August-September 2021
The End of History and the Last Mass
But one in the council rising up, a Pharisee, named Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, respected by all the people, commanded the [apostles] to be put forth a little while. And he said to them: Ye men of Israel, take heed to yourselves what you intend to do, as touching these men … And now, therefore, I say to you, refrain from these men, and let them alone; for if this council or this work be of men, it will come to naught; But if it be of God, you cannot overthrow it, lest perhaps you be found even to fight against God. |
| - Acts 5:33-39 |
This is a deeply personal piece.
Others more qualified are commenting on the technicalities and legality of what Pope Francis has purported to do in his Orwellian July 16, 2021 motu proprio Traditionis Custodes.
I know I speak for many other similarly situated lay people: it is beyond cruel what Pope Francis has done. He has flashed his fangs in a way that is obscene but also telling.
Imagine the most important thing in your life – your faith and the way you understand and practice it – being spit upon by precisely that authority who should confirm you in it.
- I –
Pope Benedict’s liberation of the Latin Mass (the “TLM”) had an immense impact on my life, and that of my family. My wife and I came into the Church in 1998 as twenty-somethings. Progressively, I read my way into a more observant Catholic life; ultimately embracing a full marriage without contraception and all the children with which God blessed us. While I am loath to ever describe myself as “devout” – perhaps a term that should only be used for the description of another by another – we became serious Catholics. All that means is that we became Catholics whose faith became central and animating, and the truths and obligations of the faith, in all of their respective glory, became real. In other words, we believed all of it.
The Church of "Nice": banal and lonely
As any convert or revert knows – especially an intellectual one – coming into the Catholic world is disorienting. Reading the great apologetical works of the 19th and 20th century, the lives of the saints, and the drama and heroism of Catholic history creates an expectation and excitement that is, to put it mildly, at variance with the experience of an ordinary American Catholic parish.
There is something palpably banal about the typical American Catholic parish; worse, there is something tacky about it. Not only does it have a whiff of effeminacy and a smell of kitsch, but the homiletics that most Catholics hear, week in and week out, are almost always a soppy sentimentalism that transforms Catholicism into something that can merely be reduced to the mantra, “be nice.” Given its “niceness,” there is no longer need for repentance, which is why a parish of thousands of people has almost no time set aside for the sacrament of confession; thirty minutes on a Saturday is typically the maximum.
Because the ordinary parish is no longer a holy place of sacrifice, it is little more than a community centre with the associated chit-chat and banter that is common to a public meeting house.
In latter day Catholicism there is no cost, no fight, no toughness, and no militancy. Something incredible and life changing has been reduced to something dreary and tiresome. It takes great difficulty to imagine the saints of old travelling thousands of miles to hostile environs to introduce – often at enormous sacrifice – the modern Catholic faith to anyone.
Indeed, and more to the point, most American Catholics don’t believe that there is any imperative to being Catholic in the first place. It doesn’t matter if people are Catholic or not, if Catholics assist at Mass or not, or even if Catholics observe the bare moral requirements of life that have always defined the Church.
Come to think of it, the vapidity of the modern Catholic experience dovetails almost perfectly with its non-existent missionary outreach. There is no need to mission when you have nothing to say: or, worse, something negative to say.
To be sure, we did meet some diligent and faithful people and priests along the way in our ten years as ordinary Catholics. They were like an oasis in a desert; a sign of life in a world of numbing apathy. But the operative experience – from the coffee hour to the parish picnic – was one in which the faith was, more or less, incidental. There was little interest in the things of God or the beauty of the Faith. It was as if every canard against Catholicism that I had heard during my brief sojourn as an Evangelical – that Catholics, or, at least, most of them, had no faith to speak of – was demonstrated week after week. For someone who still wanted Catholicism to be central to my life, all I remember of
those years, at least in terms of my life as a Catholic, was that it was lonely.
An anecdote to demonstrate: our oldest daughter had become friends with another child from the parish who likewise attended the parish school. The parents of our child’s friends were very similar to us: professional people of the same age, class and education who also had younger children like we did. They assisted at Mass in the parish week-in and week-out. One day while exchanging children for a playdate, I made “light” conversation with these folks about the wickedness of artificial contraception, assuming, wrongly, that they naturally agreed with me. The looks on their faces, and objections to my views, demonstrated that not only did they not agree but they were totally comfortable contracepting.
Looking back, we were all in our mid-thirties at the time, and while my wife would go on to have four more pregnancies after that conversation, these folks never had another child. In fairness to them, I never, not once, heard a homily denouncing artificial contraception from a pulpit in all of my years in the ordinary Catholic Church. Clearly, they didn’t see much wrong with it. As it is, there is probably no greater failure in the ordinary Catholic Church than the nearly universal disregard of the prohibition of artificial contraception by young Catholics. Our decision, early in our lives as ordinary Catholics, to refrain from artificial contraception made us very – unfortunately – unique.
Homeschooling
After several years in an ordinary parish, doing our best to cobble together a serious Catholic life, our oldest child reached school age. We dutifully sent her to the parish school, which was, regrettably, an extension of ordinary parish life. We saw clearly and early that there was not much Catholicism to parish schooling, and we began, hesitantly at first, to investigate homeschooling.
From the outside in, homeschooling seems like a huge jump into the abyss; a foray into weirdness. Very gingerly, we explored it, and, in this, we were not on the same page, as it were. My wife knew that our parish school was not complementing what we wanted for our children but the step towards homeschooling seemed daunting to her. In time, she would become its strong advocate.
It was through Catholic homeschooling that we first met “Traditional” Catholics.
Up until that point, the Traditional movement was something of which we knew little. Initially, in the spring of 2007, we began to attend Catholic homeschooling conferences. While we had been to one TLM in Brooklyn a few years earlier on a lark – a low Mass that had been totally off-putting at the time – the families that we met at the beginning of our homeschooling experience were deep and intelligent people who were raising large families. They were proudly Catholic and vivaciously faithful. In them, we had finally met people for whom the Faith was as important to them as it was us.
In connection with attending these homeschooling events, we were invited to a May Crowning at the home of one the homeschooling families. Our first such devotional event honouring the Mother of God, we had seen the hosting family on a couple of occasions at our parish church. They made an impression on me long before I ever met them; a beautiful and mannerly family of six well-behaved children who all received Holy Communion on their knees with the mother and four daughters all veiled.
It was there at the May Crowning that we were first invited to assist at a TLM, by an Ecclesia Dei community in Sleepy Hollow, New York. While this is a generalisation, not all Catholic homeschoolers are Traditional, but most Traditional Catholics are homeschoolers. So, the families that comprised this Catholic homeschooling group were significantly weighted in Traditional Catholic families. The joy and excitement among these “Latin Mass” people was profound but we were still not convinced. Vaguely, I had absorbed a sentiment in the ether that the TLM was intrinsically disobedient; almost as if there was something sinful in attending. And our one experience at a TLM had done nothing to whet our appetite to assist at another. But these people seemed like the first collective of joyful, engaged and balanced Catholics that I had met since I had been confirmed in 1998.
Summorum Pontificum
It was also at this event that I learned that Pope Benedict XVI was considering a universal indult to “liberate” the Latin Mass. It was obvious that these people thought about little else other than the TLM and Traditional Catholicism . They let me know that the TLM had been unfairly suppressed since Vatican II, and, further, the Holy Father was rumoured to be imminently correcting that wrongful suppression.
For the next several weeks, I began to follow the story of Pope Benedict’s rumoured indult, and looked increasingly into Traditional Catholicism. On Saturday, July 7, 2007, the Holy Father issued his long anticipated motu proprio, “Summorum Pontificum”.
It was much more than a universal indult. It was no longer a permission granted but a reality recognised that the TLM had never been lawfully suppressed following the Second Vatican Council. Hence, permission was not needed to offer it, and Summorum Pontificum said as much.
In the accompanying letter to the world’s bishops, Pope Benedict captured the essence of the TLM’s status and sanctity. He wrote: “[w]hat earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.”
To hate the TLM is, at least in a sense, to hate the Catholic faith as it has been passed down to us.
On Sunday, July 8, 2007, my wife and I packed up our four little daughters and assisted at, for all relevant purposes, our first TLM. It was a solemn high Mass at Sacred Heart Church in New Haven sponsored by the Saint Gregory Society. It was at one of those few summer days in Connecticut that was scorching – nearly 100 degrees. For two hours in the mid-day heat, we assisted in that old church, now long since closed, without the benefit of air conditioning. The joy of the priests at the issuance of the motu proprio was obvious. They nearly suffered heat stroke under heavy vestments as they offered the Mass in thanksgiving for the Holy Father’s generosity.
While it would take several more TLMs over the remainder of the summer for my wife to be convinced, we started to assist in Sleepy Hollow by the fall of 2007. And while we intended to alternate weekends in the beginning between our regular parish and Sleepy Hollow, we soon stopped going to our geographic parish for good.
Cohesive and Compelling
One particular Sunday that summer stands out. I assisted at a TLM with only my four-year-old daughter. As we took everything in together, I asked her what she thought about it. She said she liked it very much and that all of the women in their veils looked like our Lady. Thus, I can honestly say that my little daughter taught me the value of the veil – and the TLM – in an instant.
In the beginning, however, I must admit it took time for me to acclimate to the Traditional Mass. While the music was beautiful, it was not a primary draw. The reverence was obvious too but again that was not what clinched it for me in the beginning. No, it was the preaching. The priests that cycled through the various TLMs at that time were erudite and courageous, bold and intellectual. It was as if all of the reading that I had done, years earlier, to come into the Church and reject secularism was being validated every Sunday in homily after homily. For someone often alone in my thoughts, the loneliness I had felt in coming to the Church vanished, both from the pulpit and with the various families we met who assisted. It was one of the most joyous discoveries in my life. One that very likely helped save my faith.
There is, of course, an irony in the obvious superiority of the homiletics of the Traditional Mass vis-à-vis the new Mass. Vatican II stressed the importance of the homily and the new liturgy was supposed to elevate its importance. In reality, however, the qualitative difference in preaching was colossal. In one, you heard a cohesive and compelling call to live a virtuous life in harmony with the teachings of Holy Mother Church. In the other, you most often heard mawkish appeals to mostly secular values.
Joyous fruits
As we began to assist at the TLM exclusively, I began to read extensively an entire reading set that had otherwise escaped my attention. For the next few years, I read book after book about the “Crisis,” liturgy, Vatican II, and Modernism, among other things, and the thread that connected all of them. Soon thereafter, I began writing articles and book reviews for The Remnant, Catholic Family News and New Oxford Review – all with the zeal of a convert.
All of that continued for several years until I stopped publishing about four years ago. While I have never stopped reading or writing, I slowed down my reading about the Crisis. In fact, perhaps over a ten-year period, I ceased to be a self-described “Traditional” Catholic but just a Catholic who lived as if the past sixty years never happened. It took that long to learn how to live as a Catholic.
Obviously, it is not mere happenstance that Summorum Pontificum coincided with my involvement with the TLM. Without Benedict's motu proprio, I am not sure that we would have migrated to the incalculably rich Catholic life we now enjoy.
What has been incredible over the last fourteen years is how much growth we have seen in the TLM in the area that surrounds us. To say that it has become mainstream is an understatement. Our children do not know anything but it. Families upon families have since joined us in assisting at the TLM, with so many young priests becoming involved as well. It has been very much like a movement hitting critical mass: more and more local churches began to incorporate it into their liturgical life. The change in our diocese was incredible.
It has been both a joy and privilege to play a small part in the renaissance of traditional Catholic life in our diocese. If there is one proof positive, anecdotal though it may be, it is the new faces that continually show up at TLM events. It used to be, at least when I first started assisting locally at the TLM, that it was the same venerable group of people. In a short period of time, you knew them all. That has changed dramatically in recent times. In fact, I assisted at a special TLM at Saint John the Evangelist in Stamford, Connecticut with Cardinal Burke on July 16, 2021 for the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. While that day will now be infamous, what struck me during that beautiful liturgy was the sheer number of people I did not know.
Yes, the TLM has gained a slow but exponentially increasing following in our area. Even though the world has convulsed politically and culturally over the last several years, the resurgence of traditional Catholic life locally has been a constant. So much so, to bring the story full circle, the parish that we left some fourteen years ago began offering the TLM earlier this year under the guidance of yet another young and winsome priest who recently joined our diocese. Now, a beautiful weekly missa cantata is offered five minutes from us and new people are assisting and seeing the beauty of the TLM.
- II –
Words cannot convey the horror of July 16, 2021.
I had known for some time of yet another rumour. This time that Pope Francis would act to restrict the TLM. While I paid some attention to the conjecture, I put it mostly out of my head. I woke up, as I usually do, at 6:00 AM and checked my phone. Yes, the rumours were true. But as my bleary eyes read through the text, it was as if someone had physically assaulted me. I think, at least in part, I did not believe he would actually pull the trigger. Yes, he appears to detest Traditional Catholicism. Yes, he appears to hate the TLM. Yes, he has been a constant disappointment. But I just could not believe that he would want to go down in history as the Pope who attempted to extinguish the Mass of the Ages. But he evidently does want to go down in infamy as such.
Hatred and disdain
Over this first weekend, absorbing this body blow, waves of realisations came over me. Will my local parish be allowed to offer the TLM anymore? Will the camp that my children attend each summer be allowed to offer the TLM anymore? Will the many young priests that I have gotten to know over the last several years be given the requisite faculties to offer the TLM? What about the seminarians I have met: will they be forever stripped of the right to offer the TLM? Will the retreat I attend each year be able to have the TLM as it has for many years? Will the resurgence of Catholic life in our diocese cease?
But worst of all, perhaps, is that the Holy Father holds me and my family in such disdain. It is one thing to be disappointed in, or quarrel with, a family member; it is quite another for them to confess their enmity for you. And that is where I am today. He who is charged with loving the flock more than all others – he who sits in Saint Peter’s chair and is invested with authority over Christ’s sheep – detests me and my family. Does it matter that we love the Lord? No.
Does it matter that we cherish Holy Mother Church? No.
Does it matter that we believe in our Lord’s Real Presence? No.
Does it matter that we confess Christ the King? No.
Does it matter that we pray for him and his brother bishops? Not at all.
Does it matter that we pray our Rosary with great affection for the Mother of God? No.
Does it matter that we love and revere our priests? No.
Does it matter that we encourage our children to test their vocation and praise religious life as an august option as any Catholic parent ought? No.
Does it matter that we have rejected artificial contraception and embraced a life of children? No.
Does it matter that we joyfully accept all that Holy Mother Church teaches as a treasure instead of a burden? Surely not.
In fact, as perverse as it sounds, he appears to detest us for these very reasons: for our “rigid” Catholicity.
I have avoided, at least for the most part, obsessing over this absurdly chaotic pontificate: from “who am I to judge” to Pachamama; from suggesting that divorced and remarried Catholics (i.e., those living in a state of adultery) could receive Holy Communion to declaring that capital punishment is always inadmissible and so much, much more. I am, after all, just a layman seeking to correspond to the grace in my life by leading a Catholic life. Literacy of the “Crisis” – and angst over it – is not, in and of itself, a virtue. Moreover, there are so many other more eminently qualified authorities to dissect the disaster that is the papacy of Pope Francis.
Yet it still hurts that he, as our Holy Father, loathes me and the circle of Catholic priests, friends and family that dominate my life; that his entire motu proprio drips with derision that essentially reduces our faith and the expression of it as something diseased and leprous and worthy of quarantining. Instead of being jewels of the Church worthy of exhibition for the greater world, Pope Francis believes that my Catholic children need to be cordoned off less they infect the greater Catholic world.
Totalising theme
Perhaps it is giving him too much credit to ponder this travesty of a motu proprio – this scandal for the age – but here we are. So many others are taking apart the legality and technical application of this action that I only want to convey a few observations beyond the personal hurt that the Holy Father has caused for men and fathers such as me.
There is a theme that runs through Traditionis Custodes that might be recast as follows: the reform of the Second Vatican Council is now permanent; we are not going back and will definitively discard anything not consonant with such reform.
Everything that came before the reform must be – and finally is – abrogated. The revolutionary reform that began in the 1960s must be brought to its final conflagratory end (the “Reform”). The Holy Father’s letter says as much. What is interesting to me, or, at least, what struck me about that tenor of the Holy Father’s theme is that the Reform itself has now become talismanic. It is now axiomatic that the Reform must be fully implemented. Merely to question its efficacy or principles is tantamount to a betrayal of the Catholic faith itself.
Disingenuous and hypocritical
Consider this irony, the Holy Father says in his accompanying letter that:
With the passage of thirteen years, I instructed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to circulate a questionnaire to the Bishops regarding the implementation of the Motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. The responses reveal a situation that preoccupies and saddens me, and persuades me of the need to intervene.
Really? Does anyone believe this? [See footnote p. 20 - Ed.]
The obvious fruits of Summorum Pontificum are an ever-increasing interest in the TLM by priests and laypeople. The fruits are vocations, zeal, and fidelity. It is precisely its traction that prompted this action. And more to the point, the only interactions I have seen between our local bishop and the Traditional Catholic community has been positive, respectful, and faithful.
The supreme irony is that if we liken Summorum Pontificum to a reform itself, it is the only reform (out of literally thousands) in the last sixty years that produced good fruits. The acid test of any reform undertaken by Holy Mother Church should be whether it increases the sanctity and fervour of the people and sparks a greater interest in vocations and the religious life, which, along with good Catholic families, is the lifeblood of the Church.
I will never be a doctor of the Church but if a given reform does not yield sanctity, conversions, fidelity, and vocations, what good is it? And if it decreases sanctity, conversions, fidelity, and vocations, can’t we say with confidence that the given reform has failed and is not of God?
That said, it is almost sixty years since the close of the Second Vatican Council and the Reform that followed. What have been the fruits of that Reform? Do those results “preoccupy and sadden” the Holy Father enough for him to be persuaded to intervene? If results matter, and surely they must, are not the catastrophic diminishment and disempowerment of the Church since Vatican II the fruits of the Reform? Why are these results never surveyed?
How many seminaries must be shuttered?
How many dioceses must file bankruptcy?
How many priests must be laicised?
How many religious orders must disappear?
How many Catholic schools must close?
What percentage of faithful must deny, in ever-increasing numbers, the Real Presence of our Lord?
How many more Catholics must stop assisting at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass?
All that we have seen in the Catholic Church over the last sixty years is carnage – unmitigated and unremitting. While it is beyond me to assume causes and effects, it certainly appears that there is a relationship between the Reform and the fallout over the same time; one that, at the very least, demands further inquiry and intervention.
Ergo, the Reform is not an end unto itself. It must be judged. If the fruits of Summorum Pontificum are so obviously – and fictitiously – detrimental to the Holy Mother Church after only fourteen years, why are the disastrous fruits of the Reform so uninstructive? How many years do we need? Must the Church fall into total ruin before we can declare that the Reform was a failure and begin again?
This I believe and cling to...
While others will more adequately predict what comes next in this veritable horror show, I put my utmost confidence in our Lord. If I and my little family – and the families like us – are the good fruit of Summorum Pontificum, and if the restoration of the TLM itself has been a movement of the Holy Ghost working through His Church, there is nothing that the Holy Father can do to arrest it.
I have not been gifted with prophecy or the charism of infallibility, I am merely a Catholic layman, husband, and father, but I passionately believe that God will continue to bless those who worship Him with due honour and in accord with the ancient traditions He saw fit to hand down to us through the venerable Fathers in our illustrious history.
I trust – with all my heart – that He will not allow the Catholic faith to be stamped out: no matter who purports to do the stamping. And even though this action brings me to literal tears, I do not fret. God will triumph; Christ will triumph; and Christ’s Church, though battered and bruised, will not fail.
This I believe and this I will cling to.
Saint Joseph, Terror of Demons, Pray for Us.