History of “the movement” — What went wrong?

Dom Prosper Guéranger OSB and Pope (St.) Pius X were at the origin of the Liturgical Movement in the early 1900s, working towards “renewal of fervor for the liturgy” among clergy and faithful.

Promoters of the New Order (Novus Ordo) of the Mass say that’s where the new Mass got its start. Not so, wrote Fr. Didier Bonneterre in his 1980 book, The Liturgical Movement: Gueranger to Beauduin to Bugnini, Roots, Radicals Results.

The fact is, says Bonneterre in a detailed, fascinating, aggressively partisan argument, the liturgical movement was diverted from its course. It was his business to tell how that happened, discover who set reform off on  the wrong track, what was its early deviation, what the main error, who “hijacked” the movement so as to “propagandize” for Vatican II and a New Mass.

He identified major protagonists who would be “hounding” the Popes of the decades to come, names to conjure with in liturgical history, heroes, even icons, of the religious left (progressive, liberal) — Beauduin, Bea, Parsch, Guardini, Casel, Jungmann, Lercaro, Botte, Reinhold, Winzen, Congar, Harscouet, (Gaspar) Lefebvre, Danielou, Fischer, Bugnini, Nocent, Bouyer, Thurian, Gy, etc. Quite a list.

Thanks to them and their followers, the New Mass had been conceived — “the poisoned fruit of the perversions” of the Movement. How did it happen? His book “helps us to know what to reject and what we must carefully conserve” of the Movement, he wrote.