Tridentine Mass - Pope St. Pius V's Revision of The Liturgy

Pope St. Pius V's Revision of The Liturgy

At the time of the Council of Trent, the traditions preserved in printed and manuscript missals varied considerably, and standardization was sought both within individual dioceses and throughout the Latin West. Standardization was required also in order to prevent the introduction into the liturgy of Protestant ideas in the wake of the Protestant Reformation.

Pope St. Pius V accordingly imposed uniformity by law in 1570 with the Papal Bull "Quo Primum", ordering use of the Roman Missal as revised by him. He allowed only those rites that were at least 200 years old to survive the promulgation of his 1570 Missal. Several of the rites that remained in existence were progressively abandoned, though the Ambrosian rite survives in Milan, Italy and neighbouring areas, stretching even into Switzerland, and the Mozarabic rite remains in use to a limited extent in Toledo and Madrid, Spain. The Carmelite, Carthusian and Dominican religious orders kept their rites, but in the second half of the 20th century two of these three chose to adopt the Roman Rite. The rite of Braga, in northern Portugal, seems to have been practically abandoned: since 18 November 1971 that archdiocese authorizes its use only on an optional basis.

Beginning in the late 17th century, France and neighbouring areas, such as Münster, Cologne and Trier in Germany, saw a flurry of independent missals published by bishops influenced by Jansenism and Gallicanism. This ended when Abbot Guéranger and others initiated in the 19th century a campaign to return to the Roman Missal.

Pius V's revision of the liturgy had as one of its declared aims the restoration of the Roman Missal "to the original form and rite of the holy Fathers". Due to the relatively limited resources available to his scholars, this aim was in fact not realised.

Three different printings of Pius V's Roman Missal, with minor variations, appeared in 1570, a folio and a quarto edition in Rome and a folio edition in Venice. A reproduction of what is considered to be the earliest, referred to therefore as the editio princeps, was produced in 1998. In the course of the printing of the editio princeps, some corrections were made by pasting revised texts over parts of the already printed pages. There were several printings again in the following year 1571, with various corrections of the text.