INTRODUCTION

In 1978 when the apologists of the suspended French Archbishop Marcel Lefèbvre and the promoters of the Latin Missal of Pope St. Pius V (commonly known as the Tridentine Mass) had moved into top gear with the circulation of their material all around Australia, an ordered response did not come from the Australian Episcopal Conference, but was left to individual lay Catholics. The impact of the efforts of these apologists is largely neutralised by the blatant and massive disobedience they advocate which does not ride easily on Catholic shoulders. But their implantation of seeds of doubt however insignificant in the beginning, necessitates the admission that an appeal to Catholic obedience is insufficient, since doubt pertains to the realm of the intellect, of Faith, which happens to be a different virtue from obedience. Doubt must be eradicated with instruction in the Truth, with certainty and with Light, of which the Catholic Church is the guardian.
Now, 22 years later, we witness a steady trickle of young Australian men moving to the United States or to Europe to study at Una Voce seminaries: to be ordained exclusively in the Tridentine Rite, with the resolute exclusion of saying any Mass in the Novus Ordo Missae promulgated by His Holiness Pope Paul VI as a result of the liturgical changes that had been introduced by the Second Vatican Council.
Before one can hope to come to grips with the propaganda of bodies such as Una Voce and Latin Mass agglomerates, and with the suppression of Truth that is involved in such propaganda, it is necessary to untangle the minds that produce and artificially prolong the Una Voce phenomenon.
As an introduction to the most serious charges that can be levelled at Una Voce, we must first look at a few preliminary observations.

  1. There is the absurd situation that by far the great majority that comprises the trickle mentioned above does not know Latin, and never has known the Latin Tridentine Mass. This means at least two things.
    1. They cannot ‘love’ the Tridentine Mass, because no one can love what he does not know. They were ‘talked into’ using exclusively the Tridentine Mass. Which means their motives for rejecting Vatican II and the Novus Ordo Missae do not come from love of Latin but from a totally different source. And
    2. In order to understand the contents of the Latin Mass of the Day, these young men are forced to go to an English translation in order that they can say the Latin parrot-fashion in the hope that some of the English meanings may stay with them during the Mass. This is ludicrous. They may as well say the Mass in English.
  2. Our Blessed Lord faced the people of Jerusalem on His Cross on Calvary. He did not talk over His shoulder to tell His Mother “there is your son”, or the repentant thief: “Today you will be with Me in Paradise”. On Calvary He was the Priest as well as the altar and the Victim, offering to God the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Likewise, in the Cenacle when He instituted the Blessed Eucharist in the mystical separation of His Body and Blood, He faced as Priest His disciples. For centuries afterwards, priests and bishops did the same.
  3. The first Mass in the Cenacle was said in the vernacular. The language used was Aramaic. All the Masses the great St. Paul said were said in Greek, the same language used for ages in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. There is nothing wrong with a Mass said facing the people or saying It in the vernacular. One can only force the issue illegally and invalidly if one advances that Christ Himself was wrong.
  4. Archbishop Cranmer had a mother, but that did not prevent him from tearing England away from the Holy Catholic Church. No doubt Luther had a mother who had great hopes of him. The same remark. If this is remote, the next one occurred in our own lifetime. Archbishop Lefèbvre had a mother who no doubt was very proud of her son, but that did not prevent him causing a schism. Were all these mothers so mesmerised that they did not see the pitfalls their sons were heading for, taking millions with them?

We have now arrived at the most serious charges that can be levelled at Una Voce. By way of an introduction I will quote here the last bit of the most recent email I received from a Una Voce woman from America. She first contacted me in March this year, (2000) but her thoughts were so tangled up that there was no hope of sorting her out. When she got back to me last week the situation had gone from bad to worse, much worse!

“... By the way, Archbishop Lefèbvre asked a papal nuncio at Vatican II what had happened to the Kingship of Christ. That nuncio told him that it was no longer possible. The Archbishop had given his life working under the banner of Christ the King in Africa as a missionary. He was therefore rather shaken. The rejection of that papal teaching is why Catholic countries were ordered after the Second Vatican Council to abolish the old Catholic laws that upheld Christ’s Kingship. That is why I asked, in abandoning this teaching, did the theologians at Vatican II in effect reduce doctrine to the level of speculative theory? If so, how can the Holy Ghost safe-guard a pastoral council if He isn’t even safe-guarding doctrine?”

That this poor soul is utterly confused and has no idea what she is on about is putting it mildly. She fails to see that the question put by Archbishop Lefèbvre to the anonymous nuncio is unsustained by evidence and so that the whole thing is nothing but hearsay. It is being used to force acceptance by all ‘Catholics of goodwill’ into what abyss Vatican II has sunk by the invincible action of the ‘theologians’, an insurmountable obstacle to the Holy Spirit. The speeches and writings of their more prominent leaders are full of that sort of rubbish. They clutch at that type of scurrilous prattle as if it gives some kind of reassurance to their rejection of Vatican II. Yet her open and all too candid admission of the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit contained in her last line goes unnoticed, showing clearly that this is openly bandied about by Una Voce and - going by the above letter - not only by the leadership of this bankrupt organisation but also by the membership. This means it must lie at the root of this movement. For years it was the stand taken up by the promoters of Archbishop Lefèbvre who did know what they were doing in following the position of Archbishop Marcel Lefèbvre.

If this blasphemy lies at the root of Una Voce as a whole, it must lie at the root of its individuals and so at the root of its ‘ordinations’.

If questioned, some of these young candidates for the priesthood and the recently ordained priests themselves will of course deny that they have any problems either with Vatican II or the Novus Ordo or the Church and the Papacy who gave both of these to Catholics. With monotonous regularity (again, parrot-fashion) they will fall back on the Indult contained in Ecclesia Dei. But no papal indult can cover up, let alone forgive, a sin of which Our Blessed Lord Himself has said that it will not be forgiven either in this life or in the next, especially if it is secretly nurtured in an individual to support the reason for a sustained rejection of the Decrees of an Ecumenical Council. Thus Our Lord built in Sacred Scripture an insurmountable obstacle to this kind of dead faith and its supercillious, parrot-fashion expression for the protection of His faithful children. It is contained in the Letter of St. James ch. 2. But first an introductory line.

Like the Modernists, the Una Voce crowd also found a bypass around Vatican II which allows them to ignore that great Council with impunity, so they think.

This leads to the crux of the matter. To explain what I am driving at, I have to go to the Letter of St. James.
St. James wrote:

“This is the way to talk to people of that kind (who say they have faith but no good works to show for it): You say you have faith and I have good deeds. I show to you that I have faith by showing you my good deeds; now you prove to me that you have faith without any good deeds to show.”

So I say to these Una Voce priests:
I can show you that I have Faith by showing you my good works in relation to Vatican II, the Novus Ordo and the Papacy that gave all this to the Church. I wrote in defence of Vatican II many times. I go daily to a Novus Ordo Mass and have written extensively in defence of the Novus Ordo and the Popes that gave all this to us. In 1974 I have begged a fine Priest on his deathbed not to die at variance with Pope Paul VI over the Novus Ordo. I have never been found wanting in these practices.

Now you show me that you have faith in Vatican II, in the Novus Ordo Missae and in the Popes who imposed Vatican II and the Novus Ordo on the whole Church by even one good deed in direct relation to those three. You show me by even one good work that you accept Vatican II in toto, that you accept its changes in the liturgy (Novus Ordo) and that you accept the Pontiffs who imposed those two on us. Do not come and tell me that you have an Indult: my fight is not with the Latin Mass but with your good works or the absence of them in support or non-support of your faith. If you cannot quote even a single good work in support of Vatican II or the Novus Ordo, then I quote to you St. James again:

“Do realise, you senseless man, that faith without good works is DEAD!”

Without even a single good work to show, a Catholic’s faith in Vatican II, in the Novus Ordo, is dead. It does not exist. Your exclusive ‘faith’ in a papal indult will never revive a dead faith without good works. Will never forgive a doubt about the Holy Spirit. For the life of me I cannot even begin to envisage that God would call anyone to a dead-end ‘faith’. That God would call anyone to a priesthood at the root of which is found a dead faith. The upshot is then that you, young men, gave yourself a vocation. That you worked your own way up to the priesthood if you were not called by God. Your name may have been called by the bishop, but if you have no faith in Vatican II or in the Novus Ordo, or in the Popes who gave all that incredibly rich material to the Church, you were not called by God.

The whole Latin Mass movement has no substance. For that reason the Holy Father did not think the issue important enough to risk the loss of one’s eternity on it. So he hauled them back on board by giving in to their demand. Otherwise many of them would not have come. But that does not mean that, if at the root of these people’s internal forum there still lies a disbelief or a doubt about the power of the Holy Spirit to guide an Ecumenical Council to its foolproof end, then this hauling back on the Barque of St. Peter does not cover or forgive this individual sin. The Tridentine Mass can only be said safely and validly:

  1. if by their good works these priests show to the satisfaction of St. James and the whole Church that they have a lively Faith in all the Decrees of Vatican II and accept unreservedly the Novus Ordo as coming from the bosom of the Church, and
  2. have received sacramental forgiveness for any blasphemy of the Holy Spirit in relation to these 3 vital points. Otherwise this blasphemy will be a severe impediment to the validity of any ordination.

The 1978 Australian Scene

When in 1969 Pope Paul VI gave to the Catholic Church the Novus Ordo Missae with his Bull Missale Romanum, he implemented the changes in the Liturgy requested by the Second Vatican Council. As with all things new: the changes were not immediately understood, and so they received a mixed reception.

One of the results of the change was the necessity to set aside Papal Bulls which had laid down rules for the Church’s liturgy up until that time. The most important one of these was the bull Quo Primum, by which his holiness Pope St. Pius V, in 1570, had codified the Mass liturgy for the Western Church, as requested by the Council of Trent. At that time, the Liturgy of the Catholic Church was by no means uniform. We must not forget that the great majority of the 40 Holy English, Scottish and Welsh Martyrs did not die for what may finally have become known, even in England, as the Tridentine Rite around the turn of the century, (1600): more than 70 years after the deaths of Sts. Thomas More and John Fisher. Most of these 40 Holy Martyrs died for the old Sarum Rite which, until the late establisment of the Tridentine Rite in England, was the Mass format used in England.

One of the earliest reactions against Missale Romanum and the Novus Ordo it introduced, was the opinion that the bull Quo Primum of Pope St. Pius V, by which the Sarum Mass was derogated to be followed by the Tridentine Rite, could not be set aside. This means that we do not need much imagination to realise that some of the relatives and friends of the 40 Holy Martyrs could quite well have had the same feelings towards Pope St. Pius V for suppressing the very Mass format for which the Forty had given their lives as are now being directed towards Pope Paul for having derogated the Tridentine Rite.

May, therefore, these glorious Martyrs sustain all of us who at the present moment have difficulty accepting Pope Paul VI’s decision, as no doubt they helped their own contemporaries to accept the verdict of Pope St. Pius V.

For people who have kept a close watch on the beginnings of this movement, it is not difficult to supply this certainty and instruction. It is for this reason that I have accepted an invitation by the President of the John XXIII Fellowship to write a more detailed refutation of the claims and statements made by the Tridentine Mass promoters, especially in their recently circulated material. Their statements and claims cover four very clearly distinct areas:

In each of these areas the ‘Tridentiners’ (for short) use faulty and gravely erroneous argumentation which I will endeavour to bring out, to be followed by what I consider, and the experts I consulted with me, to be the correct teaching.

Finally, before we will have a closer look at their faulty arguments from History, it will be instructive to familiarise ourselves with the very early beginnings of this movement. This will help us to resist the temptation of becoming over-awed by the avalanche of material they have produced to substantiate their case.

That initially the Latin Mass Movement did not directly dispute the authority of Pope Paul VI, nor objected to the Novus Ordo itself, is made abundantly clear to anyone who reads the account of events from which all members of this movement take their cue and their lead:

There is no escape: no matter how hard they tried in subsequent years to make it appear that the inner force of the movement is based on internal criticism of the Novus Ordo and of Vatican II, followed by serious attacks on the Holy Father and the Vatican itself: historically it is beyond dispute that the whole movement is based on one thing and one thing only: their totally mistaken idea that the bull Quo Primum of Pope St. Pius V could not be set aside by Pope Paul VI. This mistake is the sole basis of the earliest origin of the whole controversy. Therefore, for a start of our rebuttal, it is sufficient to know that the earliest article of Abbé de Nantes: “Forbidding the Holy Roman Mass” (CRC June 1970) deals primarily with the question of the inviolability of Quo Primum and related matters. Even if in later developments much weight was attached to the theological criticism of Card. Ottaviani, in this earliest article the ‘Ottaviani Intervention’ only received no more than a brief mention. So sure were the earliest critics of Pope Paul VI that the whole question hinged around the inviolability of Quo Primum. It was a sad day for the modern Church that, when they became aware of their mistake, these people persisted in their rebellion, showing conclusively that far more was involved than the question of a new liturgy, a new Mass format.

 

PART I: ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY

There is a proper way and a misleading way to bring out facts from history to prove one’s case. The ‘Tridentiners’ make much use of historica1 facts to show the strength of their resistance, but the validity of this resistance receives its first severe set-back if it can be shown that their argumentation from history is faulty. Let us analyse some of the facts they bring up.

This is historically untenable, but since this question cannot be satisfactorily dealt with from a purely historical approach, since it touches on Catholic Faith, it is bettor left for consideration till the next Section under the heading Argument from Tradition.

This too could be refuted from a proper historical consideration, but since this question also touches on Catholic Faith it is better left until the next Section which deals with Catholic Tradition.

Neither the Holy Father nor the Novus Ordo may be declared bad just because there are abuses in the Church. For if the Holy Father happens to be a saint in reality, and if the Novus Ordo proves in reality to be the continuation of the Perpetual Sacrifice of the New Covenant, then the evils in the Church must have other causes, which of course they have. The worth of the Holy Father and the nature of the Novus Ordo are to be established on their own proper evidence before anything can be linked with them in a cause-effect relationship. Both history and logic demand scrupulous adherence to this.

  1. Pope Paul VI is not the first Pope in history who made changes to the ‘immutable code’ of his predecessors; he is not even the first Pope who made changes to the bull Quo Primum. (See the next Section: Argument From Tradition).
  2. Cardinal Ottaviani made a genuine declaration of acceptance of the Novus Ordo. (See Newsletter of the International Catholic Priests Association., Vol. VI, No.1, p. 44, where the author of “A Criticism of ‘CHANGES IN THE MASS’” ( a criticism of a book by Michael Davies) quotes the authority of Archbishop Robert Dwyer, 1976).
  3. There is unquestionable historicity of the Canons in use (except the 4th one).
  4. Twice by letters written in his own handwriting, the Holy Father has disclaimed all rumours ‘that he is a captive’, ‘that he is drugged’, ‘that he would be a plastic pope’, etc. From these letters by the Holy Pontiff to Archbishop Marcel Lefèbvre, it has become a fact of history that the Holy Father affirms with all the authority of the Supreme Pontiff, that the measures promulgated by him in application of the Decrees of Vatican II in the sphere of liturgy and discipline, must be considered as being of a doctrinal character and thus that the living Magisterium of the Church is intimately involved in this whole matter. To reject the New Mass Liturgy - as Archbishop Lefèbvre does - is to call into question not only the authoritative teaching of the Church, but also the work of the Holy Spirit in preserving a genuine Council of the whole Church against error and human interference. These are essentially matters of Faith. It is for this reason that a much better case can be made against the ‘Tridentiners’ with an Argumentation from Tradition, which will be considered now.