The first modern-day papal liturgical reformer, Pius X, 1903 to 1914, is claimed by later reformers as one of their own. But it’s truly an afterthought for them because his ideas and theirs were worlds apart.

Or drifted that way. Indeed, this Pius was more in the mold of Pius V (1566-1572), who wound down a council, of Trent, or Tridentum, 1545-1563, and followed through on its edicts and findings with the mass called Tridentine.

This 5th Pius curiously has this in common with his successor-reformer of four centuries later, Paul VI, who followed through on a council he also had not convened with a new mass, “Novus Ordo,” with radically new script and stage directions.

The two masses endure, the first as barely tolerated (by never-Tridentiners among higher clergy and arguably the recently deceased pope) or lovingly cherished (by traditionalists, or “traddies” as some call themselves — whereby hangs a dramatic tale.

To these latter this book is mainly aimed, they being a hard core (corps, you might say) of worshipers and increasing numbers of the religiously curious, a curiously growing bunch. (See Western Canada millennials in this 11/30/2018 Crisis Mag piece)

As for the the new mass, it has been offered for much of its life on pretty much a take it-or-leave-it basis, illegal at first — with an endearing exception — and restored in stages by two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. It remains a minority experience, however.

Dom Prosper Guéranger OSB and Pope (St.) Pius X were at the origin of the Liturgical Movement in the early 1900s, working towards “renewal of fervor for the liturgy” among clergy and faithful.

Promoters of the New Order (Novus Ordo) of the Mass say that’s where the new Mass got its start. Not so, wrote Fr. Didier Bonneterre in his 1980 book, The Liturgical Movement: Gueranger to Beauduin to Bugnini, Roots, Radicals Results.

The fact is, said Bonneterre in a detailed, fascinating, aggressively partisan argument, the liturgical movement was diverted from its course.

It was his business, he wrote, to tell how that happened, discover who set reform off on the wrong track, what was its early deviation, what the main error, who “hijacked” the movement so as to “propagandize” for Vatican II and a New Mass.

He identified major protagonists who would be “hounding” the Popes of the decades to come, names to conjure with in liturgical history, heroes, even icons, of the religious left (progressive, liberal) — Beauduin, Bea, Parsch, Guardini, Casel, Jungmann, Lercaro, Botte, Reinhold, Winzen, Congar, Harscouet, (Gaspar) Lefebvre, Danielou, Fischer, Bugnini, Nocent, Bouyer, Thurian, Gy, etc.

Quite a list.

Thanks to them and their followers, the New Mass had been conceived — “the poisoned fruit of the perversions” of the Movement. How did it happen? His book “helps us to know what to reject and what we must carefully conserve” of the Movement, he wrote.

— more to come —