The Novus Ordo includes prayers and elements that are ancient: the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Sanctus, the Roman Canon. That does not make the Novus Ordo itself ancient, any more than a new house becomes medieval because it was built with a few bricks from a thirteenth-century castle. The Roman Rite grew over centuries in continuity with the Church’s tradition, and a rite’s claim to antiquity is measured by how it came to be, not by the age of its parts.
None of this touches validity. The Novus Ordo, offered by a validly ordained priest with the proper matter, form and intention, is a true Mass, and many priests and faithful celebrate it with deep reverence. The claim examined here is narrower: that the reformed rite is ancient, as its defenders often say it is.
The Council’s own test
The standard comes from the Second Vatican Council itself. Sacrosanctum Concilium 23: “there must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them; and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing.”
Article 50 directs that the rites be simplified. Elements that “came to be duplicated, or were added with but little advantage, are now to be discarded,” and elements that “have suffered injury through accidents of history are now to be restored to the vigor which they had in the days of the holy Fathers, as may seem useful or necessary.” The pruning is ordered; the restoration is limited to what is useful; and the stated purposes are that the nature of each part be more clearly manifested and the participation of the faithful more easily achieved, rather than antiquity for its own sake. But the restoration clause assumes one thing: that when something is restored, the thing restored is the thing that was lost. Hold the reform to that, and the antiquity claim comes apart.
Old parts, new assembly
The flagship case is Eucharistic Prayer II, often said to be the prayer of St. Hippolytus of Rome from around the year 215, and therefore older than the Roman Canon.
The source will not bear that weight. The document called the Apostolic Tradition is no longer securely attributed to Hippolytus, nor securely placed in Rome; the standard scholarly commentary treats it as a composite of layers from several communities, compiled over perhaps two centuries. Nor does it present its prayer as the eucharistic prayer of the Church. It offers a model, given for the ordination of a bishop, and expects the bishop to give thanks according to his own ability.
The prayer itself departs from that model. Its drafters supplied what the ancient text lacked and the reformers judged necessary for a Roman eucharistic prayer: a Sanctus, intercessions, and a commemoration of the saints. They split the epiclesis and moved half of it before the words of institution, on the pattern of the Roman Canon’s Quam oblationem. The “dewfall” that English-speaking Catholics now know by heart came from the Missale Gothicum, a Gallican book of the seventh or eighth century. What reached the altar was a new composition built around an ancient model: the new house with the castle bricks.
The Prayer of the Faithful shows the same pattern in a case where restoration was genuinely called for. The ancient Roman common prayer had been missing from the Roman Mass itself for some thirteen centuries, and the Council asked for it back. The reformers knew what the ancient Roman form looked like. Their own 1966 instruction called the solemn orations of Good Friday “the most ancient text and formula of the Common Prayer in the Roman rite”: the priest announces each intention, the people kneel at the deacon’s bidding and pray in silence, and the priest concludes with a collect. The instruction granted that this silent participation was “approved by the venerable Roman usage in the Solemn Prayers,” and then ranked it below the Eastern-style litany with a short repeated response: “there is no doubt that the first way is the most deserving of recommendation, although there is complete freedom to use any one of them.” The Roman silence remains lawful (the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, n. 71, still allows the people to pray “in silence”), but the litany became the norm. What parishes received was a Roman formula for the intentions, joined to the response of the litany that had displaced the Roman form at Rome in the fifth century.
Most of the old offertory prayers are not ancient Roman either. Fortescue traces them to Gallican and Mozarabic sources, and they entered Rome from outside in the later Middle Ages. Ancient Rome’s own offertory was the procession of gifts under a sung chant, followed by a single prayer over the offerings. When the chant is sung, the 1969 rite comes close to that shape, though not in its texts. The two chief prayers of offering were replaced with newly composed blessings modelled on Jewish table prayers, two others were dropped, and the rest were kept, some of them shortened: the prayer at the mingling of water and wine (itself adapted from a Roman collect), In spiritu humilitatis, the washing of hands and the Orate, fratres. The result is neither the ancient Roman offertory nor the medieval one, but a third thing.
Older is not the same as better
Suppose the reform had restored every ancient element perfectly. It would still not follow that it should have. In Mediator Dei (1947), Pius XII granted that the liturgy of the early centuries deserves veneration and then drew a line: an ancient usage is not more fitting merely because it carries “the savor and aroma of antiquity,” and “it is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device.” He named the danger: “the exaggerated and senseless antiquarianism to which the illegal Council of Pistoia gave rise.” Pistoia, a Jansenist-leaning Tuscan synod of 1786, had set out to strip the liturgy back to a purer and simpler antiquity, and Pius VI condemned its propositions in the bull Auctorem fidei in 1794.
Pius XII was writing against private liturgists acting on their own authority, and Paul VI was no private liturgist; the reform was lawful. But the reasoning concerns whether age by itself makes a usage better, and that answer does not change with the person asking.
The liturgy grows the way an oak grows from an acorn, and an oak can be pruned. The Council ordered the pruning of what was duplicated or added with little advantage. The dispute is over how much was cut, and over what was newly composed to stand in its place. What the Roman Rite became over many centuries, its prayers, its gestures and its silences, was growth with reasons behind it: a doctrine guarded, a reverence deepened, a people formed. Cutting a grown tree back toward a sapling because saplings are older is no reason at all, and replacing what grew with something newly made is innovation, which the Council allowed only where the good of the Church “genuinely and certainly requires” it. (The same thesis runs through The Sacred Tree: the liturgy was grown, not made.)
Made, not grown
Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, described what happened in his 1992 preface to the French edition of Klaus Gamber’s book on the reform: “What happened after the Council is quite different: instead of a liturgy that is the fruit of a continuous development, a fabricated liturgy has been put in place.” He called the result “a fabrication, a banal product of the moment.” In the same preface he honoured “all those priests and their parishioners who celebrate the new liturgy with respect and solemnity.” As pope he celebrated the reformed rite, and in 2007 he wrote that “there is no contradiction between the two editions of the Roman Missal. In the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture.” His 1992 objection was to how the reform was carried out, not to whether the reformed Missal belongs to the Roman Rite.
Paul VI, explaining the new Order of Mass at his general audience of 19 November 1969, eleven days before it took effect in Italy, spoke of “the introduction into the liturgy of the new rite of the Mass.” In the same address he insisted that “nothing has been changed in the substance of our traditional Mass,” called the reform “a step forward” in the Church’s “authentic tradition,” and asked that people speak not of a “new Mass” but of a “new epoch” in the life of the Church. The distinction he drew holds: the substance of the Mass untouched, its rite newly ordered. Whether that rite can claim to be ancient is a separate question, and the evidence above answers it.
How the rite was ordered bears on that question too. Louis Bouyer, a consultor to the Consilium who by his own account finished the draft of Eucharistic Prayer II with Dom Bernard Botte, left a memoir sharply critical of the Consilium’s secretary, Annibale Bugnini. As Sandro Magister summarises it, Bouyer recalled Bugnini silencing objections in the commission with a peremptory “The Pope wants it so,” for instance over the dismantling of the rites for the dead and the removal of “imprecatory” psalm verses from the Divine Office. Paul VI later asked Bouyer why the commission had accepted one such reform; Bouyer answered that Bugnini had assured them the Pope absolutely wanted it, and the Pope replied: “But is it possible? He told me that you were unanimous in approving it…” This is one participant’s account, written years afterwards, and it concerns the governance of the reform, not the validity of the rite. On that account, in at least this case, each side was told that the other wanted the change.
Criticism is not rejection
The strongest objection to the traditional case concerns unity rather than manners. In his letter accompanying Traditionis custodes (2021), Pope Francis wrote that “ever more plain in the words and attitudes of many is the close connection between the choice of celebrations according to the liturgical books prior to Vatican Council II and the rejection of the Church and her institutions in the name of what is called the ‘true Church.’”
Where that describes someone, it describes a real fault. It does not describe the argument made here, which takes the Second Vatican Council’s own constitution on the liturgy as its standard throughout and denies neither the Council nor the validity of the reformed rite. Nor is a rite judged by the conduct of its adherents: the abuses committed in the reformed rite are no argument against it, and the harshness of some traditionalists is no argument against the older one.
The communities of the older rite keep what the Church handed down for centuries. When they speak of the break in organic development in 1969, it is because they love that inheritance too much to call a newly ordered rite an old one.
So no, the Novus Ordo is not ancient because it quotes ancient things. The accurate account keeps Paul VI’s own distinction: the substance unchanged, the rite newly ordered. Validity is the floor, not the ceiling, and a rite assembled in a few years cannot borrow the centuries it did not grow through.
This article was rewritten on 13 September 2026. An earlier version, first published in June 2025, attributed to Archbishop Annibale Bugnini and to Louis Bouyer two quotations for which we could find no source. This version replaces them with sourced material and lists its references below.
References
- Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium (4 December 1963), n. 23 (no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them; new forms to grow organically from forms already existing), n. 50 (elements duplicated or added with little advantage to be discarded; elements that suffered injury through accidents of history to be restored “as may seem useful or necessary”), n. 53 (restoration of the prayer of the faithful).
- Paul F. Bradshaw, Maxwell E. Johnson and L. Edward Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary (Hermeneia, Fortress Press, 2002): a composite of layers of diverse provenance, compiled from perhaps the mid-second to the mid-fourth century, not securely the work of Hippolytus nor securely Roman.
- John F. Baldovin, S.J., “Hippolytus and the Apostolic Tradition: Recent Research and Commentary,” Theological Studies 64.3 (2003): the document “makes no pretense whatsoever that this is the eucharistic prayer of the Church.”
- Paul Turner, “Dewfall” (2011): the line did not appear in the Apostolic Tradition; the study group took it from the Missale Gothicum.
- Consilium ad exsequendam Constitutionem de sacra Liturgia, De oratione communi seu fidelium (1966), nn. 6–9; English translation in the Canadian Catholic Conference National Bulletin on Liturgy no. 20 (January 1968).
- General Instruction of the Roman Missal, n. 71: the people pray “either by an invocation said together after each intention or by praying in silence.”
- Adrian Fortescue, “Offertory,” Catholic Encyclopedia (1911): “originally the only Roman Offertory prayers were the secrets”; the later prayers largely Gallican and in part Mozarabic, with Deus qui humanae substantiae adapted from a Roman collect.
- Pius XII, Mediator Dei (20 November 1947), nn. 58–60 (private initiative) and 61–64 (antiquarianism).
- Pius VI, Auctorem fidei (28 August 1794), condemning propositions of the Synod of Pistoia (1786).
- Joseph Ratzinger, preface to Klaus Gamber, La Réforme liturgique en question (Le Barroux: Éditions Sainte-Madeleine, 1992); English translation by Peter Kwasniewski, New Liturgical Movement (February 2023). French: “une fabrication, produit banal de l’instant.”
- Benedict XVI, Letter to the Bishops on the occasion of the publication of Summorum Pontificum (7 July 2007).
- Paul VI, General Audience of 19 November 1969, translated from the Italian: “l’introduzione nella Liturgia del nuovo rito della Messa”; “nulla è mutato nella sostanza della nostra Messa tradizionale”; “un passo in avanti della sua tradizione autentica”; “Non diciamo dunque «nuova Messa», ma piuttosto «nuova epoca» della vita della Chiesa.”
- Louis Bouyer, Mémoires (Paris: Cerf, 2014); English edition, The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer (Angelico Press, 2015). Summarised by Sandro Magister, in the translation by Gregory DiPippo, New Liturgical Movement (September 2014).
- Francis, Letter to the Bishops accompanying Traditionis custodes (16 July 2021).