Adding Saint Joseph to the canon of the Mass was the thin edge of the wedge of liturgical change. Once that was accepted, changing the Mass became normalised.
by Silvester Donald McLean
We have just celebrated the Feast of Saint Joseph the Worker on May 1, instituted by …. Msgr Bugnini!
This was brought home to me when I picked up my mother’s Daily Missal, which was presented to her as a wedding present on 31 August 1935. It is almost unusable today, even for the last acceptable version of the Mass (1962) because the Bugnini changes had altered the Mass so much.
I want to concentrate on the first change that took place circa 1954, and was the first to use Saint Joseph as a weapon. It was a change to the calendar only and therefor fairly easily sold. For comparison I will use the Roman Catholic Daily Missal from the Angelus Press, probably the most common Daily Missal in use today for the Mass of all Times. The Angelus Missal is an edited edition of my mother’s Missal of 1935 compiled by Sylvester P Juergens, S.M., S.T.D.
Until the Bugnini changes, The Solemnity of St. Joseph was celebrated on the third Wednesday after Easter. It was ever so. May 1, the current Feast of St Joseph, now titled Saint Joseph the Worker, was previously the Feast of two Apostles, Saints Philip and James. Their feast day is now May 11.
A few years after this change I had moved to the heavily unionised steel city of Newcastle. May 1 was a major celebration for the largely Communist/Unionist steel workers. They had a procession of Workers which stopped the traffic in Hunter Street, and of course, no work that day. There was little resistance from the Catholic Church. First victory to Bugnini.
After this first victory, and the death of Pope Pius XII, it was time for Bugnini to alter the Ordinary of the Mass.
The Ordinary had been codified at the Council of Trent, which meant that Pope Saint Pius V had strictly imposed one form of the Mass on the whole church. The form had been in use for well over a millennia.
These simple words were printed in English Missals as early as 1960: “. . . and her spouse Saint Joseph.” (Saint Andrews Daily Missal 1960)
Once that was accepted, Bugnini used it as a precedent for further changes to the Ordinary of the Mass, and they were many. Some of us remember the red covered loose leaf Mass Books that appeared around 1964 that allowed new pages to be inserted “as the changes come through.”
Some priests, including Padre Pio, rejected the changes and so began a decade of resistance with seemingly no hope. There then arose two lone voices, one French Archbishop and one Brazilian Bishop who gave some hope to the lonely heroic priests who resisted.
Silvester Donald McLean and his late wife Andrina founded ‘Catholic’: a traditional newspaper printed in country Victoria, Australia from 1982 to 2000.
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