This deserves its own post rather that to be mixed in with the Daily Rome Shot.
Frankly, I posted about this, with this quote, some years ago, also with material by Aidan Nichols and the late and much lamented Fr. Hunwicke (back in the day when I regularly made scones… I should do that again…). HERE
To anyone who has celebrated Holy Mass with both the Novus Ordo and the Vetus Ordo (Usus Antiquior) this is obvious.
KaBOOM
Fr. Joseph Gelineau, a favorite of Archbishop Bugnini and consultant to his Consilium responsible for creating the New Mass, admitted in his essay ‘Tomorrow the Liturgy’ that the New Mass destroyed the Roman Rite:
“In truth, it [the Novus Ordo] is a different liturgy of the… pic.twitter.com/8YNpZ2FK2Z
— Tradition in Action (@TraditionAction) August 30, 2026
And HERE.
Fr. Joseph Gelineau, a favorite of Archbishop Bugnini and consultant to his Consilium responsible for creating the New Mass, admitted in his essay ‘Tomorrow the Liturgy’ that the New Mass destroyed the Roman Rite: “In truth, it [the Novus Ordo] is a different liturgy of the Mass. This must be stated without ambiguities: The Roman rite as we knew it no longer exists. It is destroyed. The walls of the original edifice have fallen, while others have changed in appearance to the point that the structure today resembles either the ruins or the partial foundation of another building. The point is neither to weep over the ruins nor to dream of a historical reconstruction.”
Let’s be clear: Gelineau was a Jesuit and a poster boy for why they ought to be suppressed… retroactively. And, he was a Jesuit liturgist, which means that he got things wrong…. mostly. What ironic is that he didn’t get this wrong. He just got it right for the wrong reason.
Yet our Bishop insists that the Novus Ordo is the Latin Rite just improved, but some of us our just too ignorant or closed minded to acknowledge this obvious truth.
Surprising to hear this. Given his contributions to setting the Psalms to music in the vernacular, I would have assumed that he was a great fan of the Latin liturgy with the Gregorian chant.
I appreciate the candor which I so miss in the NeoCons who live in denial and keep saying everything is in keeping with Tradition.
This is made abundantly clear to me every time I attend a Novus Ordo funeral. Good gravy, the difference is like night and day.
I remembered those words vividly, having encountered them in one of Michael Davies’s books very many years ago (God rest his soul!) They should definitely be well-known to all of us who love and defend the traditional Mass, but – notwithstanding the many virtues of brevity – I think Gelineau’s words are even more impactful when they are read in the context of the (slightly-longer) quotation which Davies used: “Let those who like myself have known and sung a Latin-Gregorian High Mass remember it if they can. Let them compare it with the Mass that we now have. Not only the words, the melodies, and some of the gestures are different.
“To tell the truth, it is a different liturgy of the Mass. This needs to be said without ambiguity: the Roman Rite as we knew it no longer exists. It has been destroyed”
Then – and now – that first part struck me because of the absolute hubris. Gelineau is clearly telling us in no uncertain terms that he’s not just engaging in hyperbole; he takes the time to remind us that he knew whereof he was speaking, and that his assertions would be validated by the reader’s own experiences!
And this was only in 1976! [for those who are curious, the SSPX was initially suppressed in 1975, the first canonical sanctions against Archbishop Lefebvre came in July 1976, and Gelineau’s book was published in September of 1976…]
Thank you for this! Being generally “link-shy”, I did not follow the one in the X post, but went looking around for myself, and found various interesting things. First, the 28 August post on the Tradition in Action website with photos of five pages of the French text and a partial English translation with elisions marked (which rewards reading by non-Francophones such as myself) and the bibliographical information: Demain La Liturgie: Essai sur l’évolution des assemblées chrétiennes, Paris: Les Éditions du CERF, 1976. His French Wikipedia article however (and his Dutch – by copy-paste?) have “1970 Demain la liturgie, Cerf, Paris, 157 p., trad. anglais, italien, espagnol, portugais.” I have not managed to confirm this date via WorldCat, though I have found entries for various French editions and for German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese translations. The Internet Archive has “Log In and Borrow” scans of what seem pretty clearly American and English editions of the same English translation – as The Liturgy Today and Tomorrow with the first of the chapters (which he describes as “drawers in which I have arranged what I wanted to say”) as “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” (the English one a 1979 reprint, the American a 1978 U.S. edition, of the 1978 U.K. one). There the italicized sentences read “the Roman rite as we knew it exists no more. It has gone.” Quite a softening of the French “Il est détruit”! This translation and that of Tradition in Action both give a similar impression of the pretentious self-satisfied unpersuasive gloating impudence of this deplorably influential fellow (for some of which compare his Wikipedia articles). Happily he was deluded in his estimation of total destructive success – no need “to dream of an historical reconstruction”, “Those who […] experienced and celebrated the High Mass sung in Latin and Gregorian chant” are myriad, experiencing it weekly – if not more frequently, however many more have indeed been – and are being – successfully robbed and liturgically abused.
I am glad you mentioned Father Hunwicke because he also wrote several entries about how /why the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of our Lord against the idea that the Holy Spirit does it. His conclusion, which I find fascinating, is that the acceptability of the offering is what causes transubstantiation to occur. After all this is essentially what the priest asks in the Quam oblationem prayer.
I don’t know whether this idea is correct, but the notion that the offering has to be made in an acceptable manner seems important to me and this seems to me to be the one of the biggest differences between the rites. It seems to me many priests think as long as the words of institution are said correctly the Lord will have respect for their offering just as He respected the offering of Abel. As a result many NO masses, as a Muslim student at a Catholic school remarked, seem like something that used to be important but no longer is. (I actually heard that on Catholic Answers from the priest to whom this was stated.)
Father Z, thank you so much for linking your write up from 2018. You hit the nail on the head. As a former seminarian not yet familiar with the Traditional movement, I still found it incredibly frustrating, the little attention our Formation gave to learning Latin. Language affects the very way we perceive and conceive the world, and even truth itself. Make Latin Great Again!
Uncle Mike,
May I suggest a friendly amendment? Surely your last comment (more clunky in my presentation) should be either See Why Latin is Great Again, or Primum quarite Veritatem