You will hear it in a parish hall, or under a video, or from a priest who means well. The reformers went back to the sources. What they gave us is older than the Mass you are defending. Eucharistic Prayer II comes from Hippolytus in the third century, older than the Roman Canon itself. The Prayer of the Faithful is from the age of the martyrs. The offertory now echoes the blessings Our Lord Himself would have prayed at table.
The reply usually offered is that older does not mean better. That reply is true, and it concedes the wrong thing, because it grants the premise. Before arguing about whether antiquity settles anything, it is worth asking a narrower question with a checkable answer: when the reformers appealed to the ancient sources, did they actually follow them?
Case by case, the answer is mostly no. The ancient warrant was invoked and then set aside, and the prestige of the source was kept after its content had been overruled.
The test the reform set for itself
We do not have to import a standard from outside. The Second Vatican Council supplied one, and the reformers worked under it.
Sacrosanctum Concilium 50 is the warrant everything else rests on, and it should be read whole rather than in the fragment usually quoted. The rite of the Mass is to be revised “in such a way that the intrinsic nature and purpose of its several parts, as also the connection between them, may be more clearly manifested, and that devout and active participation by the faithful may be more easily achieved.” Then: “For this purpose the rites are to be simplified, due care being taken to preserve their substance; elements which, with the passage of time, came to be duplicated, or were added with but little advantage, are now to be discarded; other elements which 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.”
Two things in that text cut against a lazy traditionalist reading, and both should be granted at once. The governing purpose is active participation by the faithful, not antiquity. And the restoration clause ends in a discretion: as may seem useful or necessary. The Council did not command the reformers to restore any particular ancient thing. It permitted them to, where they judged it useful.
That concession costs nothing, because the argument here does not need SC 50 to be a command. It needs only what the article plainly assumes: that when an element is restored, the thing restored is the thing that was lost. Article 23 supplies the rest of the standard. Careful theological, historical and pastoral investigation of every part to be revised, and then the sentence that has been quoted at the reform ever since: “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.”
So hold the reform to its own mandate, and ask of each case whether the ancient thing invoked is the thing we actually received.
Eucharistic Prayer II, which is not from Hippolytus
This is the flagship claim and it fails twice: once on the source, once on the prayer.
The source is the document called the Apostolic Tradition, long ascribed to St. Hippolytus of Rome around 215. That ascription has come apart in the scholarship. The standard commentary of Bradshaw, Johnson and Phillips treats the text as living literature: a composite of layers from communities of diverse provenance, compiled over a long period that may run from the middle of the second century to the middle of the fourth, and therefore representing the practice of no single Christian community. It is not securely by Hippolytus, and it is not securely Roman. On the supposedly Roman features, those scholars observe that the parallels turn up only in much later Roman sources, so the influence may well run the other way, with the document shaping those sources rather than reflecting Rome in 215.
So the phrase “older than the Roman Canon” rests on an author who probably did not write it, a city that may not have used it, and a date that may be a century and a half out. That alone should retire the argument. But set it aside and grant the source, because the second failure is worse.
There is a further difficulty that the popular claim never mentions. The document does not present its anaphora as the eucharistic prayer of the Roman Church at all. As Fr. John Baldovin puts it, reviewing the state of the question, it “makes no pretense whatsoever that this is the eucharistic prayer of the Church.” It is a model, given in the specific setting of the ordination of a bishop, and the text itself expects the bishop to give thanks according to his own ability. Baldovin defends the reform, and still writes that he questions “the unjustifiable reason for using this prayer, namely the assumption that it was the eucharistic prayer of the early-third-century Church at Rome.”
An honest opponent will turn that around: if the source was a model meant to be adapted, then adapting it was faithful to it. Quite so. But then the parish-hall claim collapses on its own terms, because that claim is not “we adapted an ancient model.” It is “this is the ancient prayer, older than your Canon.” Model status refutes that outright.
And Eucharistic Prayer II is in any case not that anaphora. It was drafted by Dom Bernard Botte and Fr. Louis Bouyer, and the ancient text lacked several things the Consilium judged necessary for a Roman eucharistic prayer: a Sanctus, the intercessions, and the commemoration of the saints. All were supplied. The epiclesis was not merely added but split, half of it relocated to stand before the institution narrative in the Roman manner. Relocating the source’s own structure is a heavier intervention than adding to it. The dewfall image that English-speaking Catholics now know by heart is not in the ancient text either; the study group took it from the Missale Gothicum, a Gallican book of the seventh or eighth century.
Read as a list, that is the whole argument in miniature. The ancient source was the reason the prayer was adopted. The ancient source was then supplemented, restructured and supplemented again because the committee wanted something else. And the antiquity claim survived intact, and is still being made in parish halls sixty years later.
Bouyer left an account of the drafting. He and Botte put the finishing touches to their draft on a café terrace in Trastevere, working to a deadline set by their superiors. The prayer itself had been months in committee, so the familiar story that it was written overnight in a restaurant is a garbling; what the memoir attests is the finishing, not the composing. Bouyer spent his later years disillusioned with the direction the reform took. None of that touches the prayer’s validity and it must not be used as though it did. It is evidence about method.
The Prayer of the Faithful, which they described and then declined
Here the ancient element is real, its loss was real, and the restoration was genuinely called for. That is what makes this the clearest case, because here we possess the reformers’ own working paper and can watch the decision being made.
St. Justin Martyr, writing around 155, describes the Sunday assembly: the readings, the presider’s instruction, and then all standing to offer prayers. In the Roman Rite that common prayer was displaced. At the end of the fifth century a litany of Eastern type, the Deprecatio Gelasii, entered the papal Mass, and, in the words of the Consilium’s own study, “except for Holy Week, it supplanted the ancient Roman form of the Common Prayer and then was itself reduced, before the end of the seventh century, to the simple acclamation Kyrie eleison.” So from roughly the seventh century to 1969, some thirteen hundred years, the Sunday Mass of the Roman Rite had no prayer of the faithful. Sacrosanctum Concilium 53 called for its restoration.
What did the ancient Roman form look like? We know exactly, and so did they.
In 1966 the Consilium issued an instruction on the common prayer, De oratione communi seu fidelium. It states that the solemn orations of Good Friday “provide us with the most ancient text and formula of the Common Prayer in the Roman rite,” notes that Baumstark and Jungmann date the text to the third century, and that St. Prosper of Aquitaine quotes it in the fifth. It then sets out the structure with care: nine times the priest himself invites the faithful to prayer with an elaborately formulated intention; at the deacon’s bidding the people kneel for silent prayer; at his further instruction all rise, and the priest prays the concluding collect; the people answer Amen. The nine intentions sweep the whole world: the Church, the pope and all ranks of the people of God, those who govern, the catechumens, those in various needs, heretics and schismatics, the Jews, and the pagans.
The same document then contrasts this with the Eastern litany form, in which the deacon announces the intention and the announcement is briefer, with a short repeated response from the people.
Then it chooses. The instruction lists four permissible ways for the people to take part. The second is silent prayer, of which it says, in its own words, that this “silent participation, approved by the venerable Roman usage in the Solemn Prayers, though it may seem less active, can nevertheless give a marvellous richness to the prayer.” And having said so, it concludes: “there is no doubt that the first way is the most deserving of recommendation.” The first way is the brief repeated litany response. The stated reason is that “the participation of the people is expressly called for by the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, and it is in fact the most important feature of the Prayer of the Faithful.”
That is the whole thesis of this article, in the reform’s own paperwork, in 1966. They located the most ancient Roman form. They described it accurately. They acknowledged in writing that its manner of participation carried the authority of venerable Roman usage. And they recommended the other one, because a different principle had priority.
Be precise about what follows, because overstating it here would be easy and wrong. The Good Friday orations were not abolished; they remain in the reformed Missal, and the Consilium even took the Roman intention formula, “let us pray for… that…”, as its recommended model for wording the petitions. What was not carried over into the Sunday rite is the ancient Roman shape: the priest as the one who announces, the silence as the people’s act, the finely made collect as the response. The ancient Roman form was kept quarantined on one afternoon of the year, and its formula was grafted onto a response borrowed from the litany that had displaced it in the first place.
So the honest statement of the case is not that antiquity was ignored. It is that where two ancient forms were available, the one chosen was the one that served the reform’s governing principle, and the older and more distinctively Roman of the two was set aside with its authority explicitly acknowledged. Antiquity did not decide. It was consulted, complimented, and outvoted.
The offertory, where the traditionalist has to give ground first
This one is usually argued badly by our side, and it costs us the room.
The offertory prayers of the old Mass, the Suscipe, sancte Pater and its companions, are not ancient Roman. The Suscipe first appears in the prayerbook of Charles the Bald, made in the last years of his life in the 870s. The prayers are non-Roman in origin, mostly Gallican and in part Mozarabic, and they came into Rome from outside in the later Middle Ages; only the Missal of St. Pius V in 1570 fixed them in the Ordinary. One of them, the Deus qui humænæ substantiæ, is the exception that proves the rule, being adapted from a Roman Christmas collect. If you tell a well-read opponent that the 1969 offertory is a novelty and yours is the immemorial practice, he will hand you a ninth-century Frankish prayerbook and you will have lost the exchange.
Concede it, because the concession costs nothing and the ground on the other side is firm. What did ancient Rome do at the offertory? It sang. The offertorium chant covered the action while the gifts were brought and placed, and the priest said nothing aloud: as Fortescue put it, originally the only Roman offertory prayers were the secrets. The rite moved to the prayer over the offerings, which is genuinely old and which both Missals still have.
So if antiquity was the criterion in 1969, an austere ancient Roman offertory was available: chant, silence, and the prayer over the offerings. The imported prayers were removed, and in their place went newly composed blessings modelled on Jewish domestic table prayers. The result is neither the ancient Roman practice nor the medieval one, but a third thing, written in the twentieth century on a pattern the reformers selected.
Which raises the question that gives this article its title. If the ancient sources were the authority, why was the austere Roman offertory not the thing restored? The answer is not sinister and does not need to be. The sources were never the authority. They were the justification.
The pattern
Three cases, one shape: an ancient warrant is invoked; the ancient thing is then modified, replaced, or knowingly declined in favour of something the reformers preferred; and the appeal to antiquity survives into the popular account long after the antiquity has been edited out.
The charge is not that the reformers lied, and it is not that the new rite is invalid. It is narrower and harder to answer: ressourcement functioned as a warrant rather than as a constraint. Where the ancient evidence agreed with what the committee already wanted, it was decisive and was cited. Where it disagreed, it was overridden, and the citation was kept anyway.
A constraint binds you when it is inconvenient. That is the difference between being governed by evidence and being decorated by it. The clearest proof is the 1966 instruction, where the Consilium set the most ancient Roman form on the page, credited its silence to venerable Roman usage, and recommended the other option in the next breath.
The case that has to be conceded
An argument that proves too much proves nothing, so here is the strongest instance running the other way. It should be conceded plainly, because it is true and because a reader who knows it will otherwise stop trusting everything else here.
The Eucharistic Prayer said aloud is genuinely the older practice, and we can date the change. In 565 the Emperor Justinian legislated against silent recitation, ordering all bishops and priests to say the prayers of the divine oblation and of holy baptism not inaudibly, but in a voice that can be heard by the faithful people, that the minds of those who listen may be excited to greater compunction. He legislated because the silence was then beginning to spread. He lost. The silence spread anyway, and in the West it hardened into the silent Canon.
So on this point the traditionalist argument from antiquity does not work, and it should be dropped rather than defended. The silent Canon is the development. The audible anaphora is the older thing, and there is a sixth-century law complaining about the change as it happened.
The reply is not to dispute the date. It is to notice what the case actually shows: that antiquity was never the real ground of the traditional argument, and should not be. The Church heard Justinian, and over the following millennium she nevertheless received the silence, kept it, gave it meaning, and made it hers. A practice carrying well over a millennium of the Church’s own life is not defended because it is old. It is defended because it is hers, and because she ratified it.
Which is the argument this article has been making all along, only now pointed at our own side.
An alert reader will now aim that same principle here, and he should. If reception by the Church is what settles a rite’s standing, then the reformed Mass was promulgated by the Church’s supreme authority and has been received by her for over half a century, so it is hers too. That is correct, and this article does not dispute it. Nothing above is an argument that the Novus Ordo lacks standing, and nothing above depends on such an argument.
The two claims are simply of different kinds. This rite is the Church’s is a claim about authority, and it is true of both Missals. This rite recovered what the ancient Church did is a claim about history, and it can be checked. Showing the second one false leaves the first untouched. The point of the exercise is not to unseat the reformed rite. It is to retire an argument made on its behalf, one which happens also to be the argument most often used to tell Catholics attached to the older Mass that they are the innovators.
Why going back is not by itself a reason
The deepest problem with the antiquity argument is that the Church had already ruled on it, and had done so before the Council, in a document the reformers knew well.
In Mediator Dei, in 1947, Pius XII grants everything that should be granted. The liturgy of the early ages is worthy of veneration. Returning in spirit to its sources through research genuinely helps us understand the feasts and the ceremonies. Then he draws the line. A usage is not more fitting merely because it carries the savour and aroma of antiquity. It is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device. To go back to the rites and usages of antiquity while discarding the new patterns introduced by divine Providence to meet changed circumstances is unwise and mistaken.
And then he names the precedent, which is the part usually left out of the quotation. This way of acting, he says, threatens to revive the exaggerated and senseless antiquarianism to which the illegal Council of Pistoia gave rise.
Pistoia is worth knowing about. In 1786, a diocesan synod in Tuscany under Bishop Scipione de’ Ricci, steeped in Jansenist and Gallican ideas, set out to simplify the liturgy, push the vernacular, strip away what it judged accretion, and return to a purer and simpler antiquity. Its acts were published in Italian precisely to make the point about the vernacular. Pius VI condemned it in the bull Auctorem fidei in 1794, cataloguing eighty-five propositions.
Pius XII, then, was not warning against a hypothetical. He was pointing at a synod the Church had already condemned for doing this, and saying that the instinct was reappearing among liturgists in his own day. He wrote that in 1947. The Consilium began work in 1964.
There is a fair objection to quoting him here, and it should be met rather than left for someone else to raise. The surrounding paragraphs of Mediator Dei are aimed at private initiative: at “the temerity and daring of those who introduce novel liturgical practices,” at the reminder that the Apostolic See alone may permit such changes, at the warning that no one should arrogate to himself the right to make regulations. Paul VI was not a private person arrogating anything. He was the Apostolic See, doing precisely what Pius XII said only the Apostolic See may do.
Granted, and it disposes of any claim that the reform was unlawful. It does not touch the reasoning. Pius XII’s argument against antiquarianism is about whether age by itself makes a usage more fitting, and that question has the same answer whoever is asking it. A bad reason for changing the liturgy does not improve because the one who holds it has the authority to act on it.
His underlying point is the one that matters, and it cuts against archaeologism in either direction. Development is not decay. When the Roman Rite grew, absorbed, elaborated and settled over the centuries, that growth was the work of the Holy Ghost in the Church’s life, not a series of mistakes waiting for scholars to correct. Even the Frankish offertory prayers, imported and eventually made Roman, are an instance of a living thing growing from within according to its own nature.
What to say when you hear it
When someone tells you the new rite recovered something more ancient, the useful response is not a counter-claim about dates. Ask three questions.
- Is the source what it is said to be? For Eucharistic Prayer II, the answer is that the attribution to Hippolytus, to Rome, and to 215 has all been seriously undermined.
- Is what we now do actually that thing? Usually not. The Sanctus, the epiclesis, the intercessions and the saints were added to the ancient anaphora. The restored Prayer of the Faithful is not in the ancient Roman form. The new offertory is not the ancient Roman offertory.
- If antiquity was the rule, was it followed where it was inconvenient? This is the question that settles it, and the honest answer in each case is no.
None of this makes the new rite invalid, and nothing here is an argument against the people who pray it. It is an argument about a claim, and the claim does not hold. What was presented as recovery was largely composition, carried out under an ancient warrant that was not itself obeyed.
And the last word belongs to the Council rather than to us. Any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing. Weigh that against a prayer assembled in committee from a document whose author, city and century are all disputed, restructured at the epiclesis, supplemented with a Sanctus, intercessions and saints the source never had, and finished to a deadline on a café terrace. Whatever that is, it did not grow.
References
- Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium (4 December 1963), n. 50: the rites are to be simplified, “due care being taken to preserve their substance; elements which, with the passage of time, came to be duplicated, or were added with but little advantage, are now to be discarded; other elements which 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.”
- Sacrosanctum Concilium n. 23: careful theological, historical and pastoral investigation of each part to be revised; “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.” N. 53 on the 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): the text as “living literature”, a composite of layers of diverse provenance compiled from perhaps the mid-second to the mid-fourth century, not the work of Hippolytus or of any single author, and not the practice of any one community; on the “Roman” elements appearing only in much later Roman sources.
- On Eucharistic Prayer II: 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,” being a model given for the ordination of a bishop; and his own reservation about “the unjustifiable reason for using this prayer, namely the assumption that it was the eucharistic prayer of the early-third-century Church at Rome.” On the elements supplied by the Consilium and the relocation of the epiclesis, and on the dewfall: Paul Turner, “Dewfall” (Southwest Liturgical Conference, 2011) — the line “did not appear in the Apostolic Tradition,” the study group having taken it from the Missale Gothicum, a Gallican book of the seventh or eighth century.
- Louis Bouyer, The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer (Angelico Press, 2015), on putting the finishing touches to the draft with Botte on a café terrace in Trastevere, to a time fixed by their superiors, and on his later disillusionment with the reform. ⚠ The widely circulated “trattoria, by the following morning” wording is Sandro Magister’s paraphrase rather than Bouyer’s own; the prayer itself had been months in committee, and the memoir attests the finishing rather than the composing.
- St. Justin Martyr, First Apology 67 (c. 155), on the Sunday assembly: the readings, the presider’s instruction, and the common prayers.
- Consilium ad exsequendam Constitutionem de sacra Liturgia, De oratione communi seu fidelium (1966), English translation in the Canadian Catholic Conference National Bulletin on Liturgy no. 20 (January 1968). The Good Friday orations “provide us with the most ancient text and formula of the Common Prayer in the Roman rite,” dated to the third century on Baumstark and Jungmann and quoted by St. Prosper of Aquitaine in the fifth. Structure: nine times “the priest himself invites the assembled faithful to prayer by presenting them with an elaborately-formulated intention”; “at the deacon’s request, the people kneel for silent prayer”; then the priest prays the collect and the people answer Amen. The nine intentions: the Church, the pope and all ranks of the people of God, those who govern, the catechumens, those in various needs, heretics and schismatics, the Jews, the pagans. On the Eastern litany form, “it is the deacon who announces the intention, and the announcement is briefer.” On the Deprecatio Gelasii: introduced at Rome at the end of the fifth century, “except for Holy Week, it supplanted the ancient Roman form of the Common Prayer and then was itself reduced, before the end of the seventh century, to the simple acclamation Kyrie eleison.” On participation: silent prayer is “approved by the venerable Roman usage in the Solemn Prayers, though it may seem less active,” yet “there is no doubt that the first way” — the brief repeated litany response — “is the most deserving of recommendation,” because “the participation of the people is expressly called for by the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.”
- Adrian Fortescue, “Offertory,” Catholic Encyclopedia: “originally the only Roman Offertory prayers were the secrets”; the Suscipe, sancte Pater first appears in the prayerbook of Charles the Bald (b. 823, d. 877; the book dated c. 875–877); the prayers are non-Roman, Gallican and in part Mozarabic (Offerimus tibi Domine and Veni sanctificator), while Deus qui humænæ substantiæ is adapted from a Roman Christmas collect in the Gregorian Sacramentary. They entered Rome from outside in the later Middle Ages and were printed in the Ordinary by the Missal of St. Pius V. The 1969 offertory replaced them with newly composed blessings modelled on Jewish table prayers.
- Justinian, Novella 137 (565): “we order all bishops and priests to say the prayers used in the divine oblation and in holy baptism not inaudibly, but in a voice that can be heard by the faithful people, that the minds of those who listen may be excited to greater compunction.” The legislation responded to silent recitation then spreading, and did not succeed in stopping it.
- Pius XII, Mediator Dei (20 November 1947), nn. 59–65. On unauthorized private initiative: “the temerity and daring of those who introduce novel liturgical practices” (n. 59), and that “the Apostolic See alone is empowered to grant this permission” (n. 60). On antiquarianism, nn. 61–64: the liturgy of the early ages is worthy of veneration, but an ancient usage is not more suitable merely for carrying “the savor and aroma of antiquity”; “it is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device”; returning to ancient rites while discarding later developments given by Providence is “unwise and mistaken”; and such action “bids fair to revive the exaggerated and senseless antiquarianism to which the illegal Council of Pistoia gave rise.”
- The Synod of Pistoia (18–28 September 1786) under Bishop Scipione de’ Ricci, of Jansenist and Gallican tendency, which pursued liturgical simplification and the vernacular; its acts and decrees were published in Latin and Italian. Condemned by Pius VI in the bull Auctorem fidei (28 August 1794), which catalogued and condemned eighty-five propositions.
On the offertory in particular, and on how a rite grows by receiving what it was given, see The Offertory: What the 1969 Rewrite Lost. For the longer story of how we got here, see How did the Liturgical Movement lead to the Novus Ordo? and What Was Lost: Prayers Removed from the Roman Rite. On what the older Mass claims for itself, see Why is the TLM called the “Mass of the Ages”?, and on the validity question that is not at issue here, Is the Novus Ordo a valid Mass?