THE HERETICAL INTENTIONS OF THE REFORMERS UNMASKED

     Following the publication of the petition by Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci in October 1969 and the numerous accusations brought by the traditionalists against the artisans of the postconciliar liturgical reform, the latter established a definitive version of the new Roman missal, which was presented to the Pope on 11 May by Cardinal Gut, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship. The Holy Father expressed his keen satisfaction with this work⁵⁰.

     It was clear that a wide-ranging and meticulous revision of the Ordo and the “General Instruction” had been undertaken to pacify those who had voiced their opposition. Nevertheless, if we are to believe Fr Annibale Bugnini, the new versions in no way altered the sense of the original texts... which were beyond reproach! So let us listen to the speech that Bugnini, the tool of Paul VI, gave in April 1970:

     “A painstaking and detailed study has clearly shown that the principal objection  – which sought to cast doubt upon the doctrinal purity of these liturgical documents, chiefly by measuring them against the tradition of the past – is wholly without foundation.

     “Article 7 of the Institutio Generalis, which has been particularly attacked, rests without any doubt upon sound and solid theological foundations, provided that it is understood, as it should be, in the light of its context. However, in order to make the text even clearer and to avoid all possibility of misunderstanding, the Institutio in the New Missal will be preceded by a foreword, or Proœmium, which will highlight even more effectively the continuity and legitimate development, the enrichment of doctrinal tradition that has taken place between the Council of Trent and Vatican II upon the subject of the Eucharist, the priesthood, the Sacrifice and the Real Presence, and also the criteria according to which it has been found desirable to give concrete expression to this continuity and doctrinal progress in the New Missal.⁵¹”

     The procedure, not to say artifice, of the reformers was immediately denounced by the Abbé de Nantes. It was not the first time that the innovators had attempted to disarm the opposition without in any way admitting their errors or giving a single decisive proof of their horror of heresy: “As it was with the famous Nota Prævia which was added at the last minute to the Constitution Lumen Gentium and supposed to neutralise the venom of Collegiality... As it was with the introduction added to the Declaration on Religious Liberty which so ably contradicted its dogmatic errors (which were still allowed to remain in it)... As it is on every occasion when Modernism wants to disarm criticism without withdrawing its poison, so here too we have a Proœmium added to the General Instruction which had already explained the New Mass! It reaffirms the doctrine of the Holy Sacrifice which the texts that follow will continue to water down, to falsify or to omit without a qualm. And Bugnini claims triumphantly that, after weighing things up carefully, our criticisms of his brainchild were unfounded. No retraction or correction of any kind. No repudiation or condemnation of those who interpret and perform the New Mass in a protestant or modernist sense. We are being led up the garden path!

     “But apparently the size of the undertaking, the solemnity with which it has been launched and its pontifical approval, are all calculated to give the impression that this is an important Act of the Church's Magisterium which is to apply for many centuries. The whole thing, coming as it does from the Sovereign Pontiff, has been deliberately played up. Just as the Second Vatican Council wanted to outstrip the Council of Trent, so just four hundred years later the Missal of Saint Pius V is set to disappear before that of Saint Paul VI. It has all been very cleverly arranged.

     “But this is merely a façade put out by Rome. The universal reality is one of rottenness. Our Mass is being corrupted.⁵²”

     At the end of the first part of his detailed analysis of the foreword to the General Instruction, which affirmed “what was denied or deliberately omitted from the original text, which they refused to retract or correct”⁵³, the Abbé de Nantes concluded: “All is well that ends well, if these dogmatic truths are going to wipe out the errors spread abroad in the Church over he last few months in the name of Paul VI and his new Ordo, if the bishops and the clergy are going to take account of this foreword in their catechesis as Cardinal Ottaviani piously hopes⁵⁴, and if the denial or omission of these Catholic dogmas is going to be effectively suppressed by the hierarchy from now on. But, as we are quite certain of the contrary, it is clear to us that the sole aim of the Roman Reformer is to silence criticism by making illusory concessions. We rejoice all the same, however, at having forced him to place at the head of his reformed Missal a profession of the Catholic faith which he had so maliciously left out. Proof of how Holy Spirit assists His supreme and infallible Magisterium, at least in a negative manner.⁵⁵”

     Nevertheless, in this same foreword, the reformers made no attempt to disguise the fact that their missal contained a number of outright novelties. They “boast about this with confidence”, noted the Abbé de Nantes. “The passage is worth quoting and needs no commentary. It assures us that the Spirit of Vatican II and the new faith of our Reformers do not hesitate to create rites and prayers in which they can express themselves freely, novelties that are imposed on us as the Roman liturgy, and too bad if this modern religion is not ours, we must submit to it all the same!

     “‘One section of the new Missal adapts the prayers of the Church more suitably to the needs of our own times; this applies mainly to ritual Masses and Masses for various necessities, in which traditional and novel elements are happily combined. This also explains why – whereas many expressions dating from the Church's most ancient tradition have remained intact and have been rendered more familiar with each edition of the same Roman missal – many others have been adapted to contemporary needs and circumstances. Yet others, such as the prayers for the Church, for the laity, for the sanctification of man's labour, and for certain needs proper to our own times, have been composed entirely from scratch, borrowing ideas and often the very expressions themselves that are found in recent conciliar documents.’ Dear, dear ,dear...

     “‘Likewise, conscious of the changing situation of the contemporary world, it did not seem to imply any attack on the venerable treasure of tradition to modify certain phrase and texts borrowed from the oldest tradition in order to bring their style into line with the language of modern theology and to relate them to the present-day discipline of the Church. That is why certain ways of speaking, concerning the use and appreciation of worldly goods, have been changed, as well as certain expression that emphasised a form of outward penance belonging to the Church of times past.’

     “Can you guess what this refers to? To fasting, of course! We understand perfectly. It will be Gaudium et Spes for the Church: Food, Love and Extravagance, with no end in sight...⁵⁶”

     So, did Article 7 of the final version of the General Instruction present a definition of the Mass that was truly Catholic, conceding nothing to Lutheran heresy? One might well be in some doubt over this, before even having read it, seeing that in this month of May 1970 Father Bugnini had stated that the “first version” was beyond reproach, “clear in its context”⁵⁷. For months the reformers had been attempting to correct this article 7 without having to retract their heresy and contradict their first version, which gave the Eucharistic celebration no other significance than that of a Memorial of the Last Supper, a simple reminder of the fraternal meal that Jesus had taken with His Apostles.

     To put people's minds at rest, Paul VI had explained, in his allocution on 19 November 1969, that “the Mass is and remains the memorial of the Last Supper of Christ, during which the Lord, changing the bread and the wine into His Body and Blood, instituted the sacrifice of the New Testament and willed that, through the virtue of His priesthood conferred on the Apostles, this sacrifice should be renewed in its identity, simply being offered in a different manner, that is a sacramental and unbloody manner, in perpetual memory of Him, until He comes again at the end of time (cf. de la Taille, Mysterium fidei, Elucid. IX).⁵⁸”

     As the Abbé de Nantes immediately observed, “This form of words was intended to allay the concerns of Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci and wrong foot them. However, it is still no more than a fudge between the Catholic faith and protestant heresy. Are we really to believe that the Last Supper was... bloody?⁵⁹” The Pope was pushing the heretical meaning, but he did so cleverly, carefully keeping within the limits of orthodoxy. Listen to the theologian of the Counter-Reformation explaining to Paul VI, in his Liber accusationis, the very real malice that lay behind his teaching: “Your very words were: ‘The Mass is and remains the memorial of the Last Supper of Christ.’ This as it stands is definite heresy and it is this phrase which passed from your mouth into the hearts of thousands of priests, and corrupted their faith. But you had been careful to incorporate this definitive error into an obscure theory – little known and rather unusual – emanating from Father de la Taille⁶⁰, according to which the Supper and the Cross form a single liturgical act, a single Sacrifice. Thus you safeguarded yourself and were able for all practical purposes to adopt a Protestant viewpoint without formally abandoning Catholic doctrine. You are very clever! But so indeed are your priests, Most Holy Father, and they understand well enough that your intention in devising the New Ordo was to bring us closer to Protestantism, an example which they are not slow to follow.⁶¹”

     No, the reformers refused to retract. In no way were they going to renounce their heresy. To reveal their obstinacy, the Abbé de Nantes published their two versions of Article 7.

     In the new version, the affirmation of the truth had simply been juxtaposed to the error. “For my part”, commented the Abbé de Nantes, “I find this modification a sign of cunning rather than of orthodoxy. It is in any case not sincere. This refusal to admit to being in the wrong is not only due to personal sensitivity but to an attachment to error and to the desire that the error should remain.⁶³”

A COMBAT ON TWO FRONTS

     Acting at one and the same time as a theologian anxious to defend the purity of the faith and also as a priest, a good pastor, attentive to the well-being of the flock, the Abbé de Nantes found himself waging a fight on two fronts. On one side, against the integrists who were daring to question the liceity and even the validity of the new rites promulgated by the legitimate Roman authority. And on the other side, against the reformers, since their new Ordo conveyed the abominable heresy “which denies the reality of the sacrifice, and from there goes on to destroy the meaning of the Real Presence in all its exactness and strength and to bring this sacrament into disrepute by carrying it out in a manner which is wholly human, like a secular feast, and by surrendering it during Communion to public sinners, heretics and infidels”⁶⁴.

     The French bishops imposed the new Ordo with unbelievable moral violence on all the members of their clergy. They proscribed the old rite. Now it happened that, in forbidding the members of his diocese from attending the Mass still being celebrated at Nancy according to the rite of Saint Pius V by the Abbé Mouraux, Mgr Pirolley dragged the Abbé de Nantes into “this sordid business”⁶⁵. In his discussions with the traditionalists at Nancy, who were indefectibly attached to the old Roman rite, he had in fact invoked the theological authority of the Abbé de Nantes and made out that the latter had advised people to accept the reform of the Mass. “You should obey him”, the bishop told them.

     As soon as he caught wind of this, the Abbé de Nantes replied to him immediately. He wrote him an open letter on 13 May 1970 and published it as the editorial of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. It is impossible to read it without emotion, so strongly does it reveal the heart of this good pastor.

     “Excellency,

     “… Yes, it is true that I have cautioned my readers and friends against the danger and the temptation of the ghetto, of the integrist schism, of secession from the Church. As they have the honour of being faithful and are almost alone in the integral practice of their faith, they must on no account take a single false step. You who speak so scornfully to them, who refuse to listen to them and shut the door in their face to the last Roman Mass in your diocese, you ought to realise what a temptation there is for them to give in to their disgust and flee from this horrible ‘postconciliar Church’ whose only charity and liberty is upon its lips and which holds out to them nothing but spitefulness, treachery, and brutality.

     “You have obviously read me carefully. You have realised that I am taking care not to push them over the brink, not to gain an adventurer’s success by encouraging them to reject the authority of the Pope and the bishops, by declaring the new Mass invalid and the priests who celebrate it heretics, and by finding them excuses and justifications for abandoning the Church in favour of sects and schisms old or new. On the contrary, I am holding them back and I have taken them to task. I appeal to their heroic virtue to endure your persecution without committing sin. I dissuade them from following the evil shepherds who are bound to turn up – the phenomenon is universal – and to try and lead them away from the Church and into their secret chapels, or else to get them to dream of the Church of the miracle!

     “But I have such confidence in their wisdom that I go even further still, anxious as I am not to see them falling into the trap you have set for them and taking part, along with you, in tearing to pieces the seamless tunic of the Church. They are but human, and we all have our moments of weakness, our impatience, our anger, our prejudices. They are too alone in their defence of the integral Catholic Truth for us to allow them to get caught up in partisan feelings, sectarian reactions or unreasonable and outdated attachments.

     “You ought to be marvelling at the fact that under such persecution they are still prepared to listen to reason from us! I would not have one of them be lost and I can see that today God expects a truly superhuman perfection from those still faithful to Him. They have to acknowledge the legitimacy of Pope Paul VI, the same who has changed the Mass. They have to respect your authority as bishop and to obey those orders of yours that are just and good at the very moment when you are odiously persecuting them. They also have to recognise the validity of the other Mass and the right to exist of other liturgies (of varying degrees of vulgarity, but invariably mediocre), since these are practiced with Rome’s permission and under your watchful eye.

     “But the story does not stop there. Abandoned, hunted down, thrown back upon themselves as they are, – to the extent that it seems you are anxious to be rid of them as soon as possible –, they are bound to erupt from time to time. Occasionally they will become needlessly aggressive, unreasonably suspicious, full of bitterness against those priests who submit to every form of servitude and against those Catholics who wallow in all the immoral permissiveness of the new religion. If they become shut up in themselves, it is because the Church in your diocese marginalises them as though they were excommunicates.

     “I am very concerned, Excellency, about the spiritual health of these faithful whom you are thrusting aside, and about the future of the Church. We must rise above our worst disagreements and each one of us must bring our thoughts back to the Catholic community. We must apply our lips to the open wound made in the Heart of the Church by the spear thrust into it by the aggiornamento. We must find a modus vivendi between yourself and ourselves. You have read what I have written. You are aware that I am greatly concerned with achieving such a charitable understanding. And however little you have understood them, you have realised that the traditionalists in your diocese are prepared for every sacrifice in order to remain within the Catholic community and in submission to yourself.

     “Every sacrifice, except that of their faith!⁶⁶”

     In order to establish this modus vivendi, to fix its conditions and terms, the Abbé de Nantes proposed that Mgr Pirolley should join him in a public meeting at Nancy on 19 June. Alas, the bishop declined the invitation. So there was no public debate, but on that day, at Nancy, the Abbé de Nantes gave a long and closely argued conference talk, protesting against the sudden and implacable proscription of the Roman rite of St Pius V.

THE BANNING OF THE OLD ROMAN RITE

     Before he went on to examine the reasons that led the bishops to ban the old rite, the Abbé de Nantes quoted, as a prelude to his demonstration, an extract from Cardinal Tisserant's speech in mid-December 1969, in which he presented the good wishes of the Sacred College to the Holy Father.

     “The cardinal referred to the reform of the Mass, or rather he was pleased to recall in great detail and with a truly inordinate interest how he had played a part in the restoration of ‘thirteen pages, preserved through pure chance, of a complete missal, written shortly before or shortly after the year 700... which shows that even at that time people had seen fit to prepare books containing everything needed by an isolated priest, celebrating on his own for a few members of the faithful in a country church... Six pages present our common Preface and the text of the Canon up to the prayer Supra quae, of which they form the earliest existing example.’ But what was the significance of this discovery? ‘A missal belonging to the year 700 therefore had the same arrangement as a modern missal, and this fact had remained hidden to us.’ With a dreadful irony, the cardinal then calmly added: ‘The conclusion is inescapable: we ought not to fear the changes, convinced as we are that in the long run they will be for the best.’⁶⁷”

     This anecdote highlighted the essential reason why the Abbé de Nantes had been opposed (and always would be) to the proscription of the old Roman rite: “Over and above the Latin and the Gregorian, what we wish to safeguard is the Mass that our ancestors used to say⁶⁷”... It is true that, in his later studies, our Father envisaged the possibility of more felicitous liturgical reforms being carried out, either through the adoption of ancient Eastern anaphoras or even through the creation of new anaphoras, provided that this enrichment of the liturgy came within the framework of a movement to restore and defend the faith. But our Father would nevertheless continue to declare himself against the proscription of the Roman Canon and in favour of its integral preservation, because it is “a sacred document, the law of prayer of the Roman Church for more than a thousand years”.⁶⁸

     On 19 June 1970, the Abbé de Nantes presented his audience with an analysis which drew heavily on the legislative texts relating to the new Ordo; it was based on the works and conclusions of the Abbé Raymond Dulac. We need not mention these canonical arguments here, since the Abbé de Nantes will subsequently abandon them. To draw attention to all the juridical irregularities in the mass of documents relating to the promulgation of the new missal will in fact come to seem to him “fastidious and futile”, since without any doubt it was Paul VI himself who had wanted and who had imposed this reform⁶⁹.

     The banning of the old rite revealed the perverse intention of the reformers, their desire to replace it with something fundamentally new and treacherous. The demonstration of the Abbé de Nantes was made all the stronger and more convincing by the fact that he was not opposed in principle to a liturgical reform: “It was certainly a possible thesis: the Old Mass was good but the New would be better, and so much so that it would be worth the effort to change over to it. This was the idea suggested to the conciliar Fathers by the ‘experts’. This was the optimistic thinking of Pope Paul VI for regarding his Ordo, which gave him confidence that it would be welcomed by everyone and put an end to the ‘experiments’ of the innovators as well as quickly consoling the ‘nostalgics’ of the Tridentine Counter-Reformation. It was also hoped that the Protestants would rally to the new rite. This ecumenical idea, always present but never expressed by the Pope, can be clearly seen in an article in the Osservatore Romano: ‘The current ecumenical movement... rightly leads us to focus on and favour everything which can facilitate unity with our separated brethren and certainly not on that which might separate us further. All this without prejudice to the truth, for otherwise it would be a false ecumenism that would work against the intended result.⁷⁰’

     “And so the ‘restoration’ of the Mass proceeded, under the watchful eye of Mgr Bugnini, aided by six Protestant ‘observers’. Great care was taken not to emphasise its newness too much, and to insinuate rather than state clearly the new definition and new spirit of what was henceforth to be known as ‘the Eucharistic Supper’.

     “An analogy, which I have frequently used in connection with other reformist manoeuvres, will help us to understand this stage which I would refer to as that of Paul VI's liberalism. The Catholic train cleared an important set of switch points in 1517, deliberately closing the line that led to Lutheranism and its ‘Holy Supper’, and pursuing its way along the track of the Apostolic Tradition of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. But now the current Reform, under various influences and for reasons either admitted or concealed, is making the train go backwards, taking it back to the other side of the famous switch points. They will even go and search for a new Canon, the Prex IIa, in the fourth century, a canon written by the antipope Hippolytus⁷¹! At this stage of its reversal, the train is still on the Catholic track, but it is also on the Lutheran track. It is, as the Abbé Dulac expressed it so accurately, a ‘polyvalent’ situation.”

     Now, in banning the Roman rite of St Pius V, Mgr Pirolley had in fact “closed the Catholic line. He has placed a red light before it. By forbidding the celebration of the old Mass, he has revealed the significance of the conciliar Reform, making the intention of the reformers only too evident. If the train has been made to reverse, this was clearly so that it might switch to another track. The Catholic track has already been placed out of bounds. Nothing remains but to set the train in motion again, gently at first, upon the track of the ‘permanent reform’, yesterday Lutheran, today Modernist, tomorrow Teilhardian. And the experts and pioneers of the ‘liturgical renewal’ are already running a long way ahead!

     “We can no longer give them the benefit of the doubt. The train is now to be launched upon the track of Lutheranism. The persecution at Nancy, Rouen and elsewhere (!) is proof that, through this enforced reform of the rites, the enemies of the Church intend to destroy the Catholic faith and throw the entire Church into schism and heresy.

     “The old Mass is a Sacrifice, whereas the new Mass, the modernist Mass, is but a Meal. The Mass of Paul VI is to serve as a transition between these two. Failing an incident comparable to the derailment at Nancy, the locomotive of the Reform will everywhere jump the points blocking the route to Lutheranism and tear along the track of heresy, as happened at the intercommunion in Vaugirard, or at the Mass of Exchange and Dialogue at Dijon the other day, or at the drinking of red wine in Charleroi. And so we see that this Reform had no proportionate reason or genuine interest other than to introduce, albeit imperceptibly, a liturgy which corresponds to the change already accomplished – according to the Modernists – in the religious experience that the people of God find in the Mass. The modifications in language, hymns, ornaments, rites and words have no other aim than to ensure this transition from an out-of-date and too rigidly Catholic conception of the Mass to one that is open, dynamic and humanist, one that corresponds to Protestantism and Modernism.

     “And while the Pope, in order to salvage his Missal, reintegrates the essential element of the Catholic faith into it and completes Article 7 by tacking a few afterthoughts on to it, the whole Church is insensibly substituting the new idea of a fraternal and joyous repast in the place of the certain dogma of the propitiatory Sacrifice.

     “And so we come to the end of our enquiry. Through the Mass of Paul VI which is polyvalent, the Catholic Church is in the process of passing from a worship of God at whose centre is the propitiatory Sacrifice of Calvary sacramentally renewed upon the altar, to a worship of Man at whose centre is the ‘Lord's Supper’, a meeting and fraternal repast which celebrates human happiness. From the Sacrifice to the Meal. The New Mass, with all its pastoral options, is of course still the Sacrifice of Christ, the Memorial of His Passion. But, in addition to this, it is also the meal of a truly fraternal assembly. Around these two notions of sacrifice and meal, adjectives will fluctuate and adverbs give way to one another. As in the game of seesaw, one notion will rise while the other descends. Do not think that this movement can be arrested at the moment of their perfect equilibrium. The impulse provided by today's Reformation, reinforced by the resentment of the other, the Lutheran, will precipitate the movement to its extreme, to the point where the meal abolishes the sacrifice. Already it has been said in the Dutch Catechism that this meal is in itself a sacrifice, and at the time the idea of reducing the Sacrifice to a fraternal communion had scandalised the Roman commission⁷². Things have moved fast since then : the Sacrifice is not wanted any more and that is why the Old Missal is forbidden.

     “The dissension was introduced by the Reformers and it began to harden into schism from the moment they made up their minds to abolish the Holy Roman Mass. And they want to do this because their fraternal meal does not have any necessary connection with the Sacrifice of Calvary. All they say of this meeting is that it is the ‘the memorial of the Lord’, the ‘memorial of the Last Supper’, where one remembers Christ, His life, His death and His resurrection. Everything about it has been directed to exclude the essential Mystery of Faith: the propitiatory Sacrifice and communion with God through the redemptive Body and Blood.⁷³”

     Hence the Abbé de Nantes' opposition to the new Mass was above all motivated by the doctrinal content of the postconciliar liturgical innovations. Carried away by their desire for a reunion with the Protestant communities, the reformers, under the pretext of changing the forms of prayer, were actually obscuring and attacking Catholic dogma. In imposing their liturgical novelties, they were watering down, distorting and altering traditional doctrine to please heretics and schismatics. As the Abbé de Nantes will write elsewhere, “It is the grand plan of Ecumenism that is the real motive for replacing of the Mass of all ages, known as the Mass of St Pius V, with the Mass of Paul VI. .⁷⁴”

THE CONDITIONS AND CLAUSES OF  A MODUS VIVENDI

     In the concluding part of his conference on 19 June 1970, the Abbé de Nantes formulated several complaints, insisting that faith and charity be restored within the Church. He took his inspiration from the adage of Saint Augustine: In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas. In matters of necessity let there be unity, in matters of doubt liberty, and in all things charity. Then he spelt out what he thought should be the legitimate demands of the bishop of Nancy as well as of the traditionalists in his diocese, in order that there might be established a modus vivendi acceptable to both parties. In this way he strove to open up a path of charity and peace, seeking to distance the traditionalists from any kind of schismatic attitude whilst at the same time asking the bishop to respect their rights.

     “I. In the first place, in those matters which are absolutely certain and necessary, we ask that the unity of faith and rites be restored, since without this there can no longer be a Church.

     “Our Pastors have the duty to condemn the widespread errors on the subject of the Real Presence, the Holy Sacrifice and sacramental Communion. And they also have the duty to banish from our sanctuaries, absolutely and without delay, every form of rite that is invalid, doubtful, anarchical, or expressly sacrilegious. It is intolerable to God and to the children of the Church that priests should be teaching a corrupt faith and celebrating a sacrilegious rite with the connivance of the Pope and the bishops. Should the latter persist in this culpable passivity, then the people of God would have the right to demand their deposition.

     “II. In matters which are not essential or open to doubt, freedom would present little inconvenience to the Church. It would permit a calm appraisal of the New Ordo.

     “III. From now on our wish is to live at peace within the Church, so that brotherly charity can flourish once more.

     “Your bishop could ask and even demand that none of you should contest through your own judgment and in a spirit of schism the validity of the new rite promulgated by the legitimate Pope and adopted by the entire hierarchical Church, which we regard as endowed with an infallible sense of faith, assisted as it is by the Holy Spirit and protected by Him from all formal error in essential matters, amongst which Eucharistic worship is in the very first rank. I am certain that, despite our suspicions concerning the intentions of the authors of this reform, our criticism of its ambiguities, its omissions and its undeniably mischievous nature, our opposition to the New Ordo will never go so far as to deny its validity once the Church’s legitimate hierarchy recognises it as its own. The CRC accepts this test of Catholic orthodoxy.

     “But you have the right to ask and even demand of your bishop that he should lift the prohibition, or rather that he should allow you both the theoretical freedom and the practical opportunity of following all the traditional rites of worship without setting difficulties in the way: the old Roman Ordo in Latin and Gregorian, Communion given kneeling and upon the tongue, etc., all matters which cannot but be approved and authorised by a bishop! For, if they are matters of secondary importance, how can there possibly be such an urgent need to abandon them? But, if they are matters touching upon the essential, how can he condemn them without also accusing the Apostolic Church which gave them to us to be practised?

     “In this way there would cease this detestable, this dreadful, this scandalous division between loyal Catholics and their bishops around the very Altar of the Mass.⁷⁶”

     It was truly a combat on two fronts that the Abbé de Nantes was obliged to pursue. Shortly after he had given this conference to counter Mgr Pirolley's sectarianism, he learned that at Nancy the Abbé Mouraux was publicly stating that the new Mass was invalid. Certainly this priest could not have found a more brutal argument to confound the faithful of Nancy and bring them into his own chapel. What a drama! What folly! It was by denying the validity of the New Ordo that the integrist priests exploited and sharpened the often legitimate exasperation of the traditionalists against the liturgical novelties, in order to steer them into their own places of worship.

BETWEEN FIXISM AND SPONTANEISM

     During his interventions in these theological controversies, our Father always kept in mind the grievances that could be formulated against integrism. An example of this can be found in a personal note, dated December 1969, from which we will copy out the following remarks:

     “There is in the positions of many integrists and especially priests a certain incomprehension (which plays into the hands of their adversaries) of the life of the Church and of life ‘full stop’. The Church has needed reforms (and will always need then) in those matters that are subject to change (and the key to the cunning of the reformists lies in the surreptitious and progressive extension of ‘what can change’ to the detriment of that which is immutable.

     “There was a very sound movement of liturgical and ecclesial restoration to be taken forward. But it was deviated from, distorted and inverted by the power of the progressivists with the complicity of recent Popes. That is not a reason for claiming that all was well before and that we need only forget and erase everything to return ‘the the religiosity’ of 1900. One can admit that it was necessary to give greater prominence to the great truths of our faith and worship, without for all that turning the Mass into a quasi protestant service, abolishing Latin and imposing equivocal formulations.⁷⁷”

     During the 70's the Abbé de Nantes will deepen his knowledge of liturgical matters, and he will gradually come to realise how incompetent the traditionalists generally were in this domain. The reactionaries tirelessly cited the bull Quo primum of Saint Pius V, but never stopped to think that the maledictions fulminated by the holy Pope against possible falsifiers (or reformers) of his missal might be intended for everyone with the exception of his successors⁷⁸. In vain did the more submissive integrists remind them that Pope Saint Pius X had himself envisaged and foreseen a reform of the Mass:

     “In the Apostolic Constitution Divino afflatu in which he promulgated the new arrangement of the Psalter (1 November 1911), Pope Saint Pius X stated that, in doing this, he had committed himself to the task of revising the Breviary and the Missal of Saint Pius V. Here are his exact words:  ‘Since the arrangement of the Psalter is intimately linked with the whole of the Divine Office and the Liturgy, no one can fail to see that, by this Our decree, We have taken the first steps towards the emendation of the Roman Breviary and the Missal. For this task, We will soon appoint a special Council, or, as it is termed, a Commission of scholars.’  The reform was modest; it is nevertheless significant that this great Pope was not of the opinion that the work of Saint Pius V was definitive and irreformable. Such was also the thinking of Pius XII, seeing that he profoundly modified not the entirety of the Mass, but that which forms the heart of the liturgical year, the celebration of the Paschal Mystery.⁷⁹”

     As the Abbé de Nantes will write, “Liturgy proceeds in a manner quite different from that of dogma. The latter knows no middle way between truth and error, no historic evolution from one to the other. But the former ploughs a wide path between the extremes of fixism and mobilism, whilst always having the deepest respect for sacred doctrine and the apostolic tradition.⁸⁰”

     At the end of 1975, in a study entitled the “The reform of the Mass, fantasy or reality”, the Abbé de Nantes will retrace the history of the “Liturgical Movement” from its origins under the pontificates of Pius IX and Pius X to its disastrous postconciliar realisation. In making a final assessment of these reforms, he will at that time reveal his full thinking on the matter of the liturgy⁸¹.

WHOEVER DECLARES THE NEW “ORDO MISSÆ” ILLICIT
COMMITS THE SIN OF SCHISM

     It was, as we recall, only after he had learned the “Lesson of the Churches” that the Abbé de Nantes nuanced his estimation of the new rite. For, given that the entire hierarchy had adhered to it, the Catholic intention of the Church had clearly prevailed over the heretical intentions of those who manufactured the new Ordo. As our Father recounts, “Instead of focusing exclusively on all the disturbing new features and denouncing the interpretation that their inventors wished to give them, I was led to remark on the unchanged essentials of the Mass and the possibility of interpreting even the most equivocal parts of it in a Catholic sense. There is no mystery or sleight of hand in this. The innovators had not proposed to the Church a Mass that was essentially other than the Mass of all time; they had not introduced into it elements that were positively heretical. Humanly speaking, such a daring blow could never have succeeded.⁸²”

     Let us pass on from the external proof of the validity of the new Ordo to the internal proof, namely its preservation of the rite of consecration.

     In his study “At the Heart of the Church, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass”, the Abbé de Nantes will expound this internal proof in great detail. The extremist integrists were invalidists through tutiorism⁸³, arguing from the necessity of an inner intention on the part of the minister of the sacrament. The Abbé de Nantes replied to them that “in order for there to be a true Mass, it has never been required that the priest think and believe what the Church believes and teaches; nor that he should intend what the Church intends. Wherefore one sees that he is only there as an instrument whose thoughts, deepest wishes, virtues and personal intentions do not enter into the matter. He is simply required to perform the actions and say the words of the sacrament, seriously; that is is whole office. The rest concerns Christ alone. If to the question: ‘Are you going to say Mass?’ he answers: ‘Yes’, the requisite intention is sufficiently affirmed. Saint Thomas, and with him the whole Church, teaches that for a priest to pronounce the words over the bread and the wine is a sufficient indication of his intention. Today, every priest who says the New Mass, the Eucharistic celebration, has the intention of doing what the Church does and his celebration is valid, because the rite he uses comes to him from Christ's only Church. This seems to contradict our impressions and our spontaneous feelings because we imagine that the priest, whom we can see, is the principal author of the Holy Sacrifice. Our impressions deceive us. He is only there as the secondary agent, the instrumental cause. The principal agent, as Saint Thomas explains, is ‘Christ and the Church’; and this agency operates when the priest, its servant, correctly carries out the actions and words prescribed for him...

     “As for the rest, were the priest to have every vice (and heresy, schism and apostasy come under this heading of moral depravation), were he even to have the express intention of making his Mass into something that it is not, for example if he were to intend it not to be a sacrifice at all or that it should only express a vague spiritual presence of the Lord, his intention would have no repercussion on the essence of the sacrament, indeed no effect at all, since the priest is not the master in this affair. The thought, the will and the formal intention of the principal Agent, invisible but sovereign, namely Christ and the Church, would prevail over his own! From the moment that the priest wishes to confect the sacrament, to say the Mass, to celebrate the Eucharist, he brings into play a divine energy, a Power, that operates the Mystery of Faith, be it against him or without him.”

     Let us not go into more detail concerning this refutation of the arguments advanced by the integrists, but let us pass directly to the conclusion of this page: “The words of consecration said over the bread and wine by a true priest constitute the precise and complete form of the Holy Sacrifice, and through them is perfectly expressed the intention of the Church who validly effects the sacrament by means of the priest's hand and voice. The intention of the priest is sufficiently expressed through these words of consecration, removing all doubt about the efficacy of the sacrament. Now Paul VI has not dared to touch this essential part of the Mass, and, what is more, Almighty God would not have permitted him to do so and would have prevented him had he tried!⁸⁴”

     In this same study on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the Abbé de Nantes returned to the question of the liceity of the new Ordo.

     “Licit the New Mass certainly is, because whatever is prescribed or permitted by the sovereign authority of the Church is by definition licit. Yesterday it was forbidden to eat meat on Fridays; it was held to be a sacrilege for a layman to touch the Eucharist with his hands, etc. Today it is authorised by the Church. If the Church authorises something, then it is no longer a sin. For what authority on earth could declare illicit in the name of God, in other words forbidden, that which is permitted by the sovereign Authority of the Church, she who governs us all in the name of God? None can declare illicit what the Pope and the bishops declare licit, for to do so one would have to arrogate to oneself an authority superior to theirs. And it is precisely in this that schism lies, this claim, by one who lacks the power, to legislate, ordain and forbid in matters of religion, as though one were the supreme authority, outside of, in place of or in opposition to the Pope and the bishops.

     “None of us is a Pope or a bishop. He who insists today on saying that to receive Communion in the hand is materially and objectively sacrilegious, and condemns the behaviour of others by deciding what is or is not permitted, arrogates to himself a supreme authority that rivals or even excludes that of the Pope and the bishops. He makes himself Pope! The Church has her own discipline. If we bring into existence another discipline and claim that this is the true law of the Church, we automatically set ourselves up as a separate Church.

     “It is true that the authority of the Church, even the supreme authority, can be mistaken, can err or commit an abuse of power. In order to reach a decision about this, each of us can and must, in the last resort, consult his conscience, the immediate judge of good and bad by which we must always abide. Thus, the Church may well permit Communion in the hand and order priests to adopt the new rite of Paul VI, but I see in both of these decisions such great harm to the faith and to the well-being of the faithful, I discern in these novelties such frightful intentions and such evil results, that my conscience is formally opposed to them. I therefore refuse to adopt these practices even though they are permitted. Were they to be imposed on me by supreme authority, I would consider myself blameworthy if I yielded against my informed and certain conscience.

     “But, in making these judgments, my conscience has no authority except over me, and it cannot extend beyond this. I may be able to explain my reasons to my superiors, to my fellow priests and to all the faithful, but I will never have the right to transform the judgment of my conscience into an ecclesiastical law and condemn, nay excommunicate, those who obey the decisions of Authority. I will never have the right to impose on others the law of my conscience, my personal law, in defiance of the laws of the Authority of the Church.

     “To say that celebrating the Mass according to the new rite or attending this new Mass is a sin, is to talk too lightly without knowing what one is saying, or else it is an act of rebellion and schism. Since the Church has promulgated it, this Mass is licit. No one, whoever he is, is entitled to accuse anyone else of fault or sin for having said or heard this new rite, or for intending to say it or hear it in the future, unless of course he finds himself to blame and accuses himself personally.⁸⁵”

     During the 70's the Abbé de Nantes will often resume his demonstrations and conclusions on the validity and liceity of the new Ordo, in an attempt to thwart the senseless campaigns of the integrists.

     “Today”, he will write, “we hold to the old holy Roman Mass and we are in full communion of heart and mind with those who defend it, who preserve it, who celebrate and who participate in it, paying dearly for their fidelity and their devotion. We are the sons and brothers of all those who are faithful to it... provided only that they do not break the unity of the Church and that they do not make of the sacrament of unity an occasion of scission and an instrument of schism.

     “For wherever Christ and the Church are, there we find unity, there we find the bond of charity maintained. If the Mass is invalid, Christ is no longer there and nothing remains but a simulacrum of the sacrament. If the Mass is schismatic, Christ is there but the Church is absent; the Sacrifice is accomplished in Christ, but its fruits are retained for the Church and not for the schism. But if the Mass is of both Christ and the Church – even though the secondary words and rites, the dispositions and convictions of the celebrant, the behaviour and  merit of the participants may be questionable and even simply bad – there one finds the Mystery of the Faith and the Sacrament of Unity which you can only reject if you are prepared to reject and despise Christ and the Church, cutting yourself off from the bond of charity. The truth of the matter is that, in this work of of Christ and the Church, each receives the fruits of the sacrament in accordance with his faith and his purity of conscience. But the grace of the sacrament is perfect and it is poured out over the Mystical Body of Christ which is the Church and over its living members.⁸⁶”

THE NECESSITY OF APPEALING TO THE POPE

     It is true that, since the new Ordo was promulgated, several integrists had declared that Paul VI had fallen from the sovereign pontificate. But these extremists were still few in number and they did not generally advertise their sedevacantist convictions in public. The majority of the opponents of the new Ordo did not call the Pope into question. They refused to attack him directly or publicly. Such for example was the position of the Italian traditionalists of the Comitato internazionale per la difesa della Civilta Cristiana. During the winter of 1970, the members of this association considered the various popular demonstrations that could be organised in Rome, and their president, Franco Antico, wrote to the Abbé de Nantes on 14 February 1970:

     “We think that in any case the demonstration need not have an antipapal character. We must focus on the facts and the actions which offend our Catholic faith; the Pope need not be implicated. Of course we understand that sometimes this may be very difficult, because it is he who is the cause of the mayhem, the perplexities, and often the very measures to which we cannot and certainly do not wish to subscribe. The reality is that we are energetically opposed to the movement of subversion within the Church, but we do not attack the person of the Pope. Each of us must judge him according to our conscience in our heart of hearts.”

     The Abbé Dulac had rejected the new Ordo and since June 1969 had formulated a “Non possumus” to it, although he unfortunately made use of some highly questionable liturgical arguments. Now, despite his opposition to the doctrine and decision of Paul VI, he maintained intact his cult of the Pope and his conviction of his intangibility. A Pope cannot be heretical nor deposed, he said, that cannot happen! On the other hand, he imagined that Paul VI might be... drugged⁸⁷! “The drug hypothesis”, the Abbé de Nantes will observe, “is an ingenious way out of the theological difficulty. It holds that the Pope is unconscious when he scandalises us, and is only conscious when he happens to fall in with our own convictions.⁸⁸”

     The theologian of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in the twentieth century did not cease on the contrary from designating the Pope as the one sovereignly responsible for this liturgical reform: “People may say that Paul VI does not want the new Mass, people may say anything, but it would only be dreaming or lying. To cast all the blame on the bishops or to claim that the Pope has been shut up, imprisoned and drugged, to the extent that he says and does the opposite of what he thinks and wishes... impossible! As for the people they do accuse, it is he who raised them to their current positions. It absolutely certain that the Pope himself personally wanted this new Mass. It is he who rescued it at the critical moment by his discourses.⁸⁹”

     The artisans of the liturgical reform have testified that “Paul VI followed it in the greatest detail”⁹⁰. Mgr A.-G. Martimort even reported that “nothing was ever decided, let alone published, without Paul VI being kept up to date, receiving the drafts which he annotated in his own hand, and indicating his preferences and sometimes his demands or his rejections. On occasions his involvement was so intense that it provoked some genuine crises”⁹¹.

     It is noteworthy that, in taking up the battle against the new Ordo, the Abbé de Nantes had primarily sought to hasten the day of Paul VI's trial for heresy. Had he not, after publishing Cardinal Ottaviani's appeal, given the editorial of the Catholic Counter-Reformation the heading: “First warning to Pope Paul VI by the Roman clergy”? On that page he referred to the first Holy Communion rite of Zwingli, the third of the Reformers, on 13 April 1525, then he continued: “Will we have to rank Pope Paul VI Montini as the fourth amongst the Reformers? For those who have little knowledge of this period of history, which Mademoiselle Martin so well knows how to bring to life, one cannot be in doubt for long about this. An immense authoritarian upheaval – extraordinarily co-ordinated although hidden, gradual although astonishingly rapid – is adjusting the Roman Catholic Church to the Protestant Reformation and, beyond that, to the rationalist and romantic humanism that characterizes the modern mind. Sooner or later, before or after the cataclysm we are calling down on our heads, the trial of Paul VI will have to be opened in public, resulting in a decision without equal: either the Church will join him in severing the last links of her Apostolic Tradition, becoming but the plaything of John-Baptist Montini, or else – with him or without him, it matters little – she will abjure this false religion which he has been able to impose on her for a brief moment through cunning, seduction and deception, and continue to be the one unique Church of Jesus Christ.⁹²”

     The Abbé de Nantes was convinced that if one common action should be undertaken by all the traditionalists, it was this: “To rebuke Him who is the master of the faith, the dispenser of the sacraments, the regulator of the rites, the legislator and censor of the faithful and priests, Pope Paul VI, the one currently responsible and in charge of all.⁹³”

     “We should”, wrote the theologian of the Counter-Reformation, “all find ourselves in agreement in going back to the cause of the evil and in crying out with one unanimous powerful voice to the Pope, the only legislator: It is intolerable! The whole thing is your fault. It is urgent and imperative that you put an end to this crisis by restoring faith, law, order and liturgical unity throughout the Church, which is now in complete decadence. How? That is for you to decide. But it must be done, and at once! Already the reformists are detaching themselves from Rome and doing just what they please, whilst the traditionalists dream of saving their true Mass outside the Church. It is heartbreaking!

     “Perhaps I may recall to you the proposition of Charles V at the height of the wars of religion, that of an interim : everyone was to be left in peace, with his own opinions and the rite he was used to, until a General Council was convoked which would make sovereign decisions. I would hope that we will have the patience and the mutual charity to forbear excommunicating one another over the matter of our rite, and that we will join in a common appeal to the infallible Authority of the Pope and, along with him, of a future Council, so that the liturgy of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass may be restored in all its truth and dignity at the heart of the Church.⁹⁴”

     “The solution, however, is not to deny what we still, by the grace of God, have in common: the Presence of Christ and the authority of the Church maintaining the validity and the liceity of our Catholic Masses. Rather it is to demand of this innovator Pope firstly that he justifies his own faith by proscribing Lutheran and Modernist heresy and excommunicating the heresiarchs, and then that he takes up the fight against the appalling liturgical disorder and insists on the noble discipline of the Church being respected.⁹⁵”

     Whereas the refractory integrists continued to limit the field of their contestation to the domain of the liturgy alone, the Abbé de Nantes would always maintain his defence of the old Roman Mass within the context of a doctrinal combat, a combat that was far greater in scope and of primordial importance. It was clear to him – and it is this that shows his immense superiority over the integrists – that the degradation and devastation of the liturgy, like all the other postconciliar acts of destruction and corruption, had a single universal cause: the Reform of the Church decreed by Vatican II. Thus his standpoint in the liturgical debates and his moving appeals that scandals be repressed and condemned were not given the same priority as the complaints and accusations of heresy he brought against Vatican II and Paul VI himself.