In the previous entry of this series, I have offered an overview of the discussions on the sacred liturgy at the Council of Trent, especially during its third and last period from January 1562 to December 1563. There was a consensus among the council fathers that a revision of liturgical books was needed, but it was felt that the conciliar assembly would not be able to carry out this work. Hence, the task was entrusted to the pope and his curia.
Breviary and Missal
Pope Pius IV ratified the decrees of the Council of Trent in the bull Benedictus Deus of January 26, 1564, and established commissions for the preparation of the Catechism, for the revision of the official Latin Bible translation (which had come to be known as the Vulgate), and for the reform of the liturgical books of the Roman Rite.
Priority was given to work on the breviary, which contained the canonical hours of prayer and was intended for clergy and religious. The breviary compiled by the Franciscan Cardinal Francisco de Quinones (c. 1482–1540) and first issued with papal approval in 1535 was rejected because of its break with Roman tradition. St. Pius V, who was elected to the See of Peter in 1566, promulgated the revised Breviarium Romanum with the bull Quod a nobis of July 9, 1568.
Hardly any documents on the principles and methods of the commissions entrusted with the liturgical books have come down to us. We can only gather information from occasional annotations made in older books and from personal correspondence. It is likely that work on the missal proceeded in parallel with the breviary, since the harmonization of the texts used for the Mass and for the Divine Office was a key objective of the Tridentine liturgical reform. Pius V’s bull of promulgation Quo primum for the new edition of the Missale Romanum dates from July 14, 1570. The publication of the breviary and missal a few years after the conclusion of the council was a remarkable achievement given the complex and often slow workings of the papal curia, and the limited capacities for printing at the time.
“Norm of the Fathers”
In Quo primum, Pius V states that the missal has been restored “to the original norm and rite of the holy fathers (ad pristinam…sanctorum patrum normam ac ritum).”1 This statement has often been misread in post-Vatican-II discussions and requires a careful interpretation. The idea of a return to the “norm of the fathers” was widely shared among Renaissance Humanist theologians and fed into proposals for reform at Trent. However, at the time the title “(Church) father” had a broader meaning than today, and it was not limited to the period lasting from the post-apostolic age to the seventh (in the West) or eighth (in the East) century. For the French Benedictine scholar Jean Mabillon (1632–1707), St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who died in 1153, was the last of the fathers. In the mid-19th century, one of the great editorial projects of the French publisher Jacques-Paul Migne (1800–1875), Patrologia Latina, assembling the writings of the Latin fathers, only stopped at the threshold of scholastic theology and concluded with Pope Innocent III, who died in 1216.2
Thus, in concordance with the early modern understanding of “norm of the fathers,” the Tridentine liturgical reform did not intend a return to the liturgical practice of the early Christian centuries and ignore the development that had happened since. The Missale Romanum of 1570 is in substantial continuity with the mixed Franco-Roman order that had been established in the city of Rome by the age of Pope St. Gregory VII (1073–1085) and had been adopted in most of the Western Church. Following the principles that had emerged from the conciliar deliberations at Trent, the Order of Mass and its rubrics were unified, and any celebration of Mass was meant to conform to this standard. Moreover, more recent accretions to the rite were removed, especially those containing doubtful historical material.
The Order of Mass
The Order of Mass in the 1570 missal draws from two major sources. First, its structure and content follows the “Order of Mass according to the custom of the Roman curia” (Ordo missalis secundum consuetudinem Romane curie), which was standardized in the 13th century and became gradually incorporated into missals of local dioceses and religious orders throughout Europe. Second, the rubrical instructions are based on the Ordo Missae by the papal master of ceremonies, Johann Burchard (d. 1506). As has been discussed in the previous entry, there were frequent complaints at the time about a lack of liturgical standards, especially on the part of the officiating clergy. Burchard wanted to address such concerns by offering a detailed description of the ritual to be observed by a priest in the celebration of Mass without chant and without sacred ministers. Burchard published his Ordo Missae first in 1496, but it was above all the second, enlarged edition of 1502 that precisely regulated and meticulously explained the ritual performance of gestures and movements.3 This second edition had a lasting impact on the codification of the rite of Mass in the Tridentine period.
The missal standardizes three “soft spots” where some variation existed in late medieval predecessors according to the use of the Roman curia: first, the introductory rites, which include Psalm 42 (Iudica me); second, the sequence of prayers at the offertory; and third, the concluding rites, with the final blessing to be given after the prayer Placeat tibi sancta Trinitas (not before), and the Last Gospel to be read in a low voice at the altar.
Liturgical books from the later Middle Ages often used tropes, that is, texts (in both poetry and prose) added to embellish or augment the traditional chants from the Order or Proper of the Mass. The missal of 1570 explicitly proscribes the troping of the introit, the Kyrie, and the Gloria.
Calendar and Mass Propers
The missal of 1570 preserved the structure of the temporal cycle of the liturgical year, which had been established in the formative period of the Roman Rite in the early Middle Ages, and few modifications were made in its prayers, chants, and readings. The most substantial change in this regard was the removal of the poetic sequences to be sung before the gospel, except those for Easter, Pentecost, and Corpus Christi (as well as the Requiem Mass).
Pre-Tridentine liturgical books tended to have a very full sanctoral cycle, and the criteria for the ranks of saints’ feasts were not always clear. The reform of the Roman breviary and the missal substantially reduced the sanctoral cycle with the intention of giving precedence to the temporal cycle once again. Thus, the general calendar of 1568 and 1570 has 157 ferial days, not counting the octaves of feasts (which were simplified). In the months of March and April, entries of saints were removed to keep Lenten ferias as free as possible. The “norm of the fathers” is expressed in a preference for the early Christian saints, especially martyrs. From later periods of Church history, mainly popes, doctors of the Church, and founders of religious orders are included.
The Common of Saints was ordered more methodically, with complete Mass formularies. The number of votive Masses was reduced; their use was strictly regulated and restricted to weekday ferias.
The pruning of the sanctoral cycle and the restoration of ferial days meant that ordinarily on weekdays the Mass formulary of the preceding Sunday would be used, including its scriptural readings. Many diocesan missals in the later Middle Ages contained specific readings for Wednesdays and Fridays during the liturgical year, unless the day had a proper Mass formulary. These ferial pericopes stem from the early Roman-Frankish lectionary tradition, which was consolidated in the eighth and ninth centuries. However, they were not included in the plenary missal of the Roman curia and hence in the early printed editions of the Missale Romanum. A memorandum by Leonardo Marini (1509–1573), a member of the commissions for revising the liturgical books, reports a proposal to select three passages each from the Letters of St. Paul and from the Gospels, which are not contained in other Mass formularies, to be used every week on ferial days, in order to avoid repeating the Sunday readings.4 The note in Marini’s memorandum envisages a wider selection of scriptural texts than the ferial readings in existing diocesan missals. The intention clearly was to present the treasury of Holy Scripture more fully in the course of the liturgical year. However, this proposal was not accepted in the 1570 edition, which rather followed the tradition of the pre-Tridentine curial missals.
The Shape of the “Tridentine Mass”
It is evident that the Missale Romanum promulgated by Pope Pius V stands in continuity with the plenary missals of the Roman Rite in the form used by the papal curia, which goes back to the 13th century. This continuity extends even further to the time of the Gregorian reform in the 11th century, and, in the essential structure and contents of the rite, to the Carolingian period. The Tridentine reform consisted above all in laying out liturgical books more systematically and pruning late medieval accretions that were considered of doubtful value.
I would suggest that the most significant change concerns the prevalent form of celebration, or “shape” of the Tridentine Mass. The preliminary section of the 1570 missal includes a “Rite to be observed in the celebration of Mass” (Ritus servandus in celebratione Missae). This Ritus servandus is based on the second edition of Burchard’s Ordo Missae, which was written for the said (rather than sung) Mass of a priest with the assistance of one or more servers (missa lecta or low Mass). The Ritus servandus also contains ceremonial instructions for the solemn Mass with deacon and subdeacon, and the missal itself offers musical notation for the parts of the rite that are to be sung, including the intonations of the Gloria and Credo, the prefaces, the Lord’s Prayer, and the dismissal. However, it could be argued that the Ritus servandus accelerates the shift, which began with the 13th-century Franciscan ordinal Indutus planeta, towards an understanding that the ceremonial forms of the Mass were, as Anthony Chadwick has aptly put it, “based on low Mass rather than low Mass being a reduction of the normative pontifical Mass, from which the solemn form with deacon and subdeacon is also a reduction.”5
This shift had far-reaching consequences for the experience of the Mass on the part of the laity and, in the centuries after Trent, the question of liturgical participation became more urgent. The next installment of this series will look at this development and also consider the complex reception of the Tridentine liturgical books in various countries.
Click here to read previous entries in this series.
Footnotes
- Missale Romanum: Editio Princeps (1570), ed. Manlio Sodi and Achille Maria Triacca, Monumenta Liturgica Concilii Tridentini 2 (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1998).
- See Hubertus R. Drobner, The Fathers of the Church: A Comprehensive Introduction, trans. Siegfried R. Schatzmann (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 3–5.
- Johann Burchard, Ordo Missae (Rome: Johannes Besicken, 1502); also available in Tracts on the Mass, ed. John Wickham Legg, Henry Bradshaw Society 27 (London: Harrison, 1904), 121–174.
- See Amato Pietro Frutaz, “Contributo alla storia della riforma del Messale promulgato da san Pio V nel 1570,” in Problemi di vita religiosa in Italia nel Cinquecento: Atti del Convegno di storia della Chiesa in Italia (Bologna, 2-6 sett. 1958), Italia Sacra 2 (Padova; Editrice Antenore, 1960), 187–214, 211–212.
- Anthony Chadwick, “The Roman Missal of the Council of Trent,” in T&T Clark Companion to Liturgy, ed. Alcuin Reid (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 107–131, 108–109.