Liturgical Time Bombs In Vatican II

Destruction of the Faith Through Changes in Catholic Worship

Michael Davies

• Publisher: TAN Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781618904331
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Konfessionen

Michael Davies shows how Fr. Annibale Bugnini--before his dismissal by Pope Paul VI under suspicion of being a Freemason--was able to "reform" the Catholic Mass into the constantly evolving liturgy. Quoting Bishops and Cardinals as well as liberal "experts" and Protestant observers, he exposes the "time bombs" which were built into the Second Vatican Council's document on the liturgy by a few revolutionaries in order to be exploited later--and which have been detonating ever since. "I am convinced that the crisis in the Church that we are experiencing is to a large extent due to the disintegration of the liturgy."--Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), 1998. 121 pgs,

LITURGICAL TIME BOMBS IN VATICAN II

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.¹

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.² 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.³

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 le 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 le Sollecitudini, November 22, 1903).⁴

For St. Pius X, as for Dom Guéranger, writes Father Bonneterre, “the liturgy is essentially theocentric; it is for the worship of God rather than for the teaching of the faithful. Nevertheless, this great pastor underlined an important aspect of the liturgy: it is educative of the true Christian spirit. But let us stress that this function of the liturgy is only secondary.”⁵ The tragedy of the Liturgical Movement was that it would make this secondary aspect of the liturgy the primary aspect, as is made manifest today in any typical parish celebration of the New Mass. Father Bonneterre has nothing but praise for the initial stages of the movement: “Born of Dom Guéranger’s genius and the indomitable energy of St. Pius X, the movement at this time brought magnificent fruits of spiritual renewal.”⁶

The Modernist heresy at the beginning of the twentieth century was driven underground by St. Pius X.⁷ 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?⁸

The early leaders of the movement were, writes Father Bonneterre, “largely overtaken by the generation of the new liturgists of the various preconciliar liturgical commissions.” He describes this new generation as the “young wolves.” In any revolution it is almost routine for the first moderate revolutionaries to be replaced or even eradicated by more radical revolutionaries, as was the case with the Russian Revolution when the Mensheviks (majority) were ousted by the Bolsheviks (minority). Just as nothing could prevent the rise to power of the Bolsheviks, nothing could prevent the triumph of the young wolves:

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.⁹

The most influential of the young wolves, the great architect of the Vatican II liturgical revolution, was Father Annibale Bugnini. Father Bonneterre recounts a visit by this Italian liturgist to a liturgical convention which was held at Thieulin near Chartres in the late 1940’s, at which forty religious superiors and seminary rectors were present, making clear the extent of the influence of the liturgical Bolsheviks on the Church establishment in France. He cites a Father Duployé as stating:

Some days before the reunion at Thieulin, I had a visit from an Italian Lazarist, Fr. Bugnini, who had asked me to obtain an invitation for him. The Father listened very attentively, without saying a word, for four days. During our return journey to Paris, as the train was passing along the Swiss Lake at Versailles, he said to me: “I admire what you are doing, but the greatest service I can render you is never to say a word in Rome about all that I have just heard.”¹⁰

Father Bonneterre comments: “This revealing text shows us one of the first appearances of the ‘gravedigger of the Mass,’ a revolutionary more clever than the others, he who killed the Catholic liturgy before disappearing from the official scene.”¹¹

The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Annibale Bugnini

Before discussing the time bombs in the Council texts, more specifically those in its Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, which would lead to the destruction of the Roman Rite, it is necessary to examine the role of Annibale Bugnini, the individual most responsible for placing them there and detonating them after the Constitution had won the approval of the Council Fathers.

Annibale Bugnini was born in Civitella de Lego (Italy) in 1912. He began his theological studies in the Congregation of the Mission (the Vincentians) in 1928 and was ordained in this Order in 1936. For ten years he did parish work in a Roman suburb, and then, from 1947 to 1957, was involved in writing and editing the missionary publications of his Order. In 1947, he also began his active involvement in the field of specialized liturgical studies when he began a twenty-year period as the director of Ephemerides liturgicae, one of Italy’s best-known liturgical publications. He contributed to numerous scholarly publications, wrote articles on the liturgy for various encyclopaedias and dictionaries, and had a number of books published on both the scholarly and popular level.

Father Bugnini was appointed Secretary to Pope Pius XII’s Commission for Liturgical Reform in 1948. In 1949 he was made a Professor of Liturgy in the Pontifical Propaganda Fide (Propagation of the Faith) University; in 1955 he received a similar appointment in the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music; he was appointed a Consultor to the Sacred Congregation of Rites in 1956; and in 1957 he was appointed Professor of Sacred Liturgy in the Lateran University. In 1960, Father Bugnini was placed in a position which enabled him to exert an important, if not decisive, influence upon the history of the Church: he was appointed Secretary to the Preparatory Commission on the Liturgy for the Second Vatican Council.¹² He was the moving spirit behind the drafting of the preparatory schema (plural schemata), the draft document which was to be placed before the Council Fathers for discussion. Carlo Falconi, an “ex-priest” who has left the Church but keeps in close contact with his friends in the Vatican, refers to the preparatory schema as “the Bugnini draft.”¹³ It is of the greatest possible importance to bear in mind the fact that, as was stressed in 1972 in Father Bugnini’s own journal, Notitiae (official journal of the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship), the Liturgy Constitution that the Council Fathers eventually passed was substantially identical to the draft schema which he had steered through the Preparatory Commission.¹⁴

According to Father P. M. Gy, O.P., a French liturgist who was a consultor to the pre-conciliar Commission on the Liturgy, Father Bugnini “was a happy choice as secretary”:

He had been secretary of the commission for reform set up by Pius XII. He was a gifted organizer and possessed an open-minded, pastoral spirit. Many people noted how, with Cardinal Cicognani, he was able to imbue the discussion with the liberty of spirit recommended by Pope John XXIII.¹⁵

The Bugnini schema was accepted by a plenary session of the Liturgical Preparatory Commission in a vote taken on January 13, 1962. But the President of the Commission, the eighty-year old Cardinal Gaetano Cicognani, had the foresight to realize the dangers implicit in certain passages. Father Gy writes: “The program of reform was so vast that it caused the president, Cardinal Gaetano Cicognani, to hesitate.”¹⁶ Unless the Cardinal could be persuaded to sign the schema, it would be blocked. It could not go through without his signature, even though it had been approved by a majority of the Commission. Father Bugnini needed to act. He arranged for immediate approaches to be made to Pope John, who agreed to intervene. He called for Cardinal Amleto Cicognani, his Secretary of State and the younger brother of the President of the Preparatory Commission, and told him to visit his brother and not return until the schema had been signed. The Cardinal complied:

Later a peritus of the Liturgical Preparatory Commission stated that the old Cardinal was almost in tears as he waved the document in the air and said: “They want me to sign this but I don’t know if I want to.” Then he laid the document on his desk, picked up a pen, and signed it. Four days later he died.¹⁷

The First Fall

The Bugnini schema had been saved—and only just in time. Then, with the approval of Pope John XXIII, Father Bugnini was dismissed from his chair at the Lateran University and from the secretaryship of the Conciliar Liturgical Commission which was to oversee the schema during the conciliar debates. The reasons which prompted Pope John to take this step have not been divulged, but they must have been of a most serious nature to cause this tolerant Pontiff to act in so public and drastic a manner against a priest who had held such an influential position in the preparation for the Council. In his book The Reform of the Liturgy, which to a large extent is an apologia for himself and a denunciation of his critics, Bugnini blames Cardinal Arcadio Larraona for his downfall. He writes of himself in the third person:

Of all the secretaries of the preparatory commissions, Father Bugnini was the only one not appointed secretary to the corresponding conciliar commission . . . This was Father Bugnini’s first exile. At the same time that Father Bugnini was dismissed from the secretariat of the conciliar commission, he was also discharged from his post as teacher of liturgy in the Pontifical Pastoral Institute of the Lateran University, and an attempt was made to take from him the chair of liturgy at the Pontifical Urban University. This repressive activity emanated directly from Cardinal Larraona and was very kindly seconded by some fellow workers who wanted better to serve the Church and the liturgy. The basis for the dismis...