During the first session of the Second Vatican Council, on October 22, 1962, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC) was first presented. When the discussion of the full document by the Council Fathers began, according to historian and Jesuit Father John W. O’Malley:

“Cardinal Frings of Cologne led off from the presidents’ table. His opening words: ‘The schema before us is like the last will and testament of Pius XII, who, following in the footsteps of Saint Pius X, boldly began a renewal of the sacred liturgy.’ Frings thus sounded what would be a leitmotif of the majority: the council was carrying forward work that had already begun.”¹

In the years since the promulgation of Sacrosanctum Concilium, however, the idea that the Council was a continuation of work already begun was obscured by numerous commentaries that treated SC as a departure from the past, the beginning of a “new” liturgy for the “new” post-Vatican II Church. O’Malley’s account indicates that the Council Fathers interpreted Sacrosanctum Concilium according to what Pope Benedict XVI called the “hermeneutics of reform in continuity.” If modern readers are to interpret it in the same way, we must rediscover SC’s connection to the reform of the earlier 20th-century popes. And to do this it would help to understand one little-known editorial decision which may have unintentionally contributed to the loss of this connection.

According to Father O’Malley, the text of SC which was presented to the Council in October 1962 “had 105 sections, running without the notes to about 25 pages of ordinary print. The notes to the text covered a wide variety of sources but with a generous sprinkling from the encyclical Mediator Dei.”²

Yet the definitive text of SC, which was promulgated on December 4, 1963, has only 42 footnotes citing just four categories of sources: 23 cite Scripture, six cite the Fathers of the Church, nine cite liturgical books and four cite the Council of Trent. The “generous sprinkling” of citations of Mediator Dei has vanished.

To see when and why they were removed we need to look in more detail at the procedure followed by the Council in approving SC.³ The bishops submitted hundreds of amendments during the discussion of the draft SC presented at the first session of the Council. Chapter I was revised to accommodate the amendments and a definitive vote was taken on this chapter during the Council’s first session. The Council’s liturgical commission incorporated the rest of the bishops’ suggestions into the document, and a new draft was given to the Fathers as the basis for voting on the remaining chapters during the Council’s second session. One chapter at a time was considered. First, each paragraph of the chapter was voted on, and then the chapter as a whole was put to a vote. Bishops could vote to approve the text (placet), to reject it (non placet), or to approve on condition that it was amended in a specific way (placet juxta modum). These final amendments (modi) were incorporated into yet another draft, which was presented for the definitive vote on the document as a whole on November 22, 1963. Finally, this vote was ratified December 4, 1963 in a public session. This last draft thus became the official Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy promulgated by Pope Paul VI.

The successive Latin drafts of SC are collected and printed side by side in reference.⁴ The footnotes are included, and it is clear that footnotes (numbering over 125) from a wide variety of sources are still present in the draft presented at the beginning of the second session of the Council, and approved in the detailed section-by-section vote. But all the footnotes which cited sources other than Scripture, Fathers of the Church, liturgical books, or the Council of Trent were removed in the transition from this to the final version, reducing the number of footnotes to only 42. Why?

An explanation is offered in an article by the Dominican Pierre Marie Gy. Gy, who was a member of the Conciliar liturgical commission, discusses the commission’s concern about developing the proper style for SC, and says that: “According to the tradition of the Council of Trent and even of Vatican I, it should be biblical and patristic, and should maintain a certain distance from theological disputes. But should one not, at the same time, take account of the doctrinal style of encyclicals, which are more concerned with theological precisions and are somewhat removed from biblical theology? The question was all the more relevant since Pius XII had devoted considerable attention to the liturgy, in the encyclical, Mediator Dei, and elsewhere. Should the conciliar constitution be a solemn prolongation of the Pope’s teaching? Could it conceivably abstract from it?

“Little by little a delicate solution emerged, a solution which seems to have pleased the Council Fathers and to have inspired even the theological commission in its revision of schemas. The style of the Constitution, it was decided would be that traditionally adopted in Councils; it would be wholly biblical, except where canonical precision was necessary. Thus it is that the opening pages, on the history of salvation, are closer to biblical theology than to the style of Mediator Dei. However, at the same time, the constitution relies considerably on the great encyclical of Pius XII and time and again it uses its very terminology, without quotation marks or reference. Only in the case of biblical, liturgical and patristic quotations are references given.”⁵

Note that Gy does not say that the Council Fathers requested the footnotes be dropped, or that the content changed in a way to make them irrelevant. It was simply a matter of the proper style, according to this explanation.

In fact, it was not only Mediator Dei that was cited in earlier drafts of SC. There are also numerous citations of Pope Pius X’s motu proprio Tra le Sollecitudini (1903), Pope Pius XI’s Apostolic Constitution Divini Cultus (1928), Pope Pius XII’s Encyclical Musicae Sacrae Disciplina (1955), and the Instruction from the Congregation of Rites gathering together provisions on liturgy and music from these earlier documents De Musica Sacra et Sacra Liturgia (1958). However, none of these documents is cited in the definitive text.

The short history above makes it clear that, when the council Fathers were debating and taking the detailed section-by-section vote on SC, they were working from a text with a large number of citations to these earlier documents and other sources. Only on November 22 and December 4, 1963, were they working from the definitive text without these citations. So the Council Fathers, during the detailed voting, were working from drafts of SC which made clear that the source of many of its ideas come from the earlier liturgical reform from Pope Pius X to Pope Pius XII.

However justified the decision Gy described was, it has made it more difficult for today’s readers, who are often unfamiliar with the documents of Pope Pius X and his successors, to see the continuity with the earlier liturgical reform. Since familiarity with the content of the missing footnotes should make it easier to see SC as the Council Fathers saw it, the “legacy of Pope Pius XII” and other 20th-century popes, the “missing” footnotes are listed here (PDF):

The list contains citations of the five major documents on liturgy issued between 1903 and 1958 included in the draft of SC presented at the beginning of the Council’s second session. They are organized by paragraph numbers of SC (which were not altered in the final revision). Citations for Divini Cultus, Mediator Dei, and Musicae Sacrae Disciplina which appear in the earlier draft of SC are given as page references to the Acta Apostolic Sedes in which the official Latin versions of these documents are published. In the Latin these documents do not have numbered sections. Since the English translations have section numbers, those are given as well. Tra le Sollecitudini and the 1958 Instruction do have section numbers in the Latin and this is the form of the original citations, but the list also includes the page references for the Latin (Italian for TLS) versions.

Susan Benofy received her doctorate in physics from Saint Louis University. She was formerly Research Editor of Adoremus Bulletin.

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1. John W. O’Malley, SJ, What Happened at Vatican II? (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2008), p.133.
2. John W. O’Malley, SJ, What Happened at Vatican II? (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2008), p.131.
3. See Concilii Vaticani II Synopsis in Ordinem Redigens Schemata cum Relationibus necnon Patrum Orationes atque Animadversiones-Constitutio de Sacra Liturgia: Sacrosanctum Concilium (Citta del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vatican, 2003), and Cassian Folsom, OSB, “The Hermeneutics of Sacrosanctum concilium: Development of a Method and its Application”, Antiphon 8:1 (2003) pp. 2-9.
4. Concilii Vaticani II Synopsis in Ordinem Redigens Schemata cum Relationibus necnon Patrum Orationes atque Animadversiones-Constitutio de Sacra Liturgia: Sacrosanctum Concilium (Citta del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vatican, 2003).
5. Pierre Marie Gy, OP, “The Constitution in the Making” in Doctrine and Life, vol. 14 #1 (January 1964) p. 70.