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

[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