In the summer of 1980 the late Pope John Paul ll authorized the then Congregation for the Sacraments and Divine Worship to conduct a consultation with the heads of all Latin rite dioceses around the world. The Congregation, at that time headed by Australian Cardinal James R. Knox, put two principal questions to the bishops. The first concerned use of the Latin language in the post-Vatican II revised liturgy. The second was on the situation of the clergy and lay faithful who were still demanding celebrations of the Tridentine Rite that predated the reform.

The results of that survey – to which more than three-quarters of the 2,317 bishops responded – were published in December 1981 in the Congregation’s periodical, Notitiae. Traditionalists were immediately alarmed when the consultation indicated that Latin was “more and more tending to disappear” from the Mass, because – as the bishops reported – most Catholics in their dioceses did not want it.

“The great majority (83.82 per cent) of the responses affirm that there does not exist any request for the use of Latin in the liturgy,” the 22-page report said. And on the question of making greater allowance for use of the old rite, less than 1.5 per cent of the bishops said that their priests and people were in favour. “The rest of the episcopate (equivalent to 98.68 per cent) considers the problem resolved, in the sense that the … Tridentine Rite is by now outdated,” the report said. It indicated that many of the bishops were also “decisively opposed to an eventual concession” for use of the Old Rite because it would “create more problems than it aimed to resolve”.

The “problems” that were at the forefront of the bishops’ minds were how to deal with traditionalist groups inspired by the suspended French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, founder of the Society of St Pius X (SSPX). In the light of the Vatican’s recent overtures towards the current SSPX leadership, the concluding lines of the 1981 report in Notitiae now seem prescient. “According to the bishops, the spirit that has been created in these groups leads one to think that an eventual concession to use the Tridentine Rite would mark the beginning… of an attitude of defiance towards all that was established by the Second Vatican Council.”

The report on the episcopal consultation pushed the SSPX even further to the fringes. But in July 1982 things took a decisive turn when Pope John Paul designated Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the newly arrived Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to hold the Holy See’s first discussions in years with Archbishop Lefebvre. Talks had broken down in 1976 after Pope Paul VI suspended the archbishop from celebrating the sacraments after he illicitly ordained a group of priests. That same year, Paul VI had said to the Consistory held in May: “The adoption of the new ‘Ordo Missae’ is certainly not left to the discretion of priests or the faithful: and the Instruction of 14 June 1971 provided for the celebration of the Mass in the old form, with the authorisation of the ordinary, only for elderly or infirm priests, who offer the Divine Sacrifice sine populo [without a congregation]. The new “Ordo” was promulgated in order to take the place of the older one, after mature deliberation, following the requests of Vatican Council II.” Pope Paul and his most senior advisers seemed keen to isolate Lefebvre, while the rebel archbishop, in turn, accused the Pope of heresy and said there was no way he could reconcile his group to the developments that came from Vatican II.

For six years, until the meetings with Cardinal Ratzinger, things were at a stalemate. But as early as 1977 Lefebvre believed that the cardinal, then Archbishop of Munich and Freising, could be of help. Just days after the cardinal got his red hat, Italian journalist and author Giancarlo Zizola interviewed Lefebvre. He recalled that conversation on 8 February this year in Il Sole 24 Ore. “‘The newly created Cardinal Ratzinger’, Lefebvre assured me confidently, ‘hopes to intervene with the Pope to find a solution’,” Zizola wrote.

In an address in Long Island, New York, in November 1983, Archbishop Lefebvre named Cardinal Ratzinger among those he considered to be his most sympathetic allies in the Vatican. The other two were Cardinal Silvio Oddi, Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, and Cardinal Pietro Palazzini, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. “There is a true struggle going on in Rome between the few traditionalist cardinals” – Lefebvre said in that 1983 address – “Cardinal Oddi, Cardinal Ratzinger [and] Cardinal Pallazzini, on the one side, and all the progressive cardinals on the other.”

The Curia officials he believed to be “modernists” included Cardinals Agostino Casaroli [Secretary of State], Eduardo Pironio [Prefect of the then Congregation of Religious and Secular Institutes] and Sebastiano Baggio [Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops]; as well as “all those who are in the Congregation for Worship”.

The traditionalists evidently had more sway with Pope John Paul than the “modernists” because, less than a year after Archbishop Lefebvre gave his talk in New York, the Vatican issued a circular letter entitled “Quattuor abhinc annos” (“Four years ago”). This 1984 document totally rejected the views on the Latin Rite that bishops had expressed in the 1980 consultations – specifically their recommendation that Rome make no concession for a return to the old Mass. Instead, the new circular letter granted an “indult”, under certain conditions, for the celebration of the sixteenth-century Mass of Pius V (1962 edition), which the SSPX was already using. The irony was that this document was issued by the newly re-named Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments, at that point headed by German Cardinal Augustin Mayer OSB.

Strangely, the letter began with the admission that “four years ago” the Congregation’s consultation had taken place and it “appeared that the problem of priests and faithful holding to the so-called ‘Tridentine’ rite was almost completely solved”. But in the very next line, the text contradicted the findings with these words: “Since, however, the same problem continues, the Supreme Pontiff grants to diocesan bishops the possibility of using an indult.” Sources that worked in the Roman Curia at the time told The Tablet that the contradictory wording was not a mistake. Cardinal Mayer’s congregation was actually opposed to the indult, but “there were heads of other Congregations that insisted on it”. Pope John Paul and some of his advisers hoped Lefebvre would see the 1984 indult as an overture by Rome, which accepted his group’s use of the Old Rite in exchange for its willingness to accept developments from the Council. But the indult only emboldened Archbishop Lefebvre – now an international symbol for Catholics opposed to the New Mass and other key Vatican II reforms – to increase his demands that Rome “return to the ‘Tradition’”.

If the indult left Archbishop Lefebvre dissatisfied, it baffled and even angered many more mainstream bishops. They repeated the warning they had made in the 1980 consultation that a concession to use the Old Mass would only be the beginning of a re-questioning of “all that was established” by Vatican II. Meanwhile, traditionalist Catholics, especially from the United States and France, sent angry letters to Rome, complaining that their bishops were making it almost impossible for priests to avail themselves of the indult.

Questioned by Roman authorities, the bishops simply replied that those requesting the Old Mass did not fulfil the necessary requirement set down in the 1984 letter. It was a matter of the individual bishop’s judgement. After all, the local ordinaries remained moderators of the liturgy in their own dioceses. Those in the Roman Curia who were insistent on preserving the Tridentine Rite had only one option – they had to find a way to remove the matter from the bishops’ competence. This could be done if they could prove that the Old Rite had never been abrogated or suppressed.

Traditionalists had already used the argument forcefully when the reformed rite was gradually being implemented between 1969 and 1971. But both the Secretary of State and the Congregation for Divine Worship said it was Pope Paul VI’s specific intention that the new rite would replace the old, even if only gradually. And the 1917 Code of Canon Law, still in effect at the time, also stated that “a later law abrogates, or derogates, an earlier law if it states so expressly, is directly contrary to it, or completely re-orders the entire material of the earlier law”. Paul VI’s liturgical reform, they said, was such an entire re-ordering.

As the final sentence of the Pope’s apostolic constitution, Missale Romanum, made clear: “It is our will that these decisions and ordinances should be firm and effective now and in the future, notwithstanding any Constitutions and Apostolic Ordinances made by our predecessors, and all other decrees including those deserving special mention, no matter of what kind.” But these assertions were put under scrutiny in 198 when Pope John Paul set up an ad hoc commission to find out ways to “remove the inefficiency” of the 1984 indult. scrutiny in 1986 when Pope John Paul set up an ad hoc commission of nine cardinals to find ways to “remove the inefficiency” of the 1984 indult. The members of that commission included Cardinals Joseph Ratzinger (CDF), Augustin Mayer OSB (Worship), Josef Tomko (Propaganda Fide), Agostino Casaroli (Secretary of State), Bernardin Gantin (Bishops), Pietro Palazzini (Saints), Antonio Innocenti (Clergy), Silvio Oddi (emeritus of Clergy) and Alfons Maria Stickler SDB (Vatican Library).

Cardinals Tomko, Mayer and Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI, of course) are the only members of the commission who are still alive.

The results of the commission were never officially published, but Cardinal Stickler told an American audience in 1995 that eight of the nine cardinals believed that the Tridentine Mass had never been suppressed. He said the Pope was set to announce such a statement in a papal decree but some of the national epis- copal conferences objected, saying that it “should absolutely not be allowed because it would be the occasion or cause of controversy in the People of God … and so on”.

Last October the current head of the “Ecclesia Dei” Commission – Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos – shed more light on what happened in that ad hoc commission of cardinals. In a brief paper posted on the website of the Congregation of the Clergy, which he headed between 1996 and 2006, the Colombian cardinal quoted from the com- mission’s never-published report. What emerges is the commission’s concern that the post-Vatican II liturgical reform was being undermined by “scandalous arbitrary actions” and “creativity” that had produced “Wild Mass and other desecrations”; its insistence that bishops be more generous in allowing for the Tridentine Mass; and its resolve that Latin “should not and must not disappear from the Church” (the text never acknowledged that this was not principally an issue since Latin was and still is the first language of the new rite).

Finally, Cardinal Castrillón noted that the 1986 commission “proposed” that Pope John Paul definitively proclaim that both the old and new missals were “not to be considered other than the development of the one from the other, since liturgical norms, not being true and proper ‘laws’, cannot be abrogated, but are ‘surrogated’ – the earlier into the latter”. A year after the ad hoc commission of cardinals met, Archbishop Lefebvre returned to Rome for another meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger. He told the CDF prefect that he was intent on ordaining at least one new bishop in order to assure episcopal oversight of the SSPX after his death. After fruitless efforts to dissuade him, Lefebvre ordained four bishops against Pope John Paul’s orders. The Congregation for Bishops issued a decree saying that the SSPX leader and those involved in the illicit ordinations had incurred automatic excommunication (latae sententiae).

But in its decree ratifying the excommunications, the Vatican established the Pontifical Commission “Ecclesia Dei”. Some in Rome never abandoned the hope that the SSPX might return to full communion, a hope that was strengthened with the election of Benedict XVI. He has now lifted the excommunications that his predecessor placed on the four bishops whom Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated in 1988. The Vatican has insisted that they will not be readmitted to full communion or ministry within the Catholic Church until they give “full recognition” to the Second Vatican Council. But this will entail “examining out- standing questions” that led them to reject much of the Council in the first place.

In an interview in March 2008 with L’Osservatore Romano, Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos hinted that it might all be just a matter of interpretation. “The biggest difficulties,” he said, “are of an interpretative nature or even have to do with some gestures on an ecumenical level, but not the doctrine of Vatican II.” He claimed that “different interpretative discussions on the conciliar texts” could take place “with groups that return to full communion”. Maybe all those bishops who were consulted back in 1980 were mistaken. Perhaps the “concession to use the Tridentine Rite” did not mark the beginning of “an attitude of defiance towards all that was established by the Second Vatican Council” … just its re-interpretation.

Robert Mickens

Reprinted with permission from The Tablet