History of the Tridentine Mass
History of the Tridentine Mass
The final version of the Tridentine Mass was codified in 1570 by the Council of Trent, but some of the material in it is nearly 1000 years older.
The Council of Trent was a response by the Catholic Church to the dramatic upheaval of the Reformation. Roman Catholic bishops met for 25 sessions of debate between 1545 and 1563; further discussions continued in Rome for years afterwards.
Liturgical reform wasn't the Council's only result; it led to the founding of the Jesuits, a revision of the Church Calendar and much clarification and codification of Catholic doctrine.
The liturgical problem was that many local variations on the Mass had been created in the confusion that followed the Reformation, not all of them of high quality or in line with the central doctrine. The Church realised that different liturgies could become a real threat to unity.
The liturgical reforms were made by a commission set up for the purpose by Pope Pius V. Their job was to create new, centrally authorised orders of service that every Church in every country would have to use. They issued the Breviarum Romanum in 1568 and the Missale Romanum in 1570.
The Council of Trent carried out considerable reforms in the sphere of Catholic worship by removing many appalling abuses and by rearranging the form of the Catholic liturgy.
But the Tridentine reforms were in fact more in the nature of a restoration of the medieval status quo than a truly constructive and creative renewal of Christian worship in the light of the Gospel and arising from a need to adapt worship to the requirements of a new age.
John Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century, 1991
The liturgists went back to an earlier form of Mass (1472) and cleaned things up, removing what one theologian called "the rank and monstrous excesses which had, particularly during the later Middle Ages, crept into the Mass".
They produced an order of service that laid down in minute detail what would be done and said at each stage of the Mass, and so gave churches a simple and effective template for worship that could be shared by congregations everywhere.
The Mass remained unchanged for 400 years, and served the Church well, despite coming in for much criticism in more recent times, largely for giving the congregation virtually no active role to play in the service.
Current liturgical thinking is generally critical of the Tridentine era (effectively the four hundred years from the 1560s to the 1960s).
Nevertheless the Tridentine liturgy provided the basis for consolidation after the schism of the Reformation, for spiritual growth and devotional fervour among the laity, and for mission to every continent in the world.
John Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century, 1991
Incidentally, the Tridentine Mass didn't completely remove all other orders of the Mass: several others survived on a small scale, among them the Ambrosian rite, the Mozarabic rite of Toledo, the rite of Braga, the Carthusian rite, the Carmelite rite and the Dominican rite.