I would say the Jesuits may be one of the last to adopt the pre-conciliar form, since they are the most liberal of the major religious. But ti would be in the interest of all religious to rediscover their pre-conciliar forms, if they are to repair the rupture that has taken place.
This is not possible, since most religious orders do not have a rite of their own. There are the: Carthusian, Dominican and Carmelite Rites.
Forms are not rites. There are forms that are proper to some of the major orders of men, such as the Franciscans, Trinitarians, and Augustinians.
The Jesuits are not part of this group. The Society of Jesus is indeed an order; but it is not one of the major orders. The major orders are monastic or mendicant. Jesuits are neither. They are Clerks Regular. Clerks regular never had a conventual tradition. They never lived in convents, friaries or monasteries, which is where you would find a very structured liturgical life.
The Society of Jesus celebrated whatever form was available in the diocese where they found themselves. This was the beauty of the Jesuit foundation. It liberated male religious from the disciplines of conventual life while preserving the vowed state. They had the spiritual benefits of the vowed life and the privilege of solemn vows without the obligations that the other orders have. This is why people often find them so “liberal”. People often expect them to be like other religiuos. That was not the vision of St. Ignatius. His vision was that they be like secular priests, but in vows. Their attachment to each other is a rather loose one. They are really attached to the Superior General who governs like a head of state.
Notice that they do not have their own breviary or missal. They use the Roman breviary and missal. The same is also true for the congregations of religious men: Redemptorists, Salesians, Marists, Marianists, Trinitarians (the American congregation, not the order), Josephites, and other.
What I’m trying to say is that for most male religious, there is no liturgical tradition to go back to, because they followed whatever the universal Church was doing.
Even among the orders, the Franciscans have a diversity of forms, because we’re not monastic. The vision was to be free of monastic discipline. Every province and every Franciscan obedience developed its own form according to culture and resources. The younger Franciscan obediences, such as the Franciscans of the Renewal, Franciscans of the Eternal Word, Franciscans of the Sacred Heart, etc adopt one of the pre-existing forms from one of the original obediences or simply use the universal form with the Franciscan calendar.
When we speak of rupture, we have to careful not to assume that there was ever such a strong liturgical unity in the Roman Church. That was not the case at all. The situation is that most lay people in the USA are used to Diocesan clergy. Diocesan clergy follow the universal form. The lay faithful in the USA thought that mass was the same for the entire Roman Church.
In Europe and Latin America, where they have had a stronger presence of religious and a greater diversity of religious families, they never had the vision of “one size fits all.” Pardon the expression. I couldn’t find a better one. Catholics in those countries have been exposed to many forms and many rites, religious, Roman and Eastern. To them, walking into one church and seeing a priest wearing purple on a given Sunday while the priest up the street wore white was very common. This diversity started to disappear when the Novus Ordo came into existence. That’s actually when you began to see more uniformity in places such as Europe, South America and the European colonies. What happened with the birth of the Novus Ordo was the birth of a common liturgical calendar, even though major religious orders have kept their own liturgical calendars. Those that kept their liturgical calendars, set aside their rite or their form for the Novus Ordo, now called the Ordinary Form.
As we try to recover our roots, many religious communities are going back to their rite or form when and where they are allowed to do so. But that’s only the case for those that have one to go back to.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
