Is the Novus Ordo a Jansenist Liturgy?

[kmo_9000]

In Looking at the Liturgy by Aidan Nichols, he compares some of the modern changes in the post Vatican II Church to some of the innovations the Jansanists promoted.

For example, the Jansanists thought that the faith and the liturgy should be more didactic and less pietistic. He gives the example of Jansenists who hated the Litany of Loretto because essentially they viewed it as useless repetition.

The Novus Ordo, of course, is designed to teach more than it is aimed at promoting piety or higher participation in the sense or metitative prayer.

Aidan Nichols cites a bunch of parallel changes in the Novus Ordo compared to the Jansanists, but, not being a traditionalist per-say, he says that somehow we made the changes for different underlying motives and this somehow makes it all better.

Every time I go to a Novus Ordo I observe how the liturgy is structured and how it seems more like a class room than it does a Church where we are suppose to be praying. It seems very Jansenist to me, sterile and lifeless. I went to the FSSP two hours away last month and it was full of young families and they had an army of young boys alter serving. And it's like that every Sunday for them. Today at the local Novus Ordo it was unusually packed, there were many young families but they were only there for first communion, most of them won't come back till Christmas.

It strikes me that people will call you a Jansenist for pointing out that many people are receiving sacreligious communions, which is objectively true since many people are receiving communion even though they missed Mass most of the year. But a closer study, I think, would reveal many more similarities between the Novus Ordo liturgy and spirituality and Jansenism than with traditional Catholicism. In one of the Sensus Fidelium sermons the priest even pointed out that Jansenism is not conservative or traditional, it's actually liberal to an extreme degree.

[Miriam_M]

Every time I go to a Novus Ordo I observe how the liturgy is structured and how it seems more like a class room than it does a Church where we are suppose to be praying. It seems very Jansenist to me, sterile and lifeless.

Believe that my classrooms are a lot more interesting than most N.O. Masses.  Rather, the NOM, for the most part i.m.o resembles more a civic meeting --such as a City Council Meeting-- yawn -- with structured (yes) "participation" from those attending.  It's true that there's some attention to elementary didactics ("We know that Our Lord did blah-blah-blah..."), but there's also some attention paid to announcing what's coming next -- the meeting agenda, if you will, and especially what's on the agenda for eager social justice warriors and the Politically Correct brigade.

Today I was briefly -- and accidentally -- at the tail end of a NOM.  (I was there for an appointment with someone; the Mass was supposed to have been already finished about 30 minutes before then.)  The music was surprisingly good (and in Latin, including some traditional chant and polyphony).  The priest was facing Ad Orientem and he handled HC distribution much better than most.  No EM's.  Only male servers.  I didn't hear the homily since I came at the end, but I just wanted to mention, thank goodness for some diocesan priests with sense and reverence.  I respect him for doing this and some other stuff I know about him.  Too bad that most of those attending wore sloppy outdoor clothes suitable for gardening (Saturday Worst), and the women hadn't bothered to so much as brush their hair. (No, these were not Sunday day-laborers.)

But yes, the vast majority of Sunday morning and weekday NOM's are uninspiring and have a "business" quality to them.  You say classroom; I say secular meeting.  Either way, piety and reverence are lucky to be present and find a seat anywhere.

In one of the Sensus Fidelium sermons the priest even pointed out that Jansenism is not conservative or traditional, it's actually liberal to an extreme degree.

Do you have a link to that sermon?

[Miriam_M]

(Understand that often when I say "today" I mean the previous daylight hours of a late-night post!)  Such as above (after midnight, but in my mind, "today."

Spoken like a typical nocturnal creature.

[Prayerful]

No. Jansenism (it could of course mean a lot of things) roughly put, overemphasised the justice of God and downplayed His mercy. Their emphasis on the unworthiness and sinfulness of man, and hence a great difficulty in receiving a sacrament worthily, is the polar opposite of Jansenism. In fact, it made the sacramental life almost impossible for many, giving rise to despair and later indifference. There is a very rough approximation in that some put more emphasis on vernacular elements in the liturgy, but Jansenism in the sense of a tendency espoused in Port Royale and by the great Blaise Pascal (note his strictures on Jesuit probalism and causistry were similar to condemnations of Bl Innocent XI), and later condemned by the Pope and suppressed by the King of France, is wholly different from the NOM. Another slight resemblance is between Conciliar era crucifixes and some of that era which shows our Saviour leaning down the cross, arms narrow, but that's visual. The most prevalent tendency in the Conciliar era is towards almost abolishing sin and universal salvation. Hopefully that error is in the character of a confusion born of bad formation, a sort of material heresy.

The answer to OP is no.

[kmo_9000]

No. Jansenism (it could of course mean a lot of things) roughly put, overemphasised the justice of God and downplayed His mercy. Their emphasis on the unworthiness and sinfulness of man, and hence a great difficulty in receiving a sacrament worthily, is the polar opposite of Jansenism. In fact, it made the sacramental life almost impossible for many, giving rise to despair and later indifference. There is a very rough approximation in that some put more emphasis on vernacular elements in the liturgy, but Jansenism in the sense of a tendency espoused in Port Royale and by the great Blaise Pascal (note his strictures on Jesuit probalism and causistry were similar to condemnations of Bl Innocent XI), and later condemned by the Pope and suppressed by the King of France, is wholly different from the NOM. Another slight resemblance is between Conciliar era crucifixes and some of that era which shows our Saviour leaning down the cross, arms narrow, but that's visual. The most prevalent tendency in the Conciliar era is towards almost abolishing sin and universal salvation. Hopefully that error is in the character of a confusion born of bad formation, a sort of material heresy.

The answer to OP is no.

A top level history of the Jansenist heresy doesn't answer my question.

Here is the pertinent quote from Looking at the Liturgy:

Late Jansenism, in pursuing its fifth-century Augustinian ideal over against the contemporary Church of Rome, pushed the active participation of the laity in the Liturgy and the use of the vernacular as badges of Urchristentum, signs of a primitive authenticity from which the papal Church with her mediocre standards of Christian discipleship had painfully declined.

Nichols, Aidan. Looking at The Liturgy (Kindle Locations 135-138). Ignatius Press. Kindle Edition.

[Larry]

The Novus Ordo resembles some of the reforms to the liturgy that the Jansenists advocated for at the Synod of Pistoia, which were condemned by Pope Pius VI.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12116c.htm

[Gardener]

The Novus Ordo resembles some of the reforms to the liturgy that the Jansenists advocated for at the Synod of Pistoia, which were condemned by Pope Pius VI.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12116c.htm

Wouldn't that make sense, though? Since Modernism is a synthesis of all heresies, there would be elements of Jansenism in a liturgy designed by Modernists.

[aquinas138]

I think Nichols is probably partially correct - the NO is not Jansenist (I'd be interested in you fleshing out a bit more how they are similar), but it ended up making many of the same changes the Jansenists wanted. That's probably due more to an archaeologizing spirit, the idea that the Church as it stands has become degenerate in some way and must be restored to a more primitive usage, that is shared by many groups of differing temperament, not all of them heretical. Where Nichols is probably incorrect is that these changes are for the better; that is just not true as far as I can see.

[Michael Wilson]

The driving idea behind the reform of the Mass wasn't primitivism, but rather Ecumenism; the wreckers would use the pretext of "ancient practice" when it suited their needs in one place, then use the pretext of "making the liturgy more understandable to the people", when it became necessary to eliminate an ancient rite or prayer.
Here is Msgr. Bugnini Secretary of Consilium (the entity created by Paul VI to reform the Mass); in 1965, in "The Work of Human Hands" Rev. A. Cekada pg. 75:

The love of souls and the desire to ease in every way the path of union for separated brothers led the Church to make these difficult sacrifices, removing any stumbling block that could even slightly present an obstacle or a cause of discomfort" L'Osservatore Romano, March 19,1965.

Jean Guiton a close lifelong friend of Paul VI published a book after the Pope's death entitled "Paul VI Secret"; in which he chronicles their friendship and reports the following: http://angelqueen.org/2017/02/13/a-protestant-mass/

    The intention of Paul VI with regard to what is commonly called the [Novus Ordo] Mass, was to reform the Catholic liturgy in such a way that it should almost coincide with the Protestant liturgy — but what is curious is that Paul VI did that to get as close as possible to the Protestant Lord's Supper ... there was with Paul VI an ecumenical intention to remove, or least to correct, or at least to relax, what was too Catholic, in the traditional sense, in the Mass and, I repeat, to get the Catholic Mass closer to the Calvinist Mass.

Msgr. Bugnini again insists on the Ecumenical dimension of the reform of the Mass:http://sspx.org/en/must-catholics-attend-new-mass

In 1967, L'Osservatore Romano of October 13 affirmed:

    The liturgical reform has made a giant step forward and we have drawn quite close to the liturgical forms of the Lutheran Church."