Quo Primum
Pope St. Pius V.
On occasion of the Feast of St. Pius V, you may want to feast your eyes on Quo Primum, the Apostolic Constitution with which the great, great, great Pope Saint Pius V promulgated his Missal in 1570 and established its ambit of application.
We specifically command each and every patriarch, administrator, and all other persons or whatever ecclesiastical dignity they may be, be they even cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, or possessed of any other rank or pre-eminence, and We order them in virtue of holy obedience to chant or to read the Mass according to the rite and manner and norm herewith laid down by Us and, hereafter, to discontinue and completely discard all other rubrics and rites of other missals, however ancient, which they have customarily followed; and they must not in celebrating Mass presume to introduce any ceremonies or recite any prayers other than those contained in this Missal.
Pope Saint Pius V apparently didn’t do “encouragement” much. He doesn’t suggest, he commands. The language is brutally frank: the priest “must not presume”, other rubrics and rites are to be “completely discarded”.
We grant and concede in perpetuity that, for the chanting or reading of the Mass in any church whatsoever, this Missal is hereafter to be followed absolutely, without any scruple of conscience or fear of incurring any penalty, judgment, or censure, and may freely and lawfully be used. Nor are superiors, administrators, canons, chaplains, and other secular priests, or religious, of whatever title designated, obliged to celebrate the Mass otherwise than as enjoined by Us. We likewise declare and ordain that no one whosoever is forced or coerced to alter this Missal, and that this present document cannot be revoked or modified, but remain always valid and retain its full force notwithstanding the previous constitutions and decrees of the Holy See, as well as any general or special constitutions or edicts of provincial or synodal councils, and notwithstanding the practice and custom of the aforesaid churches, established by long and immemorial prescription – except, however, if more than two hundred years’ standing.
Note here how the Pope protects not only the Liturgy from bad priests, but the priests from bad bishops: No one can be forced or coerced to alter the missal. Also note the extremely strong words: this present document cannot be revoked or modified. Don’t ask me what I think this great Pope would think of the liturgical reforms of the Sixties…
We decree that, after We publish this constitution and the edition of the Missal, the priests of the Roman Curia are, after thirty days, obliged to chant or read the Mass according to it; all others south of the Alps, after three months; and those beyond the Alps either within six months or whenever the Missal is available for sale. Wherefore, in order that the Missal be preserved incorrupt throughout the whole world and kept free of flaws and errors, the penalty for nonobservance for printers, whether mediately or immediately subject to Our dominion, and that of the Holy Roman Church, will be the forfeiting of their books and a fine of one hundred gold ducats, payable ipso facto to the Apostolic Treasury
Splendid again: a very short time for the implementation of the new Missal, after it has become available. Similarly, the immediate threat of hefty fines for the transgressors.
Spot the differences with Summorum Pontificum…
Mundabor
Posted on April 30, 2012, in Catholicism, Good Shepherds and tagged Conservative Catholic, conservative catholicism, Quo Primum, St. Pius V. Bookmark the permalink. 15 Comments.
” … this present document cannot be revoked or modified”.
What was the weasel reasoning used by the Revolutionaries to do just that?
This is a fascinating question…
I have read somewhere someone persuaded himself (and the others) as long as they don’t touch the consecration formula then St. Pius V would be fine with it.
After reading Quo Primum I can’t say I agree.
Methinks, when the “Conciliar Fahers” died there was great weeping and gnashing of teeth…
M
Also, I remember that they said that one Pope cannot bind another.
Ben, the problem to me is not a matter of heresy, but of opportunity. One can go to hell without being openly heretical, and I have the impression many clergymen manage to do it without any problem…
M
Mudabor, is it worth pointing out that QP was ‘violated’ repeatedly from 1604 before being consigned to utter oblivion by your hero Pacelli?
Ben,
It is not a matter whether it is worth, it is a matter whether it is pertinent. Small, organic modifications had taken place regularly since Pius V time and no one would – though the 1955 one were more controversial, they say; I didn’t find anything tragic in them; I think the fact Bugnini worked on them gave them a reputation they did not deserve – have had much to say against them. It was, in fact, always understood these small, organic changes were quite in the spirit of Pius V reform.
Quite different is, of course, the rape of the liturgy perpetrated by V II.
I was glad to read of Pius XII as “my hero”. He certainly is.
M
M – Pius XII proposed in Mediator Dei the novel principle that the Popes could do whatever seemed fitting to them in relation to the liturgy. In the following few years, under his patronage and active encouragement, the entire groundplan for the Novus Ordo project was laid out in its entirety, in the face of mounting consternation among the “organic development” tendency whose objections he overruled. Montini was the fall-guy, left holding the parcel when the music stopped. This is all firmly in the public domain, but Tradworld simply can’t assimilate it.
Very funny, Ben (Donald), but so wrong.
Please expand, citing from the text, where you think the Pope said he can “do whatever seems fitting to him”.
As to the Novus Ordo, it is no secret some people worked at the subversion of the liturgy during the Pope’s life, and you see some echoes of this in the same encyclical you mention. But this does not mean in the least he approved of it. The contrary is the case. You should read Archbishop Lefebvre’s “open letter to confused Catholics” to have no doubt whatsoever until the very beginning of V II there was no talk of liturgical subversion at all; not only because of veterum sapientia, but of all of the preparatory work, to which Lefebvre himself participated.
This is plain to see for everyone who can discern the meaning and context of a papal document, but Libworld just can’t get it.
M
V II invented an entirely new liturgy: it isn’t the ancient Roman Rite but a copy of Cranmer’s meal service. It’s Protestant in tone and content and intent.
M – I’m not a “liberal” nor a progressive, so tu quoque along those lines exerts no traction at all. To reassure you a little, I do in fact regard Lefebvre as a heroic and wholly admirable figure and I’m familiar with his work, including the little book you mention; I am not, however, a Roman Catholic, and I’m not therefore “confused” by partisan attachment to any narrative other than the cold historical record.
Lefebvre was involved in the preparatory schema on Missions, if I remember correctly; he himself admitted that his work in Africa had kept him thoroughly insulated from the liturgical agendas and fashionable theories circulating among European ecclesiastical elites. He had no idea what Pius’s commission had been cooking up throughout the course of the ’50s, but that certainly doesn’t make him unique. Few beyond the rarified circles of liturgical scholarship were aware of the tectonic plates shifting beneath them, which is why Mediator Dei (like Sacrosanctum Concilium, also drafted under Pacelli in anticipation of an immanent Council, and , significantly, the only schema to have been adopted intact) seemed so reassuringly conservative at the time. Only with hindsight is it possible to identify the bits of it that really mattered – namely, what Dr. Geoffrey Hull described so aptly as the “Pandora’s box” of para 49. We could debate the historical untruthfulness of the principal asserted there, but in any case it blows clean out of the water any kind of appeal to Quo Primum.
As I mentioned above, the entire “groundplan” for the NO was fully developed in extraordinary detail under the active patronage of Pope Pacelli (do you really suppose an enterprise of that magnitude sprang into existence in the four years following the Council?) at a series of conferences between 1949 and 1955. Their deliberations are, as I also mentioned, a matter of public record, and you really ought to familiarise yourself with them. Present as the Pope’s personal representative, reporting directly to him, was Archbishop Montini. The closing Mass at Lugano was celebrated versus populo by none other than Cardinal Ottaviani. In subsequent years, prior to the ascension of John XXIII ( a liturgical conservative) details of the project were selectively leaked in a variety of popular publications (e.g. “The Mass of the Future”) designed to prepare the educated laity for what was to follow in due course. The reconstructed Triduum was a “dummy run”, and such egregious novelties as the Bea Psalter and the Dialogue Mass strategic stepping stones.
The greatest weakness of the Traditional movement is in this resistance to moving beyond the critique established in the first wave of reaction to “the changes” (by such figures as ABL and Michael Davies, whom I knew and admired), to take account of information uncovered subsequently. The fact is that the overwhelming majority of those responsible for the debacle were not “modernists” at all, formally or materially, but loyal and devoted Roman Catholics, whose ultramontanist instincts led them to believe that no Papally-instigated revolution could fail, being underwritten by “Peter”. It’s worse than a mere intellectual failure; insofar as the truth is rejected or ignored because it threatens to overturn cherished myths or to unravel dualistic comfort-blankets it’s a moral failure as well.
Ben, you can write too much, but you are still entirely wrong, and were not able to support your argument from the very document you had mentioned.
Do yourself a favour and read the encyclical you mentioned (I did, in its entirety) to see how tragically wrong you are.
If you want to talk about Catholicism, you should know what you are talking about rather than thinking the planet hasn’t noticed because it is not as smart as you are.
M
Benedict – VII opened the tap to something that had already been in the pipeline for over a decade. The ‘tap’ itself (Sacrosanctum Concilium) was had been constructed several years earlier, in anticipation. Most of the Council fathers were ignorant of the fact, but there’s no excuse for that today.
Sorry, wrong again.
If you refer to underlying tendencies, to heretic tendencies which were beneath the surface and waiting to be able to emerge, well of course they were there! They had been there for the last 60-70 years at least! The Pastor Angelicus himself was well aware of them! This was also not such an extraordinary phenomenon: the Church is vast, and black sheep are never very far away. In fact, a good number of heresies have been initiated by religious, like the heresy of Luther.
The BIG mistake is to confuse what happens beneath the surface (there’s always something happening: Ecclesia semper reformanda) with what is wanted at the top. At the top, it can be safely said Pope Pius XII was entirely orthodox liturgically as well as otherwise; Pope John XXIII was rather conservative, but still with ideas of perestroika and, most importantly, not assertive enough with the bishops who started to feel emboldened; Paul Paul VI was, as we all know, an unmitigated disaster.
Only the most warped reading of the life and work of Pius XII can let you believe Pius XII opened any “tap” whatsoever to the explosion of questionable theology, or open heresy. Again, the planet hasn’t noticed until now, and I doubt it will change its mind now.
M
M – You don’t have to be “smart”. All that’s required is a passing familiarity with some of the decent, respectable, non-partisan scholarly studies of the pre-Conciliar Liturgical Movement and its relationship with the Magisterium of Pius XII, published in the last decade or so. I’m not going to press you on your own familiarity with the material – I’m assuming it has come in below your radar.
Now – Mediator Dei. I pointed you earlier in the direction of the notorious “turnkey” paragraph No. 49 (the ‘Pandora’s Box’ and the bit that also renders any kind of appeal to Quo Primum, the subject of this post, entirely void) but the significance of it has escaped you. Here it is in full:
“From time immemorial the ecclesiastical hierarchy has exercised this right in matters liturgical. It has organized and regulated divine worship, enriching it constantly with new splendour and beauty, to the glory of God and the spiritual profit of Christians. What is more, it has not been slow – keeping the substance of the Mass and sacraments carefully intact – to modify what it deemed not altogether fitting, and to add what appeared more likely to increase the honour paid to Jesus Christ and the august Trinity, and to instruct and stimulate the Christian people to greater advantage.”
In the first place, with hindsight it’s obvious that this is the meat and potatoes – the point and purpose at the centre of the Encyclical; everything else being contingent or rhetorical. But more to the point, it establishes its principle of intent on the basis of a statement which is the diametric opposite of the truth, historically – because in fact, “slow”- ness and extreme circumspection had always, until the 20th century, characterised the”ecclesiastical hierarchy’s” attitude to interfering with the liturgical texts and rubrics received from antiquity. Moreover, no hierarch at any point earlier than the High Middle Ages, anywhere other than in Western Europe, would ever have dreamt of attempting to isolate the sacramental “substance” from the liturgical “accidents”, in order to play fast and loose with the latter.
So there you have it – unprecedented subordination of the objective Tradition to Papal authority on the basis of a misrepresentation of historical fact, coupled with a reductionist sacramental theology that renders everything but bare “substance” provisional and contingent: ultramontanist ecclesiology and debased scholastic theology – this is the two-humped camel “Traditionalism” cheerfully swallows while straining at the Modernist gnat. This is what made the Novus Ordo debacle not only possible, but inevitable. This is precisely what you remain committed to restoring. You are not therefore “Traditionalists” at all – merely reactionary conservatives who, like the ancien regime, famously, have “forgotten nothing and learned nothing”.
So what followed? Briefly:
1951 – the Holy Week reform and the Maria Laach Conference.
1952 – the Mont Saint-Odile Conference
1953 – the Lugano Conference
1954 – the Mont-Cesar Conference
- by the end of which a detailed “groundplan” for the Novus Ordo and a programme for rolling it out, has been worked out in its entirety under the supervision the Holy See (viz. Alcuin Read, ‘The Organic Development of the Liturgy” pp. 138-274). Don’t take my word for it. Go to the material yourself. No one has anything to fear from the truth; willful refusal of it, in the interests of sustaining one’s prejudices and self-serving narratives, helps no-one and nothing.
Oh for heaven’s sake, stop this nonsense!
instead of selectively reading some lines you proceed to distort showing a huge ignorance of Catholicism, why don’t you read the letter in its context…
Try ALSO paragraphs 7,8,57,59,82,83,109,110,114,182,184,189,193 and 195, for a start.
And please stop abusing my patience with this garbage.
M