This is the third part of my response to a video by Dr Brant Pitre of the Augustine Institute on the subject of popular participation in the Mass. In the previous part, I explained the errors of his claims about the nature of the Roman stational Masses, and of an ancient document which describes them, and then, the erroneous contrast which he draws between them and the Masses celebrated in the papal chapel. By repeatedly calling the latter “private Masses”, without further qualification, he gives the false impression that these were exclusively low Masses, which had no place for the participation of the lay faithful. In this telling, such low Masses were then adopted by the Franciscans when they took on the specific form of the Roman liturgy used in the papal chapel.
At 26:10, Dr Pitre says about this liturgical form that it doesn’t have “any clear directive for how the people are supposed to be engaged, because the people by and large were not present at private Masses in the papal chapel.” Therefore, when the Franciscans spread this specific form of the liturgy throughout Europe, they effectively injected into the Church’s bloodstream a habit of lay non-participation in the Mass. (This is my metaphor, not his.)As noted by Fr Uwe Michael Lang in the very book of his which Dr Pitre cites, liturgical books properly so-called (the ancient sacramentaries, the missals which derive from them, chant books, lectionaries etc.), have never contained directives for the people’s participation. The document to which Dr Pitre hitherto referred as a witness to popular participation, the Ordo Romanus Primus, is not a liturgical book properly so-called, but an early form of ceremonial manual, and the contrast which he draws between it and the liturgical books of the papal court (adopted by the Franciscans) is a category error. (As I noted in the previous article, he also greatly exaggerates the degree to which it is concerned with the people’s participation.)
Secondly, we must stop for a moment to contemplate the manifest absurdity of these claims about the Franciscans; above all, the claim that as a “missionary order”, they set out to evangelize the people by giving them a liturgy which excluded them from the active participation in the liturgy to which they had hitherto been habituated for centuries. I do not ascribe to Dr Pitre any deliberate falsehood; I am certain that he has been led astray by the bad scholarship on the liturgy and its history which has reigned supreme for centuries. Objectively, however, this is an atrocious calumny against one of the Church’s greatest religious orders.
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| Part of a fresco by Cimabue, painted between 1285 and 1288 in the lower basilica of St Francis in Assisi; this is one of the oldest likenesses of Francis that exists, and is held by many to be the closest known representation of what he actually looked like. |
And this in turn leads to a greater question: if this were really how things developed, how did the Franciscans and their liturgy come to be so popular in the first place, “spread(ing) like wildfire throughout Europe”? (26:20) Like the other mendicant orders, they were established almost entirely in large cities. This means that their congregations had plenty of other churches they could attend, churches where (even if this fictitious history were true) the high degree of popular participation which they had known hitherto would have remained.
In reality, the papal liturgy was already beginning to spread before the Franciscans were founded. As noted by Dr Donald Prudlo in a forthcoming publication (A Companion to the History of the Roman Curia, chapter 7), permission to use it was granted to two orders before them, the Hospitaler Order of the Holy Spirit and the Augustinian hermits, and it was imposed upon the canons of Genoa cathedral. In 1204, it was adopted by the bishop of Assisi for his whole diocese, which is how St Francis himself had come to know it, long before he ever laid the foundation of what would become his order.
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| The choir of the cathedral of St Lawrence in Genoa. Not designed for low Mass. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Benjamin Smith, CC BY-SA 4.0.) |
Dr Pitre says very little about the Franciscans’ supposed motives for doing as he claims they did, a point which he certainly ought to have explicated further, given its central importance to his narrative. But he does say, immediately after mentioning their adoption of the papal liturgy (25:44), that they were “a missionary order, they don’t stay in one place.” Said thus, without further qualification, this is a grotesque exaggeration. It is true that the mendicant orders did not formally keep the Benedictine rule of stability, but nevertheless, the great majority of their members spent their whole lives in their order’s house in or near their native place. Only the cream of their crops, great scholars like St Thomas Aquinas or great preachers like St Bernardine of Siena, traveled widely, and even then, most itinerant preachers were limited to their own province.
Dr Pitre then goes on to claim that “the Mass which most people are going to experience and become familiar with after the great missionary efforts of the Franciscans is a private (his verbal emphasis) Mass in which the priest and server (note the singular) would be able to celebrate anywhere at any chapel as they are traveling throughout Europe spreading the Gospel.” Of course, the Franciscans’ liturgical practice certainly exercised some influence on the liturgical culture of the Roman Rite in general outside their own churches. But to claim that it became what “most people experienced” is a gross oversimplification. However large and widespread the mendicant orders may have been, they were always vastly outnumbered by secular clergy and monks.
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| The upper basilica of St Francis in Assisi. Also not designed for low Mass. |
Note also how the emphasis on the term “private” gives the impression that what the Franciscans were doing was mostly low Mass, a false impression, reinforced in its falsehood by the reduction, within a minute, of “just the priest and whatever servers or ministers (plural) might be assisting” (26:02) to “the priest and server (singular).” (27:05)
Of course, no anti-history of the liturgy would be complete without a substantial misrepresentation of the role of the Council of Trent. (27:22) “And it’s going to be that private form of the Mass that will be ultimately adopted by the Council of Trent in 1570, whenever (sic) it publishes its official Missal of Pope St Pius V.” The Council of Trent ended in 1563, having left as its sole directive on the reform of the liturgy that this was a matter to be left to the Holy See. Dr Pitre claims that this explains why all the editions of the Missal between Trent and Vatican II contain rubrics for the clergy and “server” (again, in the singular), but contains no mention of the people. This is also false. The so-called Tridentine Missal makes no mention of the people’s role in the liturgy because, as noted above, the liturgical books never mentioned it.
Starting at 28:10, Dr Pitre lays the parts of the Mass out in a chart, and notes how the Missal of St Pius V and subsequent editions assign them to the priest and the “server”, again in the singular, reinforcing the false impression that this Missal is concerned only with low Mass. No mention is made of the many rubrics that pertain to the solemn or sung Mass, which was still the daily norm in thousands of churches of the Roman Rite when that Missal was published.
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| A page of the rite of Mass in the rubrics of the Missal of St Pius V; the section in italics at the lower right describes the beginning of the solemn Mass. |
This error in genere is compounded with several other errors in specie. Dr Pitre notes that the Confiteor is said by the priest and server, without mentioning that it had never been an audible part of the normative, i.e. sung form of Mass. He draws particular attention to the fact the readings were said facing the altar because there were no people present to read them to in the papal chapel. “It’s a private Mass.” But the readings were never done facing the people per se, and while there may not have been lay people present for the services in the papal chapel, there were still plenty of members of the papal household present.
He claims that there is no sermon in the Missal, because there is no one to preach to. This is also wrong; then as now, the papal household had its own full-time preacher, and often hosted guest preachers. But even as he says this, a citation appears on the screen from Fr Joseph Jungmann’s Mass of the Roman Rite that a rubric was added in the first revised edition (issued by Clement VIII in 1604) which specified the place of the sermon. Again, the liturgical books never specified the place of the sermon before this; even his putative model of popular participation, the Ordo Romanus Primus, makes no mention of it at all.
The simple truth is this: the notion that the sermon is an intrinsic part of the Mass is a conceit of the post-Conciliar reform. One can debate whether it has been a fruitful conceit or not, but any claim that it has a solid tradition behind it is false.
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| The nave of the church of the Holy Name of Jesus in Rome, commonly known as ‘il Gesù’, the principle Jesuit church in the city. Note the position of the preaching pulpit, which is nowhere near the sanctuary. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Finoskov, CC BY-SA 4.0.) |
Just as Dr Pitre previously claimed that the readings were anciently done facing the people, without, apparently, looking at the placement of the ambos in the ancient Roman basilicas, he seems to have made a claim about sermons in the Counter-Reformation period without looking at the placement of the pulpits in the churches of that era. Many Counter-Reformation churches have pulpits out in the nave because the sermons were often quite long and delivered with great rhetorical energy, such that on a practical level, the preacher could really only do them once. The church would therefore have two Masses, with the sermon between them, so that the faithful could come for Mass and stay for the sermon, or come for the sermon and stay for Mass. (Perhaps we should ask the harried priests today who say five Masses in three churches on a weekend, and have to deliver the same sermon five times, whether this custom might have had some merit to it.)
This goes on for a couple of more minutes, but what it all amounts to is that the Missal of St Pius V does not do a thing which no liturgical book of the Roman Rite had ever done, namely, to formally define the role of the faithful in liturgical participation. This long series of errors culminates in the claim that this form of the Mass, which he has thus far mispresented on almost every count, was “spread throughout Europe by the Council of Trent.”
As an aside, this contradicts his earlier claim that it has already been spread throughout Europe by the Franciscans: “the Mass which most people are going to experience and become familiar with after the great missionary efforts of the Franciscans…” More importantly, the Missal which was produced by St Pius V (not the Council of Trent) was not imposed on any church (be it a cathedral, a canonry, a monastery, etc.) which could demonstrate that its own liturgical usage was at least 200 years old. As the wise Fr Hunwicke beatae memoriae explained many times, all such institutions were permitted to pass over to the use of the new Roman books, but only with the unanimous consent of the bishop and chapter. They were not required to do so, and many did not, including the other most influential mendicant order, the Dominicans. So I will simply add that in regard to popular participation, the Missal of St Pius V is just as silent as the local Missals which it did replace were (e.g. that of Sarum), and had always been.
In any defense of the post-Conciliar reform, it is of course necessary to mispresent the history of the liturgy in the Tridentine period, and on this score, Dr Pitre continues to disappoint. His remaining false claims will be addressed in the next part of this series.
