Tom_B;4556799 said:
Liturgical Reform: Bugnini remains in the driver seat. At a bare minimum, vernacularization, congregational responses, ad populum orientation, revised Church calendar and readings will happen.
If there is no Vatican II, there is no Concilium. I agree that Annibale Bugnini would still have an important role to play. He would have to go through the Pope to have his reforms issued as
motu proprio.
You are right that Bugnini would have forced
versus populum just as he did in 1964. This orientation was the fashion among liturgical reformers in Europe at the time. Many continental European clergy thought that "facing the people" was indeed the way forward. I do not know, however, if Bugnini would have gotten much farther than what we now know as the "1965 Missal" (which is really the 1962
Missale Romanum with some of the requiem Mass abbreviations and the permission for vernacular propers). Far-reaching reforms like the three-year lectionary, the destruction of the sanctoral cycle, and the abrogation of Epiphanytide, Septugaesimatide, and the Sundays after Pentecost might not have happened without Bugnini's ability to twist
SC towards a radical direction. Without the ability to harness the high spirits of the Council, Bugnini might not have been able to force through the 1970 Missal either.
There would still be a smaller group, perhaps led by Lefebvre, Ottaviani, and Siri, who might have openly criticize the decision to say Mass facing the people. Even so, Mons. Lefebvre said the 1965 Missal facing
ad orientem without any qualms. He went back to 1962 only with the introduction of the new Missal in 1970. When Lefebvre signed
Sancrosanctum Concilium, he probably thought the document would be strictly interpreted. The much more radical actions of Bugnini and the Concilium in 1965 -- 1969 turned him back to the Missal of Bl. John XXIII. If the Concilium stopped at the 1965 rubrical changes, the trajectory of traditional(ist) Catholicism would look much different today. There would probably be no need for
Summorum Pontificum and
Universae Ecclesiae, as the 1965 Mass was still Tridentine. Also, I suspect that the motu command to face the people would soften through disobedience and indults.