The Mass that Made So Many Saints! We need it today more than ever!

Mother of the innocent babies in the womb, pray for us.

As a preamble to this post, let me say that the election of Donald Trump is not a cause for 

dancing in the streets. At the same time he won big in Montana with a 60-40% victory, a constitutional amendment (initiative 128) to allow abortion passed by the same margin. While the right is unlimited before viability, it appears to be restricted after. It isn’t! The amendment used the same wording as Roe v. Wade and its companion decision Doe v. Bolton which essentially allowed abortion up to birth. There is little to celebrate today. I voted for Donald Trump because I believe a Harris administration would be so much worse, but I see his election as a temporary reprieve giving us time to repent and convert. A country that kills it's own children has no future. Our imperative now is to pray for God's grace of conversion and to beg His mercy through the intercession of the Blessed Mother.

There's a mistaken notion out there that the Traditional Latin Mass only came into being during the papacy of Pius V. It's not true and those who have swallowed the error need to rethink! While the Latin Mass was codified in 1570 by the pope, it is much older than that. The reason Pope Pius V codified the Mass at that time was -- Can you guess? It's not too difficult -- the Protestant Revolution. 

Many of the revolutionaries were introducing novelties into the Mass as they attempted to convince Catholics to apostasize. What happened in England is only one example as Elizabeth gutted the liturgy and demanded her subjects attend or be fined, persecuted, and even executed. By her order, the minister faced the people. Think of that when you consider how the Novus Ordo turned the priest away from liturgical East. Instead of the priest leading the people toward God as a shepherd leads the flock, the image of the priest as host of the meal presiding over the feast took its place.

The reality is quite different from the popular misconception. Elements of the Traditional Mass developed very early following the death of Christ. Think of His words at the Last Supper transforming simple bread and wine into His real presence - Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. The Roman Canon (First Eucharistic Prayer in the Novus Ordo) was developed in the 300s and remained virtually unchanged until Vatican II introduced a myriad of alternatives. The least orthodox and shortest is the one most Catholics hear on a regular basis.

St. Gregory the Great reformed the Roman Missal at the end of the 6th century in line with Sacred Tradition and, except in minor details, the liturgy remained the same until Vatican II. Liturgical scholar, Adrian Fortescue, wrote in 1912, "From roughly the time of [Pope] St. Gregory [the Great, d. 604] we have the text of the Mass, its order and arrangement, as a sacred tradition that no one has ventured to touch except in unimportant details."

The canard that the Traditional Latin Mass only came into being in 1570 is completely false. As Fortescue points out:

From, roughly, the time of St. Gregory we have the text of the Mass, its order and arrangement, as a sacred tradition that no one has ventured to touch except in unimportant details....Essentially, the Missal of Pius V is the Gregorian Sacramentary; that again is formed from the Gelasian book, which depends on the Leonine collection. We find the prayers of our Canon in the treatise De Sacramentis [of St. Ambrose, c. 340-397] and allusions to it in the IVth century. So our Mass goes back, without essential change, to the age when it first developed out of the oldest liturgy of all. [Read more about the ancient Mass and its history and development here.]

So why the insistence that the Mass only came into being with Pope Pius V in 1570? Let me make a guess. Emphasizing the Mass was malleable in its essence for centuries fit the agenda of the modernists. Convince Catholics that drastic changes weren't a novelty; they'd happened before - in fact, for 1500 years. That set the stage for radical changes following Vatican II with the development of the Novus Ordo. Don't get your panties in a bunch, all these liturgical novelties and abuses are normal. 

More and more evidence is coming out that Annibale Bugnini, who spearheaded the commission that gutted the liturgy, not only wanted to make the Mass more agreeable to Protestants, but was, in fact, a Mason advancing the masonic goal of destroying the Church. Fr. Charles Murr in his book, Murder in the 33rd Degree, provides evidence of the Bugnini/Masonic connection. The truth is likely buried in the Vatican archives. But the result is obvious. 

In effect, Bugnini did the same things to the liturgy that the Protestant revolutionaries did in the 16th century. 

Where do we go from here? My husband and I have chosen a return to Tradition. It's been a good decision for us. We can only follow our own consciences in accordance with the lights we receive from the Holy Spirit and then share with others. Every Sunday and holy day we rejoice in the return to tradition where we can keep the Lord's day holy without a horde of laity on the altar, pabulum from the pulpit, guitars and drums, and the possibility of even worse. We fear the possibility of an accident on the road when we travel than the possibility we will be exposed to liturgical abuse when we attend Mass. We try not to be away from our home chapel on Sunday now. 

May we all be enlightened in our pursuit of the truth.

Holy Spirit, guide us.

Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom, pray for us.