Dr. Carol Byrne: A Series on the History of the Dialogue Mass

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Dr. Carol Byrne: A Series on the History of the Dialogue Mass
Tyrrell Fought the ‘Tyranny’ of Scholasticism
Taken from here.

It was characteristic of all modernists – freedom of thought and self-expression being of paramount importance in their world view – to chafe under the restrictions of any “external authority” or higher power that would stifle the spirit of independence which they fostered as the highest value. The spiritual authority of Rome in areas of Faith and Morality was their prime target of attack, as it had been during the Protestant “Reformation,” and still is in our day.

Tyrrell deeply resented the institutional Church, especially her authority structures that wielded juridical power against the expression of heretical ideas. He never forgave her for having censored his works and excommunicated him, and routinely defamed her as a prison for the soul, a repressive, authoritarian hellhole as, for example, when he stated:

“The Church sits on my soul as a nightmare, and the oppression is maddening.”1

Modernist Fr. Tyrrell died excommunicated & despondent, refusing to recant his heresy

He often complained about the “stifling” of intellectual freedom under Pius X who mandated the study of Scholastic Philosophy to form part of all seminary training. Tyrrell charged that “the theological Schools have come to tyrannize over the Church in these evil days.”2 He specifically described Scholasticism as a “tyranny”;3 in fact, “one of the worst intellectual tyrannies the world has ever known.”4 His vision for the Church was to change her into a religion freed of constraints that would make the believer “a bird free on the wing” and “not crushed and crumpled in the grip of the hawk.”5 The human spirit, he believed, could never be free as long as it was held prisoner by the necessity of obedience to religious superiors and respect for the Scholastic system of intellectual reasoning.

As a result of this kind of obloquy from Tyrrell and the early modernists, the Scholastic System was associated in the minds of progressivists with injustice and oppression. The very word Scholasticism now provokes hoots of laughter and ribald remarks among today’s clergy. It conjures up mental pictures of silly and pointless sophistries, useless disputations about issues that are irrelevant to life in the real world, all conducted by people who claimed to have the monopoly of knowledge and provide an answer to everything.


Francis treats Scholasticism as an absurd anomaly

It hardly needs saying that Francis, with his peculiar talent for spreading confusion and division on a global scale, had scant respect for the Church’s great Scholastic tradition. He may, for the sake of appearances, have praised some aspects of it on occasion but, in reality, he took every opportunity to criticize it either directly or indirectly, following Tyrrell’s example. The latter, however, at least had the merit of being less hypocritical.

After presenting a speech at the 36th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus on October 24, 2016, Francis conducted a question-and-answer session with his fellow-Jesuits. In it, he made a sweeping condemnation of the Scholastic system used in seminaries from post-Modernism up to Vatican II:

“I and those of my generation, perhaps not the youngest here, but my generation and some of the later ones too, were educated in a decadent Scholasticism. We studied theology and philosophy with manuals. It was a decadent Scholasticism. For example, to explain the “metaphysical continuum” ‒ it makes me laugh every time I remember ‒ we were taught the theory of the ‘puncta inflata.’ When the great Scholasticism began to lose force, there arose that decadent Scholasticism with which at least my generation and others have studied.”6

Francis joined ranks with Modernism when he railed against ‘decadent’ Scholasticism

Let us consider for a moment the likely impact that such derisive expressions – which had for decades been part of the progressivist narrative – would have had on the morale of young seminarians around the time of Vatican II. Being told that what they had been taught came from dry and dusty old manuals containing obsolete content that would make them appear ridiculous in the eyes of the modern world was a sure way of persuading them to abandon the old theology for the new. After all, Vatican II had set the stage for the “New Evangelization” (which is really only an updated version of the old Modernism) which is presented as the only way forward for what the Church should believe and do today.

The Pope’s vilification of the Scholastic System of seminary formation was a subtle propaganda tool which works by inducing fear of being marginalized by the modern world and of being a victim of tyrannical control by an out-of-date Church. This, too, was the message promoted by Fr. Tyrrell.

The condemnation of Scholasticism by progressivist theologians as outdated had met with the following rebuke by Pope Pius X:

“For Scholastic Philosophy and Theology they have only ridicule and contempt. Whether it is ignorance or fear, or both, that inspires this conduct in them, certain it is that the passion for novelty is always united in them with hatred of Scholasticism, and there is no surer sign that a man is on the way to Modernism than when he begins to show his dislike for this system. Modernists and their admirers should remember the proposition condemned by Pius IX: The method and principles which have served the doctors of Scholasticism when treating of theology no longer correspond with the exigencies of our time or the progress of science (Syllabus Prop. 13). They exercise all their ingenuity in diminishing the force and falsifying the character of tradition, so as to rob it of all its weight.” (Pascendi § 42)

Furthermore, the generations of seminary training to which Francis refers were anything but decadent. In that era, from the mid-19th century to the late 1950s, the long tradition of Scholasticism, especially Thomistic metaphysics, was at the height of its prestige. It was encouraged by a succession of papal accolades:

• Pius IX commended Scholasticism in Tuas libenter (1863) as “a mighty bulwark of the Faith and a formidable weapon against its enemies”;7
  
• Leo XIII issued Aeterni Patris (1879) in defence and encouragement of the Scholastic Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas;
  
• Pius X followed suit in Pascendi (1907), Sacrorum Antistitum (1910) and in Angelici Doctoris (1914);
  
• Benedict XV enshrined the tradition in the Code of Canon Law (1917);8
  
• Pius XI affirmed in Studiorum Ducem (1923) that the Scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas, which was still taught in his day, was of the highest authority, “for the Church has adopted his philosophy as her own”;
  
• Nearer to Vatican II, the Scholastic System was still held in high esteem for its perennial value as the Church’s basic intellectual conceptual framework. In 1950, Pius XII stated that “never may we overthrow it, or contaminate it with false principles, or regard it as a great, but obsolete, relic.. (Humani generis § 30)
  

The Scholasticism of St. Thomas has been formally adopted by the Church as her ‘own’ philosophy

In contradiction to Pius X and Pius XII, John Paul II denied that the Church has a philosophy of her own:

“The Church has no philosophy of her own, nor does she canonize any one particular philosophy in preference to others.” (Fides et ratio 1998, § 49)

In a vain attempt to back up his claim, he referred to a passage from Humani generis9 but without supplying a quote from it. There is nothing, however, in the reference to support his opinion. Au contraire, in the same Encyclical, Pius XII repeatedly named the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas as “our own”: (“nostram philosophiam”; “philosophiam nostris traditam scholis” etc.)

As for John Paul II’s second statement, all the evidence indicates that the Church has canonized Thomistic Philosophy, not least by mandating its use in the Code of Canon Law (1917), but also through the unanimous judgement of successive Popes from the Council of Trent onwards. It is only since Vatican II that the Church stopped counting Thomistic Philosophy as one of her own quintessentially Catholic assets, and began treating it as one among many philosophies vying for hegemony in the seminaries.


To be continued


1. G. Tyrrell, ‘Letter to V.’ [Baron Friedrich von Hügel], May 18, 1903, in Maude Petre (ed.), George Tyrrell’s Letters, London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1920, p. 109.
2. G. Tyrrell, The Church and the Future, p. 107.
3. G. Tyrrell, ‘Letter to V.’, November 5, 1904, in Maude Petrie (ed.), George Tyrrell’s Letters, p. 108.
4. G. Tyrrell, The Church and the Future, p. 33.
5. G. Tyrrell, Christianity at the Crossroads, London; New York, Longmans, Green and Co., 1910, p. 219.
6. Francis, ‘To Have Courage and Prophetic Audacity,’ Dialogue with the Jesuits gathered in the 36th General Congregation, Documents of the General Congregation of the Society of Jesus, January 6, 2017, p. 46.
7. “Fortissimum fidei propugnaculum et formidanda contra suos inimicos arma,” Letter to Archbishop Gregor von Scherr of Munich and Freising, December 21, 1863.
8. “The study of philosophy and theology, and the teaching of these sciences to their students, must be accurately carried out by professors according to the arguments, doctrines and principles of St. Thomas, which they are inviolately to hold.” (1917 Code of Canon Law, Canon 1366 § 2)
9. AAS 42, 1950, p. 566.

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Dr. Carol Byrne: A Series on the History of the Dialogue Mass
Theology of the Encounter & Primacy of Love
Taken from here - Emphasis The Catacombs.

It is well known that certain progressivists had been targeting seminaries years before Vatican II, working like termites on the inside to weaken and undermine the dominant structure of Scholasticism. Fr. Peter Henrici, S.J., averred that this was the case in Jesuit seminaries where professors paid lip service to papal mandates and students went through the motions of “thumbing through” the Manuals, while the method and principles of St. Thomas Aquinas were openly scorned and held in contempt. 1

At the same time, Fr. Henrici assures us, certain modernist texts were secretly passed around among the students, e.g. Henri de Lubac’s books, The Supernatural and Corpus Mysticum. There is no reason to believe that the activities of predatory stalkers seeking victims among trainee priests were unique to Jesuit seminaries: We have seen in Part 139 how the young Joseph Ratzinger was influenced and led astray by his neo-modernist mentor in his seminary days. None of that proves that Scholasticism itself was decadent, as Francis had claimed, but that subversive attempts to overthrow it were being allowed to succeed by progressivist Bishops.

Fr. Peter Henrici revealed progressivist tactics used to infiltrate seminaries

Francis’s caricature of the Scholastic method employed in seminaries served to bolster the progressivists’ agenda – to discredit the Church’s “perennial philosophy” so as to make way for the post-Vatican II “New Evangelization.” This is obvious from a speech he made at a meeting of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization in 2015, where he said:

“The catechesis, as a component of the process of evangelization, needs to go beyond the simple realm of Scholastics, in order to educate believers, beginning with children, to encounter Christ, living and working in his Church.” [Emphasis in the original]

We can take it as read that adopting the new “theology of encounter” meant leaving the “perennial philosophy” behind, for Francis explained that the new catechesis was needed to take the Church along what he termed “yet uncharted” paths – presumably where his “God of surprises”2 lurks around every corner.

There is, however, nothing genuinely Catholic in the current catechesis, for Francis has led us back to the teaching of Fr. George Tyrrell who maintained that Scholasticism was radically deficient as a means of presenting the truths of Revelation and was useless for modern times. It follows that Scholasticism would play no part in the “New Evangelization.” For both Francis and Tyrrell, knowledge of God derives from the lived experience of believers who encounter Him directly.

According to Francis:

“The definitive aim of catechesis is to put people not only in touch, but also in communion and intimacy, with Jesus Christ.”3

No mention is made of the indispensable role of the Ecclesia Docens in the area of catechesis. So, his words must be interpreted against the background of the neo-Modernism he embraced, where there are no absolute precepts or moral imperatives, and where everything is up for discussion.


Ecclesia Docens replaced by an ill-defined 'discernment'

One of the major planks of Francis’s new approach was his heavy emphasis on a phenomenon he termed “discernment” which he preaches at every opportunity. Whatever he meant by this term, we can be sure that it had nothing in common with the practice of casuistry that had traditionally been used in the Church as a trusted and efficient method to solve problems of conscience by applying general principles of morality to concrete cases.

The following example of his thinking on this issue illustrates the distinctly unhelpful and confusing nature of his advice to priests in dealing with matters of conscience:

“Many are asking: ‘can you do this or can you not?’ That’s all. And many people leave the confessional disappointed. Not because the priest is bad, but because the priest doesn’t have the ability to discern situations, to accompany them in authentic discernment. They don’t have the needed formation…

“We need to form future priests not to general and abstract ideas, which are clear and distinct, but to this keen discernment of spirits so that they can help people in their concrete life. We need to truly understand this: In life not all is black on white or white on black. No! The shades of grey prevail in life. We must them teach to discern in this grey area." 4

Francis to the Krakow Jesuits in 2016: ‘Life is not black & white; we have to discern the grey’

But the criteria for true discernment in line with the teachings of the great moralist and Doctor of the Church, St. Alphonsus Liguori, were already provided in the “Manualist tradition” that Francis categorically rejected. Moreover, Francis has not provided any objective criteria, but has left the process of discernment open to manipulation and abuse. In other words, he is allowing the Church to be run on subjective lines, thus creating a global situation of moral relativism, insecurity and mutual distrust.

Finally, irrefutable proof of Francis’s debt to Tyrrell and the early modernists can be found in one of Tyrrell’s letters describing his version of Catholicism that he called “the new wine that eventually burst the old scholastic bottles.” This new religion is based on the “primacy of love” over concern for the Truth, which Tyrrell attributed to Our Lord:

“He was not explicitly a theologian or a revealer of intellectual orthodoxy, but the diffuser of a spirit, or love, which implied a more liberal theology, a wider and worthier conception of God and of man, and of their mutual relations.” 5

One cannot fail to notice that this description also captures in a nutshell Vatican II’s commitment to a new religion that “liberated” the Church from Catholic Tradition, adulterating the Faith, subverting her Divine Constitution, dispensing with her discipline and making Morals adaptable.

Nor can one deny that it came from the fevered mind of George Tyrrell who proudly asserted his complete agreement with his fellow modernist and excommunicate, Alfred Loisy: “Mentally, I am heart and soul with Abbé Loisy and his school.” 6

Alfred Loisy, excommunicated, whose works were on the Index of Forbidden Books, inspired Tyrrell

But it was the goal of Tyrrell, Loisy and all the modernists to usher in a universal brotherhood – the brainchild of Masonry – united around themes of humanitarian ideals, environmentalism and “ecumenism” which would cancel out and replace the Catholic Church. These are the same deviations from Catholic Truth that were welcomed into the Council presided over by John XXIII and Paul VI and have progressively developed to the present day under the tutelage of their successors to the Chair of Peter.

At least, Loisy got one thing right when he predicted: “The heresies of today are part of the orthodoxy of tomorrow”.7

He could not have said a truer word, if we put orthodoxy in inverted commas. We cannot, however, leave the last word to Loisy, Tyrrell, the Vatican II Popes or Francis.

The happy state of living within reach of the traditional Mass and Sacraments with perhaps access to a Catholic school untainted by modernist-inspired teaching, does not come about spontaneously or by chance. Freedom to practise the Catholic Faith in a hostile world is never free of charge. In History, it was gained at the price of blood in the face of persecution by those outside the Faith.

These days, it comes mostly through a dry martyrdom inflicted on traditionalists by their own Hierarchy. In any case, it must be constantly fought for to prevent it from being taken away by those who wish to seize it from us, and then guarded religiously from future assault. Paradoxically, this freedom was the first casualty of the untraditional concept of “Religious Liberty” inaugurated by Vatican II.

Now that the Vatican II reforms have failed collectively to preserve the Faith, the antidote – which would have prevented the modernist heresies from spreading in the first place – is as obvious as it is logical: faithfulness to the teaching and practice of Tradition.

To be continued


1. Peter Henrici SJ, "The Council’s Development to Maturity," Communio, vol. 17, Winter 1990, p. 85.
2. An early example, if not the first, of the expression “God of surprises,” appeared in a book of that name by Fr. Gerard Hughes, SJ. It forms a recurring theme in the sermons of Pope Francis. See, for example, Morning Meditation in the Chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae, ‘The God of Surprises’, October 13, 2014, L'Osservatore Romano, October 17, 2014, and Morning Meditation in the Chapel of the 3. Domus Sanctae Marthae, "The God of Surprises," May 8, 2017, L'Osservatore Romano, May 26, 2017.
4. Congregation for the Clergy, General Directory for Catechesis 2020 § 80.
5. Francis, Q&A session with Polish Jesuits at a private meeting during World Youth Day in Krakow, July 30, 2016, published in Rome on August 26, 2016 in the Jesuit Journal, La Civiltà Cattolica by its Editor, Fr. Antonio Spadaro who was present.
6. G. Tyrrell, "To Dr. Zdziechowski," June 24, 1903 in George Tyrrell’s Letters, selected and edited by M. D. Petre, London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1920, pp. 97-98.
7. Ibid., p. 99.
8. Alfred Loisy, Mémoires pour Servir à l'Histoire Religieuse de Notre Temps, Paris: Émile Nourry, 3 volumes, vol. 1, 1931, p. 135.

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Dr. Carol Byrne: A Series on the History of the Dialogue Mass

Dom Prosper Guéranger: Counter-Witness to the Liturgical Movement

In 1975, on the anniversary of the death of Dom Prosper Guéranger, OSB (1805-1875), Abbot of Solesmes, Paul VI designated him as the “Author of the Liturgical Movement.”1 This claim, like many other slogans of Vatican II vintage, has been repeated so frequently by devotees of the Liturgical Movement that they now take it for granted as undeniably true.

It will be shown, however, that it rests on no verifiable data, and that it can be dismissed as part of the universe of “fake news” inhabited by today’s Catholics who are attached to the Conciliar reforms.

Dom Guéranger, an ultramontane faithful to the Church’s Tradition

This claim's purpose was evidently to lend an aura of respectability to the Liturgical Movement by linking it to the reputation of Dom Guéranger, who was noted for the remarkable success of his liturgical renewal in France in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which had reduced monasticism to ruins.

A pertinent question to consider is what reliability one can place on an assessment of Guéranger’s achievements made by members of the post-Vatican II Liturgical Establishment in an era that has been described as the French Revolution in the Catholic Church and has witnessed a widespread abandoning of monastic life.

After all, they were imbued with the principles of 1789 – Liberty, Equality and Fraternity – that Guéranger opposed. He was an Ultramontane, i.e., a strong advocate of papal supremacy and Roman centralized control of the Church, whereas they embraced Collegiality. With such diametrically opposed views, it is unlikely that there would be a concordance of sentiments between the two different worlds of pre- and post-Vatican II positions on monasticism, the liturgy or indeed any other aspect of ecclesiastical life.

The first requirement in assessing Guéranger’s work as a Benedictine monk is to place his contribution to the good of the Church in its historical context.


Contrast between Dom Guéranger & Later Reformers

If we take the main principles on which Dom Guéranger’ s liturgical reform was based, several points of divergence will emerge that throw into stark relief the fundamental incompatibility of the spirit of renewal that animated Guéranger and the spirit of reform that drove the agenda of the pre-Vatican II liturgists. For convenience, the principles to which Guéranger adhered can be grouped under four headings:

• Liturgical reform must maintain an unbroken link with Tradition;
  
• It must not introduce novelties or adaptations to local customs;
  
• It must not allow any part of the liturgy to be cut out;
  
• It must be undertaken by persons noted for their piety rather than simply for their scholarship.
  

Paul VI dishonestly claimed Dom Guéranger was the founder of the progressivist liturgical reforms

Taking all these points into consideration, we can see a glance that it will not augur well for those who maintain that the 20th-century liturgical reforms were undertaken in the spirit of Dom Guéranger.

The history of today's Liturgical Movement is peppered with experiments by reformers who introduced novelties of their own devising into the liturgy. The early years of the century saw the creeping practice of “active participation,” “Dialogue Mass” and Mass facing the people. There was even some ecumenical experimentation, e.g., Dom Beauduin’s initiatives in inter-confessional sharing at the monastery of Amay, which he founded in 1925.

From mid-century up to Vatican II the liturgical reformers were allowed, with papal support, to cut out significant elements of the Roman Missal, particularly in the Holy Week services, which they judged unsuitable to modern tastes. Pope John XXIII, continuing the policy of his predecessor, excised many Feasts from the General Calendar, which also affected the Breviary.

He removed the Confiteor before Communion in the Ordinary of the Mass, and altered the unchangeable Canon with the addition of the name of St. Joseph. Thus, by the time of the Constitution on the Liturgy in 1963, if the link with Tradition was not entirely broken, it was at least dangerously frayed.

As for the question of liturgical scholarship, Guéranger himself was an exemplary practitioner in this domain. He had all the essential qualities for the task – piety, erudition, zeal for the truth and a sincere desire to serve the Church by preserving her traditions. Far different was the situation with the pre-Vatican II liturgical reformers.

Pius XI accused modernists of lacking piety & scholarship

A thorough investigation into their research methods will show that their objective was not to furnish truth and expand knowledge, but was aimed instead at publicizing only those findings that supported their pre-conceived notions of liturgical reform while ignoring conflicting evidence.

A comparison with the work of Guéranger (who achieved unity within the Roman rite in strict fidelity to the Council of Trent) will reveal that the 20th-century progressivists had a totally different conception of liturgical renewal. For them, research-based study was simply a strategy to drive policy change at the highest level of the Church Hierarchy. In this they were eminently successful, as the history of Novus Ordo liturgy attests.

In 1924, Pope Pius XI had criticized the “proud and conceited spirit” of certain scholarly reformers who lacked the right dispositions for academic research in liturgical matters:

“However, these studies of ancient Rites must be preceded by the necessary groundwork for knowledge, and should be accompanied by piety and docile and humble obedience. And if these be lacking, any investigation whatever into ancient liturgies of Mass will turn out to be impious and fruitless: for when the supreme authority of the Apostolic See in liturgical matters, which deservedly rejects puffed-up learning, and, with the Apostle, ‘speaks wisdom among the perfect’ (1 Cor. 8: 1,2: 6), has been spurned, whether through ignorance or a proud and conceited spirit, the danger immediately threatens that the error known as Modernism will be introduced also into liturgical matters."2


The Liturgical Movement imbued with Modernism

Ironically, a resurgent Modernism was already making steady progress in Pius XI’s reign, and had gained such a foothold in Pius XII’s time that even a Protestant theologian, cheering on the progress of the Liturgical Movement from the sidelines, noted in 1954:

“It is especially in its theological method that the Liturgical Movement evidences a relationship with the errors of Modernism as condemned by Pius X in Pascendi… certain of the most fruitful trends condemned by Pius X in his blanket condemnation have served to make the Liturgical Movement the great power it is today.”3


To be continued


1. “Auctor illius spiritalis motus.”apud Cuthbert Johnson OSB, Prosper Guéranger (1805-1875), A Liturgical Theologian: an Introduction to his Liturgical Writings and Work, Pontificio Ateneo Sant’Anselmo, 1984, p. 14.
2. Pius XI, Missale Bracarense, Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1924, p. viii. The Rite of Braga took shape within the Archdiocese of Braga between the 11th and 13th centuries. Being more than 200 years old at the time of Pope Pius V's Quo Primum of July 14, 1570, the Rite of Braga was allowed to continue in use.
3. Ernest Koenker, The Liturgical Renaissance in the Roman Catholic Church, University of Chicago Press, 1954, pp. 29, 30-31.

Posted August 8, 2025

[Stone]

Dr. Carol Byrne: A Series on the History of the Dialogue Mass
The ‘Anti-Liturgical Heresy’
[Taken from here - Emphasis The Catacombs]

Given that there are many points of congruity shared by the Modernist Movement and the Liturgical Movement, it would be impossible to maintain that the latter owed its genesis to the Abbot of Solesmes, Dom Prosper Guéranger. That would be tantamount to saying that the changes in the Roman Rite from the beginning of the 20th century to the eve of Vatican II were the legacy of Dom Guéranger.

The claim can be easily refuted by using the arguments put forward by Dom Guéranger himself in his Institutions Liturgiques (Liturgical Institutions) [In English here, for example. - The Catacombs]. Volume 1 of this work contains a chapter entitled “The Anti-Liturgical Heresy” in which he provided a 12-point check list of characteristics displayed by progressivist reformers in France who introduced changes into the Roman Breviary and Missal. One cannot help but notice that they read like a summary of all the changes in the liturgy that led up to the creation of the Novus Ordo.

Let us take each of Dom Guéranger 12 points in turn, quoting from his Institutions Liturgiques.


1. Hatred of Tradition

“The first characteristic of the anti-liturgical heresy is hatred of tradition as found in the formulas used in Divine Worship. One cannot fail to note this special characteristic in all the heretics we have named, from Vigilantus to Calvin, and the reason for it is easy to explain.

“Every sectarian who wishes to introduce a new doctrine finds himself, unfailingly, face to face with the Liturgy, which is Tradition in its strongest expression, and he cannot rest until he has silenced this voice, until he has torn up these pages that enshrine the faith of past centuries.” 1

It was the same, naturally, with the 20th-century reformers who had issues with several Catholic doctrines – notably the reality of the Mass as a Sacrifice, the Real Presence and the power of the priest at the Consecration – which were all denied by Luther. Like their 16th-century counterparts, they too were faced with the major problem of the lex orandi which, since Apostolic times, had been the continuous witness of the true Catholic Faith.

Heretics always try to abolish Tradition & go to new liturgical formulas

Dom Guéranger pointed out the inevitable consequences of changing the liturgy to accommodate new doctrinal positions, drawing attention to its potential for the widespread destruction of the Faith:

“Indeed, how could Lutheranism, Calvinism or Anglicanism establish themselves and maintain their influence over the masses? All they had to do was substitute new books and new formulas in place of the ancient books and formulas, and their work was done. There was nothing that still bothered the new teachers; they could just go on preaching as they wished: the faith of the people was henceforth without defense.” 2

We can see a parallel here with Paul VI’s New Mass which was devised by proponents of the Liturgical Movement with input from six Protestant Observers. As an exercise in conciliation, many of the changes authorized in the new rite were on theological points corresponding with doctrines rejected by Luther.

It is highly significant that, when the Novus Ordo was produced in 1969, all the features of the ancient Mass that offended Protestant sensibilities were de-emphasized, distorted or simply cut out.

The result was that most of the prayers and gestures of the traditional Roman Mass were either suppressed (e.g. most Collects, the Offertory, the Placeat Tibi, genuflexions, including those at the Elevation); drastically curtailed (e.g. the Confiteor); mutilated and reduced to an option (e.g. the Canon); or altered and placed in a different context (e.g. the Words of Consecration as a narrative, Communion as a fraternal meal in which all participate).

These are only a few samples of a much wider assault on the traditional Mass instigated by Catholic clergy to please Protestants.


2. The ‘Bible only’ approach

“This, as matter of fact, is the second principle of the anti-liturgical sect: to substitute for the formulas composed by the Church readings from the Holy Scripture.” 3

Abbey of Solesmes, Dom Guéranger’s headquarters

After the 16th-century Protestants abandoned belief in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, they rejected the Catholic lex orandi as “unscriptural,” and composed a new communion service predicated on praise, thanksgiving and self-offering. This resulted in the disappearance in their services of any formulas that smacked of Catholicism.

We can be certain that Dom Guéranger, writing in the previous century, would never have envisaged, let alone condoned, such a policy that exalts Scripture over Tradition:

“This entails two advantages for members of Protestant sects: first, to silence the voice of Tradition which they regard as a continual threat to themselves. Then, there is the advantage of propagating and supporting their dogmas by means of affirmation and negation. By way of negation, in passing over in silence, through cunning, the texts that express doctrine opposed to errors they wish to propagate; by way of affirmation, by emphasizing truncated passages that show only one side of the truth, and hiding the other from the eyes of the ordinary people.” 4

A notable example of a truncated passage in the New Mass is 1 Corinthians 11:27-29 in which St. Paul issues his stern warning that communicants must “discern” what they receive, and that unworthy reception of Communion is tantamount to eating and drinking damnation to oneself.

These two verses were excised by the Consilium, hiding the vital truth from the faithful that they must be in a state of grace to receive Holy Communion. It is significant that, while the missing Pauline verses feature prominently in the traditional rite, 5 their omission in the modern liturgy has had unfortunate consequences. It has become increasingly clear that the idea of worthy reception and the necessity for Confession to achieve this have virtually disappeared from the consciousness of Catholics today, clergy and laity alike.

Dom Guéranger pointed out the reasoning behind the Protestant preference for Scripture. It is to allow selected passages from Scripture to be interpreted according to the insights of each individual person:

“In every age, and under all forms of sectarianism, it will be the same: No ecclesiastical formulas, only Holy Scripture, but interpreted, selected, presented by the person or persons who are seeking to profit from innovation.

“The trap is dangerous for the simple, and only a long time afterwards one becomes aware of having been deceived and that the word of God, ‘a two-edged sword,’ as the Apostles calls it, has caused great wounds, because it has been manipulated by the sons of perdition.” 6

In the reform of the Divine Office by the Consilium, the Scriptures were also manipulated to eliminate references to “negative” themes such as divine wrath that were deemed offensive to modern sensibilities. Archbishop Bugnini recorded that it was Paul VI who, in a handwritten note to the Secretary of the Consilium on January 3, 1968, wanted the so-called “imprecatory Psalms” to be entirely expunged. 7

There is nothing in Dom Guéranger’s work to suggest that he was in favor of mutilating Gospel passages in the Mass that contained references to harsh and unpleasant realities such as the Last Judgement, eternal punishment and condemnation of the world. The inevitable effect of reducing or eliminating such references was to weaken or remove knowledge of these articles of Faith from the minds of the faithful.


3. New formulas & revolutionary slogans

“The third principle of the heretics concerning the reform of the Liturgy … is to fabricate and introduce various formulas, filled with perfidy, by which the people are more surely ensnared in error, and thus the whole structure of the impious reform will become consolidated for centuries to come.” 8

Without, of course, realizing it, Dom Guéranger could have been speaking of the 20th-century liturgical reforms that gave rise to the Novus Ordo liturgy. For decades before Vatican II, supporters of the Liturgical Movement had been working to change the nature of the traditional Mass from the Holy Sacrifice performed by the priest to a “community celebration” with heavy emphasis on Bible reading and participation by the congregation in a fellowship meal. (The main impetus for this development came from the early reformer, Fr. Pius Parsch, who invented a biblical-liturgical apostolate).

As a result, the modern liturgy was predominantly re-configured as a Liturgy of the Word plus a medley of songs of praise that eclipsed the Catholic belief in the Real Presence. New formulas were then invented to bolster a different understanding of the Mass based on slogans such as “active participation,” “dialogue,” “community celebration” and “liturgical apostolate” of the laity.


4. Return to the first Christian centuries

The fourth anti-liturgical heresy concerns the preference for discarding 1,500 years of Catholic forms of worship and returning to the so-called “pure” sources of the liturgy before they were “corrupted” by the Church. Dom Guéranger severely criticized this policy as a strategy favored by heretics:

“All the sectarians without exceptions begin with the vindication of the rights of antiquity. They want to cut Christianity off from all that the errors and passions of man have mixed in; from whatever is ‘false’ and ‘unworthy of God.’ All they want is the primitive, and they pretend to go back to the cradle of Christian institutions. “To this end, they prune, they efface, they cut away; everything falls under their blows, and while one is waiting to see the original purity of the Divine Cult reappear, one finds himself encumbered with new formulas dating only from the night before, and which are incontestably human, since the one who created them is still alive.” 9

Msgr. Bugnini applied to the Catholic Liturgy all norms condemned by Dom Guéranger

Bugnini and his followers in the Liturgical Movement were very much alive when they invented a new liturgy to replace the traditional Mass and Sacraments in 1968-1969, thus proving that their fabrications were not of divine origin, but were an artificial construct designed more or less on the spot to serve a neo-modernist agenda in the present age.


To be continued


1. Prosper Guéranger, Institutions Liturgiques, 4 vols., Paris: Société Générale de Librairie Catholique, vol 1, 1878, p. 397.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p. 398.
4. Ibid.
5. These are contained in the Epistles of Holy Thursday and Corpus Christi respectively. In addition, the Sequence Lauda Sion Salvatorem, chanted during the Corpus Christi Mass, contains a reminder of St. Paul’s warning that the Sacrament has a dual effect for those who receive with the right or wrong dispositions: Mors est malis, vita bonis (death to the guilty, life to the worthy).
6. Ibid., p. 399.
7. Annibale Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy (1948-1975), Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1990, p. 509. The Pope’s recorded words were: “In my view, it is better that a selection be made of Psalms more suitable to Christian prayer, and that the imprecatory and historical Psalms be omitted (though these last may be suitably use in certain circumstances.”
8. P. Guéranger, op. cit., p. 399
9. Ibid., pp. 399-400