A Better Rite Is Not a Better Catholic

Part 1 of 4 in the series “A Treasure, Not a Trophy.”

A Catholic who has found the older Mass usually wants to share it. He has discovered the silence of the Canon, the chant, the prayers at the foot of the altar, the priest and people facing the same way, and he wants his friends to have what he has been given. So he says the obvious thing: come and see, it is better.

What his friends often hear is something else. They hear that he is better, and that they, who go to the parish Mass down the road, are settling for less and are somehow less Catholic for it. Many conversations about the traditional Mass begin on that tripwire. The traditionalist is trying to say that a rite is superior without saying that its people are, and the two claims are very hard to keep apart.

They can be kept apart, by a distinction the Church has drawn for centuries. But the argument has to begin with our own side, because the charge of elitism is sometimes true.

Our own side first

Our Lord told a parable “to some who trusted in themselves as just, and despised others.” Two men went up to the temple to pray. “The Pharisee standing, prayed thus with himself: O God, I give thee thanks that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, as also is this publican. I fast twice in a week: I give tithes of all that I possess. And the publican, standing afar off, would not so much as lift up his eyes towards heaven; but struck his breast, saying: O God, be merciful to me a sinner. I say to you, this man went down into his house justified rather than the other…” (Luke 18:9–14).

Nothing the Pharisee practised was wrong. Fasting and tithing are good works, and he did them faithfully. What condemned him was that he despised others and measured himself against the man at the back of the temple. His practice was good. His pride made him worse, because he used the practice as a reason to look down.

The traditional movement has not always escaped this. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, founder of the Society of St. Pius X, called the reformed rite of Mass “a bastard rite” and its sacraments “bastard sacraments,” and wrote that “[w]e no longer know if they are sacraments, which give grace or do not give it” (An Open Letter to Confused Catholics). The Society’s own editors note that in French the word means “illegitimate” rather than the English insult. Even so, those words went beyond criticism of a rite: they cast doubt on the sacraments themselves. Worse than pride has also had a voice among us, and the honest way to put it is the unflattering way. In an interview recorded in November 2008 and broadcast on Swedish television the following January, one of the Society’s four bishops, Richard Williamson, said he did not believe the Nazi gas chambers had existed, and the Holy See declared his positions on the Holocaust “absolutely unacceptable and firmly rejected by the Holy Father.” It was not a new position of his. He had said it from a pulpit in Quebec in 1989, the year after Lefebvre consecrated him, and he was still one of the Society’s bishops twenty years later. Bishop Fellay forbade him to speak publicly on political or historical questions, and the Society removed him from its Argentine seminary in February 2009. He remained one of its bishops until it expelled him on 4 October 2012, and its own communiqué gave the grounds as his refusal “to show due respect and obedience to his lawful superiors,” not his denial of the Holocaust. He has not been a member of the Society since. A reader should have all of that, including the half of it that does us no credit.

Benedict XVI, the pope most generous to traditional Catholics, said as much. In the letter accompanying Summorum Pontificum in 2007, he acknowledged “exaggerations and at times social aspects unduly linked to the attitude of the faithful attached to the ancient Latin liturgical tradition,” and observed that in Archbishop Lefebvre’s movement “fidelity to the old Missal became an external mark of identity.” He added at once that “many people who clearly accepted the binding character of the Second Vatican Council, and were faithful to the Pope and the Bishops, nonetheless also desired to recover the form of the sacred liturgy that was dear to them.” Two years later, writing of the Society of St. Pius X, he said he had heard “from some representatives of that community many unpleasant things – arrogance and presumptuousness, an obsession with one-sided positions, etc.” Pope Francis, restricting the older rite in 2021, charged that for many its use had become bound up with “the rejection of the Church and her institutions in the name of what is called the ‘true Church,’” and cited St. Paul’s rebuke of the Corinthians: “I belong to Paul; I belong instead to Apollo; I belong to Cephas; I belong to Christ.”

An external mark of identity is what this series means by a trophy. When the Mass becomes a badge that sorts Catholics into the serious and the rest, it is no longer being received as a gift. It is being worn as a distinction.

That is not the whole picture. When the sociologists Stephen Cranney and Stephen Bullivant surveyed Latin Mass Catholics in the United States, nearly two in three said they accept the teachings of the Second Vatican Council to some degree, and only 4 per cent strongly disagreed. The survey measured acceptance of the Council, not attitudes toward other Catholics, and its full method has not been published. It is enough to show that most traditional Catholics are not the anti-conciliar caricature. Some are, and the rest of us have to own that before we complain about how we are seen.

The Church ranks liturgical goods herself

With that conceded, the claim itself can be stated without apology, because it is the Church’s before it is ours. She says herself that some forms of worship are richer than others. “The musical tradition of the universal Church is a treasure of inestimable value, greater even than that of any other art,” the Second Vatican Council taught (Sacrosanctum Concilium 112). “Liturgical worship is given a more noble form when the divine offices are celebrated solemnly in song, with the assistance of sacred ministers and the active participation of the people” (113). “The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services” (116). “Particular law remaining in force, the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites” (36), even as the same article allows the vernacular a wider place.

A “treasure,” a “more noble form,” “pride of place”: this is the Church ranking liturgical goods, and a Catholic who says that one celebration is richer than another is speaking her language. She does not rank worshippers by the rite they attend. The same body of teaching adds its own check on liturgical pride: “the true solemnity of liturgical worship depends less on a more ornate form of singing and a more magnificent ceremonial than on its worthy and religious celebration” (Musicam Sacram 11).

Benedict XVI held both together. “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.” Of the priests of the communities adhering to the former usage, he added: “The total exclusion of the new rite would not in fact be consistent with the recognition of its value and holiness.” The Pope who restored the older Mass to the whole Church also insisted on the holiness of the newer one. His successor restricted the older rite again in Traditionis custodes; that law stands, and this site keeps it while asking for it to change.

Age by itself proves nothing. Pius XII warned that “ancient usage must not be esteemed more suitable and proper, either in its own right or in its significance for later times and new situations, on the simple ground that it carries the savor and aroma of antiquity” (Mediator Dei 61). He wrote it against reformers who wanted to revive the practices of the early Church, but the principle binds traditionalists too. The case for the older rite rests on what it contains and how it grew, not on its date.

And consider what the claim is actually saying, because it is not what the tripwire suggests. It is not that we are better than our neighbours. It is that a rite born in the Church of Christ, grown to maturity in her across nearly twenty centuries, and tended, pruned and prayed by her holiest ministers is a greater thing than one largely drawn up by a commission and promulgated within a single generation. The Church had the authority to do what she did in 1969, and the Mass she gave is the Mass; neither is in question here. What is in question is whether one generation’s work could be the equal of what it replaced. Stated that way, the claim is the opposite of hubris. It is a confession that our own age cannot compose what was handed down to it, that we are better at receiving than at inventing. Whatever presumption lives in the sentence does not belong to the Catholic who would rather be given something than make it.

A rite’s holiness and a person’s

Put the difficulty plainly. If the older rite is richer, those it forms ought to be the better for it — and as a body, one should expect that they are. How can that be said without saying that any one of them is holier than the Catholic at the parish down the road? The distinction is the Church’s own, and she draws it in the same breath as the doctrine. The Council of Trent taught, against the Reformers, that the sacraments confer grace ex opere operato, which Waterworth’s 1848 translation renders “through the act performed” (Session VII, on the sacraments in general, canon 8). The Catechism states what that secures and what it leaves to the soul: “From the moment that a sacrament is celebrated in accordance with the intention of the Church, the power of Christ and his Spirit acts in and through it, independently of the personal holiness of the minister. Nevertheless, the fruits of the sacraments also depend on the disposition of the one who receives them” (n. 1128).

That second sentence is the hinge, and it turns both ways. Because the fruits of a sacrament depend on the disposition of the one who receives it, a rite that better disposes those who assist at it will, among them, bear more fruit; that is not a concession wrung out of the doctrine but a consequence of it. And because the disposition has to be the receiver’s own, no rite can supply it in his place. The Sacrifice offered at a Mass of the 1970 Missal and at a Mass of the 1962 Missal is the same Sacrifice, because it is Christ’s act, and that is not what divides the Missals. What each soul carries away depends on how it comes: on faith, contrition, attention and love. A richer rite does more to awaken those. It does not have them on the soul’s behalf.

Pius XII distinguished the two orders. The efficacy of the Mass and the sacraments comes “first of all and principally from the act itself (ex opere operato).” The prayers and ceremonies with which the Church surrounds the Sacrifice act rather through “the action of the church (ex opere operantis Ecclesiae), inasmuch as she is holy” (Mediator Dei 27). It is chiefly in that second order that the two Missals differ. The Church praying in each is the same holy Church. What differs is the fullness and clarity of the signs, their power, in the words of the Council of Trent, to excite the minds of the faithful “by those visible signs of religion and piety, to the contemplation of those most sublime things which are hidden in this sacrifice” (Session XXII, ch. 5). That is what “richer” means here: a claim about the fullness of what is set before a soul. It is not a verdict on the holiness of the Church, which is one and the same in both, nor on anyone kneeling at either Mass.

The ceremonies still matter. Mediator Dei, quoting Cardinal Bona, teaches that “although the ceremonies themselves can claim no perfection or sanctity in their [own] right, they are, nevertheless, the outward acts of religion, designed to rouse the heart” to the veneration of sacred things. And it warns that “the chief element of divine worship must be interior,” since otherwise “religion clearly amounts to mere formalism, without meaning and without content” (23–24). St. Thomas Aquinas gives the reason: “in the Divine worship it is necessary to make use of corporeal things, that man’s mind may be aroused thereby, as by signs, to the spiritual acts by means of which he is united to God. Therefore the internal acts of religion take precedence of the others and belong to religion essentially, while its external acts are secondary, and subordinate to the internal acts” (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 81, a. 7).

A reader will object that a better means ought to bear better fruit. The objection should be granted, not dodged. The goods in question are not ornaments. They are doctrine made audible: a Canon that names the sacrifice as a sacrifice and was the only anaphora on offer; an offertory that named the victim and the intentions — this immaculate host, offered for my innumerable sins, offences, and negligences; a Requiem that asked in so many words for deliverance from the pains of hell; an orientation the Missal presupposes rather than leaves open; a Septuagesima and Ember Days that stood for the whole Church, with the fasts that the same reform would abolish. None of that is only a matter of taste. It is the Church’s faith in her own praying voice — lex orandi — and in these places the older books say more of it, and say it more exactly. And a soul set before a fuller and more exact expression of the truth, week after week for a lifetime, is being offered more to be formed by. It would be incoherent to call the signs richer and then deny that they do anything; the Church surrounds the Sacrifice with them precisely to excite the minds of the faithful. So the expectation is licit: other things being equal, a rite that teaches more of the faith more exactly should produce holiness more often.

The reform’s own defence has to be stated, because it is the strongest thing said against that list. Announcing Traditionis custodes, Pope Francis wrote that whoever wishes to celebrate with devotion according to the earlier forms “can find in the reformed Roman Missal according to Vatican Council II all the elements of the Roman Rite, in particular the Roman Canon.” Of the Canon the claim holds, and it should be granted plainly: the Roman Canon stands in the new books as the first Eucharistic Prayer, kept in usu sane manentem and altered, in Paul VI’s own phrase, by no more than nonnulla levi emendatione. It was neither abolished nor left untouched. It became one prayer among four, its Mysterium fidei moved out of the words of consecration, its lists of saints made omissible. But of all the elements the claim does not hold, and the record is the reform’s own. Psalm 42 at the foot of the altar, the Last Gospel and the Leonine prayers were removed in 1964 by Inter oecumenici. The prayers at the foot of the altar were suppressed altogether in 1969, and the offertory — which the Congregation itself described as “never touched in the preceding reforms” — was reordered, in its own published words, “so as not to anticipate the true offering of the sacrifice, which will be made in the Canon.” The embolism was shortened, “without the names of the Saints.” These are elements of the Roman Rite; they are not in the reformed Missal to be found; and they were not mislaid. They were removed deliberately, for reasons the reformers published at the time. That is a statement about the contents of two books and the acts of a commission, not a matter of doctrine, and on the books it can be checked.

Say the rest of it too, because this site holds it. None of this touches validity: the Mass of the reformed Missal is the Mass, and the Canon’s survival is a real continuity and not a token. What the reform left out of the book it did not leave out of the Church’s faith. What was lost is not truth but voice — the saying of it, early and unmistakably, in the prayers the faithful actually hear. That is the loss at issue here, and it is enough for the argument; nothing more is needed, and nothing more is claimed.

But see exactly what that expectation is, and what it is not. It is a claim about a cause and its tendency — about what a liturgy works in a people across generations. It is not a measurement anyone has taken; sanctity is not a quantity we can survey, and this post has already conceded what the traditional world has to answer for. Above all it is not a licence for any Catholic to count himself in the number. Between the better means and the better man stands the man’s own will, which no rite supplies for him. Grace offered is not grace accepted. The medicine has to be taken, and taken as directed: a Catholic can hear the Roman Canon every Sunday of his life and let none of it past his ears. The tendency is real. The individual case is hidden, and the Church forbids us to guess at it: “Judge not, that you may not be judged” (Matthew 7:1).

The hardest form of the objection has not been put yet, so put it. The men who took the old rite apart had been formed by it. Paul VI was ordained in 1920 and Annibale Bugnini in 1936, and neither of them had known any other rite to be formed by. Then be exact about which rite that was, because it was not the 1962 Missal this post defends. It was the editions they were ordained into, before Pius XII’s commission reached Holy Week. And that commission is the sharp end of this, because Bugnini was its secretary from 1948: the restored Vigil of 1951 and the Holy Week of 1955 are its work, and the 1962 book carries them. The man most blamed for 1969 had already left his hand on the Missal the traditionalist defends.

Two things have to be granted here, and the second is expensive. The first is cheap, because this post has already said it twice and does not get to charge for it again: a rite disposes, it does not compel. The second is harder. Sanctity is what the claim is about, and sanctity is not a quantity anyone can survey; the figures further down measure what the older rite attracts and keeps, which is a different thing, and they say so themselves. That leaves the generational version of the claim with one large-scale test in the whole record, and the test went badly, because the rite’s own alumni took the rite apart. A claim that answers that by saying other things were not equal, while never saying what equal would look like, has made itself safe against every possible result. Safe is not the same as true.

So the claim comes down to what it can carry, and the first thing to go is the bifurcation the objection assumes. There were not two camps. Lefebvre was among the 2,147 who voted for Sacrosanctum Concilium; he signed it in his own hand, as he signed all sixteen documents, and the Council’s own archives record it. Ottaviani and Bacci sat in that chamber too, and both would later put their names to the covering letter that sent Paul VI the Brief Critical Study of the new rite. The line between the men formed by the old books who kept faith with them and the men formed by the old books who did not was not drawn in December 1963. It opened afterwards, over what was made of the vote. Which is the genuinely useful thing to take from the objection, because it is also the answer to anyone who treats 1963 as a vote for the Missal of 1969. The men who cast it included the one who spent the rest of his life fighting what came of it.

What survives is the narrow claim, and the narrow claim is the one this post argued for: the older books say more of the faith, and say it more exactly, and a soul set before a fuller and more exact expression of the truth is being offered more. That is a judgment about what a rite sets before a man. It is not a forecast about what he will do with it, and it was never safe to read the second off the first. The reform is the standing proof of that, which is why the objection is worth putting in its hardest form rather than its easiest.

There is a trap inside the expectation, and it closes on whoever reaches for it. The Catholic who concludes that the medicine has worked in him has said the very thing that shows it has not, for holiness does not congratulate itself, and a man who finds himself holy is describing something else. Nor is the conclusion merely mistaken; it is corrosive. To look across at the parish down the road and find oneself the better of the two is the Pharisee’s prayer, and he is the one who went home unjustified. Pride of that kind, at the least, in the words of the Catechism, “offends and wounds” the charity in a soul; grave and consented to, it “destroys charity in the heart of man” outright (n. 1855). It puts out the life of grace that the richer rite was given to feed. Scripture keeps the portrait of the man who is sure of himself: “thou sayest: I am rich, and made wealthy, and have need of nothing: and knowest not, that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked” (Apocalypse 3:17). So in the mouth of a man applying it to himself the expectation refutes itself twice over: once because he cannot see his own soul, and once because the claiming has already begun to undo what is claimed.

Held rightly, the expectation falls on the traditionalist as a debt and not as a distinction, because it is the measure he will be held to: “unto whomsoever much is given, of him much shall be required” (Luke 12:48). The proud traditionalist is not evidence against the older Mass. He is evidence of what it has not yet been permitted to do in him — a man handed the better medicine who has been given more and shown less. That is a worse place to stand than his neighbour’s, not a better one. The expectation indicts him. It never flatters him.

Aquinas also names the danger for the learned. “Science” (that is, learning) “and anything else conducive to greatness, is to man an occasion of self-confidence, so that he does not wholly surrender himself to God,” and such things “sometimes occasion a hindrance to devotion.” Yet, he adds, “if… a man perfectly submits to God his science or any other perfection, by this very fact his devotion is increased” (q. 82, a. 3, ad 3). A Catholic who knows the rubrics of the 1962 Missal by heart has been given something good, and an occasion of pride. Offered back to God, the same knowledge becomes devotion.

This site has tried to hold the line in its own statement of principles. “Something handed down and something drawn up are not the same kind of thing, even when both are valid, and even when both are the Mass. Validity is the floor, not the ceiling.” That sentence is about rites. The sentence about people is different: “Sanctity is not distributed by rite. Were it otherwise, the traditional world would have a great deal to answer for.” Both hold, because disposing is not distributing. No one is issued holiness for having attended; what he is given is a fuller means, and what he does with it is his own.

Received, not won

St. Paul asked the Corinthians, who were quarrelling over which teacher made them superior: “For who distinguisheth thee? Or what hast thou that thou hast not received? And if thou hast received, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). The older Mass is something received, handed down through the centuries by people who did not compose it. St. Augustine saw where the danger lies for anyone who holds a good thing: “pride is to be feared even when we do right actions, lest those things which are done in a praiseworthy manner be spoiled by the desire for praise itself” (Letter 118).

St. Francis de Sales described the type long before the present quarrel over missals. “We all colour devotion according to our own likings and dispositions,” he wrote. One man “sets great value on fasting, and believes himself to be leading a very devout life, so long as he fasts rigorously, although the while his heart is full of bitterness,” and while he will not moisten his lips with wine, “he does not scruple to steep them in his neighbour’s blood, through slander and detraction” (Introduction to the Devout Life I.1). The modern version needs no inventing: a man who reckons himself devout because of the Mass he attends, and who speaks of the parish down the road with contempt.

C. S. Lewis, an Anglican writing about the revision of his own Church’s Prayer Book, argued for liturgical stability because “the perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.” In the same letter he warned: “Any tendency to a passionate preference for one type of service must be regarded simply as a temptation. Partisan ‘Churchmanships’ are my bête noire” (Letters to Malcolm, letter 1). His target was party spirit, and it is ours as well. A good rite gets out of the way so that the soul can attend to God.

St. John Henry Newman, through a convert in his novel Loss and Gain, described the Mass of his day as “a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth,” and then described the people at it: “There are little children there, and old men, and simple labourers, and students in seminaries, priests preparing for Mass, priests making their thanksgiving; there are innocent maidens, and there are penitent sinners; but out of these many minds rises one eucharistic hymn.” The Mass that traditionalists love was the prayer of labourers and sinners long before it was anyone’s cause.

The question Pope Leo asked

The strongest form of the objection was put by Pope Leo XIV in an interview published in September 2025. He said that “people have used the liturgy as an excuse for advancing other topics. It’s become a political tool, and that’s very unfortunate. I think sometimes the, say, ‘abuse’ of the liturgy from what we call the Vatican II Mass, was not helpful for people who were looking for a deeper experience of prayer, of contact with the mystery of faith that they seemed to find in the celebration of the Tridentine Mass.” And he asked: “if we celebrate the Vatican II liturgy in a proper way, do you really find that much difference between this experience and that experience?”

The answer is yes, and the difference can be named without reference to the people in the pews. It lies in the texts of the offertory, in the silence of the Canon, in the orientation that the older Missal prescribes and the newer leaves open, in the older calendar with its Septuagesima and its Ember Days fixed for the whole Church, and in the prayers that the reform removed or recast. Those are differences in the goods of the rite. They are ordered to the heart of the Catholic kneeling there — that is what signs are for, and it is why the difference is worth defending. Whether they have reached it, in him or in the man at the other Mass, is hidden from us. None of them tells anyone who is closer to God.

The Pope’s warning about the liturgy as a political tool also deserves to be taken to heart by traditionalists. When the older Mass is used to advance a quarrel, it has become a trophy.

Keeping the distinction

The distinction between the goods of a rite and the holiness of a person does not win arguments by itself. It is a discipline that the one who shares the older Mass has to keep. In practice it means speaking about the Mass rather than about the people at other Masses, speaking about what one has received, and bringing to the older rite the prayer of the man at the back of the temple. The fourth post in this series, “Come and See,” takes up what that looks like on an ordinary Sunday.

Pope Francis, preaching on the sixtieth anniversary of the Council, faulted two opposite errors at once: “both the ‘progressivism’ that lines up behind the world and the ‘traditionalism’ – or ‘looking backwards’ – that longs for a bygone world,” which he called forms of “a Pelagian selfishness that puts our own tastes and plans above the love that pleases God.” A traditionalist can dispute how that description is applied. He cannot dispute the temptation it names, because it is the Pharisee’s.

The older Mass is a treasure, and those who have received it hold it for the whole Church. They share it best when they remember the verdict at the end of the parable: “every one that exalteth himself, shall be humbled: and he that humbleth himself, shall be exalted” (Luke 18:14).

Next in the series: “Radical by Association,” on the label that came to cover anyone who loves the older Mass.

References

1. Scripture from the Douay-Rheims Bible, drbo.org: Luke 18:9–14; Luke 12:48; Matthew 7:1; 1 Corinthians 4:7; Apocalypse 3:17.
2. Marcel Lefebvre, An Open Letter to Confused Catholics (Fowler Wright Books for the Society of St. Pius X, 1986), p. 116, as quoted in Catholic Answers Magazine; on the French sense of the word, SSPX.
3. Secretariat of State, Note concerning the four prelates of the Society of Saint Pius X (4 February 2009).
4. Benedict XVI, Letter to the Bishops accompanying Summorum Pontificum (7 July 2007); Letter concerning the remission of the excommunication of the four bishops (10 March 2009).
5. Francis, Letter to the Bishops accompanying Traditionis custodes (16 July 2021); Homily for the sixtieth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council (11 October 2022).
6. Stephen Cranney and Stephen Bullivant, survey of Latin Mass Catholics (2024), as reported by OSV News (March 2026).
7. Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), nn. 36, 48, 112, 113, 116; Sacred Congregation of Rites, Musicam Sacram (1967), n. 11.
8. Secretariat of State, Note on the remission of the excommunication of the four SSPX bishops (4 February 2009): “The positions of Bishop Williamson with regard to the Shoah are absolutely unacceptable and firmly rejected by the Holy Father.” The term in the document is Shoah; Holocaust appears here only outside the quotation.
9. Society of St. Pius X, Communiqué of the General House (Menzingen, 24 October 2012), announcing the decision of 4 October 2012: Bishop Williamson, “refusing to show due respect and obedience to his lawful superiors, was declared excluded from the SSPX by decision of the Superior General and its Council.” The 1989 Sherbrooke remarks as reported by the Anti-Defamation League; the Swedish television interview recorded November 2008, broadcast 21 January 2009.
10. Ottaviani and Bacci, covering letter to Paul VI transmitting the Brief Critical Study of the New Order of Mass (1969), signature block “A. Card. Ottaviani / A. Card. Bacci,” text as printed by the Society of St. Pius X. The Study itself was the work of a group of theologians, not of the two cardinals.
11. Sacrosanctum Concilium approved 2,147 to 4 and promulgated 4 December 1963; Lefebvre among the signatories of all sixteen conciliar documents, per the conciliar archives as reported by Catholic News Agency. Bugnini ordained 1936; secretary of Pius XII’s Commission for the General Reform of the Liturgy from 28 May 1948, under Ferdinando Antonelli; that commission produced the restored Vigil of 1951 and the Holy Week of 1955.
12. Pius XII, Mediator Dei (1947), nn. 23–24 (n. 23 quoting Giovanni Cardinal Bona, De divina psalmodia), 27, 61.
13. Council of Trent, Session VII, Canons on the Sacraments in General, canon 8, and Session XXII, ch. 5, in the translation of J. Waterworth (1848), Hanover Historical Texts; Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 1128, and n. 1855.
14. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 81, a. 7 and q. 82, a. 3 (English Dominican translation).
15. Domus Dei, Where We Stand.
16. Sacred Congregation of Rites, Inter oecumenici (26 September 1964), § 48, on the omission of Psalm 42 at the foot of the altar, the Last Gospel and the Leonine prayers; Paul VI, apostolic constitution Missale Romanum (3 April 1969), on the Roman Canon retained with nonnulla levi emendatione; Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship, description of the new Ordo Missae, Notitiae 5 (1969), pp. 148–149, on the suppression of the prayers at the foot of the altar, the reordering of the offertory “never touched in the preceding reforms” so as not to anticipate the true offering of the sacrifice, and the shortened embolism “without the names of the Saints.” As cited in this site’s source dossier on the 1963–1970 reform.
17. Paul VI, Paenitemini (17 February 1966), on the abolition of the obligatory Ember and vigil fasts — a change of penitential law, three years before the new Missal, under the same pontificate and the same programme of reform.
18. Domus Dei, The Offertory: What the 1969 Rewrite Lost, for the old and new offertory prayers set side by side.
19. Augustine, Letter 118, n. 22 (NPNF); Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, Part I, ch. 1 (anonymous nineteenth-century English translation, CCEL).
20. C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (Geoffrey Bles, 1964), letter 1; John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain (1848), Part II, ch. 20.
21. Leo XIV, interview with Elise Ann Allen for León XIV: ciudadano del mundo, misionero del siglo XXI (September 2025), conducted in English, as transcribed by Rorate Caeli.