Header image: A nationally syndicated editorial cartoon depicting the arrival of the “New Mass,” featured in Catholic newspapers immediately prior to the start of the first liturgical changes in the United States. Source: The Catholic Commentator, November 27, 1964, page 4. Scan via Catholic News Archive, public domain. To view the full-size image, click here.

This article was originally published on September 8, 2025.

Links to the other parts of the series can be found here: Main Page, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and the Series Conclusion

Few subjects seem to be as frequently discussed as the Second Vatican Council and the subsequent liturgical reform. In the face of the literally thousands of books on the subject over the last five decades, and seemingly endless blog posts and social media commentary, one might justly wonder: is there anything ‘new’ which could possibly be said about these topics? At this point, can anything ‘original’ be uncovered in these well-worn sources? Shouldn’t everyone just, as one writer suggested, embrace ‘the hermeneutic of talking about something else?’[1]

That suggestion may, in some aspects, be well taken. But I also suggest that there are several significant lacunae in the study of the Second Vatican Council which deserve to be explored, specifically the very first liturgical changes which followed the council and the reception of these changes by the laity.

The period of 1964-1969 has often been overlooked in scholarly and popular histories of the Council – particularly with regard to how the laity experienced and reacted to the very first post-conciliar liturgical changes.[2] The vast majority of historical scholarship and opinion writing has, somewhat understandably, focused either on the various aspects of pre-conciliar liturgical praxis, the Council itself, or the history of the revised liturgy after 1970. 

The roughly five-year period between the publication of the Liturgical Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium and the implementation of the revised Missale Romanum of Paul VI is almost universally bracketed or quickly passed over as merely an “interim period” during which the Church made a few–mostly minor–changes to the pre-conciliar Latin Mass as a temporary measure until the revised liturgy was complete and published for use.

The conventional narratives regarding the liturgical changes that occurred during these years can be generally summarized in the following points:

It is my contention, however, that an exploration of primary sources between 1964 and 1969–many of which have been overlooked for decades–deeply complicates and in some cases overturns these common narratives. 

In this article series, I seek to return to the primary sources in order to arrive at a more accurate representation of life during these years. Specifically, I seek to explore the following questions: 

Before I begin this series, a word of clarification is in order. This project is not a study of the liturgical changes themselves nor of adjacent topics (e.g. the details of the changes, their origins, the drafting and voting during the Second Vatican Council, the internal workings of the post-conciliar liturgical commission, etc). It is not focused on a detailed review of arguments which were made at the time either for or against the need for change, nor will it involve a comparative analysis of the authorized liturgical texts in use before, during, and after the Council. 

Rather, with this series I am endeavoring to reconstruct the public and popular reception of the very first post-conciliar liturgical changes – what could be termed “the reform before the reform”. How did the English-speaking Catholic world (mainly the United States and the United Kingdom) experience, understand, and react to these things?

This project is an attempt to document what has been elsewhere called a ‘lived history of Vatican II’[8] or a record of the ‘living, popular reception of the liturgy’[9] – to understand how these “interim” changes were lived and received by the laity and the wider English-speaking church during these “interim” years. 

This series will have four parts, grouped thematically.

Click the links below to access each part (as the articles are published on a rolling basis, I will hyperlink them below):

Part 1 – A New Liturgy: How the ‘reform before the reform’ was understood

Part 2 – Polls & Surveys: Assessing popular opinions on the reform

Part 3 – “Missal-bound resistance”: A study of lay & clerical reaction

Part 4 – “What went wrong?”: Pastoral Accompaniment, Disillusionment, and Blame

This series is designed to produce longform, heavily illustrated articles which take advantage of the flexibility afforded by a self-hosted web-based project format. This allows me the ability to compile and preproduce a mass of previously uncited primary material in order to make them available for others to cite and read for the first time. Freedom from the natural restrictions of academic publication permits the inclusion of extensive selections of primary material that otherwise would remain unavailable or difficult to find for the reader and those who wish to conduct additional research and exploration. 

(Eventually, I would like to turn this material into an academic book or series of articles, which will involve revision, expansion, and restructuring of these original articles, appendices, and methodology documents. But until that day, far in the future, this series aims to make these materials and voices available again, in large part for the first time since they were originally printed between 1964 and 1968.)

This research primarily relied on an intensive, broad-ranging analysis of Catholic press materials from between these years, including the US Bishops’ official wire news service, national and diocesan Catholic newspapers from the United States, England, and Australia, and more. By exploring online databases containing thousands of editions and millions of digitized pages, from newspapers throughout the nation and around the world, I was able to capture sufficiently numerous and diverse data points to allow for the identification of certain widespread trends which before now were not clear or able to be substantiated beyond mere anecdote.

These periodicals offer direct and unfiltered access to the official press releases, legislation, pastoral letters, and commentary by the hierarchy in America and throughout the English-speaking world. They also provide a unique and unparalleled window into what life would have been like for the average Catholic during these years. What were they reading, hearing, saying, and being taught about the changes? When they turned to the official paper of their diocese for guidance, what did they find? What did they hear from their bishops, priests, and diocesan officials? 

There are many invaluable snippets of testimony, opinions, and other details (from both laity and clergy) that are documented, quoted, or referenced in the pages of these materials which were not otherwise captured in interviews and have never before been cited in academic literature. While there are certainly limitations to the conclusions which can be drawn from a study of newspapers such as this, it also deserves to be emphasized that these materials grant us access to personal and other factual details which would otherwise be impossible to recapture or reconstruct.

This is the end of the general introduction to this series, The “New Mass” of 1964: Popular reception of the first post-conciliar liturgical changes. Links to the other parts of the series can be found here: Main Page, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and the Series Conclusion.

[1] Urban Hannon, “The Prodigal Church, by Brandon McGinley: Review by Urban Hannon,” New Liturgical Movement, July 29, 2020: “With all due respect for Benedict XVI’s hermeneutic of continuity […] I like to joke that I advocate instead for the hermeneutic of talking about something else. It’s 2020. My millennial peers and I did not live through the Second Vatican Council, nor the collapse of the Church’s midcentury structures in its aftermath. We were born in the ruins. And to be honest, we’re sick of talking about it.” See also Bishop Erik Varden’s comments on Coram Fratribus: “Today’s young Catholics are not ungrateful for the council’s great gifts, but unable to proceed with their grandparents’ mindsets, uninclined to flog dead horses, unenthused by fossilised projects of aggiornamento when the sun has set on the giorno by which they were defined.”

[2] To give several examples: in the seventh chapter of his seminal 2021 work American Catholicism Transformed: From the Cold War Through the Council, Rev. Joseph P. Chinnici only dedicates ~1,400 words on the liturgy between 1964-1967 and of those only a few sentences (~200 words) discuss the direct action of the US bishops to implement the liturgical changes and the reception and experience of the laity; in his 2007 article “Frederick R. McManus, Worship, and the Reception of Vatican II in the United States,” Rev. Mark Massa only briefly mentions lay reaction between 1964 and 1969 and relies exclusively on surveys performed in 1974 to comment on the opinions of the laity regarding liturgical change; and in her 2013 book Faith in the family: A lived religious history of English Catholicism, 1945-82, Alana Harris only briefly mentions a few specific details about the initial liturgical changes and lay reactions between 1964 and 1969 in anecdotes scattered across the final ten pages of chapter three. There is no discussion whatsoever of lay reaction and reception to the initial liturgical changes whatsoever in either The Reception of Vatican II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) or “A Synoptic Look at the Failures and Successes of Post-Vatican II Liturgical Reforms” (Church Life Journal, 2022).

[3] For example, see Andrew Walsh, “Catholic Worship in a Contentious Age,” in The Future of Catholicism in America, eds. Patricia O’Connell Killen and Mark Silk (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019): “Liturgical change came rapidly after the First Sunday of Advent in 1964. The initial wave included limited use of the vernacular in the Mass, although for several years the test itself remained that of the old Roman Missal… in 1969, the Vatican approved the text of a new Missal [… which] was briefer than the Tridentine rite and gave the celebrating priest some choice in the form of prayers” (pp 245-250).

See also William Dignes, “Ritual Conflict as Social Conflict: Liturgical Reform in the Roman Catholic Church,” Sociological Analysis, Vol. 48, no. 2 (1987), page 141: “The initial changes in the liturgy between 1964-1969 […] did not constitute a new rite of the Mass per se, only modifications and adaptations of the Tridentine rite: congregational responses to the priest’s prayers, singing contemporary hymns, some vernacularization, and the celebration of the Mass from an altar facing the people […] The structure of the Mass up to the late 1960s was virtually indistinguishable from the liturgy of the four previous centuries. The Novus Ordo Mass, however, constituted an entirely new rite of worship. The changes in the new Ordo were structural in nature and represented a shift away from hierarchy, tradition, conformity, and rigid sacred/profane boundary maintenance. The new Mass was simplified and shortened.”

[4] This was recently illustrated by the debates which emerged during the pontificate of Pope Francis regarding the liceity or desirability of the continued use of the pre-conciliar form of the Mass (colloquially known as the “Traditional Latin Mass”). The term “the New Mass”–referring to the Roman Missal of 1970–was understood as an offensive and erroneous term by those who disputed with ‘traditionalists’. Cardinal Odilo Scherer of the Archdiocese of São Paulo, Brazil decried this label, saying: “Rejecting or discrediting a supposed “new mass” also includes a theological mistake and, certainly, a doctrinal error. We need to be careful with this language, which misleads many people … ‘Novus ordo missae’ means ‘new order (or ritual) of the Mass.’ This is very different from ‘new mass.’ The ‘Novus ordo missae’ did not ‘produce’ a ‘new mass,’  but updated the rite of the one mass. There are not two masses… the ‘new’ and the ‘all time.’ To say so would be a serious mistake.”

[5] This narrative can be found in many places. See for example (emphasis added):

This narrative is also featured in academic treatments of the changes, like the account given by Shaun Blanchard and Stephen Bullivant in Vatican II: A Very Short introduction (Oxford, 2023): “In fact, this was only an interim measure, prior to a much more substantially revised Order of Mass, accompanied by a wider-ranging Lectionary of scriptural readings and revamped Calendar […] promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1969. It is this Novus Ordo (‘New Order’), which the vast majority of today’s Catholics know simply as ‘the Mass,’ that is normally and most naturally seen as representing the full fruit of the liturgical reform(s) initiated by Vatican II” (pp 48-49).

Perhaps more importantly, even official Church legislation seems to suggest this bracketing of the ‘interim’ period of 1964-1969. For example, Pope Benedict XVI’s motu proprio Summorum Pontificum was titled “On the Use of the Roman Liturgy Prior to the Reform of 1970,” emphasizing the distinction between pre-conciliar 1962 edition of the missal with the revised 1970 edition with no reference to anything in between. Similarly, Pope Francis’s motu proprio Traditiones Custodes was likewise titled “On the Use of the Roman Liturgy Prior to the Reform of 1970” and refers exclusively to the 1962 missal in contrast to the revised 1970 edition.

It should be noted that the revised Roman Missal of Paul VI was actually promulgated in the spring of 1969 and first implemented — in parts of the world — in November and December of that year. However, most countries found it too difficult to implement the new liturgy in such a short timeframe, and furthermore there were immediate corrections and changes needed to the initially promulgated texts. Because of this, many regions did not implement the revised Roman Missal until 1970 and its adoption was not obligatory until 1971. It is for these reasons that the reformed liturgy is commonly associated with the year 1970 and is even referred to as “the Reform of 1970” by both Pope Benedict and Pope Francis. I have therefore chosen to use similar shorthand phrases and references in this paper.

[6] One succinct expression of this sentiment is given by Rev. Joseph Grayland in New Life, Old Churchskins: The initial implementation of Pastoral Liturgy in New Zealand, 1963 to 1970, unpublished master’s thesis, 1996, page 67: “Judging from sources like the letters to the editors of the Tablet and the Zealandia the major reaction in New Zealand against the new Mass did not begin until after 1970. From this date onwards the reaction to the new Mass took on a noticeably negative and vindictive nature than had not been previously present.” Another case is particularly illustrative: perhaps the most famous example of resistance to the new Roman Missal of 1970 is that of French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, CSSp. While it is well known that Lefebvre founded the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X in 1970 in reaction to–and rejection of–the reformed liturgy, it is not widely understood that Lefebvre was supportive of the modest initial “interim” liturgical changes. Indeed, Lefebvre went so far as to say in 1965:

The quoted text before the ellipse is from Blanchard and Bullivant in Vatican II: A Very Short introduction (page 51), while the text following the ellipse is from Yves Chiron in Annibale Bugnini: Reformer of the Liturgy (page 94). Blanchard and Bullivant give the citation as a pastoral letter, while Chiron gives the citation as an article by Lefebvre to a traditionalist Catholic magazine titled “Perspectives conciliaires entre la 3^e et le 4^e session,” in Itinéraires 95 (July-August 1965), pp 78-79. An archive of the journal can be found here, and the full text of Levebvre’s article can be found here.

[7]  See, for example, the testimony of Pierre-Marie Gy: “Everybody at that time [i.e. the first Sunday of Advent, 1964] was ready to receive celebrating Mass in the vernacular,” See The Reception of Vatican II Liturgical Reforms in the Life of the Church (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2003), page 26. Additional examples include: “National and local surveys indicated widespread acceptance and approval of the liturgical reform […] with over 93 percent of the people liking the changes [in 1966].” See Joseph P. Chinnici, American Catholicism Transformed: From the Cold War Through the Council (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), page 198 & 397, note 152; and “Most North American Catholics overwhelmingly—and surprisingly quickly—came to support what would come to be known as the new Mass.” See Mark Massa, The American Catholic Revolution: How the Sixties Changed the Church Forever (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), page 15.

[8] See the Cushwa Center’s “Lived History of Vatican II”: https://cushwa.nd.edu/about/history/

[9] For example, Frederick McManus and others have argued “that popular reception of the liturgical reforms was something ‘essential to the ongoing identity of church as church.’” Yves Congar also offered the idea of  “reception as an ecclesiological reality,” which was taken up by others to propose that how ecclesiastical developments were received throughout the church “was no more or less than the extension or prolongation of the conciliar process.”

• Follow us on Twitter

• About
• Contact
• Donate
• Features
• Home