The Deeper History of the Neo-Gallican Rites

Dom Gueranger called the liturgical milieu of his lifetime "anarchy". He did not mean that guitars and felt banners graced one church while a "reform of the reform" Mass was spoken down the street. He meant that the rites themselves varied wildly from place to place in both text and ritual, that they had changed greatly in the last several centuries, and that they would probably continue to change unabated.

A recent translation of a contemporary survey of these rites has been published in parts at Canticum Salomonis, concluded with the blogger's reflections on the original writer's intentions:

"Is he simply a liturgical tourist, a curiosity-seeker, or is his purpose more serious, or more sinister? Are the Voyages an amateur’s impressions, or a reformer’s manifesto?"

Gueranger, in an angle revived by the good Dr. Hull in Banished Heart, linked the writer with Jansenism:

"[Jansenists'] habit of regarding Saint Augustine as a theological oracle led them to idolize the Church of the age in which he lived, the fifth century. If Catholics ought to follow the teachings of Saint Augustine…then they should also seek to emulate in their churches the worship of this golden age of Christianity. Hence the heretics’ contempt for the theology and liturgy of the Middle Ages." 

Since The Liturgical Year the term "Jansenist" has become synonymous with "neo-Gallican" in a liturgical context. I once heard a seminarian for a Francophonic traditionalist order go on and on about the Jansenists loved ceremonies, "how they loved ceremonies and everything always had to be really elaborate and stuff, unlike the pure and simple Roman rite." Do Jansenists really like ceremonies? I doubt the church of fourth century Hippo had schedules of senior choristers to read the lessons, Blessed Sacrament and Palm Sunday processions, rulers of choir, vesting rituals, preparatory rites, or stational processions. Or perhaps they did. Exact features of fourth century liturgy are scant when available, variable from place to place, and, at the time, very given to change. Generally, romantics and antiquarians assume a stark, simpler liturgy, not unlike what Gueranger and other critics of Jansenism described in heretical parishes: one altar, minimal decoration, an unadorned altar, and little mention of any saint other than Our Lady. Readers of this blog will remember how very unlike our past series on the Parisian and Lyonese rites this sounds.

The history of these rites is much more complicated and generally unexplored by historians of the age, who are more interested in Louis XIV's wars or the seedlings for the Revolution. A definitive narrative remains to be written, but that should not stop us from piecing together a few thoughts. Jansenism did have a foothold in the local rites of France, but perhaps not as directly or theologically charged as one might assume. In our survey of the Parisian and Lyonese Missals we found nothing Jansenistic, but a monk commenting on the blog did remark that the breviaries of these churches are a different story. The Mattins lessons from the Church Fathers have generally been consolidated to use the harsher words of Saint Augustine rather than the other Doctors and certainly in place of medieval writers. A few rites have a "Triplex" feast of Saint Augustine, something on par with the great solemnities of the Church and higher in rank than what is given to the Apostles. Yet the Missals smell of other scents than that of Jansenism.

Jansenism elicited a papal condemnation, initially welcomed by the French Court but later disdained in the details. The Pope asked for the assent of Jansenists to a traditional formulation of Catholic doctrine concerning grace and free will, which, after an extensive propaganda campaign, came to be held as an Ultramontane impingement on the traditional rights of the Church's Eldest Daughter. The Bourbon kings, who always heard the Roman Mass in their chapel, began to appoint and promote prelates whose views on the independence of the national Church more aligned with their own. Somewhat like Henry VIII (although no one could realistically compare their actions so strictly), the kings of France were Catholic in every matter but one, and so were given to enabling dissidents who happened to accord with their singular fault. For Henry Tudor, it was the right of a national bishop to grant a divorce; for Louis XIV, it was the independence of the government and episcopate in matters of Church government and public morality.

Changes in the rites of Mass and the Office had begun some years earlier, but the advancement of French positivist bishops unleashed a strange confluence of exaggeration, vitiation, corruption, genuine restoration, legitimate variety, and proper extra-Roman tradition. For example, most neo-Gallican rites, not unlike Sarum, followed the Roman propers of the season with their own unique ceremonies and symbols. On the Sunday of the Resurrection, the Mass would have been Resurrexi. The Parisian and Lyonese books we examined invented textually interesting, albeit different, Masses for Pascha which carry little resemblance to what preceded them. Yet this same Mass would carry a multitude of concelebrant priests, deacons, subdeacons, and see the bishop give the pontifical blessing at the Pax, a non-Roman, medieval custom. There is nothing Jansenist in the Parisian texts of Mass for Pascha and the mandate to administer Communion at every public Mass would likely irritate that puritanical sect, but the intrusion of Jansenism into the French rites must be seen in the context of a great pastiche.

The Man in the Iron Mask's brother, who, unlike his brother,
had quite a bit to do with all of this.

The rites themselves are impressive if only for the haste with which they were composed. The orations are often loquacious. Some are very beautiful, some go on too long, and some are excessively vivid; they may lack the pithy and heartfelt quality of the Roman prayers, but they are still an improvement over the Missal of Paul VI. The books forcibly evolved, doubtless at the behest of bishops who wanted to test their mettle at court, during an age of great devotion in France and also an age of literary revival; it is no mistake that Msgr. Jacques Bousset's sermons are among the most memorable examples of French oratory and that they come from this time.

Whatever merits the texts of the Masses, and even Offices, have, the horrid music that accompanied them undermined their value and only enabled their Ultramontane critics. The music was composed by Nivers, Campra, Lalande, Bernier et al in a matter of a few years, often with one musician composing everything for an entire rite (!), quite a contrast to the sluggish musical output of the Consilium. Much like the music forced upon Roman Catholics in the last few decades, the neo-Gallican music was hastily composed and followed the genre of secular music in its structure, just with a better result than what we have today.

The neo-Gallican rites are fundamentally medieval, predicated on large parishes with active and full liturgical life, cathedral chapters, vibrant local feasts and traditions, sequences, litanies, weekly processions, vigils, and everything else we associate with that age. They are also elements of the rites that had obsolesced by the time Dom Gueranger refounded a monastery at Solesmes. Apropos the ICRSS seminarian, most of the ornate features of these liturgies are what they in fact retained from the ancient Roman rite and which the Tridentine Roman rite possessed in more modest prominence. The simpler features of these rites, like the text, were where they departed from ancient norms, and for reasons more complicated than nominal Jansenism, although not exclusive of Jansenism.

The French Revolution destroyed both the cultural and political predicates of the local French liturgies and made the 19th century transition to the Roman rite a fairly simple affair. One hopes that future historians will appraise the neo-Gallican liturgies as an important aspect of pre-Revolutionary France worthy of further study.