“How I Discovered the Mass of St Pius V”

A Discovery. Matteo D'Amico, an Italian philosophy professor, explained on his blog, how in March 2000 he discovered the Mass of All Ages at the Fraternity of St Pius X in Seregno, near Milan. At the time, he was unaware of the crisis in the Church, the problems linked to Vatican II, the liturgical question. He didn’t know anything about Pius X. A middle-aged priest he had met at a conference, curiously wearing a cassock, invited him to Mass.

Stones. The Mass took place in a room resembling an old warehouse. Nothing was beautiful or elegant. The priest and his altar boys entered from the back, slowly, silently, composed, indifferent to the humility of the place. Its modesty disappeared when the sacred action, the terrible and austere mystery took over. The Eternal broke from above into the room. Suddenly, it was possible to pray while adoring and to adore while praying. At home, D’Amico told his wife, “If this was the Church's rite of all time, it is inconceivable that they have suppressed it to replace it with Paul VI's new Mass! It is like throwing away a treasure of precious gems to replace it with worthless stones.”

Silence. The thing that struck D’Amico most, was the great silence pervading Mass, coming from an immense ocean of superhuman peace. Because Mass renews Christ’s Passion and death, D’Amico explains, no words could have more meaning than the silent contemplation of Christ's suffering. He notices that in the Eucharist of Paul VI this mystical silence is absent.

Solitude. The second characteristic of the Mass of All Ages is for D’Amico a very sweet solitude. Faced with the terrible mystery of Golgotha, one is alone. D’Amico observes that the Eucharist of Paul VI is built to make this silence impossible because it celebrates man and obscures the Holy Sacrifice with its loud or inappropriate singing, with liturgical variations or improvisation, while all signs of adoration are deliberately eliminated.

Beauty. Silence and solitude open up to the beauty of Mass. The person contemplating this beauty becomes part of it. D’Amico notices that in the Eucharist of Paul VI everything tends towards disorder and chaos. The parts are roughly juxtaposed, disconnected from each other, unable to converge towards unity because the centre, the Holy Sacrifice, is missing. Paul VI's reform was carried out to please the Protestants, and therefore obscures Christ’s Sacrifice. The liturgy was emptied of its meaning, became insignificant and empty, a grey and colourless container of some human communion, obtained at the price of excluding God or making him unrecognisable.