*In 1547, the Epistle and Gospel were read at Mass in English, as the first stage of the reform. *In 1549, the entire Mass was translated into English in a new "Prayer Book" which was now defined as " The Mass or Lord's Supper." *In 1551, a new ceremonial of religion was imposed. This included replacing the altar with a table. The altars were torn down, and movable tables substituted.

*The switch between the priest facing east and now "facing the people" is another reform. They switched the orientation of the priest to reflect their new 'Mass', or Communion Service: The only sacrifice in their worship was a sacrifice of praise and self-giving by the "people of God". The priest switched from offering a divine Victim to God the Father, to a presider representing the people.

*In the Ordinary of the Mass points in which the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist and the Real Presence of Christ as a Victim are expressed were suppressed and eliminated or replaced by non-committal words. - - -

Unfortunately the Novus Ordo (New Mass) has adopted most of Cranmer's innovations :

* The Novus Ordo Mass is translated and said in the vernacular.

" If anyone says that the Mass should be celebrated in the vernacular only, let him be Anathema . " - Council of Trent (Session XXII, Canon 9)

* The Novus Ordo defines the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as: "the Mass or the Lord's Supper".

"We have an Altar" (thus a sacrifice)- St Paul (Hebrews 13:10)

* The Novus Ordo has also removed the altars and replaced them with movable tables. The General Instruction refers to the altar as a "table".

"when we enter ornate and clean Basilicas, adorned with crosses, sacred images, altars, and burning lamps, we most easily conceive devotion. But, on the other hand, when we enter the temples of the heretics, where there is nothing except a chair for preaching and a wooden table for making a meal, we feel ourselves to be entering a profane hall and not the house of God." --St. Robert Bellarmine,  Octava Controversia Generalis, liber II, Controversia Quinta, caput XXXI.

* The Sacrificial nature of the Mass is implicitly denied by the many deletions, and ambiguous substitutions.

"If anyone says that in the Mass a true and real sacrifice is not offered to God, or that the act of offering is nothing else than Christ being given to us to eat: Let him be anathema." - Council of Trent (Session XII, Canon 1)

*The priest faces the people, not the Victim on the altar (table?).

"And they have turned their backs to me, and not their faces" - Jeremiah 32:33

" They knew only too well the intimate bond that unites faith with worship,"the law of belief with the law of prayer," and so, under the pretext of restoring it to its primitive form, they corrupted the order of the liturgy in many respects to adapt it to the errors of the Innovators." --Pope Leo XIII, Apostolicae Curae, Septembeer 13, 1896

First, there were little introductions of the vernacular into the Mass. Then, the entire Mass was in the vernacular. Finally, the whole Mass was 're-written' in consultation with 6 Protestants. This process, after Vat-II took six years, Cranmer's reformation took five years.

Why does the Mass keep changing?

It would have been foolhardy to introduce all the changes at once. It was obviously wiser to change gradually and gently. If all the changes had been introduced together the laity would have been shocked. St Alphonsus explains that "The devil has always attempted, by means of the heretics, to deprive the world of the Mass, making them precursors of the Anti-Christ, who, before anything else, will try to abolish and will actually abolish the Holy Sacrament of the altar, as a punishment for the sins of men, according to the prediction of Daniel "And strength was given him against the continual sacrifice" Daniel 8:12 . (Verita della Fede, Pt. iii, Ch. viii.9-10)

The Canon, with the exception of one short clause inserted by St. Gregory the Great, has remained unchanged to the present day. This alone is a sufficient testimony to the veneration in which this prayer was regarded. It is a sacred heritage, coming to the Catholic church from Jesus Himself, and it is substantially the same in every Western Liturgy.... This fact, that it [the Canon] has so remained unaltered during thirteen centuries, is the most eloquent witness of the veneration with which it has always been regarded and of the scruple which has ever been felt at touching so sacred a heritage, coming to us from unknown antiquity" (Cardinal Gasquet).

The phrase Pope Gregory (590-604) added was "diesque nostros in tua pace disponas" [may you order our days in Thy peace] to the Hanc Igitur of the Canon. The Romans were outraged at this act and threatened to kill the pope because he had dared to touch the Sacred Liturgy. From that time no pope dared to change the Ordo of the Traditional Latin Mass. The Mass was affirmed to be complete and unchangeable.

In 1962 Pope John XXIII (1958-1963) added "beati Ioseph, eiusdem Virginis Sponsi" [blessed Joseph, Spouse of the same Virgin] to the "Communicantes" of the Canon.

Pope Paul VI went even farther in 1967 with the sacrilege of adding three new "canons" and daring even to change the very words of Consecration themselves, handed down to us from the Apostles. If only the Romans of our time had expressed their outrage at Paul VI as vigorously they had at Pope Gregory!

Those who still have some residual attachment to the Novus Ordo might be instructed by this vignette from an earlier point in the Church's history.

When England began to go Protestant, many Englishmen who would have liked to remain Catholic were confused. Indeed some were so muddled that they asked the fathers at the Council of Trent in 1562 whether they could attend the Anglican common prayer and sermons.

The answer was an unequivocal: "No!"

This decision was reaffirmed in 1566, yet some Catholics still tried to serve two masters, the old and the new religion. The desire of social status, fear, and ignorance led many to abandon the Faith while retaining the name of "Catholic."

It seems that history may be repeating itself four hundred years later.

It is interesting to note that the new Anglican liturgy in the 1560s was far closer to the Traditional Latin Mass than is the Novus Ordo liturgy of 1969!

"The New Mass is a different liturgy. This needs to be said without ambiguity. The Roman Rite, as we knew it, no longer exists. It has been destroyed." -- Rev. Gelineau, S.J. (One of the 'experts' who co-authored the New Mass).

"By their fruits you shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit, and the evil tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an evil tree bring forth good fruit." (Matt. 7:15-17)

Given the foregoing, it should be plain that the New Mass was conceived for an evil purpose and constructed by evil means. It only follows that such a tree would have disastrous effects on the Church. Let us look at its fruits. From 1965 to 1973, between 22,000 and 25,000 priests left the priesthood to get married. By 1994, this figure had reached almost 100,000. In 1970 there were 1,003,670 women religious with perpetual or provisional vows; in 1992 that number was down to 655,031. In 1962, there were 46,189 seminarians in the U.S. By early 1992, this number had plummeted to 6,247. (see In the Murky Waters of Vatican II ISBN 0-89555-636-7) In countries such as France and Holland the percentage of Catholics at Mass each Sunday has declined to a single digit. In the U.S., attendance has declined from 71 percent in 1963 to 25 percent in 1993, a decrease of 65 percent. Newsweek polls and surveys show that only 15% of Catholics believe they should always obey Church teaching, nearly as many Catholics think abortion is permissible as non-Catholics, and 75% of Catholics disagree with Church teaching forbidding divorce and contraception. Another study revealed that only 25% of Catholics now believe in the Real Presence and only 50% of the priests.

Who could possibly claim that there is not a terrible crisis of Faith in the Catholic Church? Such are the fruits of the New Mass.