My Thoughts on the New Rite of Paul VI

I am a Traditionalist. I make no bones about it. If I had my way, the Novus Ordo Missae would never have existed.

Whilst I believe that the NO, celebrated with valid matter, form, and intention, is a valid Mass, I have no idea how anyone can call it a 'reform' of the Roman Rite, as the normal post-Conciliar narrative has it. There are not 'two forms of the Roman Rite' as Pope Benedict pretended. There is the Roman Rite and there is Pauline Rite. They are two different and distinct Liturgies. 

The Roman Rite is fully and authentically Catholic. The entire Rite is a catechesis in the Catholic Faith. The Pauline Rite, on the other hand, lacks virtually any catechetical content. It deliberately deemphasises the Sacrificial character of the Mass to the point that the Reformed Church of France is on record as saying that the Pauline Rite using 'Eucharistic Prayer II (of which, more later) is not the hated 'Eucharistic Sacrifice' of the protestants and that it's fine for its members to attend. (see the Bugnini quote below)

Let us look at the testimony of both the friends and the enemies of the Pauline Rite.

Father Louis Bouyer, devastated by the contrast between what, as a leading member of the Liturgical Movement, he had hoped the implementation of Sacrosanctum Concilium (the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy) would achieve, and what it did in fact achieve, had the integrity to state:

We must speak plainly: there is practically no liturgy worthy of the name today in the Catholic Church. The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer, p. 99.

Msgr Klaus Gamber sums up the true effect of the post-conciliar reform in one devastating sentence:

At this critical juncture, the traditional Roman rite, more than one thousand years old, has been destroyed. The Reform of the Roman Liturgy: Its Problems and Background, Gamber, p. 99.

Is he exaggerating? Not at all. His claim is endorsed from the opposite end of the liturgical spectrum by that "great master of the international liturgical world," Father Joseph Gelineau, SJ, who remarks with commendable honesty and no sign of regret:

'Let those who like myself have known and sung a Latin-Gregorian High Mass remember it if they can. Let them compare it with the Mass that we now have. Not only the words, the melodies, and some of the gestures are different.

'To tell the truth, it is a different liturgy of the Mass. This needs to be said without ambiguity: the Roman Rite as we knew it no longer exists (le rite romain tel que nous l'avons connu n'existe plus). It has been destroyed (il est détruit).' - The Liturgy Today and Tomorrow, Gelineau, pp. 9-10.

Bugnini himself said:

'We must strip from our Catholic prayers and from the Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren that is for the Protestants…' - L'Osservatore Romano, March 19, 1965

Fr Louis Bouyer, mentioned earlier, a member of the commission to produce the reformed liturgy relates the following in his memoirs:

Dom Botte and I were commissioned to patch up its text (Hippolytus' Eucharistic Prayer-Eucharistic Prayer II) with a view to inserting these elements (Sanctus and intercessions) — by the next morning! [ … ] Still, I cannot reread the improbable composition without recalling the Trastevere café terrace, where we had to put the finishing touches to our assignment in order to show up with it at the Bronze Gate by the time our masters had set! (Louis Bouyer, The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer, 2014, 221-222)

I have read that the finishing touches to the Prayer were scribbled on the back of a napkin and that Fr Bouyer once said he would never use Eucharistic Prayer II. When asked why, he replied, 'Because I wrote it!'

As Prof. Dietrich von Hildrebrand said of Bugnini and his 'reform commission', 'Truly, if one of the devils in C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters had been entrusted with the ruin of the liturgy he could not have done it better.'

I agree with both Prof. von Hildebrand and Fr Gelineau. The Roman Rite was destroyed by Paul VI's 'reforms' and it is an entirely different Liturgy than the Pauline Rite despite the pretence that they are the 'Extraordinary' and 'ordinary' forms of the same rite.

And now, the Roman Rite, the Rite of the Church of Rome for at least 1400 years with only minor, organic changes is under direct attack by the Vatican. Resist!!!