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We continue our conversation over tea with my curate friend from the local parish with the question of the Mass. With obvious pastoral concern, my friend asked me why I felt so strongly about the New Mass. Why was someone my age, who had never seen the Church before the changes, so “attached” to the older form? I think I rather surprised him when I passed over all questions of aesthetics and replied, “Because it represents a different religion.” He had agreed with my first premise that liturgy was a manifestation, in actions and words, of theology. Liturgy was theology...

Today marks the 50th anniversary of one of the first doctrinal documents to be released by the old Holy Office under the new appellation "Doctrine of the Faith", the circular letter Cum Oecumenicum Concilium. The Latin text can be found in Acta Apostolicae Sedis 58 (1966), pp. 659-661. Signed only 7 months after the end of Vatican II by Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, the last Secretary of the Holy Office (1959 - 1965) and Pro-Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 1965 until January 1968, it demonstrates the rapidity with which open heresy spread even more in...

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- In a new book, a Vatican archbishop has chronicled the birth pangs of the liturgical reform generated by the Second Vatican Council and warned of a Roman Curia tendency to return to a "preconciliar mindset." The book, "A Challenging Reform," was written by Archbishop Piero Marini, who recently ended a 20-year tenure as papal liturgist. His Vatican career began in 1965 in the office charged with implementing liturgical renewal. Archbishop Marini recounted the rise of a decentralized and dynamic reform movement in the 1960s and its "curialization" in the 1970s by Vatican officials afraid of losing...

The Liturgical Movement How the traditional Roman Rite, over one thousand years old, was destroyed Michael Davies REMNANT COLUMNIST, London During the first session of the Second Vatican Council, in the debate on the Liturgy Constitution, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani asked: “Are these Fathers planning a revolution?” The Cardinal was old and partly blind. He spoke from the heart without a text about a subject which moved him deeply, and continued: "Are we seeking to stir up wonder, or perhaps scandal among the Christian people, by introducing changes in so venerable a rite, that has been approved for so many centuries...