During the recent consistory, the meeting of cardinals in Rome, Cardinal Arthur Roche, Prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship, handed out a two-sided piece of paper containing some reflections on the liturgy to those present: this has been made available by Diane Montagna here. The liturgy had been among the four topics originally proposed for discussion at the meeting, but the cardinals decided to focus on just two, leaving the liturgy out. Cardinal Roche’s document was accordingly handed out without being formally discussed.
Versions were available in Italian and in English. The latter was clearly translated from the former, and not flawlessly: the Italian word sintonia, which means ‘harmony’, was rendered ‘syntony’ (para 4). It is surprising that an English Cardinal should have missed this howler, and it suggests that he didn’t write the document personally.
The argument of the text is not difficult to summarise. First, it makes historical argument that the liturgy has often developed: ‘The history of the liturgy … is the history of its continuous “reforming” in a process of organic development.’
This is linked, secondly, to the authority of the Second Vatican Council, at whose request the liturgy was reformed.
Thirdly, it repeats, with illustrations from the time of Pope Pius V, the Second Vatican Council, Pope Benedict, and Pope Francis, the claim that liturgical unity is necessary for the unity of the Church.
As a contribution to the debate sparked by Pope Francis’ Apostolic Letter restricting the Traditional Mass, Traditionis custodes, this represents a doubling-down rather than an attempt to engage with critics.
The central point of the argument is third point one above: as the text quotes Pope Francis, ‘For this reason I wrote Traditionis custodes, so that the Church may lift up, in a variety of so many languages, one and the same prayer capable of expressing her unity.’ The words ‘one and the same prayer’ are taken from Pope Paul VI’s Apostolic Constitution Missale Romanum (1969).
This claim has consistently been met with the question of the legitimate diversity of rites in the Church. What of the Eastern Rites? What of the different Western rites reformed after Vatican II, such as the Ambrosian, Carthusian, and Mozarabic Rites? What of more recent liturgical forms, such as the Ordinariate Use, the Congolese Rite, and the new usage approved as recently as 2024 for use by a group of indigenous people a single diocese in Mexico?
In the quoted text Pope Francis implies that the Traditional Mass impedes in some way that possibility of lifting up one and the same prayer throughout the Church. At a literal level one can see why this might be so. But if there is an explanation for why this is true of this Rite and not true of all the others, we are not given it in this text.
It is not, in fact, surprising that the post-Vatican II Church has tolerated a variety of religious rites and usages, since the Council taught that these do not, in fact, compromise the unity of the Church. It called upon the Eastern Churches in communion with the Holy See to ‘return to their ancestral traditions’: in other words, they should put into reverse the process of ‘Latinisation’ which had seen a gradual convergence of their rites with those of the West (Orientalium Ecclesiarum, 6). As for the West itself, Sacrosanctum Concilium insists that ‘the Church has no wish to impose a rigid uniformity’ (37).
If Pope Paul VI’s words about a ‘one and the same prayer’ seem odd in this context, it is because they have been both mistranslated and taken out of context. The translation of the Apostolic Constitution on the Vatican website gives the more accurate ‘one unique prayer’ (una eademque cunctorum precatio). Since Latin had been defended by some as a guarantee of unity, Pope Paul is pointing out that despite the different languages henceforth to be used, the Mass is still the Mass: it is one unique prayer that unites the Church in spite of liturgical variety. He is saying the precise opposite, in fact, of what he is presented as saying in Pope Francis’ quotation of him.
The slight of hand employed to make this argument work has parallels with the other stages of the argument. We are told that the reform of Vatican II had a precedent in the ‘partial reform’ of the Council of Trent, and even in earlier ‘the Franco-German reforms’ and other cases, but in none of these examples was there a whole-sale re-writing of liturgical texts. Instead, in these ‘reforms’ texts found in one old missal were given priority over versions found in other missals which were regarded as less reliable.
Similarly, the argument that the authority of the Second Vatican Council guarantees the output of the liturgical reformers ignores the fact that the Council didn’t mandate all the things the reformers did: such a thing would, of course, have been impracticable. There is also the awkward fact that the reformers actually flouted some of the principles set down by the Council in Sacrosanctum Concilium. The most famous instance is paragraph 36.1: ‘the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites’. Paragraph 23 is even more devastating, however: ‘there must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them’. It is one of the ironies of history that the Council Fathers added the word ‘certainly,’ certa, into an earlier version of this paragraph, attempting to restrain a process which was quickly to get seriously out of control.
Cardinal Roche’s text does not attempt to answer the objections raised by critics of Traditionis custodes. This text is not an attempt to enter into a debate, but as it were to ward off the debate just by insisting on a historical and theological story that would support the suppression of the Traditional Mass. On those cardinals, probably the great majority, who don’t know very much about the history of the liturgy, this may well have the intended effect. We must hope that before the cardinals offer their advice on this subject to Pope Leo, they have the chance to hear a full response.
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