Pope John XXIII Quietly Removed the Second Confiteor in 1960 — Before Vatican II Even Started

[00:00:00]What if I told you that the first cut came in 1960, two years before the council that everyone blames, and almost no one noticed the prayer was gone?

[00:00:12]I want to be honest with you from the first breath of this.

[00:00:15]I have spent the better part of my life with old missiles and rubric books, the kind that sit in sacristy cabinets with their spines cracking.

[00:00:24]And for years I assumed what most people assume.

[00:00:28]I assumed that the mass our grandparents knew stayed exactly as it was until the 1960s ended, and then changed all at once after the bishops went home from Rome.

[00:00:39]That is the story you have probably been told. It is the story I told myself, and it is wrong.

[00:00:46]Because there was a prayer that disappeared first, a small one, a second saying of words the people already knew by heart.

[00:00:54]And it was taken out in 1960 quietly by a pope most of us remember as gentle and beloved before the council opened its doors, before a single document of reform was voted on. The change had already happened, and the people knelt the next Sunday and did not realize something had been lifted out of the mass from underneath them.

[00:01:18]I am not going to give you a sermon today. I do not want your outrage, and I am not here to tell you who to blame.

[00:01:25]I am going to walk you slowly through what the records actually say, what the prayer was, where it lived in the mass, why it mattered, and what it meant when it was removed. You deserve to know this plainly without anyone shaping it for you.

[00:01:41]So, stay with me. Sit with this.

[00:01:44]By the end you will understand the mass your grandparents knelt at better than you did this morning, and you will see why this one small cut tells you everything about what came after.

[00:01:56]Let me set the ground first, because names and dates matter here, and I want you to trust me by trusting the sources.

[00:02:03]The Pope was Angelo Roncalli, who took the name John XXIII when he was elected in 1958.

[00:02:11]You know him, even if you do not know you know him.

[00:02:14]He is the Pope who called the Second Vatican Council, the great gathering of bishops that opened in October of 1962 and reshaped the public face of the Catholic Church.

[00:02:26]That is what he is remembered for.

[00:02:29]That is the headline of his life.

[00:02:31]But I want to bring you an earlier chapter, a quieter one, that happened 2 years before those doors ever opened, and that almost never makes it into the telling.

[00:02:42]I had read about it for years before I understood what it really was.

[00:02:46]In 1960, John XXIII issued a document with a Latin name, Rubricarum Instructum, and through it he promulgated what is called the Code of Rubrics. Let me explain that phrase, because it sounds technical and it is not really.

[00:03:02]Rubrics are the instructions in red.

[00:03:05]In an old missal, the words the priest is to speak are printed in black, and the directions for what he is to do, when to bow, when to make the sign of the cross, what to say at which moment, are printed in red ink. From the Latin word for red, ruber, we get the word rubric. The Code of Rubrics, then, was the official rule book that gathered all of those instructions together and set them in order.

[00:03:32]It governed how the Mass was to be celebrated, step by step, gesture by gesture.

[00:03:38]I want you to hold a picture of the man as I say this, because it matters.

[00:03:43]John XXIII was nearly 80 when he made this decision. He had been a Vatican diplomat, a man of long memory, someone who had prayed the old mass himself thousands of times across a long life as a priest and a bishop. He was not a radical. The people who knew him described a warm, plain-spoken pastor.

[00:04:03]And that is exactly why this is worth your attention. It would be easy if the prayer had been taken out by someone we could cast as a destroyer.

[00:04:12]It was not.

[00:04:14]It was taken out by a man who loved the church and the mass.

[00:04:17]They removed 47 prayers from the Catholic mass between 1955 and 1975.

[00:04:24]I compiled every single one. Original Latin, English, the exact Pope, the exact Vatican document, the forgotten Catholic prayer book.

[00:04:34]E-book in description and first comment posted in a document meant to tidy and clarify, and that is what makes the change so quiet and so easy to miss.

[00:04:44]The most consequential cuts are often made by gentle hands with good intentions in documents almost no one reads.

[00:04:53]There is one more thing I want you to understand about that year.

[00:04:56]The 1960 reform did not come from nowhere.

[00:05:00]There had been smaller adjustments to the Holy Week services a few years earlier in the 1950s.

[00:05:08]The machinery of revision was already turning.

[00:05:11]So, when John XXIII gathered the rubrics into a single code in 1960, he was both finishing a long tidying and without most people noticing, setting the first stone of something larger.

[00:05:24]Keep that in your mind. I promise you it will matter at the end.

[00:05:29]And buried inside that 1960 rule book was a single decision that changed the shape of the communion right.

[00:05:37]It removed a prayer the faithful had heard twice at every mass for centuries.

[00:05:42]To understand why that matters, you have to understand the prayer itself. And you have to understand that for a very long time it was said not once but twice.

[00:05:53]The prayer is called the Confiteor.

[00:05:55]The word itself is the first word of the Latin text, and it means simply I confess.

[00:06:01]It is the prayer that begins, "I confess to almighty God, to blessed Mary ever virgin."

[00:06:07]And goes on through a list of the saints, and then the striking of the breast, "Through my fault, through my most grievous fault." You may know it. I suspect your grandmother knew it in Latin by heart, the way you know the words to a song you have not sung in years, but could not forget if you tried.

[00:06:28]I have watched older people mouth it without thinking, the muscle memory of a lifetime, even after the Latin had left the parish.

[00:06:36]Now, here is the part that has been almost forgotten. In the old mass, the Tridentine mass, the mass as it was codified after the Council of Trent in the 16th century, the Confiteor was said twice, not once, twice.

[00:06:51]And the two sayings did very different things.

[00:06:54]If you have only ever known the mass with one Confiteor at the start, then a whole second moment has been hidden from you, and I want to give it back to you now.

[00:07:04]Let me say a word about that name, Tridentine, so it does not stay a stranger to you.

[00:07:10]After the upheavals of the 16th century, the Catholic Church gathered its bishops at a long council in the city of Trent in northern Italy.

[00:07:21]Out of that council came a standard form of the mass, set down so it would be celebrated the same way across the whole Latin Church.

[00:07:29]We call it the Tridentine mass, simply meaning the mass of Trent.

[00:07:34]It is the mass your great-grandparents knew, the one that stood largely unchanged for around four centuries.

[00:07:42]And in that mass for all those centuries, the confiteor was spoken twice. That was the settled shape of the right for generation after generation, longer than most countries have existed.

[00:07:54]When something has stood that long, I think you ought to ask hard questions before you accept that it quietly went away.

[00:08:02]Picture the old mass beginning.

[00:08:05]The priest comes to the foot of the altar, and before he climbs the steps, he and the servers say the confiteor between They removed 47 prayers from your church.

[00:08:16]Demons fear everyone, and every night you don't pray to them, your home is unguarded.

[00:08:22]The Forgotten Catholic Prayer Book restores all 47. Open it tonight. Pray one before sleep. Hand it to the next priest who says they never existed.

[00:08:32]Link in first posted comment and description. Been them. This is the first one.

[00:08:38]It is the priest acknowledging his own unworthiness at the threshold, asking pardon before he dares to approach the holy place.

[00:08:47]The servers answer in the people's name.

[00:08:49]This first confiteor most Catholics, even now, have some memory of. It opens the mass. It clears the ground.

[00:08:57]But there was a second one, and this is the one I want you to hold on to because it is the one that vanished. It did not come at the start.

[00:09:06]It came near the very end, not the end of the priest's mass, but at the threshold of the people's communion.

[00:09:13]Let me place it for you exactly because I think the location is the whole point, and I do not want you to take my word for it without seeing where it stood.

[00:09:24]After the priest had consecrated the bread and the wine, after he had received communion himself, before the people came forward, at that precise hinge, when the focus turned from the altar to the rail, the server, speaking for the faithful, would say the confiteor again. The whole prayer, I confess to almighty God, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.

[00:09:50]And the priest would turn to the people and answer with two short prayers over them. The first began miserator vestri, may almighty God have mercy on you.

[00:10:01]The second began indulgentium, a prayer asking for pardon, absolution, and remission of their sins. Then, holding up a host before them, he would say the words of the centurion, Lord, I am not worthy. Do you see what that was?

[00:10:16]I want you to see it clearly. It was a second confession placed on purpose at the doorway of communion.

[00:10:23]The first confiteor opened the mass. The second confiteor opened the soul of each person about to receive the body of Christ. I cannot stress this enough.

[00:10:34]They were not the same prayer doing the same job twice.

[00:10:37]They sat at two different doors, and in 1960, John XI through the code of rubrics, took out the second one.

[00:10:46]He left the first standing at the foot of the altar.

[00:10:50]He removed the one at the communion rail.

[00:10:52]And the change went into effect. And most of the people who knelt at that rail the following year never understood that a prayer they had heard there whole lives was simply no longer being said over them.

[00:11:06]Stay with that because we are going to go deeper. I have told you what the second confiteor was and where it stood.

[00:11:14]Now, I want to tell you what it actually did.

[00:11:17]What it was for because once you understand its purpose the removal stops being a small liturgical footnote and starts to feel like something else entirely.

[00:11:28]Let me ask you something.

[00:11:30]When you're about to do the most important thing you will do all week, when you are about to receive what the church teaches is the true body and blood of Christ, what should happen in you in the last few seconds before it touches your tongue?

[00:11:46]The old mass had an answer to that question.

[00:11:49]And the answer was the second confiteor.

[00:11:52]I would put its function in one phrase, immediate preparation. Not preparation in general, not the vague sense of having gone to confession sometime that month, but a fresh spoken act of contrition at the very threshold in the last moment before communion.

[00:12:10]The church had always taught that one ought not to receive the Eucharist carelessly.

[00:12:16]The whole tradition held that to receive worthily, you ought to come without serious sin on your soul and with sorrow for the sins you do carry.

[00:12:25]The second confiteor took that teaching and built it into the very architecture of the mass.

[00:12:31]It made you say it out loud through the server in your own name. I confess I have sinned. Have mercy on me before I come to this.

[00:12:41]I want you to think about the genius of placing it there.

[00:12:44]Anyone can drift.

[00:12:46]You can sit through the most beautiful mass in the world and let your mind wander to the parking lot and the lunch you have to make and the argument from the night before.

[00:12:57]The second confiteor was a hand on the shoulder at exactly the moment it mattered most.

[00:13:03]It pulled you back. It said in effect, "Before you take another step, stop and remember who you are and who you are about to receive." It was a threshold and the prayer was the act of pausing at it and the priest's answer made it richer still.

[00:13:19]After the people confessed, he did not simply move on.

[00:13:23]He turned and prayed those two prayers over them, Miserere vestri and Indulgentiam, asking God to have mercy on them and to grant them pardon and remission of their sins.

[00:13:35]There is real tenderness in that. The people humble themselves and the priest asks God's mercy down upon them right there at the rail. It was a small dialogue of sorrow and mercy repeated at every Mass.

[00:13:49]Placed exactly where a person most needs to hear that mercy is being asked for them.

[00:13:54]Let me slow down on that exchange because I think we read past it too fast.

[00:14:00]Imagine the rail. You are kneeling there with the others. You have just said, in the old words, that you have sinned, that the fault is yours and you have struck your breast saying so.

[00:14:12]And then a man ordained to stand between you and the altar turns toward you and asks God to be merciful to you and to forgive you. That is not nothing.

[00:14:23]That is the whole movement of the Christian life pressed into a few seconds.

[00:14:27]I confess and mercy is asked for me.

[00:14:31]And it came right before the most intimate moment a Catholic believes is possible, the receiving of Christ himself. The right was teaching you the order of things. First you own what you are, then mercy is sought. Only then do you come forward. Remove the prayer and the order stays true in doctrine, but it is no longer walked out step by step with your own voice.

[00:14:55]Now consider what its absence does.

[00:14:58]And here I want to be careful because I'm not telling you the church stopped teaching that one should receive worthily.

[00:15:05]She did not.

[00:15:07]The teaching stayed on the books.

[00:15:09]What I am telling you is narrower and I think sharper.

[00:15:13]You remove the moment that made the teaching tangible inside the Mass itself. You take away the pause.

[00:15:20]You take away the spoken act of contrition at the door.

[00:15:24]The line that once ran consecration, the priest's communion, the people's confession, the people's communion, that line now runs straight from the priest's communion to the people's.

[00:15:36]With the door standing open and no one stopping at it.

[00:15:40]The preparation does not disappear from Catholic teaching.

[00:15:44]It disappears from the right.

[00:15:46]And what is not in the right, over time, tends to fade from the soul.

[00:15:51]Because we are creatures who learn what matters by what we are made to do with our bodies and our voices, Sunday after Sunday.

[00:16:00]I want you to sit with the weight of that.

[00:16:02]Because I think it is the hinge of everything I am telling you.

[00:16:06]A prayer is not only words.

[00:16:08]A prayer placed at a particular moment teaches you something by its placement.

[00:16:13]The second confiteor taught every single week that the seconds before communion are seconds for sorrow and for asking mercy.

[00:16:22]Remove it and the mass stops teaching that even if no one ever stands up and says the teaching has changed.

[00:16:29]That is how these things move, not by announcement, by absence.

[00:16:34]Which brings me to the last thing and the heaviest and the reason I have walked you through all of this so carefully.

[00:16:42]I have been saving it. Let me return to the manner of it.

[00:16:46]I have spent enough decades with these documents to tell you something I have learned the hard way.

[00:16:52]That the loudest changes are rarely the ones that matter most.

[00:16:57]The second confiteor was not abolished with a thunderclap. There was no encyclical announcing it to the world, no headline, no debate in the pews. It was removed inside a rulebook of rubrics, a technical revision of the instructions in red, promulgated in 1960, the kind of document that priests study and laypeople never read. And so the prayer was lifted out so quietly that the people who lost it scarcely knew it was gone.

[00:17:28]They came to the rail the next Sunday and the server did not say the words.

[00:17:32]And the priest did not pray miserere over them. And they received and they went home.

[00:17:38]And most of them never registered the silence where a prayer used to be.

[00:17:43]Now think about when this happened.

[00:17:45]October of 1962 is when the Second Vatican Council opened.

[00:17:50]Everything most people associate with the changes in the mass.

[00:17:54]The new order of mass.

[00:17:56]The vernacular, the altar turned toward the people, all of it comes after that. Through the later 1960s and into 1969 and 1970 with what is called the Novus Ordo, the new order of the mass.

[00:18:11]That is the great dividing line in most people's minds. Before the council, the old mass. After the council, the new.

[00:18:19]The council gets the credit.

[00:18:21]And the council gets the blame.

[00:18:24]But the Second Confiteor was already gone before the council opened.

[00:18:28]By the hand of the very Pope who called that council two years early. Do you understand what that means? It means the cutting did not begin with Vatican II.

[00:18:39]It means the instinct to simplify the right, to remove what was seen as repetition, to streamline the path to communion.

[00:18:47]That instinct was already at work in 1960 in a quiet rule book before a single bishop arrived in Rome to debate anything.

[00:18:56]The 1960 code of rubrics was in a sense the first incision. And once you see that, the whole shape of the story changes.

[00:19:06]Here is why I keep calling this the most important thing I will tell you.

[00:19:10]People argue endlessly about the what it meant, what it intended, whether it went too far.

[00:19:17]I have sat through enough of those arguments to last a lifetime.

[00:19:21]But, the removal of the second confiteor sits before all of that argument, untouched by it. It cannot be explained as the will of the council because the council had not met.

[00:19:33]It shows you that the reasoning behind the larger changes that the mass had accumulated repetitions, that some prayers said twice could be said once, that the right could be made leaner and more direct, that reasoning was alive and acting 2 years before the doors of St. Peter's opened to the bishops.

[00:19:54]The second confiteor was the small piece that prefigured the large ones.

[00:19:59]It was the rehearsal before the performance. And the man who made the first cut was the same man history remembers as the kindly Pope who opened window to let in fresh air.

[00:20:12]What does this mean for you, sitting where you are, in the year you are living in?

[00:20:17]It means that if you have ever felt that something was missing from the mass, some pause, some sorrow, some last act of self-examination before you receive, you were not imagining it and you were not wrong. And you were not being uncharitable to notice.

[00:20:34]There was something there once.

[00:20:36]It had a name and a place and a purpose.

[00:20:39]The confiteor at the foot of the altar and the confiteor at the rail. One opening the mass, one opening the soul.

[00:20:47]And the second was carried out quietly in 1960.

[00:20:51]And the proof of it is sitting in the rubric books of that year in black ink and red for anyone willing to look.

[00:20:58]So, let me gather it for you the way I would lay out the documents at the end of a long evening so that nothing slips away from you.

[00:21:07]There was a prayer called the Confiteor, the prayer that begins I confess to almighty God. In the old Mass, the Mass codified after the Council of Trent, it was said twice.

[00:21:19]Once at the start, between the priest and the servers at the foot of the altar, and a second time near the end, just before the people received communion, when the server confessed in their name and the priest answered with Miseratur vestri and Indulgentiam, asking God's mercy and pardon upon them.

[00:21:40]The first opened the Mass.

[00:21:42]The second opened the soul at the very door of communion. A fresh act of contrition in the final moment before receiving the body of Christ.

[00:21:51]And in 1960, through the code of rubrics he promulgated with the document Rubricarum Instructum, Pope John XXIII removed that second Confiteor. He did it two years before the Second Vatican Council opened. He did it quietly.

[00:22:07]Inside a technical rulebook, so quietly that the faithful who had prayed it all their lives mostly never knew the day it stopped. And that small early silent cut prefigured the larger reshaping of the Mass that came after.

[00:22:23]That is what the records say. I am not giving you my opinion.

[00:22:27]The code of rubrics of 1960 is the source, and I can tell you it is real, and you can find it.

[00:22:34]I have only carried it up out of the cabinet and set it in front of you.

[00:22:38]And now I want to say something to you plainly, as one person to another.

[00:22:43]If you have made it this far with me, I think you are someone who feels the difference between knowing about a thing and truly understanding it.

[00:22:53]You came in thinking the story of the Mass changed all at once after a council in a single decade. You are leaving knowing that the first thread was pulled two years before that by a gentle hand in a quiet room.

[00:23:08]And that the prayer which once stood guard at the door of communion was lifted away before almost anyone looked up.

[00:23:16]That is not a small thing to carry. It will change how you kneel and how you listen and how you notice what is and is not said the next time you are at mass.

[00:23:26]I asked you at the very beginning what should happen in your soul in the last seconds before you receive communion. The old mass gave you a prayer for exactly that moment.

[00:23:38]And then in 1960, that prayer was set down and not picked back up.

[00:23:43]You know that now. You cannot unknow it.

[00:23:46]And knowing it, you can do the one thing no rubric can take from you.

[00:23:50]You can make that act of sorrow in your own heart in your own words in the silence where the prayer used to be every time you come forward.

[00:24:00]No one can remove that from you. It was always meant to be yours.

[00:24:04]May God keep you close in the days ahead.

[00:24:07]May he give you the grace to come to his altar with a humble and contrite heart the way the faithful did when that prayer still stood at the rail.

[00:24:17]And may you never lose the holy habit of pausing just for a moment before you receive what is greater than all of us.

[00:24:25]If this opens something for you, sit with it before you move on.

[00:24:30]And if you know someone who carries the same questions you do, who has felt that same quiet absence and never had a name for it, share this with them.

[00:24:39]They deserve to know it too the way you now do. Laus Deo. Praise be to God. I will see you in the next one.