With local discernment of Pope Francis’ new restrictions on the ‘old Mass’ underway, Catholics reflect on their experience of the liturgy

In 1984, Colin Cain and his wife, Jane, were on the way home from a late-evening grocery run in South St. Paul when they noticed the light was on in the rectory of St. Augustine’s parish. They stopped, and together, mustered the resolve to knock on the door with a deeply felt request for the pastor: Would he consider offering Mass as it was celebrated prior to the Second Vatican Council?

The celebration of a pre-conciliar-style Mass — not regularly offered since 1965 — had recently been made possible on a limited basis by Pope John Paul II. The Cains, however, longed for it, and with some likeminded friends, hoped to find a priest who would begin offering it. Colin, then in his early 30s, was 16 when the new, 1970 Roman Missal was issued with many changes to the Mass’s expression. In their 20s, he and Jane began attending St. Constantine, a Ukrainian-rite Catholic parish in northeast Minneapolis. For them, that liturgy, as well as the related Byzantine rite, expressed the same familiar mystery as the pre-conciliar Mass. They married at St. Constantine in 1981.

The priest who answered the rectory door that evening was 60-year-old Father Raymond Zweber, who was ordained in 1954 and remembered celebrating the Mass prior to the reforms following the Second Vatican Council, 1962-1965. After briefly quizzing Colin about his intentions — Why was he interested in a Mass in Latin? Did he even understand what was being prayed? — and apparently finding his questions sufficiently answered, the priest agreed to celebrate the Mass if permission was granted by Archbishop John Roach. Within the year, St. Augustine began to offer what has become known as the “traditional Latin Mass,” initially just on First Fridays, but later expanded to Sunday and weekday Masses.

St. Augustine is now among a handful of parishes in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis that regularly offer Mass in what the Church has called, until just recently, the “extraordinary form” — a distinction from the “ordinary form” of the Mass Pope St. Paul VI promulgated with the 1970 Missal, which has been translated worldwide into the vernacular, or commonly spoken languages, and which is the regular expression of the Mass experienced by most Roman Catholics around the world.

The pre-conciliar Mass (meaning prior to the Second Vatican Council) uses the Missal — or book of approved Mass prayers and rubrics — promulgated by Pope St. John XXIII in 1962, that maintains continuity with a missal first promulgated in 1570, following the Council of Trent amid the Church’s Counter-Reformation. That’s why that expression of the Mass is also sometimes called the “Tridentine” Mass, for its connection to Trent.

Catholics who attend Mass according to the 1962 Roman Missal are a small community within the wider Catholic Church, but because they’ve so intentionally sought it out, many are deeply connected to it. And that’s why Pope Francis’ promulgation of a legislative text July 16 restricting its wide use is being met with strong reaction — from both “traditional Mass” adherents and its critics.

In the legislation, known as a “motu proprio,” Pope Francis rolled back steps his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI took in 2007 to widen the celebration of the pre-conciliar Mass. Rather than permitting it to be up to a pastor’s discretion whether to offer the Mass, and establishing that the faithful have a right to ask for it, as Pope Benedict XVI’s “Summorum Pontificum” had allowed, Pope Francis tightened bishops’ control of the use of Mass according to the 1962 Missal, asking them to regulate it in their dioceses, effective immediately. Among the motu proprio’s restrictions is a ban on establishing more “personal parishes” specialized for the celebration of Mass with the 1962 Missal.

Pope Francis issued the new legislation, titled “Traditionis Custodes” (“Guardians of the Tradition”), following a questionnaire he had sent by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to bishops around the world regarding the implementation of “Summorum Pontificum.” In a letter explaining the changes to the world’s bishops, Pope Francis cited a concern for Church unity, and concerns that some pre-conciliar Mass devotees tend to think of themselves as the “true Church” and Vatican II as an illegitimate or failed council. He also said that he wanted to re-establish in the Church’s Roman Rite Pope St. Paul VI’s goal of “permitting the Church to raise up, in the variety of languages, ‘a single and identical prayer,’ that expressed her unity.”

In the letter, Pope Francis rejected language that has become common when describing the two “forms” of the Mass: The 1970 Missal as the “ordinary form” and the 1962 Missal as the “extraordinary form” of the Mass. (Although people interviewed by The Catholic Spirit used the terms to distinguish between the current and pre-conciliar celebrations of the Mass.) Rather than a Mass with two “forms,” Pope Francis stated unequivocally that the 1970 Missal, which Pope St. John Paul II later edited during his pontificate, is the only expression of the “lex orandi” — the rule of prayer — for Roman Rite Catholics, or the vast majority of Catholics around the world.

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‘LIKE A RETREAT’

Elisa Armstrong, 38, recently joined All Saints. A teenage convert to Catholicism from evangelical Protestantism, Armstrong had a negative experience at a Mass celebrated according to the 1962 Missal in another state as a young woman where she felt judged for her attire, and she expected never to return. But, after experiencing Masses celebrated with the 1970 Missal across the U.S. as a military wife, she found herself seeking deeper contemplation for herself and an atmosphere of greater reverence for her five children.

She lives in Chanhassen and maintains ties with St. Hubert’s parish there, but most Sundays, her family drives 25 minutes into Minneapolis for the pre-conciliar Mass.

“For me, it’s been like a retreat. I’m just so spiritually nourished,” Armstrong said. “I don’t even notice that I’m there an hour and a half, when I used to be the type of person (who thought to myself), ‘Oh, I love this Mass because it’s out at 60 minutes, whoo hoo! … I got kids. I need to get out of here.’”

Now, she said, she longs for the Sunday High Mass she attends at All Saints. Discovering the “traditional Latin Mass,” she said, “has just been a huge blessing.”

In West St. Paul, Sarah Damm, 45, is also a new 1962 Missal Mass attendee. She still goes to Mass (celebrated — like most – according to the 1970 Missal) at her parish, St. Joseph in West St. Paul, but her family also attends St. Augustine. She said the desire to go was “a prompting of the Holy Spirit,” and she decided to attend a pre-conciliar Mass one Saturday morning last August. She had been worried about not knowing what to do — standing when she was supposed to sit, or kneeling when she was supposed to stand — but she was surprised to find the liturgy felt familiar.

And rather than making her feel like an outsider, the parish has been very welcoming, she said. She noted that when she bought a 1962 Mass missal from St. Augustine’s bookstore so she could better follow along, the sales clerk helped her place the book’s ribbons so she would know where to start.

“Sometimes if I get lost in my missal, I’ll think, this is the holy sacrifice of the Mass,” she said. “This is bringing us to Calvary. You know, I’m with Mary and St. John and Mary Magdalene. I’m at the foot of the cross, and I’m just going to be present. I’m just going to be there and pray. And it’s OK if that’s all that the hour brings, it will be very fruitful.”

It’s not only adults who are attracted to the “traditional Mass.” Xavier Adkins, 14, calls the pre-conciliar Mass “the core of my faith.” He’s served at that liturgy every other Sunday for three years at his parish, St. Agnes in St. Paul.

“As a server, you learn many things about the Mass, while actively participating in it,” he told The Catholic Spirit by email July 22. “I love the (Mass according to the 1962 Missal) very much and everything in it speaks beauty and reflects God and what he has given us.”

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Following the release of Pope Francis’ motu proprio, Archbishop Bernard Hebda released a statement on the evening of July 16 stating that, in the archdiocese, the status quo held, for the time being, for Masses celebrated according to the 1962 Missal, until a task force he had assembled could study the motu proprio and determine how best to proceed. Led by Auxiliary Bishop Andrew Cozzens, that task force includes two priests who regularly celebrate the pre-conciliar Mass, the archdiocese’s director of worship and its canonical chancellor.

The motu proprio — and Pope Francis’ criticism — has spurred a social media wildfire and wide-ranging Catholic commentary. Some Catholics are deeply wounded that the pope would “take away” the “traditional Latin Mass” in the name of unity, while others say they share the pope’s concerns and hope that this addresses divisions within the 1962 Missal Mass community and the wider Church. Some commentators have suggested that the return of 1962 Missal devotees to regular parish life could help to elevate celebrations of the “new Mass.” Others have expressed a concern that the measures might result in Church schism, with “traditional Mass Catholics” leaving in droves for the Society of St. Pius X (a schismatic group that began in Switzerland that resisted Vatican II, and the group that prompted St. John Paul II to allow celebration of the Mass according to 1962 Missal in the first place) or Eastern Orthodoxy, or, in their disillusionment, even leave institutional Christianity altogether.

Seeking unity

The motu proprio certainly surprised Colin Cain, now 67 and retired from longtime work as a maintenance manager at Nestlé Purina near Red Wing. He and Jane raised three girls at St. Augustine, and continue to be deeply involved in the parish, especially its celebration of Mass according to the 1962 Missal, offered daily and three times on weekends. He’s watched its attendance grow, a phenomenon confirmed by his pastor, Father John Echert, who said almost half of his parish attends the “Tridentine Mass,” with many alternating between Masses celebrated with the 1962 Missal and the 1970 Missal, depending on the weekend.

With Mass according to the newer missal offered with such variety from parish to parish, that Pope Francis would want to restrict availability of a Mass that is largely unchanging in the name of “unity” is puzzling, Cain said.

He recalls a time Mass according to the 1962 Missal was a significant source of unity in his life — when, in 2016, Nestlé sent him to France.

“I went into a parish where the traditional Mass is celebrated,” he said. “I’m totally lost. I don’t understand French. I’m lonesome. I’m a long way from home. And I go inside for the next Mass, and the priest says, ‘Introibo ad altare Dei’ — and I’m home! All these are my brothers and sisters here, and I know it. What a unifying thing that the (Latin) language is.”

At least six parishes in the archdiocese regularly offer the pre-conciliar Mass, among them St. Agnes in St. Paul, St. Joseph in Miesville, the clustered Holy Trinity and St. Augustine in South St. Paul, St. Michael in Pine Island, Sacred Heart in Robbinsdale and All Saints in northeast Minneapolis. Most parishes that offer the pre-conciliar Mass are served by archdiocesan priests, but since 2013, All Saints has been in the ministerial care of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, which as its mission exclusively provides Mass and other sacraments according to the 1962 Missal.

In 2017, Archbishop Hebda named All Saints a “personal parish” for Catholics seeking the pre-conciliar Mass. The parish is currently served by two FSSP priests. Also tied to the parish are the Filiae Laboris Mariae sisters, an association of the faithful of women living in community with a shared apostolic life who exclusively worship according to the 1962 Missal. (All Saints’ pastor, Father Christopher Pelster, declined to be interviewed for this story, and the sisters did not respond to a request for an interview.)

Longtime controversy

The pre-conciliar Mass has been a source of controversy since Pope St. John Paul II reinstated its celebration in 1984. In a letter dated Jan. 10, 1989, from Archbishop Roach to priests and deacons announcing that the 1962 Mass would be permitted on a weekly basis at St. Vincent de Paul in St. Paul (and would continue on First Fridays at St. Augustine), he notes, “For some people, its beauty is a profound source of intimacy with God. For a few, it has become a symbolic act of rejection of the Second Vatican Council.”

There’s a great deal to unpack in the Mass celebrated according to the 1962 Missal — the words of the liturgy itself and its additional prayers, its orchestrated gestures and baroque vestments, its use of Communion rails and exclusive reception of the Eucharist on the tongue. Many women veil, men and women tend to dress more formally, and girls don’t serve at the altar. The priest faces the altar instead of the congregation, whispers the prayer of consecration, and there’s less emphasis on congregational response. The 1962 Missal follows an annual cycle of readings, whereas the 1970 Missal follows a three-year cycle of readings.

The pre-conciliar Mass also follows the 1962 Missal’s liturgical calendar, which differs from the 1970 Missal’s revised calendar. That means some saints’ feasts fall on different days in the two Missals (for example, St. Thomas Aquinas is celebrated Jan. 28 in the 1970 Missal’s calendar, but March 7 according to the 1962 calendar). The “old calendar” also retains some fasting days, such as quarterly “Ember Days,” now optional according to the “new calendar.”

Critics of the 1962 Missal’s liturgy include those concerned about its posture toward Jewish people, as it includes prayers calling for Jews to “be delivered from darkness” through conversion to Christianity. Others call it clericalist or sexist, since it restricts the roles available to laity, especially women, or a bastion for ultra-conservative Catholics unwilling to embrace a living, contemporary faith.

As a child, Father James Notebaart, 76, memorized the Tridentine Latin Mass, and he experienced the liturgical changes prior to the Second Vatican Council, such as changes in Holy Week and an emphasis, drawn from Germany, on the congregation praying with the priest during the Liturgy of the Eucharist. “There were changes going on way prior to the Second Vatican Council,” he said.

Ordained in 1971, Father Notebaart was the director of the archdiocese’s Worship Center from 1975-1986 as the reforms to the Mass and other sacraments were implemented following Vatican II. He cited the ancient Christian maxim, “Lex orandi, lex credendi” — “the law of what is prayed is the law of what is believed.” Because the 1962 Missal doesn’t reflect the elements of the Church’s Christology and ecclesiology (the understanding of Jesus and the Church, respectively) that were emphasized at the Second Vatican Council, Father Notebaart said while he doesn’t dismiss the contemporary celebration of the pre-conciliar Mass outright, he approaches its use with caution.

He is especially concerned around implementation of the clergy and laity’s full, active participation in the Mass, called for by Vatican II. For him, the main question is: Why are Catholics seeking a pre-conciliar Mass in a post-conciliar world?

“Once you adopt that (pre-conciliar) ‘form,’ if you adopt the ecclesiology with it, you’re limiting the scope of the Second Vatican Council’s perception of ministry,” he said.

James Kremer, 76, has similar concerns as a member of the laity. He grew up in a devout Catholic family in Holdingford, northwest of St. Cloud, before Vatican II. He entered the Crosiers, leaving before taking final vows. As a child and seminarian, he attended daily Mass, and his experience convinces him that the Church shouldn’t “backslide” toward Mass as it was celebrated before Vatican II. He remembers those Masses as rushed and mumbled, and they were something to be endured, rather than looked forward to. He felt like he was there simply to watch the priest pray in a regimented, choreographed way. If there was something for him to focus on, it was his own sinfulness.

Vatican II took place while Kremer was in seminary, and he welcomed the focus of the new Mass’ shift toward a theology of Eucharist as a shared meal, and not solely a sacrificial offering. He deeply appreciates the emphasis “Sacrosanctum Concilium” — the Council’s document on sacred liturgy promulgated in 1963 — put on the laity’s “fully conscious, and active participation,” which he thinks is only possible with Mass in the vernacular and the priest facing the congregation.

Mass, as Kremer, a parishioner of St. Ambrose in Woodbury, experiences it now with the 1970 Missal, feels more like a true celebration, he said, and it’s more capable of resonating with non-Catholics who might attend for weddings or funerals. When celebrated well, he finds the revised Mass uplifting and affirming of its participants being “part of the community,” he said.

“If you read the documents from Vatican II, one of the things that they talk about is that no longer in the Mass is the priest the sole celebrant. The Eucharist is celebrated by the congregation,” he said. “And the priest may be the leader of that celebration, but he’s not the only celebrant. I think that’s the major distinction between the old rite and the present rite, is that theoretically one is a community celebration. The other is the priest’s prayer, being watched by a community.”

Karen Hastreiter, 43, also grew up with Mass according to the 1962 Missal, but under very different circumstances. Her parents were among the Catholics who sought it out when it was first reestablished at St. Augustine. She was then 10. She doesn’t remember as a child having a strong preference for either Mass expression, but she recalls feeling “more freedom” during the pre-conciliar liturgy, because she felt she could choose whether or not she wanted to follow in the Missal, to say the responses or just enter into contemplative prayer. While she’s continued to attend Mass according to both Missals over the years, she — with her husband and six children — are now members of All Saints.

As she understands it, the Mass as it was celebrated prior to the council left a lot to be desired, and often both priests and laity had a sense of “going through the motions.” “That’s why the Second Vatican Council was called,” Hastreiter said. “Things had become rules, things had become ‘just what I do.’ I think there really was needed a renewal for what does it mean for us to be Christians, followers of Christ, to live a life of holiness, to be saints? I don’t think that was here in the 40s or 50s just because there was a ‘traditional Mass.’”

Over the years, she’s seen some of Pope Francis’ concerns about 1962 Missal adherents manifest. Some people were angry about “losing the Mass” and have gotten stuck in that place, she said. But, while she thinks stereotypes of “traditional Latin Mass” attendees as arrogant or separatist may have been true 15 or 20 years ago, they’re not anymore. As more Catholics — especially young adults and families — have discovered Mass according to the 1962 Missal, they’re attracted to its beauty and goodness, she said, and they don’t get mired in the politics of her parents’ era.

Hastreiter also doesn’t think that attending the Mass celebrated with the 1962 Missal makes a person holier, or that Mass according to the 1970 Missal doesn’t equally share in Christ’s sacrifice. The problems she sees Pope Francis wanting to address aren’t truly about the Mass, she said, but are about a fallen humanity, and problems abound among Catholics who worship according to the 1970 Missal, too.

If she could speak to Pope Francis, she would ask him to “analyze whether this is really about the Mass or about people needing to be reenergized into understanding what it is to have an interior life that is aligned with Jesus and following him,” she said. “This is about a Church that is broken and wounded and and wandering, and just wants to be holy and Catholic but doesn’t know where to look.”

‘I love both’

One of Hastreiter’s greatest concerns with the motu proprio is its stipulation that, going forward, newly ordained priests must petition Rome for permission to celebrate the pre-conciliar Mass. “Rome isn’t known to move quickly,” she said. “These young seminarians and priests could be — will be, actually, are — the future of the Church in reconciling the whole picture.”

Father Paul Hedman might be one of those priests Hastreiter has in mind. Out of curiosity, he attended his first Mass celebrated according to the 1962 Missal during his freshman year in college, before he entered seminary. He discovered he liked its “contemplative experience.” As a seminarian, he trained to celebrate Mass according to both the 1962 and 1970 Missals.

“I love both,” he said.

Ordained last year, Father Hedman, 26, is the youngest priest in the archdiocese. He hasn’t offered the pre-conciliar Mass at his assigned parish, St. Peter in Forest Lake, where he is a parochial vicar. But he does fill in from time to time at parishes that need a priest to offer the pre-conciliar Mass.

He said Pope Francis “rightfully points out that there are some issues in the traditionalist community, though I’m not sure if I would agree with perhaps how widespread he thinks it is. There’s a very loud minority. And as with any group, the loud minority will get more attention than the silent majority. I know so many people who attend the ‘Latin Mass’ who just find it to be beautiful and who also attend the ‘ordinary form,’ or who would have no theological problems with the ‘ordinary form,’ or who would even want to see Vatican II implemented more, with some of the things that the document on the liturgy said, that maybe the ‘ordinary form’ doesn’t even quite get to what Vatican II wanted.”

When Catholics with a preference for the 1962 Missal explain their view, they list spiritual, aesthetic, cultural and theological reasons. For many attendees, the main theological issue, Father Hedman said, “is that those who would more strongly prefer the ‘extraordinary form’ would say it more perfectly theologically demonstrates the sacrificial nature of the Mass, which is something they would say can sometimes be lost in the ‘ordinary form’ — that the ‘ordinary form’ would emphasize the meal nature, where the ‘extraordinary form’ would more emphasize the sacrificial nature. And they both do both — it’s both a sacrifice and a meal.”

Father Hedman is concerned that the motu proprio’s restrictions could displace Mass according to the 1962 Missal from where he sees as the best place for it: Parishes that offer Mass according to both Missals. They “are able to be a bridge, and we don’t have to shove people into their own little bubble,” he said.

“I think that the Holy Father’s motu proprio will just sort of increase the sort of bubble in which the ‘extraordinary form’ exists, and that might just intensify these feelings of disunity. The people who like the ‘extraordinary form’ sometimes can feel as if they’re rejected by the Church, and sort of pushing them off even further like this, I’m not sure if it’ll have the intended effect that our Holy Father is looking for,” he said.

Father Hedman advises Catholics who attend different kinds of liturgies to seek to understand one another, instead of stereotyping or writing off the other’s experience. “There are a lot of people hurting right now by this decision, and to come to know and understand is very important — even if it’s not something you would ever consider attending — to come to understand the pain that people are experiencing right now because they’ve come to fall in love with this ‘form’ of the Mass, and many of them without any sort of schismatic feelings towards the Holy Father.”

Like Father Hedman, Father John Paul Erickson has concerns about potentially restricting parishes from offering Mass according to the 1962 Missal. A former archdiocesan director of worship and currently pastor of Transfiguration in Oakdale, Father Erickson had planned to begin offering the pre-conciliar Mass at Transfiguration next month, but tabled those plans after the motu proprio’s release.

“The pope’s beef is not about the Mass. It’s not so much how you celebrate it. It’s the attitudes of people who go to it and what commentators have really allowed it to become,” he said, pointing to “far-right” Catholic YouTube celebrities, commentators and talking heads. “They’re the real villains here.”

“Anyone who actively promotes division within the Church — that is a very serious sin. I think they have a lot to account for, and I think they have contributed severely to the current situation,” he said.

Ordained in 2006, Father Erickson first learned about the pre-conciliar Mass while attending Thomas Aquinas College in California in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and his first impression was that there were “schismatic tendencies” within traditional Mass communities — “belief that the Second Vatican council was manufactured by the enemy and a product of the Masons — these attitudes were really attached to the ‘traditional Latin Mass’ in my mind,” he said, which turned him off from its celebration.

Then, in 2007, with the promulgation of “Summorum Pontificum” and Pope Benedict XVI’s explanation of the wholesome role the pre-conciliar Mass could have in the Church, Father Erickson explored the “old Mass” and embraced it, he said, although he didn’t celebrate a Mass with the 1962 Missal until 2011, when he was in residence at St. Agnes. That parish has long offered the Mass according to the 1970 Missal in Latin, later adding celebrations with the 1962 Missal as well. He found celebrating the Mass with the 1962 Missal to be very moving, he said, and the moment of consecration to be very intimate. But, he said, although he has never been as familiar with the 1962 Missal as the 1970 Missal, he does not think that the pre-conciliar Mass is in any way objectively better than the Mass as it’s commonly celebrated worldwide.

From his experience, he thinks Pope Francis’ concerns about the culture around the “traditional Latin Mass” “are founded upon reality,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s found everywhere. But yes, I have experienced those tendencies,” he said. “I want to be clear, however, that while you may not have those schismatic attitudes in other (Catholic) churches, you have attitudes like, ‘Why do I have to go to church?’ These are errors on both sides. It’s not just the ‘bad traddies.’ There are errors on the other side of the spectrum, too.”

Like others interviewed by The Catholic Spirit, Father Erickson expressed concern the motu proprio may cause further division, rather than the unity Pope Francis seeks. “I just wish that the solution had been accompaniment,” he said. “If you ever want accompaniment, now’s the time.”

Liturgical renewal

In the letter to bishops accompanying the motu proprio, Pope Francis acknowledged liturgical abuses that have taken place with the implementation of the current missal, and he asked them “to be vigilant in ensuring that every liturgy be celebrated with decorum and fidelity to the liturgical books promulgated after Vatican Council II, without the eccentricities that can easily degenerate into abuses,” he said.

“Seminarians and new priests should be formed in the faithful observance of the prescriptions of the Missal and liturgical books, in which is reflected the liturgical reform willed by Vatican Council II,” he said.

In a statement to Catholic News Service, Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia, an American theologian and Dominican who had served as secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments and was involved with the Vatican’s dialogue with the Society of St. Pius X, said that previous popes’ efforts to extend latitude around the pre-conciliar Mass failed to restore Society members to communion with the Church.

“What we have got now,” he said, “is a movement within the church herself, seemingly endorsed by her leaders, that sows division by undermining the reforms of the Second Vatican Council through the rejection of the most important of them: the reform of the Roman Rite.”

Currently the adjunct secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith but speaking as a theologian and not a Vatican official, Archbishop DiNoia said Pope Francis explained in his letter to bishops that “his rationale for the abrogation of all previous provisions in this area is not based on the results of the questionnaire but only occasioned by them.”

“The decisive point is there for all to behold: the evident and ongoing betrayal of the intentions of the two pontiffs who permitted the celebration of the 1962 Missal to draw traditionalists back into the unity of the Church,” he told Catholic News Service. “What the Holy Father is saying is that the TLM (traditional Latin Mass) movement is working for objectives that are precisely contrary to what St. John Paul and Benedict XVI hoped for.”

Like his predecessors, the archbishop said, Pope Francis believes “the way to address abuses is not by adopting the ‘extraordinary form,’ but by promoting the true renewal of the liturgy which, in many places, has simply not happened.”

“Many people with a desire for Latin in the liturgy would have been better served by the ‘novus ordo’ (the modern Mass) in Latin than by the repristination of the pre-conciliar liturgy,” he said. “The TLM movement promotes the rejection of that which the liturgical movement sought above all: active participation of the faithful in the liturgical celebration of the mysteries of Christ. In TLM, there is little concern for active participation. The ‘traditional Latin Mass,’ as in the past, becomes the occasion for engaging in various types of private prayer if the participants don’t follow the Mass with a missal.”

As the chairman of the task force studying the motu proprio, Bishop Cozzens said that in choosing the task force members, Archbishop Hebda sought “to bring together priests who were familiar with the ‘extraordinary form’ of the Mass and also had vast pastoral experience with the ‘ordinary form,’ as well as experts in liturgy and canon law.”

“We believe this combination of expertise will help us to be faithful to carrying out the motu proprio of our Holy Father, always with a pastoral concern for the good of the faithful that our Holy Father also expresses,” Bishop Cozzens said.

When he meets Catholics who worship according to the 1962 Missal, he said, “I am almost always edified by their deep faith, their love for our Lord, and their reverence for the liturgy and the gift of our tradition.”

“I would want them to know that these are beautiful things which are intended to bring them to deep union with our Lord,” he said. “That union always happens through his Church and the Lord will continue to work through his Church to bring us all to union with him.”

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LITURGICAL REFORMS

By Father James Notebaart

We think of the Second Vatican Council as the Council of reform, but in fact reforms have been ongoing for centuries. Liturgical reforms took shape especially under Pope St. Pius X (papacy 1903-1914), whose motto was “To restore all things in Christ.” To do this, he focused, in part, on the celebration of the Eucharist: He lowered the age of first Communion to encourage reception and promoted the Belgian Monastery of Solesmes and its development of plain chant. These changes fostered a more active engagement with the liturgy.

Then, beginning in Germany, the “Missa Recitata” gave the response parts usually done by acolytes to the congregation. This began to replace the prayer books which people used to accompany the priests’ prayers. These prayer books were essentially private devotions. Now there was a union of congregational texts with the actual texts of the liturgy.

Pope Pius XII (papacy 1939-1958) wrote several encyclicals relating to the nature of the Church and on liturgy: “Mystigi Corporis” (1943) and “Mediator Dei” (1947), furthering the relationship between assembly and presider. The idea that the priest alone “said” Mass was broadened to the action of the whole Church. Pope Pius XII also reformed the Holy Week Liturgies in the mid -1950s.

So, by the time the Missal of 1962 came out, (promulgated by Pope St. John XXIII) there were already clear indications of a value for liturgy that was participative and engaging: the action of the entire assembly.

The Second Vatican Council in its reforms broadened our understanding of the nature and mission of the Church creating renewed models of ecclesiology delving into the Church’s rich history. It talked about the communal nature of the Church grounded in our baptismal identity and expressing the Paschal Mystery: One Church, the mystical Body of Christ, head and members, with Christ being the head. It also expanded our Christology, giving multiple models of how we understand Christ. Now both of these had an impact on liturgy. The ancient phrase: “Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi” (meaning: “The way we pray is an expression of how/what we believe” or, one shapes the other) became expressed in the reforms of the liturgy.

The idea that full conscious active participation we find in “Sacrosanctum Concilium” No. 14 was an evolution of what Pope St. Pius X had intended in the first decades of the Twentieth Century and Pope Pius XII as well.

The challenge in the contemporary use of the Missal of 1962 is to preserve the values enunciated by these popes while maintaining the breadth of ecclesiology and Christology enunciated at the Second Vatican Council. It isn’t one versus the other: It is one reality of the Church expressed in different forms, while maintaining a Conciliar expression of our identity as Church.

Promoting a revitalization of the Missal of 1962 in order to abrogate the Second Vatican Council is not the way of the Church. It is not good thinking. Rather, the use of these texts should stand alone, be valued for what they offer while nourishing not only us as a Church but promoting unity rather than discord. This is not the time in history for polarization.

Father Notebaart is a retired priest of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis who directed the archdiocese’s Worship Center during the implementation of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.