One of the least known aspects of the long pontificate of Saint John Paul II was his attempts to free the traditional Mass, to grant full freedom to priests and the faithful who desired it.
We have already referred to the work of Jean Madiran, Histoire de la Messe interdite, and this will be the principal source upon which we shall draw to examine the indult issued by John Paul II in 1984, the secret commission he established to investigate whether the traditional Mass had been prohibited, and his general attitude towards the Mass of all time.
Madiran recounts that “during the ten years following the death of Paul VI (1978–1988), the situation of the forbidden Mass remained practically unchanged; (though) not without its twists and turns: the confrontation between the Montinists (progressives who supported Paul VI and the new Mass) and the refractories (or traditionalists) seemed interminable, albeit without any decisive event despite the intensity of the tensions. The traditionalists, and principally the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X founded by Monsignor Marcel Lefebvre, developed communities, founded schools, and established their organisations; all the while remaining a minority and suffering both intra- and extra-ecclesial marginalisation, always despised and morally lynched by every audiovisual medium. Meanwhile, the religious revolution continued, in accordance with the ‘spirit of the Council,’ destroying traditional ideas, institutions, and customs, exulting in the wonders of the ‘renewal’ it had undertaken, which, however, manifested itself above all in the dioceses through a scarcity of clergy, a collapse in vocations, the disappearance of the parochial spirit and of parish life, a galloping decline in religious practice, the disorientation of ideas, the relentless advance of moral laxism, and spiritual indifference.
In 1980, the Roman Congregation for Divine Worship, at the behest of John Paul II, issued a communication requesting all bishops of the Latin Church to conduct an investigation into the possible persistence of an attachment to the celebration of the Mass in Latin and according to the traditional rite. The Pope had wished this survey to remain secret, but the French magazine presided over by Madiran, Itinéraires, revealed it in its September–October 1981 issue.
2,317 Latin-rite diocesan bishops received a letter from Cardinal Knox, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, which posed two questions:
First question:
a) Are Masses celebrated in Latin in your diocese?
b) Is the demand for Masses in Latin increasing or decreasing?
Second question:
Are there in your diocese persons or groups who insist on having the Mass in Latin according to the ancient rite (‘Tridentine Mass’)?
What is the size of these groups?
What are their motivations?
As it fell to the bishops to respond to these questions, their answers were systematically skewed by the fact that almost all of them omitted or even refused to listen to the persons and groups attached to the traditional Mass. As if obeying a Montinist party directive, they considered that the survey concerned only Catholics who remained within their parishes and in no way those who had left them. Hence the conclusion of the survey, which did not reflect the reality of persons and communities attached to the traditional Mass.
John Paul II’s attempts to free the traditional Mass—that is, to grant full freedom to priests and the faithful who desired it—remain largely unknown to this day to the public and to the clergy. The principal of these attempts, the ‘indult’ theoretically granted by Quattuor Abhinc Annos (1984), had no effective result, sabotaged by the Montinist revolutionaries, underestimated or misunderstood by the counter-revolutionaries. The latter bitterly reproached John Paul II for doing so little and so poorly for the Mass, without realising at the time that this ‘little,’ which was indeed practically insignificant, was advancing step by step in the same direction.
The letter Quattuor abhinc annos was addressed by the Roman Congregation for Divine Worship to the presidents of the episcopal conferences. It declared that it was fulfilling a personal wish of Pope John Paul II (‘ipse summus pontifex’) and granted to the bishops the faculty to permit, by way of an ‘indult,’ celebrations of the Mass that had hitherto been prohibited: for this reason, it is commonly referred to as ‘the indult to use the Roman Missal of 1962 at the discretion of the diocesan bishop’. The original of the letter was in Latin, as are all ecclesiastical documents until very recently, and it stated:
‘Most Excellent and Reverend Sir,
Four years ago, at the order of Pope John Paul II, the bishops of the universal Church were invited to conduct a survey: on how, in their dioceses, priests and the faithful had received the Missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI by virtue of the decisions of the Second Vatican Council; on the difficulties encountered; on the resistances that had to be overcome.’ The results of this survey were communicated to all the bishops (cf. ‘Notitiae,’ no. 185). According to their responses, the problem of priests and the faithful attached to the so-called ‘Tridentine’ rite seemed to have been almost entirely resolved.
But since this problem persists…’
This opening—Madiran notes—bears the clear personal mark of John Paul II: the Pope wished from the outset (‘quattuor abhinc annos’) to signal that he had been misled four years earlier, or at least gravely mistaken in being assured that the disappearance of Latin and of the traditional Mass was about to be completed and no longer posed any problem; and yet, four years later, the problem persisted!
‘But since the problem persists, the Sovereign Pontiff himself, wishing to show himself favourable to these groups, grants to the bishops of the dioceses the faculty to consent, by indult, that priests and the faithful who expressly request it from their bishop may celebrate the Mass using the Roman Missal in its official 1962 edition, but…’
With this ‘but’ ends the declaration of what John Paul II decided ‘in person,’ and from there begins the regulatory application that practically annulled all that had just been granted. The episcopal conferences that remained progressive and the clique that Madiran terms the Montinist party, which remained the most numerous and powerful within the Roman Curia, succeeded in imposing ‘norms’ that were radically destructive of what had been conceded:
Quattuor abhinc annos explicitly decided to grant the traditional Mass to those who requested it. Today, it is clearer than ever that this was John Paul II’s intention from his election in 1978.
Yet the opposition of the progressives, who continued—and continue—to constitute the ruling core of the episcopal conferences, was violent and unrelenting. John Paul II took their existence into account. His intention, it seems, was to free the traditional Mass step by step, to the extent that he could gradually win over the episcopate and public opinion. But he did not go further. And for this reason, he accepted that requests for authorisation be directed to the bishops, so that they might join the movement: but they, on the contrary, remained those who did not want it and who would know how to ensure that it did not prosper. As for the traditionalists, they chiefly noted the fact that the traditional Mass was thus subjected to an inappropriate regime of prior authorisation.
The difficulty for the Pope was real; the obstacle he encountered was enormously powerful: any measure in favour of the traditional Mass implied, implicitly but inevitably, a grave refutation and an evident reprobation of the bishops who, since 1969, had repeatedly declared that the Latin Mass, the Tridentine Mass, the ancient Mass, had been abolished, dead. They had said and repeated this ad nauseam ‘in the name’ of the Pope and of the Council. As for the Council and its document Sacrosanctum Concilium, this was not true, but the ‘spirit of the Council’ had been made to function in this sense, with Paul VI at its head. For Montini himself, the Pope in person, wished, said, and ensured that his new Mass ‘replace the old’ everywhere. In the early 1980s, Paul VI was no longer alive, but most of the prevaricating bishops, responsible for the same abuse of power as his, remained in place; they controlled the ecclesiastical hierarchy and had public opinion on their side, both Catholic and non-Catholic, already strongly mobilised against the Mass in the name of anti-fascism, the struggle against racism, anti-Semitism, the far right, and discrimination in all its forms. The ancient Mass was presented as a return to the obscurantism of the Middle Ages, to clerical intolerance, to the contempt for human rights. All this, solidly amalgamated and, regrettably, as a ‘sign of the times,’ has been widely accepted by believers and non-believers alike.
John Paul II, however, and despite the obstacles, did not cease in his endeavour to free the traditional Mass, involving the bishops in the process. To this end, he had created, before the promulgation of Quattuor abhinc annos, a secret commission tasked with investigating whether the traditional Mass had been prohibited or not (one can imagine the confusion of the documents emanating from Rome and their translations into various vernacular languages that made such a commission necessary). Between 1982 and 1995, and even beyond, a secret cardinalatial commission instituted by John Paul II to study the matter of the forbidden Mass operated, escaping the notice of the mass media.
The existence of this secret commission and its conclusions were revealed, it seems for the first time, by Éric de Saventhem (founder of Una Voce) in 1984, in his lecture in Düsseldorf. This revelation went unnoticed or was considered unimportant by the major media and ecclesiastical circles. ‘October 1982’ is the date Éric de Saventhem revealed on 28 October 1984 as that on which the (perhaps first?) secret cardinalatial commission instituted by John Paul II ruled in favour of the complete liberation of the Tridentine Mass.
On 23 October 1984, in a lecture delivered in Düsseldorf, Éric de Saventhem affirmed that ‘since the spring of 1979, John Paul II was determined, as Cardinal Seper confirms to us, to authorise once more the ancient Mass, and the draft of the great encyclical Dominicae Cenae would already have contained the corresponding general authorisation.
Faced with the firm opposition of Cardinal Knox, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, as well as of the Secretariat of State, the Pope accepted proceeding in stages:
He accepted that a survey be conducted on the situation among the diocesan bishops. This was the backdrop to the inglorious Knox survey of June 1980 (…). Although Rome did not at all ask the bishops what their position was regarding the restoration of the ancient rite—alongside the new one—the Congregation for Divine Worship boldly concluded, from the responses received, that 98.68% of diocesan bishops categorically opposed such a concession.
In October 1982, a special commission of cardinals reached the consensus that there were no grounds for maintaining the general prohibition of the ancient Mass, ‘neither for juridical nor for theological reasons,’ and in December of the same year, Cardinal Ratzinger, at the Pope’s order, wrote to Monsignor Lefebvre that the Holy Father had decided to authorise the ancient Mass once more and this ‘independently of his own case.’ Two conditions were then mentioned: 1) that the use of the ancient Missal be done ‘without disparaging’ the new one, and 2) that on Sundays and feast days, especially at parish Masses, the new calendar be observed.’
Éric de Saventhem again spoke of the secret cardinalatial commission in his 1994 letter to Monsignor Giovanni Battista Re. It was only the following year that there began to be (slightly) public discussion of a conference in America by the Roman cardinal Stickler, in which details were given about the activity of the secret commission in 1986. But the 20th century ended without any further word on the matter.
In light of the above, it is important to bear in mind that in the 1980s there existed one or more secret cardinalatial commissions that are indicative of John Paul II’s thinking on the restoration of the traditional Mass alongside the new Mass of Paul VI. But it must also be recalled that the conflicts of those years unfolded without public opinion knowing anything of this secrecy or of the majority of the protagonists.
Seen in perspective, the situation is lamentable and outrageous: the traditional Mass was prohibited without actually being so. For after Quattuor abhinc annos, it was no longer theoretically prohibited, but in almost every place, as if it still were, it was in fact prevented, just as before. It was no longer officially prohibited: yet the fact that it was subject to a regime of prior authorisation, even if under draconian conditions, nonetheless demonstrated that it had not been abolished, that it still existed, that it was no longer obligatory to ‘replace the old with the new’ universally, as Paul VI had demanded and as John Paul II never did.
In other words, on 3 October 1983, the ancient Mass passed from a regime of general prohibition to one of prior authorisation, which in most cases was denied or vitiated: it was granted only once every fortnight or month, or only on weekdays, and was always prohibited on Sundays.
The fact is that, in his lengthy pontificate, and regardless of his goodwill towards traditionalists and the traditional Mass, John Paul II had other priorities and behaviours: he himself, in matters of rites and celebrations, was spontaneously bold, even imprudent. When he gathered in Assisi the representatives of all ‘religions’ to pray for world peace, it was clear that this was not a matter of ‘praying together,’ but rather of ‘being together to pray.’ As might be expected, the vast majority of the faithful and the clergy did not grasp the difference.
It must also be borne in mind that, while the Mass was, along with catechesis, a decisive concern for traditionalist Catholics resistant to the ‘modernisation’ that enthused the clergy and their hierarchy, there were other issues that influenced the behaviour of the majority just as much or even more: the disorientation of minds was aggravated in the decades following the Second Vatican Council by a new way of speaking about the Council, which imposed itself without John Paul II making any effort to counter it.
Prescriptions of Vatican II began to be designated as ‘what the Spirit says to the Church,’ all in slogans and arguments marked by a powerful ambiguity, carrying an intellectual confusion from which it is not easy to escape, and which has given rise to this flawed reasoning that if we believe what the Second Vatican Council decided is what the Holy Spirit Himself wished to say to the Church, then we consider that the Second Vatican Council is infallible, though without using that word. And then Vatican II would have as much authority as dogmatic councils, but in an informal and subtly effective manner; no longer explicitly, but practically. And if Vatican II diverged in some points from Catholic Tradition, it was deduced that the Holy Spirit had come to correct Tradition. To simplify, it was concluded that everything pre-conciliar had become obsolete, with the sole exception of what Vatican II had explicitly retained. This was the situation of growing disorder that the Church experienced from the close of the Second Vatican Council and throughout the entire pontificate of John Paul II; a disorder solidly established and maintained by a strong ‘Montinist party,’ the progressive bishops and cardinals who considered themselves called to remain dominant in the Church.
These did not trouble themselves greatly over the election to the Chair of Peter of Cardinal Karol Wojtyła of Poland and sought to continue their drive to prohibit the traditional Mass without mercy. Yet, as we have seen, this strict prohibition was not part of John Paul II’s convictions. Though, as we have also seen, neither was it among his priorities. But he did have a solution, as we have seen: to allow the celebration of the traditional Mass for all who desired it. His decision in this regard was already made in 1978, but it would take twenty-nine years for his solution to be finally decreed in 2007 by his successor, Benedict XVI.
Why this great anomaly? Because the progressive hierarchy was, over these decades, sufficiently strong and skilful to achieve such prolonged obstruction through pressure, threats, disinformation, intimidation, and sabotage.
In this regard, we may conclude with the reflection that the pontificate of Benedict XVI and the promulgation of Summorum Pontificum were an extraordinary grace that the Lord bestowed upon His Church of the 21st century. Nearly twenty years later, and with the terrifying pontificate of Bergoglio intervening, the Montinist party, though now elderly, out-of-date, and at odds with the new generations of the baptised, is determined to die fighting.”