James Likoudis - The Pope, the Council, and the Mass

THE POPE, THE COUNCIL,
AND THE MASS

Remove every obstruction from my peoples way
Is. 57:14

Emmaus Road Publishing
827 North Fourth Street
Steubenville, Ohio 43952

1981, 2006 by James Likoudis and Kenneth D. Whitehead
All rights reserved.
First edition 1981
Second edition 1982
Third edition 2006
Printed in the United States of America
10 09 08 07 06 1 2 3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2006908470
ISBN: 1-931018-34-0

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are taken
from the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition (RSV-CE)
1965, 1966 by the Division of Christian Education of the
National Council of the Churches of Christ in the
United States of America. Used by permission

Cover design and layout by
Beth Hart

On the cover:
Saint Peters Basilica, Vatican

The Old Testament

The New Testament

Documents of Vatican II

Other Abbreviations

D uring the 1970s, when the Catholic faithful were feeling the full force of the liturgical reform in the Catholic Church mandated by the Second Vatican Council we, the authors of this book, were full-time staff members of Catholics United for the Faith (CUF). In the course of our daily work, we received numerous calls and letters from distressed Catholics: What is happening to my Church? What have they done to the Mass? Is this really what the Second Vatican Council ordered? Such were the questions we heard.

Many of these distress calls contained a built-in conclusion, An enemy has done this (Mt. 13:28).

No one who lived through the implementation of Vatican IIs reform of the liturgy can deny that it was accompanied by a good many false starts, often great confusion and misunderstanding, and no little stress and turmoil. Many of these things are with us still, at least to some extent, more than forty years after the Council. Generally, throughout the post-conciliar era, adequate explanations were simply not given to the faithful about the nature of the changes being made in our worship and the reasons for them.

In addition to the officially mandated changes, there were the changes introduced by those with their own ideas of what a proper renewed liturgy ought to be. This latter phenomenon, the do-it-yourself liturgy, seemed to be little understood by Church authorities, who often gave the impression that they thought the desired reforms were working out just finecontributing to the anguish of the distress calls frequently addressed to CUF.

Even before the liturgical reform was well underway, there were those who had a ready explanation for all that seemed to be going so wrong. These were the Traditionalists, who had been suspicious of the Council from the start, and who were not slow to rush in as soon as its perceived bitter fruits began to be evident. The Council was wrong, they argued; or it was invalid; or it was merely a pastoral Council, laying no binding obligation on Catholics to obey; and certainly some of its acts went contrary to Catholic tradition. Thus did the Traditionalists explain the situation.