BOOK REVIEW

Liturgical Time Bombs in Vatican II:

The Destruction of Catholic Faith through Changes in Catholic Worship

reviewed by Gladden J. Pappin

Imagine the scene — which may sound familiar. Midway through a century of unprecedented strife, with ever-widening swaths of humanity denying their God, the cradle of Western civilization itself flirting with apostasy, and Christ's Church beleaguered by the synthesis of all heresies, the Church convokes a council. It will be the first ecumenical council in the Church's history that responds to the errors of the age (for the Church always sets herself against the errors of the age) with an attitude of accommodation and not, any longer, of reproof. Banished to the fringes of the Roman communion will be the scholastic gobbledygook of yesteryear, the stubborn and unappealing attitude of Christlike contradiction. Fiat voluntas hominum will be the implicit slogan of the day, and all will revolve around the placation of modern man.

To this end the liturgy itself, too long disconnected from the workaday world, must bend its knee. And so the changes will commence: the passing of a novel document, the founding of a commission. A priest suspect of Freemasonry and already once dismissed from his positions will take charge of the "reform," dutifully assisted in the propagation of Catholic truth by half a dozen liberal Protestant ministers. What, we must ask, is the likelihood that such a group, with such novel goals, in an age more enthralled by self-worship than any before, would produce anything of either temporary or lasting benefit for the Church? At the least, it is hardly the recipe for success St. Pius X would have devised!

The very idea was and remains unthinkable. But sometimes, in the stumbling story of human history, the unthinkable happens; error turns truth on its head, even in the most unlikely places. How a few seeds of error contaminated the Church's liturgical tradition is the subject of Michael Davies' newest work — Liturgical Time Bombs in Vatican II, published in August by TAN. Davies expands on his Liturgical Revolution series from the 1970s, and connects the dots from Vatican II's Sacrosanctum Concilium to the subsequent disaster. Many "conservative" apologists latch onto Sacrosanctum Concilium's scattered platitudes to claim that the true "reform" is not yet initiated. But today's jaundiced liturgy does not, according to Davies, spring from liberal misinterpretations of Vatican II. It was the result intended by its authors and allowed by its promulgators. The liturgical reforms after 1962 were doomed from the outset.

Sowing the Seeds of Ruin

As Davies explains, the council's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy is positively pregnant with the thought of the revolutionaries — thought it did not issue in the Novus Ordo Missae for another seven years. The schema on liturgy lay in the hands of the council's expert advisers, the periti, under the direction of Fr. Annibale Bugnini. Although dismissed by John XXIII from the Conciliar Liturgical Commission, Bugnini had already put his stamp on the council in drafting the liturgy schema. Unlike the other, more conservative drafts, the liturgy schema delighted the liberals to no end — even earning kudos from the archmodernist Fr. Edward Schillebeeckx O.P. (Davies, p. 10). It was Schillebeeckx who, in his book The Real Achievement of Vatican II, boasted of the way the liberal periti disguised their goals for Catholic doctrine and liturgy in precisely the "time bombs" that Davies wishes to expose. Deception was their métier, and not a council father could resist it.

And so, says Davies, at every step Vatican II's liturgical modernists endeavored to eliminate the old. It was they who wrote Sacrosanctum Concilium itself, lacing the pill of revolution with the sugars of Latin, and Gregorian chant, and toothless codicils about "preserving" the Church's ancient rites. As long as the council fathers were seduced by the experts' blandishments, the New Guard — who would control the implementation — was home free. At the time, according to Westminster cardinal John Heenan, "Pope John did not suspect what was being planned by the liturgical experts" (p. 25). Nor did the bishops, who literally laughed off the suggestion of Card. Michael Browne, master general of the Dominicans, that approval of Sacrosanctum Concilium would soon result in an all-vernacular Mass. One must wonder: Do good developments in Church history usually emerge through such subterfuge and trickery?

At the head of the conspiracy, Bugnini had already plotted the downfall of the traditional liturgy. History did not wait to reward him. "Firstly," writes Davies, summarizing Bugnini's plan, "[there must be] the transition from Latin to the vernacular; secondly, the reform of the liturgical books; thirdly, the translation of the liturgical books; and fourthly, the adaptation or 'incarnation' of the Roman form of the liturgy into the usages and mentality of each individual Church" (p. 15). It was this four-part plan that panned out over the course of Vatican II and the subsequent liturgical reforms: beginning with the most critical stage, Sacrosanctum Concilium itself. Bugnini ensured the justification for each phase of his war was present in the conciliar Constitution. It was he who fashioned out of Vatican II a graveyard for the Latin Mass. Traditional Catholics may find much ammunition for apologetics in the facts of Sacrosanctum Concilium's history as described by Davies. From Bugnini, to the doubtful orthodoxy of the contemporary Liturgical Movement, to the curia's antipathy toward the liturgy schema's radical proposals, to John XXIII's ignorance of the liturgists' true plans — every fact related is another argument against the postconciliar liturgy, before it was even put on paper.

Lifting up the Church's Gates

But apologists for the postconciliar reforms hastily overlook these facts, if they know them at all. They would hardly be the ones to say the Holy Ghost worked through a cleric of probable Masonic pedigree, but would be the first to claim Sacrosanctum Concilium's traditional-sounding articles as the true intentions of Vatican II. Much like those who seek nothing but a return to our Constitution, which did not quite prevent America's decline, they clamor for a "return to the texts" as the strong foundation for the Church's future — never mind their infestation with termites!

Our author dispatches with these bromides. The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, he writes, shows elements of the traditional Catholic understanding of the Mass and the liturgy, but often steps away from these toward a liturgy placed abjectly at the service of modern man. It is the specter of "today," "contemporary society," "modern man," "up-to-dateness" that appears whenever the revolutionaries wish Holy Mother Church to bow low and grovel at the feet of modernity. Given only a few petards, they will bring down a masterwork. And so the council calls for the Church's rites to be "carefully and thoroughly revised . . . [and] given new vigor to meet the circumstances of modern times" (§4). It says that the changeable elements of the liturgy "not only may but ought to be changed with the passing of time . . . if existing elements have grown less functional" (§21), harking back to the clarion call to "adapt more suitably to the needs of our own times those institutions which are subject to change" (§1). To sate the ever-restless soul of modern man (who could not endure silence for an hour if salvation required it), "the full and active participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all else" (§14). Adoration, reparation, petition, thanksgiving . . . and participation — the five ends of Catholic worship!

After the vaguely mandated revisions, the Mass "should be distinguished by a noble simplicity; . . . should be short, clear, and unencumbered by useless repetitions; [and] should be within the people's powers of comprehension" (§34). In mission territories, the heathen — apparently even less capable of appreciating beautiful liturgy than the First World masses — must be accommodated by "radical adaptation of the liturgy" to the local cults (§40). One would be hard pressed to decide where to end such a wide-ranging revolution. (Conveniently enough, the "liturgists" wish no end to the revolution!) Davies explains how each phrase — when interpreted by the modernist — militates against the traditional liturgy, part and whole. To restrain the forces unleashed by Sacrosanctum Concilium requires bending the document 180 degrees away from its purpose.

Among a thousand other terms lost in the fog of Vatican II's springtime, Davies comments, was the backward-looking transubstantiation. Here, by closing one door, the council flung open another to error — without so much as an erroneous word of its own. Of course, in an encyclical only a few years later, Paul VI demanded the use of the term, but in Vatican II it is quite absent. Davies wonders how Pope Pius VI might have responded to the same absence of transubstantiation in Sacrosanctum Concilium. Pius had to formulate condemnations of the renegade Gallican-Jansenist Synod of Pistoia, held in 1786. Pistoia, Davies notes, defined Christ's Eucharistic presence as follows. "Christ is," according to the council, "after the Consecration, truly, really and substantially present under the appearances of bread and wine, and the whole substance of bread and wine has then ceased to exist, only the appearances remaining." Hardly objectionable on its face. Comments Davies: "Readers will be surprised to learn that this definition was condemned by the Church as 'pernicious, derogatory to the expounding of Catholic truth about the dogma of transubstantiation, favorable to heretics'" (p. 32). When Sacrosanctum Concilium says Christ is present "especially in the Eucharistic species" (§7), what, pray tell, would good Pope Pius have said? No error there, either, but is avoidance of explicit heresy all we can hope for from a Church council nowadays?

The Faux Desires of 'Modern Man'

Although, as Davies points out, Vatican II said there "must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them" (§23), the revolutionary animus behind the document was toward the satisfaction of twentieth-century man and the corresponding foundation of a new religion suited to his needs. Regardless of whether the periti and council fathers (including Bugnini) "genuinely and certainly" thought modern man could no longer relate to the traditional liturgy and to traditional Catholic doctrine, the point remains — and Davies makes it — that no group of revolutionaries set on destroying the Mass and the Church could have done a job superior to that of the post-Vatican II reformers. "Truly," wrote Dietrich von Hildebrand, "if one of the devils in C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters had been entrusted with the ruin of the liturgy, he could not have done it better" (qtd. by Davies, p. 16). By intention or effect, the New Mass was for man, concerns about God and tradition tossed aside.

Jacques Maritain himself, generally supportive of the Second Vatican Council, lamented what he called the epistemological time-worship of the modern era — constant deferral to modern trends and attitudes, ranked superior simply because they are newer. Davies points to this aspect of the modernist error, as well. After all, he observes, "papal teaching on the need to adapt the liturgy to keep pace with modern times is conspicuous only by its absence" (p. 30). He notes the supreme arrogance of those liturgists who freely admitted that modern liturgical reform is "not a question of what people want; it is a question of what is good for them" (qtd. in p. 38) — an irony for worshipers of modern democracy so opposed to "top-down" ecclesiology. The liturgical periti and the council fathers wished to read the signs of the times to determine what men wanted: for modern man to remain interested, he required a drastically simplified and shortened Mass freed of ritual, in his own language, with all-controlling emphasis on the banalities of his own external participation. The result? An incurable liturgical ennui, redressed only by even more radical changes with no end in sight. As Thomas Woods and Christopher Ferrara summarize it, the reformers "dumbed it [the traditional Latin Mass] down so that a second-grader would be insulted by the finished product, and actually called it an improvement" (The Great Façade, p. 103). No longer taught the most basic Catholicism, modern man cannot make up for the impossibility of his interior participation, no matter how "active" his external participation.

The failure of the postconciliar reforms to keep Catholics in the Church and coming to Mass (a fact Davies documents in a thorough appendix) shows a truth that traditionalists after Vatican II quickly pointed out. Man's nature does not change so radically from century to century — human nature itself is inalterable — that he must daily reinvent the liturgy to suit him. Quite the contrary, it is the point of a divine liturgy to lift man out of the mundane and into the supernatural, something outside the capacity of the typical Novus Ordo Mass. And the world does a far better job being the world than the Church does; no man has any reason to attend his parish Mass if he can find an equally worldly, popular show on television or out on the town. Indeed, explains Davies, "[b]ecause the housewife or the manual laborer listens to pop music to relieve the monotony of the day's routine, it does not follow that they are incapable of appreciating anything better, or that they wish to hear the same sort of music in Church on Sunday" (p. 40). Men, even the much-vaunted modern men, seek after the sacred and balk at drastic change. (Perhaps if the reformers bothered to consult the faithful at all, they would have discovered this.) It remains for the Church only to proclaim her divine answer, the integral Catholic truth, and win the souls of men away from the world, the flesh and the devil.

Ending the Faith by Ending the Mass

Yet as we all know, most of the Church has quit the stage and abandoned this mission. Tolle Missam, tolle Ecclesiam, said Card. Newman, and Davies' book reflects the idea. Outfitted with the ideas, connections and positions necessary to effect a revolution, the cabal of Annibale Bugnini succeeded in what Bugnini himself described as "a major conquest of the Catholic Church" (qtd. in p. 59). They hid behind a thin veneer of Catholicism the principles of revolutionary destruction: a reversal of the hierarchy of God and man in the Mass and in reality, an elimination of all things sacred and sacrificial in the liturgy, daily and unending change in the manner of liturgical celebrations. And so with the deftness of years of observing the Novus Ordo and studying its origins, Michael Davies sets out plainly the historical events and personages whose actions have destroyed the Mass and threaten the Church herself. Just as during the forty-five-year reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Catholics are abandoning the faith "not by a preaching campaign against it, but by participating for decades in a liturgy from which the ritual signs of reverence, which kept this belief alive in their minds and affections, [have] been removed" (p. 71). Few realize this was the design from the beginning, the plan which would birth the grand Masonic éclat of the Novus Ordo.

Thus one may hope Davies' book will convince Catholics still clinging to the Mass of Paul VI to understand its danger by comprehending its origins. Almost no well-meaning Catholics would — barring insanity — yield control of the liturgy to the wrecking-crew of modernists who abused it after the council. Fewer still the number who would seek the most moderate reforms of the traditional Roman missal by such open-ended directives as fill the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. Msgr. Lefebvre used to say that "our future lies in our past"; Davies' history proves the point. No "reform of the reform" short of the full-blown Novus Ordo justifies departure from the traditional Mass, and the thought of "returning to the council" is nothing if not chimerical. Surveying the modern Church's liturgical wasteland and its origins in Vatican II and Annibale Bugnini, it becomes difficult to postulate any other solution than that of the late French archbishop. To rephrase Edward Schillebeeckx, it is the Old Mass, and nothing else, which is "an admirable" — even perfect — "piece of work."

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"Liturgical Time Bombs in Vatican II: The Destruction of Catholic Faith through Changes in Catholic Worship" by Michael Davies can be ordered through TAN Books and Publishers.