The Liturgical Reforms of the Jansenists and John XIII Compared

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The Liturgical Reforms of the Jansenists and of Pius XII, John XXIII and Paul VI Compared

The following comparison of the liturgical reforms of the Jansenists and of Pius XII, John XXIII and Paul VI is taken from the article, The Slow and Methodical Destruction of the Traditional Liturgy by Rev. Francesco Ricossa. Similarities not mentioned include:

· the use of the vernacular spoken aloud;

· that the minor orders should be abolished and that lay people should take part in conducting public worship as readers, acolytes and so forth;

· revival of the offertory procession;

· that the use of devotional statues and icons should be downplayed;

· that holy days of obligation ought to be reduced or transferred to Sundays;

· the obligation to give sermons;

· the presence of only one altar in a church;

· an antiquarianist ethos.

The reforms of the illuminists are also mentioned below – they were not Jansenists.

ON JULY 25, 1960, JOHN XXIII PUBLISHED the Motu Proprio Rubricarum Instructum. He had already decided to call Vatican II and to proceed with changing Canon Law. John XXIII incorporated the rubrical innovations of 1955–1956 into this Motu Proprio and made them even worse. “Although we have reached the decision,” he writes, “that the fundamental principles concerning the liturgical reform must be presented to the Fathers of the future Council, nevertheless, the reform of the rubrics of the Breviary and Roman Missal must not be delayed any longer.”

In this framework, so far from being orthodox, with such dubious authors, in a climate which was already “Conciliar,” the Breviary and Missal of John XXIII were born. They formed a “Liturgy of transition” destined to last — as it in fact did last — for three or four years. It is a transition from the Catholic liturgy consecrated at the Council of Trent to that heterodox liturgy proclaimed in full by Paul VI.

Principles of the antiliturgical heresy of the 18th century inspired by Illuminism and Jansenism continued to actuate John XXIII’s modernist Vatican, and innovating efforts proceeded apace in his innovations, which touched the Breviary as well as the Missal:

1. Reduction of Matins to three lessons. Archbishop Vintimille of Paris, a Jansenist sympathizer, in his reform of the Breviary in 1736, “reduced the Office for most days to three lessons, to make it shorter.” In 1960 John XXIII also reduced the Office of Matins to only three lessons on most days. This meant the suppression of a third of Holy Scripture, two-thirds of the lives of the saints, and the whole of the commentaries of the Church Fathers on Holy Scripture. Matins, of course, forms a considerable part of the Breviary.

2. Replacing ecclesiastical formulas style with Scripture. “The second principle of the anti-liturgical sect,” said Dom Guéranger, “is to replace the formulae in ecclesiastical style with readings from Holy Scripture.” While the Breviary of St. Pius X had the commentaries on Holy Scripture by the Fathers of the Church, John XXIII’s Breviary suppressed most commentaries written by the Fathers of the Church. On Sundays, only five or six lines from the Fathers remains.

3. Removal of saints’ feasts from Sunday. Dom Gueranger gives the Jansenists’ position: “It is their [the Jansenists’] great principle of the sanctity of Sunday which will not permit this day to be ‘degraded’ by consecrating it to the veneration of a saint, not even the Blessed Virgin Mary. A fortiori, the feasts with a rank of double or double major which make such an agreeable change for the faithful from the monotony of the Sundays, reminding them of the friends of God, their virtues and their protection — shouldn’t they be deferred always to weekdays, when their feasts would pass by silently and unnoticed?”

John XXIII, going well beyond the well-balanced reform of St. Pius X, fulfills almost to the letter the ideal of the Jansenist heretics: only nine feasts of the saints can take precedence over the Sunday (two feasts of St. Joseph, three feasts of Our Lady, St. John the Baptist, Saints Peter and Paul, St. Michael, and All Saints). By contrast, the calendar of St. Pius X included 32 feasts which took precedence, many of which were former holydays of obligation. What is worse, John XXIII abolished even the commemoration of the saints on Sunday.

4. Preferring the ferial office over the saint’s feast. Dom Guéranger goes on to describe the moves of the Jansenists as follows: “The calendar would then be purged, and the aim, acknowledged by Grancolas (1727) and his accomplices, would be to make the clergy prefer the ferial office to that of the saints. What a pitiful spectacle! To see the putrid principles of Calvinism, so vulgarly opposed to those of the Holy See, which for two centuries has not ceased fortifying the Church’s calendar with the inclusion’ of new protectors, penetrate into our churches!”

John XXIII totally suppressed ten feasts from the calendar (eleven in Italy with the feast of Our Lady of Loreto), reduced 29 feasts of simple rank and nine of more elevated rank to mere commemorations, thus causing the ferial office to take precedence. He suppressed almost all the octaves and vigils, and replaced another 24 saints’ days with the ferial office.

Finally, with the new rules for Lent, the feasts of another nine saints, officially in the calendar, are never celebrated. In sum, the reform of John XXIII purged about 81 or 82 feasts of saints, sacrificing them to “Calvinist principles.”

Dom Gueranger also notes that the Jansenists suppressed the feasts of the saints in Lent. John XXIII did the same, keeping only the feasts of first and second class. Since they always fall during Lent, the feasts of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Gregory the Great. St. Benedict, St. Patrick, and St. Gabriel the Archangel would never be celebrated.

5. Excising miracles from the lives of the Saints. Speaking of the principle of the Illuminist liturgists, Dom Gueranger notes: “the lives of the saints were stripped of their miracles on the one hand, and of their pious stories on the other.”

The reform of 1960 suppresses two out of three lessons of the Second Nocturn of Matins, in which the lives of the saints are read. Eleven feasts were totally suppressed by the preconciliar rationalists. For example, St. Vitus, the Invention of the Holy Cross, St. John before the Latin Gate, the Apparition of St. Michael on Mt. Gargano, St. Anacletus, St. Peter in Chains, the Finding of St. Stephen, Our Lady of Loreto; among the votive feasts, St. Philomena.

Other saints were eliminated more discreetly: Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Our Lady of Ransom, St. George, St. Alexis, St. Eustace, the Stigmata of St. Francis — these all remain, but only as a commemoration on a ferial day.

Two popes are also removed, seemingly without reason: St. Sylvester (was he too triumphalistic?) and St. Leo II (the latter, perhaps, because he condemned the heretic Pope Honorius.)

6. Anti-Roman Spirit. The Jansenists suppressed one of the two feasts of the Chair of St. Peter (January 18), and also the Octave of St. Peter. Identical measures were taken by John XXIII.

7. Suppression of the Confiteor before Communion. The suspect Missal of Trojes suppressed the Confiteor. John XXIII did the same thing in 1960.

8. Reform of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday. This happened in 1736, with the suspect Breviary of Vintimille (“a very grave action, and what is more, most grievous for the piety of the faithful,” said Dom Gueranger.)

9. Suppression of Octaves. The same thing goes for the suppression of nearly all the octaves (a usage we find already in the Old Testament, to solemnize the great feasts over eight days), anticipated by the Jansenists in 1736 and repeated in 1955-1960.

10. Make the Breviary as short as possible and without any repetition. This was the dream of the renaissance liturgists (the Breviary of the Holy Cross, for example, abolished by St. Pius V), and then of the illuminists. Dom Gueranger said that the innovators wanted a Breviary “without those complicated rubrics which oblige the priest to make a serious study of the Divine Office; moreover, the rubrics themselves are traditions, and it is only right they should disappear. Without repetitions...and as short as possible... They want a short Breviary. They will have it; and it will be up to the Jansenists to write it.”

11. The long petitions in the Office called Preces disappear; so too, the commemorations, the suffrages, the Pater, Ave, and Credo, the antiphons to Our Lady, the Athanasian Creed, two-thirds of Matins, and so on.

It is to be noted that the “Liturgy of John XXIII” was in vigor for all of three years, until it came to its logical conclusion with the promulgation of the Conciliar Decree on the Liturgy, and ultimately with the proclamation of the Novus Ordo Missae, all the work of Bugnini.

Pius XII and his successor Cardinal Roncalli who became John XXIII