Why are we moderns in such a hurry to be “in-‘n’-out” of liturgy?

I’m not even talking here about the Novus Ordo, which—apart from the sprawling lectionary and various indeterminate local addenda—counts as the miniskirt in the wardrobe of liturgies, if you just compare the fixed texts of the rite with any other historic Christian rite of East or West.

No, here I have in mind the contrast between the Tridentine rite (that is, what some call the “pre-55”) and the Pacellian-Roncallian rite (that is, what you will find in a 1962 missal). Compare the extravagant blessings of the palms in the “Dry Mass” to the lame abbreviation; compare the four prayers of blessing of fire with only one; the omission of the prayers at the foot of the altar whenever a procession happens before Mass (often leaving the ministers with nothing to do for a long while), and the cutting-out of the Prologue of John when something else follows Mass…

Was all this really too much for ordinary Catholics? Was it too much for the clergy?

Whenever I go to very long, complicated liturgies such as you find in the pre-55 Triduum, I see tons of families and somehow they seem to manage. Sometimes the little kids fall asleep, and that’s fine. As the psalmist says, “He pours gifts on His beloved while they slumber.” It’s a family affair: we all go there together, and we give of ourselves as best we can. For a 5-year-old, that means sleeping; for a 15-year-old boy, maybe it’s serving at the altar; for a 25-year-old, following the prayers in a missal or singing in the schola; for a 50-year-old, meditating on life and death and God.

Our Byzantine brethren have notoriously long liturgies. Why was this not one of the “Eastern features” that the West decided to copy? After all, liturgical historians tell us constantly how much was borrowed from the East, and the reformers claimed the East as their justification for certain steps they took. It seems, in reality, that they took from the East whatever chimed in with modern theology, but they passed over with a sense of relief—indeed, they stripped away, with a sense of obligation—anything that might have conflicted with modern Western habits. They said “No thanks!” to fasting, lots of prostrations, and long liturgies, but “Gimme!” to the foreign epiklesis, communion under both kinds, standing rather than kneeling, and so forth. In short: the Western liturgists sought the titillation of change, not the truth of tradition. Their arbitrainess indicts them of wilfulness; their wilfulness points to disordered passions.

Reflecting on my life as a Catholic, I can honestly say that the strongest feelings of boredom, impatience, and “get me outta here” overcame me during vernacular, horizontal Novus Ordo Masses with a seemingly endless tide of spoken verbiage: several readings, declaimed in mock-drama or flat monotony; a rambling homily; poorly composed “prayers of the faithful”; and on and on—always this flood of verbosity, like a new form of Chinese water-torture.

The contrast with the old rite couldn’t be more pronounced. In the nearly four-hour pre-55 Easter Vigil, the only words spoken the entire time are “Ecce Agnus Dei, ecce qui tollit peccata mundi: Domine, non sum dignus,” etc., and “Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus,” etc. (I’m not counting the homily, since traditionalists don’t consider this to be part of the liturgy, for reasons explained here.) Everything else in the pre-55 Vigil is either chant or silence, punctuated with solemn actions.1 This gives a timeless, restful, mystical “glow” to everything. Even if one is tired, one is also spellbound and drawn continuously back to the pageant of symbols and ceremonies. One can freely surrender to the all-embracing worship and float along with it, in and out, rising and falling with the waves, as one’s senses and intelligence are steeped in a solemn sacred event.

In such a rite, the question “are you following everything?” doesn’t even occur to the mind. It’s so much greater and deeper than a bunch of words to be instantly grasped. It is mystery, and absorption in mystery. There is light, darkness, beauty, incomprehension. I leave on a different plane than that on which I entered. The scent of incense lingers, as if it’s penetrated my soul as well as my clothing. God was there, and I adored Him. That is the purpose for which He called me and for which I came. That is the pulsing heart of liturgy.

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Some years ago I read a fascinating book, though I will admit it was rather dense and at times difficult to understand: Vladislav Andrejev’s The Angel of the Countenance of God: Theology and Iconology of Theophanies, published by Angelico Press in 2021. Andrejev (b. 1938) is the founder of the Prospon School of Iconology. I have always been fascinated with Eastern icons and with the theology of the icon as it was hammered out during the iconoclasm controversies in the Byzantine empire, from which we in the West have so much to learn as we weather the storm of the third wave of iconoclasm (circa 1960 to the present), which targeted the primordial icon of the liturgy itself, which not even the original iconoclasts dared to touch.1

Here’s the chapel in Gaming, Austria, where I first fell in love with the Byzantine Divine Liturgy and with its lavish use of icons:

And here’s what the icon corner in my bedroom looks like, where I pray the Divine Office by candlelight:

For me, Eastern and Western tradition have long been mutually reinforcing and deeply nourishing, even if I worship primarily in the Roman rite. Readers of my book The Once and Future Roman Rite will know that I dedicate an entire chapter to the profound parallels between these traditions in their authentic forms.

Thus, I read Andrejev with great eagerness to learn. What follows are some of the passages I highlighted for future meditation, and now I share them with you for your edification. I should hasten to add that Andrejev’s book is not so much about the art of the icon (there are many other full-color books on that topic) as it is about the theological anthropology and metaphysics behind icons.

I found especially delightful his mini-commentary on the Song of Songs, a book to whose exegesis I have given a lot of time. (In fact, Os Justi Press recently published a book about it that I consider one of the very best ever to have appeared: Timothy Kelly’s Wounded I Sing: The Song of Songs and the Incarnation of the Son of God.) Truly, this poem is an inexhaustible font of mystical prayer.

Page numbers in parentheses. —PAK

Emmanuel is constantly born in the “veils” of Man’s inner faith. This is exactly how Christians greet each other at Christmas: “Christ is born.” They do not say “was born,” because that would only sound like a memory of two thousand years ago. They say “is born,” because Christ is eternally born and grows in every Christian soul, in the same way as He is hypostatically born in the bosom of His Father. The biblical events are lost in the mists of time, but their essence is of unfading significance for religious life, forming the basis for the perception of future Theophanies. (91)

According to the Talmud, Abraham was the first to recognize God’s power over the world and, therefore, called Him the Lord, as distinguished from the prior generalized name “God.” We should see the ontological difference between these names, because “God” is a generally valid name, while “the Lord” is a personal name that is directly related to a believer’s improvement of life. Almost all people are believers to a greater or lesser extent, but not every believer can call God “the Lord,” but only those who are willing “in the Spirit” to recognize His authority over them and do His will. It is said that “the devils also believe, and tremble” (Jas 2:19), but they do not do His Will at all and, although they listen to God, they are afraid to call Him “the Lord.” … Therefore, the prayer “Lord, have mercy” features this, as it were, intimate Name of God, rather than any other name. (95)

The Holy Name of Jesus (quoting Alfeyev):

Among all the names of God, the Tetragrammaton is distinguished by its special holiness and importance.

The life at Solomon’s Temple is focused on honoring the name of God: the Temple is called after the Lord’s name; the Temple is where the Lord’s name dwells; they come to the Temple having heard the Lord’s name; and they profess the Lord’s name in the Temple. (99-100)

Quoting Averintsev:

If the Christology of the Church Fathers had been entirely guided by the evolution of ideas law without the miracle of Revelation, the evolution of ideas from both the Wisdom literature and the Greek Platonic sources could have inevitably led only to Arianism. Therefore, the victory over Arianism was about overcoming the imaginary autonomy of the evolution of ideas. (130)

Quoting Florovsky:

The properties of God are not only mentally conceivable or thinkable attributes. They are not abstractions or inventions. They are powers and actions—actual, essential, and life-giving revelations of the Divine Life. (137)

Comments on the Song of Songs

Indeed, the title “The Song of Songs” (eighth century BC), according to one of the earliest Christian commentators, Origen, means “the best song of all.” This is the most mysterious book of the Bible, according to commentators, and the most difficult one in terms of logic, which is not surprising, because it is a poem about Love. The language of love is deeply intimate, extremely symbolic, and ecstatically mystical.

The Book of the Wisdom of Solomon is a “full-blooded sister” of the Song of Songs and both of them are amazingly rich in symbolism, but the Song of Songs is gold refined in the crucible of Man’s fiery aspiration to God, and the Love described in this book is understood both as the Eros of the human valleys and as the Agape of the heavenly Spirit. In addition, the Song of Songs is a lyrical poem whose dialogues and monologues are not only about love. Pre-eminently, they are about praise of Love, the essential Agape of God. Like an abundant rain, Love is poured out without measure by the Lord on the created world, and we know about love reuniting us with God only owing to our inherent seminal Logos, the Bridegroom of our souls, who, having found an “earthly bride,” returns with her to His Father. (166)

The Song of Songs is the New Testament written in ancient times, and that is why this book is prophetic. It is written in a special figurative, antinomial, i.e., iconological, language, whose height of expression and special tone of symbolism surpasses that of all the biblical prophets.

Rabbi Akiva (died in AD 135) supported the canonical books: “No man in Israel ever disputed the status of the Song of Songs… The whole world is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Writings are Holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.” (167)

There are also those who reject the spiritual significance of the Song of Songs in the new times of “scientific” interpretation of the Bible, because this book, like “a voice crying in the wilderness,” calls to God, yet there is no mention of God in it. In addition, this book has no prayers or national features, unlike the other books of the Old Testament. All this shows that Love has an enduring value for all living things, because God Himself is Love, and He created the whole world with Wisdom and Love.

In the Song of Songs, the beloved one is often called now “sister,” now “spouse,” and sometimes even both names are used: “Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse” (Song 4:9–11). In the times of Solomon, a sister could not be a spouse, which means that the book symbolically refers to a mystical feeling of faith that connects God’s Virgin Sophia and God’s Agape into a single image of action. In his great wisdom, Solomon says, “Say unto wisdom, Thou art my sister; and call understanding thy kinswoman” (Prov 7:4) and “I loved her, and sought her out from my youth, I desired to make her my spouse, and I was a lover of her beauty” (Wis 8:2). Again, the Bridegroom takes a “sister” as a “spouse” for himself. So, the movement of God’s Wisdom (Sophia) and Love (Agape) towards the Logos, who lives in the temple of the human soul, should be understood as inseparable. For the believer’s Soul, Christ is a Brother, by the human nature, and a Hypostatic Bridegroom, by the divine nature. The soul is Christ’s sister, by virtue of its created nature, and His Bride, by virtue of the gracious gift of conjugal deification. (168)

Quoting Archimandrite Ambrose:

Even though some scholars tried to create a pattern of development of the action or movement of the theme in the book of the Song of Songs, they could not achieve their purpose, which was impossible due to the fact that the book has no beginning, end, or middle. This is an excerpt or revelation from eternity about God’s Love for Man and about the love expected from Man for his God as an essential response. Human language has no adequate words for Agape. It has to use imperfect human language and graciously descend to earthly images. The language of the book is special; it is absolutely above any language rules and, as it were, beyond human speech. (169)

Before the seventeenth century, commentators still adhered to the tradition of the ancient Fathers. The eighteenth century, however, saw a sudden change in view concerning biblical studies, and commentators began to identify the Song of Songs as folk erotic poetry rather than spiritual and sacred literature. This is understandable, because this was an era of triumphalist scientific thinking, with its discursive and material approach to everything, including Divine things. But even though the “philosophical” mind can somehow understand love at the Eros level, God’s Agape is beyond it. (172)

The Soul should become a Sister and a Spouse turned in love to God. “Spouse” refers to the Soul as being different in nature from the Bridegroom yet subject to conjugal deification, while the word “Sister” shows Her human affinity with him. … The God-Man Bridegroom exists in two natures, while His Bride—the Church, as the Soul, exists as His Sister by human nature and His Bride by Divine nature. (175; 177)

Chosen from among brides and virgins, the Immaculate Virgin Mary, the Unwedded Bride, became a living Ark into which the Logos placed himself instead of the stone tables of the Old Testament. The image of the Virgin is reunited with the image of the Mother nursing the Infant God. From then on, the iconological image of the Holy Virgin Mother has reminded believers of the conception and birth in their hearts of Logos Immanuel sown by the Holy Spirit rather than the flesh. Since then, “My kinsman is to me a [fragrant] bundle of myrrh; he shall lie between my breasts [in the heart]” (Song 1:13). We justify our lives only by conceiving from the seed of God and living in harmony with the meaning of the creation of the world and Man. (184)

The marriage of the Lamb and the Bride is crowned with the ekstasis of communion of the Bride. “Bring me into the house of wine; set love before me” (Song 2:4). The annunciation to the Soul engulfed in the flames of Love transforms itself into the act of knowledge of God and of conception from the Holy Spirit. However, not only does the Soul come to know the mystery of God’s Love, but also God to the same degree deeply immerses Himself into the Soul and comes to know the mystery of the human heart. (185)

According to Gregory of Nyssa, this verse is about the wisdom-loving Virgin, the Soul, who is filled with such a strong Love that she is not satisfied with the cup prepared by Wisdom and, to quench her thirst of love, asks to be brought into the house of wine to set her mouth to the very winepress pouring out the spiritual drink of Agape. This daring rise to the heights of Love can be compared with the state of the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation. Only she who passed through this fire of immeasurable Love of seedless conception could boldly ask her Son to turn water into wine at the marriage (!) feast in Cana. The divine Logos Himself was present at the wedding, but was not recognized by the earthly bride and bridegroom. Therefore, He said to His Mother Bride: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” However, He worked the miracle for the sake of the all-encompassing Love between the Bridegroom and the Bride as symbolized in its earthly aspect. Here, we see the convergence of conceptual aspects of “wine” at the earthly wedding (Eros) and then at the wedding of heavenly Communion (Agape). (185)

Quoting Fast’s Commentary:

With the Bride, seven parts of her body were named and praised, which meant the fullness of grace of the Church, because the Church is the Body of Christ, while the number seven, according to the Fathers, is the church number of this century. With Christ the Bridegroom, nine parts of His body were praised and three characteristic features were described, making a total of twelve (9+3=12) comparisons. With the Bride, the number seven refers to the fullness of grace of the visible and earthly Church. With Christ the Bridegroom, the number twelve, consisting of nine and three, refers to the nine angelic orders (of the Heavenly Church) and the Divinity of the Holy Trinity glorified by the visible and invisible Church: Holy, Holy, Holy, the Lord of Sabaoth; heaven and earth are filled with Your Glory. (186)

Quoting Maximus:

The mystery of the Incarnation of the Word (Logos) contains in itself the whole meaning (τήν δύναμιν) of the riddles and symbols of Scripture, the whole significance of visible and invisible creatures. (189)

Every believing Soul called upon and chosen by God in a noble harmony of its body, soul, and mind is a Virgin Sister, according to human nature, and a Virgin Bride, according to the Divine Nature. (189)

Baptism in the fiery element of Love concludes the Trinity cycle of New Testament salvation.

God the Father revealed his Will having chosen Israel and through the Angel of His Divinity brought the people out of the midst of the pagan world.

God the Son came into the world, was truly incarnated in the holy land of promise, and through the Angel of Sophia gave the people the Beatitudes and the rule of spiritual anagogy.

God the Holy Spirit descended, and the people prepared by Christ were pierced and kindled with the divine fire of Love; from then on, the baptized in the name of the Trinity have been “sealed unto the day of redemption” (Eph 4:30) by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit kindled in believers’ hearts the firstfruits of deification, elevating Man from the image of general righteousness by law to the blessed likeness to the Divine Logos. From then on, the spermatic Logos became an active and guiding principle in human lives, and God’s Name began to speak in Man through Baptism and Chrismation. The day of the descent of the Holy Spirit became the Eighth Day in the spiritual calendar of monotheistic faith and the First day of the living Kingdom anticipated in the Coming of Christ—the King, Prophet, and Priest. (209-10)

Quoting Macarius:

But the Three Children, because of their righteousness, while they were in the visible fire, had in their hearts the divine and heavenly Fire ministering within their thoughts and exerting its energy in them. That very Fire showed itself outside them. It (the Angel) stood between them and the visible fire, and restrained it, that it should not burn the righteous . . . . As, then, the Three Children, having thoughts of righteousness, received in themselves the Fire of God, and worshipped the Lord in truth, so now faithful souls receive that divine and heavenly Fire, in this world, in secret; and that Fire forms a heavenly image upon their humanity. (218)

St. Symeon on Love

Quoting Symeon the New Theologian:

When I recalled the beauty of undefiled love, its light suddenly appeared in my heart. I was ravished with its sweetness and lost my senses; I lost all perception of this life and forgot all the things of this world.

Love desired, how fortunate are those who have embraced you, for they will no longer have a yearning to embrace any human beauty.

How fortunate are they who are moved by divine love to cling to you.

How fortunate are those who caress your beauty and delight in it with great desire, for their souls will be sanctified by the undefiled blood and water which issue from you.

How fortunate are those who passionately embrace you, for they will be altered for the better in spirit and will exult in their souls, because you are inexpressible Joy.

How fortunate are they who gain possession of you, for they will count the treasures of the world as nothing, for you are indeed wealth “beyond the dreams of avarice.”

How blessed and thrice-blessed are they whom you accept, for though they be apparently without any glory, they will be more glorious than those who are glorious, more honored than those who are honored.

How worthy of praise are those who pursue you; even more so those who have found you. Most blessed are those who are loved by you, received by you, taught by you, those who have dwelt in you and been fed by you with immortal food, that is the Lord, Jesus Christ. (228-29)

The main instrument in the knowledge of God is the heart capable of letting in the energies of the noetic mind. Actually, the human heart is the center of Man’s mystical life; the heart is home to a Cross where the horizontal physical nature and the vertical noetic nature intersect, and there, at the point of intersection, God’s Presence is depicted…. The image of the Cross inscribed in the heart is the main organ of religious experience and mystical ekstasis of the human spirit. St. Macarius the Great says, “the heart governs and reigns over the whole bodily organism; and when grace possesses the ranges of the heart, it reigns over all the members and the thoughts.” (243)

St. Symeon:

O excess of love! He Who embraces all things makes His home within a mortal corruptible man, He by Whose indwelling might all things are governed, and the man becomes as a woman heavy with child. O astonishing miracle and incomprehensible deeds and mysteries of the incomprehensible God! A man carries God consciously within himself as light, carries Him Who has brought all things into being and created them, including the one who carries Him now. He carries Him within as a treasure inexpressible, unspeakable, without quality, quantity, or form, immaterial, shapeless, yet with form in beauty inexplicable, altogether simple, like light, Him Who transcends all light. (245-46)

The Church combines the uncreated, noetic, and material worlds; making it possible for every person who has reached the hypostatic faith to be a god by grace, an angel by his mind’s conformity to the heavenly powers, and man by the flesh of natural feelings correlated with the cosmos. (267)

It has often seemed to me bizarre in the extreme that incense is rarely encountered in many Catholic churches. Incense appears everywhere in Scripture—in the law of Moses, in the books about Temple worship, in the Psalms where it serves as a primary symbol for prayers rising up to God, in the Gospel account of Zechariah, in scenes of heaven from both Testaments. On the following verse of Scripture—

And I saw an angel come and stand before the altar, having a golden censer; and there was given to him much incense, and the smoke of the incense of the prayers of the saints ascended up before God from the hand of the angel.

—Romano Guardini comments:

So writes Saint John in the mysterious book of the Apocalypse. The offering of incense is a generous and beautiful rite. The bright grains of incense are laid upon the red-hot charcoal, the censer is swung, and the fragrant smoke rises in clouds. In the rhythm and the sweetness there is a musical quality; and like music also is the entire lack of practical utility: it is a prodigal waste of precious material. It is a pouring out of unwithholding love. “When the Lord was at supper Mary brought the spikenard of great price and poured it over his feet and wiped them with her hair, and the house was filled with the odor of the ointment.” Narrower spirits objected. “Whereto this waste?” But the Son of God has spoken, “Let her alone. She hath done it against my burial.” Mary’s anointing was a mystery of death and love and the sweet savor of sacrifice.1

The sweet-smelling smoke was always there in Hebrew worship and became even more prevalent in Christian worship, where, in contrast with the bloody animal sacrifices of the old covenant, it fittingly represented the rational worship of a mind raised up to God in union with Christ, Himself the pleasing oblation par excellence. The importance of it is well captured by one of the antiphons for Lauds on the Solemnity of Corpus Christi: Sacerdotes sancti incensum et panes offerunt Deo, alleluia, “The holy priests offer incense and bread to God, alleluia.”2 The bread has managed to survive—but what of the incense?

Then there is the subjective experience of the worshiper. Every time incense is brought forth at Mass or the Divine Office, it just feels like worship is now under way. Something special is happening here that no words or songs can convey by themselves; someone is present who deserves the treatment owed to a king or a god.3 The fragrance surrounds you, gets into your hair and your clothing. Your line of vision is interrupted by a hanging haze, which subconsciously says: You are in the midst of mysteries that cannot be clearly seen but must be worshiped on bended knee. When the embers are glowing well and the grains are heaped on with abandon, those clouds of incense make everything hazy, as if seen through a veil—a drifting image of the pilgrimage of the Christian’s life, as he passes through this vale of tears.

To continue the quotation from Guardini:

The offering of incense is like Mary’s anointing at Bethany. It is as free and objectless as beauty. It burns and is consumed like love that lasts through death. And the arid soul still takes his stand and asks the same question: What is the good of it?

It is the offering of a sweet savor which Scripture itself tells us is the prayers of the Saints. Incense is the symbol of prayer. Like pure prayer it has in view no object of its own; it asks nothing for itself. It rises like the Gloria Patri at the end of a psalm in adoration and thanksgiving to God for his great glory.…

Prayer is a profound act of worship, that asks neither why nor wherefore. It rises like beauty, like sweetness, like love. The more there is in it of love, the more of sacrifice. And when the fire has wholly consumed the sacrifice, a sweet savor ascends.4

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The following post is adapted from chapter 12 of my book Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright. One of the most predictable and wearisome objections launched by conservatives against traditionalists is that the latter “make an idol out of the TLM.” You’ll find a large number of Catholics on social media who say something like: “I’m not a liberal but I’m certainly not a trad, either. I take a middle path, the magisterial one.” This balloon needs to have a bright, sharp pin stuck into it.—PAK

The ancients liked to say: “Nothing in excess.” Make sure you strike a balance. Give a little, take a little. Don’t go overboard. Life is full of compromises. Whatever you do, avoid the extremes. The Bible says it, too: “Do not swerve to the right or to the left; turn your foot away from evil” (Prov 4:27). The via media, the middle way, the “golden mean,” is a legitimate concept. As Aristotle explains, every moral virtue consists in a mean between extremes, as courage is a mean between cowardice and rashness.

Problems arise, however, when the concept of the via media is applied to the realm of ideas, where it can become a substitute for real thinking, for the hard work of clinging to the truth even when it is so unpopular or so unrecognized that it looks extreme. There are times when the middle way is the wrong way. There are times when the middle way is the broad path that leads to destruction.

How easily the via media logic can be abused! “Believers are too credulous, atheists are too assertive in the opposite direction, so the via media is agnosticism.” “Sedevacantists go to one extreme in their rejection of the reigning pope, while most traditional Catholics are too flaccid in their acceptance of him; the via media is the SSPX.” “The Eastern Orthodox have a rich tradition but are separated from Rome. Roman Catholics have largely given up on tradition but are still in union with Rome. The via media, then, is to be a Byzantine Catholic.” Or, to take a real historical example, the position that John Henry Newman believed and defended for many years: “Roman Catholicism is ancient but overgrown with superstition; Protestantism is free from superstition but cut off from antiquity. The via media is Anglicanism.” One could play this game for a long time, and always come out wrong.

Then it dawned on Newman, as he studied debates in the ancient Church, that sometimes the three parties—two extremes and a middle—were ranged in such a way that the orthodox faith, the true doctrine, stood at one of the extremes. For example, at the time of the Arian crisis, there were Arians, Semi-Arians, and Nicaeans. In the political battles and regional councils, the Semi-Arians were able to position themselves as holding the reasonable middle ground between the extremists who denied any likeness of nature between Father and Son (the Anomoeans) and the other extremists who, in their view, conflated the Son and the Father by identifying them both as God, “consubstantial” (the Homoousians). In holding their false view of the subordinating “similarity” of the Son to the Father, they showed that they did not grasp—or did not wish to grasp—the Nicaean faith of St. Athanasius and other orthodox fathers, who, though a beleaguered minority, valiantly confessed the truth and ultimately prevailed.^[1] The Holy Spirit did not validate the via media; He led the Church to reaffirm what looked like an extreme to nearly everyone at the time. It was pondering the implications of episodes like this that led Newman to relinquish his via media theory.

I once saw a bulletin from England in which the pastor stated that there is a via media between progressivism and traditionalism. An interesting claim! What kind of a mean is it, I wonder? No doubt we can have too much of the wrong kind of progress, or too heavy a dose of that liberalism condemned by Leo XIII and other pontiffs; but, considering that Catholicism is entirely a religion of tradition (the Greek word parádosis and the Latin word traditio mean “handing down”: even our Scriptures and the Magisterium are part of what is handed down), can we have “too much” tradition? Can we receive too well, embrace too heartily, live too fully, love too ardently, and pass on too carefully the sacred inheritance of the Church?

The same pastor then claimed that there is a mean between “liturgical silliness or corruption” and “liturgical snobbery.” Perhaps we know what he means by the latter, but the way it’s phrased supports my general point: it’s easy to mold the description of one’s opponents in such a way that one ends up comfortably as the via media. Maybe we should concentrate less on persons or trends, and more on the truths we should adhere to with all our mind, the goods we should aspire to with all our heart, the beauty we should long for with all our soul, the holiness we should pursue with all our strength. In this way, we will be the right kind of “extremists.”

I couldn’t help thinking of Newman when I read an article, “Tradition is the Democracy of the Dead,”^[2] penned by another Anglican clerical convert, the popular author Fr. Dwight Longenecker. Fr. Longenecker assures us that he is a lover of tradition—but not excessively. He says, rightly, that one should be or become Catholic for the sake of its 2,000-year-old tradition—or, more accurately, its 4,000-year-old tradition, since the law, prophecies, and worship of Israel are fulfilled in the Church. But he also says that, since tradition is not static or unchangeable, we need to be willing to change with the times, according to the judgment calls emanating from Rome, and not make an “idol” of the past. (One can certainly live free of fear that today’s Rome will make an idol of the past; one might rather fear its making an idol of the present or of the future.)

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One of the most wonderful authors I’ve gotten to know in the past few years is a Chinese legal philosopher and Catholic convert named John C.H. Wu (1899–1986), whose life was extraordinary in so many ways: he corresponded for years with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.; he drafted the Constitution for the Republic of China in the 1930s; he and his wife had 14 children, one of whom was miraculously cured through the intercession of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, leading the way to the conversion of the entire family; he produced admirable translations of the Psalms and the New Testament into literary Chinese; he served as ambassador of China to the Holy See under Pius XII; he taught at many universities—in Hawaii, New Jersey, Taiwan. One of his sons became a Maryknoll priest: Fr. Peter A. Wu (1932-2020).

Of greatest interest to me is John Wu’s series of publications in which he translates and comments on sages from Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, pointing out their parallels or analogies, on a natural level, with divinely-revealed wisdom in Scripture, seeing this ancient lore, at its best, as a kind of praeparatio evangelica to pave the way for the Far East to embrace Christ.1

The most moving and delightful of his books is Beyond East and West (Sheed & Ward, 1951; republished by University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), which has been compared—appropriately, in my opinion—with the Confessions of St. Augustine. It’s a book I believe everyone should read. Also highly recommended is the collection of essays Chinese Humanism and Christian Spirituality (Angelico, 2017).

Today, my focus will be on a book my wife and I just finished reading aloud, savoring every page of it: The Interior Carmel: The Threefold Way of Love (Arouca Press, 2025). Wu elegantly organizes the classic Carmelite spirituality of St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and St. Thérèse of Lisieux according to the Beatitudes and offers poetic or ethical parallels from ancient Chinese literature. He fully recognizes the infinite distinction between the orders of nature and of grace, but believes that the sages had intuitions into reality that they themselves were unable to justify or to complete, and that God in His mercy reached down into suffering, longing, light-glimpsing humanity to heal it and elevate it.

I highly recommend this work, originally published in 1953; as someone who has studied a fair amount of Carmelite literature, I can vouch for its accuracy. He has a deep love of Scripture, the traditional liturgy, and the saints; all this comes out very clearly and beautifully.

In what follows, I will share some favorite passages, with no effort made at being comprehensive or synoptic. I have grouped them loosely according to themes.

Advancing in the spiritual life

Christ has summed up the three stages of our spiritual life in words at once simple and profound: Ask and it shall be given you; seek and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened to you. You ask for graces and gifts and even for your daily bread, so that you may be provided for in your journey of life, and they will be given to you inasmuch as they are necessary means to enable you to reach your destination. But in this you are thinking primarily of your own needs. So your love is more or less self-centered and possessive. You look upon God chiefly as your benefactor.

When you advance a stage higher, you begin to seek Him because of His attractions; and this plainly is a higher form of love than merely to expect gifts from Him. The higher you rise, the more beautiful he appears to your eyes. Then comes a point where you are so enamored of Him that you cannot help knocking at the door of His inner chamber in order that you may be united with Him forever. When it will be opened to you depends upon His good pleasure; but knock you must. If you are so lucky as to be admitted into His intimate company, you will enjoy the liberty of the children of God, as free as a butterfly. But it must be remembered that before one becomes a butterfly, one must pass through the larval stage and that of the chrysalis. There is no Easter without Good Friday. (8)

So long as we remain pilgrims on earth, there is always a longing for Home. It is God Himself who draws us towards Him, lest we should forget our true destiny. In the words of Father Poulain, S. J., “With a loving cruelty He may quite well enkindle a great craving for eternal blessedness, breathing into us a homesickness for the Divine Essence, that true country of our souls.” In order to reach that Home, we must begin our journey on earth. We journey neither eastwards nor westwards, but inwards; because in the center of our soul dwells the Divine Essence, which is our true home. We must, by the help of grace, make ourselves fitting homes for God, if we want ultimately to find our Home in God. Thus, grace is the seed of glory; our spiritual life is a continuous process which begins here below and finds its consummation in heaven. (197-98)

The Beatitudes are “the way of His steps” (Ps. 84). If we follow Him step by step, we are not only assured of our life of bliss hereafter, but of the indwelling of God and of the Divine friendship even during this life. Grace is the seed of glory. There is a continuity between our life on earth and our life in heaven. Heaven, therefore, must in some way begin on earth if we are to know heaven at all. The rewards as stated in the Beatitudes, such as “they shall be comforted,” “they shall find mercy,” “they shall see God,” “they shall be called children of God,” and “theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” refer primarily to our ultimate goal; but they refer also to the inchoate happiness of the spiritually ripe. (202)

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Purification

Now, in the budding of love, the soul is awakened to the utter worthlessness of earthly riches and worldly honors, on the one hand, and to the infinite riches and ineffable glories of the kingdom of heaven on the other. “Vanity of vanities,” sighed the splendid Solomon, “vanity of vanities, and all is vanity” (Eccles. 1:2). “I am poor and needy, and my heart is wounded within me” (Ps. 108:22), said another king, David. To realize that “a man’s life does not consist in having more possessions that he needs” (Luke 12:15) is to be “poor in spirit.” St. Angela of Foligno said that “To know God’s allness and man’s nothingness: that is perfection.”

I do not know whether it is perfection; at least, it is the beginning of wisdom. We cannot too often remind ourselves that “man is insufficient without God because without God he would not even be,” and that “there is an abyss of nothingness at the very heart of our being.” It was no accident that the prodigal son came to himself before he returned to his father. This thought is in line with the idea of St. Catherine of Siena that there is an interior cell with twin chambers within us, one of which is the chamber of self-knowledge and the other the chamber of the knowledge of God. “It is in the chamber of self-knowledge that one learns his wretchedness, because he sees with his spiritual eye his defects and his nothingness, and he sees in truth. And when the man knows himself, he knows also the goodness of God towards him.” Cardinal Bérulle also said, “Abnegation is founded on the greatness of God, and on the state of the creature drawn from nothing and tending to nothingness by his own condition and owing to sin, and also on another kind of nothingness of self through grace.” (10-11)

This insight is the first step in what Father Gerald Vann calls “the quest for self-loss in God.” Without this initial insight, there can be no talk of the spiritual life; for the spiritual life is nothing but a self-realization through self-immolation in Christ. (12)

This struggle of the inner man against the concupiscence of our body costs tears of anguish and contrition, but it leads to the salutary knowledge that we can do nothing of ourselves, that it is by the grace of God that we can conquer ourselves, and that the grace of God comes only through our abiding in Christ. Our relation with Christ is infinitely closer than any human relation can possibly be. It can best be symbolized by the Vine and its branches, for we are members of the Mystical Body of which Christ is the Head. (12)

The best way for a soul in this state to conduct itself is in complete abandonment to the good pleasure of the Lord, and in absolute confidence in His power to cure even the cancer of self-will and the leprosy of evil desires. Let Him operate in you, and trust in His power to Cure you. Say to Him with David: “Create a clean heart in me, O God, and renew a right spirit in me” (Ps. 50:12). Approach Him as the wise leper did: “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.” And He will certainly stretch forth His hand and touch you, saying, “I will: be thou cleansed” (Luke 5:12–14). The more hopeless you are in yourself, the more hopeful you are in the Lord. Only keep your heart open and let Christ, the Eternal Sun, shine into it, and He will purify it and cause it to open out in His light, until it overflows with the joy and sweetness it has received.

Christ came that we might have life, and have it more abundantly (John 10:10). But there is no other way to that abundant life than mortification. This sounds like a paradox, but the truth is that to be a Christian is to put on the New Man, and in order that the New Man may live, the old man in us must die. The unfortunate thing is that the old man dies hard; and this is the reason why the life of a Christian is a continual warfare against the evil tendencies and habits of his old self…. There is nothing morbid about mortification, which is but another name for self-denial. I do not know of any religion or moral philosophy worthy of the name that preaches self-indulgence rather than self-denial. (49)

One has no idea of how many deaths and births one has to undergo before one’s love is thoroughly purified, before one can truly say with St. Paul, “And I live now, yet not I; but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20). Those who believe in the transmigration of souls often say that to attain perfection one has to die and be reborn many times. We Christians do not believe in transmigration, but we do believe in dying daily and living every day anew in this very life, which furnishes our only chance to strive for perfection. (105)

Living on the surface vs. plunging into the depths

This introduces you into the unitive stage, where what the mystics call “spiritual betrothal” and “spiritual marriage” take place. I should prefer to speak of it in terms of the consummation, so far as is possible in this life, of our birthright as children of God. We have seen that in the first stage the Son led you to the Father, and in the second, the Father led you to the Son. In this third stage, Father and Son together pour Their Spirit of Love into your heart; and “because you are sons, God hath sent the Spirit of his son into your hearts, crying: Abba, Father” (Gal. 4:6). Only then have we begun to live on the deeper levels of reality. “Most of us,” as Mother St. Austin says, “live on the surface of ourselves; underneath is a fathomless sanctuary where ‘Spirit and spirit can meet.’ That is the secret place where the Holy Ghost, the Love of the Father and of the Son, makes love to us.” When you have the spirit of the Son, then you have His freedom, His peace, and His joy, which the world cannot take away from you. (19-20)

Happy the soul who can say: “I am become in his presence as one finding peace” (Cant. 8:10). Night or day, in season or out of season, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, such a soul is wedded to the tremendous Lover, and finds Him more and more lovable as the years go by. In these circumstances life is a veritable prelude to heaven. (21)

Contemplation, in this life, is nothing but an awareness of being shone upon by God and reflecting His glory as in a mirror. His shining upon us transforms us “into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Cor 3:18). This is the work of the Spirit of Love. (24)

“We are all passing shadows,” says a holy priest. In fact, these words form the constant refrain of all his speeches and conversations. Every time I hear it, I feel a thrill in my heart. Thank God that our life here on earth is but a temporary exile! The fact that we have a true Home to look forward to gives us the necessary courage to face all the vagaries and vicissitudes of life without blinking, and to undergo all the trials and tribulations without flagging. (33)

To take just one instance out of a million, Blessed John Almond, immediately before his execution, said: “One hour overtaketh another, and though never so long, at last cometh death. And yet not death; for death is the gate of life unto us whereby we enter into everlasting blessedness. And life is death to those who do not provide for death, for they are ever tossed and troubled with vexations, miseries, and wickedness. To use this life well is the pathway through death to eternal life.” (34)

Every little happening and anecdote of our pilgrimage acquires an eternal significance if we refer it to God, our Origin, our Home, and our Way. The saints, who realize this in their very bones, are the true realists; the rest of us are mere daydreamers. How wise the prayer of St. Gertrude: “O Almighty God, I sanctify, dedicate and consecrate to Thee every beating of my heart, and every pulsation of my blood; and I desire to make this compact with Thee, that their every movement shall say to Thee, Holy, holy holy, Lord God of Sabaoth: and I beseech Thee to impart this meaning to them, so that they may be before Thy Divine Majesty as the unceasing echo of that heavenly canticle which seraphim sing without ceasing unto Thee. Amen, amen.”

Now, here is the paradox: If we regard our earthly existence as our abiding home, we become homeless waifs; if, on the other hand, we regard ourselves as birds of passage, we feel at home even in our exile. Similarly, if we regard ourselves as somebody, we are nobody; if we regard ourselves as nobody, we are somebody. The Lord empties the full, but fills the empty. The more we are emptied of ourselves, the more we are filled with God. This presents in its essence the whole process of the spiritual life, with its polarity of negative and positive phases, or, as the Chinese would express it, the Yin and Yang aspects. (34)

All spiritual life begins with an initial insight as to our poverty and helplessness, and the absolute necessity of the grace of God. It is only because the Lord is our shepherd that we shall want for nothing. It is only because Christ has given us the kingdom of heaven that our very poverty is turned into a blessing. All that we need to do is to see eye to eye with Christ and be willing, heart and soul, to accept His blessing; but we must acknowledge that even that insight and that good will come from His grace. (37)

Now here is the living embodiment of the spirit of poverty in its plenitude. Christ, in whom dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily (Col. 2:9), emptied Himself to such an extent that He could say of Himself, “I am a worm and no man, the reproach of men and the outcast of the people” (Ps. 21:7). This infinite condescension is hard for us finite beings to comprehend in its full purport. Even to think of it makes the mind reel. But its lesson for us is clear enough. He had to empty Himself in order to fill us. All that we need to do is to take our stand upon our emptiness in order to be filled. He detached Himself from His true riches and glory as God, so that He might share them with us. The only price that we have to pay for all this is a wholehearted and grateful acceptance of His ineffable gifts; and we only need to detach ourselves from false riches and vain glories, to which we foolishly cling. God became a “worm” that we worms may become gods. Our salvation and our deification is thus a gift from God. That is why Our Lord said to the disciples, “Freely you have received, freely give.” Again, in the Apocalypse, the idea of grace as a free gift of God is emphasized: “And he that sat on the throne said: Behold, I make all things new. . . . I am Alpha and Omega: the beginning and the end. To him that thirsteth, I will give of the fountain of the water of life, freely” (21:5–6). (39)

This question brings to a focus all the groanings of the spirit of man. All of us feel an abysmal void within us which can be filled only by God. We have tried to fill it with rubbish; and our unhappiness mounts with the heap. This rubbish must be turned out before God can dwell in us. (45)

The awareness of this bottomless “spiritual emptiness” and “interior poverty” in our age of unprecedented material civilization— this awareness is the prerequisite to a genuine Christian awakening. (46)

Meekness is not weakness

Humor is an essential ingredient of Christian perfection. A humorous man laughs at himself, while a wit laughs at others. In this definition, wit is pagan, but humor is Christian. The devil may be witty, but he cannot be humorous. For there is something sharp and venomous about wit, and something mellow and kind about humor…. Meekness is a tree rooted in humility and watered by humor; it flowers in the form of a serene mellowness, and bears the fruit of docility to the Holy Ghost…. Suffice it to say that humor flows from meekness, which, in turn, is replenished by it. It helps grace to score a victory over nature, not violently, but in a subtle and unobtrusive way. (60-61)

Meekness is not to be confused with weakness of character, or a spineless conformity to the ways and conventions of the world. On the contrary, it presupposes a high degree of self-possession, which enables a man to adapt himself to his environment without losing his central harmony. As St. Thomas Aquinas has put it, “Meekness is a virtue which supposes a noble soul; that is, those who possess this virtue are superior to all one may say or do to them. Though they receive indignities from others in word or action, they preserve their tranquility and lose not their peace of soul.”

There is therefore nothing abject or slavish about meekness. Tout au contraire, the meek man is the free man. For, if one’s tranquility and peace of soul can be disturbed by the actions or words of others, then one is truly a slave to others. If, on the other hand, one can maintain one’s equipoise in the face of insults, then one enjoys true independence and freedom. In fact, nothing is so dignified as self-mastery in the spirit of piety. (64-65)

It is, indeed, not easy to take in other people’s criticisms of us as if we were drinking the sweet dew. But a rational consideration will, perhaps, help us in this matter. Other people’s criticisms of us may be either just or unjust. If they are just, of course, they hurt you to the quick, for truth hurts. But what is there to prevent you from reforming yourself in accordance with the criticisms, thus making the critic your spiritual guide? You should be happy to learn a lesson without being charged for it. What difference does it make to you whether the criticism was made in good faith or with malice? Even if it was made maliciously, it does not hurt your soul, so long as you do not resent it. If the criticism is unjust, then you are in a still better position, for you can offer it cheerfully as a little cross to be united with the Cross of Christ. Of course, in the matter of self-mastery as in all spiritual exercises, it is easier said than done. The saints are not insensitive people; but by trusting themselves in the hands of Providence they achieved self-mastery in the midst of the most provoking and trying of circumstances. (65-66)

Only God knows how much energy is needed to master oneself when one happens to be fiery in nature, as most Christian saints are. In their case, therefore, meekness means intense energy under intense control; it has nothing in common with the idea of a milk-and-watery character, a nice person who simply lets himself be shoved around. A meek person is not a goody-goody any more than a roughneck is a strong character. As Confucius said, “The goody-goodies are thieves of goodness.” They are thieves because they only appear good, but are not really good. (66-67)

The meek, or the true gentlemen, are so far from the goody-goodies that they belong to the first order of persons, those who follow the Golden Mean. They are as careful in avoiding evil as the scrupulous, but they know that the avoidance of evil is only the beginning of goodness. They are as eager for goodness as the idealists; but they know that goodness must be cultivated with patience and perseverance, and they are careful to check words against conduct. (68)

One cannot help marveling at the way the Divine Artist deals with souls. He made use of the extreme sensitivity of Thérèse and transmuted it into an extreme responsiveness to the whisperings of the Holy Spirit! He does not destroy our nature, but raises us at precisely our weakest point. In the case of Thérèse, He opened her eyes to the supernatural value of suffering, and Thérèse, the docile disciple, used her native sensitivity in the exploration of the opportunities for suffering and sacrifices in her daily life. Thereafter, she was no longer egocentric; she became Christocentric. (71)

A deep filial love for God will spontaneously beget in us the spirit of harmony and mildness, and make us radiate an atmosphere of joy and gladness, and behave sweetly and cordially towards others. Thus, we see that love is at the bottom of it all; but it takes time and practice for Love to acquire some mellowness so as to attain the state of meekness. (75)

The truth is that only the meek and humble of heart could have the impetuous audacity of love without falling into the bottomless pit of presumption and pride. Each of us is a temple of the Holy Ghost; but this temple must be built upon the solid foundation of humility, and the deeper the foundation the higher the temple will rise. (93-94)

Love and peace

In order to keep this commandment [“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength” (Mark 12:29–30)], it is well to recall to mind the four dimensions of Christ’s love. We have seen how infinitely broad, long, high and deep His love is. To imitate Him well, your heart must be big enough to embrace the One and all; your soul should be filled with immortal longings and aspire after an ever closer union with God; your mind should try to understand the ways and thoughts of God, so that you may to some extent see eye to eye with God; and, finally, all your physical forces should be mobilized in the service of God, so that “with the instrument of the body, you may prove and exercise the virtues” (St. Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue). (102)

There is a tendency in human nature to exalt self and belittle others. To combat this tendency one has first to cultivate a sense of reverence towards one’s fellow men…. To counteract our inborn egoism, it would be good for us to form a habit of always seeing the good qualities of others and our own bad qualities…. So it is always a wise rule to judge yourself in the light of your rotten past, to judge others in the light of their golden future, and to judge everything in the light of God’s infinite mercies. (107-8)

Matter can be spiritualized by the fire of love. To put it more plainly, material things can be transmuted into spiritual values in the furnace of divine love. On the other hand, spiritual riches can degenerate into worthless metal if they are spoiled by selfishness and possessiveness. (111)

By the gift of understanding which He infuses into you, He makes you realize many secret truths of which you had no idea before, especially two main lessons. First, with regard to your past, He wants you to understand that all your interior attainments and exterior accomplishments are due to His grace rather than to your own merit. You must understand, as Bishop Sheen puts it, “that even the desire for God came from God and that the fires that burned within itself were kindled from the hearth of God.” It is not enough for you to have just a nodding acquaintance with this truth; you must be utterly convinced of it and feel it in your very bones. (133)

There is a close analogy between the spiritual life and the art of poetry. It was the mystical poet Coventry Patmore who said, “The quality of all emotion which is not ignoble is to boast of its allegiance to law.” Alice Meynell has likewise remarked, “Those who have nothing to say clamor for large license in which to say it, and hence the vers libre. Those who have something to say cling to the order and discipline of bonds valuing that voluntary obedience which is the force of art, literature, morals, religion and politics.” There is a deep meaning in these words. In every field of human endeavor, superlative excellence is attained only by the harmonious cooperation of reason and intuition. In jurisprudence, for instance, nothing is more interesting than to study how law and equity, justice and mercy, rigidity and fluidity, complement each other in the formation of any living juridical order. So in the spiritual life, there is also an orderly subordination of passions and emotions to reason, and of reason to grace. As Patmore observes, “the spirit of man is like a kite which rises by means of those very forces which seem to oppose their rise; the tie that joins it to the earth, the opposing winds of temptation, and the weight of earth-born affections which it carries with it into the sky” (Aurea Dicta, XII). (147)

One of the surest signs that you are possessed by the Holy Spirit is that every experience puts you in mind of the words of Christ and of the Holy Scripture. (148)

In this life, only relative peace can be attained; and even this can only be maintained on the condition of our ever-watchfulness. Like a soldier on the battlefield, a Christian should sleep with his armor on and with the sword for a pillow. And the better armed he is, the more soundly and peacefully he can sleep. This, I think, is the reason why Christ, who has given us His peace, has also furnished us with His sword, the sword of Truth. These two things are so far from contradicting each other that the sword is actually an indispensable means toward the attainment and maintenance of true peace. (155)

Seek God, and you will have peace; seek peace apart from God, and you will have war upon war. (156)

It is only in the Word Incarnate that mercy and truth have embraced each other, and justice and peace have kissed each other. It is only in Him that heaven and earth have united. It is only in the way of His steps that salvation is to be found. (157)

The holier you are, the greater glory you give to God; for His power is revealed in the very distance between your present attainment and what you might have been without His grace. (160)

Dangers of activism

You remember in what high spirits the seventy-two disciples returned from their first missionary trip, reporting to Christ, “Lord, even the devils are made subject to us in thy name” (Luke 10:17). Christ, who knew what is in man, discerned at once their inborn tendency to attach their hearts to the fruits of their labors, and bade them to raise their minds to heaven and fix their eyes on their ultimate destiny, saying, “You, instead of rejoicing that the devils are made subject to you, should be rejoicing that your names are enrolled in heaven” (Luke 10:20).

How many zealous missionaries and lay apostles are stunted in their spiritual development because they set too much store by what they have accomplished and are unconsciously infected by a kind of partisan spirit, a group egoism! So long as you are not completely detached from the fruit of your hands, your love for God is not pure. (18)

It is not easy to talk about the apostolic mission of Carmel; because it is incidental to its principal mission. The principal mission of Carmel is to be the garden of delights for the Divine Lover, our Lord. The apostolic work is only an effect of the supreme romance between God and the soul in love with God. So long as it remains a garden of delights for the Divine Lover, it will necessarily continue to bear fruit; but as soon as it ceases to be a garden of delights, it will become a barren piece of ground…. In this age of ours, when pragmatism and activism seem to prevail, we cannot too often remind ourselves of what St. John of the Cross said: “An instant of pure love is more precious in the sight of God, and of the soul, and more profitable to the Church than all good works put together.” (113-14)

Happy are the saints who joyfully drink sober inebriation of the Spirit! They can be quiet without being quietists, and active without being activists; for there is activity in their quiet and quiet in their activity. They are quiet because even when they find themselves in a crowd, they are still aware of the Holy Trinity dwelling in the very center of their souls. They are active because souls on fire with love can never remain inactive. In such souls love and reason work together harmoniously. (170)

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In love with God

In the state of Spiritual Marriage, the soul burns inwardly and sweetly through love and wisdom. Love is like fire and wisdom is like water. The soul that has entered into this state is at once fiery and watery…. The soul in peace is a divine symphony, where all kinds of counterpoints are harmonized. (167, 169)

Every service that we are able to render to God is a sign of His love for us more than of our love for Him. (181)

O the magical power of love! Love is the Alpha and the Omega; love is also the Way. Love separates; love purifies; love tames. Love makes you thirst for God. Love unites you with Him and with His whole creation. Love gives simplicity to your heart and peace to your soul. Love enables you to suffer with joy. Love binds together in one volume all the loose leaves “that the universe holds scattered through its maze.” Even the eight Beatitudes are but steps on the Way of Love.

Love impels you to renounce the pride of life and the pomps of the devil. Love urges you to advance unceasingly toward God. Love makes you perfect….

Love causes you to weep for your sins, for it is your sins that estrange you from the object of your desires. Love presses you to ornament yourself with virtues in order to win the heart of your Beloved. Love makes you despise your own beauty, because you can never be beautiful enough for Him. Love puts you at the mercy of your Beloved, and emboldens you to beg for His love in spite of your unworthiness. Finally, love initiates you into the joy of the cross, and gives you a foretaste of eternal bliss. O the mystery of love! It began by separating, and ends by embracing all. (186-87)

A man in love with God has begun his heaven on earth. Life is a continual feast and a perpetual spring to him. He finds God within and without. To him the whole universe is a hymn to God. God is singing in the birds, smiling in the flowers, shining in the sun, twinkling in the stars, showering blessings in the rain, rejoicing with the happy, weeping with the prisoners. He is the Father of the orphans, the Friend of the lonely, the Hope of the forlorn, the Music of life. He fills the air with gladness; the earth is full of His glory. He dances to the rhythm of your heart, and causes your cup of joy to brim over. The true lover of God “always swims in joy, always keeps holiday, and is always in a mood of singing” (St. John of the Cross). He dances with Christ in the bosom of the Father to the tunes of the Holy Spirit. He is still a wayfarer, it is true. But he already feels like a river about to pour its waters into the ocean. To borrow the words of Tagore, “In the music of the rushing stream sounds the joyful assurance, ‘I shall become the sea.’” (187)

They are mistaken who say that we Christians are mercenary workers, because we talk of reward. They should know that the reward we are hoping for is not extrinsic but intrinsic, for it consists in the union with the Source of our being. A lover is not mercenary when he desires to be united with the object of his love. Nor can a fish in shallow waters be said to be a mercenary fish when it yearns for its home in the deep. Happy are the saints, for their sorrows are the sorrows of the Sacred Heart of Christ, and their joy is identical with His joy. The sorrows are temporal and human, the joy is eternal and divine. The sufferings and tribulations of the saints are many, but they can be measured. Who can ever measure the joy of the saints? Who can ever recount all the tender caresses and attentions that God lavishes upon a soul in union with Him? The joy of the saints is not their joy, but the joy of Christ. For, as St. Thomas Aquinas says: “Since the enjoyment of God, deservedly due to His excellence, surpasses the power of all creatures, it follows that this complete and perfect joy does not enter into man but rather man enters into it. Enter into the joy of thy Lord” (Matt. 25:21). (193-94)

The doctrine of spiritual childhood is of special importance to the present age. Since the Renaissance in Europe, mankind has developed its natural talents to such an extent that it can fly in the air and split the atom. Psychology has probed deep into the complexities and subterranean urges of the human soul. It is about time to return to simplicity and to remember our dependence upon God. Spiritually, man will never become mature unless he is converted into a child again. It is providential that God should have raised up a saint like the Little Flower of Lisieux to re-emphasize the message of spiritual childhood in an age when it is most needed. (210)

A salutary reminder of the intellectual liberty that exists within the boundaries of Catholic orthodoxy:

Those who do not know Catholicism are apt to think that in our Church everything is laid down ex cathedra in black and white, so that Catholics need not think for themselves. The fact is that, within the framework of dogma, there is ample room for differences of opinion and for creative work and original thinking. The Church of Christ is a house of many mansions, but there is no mansion for provincialism. Although I have profited by my association with first-rate theologians of different schools, I recognize ultimately only one Father, one Master, and one Teacher—the Holy Trinity. (221)

Mysticism true and false

When the Holy Trinity takes up His abode in you, then you will have peace that surpasses understanding, and joy that no man can take away from you. Furthermore, your devotion to the Sacred Humanity of Christ and to the Blessed Virgin will deepen beyond measure, for no one can truly be united with the Holy Trinity without being convinced of the eminent appropriateness and necessity of the Incarnation. This is the surest sign of true mysticism. (129)

The mysticism of the Catholic saints is so comprehensive and profound, because it is not composed of irresponsible fancies of isolated individuals, but is rooted in theoretical and moral theology, and is constantly nourished by the Spirit through the living channels of grace. In other words, it is not purely intuitive-emotional, but is balanced and supported by the institutional and rational elements. (141)

The airplane can fly precisely because it is built according to the laws of physics. A mystic can be truly united with God only if he follows strictly the laws of reason and the principles of metaphysics. This may be called intellectual asceticism, which, together with moral asceticism, must be passed through before one can hope to be a temple of the Holy Spirit or a sanctuary of the Blessed Trinity. Only an unleavened bread can be fully leavened by the Holy Spirit. In mystical parlance, you must tame the Green Lion before you can give it wings. (146)

To realize that the expressed is also the inexpressible, that the known is also the unknown, that the immanent is also the transcendent, is to move beyond image and logic, and this is the essence of contemplation. (178)

Wisdom traditions

As the Psalmist says, “In Thy light shall we see light.” Since all lights, whether natural or supernatural, come from God, a scribe steeped in the Kingdom of God should be able to bring forth from his storeroom “things new and old” without too much incongruity between them; because whether old or new they flow from the one living Source, which is neither old nor new. To my mind, things new and old must meet beyond old and new, just as the East and the West must meet beyond the East and the West….

It is true that the work of Creation has been spoiled by man’s disobedience, but it is not wholly spoiled, and therefore grains of truth are to be found in the philosophies and religions of all peoples. So long as they are grains of truth, they belong to God, because according to the saying of Saint Ambrose, which Saint Thomas Aquinas delighted to quote, “every truth, whoever said it, comes from the Holy Spirit.” In fact, it is the Light of Revelation that enables a Christian to judge all things, while he himself is judged by no man. (See 1 Cor. 2:15.) As Father Otto Karrer has put it: “Christianity is ‘the fulfilment of all religions,’ not only because it possesses in the pure state all religious values, but because it comprehends in their utmost extent and fullness values elsewhere scattered and fragmentary.” To use an analogy, Christ is the Sun who gives light to the whole world, while the Church is like the biconvex lens through which His luminous rays are brought together and focused in order to cast fire on earth. We must put our soul under this focus so that it may be inflamed with divine love. (78-79)

Without any doubt, Christ is the greatest Teacher, the only Teacher of humanity. Compared with Him, all other “teachers” are at most as candlelights compared with the Sun. For He who comes from above is over all and speaks of the things of heaven; while they who are from earth belong to the earth, and of the earth they speak. He not only teaches these lofty doctrines, but gives us the grace to put them into practice. (98-99)

Christian appreciation of nature

A Christian can enjoy all the lyrical ecstasies of a pantheist at their very Source, and without the danger of being drowned in the ocean of creatures. The truth is that, as God contains all things in Himself, so His lovers carry in their hearts all other creatures. In the words of St. Leo the Great, “Christian poverty possesses all things, for it possesses the master of all things.” (17)

The soul in peace with God and with itself lives harmoniously with the whole universe and with the spirit of the liturgy, being perfectly attuned to the rhythms of life and to the liturgical cycles of the Church. There is a parallel of this harmony even in the natural sphere, for natural contemplation attunes one’s spirit to the Cosmos…. If a Christian does not love Nature, he is worse than a pantheist; but if he does, he will drink all the joys of a pantheist at their very Source. (172-73)

Liturgy and the spiritual life

In attending the Mass, we must not do it as a matter of formality; we must try to assimilate its spirit, so that we may live the Mass. Not the least important of the lessons it gives us is the progress of love. You will realize that the Mass is the perfect embodiment of the threefold way of love.

The first part, called “the Mass of the Catechumens,” corresponds to the budding of love. There the keynote is the Confiteor, and the principal interior disposition is the willingness and eagerness to learn the truth. The middle part, called “the Mass of the Faithful,” corresponds to the flowering of love, whose keynote is the spirit of sacrifice. The third part, called “the Banquet of the Faithful,” corresponds to the ripening of love, whose keynote is peace and joy. It is not for nothing that the word “peace” is so often repeated in the Communion. “Mercifully grant peace in our days.” “The peace of the Lord be always with you.” “O Lord Jesus Christ, who saidst to Thy Apostles, Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you; look not upon my sins, but upon the faith of Thy Church; and vouchsafe to grant her peace and unity according to Thy will.”

It is also significant that before we receive the Holy Eucharist, we pray to be delivered “from all evils, past, present and to come,” and we say the Confiteor once more. To my mind, this signifies that before we can enjoy the beatitude of peace, we must undergo a thorough and radical purification, which corresponds to the beatitude of the pure of heart.

Thus, the whole Liturgy of the Church forms a seamless tunic with her spiritual doctrine. “This is the will of God, your sanctification.” Every prayer, every ceremony, and every Sacrament that Christ has instituted is for your sanctification, so that God may be glorified in you. They are all ordained to the practice and actualization of the Sermon on the Mount, which may be called the Constitution of the Kingdom of Heaven, of which the Beatitudes form the worthy preamble. (88-89)

You begin to perceive, as St. John of the Cross did, that, being omnipotent, He loves you with omnipotence; being wise, He loves you with wisdom; being good, He loves you with goodness; being just and merciful, He loves you with justice and mercy; and being the virtue of the greatest humility, He loves you with the greatest humility, and with the greatest esteem, making you His equal, joyfully revealing Himself to you and saying to you: I am yours and for you, and I delight to be such as I am that I may be yours and give Myself to you. Having gradually perceived all this, you are overwhelmed with wonder and gratitude. You realize what a profound meaning is contained in these words of the Gloria: We give Thee thanks for Thy great glory. That is to say, “We are grateful to Thee for being what Thou art.” If God were not what He is, there would have been no creation, no redemption, no sanctification. If a man is not aware of the wonders of creation, he has no rationality. If he is not aware of the wonders of redemption, he has no spirituality. If he is not aware of the wonders of sanctification, he has no part in divinity. (100-101)

Unless you have the mind of Christ, you will not possess His heart. And I may add that the mind of Christ is nowhere better expressed than in the liturgy of the Church. (140)

Quoting Fr. John Oesterreicher:

All that the mystics are, they are through the Church, as rivulets drawing from that mighty stream whose fountainhead is Christ. They could not know the incomprehensible and ineffable God were it not for Him, the “revelation which has a definite date,” and Him they could not hear were it not for the Church, who is His voice resounding till the end of time. It is she who communicates to them aspiration for the union with God, as it is her dogma which— far from stifling the inner life— enkindles it. Because their path is beaconed by the light of faith, the mystics can proceed on their arduous journey to direct experience of God . . . . The beginning and growth of their inner life is owed, they themselves attest, to the sacraments, those vessels of love in which matter, otherwise retarding the movements of the Spirit, becomes His chariot. (143-44)

If we grasp this point, we can easily see the important function that the Liturgy plays in the development and enrichment of our inner life. The Holy Spirit breathes in the liturgical prayers, so they are your own prayers in the degree in which He breathes in you. Thus, they do not lose their freshness and spontaneity, no matter how many times they have been repeated.

It is only where love and understanding are lacking that your prayers become mechanical and lifeless. Then your silence is awkward, your speech nothing but lip-service, and liturgical prayers become so many vexatious repetitions. All depends upon your interior dispositions. For sincerity is the soul of prayer. When you are sincere, the dictates of your heart become liturgical, and the liturgical prayers flow from your heart, so that whenever you hear the priest say, Sursum corda, you will joyfully answer, Habemus ad Dominum; and whenever he says, Gratias agamus Domino Deo nostro, you will be ready heart and soul to respond, Dignum et justum est.

To my mind the highest prayer consists in an understanding and wholehearted Amen to all the prayers of the Church. Who but the Holy Ghost could ever have suggested such a prayer as: “O God, who in a wonderful manner didst create and ennoble human nature, and still more wonderfully hast renewed it; grant that by the mystery of this water and wine, we may be made partakers of His divinity who vouchsafed to become partaker of our humanity, Jesus Christ Thy Son, our Lord”? And who but the Spirit of Love could have uttered a Felix culpa?

We need not multiply instances; we need only say that anyone who does not recognize the voice of the Holy Spirit in the prayers of the Church cannot be of the Spirit and therefore cannot be a genuine mystic. As Romano Guardini remarks in The Spirit of the Liturgy, “Only a system of life and thought which is truly Catholic— that is to say, actual and universal— is capable of being universally adopted, without violence to the individual. Yet there is an element of sacrifice in such adoption. Each one is bound to strive within himself, and to rise superior to self. Yet in doing so he is not swallowed up by, and lost in, the majority; on the contrary, he becomes more independent, rich, and versatile.”

We may add that an individual becomes a person only by being a member of a community. No one can acquire universality except by accepting limits. It was by incarnation that God became man; so it is by incarnation— that is, incorporation in His Mystical Body— that a man can be deified. As Christ is the Way of God to man, so is He the Way of man to God. The realization of this truth is the beginning of all mystical insights. (144-45)

If we think that we can dispense with the scaffolding in the early stages of our spiritual life, we shall never be able to erect the cathedral. On the other hand, if we mistake the scaffolding for the cathedral, our spiritual life will be stultified. It should be noted, however, that the disappearance of the scaffolding does not mean the disappearance of rationality; it should rather mean that whatever rationality there is in the scaffolding has been absorbed into the cathedral.

For example, a contemplative does not, certainly, forget about the Credo. On the contrary, he penetrates more deeply into the mysteries, so that every iota of the Credo becomes in his mind vibrant with meaning. In fact, originality in the spiritual life does not so much consist in the discovery of new truths as in the sounding of new depths of old truths. One’s spiritual life is an organism, of which dogmatic theology constitutes the skeleton and mystical life forms the flesh and blood. Without reason and dogma, mysticism is apt to be a monster. Without mysticism and contemplative, affective life, dogmatic theology and discursive reasoning are apt to be like a sapless tree. We are too prone to forget that St. Thomas himself was one of the greatest mystics of all times. (146)

You can make as many cycles [in the spiritual life] as God wants you to. It is just like attending Mass. Every Mass begins with acts of contrition and ends with Communion and thanksgiving. It covers the whole Way; but you can repeat it every morning. The same is true of the liturgical year, which forms in itself a complete cycle. Advent, Christmastide, and Epiphany form one period, corresponding to the budding of love. The season of Septuagesima, Lent, and Passiontide correspond to the flowering of love. Finally, Paschaltide, Pentecost, and the Time after Pentecost correspond to the age of ripening; and this completes the cycle. But this does not mean that one year is enough to perfect your love. (214-15)

This passage is remarkable because, on the one hand, it so clearly states the primacy of Peter, but, on the other hand, no less clearly formulates what precisely this primacy is in service of (and therefore indicates, by implication, what it cannot possibly be in service of):

What is important to note is that, whether it is a case of feeding the lambs, or of shepherding the sheep, or of feeding the sheep, it is clearly the intention of Christ that it should be done by St. Peter, who represents the Catholic Church with all her priests, with all her invaluable heritage of the Holy Scriptures and the spiritual teachings of her Doctors and Saints, with all her life-giving Sacraments and refreshing sacramentals and devotions, with all her wonderful liturgy, and finally with the Holy Spirit working through her and guiding her in her growth and development throughout the ages. (200)

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I am pleased to share with readers of Tradition & Sanity the following incisive guest article by Dr. Jeremy Holmes, Associate Professor of Theology at Wyoming Catholic College. As I do from time to time with articles I consider especially important and deserving of the widest possible dissemination, I have published this post without a paywall. Enjoy! —PAK

The public debate over Artificial Intelligence rightly focuses on whether AI is, on the whole, a good thing or a bad thing. At one extreme, the lords of Silicon Valley assure us that AI will save us from all ills, free us from all work, and replace us as the dominant species on the planet. These take as their standard Genesis 6:4:

COME, LET US BUILD OURSELVES A CITY, AND A TOWER WITH ITS TOP IN THE HEAVENS!

At the other extreme, culture warriors warn us that AI will make us stupid, enslave us, and replace us as the dominant species on the planet. These take as their banner Joshua 8:28:

SO JOSHUA BURNED AI, AND MADE IT FOREVER A HEAP OF RUINS, AS IT IS TO THIS DAY.1

This essay joins the quieter conversation in the background, where people are asking: What is AI? Is it “intelligent” in the strict sense of that word?2 More specifically, I want to look at what most people think of when they hear talk of AI, namely Large Language Models: ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and all the rest. AI taken broadly seems to fall under Aquinas’s oft-repeated dictum, “Every agent produces its own like”: in the realm of artifice, man’s production of his own like reaches a kind of zenith in AI, which appears to resemble man in his inmost secret, namely intelligence itself.3 But LLMs can be situated more precisely as a next step in the history of man’s relationship to language.

Just as we are embodied spirits, so we embody our thoughts in language. When our thoughts are purely intellectual, in no way enfleshed, they are elusive even to us, but language helps us get our thoughts out in front of us, so to speak, where we can examine them and play with them and reorganize them. Those unfortunate enough to grow up without language seem like animals, unable to tap into their own rationality. Language is built into our nature as the proto-tool of thought, as hands are the proto-tool of action.

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However, readers of this essay encounter language under many layers of technology: writing, uniform printing, digitization, Internet. Walter Ong, S.J., writes in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word that “Fully literate persons can only with great difficulty imagine what a primary oral culture is like, that is, a culture with no knowledge whatsoever of writing or even of the possibility of writing.”4 We have to place ourselves imaginatively in a situation where words have no visual aspect: they can be “recalled” or “called back,” but you cannot “look them up.” They are not things or objects and they leave no trace (a visual metaphor): they are simply events, happenings. They pass away even as they arrive. This is why the Hebrew term dabar means both “word” and “event”.

So in the purely oral situation, if you want to keep the benefit of words then you just have to remember them, and if you want to remember what you said then you have to say memorable things.5 A purely oral culture puts a lot of energy into saying things memorably: it possesses an enormous complex of mnemonic techniques and habits, and repetition in this context is a virtue. The purely oral speaker is immersed in his words like a fish swimming in water; language pushes thought out in front of him, but not in any stable way. His speech knows nothing of an abstract, neutral list or a how-to manual, because his thought stays close to the situation of human life. To be thinking is for the language event to be happening and happening in a beautifully memorable but still fluid way in moment-to-moment dependence on the speaker.

With the advent of writing, the word stands still.6 It gets literally “out in front of” us, and it stays put, having become of a kind of “thing” at last. As a result, memorization is not the only way to recall what one said before, and the whole complex of mnemonic techniques loses urgency. In a manuscript culture, thought processes are more linear, repetition less valued, and the experience of language becomes more detached. Someone who has grown up writing can hardly imagine a word without spelling it in his head: even spoken language has become more thing-like.7 Our ability to put our language in front of us and analyze and examine it soars, bringing with it the art of logic properly so called as well as theories of grammar. The act of language becomes more solitary, because while spoken language would rarely happen in the absence of anyone to hear, writing normatively happens without the audience actually present. So language becomes in a way more interior, more something that just happens “in my head”.

The move from manuscript to printing press doubles down on all these trends.8 The word is even more a “thing”: not only does the word stay still on the page, but all the letter shapes pre-existed this particular assemblage of letters, and every copy of a book is identical to the others, less tied to any one scribe and more just its own thing. Frodo may have met his friends at “the sign of the Prancing Pony,” but that was in manuscript times; in the printing press age the painted pony gives way to words, such as “Lander Bar”. And people read “Lander Bar” silently, without evening imagining a sound in their heads, as they fly down Lander’s Main Street at speeds unimaginable to hobbits, because the word has ceased to be an object for the ear and has become instead an object for the eye alone. Books are available cheaply, so there is less reason than ever to memorize; the printing press ushers in the golden age of the dictionary and eventually the encyclopedia, and a gentleman can sit in his private library with the knowledge of ages around him at his fingertips. Reading becomes normatively silent, an entirely solitary affair. Descartes retreats into his cabin, and the world goes mad over the possibilities of reason.

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The digital age carries these trends even further. Computers brought to writing the same standardization that the printing press had brought to printing, so that even as I type this essay the letters all pre-exist in some way in the computer and I just call them down by pressing the appropriate buttons. There is no longer a “manuscript,” literally a “written by hand,” a personal physical link between author and first draft. Moreover, the final result is even more distant from the one who would read it. On this point, Byung-Chul Han’s work Non Things is worth quoting at some length:

An e-book is not a thing, but information; it has an altogether different status of being. Even if we have it at our disposal, it is not a possession. It is something to which we have access. An e-book reduces a book to informational value. … Information has neither a physiognomy nor a fate, and it does not allow for the formation of intense ties. One cannot have, for instance, a personal copy [Handexemplar] of an e-book. A personal copy of a book is given its unmistakeable face, its physiognomy, by the hand of the owner. E-books are faceless and without history.9

While the digital text’s quasi-immaterial status means that it cannot precisely be “possessed,” the same status means that unlimited numbers of readers can “access” it. The gentleman mentioned above no longer needs a dedicated library room, because the entire literature of all the world is accessible from his hand-held device. Incentive to memory vanishes entirely, and even the incentive to think softens because a quick search will pull up how someone else has solved any given problem.

At root, language works by giving thought some existence outside our spiritual power of knowing. Step by step, we have “technologized the word” by giving it more and more autonomy from us, seeking more and more benefit from language. It all started with getting thoughts outside of ourselves as events in the air, through speech. Then we got our thoughts out in front of us as stable things, through writing. Then our words became even more thinglike and independent, through the printing press. Then all of our words became pseudo-spiritual beings beyond the grasp of any hand but available as a kind of army at the touch of a finger, through digitization and the Internet.

Large Language Models take the next step. With LLMs, the texts we have written vanish into the inaccessible realm of “training data,” as we push not just words but language itself outside of us. It is as though we meet our whole faculty of language, there in front of us, speaking all by itself. We keep making the language act more and more independent of us, more a “thing” on its own, and eventually there it is: language itself steps out of us to turn back and greet us.10 As language has always been the handmaid of reason, it is no surprise that language externalized seems as though it were rational. Previous progress in technologizing the word made knowledge ever more available and so disincentivized memorization; LLMs respond to our questions directly, disincentivizing not just memory but the reasoning memory always supported. Seen this way, ChatGPT and Grok and company constitute a remarkably smooth continuation of what we have been doing over the past several thousand years.

At the same time, there is an equally remarkable rupture with the past. No matter how much we thingified our words, they were still our words, and they had to happen in our minds before they could pass into any more independent condition. LLMs sever the link between language and mind: for the first time, there are words but no speaker. If this seems the next logical step, it is also a leap like nothing before it.

Consequently, I have to circle back to question my own claim: Is that really language greeting us in an LLM? Thought is to word like soul to body. As the soul expresses itself tangibly through the body, thought expresses itself imaginably through words. How can LLMs possess language when they sever its connection to thought? But on the other hand, if LLMs do not possess language, what is this in them that seems so much like language? How can we describe an LLM so as to capture both the continuity and the rupture with past language technologies?

I find it helpful at this point to introduce the concept of a philosophical zombie. This is a purely theoretical fiction used by philosophers to develop arguments about consciousness, but the definition of a “philosophical zombie” is something that is physically identical to a human being but lacks any conscious experience. That is to say, every molecule and every atom and every electron in a “p-zombie” is exactly where it would be in a real person and is moving exactly as it would in a real person, but there is no intellect, no will, no awareness, no love, no hate—no soul. Supposing you met a p-zombie and spoke with it you would think it human. Supposing you met a p-zombie that you knew beforehand was a p-zombie, you would reap the stuff of nightmares: not a who but an it, not a he or she or even a “they” but just an it, like a Golem out of Jewish folklore but with a precise resemblance to your neighbor, creating vocal sounds identical to words and touching you with that warm but ultimately oh-so-cold non-hand.

Can such an abomination exist? I don’t think so.

But with LLMs, it does seem that we have a philosophical zombie of language: it is physically identical to language, behaves like language, responds like language, and yet has no thought or consciousness behind it. Physical identity but no “soul”.

LLMs work by first “tokenizing” language and then transforming tokens into vectors. That is to say, they first identify the little chunks that language is made out of and then turn each little chunk into numbers, so that they can create a kind of map in which any given “token” or language chunk is near to or far away from any other given token. In other words, LLMs work by transforming language into relationships between quantities. While their success is startling, in retrospect it makes some sense, because all language traces back to spoken language, and Aristotle long ago described spoken language as a kind of quantity. Our thought enfleshes itself first of all in quantity. So a machine that recreates language as quantitative relationships has in fact come in at the ground floor, so to speak, tapping into the basis of everything else in speech.

I will not plunge on into the debate about whether LLMs are good or bad. However, it will surely be helpful for that debate to see that LLMs are the next step in a process that has been going on for millennia, so that we can look to the past to see how previous changes affected us. It turns out that writing, the printing press, and digitization each had profound effects not only on how society is organized but even on how we think—on what we think thinking is.

These past experiences can offer principles for thinking about the present. Moreover, while everyone senses that AI brings something new, it will be helpful to see more precisely what rupture LLMs bring with them. This, too, should help us think about what future the new technology offers or does not offer, and what role our society should assign to it.

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On June 8, 2026, a journalist named Wouter J. Suenens published an article at The Catholic Herald entitled “The Traditional Latin Mass does not need the SSPX.” In this article he claimed that the crisis through which the Church is passing today is just one of many in her history, and not even the worst. On this basis he maintains that the Society of St. Pius X is guilty of poor judgment of the situation and, thus, makes a disproportionate response to it, and, finally, that the SSPX makes things worse by linking the desire for the TLM with schismatic tendencies.

I sincerely wonder if Mr. Suenens had done his homework. This is an abiding concern of mine, as I find that most who wade into these waters are still in the shallow end of the pool, and have not gotten beyond waist-deep familiarity with the issues. I decided to send a letter to him.

He never responded.

But that doesn’t mean the letter might not be of benefit to others—either those who might be tempted to think along his lines, or those who wonder what to reply to such folks. The letter has been amplified a bit.

Dear Mr. Suenens:

While I am undoubtedly sympathetic to the SSPX’s concerns, I do not attend their chapels (I attend an FSSP oratory), and I can certainly see weak elements in their position. You have pointed out some of them in your June 8 article in The Catholic Herald; I have pointed them out on my Substack.

However, whether or not you are correct that we don’t need the SSPX today (I will return to that claim in a moment), I strenuously disagree with you that we didn’t need them before. The Fraternity of St. Peter, the Institute of the Good Shepherd, the monastery of Le Barroux, and many other places emerged from Lefebvre’s movement. Only weak and isolated priests, usually elderly, were holding out against the juggernaut of the modern rite’s implementation. It was Lefebvre who gave the movement a face, a voice, an organization, and a direction.

You write:

There have been crises far worse than ours: the scandal of the Western Schism, curial corruption, simony, political captivity and moral decadence in Rome.... The claim that our crisis is so unprecedented that public disobedience has now become necessary reveals, in that sense, a remarkable lack of historical memory.

This is simply an astonishing claim. It is manifestly the case that the modern(ist) crisis is far worse than all the earlier ones put together. Why do I say this?

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Beatified by John Paul II on May 12, 1996, Alfredo Ildephonso Cardinal Schuster (1880–1954) was one of the giants of twentieth-century Benedictine monasticism and liturgical studies. The author of the impressive five-volume commentary on the Roman Rite—The Sacramentary (Liber Sacramentorum), again in print from Arouca Press—Cardinal Schuster was abbot for Saint Paul Outside the Walls (1918–1929), then Archbishop of Milan (1929–1954). Pope Pius XI created him cardinal in 1929. During his tenure as archbishop, Schuster ordained 1,265 priests and consecrated 22 bishops.

He was a giant in a time of giants, and an intensely prayerful man, in love with the traditional liturgy, whose reputation for sanctity led to a modest but abiding devotion to him after his death. It is extremely ironic that he was succeeded as archbishop of Milan by none other than Giovanni Battista Montini, who, as Chiron relates, would do such a poor job in the same position, and who, as pope, would both allow monasticism to castrate itself, and defile the liturgy Schuster so dearly loved.

Today, I would like to share some fine passages from Cardinal Schuster’s precise and profound Commentary on the Holy Rule of Saint Benedict, a first-ever English translation of which was released by Angelico Press in 2023. While no commentary can ever surpass Dom Delatte’s, Schuster’s is impressive in its own way, and definitely belongs in the collection of anyone who is interested in monasticism or eager for Benedictine spirituality. The following taste will be more than enough to convince you of its quality.

(I am happy to say that Schuster demonstrates that Benedict must have been a priest, contrary to the revisionist history so popular among liberal Benedictines.)

As usual, I will occasionally offer comments when introducing a particular quotation. Numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers.

I have no peace in the thought that a book [the Holy Rule] by which so many generations of giants of sanctity were formed is today, outside of the cloisters, almost no longer known, even by the clergy. Of course, in all the history textbooks there is discussion of Benedictine monasticism and its merits of old. But no one then takes the trouble of getting to know the manual that formed for the Church and for European society the character of these popes, apostles, doctors, pontiffs of the various churches, and abbots of the innumerable medieval abbeys that then adorned the garden of the Catholic Church. (xvii)

The most ancient ecclesiastical writers, beginning with the Holy Evangelists, sought above all the praise of being faithful witnesses of the Christian tradition, sacrificing to this criterion their personality, their own genius, and their own intellectual speculation. (xxi)

When the flame of divine charity shall have consumed and destroyed in us the spirit of selfishness, that is, the typhus superbiae (delusion of pride) in its various swellings described by the Holy Lawgiver in his mystic ladder of humility, then the monk will arrive at that fullness of Christ in the flame of divine charity that ought to reign supreme in the soul. Then indeed we will sing with the Apostle: The charity of God has been poured out in our hearts, thanks to the Holy Ghost Who has been granted to us (Rom 5:5). Such is the goal of the monastic life. By means of the practice of the evangelical counsels, one removes from the heart whatever is opposed to this fullness of God in the soul of the just: ut impleamini in omnem plenitudinem Dei (that you may be filled unto all the fullness of God). When the soul shall have reached that twelfth degree of humility, at the top of Jacob’s ladder, she will feel herself to be dead to the world and will experience a great nostalgia for Paradise. Then indeed will she say like St Monica to Augustine: “As for me, O son, nothing any longer detains my heart here below.” (37)

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Seventy-five instruments or canons of spiritual life seems a great number, and one might become discouraged in the contemplation of his own weakness. Add to that the external tribulations and various vicissitudes of life. Hence St Benedict comes at this moment to lift our courage with the thought of God’s immense goodness, ending his litany with the conclusive final axiom: Et de Dei misericordia numquam desperare. The phrase seems to derive from the Eucharistic Anaphora of Holy Thursday, still in use today among the Ambrosian churches: Haud quid desperare de tua misericordia possumus (In no way can we despair of your mercy). Formerly, this Anaphora must have been in use in various churches of Italy. Whoever doubts that he can observe all the preceding spiritual instruments, let him cling at least to this last one, as to the plank of salvation in the shipwreck.

As the saint was writing these words, the Roman world was being buried under its own immense ruins. From Monte Cassino, St Benedict himself could behold in the plains below the passage of the enemy hordes that had invaded Italy. These marked their path with the trail of the flames and smoke of cities burned atop their slaughtered or enslaved populations. At that time, the poor peasants, despoiled and ill-treated by the Lombards, must have come running every day to Monte Cassino to seek safety, just as St Gregory describes them for us in his Dialogues. And yet, St Benedict composes the Rule in confidence and serenity, not showing in any way the anxiety of that dreadful hour the world was then passing through.

How does one explain such an unshakeable state of serenity in a soul? The last canon of his Syntagma of the spiritual craft reveals his secret to us: Et de Dei misericordia nunquam desperare. God does not abandon into another’s hands the government of the world, whose tempora vel momenta Pater posuit in sua potestate (times or moments the Father hath put in his own power). All will be for the best, since it is God Who governs. (38)

The Laudate Psalms (148–150), which give the hour of Lauds its very name, were recited as a unit from ancient Hebrew times—Our Lord Himself would have prayed them every morning—down to the breviary reform of Pius X in 1911. Hmm…

There follow the Benedictiones of the three young men in the furnace of Babylon, used on feasts. This practice, too, is almost universal. The Ambrosians, in fact, have the Hymn of the Three Children sung even on the solemn afternoon of Good Friday! Last come the true Laudes (Praises), that is, the three last psalms of the songbook of David, Psalms 148–150: Laudate Dominum de caelis (Praise ye the Lord from the heavens), etc. The tradition of these Laudes at Dawn is truly primitive and universal. In the various Eastern and Latin liturgies these are never omitted, not even in the Offices of the Dead, not even on Good Friday. This was also the case for the Roman Breviary before the reform of Pius X. (79)

The origin of singing “alleluia”:

The origin of the singing of the Alleluia represents, in a certain way, the history of the spirituality first of Israel, then of the Catholic Church. This acclamation possessed for the Hebrews such an hieratic character that, as a rule, it accompanied certain specified psalms in the temple, and it formed part of the Passover chants. The apostles themselves transmitted its use to the churches. For the sake of greater respect, no one ever dared to translate it into Greek or into Latin; so much so that certain authors have even suggested the possibility that, together with the Alleluia, there were also passed on to the Church certain Syriac melodies that adorned it in Solomon’s temple, or in the various synagogues of the diaspora. In the mind of the early generations of Christians, the Alleluia was the Paschal chant par excellence. According to St Gregory, it seems to have been St Jerome who induced Pope Damasus to prescribe its singing on every Sunday outside of Lent, in honor of Christ’s Resurrection. (87)

We are such wimps compared to our forefathers:

At Milan, still today, the Psalter is distributed into decades [groups of ten]. While during the day, at the minor Hours, Psalm 118 is repeated daily, for the nocturns, on the other hand, there is assigned one decade per night. Since, however, Saturday and Sunday are considered by the Ambrosians as festivals, and either the prophetic odes, or again Psalm 118, are recited, therefore to complete the entire series of the Psalter requires a full fifteen days!

St Benedict, perhaps, did not have direct knowledge of this very ancient distribution of the Ambrosian Psalter, which turns out to be much heavier than the monastic one. Hence, he brands it as nimis inertem devotionis suae servitium. How “lazy” this devotion was, however, can be seen by the fact that, in reality, the Milanese, repeating the same chants daily at the minor Hours and at Compline, end up reciting in the week at least two hundred Psalms. Then he says nothing about the solemn Vigils, which, up to the time of St Charles, were celebrated [at Milan] on the night preceding certain special feasts of apostles and martyrs. In these, the whole Psalter in its entirety would actually be recited, divided into three sections of fifty psalms each.

After each section a scriptural passage was read and a responsory followed. When the Psalter was finished, the final Litanies were sung and the vigil Mass was celebrated. Let the sons of St Ambrose, then, guard their liturgy unaltered—a liturgy that boasts now a tradition of at least seventeen centuries and has been so many times praised and recommended by the Holy Apostolic See. In homage to this tradition, throughout all the Middle Ages, even the numerous abbeys of Milan followed the special cursus of the region instead of the Benedictine one. (99-100)

The importance of awe and reverence. Note how gently Schuster expresses his disagreement with the liturgical reformers, who were already revving their engines in his day. I can’t imagine what he would have thought had he lived another ten or fifteen years (he died in 1954)…

God is omnipresent, and the Holy Ghost Who dwells in us lifts us on high to converse with our good Father in Heaven. We begin our prayer, therefore, renewing our act of faith and placing ourselves spiritually in the divine presence, as creatures before the Creator, as sons before the Father, as members of the mystical Body of Christ joined to Him Who is the Head of the Church and Who, by means of the Paraclete, prays for us with unutterable groans. This is what Abraham did when he said: Loquar ad Dominum meum, cum sim pulvis et cinis (I will speak to my Lord, whereas I am dust and ashes). This is what Moses and the Prophets were accustomed to do when, in the presence of God or of His Angel, they prostrated themselves face down on the earth. This is also what St Benedict did when, in the silence of his Roman tower that rose as a lookout post over the gate of the Arx Cassinensis, he prayed with tears and sighs, as St Gregory relates to us, and he prostrated himself on the ground on a simple mat: in psiathio in quo orare consueverat (on the rush mat on which he was accustomed to pray).

The ancient liturgy, with its dramatic apparatus of rites, sacred ministers, prayers, and chants, was most suited to nourish in the faithful this sense of respect and of divine fear in the presence of God and of His awesome mysteries. The more modern sensibility, on the other hand, prefers to simplify, and would rather try to minimize and reduce the rite to the bare essential forms. The Church sometimes finds herself persuaded to adapt herself to the diminished faith of modern society, but this is not to say that these liturgical simplifications, from the pastoral point of view, always represent a true gain for the spiritual formation of souls. […]

The social character that the liturgy had among the ancient peoples, foremost among them being the Greeks and the Romans, had contributed to the creation of marvelous ceremonials, and ones that must have deeply impressed the minds of the people. Even now, for example, the basilicas of the Roman Forum and the stupendous bas-reliefs of the Ara pacis Augustae at Rome, with the representation of the sacrifice offered by Octavian for the peace restored to the world, force the observer to stop and reflect before these relics of a truly heartfelt and exquisitely religious art. As soon as the Church emerged from the catacombs and became, after a century, the religion of the Empire, the Christian liturgy, too, could not fail to assume very imposing and solemn forms that beautifully expressed the essential religiosity of the ancient state, whose orientation was now turned from Jove to Christ the Savior.

There is, however, a great difference in outward expression between the classical piety of the ancient peoples and modern piety. For us, it is individuals above all who treat their wounds with the balm of prayer. For the ancients, on the other hand, the individual could even be absent and stand outside the temple. It was above all the Polis, the State, which by means of its official representatives, the priests, in dependence on the Pontifex Maximus, rendered to the local or national Divinity its tribute of cult in a solemn, official liturgy, worthy of Ceres, of Rome, or of Athens. This explains, too, the pomp and also the length accorded to the liturgy all throughout the early Middle Ages. It was a religious service with a civic or national character, and so it mattered little if it required one to invest half a day in processions and sacrifices.

In the ancient Christian liturgy, too, at Jerusalem, at Rome, at Milan, at Ravenna, we see that bishops, popes, metropolitans, and clergy would pass a great part of their day in going in procession from one church to another, carrying out the stations, and singing psalms. By good or ill fortune, at that time there were no industrial establishments and machines to make people hurry! The people followed their pastors, and passed the better part of their time in celebrating religious functions. In this privileged position accorded by Christianity to the solemn liturgy, the Church did nothing but continue the ancient Etruscan and Latin tradition that had completely permeated the entire social life of those peoples with religion and cult. (102)

The title of chapter 19, De disciplina psallendi, seems to indicate more the external bearing of the monk when he is present in choir and carries out the whole series of ceremonies, genuflections, and bows that are prescribed. It treats, then, of a true disciplina, to which the spirit of faith makes us submit with exactness and a devout attitude. It is thus that they recount of Basil the Great that he celebrated the Divine Mysteries with such majesty that, assisting at them one day, the heretical emperor Valens was stunned with a salutary terror. In the Vatican Basilica there is a beautiful altarpiece that represents this scene. (104)

In fact, not every prayer is pleasing to God. There is, for example, a prayer of the wicked, mentioned in Scripture, which actually increases their fault, according to the word of the Psalmist: Et oratio eius fiat in peccatum (And may his prayer be turned to sin). (105)

What would Schuster have said if he lived to see the reign of Paul VI??? And don’t tell me about the document “Sacrificium Laudis.” It was a dead letter before the ink was dry, as Montini immediately caved in to the pressure applied on him by Joseph Bernardin, as the latter openly states in his memoirs.

For the sons of St Benedict it would not be licit—nor would the Church permit it—to sacrifice the traditional choral celebration of the Divine Offices for the sake of more convenient and modern forms of prayer. (108)

A fine discussion of religious poverty:

The vow of poverty is so essential to the monastic state that the Cassinese Patriarch has considered it superfluous to mention it explicitly in the Rule. He has always assumed it, so much so that he does not state it even in the formula of profession. The synthetic mentality of the ancients sometimes lacked the scholastic precision of the juridic formulas of the more recent canonists, and considered things from the simple point of view of the Catholic conscience and the common meaning of the act. In Christian antiquity, to take the monastic habit, to become a monk, to place upon the altar the cartula (charter) of Profession together with one’s own head of hair, were so many valid ways to commit oneself irrevocably before God and before the Church to the observance of the monastic Rule.

The complete dispossession of material goods was precisely the first condition posed by Christ to the young man in the Gospel who asked Him about the various ways of perfection. Vade, vende quae habes, et da pauperibus, et habebis thesaurum magnum in caelo: et veni, sequere me (Go, sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me). The poor Christ, Who had not even anywhere to lay His Head during the night, was the model and the norm of the apostles when they too left their boats and their nets and dedicated themselves to following Him: Ecce nos reliquimus omnia et secuti sumus te (Behold we have left all things and have followed thee). The example of the holy apostles, pillars and teachers of the first and most ancient Christian churches, caused their successors, the first bishops, the holy virgins, the ascetics, the “philosophers,” as Tertullian, St Cyprian, Clement of Alexandria, St Catherine, St Eusebius, St Ambrose, etc., then called themselves, to give up their substance to the poor or to the Church, so that each of them, nudus et expeditus ad Christianam Philosophiam (naked and made free for the Christian Philosophy), could give himself to the study of sacred letters and the discipline of asceticism.

There had not yet arisen the monasteries and the religious orders, but the ascetical state, based on the evangelical counsels of perfection, taking its origin from the teaching of the Savior and of the holy apostles, was already established and held in honor. The Holy Fathers rightly observe that for the souls of religious and for the cenobia themselves the observance of the vow of poverty constitutes the guarantee of the observance.

We should meditate well on these words of St Gregory:

Cognovi enim quia idem Constantius peculiaritati studeat. Quae res maxime testatur eum cor monachi non habere. Stude . . . monasterium a tali peste mundare . . . ; quia si illic peculiaritas a monachis habetur, neque concordia, neque caritas in congregatione eadem poterit permanere. (For I have learned that this Constantius is intent upon his personal property. This fact most especially bears witness that he does not have the heart of a monk. Be intent . . . to cleanse the monastery of this plague . . . for if personal property is held by the monks there, neither concord nor charity shall be able to abide in that community.)

When God is no longer enough for the soul, then no more are all the riches of the entire world enough for her: greed creeps in, the striving after material comforts, quarrels, discords among brethren. Monastic history sadly confirms this truth. As long as poverty was held in honor in the monasteries, discipline and holiness kept her good company. On the other hand, the day that poverty went into exile from the cloisters, the other virtues too, her companions, had to take the path of exile. (145-46)

Schuster explains how the refectory is an image of the church. Our forefathers thought of everything, and connected all of life to the feast of heaven.

Leaving, then, the office of the kitchen to the lay brothers charged with it, the service of the tables, on the other hand, remains reserved to the monks, excluding no one. According to the medieval tradition, in numerous abbeys still today the abbot serves at table on Holy Thursday, while the deacon in the pulpit, with a white stole over his shoulder, sings the last discourse given by the Lord in the Cenacle of Jerusalem. It is an excellent thing to preserve all these ancient liturgical traditions, with which the Holy Fathers sanctifi ed the Christian agape, elevating the simple meal of the community to the loftiness of a sacred function. (157)

The old medieval tradition made episcopal dining halls and Benedictine refectories to be like so many basilicas, where the dinner represented the ancient Christian agape; the bread of the soul was the Sacred Scripture, the ministers of the banquet the monks, among whom were the deacons and the priests, who served their brethren in joyful charity and humility. At Monte Cassino, in the kitchen, is still seen the drum of the cupola, with the remains of the mosaics that Abbot Desiderius caused to be executed there in the eleventh century. At Rome, in the Lateran there still remains the apse mosaic that decorated the dining hall of Pope Leo III. In general, the ancient refectories of the abbeys preserve the grand appearance of a church, with the lavabo in the atrium or narthex, the Crucifix above the abbot’s place, the marble ambo for the spiritual reading. […]

The service of the tables recalls in some way that of the original deacons, among whose obligations was precisely that of ministrare mensis (serving at the tables). For this reason St Benedict, following the authority of Cassian, orders that the servers on duty should begin and end their week in church with a brief liturgical function of blessing or of thanksgiving. This rite should be carried out at Dawn on Sunday—post matutinos hymnos, says Cassian, precisely at the hour at which sacred ordinations were accustomed to be celebrated. (157-58)

The ancient tradition of the Christian agape has been preserved in the refectory of the abbeys, where the food, consumed between the singing of the psalms and during the reading of the pages of Sacred Scripture, takes on still today almost a liturgical character. Even the blessings of the table have a certain Eucharistic perfume: Mensae caelestis participes faciat nos Rex aeternae gloriae (May the King of eternal glory make us partakers of the heavenly table); or: Ad coenam vitae aeternae perducat nos Rex aeternae gloriae (May the King of eternal glory lead us to the supper of eternal life). (170)

Why does St. Benedict specify having a drink of water after communion?

Are these two distinct reasons, or rather is there one reason: respect for the Holy Eucharist? Some authors maintain that the reason for the mixtum is twofold: one takes a little water and wine, as do the servers of the table, also in order to avoid that, in singing or emitting saliva, any particle of the Holy Communion should be scattered. From ancient times we notice this precaution, so much so that at one time the communicants were accustomed to take the ablution: a little wine or a little water in the church itself. (171)

Why fast on Wednesdays & Fridays?

From Pentecost onwards, during all the summer season, which in central Italy is usually reckoned until the middle of September, the monks’ fast is limited to Wednesdays and Fridays only, as the common tradition of the faithful maintained at the time. The origin of this twice-weekly fast goes back to the Synagogue, whose Pharisee in the Gospel boasted because Ieiuno bis in sabbato. According to the Didache, the Hebrews were accustomed to dedicate Mondays and Thursdays to fasting, while The Tradition of the Apostles, in contrast, introduced the fast on Wednesdays and Fridays (n. 8), so that it would not coincide with that of the hypocrites. There is a fast on Wednesday because on that day the Sanhedrin resolved on the capture and the condemnation of the Divine Savior. There is then added the Friday fast because on that day the Lord died and the ancient Church in the East would prepare for the solemnity of the Sabbath. (181)

How penance was done in ancient times. We can’t even imagine today how seriously sin—and therefore penance for sin—was taken in the early church. Funny that none of the proponents of a “liturgy like the early Christians had” ever suggests reviving the whole of it…

In Rome, public penance did not last, generally, more than one Lent, and the reconciliation was completed on Holy Thursday. The rites described by Tertullian for the reconciliation of penitents in the time of Pope Callistus are almost the same ones that St Benedict imposes for the absolution of the excommunication. Here are two very significant outlines:

Et tu quidem poenitentiam moechi ad exorandam Fraternitatem in ecclesiam inducens, conciliatum [sic] et concineratum . . . prosternis in medium ante viduas, ante presbyteros, omnium lacinias invadentem, omnium vestigia lambentem, omnium genua detinentem, inque eum . . . bonus pastor et benedictus papa concionaris, et in parabola ovis capras tuas quaeris, tua ovis ne rursus de grege exiliat. (And thou, indeed bringing him into church to beseech the Brotherhood for penance for adultery, dost have him, reconciled and covered with ashes . . . lie prostrate in the middle before the widows, before the presbyters, seizing the hem of everyone’s garments, licking everyone’s footsteps, grasping everyone’s knees, and him. . . . O good shepherd and blessed pope [papa], thou dost address, and with the parable of the sheep thou dost seek thy she-goats, lest one of thy sheep should once again become an exile from the fold.)

Collocavit in vestibulo poenitentiam secundam, quae pulsantibus patefaciat . . . . Itaque Exomologesis prosternendi et humilificandi hominis disciplina est . . . de ipso quoque habitu et victu mandat, sacco et cineri incubare. . . . Cum ergo te ad fratrum genua protendis, Christum contrectas, Christum exoras. Aeque illi cum super te lacrymas agunt, Christus patitur, Christus Patrem deprecatur. Facile impetratur quod Filius postulat. (Thou hast established in the vestibule a second penance, which will lie open to those who knock . . . . Therefore, confession [exomologesis] is a discipline of prostrating and humbling a man . . . it commands also regarding even his attire and food, that he should lie in sackcloth and ashes . . . . Therefore, when thou dost cast thyself at the knees of the brethren, thou dost grasp Christ, thou dost beseech Christ. Likewise, when they shed tears over thee, Christ suffers, Christ beseeches the Father. What the Son asks is easily obtained.) (192)

On the importance of liturgical law:

With a meager spirit of faith, it is not easy to understand the importance of the liturgical laws before God. Nonetheless, when one is dealing with an infinite majesty, all is majestic, all must be supremely fitting. In the Old Law, the divine flame devoured those ill-advised priests who dared to fill their thurible with unholy fire. It is thus that the Holy Church, even for the lesser ministries in God’s temple—for the ringing of the bells, for the tidiness of the church, for the closing of the doors of the sacred building, for the refurnishing of the lamps—instituted from ancient times a corresponding number of special ministers, with vestments, with rules, and with most holy rites. We read of the holy Curé of Ars that he used to sweep his church wearing the cotta, because he said that he was exercising one of the ecclesiastical orders. (196-97)

The Holy Church shares in this supernatural mentality, reserving the sounding of the consecrated bells to a particular ecclesiastical order: that of the Porters. (202)

The exactness of the horaria reminds the Holy Lawgiver of another necessary provision, regarding the succession of the choir monks in their turns as antiphoners, lectors, cantors, etc. The proverb says: Serva ordinem et ordo servabit te (Keep order and order will keep you). One of the characteristics of the works of God is that they are all done in mensura, numero, et pondere (in measure, number, and weight). Nothing, therefore, in choir, in the refectory, in Chapter, etc., ought to be left to private initiative. Thus there will be lists of turns; but he urges that these lists be drawn up with sound criteria, in such wise as to exclude those who sing out of tune, those who do not know how to make themselves understood when they read, and lastly those who are not content to carry out their service cum humilitate et gravitate et tremore, as St Benedict prescribes. (203)

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This second type of prayer at the end of the Divine Office—as we note also from St Gregory’s account of the wandering monk, drawn out of the choir by a little devil—is exactly what moderns call mental prayer. St Benedict designates it by the name of secret or mystical prayer, secretius orare, and he says that it is carried out in lacrymis et intentione cordis. It is more fully described in chapter 20, where there is already mention of puritate cordis et compunctione lacrymarum (purity of heart and the compunction of tears). […]

The importance given by the saint to prayer both by his teaching and by his example should leave its impression on all his sons. Without this life of adoring union with God, of prayerful confidence, of unceasing conversation with Him in Whom we live, work, and are, one cannot even make sense of the prolonged choral Office, and not even the Sacred Liturgy proves to be truly lifegiving. The Benedictine monk, precisely because he is consecrated to the extended choral Office, absolutely needs the exercise of daily meditation, in an atmosphere of silence, of recollection, of hieratic order. (222)

If a religious family does not have novices, it is a sign that God does not consider it worthwhile to send them to it. “Purify the nest”—an outstanding ecclesiastic said to me one day—“and then you will see that the doves will come.” (249)

All this crashed and burned. “Libido delendi”: the lust for destruction. Once you start, you can’t stop.

Today, there is an entire portion of the laity that shows itself bitterly disillusioned by the various systems of man and of Protestant individualism, and has a strong nostalgia for God and the things of God. Often it looks to the Benedictine abbeys as to oases where, under the wise guidance of the Church in her Catholic liturgy, one breathes in the supernatural and senses better the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ. Mini-retreats, Spiritual Exercises, Liturgical Weeks, and Weeks of Ecclesiastical Culture in Benedictine monasteries find an ever more eager throng of participants. The spiritual fruit is generally ample, especially for the educated classes. I consider this form of liturgical apostolate as one of the very important functions that Divine Providence reserves in our days to the family of St Benedict. It is necessary, however, that the abbeys be made ever more worthy and more suitable for this form of apostolate, which demands of the monks an edifying regular observance, a dignified sacred Office, an outstanding interior spirit, places suitable and well furnished for the retreatants, gentlemanliness in welcoming and treating them. (280)

The greatness of the family of St. Benedict. May it flourish again!

One day, St Gertrude in contemplation considered St Benedict under the symbol of a rose garden all in flower. First some buds sprouted on the ground, as in spring around the feast of St Benedict. Then, multiplying and interlacing their branches, these in turn were bedecked with flowers; so that at the end all the great rose garden seemed to her an immense bunch of roses, which brought joy to Heaven and surrounded the Holy Patriarch with a particular glory.

The Benedictine family can indeed glory in the Lord that it has given to Heaven an incomparable throng of saints, while on earth it has supplied Christendom with a multitude of Supreme Pontiff s, apostles of nations, martyrs, doctors, bishops, priests and monks, who have planted and watered the garden of the Church with their own blood and their sweat. In this regard, the daily reading of the old Benedictine menologies and martyrologies of the seventeenth century cannot but prove extremely useful for the formation of the spirit of young monks.

A legend of the late Middle Ages relates that one of the Avignon pontiff s, having done the necessary research in the pontifical archives, verified that the Order of St Benedict had given to the Catholic family thirty popes, several hundred cardinals, several thousand bishops, with about 30,000 saints—or more—canonically inscribed in the Church’s register. The Pontifical Archives do not contain anything to justify such statistics. Yet it still remains true that, at the time when such numbers were repeatedly published and believed, it was commonly known among the wide public that the Order of St Benedict, across its fourteen centuries of existence, had really produced and formed a great number of giants of sanctity, of science, of the progress of Christian civilization.

One year, on the feast of St Bernard, while the Introit In medio Ecclesiae of the Mass of Doctors was being sung, it seemed to St Mechtilde that the Lord said: “This center of the Church—In medio Ecclesiae—is the Order of St Benedict; not only because it preceded all by its antiquity, but because all the others that arose afterwards derived many things from the institutes of the Benedictine family.” (316-17)

How sad. It was Vatican II that shattered this, not twenty years after Schuster penned these words:

To judge by our meager human standards, We see a happy future traced before the family of St Benedict, when the period of rebuilding follows after the universal cataclysm of the war. It is in our abbeys—and the people know it—that there has always been kept burning the twofold lamp of liturgical piety and knowledge of God. Our age seems especially oriented towards these two currents of Christian life. It is to be hoped that, disillusioned by everything that has, for so many years, fed human pride, flattering it that it could do without God, if not actually rebel against Him, the postwar generation will return, as in the Middle Ages, to seek God in the Dominici schola servitii. (318)

Today, the only places where one will experience something like this are the traditional monasteries such as Norcia, Le Barroux, Fontgombault, Clear Creek, Silver City, and a few of the conservative Solesmes-influenced ones, which are trad-adjacent. But from such seeds are already springing new trees, as healthy monasteries are repopulating abandoned or senescent ones.

Today’s post has presented excerpts from Blessed Ildefons Cardinal Schuster’s Commentary on the Holy Rule of Saint Benedict.

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Go West, young couples?

A robust account of the positive value of purity—an account which was, in my opinion, even better than the luminous Theology of the Body audiences of which it was the precursor—is given in Dietrich von Hildebrand’s classic work In Defense of Purity.

After his death, Dietrich’s beloved wife, Alice von Hildebrand, having thoroughly absorbed this understanding of purity as a positive value, expressed serious alarm about the efforts of Christopher West to “popularize” John Paul II’s Theology of the Body audiences, which West framed as the final renunciation of puritanism. West saw puritanism as a great evil but thought of sexual licentiousness as simply misguided—indulging, so to say, in the wrong context. And the greatest evil of puritanism, as West saw it, was that it discouraged speaking frankly and objectively about sex; it was a topic stifled by unhealthy shame and bashfulness.

Alice von Hildebrand disagreed; though she hated puritanism, she thought genuine puritanism was hardly a formidable social force by the early 2000s. She argued that the “bashfulness” that West took as a vestige of puritanism was, on the whole, something healthy: a proper sense of shame, pudeur. And she was deeply alarmed that West, in his fervor to “complete what the sexual revolution began,” was co-opting the positive vision of sexuality that her husband and John Paul II had put forward, but stripping it of all affective reverence and bashfulness:

Key to my concerns is West’s hyper-sexualized approach to the Theology of the Body. The French have a wonderful word to capture the veiling of one’s intimate feelings, out of a proper sense of shame: pudeur, a holy bashfulness, so to speak. Seized as he is by what he regards as his calling to evangelize a new generation with this theology in modern ways they can supposedly better understand, West practically ignores the importance of pudeur, and, by his imprudence, winds up undermining his own message.1

One critical difference—perhaps the difference between West and the von Hildebrands—was that the von Hildebrands saw the sexual sphere as deeply personal, involving the intimate mystery of each person. For this reason, they argued, it presents powerful opportunities for love, tenderness, and the affirmation of embodied goodness. It is a way of saying both to the beloved person and to the whole created order, as Josef Pieper puts it, “how good that you exist!”—and this is, of course, wrapped up with the openness to new existence. But because of how intimately connected it is with the person, it presents serious dangers. Because it is deep, it threatens to balloon into an intoxicating cosmos all of its own; because of its intimacy it provides opportunities to debase the self and harm other persons in profoundly vicious ways. It is a sphere that can be appreciated and spoken about tactfully, but a casual, objective “neutrality” is impossible in its regard.

West’s contention was that the lion’s share of the dangers and difficulties of the sexual sphere would largely go away once we got rid of all the shame about it, once we banished our puritan ideas. Whereas the von Hildebrands thought that the only right response to the sexual sphere was a certain reverence and bashfulness which respected the logos of the thing, West took this sort of reverence as the enemy of common sense and dedicated himself wholeheartedly to doing away with it. His mission was what C.S. Lewis called “ventilation” in an illuminating passage from Mere Christianity written long before the rise of Christopher West:

They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been. It has been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still in a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not. I think it is the other way round. I think the human race originally hushed it up because it had become such a mess.2

The von Hildebrands might push back slightly on Lewis here and point out that the sexual sphere is quite different from the sphere of other natural appetites, like those for food and drink, and so, even healthy sexuality has an element of bashfulness that is proper to it, but not proper to other physical “appetites.”

To put it very succinctly, West thought that we ought to be objective and neutral about sexuality, through a frank and honest approach, through proper ventilation. He thought that such neutrality was possible and healthy. The von Hildebrands did not; they saw that as totally opposed to the logos of the sexual sphere.

This is a battle that, by most readings of history, Alice von Hildebrand lost and Christopher West won. She is beloved by a few, but her critique did relatively little to stem the tide of a thoroughly popularized Theology of the Body, which has met the public in classes and podcasts.3

When extremes meet

Neither has this re-reading of Catholic sexual ethics been confined to “liberals.” The editor-in-chief of Evie magazine, which describes itself as a “Conservative Cosmo,” attends the Latin Mass. Her magazine is known for selling salacious “milkmaid” sundresses, parodies of traditional feminine dress designed with those standards of craftsmanship, modesty, and devotion to tradition which one usually expects from Spirit Halloween. Their latest print publication is an explicit 200-page-long coffee table magazine of sex tips and boudoir photos. I cannot help but be reminded of the now-notorious interview on ABC Nightline in which Christopher West favorably compared John Paul II and Hugh Hefner. Though he later claimed he was taken out of context, if the success of Evie magazine is any indication, this dreamy postmodern fusion of Catholicism with Playboy is well underway.

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On July 12, thousands of visitors flooded the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth, Texas, for the final day of the special exhibition, “The Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum, Jerusalem.” The exhibit featured over 60 pieces of exquisite 17th and 18th century liturgical art from the Terra Sancta Museum, formerly the Museum of the Franciscan Friars in Jerusalem. The treasures, some still in use at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Monastery of Saint Saviour’s, are on loan while the Terra Sancta Museum is undergoing construction.

The exhibition items included copes, chasubles, chalices, lamps, and a variety of other priceless ornaments, many of them saved or restored from desecration. The items were made for the Franciscan custodians of the Holy Sepulcher. They represent the generosity of the Habsburg and Bourbon families, as well as numerous other European monarchies, who sought to adorn the altars of the Holy Land with glorious and lasting monuments.

The great popularity of the exhibit led the museum curators to extend “Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum” for two weeks past the original closing date, and on the final day, lines of patrons waiting to see the exhibit extended out of the back of the building.

The beauty of the art, made by loving hands for the holiest site in Christendom, was nearly overwhelming in its richness and rarity. People lingered in awe before a crimson silk cope, embroidered with baroque flowering vines and fruits in cascading cornucopia, complete with delicate shading. They admired the hood, which featured a scene of St. George slaying a dragon and asked about the story depicted. They gazed in wonder at a jeweled monstrance and two majestic thrones for Eucharistic Adoration, marveled at scriptural scenes minutely depicted on ciboria, and saints grandly adorning enormous candlesticks and lamps. As may be expected, the pieces inspired friendly discussions among strangers about the possible meaning of the objects, their history, and their loveliness.

What follows here is a meditation on beauty in Liturgical Art, inspired by the Treasures and the conversations of the patrons, in gratitude for the anonymous, centuries-long work of preservation of these ornaments, carried on through continuous warfare, ecclesial turmoil, and liturgical upheaval. May we be moved to pray for our suffering brothers and sisters in the Holy Land, and our hearts drawn up into the Eternal Beauty that knows no shadow or change.

Dwelling in Unity

St. Francis de Sales begins his Treatise on the Love of God by summarizing St. Thomas’s teaching about beauty. Beauty, according to St. Francis de Sales, is composed of three elements: unity, harmony, and splendor (or clarity).

Of unity, he writes, “Union between several and distinct parts produces order.” Unity does not destroy difference, but directs each variation to the goal or purpose of the artist. The order that results pleases our minds and leads them to relish the good thing presented to us, and thus at the same time, we may enjoy both the beauty and the goodness before us precisely as a whole. Necessarily, the quality of our enjoyment will be in proportion to three things: the excellence of the artist’s goal, his skill, and our ability to receive the meaning of the object.

The magnificent artistic unity of each individual object in the exhibit, as well as the entire display, could be easily recognized in its sacrality, that is, in the pieces each being set apart for the solemn worship of God. Liturgical beauty is wed to purpose that transcends mere utility. Each thread, each delicate strike of the hammer, each stitch worked silently and anonymously, was made to serve an ancient liturgy of surpassing holiness, that in turn served the God Who Is Holiness.

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In 1969, A Short Critical Study of the Novus Ordo Missae was published with the signatures of two powerful cardinals, Antonio Bacci and Alfredo Ottaviani. Nicknamed “The Ottaviani Intervention,” it quickly become a classic, and has never gone out of print. But... where was its companion volume? You know, the one about the other six sacraments?

For, indeed, the reform of the Mass was accompanied by profound overhauls of the rituals for baptism, confirmation, marriage, holy orders, penance, and extreme unction (the last two renamed reconciliation and the anointing of the sick). And the changes to these were no less profound, no less meaningful, no less consequential.

Understandably, debates about liturgical reform have coalesced around the new missal for decades, since the Holy Mass is the Church’s central act of worship and touches the daily lives of Catholics. Yet if the new rite of the Mass deserves criticism for its diminished signification of the Church’s faith, the same holds for the new rituals of the sacraments, which were produced according to the same assumptions and principles.

Esteemed liturgical theologian Fr. Claude Barthe confronts this question in his short but potent work, The Seven Sacraments, Past and Present: A Short Critical Study of the New Rituals. Fr. Barthe takes up particular points of comparison between the old and new rituals, looking to the matter and the form (the elements used, the words spoken) as well as the ceremonies surrounding them. He asks, and answers, the question: Did the effort to “adapt the rites for modern man” end up diluting and dissipating the very faith they were supposed to express more effectively?

In this well-documented book, Fr. Barthe helps readers to see why a coherent defense and practice of tradition must reach beyond the Mass to embrace all of the Church’s rites—at a time when some are seeking to rule out the very possibility of doing so. The Roman Rite, he explains, is a unified world of prayer, and its components should not be arbitrarily divorced. If the traditional Mass deserves to be honored and prayed in our churches, the traditional form of each and every sacrament should be given no less honor and be no less readily available.

Perhaps in time, this book, too, will become famous, and people will start speaking of “The Barthe Intervention”!

I encourage tradition-loving Catholics to take up this brisk and battling book. Find out why it caused a firestorm upon its 2025 publication in France. Consider gifting it to priests you know who love the Mass of the Ages but may not yet fully understand how it is but the crown jewel of an entire ensemble of closely connected and harmonious parts.

Today, I will share some passages from this book, to whet the reader’s appetite.

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In his Foreword, Bishop Athanasius Schneider writes:

All that the Church Fathers and most Roman Pontiffs, that is, the perennis sensus ecclesiae, warned against— innovations, improvisations, and breaks with the rites of the previous era— all this was carried out in an incomprehensible manner during the liturgical reform following the Second Vatican Council, with the approval of the Holy See. The rites of the sacraments of the post-conciliar reform depart strikingly from the constant and essential qualities of the Church’s liturgy, as inspired by the Apostles, faithfully developed according to the same sense by the Church Fathers, and carefully protected for centuries by the Roman Pontiffs.

Among the characteristics of the ritual of the “new sacraments” that contrast with the liturgy of all time, the following elements can be noted: the diminution of sacredness; the systematic weakening of biblical symbolism and typology, especially the link with the types of divine worship of the Old Covenant (such an attitude was typical of the ancient Christian Gnostics and partly also of Martin Luther); an overly academic and artificial tone; novelties invented with improvisations; anthropocentrism; a neo-Pelagian tendency (the obvious weakening of the doctrine of original sin and the weakening of the prayers of repentance and propitiation) associated with a naturalistic tendency (the weakening of the awareness of the existence and the action of evil spirits, hence an almost systematic omission of exorcisms). (xiii-xiv)

Abbé Claude Barthe deserves great credit for pointing out the deficiencies and clearly anti-traditional characteristics of the new ritual of the sacraments in a thorough and fair presentation. After an impartial reading of this study, one must honestly arrive at the conclusion that we must return to the sacramental spirit and rites as the Church has always preserved them, in accordance with the norm and spirit of the Church Fathers and of almost all the Roman Pontiffs. (xvi)

Now, turning to Fr. Barthe:

Seeking to deprive the Christian people of the immemorial liturgy of the Roman Church is gravely unjust, given that the Tridentine liturgy shows every sign of being a key vehicle for the transmission and preservation of the deposit of faith. Indeed, since Pope Francis’ motu proprio Traditionis custodes of July 16, 2021, which drastically restricts the celebration of the traditional Roman Mass, a campaign has been underway, especially in France, to chip away at the various forms of traditional worship: the Tridentine Mass is permitted, but only as a concession which is gradually being reduced (as can be seen in the bans on pilgrimage Masses), and traditional sacraments are strictly prohibited. However, the transmission of this doctrinal and spiritual treasure, by its very nature a taking part in the traditio of the deposit of faith, must be whole and intact.

Let us begin by stating that we are experiencing an exceptional crisis in the Church, one that is completely atypical, and that it is important, while attempting to survive, to avoid normalizing the abnormal. (1)

Explaining why “the new liturgy cannot be divided: it must be accepted or rejected in its entirety,” Fr. Barthe writes:

The liturgical reform is a single entity, “a block,” to borrow an expression used by Clémenceau about another revolution, and is intended to be so. From this perspective, what the current provision proposes, by distinguishing between the Mass and the other sacraments, is unthinkable. The reform of the missal is undoubtedly the most important aspect of the liturgical reform, but the aim of the latter is comprehensive. All the liturgical books have been modified, and profoundly so.

The comprehensive character of the post-conciliar liturgical reform is clear in its desire to manifest a new face of the Church through transforming the entire Roman liturgy so as to offer a lex orandi better suited to the people of this time (notably by smoothing out the expression of harsh dogmas, of the Mass as a propitiatory sacrifice, of baptism as a struggle against the devil, and so on). As the celebration of the other sacraments is less important than that of the Eucharist, they are not given as much attention.

Nevertheless, it is the whole world of the Tridentine liturgy that has been discarded. In fact, the new liturgy constitutes a different world. Even if Summorum Pontificum speaks of different “forms” of the Roman rite, these are in fact two distinct rites, but not in the same way that the Eastern rites are distinct from the Roman rite: the new rite is intended to replace the old one, as one set of things supplants another.

Truly, in the liturgy, all the parts cohere and communicate with one another around the center, the Eucharist, to which all the other sacraments are ordered. The old missal and the reformed missal are thus the respective hearts of the old and new liturgies. Anyone who rejects the new missal would be inconsistent if he accepted the new rites of the sacraments. (7-8)

If the new liturgy is “a block,” the old liturgy also constitutes a coherent whole that likewise cannot be dismembered. (9)

Today, defenders of the traditional liturgy are a minority within the Church. To employ the language of strategists, they are fighting a battle of the weak against the strong. But the “weak” benefit here, with divine assistance, from the supreme strength of a just cause, according to the criterion of the sensus fidei. They are all the more successful in making their voices heard because their cause is in harmony with the very essence of the transmission of the deposit of faith as summed up in the concept of Tradition. In fact, in this theoretically unequal battle, the “traditionalists,” although in the minority, benefit from the guilty conscience of the “moderns” and their vague sense of illegitimacy.

However, the “traditionalists” do not in any way hold the reins of power. And this situation entails constraints: any negotiating of their positions, any inch given, is extremely hazardous for them as things stand. And each particular transaction is dangerous for all those attached to the traditional liturgy, as I will emphasize regarding the requirements of the common good. On the other hand, once this liturgy has regained its place, either throughout the Church or in certain parts of it, showing tolerance towards followers of the new liturgy, by allowing them a transition process so that they can more easily become accustomed to the old liturgy in stages— a process known as the “reform of the reform”—will certainly be appropriate. (10-11)

Speaking of extreme unction:

Such is always the case with liturgical reform, in which the “return to the sources” aspect of rites is combined with a devaluation of their meaning. In fact, the transformation of this sacrament has gone hand in hand with a general de-dramatizing of death, which is medicalized and relegated to hospitals. (54)

Quoting the novelist François Mauriac, in words that I think are both hopeful about God’s mercy and realistic about the situation:

“Grace seeps or trickles through the rubble of the ruined liturgy.”

In an appendix, Fr. Barthe addresses the issue of “the lack of authority of the new liturgy”:

Is it disobedience when there are no grounds for obeying? Is it disobedience not to submit to a law that manifestly does not serve the common good? Unlike previous councils, Vatican II sought neither condemnation nor dogmatization. The development of a new form of teaching in which it situated itself—“authentic teaching” or “pastoral” teaching— was a skillful masterstroke: it introduces novelties, which devalue tradition, and simultaneously enables itself to be in tune with the times. This type of teaching allows for the expression of new doctrines (e.g., the “sincere reverence” with which the Church regards other religions), while at the same time nullifying the authority of the previous magisterium without having to actually contradict it, since we remain in the “pastoral” sphere. And all of this in a manner that fits in with a modern intellectual freedom that rejects all dogmatization except that of freedom itself.

It is only natural that the liturgical reform produced a new rule of worship, variable and barely binding, constantly opening up numerous options and leaving maximum leeway for interpretation by celebrants. The norm of worship reflects the norm of faith and vice versa: lex orandi, lex credendi. Or more precisely, the absence of norms in the strict sense: it is no longer a question of a lex with this form of worship, which contemptuously rejects the ancient rituals and avoids “rigidity” as much as possible, thereby reflecting a poorly defined, weakened message (like the “weak thinking” of modern people).

The choice is therefore to obey either the sensus fidei or that which is not a law, in that it does not involve an obligation of obedience. In any case, those who, from the moment the new missal was published, expressed the harshest criticism, did indeed consider it as being legitimately open to criticism. (103-4)

This manufactured liturgy will never become a tradition, even if, over the past half-century, it has become a habit, one that will still be difficult to uproot. (113-14)

Fr. Claude Barthe’s “The Seven Sacraments, Past and Present: A Short Critical Study of the New Rituals” may be obtained from the publisher or from any Amazon site.

I would like to take this opportunity to share with readers of Tradition & Sanity announcements of two TLM pilgrimages in 2027 worth knowing about.

A prefatory remark: I’ve noticed a happy development in recent years, which seems to confirm a general trend pointed out by countless observers — namely that wherever Catholicism still exists, it is becoming more traditional, or at least more “tradition-friendly.” Thus, it used to be the case that it was nearly impossible to find a group pilgrimage to the famous religious sites, be it Lourdes or Fatima, Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, or what have you, that also featured the daily celebration of the traditional Roman Rite. But today, if you look at companies like St. Charles Catholic Pilgrimages or Syversen Touring, you will quickly find several trips with Latin Mass chaplains.

Without prejudice to any of the other wonderful trips taking place, here are two pilgrimages I will be co-leading in 2027. Each will be suffused with traditional liturgy, sacred music, theology, prayer, and good conversation.

O Beauty Ever Ancient, Ever New: French Gothic Cathedrals with Sacred Music

From September 29 to October 9, 2027, I will be co-leading a pilgrimage to sacred sites in France that offers a rare immersion in the Church’s tradition.

We will contemplate the theological vision embodied in Gothic architecture (including the cathedrals of Paris, Chartres, Beauvais, Amiens, and Rouen), and venerate relics and holy sites (Mont St. Michel, St. Denis, Sainte Chapelle, Miraculous Medal chapel, the Carmel of Lisieux and Les Buissonnets, the site of St. Joan of Arc’s martyrdom). I will be offering commentary as the trip proceeds, in addition to casual conversations with each of the participants.

We will come together for daily High Mass offered by Canon Jean-Baptiste Commins, ICKSP. A particular highlight will be the professional men’s schola that I will be directing, which will sing Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony for every Mass. For an idea of the kind of music we’ll be singing:

Formed by the Church’s liturgy and the legacy of French Catholic culture, we will seek to draw closer to Christ in His mysteries. The itinerary concludes with a Seine River cruise.

***N.B.: there’s a $300 per person Early Booking Discount for deposits received before 9/29/2026 and a $200 per person Check Discount for those paying the remaining balance by check after the initial deposit.

For more information, visit the pilgrimage page.

Then there’s…

The Holy Land: An 11-Day REGINA Insider’s Pilgrimage

Those who are looking for a traditional Catholic pilgrimage to the Holy Land, look no further. On this Regina/St. Charles trip, taking place November 29 to December 9, 2027, we will have daily Latin Mass with a wonderful priest, Fr. Pablo Santa Maria—and we will sing whenever we can, whether inside or outside of churches, utilizing special Masses and chants for the Holy Land.

Our tour manager will be the incomparable John Paul Sonnen of Liturgical Arts Journal, one of the most widely-traveled and culturally knowledgeable Catholics you will ever meet in your life. Our local guide will be Amer Shehadeh, revered for his experience, lore, and connections. And I will be offering theological and liturgical commentary, as well as being available for conversations over meals or on walks.

A rare opportunity and still a few spots open. For details, see this page.

Hope to meet (or meet again) some of the readers of Tradition & Sanity on one or the other of these extraordinary pilgrimages.

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On the traditional Roman liturgical calendar, August 22 is the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and May 31 is the feast of the Queenship of Mary. (In Belgium and some other places, there was a feast of Mary, Mediatrix of All Graces on this date, which expresses a similar idea.) In spite of the clear statement of the Second Vatican Council that “there must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 23), the architects of the Novus Ordo decided to change nearly everything around, including many dates on the calendar of saints; so, for the modern papal rite of 1969, the Queenship of Mary was moved to August 22, and the Immaculate Heart of Mary was moved to the Saturday immediately after the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

I used to think this was a rare example of an improvement — although by no stretch of the imagination could it have been considered “genuinely and certainly required.”

But then I came to understand how the Western tradition understood the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, namely, in parallel to the Ascension of Jesus Christ her Son.

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On social media last week, a kind of exchange took place between me and a prominent conservative theologian that I think readers here will find an interesting exposé of the current state of the debate. The name of the theologian is of no significance, in the sense that I am not going after him personally, but wish to stay focused on the ideas and the attitudes. If you do know who it is, please pause, say a prayer for both of us, and refrain from bringing his name into the comments.

It started with a post I made, concerning an article by Ryan Burge called “The Conformity Gap: What American Catholics Actually Believe and Practice”:

I will never cease to be amazed that there are people out there who don’t think the Church is in a state of unprecedented freefall (that is, things aren’t “pretty good” or “getting better,” as some ever-hopeful conservatives would like to have us think; remember, they were saying this back in the JP2 and BXVI days!). All you have to do is look at the data about what Catholics say they believe and how they practice to realize that even churchgoers, let alone nominals, are not remotely orthodox by any normal meaning of that word. Hence, the notion that we should somehow be policing a minority of Catholics (trads) to ensure that they “accept Vatican II” when most Catholics barely accept Catechism 101 is a double standard on steroids.

I also posted a quotation from Timon Cline’s “A Catholic Moment or an Evangelical Century?”:

Contrary to online chatter, we are not in a “Catholic moment.” But we may already be in an evangelical century. Significantly more people are leaving Catholicism than converting to it. By contrast, evangelical Protestants boast remarkably high conversion and retention rates and healthier levels of practical piety—church attendance, Bible reading, catechesis. Through the upheaval of the past half century, evangelicals have remained numerically and spiritually stable, have repeatedly reformed their institutions, and consistently outperform their counterparts. To cite one example, the percentage of Americans who convert from Catholicism to Protestantism (4 percent) is higher than the percentage of all converts to Catholicism (1.5 percent).

Such things (and there are vastly more like them out there) tell you: Not all is well with the Church in the USA since Vatican II—not that you needed me to tell you that!

It was not long before the explosion came from this theologian:

It never ceases to amaze me that Kwasniewski thinks the Vatican is “policing” trads over Vatican II. He has been writing against Vatican II for years and years now. Has he been censured? Denounced by Rome? No. In fact, he is quite well known and cavorts around the speaking circuit quite freely. He is a minor celebrity. So where is the “policing”?

Obviously, he is alluding to the SSPX and the recent excommunications. But as Kwasniewski well knows, those excommunications were canonically automatic and were the result of the illicit episcopal ordinations. The Vatican has actually been quite patient for 50 years concerning the SSPX rejection of some elements of Vatican II. That argument in the current crisis is a red herring. And it is the SSPX, and not the Vatican, that has made Vatican II into one of its main obstacles to full regularization with Rome. There are all kinds of theologians, including Ratzinger himself, who have leveled criticisms at the Council. The difference is that those theologians did not use their differences with the Council as a pretext for creating their own breakaway parachurch within a church. The issue therefore before us is not Vatican II but the episcopal ordinations. And Kwasniewski knows that. But he is clearly sympathetic to their cause so he is running some rhetorical interference for them here. But it is a deflection.

Yes, the Church in the West is in decline. But Kwasniewski exaggerates the extent to which “conservatives” deny this. I know not one astute observer of a conservative bent who would claim there is no decline and things are fine. But it serves his rhetorical purposes here to make it seem as if the critics of the SSPX are a gaggle of Pollyanna truth deniers as opposed to the “sober realism” of the giant intellects that run the schismatic cult called the SSPX.

It is clear that Kwasniewski thinks that the antidote to this decline is to restore the preconciliar form of Catholicism. Most trads think this way.

By all means. Let’s go back to the days of thinking that most non Catholics, and probably half of the Catholics, are going to Hell. Let’s go back to the days of liturgies so poorly done that the vast vast vast majority of preconciliar bishops knew it needed reform. Even Lefebvre voted for Sacrosanctum Concilium. Regardless of the liturgical reform we actually got, the fact remains that Sacrosanctum called for a reform of the liturgy and Lefebvre voted in favor of that. Kwasniewski treats the old Mass as this untouchable platonic form of liturgical perfection. Not even Lefebvre thought that way.

So yes, let’s go back to the days of damnation for most everyone. Massa damnata Catholicism will win back the lost. That and more Latin. Because we all know that is what most people want these days. Hell fire and Latin.

If preconciliar Catholicism was so strong, why did it collapse almost overnight after Vatican II lifted the lid off of the ecclesiastical libido? Why were so many millions of Catholics so happy to rid themselves of it? Kwasniewski’s romanticized historical revisionism would have us ignore the deep, deep problems that existed in the preconciliar Church that led directly to the problems exploding into the open in the post conciliar Church. His “We are the Holy Remnant” thinking therefore begs the question: The “Holy Remnant” of what, exactly?

About this post, my first reaction was to write:

Note how there is no attempt to engage the main point, which is the alarming lack of orthodoxy and orthopraxy in the vast majority of Catholics, versus the obvious penalization or marginalization of trads for six decades now because they have problems with Vatican II, even though they are known to be faithful and generous.

Note how he instantly makes the discussion appear ridiculous by reducing it all to Latin and damnation, as if these were the twin stars of preconciliar Catholicism. (Although, truth be told, we could actually use a revival of faith in the Four Last Things and in the abiding value of Latin, as taught by John XXIII and Vatican II.)

But as I pondered it, I felt that such a tangle of assertions deserved a much more thorough response. I subsequently posted a guide to why we should not put too much stock in the talking points of conservatives. (The text is edited here as compared with its social-media version.)

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Long-time readers of Tradition & Sanity will know that one of our recurring themes has been the right understanding of the office of the papacy.

The primacy of Peter and his successors is a foundational, necessary, and beautiful dogma of the Catholic Church founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ. Yet it is also open to misunderstanding and, as we know from the historical record, can be abused by those who fulfill the office unworthily. Nor should this be shocking to us, when we consider that one of the twelve apostles chosen by Christ betrayed Him and then hanged himself in despair; St. Paul, too, complains about renegade disciples. The Church is made up of wheat and tares, as the Lord teaches, and this applies at every level, until the end of time.

The reason the dogma is so unclear to Catholics nowadays is, I would argue, the clouding effect of over a century and a half of exaggerated papal adulation and exaltation, combined with acidic forces in modern philosophy that have rendered men skeptical of almost every source of external or internal knowledge.

Christians always acknowledged the pope, but they had the common sense to get on with their Christian lives according to the norms of natural law and ecclesiastical tradition. They were not, as it were, hanging on each word of the pope to see what they should think or act today as opposed to yesterday or tomorrow. The pope was seen as a remora or barrier (in Newman’s word) to innovation and novelty, someone who would hold fast to the traditional teaching even at the cost of looking hidebound, backward, entrenched, unoriginal, and downright stubborn. And Christians felt confident in believing and acting in accord with the tradition and traditions handed down, which acted like guiderails for their lives.

This, you might say, is what the normal functioning of the Church looks like: the pope is there in Rome to make big decisions, to evaluate disputes and act as a court of final appeal, to appoint bishops (to a degree; that the pope should appoint literally every bishop in the Latin Church is a very recent development), and so forth, but 99% of the time you know what you need to do because your traditional catechism, liturgy, devotions, and local clergy are saying it consistently and coherently.

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Sadly, that’s not the world we’re living in anymore. Various parties, some more orthodox than others, have taken advantage of the swelling of the papal office to sow terrors or errors of one kind or another, be it (in the early twentieth century) threats against modernists who weren’t actually modernists, or (in the twenty-first century) threats against traditionalists who are simply Catholics. Adding to the effect of chaos is the continual pepper-spray of the sedevacantists, blinding some observers to the obvious—that Vatican I taught there will always be successors of Peter in the visible Church, and that the morally unanimous consent of Catholics as to their pope suffices to establish his identity—while their rationalist engines churn away, constructing an uncompromisingly ultramontane remnant that shelters in a few chapels dotted across the world, praying a Roman Canon evacuated of its prelates.

I’ve talked about these points especially in these earlier posts:

It is therefore of considerable importance for Catholics who wish to be well-educated on the papacy to apply the twin gifts of faith and reason to understand it better. And that brings me (at last) to the main topic of this post: John Joy’s excellent book Disputed Questions on Papal Infallibility. Short, sweet, and to the point, he masterfully clarifies what the Church actually teaches, with many concrete examples from history—not omitting our more troubled recent history. In today’s Professor’s Bookshelf, I will share some excerpts from this book, so that you can see if reading Joy’s book might be a wise step for you to take in your ongoing education as a Catholic.

As usual, I’ll place the page numbers in parentheses at the end of selections.

The faithful must take care, therefore, to be well formed in the tradition of the Church, especially the sacred Scriptures, the common teaching of the fathers and doctors, the divine liturgy, and the infallible decrees of prior popes and councils, so that they may not be led astray if the bishops, or the pope, or even an angel from heaven should preach a gospel contrary to that which has been received from the apostles (see Gal 1:8). (13-14)

Pope John Paul II distinguishes the ordinary (merely authentic) papal magisterium, which is exercised continually, from the extraordinary or solemn papal magisterium, which is exercised only in ex cathedra definitions, and then proceeds to say that the pope is infallible “only when he speaks ex cathedra.” But if the pope is infallible only when he speaks ex cathedra, then he is not infallible when he does not speak ex cathedra, and therefore he is able to teach error, even in matters of faith or morals, in his authentic magisterium when not speaking ex cathedra.

In order to uphold the objection, one would have to deny what Pope John Paul II teaches here, which would be to attribute error to the teaching of his authentic magisterium in a matter pertaining to faith, in which case the objection would fail. Therefore, the charism of the Holy Spirit’s assistance, about which the pope speaks in the passage quoted, cannot be understood as an absolute protection against error, such as is given in the case of infallible teaching, but should rather be understood as a grace of office, of which the pope must avail himself in order to benefit from it, just as grace is given to the justified so that they would not sin, but not so that they could not sin. (14-15)

This same religious submission is also due to the teaching of the individual bishops, who are certainly not infallible, as the Second Vatican Council teaches in Lumen Gentium §25 and as history also proves by the example of Nestorius and other heretical bishops. But if the response due to the teaching of individual bishops, who are not infallible, is this same religious assent or religious submission, then we cannot conclude that the authentic magisterium of the pope is infallible simply from the fact that a religious submission of will and intellect is owed to it. (15)

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Untying knots of terminology that are often confused:

The term “ordinary magisterium”…means one thing when applied to the Church and another thing when applied to the pope.

The term “extraordinary magisterium” refers unequivocally to the explicit and definitive teaching of the Church—that is, the infallible teaching of the Church that is tangibly enshrined in public documents of the supreme magisterium. But because the extraordinary magisterium has two essential characteristics (namely, that it is both explicit and definitive), two very different forms of teaching can be contrasted against it and each will appear to be “ordinary” by comparison, though in different ways.

First, and more properly, the term “ordinary magisterium” refers to the definitive but non-explicit teaching of the Church—that is, to the infallible teaching of the Church that is not found in explicit decrees of popes or councils but is gathered instead from all the sources of theology, and especially from the plain sense of Scripture, the consensus of the Church Fathers, the consensus of Catholic theologians, the consensus of the bishops, or the consensus of the faithful.

Secondly, however, the term “ordinary magisterium” is also sometimes used to refer to the explicit but non-definitive teaching of the pope or the college of bishops, which is more properly called the “authentic magisterium” of the pope or bishops. But since “ordinary” in this case simply means “non-definitive” or “non-infallible,” it is impossible for the pope to speak infallibly through his “ordinary” magisterium. This unfortunate ambiguity of the term “ordinary magisterium” has been a source of untold confusion. It is as if one were to call an angel and an ape by the same name simply because neither is a man. (20-21)

It must be said that the pope is able to speak infallibly not only when he defines new dogmas, but also when he definitively confirms or reaffirms a doctrine already infallibly taught by the Church. For the purpose of the charism of infallibility bestowed on the pope by Christ is so that all Christ’s faithful would be able to know with certainty what they ought to believe in order to be saved. But doubts may arise in the Church not only with regard to legitimately disputed questions, but also when the established teaching of the Church is obscured by heresies and errors. And indeed, the need for an infallible judgment is all the more urgent in the latter case. Thus the purpose of infallibility would be frustrated if the pope were not able to issue an infallible judgment by which he confirms or reaffirms existing Catholic doctrine.

Moreover, in order to avoid falling into the error of the Gallicans, we must hold that the charism of infallibility is not more restricted in the pope than in the Church, as said above. But it is clear from history that the Church is able to pronounce solemn and infallible definitions by which she confirms or reaffirms doctrines already taught infallibly by the ordinary and universal magisterium. For the Council of Nicaea solemnly defined the co-equal divinity of Christ, which had been infallibly taught by the ordinary and universal magisterium of the Church from the beginning, according to the words of Christ: “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). Likewise, the Council of Trent defined the necessity of good works for salvation, which had always been taught infallibly by the Church, according to the words of St. James: “You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith alone” (Jas 2:24). Therefore, the pope can also pronounce a solemn and infallible definition by which he confirms or reaffirms a doctrine already taught infallibly by the ordinary and universal magisterium, as Pope Pius XII did when he defined the dogma of the Assumption. (25-26)

The solemn definition of a truth already infallibly taught by the Church is indeed a new judgment, but the only thing new about it is the new act of reaffirming the same doctrine. (27)

Kleutgen’s main purpose in speaking at all about an “ordinary magisterium” was to re-assert against the dogmatic minimalists of his time (who are still with us today) the binding authority of the living tradition of the Church; he wanted to re-direct our attention away from an obsessive fixation on the formal teaching documents of the Church toward the broader horizons and greater depths of the entire living tradition. At the same time, however, he was wary of asserting the authority of Scripture and Tradition apart from the explicit judgments of the Church without linking them in some way to the magisterium in order to maintain (against the Protestant principle of private interpretation) the Catholic principle of ecclesiastical mediation according to which Catholics believe all that and only that which God has revealed and which has been proposed as such by the Church. Hence his reinterpretation of the living tradition of the Church, by which Scripture and the oral Tradition are perpetually handed down in the Church, as an exercise of the magisterium of the Church. (112)

In proof of the authority of the living tradition/ordinary magisterium, Kleutgen appeals to the practice of the ancient Fathers of the Church, who did not hesitate to accuse Marcion, Arius, Nestorius, and many others of heresy even before their doctrines had been condemned by a judgment of the Church; in fact, it was precisely this vigorous opposition that eventually led to their formal condemnation. Yet how could this be if the faith of the Church were unable to be known with certitude apart from her formal judgments? The Fathers of the Church who opposed Arius, for example, seem to have acted on the assumption that the coequal divinity of Father and Son was sufficiently taught by the Church such that its denial constituted heresy even prior to its solemn definition at the First Council of Nicaea. In Kleutgen’s terminology, it was already infallibly proposed as a dogma of faith by the ordinary magisterium prior to its solemn definition by the extraordinary magisterium. And the Fathers of the Church were not gathering citations from the authentic teaching documents of every bishop dispersed throughout the world. They were citing the clear teaching of Scripture and the Tradition received from the apostles. (137-38)

And even for those passages in Scripture which are not sufficiently clear in themselves, says Kleutgen, the Council of Trent refers the faithful not to the explicit judgments of the Church but to “that meaning which she has always held and holds” and to “the unanimous interpretation of the Fathers,” or in other words, to the living tradition. (138)

As examples of dogmas never defined by explicit judgment but taught infallibly by the ordinary magisterium, Kleutgen includes: that Christians have the moral duty to love their neighbors; that pride is a sin and humility a virtue; that God is infinite according to His nature, that He is all good and all knowing, that He foresees the free actions of men; that He freely created and rules the world; that creatures not only receive their existence from Him, but are also held in being by Him; that His providence extends over everything; that the fallen angels are all damned; and that the souls in purgatory are unable to grow in virtue and merit. (139-40)

After this, several more bishops commented (more approvingly) on the text and expressed their understanding of the ordinary magisterium in various ways as consisting in the daily preaching, liturgical prayers, method of conducting and defining business in the episcopal courts, and in the Roman congregations; as being exercised under the authority of the hierarchy, through pastors and teachers, through bishops and parish priests, through the words of preachers, through orthodox theologians, through approved books, through liturgical books and catechisms, etc. (141)

Although this religious submission is normally due to the teaching of the authentic magisterium, it may legitimately be withheld in certain cases. To do so merely on the basis of one’s own private judgment would certainly be rash and dangerous, but assent must be withheld when the teaching in question openly conflicts with the public dogma or definitive doctrine of the Church. For in the case of conflicting obligations, precedence must always be given to the stricter obligation; and the obligation to give definitive assent to the irreformable doctrines of the infallible Church is a stricter obligation than the religious submission due to the non-infallible teaching of the authentic magisterium. (And it is not possible to assent simultaneously to contradictory propositions.) (146)

The Church is infallible. The Church is holy. The Church is guided by the Holy Spirit. But have you ever heard someone (or caught yourself) saying, “The Church” did or said something, when in fact it was the pope who did or said that thing? One of the common symptoms of hyperpapalism is a tendency to identify the pope with the Church, or to identify papal teaching with Church teaching as if the two were entirely synonymous.

Once you accept a total identification of the pope and the Church, you start expecting every pope to be a pure and holy pillar of truth in the same absolute sense. This kind of identification happens even at lower levels of the hierarchy. When your neighbor says that she has been hurt by “the Church,” what she really means is that she has been hurt by some member of the clergy. This false identification is especially tempting and problematic with the pope because he is the visible head of the Church on earth, and so he can in some cases speak and act for the Church—in persona Ecclesiae, as it were. But most of his acts do not fall in that category. (154-55)

But what exactly is this religious assent? It must correspond in nature to the kind of teaching to which it responds; that is, teaching which is authoritative but not infallible. Because it is authoritative, we owe it our assent; but because it is not infallible, this assent must be opinionative and conditional in nature. By opinionative, I mean that if a pope officially teaches something about faith or morals in a non-infallible way, then we are obliged to think that what he teaches is true (while still acknowledging that it could be false). This is typical of the way we express opinions: I think that the Detroit Tigers will not win the World Series this year (even though I know they could). This is a real assent—I really do think that the Tigers will not win and I have good reason for thinking that; but it is the kind of assent characteristic of opinions rather than certain knowledge.

The religious assent due to non-infallible papal teaching is also conditional. By that, I mean that the obligation holds only as long as it does not conflict with a higher obligation. This is typical of basic moral reasoning in any case where different obligations come into conflict with one another. The obligation to obey the speed limit, for example, might give way in certain cases to a higher obligation to get a dying person to the hospital in time to save his life. The obligation not to break into a neighbor’s house will give way to the higher obligation to save a life if someone is trapped inside when the house is on fire.

An even better example to illustrate the point under discussion is the way we teach the fourth commandment to children. We ordinarily express the obligation that children should obey their parents in an unqualified way, as St. Paul does to the Ephesians: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is just” (Eph 6:1); but this command is always understood to be conditional rather than absolute. It applies only on the condition that parents act within the scope of their authority under divine and natural law. Were a parent to command something contrary to a higher law (divine or natural), then the child’s obligation to obey his parent would cease in that case. For “we ought to obey God, rather than men,” as St. Peter says (Acts 5:29).

Similarly, we are obliged to accept the non-infallible teaching of our Holy Father only on the condition that he acts within the scope of his authority under divine law. If he were to teach something contrary to a higher law of belief, then the obligation to give religious assent to this teaching would yield to the stricter obligation binding the faithful to believe the word of God and hold fast to the infallible teaching of the Church. (157-58)

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It is well known that traditional Catholics typically do not pray the luminous mysteries with the holy rosary. Some denounce the introduction of these mysteries as yet another innovation promulgated to undermine the received tradition which Catholics should hold dear.

Various reasons are given for the traditionalist distrust of praying the luminous mysteries. The two most frequently heard are as follows. First, it seems impious to suggest that something given to a much-loved saint, namely Saint Dominic, bequeathed to him directly by our Lady amid a vision, can subsequently be improved upon by a pope. Second, the laity, as a part of their devotion to the rosary, have conjoined in their minds the 150 Aves of the 15 mysteries to the 150 Psalms, thereby intentionally offering their rosaries in union with the consecrated members of the Church who pray the divine office throughout the world, a pious practice undermined by the addition of another 50 Hail Marys.

It is worth examining these two objections in order to appreciate their importance. Traditionalists rightly feel that ancient and long-received devotions of the Church ought not to be tampered with on the whim of popes. Perhaps popes genuinely have the legal power to make such innovations—which is to say, perhaps the power to make changes to this or that devotion authentically belongs to their office—but it nonetheless may be immoral for them to do so. After all, it may belong to the pope to change the habit of this or that religious order, but that does not mean that any pope should do so unless there is something about the habit of this or that religious order that’s contrary to faith or morals.

Indeed, making any such changes may be itself damaging to faith or morals, especially given that the Church’s faithful are widely traumatised from ongoing innovations to their life of faith due to revolutions in liturgy, aesthetics, moral attitudes, and a host of other aspects on which the Church should have been in the business of conservation rather than rupture.

Perhaps the pope, for example, has the legal power to change the colour of the brown scapular to a fluorescent pink, but it does not follow that it would be morally right for him to do so, and in doing so he would certainly be executing something gravely injurious to the piety of the faithful—hence it would be manifestly unjust.

If there is a devotion, then, like the holy rosary, which tradition holds was given to a great saint amid a private revelation for the sanctification of the faithful, a devotion to which the faithful has since attached much importance, and on which their spiritual life largely depends, a pope should treat with extreme caution any suggestion that it be tampered with. Indeed, prudence would generally press him to leave it well alone.

The rosary has often been called the ‘psalter of the laity’ not because the lay faithful alone pray it, but because—as noted—it has long been part of their devotion intentionally to unite their recital of it to the prayers offered in religious houses throughout the world. This pious intention is rooted in a tradition that goes back to the origins of prayer beads among Christians.

It was a practice, even among the 3rd-century fathers and mothers of the Egyptian desert, to pray all the Psalms. Those monks who were illiterate, however, would instead say 150 prayers of “Lord have mercy”, or “Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”, or they would recite that number of Our Fathers. A millennium later, in the 12th and 13th centuries, crusader knights who struggled to combine their martial duties with praying the office, would pray 150 Pater nosters, in continuity with the ancient practice.

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William Shakespeare has kept alive the deeds of King Henry V for the English-speaking world, and it is gratifying to Catholics here that England’s Catholic past remains a source of national identity and pride. Shakespeare’ account is subject to the usual dramatic simplifications of his trade as a playwright, but he deserves credit for incorporating into his history plays anecdotes and even phrases directly from the chroniclers and other contemporary sources. Shakespeare really does give us a flavour of the late Middle Ages.

One such anecdote is the execution of Bardolf for robbing a church. It is a melancholy moment between the hard-won success of the capture of Harfleur and the battle of Agincourt. This short scene, in which the king confirms the sentence of death on a man who had been a drinking companion in his younger days, has greater significance than meets the eye: a significance not sufficiently brought out by commentators on the play or historians of the 1415 Agincourt campaign.

First, a little background. Bardolf had been one of Falstaff’s companions, and Falstaff had been Henry’s close friend before he became king. Falstaff is one of the most popular of Shakespeare’s creations, and is based on two historical figures. One is Sir John Oldcastle, who had been the young Prince Hal’s military advisor when he was fighting Owen Glendower (as Shakespeare calls him: Welsh speakers call him Owain Glyndŵr) in Wales. The other is Sir John Fastolf, who, confusingly, makes an appearance in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part I as a cowardly English captain in France. Under pressure from the censors, Shakespeare changed his character’s name from Oldcastle to Falstaff, and this is where it gets interesting.

Prince Hal’s youth, contrary to Shakespeare’s depiction, was not spent drinking in East Cheap outside London, but, from his early teens, waging a brutal, under-funded war against Glendower, who had created an independent Principality of Wales. He was assisted in this by an experienced soldier, Oldcastle, but despite this relationship Oldcastle later had a terrible fall from grace. Not only did he adopt the Lollard heresy, but he escaped from imprisonment in the Tower of London in 1413 to coordinate a Lollard uprising the following year. Henry, now king, had his old comrade executed.

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Last week, I began sharing excerpts from Chiron’s remarkable history of traditionalism. Let’s continue. Any of my commentary is in italics; the rest of the text is from Chiron, with page numbers in parentheses.

On two occasions, Dom Gérard [Calvet, founder of Le Barroux] made decisions that placed him afoul of canon law: on December 8, 1972, without the agreement of the Abbot of Tournay, on whom he still depended, he had the first brother of the community, Jehan de Belleville, who had joined him two years earlier, take religious vows; and on June 10, 1974, instead of appealing to the bishop of the diocese, he asked Archbishop Lefebvre to confer minor orders on the first brothers of the community. These two initiatives led to a rupture with the Archbishop of Avignon and with the Benedictine Order. Refusing to leave the nascent community to another superior, and refusing to adopt the new Mass, Dom Gérard was expelled from the Benedictine Order in 1975 and declared suspended a divinis. He remained closely linked to Archbishop Lefebvre until 1988, having his monks ordained by the Prelate of Écône. The growth of the community (eleven members at the beginning of 1977) necessitated the building of a new monastery, the site of which was Le Barroux, a dozen kilometers from Bédoin, in 1978. (218)

What one sees over and over again is a hatred of tradition like that of a defrocked priest who becomes an anticlericalist apostate or satanist or philanderer.

When the abbey [of En-Calcat] adopted the new Mass and a new monastic office, in French, Dom Hugues refused to submit to it. According to one of his friends, the historian Hervé Pinoteau, “his abbot wrote to him that he no longer had a place in the community and he himself replied that it was the abbot who was no longer there.”… it is attested that until the end of his life, in 2009, Dom Hugues Portes was able to remain “faithful to the individual celebration of the Mass in the Tridentine rite, faithful also to the celebration of the breviary, following St. Benedict.” He was not a marginal figure in his monastery, however, and continued to participate in the life of the community and to be the confessor of the nuns of the neighboring abbey of Dourgne, a position he held for thirty years. (222)

The changes in religious life paralleled the changes in liturgical life. (223)

Outrageous:

From 1965 onwards, the monastery [Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours in Couvrechef, near Caen] underwent many changes as a result of the aggiornamento of religious life and the application of the liturgical reform: introduction of the vernacular in the Divine Office from 1965, adoption of the new Ordo Missae from 1970, communion in the hand, and changes in the application of the Rule and Constitutions, notably the suppression of perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, a perpetual adoration which was one of the reasons for the congregation’s existence. …

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The successive changes that took place at Notre-Dame de Bonsecours, most often without the community being consulted, caused Mother Élisabeth a great deal of sorrow. They appeared to her not as natural developments, but as infidelities to the Rule and to the vows she had professed. …

Father de Bailliencourt argued that fidelity to God and to her vocation allowed her to leave her monastery without the permission of her superiors, and to continue her religious life in another community. On July 24, 1979, without informing anyone in her community, and seizing the opportunity provided by having to receive medical care on the outside, Mother Élisabeth “fled” her monastery and took refuge, at first, with her sister in Versailles. She was fifty-seven years old, and had been in consecrated life for almost thirty-four years. She stayed with her sister for almost a month. On August 1, in Paris, she met with Mother Gertrude de Maissin, and on August 21, she went to Bédoin to meet with Dom Gérard. She discovered a monastery faithful to the traditional observances, a young community, which at that time numbered sixteen monks. The next day, August 22, on the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, she attended Mass for the first time in the priory chapel and, almost ten years after being deprived of it, rediscovered the traditional Mass.

So beautiful—in the face of churchmen treating their charges so wretchedly.

And so, in the autumn of 1979, two traditional Benedictine communities were born, one in Lamairé, on the initiative of Mother Gertrude de Maissin, the other in Montfavet, on the initiative of Mother Élisabeth de La Londe. In both cases, the foundations were irregular with regard to canon law, founded by nuns who had broken away from their communities, and the bishops of the dioceses concerned soon issued warnings. Both communities, however, were to prosper. (225)

Concerning the Capuchins:

Concelebration became the rule, prayer in the conventual church disappeared almost everywhere. Here it’s opportune to remark that concelebration did more to undermine Catholic religious life for men than any other postconciliar innovation. The aggiornamento nearly destroyed religious life, and where it survived, it did so by clinging to whatever scraps and shreds of tradition it could. The more traditional, the healthier. (226)

At the end of 1969, when the new Mass began to take effect, the superior of the Merville community, Mother Thérese-Marie Coache, sister of Father Coache, refused to have it celebrated in their chapel. She also refused, in 1971, to allow the abbreviated French office, Prière du temps présent, to replace the Latin office, and the possibility for the nuns to wear lay clothes. That same year, with another religious, Mother Marie-Xavier, she left the Merville community. They found refuge in the Maison Lacordaire in Flavigny, which Father Coache had just acquired. In 1973, postulants presented themselves and Mother Thérese-Marie decided to restore their original congregation under the name of Little Sisters of Saint Francis and to write new constitutions. (229)

Pages 234–36 tell the harrowing tale of Mother Simoulin, foundress of one of several communities of traditional Dominican nuns (one of them has some 270 sisters in 23 houses, and nearly 3,000 students in 5 countries; while another has some 150 sisters running 12 schools in 3 countries). What noble souls! You can see how the Vatican under Pope Francis did exactly the same thing to traditional religious communities as was done to them back in the 1970s, acts of vicious tyranny: they were declared not Dominicans, not religious, mere laywomen. Of course, they carried on doing what they had solemnly vowed themselves to in the sight of the Lord.

But no matter how bad things get, the one thing that must never be done is… return to tradition!

The Jesuit Louis de Vaucelles, in an article devoted to the vocations crisis, recalled that “the episcopate firmly excludes the return to a type of preparation for the priesthood that is considered outdated” and “rejected the solution advocated by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in his seminary at Écône.” (245)

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Jean Madiran:

On October 27, 1972, he addressed a letter to Paul VI, which he would make public only several months later. The first words were a threefold plea: “Holy Father, give us back the Scriptures, the catechism, and the Mass.” Scripture is “now falsified by the mandatory versions that the new catechism and the new liturgy seek to impose,” the new official catechisms “no longer teach the three things needful for salvation,” while the new Mass has eclipsed the traditional Mass. He asked the pope to confirm “in their faith and in their just rights the priests and laity who, in spite of the foreign occupation of the Church by the party of apostasy, faithfully keep Holy Scripture, the Roman catechism, the Catholic Mass.” (247-48)

Bishop Adam of Écône, spewing forth the same line they’ve always been using:

The Mass of Paul VI is obligatory. . . . I cannot put up with the formation of a sect in the diocese. . . . All the history of the Church teaches us that true reformers . . . do not withdraw themselves from obedience. (250)

Lefebvre’s famous Declaration of 1974 contains this magnificent paragraph:

Without any rebellion, bitterness, or resentment we continue our work of priestly formation under the lodestar of the perennial magisterium of all time, convinced that we cannot render a greater service to the Holy Catholic Church, to the Sovereign Pontiff, and to future generations. (251)

The same garbage is hurled at traditional Catholics in 2026:

“You are against the Pope and the Council,” accused Cardinal Garrone, who also reproached him for teaching his seminarians to “rely on their personal judgment, on tradition as they understand it. This is free thinking, the worst kind of liberalism!” He also hurled at him: “You are forming a sect. Archbishop Lefebvre will be the pope of a new Church!” (253)

Lefebvre on March 19, 1975:

Know that if a Bishop breaks with Rome it will not be me. My Declaration says as much quite explicitly and strongly. . . . Liberalism has been condemned by the Church for a century and a half. It entered the Church thanks to the Council. The Church is dying from the practical effects of this liberalism. We must therefore do everything possible to help the Church and those who govern her to free themselves from this satanic grip. (254)

That very June 29, 1975, Paul VI addressed a long letter to Archbishop Lefebvre. It was not brought to Écône until July 8. The Pope gave specific pontifical approval to the “conclusions” reached by the Cardinal’s Commission, specifying: “We have personally ordered their immediate implementation.” Consequently, he asked Archbishop Lefebvre to make “a public act of submission.” It was in this letter that Paul VI reproached Archbishop Lefebvre for “daring to fight a Council such as the Second Vatican Council, which is no less authoritative, and in some respects even more important yet than that of Nicaea.” The formula scandalized some, because the Council of Nicaea, in 325, the first ecumenical council in the history of the Church, had been the one that had formulated the Creed. (257)

Chiron shows how energetically Card. Villot, a known Freemason, worked to have Lefebvre condemned and damaged. Lefebvre’s friends tried to persuade him to back down, to grovel before Paul VI. For example, Bp. Morilleau wrote to him something strikingly wrong—exactly not what would have persuaded him in any case:

They [to wit, your opinionated and passionate entourage] have gradually become your usual environment of life or relationships; their influence unwittingly has made you persist in attitudes that have become untenable today. This is not fidelity to Tradition. I am not going to tell you again that Tradition, founded on the Truth and guaranteed by the living Holy Father, is itself a living reality. In every field opinions, methods, habits, formulas risk becoming ossified. (260)

Then Morilleau brings in an exquisite ultramontanist flourish:

I can see no way out that is honorable for you, ‘edifying’ for all those who have placed their trust in you, salvific for the young men for whom you are responsible, outside of a total submission to the Holy Father, who is “Our Lord on earth.”

Paul VI himself directly criticized Lefebvre in an address to all the cardinals in Rome in May 24, 1976—a very unusual thing!—saying exactly what folks like Lofton or Likoudis say today:

Such people [as Lefebvre] diminish the Church’s authority under pretext of tradition; their obedience to that authority is merely lip-service. They draw the faithful away from the ties of obedience to the See of Peter as well as from their lawful bishops. They repudiate the authority of today in favor of that of another age. (261)

Paul VI also declared on that occasion: “Use of the new Ordo Missae is in no way left up to the choice of priests or people,” it was “promulgated in place of the old.” This was the line everyone had been saying, but when the committee of cardinals was called to study the question by John Paul II, they concluded that Paul VI had not, in fact, abrogated the old missal or absolutely mandated the new; and this was the basis of “Summorum Pontificum.”

This must be seen clearly: Lefebvre was the ultimate challenge to Paul VI’s pride in his modernizing project. He threatened his entire pontificate, indeed one may say his entire worldview. And Lefebvre’s success with both vocations and lay support at a time when both were drying up elsewhere indicated the ongoing vitality of the tradition at a time when everyone was supposed to believe it was “of another age,” “ossified,” and therefore could not be fruitful.

Referring to his meeting with Bishop Benelli, Archbishop Lefebvre also wrote the following to Dom Roy: “We are not here dealing with men of the Church…. The time has come to show that we do not belong to that Religion and to keep up the struggle.” (261)

263, in Lefebvre’s text from July 1976:

He twice states: “this conciliar Church is schismatic,” and again: “It is both schismatic and heretical. This conciliar Church is therefore not Catholic. Insofar as the Pope, the bishops, priests, and faithful adhere to this new Church, they separate themselves from the Catholic Church.”

In the Lille sermon [of August 1976], Archbishop Lefebvre also explained why he did not accept the canonical sanctions imposed on him by the Holy See:

I do not consider these penalties to be valid, whether canonically or theologically. In all sincerity, in all peace, in all serenity, I believe that I cannot accede to these suspensions, by these punishments with which I am struck, to the closure of my seminaries, to the refusal to perform ordinations, to the destruction of the Catholic Church. At the hour of my death, when Our Lord asks me: “What have you done with your episcopal and priestly grace?” I do not wish to have to hear from the mouth of the Lord: “You have contributed to the destruction of the Church along with the others.”

He also announced his determination to continue his work forming priests:

We shall have another twenty-five new recruits this year at the seminary in Écône… As you can see, despite the difficulties we face, the young people understand very well that we are forming true Catholic priests. That is why we are not in schism, we are the continuators of the Catholic Church. It is those who make novelties that are going into schism. As for us, we continue Tradition. (266)

Lefebvre in I Accuse the Council:

The spirit that dominated the Council and inspired so many ambiguous and equivocal and even frankly erroneous texts was not the Holy Spirit, but the spirit of the modern world, a liberal, Teilhardian, modernist spirit, opposed to the reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ. (268)

This said in 1977; how much has really changed, 50 years later?

“Traditionalists are upset and scandalized at seeing themselves rejected by the churches and the Church” and “the liturgical subversion.” (273)

February 1978:

On February 26, Archbishop Lefebvre gave a very long reply to the Congregation: over eighty pages. The response was a well-reasoned critique of the Council’s doctrine of religious liberty, of “liberal ecumenism,” and of the new liturgy, which he described as “equivocal, bastardized, and nauseating to true Catholics, even if it is sometimes valid.” (274)

Lefebvre in November 1979 (I think):

I have never celebrated the new Mass according to the rite introduced in November 1969; I have always considered it dangerous and poisoned by a false ecumenism. (281)

He affirmed, with regard to the celebrations of the new Mass that “[m]ost of these Masses are sacrilegious and they pervert the faith by diminishing it,” but he refused to consider invalid all Masses celebrated according to the new rite, “as long as the essential conditions for validity exist, that is to say, the matter, the form, the intention, and a validly ordained priest.” (282)

Regarding the Pope and his authority, even though he said that Paul VI had contributed to the “awful demolition of the Church” by many of his acts and words, he “acted much more as a liberal than as an adherent of heresy. For as soon as the risk he was taking was pointed out to him, he made the text contradictory by adding a formula contrary to what was stated in the wording, or by writing an equivocal formula, which is the characteristic of liberals who are inconsistent by nature.”

Archbishop Lefebvre rejected the thesis of what some would soon call “the Church in eclipse,” as he felt that “the question of the Church’s visibility is too necessary to its existence for God to omit it for decades,” and he stated: “Far from refusing to pray for the Pope, we redouble our prayers and supplications that the Holy Spirit may give him light and strength in the affirmation and defense of the faith.” (283)

Dom Gerard Calvet:

The “Ultras” mistake failure in the exercise of the papacy for vacancy of the Apostolic See. They equate “bad pope” with “nonpope”; “resistance to the pope” with “rejection of the pope.” This imprudent upping of the ante has ever been a temptation throughout history among “right-wing schismatics,” those who push the requirement of purity to the extreme (Donatists, Jansenists, Old Catholics). (285)

Madiran in 1980 (!):

The longer we wait, the deeper the wounds to the Church will be, and the more advanced the unravelling of the Catholic fabric. Undoubtedly, there will remain many pending questions: but they will begin to be usefully dealt with from the moment when the nullity of the prohibitions against the Mass, against the catechism, against the person of Archbishop Lefebvre, and against the priests he formed and ordained in view of a new springtime of the Church is acknowledged. (287)

All the way back in 1982, here’s what Ratzinger was thinking. How long it took for “Summorum Pontificum”… 1982–2007, or 25 years!

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On November 16, 1982, Cardinal Ratzinger, four other cardinals, and a Curia bishop met to discuss the question of the Mass, independently of the “Lefebvre question,” although it was on everyone’s mind all the same. The participants were unanimous in their view that “the Roman Missal in the form in which it was used until 1969 must be granted throughout the Church by the Holy See,” so long as the Mass of Paul VI was not considered suspect of “heresy or invalidity” and that the new liturgical calendar was followed. A papal document was to recall “the essence of the sacred liturgy,” denounce “the widespread abuses,” and expose “the intimate identity of the old and new missals, of the ordinary form and of the permissible form, which are in no way opposed.” And in the future it would be necessary to envisage a “synthesis of the two missals which preserves the achievements of the liturgical restoration, but which abandons certain exaggerated innovations.” (297)

Madiran’s reaction to “Quattuor Abhunc Anno”:

“The traditional Mass is no longer forbidden outright; this is progress, or rather a slightly lesser evil.” Nevertheless, he expressed his dissatisfaction: “It remains, however, a suspect Mass, subject to prior authorization; this is an enormous and senseless scandal.” (302)

Lefebvre in November 1983:

The problem of the situation of the faithful and the present papacy renders obsolete the difficulties of jurisdiction, disobedience, and apostolicity. These notions presuppose a Pope who is Catholic in his faith and in his government. (309)

Lefebvre, August 29, 1987:

“Since the Chair of Peter and the positions of authority in Rome are occupied by antichrists, the destruction of Our Lord’s Reign is proceeding apace within his Mystical Body here below, especially through the corruption of the Holy Mass”; consequently there was an “absolute necessity” to ensure the perpetuation of the priesthood by bishops: “As this modernist and liberal Rome continues its work of destroying the Kingdom of Our Lord, as evidenced by Assisi and the confirmation of Vatican II’s liberal theses on religious freedom, I find myself compelled by Divine Providence to pass on the grace of the Catholic episcopate which I have received, so that the Church and the Catholic priesthood may continue to subsist for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.” (317)

“The official link with modernist Rome is nothing in comparison with the preservation of the Faith.” (322)

Madiran refused to express a definitive view—this is how I am too:

Jean Madiran, one of the most trusted voices in traditionalism at the time, was unwilling to take a public stand for or against the consecrations before the event. In the newspaper Présent, he published press releases and statements both from those in favor of the consecrations and from those opposed. This was not a refusal to choose, but a more general view of the situation. He did not want “the whole religious problem to be reduced to [this] single question. . . .The decisive question remains that of the Mass, the catechism, the traditional version and interpretation of Scripture.”

Yet his personal view was this (from his diary, June 29, 1988):

We’ve been given demonstrations that, in extraordinary cases, bishops can be consecrated without a papal mandate. But it is not the simple absence of a mandate that is at issue. I fail to see where it has been demonstrated that it is not forbidden to consecrate bishops against the expressly manifested formal will of the Pope. Or at least, I don’t see how such a demonstration could avoid postulating or implying sedevacantism. (324)

Lefebvre citing Quito:

Our Lady prophesied that during the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth, errors would spread more and more strongly in the Holy Church, and that they would lead to catastrophe, corrupt morals, and the disappearance of the faith. This is something we cannot fail to notice. And I apologize for continuing the account of this apparition, but it speaks of a prelate who will absolutely oppose this wave of apostasy and impiety by preserving the priesthood, by making good priests. . . . I was stunned myself when I read these lines, I can’t deny them, it’s recorded in the apparition archives. (325)

What a bizarre formulation!:

They were assured by Cardinal Ratzinger that “the Pope’s will is to give a place in the holy Church to those who are attached to the spiritual tradition.” (327)

Bp. Garnier of Luçon in 1992 explained why he didn’t want to implement “Ecclesia Dei” of 1988:

Can you imagine us bishops managing what is known as biritualism? . . .We bishops are doing everything we can not to have to deal with bi-ritualism some day. In other words, if we were to accept, if we were to say yes to the application of the indult, to the Motu proprio, it would really only be in one or two chapels per diocese, with priests appointed by the bishop, of course, for a certain number of Sundays in the year, but not necessarily all of them, so that those who take advantage of these assemblies according to the old ritual, from time to time, also come and celebrate the Eucharist according to the new one, and thus manifest, in reality, and not just in words, their attachment to the Council and to the Church. (330)

Think of Bergoglio and Roche!:

In 1992, for example, Bishop Raffin of Metz considered the motu proprio Ecclesia Dei to be “a merciful parenthesis for people who must gradually come to terms with Paul VI’s Ordo Missae, for there can be no question of turning the Tridentine Missal into a new Latin rite like those that have existed and still exist.” (334)

Dom Robert le Gall, abbot of Kergonan wrote off Msgr. Klaus Gamber’s book:

His whole book amounts to a collection of little historical quibbles designed to justify a kind of allergy to what he irreverently calls the “ritus modernus.” (334)

Note how Madiran welcomed John Paul II’s “Veritatis Splendor”:

At last, the word we’ve been waiting for— or rather which, discouraged as we were, we were no longer expecting. . . . Nothing presaged that the announced encyclical “on morals” would be this strong, this radiant, this total: it is an encyclical on the law of God and the human call to life eternal. (338)

Archbp. Re in 1993 (!):

He asserted that the new Mass should remain the “general law,” while “the use of the previous rite is currently a matter of privilege which must remain an exception.” (340)

In his assessment, journalist Michel De Jaeghere, who for the previous three years had directed the summer universities of Renaissance catholique (close to the SSPX), considered that the tenth anniversary of the motu proprio could not be celebrated with joy because it was also the tenth anniversary of the condemnation of Archbishop Lefebvre. He noted that the July 1988 excommunication had struck first and foremost the bishop who, for twenty years, embodied the defense of the Tridentine Mass and the Catholic priesthood, a bishop to whom a large number of the priests who today benefit from the faculties of the motu proprio owe their formation, their vocation perhaps, their ordination in any case; that without his resistance, obstinacy, and repeated disobedience, there would be no Society of Saint Pius X, no Fraternity of Saint Peter, no monastery at Le Barroux, no Chartres pilgrimage. (345)

The controversy over the legitimacy of celebrating the Mass of Paul VI, even occasionally, continued to divide traditionalists, particularly the Fraternity of St. Peter. (348)

Bp. Fellay:

In his homily, the Superior General of the SSPX issued two pleas to the Pope: “Do justice to the Mass. Not to us— who are we? But to the Mass, give it back its rights, give the Church’s tradition back its rights, for it has rights.” (351)

Two days later, on January 18, 2002, the return of SSJV members to full communion in the Church took place during a ceremony at the cathedral in the presence of Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos. Bishop Rangel signed, on behalf of all the members of the Union, a doctrinal declaration on the acceptance of the Second Vatican Council “in the light of Holy Tradition” and the validity of the new Ordo Missae “whenever it is celebrated correctly and with the intention of offering the true Sacrifice of the Holy Mass.” On the same day, a decree from the Congregation for Bishops established the SSJV as a personal Apostolic Administration. The decree specified that “faculty is granted to the Apostolic Administration to celebrate the Holy Eucharist, the other sacraments, the Liturgy of the Hours, and other liturgical actions according to the Roman Rite and the liturgical discipline of Saint Pius V.” (355)

Liturgically speaking, the final years of John Paul II’s pontificate were marked by a major ceremony that vividly reaffirmed the “right of citizenship” of the traditional rite. On May 24, 2003, Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos celebrated a solemn Mass in the rite of St. Pius V at the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, in the presence of five cardinals and several prelates of the Curia. … The choice of date is also a coincidence, or a deliberate sign: this solemn reaffirmation of the traditional Mass took place exactly twenty-seven years after Paul VI’s famous address to the Consistory on May 24, 1976, in which he declared that the novus ordo was obligatory and “promulgated in place of the old.” (356)

What an effeminate primadonna!—as if anyone was forcing them at gunpoint to give up the NOM:

The day after the motu proprio was published, Mgr Luca Brandolini, bishop of Sora-Aquinio Pontecorvo, a member of the Liturgical Commission of the Italian Episcopal Conference and a former collaborator of Archbishop Bugnini, declared:

Today is a day of mourning for me. My throat is in knots and I can’t hold back the tears. But I’ll obey the Pope because I’m a bishop and because I like him. But I can’t hide my sadness at the collapse of one of the most important reforms of the Second Vatican Council. . . .This is the saddest moment of my life as a priest, a bishop, and a man. It is a day of mourning, not only for me, but for all those who lived and worked for the Second Vatican Council. Today, a reform has been wiped out for which so many worked, at great sacrifice, driven only by the desire to renew the Church. (363-64)

Behold: the Super-Dogma!

In concise terms, the CEF expressed its expectations and caution: “Under no circumstances will the Council be negotiable. No ecclesial group can substitute itself for the Magisterium.” (367)

Among the things against which Bp. Fellay objected to Card. Levada early in 2012 was the following:

• the soundness of the Novus Ordo Missae, which, irrespective of its validity and the liceity of its promulgation, presents deficiencies harmful to divine worship. (370)

Unless I missed it, Chiron never points out that the SSPX disputed the validity of the excommunications on canonical and theological grounds—an unusual lacuna in an otherwise detailed history.

The SSPX also justified its position by recourse to canon law (both old and new), which provides for extraordinary cases in which a marriage cannot, “without grave inconvenience,” be celebrated before a priest with faculties. Here, the “inconvenience” is, in ordinary parishes, both the pastoral preparation prior to the reception of the sacrament, the marriage Mass according to the new rite, and the preaching during the ceremony. … In fact, the Pope [Francis] asked the bishops to “guarantee the legal security of marriages contracted within the framework of the SSPX, so as to appease consciences”: to grant delegations to celebrate marriages and to register celebrations in Catholic registers. (381)

“The Church is a world,” as Émile Poulat used to say, a diverse and changing world. He also pointed out, in reference to Msgr Ducaud-Bourget, that his “life and mystical faith . . . a traditional faith” became, “without changing one iota, traditionalist through the simple course of history and of the Church.”10 It was historical change, particularly change in the Church, that made of him a “traditionalist.” In a word, traditionalism might be defined as a reaction and a will to transmit the faith. (398)

Between Rome and Rebellion: A History of Catholic Traditionalism with Special Attention to France is publised by Angelico Press. You can obtain it from the publisher or from Amazon.

The 31^st of July is the dies natalis or heavenly birthday of one of the greatest priests and religious founders of Church history, Ignacio de Loyola, who died on this day in 1556 and was canonized in 1622. St. Ignatius is famous, of course, for having established the Society of Jesus (S.J.) or Jesuits. This order has given the Church many of her most daring and successful missionaries to the most far-flung corners of the earth. St. Francis Xavier comes to mind, who during his journeys baptized an estimated 30,000 converts, driven by the love of God and anxiety for the eternal loss of all who die outside of the Church.

A magnificent painting by the Flemish artist and devout Catholic Peter-Paul Rubens (1577–1640), painted right around the time of the saint’s canonization, vividly captures many of the qualities of Ignatius that made him and his order great.

He is shown looking up to heaven in prayerful meditation, awaiting the light of God’s will, the guidance and strength of the Holy Spirit. This no doubt is a reference to the Spiritual Exercises in which Ignatius, on the basis of his own profound spiritual life and his experience in directing others, formulated certain rules by which Christians could distinguish between the voice of God and the contrary voices of the world, the flesh, and the devil—a crucial tool for a world tempest-tossed by the Protestant Revolt, against which the Jesuits campaigned with a fervor that culminated in the astonishing fortitude of the host of Jesuit martyrs of Elizabethan England.

Rubens depicts the face of the saint as calm and resolute, determined to do what God wills, as He wills it, when He wills it. There is neither the agitated haste of one who rushes ahead into trouble with a false zeal, or the pusillanimous hesitancy that doubts, second-guesses, or shrinks in fear of pain and difficulty. With the spirit of Christian chivalry he is ready to take up arms against a sea of troubles.

He has drunk in peace from its very source—“in His will is our peace,” as Dante sang—and therefore can radiate it to others, attracting them to follow him in the friendship, the society, of Jesus. We can also detect, thanks to the subtle brush of Rubens, a combination of remorse for his own sins and lamentation of the sorry state of others, especially heretics, schismatics, infidels, and pagans, for whose conversion he and his faithful spiritual sons will exhaust themselves.

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When people hear that I lived for twelve years in the wild, wonderful state of Wyoming—the seventh largest in the USA, but the least populated—they assume that I must have been a wood-chopping, mountain-climbing, horse-riding, trout-fishing, backpacking kind of fellow.

The reality was, I did sometimes chop some wood, although we stopped heating with wood when a chimney fire nearly burned down our house; and I did ride horseback sometimes, though that began way back in grad school, when I was living in Virginia; and I liked being outside in the town of Lander. And as a kid, in Boy Scouts, I went on a lot of camping trips. But climbing mountains, backpacking, and fishing were foreign activities to me, and so busy was I with teaching, reading, grading papers, faculty meetings, choir practices, and the whole usual run of life, that I can’t say it looked like I’d ever take a crack at them.

But one year it was suggested that the faculty, for their own development and to better understand the students at Wyoming Catholic College, should go on a backpacking trip similar to the one taken by freshmen as their orientation. Now, that trip is three weeks of backpacking, with two re-rations, while the faculty trip would be a modest twelve days (in the end, it turned out to be eleven because we did the hiking planned for the last three days in two days’ time); and yet, we would hike over a boulder field, past mountain lakes, over a steep pass, into the Cirque of the Towers, over a different pass, then climb Wind River Peak, and finally exit at Bruce’s Bridge near Lander. In other words, very demanding.

The planner and leader of the trip would be Dr. Thomas Zimmer, head of outdoor education at Wyoming Catholic College. Since just about all the faculty were a few pounds overweight, we jokingly called our expedition “Slimmer with Zimmer.”

I signed up for it, and boy, am I glad I did. It was, physically, the hardest thing I had ever done up to that point in my life, and the first few days were pretty awful, but eventually we got into our stride, and by the end we were sailing along the trails like pros. (It didn’t hurt that our packs were getting lighter by the day.) The penultimate day, when we summited the mountain, was the hardest thing I had to do on that trip, and I felt like quitting over and over, but positive peer pressure is a wonderful thing; you don’t want to flake out when you’re with other men, and you encourage one another to keep going.

One highlight of our trip was that a priest of the Fraternity of St. Peter, the late and much-missed Fr. Dennis Gordon, accompanied us as our chaplain for about a week’s time (he had to peel off to join a group of WCC students towards the end as their chaplain).

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I would say that I have been a traditionalist, in thought and feeling, for a lot longer than I have used that specific term to characterize the movement to which I belong. Now, there are some who object to the term in principle, but I think we can use it in a pragmatic way; after all, language is meant to be useful, and having a term that refers to people who strive to adhere to Catholic tradition in theology, morality, and liturgy is useful. (I wrote about this matter here.)

But one thing I’ve noticed is that very few traditionalists know their own history well.

This, I think, is a problem—especially for people who are involved in conversations, whether online or in person, and all the more if they are going to produce podcasts or in any other way set themselves up as public spokesmen for the cause of tradition.

Why is it a problem?

Well, think about what it would be like for someone to be a spokesman on the USA without knowing American history extremely well, or on World War II without knowing the battles and negotiations backwards and forwards. Just being a Catholic, while it gets you very far in regard to the basics of salvation, does not automatically qualify you to set up as a Catholic apologist; and just attending the traditional Latin Mass does not suddenly qualify you to defend it or to interpret the many complex issues that arise in its ambit.

Over the years I have seen some very embarrassing “TLM apologetics” in which the arguments were so severely flawed that anyone who knew their liturgical history well would instantly walk away, more convinced of his anti-trad views than ever. Similarly, social media encourages people to feel confident about sharing every thought that pops into their heads on the SSPX or the Ecclesia Dei period or Bugnini or whatever, but in 9 out of 10 cases they are ill-prepared to address these topics.

I say these things not to discourage anyone from being involved in the melee, but rather, to encourage readers to remember that opinions and arguments will be taken all the more seriously when they proceed from a certain breadth and depth of knowledge — and, therefore, that we owe it to ourselves and to our fellow Catholics to take pains to acquire this knowledge by means of at least some study every day.

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All that by way of an introduction to this week’s and next week’s Professor’s Bookshelf. We will look at excerpts from Yves Chiron’s marvelous book Between Rome and Rebellion: A History of Catholic Traditionalism with Special Attention to France (Angelico Press, 2024), which is a must-read for those who want a close-up study of where and how the traditionalist movement started, and what are the major traits it has shown over the decades.

Chiron effectively conveys the immense drama of the period immediately after the Council, which was, in a lot of ways, far more rumbustious and scandalous than most of what we’ve had to experience in recent decades. Even during the Francis pontificate, as awful as it was, there was always a pretty substantial conservative and traditional counterforce, whereas reading about the late 1960s and 1970s one has the impression that just about everybody in the Church had lost their minds or their bearings.

Breathlessly moving from one upheaval to the next, Chiron sheds light on how things became as bad as they did, inspiring the reader with stories of the notable lay and clerical heroes who entered the fray and fought the good fight, in spite of being constantly harassed and accused of “disobedience” (not much has changed in that playbook). Chiron documents the vitality of the traditional groups at a time when everything seemed to be falling apart—and documents the violent rage of the Establishment against them.

Between Rome and Rebellion covers a vast amount of information that every traditionalist activist, writer, or speaker should know. In particular, if you want to understand why Lefebvre did what he did, and why the SSPX exists, there is no better resource.

I shall split these excerpts in two parts. Enjoy! As usual, the page number is given in parentheses. Any editorial remarks by me are placed in italics.

[All plain text is from Chiron; italics are my comments. PAK]

Ultramontanist origins

In establishing the intellectual genealogy of twentieth-century traditionalism, one finds that it is the direct descendant of intransigent Catholicism. It was born in opposition to the French Revolution. This is what Émile Poulat calls the “Catholic Counter-Revolution.” (1)

Initially, it was over-the-top ultramontanist:

“We are integral Roman Catholics,” reads the statement of purpose of La Vigie [a weekly that began in 1912],

that is to say, we place above everything and everyone not only the traditional teaching of the Church in the order of absolute truths, but also the directions of the pope in the order of practical contingencies. The Church and the Pope are one and the same. Ubi Petrus ibi ecclesia [Where Peter is, there is the Church].

Benedict XV defined the modernist “spirit” as a search for “novelties” at all costs “in the way in which they carry out religious functions, in the ruling of Catholic institutions, and even in private exercises of piety.” (7)

Quoting Veuillot:

I believe that since the world cannot live without authority, it will come to seek authority at its source here below, which is the Holy See. . . . [t]o establish order, it will be necessary to begin with a solemn affirmation of the rights of the Papacy, which are the rights of God. (17)

So ironic!

In his June 19, 1913 Declaration mentioned above, Archbishop Benigni established the equivalence between “integral Catholicism” and “Romanity.” He affirmed that “integral Catholics” are “Catholics who want to be entirely, integrally Roman, faithful to the Holy See and to its directions in individual and social life.” He specified: “In the face of the minimization of Roman Catholicism attempted by liberal Catholics, modernizers, etc., they affirm the integrity of their Romanism. That is all.” When the appellation “integral Catholics” was prohibited by Benedict XV, “Romanity” remained more than ever a characteristic claimed by anti-liberals and anti-modernists. In doing so, they were in full agreement with the popes. (18)

The rise of progressivism

The crisis in the Church did not begin with the Second Vatican Council. In France, it began at the Liberation [from German occupation], in an unprecedented historical context in which the end of the war marked in all areas (political, international, economic, cultural, including religious) the end of one world and the advent of another. “A transitional age,” Cardinal Suhard, Archbishop of Paris, would soon say, in Essor ou déclin de l’Église. … There is, he wrote, a “Church divided” between a “progressive mysticism” that pleads for “adaptation” and an “intransigence” that refuses “accommodations” and “compromises” and wants “an integral return to traditional forms.” (27)

As soon as the country was liberated, French Catholicism entered into “effervescence.” It was Cardinal Gerlier, Archbishop of Lyon, who used the word a few years later, describing “a kind of intellectual effervescence” which, “for some time now, has been troubling some souls” and “certain audacities of thought [that] were flying thick and fast.” (33)

Early liturgical experiments

This was happening in the 1930s!:

The effervescence was not limited to theology; it was also liturgical. The Liturgical Movement, born in 1909 in Belgian and German Benedictine abbeys, had spread to France in the 1920s and 1930s. At the same time, certain liturgical innovations began to spread. The practice of the “dialogue Mass” was approved under specific circumstances by the Congregation for Rites in 1935: when the priest celebrated a low Mass, the faithful might say the servers’ responses as well as the Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. Other innovations spread at the end of the 1930s and during the war. At the Cité des Jeunes, a large sponsorship center he had founded in Jouy-en-Morin for children and adolescents from Parisian parishes, the Marist Father Fillère instituted “living” Masses: the priest celebrated facing the congregation arranged in a semicircle, the hymns were in French, and the kiss of peace was exchanged among the participants. (34)

In addition to these innovations and experiments in France, there were those of the four thousand or so priests, religious, and seminarians who were prisoners or deportees to Germany. In the camps, where religious celebrations were never forbidden, various “pastoral liturgical experiments,” as one stalag chaplain put it, were put into practice and lived. They transgressed certain liturgical norms in force at the time, and introduced new practices. When they returned from the camps, these thousands of priests, religious, and seminarians did not forget what they had experienced and practiced, and some of them wanted to introduce these new practices in their parishes or convents. (35)

The CPL [Centre de pastorale liturgique], through its sessions, conferences, and publications, carried out “activities of research, information, experience, and liturgical propaganda,” to use the formula of Father Dubarle, then director of Éditions du Cerf. It was a “great laboratory of new ideas.” The CPL encouraged, guided, and inspired the liturgical innovations and experiments that multiplied in certain parishes and communities up until the Council, all the while trying to temper the impatience and imprudence of the most daring. (35)

New alliances against “intransigents”

Georges Hourdin [editor of La Vie catholique illustrée, which began in 1945] said: “This trimmed-down faith, this insertion of Christians into the modern world as it was, prefigured the decisions of the Second Vatican Council; we were laying the groundwork for it in a completely disinterested way, since we did not even imagine that it could ever take place.” (39)

They [various new postwar publications] all shared “the same conviction that to give in to anti-communism would be to cut oneself off from the working class, the masses, in a word the people.” (40)

This earned the movement the approval of Emmanuel Mounier in Esprit: “It cannot be said that being Christian necessarily excludes any defined, lucid collaboration with the communists.” (41)

Card. Suhard in a 1947 pastoral letter used the terms “integrism” and “progressivism” for the first time in an official church document. He described the integrists as follows: “Against aggressively militant atheism they oppose a defensive dogmatism. . . .The Church [in this view] is not behind the times. It is man who is sinning and losing his reason.” He rejected this view as a “rupture” with the modern world. (48)

It can be said that in the 1940s and until the early 1960s there was a kind of tacit triple alliance between the Holy Office, certain professors of the pontifical universities, and various French Catholic publications with a view to denounce what appeared to them as theological deviations, and to defend the faith against threats. (55)

A few months later, in September 1952, Pierre Lemaire devoted a special issue of Paternité to the infiltration of Catholic circles by communist ideas. It contained an alarming account of how communist ideology was being imposed in the seminaries that remained open in China, and an article devoted to the “Marxist impregnation in France.” (67)

In September [1953], Father Congar published an article on the future of priest-workers in which he used a formula that was to become famous: “You can condemn a solution if it is faulty; you cannot condemn a problem.” (69)

Father Fessard, who was always a lucid and profound analyst, noted its persistence and explained it [in 1960]: “Poverty, justice, and the direction of history: so many ambiguous words through which the Marxist poison has crept in.” (70)

In the cases of both Pierre Lemaire and Jean Ousset, these first episcopal warnings or prohibitions occurred while other bishops, in private and in public, had given them support and encouragement. This support continued, which shows a division in the episcopate or, at least, attests to the freedom of the bishops at a time when Episcopal Conferences and their unwieldy structures did not yet exist. (70)

Jean Madiran in 1954. The same could be said of liturgical propaganda:

The worker-priests are “morally prisoners of the diabolical communist phantasmagoria. Therein lies the essence of this horrible drama: they are in the state of men who have gone through a long hallucination and who are unable to shake it off.” (77)

New lay apostles enter the fray

Bishop Lusseau complaining about a new “progressive catechism” circulating in France: He did not question the good intentions of the propagators of the new catechetical methods, but he pointed out a number of silences or insufficiencies on original sin, the mystery of the Trinity, the Incarnation of God, the Real Presence in the Eucharist, etc. […]

Indeed, it is not possible for intelligences whose initiation from a young age to the truths of the revealed Faith is incomplete not to find themselves forever deprived of the deep convictions that make up the Christian life. (85)

Archbishop Marmottin of Reims was much warmer, and encouraged Pierre Lemaire to continue his fight [1957]: “I admire your courage and your ever ardent zeal, as well as your holy wrath against so many errors and deviations. You know that I share your ideas; but I cannot go to war as you do.” (86)

Pierre Lemaire considered leaving Angers at that time, where he was now persona non grata with the bishop. He did not leave the city until two years later, when he had found a suitable place to continue his activities: it was Saint-Céneré, in Mayenne, where he set up a printing house and published books, brochures, and reviews. For the time being, he did not decide to retire from all lay apostolate— he was not yet fifty-five years old— and he did not give up publishing, distributing, and fighting. (89)

In 1958, Lemaire launched a new periodical called Défense du foyer. In his first editorial he wrote of it:

It appears at a serious moment: because we have denied the Author of all good, all authority is disappearing. The evil is so great that our overseas empire is collapsing. . . .Our sons are fighting in Algeria, but it is in France that the real problems arise. The impotent State no longer defends essential values. It is sinking into anarchy and corruption. We, fathers, have the obligation— it is a matter of life and death— to restore order, first at home, and then in the city. (89)

Multiplying quotations from the teachings of Leo XIII and St. Pius X, the text concluded that in a political constitution “abstract notions, enchanting and flattering as they may be, are more prone to equivocation and error than are concrete realities such as God, family, country, and work on which any balanced society rests.” (91)

Sixties-ism

Mentalities, too, were undergoing significant changes, especially in the West. The Western world was embarking on what Canadian sociologist Louis Rade has called “Sixties-ism.” He defines it as “an ideology of modernity that reached its peak in the 1960s and continued until the mid-1970s. It is characterized by individualism, a more or less radical rejection of authority, the refusal of duty, the demand for rights, youthism, consumerism and, at the same time, the contestation of this consumerism.” This “1960s” state of mind had become widespread before the Council met, and the bishops gathered in Council could not ignore it. It can be said that many of them, without approving it, did not want to contradict it head-on.

From a strictly religious point of view, in the still predominantly Catholic countries of Europe and in North America, secularization of society and education, as well as other factors, had led to an ever-decreasing number of regular Massgoers. In 1962, the year the Council opened, in Austria only one-third of Catholics attended Mass regularly; in France, the proportion was between 27 and 28%.5 The de-Christianization of the Church goes back before the Council. John XXIII and a majority of the Council Fathers wanted to confront it with a new method and a new language. (110)

One can sympathize, in a way: they thought they might reverse this. But everything done by Vatican II and afterwards only accelerated the decline, adding fuel to the fire of secularization.

Thus, on October 23, 1964, in his intervention in the aula, the exiled Archbishop Yu-Pin of Nanking was indignant:

The schema on the Church and the modern world has an inexplicable omission: it says nothing about communism. But even if one wants to ignore the political-economic aspects of the system, it is not possible to ignore its ideology, which has the most serious consequences for the whole of life in the world. Communism dominates almost half of humanity and threatens the other half. It is the gravest danger in the modern world. (125)

Ignored then, ignored now. (Think of Cardinal Zen.)

Tough times call for tough men

On June 4, 1964, Promotion du laïcat sent an open letter to all the bishops of France, in which it gave the following warning:

Our action will continue to grow; it is not for us to reveal our plans; we will act —when necessary —where necessary —for as long as necessary. Such is the price of protecting our homes. Promotion of the Laity will not disarm until the progressives and crypto-communists who are ensconced at the head of Catholic organizations and media outlets have been kicked out by our Higher Clergy. (131)

Now THAT’s the spirit!

Father Coache, a simple country priest who until then had been unknown, began to make his voice heard and soon attracted the media’s attention. Ordained a priest in 1943 and pastor of various rural parishes in the Oise region, he had been concerned since the beginning of the 1950s about a growing independence among certain priests and religious “with regard to discipline, morality, and liturgy.” He noted at that time a “degradation of the Faith” which, he said, “always happened under the pretext of clarification or better expression, of adaptation or charity.”…

After the end of the third session of the Council he was concerned about what he was observing in many churches and what the press was reporting, and at Christmas 1964 he published at his own expense the Lettre d’un curé de campagne à ses confrères (“Letter from a country priest to his confreres,” 32 pages). He wanted to alert them to the

real tidal wave that is breaking on the various beaches of our Roman Church. In a great number of religious and ecclesiastical circles, there is a desire to shake the authority of the Church, to make a world religion for a world that must be pleased at all costs. . . .The authority and principles of the Church are being undermined under the silly pretext of abolishing triumphalism or clericalism . . . disobedience is taking hold, evil is no longer denounced; attitudes, virtues, and prayers that correspond to the most authentic Christian principles are condemned as rigorism, pharisaism or narrowness. (132)

You see how little has changed? The last sentence perfectly sums up what the anti-trads are still saying today.

Lefebvre begins to make waves

Without going into the details of all the debates, it should be noted that Archbishop Lefebvre, who had already intervened several times on religious liberty during the previous sessions, spoke twice on this theme during the fourth session: on September 9 and 15, 1965. According to him, and to many of the Fathers of the CIP or allied to them, the schema on religious liberty was based on an erroneous definition of liberty as immunity; in reality, “liberty is good and true insofar as it is regulated by the truth.” Without the will to do good, there is no dignity of the person, and under the pretext of respecting consciences, one must not give rights to error. At most, error can be tolerated if its repression would cause a greater evil. (136-37)

[Father Coache] protested against the “abomination of the catechetical sheets” in use before the expected publication of a new catechism, and the arbitrary liturgical innovations by which “an entire clergy is causing us to slide into heresy and abomination.”

And, predictably, this protest met with a chilly reception among bishops:

Coadjutor Archbishop Pierre Veuillot of Paris wrote to Archbishop Marty of Rheims (at the time): “Once again I ask myself the same question: can we remain mute in the face of a generalized and passionate attack on all the efforts at renewal in the Church?”

Soon thereafter, the episcopate issued this statement:

“The duty of Catholics is clear. They must filially receive and implement these teachings and decisions [of Vatican II]. However, a minority, with ever more assertive boldness, is challenging, in the name of fidelity to the past, the principles of the renewal now under way.” (139-140)

In 1965, Fr. Georges de Nante already predicted exactly what would come to pass with Pope Francis:

The Council and the Pope were aiming at making the Catholic Church abandon “its former title” and “replace it with the far more evocative acronym: MASDU (Movement of Spiritual Animation of Universal Democracy). A decatholicized Christianity, the friend of men!” (142)

One sees revving up the whole “enforced optimism” machine that has been such a feature of postconciliar life. The French bishops wrote to the Vatican in 1966 that “shadows must not make us forget the light projected by the Council on the life of our dioceses. The symptoms of vitality are many and comforting, both among the clergy and among the laity.” (146)

Catechism crisis flares up

A new catechism was to be released in 1966. Le Monde noted “significant changes”:

The Precepts of the Church have purely and simply vanished. Mortal sin too, which so traumatized young children, has vanished. . . . Venial sin goes unmentioned. There is no definition of Original Sin. The very names of the devil, or demon, and evil spirits are not even mentioned. The famous “guardian angels” of so many generations’ lullabies no longer figure in this “obligatory fund.” All mention of hell has vanished, as well as its definition as a place of torment, of suffering, and of fire. All that is specified is that “those who refuse to love God to the end would not be able to live with God.” (150)

Madiran, in response, republished the catechism of Pius X and the catechism of Trent, and observed:

“Lay people must, today, vicariously provide the faithful with the Roman catechism that no one provides any more…. What is immediately striking in the new catechism is its revolutionary character,” particularly “the number of omissions”: “The new catechism makes no mention of angels, nor of the Ascension, nor of the Assumption, nor of the sacraments of order, marriage, and extreme unction, etc.” He also noted, and deplored, the fact that: The new catechism, referring as it does mainly to the Bible and Vatican II, completely ignores the great dogmatic formulations of the early Councils. (151)

He concluded:

“All in all, if one refers to the meaning of modernism as defined by Pius X, we can say that the climate of the new catechism is typically modernist.”

Pierre Lemaire reprinted the Grand catéchisme en images [a large-format illustrated catechism for children] that Father Bailly, founder of the Maison de la Bonne Presse, had published in 1909, and which had been reprinted many times until the 1950s. He also reprinted 10,000 copies of the catechism that was in use in the diocese of Paris in 1930, under the title Catechisme de nos enfants (“Our Children’s Catechism”). (158)

Maurice Clavel: “You have not gone out to the world, you have gone over to the world. The spirit of the age has taken hold of you, intimidated you . . . it got you.” (161)

First rumblings about the New Mass

Father Dulac, in Le Courrier de Rome—which was increasingly read by priests and faithful attached to tradition—was kept well-informed by his Roman friends and marshalled his theological verve against this “normative Mass” [of 1967] which

is allegedly destined to replace the one that Gregory the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Philip Neri, Bossuet, the Curé of Ars celebrated without ever suspecting that they were celebrating a passive, unconscious, individualistic, and complicated Mass. The normativa suppresses Kyrie, Gloria, and Offertory; it pulverizes the Confiteor; it glosses over the intercession of the saints, over the commemoration of the souls in purgatory, over anything that expresses the personal offering of the human priest; it proposes two spare Canons; it corrects the words of the consecration; and, of course, it replaces Latin with the national idiom. (177)

In France, the first full critique of the new Mass was that published by Father Dulac, who, as we have seen, had reacted against the liturgical reforms in the very first issues of Le Courrier de Rome, in 1967.

On June 27, 1969, in a long article that was to set the tone for a good many other commentators after him, he attacked an “ecumenical Mass” that could well suit Protestants, a “polyvalent Mass,” since some of its “rites [were] left to the celebrant’s choice” and it contained “equivocal” words; it “annihilated the Offertory”; it was a “Mass that hides its face.” The article ended with a clear and definite rejection: “We refuse to follow the Novus Ordo Missae.” (182)

Rather sad: because of neoscholastic reductionism, wherein only doctrine matters and not ritual, Journet simply accepts the pope’s word that doctrine hasn’t changed and accepts the new rite. But his words damn with faint praise:

Cardinal Journet, on the eve of celebrating the new Mass for the first time, said that he would do so “with great obedience,” and that Paul VI’s address had reassured him. “Of course,” he agreed, “we are losing great riches...[t]here is no doubt about it,” but he hoped that the monasteries would remain “islets” that would know how to “preserve the Latin tradition, as a witness to the catholicity of the Church through time.” (188)

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Jean Madiran observed that the text of the Mass remained “uncertain, variable, ever-changing, because the options offered to the celebrant and the liberties he may take mean that there is no longer the new Mass, but new Masses.” (190-91)

Card. Siri expressing the most irrational hyperpapalism imaginable:

The Council did not ask for such a revolution. The liturgical reform was done, the Pope approved it, and that’s enough: I adopt a position of obedience that one must always have with regard to the Pope. If he had asked me, I think I would have made some observations, several. But once a law is approved, there is only one thing to do: obey. (191)

In the event, it was grassroots “resistance” that allowed the traditional Mass to continue despite the prohibitions from Rome, from the Episcopal Conferences, and from the chanceries. (195)

A not inconsiderable number of parish priests were able to remain faithful to the traditional Mass. (196)

Stalwart priests resist the New Mass

Chiron then goes on to tell the fascinating stories of several priests who simply refused to stop saying the old Mass, and carried on in varying degrees of trouble with their superiors. But they would never back down, and this seems to have earned them grudging respect. But when these various priests died, in many cases it was only due to the SSPX that the Masses, which by then had been going for many years after the introduction of the Novus Ordo, could be continued for the benefit of the stable congregations. This kind of history puts meat on the bones when it comes to understanding the real-world situations to which Lefevbre was responding.

A journalist reported on one such priest in the diocese of Montpellier:

He [Father Caucanas] is reputed to be a formidable integrist. He says Mass in Latin. For years he has been in constant opposition to Cyprien Tourel, bishop of Montpellier, an old seminary chum. The bishop reproaches him for not applying the liturgical reforms of Vatican II? Each time, he retorts: “Get lost.” (199)

The association was registered at the prefecture under the name Association sacerdotale Noël Pinot (ANP), named after the priest from Anjou who was executed during the Revolution and who went to the scaffold wearing priestly vestments while saying the first words of the Mass: Introïbo ad altare Dei (“I will go to the altar of God”). (202)

At this point in the story, it is worth pondering the reasons for which Paul VI was so determined and inflexible in imposing a new rite of Mass. He himself, by temperament, was inclined to beautiful liturgies in Latin and Gregorian chant, as he had discovered them in his childhood among the Benedictines of Chiari, near Brescia. But since at least the 1950s he was convinced that the faithful wanted greater participation in the liturgy and/or were incapable of relating to a more intellectual worship (as he saw it). He soon felt that it was legitimate to sacrifice Latin, Gregorian chant, ad orientem celebration, and certain other practices, in order to make the Mass more accessible to the greatest number.

There was also a more subjective reason: Paul VI had entrusted the preparation of the liturgical reform to a new organism, the Consilium, which answered directly to him, and had left a great deal of freedom to the person actually in charge of it, Father Bugnini, whom he made a prelate and then an archbishop. Paul VI, an intellectual pope, put all his trust, for several years, in the army of liturgical specialists who had been at work in this Consilium.

The clergy and faithful attached to the traditional Mass, however, were not defending it solely on grounds of sentiment (for being the Mass of their youth or ordination) or aesthetics, but for primarily doctrinal reasons: the Mass as “propitiatory sacrifice” and “pure oblation” (to quote the Council of Trent), offered through the ministry of the priest whose primary function this is. Within this attachment to the traditional Mass, there is also a traditional notion of the priesthood. (202)

The need for traditional priests becomes urgent

Father Aulagnier reports [in a 2000 interview]:

Our way of life, too, was changing considerably. After four years, the rules of the seminary had practically disappeared. There was no more silence since everyone had a radio in his cell, no more liturgy since every morning saw a new improvisation. The Council had celebrated “openness to the world,” and the world had entered into minds and hearts. (204)

To the mystic Claire Ferchaud, he [Lefebvre] wrote on May 13, 1969:

I believe that at this moment in time, my most urgent duty is to train priests. This is my constant concern and it fills all my time. . . . I am also convinced that it is the holiness of the priesthood that will save us. This is why I’m devoting all my energy and prayers to that end. (205)

On June 9, 1971, in a clear and definitive manner, he [Lefebvre] affirmed his firm and irrevocable choice to preserve the traditional Mass and to refuse the new Ordo Missae. … The Mass, Archbishop Lefebvre explained, rests on “three truths of defined Catholic faith— de fide divina catholica”: the priest, “alone capable of consecrating the Eucharist”; “the sacrificial nature of the Mass and its propitiatory role”; and “the real and substantial presence” of Christ. Now, the liturgical reform, Archbishop Lefebvre affirmed, “directly or indirectly undermines these three essential truths.”

Archbishop Lefebvre, on the other hand, felt that “one cannot affirm in a general way that the new Mass is invalid and heretical” but “it leads slowly to heresy” and “the number of invalid Masses is on the rise.”17 Gradually, however, he would proscribe all participation in the Mass according to the new rite. The doctrine of the SSPX, to this day, is that it is better— during vacations, for example— to break the Sunday precept than to attend an “equivocal” or “questionable” Mass. (208)

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The envy kicks in…

In the early 1970s, the bishops of France could not help but notice the growing number of entries to the seminary of Écône, whereas their own seminaries were receiving fewer and fewer candidates. (210)

An attempt at a pre-seminary was started at Paray-le-Monial:

“There are young men who wish to serve God and the Church,” wrote Father Ladame.

But they ask, in order to commit themselves, to be offered something both serious and stable: not a Christianity reduced to social action tinged with politics, nor a priesthood in perpetual search of its identity and usefulness! The day, on the contrary, when these young people discover that the priesthood is first and foremost a loving response to a loving call from Jesus, Son of God—“Come and follow me!”—they decide to walk in the footsteps of the Master, in joyful renunciation of all that is not Christ, in complete availability to the tasks that the Church will one day entrust to them in the name of the Lord. (211)

It was therefore in a context of acute crisis among French seminaries that Écône was first condemned and Archbishop Lefebvre was first ostracized in the autumn of 1972. (212)

Here was the excuse for refusing to accept Lefebvre’s seminarians into dioceses:

“Who today can venture into this calling without being actually ‘taken from among men,’ that is, marked by the common demands of contemporary life?” (212)

This double rebuff against Archbishop Lefebvre—the refusal to allow him to come to Lourdes and the refusal to recognize his seminary—had no immediate effect on his work, which still had the approval of the Bishop of Sion and the Holy See. The number of entries to the seminary continued to increase. (214)

Father Louis Bouyer, an Oratorian and eminent theologian, noted in 1975 that the “crisis of Catholicism affected first of all the religious” and he denounced “the headlong rush to which religious superiors and prelates tried to give their blessing even as the fruits of their Council were massive defrockings and a generalized confusion of apostolate with apostasy.”

We will only call to mind the reactions and resistances of those who wanted to remain faithful to the Rule and traditions of their order or congregation, even to the point of leaving it in order to remain faithful to the spirit and letter of their order or congregation. (216)

A two-track proposal never implemented

Cardinal Daniélou (!) even proposed a sort of Benedict XVI solution, well in advance of Ratzinger—let there be two tracks in the Church for seminaries and religious orders — one that is “updated” and one that is “traditional” — and see which one works better!

But of course this was unacceptable to the progressives. They would never allow the slightest bit of “competition” either because their hatred for the old was so inextricably a part of their ideological commitment to the new, or because they were quite frankly aware that the revolution could never win in an open competition with the old (actually, these positions are compatible: a communist would say that people are wedded to habit and thus need to be broken from it, for their own good—or at least for the good of subsequent generations).

I think that the only and urgent solution is to stop the false orientations taken in a number of institutes. To do this, we have to stop all experiments and decisions contrary to Council directives; warn against books, magazines, sessions where these erroneous conceptions are spread; restore in their integrity the practice of the constitutions with the adaptations requested by the Council. Where this seems impossible, it seems to me that religious who want to be faithful to the constitutions of their order and to the directives of Vatican II cannot be refused the right to form distinct communities. Religious superiors are bound to respect this desire.

These communities must be allowed to have houses of formation. Experience will show whether vocations are more numerous in houses of strict observance or in houses of mixed observance. In the event that superiors oppose these legitimate requests, recourse to the Supreme Pontiff is certainly allowable. (216)

Next week, we’ll complete our tour through highlights from Chiron’s Between Rome and Rebellion.

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