955 Holy Week rite insisted continually on
the "participation" of the faithful, and they scorned, as abuses, many
of the popular devotions connected with Holy Week.

13. The Triduum: The whole of the balance of the Triduum Sacrum, the
last three days of Holy Week, was upset. The beautiful Office of
Tenebrae practically disappeared, as did the popular devotion of the
Tre Ore.

This brief examination of the reform of Holy Week clearly shows how the
"experts", who would come up with the New Mass fourteen years later,
had first desecrated Holy Week rites to test their revolutionary
experiments before applying them to the liturgy for the rest of the
year.  This desecration, at the end of the pontificate of Pius XII, and
instituted during a time in which the world later learned the pope was
mentally and physically incapacitated, was carefully designed to be the
first stage of the self-destruction of the Roman Liturgy.

Pius XII apparently did not realize that the changes authorized in his
name were shaking discipline and corrupting the liturgy during one of
the most crucial periods of the Church's history; above all, he did not
realize that he was legislating the very agenda of the modernists and
their liturgical revolution.

Many Catholics today believe in their innocence that defenders of
Tradition were not aware of the degree or scope of the conspiracy
within the Church at this early stage of the modernist program.  This
belief is not justified by fact.  To illustrate that many knew the evil
that was afoot in the Vatican, there is the case of the suppression of
the Solemnity of St. Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church.  This
attack on the Heavenly protector of Holy Mother Church, by replacing
its patron's feast with a kind of Feast Day of Labor (St. Joseph the
Worker) on the international socialist holiday of May Day, was resisted
by many in the Sacred Congregation of Rites in the Vatican.  Already,
however, the modernists had out-manoeuvred Traditionalists, and had
acquired secretly the levers of power within the Holy See.  A learned
priest, Jean Crete, who was at the time working in the Vatican's Sacred
Congregation of Rites, has commented about the situation within the
Vatican at the time:

"Most people, except those who were party to the subversion, are
thought of today as having been ignorant as to what was going on. I
can, on the contrary, give a categorical testimony on this point. I
realized very well that Pius XII's decrees were just the beginning of a
total subversion of the liturgy, and I was not the only one. All the
true liturgists, all the priests who were attached to tradition, were
dismayed.

"The Sacred Congregation of Rites was not favorable toward the proposed
innovations, which were the special work of a modernizing commission.
When, five weeks later, Pius XII announced the feast of St. Joseph the
Worker, which caused the ancient feast of Ss. Philip and James to be
transferred, and which replaced the Solemnity of St Joseph, Patron of
the Church, there was open opposition to it.

“For more than a year the Sacred Congregation of Rites refused to
compose the office and Mass for the new feast. Many interventions of
agents purporting to represent the pope were necessary before the
Congregation of Rites agreed, against their will, to publish the office
in 1956 — an office so badly composed that one might suspect it had
been deliberately sabotaged. And it was only in 1960 that the melodies
of the Mass and office were composed — melodies based on models of the
worst taste.

"I relate this little-known episode to give an idea of the violence of
the reaction to the first liturgical reforms of Pius XII".

The modernists could scarcely believe their good fortune, how easy it
had been to breach the bulwark of Sacred Tradition, and destroy the
continuity of centuries by implementing their program of liturgical
revolution.

On the heels of these innovations, the decree cuм hac nostra aetate,
oddly enough not published in the Acta Apostolica Sedis and not printed
in the liturgical books, made significant and surreptitious changes to
the rubrics of the Missal and Breviary.

These changes included:

1. The ancient ranks of semi-double and simple feasts were abolished.

2.   Most vigils of feast days were suppressed, leaving the celebration
of vigils "a shadow of its former self." (Vigils such as All Saints,
the Apostles, Our Lady, etc.)

3. The number of octaves was reduced from fifteen to three. Some of the
suppressed octaves went back to the seventh century.

4. For the first time a distinction between "public" and "private"
recitation of the Divine Office was introduced, even though tradition
teaches us that the Office is by its very nature a public prayer. This
foreshadows the Novus Ordo distinction between Masses with and without
people.

5. The Paters recited in the Office were reduced from sixteen to five,
and the ten Aves and three Credos were entirely omitted, as were
certain other prayers before and after the office.

6. The penitential ferial prayers were abolished with two minor
exceptions.

7. The Suffrage of the Saints and the Commemoration of the Cross were
abolished, and the beautiful Athanasian Creed (dating from the eighth
century) was said but once a year.

8. The additional Collects said at Mass during the different seasons of
the year (such as those of Our Lady and Against the Persecutors of the
Church) were abolished.

9. The Proper Last Gospel was abolished. Here again we have been
obliged to content ourselves with a brief overview of these changes
which were described as "provisional" — but which so altered the sacred
liturgy as to discourage all but the most dedicated priest from
learning them.

In 1957, the bishops of the world were consulted about further
liturgical changes. The majority asked that the traditional structure
of the Divine Office be preserved. Fr. Thomas Richstatter, in his book
Liturgical Law: New Style, New Spirit, gives the following account:

"One bishop quotes Saint Thomas (Summa, I-II, q. 97, art. 2) where he
states that the modification of any positive law will naturally bring
with it a certain lessening of discipline. Consequently, if there is to
be a change, it must be not just for something 'a little better' but
for something 'much better' in order to compensate for this falling off
of discipline which necessarily accompanies any change in legislation.
Therefore, the bishop states, we must be very cautious in this matter.
It is not easy to say 'no' to requests for change, but that is the
proper action here. The bishop concludes by stating that he is among
that large number who are not only satisfied with the liturgy as it is,
but who consider any change not only undesirable but dangerous to the
Church."

On September 3, 1958, one month before the death of the beleaguered
Pius XII, the Instruction on Sacred Music was issued. The use of the
"Dialogue Mass," was encouraged, so that the congregation would recite
much of the Mass along with the priest:  the Introit, Kyrie, Gloria,
etc., as well as all the responses. It should be noted here that the
traditional form of congregational participation is Gregorian Chant.
Popular recitation of Mass prayers was never done until the "Dialogue
Mass" was introduced.

Under the cover of participation, lay commentators made their
appearance for the first time. Their role was to read in the vernacular
while the priest read in Latin.  Additionally, the opportunity was
exploited to remove so-called "undesirable accretions" in the Sacred
Liturgy.

Pope Pius XII was succeeded by John XXIII, Angelo Roncalli. Roncalli
wasted no time in calling a general Council which would "consecrate
Ecuмenism." The following year, in June of 1960, John XXIII appointed
Fr. Bugnini to serve as secretary of the Preparatory Liturgical
Commission for the Council.

In the meantime, Fr. Bugnini continued his work with the commission for
the reform of the liturgy, producing yet another series of provisional
changes, to last until the conciliar reforms. The Missal and Breviary
were again changed, as was the Calendar, and for the first time, the
Pontifical and the Ritual.

Throughout his ecclesiastical career, Roncalli was involved in affairs
that placed his orthodoxy under a cloud. Here are a few facts:

As professor at the seminary of Bergamo, Roncalli was investigated for
following the theories of Msgr. Duchesne, which were forbidden under
Saint Pius X in all Italian seminaries. Msgr Duchesne's work, Histoire
Ancienne de l'Eglise, ended up on the Index.

While papal nuncio to Paris, Roncalli revealed his adhesion to the
teachings of Sillon, a movement condemned by St. Pius X. In a letter to
the widow of Marc Sagnier, the founder of the condemned movement, he
wrote: The powerful fascination of his [Sagnier's] words, his spirit,
had enchanted me; and from my early years as a priest, I maintained a
vivid memory of his personality, his political and social activity."

Named as Patriarch of Venice, Msgr.Roncalli gave a public blessing to
the socialists meeting there for their party convention. As John XXIII,
he made Msgr. Montini a cardinal and called the Second Vatican Council.
He also wrote the Encyclical Pacem in Terris. The Encyclical uses a
deliberately ambiguous phrase, which foreshadows the same false
religious liberty the Council would later proclaim.

John XXIII's attitude in matters liturgical, then, comes as no
surprise. Dom Lambert Beauduin, quasi-founder of the modernist
Liturgical Movement, was a friend of Roncalli's from 1924 onwards. At
the death of Pius XII, Beauduin remarked: "If they elect Roncalli,
everything will be saved; he would be capable of calling a council and
consecrating ecuмenism..."

On July 25, 1960, John XXIII published the Motu Proprio Rubricarum
Instructum. He had already decided to call Vatican II and to proceed
with changing Canon Law. John XXIII incorporated the rubrical
innovations of 1955–1956 into this Motu Proprio and made them even
worse. "Although we have reached the decision," he writes, "that the
fundamental principles concerning the liturgical reform must be
presented to the Fathers of the future Council, nevertheless, the
reform of the rubrics of the Breviary and Roman Missal must not be
delayed any longer."

In this framework, so far from being orthodox, with such dubious
authors, in a climate which was already "Conciliar," the Breviary and
Missal of John XXIII were born. They formed a "Liturgy of transition"
destined to last — as it in fact did last — for three or four years. It
is a transition from the Catholic liturgy consecrated at the Council of
Trent to that heterodox liturgy proclaimed in full by Paul VI.

Principles of the antiliturgical heresy 18th century inspired by
Illuminism and Jansenism continued to actuate John XXIII's modernist
Vatican, and innovating efforts proceeded apace in his innovations,
which touched the Breviary as well as the Missal:

1.   Reduction of Matins to three lessons. Archbishop Vintimille of
Paris, a Jansenist sympathizer, in his reform of the Breviary in 1736,
"reduced the Office for most days to three lessons, to make it
shorter." In 1960 John XXIII also reduced the Office of Matins to only
three lessons on most days. This meant the suppression of a third of
Holy Scripture, two-thirds of the lives of the saints, and the whole of
the commentaries of the Church Fathers on Holy Scripture. Matins, of
course, forms a considerable part of the Breviary.

2.   Replacing ecclesiastical formulas style with Scripture. "The
second principle of the anti-liturgical sect," said Dom Guéranger, "is
to replace the formulae in ecclesiastical style with readings from Holy
Scripture." While the Breviary of St. Pius X had the commentaries on
Holy Scripture by the Fathers of the Church, John XXIII's Breviary
suppressed most commentaries written by the Fathers of the Church. On
Sundays, only five or six lines from the Fathers remains.

3.   Removal of saints' feasts from Sunday. Dom Gueranger gives the
Jansenists' position: "It is their [the Jansenists'] great principle of
the sanctity of Sunday which will not permit this day to be 'degraded'
by consecrating it to the veneration of a saint, not even the Blessed
Virgin Mary. A fortiori, the feasts with a rank of double or double
major which make such an agreeable change for the faithful from the
monotony of the Sundays, reminding them of the friends of God, their
virtues and their protection — shouldn't they be deferred always to
weekdays, when their feasts would pass by silently and unnoticed?"

John XXIII, going well beyond the well-balanced reform of St. Pius X,
fulfills almost to the letter the ideal of the Jansenist heretics: only
nine feasts of the saints can take precedence over the Sunday (two
feasts of St. Joseph, three feasts of Our Lady, St. John the Baptist,
Saints Peter and Paul, St. Michael, and All Saints). By contrast, the
calendar of St. Pius X included 32 feasts which took precedence, many
of which were former holydays of obligation. What is worse, John XXIII
abolished even the commemoration of the saints on Sunday.

4.   Preferring the ferial office over the saint’s feast. Dom Guéranger
goes on to describe the moves of the Jansenists as follows: "The
calendar would then be purged, and the aim, acknowledged by Grancolas
(1727) and his accomplices, would be to make the clergy prefer the
ferial office to that of the saints. What a pitiful spectacle! To see
the putrid principles of Calvinism, so vulgarly opposed to those of the
Holy See, which for two centuries has not ceased fortifying the
Church's calendar with the inclusion' of new protectors, penetrate into
our churches!"

John XXIII totally suppressed ten feasts from the calendar (eleven in
Italy with the feast of Our Lady of Loreto), reduced 29 feasts of
simple rank and nine of more elevated rank to mere commemorations, thus
causing the ferial office to take precedence. He suppressed almost all
the octaves and vigils, and replaced another 24 saints' days with the
ferial office.

Finally, with the new rules for Lent, the feasts of another nine
saints, officially in the calendar, are never celebrated. In sum, the
reform of John XXIII purged about 81 or 82 feasts of saints,
sacrificing them to "Calvinist principles."

Dom Gueranger also notes that the Jansenists suppressed the feasts of
the saints in Lent. John XXIII did the same, keeping only the feasts of
first and second class. Since they always fall during Lent, the feasts
of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Gregory the Great. St. Benedict, St.
Patrick, and St. Gabriel the Archangel would never be celebrated.

5.   Excising miracles from the lives of the Saints. Speaking of the
principle of the Illuminist liturgists, Dom Gueranger notes: "the lives
of the saints were stripped of their miracles on the one hand, and of
their pious stories on the other."

The reform of 1960 suppresses two out of three lessons of the Second
Nocturn of Matins, in which the lives of the saints are read. Eleven
feasts were totally suppressed by the preconciliar rationalists. For
example, St. Vitus, the Invention of the Holy Cross, St. John before
the Latin Gate, the Apparition of St. Michael on Mt. Gargano, St.
Anacletus, St. Peter in Chains, the Finding of St. Stephen, Our Lady of
Loreto; among the votive feasts, St. Philomena.

Other saints were eliminated more discreetly: Our Lady of Mount Carmel,
Our Lady of Ransom, St. George, St. Alexis, St. Eustace, the Stigmata
of St. Francis — these all remain, but only as a commemoration on a
ferial day.

Two popes are also removed, seemingly without reason: St. Sylvester
(was he too triumphalistic?) and St. Leo II (the latter, perhaps,
because he condemned the heretic Pope Honorius.)

6.   Anti-Roman Spirit. The Jansenists suppressed one of the two feasts
of the Chair of  St. Peter (January 18), and also the Octave of St.
Peter. Identical measures were taken by John XXIII.

7.   Suppression of the Confiteor before Communion. The suspect Missal
of Trojes suppressed the Confiteor. John XXIII did the same thing in
1960.

8.   Reform of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday. and Holy Saturday. This
happened in 1736, with the suspect Breviary of Vintimille ("a very
grave action, and what is more, most grievous for the piety of the
faithful," said Dom Gueranger.)

9.   Suppression of Octaves. The same thing goes for the suppression of
nearly all the octaves (a usage we find already in the Old Testament,
to solemnize the great feasts over eight days), anticipated by the
Jansenists in 1736 and repeated in 1955-1960.

10. Make the Breviary as short as possible and without any repetition.
This was the dream of the renaissance liturgists (the Breviary of the
Holy Cross, for example, abolished by St. Pius V), and then of the
illuminists. Dom Gueranger said that the innovators wanted a Breviary
"without those complicated rubrics which oblige the priest to make a
serious study of the Divine Office; moreover, the rubrics themselves
are traditions, and it is only right they should disappear. Without
repetitions...and as short as possible... They want a short Breviary.
They will, have it; and it will be up to the Jansenists to write it."

11. The long petitions in the Office called Preces disappear; so too,
the commemorations, the suffrages, the Pater, Ave, and Credo, the
antiphons to Our Lady, the Athanasian Creed, two-thirds of Matins, and
so on.

12. The suppression in the prayers of Good Friday of the Latin
adjective perfidis (faithless) with reference to the Jєωs, and the noun
perfidiam (impiety) with reference to Judaism.

These changes reveal the liberalism, pacifism, and false ecuмenism of
those who conceived and promulgated them.

13. Denial of the Communion of Saints.  The Ottaviani Intervention
rightly declared that "when the priest celebrates [the NOM] without a
server the suppression of all the salutations (i.e., Dominus Vobiscuм,
etc.) and of the final blessing is a clear attack on the dogma of the
communion of the saints."  Traditionalists of course know that the
priest, even if he is alone, when celebrating Mass or saying his
Breviary, is praying in the name of the whole Church, and praying with
the whole Church in Communion with the Saints and the angels. This
truth was denied by Luther.

Luther’s attack on dogma was joined by John XXIII in his reformed
Breviary; it obliged the priest when reciting it alone to say Domine
exaudi orationem meam (O Lord, hear my prayer) instead of Dominus
vobiscuм (The Lord be with you). The idea, "a profession of purely
rational faith," was that the Breviary was not the public prayer of the
Church any more, but merely private devotional reading.

It is to be noted that the "Liturgy of John XXIII” was in vigor for all
of three years, until it came to its logical conclusion with the
promulgation of the Conciliar Decree on the Liturgy, and ultimately
with the proclamation of the Novus Ordo Missae, all the work of
Bugnini.