Can a document based on falsehoods have juridical standing? Can a doubtful law bind?

Given Its Foundational Falsehoods, Does Traditionis Custodes Lack Juridical Standing?

Peter A. Kwasniewski

ARTICLE 1 of the motu proprio Traditionis Custodes reads: “The liturgical books promulgated by Saint Paul VI and Saint John Paul II, in conformity with the decrees of Vatican Council II, are the unique expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite.”

The pope here claims that the Novus Ordo is the only law of prayer for the Roman Rite. It is impossible to see how this is compatible with the history of the Church and with her reverence for the venerable rites of antiquity and the Middle Ages, epitomized in the Missale Romanum of 1570 and its subsequent integral editions. They, too, are the lex orandi and cannot be otherwise. Instead, the motu proprio fumblingly makes “lex orandi” do duty as a juridical, canonical term, able to be applied ad libitum, as if it were an extrinsic label. In reality, the lex orandi is the whole complex of historical prayer texts, ceremonies, and music that make up the Roman Rite.

The only way to sustain the fiction of Article 1 is to claim that there is so great a continuity between the old missal and the new missal that the new one is simply an updated version of the old one—that the Novus Ordo is substantially the same as the traditional Roman Rite that preceded it is. Francis’s letter to the bishops makes just this move:

It must therefore be considered that the Roman Rite, adapted several times over the centuries to the needs of the times, has not only been preserved but also renewed “in faithful obedience to Tradition.” Those who wish to celebrate with devotion according to the previous liturgical form will not find it difficult to find in the Roman Missal, reformed according to the mind of the Second Vatican Council, all the elements of the Roman Rite, especially the Roman Canon, which is one of its most characteristic features.

One can only stare in amazement at the flagrant falsehood of this pair of sentences.

“The right to celebrate the perennial Mass of the Roman Church is based on immemorial tradition and not on legal positivism” — Homily by Traditional Catholic Priest

A recently-ordained priest's first Mass

Rorate Caeli has been given a copy of a homily preached this past Sunday, the Seventh after Pentecost, by a traditional priest serving in a major metropolitan parish, with whose permission we publish it for the benefit of our readers as we prepare to return to the bunkers and trenches of the 1970s.

Everyone knows that the centrepiece of the Catholic religion is the holy Mass. The Mass is a proper sacrifice in which the true Body and Blood of the Lord are offered to God under the outward appearances of bread and wine through the ministry of an ordained priest. The holy Mass renews—you could say it prolongs and perpetuates—the sacrifice Our Lord offered once and for all on the cross. In fact, it is the self-same sacrifice; only the outward manner of the offering differs.

 

This holy sacrifice, moreover, does not exist in a void but it is encased in a sublime sequence of prayers and ceremonies called the rite or the liturgy of the Mass. The ancient axiom of the Church Fathers lex orandi, lex credendi—“the law of praying is the law of believing”—reminds us that our liturgical prayers must be an accurate expression of our faith and must inculcate true reverence for God. That is why, especially at the time of the Protestant Reformation, the faith of the people was changed precisely by disrupting the ancient forms of Catholic worship. For example, John Calvin, a radical reformer who denied the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Eucharist, once wrote, “God has given us a table at which to feast, not an altar on which to offer sacrifice” (Institutes; IV, xviii, 12, col. 1059), and so by removing the old high altars and replacing them with a common table, the faith of the people in the sacrifice of the Mass was undermined and soon destroyed.

 

I mention these things because today [July 11] falls right between two important anniversaries related to the sacred liturgy: the papal letter Summorum pontificum from Pope Benedict XVI on July 7, 2007 and the papal bull Quo primum from Pope Saint Pius V on July 14, 1570. The Council of Trent had met from 1545 to 1563 to address the challenges of the Protestant Reformation, above all by clearly defining the Catholic dogmas denied by the heretics [1] and by promoting sound reforms in the life of the Church to root out the abuses which had first sparked the Reformation—things like the poor training and immorality of some of the clergy and the shoddy manner of celebrating Mass in many places.

 

“Two ‘Forms’ of the Roman Rite: Liturgical Fact or Canonical Fiat?” — Full Text of Dr. Kwasniewski’s Norwalk Lecture

In June 2017, I gave a lecture at St. Mary’s in Norwalk, Connecticut, on the intellectual and historical incoherence of the notion of “two (equal) forms” of the Roman Rite. Given the rapid progress that has been made in liturgical discussions over the past three years, with many more people now attending the traditional Latin Mass and seeing for themselves the truth of Mosebach’s words—“No one who has eyes and ears will be persuaded to ignore what his own senses tell him: these two forms are so different that their theoretical unity appears entirely unreal”—I have decided to make the transcript of the lecture available, and have chosen this date, September 14, for the symbolic reasons one might infer. The text below has been rewritten for its inclusion as a chapter in a forthcoming book with the tentative title: “Pass on Real Gold, Not Counterfeit”: The Immemorial Roman Mass and Fifty Years of Rupture, which I hope will appear from Arouca Press in 2020.

Two “Forms” of the Roman Rite: Liturgical Fact or Canonical Fiat?

Peter A. Kwasniewski

Every Catholic in the world—where he knows it or not—is indebted to Pope Benedict XVI for “liberating” the traditional Latin Mass with the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. We may grumble about various things Pope Benedict did not do that we feel he ought to have done, but we must never fail to be grateful for the courageous steps he took, in matters in which nearly the entire hierarchy of the Church stood opposed to him. It was deeply against his nature to impose anything that would not be welcomed by at least a large number, and in this act he stood nearly alone. The motu proprio has caused innumerable flowers to flourish, countless fruits to be harvested. In this lecture, I come neither to praise nor to bury Pope Benedict, but rather, to examine an operative assumption in the motu proprio: that Paul VI’s Missale Romanum of 1969 (the “Novus Ordo”) is, or belongs to, the same rite as the Missale Romanum last codified in 1962, or, more plainly, that the Novus Ordo can be called “the Roman rite” of the Mass. This, I shall argue, cannot withstand critical scrutiny. Although I will be referring primarily to the Roman missal and the Mass, my argument would apply, mutatis mutandis, to the rites of the other sacraments, to blessings and rituals, and to the Divine Office and its substitute, the Liturgy of the Hours.

Rorate Exclusive: Letter Exchange between Msgr. Eugene Clark and Neil McCaffrey in 1977 on the Old Mass

[Rorate thanks Roger McCaffrey for sharing with us these letters from his father's archives from January 1977 and for providing the following introduction.]

The letters below are part of an epistolary exchange between Neil McCaffrey, Jr. and one of his oldest friends from minor-seminary days in New York, Msgr. Eugene Clark, both protégés of Msgr. Florence Cohalan, noted New York archdiocesan historian and pastor. Both men rather quickly succeeded in their chosen paths, Neil as an executive at Doubleday and Macmillan publishers before founding his own companies; Gene Clark as secretary to Cardinal Spellman and then communications director and aide de camp for Cardinal Cooke. Vatican II liturgical changes were embraced by neither man at first, but Clark eventually took up the party line, and the two old friends quarreled, eventually committing their thoughts to a letter exchange that had several back-and-forths, of which we publish below a pair. The reference to The Wanderer was to the way that newspaper leveled criticism at traditional Mass partisans like Michael Davies while not, McCaffrey complained, giving equal time for responses. The full exchange between Neil and Msgr. Clark will be published in the next print edition of The Traditionalist magazine, in Spring 2017. For the current edition of The Traditionalist, visit BooksForCatholics.com. -- Roger McCaffrey

January 19, 1977

Dear Neil:

Back to the question of Pope Pius V and the Tridentine Mass.