The Reverent Novus Ordo Doesn’t Scale

A few years ago, I wondered how many "different" Masses could be celebrated according to the NO. Here are the results: Multiplicity of Masses (or How Many Permutations are Possible in the NO?)

From One Peter Five

By Eric Sammons

In the technology world, scaling is vital to success. An entrepreneur might have a wonderful idea for a new product, but if its design is such that it can’t be used by a large consumer base, it’s doomed to obscurity.

The Segway is an example of a technology that didn’t scale. Many people wanted a way to move around urban areas more easily and quickly, and the Segway was introduced with massive fanfare as the solution to that problem. Futurists imagined a world in which everyone got around town on one of these devices. However, the Segway didn’t take off for a variety of reasons, including cost and overregulation by city officials. But more than anything, it was too bulky, making it difficult to store and near-impossible to integrate with other forms of transportation such as buses and cars. It became a niche product used mostly by policemen and warehouse workers.

The reverent Novus Ordo Mass faces a similar predicament in terms of scaling. Many, if not most, Catholics desire a reverent Mass at their local parish, yet finding a reverently-celebrated Novus Ordo Mass can be like spotting a Segway out in the wild—sure, they exist, but they’re nowhere near the norm. They’re simply not offered on a large scale. Let me explain why.

By the middle of the 20th century, many Catholic leaders believed that the liturgy had to change to meet the needs of modern man. The changes proposed ranged from minor adjustment to radical reworking. Eventually, in the wake of Vatican II, a new “product” was introduced: the Novus Ordo Mass.

A key feature that truly set the Novus Ordo apart from the old Mass was its increased adaptability. In the old Mass, there were options, to be sure, but they were very limited. In the Novus Ordo, however, the celebrating priest can mix-and-match almost every aspect of the Mass, including the most fundamental piece, the Eucharistic Prayer. Because of this adaptability, specific liturgies could be shaped into different forms, depending on the presiding priest’s preferences. This also gave rise to parishes experimenting with changes beyond the rubrics (“If I can choose the Eucharistic Prayer, why can’t I create my own collect?”), as well as experimenting with the music and vestments… usually to disastrous results.

Herein lies the Novus Ordo’s fatal design flaw in terms of scalability. The architects of the new Mass believed that this malleability would allow priests and bishops to adapt to changing times. It would make the Mass more “relevant” to modern man. Instead, what happened is that no one knows what they might get when they enter a church for Mass. Will it be a reverently-celebrated Mass with beautiful hymns and a powerful, orthodox homily? Or will it be a liturgy just one step above a clown Mass? In most cases, the Mass is closer to the latter than the former.

The rarity of reverently-celebrated Novus Ordo Masses has given rise to the term “unicorn Masses.” As rare as a unicorn, these Novus Ordo Masses are the ones in which many of the trappings of the traditional Latin Mass—ad orientem, altar rails, sacred music—are included. But that raises the question: why are these the unicorns? Why is the standard NO Mass one that is celebrated with all the pomp of karaoke night at the local bar?

Here’s why: the extreme adaptability of the reverent Novus Ordo renders it unscale-able.

Liturgical rites of the Church are not meant to be changed according to our times; instead, we are meant to be changed by them. This is why, before Vatican II, all liturgical rites, both Eastern and Western, took on a fixed form that rarely changed. Any “experimentation” was worked out in the early centuries of the Church—the time (and place) closest to Our Lord’s time (and place) here on earth. Before long the liturgy took its essential shape, and its development slowed down to a snail’s pace.

This ossification is fundamental to celebrating a liturgy on a wide scale, and we see this in the history of the Church. In the Church’s first 600 years the faith spread rapidly, but it was mostly contained within the Roman/Byzantine Empire. By the time it began spreading into barbarian lands, the shaping of the liturgical rites was mostly completed. Missionary priests and bishops went forth with a fixed way of bringing the Sacraments to the pagans; they did not have to experiment with every people they encountered, trying to single-handedly adapt the liturgy as they thought best. Instead, they sought to conform the people to the Mass. Yes, there was more than one rite, but the ways in which a Mass or Divine Liturgy was celebrated were limited, and they contained only what had withstood the crucible of development in those first six centuries.

(Yes, I know that the Roman Rite Mass of the seventh century was not exactly the same as that which followed the Council of Trent and that local variations developed in the West, but these were mostly differences on the fringes. A Mass celebrated in 13th century England was little different in its core elements and ethos than one celebrated in 13th century Germany, which was also essentially the same as one celebrated in 19th century France. These were minor differences compared to the average difference between a traditional Latin Mass and a Novus Ordo Mass today.)

This uniformity was important to scaling the liturgy, for it ensured a consistent—and faithful—means by which Catholics received the Sacraments and connected to the universal Church. The Mass forms Catholics and helps pass on the Faith from generation to generation, and the fixed nature of the Mass allowed it to perform this function on a massive scale.

The “optionitis” of the Novus Ordo, on the other hand, hinders this scaling. Instead of a uniform way to pass on the Faith across cultures, we have each and every Mass beholden to the whims of the celebrant priest. Every one is a new and unique “product.” Yes, sometimes that means reverently-celebrated Masses. But more often than not, it means Masses that fall far short of that ideal (which shouldn’t even be an “ideal,” but the norm). The adaptability of the new Mass means that this new “product” cannot scale. The reverent Novus Ordo has become the Segway of liturgies.

Of course, there is a liturgy currently celebrated in the West that’s been proven to scale: the traditional Latin Mass. Its fixed nature, which allows for far fewer adjustments by the celebrant priest, makes it perfectly suited for usefulness for a worldwide audience. If we really want to spread and practice the faith throughout the world, the way forward is to return to a liturgy that can serve the needs of that whole world. We need a Mass that can scale.