The Pistoia Continuum

We often think that the modernism that triumphed at Vatican II arose in the late 19th century. It was actually active a century before.

From Christian Order

By Fr John Parsons

Extracted from the Australian author's Reform of the Reform?, published in Christian Order, Nov. & Dec. 2001.

If a wrestling with historical relativity is the root of the matter, then the spirit of the recent liturgical revolution may be grasped by beginning not with the revivalist ultramontane traditionalism of Dom Gueranger, but with the revolution, part antiquarian, part rationalist, part historicist, that was attempted at the beginning of the contemporary period by the Jansenist party.

The most formal move in this direction occurred at the diocesan Synod of Pistoia in Tuscany, convened by Scipio de Ricci, Bishop of Pistoia and Prato in 1786 and which was condemned by the Holy See for the first time in 1794, and for the last in 1947.

With the benefit of hindsight, Pistoia can be seen as the beginning of the current Catholic debate on the cultural adaptation of the liturgical lex orandi, and on its subtle but profound connection with the lex credendi. The Holy See's volte face in its response to the kind of adaptation the Synod of Pistoia proposed also serves to demonstrate how far the Papacy has been prepared to reverse its historico-cultural judgements on liturgical matters in the past. This in turn should provide supporters of the traditional liturgy with a helpful precedent to cite when the time comes for the Holy See to reform its own recent reform.

It can hardly be denied that the spirit which hovered over Archbishop Bugnini's Consilium following Vatican II, was more akin to the spirit of Scipio de Ricci and his synod, than to that of Prosper Gueranger and his abbey. In the bull Auctorem Fidei of 1794, Pius VI censured as "heretical" the Synod of Pistoia's assertion that "in recent centuries a general obscuring has occurred regarding truths of great importance relating to religion."

It is true that the doctrinal assertions of the Synod which contradict the Church's lex credendi were the principal object of this condemnation; but the Synod's implicit assertion that the Church's lex orandi had also been defective and contrary to the will of God for many centuries would certainly have been held by Pius VI to be, if not heretical, then at least close to it; haeresi proxima as the traditional phrase has it.

Pistoia Revisited

Let us then briefly recall the mixed rationalism and antiquarianism of the Pistoian project, noting the similarities between the changes in theology and practice which that Synod wished to make, and those which have occurred de facto since Vatican II. These include the notions:

• that the Church is wholly ministerial and that therefore the clergy act as delegates of the laity and derive their authority from them;
• that the Pope is likewise a representative of the Church deriving authority from it and not from Christ via St Peter;
• that the Church should not be governed by binding laws but by moral suasion only;
• that bishops need not obey the Pope but can govern their particular churches and alter traditional discipline as they like;
• that priests have equal doctrinal authority with bishops;
• that local synods can sit in judgement on Roman decrees;
• that the doctrinal decisions made in the past by Rome are not binding on local churches;
• that Masses said by a priest with only a server in attendance are somehow defective;
• that the doctrine of transubstantiation should not be insisted upon;
• that Masses cannot be offered for particular intentions;
• that side altars should be removed;
• that the liturgy should be celebrated aloud and in the vernacular;
• that frequent use of the sacrament of penance should be done away with and that venial sins should not be confessed;
• that indulgences are of no benefit to us upon arrival in the next world and that, in addition, they cannot be offered up for the dead;
• that the minor orders should be abolished and that lay people should take part in conducting public worship as readers, acolytes and so forth;
• that the Church should not regulate marriage law but should accept whatever civil society decrees on the matter;
• that devotion to the Sacred Heart should be done away with;
• that conventional popular devotions should be discouraged;
• that books condemned by the Holy Office should nonetheless be publicised by parish priests;
• that the use of devotional statues and icons should be downplayed;
• that holy days of obligation ought to be reduced or transferred to Sundays;
• and finally that all the traditional forms of religious life ought to be abolished except for the occasional monastery of which the inmates would all be laymen except for a few priests who would concelebrate at a single daily Mass.

Are these the proposals of the 1780s or the 1980s?

They are both.

Striking as these parallels are, it is even more important to note that the Synod was praised by its supporters as being "perhaps the most regular which has been held for ten or twelve centuries", that is, since the age of St Gregory the Great. Taking the patristic Church as normative, the Pistoians, carried along by a spirit of revolutionary pedanticism, outlined an impossible scheme for recreating it. It was a hankering to create a modern analogue of that same patristic Church, which haunted the imagination of many in the reform party in the mid-twentieth century, and which inspired them with the same revolutionary zeal.

THE CHANGE IN CURIAL POLICY

The Pistoian line of argument was solemnly rejected by the Holy See. From Pius VI in the bull Auctorem Fidei of 1794, to Pius XII in the encyclical Mediator Dei of 1947, the papacy explicitly condemned the Synod by name, and also its contemporary emulators, as promoting a false "liturgical antiquarianism." The Synod had asserted it to be "against apostolic practice and the counsels of God unless easier ways are provided for the people to join their voice with the voice of the whole Church." Article 66 of the Auctorem Fidei condemns this proposition, understood as proposing the introduction of the vernacular into the liturgy, as ''false, temerarious, disruptive of the order laid down for the celebration of the mysteries, and easily productive of numerous evils." It is the unhappy privilege of those living in the late twentieth century to see how prescient that condemnation was!

Mediator Dei reiterated "the serious reasons the Church has for firmly maintaining the unconditional obligation on the celebrant to use the Latin tongue." In 1956, at the International Liturgical Conference held at Assisi, the Holy See maintained its warnings against a vernacular liturgy, though the rites for the sacraments were being vernacularised with Roman authority by that time in countries where the more advanced liturgical thinking prevailed. Even as late as 1962, in the encyclical Veterum Sapientia, John XXIII said "let no innovator dare to write against the use of Latin in the sacred rites...nor let them in their folly attempt to minimise the will of the Apostolic See in this matter."

Annibale Bugnini: Neo-Pistoian Reformer

From 1948 however, the year after Mediator Dei appeared, the Roman line had begun to change. In that year a Commission for Liturgical Reform was established in the Roman Curia, of which the most influential members seem to have been Augustin Bea S.J., confessor to Pius XII, and Annibale Bugnini, the secretary of the Commission, who was to remain the central bureaucratic figure in Roman liturgical reform until his dismissal by Paul VI in 1975. The sentiments of Auctorem Fidei are not those of this extremely influential figure, for Bugnini shared Scipio de Ricci's conviction that Catholic worship had been in need of reform for many centuries, and shared also in the complacent conviction that he was just the man needed to reform it.

When in 1969 Hubert Jedin, the distinguished historian of the Council of Trent, criticised the effects of the post-conciliar liturgical changes in an article in the Osservatore Romano, and in particular the introduction of the vernacular as sacrificing an important bond of unity in the western Church, Archbishop Bugnini replied saying:

"As a good historian who knows how to weigh both sides and reach a balanced judgment, why did you not mention the millions and hundreds of millions of the faithful who have at last achieved worship in spirit and in truth? [my italics]. Who can at last pray to God in their own languages and not in meaningless sounds, and are happy that henceforth they know what they are saying? Are they not 'the Church'?

"As for the 'bond of unity': Do you believe the Church has no other ways of securing unity? Do you believe there is a deep and heartfelt unity amid lack of understanding, ignorance, and the 'dark night' of a worship that lacks a face and light, at least for those out in the nave? Do you not think that a priestly pastor must seek and foster the unity of his flock - and thereby of the universal flock - through a living faith that is fed by the rites and finds expression in song, in communion of minds, in love that animates the Eucharist, in conscious participation, and in entrance into the mystery? Unity of language is superficial and fictitious; the other kind of unity is vital and profound.... Here in the Consilium we are not working for museums and archives, but for the spiritual life of the people of God.... The present renewal of the Church is serious, solid, thoroughgoing, and safe [Bugnini's italics] even if it also brings suffering and opposition.... Do you not think, Professor, that historians too ought to search historical events and discover signs of God in them?"

The "ignorance and 'dark night' of worship" to which the Archbishop refers is reminiscent of the Synod of Pistoia's belief in a centuries old "general obscuring of truths of great moment relating to religion". Since Archbishop Bugnini's argument is based on the existence of a non-vernacular liturgy, we must assume that his dark night has reigned from at least the eighth century, if not the sixth; just the same point identified by the Synod of Pistoia's supporters as the beginning of the decadence of the Church.

In his invaluable work La Riforma Liturgica 1948-1975, published in 1983, and in English translation in 1990, Archbishop Bugnini makes it plain repeatedly that his words to Professor Jedin are not a misrepresentation of his habitual state of mind. A very negative and dismissive evaluation of the liturgical practice of the Catholic Church, at least in the Latin rites, ever since the Carolingian period, is a strikingly persistent part of his mentality. The assumption underlying the work of the Consilium over which Archbishop Bugnini presided is distinctly parallel to that of the Pistoian reformers. The assumption is that the Church has been off course for centuries, since the end of the patristic age, and that it is now the task of the Consilium to sweep away whatever it deems appropriate from the "accretions" of the past, in order to implement its own ideas as to what Catholic worship should be. Antiquity can be appealed to where possible, but rationalist clarity or "pastoral need" must be invoked whenever antiquity stands in the way; thus, on one ground or the other, the will of the Consilium must always prevail, since no fixed and objective criterion can be invoked against it.