Winning Back The Liturgical Movement

 

To My Readers: Merry Christmas and a Happy, Holy New Year to you all! The year 2023 will end with this post by Joanna From Poland. It's been awhile since she has done one of her incredible guest posts, and I'm so happy that I get to publish this as 2023 draws to a close. This post is an extremely well-researched look into the Liturgical Movement.  I'm sure you will enjoy it as much as I did. My thanks and gratitude to Joanna From Poland, for having given me the gift of some much needed time off from research and writing during December as the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ approaches.

Feel free to leave comments for Joanna From Poland. If you have a specific comment or question for me, I will respond as always, but it will take me a bit longer to reply this week.

God bless you all, my dear readers---Introibo

Winning Back The Liturgical Movement

By Joanna From Poland

The phrase liturgical movement tends to elicit a knee-jerk reaction among Traditionalists. The Holy Week reform promulgated by Pope Pius XII in 1955 is a bone of contention both among Traditionalist and semi-Traditionalist clergy and laity. Obviously, no question of liturgical discipline can be resolved authoritatively with the Chair of Peter being vacant. Disputes among Catholics (and those who believe themselves to be Catholic) are a sad but inevitable consequence of a lack of a true Pope. Nevertheless, Traditionalist should learn to “agree to disagree” charitably on those issues which do not pertain to the teaching of the Church (which is infallible both in solemn pronouncements as well as in her ordinary universal magisterium). 

No Traditionalist can dispense himself or herself from the duty to educate oneself on the roots of the crisis in the Church. The enemies of the Catholic religion have always benefited from the ignorance and passivity of Catholics. The Liturgical Movement, hijacked by Modernists, which gained impetus in the direction of crass error especially after World War II, is a prime example of a hostile takeover facilitated by the determination of the enemies of Christ and the indifference of those who belonged to His Mystical Body. 

Modernists dare to arrogate to themselves the fully orthodox liturgical work of Dom Prosper Guéranger, presenting him as the founder and his research as the cornerstone of their liturgical subversion that eventually resulted in the abominable Novus Ordo service promulgated by Montini on April 3, 1969. In this post I would like to give you the unadulterated profile of Dom Guéranger and his outlook on the liturgy so you may be better equipped to refute the lies peddled by Modernists – the progeny of the anti-liturgical heresy so fiercely fought by the renowned Benedictine of Solesmes.

True Champion of Liturgical Renewal

Dom Prosper Louis Pascal Guéranger (1805-1875) belonged to the generation of clergymen who found themselves thirsting after liturgical piety in a land ravaged by anti-Catholic and anti-Roman forces. The illustrious founder of the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes, France and restorer of monastic life under the ancient Rule of St. Benedict in post-Revolutionary France was devoted to instill in his young Benedictine community “an absolute devotion to the Church and the Pope”. The Catholic Encyclopedia (1910) thus characterizes this tireless lover of the liturgy and loyal son of the Church:

Being a devout and ardent servant of the Church, Dom Guéranger wished to re-establish more respectful and more filial relations between France and the See of Rome, and his entire life was spent in endeavoring to effect a closer union between the two. With this end in view he set himself to combat, wherever he thought he found its traces, the separatist spirit that had, of old, allied itself with Gallicanism and Jansenism. With a strategic skill which deserves special recognition, Dom Guéranger worked on the principle that to suppress what is wrong, the thing must be replaced, and he labored hard to supplant everywhere whatever reflected the opinion he was fighting. He fought to have the Roman liturgy substituted for the diocesan liturgies, and he live to see his efforts in this line crowned with complete success. 

On philosophical ground, he struggled with unwavering hope against Naturalism and Liberalism, which he considered a fatal impediment to the constitution of an unreservedly Christian society. He helped, in a measure, to prepare men’s minds for the definition of the papal infallibility, that brilliant triumph which succeeded the struggle against papal authority so bitterly carried on a century previously by many Gallican and Josephite bishops [Joseph II, German emperor from 1765 to 1790, inspired by the so-called Enlightenment, adopted a Gallican-based policy of limiting ecclesial freedom in his land in favor of the intervention of the State in the affairs of the Church]. (…) 

In 1841 [ten years after he embarked on his great work of re-introducing the traditional monastic life to his native France at Solesmes – annotation mine] he began to publish a mystical work by which he hoped to arouse the faithful from their spiritual torpor and to supplant what he deemed the lifeless or erroneous literature that had been produced by the French spiritual writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. L’Année liturgique [French for The Liturgical Year], of which the author was not to finish the long series of fifteen volumes, is probably the one of all Dom Guéranger’s works that best fulfilled the purpose he had in view. Accommodating himself to the development of the liturgical periods of the year, the author labored to familiarize the faithful with the official prayer of the Church by lavishly introducing fragments of the Eastern and Western liturgies, with interpretations and commentaries.

The liturgical landscape in France and other European countries prior to the groundbreaking work begun by Dom Guéranger truly was a spiritual wasteland in which the errors of Jansenism, Gallicanism, and Quietism had wreaked great havoc. 

Fr. Didier Bonneterre SSPX* (died in 2009), author of The Liturgical Movement. From Dom Guéranger to Annibale Bugnini (published originally in French in 1980), one of the first priests to be ordained for the Society by Abp. Lefebvre in 1977, writes:

In the eighteenth century, the liturgy had ceased to be a vital force in Catholicism. The liturgy, so admirably restored by St. Pius V, had suffered the repeated assaults of Jansenism and Quietism. The disciples of Jansenius had led the faithful away from the practice of the sacraments. The Quietists, who had claimed to reach God directly, had turned souls away from the liturgy, which is the intermediary determined by the Church between God and ourselves. This was the period when triumphant Gallicanism was composing its diocesan liturgies, which resembled one another only in their anti-Roman character. In Germany, Febronius, Auxiliary Bishop of Treves, was spreading his ideas; in Italy there was the work of Ricci, Bishop of Pistoia – condemned with his council by Pope Pius VI in the bull Auctorem Fidei on August 28, 1794.

The whole of Europe therefore was floundering in the “anti-liturgical heresy” when the revolution broke out in France. The cult of Catholicism was forbidden, and replaced by that of the goddess of Reason. The Concordat of 1801 restored hope – but only trials for the liturgy! The people had lost the taste for it, the clergy themselves did not like these ceremonies that they no longer really understood, all the more so as the restoration of Catholicism [in France after the Masonic French Revolution] had brought back the many Gallican liturgies. 

But the hope of a real restoration remained possible. Already Chateaubriand, with his works The Genius of Christianity and The Martyrs, had revealed to the French of that time all the marvels of the liturgy of the Middle Ages. A new generation of young people was incited to pore over the manuscripts of antiquity and to discover there ceremonies of which the fragmented liturgies of the time could give no exact idea.

*Please note that while Fr. Bonneterre is correct in his description of the liturgical climate in Europe some three hundred years ago, his book obviously favors the false R&R theology espoused by the SSPX, ironically Gallican in its principles, as the SSPX have consistently undermined the prerogatives of those whom they recognize as “Popes." I do not endorse this book as a whole nor do I support any of the R&R ideas contained in it. ---Joanna From Poland

Principles of True Liturgical Revival

At a remarkably young age of twenty-five, Dom Guéranger already set forward the aim of his liturgical activity in his Considerations on the Catholic Liturgy: first of all, to equip the clergy with the understanding of and devotion to the liturgy of Rome. Secondly, he sought to “unite the faithful with the hierarchy when it celebrates the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, administers the sacraments, and celebrates the Divine Office." To achieve the former, Dom Guéranger published The Liturgical Institutions, “a closely argued attack on the neo-Gallican liturgies and a wonderful demonstration of the antiquity and the beauties of the Roman liturgy." To achieve the latter, he devoted his most famous multi-volume work, The Liturgical Year, addressed specifically to the laity. 

Dom Guéranger and his Benedictine community at Solesmes also managed to restore to its original beauty the inalienable part of the Roman liturgy, namely the Gregorian chant. The Catholic Encyclopedia (1912) writes that the Abbot:

 set himself the task of resuscitating sound liturgical traditions in France at a time when such were at their lowest ebb. He revived the accent and rhythm of plainsong [per Catholic Encyclopedia, plain chant is ‘the church music of the early Middle Ages, before the advent of polyphony (...) which remained the exclusive music of the Church till the ninth century, when polyphony made its first modest appearance’] which had been lost, and in restoring the true text of the chant he laid down the principle, which has since been always strictly adhered to, that when various manuscripts of different periods and places agreed on a version, there existed the most correct text. (…) The labors of the Solesmes fathers received the highest possible recognition in 1904, when Pope Pius X (Motu Proprio, 25 April, 1904) entrusted particularly to the monks of the French Congregation and to the monastery of Solesmes the work of preparing an official Vatican edition of the Church’s Chant (…).

Anti-Liturgical Heresy According to Dom Guéranger

Institutions liturgiques written by Dom Guéranger is probably the most comprehensive exposition of the history of Catholic liturgy by an author of undisputed orthodoxy. Unfortunately, this masterpiece has never been translated into English in its entirety. There is, however, an excerpt of vital importance to Traditionalists today that has been made available on the Internet in English. The excerpt is taken from Vol. 1, Chapter XIV: Anti-liturgical heresy and the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century considered in its relation to the liturgy. The original work in French has been digitalized and is available in a convenient HTML format under this link: https://www.bibliotheque-monastique.ch/bibliotheque/bibliotheque/gueranger/institutions/volume01/volume0114.htm#_Toc126113301.

Dom Guéranger lists eleven precepts of what he fittingly calls the anti-liturgical heresy which have been employed throughout centuries by impious innovators rebelling against the authority of Rome:

1. Hatred of Tradition as found in the formulas used in Divine worship, exemplified by Luther and his detestation of everything in the liturgy which does not derive exclusively from Holy Scripture.

2. Substitution of formulas of ecclesiastical origin with scriptural readings.

3. Fabrication and introduction of new formulas to be used in divine worship.

4. Habitual contradiction of the very principles devised by anti-liturgical sectarians, demonstrated in their initial attempt to vindicate the rights of antiquity but leading them to concoct completely novel formulas.

5. Expulsion of all the liturgical ceremonies and formulas expressing mysteries.

6. Suppression of the mystical element in the liturgy which eradicates the spirit of piety among the clergy and lay people.

7. Rejection of the need for intermediaries between God and man (Our Lady and the Saints) under the pretense of giving greater and sole worship due to God.

8. Vindication of the use of the vernacular language in the liturgy (stemming from the abolition of any liturgical actions and formulas favoring the sense of mystery).

9. Abolition of disciplinary rules imposed on the clergy and laity (the Divine Office, fast and abstinence, genuflections, and other external acts of devotion) aiming at diminishing the sum of public and private prayers.

10. Instilling disdain for the Papacy and Rome as the center of authority in the Church into the minds of the faithful.

11. Destruction in fact and in principle of the notion of (sacrificial) priesthood.

Source: http://catholicapologetics.info/modernproblems/newmass/antigy.htm

The fact that the above-mentioned rules employed by Protestant deformers in the destruction of the lex orandi were at work in the Vatican II sect has been confirmed by none other than a Modernist theologian and a liturgical butcher in one of his candid moments. Louis Bouyer (1913-2004), a Lutheran minister received into the Catholic Church in 1944, co-founder of the “conservative” Modernist theological journal Communio (along with Ratzinger and Urs von Balthasar among others), and one of the key figures in the liturgical mayhem of Vatican II.

Bouyer seems to have earned the reputation of a “good” Modernist among semi-trads due to his criticism of the direction taken by the Vatican II sect in the early post-conciliar years (Bouyer penned The Decompostion of Catholicism [sic!] in 1969). He would also voice his criticism of Annibale Bugnini. Nevertheless, beware of Greeks bearing gifts. A conservative Modernist is still a Modernist. He may lure you with his nostalgic sentiment for “tradition” only to make the new religion palatable enough for us to remain in it.

The following excerpt – Bouyer’s own recollection of his involvement in the post-Vatican II liturgical deform – is taken from The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer: From Youth and Conversion to Vatican II, the Liturgical Reform, and After published in 2015 by Angelico Press (pp. 123-124) [emphasis in the text below is mine]:

What shall I say, after that, about my collaboration, at first, in the Consilium for the reform of the liturgical books, which, after the publication of my Eucharistie and called by Paul VI, I could not evade? I would not like to be too hard on that commission. (…) Unfortunately, on the other hand, a fatal error of judgment placed the theoretical direction of this committee in the hands of a generous and courageous but poorly educated man, Cardinal Lercaro. He was completely incapable of standing up to the maneuvers of the smooth-talking villain, the Neapolitan Vincentian Bugnini, who was not long in proving to be as devoid of culture as he was of simple honesty. Even without that, there was no hope of producing anything of much more value than what could be produced when one was claiming to remake comprehensively in a few months an entire liturgy that took twenty centuries to develop gradually. 

Called specifically to the subcommission charged with the Missal, I was petrified, when I arrived, to discover the plans of a preparatory subcommission (…) in the belief that they would thereby obviate the custom coming from Holland of having Eucharists improvised in a total misunderstanding of the liturgical tradition going back to Christian origins. I cannot succeed in understanding by what aberration these excellent gentlemen, rather good historians and generally reasonable minds, could have made the equally disconcerting suggestion that the Roman Canon should be dismembered and reconstructed and formed other plans supposedly ‘inspired’ by Hippolytus of Rome but scarcely less harebrained. (…)

Ultimately the Roman Canon was more or less respected, and we managed to produce three Eucharistic Prayers that, in spite of quite wordy intercessions, retrieve pieces of great antiquity and unrivalled theological and euchological [referring to the Church’s liturgical books] richness, out of use since the disappearance of the ancient Gallican rites. I am thinking of the anamnesis of the third Eucharistic Prayer and also of what we were able to salvage of a rather successful attempt to adapt a series of phrases from the ancient so-called prayer of Saint James to the Roman scheme (…).

But, although there was talk of simplifying the liturgy and of returning it to the primitive models, what can be said of that actus poenitentialis inspired by Father Jungmann (who was an excellent historian of the Roman Missal . . . but who had never celebrated a solemn Mass in his life!)? The worst thing was an incredible offertory in the Catholic Action, sentimental-workerist style, the work of Father Cellier, who manipulated the despicable Bugnini with arguments tailored to his range of understanding so as to get his production passed despite nearly unanimous opposition.

Some idea will be given of the deplorable conditions in which this hasty reform was dispatched when I describe how the second Eucharistic Prayer was strung together. Between the indiscriminately archeologizing fanatics who wanted to banish the Sanctus and the intercessions from the Eucharistic Prayer by taking Hippolytus’ Eucharist at it is and others who did not care at all about his alleged Apostolic Tradition but who wanted only some slipshod Mass, Dom Botte and I were to take charge of piecing together its text so as to work in those elements that were certainly more ancient – for the next day!

By chance I discovered in a text, if not by Hippolytus himself then assuredly in his style, a felicitous phrase on the Holy Spirit that could form a transition of the Vere Sanctus type to the brief epiclesis. Botte, for his part, made up an intercession more worthy of Paul Reboux and his ‘in the manner of’ [Reboux was a French writer and humorist, author of literary pastiches of some of the most famous contemporary authors, published under the title In the manner of… ) than of his own knowledge. But I cannot reread that improbable composition without thinking again of the terrace of the Trastevere café where we put the finishing touches on our chore in order to be able to present ourselves with it at the Bronze Gate at the hour appointed by our schoolmasters!

I prefer to say nothing or virtually nothing about the new calendar, the work of a trio of maniacs, suppressing Septuagesima and the octave of Pentecost without any serious reason and tossing three-quarters of the saints out who knows where, on the basis of their own ideas! Since these three fanatics obstinately refused to change anything in their work and since the pope [Montini] wanted to finish it quickly so as not to let chaos spread, their project was accepted, as outrageous as it was!

The only element not open to criticism in this new Missal was the enrichment provided above all by the resurrection of a good number of magnificent prefaces recovered from ancient sacramentaries and the expansion of the biblical readings (…). I will pass over the number of ancient prayers for penitential seasons . . . that we were obliged to mutilate so as to empty them as much as possible . . . precisely of anything penitential!

The Modernist myth of “restoring the liturgical riches of antiquity” has already been debunked masterfully by Fr. Anthony Cekada (R.I.P.) in The Work of Human Hands: A Theological Critique of The Mass of Paul VI. Videos chapter overviews made by Fr. Cekada are available for viewing here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDA085477E90AC096.

The so-called Eucharistic Prayer II, that “improbable composition” rustled up over some pizza at an Italian diner by two Modernists in a rush, has become the law of praying and, consequently, of believing for those trapped in the Novus Ordo religion for the last fifty years. I can attest to the fact that this horrible concoction was used most of the time I attended the Novus Ordo service and was stuck in my mind to such a degree that when some young “priest” dared to say the Modernist-botched Roman Canon (Eucharistic Prayer I), I felt uneasy, confused, and… bored (and so was the rest of the congregation). 

Conclusion

One of the most favorite stratagems employed by Modernists to justify their glaringly obvious rupture with Catholic doctrine and discipline is to find an apparent precedent to their actions. Their deviousness would surely fail if only Catholics knew enough Church history to expose their thinly-veiled lies. Remember the goals set forward by Dom Guéranger that were to guide the true liturgical movement which he set in motion. Firstly, to give the clergy a thorough knowledge and admiration of the liturgy handed down by centuries of Catholicism, NOT to invent novel forms of worship in the name of going back to uncorrupted primitive Christianity (the alleged corruptive forces being the medieval hierarchy). 

Secondly, to unite the minds and hearts of the lay people to the mind and heart of the priest offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in persona Christi (in the person of Christ) for validity and in persona Ecclesiae (in the person of the Church) for efficacy, NOT to empower the laity with the exaggerated notion of the “priesthood of all believers”, thus instilling in them the false idea that it is the community that celebrates while the priest is reduced to a role of presider/entertainer/commentator/moderator (cross out the redundant word). 

Dom Guéranger sought to restore the liturgical treasures of the Middle Ages; the Modernists see in that glorious era of Christendom a corruption of the purity of primitive Christianity brought about by the marriage of the altar and the throne and the rise of clericalism in the form of Catholic hierarchy. The liturgical movement infiltrated by Modernists, culminating in Vatican II and the Novus Ordo service of Montini is the actual antithesis of the true liturgical movement begun by Dom Guéranger.