www.byzcath.org Forums News & Events Church News Fr Robert Taft says a history lesson is needed

Opponents of the modern liturgy could use a history lesson, says this scholar of the church's prayer. Overall, the liturgical reform has been a great success.
If any scholar could claim a ring-side seat to the liturgical reform of the 20th century, it would have to be Father Robert Taft, S.J. Taft recalls being surprised when he arrived in Europe in 1964 to see liturgical change already well underway. "Worker priests in Western Europe were celebrating the liturgy in the vernacular because it was the only way to come into contact with the de-Christianized workers there," he says. "The notion of celebrating the liturgy for them in Latin was simply absurd.".........

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Mass instruction is needed [uscatholic.org]

Vernacular wasn't the big problem, I think.

Changing the whole darn liturgy was - and is.

I would have loved to experience a Tridentine Liturgy in English - and translation wasn't a problem as the missal had one side in Latin, one in English already.

I agree with Father John. I've offered my two cents on this numerous times. I would have simply taken the texts from the 'altar server' and given them back to the people, and then slowly move to the vernacular while keeping Latin as a standard. Using both Gregorian chant and allowing new, simpler chant to develop naturally. Let's not forget that because of he radicalness of the change up to 1/3 of Latin Catholics walked away, with many of them never really returning except as "Christmas and Easter Catholics". [See this link [rorate-caeli.blogspot.com].]

Father John and John:

They wouldn't even have had to go too far to get the whole liturgical cycle in English. I met an Anglican priest in the mid-1960s who used the Anglican Missal: an English translation of the entire Latin Missal used by Rome until 1962 when Pope John XXIII of blessed memory issued the last minor reforms to it. I had a chance to borrow one some years ago and it was almost laid out in the exact way--page by page--that the Latin altar missal was arranged. It was in 1928 English and the "thees" and thous" might have needed to be updated, but there it was page by page and feast by feast.

It's only since the liturgical terrorists--sorry, my poor opinion--began to work together across Church and eccelsial communities that this particular gem has been banned in the Anglican Church (so I'm told by my friend, now retired).

Oh well . . .

BOB

Even I would be totally fine with the Traditional Rites (not just the Holy Mass) (primarily) in English. The sense of the sacred, and respect to our Tradition, would still be intact.

From all the numbers I've ever seen, the liturgical "reform" has been a miserable failure.

Alexis

This is where I have strong disagreement with Fr. Taft. He thinks the whole Bugnini-engineered reform in the West was wonderful, and has stated his support for Bishop Donald Trautman of Erie,Pa., with his penchant for "inclusive" language in the Liturgy (one priest, a well known poster on this forum, has referred to the latter bishop as "Traut-person" )

Dn. Robert

P.S.

The late Monsignor William Smith, who was chairman of the Moral Theology Dept., and Academic Dean at St. Joseph's Seminary in Dunwoodie, NY (RC Archdiocese of New York), once stated in a speech which I attended, that the only thing Catholic about U.S. Catholic is the name!

Dn. Robert

God save us from the reformers.

I'll quote Father Taft on this one. "This is what is known in the vernacular as slander." Your remarks and the respondents above are unfounded. The liturgical reform was not engineered by Bugnini, but came as the result of many years of liturgical scholarship. It has been embraced by the Bishops of Rome since Pope Paul VI and has been enthusiastically embraced by the vast majority of bishops of the Latin church, not to mention millions of faithful for over forty years. The fact is, as Father Taft notes, the reforms and the council that spawned them have been received by the Latin church. Is not that the mark of acceptance? No apologies needed. People leave the Church for many reasons, as once did I. I left from the weakness of my faith, and I suspect so do most. Liturgical abuse is another issue, but on this one good Father Taft is absolutely correct.

A number of people, among whom would be the liturgist Msgr Klaus Gamber, beg to disagree. Monsignor Gamber's book is extremely well documented, and, as we say in my business, "you can't argue with actuals". One of those actuals was the Ordo Paulus VI was developed largely in secret by what has been described as "conclaves of experts" (within which Bugnini was one of the leading forces), without much regard for the opinion of the wider Church.

As for the reception of the bishops being some sort of good housekeeping seal of approval, I recommend reading Sacrosanctum concilium on the liturgical duties and obligations of the bishop, which are spelled out in painful detail. Why was that necessary? Because the bishops were disregarding their duties and shirking their obligations. It is an unpleasant truth that prior to Vatican II, the study of liturgy was actively discouraged in the Latin Church, and those who did so were generally regarded as peculiar people not to be trusted.

The bishops of the Latin Church, therefore, generally had one thing in common: their abysmal ignorance of liturgy, liturgical history, liturgical development and liturgical theology. Which makes it all the more ironic that one should hail the acceptance of the product of the conclaves of experts by men utterly unqualified to judge their work as the benchmark of success.

It's significant, I think, that many of the surviving members of the liturgical movement ended up denouncing what was done in their name. Liturgical malpractice at best, fraud at worst.

Bugnini was the author of the Novus Ordo Missae. The late Michael Davies, a Welshman and a convert from Anglicanism closely associated with the Traditionalist movement in the Roman Church, wrote an excellent trilogy on the liturgical "Reform" in the West (Cranmer's Godly Order, Pope John's Council, and Pope Paul�s New Mass). In these books, he documents quite thoroughly, that if you remove everything from the Old Rite that is objectionable theologically to Protestants, what you are left with is the Novus Ordo Missae. Per Mr. Davies, the Novus Ordo was Bugnini's "baby". He may have ingested a lot of the ideas which were floating around at the time, but, per Mr. Davies, he, with the input of Protestant consultants, put together the text. When the text of the Novus Ordo was first presented for review by certain members of the Papal curia, including the late Cardinal Ottaviani (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), it was found to be seriously lacking. I refer you to the text of the "Ottaviani Intervention" for these criticisms. Despite the serious criticisms of the Novus Ordo text, both for what was removed, and for its ambiguities, it was promulgated by Pope Paul VI. When it was promulgated, Bugnini was heard to boast "we have conquered the Roman Church". Later on, per Mr. Davies, an Italian writer by the name of Tito Casini went to Paul VI with pictoral evidence of Bugnini's membership in Freemasonry. Subsequently, Bugnini was stripped of his role as head of the Congregation for Divine Worship, and given the post of Nuncio to Iran. While Paul VI promulgated the Novus Ordo, he never abrogated the Old Rite (this assertion of mine was recently confirmed by Pope Benedict XVI), now known as the "Extraordinary Form", although many bishops acted as if it had been abrogated. I am formerly of the Latin Rite. IMHO, the Roman Rite would have been better off if they had simply translated the Mass of Tradition into vernacular languages (without inclusive language, please). As to the accusation of "slander", Mr. Davies was very meticulous about "getting the story right". Having met him on numerous occassions, I can affirm that he would never have said what he did if he could not back it up.

Dn. Robert

Deacon, that's hogwash. The Novus Ordo, whatever it's source, has been embraced by the vast majority in the Latin church including the present Holy Father. It is the Ordinary form of worship in the Latin church and the people love and comprehend it. I'm
confident it will organically develop, with love and devotion, become more beautiful, and flourish. Enough said.

Are you really an historian? The popes, the bishops of the Latin church, Father Taft and I, your humble servant, are all fools then.

"Everybody's doing it" doesn't seem like much of an argument. After all, wasn't that the defense of the Tridentine Rite back in 1965? Was it sufficient then? If not, why would it be sufficient now?

In any case, even Pope Benedict has leveled some fairly strong criticism of the Novus Ordo, going so far as to write a book about it. It was clear, back in the 1960s, that there were serious problems with the Tridentine rite, a product of its formulation in the midst of the counter-reformation and codification of a set of medieval deformations of the patristic understanding of liturgy. Similarly, the Novus Ordo is also deeply flawed, a product of the time in which it was composed, and the assumptions that governed those responsible for composing it.

It is noteworthy that those who compiled both the Tridentine and the Novus Ordo thought they were restoring the Roman rite to its "pristine purity"--and that both failed. The opportunity still remains to fulfill the mandate, but partisans of both forms don't seem too interested in going down that road. Too much invested, I suppose.

I find it difficult to believe that one who has so vehemently argued on this forum that acceptance by the Church is a hallmark of orthodoxy should repudiate the acceptance of the Novus Ordo by the vast majority in the Latin church as suspect. Father Taft has not argued that it is perfect, nor do I, but it is an authentic development of the Roman liturgy in its spirit and essential structure. What is more,it has returned the liturgy to the people to whom it belongs.

"Everybody's doing it". I think you should give the community of faithful a little more credence than that. The Church is not the local high school.