Pre-Tridentine Mass

The term Pre-Tridentine Mass here refers to the variants of the liturgical rite of Mass in Rome before 1570, when, with his bull Quo primum, Pope Pius V made the Roman Missal, as revised by him, obligatory throughout the Latin-Rite or Western Church, except for those places and congregations whose distinct rites could demonstrate an antiquity of 200 years or more.

The Pope made this revision of the Roman Missal, which included the introduction of the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar and the addition of all that in his Missal follows the Ite missa est, at the request that the Council of Trent (1545–1563) presented to his predecessor at its final session.

Outside of Rome in the period before 1570, many other liturgical rites were in use, not only in Eastern Christianity, but also in the West. Some of the Western rites, such as the Mozarabic Rite, were unrelated to the Roman Rite that Pope Pius V revised and ordered to be adopted generally. But even the areas that at one time or another had accepted the Roman rite (see, below, "Middle Ages") had soon introduced changes and additions. As a result, every ecclesiastical province and almost every diocese had its local use, such as the Use of Sarum, the Use of York and the Use of Hereford in England. In France there were strong traces of the Gallican Rite. With the exception of the relatively few places where no form of the Roman Rite had ever been adopted, the Canon of the Mass remained generally uniform, but the prayers in the "Ordo Missae", and still more the "Proprium Sanctorum" and the "Proprium de Tempore", varied widely. For that reason, this article considers only the liturgy of the Mass as celebrated in Rome.