A culture is shaped by its cult, and therefore the question of how the Church celebrates divine worship is not a matter of taste, but a question with societal consequences. The word itself reveals this connection. The Latin cultus denotes the cultivation of a field just as much as the veneration of the gods; from the same root colere stem cultura and cultus.
The American commentator Michael Knowles summarized this connection in a single sentence: “’Culture’ and ‘cult’ derive from the same word; what a culture worships defines it” (Knowles n.d.).
If this is true, then the liturgical reform of 1969 did not only change the Mass, but also the culture that emerged from it. The following text attempts to justify this connection soberly: using cultural philosophy, sociology of religion, ritual studies, and the philological analysis of the liturgical texts. In doing so, it also takes the strongest objections seriously. For an argument based on emotion or preference convinces only those who are already convinced; an argument based on reasons can also reach others.
Cult as the Origin of Culture
That culture emerges from cult is not an invention of today’s traditionalists, but a widely held thesis of the 20th century. Josef Pieper formulated it most clearly in his essay on leisure and cult: the leisure from which philosophy, art, and education arise is grounded in the feast, and the feast is grounded in the worship of God (Pieper 1948). Where the cult disappears, according to Pieper, leisure also becomes a mere break between working hours, and the “total world of work” establishes itself.
The historian Christopher Dawson arrived at the same conclusion by another path. In his Gifford Lectures, he shows that the great cultures of humanity formed around a religious center and that Europe as a culture emerged from Western Christianity, its monasteries, and its liturgy (Dawson 1948; Dawson 1950). T. S. Eliot even called the culture of a people the “incarnation” of its religion and warned that a culture does not long survive the religion from which it draws its life (Eliot 1948).
Classical sociology of religion also supports this view, although it starts from completely different premises. Émile Durkheim described the collective rite as the place where a society generates itself as a community and solidifies its order of the sacred and the profane (Durkheim 1912). For Durkheim, the ritual is not the expression of an already existing society, but its foundation.
In the present day, the American commentator Michael Knowles has popularized this idea. His core formula is that a culture is determined by what it worships: anyone who wants to renew a culture must begin with its divine worship, not with politics or education (Knowles n.d.). Knowles connects this with an observation from his book on the political power of language: whoever controls the words with which people speak about reality also shapes their thinking about that reality (Knowles 2021). Both thoughts combined lead directly to the liturgical reform: if the cult shapes the culture and language shapes thought, then the language of the cult shapes the thinking of an entire culture.
ince the 5th century, the Church itself has known the principle that the law of prayer establishes the law of belief. It goes back to Prosper of Aquitaine and states: what the Church prays, it believes, and what it no longer prays, it eventually loses in faith. Joseph Ratzinger derived a diagnosis of the present from this. In his memoirs, he writes that he is convinced that the crisis in the Church that we are experiencing today is largely based on the disintegration of the liturgy (Ratzinger 1998, 174).
Lex orandi, lex credendi: How the Rite Shapes the Faith
Since the 5th century, the Church itself has known the principle that the law of prayer establishes the law of belief. It goes back to Prosper of Aquitaine and states: what the Church prays, it believes, and what it no longer prays, it eventually loses in faith. Joseph Ratzinger derived a diagnosis of the present from this. In his memoirs, he writes that he is convinced that the crisis in the Church that we are experiencing today is largely based on the disintegration of the liturgy (Ratzinger 1998, 174).
In his main work on the liturgy, Ratzinger describes the danger more precisely: a congregation that gathers in a circle around itself becomes a “self-enclosed circle” that is no longer oriented together toward the coming Lord (Ratzinger 2000). The direction of prayer, facing East, toward the Lord, is for him no mere formality, but an expression of what the cult is ultimately about.
It is remarkable that it was social scientists without any ecclesiastical-political interest who warned early on about the consequences of the reform. The anthropologist Mary Douglas showed that condensed, seemingly “empty” rituals, such as the Friday abstinence, were carriers of identity and belonging for ordinary believers, and that their abolition as a rationalization from above destroyed this bond (Douglas 1970). The ethnologist Victor Turner, who had researched rituals worldwide, criticized that the reform treated the ritual as a text that can be rewritten at will, thereby underestimating its liminal, transformative power (Turner 1976). The sociologist Kieran Flanagan added that the liturgy represents the sacred precisely through distance, form, and concealment; where it becomes all too comprehensible and everyday, it loses this capacity (Flanagan 1991).
The finding is therefore not only theological, but can be justified empirically: rituals are not interchangeable packaging for a content. They are content themselves, and whoever changes them, changes the people who perform them.
The Mass of Paul VI: What Changed in 1969
With the Missale Romanum promulgated by Paul VI in 1969, not only the language of the celebration changed, but also the language about the celebration. This is most clearly evident in the part of the Mass that for centuries was called the “Offertory” and is now called the “Preparation of the Gifts”.
Missal of 1962: “Offertory”
“Accept, O holy Father, almighty and eternal God, this spotless host, which I, Thine unworthy servant, offer unto Thee, my living and true God, for my innumerable sins, offenses, and negligences, and for all here present, as also for all faithful Christians, both living and dead, that it may avail for my own and for their salvation unto life everlasting. Amen.”
Focus: God, the propitiatory sacrifice, the sin of the priest.
Missal of 1970: “Preparation of the Gifts”
“Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer you: fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life.”.
Focus: Creation, labor, community
The old text speaks of sacrifice, atonement, and sin. The new text, modeled on Jewish table blessings, speaks of bread, earth, and human work. The emphasis has shifted. Already in 1969, Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci criticized precisely this point in their “Short Critical Study”: the sacrificial character of the Mass receded in the new order, while the meal and the assembly came to the fore (Ottaviani/Bacci 1969). Klaus Gamber, a liturgical scholar of distinction, later spoke of a break with the organically grown Roman tradition (Gamber 1979); Alcuin Reid has reconstructed this break with historical precision (Reid 2005).
Even less known, but scientifically best documented, is the alteration of the orations, i.e., the collect prayers. The American theologian Lauren Pristas compared the Sunday orations before and after the Council sentence by sentence (Pristas 2003; Pristas 2013). Her result: only a fraction of the old orations was adopted unchanged. Many were rewritten, replaced, or deleted, following explicit principles of revision by the responsible working group of the “Consilium”. The texts were meant to be understandable and acceptable to “modern man”.
Specifically, this means that themes such as the disdain for the earthly in favor of the heavenly, the fear of God’s wrath, merit, the struggle against sin, and the plea for deliverance from eternal damnation were systematically mitigated or removed. A member of the working group, Antoine Dumas, openly described this line himself (Dumas 1971). In their place, themes of shaping the world, community, and human growth appeared more frequently. Pristas concludes from this that not only the style but the theology of the prayers has changed: less asceticism and judgment, more affirmation of the world and of man.
These shifts are small in isolation. Taken together, they form a different picture of who God is and who man is before Him. And because the faithful hear and pray this image every Sunday, it becomes their own.
From the Cult of God to the Cult of Man
If cult shapes culture, then a cult that places man more prominently at the center must also produce a culture that revolves around man. This is precisely what can be observed. As early as 1966, sociologist Philip Rieff described the “triumph of the therapeutic”: religion was no longer understood as God’s claim on man, but as a means to emotional well-being (Rieff 1966).
Sociologists of religion Christian Smith and Melinda Denton gave this attitude a name in 2005: “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” God exists, He wants us to be nice to one another and feel good, and He only intervenes when we need Him (Smith/Denton 2005). Worship, sacrifice, sin, and judgment are scarcely mentioned in this faith. It fits this pattern that according to a survey by the Pew Research Center, only about one-third of US Catholics believe in the transubstantiation in the Eucharist (Pew Research Center 2019). Where the Mass is experienced as a meal of the community, faith in the sacrifice and in the real presence of Christ fades.
This development does not only affect progressive circles. Much of what is considered “conservative Christianity” today is also, at its core, a humanistic Christianity. It defends the family, the protection of life, and civic order—all important goods. Yet it often defends them as human values, not as consequences of submission to God. Reverence, worship, asceticism, penance, and talk of sin and hell recede; in their place stands a program of moral order for man, combined with an enthusiasm for his dignity and potential. The question then is no longer: how does man turn back to God? Rather, it is: how do we put society in moral order?
The difference is fundamental. A morality without a cult remains an appeal to good will and is perceived as paternalism. A cult, by contrast, first orders man toward God, and from this orientation, morality grows naturally. Martin Mosebach described this situation as the “heresy of formlessness”: where the form of the cult is lost, its content is ultimately lost as well (Mosebach 2002). We have, it must be noted soberly, fallen deeply: from the worship of God to the veneration of man.
Reconstruction Begins at the Altar
If culture emerges from cult, then the renewal of Europe does not begin in parliaments, talk shows, or value transmission programs, but at the altar. Europe did not arise from a morality, but from adoration: from monasteries where the Divine Office ordered the day, and from a Mass celebrated in the same language and form for centuries (Dawson 1950).
The traditional Mass is therefore no hobby for aesthetes. It is a place where man learns once again that he is not at the center, but God; that sacrifice, penance, and conversion are not impositions, but the path to freedom; and that reverence is the fundamental attitude of any genuine culture. Anyone who recognizes this defends the old Mass not out of nostalgia, but out of insight.
This question is therefore not one of feeling or preference. It is an objective question of cause and effect, and more depends on its answer than many realize: the fate of the Church, of Europe, and of every single individual living within it.
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