Bugnini Heads the Preparatory Commission

On 5 June 1960, Pope John XXIII issued the motu proprio Superno Dei nutu, setting in motion the preparation of the Second Vatican Council. The next day, 6 June 1960, the Pontifical Preparatory Commission on the Sacred Liturgy was constituted, and a Vincentian priest named Annibale Bugnini was appointed its secretary. The presidency went to the aged Cardinal Gaetano Cicognani; the daily work, the drafting, the agenda — all of it fell to the secretary. It is a quiet entry in the chronicles of 1960, easy to pass over. It was, in fact, the moment the reform of the Roman Rite acquired its drafting table.

A preparatory commission is, on paper, a modest thing: it gathers experts, studies a question, and writes a draft document — a schema — to be set before the Council Fathers for debate. But whoever holds the secretary’s pen shapes the page the bishops first see. Bugnini did not invent the desire for liturgical renewal; that was the long inheritance of the genuine Liturgical Movement, with its real and approved aims. What he now possessed was the institutional position from which a particular reading of that movement — the activist, far-reaching reading he had championed since 1948 — could be written into the very first document the Council would consider.

Why this appointment, of all of them, matters

The schema drafted under Bugnini’s secretaryship became, after the Fathers debated and amended it, Sacrosanctum Concilium — the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. To stand at the head of the preparatory commission in 1960 was to stand at the headwaters of everything that followed.

From the Margins to the Drafting Table

Twelve years earlier, in 1948, Bugnini had been an unlikely choice to serve as secretary of Pius XII’s quiet Commission for the General Reform of the Liturgy — a thirty-five-year-old with no curial rank, lifted into place by allies who valued his energy and his network. From that desk came the restored Easter Vigil of 1951, the reformed Holy Week of 1955, and the rubrical simplifications that fed into the 1960 Code of Rubrics and the 1962 Missal. He had learned, in those years, how a commission actually works: how an agenda is set, how a draft is steered, how a result is reached before the meeting that ratifies it.

So when John XXIII announced a council, Bugnini was not a newcomer but a practiced hand. The same currents that had carried him in 1948 — above all the patronage of Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Paul VI — were still flowing. The appointment of June 1960 was less a surprise than a continuation.

The President Who Hesitated

The clearest sign that this schema was no ordinary committee product is the story of the man who had to sign it. Cardinal Gaetano Cicognani, the commission’s eighty-year-old president, read the program of reform and balked. By the accounts that survive — including testimony from within the commission — he saw dangers in what the draft made possible and was reluctant to put his name to it. The reform it sketched was simply vaster than he had expected to authorize.

What broke the impasse is a scene almost too vivid to be true, yet it is recorded by serious witnesses. John XXIII is said to have sent for the cardinal’s own brother, Amleto Cicognani, the Secretary of State, instructing him not to return until the schema was signed. The old cardinal, a participant later reported, waved the document almost in tears, protested that he did not wish to sign it — and then signed. Four days later he was dead. Cardinal Arcadio Larraona succeeded him; the schema went forward.

Read this scene carefully — and fairly

The temptation is to read Cicognani’s reluctant signature as proof of a plot forced through over a dying man’s protest. Resist the melodrama. What the episode actually shows is narrower and more sobering: an experienced churchman, close to the matter, judged the draft’s permissions wide enough to be dangerous, and his hesitation was overruled. That is a prudential warning from inside the room — not evidence of conspiracy, and certainly not grounds to question the Council that later took up the text and amended it.

The Only Schema That Sailed

There is a structural fact about the Council’s preparation that the liturgy schema illuminates better than any other. Fr. Ralph Wiltgen, in his sober eyewitness history The Rhine Flows into the Tiber, documented how the progressive bloc of Council Fathers and periti — drawn from the lands along the Rhine — came to exert a predominant influence over the assembly, sending one preparatory schema after another back to be rewritten. The liturgical schema was the conspicuous exception: it was the one preparatory text largely congenial to that bloc, and so it advanced where others were sent back.

When the Council opened, the liturgy was taken up first, and the debate was real and amending — the Fathers were not rubber-stamping Bugnini’s draft. But the document that gave them their starting point had been shaped at his desk. This is the institutionally precise point, and it must be made precisely: the schema was the floor of the discussion, not its ceiling. The Fathers debated it, corrected it, and voted it into the conservative, carefully fenced text that Sacrosanctum Concilium actually is.

In fairness to the schema — and to the man

The draft Bugnini’s commission produced was itself moderate; the constitution the Council finally approved on 4 December 1963, by a vote of 2,147 to 4, was more conservative still — it preserved Latin, gave Gregorian chant pride of place, and forbade innovation that did not grow organically from existing forms. The gulf that opened later lay not chiefly in the 1960 schema but in how the constitution would be implemented after 1964. To fault Bugnini here for the whole of the post-conciliar reform is to collapse twenty years into one appointment. The fair charge is narrower: that the pen which framed the question was held by the movement’s most far-reaching partisan.

The Quiet Hinge

It is worth naming plainly what did and did not happen in June 1960. A pope of unquestioned legitimacy convoked a true ecumenical council and ordered its preparation; that is the ordinary, lawful life of the Church and nothing in it is to be deplored. What can be soberly observed is a matter of stewardship and prudence: that the secretaryship of the liturgical commission — the single most consequential drafting post in the entire preparation — was entrusted to a man whose vision of reform reached well beyond what the genuine movement, or the warnings of Pius XII’s Mediator Dei, had sanctioned.

Bugnini would be abruptly dropped in 1962, removed from his Lateran chair and from the preparatory work, his ideas judged by some too radical even then. It looked like the end. It was not: when Montini became Paul VI, Bugnini returned in January 1964 as secretary of the Consilium, the body that would actually rebuild the rite. But the door he would later walk through had been opened here, quietly, in the summer of 1960 — at a drafting table most of the Church never saw.