The
late Fr Gregory Hesse, on whose arguments we relied,
concluded that the act of
Pope Paul VI in publishing (but neglecting to promulgate!)
the novus ordo
missae in breach of the terms
of Quo primum
and in breach of the
directives of the Council of Trent, was accordingly
illicit, as was the novel rite
itself. He
concluded from the rite’s
content that it must also be schismatic.
In
his analysis of the novus
ordo in his
Phoenix from the
Ashes, historian
Henry Sire argues that the novus
ordo
is not an expression of Catholic orthodoxy but of heresy. He writes:
“[I]n the two years that followed the closure
of the council Msgr.
Bugnini and his entourage… set about remaking the Mass
according to the heretical
doctrines that were then becoming rampant in the Church. The first element was
an assimilation to
Protestantism… but the rejection of tradition in fact went
much further than
Protestantism. It
was embodied in the
flood of Modernist publications, appealing to an imaginary
idea of primitive
Christianity and submerging the sacramental reality of the
Mass in the human
action. The Novus Ordo can only be interpreted in the light of those concepts,
of which it is the liturgical expression.
“This
could be gathered from
the rite itself, but Msgr. Bugnini spared us the trouble
of
interpretation. He
defined his new
theology in the General Instruction published with the Novus Ordo on April 3, 1969.
The understanding of the Mass that it preaches is
set out in Article
7: ‘The Lord’s
Supper, or the Mass, is
the sacred assembly or gathering together of the people of
God, with the priest
presiding, to celebrate the memorial of the Lord.
For this reason, the promise of Christ is
particularly true of a local congregation of the Church:
where two or three are
gathered together in My name, there am I in their midst.’ We see here a
compendium of the Modernist
doctrines regarding the Mass:
·
the
acceptance of the Protestant notion of the Eucharist as
the ‘Lord’s Supper’,
without attention to the proper scriptural use of that
term;
·
the
spurious concept of the priest’s ‘presiding’ at the Mass,
instead of his
offering the sacrifice by his priestly power in persona Christi;
·
the
presentation of the Mass as a ‘memorial’ instead of the
re-enactment of the
sacrifice of Christ;
·
the
implication that the essence of the Mass resides in the
assembly of the people
and not in its character as Christ’s sacrifice; and, worst
of all,
·
the
suggestion that Christ is present in the Mass by virtue of
the people’s
gathering and not through his real presence in the Blessed
Sacrament.
As to the last, the disparity between the two
forms of presence is such
that nobody who believed in the true nature of the Mass
could credibly have
penned such a misstatement of it.
In
this Bugninian doctrine we see the culmination of
Protestant thinking, which
rejected the doctrine of the Eucharist as sacrifice and
thus lost the
conviction, held by mankind since the earliest times, of
the need to offer
sacrifice to God…”
Sire’s
criticism sounds with the remark of Fr Hesse that no licit
order of Mass in
any rite has ever omitted prayers to
the Blessed Trinity.
In the rite
canonised by Pius V in 1570 such
prayers appear at the close of the Offertory (Suscipe, Sancta Trinitas) and at the end of Mass (Placeat
tibi, Sancta Trinitas).
No such prayers are to be found in the novus
ordo.
Sire
suggests certain ‘improvements’ that might have been made
to the Roman rite of
Mass by the reformers under Paul VI.
He
does this because he fails to understand that Trent and Quo primum
dealt
with a matter of faith, not discipline; fails to see that
Pius V established
the form in which is to be said for all time.
Notwithstanding these limitations, his study of the
defective approach
of Msgr. Bugnini, and the error of Pope Paul VI in
adopting Bugnini’s defects,
is admirable.
********************
When,
on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul in 1972, Pope Paul
VI lamented that the
smoke of Satan had entered the Temple of God through some
fissure, he spoke
prophetically and with immense irony.
The first element of this irony is that he, the
pope, was the
fissure. The
second is that he should
have uttered this condemnation of his own conduct on the
feast of St Paul,
whose name he had taken, and of St Peter, whose office he
exercised. The
words of Pius V in Quo primum deserve to be repeated:
No
one,
whosoever he be (nulli omnino hominum), is permitted to
infringe or rashly
contravene this notice of Our permission… nor is he
allowed to act against it
temerariously. But
should anyone presume
to attempt to do so, let him know that he will incur the
wrath of Almighty God
and of Saints Peter and Paul, His Apostles.
Michael
Baker
December
8th, 2022—Immaculate
Conception
of the Blessed Virgin
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