Archbishop Viola, the violator of Tradition -- the dangerous secretary of Divine Worship and the man behind the attempts to ban the Traditional Mass. His letter to the Melbourne Archbishop

 Who is Archbishop Vittorio Francesco Viola, OFM? The Secretary of the Dicastery for Divine Worship is said to be proud to wear the episcopal ring of none other than the devious creator of the Novus Ordo, Archbishop Annibale Bugnini (cf. here, in Italian). 

(Archbishop Viola, celebrating something - image: Silere non possum)

We can affirm today that he is the main dangerous ideologically motivated cleric whose final intent is to completely ban the Traditional Latin Mass. We could add much more, in much more detail, but instead will present the translation of the post just published by the Italian religious blog Silere non possum (a centrist, non-traditionalist blog) on the appalling ban Viola imposed on the continuation of the celebration of the Traditional Mass in the Cathedral of Melbourne, Australia -- as if the Metropolitan Archbishop of Melbourne were some kind of naughty altar boy who is not in charge even of the liturgy in his OWN cathedral! The absolute opposite of the deceitful allegations contained in Traditionis custodes. 

Reposting: A most important historical document: the 1969 Institutio Generalis Missalis Romani (the original GIRM) - "The Lord's Supper, or Mass, is the sacred meeting or congregation of the people of God assembled, the priest presiding, to celebrate the memorial of the Lord..."

Eleven years ago, in 2011, we in RORATE were proud to be the first to make available online, for the first time, a document that had then become extremely rare: the very first GIRM (General Instruction of the Roman Missal), published together with the 1969 Novus Ordo Missae.

From our post:

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7. Cena dominica sive Missa est sacra synaxis seu congregatio populi Dei in unum convenientis, sacerdote praeside, ad memoriale Domini celebrandum. Quare de sanctae Ecclesiae locali congregatione eminenter valet promissio Christi: "Ubi sunt duo vel tres congregati in nomine meo, ibi sum in medio eorum" (Mt. 18, 20).

"7. The Lord's Supper, or Mass, is the sacred meeting or congregation of the people of God assembled, the priest presiding, to celebrate the memorial of the Lord. For this reason, Christ's promise applies eminently to such a local gathering of holy Church: 'Where two or three come together in my name, there am I in their midst' (Mt. 18:20)."

This is the original complete definition of the Mass according to the 1969 Novus Ordo Missae: they were arguably the most influential liturgical words written in the 20th century and signaled a watershed moment - in a sense, closing the book written since late antiquity and the chapter begun in Sessions XIII and XXII of the Council of Trent. 

Announcing Fr. Charles Murr’s new book of memoirs, Murder in the 33rd Degree: The Gagnon Investigation into Vatican & Freemasonry

In Catholic discourse today, one notices two extremes when the question of Freemasonry and its (past or present) penetration into the Church hierarchy is raised.

The Roadmap of Archbishop Roche: Liquidate the Traditional Liturgy!

Rorate is pleased to present a translation of the Paix Liturgique Letter 837, with permission of Christian Marquant.
 

The Roadmap of Archbishop Roche: Liquidate the Traditional Liturgy!

(Paix Liturgique Letter 837 in French)

The future Cardinal Arthur Roche is a key figure in the project to destroy the traditional liturgy. This man, who likes his ease and his tranquility, does not have the stature of a historical figure, nor does he seek to be one: Auream quisquis mediocritatem diligit, said Horace, Whoever loves golden mediocrity...

MAJOR EXPOSÉ: Rooms broken into, dossiers stolen, death threats, armed guards, assassinations... Fr. Charles Murr on Vatican intrigues surrounding Cardinals Baggio, Benelli, Villot, and Gagnon

Rorate readers will be aware of the groundbreaking interview Kevin J. Symonds conducted with Fr. Murr for the October 2020 issue of Inside the Vatican, which was also published at Rorate on October 10. Interested readers may want to read that interview first in order to gain more understanding of context for the present one, which was done once again for Inside the Vatican. In the previous interview, Fr. Murr told us about his friendship with Mother Pascalina Lehnert, the “right hand” of Pope Pius XII for several decades. In addition to this discussion, Fr. Murr made some notable revelations about what was going on at the Vatican in the 1960s, and 1970s. The interview below follows up on these revelations with the theme of “where do we go from here?”

Cardinal Baggi (L) and Cardinal Benelli (R)

“BY THEIR FRUITS YOU SHALL KNOW THEM”:

KEVIN SYMONDS’ SECOND INTERVIEW WITH FR. CHARLES MURR

ITV: Thank you, Fr. Murr, for sitting down again with Inside the Vatican. In our previous interview, you spoke of your association with Cardinal Edouard Gagnon and Msgr. Mario Marini. These two men worked closely with the Sostituto of the Secretariat of State, Cardinal Benelli. You yourself, however, did not enjoy the same association with Cardinal Benelli...

I was twenty-four years-old when I met and became friends with the newly appointed minutante in the Vatican Secretariat of State, Monsignor Mario Marini. Soon after, Marini introduced me to another extraordinary man who would play a major role in my life, his good friend, Archbishop Edouard Gagnon (1918–2007). Gagnon and Marini were respected friends and confidants of Archbishop Giovanni Benelli (Sostituto of the Secretary of State); I was not part of that inner circle. I knew Benelli, of course, and spoke with him many times, but I knew my place. Once, on Lago di Bracciano I was at table with him and Monsignors [Guillermo] Zanoni and Marini. I remember talking as little as possible. With Benelli, I knew my place and kept it.

Why did you think of your relationship with Benelli in this way?

To begin with, Giovanni Benelli was Giovanni Benelli! He was one of the most powerful men on earth; brilliant, a strategizer and deal-maker par excellence, the #1 Vatican diplomat, a man on familiar terms with popes and princes, patriarchs and presidents, world leaders of all sorts. I, on the other hand, was a greenhorn American student of philosophy; absolutely no one of consequence. Those special times that I was privileged to be in Benelli’s company were times I knew I was in the presence of greatness.

EXPOSÉ: New Interview with Fr. Charles Murr on Mother Pascalina, Bugnini, Paul VI, and Other Major Figures

Preliminary Note: For decades, traditionalists have suspected or accused Annibale Bugnini of being a Freemason, based essentially on hearsay and circumstantial evidence. The matter remained doubtful to such an extent that the eminent French historian Yves Chiron, himself a traditionalist, was unable to credit the rumor, judging the evidence inadequate and inconclusive. The situation began to change last May when Kevin Symonds presented credible details, courtesy of Fr. Brian Harrison, naming Cardinal Dino Staffa as the one who brought Paul VI the "smoking gun" information on Bugnini, which precipitated the latter's sudden fall from grace. 

It is therefore of major significance that more and better evidence — in the form of an interview conducted by Kevin Symonds with Fr. Charles Theodore Murr, author of The Godmother: Mother Pascalina: A Feminine Tour de Force (2017) — has now appeared that independently confirms the same sequence of events. With such confirmatory proofs, it is fair to say that there is no longer any reasonable doubt that the moving force in the Consilium was, indeed, a Freemason. 

“Two ‘Forms’ of the Roman Rite: Liturgical Fact or Canonical Fiat?” — Full Text of Dr. Kwasniewski’s Norwalk Lecture

In June 2017, I gave a lecture at St. Mary’s in Norwalk, Connecticut, on the intellectual and historical incoherence of the notion of “two (equal) forms” of the Roman Rite. Given the rapid progress that has been made in liturgical discussions over the past three years, with many more people now attending the traditional Latin Mass and seeing for themselves the truth of Mosebach’s words—“No one who has eyes and ears will be persuaded to ignore what his own senses tell him: these two forms are so different that their theoretical unity appears entirely unreal”—I have decided to make the transcript of the lecture available, and have chosen this date, September 14, for the symbolic reasons one might infer. The text below has been rewritten for its inclusion as a chapter in a forthcoming book with the tentative title: “Pass on Real Gold, Not Counterfeit”: The Immemorial Roman Mass and Fifty Years of Rupture, which I hope will appear from Arouca Press in 2020.

Two “Forms” of the Roman Rite: Liturgical Fact or Canonical Fiat?

Peter A. Kwasniewski

Every Catholic in the world—where he knows it or not—is indebted to Pope Benedict XVI for “liberating” the traditional Latin Mass with the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. We may grumble about various things Pope Benedict did not do that we feel he ought to have done, but we must never fail to be grateful for the courageous steps he took, in matters in which nearly the entire hierarchy of the Church stood opposed to him. It was deeply against his nature to impose anything that would not be welcomed by at least a large number, and in this act he stood nearly alone. The motu proprio has caused innumerable flowers to flourish, countless fruits to be harvested. In this lecture, I come neither to praise nor to bury Pope Benedict, but rather, to examine an operative assumption in the motu proprio: that Paul VI’s Missale Romanum of 1969 (the “Novus Ordo”) is, or belongs to, the same rite as the Missale Romanum last codified in 1962, or, more plainly, that the Novus Ordo can be called “the Roman rite” of the Mass. This, I shall argue, cannot withstand critical scrutiny. Although I will be referring primarily to the Roman missal and the Mass, my argument would apply, mutatis mutandis, to the rites of the other sacraments, to blessings and rituals, and to the Divine Office and its substitute, the Liturgy of the Hours.

BOMBSHELL: New historical evidence emerges in support of Bugnini’s association with Freemasonry — Names are named

The latest edition of the magazine of the Latin Mass Society of England & Wales, Mass of Ages, contains a review by Kevin Symonds of Taylor Marshall’s book Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church from Within. (The review as published may be viewed in a PDF of the magazine, starting at page 40, as well as on the author’s personal website; it has been reproduced in full here.) 

Pursuing hints in the book, Symonds goes much beyond the conclusions of Marshall regarding Bugnini, having uncovered new material on Bugnini that decisively moves the question of his association with Freemasonry from the realm of shadowy speculation, where it remained even as recently as the scholarly biography by Yves Chiron, to the level of reasonable certainty. Instead of “unnamed sources,” where the matter was left by Michael Davies, we finally have named sources, with a plausible paper trail.

New Evidence on the Freemasonic Membership of Annibale Bugnini

Kevin Symonds

In this book, Taylor Marshall firmly maintains that the Catholic Church has been literally infiltrated by her enemies, thereby experiencing a massive campaign of disruption and distortion. A particular area in which Marshall advances this thesis pertains to the influence of the Vincentian priest, and later Archbishop, Annibale Bugnini (1912-1982) in the liturgical reforms of the mid-twentieth century. This review focuses on Marshall’s presentation of Bugnini’s influence upon these reforms and in particular of Marshall’s claim that Bugnini was involved with Freemasonry. It will be argued that, despite his eagerness to find evidence of ‘infiltration’ and his animus against Bugnini, Marshall actually misses some important evidence in favor of Bugnini’s membership of the Italian Freemasons.

Book Announcement: Annibale Bugnini: Reformer of the Liturgy by Yves Chiron

A proper review of this book will be coming along at Rorate later, but it seemed a good idea, especially in the Christmas season, to let our readers know about one of the great publishing events of the decade: the first full-length "scientific" biography of Archbishop Annibale Bugnini. Until now, the only biographies available have been short (usually hagiographical) accounts by Bugnini's disciples and friends, or the lengthy (and definitely hagiographical) writings left by Bugnini himself. No professional historian has tackled this important and intricate figure until Yves Chiron did so in Annibale Bugnini (1912-1982): Réformateur de la liturgie, which appeared at the beginning of 2016. Thanks to the diligence of John Pepino and Angelico Press, an English edition has now been released. Below is the publisher's announcement.

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Annibale Bugnini: Reformer of the Liturgy

Yves Chiron

Foreword by Alcuin Reid

214 pages, 5.5 × 8.5 in

978-1-62138-411-3 (paper) $17.95

978-1-62138-412-0 (cloth) $26.00

In this book, French historian Yves Chiron turns his attention to one of the most influential figures of 20th-century Catholicism: Annibale Bugnini, guiding spirit of liturgical reform in the period surrounding the Second Vatican Council. Highly controversial in his day, and down to the present, Bugnini has attracted high praise from his disciples and vilification from his detractors—but all agree that without his energetic organizational skills and access to the levers of power, the most extensive overhaul of the Roman Catholic liturgy in the history of the Church would not have taken place as it did.

Yet who was Bugnini, really? What were his formative experiences, personal ideals, intellectual assumptions, practical aims? How did he accomplish so much in so short a time? Why, after such a singular collaboration with Pope Paul VI, did he suddenly fall from grace and suffer exile? Should he be remembered as liturgiae amator et cultor, lover and servant of the liturgy (his epitaph), or as the éminence grise of an unscrupulous reinvention of Catholic worship? Can we cut through the legendary, the polemical, and the partisan, to arrive at a clear portrait of the man and his work?

The spirit of the liturgy in the words and actions of Our Lady

On Saturday, November 12, I delivered the plenary address at the Annual General Meeting of the Vancouver Traditional Mass Society/Una Voce Canada. The event was located at Holy Family Parish, an apostolate of the Fraternity of St. Peter. The text of my lecture is reproduced in full below, with notes at the end. All paintings are by James Tissot (1836-1902). Those who would like to listen to the audio (including Q&A) will find it here.

The Spirit of the Liturgy in the Words and Actions of Our Lady

Peter A. Kwasniewski 

Reverend Fathers and friends in Christ: I thank all of you for coming this evening to hear my lecture, which I dedicate to Our Lady of Victories and to our saint of today, Pope St. Martin I. Rather than compromise one bit with error (as Pope Honorius had shamefully done about 15 years earlier), St. Martin energetically opposed the Monothelite heresy, on account of which he was abducted by command of the Byzantine emperor, exiled, imprisoned, and banished. Having died of exhaustion, he is revered as a martyr by both Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox. He exemplifies how a pope is supposed to behave towards heresies, regardless of threats or punishments from the mighty of this world.