The Legislating Church
Novelty in the Name of the Pope
In his historic Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum of July 7, 2007, Pope Benedict declared with the full authority of his office what traditionalists had always known: that the typical edition of the Roman Missal promulgated in 1962, representing the immemorial Roman liturgy, was “never abrogated” by Paul VI (numquam abrogatam).
In the accompanying letter to the worldwide episcopate, Pope Benedict was at pains to draw “attention to the fact that this Missal was never juridically abrogated and, consequently, in principle, was always permitted.”
Always permitted.
And yet for forty years after the first public celebration of Pope Paul’s New Mass on October 24, 1967—a Biblical epoch of suffering—the Church groaned under the burden of the falsehood that the traditional Mass had been abrogated, or “obrogated” (eliminated by substitution) as the neo-Catholic establishment now contends in a hasty revision of its discredited propaganda.
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