By François Savy, for Le Salon Beige
In his article À quand la paix liturgique ? (When will there be liturgical peace?), in the July-August 2025 issue (no. 382) of La Nef, Christophe Geffroy raised a question to which the consecrations recently conferred within the Society of Saint Pius X give particular prominence. In it, he championed the equality in "value and holiness" of the two forms of the Roman rite, and reproached the "priests who refuse any celebration of the new ordo" for contesting this value and holiness "because they judge this liturgy to be 'deficient'." However, it turns out that the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith specifically mentioned the "legitimacy of the Novus Ordo Missae" in the preamble to the procedure allowing clerics of the Society of Saint Pius X to return to full communion after the consecrations.
"that it should be made abundantly clear that such priests and their respective faithful in no way share the positions of those who call in question the legitimacy and doctrinal exactitude of the Roman Missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1970, and that this position should be publicly recognized and completely free from ambiguity."
We must believe that these conditions were not so simple to fulfill, since Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre made these commitments in the protocol of agreement of May 5, 1988:
"3. Regarding certain points taught by the Second Vatican Council or concerning later reforms of the liturgy and law, and which appear to us difficult to reconcile with Tradition, we commit ourselves to have a positive attitude of study and of communication with the Apostolic See, avoiding all polemics.
Moreover, we declare that we recognize the validity of the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Sacraments celebrated with the intention of doing what the Church does, and according to the rites indicated in the typical editions of the Roman Missal and the Sacramentary Rituals promulgated by Popes Paul VI and John Paul II."
In these commitments, there is no trace of any legitimacy that would need to be recognized regarding the Novus Ordo Missae. Yet, this protocol of agreement is the foundation upon which the relationship between the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter and Rome was established from the beginning. These commitments made by Archbishop Lefebvre, and accepted in the name of the Holy Father by Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, const
What Josef Ratzinger, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, had accepted in 1988, the Holy Father Benedict XVI could not call into question. It was therefore not the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum (July 7, 2007) that would bring the question of legitimacy back to the table, but rather the instruction on the application of the motu proprio dated April 30, 2011, in its article 19:
"The faithful who ask for the celebration of the forma extraordinaria must not in any way support or belong to groups which show themselves to be against the validity or legitimacy of the Holy Mass or the Sacraments celebrated in the forma ordinaria […]."
Thus, with the instruction on the application of the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, the question of the legitimacy of the new liturgy made its return after an eclipse of 23 years. Obviously, this article 19 could not fail to arouse questions about the meaning to be given to "legitimacy", and thus questions in the form of dubia addressed to the Commission. The response of the PCED (Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei), dated May 23, 2012 (ref. Prot. 156/2009), consisted of affirming that legitimacy was to be understood as strictly equivalent to liceity. This was obviously a minimalist response and the most conciliatory solution, the one that avoided casting into outer darkness all the troublemakers of my sort who, despite all their efforts and goodwill, using their senses and their intelligence, could not bring themselves to follow the equalizing injunctions.
It was quite logical and unsurprising that the motu proprio Traditionis Custodes, taking up the question of legitimacy in its article 3, drove the point home on July 16, 2021:
The bishop, in dioceses where there are currently one or more groups that celebrate according to the Missal antecedent to the reform of 1970 […] must determine that these groups do not deny the validity and the legitimacy of the liturgical reform, dictated by Vatican Council II and the Supreme Pontiffs;
It is not attributing false motives to Pope Francis to imagine that he had in mind a much less pacifying definition of legitimacy than that of simple liceity, to which the Commission had claimed to assimilate it in 2012: the general content of the document, and its tone, reveal a much more restrictive, and paradoxically more traditional, understanding, despite its grave weaknesses—injustice of the intention that presided over its drafting, partial inapplicability resulting from its inconsistencies, and juridical irrationality (cf. Réginald-Marie Rivoire, Does 'Traditionis Custodes' Pass the Juridical Rationality Test?).
And, if he had then affirmed that the legitimacy of the Novus Ordo Missae, well beyond simple liceity, had to be judged against its alignment with the objective Common Good of the Holy Church, well, we would have been in full agreement with him, particularly regarding the Lex Credendi—he had the merit of recalling this link between the law of prayer and the law of Faith. It is just as certain that with Traditionis Custodes, recalcitrants of my kind were once again running the risk, after years of relative impunity, of being ostracized.
The 1988 protocol of agreement shows us, if it were necessary, that the two signatories, and, one imagines, John Paul II himself, either admitted at least the possibility of a deficiency in the new rite, or did not consider it improper and absurd to debate it. None of the signatories apparently saw it as an attack on the dogma of the Church's indefectibility.
That the Novus Ordo Missae presents "deficiencies in its liturgical being," to use a formula dear to a certain father from Chémeré-le-Roi, is possible to demonstrate, and reasonable to maintain. Others, much more eminent, starting with Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci (one could also profitably read this, taken from LA PENSÉE CATHOLIQUE N°122 of the 4th quarter 1969), set about doing so, and there is no need to revisit it. Let us remember the offertory, downgraded to a simple presentation of gifts, the substitution of—numerous and unequal—so-called eucharistic prayers for a sacrificial prayer (the canon), the modification of the words of consecration (words and ritual context). All these elements objectively contribute to blurring nothing less than the dogma of the Real Presence of Christ, the oblation and immolation of his redeeming (propitiatory) sacrifice, and finally the ministerial sacramental power of the priest, even insinuating an erroneous understanding of it. The consequences? The Novus Ordo Missae prepares souls less well to receive all the fruits of the divine sacrifice; it diminishes the testimony of Faith and the manifestation of the glory of God required by any liturgical action, by leaving the door open to a Protestant interpretation. Anthropocentric, focused on the presence of the faithful, it expresses less the sacrificial, propitiatory, and cultic dimensions of the Mass and the adoration of God to whom the sacrifice is offered—sticking to the case of the minister celebrating according to the typical editions. A very concrete illustration of the effects of this deficiency and equivocation was provided by an American study on the belief in the Real Presence.
Thus, to put it cautiously, it is defensible to say that the Novus Ordo contributes less powerfully and less surely than the usus antiquior or other venerable rites, such as the Dominican rite, to the Common Good of the Church (ordered to the Glory of God and the sanctification of souls). And it is equally so to say that the Novus Ordo is not the result of an organic development, but rather the product of the work of scholars and experts, the fruit of an anti-liturgical process: if one made the method of elaborating a rite a criterion of its legitimacy, the Novus Ordo would fail to pass the test. As the future Benedict XVI wrote:
"the new missal was published as a book put together by professors, not a phase in a continual growth process. Such a thing has never happened before […]" (in Theology of the Liturgy – Parole et silence, p. 556).
Having reached this point, we must face the facts: against the opinion of Christophe Geffroy, Abbé Spriet, or even Dom Pateau, it is reasonable and defensible to hold the inequality in value and holiness of the two Roman rites, the old and the new. It is reasonable and defensible to hold the Novus Ordo as deficient, and even equivocal in its liturgical being, without contesting its validity for a second—which, by pulling the thread, would lead to denying the indefectibility of the Church. It is reasonable and defensible for a priest to absolutely refuse to celebrate it—and even to concelebrate it—and to argue to that effect. Those who benefit from the canonical shelter of the specific charism of their society of apostolic life or institute of affiliation must remember that it was obtained by their founders on the theological basis of a critique of the liturgical deficiencies of the Novus Ordo; and it is reasonable and prudent for them to argue in this direction if necessary. It is reasonable and defensible for a simple lay faithful to habitually avoid attending a Novus Ordo Mass. This position is legitimate. For my part, I will hold it.
[source, in French; our translation]
