This article is the second part of my response to a video by Dr Brant Pitre of the Augustine Institute, on the subject of popular participation in the liturgy. The first part covered up to the 20:50 mark, the point at which Dr Pitre begins his would-be explanation of how and why popular participation was lost in the high Middle Ages, and putatively recovered by the post-Conciliar reform. This is done by contrasting an ancient description of a Roman stational liturgy known as the Ordo Romanus Primus, the “First Roman Order”, with the later medieval manner of celebrating the Mass in the papal chapel which gave us the so-called Tridentine Missal. The supposed contrast is, however, based on a genuinely astonishing amount of historical error.
He begins by introducing the Ordo Romanus Primus (henceforth ORP) as a description of a papal stational liturgy “from the 7th century”, without further qualification. This gives the impression of a greater and more certain antiquity to the text than is really the case. The earliest manuscripts of the ORP are from the first quarter of the 9th century, but most are from the 10th or 11th. However, as noted by Michel Andrieu in his exhaustive critical edition of the Ordines Romani, the ORP contains many references to customs which are certainly later than the 7th century, such as the Agnus Dei, which was added to the Mass at the very end of the eighth. Furthermore, the manuscripts of it are not Roman, and most of them are not even Italian, a fact which raises a whole series of complicated questions about modifications made to the text over the centuries. The ORP is unquestionably a valuable witness to the liturgical customs of the Roman Church in late antiquity, but it is neither comprehensive nor wholly reliable. [note]More to the point, Dr Pitre’s presentation gives a false impression of the degree to which the ORP is concerned with the people’s participation in the liturgy, which is minimal. In Andrieu’s edition, the text occupies 42 pages; at least half of every page is filled with critical notes in a smaller font. The total number of references to “the people” in the text and all the notes is fifteen. Six of these refer not to what the people are doing, but to the celebrant turning towards them at specific points, because, of course, the Mass it describes was not celebrated versus populum.
In point of fact, the ORP is almost entirely about the roles of the clergy and the various officials of the papal court. To give just two simple examples, there are over 50 references to the subdeacons in the main text, and dozens of variations on them in the critical notes, while the acolytes are mentioned more than twice as often as the people.
At 21:33, Dr Pitre incorrectly states that the ORP says that the people sing the Gloria; it actually says that the schola sings it. He also states that when the pope says, “Peace be with you,” the people respond (i.e. “And with thy spirit”); the ORP does not say this. In both cases, it is certainly possible, even likely, that the people did sing along with the schola. But in light of the contrast which Dr Pitre will draw later between the ORP and the liturgy of the high to late Middle Ages, this becomes a much more serious historical misrepresentation.
At 21:38, he states, “the Scriptures are read to the people from the ambo (this is important), they are facing the people when they are reading the Scriptures. We’ll see that’ll change in the second millennium.” But the ORP does not say anything to suggest that the ambos faced the people, because they didn’t. (See picture below.) This would be a minor mistake, but for the fact that later, much is made of this point vis-à-vis further erroneous claims about changes supposedly made to the liturgy in the high Middle Ages.
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| The choir of the basilica of St Clement in Rome is typical in having an ambo for the epistle facing the altar, and another for the Gospel facing north. The lower ambo on the Epistle side is for the director of the choir; it was formerly mistakenly understood to be evidence of the mythical lost Old Testament reading. |
The rest of this section (to 22:25) is basically accurate, although again, we are left with a false impression that the ORP says a lot about the people’s role in the liturgy, where it really says very little. This false impression is then reinforced by Dr Pitre’s description of it as if it were fully representative of “the Roman tradition well into the Middle Ages,” and the “active participation of the laity” as “part and parcel” that tradition. And all of this is aimed at setting up a series of false claims that will be made about how this tradition changed in the 13th century.
Later, Dr Pitre will unfavorably contrast the ORP’s few references to the people with the almost complete absence of any reference to them in the Missal of St Pius V and its high medieval predecessors. And in turn, this will supposedly show that the introduction of rubrics for the laity in the Missal of the post-Conciliar Rite is a return to an earlier tradition, and therefore a great achievement. We must therefore mention here that the earliest Roman sacramentaries, which are older than the oldest manuscripts of the ORP, have even less to say about the people’s role in the Mass than the ORP. This is important because the sacramentary, not the ordo, is the ancestor of the missal, and the comparison of ordo with missal which Dr Pitre makes is based on a serious category error.
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| The beginning of the Canon in the Gellone Sacramentary, ca. 780. Search in vain through this manuscript or others like it for references to the people’s participation. |
Now (23:00) we come to the 13th century, and the development of a new form of papal liturgy alongside that of the stations, the daily liturgy of the pope’s “private” chapel. After referring to this once in passing as “quasi-private”, Dr Pitre then repeatedly calls it the “private liturgy” or “private Mass” without further qualification, in a matter where further qualification is absolutely necessary.
To the modern ear, the expression “private liturgy” or “private Mass” gives the impression that the pope was routinely celebrating low Mass in a small chapel, perhaps attended by a secretary or two, much like any other priest’s low Mass.
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| The private chapel used by St John XXIII in his summer residence. |
This impression is false. The pope’s “chapel” was private, in the sense that it was not open to the public like a cathedral or a parish; not just anyone could walk in to attend the services held there. But it was nevertheless the home of a corporate body of clergymen, and quite a large one at that, who sang the Divine Office and Mass together on a regular basis, just like the canons of a cathedral or the monks of a monastery. These clerics were known as “cappellani – chaplains”, from which position derives the official title of monsignori to this very day, “chaplain of His Holiness.”
Furthermore, the pope was not by any means the only major prelate in the high Middle Ages who had such a “private” chapel with its own clerical staff. Such institutions existed within the households of many bishops, and heads of large religious houses such as the abbey of Cluny, as well as within many noble courts. Some of the greatest composers of sacred music that the Church has ever known, such as Josquin des Prez and Palestrina, worked as choirmasters for chapels of this sort, including the papal chapel, and it doesn’t take much to figure out that their works were not intended to be sung as background music for low Mass.
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| Josquin des Prez’s signature on the wall of the choir gallery of the Sistine Chapel, where he was a member of the choir from June 1489 until at least April of 1494. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.) |
Dr Pitre goes on to contrast the liturgy of the papal court as it was in the early 13th century with the “communal, stational Masses of the pope that we see in Ordo Romanus I.” This part is full of really grave historical errors; I will explain why in detail, but the simple version is that his essential contention is completely wrong. There was no substantive difference between the Mass of the Papal court on the one hand, and any other version of the Mass on the other, including that which is described in the ORP, such that it would per se exclude the participation of the laity.
At 23:45, as he speaks about the liturgy of the papal chapel, a citation appears at the bottom of the screen from Christian Worship in East and West, by Herman Wegman. “Beginning in the eleventh century and especially in the twelfth, the popes began to withdraw from direct pastoral work in the city… the pope… had his own chapel where he celebrated the liturgy isolated and closed off from the clergy and faithful of the city.” This quote (which Dr Pitre does not himself repeat) is itself very misleading. Beginning in the middle of the 11th century, the popes became very active in the great reform movement that was sweeping through the Church, and as a result, spent a great deal of time traveling. Over the 250-year span from 1050 to 1300, they were out of Rome for about 180 of those years. When they were in Rome, however, they did continue to celebrate major feast days in the city’s great churches, as attested by e.g. the eleventh Ordo Romanus (1134-43) and the ordinal of Innocent III (ca. 1200). Moreover, many members of the Roman clergy were also members of the papal chapel.
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| Part of the papal residence in the city of Viterbo (roughly 52 miles to the north-northwest of Rome), built by Pope Alexander IV from 1257-66. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Sailko, CC BY-SA 4.0) |
This is then contrasted with the stational Masses, the supposed focus of popular participation, without ever mentioning that stational Masses were never celebrated every day. The temporal cycle of the Missal of St Pius V has about 80, several of which were not on the list in the days when the ORP was first written, so call it seventy. There have never been stations for the Sundays per annum. The pope also kept stations at some of the major basilicas on their titular feasts or other pertinent occasions; there is no reason to think this was done with the same consistency and frequency as with the Masses of the temporal cycle. The Gellone Sacramentary, ca. 780 AD, gives one station for a feast in the sanctoral, the Purification at St Mary Major. Granting for the sake of argument, and with absurd generosity, that there were fifty such occasions, this gives us a total of 120.
This means that even the most devout among the Roman faithful, those who attended Mass every single day, could attend a stational Mass with the Pope for one-third of the year at most. Therefore, ALL of the Roman faithful were used to attending Masses without the pope, i.e. in a manner on some level different from what is described in the ORP, and thus, the Mass of the ORP, even if it were as fully participatory as any modern liturgist could desire, cannot ever have been normative to begin with.
Now (23:50) the villains, as it were, of the cause of popular participation are introduced, the Franciscans. “When St Francis of Assisi goes to Innocent III and asks for his blessing on the missionary work of this new order of Franciscans (sic), … the Franciscan order is going to adopt as its liturgy … not the communal, station Masses of the Pope that we see in Ordo Romanus I, but the private (sic) liturgy of the papal chapel.” I say “villains” because, in Dr Pitre’s telling, their use of the papal liturgy spreads all over Europe a form of the Mass in which there was no provision made for the people’s participation.
Everything that follows for the next several minutes is a gross distortion and oversimplification.
At 24:25, Dr Pitre adduces a passage from Fr Uwe Michael Lang’s book The Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform, which purportedly “summarize(s) this shift very nicely”, i.e. from stational liturgy described by the ORP to the “private” liturgy of the papal chapel. And he quotes Fr Lang as follows: “Beginning with the pontificate of Innocent III (r. 1198-1216) popes increasingly used the Vatican… ‘chapel’ (his vocal emphasis) for liturgical celebrations. However, these ceremonial spaces were relatively small, and did not allow for the processional elements that characterized the stational liturgies in the churches of the city.”
Dr Pitre comments on this by saying “…think here of the communal participation of the people.” This is a very tendentious explication. What Fr Lang says here is specifically and solely about the lack of processions in the liturgy of the papal chapel. He says nothing at all about changes to the manner of celebrating Mass, much less about changes which exclude popular participation.
Furthermore, the ellipsis in the quote seriously misrepresents what Fr Lang says. The full quote is as follows; I underline the words which Dr Pitre omits. “Beginning with the pontificate of Innocent III (r. 1198-1216) popes increasingly (n.b.) used the Vatican palace as a residence, and its ‘great chapel’ (no emphasis) (cappella magna) for liturgical celebrations. However, these ceremonial spaces were relatively (n.b.) small, and did not allow for the processional elements that characterized the stational liturgies in the churches of the city.”
First, we should note the word “increasingly”, because until the popes moved to Avignon at the beginning of the 14th century, papal stational liturgies continued to be celebrated in Rome all along, when the popes were there. As noted earlier, they often were not in Rome in this period, a fact which Fr Lang also mentions, and which unquestionably played a significant role in diminishing that aspect of the tradition.
But much more important here is the way Dr Pitre omits the word “great” where Fr Lang talks about the “great chapel”, and vocally emphasizes “chapel” where Fr Lang does not emphasize it. Once again, this creates the false impression that what we are talking about is a privately celebrated low Mass, a false impression which Dr Pitre’s subsequent statements reinforce. (25:35: “This has a dramatic effect on the whole history of the Roman liturgy for the next thousand years. (sic: a thousand years have not elapsed even since the birth of St Francis.) … the form of the Mass that they adopt is a private (his emphasis) Mass from the Pope’s private chapel … organized primarily around just the priest and whatever servers or ministers might be assisting him in the chapel.”)
But the “great chapel” was in fact a great chapel; “relatively small”, as Fr Lang says, which is to say, compared to the major basilicas like the Lateran or St Peter’s, but still not small. The version of it at the Vatican known to Innocent III and St Francis no longer exists, but this is what the popes built as its equivalent when they moved to Avignon.
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| Image from Wikimedia Commons by Holger Uwe Schmitt, CC BY-SA 4.0 |
And its modern equivalent, the Sistine Chapel, consecrated in 1483, is also not small.
Again, neither of these spaces is designed for low Mass. (I can personally attest that they both have magnificent acoustics.) “(W)hatever servers or ministers might be assisting (the pope) in the chapel” is a large group of clergy, and a full-time professional liturgical choir, who regularly and solemnly celebrated both the Mass and Divine Office. Dr Pitre’s presentation creates the false impression that the Mass which the Franciscans copied from the papal chapel was a low Mass served by a priest and altar boy, to the exclusion of the people.
The next article in this series will examine Dr Pitre’s claims made about the supposed absence of popular participation in the papal/Franciscan Mass.
[note] Fr Lang writes the following about the Ordo Romanus Primus in the very book which Dr Pitre adduces in favor of his own contentions about popular participation. (p. 213): “Interpreting the extant sources of the papal stational liturgy presents us with a fundamental problem, since they are prescriptive texts that communicate how the right should be enacted. As historical scholarship has made us increasingly aware, however, we cannot simply assume that such prescriptions are identical with the way in which the liturgy was in fact carried out. Ordo Romanus I was originally designed for the solemn papal mass on Easter Sunday, Monday and Tuesday; as a template for other occasions it was likely to be adapted to the spatial arrangements, local resources and (quite possibly) particular observances of the stational church chosen for the day. Moreover, it is a script for liturgical actors who were, for the most part, clerics (the papal court included also lay officials). As such (it) can easily give the impression of a ‘clericalized’ liturgy, but such a view would be misleading since it abstracts from the genre and purpose of the document. Liturgical books in the strict sense are not concerned with how people in general participated in the rite, let alone how they experienced it.” (my emphasis)
