...Although the traditional Latin mass is a form of religious worship of this sort, the Novus Ordo is not. This is not simply a matter of its having abandoned most of the ritual acts and details of the traditional mass; it is also a result of its practice of offering many different options for the way the mass is celebrated. The simplest options of course involve very little time, knowledge and effort on the part of the priest, but the very existence of such options makes the Novus Ordo an anti-liturgy by the standards of most human religions. In the Novus Ordo there is no determinate language or form in which worship is offered. The nature of the worship is left up within wide limits to the whim of the individual priest, and the easiest and least complicated form is the most commonly used ('Eucharistic Prayer II', a fabrication produced over the course of an afternoon in a farcical episode in a Roman bistro). The Novus Ordo is not a form of worship, of the kind of worship that is common not only to traditional Christian and Jewish liturgies, but also to all the main religions of the world. This is why the contents of the Kyriale Romanum are virtually never used in the Novus Ordo, although it is theoretically permissible to use them. These contents are parts of a liturgy that is worship of God in the traditional sense. Their function does not exist in the Novus Ordo, so they are useless and confusing if they are introduced into that form of the mass. The ugliness, banality and idiocy of the architecture, vestments, art, and music that has been developed for the Novus Ordo express its nature and purpose as an anti-liturgy. Their character faithfully communicates the nihilism implicit in the rejection by the Novus Ordo of the traditional Catholic and human conception of worship. It is a rejection both of the duty owed to God to devote the best resources to his worship, and of the sanctification of human culture – and thus of human society – that results from the performance of this duty. This nihilism was the force behind the orgy of destruction of sacred things – altars, sanctuaries, crucifixes, paintings, statues, vestments – that accompanied the introduction of the new rite....

...The traditional mass is a liturgy in a way that the Novus Ordo is not; it is a complex and ancient mass of ceremonies, having many-layered depths of meaning and symbolism that are rooted in a great and deep literary past, and having one of the world's great musical traditions – and one of the world's great architectural traditions – as its components. The Novus Ordo was deliberately created to be none of these things. These features possessed by the traditional mass and lacking in the Novus Ordo mean that the nature and possibilities of lay participation in the traditional mass are completely different from those in the Novus Ordo....