With no apparent disapproval or even discomfort, John Paul II that day presided over ceremonies in which, with such monstrosites as female altar servers, Australian aboriginal "sacred smoke" and liturgical dancing, the basic rubrics even of Paul VI's reformed liturgy were flouted.

Why do so many otherwise orthodox Catholic "Conservatives" continue to defend a liturgy so manifestly in breach with sacrificial worship and Catholic tradition? Why do they continue, effectively, to support their supposed arch-enemies, the Modernists?

A lot of that history can be found in Dr. Hull's book, The Banished Heart. In the beginning St. Peter and his successors had ruled the early Church as the servus servorum Dei (Servant of the Servants of God). In 107 St. Ignatius the Patriarch of Antioch had addressed his famous Letter to the Romans as "presiding in love" over all the churches united to her by the one faith and the same seven Sacraments.

This unity of faith and sacraments has remained the criterion of Church unity in the Orthodox churches of the East. As the Patriarch of the West, however, the Successor of Peter, after the schism of 1054, over-centralised the Western Church upon his office which in turn led to his being over-involved in worldly affairs.

Indeed lawyers and scholars have set up the three great "Religions of the Book", all priestless and all run by scholars: Judaism with its Rabbis and Torah, Islam with its Mullahs and Koran, and Protestantism with its Pastors and mutilated Bible.

As the centuries passed Apostolic worship had come to be enshrined in a mass of traditional liturgical practice called orthopraxis. True teaching needs true worship. Orthodoxy needs orthopraxis. Catholic orthodoxy is expressed and preserved and conveyed down the centuries by Catholic orthopraxis.

But the scholars have always been burrowing away. Professor Martin Luther - was he the first liturgical historian? - has had his hordes of scholarly successors devoted to the reformation of the Church after their own scholarly image and likeness.

Invariably these liturgical scholars idealise a particular period of the Church's history, decry all other eras as corruptions and degenerations, and advocate that all the Church's worship be returned to conform with the forms of whichever happens to be their favorite period of the Church's past.

But what liturgical historians like Jungmann and Bouyer regarded as so many later distortions, the traditional Catholic accepts as so many providential and beneficial gains in the organic growth of the liturgy. Or as Dr. Hull well put it: "Just as the Christian cultus had been enhanced by the adoption of compatible elements from Judaism and Pagan religions, so too did these corrective responses to the challenges of heresy have a fertilising and creative effect." (p. 210)

The opposite of orthopraxis is heteropraxis: "false worship". Heresy must naturally express, preserve and seek to convey itself by heteropraxis. Just as one who enters into the spirit of orthopraxis becomes Catholic, so too does one caught up in heteropraxis quietly cease to be Catholic.

The Protestant John Henry Newman had become Catholic by the near orthopraxis of his High Anglican worship, and today millions are quietly becoming non-Catholic thanks to the heteropraxis of the New Order Mass ordered upon the Church by Pope Paul VI in 1970.

Dr. Hull shows how worship takes natural precedence over doctrine. Just as we worship God before reasoning about Him, so must liturgy (called theologia prima) always take precedence over dogma (theologia secunda). God's reality comes first, our faith in Him second.

(Dr. Hull cites the opinion of the 16th century Jesuit theologian Francisco de Suarez that a Pope would become schismatic "if he were to change all the ecclesiastical ceremonies of the Church that have been upheld by Apostolic tradition..." (Tract. de Charitate, Disput. No. 12, p. 1).)

In the fifth century St. Prosper of Aquitaine had written "lex supplicandi legem statuat credendi" ("let the law of prayer determine the law of belief"). This was the rule in the Church all the way until it was explicitly reversed by, believe it or not, Pope Pius XII in his encyclical on the liturgy: "the law of our faith must establish the law of our prayer"! (Mediator Dei, iii, 52)

This new precedence of doctrine over prayer is fully accepted by today's Catholic "conservatives". One of the few systematic attempts to present the conservative position to Catholic traditionalists was that by James Likoudis and Kenneth Whitehead in 1981: The Pope, the Council and the Mass: Answers to the Questions the "Traditionalists" are Asking. Their position, too, is that "It is to...magisterial documents that we must look first, as far as the faith is concerned, and not exclusively and in a spirit of suspicion at the Mass." (p.133)

They expect our Catholic faith henceforward to survive no longer on the Apostolic tradition of worship in which the Faith has always been lived and reflected upon, but on a series of defined beliefs celebrated in the ever changing patterns and forms of the "New Mass".

The revival of pagan philosphy in the West which began with the Aristotelian revival of the 11th and 12th centuries led to a redefining of the Church away from the sacramental and towards the juridical. This coincided with the breach with the Eastern churches. These continued to adhere to the original sacramental concept of the Church as a communion of churches united by the same Faith and seven sacraments.

In tandem with rationalising tendencies came an ever stronger centralisation of the Church upon the Papacy. This was accompanied by a lot of clericalisation and institutionalisation, which was especially strengthened by the Counter-Reformation, led by the Jesuits.

In the wake of the Counter Reformation, rationalist tendencies ravaged Church life from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Various scholarly groups schemed for liturgical reforms to return the Church's liturgy to conform with the liturgy of this or that idealised era of the Church's past.

Most notably the Patristic age was revered by the Jansenists of the 18th century who in their turn had their admirers among leading advocates of liturgical change in the 1950's, such as Frs. Jungmann and Bouyer.In vain did Pope Pius XII strongly condemn the work of these liturgical antiquarians as "a wicked

These rationalist currents however could not triumph in the Church until a Pope was found willing to impose them. And before any Pope could do any such thing, the Church had to be totally centralised upon him, and all Catholics then conditioned to follow the Pope anywhere regardless of tradition.

This declaration has never been accepted by the Eastern Orthodox churches. These hold that legislation binding upon the universal church can only be deceed by an ecumenical council the canons of which have been ratified by the Pope.

It was Pope Nicholas I (858 - 867), whom Hull describes as "the first papal monarch", who first attempted to absolutise Pope Gelasius' claim for the papacy. In 861 he told the Byzantine Emperor that "without the Church of Rome there is no Christianity".

Dr. Hull continues this history of the growth of papal power in Chapter 6, entitled Tightening the Screws. After the chaotic tenth century, a new era dawned when Pope St. Leo IX (1049 - 1054) and Nicholas II (1058 - 1061) set about the work of centralisation.

After the unqualified contentions of papal monarchists like St. Gregory VII (1073 - 1085) and Boniface VIII (1294 - 1303) that the Roman Pontiff was not subject to the laws of the Church, it was only natural that the beleaguered Clement V (1305 - 1314) could convince himself that he no longer even needed Rome to be fully Pope.

This Pope it was that moved the papacy to Avignon, a location more centrally located hence better for administrative purposes. Thus began the disgraceful era of the Avignon papacy (1309 to 1378) and the Western Schism (1378 to 1417).

As papal supremacists drew on the pagan legacy of Roman law with its absolutist concepts of imperial power, "Papal pride and intransigence", according to Dr. Hull, undermined the 14th century Conciliarist movement. Nevertheless it was this movement which finally rescued the Papacy in 1417 and made inter-ecclesial reconciliation possible at the Council of Constance and Florence (1438 - 1445).

Papal centralism and use of Roman law was readily copied by secular governments. To such effect that in the 16th century many of these newly centralised governments were able to impose heresy on whole Catholic populations.