Giuseppe Federici Study Center – For a new onset
Press release no. 36/19 of the 6 maggio 2019, San Giovanni a Porta Latina
For the Roman Mass, against the Novus ordo
“Whoever is satisfied with the M.P. the Supreme Pontiff, which on the contrary declares that the missal reformed by Paul VI is the ordinary rite of the Catholic Church, and which defends its doctrinal orthodoxy a priori, he has already deserted the battle that has begun, 40 years ago, give a brief critical review of the New Order of the Mass".
Preface to the reprint of the Brief Critical Examination of the Novus Ordo Miss
Il 30 November 1969, first Sunday of Advent and therefore the beginning of the new liturgical year, a new "Ordo Missae" was to come into force in all Catholic churches, a new missal (promulgated with the apostolic constitution Missale Romanum of 3 April 1969) in application, it was said, of the conciliar constitution on the liturgy Sacrosantum Concilium (4 December 1963). In the intentions of Paul VI, clearly manifested in the consistory to the cardinals of 24 maggio 1976, the reformed missal had to take - definitively - the place of the old one: “The adoption of the new Ordo Missae is certainly not left to the free decision of the priest or the faithful. The education of 14 June 1971 predicted that the celebration of mass according to the ancient rite would be permitted, with the authorization of the Ordinary, only to elderly or sick priests who celebrate without assistance. The new Ordo was promulgated to take the place of the old one, after mature reflection, in order to put into practice the norms established by the Second Vatican Council".
Thirty years have passed now (Today 50, ndr) from that famous speech, and the ancient missal has not disappeared, as was desired and thought. And this not only because it is still celebrated in every part of the Catholic world, but also because the provisions issued by the successors of Paul VI have increasingly authorized the celebration of the ancient missal; ultimo in ordine di tempo il Motu Proprio "Summorum Pontificum" del 7 July 2007.
(cfr: https://www.sodalitium.biz/comunicato-riflessioni-sul-motu-summorum-pontificum-2/)

The ancient Missed Order has not disappeared, it's a fact. How to explain it? This is explained by another fact: peaceful non-acceptance, by the Church, of the reformed missal. From the beginning, not just many priests, bishops and even cardinals continued to celebrate with the ancient Missale Romanum (even recently, a book and an interview have revealed, for example, that among these we must include Bishop Ronca and Cardinal Poggi). But objections have also been raised, of criticisms, of the accusations, to the orthodoxy itself of a liturgical reform which - among other things - did not apply the conciliar prescriptions, but it went beyond them and, sometimes, contradicted them (cf cardinal Alfons Stickler, Testimony of an expert to the Council, A.P.O.C.-International Center for Liturgical Studies, Versailles, 2002).
In the same year as the promulgation of the new missal, in fact, two theological studies were published in which not only the opportunity but the very orthodoxy of the new missal was called into question, studies that the reader will be able to read in this booklet, and in n. 63 of the Sodalitium magazine.
The first and best known of these studies is the Brief Critical Examination of the Novus Ordo Missae, dated "Corpus Domini 1969", and it works, according to the expression of Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci who approved it and presented it to Paul VI, of “a select group of theologians, liturgists and pastors of souls". The Brief Examination was published in Rome by the "Lumen Gentium Foundation" (in reality the Una Voce association), and soon translated from Italian into French, and in numerous other languages. Also the second study, published in Paris by the magazine “La Pensée catholique” (n. 122, anno 1969, pp. 5-43) with the title of “Ordo missae”, it was the work of an anonymous "group of theologians". Actually, the main author, if not unique, of these two anonymous and collective works, fu il teologo domenicano Michel-Louis Guérard des Lauriers.
In that year 1969, Father Guérard des Lauriers taught in Rome, in the Pontifical Lateran University, where he had been called by the Rector, Mons. Antonio Piolanti, since 1961. Born in Suresnes, near Paris, In the 1898, Raymond Michel Charles Guérard des Lauriers, he immediately stood out for his remarkable intellectual abilities. Entered the 1921 in the Scuola Normale Superiore (rue d’Ulm) In the 1921, passed the mathematics competitive exam in 1924. He studied for two years in Rome, with Professor Levi-Civita, preparing the thesis that he will support at the Sorbonne with Professor Elie Cartan. Precisely during his Roman stay, he felt the call of a religious vocation which interrupted his brilliant scientific career, but not his studies which he wanted to be entirely dedicated to the first Truth. Entered the Order of Preachers in 1925, he made his profession there in 1930 with the religious name of Brother Louis Bertrand, and was ordained a priest in 1931. Dal 1933 he taught at the Dominican University of Saulchoir, when, as said, he was called to Rome by Mons. Piolanti, and obtained the professorship in the "Pope's University", as the Lateran was called. He lived up close, Therefore, the events of Vatican II, which upset the life of the Church; protagonists, negatively, of this revolution were, among other things, two Dominican brothers from the Saulchoir: Father Chenu and Father Congar. At the close of the Council, Paul VI entrusted the liturgical reform not to the Roman Curia, ma al Council for the execution of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, which had Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro as its first president, and as secretary the Lazarist father Annibale Bugnino. Cardinal Antonelli, who was also a member of the Consilium, had to write: “I have the impression that he allowed himself a lot, especially in matters of the sacraments, to the Protestant mentality"; in the rite of the Mass "the insistence on the idea of ​​dinner (…) seems to go to the detriment of the idea of ​​sacrifice".
Since 1965, year in which the vernacular was introduced into the Liturgy, However, opposition to the liturgical reform underway with the foundation of the international association Una voci dicentes emerged, for the protection of the Latin-Gregorian liturgy. In Italy, in Rome, Una Voce was founded on 7 June 1966. It doesn't appear, among the names of the founders, the writer Cristina Campo (1923-1977): yet it was she who inspired and directed the first steps of the new association which had little time to try to counteract the creation from scratch, something unheard of, of a new rite of the Roman Mass which should have supplanted and annihilated the Mass which had been handed down to us from the time of Saint Leo the Great and Saint Gregory the Great from immemorial times, and which Saint Pius V had almost "canonized" as a bulwark opposed to Protestant heresy.
The Brief Critical Examination was born from the meeting, in Rome, of the Dominican theologian Guérard des Lauriers and of the Bolognese writer, now transplanted to Rome, Cristina Campo (nom de plume of Vittoria Guerrini). A Cristina Campo, to its lights and its shadows, our Library Center has dedicated an essay (F. Ricossa, Cristina Campo, or the ambiguity of Tradition) to which we refer the reader; it also traces the history with all the vicissitudes of the Brief Critical Examination of the Novus Ordo Missae, which we therefore do not report in this brief introduction. It will be enough here to remember how the Short Examination was "drawn up in the months of April and May 1969 [it bears the symbolic date of Corpus Christi, which fell that year 5 June] especially at night, since this unexpected commitment added to already quite busy days [Father Guérard taught at the Pontifical Lateran University]. Dictation from notes written in French, and written directly in Italian by V.C. Guerrini, the text was completed and meticulously fine-tuned by the latter, especially for everything that concerns the liturgy". This is what Father Guérard himself wrote when presenting, In the 1983, a new edition of the Short Exam in Italian and French. Opera di Padre Guérard, Therefore, and Cristina Campo: a comparison with the aforementioned article published by the Parisian magazine La Pensée catholique and the Brief Examination, despite the difference in style, would easily demonstrate the similarity of the arguments developed by Father Guérard in the two texts, the developments he gave in the article in French in the Brief Examination, and the own part goes to Cristina Campo, that is, that which is found in the Brief Examination and not in the article of the Pensée Catholique. After the publication of our Cristina Campo or the ambiguity of Tradition there can be no doubt about the authors of the Brief Examination (Padre Guérard des Lauriers and Cristina Campo): a fatherhood that Father Guérard, on the other hand, he claimed publicly, without ever being denied, on Itineraries magazine (n. 146, September-October 1970). Many other names have been mentioned; in reality there were preparatory meetings at the headquarters of Una Voce, during which some priests gave their contribution (“five or six”, according to Father Guérard) among whom the liturgist Msgr. is worthy of mention. Domenico Celada, and the curial Monsignor. Renato Pozzi; but their contribution was marginal. Mons. Lefebvre, who still had a residence in Rome and who had just begun the work of the priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius, he followed the Roman works and encouraged them; However, to protect the nascent Fraternity he remained behind the scenes: “Mons. Marcel Lefebvre encouraged us a bit from afar – testified Mgr. Guérard des Lauriers – he also filled us with hope: 'there will be the signatures of 600 Bishops!’. Unfortunately his wasn't there either.".
A Voice (as well as Cristina Campo, Emilia Pediconi ed Elisabeth Gerstner) However, he managed to obtain the participation of two Cardinals in the Brief Examination: Antonio Bacci, who had already publicly criticized the liturgical reform, and Alfredo Ottaviani. Other cardinals (Relative, Happy, Bracket) they gave their support, and they would have signed the Critical Exam, if, due to circumstances that are mentioned in my essay on Cristina Campo, the need had not arisen to hastily direct the Brief Examination to Paul VI, in October of 1969; he card. Ottaviani had given his approval on 13 September, he card. Kiss the 28 September.
Cardinal Ottaviani's approval was particularly serious, as the prelate had been responsible for the Holy Office and then for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and it was the very conformity of the Novus ordo with the Catholic faith defined at the Council of Trent that was denied by the two cardinals. Paul VI was therefore forced to suspend the publication of the new missal and have it examined by a commission that was hastily established. The Commission's task was clear, however: absolve the New Missal of any accusation; and yet, the decision to review and correct numerous expressions of the Institutio generalis (the doctrinal introduction to the new missal) it merely confirmed the validity of the accusations.
These accusations – officially placed before the Church, in facie Ecclesiae by two eminent cardinals – still retain their validity. Cardinal Alfons Maria Stickler himself states this, in a letter from 27 November 2004, occasiond by a re-edition of the Brief Critical Examination: “the analysis of the 'Novus Ordo' made by these two cardinals has not lost its value at all and, Unfortunately, its relevance. (…) The results of the reform, in the opinion of many, nowadays, they were devastating. It was the merit of Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci to soon discover that the modification of the rites resulted in a fundamental change of doctrine. (…) It is therefore praiseworthy and useful to make the voice of these two principles of the Church heard again - according to your desire, defenders of the doctrine, of the Catholic Tradition and the Papacy".
After the Brief Examination the criticism of the liturgical reform (of the Mass but also of the sacraments) has been explored in depth by numerous contributions: we remember, among others, since 1970, that of the Bishop of Campos, Mons. by Castro Mayer, in collaboration with Arnaldo Xavier Vidigal da Silveira, and then those of L. Salleron, Michael Davies, A. Cekada, K. Gamber, and many others… The fact remains that the Brief Critical Examination, says Jean Madiran, it is “a historical document of capital importance” It “fixes forever the reasons of those who opposed, categorically and from the first moment, to the new Missed Order. Everything else came later, everything else came from there: first of all from the content of this 'Short Exam', secondly by the authority of the two Cardinals. This text is, this text will remain for history, the first moment of Catholic rejection of the new mass".
Historical document, Certainly. But also theological document, doctrinal, we would dare say ecclesial: it represents, forever, the voice of the Catholic hierarchy against a Protestant-flavored reform that cannot, as such, come from the Catholic Church. The theological consequences, sacramentals, ecclesial and doctrinal aspects of the "promulgation" of the Novus Ordo, have been logically and rigorously deduced, explored and exposed by Father Guérard des Lauriers in his monumental study on the validity of the Novus Ordo Missæ (Reflections on the New Ordo Missæ, for the manuscript 1977) and then in his studies on the formal vacancy of the Apostolic See published in the theology magazine Cahiers de Cassiciacum (1979-81). But already the short exam, signed by Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci, he did not limit himself to asking Paul VI for the survival of the ancient and venerable Roman Missal. It also called for the repeal of the new one, putting its doctrinal orthodoxy under accusation. Whoever is satisfied with the M.P. the Supreme Pontiff, which on the contrary declares that the missal reformed by Paul VI is the ordinary rite of the Catholic Church, and which defends its doctrinal orthodoxy a priori, he has already deserted the battle that has begun, 40 years ago, give a brief critical essay on the New Order of the Mass. By republishing the Brief Critical Review we want to condemn and avoid this desertion, place it with those responsible, again, the objections of the two cardinals, until their voice, echo of the infallible and immutable doctrine of the Church, it will not finally be heard and accepted. We do it, in a profound act of love and adoration of the Sacrifice that Our Lord Jesus Christ offered to the Father on the Cross, and that still exists today, everyday, thanks to those who have remained faithful to him over these forty years, it is still renewed on the altars.
Don Francesco Ricossa
M. L. Guérard de Lauriers o.p., “A brief critical essay on the New Order of the Mass, of Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci", Sodalitium Book Center, pages. 32, euro 5,00 https://www.sodalitiumshop.it/epages/106854.sf/it_IT/?ObjectPath=/Shops/106854/Products/024
source – http://www.centrostudifederici.org/la-messa-romana-novus-ordo/?fbclid=IwAR01u6vD895ZRymYOrSv0EqjCXFebKEnctv8zNkKB-zNKnAyT35OGWETrpQ