Liturgical Time Bombs: The Destruction of the Faith thru Changes in Catholic Worship

[Stone]

Liturgical Time Bombs in Vatican II: Excerpts
The Destruction of Catholic Faith Through Changes in Catholic Worship
by Michael Davies - adapted

"Ridiculum est, et satis abominabile dedecus, ut traditiones, quas antiquitus a patribus suscepimus, infringi patiamur."
"It is absurd, and a detestable shame, that we should suffer those traditions to be changed which we have received from the fathers of old."

-----The Decretals (Dist. xii, 5)
Cited by St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica, II, I, Q. 97, art. 2.

Contents:
Plans for a Liturgical Revolution?
The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Annibale Bugnini
An Unsuspected Blueprint for Revolution
Detonating the Time Bombs
Omission of the Term "Transubstantiation"
Active Participation
Instruction Overshadows Worship
Protestantism and the Mass
A Ban on Kneeling for Holy Communion
Another Destructive Time Bomb-----"Legitimate Variations"
Legalizing Abuses!
The Abolition of Latin
A Pastoral Disaster
The Mass and Sacraments Reformed by a Freemason?
Destruction of the Roman Rite and Loss of Faith
Appendix I: Participation of Protestants in the Compilation of the New Rites
Appendix II: Fruits of the Liturgical Reforms with Stark Statistics

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LITURGICAL TIME BOMBS IN VATICAN II

Plans for a Liturgical Revolution?

During the first session of the Second Vatican Council, in the debate on the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani asked: "Are these Fathers planning a revolution?" The Cardinal was old and partly blind. He spoke from the heart about a subject that moved him deeply:

Are we seeking to stir up wonder, or perhaps scandal among the Christian people, by introducing changes in so venerable a rite, that has been approved for so many centuries and is now so familiar? The rite of Holy Mass should not be treated as if it were a piece of cloth to be refashioned according to the whim of each generation. [Michael Davies, Pope John's Council (Dickinson, TX: Angelus Press, 1977), p. 93]

So concerned was the elderly Cardinal at the revolutionary potential of the Constitution, and having no prepared text, due to his very poor sight, he exceeded the ten-minute time limit for speeches. At a signal from Cardinal Alfrink, who was presiding at the session, a technician switched off the microphone, and Cardinal Ottaviani stumbled back to his seat in humiliation. The Council Fathers clapped with glee, and the journalists to whose dictatorship Father Louis Bouyer claimed that the Council had surrendered itself were even more gleeful when they wrote their reports that night, and when they wrote their books at the end of the session.

["I do not know whether, as we are told, the Council has freed us from the tyranny of the Roman Curia, but what is sure is that, willy-nilly, it has handed us over (after having first surrendered itself to the dictatorship of the journalists and particularly the most incompetent and irresponsible among them."-----L. Bouyer, The Decomposition of Catholicism (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1970), p. 3.]

While we laugh, we do not think, and had they not been laughing, at least some of the bishops may have wondered whether perhaps Cardinal Ottaviani might have had a point. He did indeed.

A liturgical revolution had been planned, and the Council's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium (CSL), was the instrument by which it was to be achieved. Very few of the 3,000 bishops present in St. Peter's would have endorsed the document had they suspected its true nature, but it would have been surprising had they done so. In his book, La Nouvelle Messe, Professor Louis Salleron remarks that far from seeing it as a means of initiating a revolution, the ordinary layman would have considered the CSL as the crowning achievement of the work of liturgical renewal that had been in progress for a hundred years. [Louis Salleron, La Nouvelle Messe (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 197?), p. 17.]



The Liturgical Movement

Let there be no mistake, there was great need and great scope for liturgical renewal within the Roman rite, but a renewal within the correct sense of the term, using the existing liturgy to its fullest potential. This was the aim of the liturgical movement initiated by Dom Prosper Guéranger and endorsed by Pope St. Pius X. It was defined by Dom Oliver Rousseau, O.S.B., as "the renewal of fervour for the liturgy among the clergy and the faithful." In his study of the Liturgical Movement, Father Didier Bonneterre writes:

In 1903 the person who was to give the movement a definite impetus had just ascended to the See of Peter, St. Pius X. Gifted with an immense pastoral experience, this saintly pope suffered terribly from the decadence of liturgical life. But he knew that a trend for renewal was developing, and he decided to do his utmost to ensure that it bring forth good fruits. That is why on November 22, 1903, he published his famous motu proprio "Tra Ie Sollecitudini," restoring Gregorian chant. In this document he inserted the vital sentence which went on to play a determining role in the evolution of the Liturgical Movement: "Our keen desire being that the true Christian spirit may once more flourish, cost what it may, and be maintained among all the faithful. We deem it necessary to provide before anything else for the sanctity and dignity of the temple, in which the faithful assemble for . . . [the purpose] of acquiring this spirit from its primary and indispensable source, which is the active participation in the most holy mysteries and the public and solemn prayer of the Church." (Tra Ie Sollecitudini, November 22, 1903). [Rev. Fr. Didier Bonneterre, The Liturgical Movement: Guéranger to Beauduin to Bugnini (Kansas City, MO: Angelus Press, 2002), p. 9.]

For St. Pius X, as for Dom Guéranger, writes Father Bonneterre, "the liturgy is essentially theocentric; it is for the worship of God rather than for the teaching of the faithful. Nevertheless, this great pastor underlined an important aspect of the liturgy: it is educative of the true Christian spirit. But let us stress that this function of the liturgy is only secondary." [Bonneterre, p. 10.] The tragedy of the Liturgical Movement was that it would make this secondary aspect of the liturgy the primary aspect, as is made manifest today in any typical parish celebration of the New Mass. Father Bonneterre has nothing but praise for the initial stages of the movement: "Born of Dom Guéranger genius and the indomitable energy of St. Pius X, the movement at this time brought magnificent fruits of spiritual renewal." [Bonneterre, p. 17.]

The Modernist heresy at the beginning of the twentieth century was driven underground by St. Pius X. [The story of the Modernist heresy is told in my book Partisans of Error (Long Prairie, Minnesota: Neumann Press, 1983). www.neumannpress.com] Father Bonneterre claims that Modernist theologians who could no longer propagate their theories in public saw in the Liturgical Movement the ideal Trojan Horse for their revolution and that, from the 1920's onward, it became clear that the Liturgical Movement had been diverted from its original admirable aims. He writes:

It was easy for all the revolutionaries to hide themselves in the belly of such a large carcass. Before Mediator Dei [Pius XII, 1947], who among the Catholic hierarchy was concerned about liturgy? What vigilance was applied to detecting this particularly subtle form of practical Modernism? [Bonneterre, p. 93.]

The early leaders of the movement were, writes Father Bonneterre, "largely overtaken by the generation of the new liturgists of the various preconciliar liturgical commissions." He describes this new generation as the "young wolves." In any revolution it is almost routine for the first moderate revolutionaries to be replaced or even eradicated by more radical revolutionaries, as was the case with the Russian Revolution when the Mensheviks (majority) were ousted by the Bolsheviks (minority). Just as nothing could prevent the rise to power of the Bolsheviks, nothing could prevent the triumph of the young wolves:

After the Second World War the movement became a force that nothing could stop. Protected from on high by eminent prelates, the new liturgists took control little by little of the Commission for Reform of the Liturgy founded by Pius XII, and influenced the reforms devised by this Commission at the end of the pontificate of Pius XII and at the beginning of that of John XXIII. Already masters, thanks to the Pope, of the preconciliar liturgical commission, the new liturgists got the Fathers of the Council to accept a self-contradictory and ambiguous document, the constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium. Pope Paul VI, Cardinal Lercaro and Fr. Bugnini, themselves very active members of the Italian Liturgical Movement, directed the efforts of the Consilium which culminated in the promulgation of the New Mass. [Bonneterre, p. 94.]

Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, chief architect of the New Rite of Mass which was composed after Vatican Council II (1962-1965) and imposed upon the Church in 1969.

In 1975 Pope Paul VI took action to remove Archbishop Bugnini from his powerful position as Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship: the Holy Father dissolved the Congregation and assigned the Archbishop to Iran. Evidence shows that the Pope did this because he believed Archbishop Bugnini to be a Freemason. Archbishop Bugnini died in Teheran in 1982. Archbishop Bugnini had described the New Rite of Mass (Novus Ordo Missae) as "a major conquest of the Catholic Church." This rite of Mass continues to be celebrated in almost every Catholic church (of the Roman Rite) in the entire world.

The most influential of the young wolves, the great architect of the Vatican II liturgical revolution, was Father Annibale Bugnini. Father Bonneterre recounts a visit by this Italian liturgist to a liturgical convention which was held at Thieulin near Chartres in the late 1940's, at which forty religious superiors and seminary rectors were present, making clear the extent of the influence of the liturgical Bolsheviks on the Church establishment in France. He cites a Father Duploye as stating:

Some days before the reunion at Thieulin, I had a visit from an Italian Lazarist, Fr. Bugnini, who had asked me to obtain an invitation for him. The Father listened very attentively, without saying a word, for four days. During our return journey to Paris, as the train was passing along the Swiss Lake at Versailles, he said to me: "I admire what you are doing, but the greatest service I can render you is never to say a word in Rome about all that I have just heard." [Bonneterre, p. 52.]

Father Bonneterre comments:

"This revealing text shows us one of the first appearances of the 'gravedigger of the Mass,' a revolutionary more clever than the others, he who killed the Catholic liturgy before disappearing from the official scene." [Ibid.]