Catholic mass “changed or mutilated to make it easier to understand” — Cardinals who objected

Something of a replay here, from earlier posts — a coordination if you will, with more from the dissident Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani.

The supposed betrayal came to light officially, on April 4, 1969, when Pope Paul VI announced adoption of the Novus Ordo, “New Order,” of the mass.

Four and a half months later, on September 25, 1969, Cardinal Ottaviani and a colleague blew a whistle on it with an “intervention” accompanied by a cover letter which warned that the Novus Ordo “represents both as a whole, and in its details, a striking departure from the Catholic theology of the Mass as it was formulated” in the 16th-century Council of Trent.

Among other points made or stated, was that Catholics in general had “never, absolutely never, asked that the liturgy be changed or mutilated to make it easier to understand.”

(Catholics as a whole were not complaining, nor were they abstaining from mass attendance or other practices. Rather, they were in general accepting of the church’s worship arrangements. It was dedicated experts who were moving this thing and had been doing so for many years.)

“On many points,” the two cardinals said, the Novus Ordo “has much to gladden the heart of even the most modernist Protestant.”

The Mass, they said, had been “reduced to a ‘supper’ . . . The altar is nearly always called the table. . . . The Blessed Sacrament [was to] be kept in a place apart . . . as though it were some sort of relic. [Implicitly deserving of no more reverence than the bones of a saint.] . . . The people themselves appear as possessing autonomous priestly powers. . . . [the priest] appears as nothing more than a Protestant minister.” pickup

Question here: When did Ottaviani et al. become aware of all this? Had they kept track of the dozens, hundreds of conferences, work sessions, scholarly and other writings over the decades — in short of the hard-working cadre of operators of the “liturgical movement”?

Surely, these operatives had not told him, who with many others had never been seen as an ally.  They had worked the precincts of ecclesial prelates, maneuvered in the corridors of power, pressed buttons of the major decision-makers, winning some decisions, losing some but never giving up.

Their final achievement “teems with insinuations of manifest errors” against the Faith, the slashing critique said this “Critical Study of the New Mass,” as it came to be called. The old guard had lost a big one. Ottaviani, 79, and his colleague was Antonio Cardinal Bacci, 84. The study’s spadework had been done by a dozen theologians working under the direction of a man who was to figure mightily in subsequent events, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.