The greatest liturgical disaster had nothing to do with Vatican II

Pius XII and John XXIII's destruction of the liturgical day

Kalendis Augusti (1 August) Anno Incarnationis MMXXIV

The Feast of Saint Peter in Chains

Commemoration of the Maccabean Martyrs

I suppose that we have all caught glimpses of it here and there in our lives.  For instance encountering the Jewish custom of the Passover or Shabat starting at sundown we get some little tingle of magic that runs down our spine and the thought arises in our minds: ‘that’s really cool, why don’t we do that?’ 

Why indeed… 

Well we did do it - until something happened.

Cum hac nostra aetate

Sometimes it is the little things that screw everything up.  Or rather the things that are made to appear tiny and insignificant on the surface yet have a devastating effect when implemented.  And so it was with Title IV, section d, paragraph 11 of a now almost entirely forgotten motu proprio issued out of the Vatican City State in 1955 which falls under the heading ‘concerning other changes (in the Breviary)’ and reads as follows:

Primae vesperae (sive integrae, sive a capitulo, sive per modum commemorationis) competunt solummodo festis I et II clasis, et dominicis.

First Vespers (whether in full, from the chapter reading, or as a commemoration) belong only to I and II class feasts and to Sundays.¹

With these words a way of life² and of understanding the world that stretches so far back into the mists of time that no one knows where it came from was pushed out of the liturgical life of the West.  It is so old that we find mention of it already in existence in Genesis 1: 5:

ויאמר אלהים יהי אור ויהי אור וירא אלהים את האור כי טוב ויבדל אלהים בין האור ובין החשך ויקרא אלהים לאור יום ולחשך קרא לילה ויהי ערב ויהי בקר יום אחד

And God said ‘Let there be light’ and there was light.  And God saw that the light was good and God divided the light³ from the darkness.  And God called the light day and the darkness He called night.  And so there was evening and so morning of day one.⁴

The antiquity of this thing

Thus the darkness first, the darkness and the abyss of chaos, which is succeeded by the brightness of day.  First evening and then morning. 

This simple fact⁵ permeates both the Old and New Testament.  It is woven into the fabric of these books and I would wager that unless one has internalized this feature of life it is impossible to fully grasp either the contents of the two Testaments or the significance of the events recorded therein.

Evening first and then morning as the structure of the day is the air that is breathed here and when one is unfamiliar with this they lose touch with the reality of life and a basic fact of human existence.  Namely things are not always what our senses tell us, nor can the most important things in life be defined and measured and categorized by rationalistic and naturalistic observation.

 And sadly Catholics living in the early twenty first century no longer have any idea of this beyond possibly the vague notion that going to Mass on Saturday night ‘counts’ for your Sunday obligation.

Even many of our vaunted ‘Scripture scholars’, most of whom nowadays come from a Protestant background anyways, know very little about this.  Sure they understand it in an academic sense as a characteristic of the society and culture whose study they are specializing in, but it is not part of their lived experience.  And their purely academic knowledge seems to make it all the more alien to them.

Yet it was not always this way, nor should it be now.  The ancient Hebrew practice of the day starting at eventide flowed seamlessly into the life of Christendom and endured in the West throughout the centuries and millennia until a decade after the close of the Second World War, a time that still remains within living memory.  Then suddenly it vanished.  How did this happen?

Of course like all of the demolition of our liturgical rites that have taken place from Pius X’s 1911 destruction of the Roman Psalter onward it didn’t happen overnight.  Mostly it was the culmination of a process that stretched back to the Council of Trent where the bishops of the word ended up at least somewhat unwittingly surrending their liturgical authority completely to the Roman Pontiff.  

From then on for reasons that remain unexplained something very strange began to happen to the liturgical calendar which in its own weird way ended up being the root cause of all of the liturgical disasters the Western Church has endured during the twentieth and twenty first centuries.

Another effect of the disordered multiplication duplex feasts

That something is that the number of duplex feasts began to rapidly multiply and almost every new feast that was added to the calendar starting from the 1580s onward was given the rank of duplex – a grade of feast which had previously been reserved for the great feasts of Our Lord and Our Lady and the Apostles.

Prior to this the most common grade of feast on the calendar had been the simplex Feast whose structure perfectly fits the ancient Semitic structure of the day starting in the middle of Vespers the evening before and concluding with the Hour of None the following afternoon which permitted the feast of the next day to start at eventide as well.  And this is what built the structure of the day in the Catholic world.

An exception of sorts was made for the two higher grades of Feasts: Duplex and Semiduplex.  These both start the evening before as well however they do not stop at None the following day but rather continue on until the close of Vespers.  The greatness of the Feast was emphasized in that it stretched into a second singing of Vespers not that it began with the first. 

Yet even here the next day’s Feast was not forgotten.  On these great Feasts a commemoration would be made of the following day’s Feast following the closing Oratio of Second Vespers to transition from the one Feast to the next.

Yet little by little over the decades and centuries the disordered multiplication of duplex feasts began to skew the proper perspective on everything.  Now instead of the basic idea being that the Feast started the evening before and concluded the following afternoon with only feasts of greater magnitude continuing on to the conclusion of a second set of Vespers, every Feast began to be celebrated, at least in theory, with two sets of Vespers.

On the practical level this created enormous problems with Vespers of Feasts constantly running into each other creating uncerainty over which one should take priority and probably a fair amount of doubt and annoyance as to why things were set up this way began to take hold among clerics and those bound to say the Office.

But with respect to the structure of the day one can surmise that another problem arose that ended up being far more disastrous.  The ‘normal’ perception of the day had been for millennia what had been inherited from the ancient Semitic Middle East i.e. that the day ran from evening to evening but with the multiplication of the duplex feasts this began to be seriously altered.

Little by little as the generations passed with the disordered multiplication of feasts that had both morning and evening prayer i.e. laudes/matins and vespers being celebrated on the same solar day then it must have started to seem strange, especially with the advent of the diseased rationalism and naturalism of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, to have something being celebrated the night before.

The absurd multiplication of Duplex Feasts. The top is from 1569 with six Duplex Feasts in the month of May. And the second is from 1905 with nineteen! And it should be noted as well the elimination of a great number of Simplex feasts. (source 1905 here) (source 1569 here)

Enter Pius XII

So then by the middle of the twentieth century by which time rationalism and naturalism had clouded the minds of maybe three generations of clergy all indications are that the question began to be raised at least among a parasite crowd of professional liturgists as to why there should be anything the night before?  It began to be suggested that the first vespers was only for the really special feasts and it should be eliminated for every other feast.

Hence we find ourselves at Cum hac nostra aetate wherein First Vespers becomes suppressed in the clerical breviary for all but first and second class⁶ feasts.  Even here however Pius XII did leave some number of feasts which retained First Vespers since even after 1955 the feasts of the Apostles still retained their first vespers. However if you are familiar with the famous 1962 Breviary you know now that even these were no longer there.

And John XXIII…

So to John XXIII it was left to lay the final wrecking ball to the observance in the West of a tradition that is literally older than the Garden of Eden when he explicitly declared in the Rubricae Generalis of the 1962 Breviary that :

Dies liturgicus est dies sanctificatus actionibus liturgicis, praesertim Sacrificio eucharistico et publica Ecclesiae prece, id est Officio divino; et decurrit a media nocte ad mediam noctem.

Celebratio diei liturgici decurrit per se a Matutino ad Completorum.  Sunt tamen dies solemniores, quorum Officium inchoatur a I Vesperis, die praecedenti.

The liturgical day is the day sanctified by liturgical actions, above all the Eucharistic Sacrifice and the public prayer of the Church, that is the Divine Office: and it runs from midnight⁷ to midnight.

The celebration of the liturgical day runs in its proper course from Matins to Compline.  There are however more solemn days whose Office begins at I Vespers the day before.⁸

Thus here in a final act of insanity, to which in some ways all of the disasters that occurred after the Second Vatican Council were just a footnote, the practice of the day running from evening to evening which had literally been in place and continuously observed for more than four thousand years under both the Old and New Covenants and is kept to this day by both the Eastern Churches and the Jews (so much for ecumenism!) was simply tossed aside in the West by proud and stupid men.

And what were these more solemn days?  They were, as you know if you are familiar with the 1962 Breviary, I Class feasts and Sundays.  There were a grand total of twelve I Class feasts that did not automatically fall on a Sunday on the 1962 calendar.  Thus in a very short space of time from the beginning of 1955 until the beginning of 1961⁹ the Breviary went from every feast starting the evening before to only twelve during the whole year plus Sundays.  And on top of that it was officially declared by those holding positions of power Vatican that the day was no longer the day.  The day was now only what they told us it was - which is literally insane. 

Can it be lawful for a pope to invalidate a custom that literally predates by many centuries the very existence of the papacy itself?  Answer: no it isn’t.  (nor should he want to if he is sane)

When the liturgical day begins at eventide we find ourselves on the threshold of another world.  It tugs at something in the deepest places in our heart and reveals to us that (thank God) neither our weak and faltering senses nor our darkened and fallen intellect are the ultimate judge of anything. 

This practice when followed faithfully and consistently and with attention begins to permeate our being and we begin little by little to transition from the life this world to that of the next by following the path that God Himself has laid out for us and that our ancestors pursued to such great effect.

This is the absolute number one reason (among many) why the 1962 Breviary needs to be abandoned forthwith by all those who run around publicly claiming that they are the great upholders of Catholic tradition. That means you Society of Saint Pius X and all of your ilk because if you insist on promoting this Breviary then you are in fact doing far less than you claim to restore sane liturgical practice and the path you are on will lead no one out of darkness.

1. Cum nostra hac aetate, Motu Proprio issued 22 March 1945, translation mine

2. Here is where the naysayers usually chime in with their snide sneering: ‘oh that is just the Breviary… that is just for the priests not for laypeople. Laypeople don’t do that. It has nothing to with laypeople, yada yada yada’

Even if they dress themselves up in ‘trad’ clothes it is best to avoid this crowd entirely and stay as far away from them as possible because at best they ignorant fools who actually know very little to nothing about the actual traditions of Western Catholicism or at worst they are malicious ne’er do wells who are seeking to sow confusion and discord.

The canonical hours organize the day. And the organization of the day and thence the calendar is a foundational feature of civilization. Anyone who refuses to recognize that fact or simply doesn’t care about it is not part of the solution; they are part of the problem.

3. To this particular line about separating out the light from the darkness the rest of divine revelation is but a commentary.

4. Hebrew text of Genesis 1: 3-5 from the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, translation mine.

5. It is true that there are some (mostly in the Protestant world) who argue that the day under the Old Covenant began at sunrise but the great bulk of the Scriptural evidence plus the constant tradition of the Church which inherited this tradition from ancient Israel argues emphatically against that.

The ‘civil’ or calendar day seems to have gone from sunrise to sunset but that is something different. Business was not conducted at night prior to the invention of electric lighting so the modern concept of ‘midnight’ i.e. the exact second in the darkness of night when one day stops and another begins was neither necessary nor relevant.

6. One does have to be a bit careful here with the nomenclature.  If what you know is the 1962 Breviary of John XXIII passed off in so many places as ‘traditional’ these are not necessarily the same as the I and II class feasts of that breviary.  Basically the term ‘duplex’ was still being used post 1955 but because of the ridiculous number of feasts of this once exalted rank then on the calendar the grade of ‘duplex’ had to be itself divided into four different classes of which duplex I and duplex II were the highest.  And it is to these that this provision of Cum hac nostra aetate refers.

7. This idea of ‘midnight’ alone invalidates this structure of the day that John XXIII invented here because it is wholly dependent on machine timepieces of very recent invention and uncertain future and cannot persist without them. I think that the only place in the liturgical format where it might have had any use prior to the arrival of these timepieces was possibly the start of fasting on Ash Wednesday but even ther it likely would have been impossible to determine the exact moment when one day turned into the next.

If anyone has any information about when the fasting for Lent on Ash Wednesday was judged to start prior to the timepiece I would love to hear it.

8. Caput II: 4-5, Pars Prima, Rubricae Generales, Rubricae Breviarii Romani (1962 Roman Breviary), translation mine

9. Despite the fact that it is for some reason universally known as the 1962 Breviary its provisions actually took effect on 1 January 1961