Pius XII: True Reform?

source: sgg.org

Our post on Byran Houghton generated some passing discussion on the liturgical reforms of Pius XII and the curious tendency of some traditionalists not only to accept their legality, but to embrace the Pacellian wisdom, glorifying the Black Nobleman's work as "true reform." Bryan Houghton, Michael Davies, Brunero Gherardini and countless others accepted part or all of Pius XII's liturgical novelties—particularly Holy Week. While most of the emerging traditionalist movement used pre-Pius XII (not necessarily "pre-1955"), a strange Gallican tendency preferred early Paul VI and eventually settled on 1962. The Fraternity of St. Pius X's preference for 1962 compelled its descendants in the FSSP, ICRSS, IBP, monastic communities and "indult" Masses to follow suit. The general consensus is that something was wrong with the liturgy before Pius XII and something had to be changed, but not everything; Pius XII changed just enough, Paul VI changed too much. Why?

Sadly, the reasoning is likely laced in the politics of the time. Pius XII, the first pope of the media age, filled every seminarian and priest's newspaper and television, always wearing the tiara and uttering the pontifical blessing from his lips. Papa Pacelli embodied the outward immutability of the baroque Church, if, of course, one ignores what he actually did. Pope John's Council and Pope Paul's New Mass, as Michael Davies entitled both of those phenomena, broke the baroque statue of the Church and left those reared in the eccentric obedience of the time grasping for a means of understanding what had just happened. They latched on to Pius XII as a contrast to the changes of Paul VI, true change versus false change, true renewal versus false renewal.

On closer inspection, these aspirations are quite facile. Giovanni Battista Montini, not Siri of Genoa, was Pius XII's protege and handpicked successor (one does not get rid of a priest with an under-secretary job by making him archbishop of the prior pope's see and instantly papabile). The same people who accomplished Paul VI's reforms also accomplished Pius XII's and were in fact hired by Pius XII (he personally found Bugnini). At a time when the pope was too sick to hold a consistory or meet with bishops, he was well enough to get regular reports on the progress of liturgical changes. All this will be familiar to regular readers, but to newer ones this may be a surprise.

There stands another possibility, however, that early proponents of the post-War Liturgical Movement, disappointed with the Pauline liturgy, projected their hopes onto the liturgy of Papa Pacelli. Louis Bouyer, whose arrant disillusionment with the reform would startled modern day conservatives, recounts that in the 1940s, before it was legal he celebrated the Holy Saturday Vesperal Mass after nightfall. The Paschal vigil Mass obsessed liturgists, who, far from acknowledging that its daytime celebration was a pastoral accommodation, saw the morning or noontime vigil as a great corruption, a departure from the ancient practice. They welcomed Pius XII's experimental vigil in 1951, and the next one in 1952, and the third one in 1955 (four Masses for one day in four years!). In reality, the "vigil," as it existed as a distinct ceremony from the all-night Paschal celebration of the first millennium, never took place at night; its creation separated it from the Resurrectional liturgy and put them both in the daytime. However, those who wanted to return to the ancient praxis as best they knew it may have seen in Pius XII's Holy Saturday a nod toward the primitive practice devoid of Paul VI's textual deviations.

Rather than asking "What is true reform?" Catholics would better use their time by asking "What is true tradition?"

Bryan Houghton: Mitre & Crook

Viviers

Fr. Bryan Houghton wrote Mitre and Crook early in his retirement, which he took after the promulgation of the Pauline Mass in 1969 and which he spent in Viviers, celebrating some iteration of the vetus ordo "privately" for a hundred people there gathered. A soldier before conversion, he was a writer in retirement. His most notable book, Mitre and Crook, is among the few available in English, although Una Voce has excerpts of his Pretre rejeté available in our tongue. Selected for the episcopacy, Houghton found he had no place left in the hierarchy after he refused to affirm the supposed orthodoxy of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He initially held Marcel Lefebvre in high regard until well inculcated sense of obedience told him the French missionary bishop was out to destroy the Church. He died quite pessimistic, but steadfast in faith, writing, "Here I am, a priest rejected, unusable even as a curate or convent chaplain, utterly good for nothing."

His Mitre and Crook imagines a fictitious Bishop Forester who, tired of the new way of doing things, decides to turn back the liturgical clock and to found a seminary to ordain priests trained the old way. He gains five seminarians, who he defends in this epistolary novel against his ambitious Canon and a zealously modern papal legate. Houghton's pastoral sensibilities shine through in this work, so I have included some of the more poignant passage below:

“It is extraordinary, you know, how images, metaphors, colour our judgments. I am by no means certain that Christians ought to be “outward-and forward-looking.” I even wonder if you really are. It seems to me that we cannot help being downward-and upward-looking: downward into the abyss of our own void and upward into the abyss of the Absolute Being. Herein lies the difference between the new horizontal and anthropocentric outlook as against the old vertical and theocentric religion. The one is precisely an outlook and the other precisely a religion: they have nothing in common. Moreover, I need scarcely remind you that, no matter how “forward-looking” one may be, one still has to look forward to death. What a wonderful and splendid thing death is: the punishment for sin turned by an omnipotent hand into the means of being grasped by God! I wish priests would preach more about death. Perhaps they do not believe in it any more? They used to say “black Masses” a bit too often, perhaps; now, of course, they say none at all. You who are an expert on the Council documents, did Vatican II abolish death along with Friday fish? It would doubtless be in Gaudium et Spes: I have never read it as I use it as a remedy against insomnia.” to Philip Goodman, Bishop of Hull

“How strange! What you hurl at me as an insult I receive as a compliment: “you are a traditionalist at heart.”…. It is absolutely untrue to say that I am a bundle of sensations. In the first place I am a bundle of traditions. It is by my traditions that I judge the sensations of experience. Without them no sensation would have significance. The traditions form the warp and experience the woof of that wonderful tapestry we call the human person. If an experience can be absorbed by my traditions, then it is woven into the tissue of my personality. If not, it is rejected….[You] are as much a traditionalist as I.” to Stephen O’Keary, Bishop of Devizes

“How can anyone dare stamp on other people’s sentiments? Who has given them permission? ‘The hankering after the Old Mass is pure sentimentality.’ Of course it is, and that is precisely why it is sacrosanct.” 

“Edmund they could understand: it was a Bishop’s job to talk about God and Jesus, Heaven and Hell. That is what he appeared to be doing. Moreover, he represented two ideas still dear to the British heart: tradition and fair play for the underdog. His supporters consequently were not only traditionalists, nor even the bulk of the Catholic laity, but the Great British Public.” 

“Anyway, it is typical of Divine Providence. So that no human should take to himself the glory, what God has initiated through a saint He will bring to fruition through a crook.” Bishop Cocksedge (Forester's nominal adversary and secretly chosen successor)