THE COUNCIL, THE REFORM, AND THE MISSING “THUS”
Dom Alcuin Reid’s criticism of Leo XIV confirms a question Nuntiatoria had already placed at the centre of the liturgical debate
One of the most recognisable supposed achievements of Vatican II — the priest celebrating Mass facing the people — was never commanded by Vatican II. That fact is not incidental. It illustrates precisely the methodological problem now identified by Dom Alcuin Reid in Pope Leo XIV’s latest catechesis: the tendency to treat the Council’s authorisation of liturgical reform, the subsequent work of the Consilium, and the practices which eventually became widespread as though they were one historical act.
The altar provides the obvious place to begin because it stands as a physical witness to how easily the history of the postconciliar reform can be rewritten after the event. Generations of Catholics were taught, explicitly or implicitly, that Vatican II “turned the priest around.” Yet Sacrosanctum Concilium did no such thing. The Constitution neither commanded versus populum celebration nor abolished the common orientation of priest and faithful. It did not require existing high altars to be abandoned, did not condemn eastward celebration as defective, and did not prescribe the arrangement which within a few years became almost synonymous in the popular imagination with “the Council”.¹
That history matters because it exposes a recurring sequence. The Council establishes principles and authorises reforms. Postconciliar authorities interpret and implement those principles. New practices become common. In time, what became customary is remembered as though it had been explicitly decreed at the Council itself. Permission becomes preference; preference becomes expectation; expectation becomes near-universal practice; near-universal practice becomes historical memory. Eventually Catholics can be told that an inherited practice represents resistance to Vatican II when Vatican II never ordered its abandonment in the first place.
This was one of the central arguments of Nuntiatoria’s recent editorial, “Reverence Cannot Rewrite History — Leo XIV and the Unanswered Question of Liturgical Reform.” There we distinguished what the Council actually mandated from what was subsequently devised in the implementation of that mandate. We argued that celebrating the Missal of Paul VI ad orientem itself exposes an uncomfortable historical fact: one of the practices most routinely identified with Vatican II was never required by Vatican II. As we put it then, **reverence may improve the celebration; it cannot rewrite the history of the reform.**¹
Nine days later, on 26 August, Diane Montagna published an intervention by Dom Alcuin Reid addressing Pope Leo XIV’s latest General Audience on Sacrosanctum Concilium. Reid, whose The Organic Development of the Liturgy was published with a preface by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, isolated a single word in the Pope’s argument: “thus”. Leo recalled the history of twentieth-century liturgical reform, referred to developments under Pius XII and John XXIII, and concluded that “the liturgical reform promoted by the Second Vatican Council is thus firmly rooted in the living tradition of the Church.”²
Reid’s objection is simple but substantial: the conclusion does not follow merely from what precedes it. The fact that the Church has legitimately reformed her liturgy before demonstrates that liturgical reform is possible and, in appropriate circumstances, necessary. It does not demonstrate that the particular reform devised after Vatican II therefore fulfilled the Council’s own requirement of organic development. The precedent proves the legitimacy of reform in principle; it does not prove the organic continuity of this reform in fact.³
That distinction is precisely the one Nuntiatoria had already placed at the centre of its analysis. To say that the Council ordered reform is not to prove that the Council ordered this reform. The conciliar mandate, the decisions subsequently taken by the Consilium, and the final promulgation of the revised liturgical books under Paul VI are historically connected, certainly; but they are not one and the same act. To collapse them into the convenient shorthand of “Vatican II changed the Mass” is not history. It is retrospective compression.¹
There is no particular virtue in claiming priority for the observation. What matters is the independent convergence. Reid is an internationally recognised liturgical scholar, and the fact that his criticism of Leo XIV arrives independently at substantially the same historiographical problem already identified in these pages is significant. It confirms that the distinction between what Vatican II authorised and what was subsequently produced in its name is neither rhetorical nor sectarian. It is a real historical distinction, demonstrable from the documents themselves.
Indeed, Pope Leo XIV has himself already articulated the standard by which the matter ought to be judged. Earlier this year he cited Sacrosanctum Concilium §23, which insists that reform must preserve sound tradition while allowing legitimate progress; that innovations should be introduced only where the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them; that theological, historical and pastoral investigation must precede reform; and that new forms should grow organically from forms already existing.⁴ These are not criteria invented by critics of the postconciliar settlement. They are the criteria established by the Council itself.
Once those principles are acknowledged, however, they must be allowed to perform actual historical work. It is not enough to say that competent authority promulgated a reform and then to treat promulgation itself as proof that the reform was organically continuous. If competent promulgation alone settles the question, then “organic development” ceases to describe a historical relationship between inherited and revised forms. It becomes merely an honorific automatically attached to whatever ecclesiastical authority happens to legislate.
That is not what Sacrosanctum Concilium says. The very existence of §23 presupposes that there are criteria by which reform is to be disciplined. Innovation bears a burden of justification. The inherited form is not merely raw material awaiting reconstruction. Reform is ordered to tradition, not tradition to reform.
This is also the principle expressed in the recent Nuntiatoria reflection “Accipere, non fingere — To Receive, Not to Fabricate.” The Roman liturgy was never historically regarded as undifferentiated ecclesiastical material periodically available for comprehensive redesign. Popes legislated, codified, corrected and sometimes made substantial changes, but they acted within a received liturgical inheritance whose antiquity and accumulated authority themselves constrained the manner in which reform could legitimately occur. The Roman Pontiff is the Church’s supreme legislator. He is not the proprietor of the Church’s worship.⁵
The question of priestly orientation is particularly revealing because it also exposes how appeals to antiquity can conceal a change of meaning. Ancient freestanding altars unquestionably existed. Certain Roman basilicas were so constructed that a priest celebrating towards geographical east could at the same time be physically facing the nave. But those facts do not establish that ancient Christians understood the Eucharistic action according to the modern model of priest and congregation deliberately confronting one another across an altar. An ancient architectural circumstance and a twentieth-century theological interpretation of that circumstance are not identical.
The older Roman rubrics themselves make the distinction clear. They knew perfectly well that some altars were situated ad orientem, versus populum, and they provided for such circumstances. But the exceptional rubric proves that the rite could accommodate such an arrangement; it does not prove that sustained face-to-face celebration constituted the normative theological principle of Roman worship. Indeed, the repeated traditional directions instructing the celebrant to turn towards the people at specified moments presuppose the normal ceremonial situation in which priest and faithful are otherwise commonly oriented.
Joseph Ratzinger repeatedly identified the mistake. The fundamental ancient principle was not that the priest should look at the people, but that priest and people should turn together towards the Lord. The twentieth-century transformation of the altar into the visual centre of a face-to-face assembly therefore involved more than the recovery of an ancient architectural form. It involved a reinterpretation of what that form meant.⁶
This distinction is crucial. Recovering an ancient object is not necessarily recovering the ancient theology attached to it.
A freestanding altar may be ancient. Celebration at a freestanding altar may be ancient. The priest’s geographical position facing towards the nave in particular basilicas may be ancient. None of this proves that the theological programme of celebrant and congregation looking at one another across an altar throughout the Eucharistic Prayer is therefore the ancient Roman norm.
Here, then, the altar becomes a miniature of Reid’s larger objection to Leo XIV. “Ancient freestanding altars existed” does not logically entail “therefore the twentieth-century universalisation of versus populum represents a straightforward restoration of ancient Christian worship.” In precisely the same way, “the Church has reformed the liturgy before” does not logically entail “therefore the particular reform constructed between the Council and the promulgation of the new Missal constitutes organic development of the received Roman Rite.”
In each case, the decisive historical step has been assumed rather than demonstrated.
The chronology of versus populum makes the problem particularly difficult to ignore. Vatican II did not command it. The 1964 instruction Inter Oecumenici subsequently encouraged the construction of freestanding principal altars so that they might easily be walked around and so that celebration facing the people could take place.⁷ Even that instruction did not command universal celebration facing the congregation. Nor was ad orientem subsequently prohibited. When the Congregation for Divine Worship was formally asked whether the relevant wording of the General Instruction excluded celebration versus absidem, its answer was simply: “Negative.”⁸
Yet within remarkably little time, the practice which had never been mandated by the Council had become so closely identified with the Council that Catholics commonly described eastward celebration as “turning one’s back on the people”. A permitted possibility had become a practical norm, the practical norm had become an ideological symbol, and the ideological symbol had been projected backwards into Vatican II itself.
That is not merely a dispute about which way the priest stands. It is a case study in how the history of the entire liturgical reform has been narrated.
The same distinction must therefore be maintained elsewhere. Vatican II desired that the treasures of Scripture be opened more abundantly to the faithful; it did not itself construct the later three-year Sunday lectionary. The Council required revision of the liturgical calendar; it did not determine each subsequent suppression, transfer and reclassification. It encouraged prudent simplification where genuine duplication existed; it did not itself author every deletion or replacement made by the Consilium. Sacrosanctum Concilium did not demand several new Eucharistic Prayers. It did not command the practical disappearance of Latin. It explicitly accorded Gregorian chant pride of place even though much ordinary postconciliar worship proceeded in another direction entirely.
None of this proves by itself that each subsequent change was illegitimate. It proves something more modest, but historically indispensable: those changes cannot simply be called “what Vatican II did”.
That distinction also protects the authority of the Council from being used as a rhetorical shield for decisions the Council Fathers themselves never made. If the postconciliar reform is defensible on its own merits, then it should be defended on its own merits. It should not need to borrow authority retrospectively from propositions which cannot be found in the conciliar text.
This is where the word identified by Reid becomes so important. “Thus.”
The word bears an enormous logical weight. Leo XIV’s formulation suggests that because liturgical reform has historical antecedents, the reform following Vatican II is therefore firmly rooted in the living tradition of the Church. But “thus” bridges the very historical question that remains contested. It assumes the conclusion that requires demonstration.
If the reform is truly an organic development of the Roman tradition, that proposition should be capable of demonstration according to the Council’s own standard. Where Vatican II explicitly required a reform, identify the mandate. Where no such mandate exists, establish why the genuine and certain good of the Church required the innovation. Then demonstrate how the new form grew organically from the form immediately preceding it.
Apply that test to the offertory.
Apply it to the Eucharistic Prayers.
Apply it to the reconstruction of the lectionary.
Apply it to the calendar.
Apply it to the practical disappearance of Latin and the marginalisation of Gregorian chant.
And apply it, perhaps most visibly of all, to the altar and the orientation of the priest.
If the historical evidence supports the claim of organic development, the enquiry will strengthen the reform’s case. If the enquiry itself is treated as inadmissible, the problem lies not with the historian but with a conclusion being protected from historical scrutiny.
Dom Alcuin Reid has therefore not introduced an entirely new criticism. He has publicly and independently articulated the same fundamental difficulty which Nuntiatoria had already identified: the authority to reform the liturgy does not itself prove that the reform actually produced was organically developed from what preceded it.
Pope Leo XIV says that the reform is “thus firmly rooted in the living tradition of the Church.”
Dom Alcuin Reid asks whether the “thus” follows.
Nuntiatoria had already asked the same question.
The altar shows why the answer cannot simply be assumed.
¹ Nuntiatoria, “Reverence Cannot Rewrite History — Leo XIV and the Unanswered Question of Liturgical Reform,” 17 August 2026. The article distinguished the conciliar mandate from the subsequent work of the Consilium and drew particular attention to the fact that versus populum celebration was neither required by Sacrosanctum Concilium nor made obligatory by the reformed liturgical books.
² Leo XIV, General Audience: The Documents of the Second Vatican Council — Sacrosanctum Concilium: The motivations of the liturgical reform, 26 August 2026.
³ Diane Montagna, “Liturgy Wars — The Latest Volley: A Papal ‘Thus’,” Diane Montagna on Substack, 26 August 2026, incorporating the analysis of Dom Alcuin Reid.
⁴ Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, §23; cf. Leo XIV, General Audience on Sacrosanctum Concilium: Tradition and Development, 27 May 2026.
⁵ Nuntiatoria, “Accipere, non fingere — To Receive, Not to Fabricate,” Nuntiatoria CXIX, August 2026.
⁶ Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, especially the discussion of the altar and the direction of liturgical prayer; see also Ratzinger’s critique of the modern assumption that celebration facing the people constituted the normative practice of Christian antiquity.
⁷ Sacred Congregation of Rites and Consilium, Inter Oecumenici, 26 September 1964, §91: the principal altar should preferably be freestanding so that it may easily be walked around and celebration facing the people may take place.
⁸ Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, response concerning the interpretation of General Instruction of the Roman Missal §299, published in Notitiae 36 (2000): the proposition that §299 excludes celebration versus absidem was answered “Negative.”
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