Learned Blunders: Concelebration
An excerpt from the Spring 2026 issue of The Latin Mass magazine article by Michael P. Foley entitled “Learned Blunders: The Impact of Flawed Scholarship on the Liturgical Reforms of the Twentieth Century,” pp. 38-42.
Twentieth-century ligurgists were so convinced that the early Church has Masses regularly concelebrated by two or more priests that the Second Vatican Council was moved to make the following changes:
Concelebration, whereby the unity of the priesthood is appropriately manifested, has remained in use to this day in the Church both in the east and the west. For this reason it has seemed good to the Council to extend permission for concelebration to the following cases (Sacrosanctum Concilium 57.1).
The Council goes on to allow concelebration for both the Chrism Mass and evening Mass on Holy Thursday, for Masses during the Bishop’s meetings, and for Masses for the blessing of an abbot. It also gives Bishops the authority to allow concelebration at parish Masses, and it calls for a new rite for concelebration to be drawn up and inserted into the Missal and the Pontifical (58). The Council Fathers declare that “each priest shall always retain his right to celebrate Mass individually” (57.2), but many priests today feel pressure to concelebrate every Mass they attend.
There was no definitive or extensive study of concelebration prior to the Second Vatican Council; one wonders how everyone was so confident about a conviction based on so little research. Finally, in 1982, Carmelite Father Joseph de Sainte-Marie published an almost 600-page book entitled L’eucharistie salut du monde, which in 2015 appeared as The Holy Eucharist—The World’s Salvation: Studies on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, its Celebration and its Concelebration (Leominster: Gracewing, 2015). The magnum opus covers a range of topics, such as the sacrificial character of the Eucharist, but it is especially concerned with separating fact from fiction regarding concelebration.
Sainte-Marie’s conclusion, as the back-cover puts it, is that the “present practice of daily concelebration, especially among simple priests without their Ordinary presiding, far from being a return to an ancient norm, is in fact a new development.” Earlier liturgists made a crucial mistake, failing to distinguish between ceremonial concelebration and sacramental concelebration, when two or more ministers confect the same sacrament. Sacramental concelebration happened on occasion, especially with a Mass led by a bishop, but in both the East and the West, the preference was for ceremonial concelebrations and for individually celebrated Masses, which multiplied graces flowing into the world.
Sainte-Marie researched the debates the Council Fathers had about concelebration, and he shows how the Council Fathers were unaware of this distinction. If concelebration remains “in use to this day in the Church both in the east and in the west” as the Council claims, then why do most Orthodox churches refuse sacramental concelebration on principle, and why are the only Eastern Churches that practice sacramental concelebration the ones that are in union with Rome, and even then only beginning in the eighteenth century and only under Western influence?
The World’s Salvation did not come out in time to stop the campaign to make concelebrated Masses the norm, especially in religious communities, but it was able to stop further damage. I am told that plans were being made to make it a requirement of Canon Law that all members of a religious community concelebrate the same Mass, but Sainte-Marie’s scholarship changed their minds.