Monsignor Eleganti: Liturgical Changes Were Brutal and Excessive

Monsignor Marian Eleganti, OSB, a former auxiliary bishop of Chur, Switzerland, distinguishes the Second Vatican Council, which called itself a pastoral assembly, from previous dogmatic councils (Marian-Eleganti.ch, 30 June).

Already as a 20-year-old Benedictine novice, he noticed that many passages of the Pastoral Council were open to interpretation, had a strong character of compromise and ambiguity.

"As an altar server, I experienced how brutally and excessively a liturgical reform was imposed, which was neither intended by the Council Fathers nor to be deduced from the texts," he writes: "It was the commissions (Archbishop Bugnini) who were at work, not the Council Fathers".

Some of the Council Fathers went home in order to interpret the leeway offered by the Council texts as broadly as possible.

The bishop concludes that "we can no longer go forward" with the generation of that time, including John Paul II and Benedict XVI [and Francis], because "today's young faithful, as I could see as a youth bishop, don't know the Council and are not interested in it. They have hardly read the text, but they are attracted by the old liturgy without being ideological".

According to Eleganti, there is a clear "conservative" turn in the young clergy as a reaction to the last 50 years of "Church reform".

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