Dr. Carol Byrne: A Series on the History of the Dialogue Mass

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Dr. Carol Byrne: A Series on the History of the Dialogue Mass
‘The Action of the Mass Is Performed by the Clergy Alone’
Taken from here [slightly adapted - emphasis mine].

For virtually all Catholics before Vatican II, the idea of “active participation” in the Mass by members of the congregation was inconceivable. For many centuries, the priest was regarded as the “man of the Mass” in the sense of the one who bears the responsibility for performing all its prayers and actions from start to finish.

The altar place occupied only by priests & servers

This was still the official position of the Vatican in the years before the Liturgical Movement was inaugurated. For example, the first volume of Ephemerides Liturgicae (1887), an international journal associated with the Congregation of Rites, set out the mind of the Church on this issue, as follows:

“The Mass, according to its commonly accepted meaning, is the whole complex of ceremonies and rites performed by the Priest while he carries out the Holy Sacrifice at the altar. This is what the Church affirms when she obliges the faithful to hear Mass; it is understood according to this meaning by the faithful when they assist [i.e. are present] at it, by the Priests when they perform it”.(1)

In other words, everyone who went to Mass understood that the only people with an active role in it were the clergy, and this impression was reinforced by the fact that the gates of the sanctuary were closed – and bolted – during the ceremonies.

This arrangement conveyed a key fact about the Mass: that the area of the sanctuary was the Holy of Holies, and that the ceremonies enacted there were the business of the clergy, not of the laity. Investing the congregation with roles traditionally reserved to the priest was bound to be a severe shock to most Catholics’ imbued sense of right and wrong.


Some Earlier Testimonies

The 19th-century Catholic priest, Fr. Daniel Rock (2) – a highly respected expert on the liturgical and ceremonial practice of the English Middle Ages – elucidated the point in even clearer and more explicit terms:

“But in the performance of this sacred function, no office is assigned to the people. The Sacrifice is offered up by the priest in their name and on their behalf. The whole action is between God and the priest. So far is it from being necessary that the people should understand the language of the Sacrifice, that they are not allowed even to hear the most important and solemn part of it...

“They attend indeed, and pray, as the crowd did while Zachary was within the Temple: but they do not act; they do not say the prayers of the priest; they have nothing to do with the actual performance of the Holy Sacrifice.” (3)

Fr. Daniel Rock: ‘No office is assigned to the people’

The modern Church has moved from “no office is assigned to the people” to “active participation” of all the laity; and from their having “nothing to do with the actual performance of the Holy Sacrifice” to the Vatican II-inspired nostrum: “The priest should do everything with the active participation of the people, and never alone.” (4)

From this fact alone we can gauge how far from Catholic truth the Liturgical Movement strayed from its inauguration by Dom Beauduin on a platform of “active participation” for the laity, based on their “need” to understand the words spoken by the priest and respond accordingly. No such need had ever been identified by any past Pope, including Pius X, in the History of the Church.

Another eminent 19th-century churchman, Card. Nicholas Wiseman, the first Archbishop of Westminster, was equally adamant about the unique role of the priest in the Mass: “Where the principal actor is the priest, having a ministry exclusively his, the rest must be content to join their prayers mentally with his, or rather with the sacred rite performed by him.” (5)

This point is echoed by Fr. Thomas Bridgett in these memorable words:

“But the great act of Catholic worship is the Holy Mass, or the unbloody Sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. One alone stands forth and makes the awful offering; the rest kneel around, and join their intentions and devotions with his; but even were there not a solitary worshipper present, the sacrifice both for the living and dead would be efficacious and complete.” (6)

Never the Twain shall Meet

A great chasm in the Church has opened up between traditional and progressivist Catholics on the issue of who is or who is not entitled to perform the visible and external rites of the Mass.

On one side of the yawning divide are those who uphold the traditional teaching that only the clergy have the right to enact liturgical functions. The laity, for their part, had no officially recognized active role in the proceedings; they participated spiritually in the Mass, without performing any of the rites, by joining their prayers and intentions with the actions of the priest at the altar.

The new Liturgical Theology considers the people as equal to the priest in the celebration of the Mass

And on the other side are those who believe that the received and accepted tradition of Catholic worship should be superseded by the new “theology of the liturgical assembly,” according to which it is the assembly at large that is corporately endowed with priestly power to perform the liturgy.

For them, the Mass is the work of the People of God instead of the work of God for the people, performed at the altar of Sacrifice through the mediation of the priest in his ordained role as alter Christus.

Therein lies the root of the division between the traditional and progressivist positions which amount to two irreconcilable conceptions of the Mass and the Faith. The traditional manner of participation is possible only to those who understand what the Mass truly is.

But the current understanding of the Mass exhibited by most Catholics today has strayed so far from what it had been throughout the History of the Church that we can talk of a sea-change in their perception of the Mass and the ordained priesthood. Some even go so far as to assert heretically that the Mass is not the Mass without the action of the people.

The mantra that heralded and sustains this revolution is, of course, “active participation” mandated by Vatican II,


How Subversive is the ‘New Liturgical Theology’?

The involvement of lay people in the liturgical action is based on the premise that they are entitled to a role in the management and delivery of their own liturgy – hence the spawning of “liturgy committees” in every parish whose members plan the liturgy to suit themselves. But responsibility for the liturgy had always been the exclusive prerogative of the clergy, whose actions were circumscribed by the rubrics of the liturgical books.

A Life Teen Mass with full equality & participation

When we consider the teaching of the pre-Vatican II Magisterium on the Mass and the Priesthood, it is clear that the liturgical reformers have based their arguments on ideas imported from Protestantism that mark a radical departure from the Catholic theological tradition. They insist that the tradition inherited from the Council of Trent is now obsolete and must be re-founded on a new basis.

After Dom Beauduin started the Liturgical Movement in 1909 with his rallying cry to “democratize” the liturgy, the driving force behind the demand for “active participation” of the laity was evidently not a concern for the spiritual good of the people, but a revolt against the “patriarchal structures” of the Church. Their aim was to attack priestly privilege as “elitist,” impose a “communitarian” involvement of all in the liturgy and raise the profile of the lay people in the congregation by investing them with clerical roles.

As Fr. J. D. Crichton, one of England’s most prominent progressivist liturgists, remarked in 1973 with reference to the distribution of Holy Communion by lay people: “they will now be able to exercise their priesthood in a way that perhaps they had never envisaged.” (7)

But there can be no alternative to the traditional understanding of the Mass, no mixing or sharing of duties and responsibilities among the ordained ministers and the people in the pews, if the Mass is to keep its identity.

To the extent that those distinctions are not respected – and we have seen examples of how this was put into practice in the liturgical reforms of Pius XII – the nature of the ordained priesthood is undermined.

Fr. Crichton’s observation about the “priesthood of the laity,” though written after the Novus Ordo was imposed on the faithful, is as revealing as a glance in a rear view mirror: in it we catch a glimpse of a motorcade of early 20th-century reformers advancing along the highway of the Liturgical Movement towards their common destination ‒ the creation of a New Mass that would achieve all their strategic objectives.


All Hands on Deck

Before the Liturgical Movement, no official rubrics of the Roman Missal had ever established a “division of labor” policy between the clergy and the laity, with designated tasks for lay people to perform along with the priest. That is the basic organizing principle of the assembly line in factories where groups work together for the most efficient mass production of goods.

But the Mass is not a joint enterprise in which all the faithful present share the responsibility for its performance (as the Vatican II rule of “active participation” demands), but, as the 19th-century Fr. Nikolaus Gihr explained, is “a liturgical action performed by the priest for propitiating and glorifying God, as well as for the salvation of the faithful.” (8)

By insisting on the “division of labor” as the sine qua non of all Novus Ordo liturgies and imposing it on priests and laity alike, the modern Church has introduced a totally different concept of the Mass ‒ as the work of the “People of God.” For Novus Ordo Catholics, this results in a hostile takeover of clerical roles by predatory lay competitors, as we see happening today before our eyes with the willing compliance of their clergy.


Continued


1. “Missa, prout communiter accipit, est complexus omnium caeremoniarum rituumque, qui per Sacerdotem perficiuntur dum super altare sacrificat. Hanc intendit Ecclesia, cum ad illam audiendam fideles obligat, secundum hanc significationem accipitur a fidelibus cum ei assistunt, a Sacerdotibus cum eam peragunt”. Ephemerides Liturgicae, Rome: Centro Liturgico Vincenziano, Edizioni Liturgiche, vol. 1, 1887, p. 134.
2. Fr. Daniel Rock D.D. (1799-1871) was renowned for his immense knowledge and expertise in the areas of medieval English liturgy, Church vestments and architecture. Such was Fr. Rock’s zeal to revive the glories of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church that he was one of the leading lights of the restoration of the Hierarchy in England in 1850.
3. Daniel Rock, Hierurgia: or the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with Notes and Dissertations Elucidating its Doctrines and Ceremonies, 2 volumes, London: Joseph Booker, vol. 1, 1833, p. 294.
4. Fr. Ralph Wiltgen S.V.D. affirms: “In an interview following the vote, Bishop Zauner told me that four important aims or principles were reflected in the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. ‘The first is that divine worship must be a community action; that is, that the priest should do everything with the active participation of the people, and never alone’. The use of the vernacular, he said, was a necessary condition for such participation.” (The Rhine Flows into the Tiber: The Unknown Council, New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967, p. 137). This is a revealing insight into the thinking of the liturgical reformers which would be incorporated into Paul VI’s New Mass in conformity with the official interpretation of Vatican II’s Constitution on the Liturgy.
5. Nicholas Wiseman, Essays on Various Subjects, 3 volumes, London: Charles Dolman, 1853, vol. 1, p. 387. The Cardinal was praising the excellence of the prayers of the Divine Office in which some of the faithful could sing the responses to the psalms, versicles, antiphons etc. because it was essentially a choral service. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, however, he considered to be in a different category, unique of its kind.
6. Thomas Edward Bridgett, Ritual of the New Testament, New Testament, London: Burns and Oates, 1887, pp. 112-113. Fr. Bridgett makes a distinction between devotions “in which the whole congregation joins, such as the singing of hymns, the recitation of the Rosary, performing the Stations of the Way of the Cross, and especially the chanting of Vespers or Complin,” adding that “Such prayers are either recited in the vernacular or, when Latin is used, they require some little education in those who take a direct and vocal part in them.” (ibid., p. 114)
7. The Tablet, April 28, 1973.
8. Nikolaus Gihr, The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass; Dogmatically, Liturgically and Ascetically Explained,Freiburg: B. Herder, 1902, p. 329.

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Dr. Carol Byrne: A Series on the History of the Dialogue Mass
Contested Boundaries & ‘Bridging the Gap’
Taken from here [slightly adapted - emphasis mine].

The Liturgical Movement set out to reframe the issue [of “active participation”] so that the age-old clergy-laity distinction would be seen as a problem, one that could only be rectified by a radical reform to give the laity more power and control in the liturgy. This Marxist-style dialectic was simply an assumption of collective clerical guilt for having “dominated” the liturgy and “monopolized” all the action.

Yves Congar in 1965 at a Milan conference preaching lay participation

Fr. Yves Congar, OP, one of the most influential theologians at Vatican II, put it this way: “For more than 15 centuries now, Rome has striven to monopolize ‒ yes to monopolize ‒ all the lines of direction and control. And has succeeded!” (1)

He complained that “the hierarchical priesthood has, as it were, taken over everything” (2) and treated the non-ordained as if they were not fully members of the Church by their Baptism. That was the founding narrative of the Liturgical Movement, first introduced by Dom Lambert Beauduin in 1909, and became the blueprint for all subsequent reforms involving “active participation” of the laity in the liturgy and life of the Church. It is still believed today and is used as the ongoing justification for “active participation.” (3)

The solution envisaged was to set in motion a systematic encroachment of the priest’s ministerial role in favor of lay “active participation” as a means of “redressing the balance” and restoring “justice” to the laity for having allegedly suffered at the hands of the clergy for so many centuries.


Congar’s Dynamite

This Marxist rationale was certainly the perspective that informed all of Fr Congar’s writings, and earned him the censorship of the Dominican Order and the Vatican in the 1950s. (4) But in 1954, he gleefully recorded in his diary that if he was banned from writing, he could continue his opposition to “the system” (by which he meant the Church’s Constitution, doctrine, governance and rites) in his lectures.

Congar's dream achieved: Francis sits & the laity read from the pulpit in St. Martha's Chapel

He said that one of these lectures would put “true dynamite under the chairs of the scribes!” – a reference to the Roman authorities who had disciplined him. This suggests a way of thinking that is more about personal revenge than a concern for justice.

Fr. Congar considered it “a matter for rejoicing” that in the 1951 Pascal Vigil the priest is made to sit and listen while someone else (including a layman) reads the Scriptures, because Congar realized the explosive potential of this breach with a 1,000-year-old tradition: It marked the first official step in the process of dethroning the priest from his exalted position in the liturgy.

The revolutionary undertones of this reform can be gleaned from Congar’s statement:

“The laity will not be re-established in the fullness of its quality as the Church’s laity until the spirit of that small Easter reform of 1951 shall have been extended to all the spheres where it is relevant”. (5)


The Spirit of the Bolshevik Revolution

What spirit he had in mind was later revealed when, in an off-guard moment, he declared triumphantly that with Vatican II “the Church has peacefully accomplished its own October Revolution.” (6)

Laity have become ‘co-workers’ with priest under multiple titles

The metaphor could not be more appropriate in terms of cataclysmic legacy: The 1917 Revolution led to 70 years of devastation, beginning with regicide and the massacre of Russia’s Romanov dynasty, children included; Vatican II ended the monarchical structure of the Church with the Pope as “King,” triggered an era of ecclesiastical mayhem and handed victory to the Catholic Bolsheviki – of whom Congar himself was a prime example.

As for “all the spheres where it is relevant,” this became evident after said Bolsheviki won the day at Vatican II. With the introduction of Communion in the hand, it was not long before the laity were invested with ministry at the altar, simulating the work of the external priesthood.

There are now lay Eucharistic Ministers, and lay Presiders of priestless Communion services; lay Lectors (of both the Epistle and the Gospel) and lay preachers of the homily; lay ministers of sacramentals, e.g., to bless throats and administer ashes; lay Presiders of weddings and funerals; lay Pastoral Associates and lay Chaplains for hospitals and schools; lay Parish Administrators and even lay Chancellors of dioceses – to name some of the most egregious examples.


‘Equal is as Equal Does’

According to the liturgical reformers’ new theology, the primacy of the priest’s activities in the Mass must give way to an equality of action of the assembled faithful who are all priests, just as much as he is. If we follow their chain of reasoning by which they arrived at their theory of lay “active participation,” we will find a well-worn pattern of misdirection: starting with a correct premise drawn from Scripture and twisting its meaning to produce a conclusion at odds with Catholic teaching.

There is a consensus among the members of the Liturgical Movement that the New Testament (1 Pet 2:5, 9) establishes the basis for lay “active participation.” Here St Peter declares that Christians, by reason of their baptized status, constitute “a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices.” We must keep in mind that the Apostle, in describing the priestly status of all the faithful, was speaking in a purely figurative sense.

Let us look at how the Church up to the middle of the 20th century has understood this.


The Clarity of pre-Vatican II Times

The Council of Trent explained clearly that the visible and external priesthood belongs to the ordained ministers who mediate between man and God, while the laity are endowed through Baptism with an “internal priesthood” which enables them to “offer up spiritual sacrifices on the altar of their hearts.” (7)

Pre-Vatican II Mass: Only ecclesiastics on the altar

The only true participation of the laity present at Mass consists, therefore, in uniting the interior homage of their heart to the visible rite performed by the priest. This distinction was understood by all, and was incarnated in the liturgical rites, vestments, governance and architecture of pre-Vatican II churches which were uninfluenced by the new “theology of the liturgical assembly.”

Although the character imprinted on the Christian soul by the Sacrament of Baptism causes lay people to enter into the internal priesthood mentioned by the Council of Trent, it does not make them participate in the external priesthood. Nor does it endow them with a right to active participation in the Church’s rites. There is, therefore, only an analogy between the priesthood of the layman and that of the ordained minister, which is the only true priesthood.

However, Trent’s teaching was first rendered incoherent by Pius XII who, as we have seen earlier, yielded to the demands of the liturgical reformers, and made “active participation” of the laity an integral part of the Roman Missal.

This means that the laity’s “internal” priesthood was, as it were, turned inside out and made “external,” causing confusion in anyone trying to understand the essential binary distinction between the ordained and lay states. Ever since then, the boundaries between the clergy and laity have become increasingly porous.


The ‘Universal Priesthood’ as Promoted by Vatican II

We can locate the reason for this confusion in the wording of Lumen Gentium §10 which, upon close inspection, turns out to be a façade for the “new theology” and introduces ambiguity, uncertainty and confusion:

“Though they differ essentially and not only in degree, the common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood are nonetheless interrelated: Each in its own way shares in the one priesthood of Christ”.

Priestless parishes are becoming more common with laypersons assuming almost all priestly duties

The sentence may start by reiterating a valid statement, but this is hastily batted to one side to draw the focus of attention away from the orthodox teaching and redirect it towards a concept of the priesthood with very blurry edges.

The words “though” and “nonetheless” introduce a modification to the traditional doctrine, making it seem less true, less worthy of credibility. What is meant by “interrelated” is left obscure, open to opinion and to the imagination of creative liturgists to interpret its practical application in the Church. And the reference to all promiscuously sharing Christ’s priesthood placed clergy and laity on the same level, making it difficult to distinguish between the two.

But, as priests and lay people belong to two mutually exclusive ontological categories, the argument contained in §10 is self-contradictory because it starts by saying they are essentially different, and then implies that they are really one and the same essence.

It is now evident that §10 was a linguistic sleight of hand to mystify the Council Fathers and manipulate them into signing a document that would, as history has shown, be used to undermine the priesthood. It was an attempt to sidetrack the Church’s perennial teaching on the ministerial priesthood by raising a false issue about lay “active participation,” and constitutes one of the many intellectually dishonest tactics typically used in the Council documents to deceive the faithful into accepting an unorthodox teaching.

But what was the precise intention of the corruption of language embedded in §10 and its use of weasel words to distort the truth? Romano Amerio, who was himself a peritus (expert) at Vatican II and familiar with the thinking of the progressivist theologians, commented:

“The new theology revives old heretical doctrines, which came together to produce the Lutheran abolition of the priesthood, and disguises the difference that exists between the universal priesthood of baptized believers and the sacramental priesthood, which is proper to priests alone.” (8)


To be continued


1. Yves Congar, My Journal of the Council, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012, p. 7.
2. “What a matter for rejoicing it is that, in the Pascal Vigil service as restored in 1951, the celebrant listens to the prophecies read by another minister, without reading them privately himself.” Yves Congar, Lay People in the Church: A study for a theology of laity, London: Chapman, 1957, p. 435.
3. Many progressivist commentators use frankly Marxist expressions to keep the Liturgical Revolution going, e.g. ex-priest Paul Lakeland claimed that the Catholic laity are the victims of “structural oppression” caused by collective clericalism: The Liberation of the Laity: In Search of an Accountable Church, New York: Continuum, 2003, p. 194; and Fr. Paul Philibert, OP, a follower of the noted Dominican theologians Marie-Dominique Chenu and Yves Congar, wrote that the Church must combat “the clericalizing tendencies of the ministerial elites”: The Priesthood of the Faithful: Key to a Living Church, Liturgical Press, 2005, p. 16.
4. From 1947 to 1956 Congar's writings were subjected to stringent censorship because of his unorthodox theological opinions and his involvement in ecumenical activity with the Protestants. When, for example, he published Vraie et Fausse Réforme dans l'Église (True and False Reform in the Church) in 1950, the Vatican banned any further printing of the book and any translations of it into foreign languages.
5. Yves Congar, Lay People in the Church: A study for a theology of laity, London: Chapman, p. 436.
6. “L’Église a fait pacifiquement sa Révolution d’octobre ‒ Yves Congar, Le Concile au jour le jour: Deuxième session (The Council day by day, second session), Paris: Cerf, 1964, p. 115.
7. Catechism of the Council of Trent, translated by McHugh and Callan New York, 1934, p. 330. The Council of Trent stated: “But as Sacred Scripture describes a twofold priesthood, one internal and the other external, it will be necessary to have a distinct idea of each to enable pastors to explain the nature of the priesthood now under discussion. Regarding the internal priesthood, all the faithful are said to be priests once they have been washed in the saving waters of baptism. Especially is this name given to the just who have the spirit of God, and who, by the help of divine grace, have been made living members of the great High Priest, Jesus Christ; for, enlightened by faith which is inflamed by charity, they offer up spiritual sacrifices to God on the altar of their hearts. Among such sacrifices must be reckoned every good and virtuous action done for the glory of God”. This passage is followed by the supporting Scriptural texts: Apoc. 1:5, 6; I Pet. 2:5; Rom, 12:1; Ps. I:19.
8. Romano Amerio, Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the Twentieth Century, Angelus Press, 1996, p. 187.

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Dr. Carol Byrne: A Series on the History of the Dialogue Mass
Minor Clerical Orders Suppressed for Lay ‘Active Participation’
Taken from here [slightly adapted - emphasis mine].

If Pius XII allowed the reformers to park their tanks on the clerical lawn, it was Paul VI who gave the command in Ministeria quaedam (1972) (1) for them to open fire on the four Minor Orders, (2) plus the Major Order of Sub-Deacon. (3) The intention was to discontinue the Church’s immemorial custom of conferring all these clerical offices on candidates for Ordination to the Priesthood. Pope Paul VI stated that only two of the former Minor Orders – Lector and Acolyte – would be retained and renamed “ministries” which could be performed by laymen. (4)

It should be noted that, before this reform, the Minor Orders and Sub-Diaconate were all ranks of the Church’s hierarchy and, from the early centuries of the Church, were considered as clerical offices. They were conferred in non-sacramental rites of ordination on selected men, for the most part as stages in ascending sequence towards the Priesthood. The crucial factor here is that recipients of these Orders were clerics in the juridical sense, specifically separated from the rest of the faithful for service at the altar. There was thus never any recognition of a right of lay people to perform liturgical functions.

It is only when we realize this that we can see what a monumental rupture in centuries of law and custom, tradition and thinking was brought about by Ministeria quaedam. For in that document Paul VI, quoting Sacrosanctum Concilium, stated that “active participation” of the laity in these ministries was their “right and duty by reason of their Baptism.” In other words, according to the “new theology,” Baptism ipso facto confers on the laity, through their membership of the “common priesthood of all believers,” an entitlement to “active participation” in the liturgy.


Where did this come from?

This idea, borrowed from Protestantism, was a complete novelty in the Catholic Church when it was first introduced by Dom Lambert Beauduin in 1909. The entire basis of his thesis rested on a false premise. It was never part of Catholic teaching, either in the West or the East, that membership of the “common priesthood” conferred an automatic right to any active role in the liturgy. That had been the prerogative of the ordained, whether in Minor or Major Orders. Rather, Minor Orders were regarded as a subset of the Diaconate from which they drew their raison d’être.

From a monarchical Catholic Church, (above); to a progressivist egalitarian
‘priesthood of all believers,’ (below)

The Catholic theologian who gave the greatest boost to the “common priesthood” theory as a catalyst for lay “active participation” was undoubtedly Fr. Yves Congar. Throughout his ecclesiastical career, he conducted an unrelenting campaign in books, articles and lectures against the juridical structures of the Church that upheld her monarchical character, reflecting the hierarchy established by Our Lord of spiritual rulers (the clergy) over the ruled (the laity). He eschewed this two-state constitution of the Church as an unequal society, and replaced it with what he called a “total ecclesiology,” a communion of all the “People of God” with co-responsibility for running the Church. (5) In Congar’s words, “everyone does everything” in the ecclesial community, bearing responsibility for liturgical, administrative and governing functions. (6)

In particular, he impugned the juridical system of law that separated the laity from the clergy, excluding them from the performance of liturgical acts reserved to the latter. Congar’s dynamite was strategically placed to cause optimal structural damage. If the hierarchical structure of the Church were made to collapse into an amorphous, egalitarian “priesthood of all believers,” the Church could not survive the loss of her monarchical constitution, and would simply disintegrate – as, indeed, she has done in many parts of the world today. Congar’s influence at Vatican II and his success in winning adherents among the Hierarchy to his anti-traditional point of view are well-documented and beyond dispute.


Paul VI adopts the progressivists’ anti-clerical agenda

[color=#71101]When Ministeria quaedam was published in 1972, it was obvious that the document had been drawn up within the conceptual framework of the “new theology,” and that Paul VI had simply adopted uncritically Congar’s ideas on how things should be in the Church. [/color]The Pope’s rationale for the demise of the Minor Orders was as follows:

“Since minor orders have not always been the same and many functions connected with them, as at present, have also been exercised by the laity, it seems fitting to re-examine this practice and to adapt it to contemporary needs.”

It would be wise to be sceptical about taking this argument at face value for two reasons. First, because no one has provided a convincing explanation as to how the vicissitudes of History affecting the Minor Orders constitute grounds for their abolition.

Second, because of its circularity: there is no reason to accept the premise (that historical developments had corrupted the integrity of the Minor Orders) unless one has already accepted the conclusion (that they should be abolished). That was not the approach of the Council of Trent, which sought to restore and uphold them. As we are about to see, Paul VI drew on the work of key leaders of the Liturgical Movement who were already committed to a radical reform of the Church’s Constitution to eliminate the clergy/laity divide. They all agreed that Minor Orders were an impediment to their goals of lay “active participation,” and so the Pope had no compunction in quashing them.

The Council of Trent upheld Minor Orders;
above, a Bishop ordains new acolytes

Msgr. Balthasar Fischer, co-founder (1947) and Professor at the German Liturgical Institute in Trier, (7) produced a piece of research on the history of the Minor Orders (8) that furnished the points made by Pope Paul. But the research was based on selective data that failed to give solid, compelling reasons for ending a tradition of minor clerical orders that stretched back – albeit with some modifications – to early Christianity.

In the absence of an intellectually satisfying argument, all that Msgr. Fischer could offer was derision of the ancient custom. He decried the Minor Orders as a useless appendage that turned the Church into “an army without sub-officers,” (9) i.e., “all Generals and no Privates.” The message he conveyed was that the Minor Orders were a fictional role exercised by clerics wearing the outward trappings of office but achieving no useful purpose. (10) The situation, he urged, cried out for long-overdue reform. (11)

No less savage in his denunciation of Minor Orders was Dom Bernard Botte, a monk of Mont César, Louvain, and disciple of Beauduin and the first Director (1956-1964) of the Institut Supérieur de Liturgie in Paris. He was a Consultor for the Consilium, and as Chairman of its sub-committee for the New Pontifical, he collaborated substantially in creating the Protestantized post-Vatican II Ordination rites. This explains his negative attitude to the Minor Orders, which were steps to the Priesthood. He recommended they should be abolished and given to lay people, which is exactly what transpired under Paul VI.

A revolted Botte scorned the Minor Orders of the Church

It is highly significant that, as Archbishop Thomas Cranmer had already abolished them (plus the Sub-Diaconate) in his new Ordination rite of 1550, this reform would bring the Church into closer conformity with Protestant practice – and, inevitably, with Protestant beliefs.

Fr. Botte poured scorn on the Minor Orders as a senseless anachronism that had no connection with the reality of modern life outside the seminary and, therefore, lacked a “pastoral” use. He denounced them as a “juridical fiction” because, he argued, all that remained was the title without a substantive function. (12)

What he failed to appreciate, or deliberately misunderstood, was that they are not so much about activities as about receiving certain rights and powers in the Church, which would be exercised after Ordination to the Priesthood. These were part of a priest’s spiritual formation, his “apprenticeship” as he climbed the hierarchical ladder in incremental stages towards his goal.


Supernatural symbolism

The Porter (Doorkeeper) may no longer open the church door and stand guard corporeally to keep out intruders, as in days of persecution, but the symbol of his office (a key) signifies a vital aspect of the Priesthood to which he aspires: that of opening spiritual doors, of guarding the Blessed Sacrament from profanation (including reception of Holy Communion by public sinners), of protecting the ceremonies from irreverent disturbance. His Office has been made redundant by the “all are welcome” mantra and permissive atmosphere of post-Vatican II Progressivism, which opened the door to profanation in the sanctuary and threw away the key.

The ordination of porters

The Exorcist

Fr. Botte dismissed the Order of Exorcist as a useless sinecure, charging that it conferred a title and status but involved no active service. The Exorcist, he scoffed, “cannot exorcize anyone or anything.” (13) But that is to miss the point entirely. For, the power given by Christ to the Apostles to drive away demonic influences was conferred on the Exorcist during the minor ordination rite in preparation for when, as a priest, he would routinely perform a rite of exorcism on infants and adults during Baptism, and also exorcize oil, water and salt in the liturgy. (14)


Nolite locum dare diabolo (Eph. 4:27) (15)

On the command of Paul VI, the Order of Exorcist was eliminated from the liturgy – in the same year that he had expressed his feeling that “through some crack the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God” (16) – leaving Novus Ordo priests in an invidious position, for the new Rite of “Exorcism” he introduced did not command the Devil to depart. (Presumably he is still there). It can be no coincidence that this reform gave leeway to a flood of demonic influences in the Church, of which the clergy abuse scandal and the hatred for Catholic Tradition are prime examples.


To be continued



1. Ministeria quaedam was an Apostolic Letter by Pope Paul VI issued to implement the Vatican II reforms of the Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium.
2. Minor Orders: Porter, Lector, Exorcist and Acolyte.
3. Ministeria quaedam §4: “The functions heretofore assigned to the sub-deacon are entrusted to the reader and the acolyte; consequently, the major order of sub-diaconate no longer exists in the Latin Church.” Instead, the role of the sub-deacon was divided up and handed out any member of the congregation, including the role of purifying the sacred vessels.
4. Ministeria quaedam §3: “Ministries may be assigned to lay Christians; hence they are no longer to be considered as reserved to candidates for the sacrament of orders.”
5. Yves Congar, Lay People in the Church: A Study for a Theology of Laity, London: Chapman, p. 436.
6. “Tous font tout, mais pas de la même façon”. Yves Congar, “Quelques problèmes touchant les ministères,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique, October 1971, n. 8, p. 792.
7. He was also involved in drawing up the rites of Infant Baptism (1969) and Adult Initiation (1972), and was Chairman of the sub-committe of the Consilium, which produced the Directory on Masses with Children (1973) and the three Eucharistic Prayers for Children (1974).
8. ‘Esquisse historique sur les orders mineurs,’ La Maison-Dieu, vol. 61, n. 1, 1960. pp. 58-69.
9. Ibid., p. 69: “l'Église est toujours une armée sans sous-officiers.”
10. Ibid.: “ce n'est qu'une fiction” (It’s only a fiction). He compared minor clerics in seminaries to members of the armed forces who bedecked themselves with badges and stripes (“galons”) but performed no useful role.
11. Ibid.: “Res clamat, ut reformetur.”
12. Bernard Botte, Le Mouveent Liturgique: Témoignage et Souvenirs, Paris: Desclée:, 1973, p. 165: “Il y a divorce entre les fonctions et les ordres” (There is no longer a connection between the functions and the Orders); p. 173: “les ordres mineurs ne répondent plus aujourd'hui à une réalité et qu'ils ne sont plus qu'une fiction juridique” (The Minor Orders no longer correspond with any real life situation today, and they are nothing but a juridical fiction).
13. Ibid., p. 165: “les exorcistes ne peuvent exorciser rien ni personne”.
14. The power to cast out demons from a possessed soul, however, can only be exercised in strictly controlled circumstances and by permission of a bishop.
15. “Do not give place to the Devil.”
16. Paul VI, Sermon on the Feast of Ss. Peter and Paul, 29 June 1972, Basilica of St Peter.

[Stone]

Dr. Carol Byrne: A Series on the History of the Dialogue Mass
Minor Orders: a Major Matter
Taken from here [slightly adapted - emphasis mine].

The disrepute into which the Minor Orders have fallen after Vatican II was the direct result of the derision heaped upon them by influential reformers eager to “close the gap” between Clergy and laity. This, in turn, was a consequence of a process of rationalization of the supernatural that began with the early 20th-century modernists and pursued its destructive course via the Liturgical Movement.

The traditional scale of Orders – rejected by Vatican II progressivists

It is inconceivable that such attacks could have succeeded unless the Orders themselves had first been undermined by doubts as to whether the end to which they aimed (the Catholic Priesthood as defined by the Council of Trent) should be upheld as sacrosanct.

And it is precisely on this point that the progressivists – these neo-modernists – diverged from Catholic doctrine: These proponents of the revolutionary “new theology” were no longer convinced that the sacramental priesthood, to which the Minor Orders and Sub-Diaconate were incremental stages, transcended all other states of life in dignity and holiness.

In fact, the very idea of climbing a ladder from the lay state to attain this summit of greatness flies in the face of the modern egalitarian Church. According to Pope Francis, “within the Church, no one can be ‘raised up’ higher than others.” (1) The ladder, being of no further use to the reformers, was consequently kicked away.


The Transcendent Excellence of the Priesthood

But that does not mean that the Minor Orders were unwanted by those who did appreciate their perennial value. In all the centuries before Vatican II, they were presumed to be invested with a supernatural significance and importance for the priesthood, which is no longer understood.

Priesthood: noble & sublime in its mission to offer Mass & the Sacraments

The Council of Trent explained the necessity of these Orders as a fitting preparation for and anticipation of the sacramental Priesthood:

“The ministry of so sublime a Priesthood being a thing divine, it is but befitting its worthier and more reverent exercise that in the Church’s well-ordered disposition there should be several different orders of ministers destined to assist the Priesthood by virtue of their office ‒ orders arranged in such a way that those who have already received clerical tonsure should be raised, step by step from the lower to the higher order.” (2)

The salient point in this description of the priesthood is the word “sublime.” Here we may be permitted a short diversion to explain why it was chosen and how it stood in relation to the Minor Orders and Sub-Diaconate.

It is an established fact that, from the earliest centuries, many of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church used this same word when talking of the Priesthood. This can be easily verified by reading St. Alphonsus Liguori’s work on the subject (now among the “forgotten books”). (3) He himself assures us that, of all the states in life, the Priesthood is “the most noble, the most exalted and sublime.” (4)

In that one single word, we find encased the fundamental reason why the Church insisted on keeping the Minor Orders intact in sequence and number. Throughout the Church’s history, these clerical Orders had been organized on the assumption that they possessed a degree of sanctity that obliged the Clergy to respect the pattern prescribed. For centuries, Bishops of the Roman Rite were willing to be guided by this rule of precedent, for the simple reason that the need for continuing the universal custom was clear to them.

They were convinced that, as the Priesthood is a divine institution for bringing the means of eternal life to the faithful through the Mass and Sacraments, it needed to be protected by a juridical structure of custom and law (of which the Minor Orders and Sub-Diaconate are constitutive parts) to serve as bulwarks against assault.

Von Balthasar, above, like Ratzinger, called for razing the bastions of the Church

“Razing the bastions” – a common trope of the reformers who no longer wanted to defend the Priesthood – was bound to undermine our faith in the nature of the priesthood as “a thing divine.”

What we can deduce from this is that those who disparage the Minor Orders and Sub-Diaconate necessarily trivialize the Priesthood.

The Council of Trent defined the priesthood first and foremost in terms of its supernatural end – as confecting, offering and administering the Body and Blood of Christ, and absolving sins – for the glory of God and the sanctification of souls. That is what the Popes and Councils taught up to Vatican II. (5)

But Vatican II redefined it in the general context of the active ministry of all the faithful in the Church and the world. As a result of this paradigm shift, the Priesthood is now meant to serve a completely different end, as secular as it is nebulous: working together with all mankind to make a better world. The essential distinction between the sacred and the profane has been lost.


Paul VI: ‘First tonsure is no longer conferred’

Every part of the reformers’ narrative that disparaged the Minor Orders and Sub-Diaconate was used by Pope Paul VI in Ministeria quaedam to sever their connection with the clerical state. In the same document, he abolished the rite of tonsure which, though not an ecclesiastical order, was an ancient ceremony by which candidates for the Priesthood were constituted clerics.

Tonsure – a sacred ritual of passage to the priesthood

It was also a rite of passage by which the Church marked off from the laity those whom she called to the service of the altar. Tonsure demonstrably separated the sheep from the goats, so much so that no one could claim (as they do today) that the difference between the Clergy and laity is merely one of splitting hairs.

The rite itself consisted of the ceremonial snipping of a tuft of hair on the candidate’s head. Its symbolism – the abandonment of the world – was reflected in the prayers said by the Bishop and in the new cleric’s statement that “the Lord is the portion of my inheritance” (Ps. 15:5). Henceforth, he would be required to rid himself of all worldly pursuits and manners so as to preserve purity of soul on the road to sacramental ordination.

Pope Paul VI did not accompany his terse announcement with any explanation for his decision to end a custom that had been practised in the Church for over 1,500 years. But the Vatican’s newspaper L'Osservatore Romano stated at the time that the tonsure was abolished because it “had almost completely lost its significance and had become an empty ceremony.”(6)

The person who made this remark, Fr. Paolo Dezza, (7) hastened to assure readers anxious to know if women were excluded from “ministries,” that Ministeria quaedam “does not prevent women from continuing to be commissioned with officially public reading during the liturgy” and that “Bishops can also, in accordance with the norms in force, ask the Holy See to authorize women to distribute Holy Communion as extraordinary ministers.” (8)


The Greatest ‘Active Participation’ for the Greatest Number

The reformers viewed liturgical tradition in general and the Minor Orders in particular from a utilitarian point of view. They were to be judged not for what they were in their metaphysical essence, but for their usefulness in facilitating the greatest possible number of activities for the laity.

As many lay roles as possible added as ‘ministries,’ also the inclusion of women (below, lector & acolyte)
Women as lector and acolyte

This shows the influence of the false principles of Modernism and Progressivism which were characterized by a rejection of metaphysical reality and a preferential option for agere “doing” over esse “being.”

For the reformers, being a cleric held no interest or meaning if it was not directed to doing something useful to support and advance the Vatican II reforms. As the Minor Orders were not useful in furthering progressivist aims – egalitarianism, false ecumenism etc., it was decided that they had to be rationalized, i.e., made to conform to modern secular values. The idea that Catholic Tradition has any inherent authority of its own, or any direct claim on our fidelity, is bound to seem absurd from this perspective.

We have seen examples of the strategies used by liturgical reformers to make the Minor Orders seem undesirable, useless and irrelevant, and to rationalize them out of existence. To these once-prestigious Orders must be added that of the Sub-Diaconate, whose meaning has also been evacuated by the same process of rationalization.

Paul VI’s Ministeria quaedam was a repudiation of their clerical nature with a view to altering the hierarchical structure of the Church. With his abolition of the tonsure there were no longer any clerics below the rank of Deacon.

From then on, all Novus Ordo seminarians preparing for the Priesthood would be considered as essentially laymen, placed on a par with all non-ordained members of the faithful. This contributed greatly to the secularization of the Church for, even after they were ordained to the Priesthood, they were placed in the same category as any lay person in active “ministry.” (How this reform affected the spiritual identity of the former Sub-Deacon in Major Orders and his vow of life-long celibacy for service at the altar was not addressed).

To say that these Orders were trashed to accommodate lay “active participation” would not be an exaggeration. They were treated like the proverbial salt that had lost its savor – “good for nothing any more but to be cast out and to be trodden on by [lay] men” (Matt. 5:13) ‒ and, eventually, lay women.


Continued


1. Pope Francis, Ceremony Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Institution of the Synod of Bishops, October 17, 2015.
2. Council of Trent, Session XXIII, De sacramento ordinis, chap. 2.
3. St. Alphonsus Liguori, Dignity and duties of the priest: or, Selva; a collection of materials for ecclesiastical retreats. Rule of life and spiritual rules, New York: Benziger Brothers, 1889.
4. Ibid., p. 41.
5. See, for example, Pope Pius XI, Ad Catholici Sacerdotii (On the Catholic Priesthood), December 20, 1935, § 70: “[The seminarian] must look to the Priesthood solely from the noble motive of consecrating himself to the service of God and the salvation of souls.”
6. Fr. Paolo Dezza SJ, L'Osservatore Romano, September 14, 1972.
7. Fr. Dezza was rector of the Gregorian Pontifical Institute and teacher of Pope John Paul II who attended his lectures when studying in Rome after World War II. Fr. Dezza was also a confessor to Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul I. He was appointed Cardinal by John Paul II in 1991.
8. P. Dezza, ibid., October 6, 1972.

[Stone]

Dr. Carol Byrne: A Series on the History of the Dialogue Mass
Minor Orders Placed at the Mercy of the Zeitgeist
Taken from here [slightly adapted - emphasis mine].

It is certain that the Minor Orders did not stand a chance of survival after Vatican II’s call for aggiornamento. Mgr. Bugnini, as Secretary of the Consilium, recorded in 1966 that its members unanimously approved the following proposal regarding the Minor Orders:

“The Church may abolish, change or increase the number of the orders below the diaconate, as any given period needs or finds useful.” (1)

This shows that the dominant strain of thought among the reformers was that the Minor Orders were obsolete and were to be scrapped, like yesterday’s technology, for innovative models more in keeping with modern expectations. It is also evidence of the reformers’ desire to fashion and refashion the liturgy at will, subject only to the criterion of what “any given period needs or finds useful.”

Paul VI with members of Consilium

In other words, the Minor Orders were given short shrift because a committee had sat and decided that they served no useful purpose: safeguarding the integrity of the priesthood was evidently not considered a worthy motive for their retention.

Here we touch on the hidden springs of the revolution: The plan to ravage the Minor Orders was hatched in the committee room under Bugnini’s close supervision, and the target of the members of Paul VI’s Consilium was revealed by Bugnini to be that of an ever-evolving reform. We can further extrapolate that the same principles were applied to the creation of the Novus Ordo liturgy in 1969.


Out of the Window: ‘Defenestration’ of the Minor Orders

Now we will turn to the manner in which the Minor Orders were forcibly and peremptorily removed – “defenestrated” (literally thrown out of the window) would seem the most appropriate term to use in the circumstances. Historically a swift and effective means of dispatching one’s opponents, (2) the act of defenestration also facilitated the ejection of a substantial portion of the Church’s liturgical traditions from the time of Pope Pius XII onwards.

The defenestration of Prague - 1618 - Protestants threw Catholic imperial officials out of the window

What follows is a summary of Mgr. Bugnini’s account of the behind-the-scenes operations of progressivists and their representatives on the Consilium to rid the Church of Minor Orders.

Of particular note is his casual reference to a groundswell of quiet rebellion against Minor Orders among seminarians in the German-speaking countries. It will become apparent that we are dealing with an act of ecclesiastical dissent that not only went uncorrected by the local Ordinaries, but was actually endorsed by Paul VI several years before he issued Ministeria quaedam. The whole account remains an unrivalled guide to what went on in the corridors of the Vatican to bring about the desired objective.

First, Mgr. Bugnini tells us about a group of married seminarians in Rottenburg who demanded to proceed straight to the diaconate without having to submit to Minor Orders. In October 1968, their Bishop requested a dispensation from the Pope, which Paul VI granted through the Congregation for the Sacraments “as a favor, on this one occasion.” (3)


Follow Me & Keep the Paycheques Coming


What Bugnini did not mention was that the Congregation was already parti pris in the situation.

According to Dom Bernard Botte, its President, Card. Samoré, having consulted his expert opinion, concluded that the Minor Orders should be abolished because they were “no longer of any relevance in the Church” – and paid Dom Bernard 10,000 lira for his advice. (4)

Card. Antonio Samoré

But, unsurprisingly, the Rottenburg case did not remain for long a one-off event for, continues Bugnini, “requests multiplied: France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Canada asked permission to do away with first tonsure and Minor Orders” for “candidates for the priesthood.” (5)


The Water is now on this side of the Dike

The only person standing between salvation and disaster for the Minor Orders was Paul VI, but once he produced a chink in the restraining wall of the dike, an unstoppable flood of water cascaded through the weakened area. Not even the Little Dutch Boy could have saved the situation.

If revolution finds opportunities in chaos, the reformers were well on their way to victory, considering the effects of Paul VI’s policy of non-intervention while national Episcopal Conferences took matters into their own hands: according to Bugnini, they simply “acted on their own responsibility and undertook their own reform.” (6)

Paul VI warmly greets Arch. Bugnini

Mgr. Bugnini describes, without making the least criticism, a mutiny staged by seminarians in the Diocese of Linz, Austria, against the discipline of Minor Orders. Their Bishop, Franz Zauner – a member of the Consilium with a marked propensity for defenestration of all things traditional (7) – naturally supported their cause. In a 1970 letter, he threw the gauntlet down at the Pope’s feet with the statement that “in his diocese the candidates for tonsure and the Minor Orders are this year refusing to receive them in the traditional form, claiming that they are ‘absurd and not fulfillable’ (sinnwidrig und nicht vollziehbar).” The Bishop added that they had “even supplied a new form [of ordination] that they want the consecrating bishop to use.” (8)

The revolt against constituted authority represents a state of depravity that puts the German revolutionaries in the company of the Church’s opponents such as the 16th-century Protestant and 18th-century Jansenist heretics who likewise rejected Minor Orders. We can see in this expression of wayward passions a grave challenge to the preservation of Tradition that would have the most profound implications for the unity of the Church.

It was an early manifestation of the de facto schism operating today among the German Hierarchy of the “Synodal Church.” Allowing rebellious groups to dictate Church policy lies at the root of all Vatican II-inspired reforms, and the abolition of Minor Orders was no exception.


Bugnini’s Joke: ‘While Rome is Consulted, Saguntum Falls’

Bugnini notes that Paul VI’s reaction was to remain aloof while dissent in the German-speaking lands ran rife.

Although the matter had gone beyond a joke, Bugnini was evidently much amused at the situation which he compared to the siege of Saguntum by his namesake, Hannibal, in 219 B.C. Those who are familiar with the history of the event will get the joke.

When Rome’s Iberian ally, Saguntum, was threatened by the Carthaginian General, Hannibal, its citizens appealed to Rome for help. But all that Rome sent were envoys to make diplomatic overtures to the Carthaginians and to convey its highest esteem for the people of Saguntum. It was not willing, however, to commit any force behind its words to save its stricken friends.

Pope Paul VI’s attitude towards Tradition was similarly ambivalent. He sent his nuncio to negotiate with the Germans, praised the Minor Orders for their venerable antiquity, and temporized for years, calling for a committee to be formed, discussions to be held by the Congregation for the Sacraments in collaboration with the Consilium, a study to be made and guidelines to be drawn up. (9)

Only when the rebellion was completely out of hand, having spread to dissident Episcopal Conferences around the world, did he finally intervene in 1972. But by then Saguntum, as it were, had been taken hostage by the enemy.

In Ministeria quaedam, he gave the Minor Orders his thumbs-down with all the finality of a Roman Emperor in the arena whose imperium required the most severe damage to be inflicted on the Christian priesthood.


Continued


1. Annibale Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy 1948-1975, p. 733.
2. From the Latin de (down from) and fenestra (window), this word signifies the act of throwing someone or something out of a window. It was coined with reference to the second Defenestration of Prague (1618) when a group of Protestant Bohemian reformers threw two Catholic imperial officials and their secretary out of a window in Prague Castle, thus helping to precipitate the Thirty Years’ War, The word has an obvious analogy to the ejection of the Minor Orders at the instigation of a group of seminarians in Germany and Austria.
3. A. Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy, p. 739.
4. Bernard Botte, Le Mouvement Liturgique: témoignage et souvenirs, Desclée: Paris, 1973. On p. 175, Dom Bernard states that he received a letter from Cardinal Samoré, Prefect of the Congregation for the Sacraments to this effect: “Dans sa lettre, le cardinal Samoré me faisait savoir que la Congrégation des Sacrements ne voyait aucun inconvénient à l'abrogation des ordres mineurs, qui ne représentaient plus aucun intérêt pour la vie de l'Église”. (In his letter, Cardinal Samoré informed me that the Congregation for the Sacraments saw no problem in the abrogation of the Minor Orders which were no longer of any relevance in the life of the Church”.)
5. A. Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy, p. 740.
6. Ibid..
7. Bishop Zauner’s comments on the reform of the liturgy were recorded by Fr. Henri De Lubac, Vatican Council Notebooks, trans. Andrew Stefanelli and Anne Englund Nash, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2015. At Vatican II he loudly advocated “casting off” most of the traditional prayers and ceremonies of the Mass which he described as so many “impedimenta” (hindrances, useless baggage) on the path to reform. His disrespect for the sacred is evident from this quote: “Some have invoked a text from Exodus [3:5} not to change anything; my conclusion is the exact opposite: depone tua calceamenta, id est, rejice impedimenta [remove your sandals, that is, cast off all obstacles]”. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 242.
8. A. Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy, p. 741.
9. Details are provided by Bugnini, ibid., pp. 738-751.

[Stone]

Dr. Carol Byrne: A Series on the History of the Dialogue Mass
Confused Papal Text Led to the End of Minor Orders

Taken from here [slightly adapted - emphasis mine].

If we pause for a moment to take stock of the situation with the Minor Orders in the years immediately after Vatican II, one inescapable point stands out: The liturgical reformers enjoyed excessive and unfair advantages over traditionalists.

We have seen how Bishops of the German-speaking countries who were the leading advocates of the Liturgical Movement (here, here, here, and here) were also the most powerful lobbyists for the reform of the Minor Orders. It goes without saying that mutinous clerics in their dioceses were immune from disciplinary action and were effectively given a free pass to overthrow liturgical traditions.

Paul VI: ‘Minor Orders ripe for development’

Traditionally-minded clergy from around the world, on the other hand, who wanted to retain the Minor Orders and were not part of the fractious club of progressivists, remained outliers with severely limited, if any, influence.

This is clear from Bugnini's allusion to what he called unwelcome “external pressures” from high-ranking Prelates such as Cardinal Ottaviani who tried unsuccessfully to prevent the planned suppression of the Minor Orders and Sub-Diaconate. (1) Their opinions were completely ignored.

But, most importantly, the progressivists had the support of the Supreme Pontiff himself who, despite shedding a few tears over the impending demise of the Minor Orders, in the end did precisely nothing to save them.


Have Cake, Eat Cake: The Politics of Ambivalence

Pope Paul VI wrote in 1967: “Minor orders must be retained, but their concept and function must be developed,” adding that they must be conferred in new and “improved rites.” (2)

Did these words denote retention or revolution? It seems that the Pope’s mind was conflicted about two mutually exclusive events: keeping the Minor Orders and simultaneously abolishing them, allowing them to exist and at the same time making them develop into something essentially different.

All the ingredients for doctrinal confusion

We are told that the Minor Orders were somehow ripe for “development” – a euphemism for their replacement by something “better,” and a veiled insult to the judgement of all his Predecessors throughout History who had upheld Tradition. When, however, we parse the issues underlying the rhetoric, we can see that nothing of substance has, in fact, been said.

It was only when the crucial moment came in 1972 that the Pope revealed exactly what the new “concept and function” of the Minor Orders would develop into: liturgical activism for lay people, a distortion and falsification of their true vocation in the world.

Pope Paul VI tried to reassure the faithful with this bromide:

“This arrangement will bring out more clearly the distinction between clergy and laity, between what is proper and reserved to the clergy and what can be entrusted to the laity.”

But Ministeria quaedam mixed all the ingredients for the doctrinal confusion as to the identity of priests and lay people that is a hallmark of the post-conciliar Church.

This particular recipe for fudge leaves a bad taste in the mouth, for the revolutionary change could not be brought about without a betrayal of the historic Church, which had appreciated their enduring value in the spiritual formation of priests. This betrayal was the logical outcome of the “active participation” of the laity mandated by Vatican II, which Pope Paul VI endorsed to the hilt.

But fudge cannot hide the hard truth that the Pope, whose primary responsibility was to preserve Tradition and resist novelties, had collaborated with those who wanted to deprive the Church of bi-millennial Minor Orders. Whatever Paul VI’s personal feelings on the matter might have been, the fact remains that he was prepared to delegate his responsibility to a committee of “experts” and leave the fate of the Minor Orders in the hands of those who wanted rid of them.


A Preset Agenda

Bugnini relates the origin and formation of this committee as follows:

“At the fifth general meeting of the Consilium in April 1965, the Fathers expressed their wish that the problems raised by minor orders be studied in a limited group.” (3)

Former ‘minor orders’ of lector & acolyte to both lay men & women

Even before the committee sat, we can see the presence of bias that would pre-determine the outcome: the study of the Minor Orders was framed in purely negative terms as a “problem” to be removed.

But it was a problem of Vatican II’s own making, because Minor clerical Orders could not coexist with the Council’s mandate to raise “active participation” of the laity to the highest priority. The fabricated problem could only be solved by the rejection of the tradition handed down and observed in the Roman Rite for centuries.

As for the members of the select group, we shall see from their credentials that all had divided loyalties over the best interests of the Church: whether to adhere to Tradition or follow the revolutionary agenda of Vatican II.

When it came to choosing sides, they took their stand against centuries of tradition and voted overwhelmingly that “those entering the diaconate should not be obliged to receive each and all of the minor orders” and that “laymen should be allowed to receive the minor orders” [without thereby becoming clerics]. (4)

The committee, held between July 1 and 3, 1965, was composed of the following members and consultors:


Msgr. Emilio Guano, Bishop of Livorno (President)

As a member of the Consilium, Bishop Guano collaborated in the reform of the rites of Ordination, both Major and Minor. He hosted the committee’s meetings on Minor Orders at his residential palace in Livorno.

Bishop Guano, promoter of ‘lay empowerment’

As he had spent his entire ecclesiastical career in promoting lay “empowerment” in the political sphere (5) as well as in the liturgy, his personal stake in the proceedings against the Minor Orders as exclusively clerical functions was thus already well established.


Dom Bernard Botte, OSB (Chairman)

Dom Bernard, a monk of Mont César was, together with his confrere, Lambert Beauduin, the inspiration behind the statement in Sacrosanctum Concilium that efforts to reform the liturgy would not succeed without a different type of formation of priests – hence his virulent attack on the Minor Orders, which he considered unfit for purpose.

He was given the chief responsibility for reforming the Roman Pontifical. Despite his reputation as a liturgical scholar of renown, no one could reasonably consider him to be an impartial source of information on the Pontifical which, he charged, had “seriously deviated from the true tradition” and required, therefore, a radical reform. (6)

The other group members who collaborated with him against the Minor Orders were Frs. Joseph Lécuyer, CSSP, (7) Aimé-Georges Martimort, (8) Emil Lengeling, (9) Cipriano Vagaggini, OSB Cam., (10) and Bruno Kleinheyer. (11) All were members of Coetus 20 of the Consilium for the reform of Holy Orders.


‘Sentence first, Verdict Afterwards’

These words, taken from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland – the surreal world where people “believe in impossible things” – illustrate perfectly the essence of the treatment meted out to the Minor Orders.

As we have seen, the Minor Orders were placed on trial by an impromptu court set up at Livorno, whose members sat in judgement on the venerable rites, and declared them guilty of “irrelevance” to the modern age – a crime against aggiornamento for which the sentence was a foregone conclusion.

Bugnini commented with evident satisfaction: “When we look back across the years to the work done at Livorno … we can see that it contained all or almost all of the elements needed for solutions reached only eight years later.” (12)

This is tantamount to admitting that the sentence against clerical Minor Orders had been assured years in advance of their formal suppression in 1972. When Pope Paul gave his verdict in Ministeria quaedam, he justified his decision by regurgitating point by point the arguments for the supposed “uselessness” of clerical Minor Orders, which had been put forward by the Livorno group in 1965.

We know that was the case from two sources. First, Bugnini recorded a list of the committee members’ objections:

•     Minor Orders as steps to the priesthood no longer corresponded to a ‘real situation’;
  
•     They have been, especially since Vatican II, routinely exercised by lay people;
  
•     We must “meet the needs of the present-day Church” and open Minor Orders to the laity [i.e. end the clerical status of these functions];
  
•     The canonical requirement to receive all the Minor Orders before entry to the Diaconate should be revoked;
  
•     The term “ordination” should be changed to “institution”;
  
•     The number of Minor Orders has varied in different periods of History and in the Churches of the East and West: they are not, therefore, immutable. (13)
  

Second, committee member, Fr. Lécuyer, wrote an article (14) in which he elaborated these arguments and tried (in vain) to give them a semblance of rationality. We will analyse these later.

Significantly, all of these points, sometimes couched in exactly the same phraseology, occur in Ministeria quaedam, as if the document had been ghost-written by Fr. Lécuyer.

In other words, it was merely a question of the Pope rubber-stamping the sentence against the Minor Orders passed by a small coterie of prejudiced naysayers who had been “primed” to respond negatively – their comments were a clear declaration of intent to have the Minor Orders declericalized.

It was the crowning achievement of the Liturgical Movement whose principal aim was to bring about a structural revolution, which would enable the laity juridically to take over functions reserved to the clergy.



Continued


1. Annibale Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy 1948-1975, p. 745, note 28.
2. Ibid., p. 737.
3. Ibid., p. 727.
4. Ibid., p. 734.
5. First as one of Msgr. Montini’s successors as National Chaplain of the Italian Federation of University Students (FUCI) and then as the International Chaplain of Pax Romana. Bishop Guano was also Chairman of the mixed commission for Gaudium et spes, having been appointed by Paul VI to the Commission for the Laity, he played a key role in drafting Apostolicam actuositatem Vatican II’s Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity.
6. B. Botte, ‘L'ordination de l'évêque’, La Maison-Dieu, vol. 98, n. 2, 1969, p. 115: “On ne pouvait pas advantage considérer le Pontifical romain comme un monument intangible qu’un cérémoniaire du 13e siècle aurait amené à sa perfection. L’étude de la tradition antérieure montrait d’ailleurs que, sur bien des points, on avait dévié de la vraie tradition. On ne pouvait donc pas se contenter d’une révision superficielle du texte”. (One could no longer consider the Roman Pontifical as an untouchable monument which a 13th-century papal master of ceremonies had brought to its state of perfection. Research into the former tradition, moreover, showed that, on many points, the Church had deviated from the true tradition. We cannot, therefore, be content with a superficial revision of the text).
7. Professor at the Regina Mundi Pontifical Institute in Rome for the education of women religious.
8. Professor of Liturgy at the Faculty of Theology, Toulouse, co-founder of the Centre de Pastorale Liturgique in Paris.
9. Professor of Liturgical Studies at the University of Münster.
10. Professor of Theology at the Pontifical Athenaeum of Sant'Anselmo in Rome, and a member of the Theological Commission. His argument for the sacramental ordination of women deacons was published as: ‘L’ordinazione delle diaconesse nella tradizione greca e bizantina,’ in Orientalia Christiana Periodica, vol. 40, 1974, pp. 145-189.
11. Professor of Liturgical Science in 1968 at the Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Regensburg, an advisor to the Liturgy Commission of the German Bishops’ Conference and a member of the Liturgical Commission of the Diocese of Regensburg.
12. A. Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy, p. 730.
13. Ibid., p. 728.
14. J. Lécuyer, ‘Les ordres mineurs en question,’ La Maison-Dieu, vol. 102, 1970, pp. 97-107.

[Stone]

Dr. Carol Byrne: A Series on the History of the Dialogue Mass
Not the Whole Truth or even Half of It
Taken from here [slightly adapted - emphasis mine].

How much credibility ought we to accord the research conducted by the Consilium’s Committee on the Minor Orders, given the partisan profile of its members? And what are we to make of the studies produced under the guise of scholarly and academic research by the erudite members of the Committee for the abolition of the Minor clerical Orders?

Each Order had a place and function before Vatican II

Surely this monumental clash between the Titans of the Liturgical Movement who sought control of the liturgy, and the millennial Tradition of the Church should raise at least some eyebrows if not some hackles. Their work was music to the ears of reforming zealots of their day; it impressed Paul VI (his Ministeria quaedam was cobbled together using whole chunks of texts, complete with identical language, lifted from their findings); and it continues to influence progressivists today.

But raw data on their own serve little purpose; they need the essential qualities of reason, context and a commitment to truth when being applied to historical circumstances. The following examination of the Committee’s methodology will reveal the extent to which these salutary influences were lacking and how, as a consequence, the Committee distinguished itself as a Think Tank that delivered an unreliable and sloppy analysis of the role of Minor Orders in the History of the Church.

The research findings provided by the reformers were skewed to deliver a certain message: that the Minor Orders were unsustainable as steps to the priesthood because they were merely “empty titles, contrary to the principle of ‘truthfulness’ that is to be followed in the liturgical reform,” (1) and, therefore, no longer corresponded to a “real situation” in the Church.


Lack of Commitment to Objective Reality

How did they arrive at this damning conclusion? They put their own “spin” on the history of the Minor Orders, making sweeping generalizations, exaggerating or oversimplifying the evidence. Their reasoning went something like this:

• The Doorkeeper no longer turned the key in the lock – so, clearly, he must be shown the door; and who needs Frère Jacques to ring the church bells when any layman can perform the task?;
  
• The Lector did not read the lessons at Mass – that role was performed before Vatican II by the priest and after Vatican II by the laity – he was obviously surplus to requirements, a real impediment to their “active participation”;
  
• The Exorcist was not allowed to cast out demons – so what was the point of his existence? He should be commanded to depart because modern man no longer believes in the existence of the Devil;
  
• The Acolyte would cease to serve at the altar as soon as he became a priest – such a short-lived role was not worth the candle, figuratively speaking.
  
• Minor Orders have become a useless formality – they had only been preserved out of routine and nostalgia for a bygone age;
  
• We must end the clerical status of these functions because lay people can perform them – the term “ordination” is absurd and should be changed to “institution”.
  

Door greeters at St. Francis of Assisi Church in Maryland

But these are neither serious nor intellectually respectable arguments upon which to make a coherent case for the abolition of Minor Orders. No attempt was made to define the term “real” – it was vaguely linked to “how people think nowadays” – or to address the supernatural reality of the offices. Even the claim of “truthfulness” became a catalyst for doing away with fidelity to the truthfulness of Tradition.

Let us see how this worked out in practice by analyzing the Committee’s research findings, (see Part 105) with special reference to Fr. Joseph Lécuyer’s contributions. For anyone who still believes that the reforms were divinely inspired (as the reformers themselves claimed) and characterized by the inerrancy of Holy Writ, this analysis should dispel that misapprehension.


Minor Orders as Steps to the Priesthood

This was the main bone of contention with the reformers whose aim was to convince the faithful that the various offices performed by minor clerics in the past were not inherently clerical in nature, but belonged by right to the “priesthood of all the baptized.”

So they set out to sever the historic connection between the minor ecclesiastical offices and the clerical status of their tonsured holders. Their revolutionary wish was fully granted in Paul VI’s Ministeria quaedam.


Fr. Lécuyer’s ‘Think Piece’

In 1970, Fr. Lécuyer, representing the Consilium’s Committee, published a long article in a progressivist French journal (2) to justify the impending suppression of the Minor Orders. But, as we shall see, he failed to provide one solid reason why they should be abolished, for there is no direct logical link between what he said and what he hoped to achieve.

Female lectors consider reading their 'right' today

His article consisted in a collection of statements that supported Vatican II’s new-found emphasis on the “priesthood of the baptized” as a basis for lay “active participation.” However, [color=#711101d]in promoting this stepping-stone to greater freedom for the laity, he overlooked the immovable stumbling block of Tradition that had consecrated the offices of the Minor Orders from the beginning as essentially clerical in nature[/color].

Take, for instance, his statement that the reform was justified because in former times the Minor Orders were not always seen as steps to the priesthood, and were sometimes conferred on men who had no intention of proceeding to the Diaconate. Without explaining the historical context, he concluded that the Minor Orders should be dispensed with and that permanent ministries should be established for lay people.

He omitted to mention that, in those days, when necessity arose, there were some who, out of humility and love for lowly tasks, willingly dedicated their lives to the duties of the Minor Orders in order to serve the deacons and priests, without themselves advancing to that higher status. There was no question of a free-for-all for lay activism, as Fr. Lécuyer would have us believe, which was later superseded by clerical domination.

It is, of course, an essential tool of propagandists to omit the crucial context because it simply does not fit in with the narrative they have decided to foist on their target audience. The reformers were keen to spread the false notion that the Minor Orders were originally performed by lay men and women, but that their roles were usurped by the clergy. By 1970, it was high time to redress the balance and “restore justice” to the laity.

Echoing Vatican II’s novel interpretation of the “priesthood of the faithful”, no one, Fr. Lécuyer said, had the right to exclude them from service at the altar, reading the Scriptures during the liturgy, forming an Offertory procession or distributing Holy Communion during Mass. He saw these innovations as a “sign of the purification of our Christian faith” in that they would rid the Church of “taboos” about touching certain things regarded as sacred, or exhibiting a reverential attitude in the liturgy redolent of the fear of God associated with former times. (3)


The ‘Ordination Principle’

But the Church before Vatican II has always been clear about the clerical nature of the Minor Orders even when it allowed laymen, where necessity demanded, to perform the duties of Porter or Acolyte. Nevertheless, it must be kept in mind that only the ordained had the right, in virtue of their ordination, to perform these duties, whereas the layman acted only by a favour granted to him by the Church.

Now that ordination to Minor Orders has been replaced by the “institution” of ministries for the laity, modern Catholics find it hard to understand how a priest can undertake the role of a minor cleric in the traditional rites without “usurping” lay roles in the sanctuary.

Even with Major Orders, they talk of the priest as “playing at being a deacon” or acting illogically as sub-deacon. The key to the misunderstanding is the word “ordination” which gives the priest the right to perform any of the roles, minor or major, to which he had been ordained – a right which, by definition, cannot apply to the laity. Only a revolution to turn the tables on the clergy would reverse these conditions, which is exactly what Ministeria quaedam achieved by enabling the laity to leapfrog juridically into offices reserved by right to ordained ministers.


Continued



1. A. Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy, p. 728
2. ‘Les ordres mineurs en question’, La Maison-Dieu, vol. 102, 1970, pp. 97-107.
3. Ibid., p. 100

[Stone]

Dr. Carol Byrne: A Series on the History of the Dialogue Mass
Turning Clerics into Lay People

Taken from here [slightly adapted - emphasis mine].

The Minor Orders were a valued and important part of the Church’s hierarchical Constitution and identity. But Paul VI ended the distinction between the clergy and laity as far as the minor offices were concerned. From 1972, entry to the clerical state would no longer be via the Tonsure but would start with ordination to the Diaconate, with all seminarians below that rank being regarded as laymen. In short, the corollary of this Novus Ordo system is that the Minor Orders are not entitled to have a part in the Hierarchy. From then on, the only legitimate status of ministry for these former clerics would be a lay one.


The abolition of Minor Orders Derives from Vatican II

In Ministeria quaedam, Pope Paul VI stated that “while Vatican Council II was in preparation, many Bishops of the Church requested that the Minor Orders and Sub-Diaconate be revised.” [emphasis added] But how many? To gain some perspective on this, we need a clearer, more accurate assessment of the “many” in relation to the total number of Bishops consulted during the preparatory period. This is provided in the Acts and Documents of the pre-Council of 1960-1961 (1) which shows that of the 2,500 Bishops and Religious Superiors in the Church, only 4% requested a reform of the Minor Orders. The clear indication is that, immediately prior to Vatican II, the overwhelming majority of Bishops had no agenda for a change in the system.

From 2,500 Bishops present at Vatican II only 4% asked for the reform of Minor Orders

With such paltry results, no document of the Council legislated on this subject. It was only in 1972 – almost a decade after the Constitution on the Liturgy – that Paul VI made the revelatory announcement in Ministeria quaedam that “although the Council did not decree anything concerning this for the Latin Church, it stated certain principles for resolving the issue.” We have, then, Paul VI’s word for it that the demise of the Minor Orders was not an afterthought or an unintended consequence, but was directly and deliberately willed by the Council itself. The principles referred to were, of course, based on the all-encompassing “active participation” of the laity, which was a convenient tool for justifying whatever the innovators wanted to achieve.

But these were not the established and settled principles by which the Church has always maintained its hierarchical constitution. For the reformers, Minor Order in the hands of the clergy were perceived to be of no benefit at all and instead to be an instrument of oppression of the laity, preventing their progress towards full emancipation and freedom to take an active role in ecclesiastical affairs.

Nothing could be more symbolic of the contempt for those who had been serving the Church in the lower ranks of the clergy since Apostolic times, even to the point of martyrdom, than this rubber-stamped document that diminished the “cursus honorum” – the series of sequential ordinations, each representing a higher step in the journey towards the Major Orders. Paul VI’s complicity in this act of treachery is evident: He supported the reformers who intended to remove the Minor clerical Orders, formally adopting their ideas as his own in Ministeria quaedam.

By contrast, the Minor Orders were historically treated with high regard, their ranks given honorable mention in Martyrologies, Calendars, Lives of the Saints and in liturgical books of the East and the West. They are also recorded in the intercessory prayers of the pre-Vatican II Good Friday liturgy of the Roman Rite. In doing this, the Church was honoring the recipients of Minor Orders for what they were – members of the Hierarchy. Such a roll of honor, which made the minor clergy stand visibly above the laity, could not be tolerated by the reformers who aimed to flatten the ecclesiastical curve so as to provide a level playing field in terms of opportunities for “active participation” of the laity.


Battering ram for a Marxist Revolution in the Church

This gets to the heart of what the abolition of the Minor Orders was really about – creating a set of common rules and conditions primarily to prevent the minor clergy from receiving powers, privileges and status that are denied to the laity. The implication is that “fairness” demands positive discrimination in favor of allowing the laity to enjoy equal terms of access to liturgical and administrative roles formerly reserved for the clergy. Now they can all play a game of faux equals.

But the price to pay for this disastrous policy is a diminution in the honor that had always been given to the priest because of the pre-eminent dignity of his office. For, the concept of the Minor Orders is predicated on the greatness of the priesthood seen as the pinnacle towards which each ascending rank was progressing.


True Value of Minor Orders

This testimony from a pre-Liturgical Movement priest, Fr. Louis Bacuez, Rector of the Seminary of Saint Sulpice in Paris, illustrates the importance of the Minor Orders in relation to the ordained priesthood:

“[N]ever have the faithful a more exalted idea of the priesthood, nor greater esteem for the dignity of the priest, than when they see him assisted and served at the altar by numerous ministers, representing the various grades of the Hierarchy, every one of whom is above the layman in dignity and authority.” (2)

The mention of the Angelic Hierarchy has been omitted in the Novus Ordo Masses

This view of the Church’s Constitution is no longer proclaimed since Vatican II presumed a fundamental equality of all members of the Church, whereas the constant teaching of the Magisterium was that the non-ordained faithful are subordinated to the sacramental priesthood. It seems that the reformers had a problem with recognizing any ranking system that differentiated between higher and lower status. In the multifarious Prefaces of the Novus Ordo Mass, for example, the celebrant can choose not to mention the ranks of the Angelic Hierarchies (3) by selecting one of the numerous options from which they have been deliberately excised. And the new Code of Canon Law reflects the Conciliar ecclesiology of the Church as a so-called communio of all the People of God, which, in turn, has had a decisive influence on the revision of ecclesiastical law to blur the distinction between clergy and laity.

With Paul VI’s revolutionary act, we are prompted to ask how clerical orders that have been recognized as such from the earliest Christian times, can be turned overnight into exclusively lay ministries without adversely affecting the hierarchical nature of the Church. The question also arises as to how this can be done without affecting the priesthood itself, downgrading its transcendent character and changing its meaning.


Weasel Phrases

The progressivist answer is as simplistic as it is specious: Lumen gentium § 10 declared that clergy and laity a “share in the one priesthood of Christ.” Although this is technically true, it is a phrase that belongs to theological discourse but which, when popularized in ordinary use, changes its meaning into something more general, less specific than intended by Tradition. Taken in a democratic sense (as intended by the reformers), it fails to differentiate between a literal sense – as applicable to the clergy – and a figurative sense (as to the laity). And this confusion has arisen precisely because of the abolition of Minor Orders, which had brought the seminarian step by step to a full participation in the priesthood of Christ at his ordination.

Moreover, it is hardly a phrase conducive to delineating any distinction of status between them, especially when reinforced in the same document by the hyper-inflated and vainglorious notion that every layman is his own “prophet, priest and king.”


Beggars on Horseback

It was inevitable that such flattery would encourage the laity to become arrogant and forgetful of their place in the Church, with the result that respect for one’s ecclesiastical superiors was cast aside in favor of endless conflict between clergy and laity over ecclesiastical rights. As the 4th-century Latin poet, Claudianus, reiterating the wisdom of the ancients, put it:

Asperius nihil est humili cum surgit in altum. (4) (Nothing is more troublesome than a person of low status elevated to a high position)

Aesop could not have put it better. It should have been foreseen that the sudden acquisition of powers by the laity to which they have no intrinsic title in reality would bring nothing but tragic consequences for the Church in terms of undermining the sacramental priesthood. When, for example, the priest has consecrated the elements in the Novus Ordo, all the faithful present are meant to exercise their ministries even to the point of taking over from the priest and loudly proclaiming “the Mystery of Faith” – a phrase indicating transubstantiation which belongs to the Words of Consecration in the traditional Roman Rite.

One cannot help noticing the parallel between the fading relevance of the priest in the Novus Ordo liturgy and the perversity of certain people who, according to this historical account, “behave themselves like beggars on horseback, and not only ride furiously as soon as they are up, but endeavor to ride over those very Persons who, but the moment before, mounted them.” (5)


Continued


1. Acta et Documenta Concilio Oecumenico Vaticano II Apparando. Series I (Antepraeparatoria). Volumen II: Consilia et Vota Episcoporum ac Praelatorum. Pars I: Europa, 1960. This recorded 17 requests for reform of the Minor Orders from the Bishops of Belgium, France and Germany. See pp. 573, 579, 626, 636, 642, 698, 738, 773, 775.
2. Acta et Documenta Concilio Oecumenico Vaticano II Apparando. Series I (Antepraeparatoria). Appendix Voluminis II: Analyticus Conspectus Consiliorum et Votorum quae ab Episcopis et Praelatis data sunt. Pars II, 1961, pp. 107-113. This recorded 45 requests from Bishops the rest of the world, especially those from Missionary countries./li>
3. Louis Bacuez SS, Minor Orders, St. Louis, Mo; London: B. Herder, 1912, p. 135.
4. According to St. Gregory the Great (Homily 34 on the Gospels) their ranks in ascending order are: 1. Angeli (Angels); 2. Archangeli (Archangels); 3. Virtutes (Virtues); 4. Potestates (Powers); 5. Principatus (Principalities); 6. Dominationes (Dominations); 7. Throni (Thrones); 8. Cherubim (Cherubim); 9. Seraphim (Seraphim). All of these ranks – apart from the Principalities – are mentioned mutatis mutandis in the Prefaces of the traditional Roman Missal. Although all ranks are not mentioned by name in every Preface, all Prefaces contain a specific reference to some of them.
5. Claudius Claudianus, In Eutropium, I, line 189. St. Augustine in his City of God, book 5, chap. 26, writing about 415, also quotes Claudian who, “although an alien from the name of Christ,”, was an eye-witness to the superior power of the victorious Christian army in the Battle of the Frigidus (394) and attributed the victory of the Emperor Theodosius to divine intervention. The victory of Theodosius in this battle finally determined the direction of the religious development of Western Europe when Rome became a Christian State.
6. John Dennis, The Characters and Conduct of Sir John Edgar Call'd by Himself Sole Monarch of the Stage in Drury-Lane; and His Three Deputy-governors, London: M. Smith, 1720, p. 10.

[Stone]

Dr. Carol Byrne: A Series on the History of the Dialogue Mass
Why Should the Minor Orders Be Accused of ‘Untruthfulness’?
Taken from here [slightly adapted - emphasis mine].

This is a question that hardly any Novus Ordo priests today would be interested in asking, as most would assume that the Minor Orders had been suppressed for a very good reason. If asked, however, their inevitable reaction would be to dismiss the Minor Orders as an anachronism that had no place in the “age of the laity” – a statement that begs the question rather than supplying a rational explanation.

And if pressed further, the more radical among them would fall back on another circular argument found in Ministeria quaedam, which is that the Minor Orders did not fulfil the criteria for “truthfulness” as laid down by Fr. Bugnini and the Consilium. Here we may interject that their readiness, even enthusiasm, to be deceived by propaganda has been a major force in the success of the Vatican II reforms.

The source of this particular piece of propaganda was, as we have seen, the Consilium’s Committee which met in Livorno in 1965 when its members decided to accuse the Minor Orders of having lost any connection with “truthfulness.” In support of the Committee’s findings, Fr. Lécuyer wrote an article in 1970 denouncing the Minor Orders as an absurd anachronism with no discernible connection to real life situations.

The Vatican II aim: Liberating the seminarians and ‘letting them’ enter into ‘real life’

In it, he argued that the Minor Orders had lost their character of “truthfulness,” and that it was Vatican II’s promotion of lay activism that supplied the antidote for this malaise. He assured his readers that even the seminarians of his time (who, we now know, were willing to swallow any amount of heretical propaganda) rejected them on the grounds of their alleged “untruthfulness.”

It seems that when Fr. Lécuyer made this statement he had never ventured outside the Consilium’s echo chamber, or else had no sense of irony. For, the voices of opposition to Minor Orders had come mainly from those mutinous seminarians in the German-speaking countries who were unwilling to submit to ecclesiastical authority. Theirs was hardly a reliable testimony on which to assess the situation.

Besides, by then, all seminarians had been indoctrinated with the progressivist principles of Vatican II, which would dispose them against traditional seminary training. How could they hope to become priests unless they, too, rejected the Minor Orders in favor of the paramountcy of lay participation in the Church?

So what, then, were the “true perspectives” that Fr. Lécuyer had in mind and that the historic Church had failed to see? They were all about performing specific jobs “in the heart of the Christian community,” rather than being “directly ordered towards supporting the spiritual life of the future priest.” (1)

These words not only betray the crass literal-mindedness of his understanding of the Minor Orders as a jobs-to-be-done Training Workshop to set a common direction for “active participation” of all the faithful. But they also reveal his barely-concealed desire to re-orient the training of priests away from the traditional spirituality (requiring seminarians to be withdrawn from the world) which was designed to enhance their sanctification, that is, to make future “holy priests.”

This “utilitarian” conception of ministry stems from the progressivist notion that the priesthood is mainly about serving the community rather than the true priestly task of offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass to God. It was precisely on this issue that the reform departed from the teaching of the Council of Trent.


Kasper: Vatican II ‘corrected’ Trent

Card. Walter Kasper stated that “Luther certainly had reasons for his protest” against the concept of the priesthood canonized at Trent for being “excessively narrow and one-sided” in identifying it in terms of the Holy Sacrifice. He went on to state that “it was the achievement of the Second Vatican Council to present a holistic understanding that left behind the narrow reductionisms of the past.” (2)


A Changed Priesthood for a Changing Church

We now come to the nub of the question: the loss of the supernatural dimension of the priesthood. The Council of Trent described the Minor clerical Orders as an eminently fitting and proper (“consentaneum”) (3) preparation for ordination to the priesthood.

Pius VI condemned a similar attempt to reform the priesthood

The 20th-century reformers’ assessment of the Minor Orders was, instead, undertaken in clearly naturalistic terms – their outlook was formed by Vatican II’s “openness to the world” and promotion of the laity. When Pope Paul VI declericalized the Minor Orders and replaced them by lay ministries, he did so, as he himself declared in Ministeria quaedam, in accordance with the Council’s principles that “active participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all else.”

We gather from this that the loss of the Minor Orders – a matter that impinges on the very nature of the ordained priesthood – is regarded as of no importance whatever compared with the Council’s over-exaggerated mandate for the aggrandizement of the laity. It is obvious that their abolition and substitution by ministries exclusively exercised by lay people could not have derived from Tradition: a previous attempt to achieve this reform in the 18th century had already been condemned by Pope Pius VI as harmful to the Church. (4)


The Inversion of Truthfulness

Unfortunately, this anti-traditional view continues to be the received wisdom even today among the bien pensants of the liturgical establishment. The consensus of opinion in the Church is that the practice of the Minor Orders in preceding centuries, especially since the Council of Trent, was flawed in the sense of “untruthful,” utterly useless and absurd, even harmful to the good of the Church. But that is a self-contradictory and untenable position for any Catholic to hold because if what the reformers allege is true, then the Church would have to be false.

One would have thought that this onslaught against the holy institution of the Minor Orders would have been countered by a spirited resistance from the Catholic Hierarchy. But most Bishops being progressivists, instead of making strong protest as their duty would require, silently permitted them to be maligned in influential publications and even in the official documents of the Church.


The Roots of Schism

Let us keep in mind that when Paul VI abolished the Minor Orders and the Sub-Diaconate, he not only contradicted the truth of their status as clerical orders, but also rejected the anathemas issued by the Council of Trent on this subject. He inflicted on the Church a sudden and violent change that would prove to be severely damaging to the Faith.

A death blow to the cursus honorum

Ministeria quaedam was a blow aimed directly at the traditional understanding of the hierarchical priesthood for which a gradation of clerical orders by way of preparation and probation – the so-called cursus honorum – had been understood to have existed from the very beginnings of the Church (ad ipso Ecclesiae initio, as the Council of Trent stated).

When this long-standing tradition was abruptly ended in 1972, clergy and laity alike were left with the impression that what they believed about the greatness of the ordained priesthood was a monumental delusion that came crashing down at the stroke of a papal pen.

It is true that the sequence of Minor Orders had a varied and complex history before becoming standardized in the 11th century in the Western Church. (5) But what remained unchanged over all the centuries up to 1972 was the vital principle of stability and continuity insofar as they were recognized as clerical in nature. This was the unbroken Latin tradition as it was actually understood in the first two millennia of the Church. And as no Pope has the authority to subvert Tradition, we can draw the only reasonable conclusion that Ministeria quaedam – like many other of Pope Paul’s innovations, including his Novus Ordo Missae – was a schismatic act. (here, here and here)

This conclusion is strengthened by the open derision and contempt with which the Consilium members treated the Minor Orders and the slurs they cast on their truthfulness. It is scarcely credible that they could speak in those terms against an ancient and venerable institution that had supported their own priesthood.

How can Catholic priests so despise their own sacred tradition of Minor Orders as to recommend their abolition? How can a Pope accede to their demands, suddenly declare them to be outdated categories, and sever their intrinsic connection with the clerical state?

It is unconscionable that the Church was providing a platform for the dissemination of lies about the liturgy and that it was providing support for those who were hostile towards Tradition and anyone who followed it faithfully.

Pope Paul VI famously lamented that the Church was undergoing a process of self-demolition. But in a Church where the revolutionaries’ desires are more important than Tradition, and where the ordained ministers have been induced to hate what they had been taught to love before Vatican II, what other outcome could be expected?

Continued


1. E. Lécuyer, ‘Les ordres mineurs en question,’ La Maison-Dieu, vol. 102, 1970, p. 99.
2. Walter Kasper, A Celebration of Priestly Ministry, New York: Crossroads, 2007, p. 156.
3. Session XXIII, Canon II.
4. Pope Pius VI, in his Constitution Auctorem Fidei, 1794, had already condemned the proposal to remove the lesser clergy and give their function to lay people as “a rash suggestion, offensive to pious ears, disturbing to the ecclesiastical ministry, lessening of the decency which should he observed as far as possible in celebrating the mysteries, injurious to the duties and functions of minor orders, as well as to the discipline approved by the canons and especially by the Tridentine Synod, favorable to the charges and calumnies of heretics against it.”
5.John St. H. Gibaut, The Cursus Honorum: A Study of Origins and Evolution of Sequential Ordination, Patristic Studies, vol. 3, Bern: Peter Lang, 2000, p. 247.

[Stone]

Dr. Carol Byrne: A Series on the History of the Dialogue Mass
The Truthfulness of the Minor Orders
Taken from here [slightly adapted - emphasis mine].

What the reformers failed to appreciate is that the Person of Jesus Christ the Priest was the root from which the venerable tradition of the Orders grew, and that each successive grade of Orders brought the candidate for the priesthood more in conformity to their Divine model, less unworthy of exercising His Priesthood.

Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Divine Model of priesthood

For this reason, the Minor Orders can never become anachronistic, no matter how social structures may change in different ages. Any attempt to make them conform to contemporary categories of thought is fundamentally misconceived and, therefore, harmful to the good of the Church, particularly the priesthood.

The real problem was that the progressivist reformers refused to acknowledge the order and wisdom of this step-by-step arrangement inspired by the Holy Ghost. Instead, they wished to bypass it by having a candidate bearing the character of a layman jump straight into the Diaconate, and to farm out the “redundant” clerical offices of the Minor Orders to the non-ordained.

It is self-evident that because the Minor Orders were consecrated by the immemorial tradition of the Church, they were productive of special graces for those ordained into them. No such assurance, however, can be claimed for the lay “ministries” which supplanted them in 1972 by papal fiat, and which had been devised in the committee room in order to replace clerical privilege by lay “entitlement.”

This has not only placed the Novus Ordo clergy out of kilter with their own traditions, but also deprived them of the special graces inherent in the Minor Orders – hence the need for a re-examination of the truthfulness of the Minor Orders that has been impugned by the reformers.

A new lay minister with her ‘certificate’

But where would they look for enlightenment on this issue? Certainly not to the documents of Vatican II which, according to Paul VI in Ministeria quaedam, had laid the foundations for the abolition of the Minor Orders; nor to the “new theology” on which that document was based, which changed the traditional understanding of the ordained priesthood.

Unsurprisingly, there seems to be no one in the Vatican today capable of understanding that the Minor Orders are not, and never have been, a problem for the priesthood. So why have they been abolished and made the subject of controversy whenever traditionalist organizations faithfully continue the practice?

The difficulty, then, for anyone trying to explain the truthfulness of the Minor Orders is this: without a common starting point – an understanding of the priesthood according to Tradition – we cannot even begin to address their importance as a fitting preparation for priestly ministry. For any talk about the authority of Tradition – or the Catholic wisdom of the ages, or reverence for our spiritual patrimony and fidelity to its consecrated forms – is foreign to the ears of most Church leaders today. One might as well be speaking in ancient Hittite or Sumerian for all the likelihood of being understood.

If we wish to assess the truth of the Minor Orders, we need to understand first what was believed up to Vatican II and then compare it with the deliberations of the Consilium’s Committee on the Minors Orders, which met at Livorno in 1965. From what we have so far seen of the opinions of Fr. Lécuyer who wrote on the Committee’s behalf, the contrast could not have been more extreme.

The outcome of his 1970 article was that the Church’s traditional teaching on the Minor Orders was “untruthful,” and whatever had hitherto been taught on this subject by the Ordinary Magisterium must be abandoned if the life of the Church was to become renewed in modern times. The neo-modernist reformers and Pope Paul VI agreed.

Dom Grea: The Diaconate came into being naturally, like a branch on a grand tree

Before embarking on the task of explaining what the Minor Orders always meant in the Church, we need to recall the central issue – hotly contested by the reformers – that the Minor Orders and the Sub-Diaconate were, by their very nature, diverse subdivisions of the Diaconate. In fact, the connection between them was so intimate that Dom Adrien Gréa (1828-1917) likened them to branches of the same tree:

“As the tree of the Church grew, this main branch of the Diaconate, obeying the laws of a divine expansion, opened up and divided into several branches, which were the Sub-Diaconate order and the other minor orders.” (1)

From this metaphorical picture we can see how the inferior clerical Orders allowed the role of the Deacon to “branch out” so as to bear fruit throughout the Church down the ages. This expansion was accompanied by the outpouring of graces proper to each degree of the Minor Orders in proportion as they gave the recipients a share in the authority and powers exercised by Our Lord as Priest.

Although the various levels of participation are only small – hence the epithet “Minor” as distinct from “Major” Orders – they are nonetheless real in the sense that they make the recipients actually (not just figuratively, as with the laity) partake in the Church’s mission. In fact, the whole cycle of Minor Orders tend to the same end and contribute to the same result – the worship of God in a manner worthy of His sovereign majesty and the sanctification of souls for eternal life.

Who now mentions these supernatural ends in the reformed rites? They do not appear to be uppermost in the minds of the modern clergy. Nor do they feature prominently in the Novus Ordo liturgy which was created to fit a “horizontal” rather than a “vertical” dimension. Here we may pause to note that the suppression of the Minor Orders as a step-by-step preparation for the priesthood greatly enhanced the man-centred, this-worldly, “democratic” liturgies encouraged by Vatican II where the “active participation” of the people is to be “considered before all else.”


An Assault on the Hierarchical Nature of the Church

Furthermore, the very word “Orders” by which these preparatory steps are designated shows that they belonged fairly and squarely in the domain of the Church’s Hierarchy, which placed their recipients on a higher level than the simple faithful. Thus, one cannot pretend that these Orders are simply exchangeable with lay “active participation,” or act as if the two sorts of activity – the one clerical, the other lay – stood on the same level with a shared identity.

An attack on the supposedly ‘elitist’ hierarchical structure

Yet this confusion of identity was introduced by Paul VI in Ministeria quaedam when he collapsed the Minor Orders into lay ministries, in accordance with the reformers’ wishes. Fr. Lécuyer summed up their arguments:

“[The Minor Orders] were in reality only a class-based system determined by the Church, conferring particular rights and duties: access to each individual class was through ordination. This was more suited to the rigidly hierarchical concept of ancient and medieval society rather than to modern society … Therefore, we are within our rights to question the propriety of keeping this system going in perpetuity … the Church has the power to abolish these Orders.” (2)

Their aim was to attack priestly privilege as “elitist,” impose a “communitarian” involvement of all not just in the liturgy, but in the whole life and mission of the Church. Whereas this mission was entrusted first to the Apostles and, through them, to her Hierarchy, Ministeria quaedam effectively set the stage for the “institution” (the very word used in the document) of laymen to replace the ordination of clerics. It was a revolutionary move that would have enormous consequences for the Church.


Loss of Graces to the Church

The suppression of the Minor Orders also led to an incalculable loss of graces in the ranks of the Hierarchy. With each successive ordination, there were conferred not only the right and power to perform certain functions, but also the special graces peculiar to each grade. Thus, the aspiring priest could nurture his soul on the traditional spirituality of the Orders, and gradually understand the greatness of the role he was about to undertake.

Installing female Eucharistic ministers in a modern Novus Ordo church

Nor can the “installation” of lay people into “ministries” compensate for this loss to the treasury of the Church’s graces. No matter how hard Church leaders pretend otherwise, the laity cannot be invested with the same rights and powers enjoyed by recipients of the Minor Orders. For Baptism only gives the laity the right to receive the Sacraments and the power to offer spiritual sacrifices in union with the Church.

With Ministeria quaedam Pope Paul VI inflicted serious damage on the clerical state. By weaponizing “active participation” of the laity, he succeeded in officially disestablishing part of the Church’s Hierarchy. Nothing like it had ever happened in the Church before Vatican II. It was the Protestant Pseudo-Reformation that mounted the first serious challenge to the structure and hierarchical nature of the Church.

The response of the Church to this and any subsequent attacks was to preserve the integrity of the institution keeping her hierarchical structure intact – hence the concern of the Council of Trent to protect all ecclesiastical offices, including the Minor Orders.


Continued


1. Adrien Gréa, De l’Église et de sa divine constitution, Brussels and Geneva: Société générale de librairie catholique, 1885, vol. 2, p. 36. Dom Adrien founded the Canons Regular of the Immaculate Conception in the Jura region of France with a view to restoring religious life after the French Revolution.
2. Joseph Lécuyer, ‘Les ordres mineurs en question,’ La Maison-Dieu, vol. 102, 1970, pp. 101, 99.