REVIEW: In Defence of the Roman Mass – Father Raymond Dulac (2018; Te Deum Press, 2020)

When Pope St. John XXIII called an opening to the Second Vatican Council in 1962, both the Church and the world looked forward to the bright future to come. Called in order to finish the business started more than ninety years beforehand at Vatican I, as well as to combat the increasing prevalence and trends toward modernism within the Church, Vatican II’s preparation included a plethora of suggested reforms that would have returned the Church back to its roots. The result, however, was the complete opposite; to the horror of bishops, popes, and millions of laypeople, the Church’s implementation of what was discussed in Rome resulted in what would have been unimaginable just a year before the council. Under the guidance of cadres of experts, and under the eye of one (at the time) Father Bugnini, Vatican II’s prize fruit was the New Order of the Mass promulgated by Pope St. Paul VI—the Novus Ordo.

Writing at the end of the sixties, one Father Raymond Dulac, submitted a series of articles to traditionalist Catholic journals in France covering the “revolution” that was taking place at some of the highest levels of the Church’s hierarchy. This book, In Defence of the Roman Mass, compiles some of these articles.

When approaching Vatican II, the first thing to establish is exactly what is being studied. Contemporary discourse—particularly among traditionalist-leaning conservative circles, as more liberal Catholics rarely see a need to critique the Council in the first place—tends to favor what’s called now the Hermeneutic of Continuity. The term was popularized by Pope Benedict XVI with regards to specifically understanding the documents of the Council in light of the tradition of the Church. While it’s a perfectly valid method of interpretation, this discourse leaves much to be desired; were the documents themselves relevant to the implementation of the Council’s ends, then such an interpretive method should grant insight into why the Church of today—much less the Church of the 1970s—is in so many instances unrecognizable from the Church even of the 1940s. It doesn’t. On the contrary, such an approach makes the extent of liturgical abuses all the more baffling.

Fr. Dulac, however, recognized very early the need to interpret the whole Council without the myopic focus on the documents alone. As he wrote in Courrier de Rome in 1967:

As a matter of fact, since this Council and especially this reform wanted to be essentially “pastoral”, when carrying out our analysis we have considered ourselves obliged not to separate official acts from the historical circumstances (foreseen or otherwise) which accompanied them. Indeed, in order to be soundly assessed from the pastoral standpoint, every human decision must be considered, not only in itself, but also in its de facto consequences, even those which are unintended and abusive. The leader must foresee them before enacting his law.¹

This applies to the scaling back of the Church’s presence in the world, but more importantly it also applies specifically to the New Order of the Mass. What was implemented was not, in all too many cases, what was put down on paper. Most famously, with regards to the matters of Extraordinary Ministers and Communion in the hand, what was implemented was very nearly the exact opposite of what was officially sanctioned.

What’s notable about Father Dulac’s writing is that he had taken his position against the Mass before the full extent of the most rampant abuses had unfolded. Most churches did not witness the desolation of the parish life until well into the seventies; high altars were not torn out until then, the famous Clown Masses of the US did not make appearances until after the sixties had ended, and the fatiguing deluge of disinformation campaigns leveraged against parishioners, priests, and even bishops alike would not reach their apex for another five or six years. The content of Dulac’s critique is on the promulgations themselves. He knew—as anyone forward-thinking enough, and reasonable enough, could know at the time—that the changes to the Church as implemented by Rome (and by the dioceses on the cutting edge of progress) would lead to disaster. More importantly, he was willing to call it out.

Admittedly, the changes to the Mass were so drastic that it’s hard not to have predicted, at least somewhat, the direction the liturgy would lead the faithful. Lex orendi, lex credendi, lex vivendi is a motto never far from the traditionalist’s lips whenever the topic arises, and the last sixty years has by almost all appearances vindicated the alarmism of the early post-Council years. Fr. Dulac points out that these liturgical ‘reforms’—although, as he notes, “revolution” was certainly a better description²—were enacted with the explicit intention of drawing together Catholic and Protestant services. But this was attempted not by converting Protestants so that they may come to understand the Truth that the Church bulwarks, so that they might be converted, but by conforming Catholic liturgy to that of the Protestants’ in order to hoodwink them into attending the same service.

In one article, he makes explicit reference to Protestant Max Thurian, a “moderate” and “brother of Taize”, who “declare[d] this goal of the reform of the Missal” himself:

Thus, we hold from the lips of a Protestant who calmly proclaims it in La Croix (which commonly passes for a Catholic newspaper) a judgment which we would only have uttered ourselves with the greatest scruples. Here is this judgment in plain language:

The new Ordo Missae introduces or favors a new concept of religious unity.

Indeed, it allows us to express different ideas with exactly the same words. Which, obviously, is only possible because the words are ambiguous, or the ideas are uncertain.³

The problem is clear; liturgical experimentation dolled out with the express purpose of ecumenism does not bring those targeted by ecumenical efforts into a proper understanding of the Faith. And Fr. Dulac was right; the conversions of Protestants to the Faith over the last sixty years has, by and large, been in spite of the liturgical confusion. The “reform” involved reshaping the Mass to conform to Protestant interests, and then allowing purposefully ambiguous language to invite misinterpretations favorable to Protestant theologies. This is a radical break from method of ecumenical and missionary enterprises that took place prior to the Council.

Father Dulac was very adamant to insist that the new Mass is not heretical. In a certain sense, as he wrote in 1970, it is in fact “worse” than heretical, because “it is equivocal, it is flexible in different directions.”⁴ A heretical Mass can be openly condemned, suppressed, and pushed out of the public eye without censure save from those prelates who condemn themselves by defending it. The new Mass, whose foremost dangers come in implementation, flagrant abuses, willful miscommunications, and general docility rather than in its actual Missae, became, over the course of the decade following the papers in this volume, a liturgical hydrogen bomb for the faithful. True enough, many Catholics survived the seventies with their Rosaries in tact (although perhaps far more worn down than before!); many others abandoned the Faith in the resulting confusion. Nonetheless, as Fr. Dulac makes clear in a separate article from earlier that same year,

we have never said, we will never say, and with all our strength we disapprove of it being said that Paul VI’s new Ordo Missae is “heretical”, under the rigorous conditions which this precise and terrible term implies in the dogmatic and moral order.

But we have said and will continue to say that this Ordo is equivocal to the point of being “versatile”, with the imprecise and dangerous implications which accompany these two adjectives in practice.⁵

This position he maintains throughout the subsequent several years’ worth of relevant articles contained in this volume. Even as his outspokenness against the new order increases, and even as his practical approaches to dealing with the problem skirt what is, by both our eyes and those contemporaneously reading him in the sixties, scandal, nonetheless he remains Catholic, loyal, and, to the ability he is capable, obedient.

It is unfortunate that the Church was guided into the position of forcing those most orthodox among her administration to have to doubt the actions of their superiors. Fr. Dulac’s practical considerations result in, perhaps understandably, a refusal of the New Order of the Mass.

There is no doubt that, for a Catholic, it is an awful extreme to have to go to. He can only bow to it after endless reflection and, as it were, trembling. But it would be both hypocritical and treasonous to refuse to admit in our day the possibility of such a tragedy when everyone knows that there have been similar examples in the past.

Indeed, Jesus Christ (Who promised to be with His Church until the consummation of the world) has again and again pulled Her back from similar abysses. But we see that His supernatural assistance has always used the human cooperation of Her martyrs and Doctors in this. The Church always saved Herself.⁶

This is, for traditionalists, the elephant in the room. Could it be argued that Fr. Dulac’s sentiments were those of an arrogant egoist who supposes himself, without merit, to be another St. Athanasius? The liberals in the Church would—and almost certainly did—accuse him of such. But such a condemnation can only come at the grave risk of judging his interior disposition, which is an area of judgment reserved for God alone at the time of Fr. Dulac’s death. For my part, I’m most certainly not willing to make such a condemnation, particularly after how well-argued his case is and remains even after all this time. If anything, the survival—and revitalization—of the Tridentine form, in addition to the history of the SSPX’s relationship to the Vatican hierarchy, increasingly vindicate his position and those of traditionalists like him. And this is to say nothing of the Church’s relationship with the world-at-large in the wake of the Council.

“For two years now,” Fr. Dulac continues, in the same piece from October of 1969,

there has been no end to us hearing the same terrible complaint from our readers:

‘We no longer trust. We have been deceived. Acts contradict words. The words themselves vary. Which should we choose: the encyclical Mysterium Fidei on the Eucharist or the Ordo Missae? For we cannot truthfully maintain that there is no difference between the two.⁷

This sort of confusion, and the scale of it, affecting both clergymen and laity alike, is nearly unprecedented in the history of the Church. In order to draw similar comparisons, the only places to look are the periods in the Church’s history aptly named crises. Such context forces attention to what exactly the Novus Ordo is and how it came to be.

The topic is larger than the scope of this volume, but Fr. Dulac is able nonetheless to address its necessities succinctly. He does so by contrasting the revolutionary imposition of the new order against the standardization of the order that it replaced. Some four hundred years before Vatican II, Pope St. Pius V promulgated the missal that formed what we recognize today as the Tridentine form. The Papal Bull Quo Primum was published to this end. As Fr. Dulac explains,

1. It creates no new rite or text. It merely selects from those already existing.

2. The rule governing this choice is reference to the customs of the ancient Fathers.

3. The only purpose of this ordinance expressed by the Pope is to re-establish unity in the celebration of the Church’s sacrifice, just as this unity has already been re-established in the psalmody (the Breviary). There is no question of a “pastoral” objective, in the modern sense of the word. The Mass is an act of Divine worship and not a preaching ministry or a fervorino.⁸

As he explains in a separate article from several months later, because of the Sacramental aspect of the Mass, there are “essential elements” to it that “we cannot add or subtract anything whatsoever to or from […] without making something completely different which would no longer have the same effects at all.” This is why, contrasting Catholicism with Protestantism,

[their] Sacraments and [their] Mass are not bound to actions which are determined, necessary and unchangeable and which must be carried out exactly in order for them to be efficacious. Since rites have no other purpose than to animate faith, they can be modified indefinitely so long as these innovations attain the goal which is, itself, variable. If rites operate like a musical tune, then why not change the tune from time to time?

The Council of Trent condemned this liturgical indifferentism⁹

The Mass is a crucial component to salvation, not simply because it is a particular collection of prayers and ceremonies that direct our attention toward thanksgiving, commemoration, and hope, but because it is an irreplaceable Sacrament that were were instructed by God to partake in. “The Mass and the Eucharist,” Fr. Dulac writes, “only fulfill the promises of Jesus Christ if they are truly a Mass and a Eucharist.”¹⁰ The experimentation in revolution that began at the end of the 60s, and which wreaked havoc across parishes all over the West in the 70s, should have been enough to give anyone pause. “They have to stop if they want to remain Catholic,” he said in 1967,

For, from simplification to simplification, from one instance of increasingly active participation of the faithful to the next, we will end up with the purely internal worship (“in spirit and truth”) of the extreme Protestants (who are, by the way, the only logical ones).¹¹

The results of this Protestantization of the Mass, of the liturgy’s and priesthood’s dilution by foreign elements, is less clear now than it was ten years after Fr. Dulac’s writing. We’re fortunate enough to have witnessed St. John Paul II’s condemnation of liturgical abuses in the early 80s, which although did stem the tide of revolutionary fervor, did not result in certain excommunications, laicizations, or specific condemnations that so many nearly countless abuses almost certainly warranted. While you’re less likely to find outright Clown Masses celebrated in the US today, for instance, the fundamental problem of how to rectify the issue of the Novus Ordo Mass’s confusing character remains, mostly, unaddressed. Should it remain unaddressed, the guitars aren’t going to go away, the sacred music isn’t going to come back, the Extraordinary Ministers are here to stay (although, with the recent coronavirus restrictions, they are thankfully suspended for the time being), and Communion in the hand is so normalized that many Catholics can’t imagine Mass without it.

Even celebrated reverently, without the Extraordinary Ministers, without Communion in the hand, with the Mass ad orientem, with the first Eucharistic Prayer, it’s difficult for someone familiar with the Tridentine form to observe the New Order as anything other than a puzzling abbreviation that, for instance, removes important prayers like the Offertory, the Judica Me, and the Last Gospel. These are not welcome suppressions, and Fr. Dulac rather succinctly explains how they are clear indications of the Mass’s alteration in order to appeal to obstinate Protestant experts. This line of reasoning, while not unique to Fr. Dulac even at the time, is one that many traditionalist critics of the New Order have commented on in excruciating detail.

There is too much in this book to comment on with complete specificity, so I’ll end on this remark: Fr. Dulac’s prediction in 1970, that the reform of the Mass would have no end in sight, was proven true.

The insipid criticism of Saint Pius Vi’s rubrics will be applied to those of Paul VI. The “experiments” will continue. As before. There will be a “floating” liturgy just as there was a floating Deutschmark last October. There will no longer be a bound “Missal”, but loose sheets held together with plastic clips.

It has already begun! The French “translations” of the new Ordo Missae have only a fanciful relationship with the original Latin. On this side of the Alps, Paul VI’s “simplified” offertory has given way to “Father” Boudon’s volatile offertory.¹²

One might consider that, as mentioned above, the papacy of Pope John Paul II saw an end to this revolution. Strictly speaking, even in its liturgical sense, it’s too soon to know; the effects of the revolution have struck like waves across the decades as each successive generation has had to deal with the catastrophes of their elders. Are the contemporary Missals of the New Order loose sheets held together with plastic clips? Obviously not. Is there a floating liturgy yet? No. As I said, things seem to have improved since the 1970s. But do we have an answer yet? Is the ship steadied? Can Catholics safely be known to agree on what it means to be Catholic? If the last twenty years has been any indication—much less the last seven—the answer is no. And when it comes to the Tridentine form, Pope Benedict XVI had to officially issue the apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum just to get everyone on the same page. That was thirteen years ago, and it was met with derision from not-insignificant pockets of the Church at the time. That derision, while it’s ebbed, hasn’t gone away.

This review is not, of course, for the original 2018 French edition, as my French literacy is comparable to that of a three-year-old’s. Rather, this is for the very recent 2020 English edition, translated by Peadar Walsh and released in the UK by Te Deum Press. The translation of great quality; Fr. Dulac’s famous (or infamous) wit, teeth, and personality come through in his words with a liveliness that makes you forget that these articles were originally published in French. The meanings are clear and the explanations quite followable, even when grappling with what some might consider liturgical minutiae or legalese.

This is a collection of what are becoming, as time passes, increasingly historical documents, but the manner of their writing and their relevance to today remain impossible to ignore. In certain instances, they might as well have been written within the last decade. Others, particularly those focusing on Pope Paul VI and Fr. Bugnini, are obviously trapped in the period of their time. For those attendees of the Latin Mass looking to deepen their understanding of what occurred in the wake of Vatican II, this is most certainly recommended. For those interested in the traditionalist Catholic movement within the Church, it’s also recommended, although some of the passages do come across quite incendiary. Given the revolution that was taking place at the time, I hope such readers can at least recognize the need for such contributions. The average Catholic reader, if there is such a person, should heed the same recommendation. It’s worth it, but by reading it, you’re stepping into a fight.

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