How Milan Kept Its Liturgy

Every centralising wave in Western liturgical history broke against Milan, and the story of how is half the interest of the rite. Carolingian policy in the eighth and ninth centuries aimed at Roman uniformity across the empire, and later legend delighted in telling how the Ambrosian books were vindicated, in one tale by trial of fire, when their abolition was urged. The decisive test came after the Council of Trent.

When Pius V imposed the Roman Missal of 1570 on the Latin Church, his bull Quo Primum exempted any rite that could prove more than two hundred years of continuous use, and the Ambrosian rite qualified many times over. Its position was then secured from within by Charles Borromeo, the reforming cardinal archbishop of Milan from 1564 to 1584, who might have been expected to Romanise his diocese and instead edited and defended the Ambrosian books, giving the rite a Tridentine-era codification of its own. His successors maintained it, and when the Second Vatican Council ordered the reform of all the Latin liturgies, Milan carried out its own revision rather than adopting the Roman one, publishing a reformed Ambrosian missal in 1976 and a revised lectionary in 2008. The result is a rite that has passed through the same historical gates as the Roman liturgy, Trent and Vatican II alike, while remaining recognisably the worship of one particular church with sixteen centuries of memory.