Liturgical Time Bombs
in Vatican II: Excerpts
The Destruction of Catholic Faith
Through Changes in Catholic Worship
by Michael Davies
TAN BOOKS
Published on the Web with Permission of the Author.
"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
Appendix III: The Right of Any Priest
of the Roman Rite to Offer Mass
According to the 1962 Missal
Liturgical Hell: Book Cover Image
Our Image Plain and Where to
Purchase
the Holy Card
[with Fatima Angel's Prayer on
Reverse Side]
LITURGICAL TIME BOMBS IN VATICAN II
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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. www.angeluspress.org]
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.]
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.]
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.
