In recent months a number of prominent attempts have been made to double down on the party line that the liturgical reform following the Second Vatican Council conforms to the Council’s own desires and is beyond criticism, and that the older liturgical rites have little, if any, place in the life of the Church.
One only need recall three recent examples: Cardinal Arthur Roche’s July 29 interview with The Tablet; the subsequent article in the secular Spanish daily La Razón claiming that Cardinal Roche’s discredited report on the liturgy — distributed to Cardinals at Pope Leo XIV’s first extraordinary consistory — conveys the mind of the Pope on the traditional Roman rite; and Andrea Grillo’s recent assertion that “the old rite has no longer existed since the approval of the Novus Ordo.”
The latest appeared today at the Pope’s general audience, in his final catechesis on the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium.
Dom Alcuin Reid, an internationally recognized liturgical scholar — whose doctoral work on liturgical reform was published as The Organic Development of the Liturgy, with a preface by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger — offers some analysis and commentary.
Continue reading at Diane Montangna Substack