A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ROMAN MASS
by Michael Davies
NOT A NEW MASS
It would be impossible to lay too much stress upon the fact that
St. Pius V did not promulgate a new Order of Mass (Novus Ordo
Missae). The very idea of composing a new order of Mass was
and is totally alien to the whole Catholic ethos, both in
the East and in the West. The Catholic tradition has been
to hold fast to what has been handed down and look upon any novelty
with the utmost suspicion. Cardinal Gasquet observed that:
Every Catholic must feel a personal love for those sacred rites
when they come to him with all the authority of the centuries. Any
rude handling of such forms must cause deep pain to those who know and
use them. For they come to them from God through Christ and through
the Church. But they would not have such an attraction were they not
also sanctified by the piety of so many generations who have prayed in
the same words and found in them steadiness in joy and consolation in
sorrow.
The essence of the reform of St.
Pius V was, like that of St. Gregory the Great, respect for tradition
there was no question of any "rude handling"
of what had been handed down. In a letter to The Tablet,
published on 24 July 1971, Father David Knowles, who was Britain's
most distinguished Catholic scholar until his death in 1974, pointed
out that:
The Missal of 1570 was indeed the result of instructions given at
Trent, but it was, in fact, as regards the Ordinary, Canon, Proper of
the time and much else a replica of the Roman Missal of 1474, which in
its
turn repeated in all essentials the practice of the Roman Church of
the epoch of Innocent III, which itself derived from the usage of
Gregory the Great and his successors in the seventh century. In
short, the Missal of 1570 was, in all essentials, the usage
of the mainstream of medieval European liturgy which included
England and all its rites.
Writing in 1912 Father Fortescue was able to commenmt with
satisfaction:
The Missal of Pius V is
the one we still use. Later revisions are of slight importance.
No doubt in every reform one may find something that one would
have preferred not to change. Still, a just and reasonable
criticism will admit that Pius V's restoration was on the whole
eminently satisfactory. The standard of the commission
was antiquity. They abolished later ornate features and
made for simplicity, yet without destroying all those picturesque
elements that add poetic beauty to the severe Roman Mass.
They expelled the host of long sequences that crowded Mass
continually, but kept what are undoubtedly the five best; they
reduced processions and elaborate, ceremonial, yet kept the
really pregnant ceremonies, candles, ashes, palms and the
beautiful Holy Week rites. Certainly we in the West may be
very glad that we have the Roman rite in the form of Pius V's
Missal.
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