Consilium

This article is about the Vatican commission that produced the Novus Ordo Mass. For other uses, see Consilium (disambiguation).

The Consilium, officially the Consilium ad exsequendam Constitutionem de Sacra Liturgia ("Council for the Implementation of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy"), was a special commission established by Pope Paul VI to carry out the liturgical reform called for by the Second Vatican Council. Created motu proprio by Sacram Liturgiam on 25 January 1964, the Consilium was charged with revising the liturgical books of the Roman Rite, and its work finished in the Novus Ordo Missae, the revised Order of Mass promulgated by the apostolic constitution Missale Romanum on 3 April 1969.

Operating semi-independent of the Sacred Congregation of Rites under the leadership of Father Annibale Bugnini, the Consilium drew on about 50 bishops and cardinals and more than 200 consultors organized into dozens of study groups called "coetus a studiis". It's proposals, particularly a 1967 trial rite known as the Missa Normativa, proved controversial among bishops and were the subject of criticism from traditionalist Catholics as shown most notably in the 1969 Ottaviani Intervention. The Consilium was later absorbed into the newly created Congregation for Divine Worship in 1969 and formally ceased to exist in April 1970.

Background

On 4 December 1963, the Second Vatican Council promulgated the constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium, which called for a reform of the liturgical books to more clearly express the nature of the liturgy and encourage the "full, conscious, and active participation" of lay faithful. But rather than assign this task to the existing Sacred Congregation of Rites, which had jurisdiction over the liturgy but was widely seen within reform circles as slow-moving, Paul VI chose to create a new, dedicated body to direct the implementation of Sacrosanctum Concilium.

What Sacrosanctum Concilium called for

Sacrosanctum set out general principles rather than a specific new rite, and its provisions were narrower than the reform eventually produced. Paragraph (¶) 23 stated that innovations should not be introduced unless a genuine and certain benefit to the Church required them, and that any new forms should grow organically from those already existing. ¶ 34 directed that the rites be marked by "noble simplicity," be brief and clear, and omit repetitions that did not serve the understanding of the faithful, while ¶ 50 similarly called for the Ordo Missae to be revised so that the distinctive character of each part would be more evident and elements added over time with little benefit be dropped, "as, for instance, the two-fold reading of the Epistle and Gospel" at low Mass. On the language of the liturgy, ¶ 36 stated that the use of Latin was to be preserved in the Latin rites, while permitting a wider use of the vernacular, especially in the readings and some prayers, where a local episcopal conference judged it advantageous; ¶ 54 envisaged that the vernacular might be given "a suitable place" particularly in the readings and general intercessions, while expecting that the faithful would also be able to say or sing in Latin the parts of the Mass that pertained to them. The constitution did not itself mandate celebration facing the people, a fully vernacular Mass, the elimination of the Last Gospel, or the composition of new Eucharistic prayers, these accretions emerged during the Consilium's later work rather than being decreed in the Second Vatican Council

Mandate

Paul VI established the commission by the apostolic letter motu proprio Sacram Liturgiam, dated 25 January 1964. As a body operating in parallel to the Congregation of Rites, the Consilium was given considerable autonomy over the reform, a status it retained until 8 May 1969, when the Congregation of Rites was suppressed and divided into the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. Giacomo Lercaro, Archbishop of Bologna, was appointed the Consilium's first president, with Bugnini, a liturgical scholar who had long advocated reform of the Mass, serving as its secretary.

Membership

At its fullest, the Consilium comprised 48 members; 11 Cardinals, 36 Bishops, and one Abbot. They were supported by more than 200 international consultors and advisors. This body was divided into over 40 specialized study groups, each assigned to a particular book or aspect of the liturgy, such as the Ordo Missae, the calendar, the lectionary, and the Divine Office. Some Consultors included liturgical scholars such as Josef Andreas Jungmann and Cipriano Vagaggini, alongside members having a range of theological views. The Frenchman Louis Bouyer served among the consultors and later published memoirs critical of aspects of the process. According to Bugni's own account, Paul VI took a little direct part in the day-to-day drafting, telling the Consilium only that the Church had entered a "historical moment" in its liturgical life and that members bore the responsibility for exercising careful judgment as the reform went forth.

Development of the reformed Mass

Initial revisions, 1964–1966

The Consilium's earliest work modified the existing Missale Romanum of 1962 bit by bit, producing instructions such as Inter Oecumenici (1964), which introduced limited use of the vernacular and simplified some rubrics, well before a wholly new Order of Mass was drafted. Over the next years the "coetus" responsible for the Mass, working principally under Bugniii's direction, moved toward a more thorough restructuring of the rite rather than a simple revision of the 1962 Missal.

The Missa Normativa and the 1967 Synod of Bishops

By 1967 the Consilium had developed an experimental rite, referred to as the Missa Normativa ("normative Mass"), which was celebrated before consultors in the Sistine Chapel and subsequently presented to the first postconciliar Synod of Bishops, meeting in Rome that October alongside discussion of the reform of the code of canon law and the Divine Office. On 21 October 1967, Cardinal Lercaro presented the synod fathers with a report on the new structure, and on 24 October a trial celebration of the Missa Normativa was held for the assembled bishops. The response was mixed but most had reservations. in the vote that followed, of 187 bishops present, 43 voted non placet (against), 62 approved only iuxta modum (with reservations), and four abstained. Bugnini later acknowledged to Consilium members that the vote had gone, in his words, against what the body had hoped for. The setback contributed to a wider deterioration in Lercaro's standing; having already offered his resignation as archbishop of Bologna in 1966 on reaching the customary retirement age, Lercaro was informed by Paul VI in January 1968 that his resignation from the presidency of the Consilium had been accepted.

Finalization and the Ottaviani Intervention

Work on the rite continued after the synod, with further revisions to the offertory, the eucharistic prayers, and the calendar; nine new prefaces were composed for the Missal during this period, of which eight were ultimately retained. Paul VI gave his approval to the revsed Ordo Missae in writing on 6 November 1968.

Before the new rite's promulgation, a critique compiled under the direction of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and endorsed by Cardnals Alfredo Ottaviani and Antonio Bacci was submitted to Paul VI; it became known as the Short Critical Study of the New Order of Mass, or the Ottaviani Intervention. The document argued that the revised Mass represented a significant departure from the theology of the Mass affirmed at the Council of Trent and objected that, in its view, the Missa Normativa had in substance already been rejected by the 1967 synod without subsequently being submitted to a fresh vote of episcopal conferences. Some Vaticanologists have noted that the intervention was among the factors that led Paul VI to postpone by two years the deadline he had initially set for mandatory use of the new Missal.

Elements removed or altered

The Consilium's revisions proceeded in parts/stages, beginning with the interim missal of 1965 and continuing through further instructions before the definitive Ordo Missae of 1969. Among the changes and accretions made to the 1962 Missal were the following:

• Prayers at the foot of the altar: the opening dialogue drawn from Psalm 42 (Iudica me, Deus) was dropped from the 1965 interim missal, and the whole set of prayers, and the recitation of the Confiteor at the beginning of Mass, was removed in the 1969 rite and replaced by a simplified penitential act.
• The Last Gospel and Leonine Prayers: the reading of the prologue of the Gospel of St. John (St. John 1:1–14) at the end of Mass, along wth the prayers after low Mass started by Pope Leo XIII, were suppressed in the 1965 interim missal on the grounds that the material duplicated readings now given greater prominence earlier in the liturgy.
• The double Confiteor: the 1962 Missal called for the Confiteor to be said twice, once by the priest and once by the servers or people, the reformed rite kept a single, shared recitation.
• Offertory prayers: the older offertory prayers, including Suscipe, sancte Pater and Deus, qui humanae substantiae, were replaced with new blessing formulas modeled on Jewish table blessings (berakoth), part of a broader recasting of the presentation of the bread and wine.
• Genuflections and signs of the cross: The number of genuflections by the celebrant and signs of the cross made over the offerings, especiallyduring the canon, were substantially reduced in the revised rite compared with the 1962 form.
• The Eucharistic Prayer: the Roman Canon, with minor changes, was retained as Eucharistic Prayer I, but the 1969 Missal introduced three newly composed alternatives (Eucharistic Prayers II, III, and IV) that priests could use in its placce, endingthe Roman rite's traditional practice of one single canon.
• Orientation: although the revised General Instruction permitted celebration facing the people (versus populum) and this became the near-universal parish practice after 1969, Sacrosanctum Concilium itself did not require it, and celebration facing the liturgical east was neither forbidden by the constitution nor by the Missal's rubrics.

Defenders of the reform have argued that these changees fall within the constitution' own call to simplify rites and eliminate "useless repetitions," and that the near-total adoption of the vernacular, while not itself commanded by the text, followed from decisions subsequently approved by episcopal conferences and the Holy See under the discretion paragraphs 36 and 40 left to competent authorities. Critics have replied that several of the changes-- particularly the wholesale removal of the Last Gospel and the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar, the multiplication of eucharistic prayers, and the near-disappearance of Latin from parish celebrations went beyond ¶ 23's requirement of organic growth from existing forms could support.

Promulgation, 1969

Paul VI published the new Order of Mass by the apostolic constitution Missale Romanum, signed on Holy Thursday, 3 Aril 1969. The accompanying Ordo Missae and its Institutio Generalis Missalis Romani (General Instruction of the Roman Missal) were published by decree of the Congregaion of Rites on 6 April 1969, and the new rite was set to take effect on the first Sunday of Advent, 30 November 1969. The new constitution and rite were formally announced in consistory on 28 April and presented to the press on 2 May 1969. A complete typical edition of the revised Missal, incorporating more textual corrections, was published the following year, on 11 My 1970. Following the division of the Sacred Congregation of Rites on 8 May 1969, the Consilium was absorbed into the new Congregation for Divine Worship, continuing its work on the remaining liturgical books — including the Divine Office, the lectionary, and the rites of the sacraments — with more limited institutional independence than before. The Consilium was formally dissolved on 10 April 1970, its remaining responsibilities passing to the Congregation for Divine Worship.

Aftermath

Reactions to the Consilium's work, both at the time and in later decades, have ranged across procedural objections, doctrinal disputes, and a broader debate over whether the difficulties lay in the reform's execution or in the conciliar mandate itself.

Procedural criticism

Critics have focused on the compostion and working methods of the Consilium itself. Because it operated in parallel to, and with more independence than, the Sacred Congregation of Rites, decision-making rested with a comparatively small circle of consultors around Bugnini rather than with the wider body of bishops, a structure some historians have said allowed the reform to move faster, and further, than many bishops attending Vatican II had anticipated when they voted for Sacrosanctum Concilium. The 1967 Synod of Bishops' unfavorable vote on the Missa Normativa, was cited by critics at the time as evidence that the Consilium's proposals did not command the confidence of the wider episcopate, and the subsequent removal of Cardinal Lercaro as president shortly afterward was read by some observers as a sign of tension between the Consilium and Paul VI over how to respond to that vote.

Bugnini's own removal in 1975 from his later post as secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship, and his reassignment as apostolic pro-nuncio to Iran, has itself become a subject of historical dispute. traditionalist writer Michael Davies argued in Pope Paul's New Mass (1980) that Paul VI dismissed Bugnini after receiving a dossier alleging Masonic affiliation, while stating explicitly that he had no proof the allegation was true; Bugnini himself denied ever having been a Freemason. A 2022 memoir by Charles Murr revived the claim through second-hand recollections attributed to Cardinal Édouard Gagnon, but no primary documentation of the allegation has been made public, and the episode remains unresolved and disputed among historians.

The Ottaviani Intervention

The most prominent contemporary critique was the Short Critical Study of the New Order of Mass, compiled under the direction of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and presented to the Roman Pontiff, Paul VI over the signatures of Cardinals Alfredo Ottaviani, who the intervention is commonly named after, and Antonio Bacci. The study contended that the new rite, considered as a whole and in its individual parts, represented a striking departure from the Catholic theology of the Mass as it was understood and defined at the Council of Trent, and that it had been imposed without the fresh consultation of episcopal conferences that its authors believed the 1967 synod vote had made necessary. Paul VI did not withdraw the Missal in response, but historians have noted that the intervention was among the pressures that led him to postpone by two years the date on which he had originally intended to make use of the new Missal obligatory.

Theological criticism

A further line of criticism, associated principally with Lefebvre and the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) that he later founded, held that the reformed Mass was not merely a simplification but a doctrnal departure from the Tridentine rite it replaced, on points such as the wording of the offertory and the emphasis given to the Mass as a communal meal alongside its character as a sacrifice. Lefebvre went further, arguing that the confusion which followed the councl was not merely the product of unauthorized departures from the reform as promulgated but flowed from the reform itself. This view has not been shared by the Holy See, which has consistently affirmed the validity and doctrinal soundness of the Novus Ordo Missae, but it has continued to circulate among traditionalist Catholics.

Liturgical creativity

Some of the most influential criticism came from within the Church's mainstream. As Cardinal, and later as Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger returned repeatedly to the theme that the postconciliar liturgy had come to be treated as something the celebrant or community produces, rather than something received. In his 1997 memoir Milestones: Memoirs 1927–1977, he wrote that while the council had reasonably called for a revision of the missal of a kind that had often occurred before, what followed instead was that the old structure was pulled down and a new one built in its place; setting the new missal over against the historically developed rite, and forbidding continued use of the latter, made the liturgy appear to be the product of scholarly work and legal authority rather than a living development, which he said had caused the Church serious harm. He argued that this gave rise to the impression that the liturgy is something "made" by the community rather than something given to it in advance, a shift he considered a central cause of a broader loss of a sense of the sacred.

Ratzinger connected this to a broader unease with "liturgical creativity," which is as he meant, the tendency of celebrants and planning committees to treat the rite as draft material for invention rather than as a received form; he wrote elsewhere that the new missal, in both particular sections and as a whole, could leave the impression of a rupture with the past and read more like the work of a committee of academics than the organic growth of a living liturgy. In a preface written for the French edition of the German liturgist Klaus Gamber's The Reform of the Roman Liturgy, he characterized the postconciliar reform as having replaced liturgy that grew organically over centuries with a fabricated product assembled for the occasion, often summarized in english commentary as describing the new rite as a "banal on-the-spot" creation. At the same time, Ratzinger repeatedly stated that he did not regret the reform having taken place, welcomed the expanded scriptural readings and the wider use of the vernacular, and never questioned the doctrinal adequacy of the reformed Missal; his criticism was directed at how the change was carried out and at subsequent practice, not at the legiimacy of the Novus Ordo itself.

The Council is actually the source of the problem

A distinct strand of criticism has located the difficulty not in the Consilium's execution but in Sacrosanctum Concilium and the council that produced it. Michael Davies, in a later book, Liturgical Time Bombs in Vatican II (2003), argued that ambiguous or permissive language had been deliberately built into the constitution by a minority of reform-minded so that it could be subverted for changes far beyond what the bishops who voted for the text understood themselves to be approving. The Swiss theologian Romano Amerio made a related argument in his 1985 work Iota Unum, arguing that the postconciliar period was marked by genuine ruptures in Catholic teaching and practice rather than a straightforward continuation of prior tradition, of which the liturgical changes were one instance. The historian Roberto de Mattei has likewise argued that Vatican II is unusual among ecumenical councils in having generated two fundamentally opposed readings, a "hermeneutic of continuity" and a "hermeneutic of rupture," and has traced this to ambiguities within the conciliar documents themselves rather than solely to their later implementation.

Benedict XVI addressed this dspute directly. Speaking in a December 2005 address to the Roman Curia, he differed a "hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture," which treats the council as a break with the Church's prior tradition, with what he called a "hermeneutic of reform," in which the council is understood in continuity with the Church that preceded it. Some Commentators have observed the irony that this same rupture-based reading of the council was shared by some of its warmest progressive admirers and by traditionalist critics such as Lefebvre, who for opposite reasons agreed that the council represented a decisive break with what had gone before.

Practices attributed to the "spirit of Vatican II"

A further critcism distinguishes between the text of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Missale Romanum of 1969 as actually promulgated, and a wider set of practices that became common in parishes afterward. Commentators sympathetic to the reform itself have noted that widely adopted features of parish life after 1969, celebration facing the people as the near-universal default, the reception of Communion in the hand while standing, and the routine use of lay extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion -- are not required, or in some cases not even mentioned, by either the council's constitution or the Missal Paul VI promulgated, and instead spread during the 1970s under the broader banner of the "spirit of Vatican II." On this reading, some of the practical changes most associated with the Novus Ordo in the popular imagination are better described as accretions that grew up around the reform in its implementation than as elements the Consilium itself wrote into the Ordo Missae.

Defenses of the reform

Liberals within the postconciliar liturgical movement have argued that the Consilium's work was a legitimate, f occasionally contested, application of the principles Sacrosanctum Concilium set out, particularly its calls for simpler rites and fuller participation by the laity. On this view, the widespread adoption of the vernacular -- which the constitution permitted rather than required -- reflected a broad consensus among bishops and faithful that emerged in the years after the council and was subsequently ratified through the ordinary channels of episcopal conferences and the Holy See, rather than being imposed against the council's intent. Others have argued that the Novus Ordo should be read as continuous with, rather than a rupture from, the wider history of the Roman rite, on the grounds that some of its features -- such as the multiplication eucharistic prayers, which number 10, drew on ancient anaphoral traditions and represent a recovery of older forms rather than pure invention, even as they concede the finished Missal differs from the 1962 Missal in substantial ways. Even partiipants in the reform process were not uniformly satisfied in every outcome. One consultor named Louis Bouyer later voiced reservations about aspects of how the reform had been carried out, while at the same time praising specific elements of the finished Missal, including its enlarged set of prefaces drawn from ancient sacramentaries.

See also

• Hermeneutics of the Second Vatican Council
• Sacrosanctum Concilium
• Mass of Paul VI
• Ottaviani Intervention
• Tridentine Mass
• Second Vatican Council
• Society of St. Pius X

External links

• Official history of the Consilium, by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments
• Text of Missale Romanum (1969), by the Holy See