Dr. K’s Weekly Roundup, April 11th Edition

Sanctus Ranch - Good News - Pontifical Polemics - Liturgical Lessons - Other News and Views - Book Announcement

Traditionally, this Friday of Passion Week is the Commemoration of the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which can be celebrated as the Mass in place of the Lenten feria.

The coming week is, of course, Holy Week, and so my posts at Tradition & Sanity will reflect this solemn time of the year: on Monday, we’ll contemplate together four unusual artistic depictions of the Agony of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane; on Maundy Thursday, we’ll enjoy some moving (and liturgically rich!) passages from a British author’s experience of Tenebrae in Slovakia and Easter in Hungary in the year 1934; and on Good Friday, I’ll share several poems about the Passion of the Lord.

Before we get into the weekly roundup, allow me to share a plea for help from my good friends at Sanctus Ranch in Texas:

You can read the full story — with its heart-wrenching combination of good news to lift the heart and persecution from the local church — in an article written by founder Dan Sevigny: “Securing Sacred Ground: The Story and Mission of Sanctus Ranch.” What Dan is doing there is the kind of thing every traditional Catholic I know believes we need to be doing now. Any tax-deductible support you can direct toward the Ranch from out of your tithing will be most appreciated and, I truly believe, rewarded by Our Lord.

Good News

Confraternity of the Most Holy Trinity

It’s always refreshing to see a mainstream outlet like CNA (and no one is more mainstream than they — with all the good and bad that implies) give positive coverage to a traditionalist apostolic outreach at the FSSP parish in Rome: “From washing feet to a place to sleep: How Rome is welcoming jubilee pilgrims.”

A bishop unafraid to smell like the sheep

On the solemnity of the Annunciation, Bishop Rhoades visited St. Stanislaus Catholic Church as the community celebrated its 125-year anniversary with a high solemn Mass and the consecration of a new altar stone. The parish is an apostolate of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, celebrating the Mass in Latin, according to the liturgical books of 1962. The traditional liturgy used in worship is a preference of many families in the South Bend area.

Two Viennese balls worth knowing about

The ITI Catholic University — the International Theological Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family when I taught there from 1998 to 2006 — is holding a second “ITI Viennese Benefit Ball” in Denver on April 26. I’d encourage everyone who can make it to Denver to be there. More information here.

Meanwhile, across the pond in Paris, on the same date, April 26, will be held the Grand Bal Transaltantique, celebrating the best of traditional Franco-American culture. I realize that not many of my readers will be in or around Paris at that time, but anyone who is or can be may read more about the ball here.

Let social dancing flourish again!

Sculptures for your home

I love the sculptures of Crowned Earth Studio, hand-crafted by a traditional Catholic. They remind me of the figurines made by the monastic family of Bethlehem. I encourage you to check them out. The most recent release is a holy water font but they also have statutes of the Sacred Heart, the Immaculate Heart, Our Lady Seat of Wisdom, ornaments for Christmas trees, and a lot more. You might recall that I used the sculptress’s Seat of Wisdom as the headline image of my post on that title of Our Lady.

Pontifical Polemics

Dialogue with sedes?

A small outfit called “Novus Ordo Watch” created a video that attempted to refute my position on the permissibility of praying with the pre-55 Roman Rite (and, more generally, my position on the limits of papal authority with regard to liturgical tradition). People asked me if I would respond to it.

My answer was no (beyond the considerable body of work I have already written or edited on the subject). The reason: I do not engage sedevacantists. Their understanding of papal authority is dominated by the approximately 150-year period since Vatican I (they rarely cite documents prior to Pastor Aeternus), i.e., the period of peak ultramontanism, which has tended to morph into a hyperpapalism contrary to both faith and reason.

If the price of a supposedly “perfect obedience to the all-powerful pope” is the necessity of holding that the See of Rome has been empty since Pius XII, then I’m not remotely interested. It is not I but Novus Ordo Watch that has effectively founded a new “Catholicism without the Pope” (or a “Catholicism with a Pope who meets our tailor-made specifications,” which, I would submit, amounts to the same thing), and I will have nothing to do with it. Contrary to the almost Euclidean purity of the sedevacantist account of what the pope “must be like,” reality is terribly messy, the fallen world is not logical, and we must roll with the punches as well as we can.

And yes, I am well aware that comments like these will only unleash a further barrage of anti-Kwasniewski posts; I’m not sure what such entities as Where Peter Is and Novus Ordo Watch — extremes that paradoxically meet — would do for ideas if I ever stopped writing!

The devil has it out for the pope

At the excellent Oriens Journal, Dom Pius Mary Noonan, OSB writes a probing meditation on the papacy in modern times: “In Garments All Red.”

The enemy of our salvation is constantly waging war against the Church of Christ to prevent the salvation of souls. That is why Satan lays numerous traps for the pope, one of the most insidious of which has consistently been that of getting overly involved in politics and leaving aside his essential mission…. This trap was only avoided by saintly pontiffs due to their determination to be primarily not just any spiritual guide but the God-given guide who knows full well that souls on both sides of any conflict are being lost, and it is the Church’s job to save them all.

So, what are the traps laid for the pope in our day? It seems that the age-old temptation to get overly involved in politics has taken on a new, much more deceptive, but also much more destructive form for the contemporary papacy. Modern popes are no longer influential political powers; they allow themselves to get embroiled in politics in other ways. The magna charta of such involvement was Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes. The document proposed establishing a new relationship between the Church and the world, but at a high cost.

As a theologian at the Council, the young Joseph Ratzinger had already put his finger on what has revealed itself to be one of the major flaws in the text: ‘Even in its modified form, as found in schema 13 [this was the name of the document during its elaboration], it was obvious what a horrible perversion of Christianity this represents… the schema as a whole tended, in its definition of the relationship between the Christian and the technological world, to see the real meaning of the Christological in the sacred aura it confers upon technological achievement… The schema speaks of the victories of mankind, and means by this the phases of technological progress. The Scriptures also know the language of victory but what they mean is the victory of faith, of love… the great victory of Jesus Christ…’.

In other words, the Church now applauds the prowess of mankind, thus seeming to relativise the true victory of Christ over Satan, of good over evil, of virtue over vice, of salvation over damnation, of Heaven over Hell.

Defending the indefensible

Fr Peter Ryan and Christian Brugger show that Pedro Gabriel has no idea what he is talking about when he tries to defend Amoris Laetitia against the charges that moral theologians have brought against it.

We did not delve into this matter lightly, and we certainly don’t want to make it harder for the faithful to trust magisterial teachings. But because the salvation of many souls is at stake, we are convinced that it would ill serve the Church to ignore this sincere concern. We wish to be of assistance to the numerous validly married Catholics—tens of thousands of active Catholics around the world—who are in a second union involving sexual activity that they are strongly tempted to regard as acceptable in God’s sight. Is our concern misplaced?

We said we would welcome a response that could show us that our concern is misplaced, and we are grateful to Pedro Gabriel for attempting to do just that. Unfortunately, however, his attempt fails to reassure us. Indeed, since his best arguments fall so far short of the rebuttal that he claims them to be, his response only intensifies our concern. And while he says the problem is not with the ambiguity of the document itself but with articles like ours that read ambiguity into it, his efforts to substantiate that claim miss the mark entirely.

Tradition as guiding star

The crisis in marriage and family has only one answer, and it is NOT what the Pope Francis party is proposing: loosening up, modernizing, diversifying, winking at departures from the divine law. In his essay “Is the family still fundamental?,” James Kalb explains what is actually needed:

A better future cannot be planned or imposed. Joseph de Maistre, although often considered a violent reactionary, summed up the issue: “what is needed is not a revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of a revolution.” And Christ put it at the deepest possible level: “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation.”

What is needed is a fundamental reorientation: a world more pervaded by humility and love of what is highest. There is no specific recipe for getting there, but it seems that love of tradition will have to play a role. It helps people retrieve lost goods through the redirection of attention and the revival of older ways that others have found practically and symbolically sustaining. And it embodies a recognition that religion is at the heart of our social and political problems.

That approach won’t change the world tomorrow. The older ways declined not only because of bad thinking but also because of changes in practical life, primarily industrialization and increasing reliance on technology. These things are not likely to go away. Even so, a turn toward tradition can provide a concrete point of focus for attempts to turn from current orthodoxies to something better. And it can help build and furnish a lifeboat for many people. To the extent secular life keeps declining, that lifeboat will look better and better, and start to influence life elsewhere. Isn’t that, after all, how the Barque of Peter originally grew?

Indeed, as Christopher Raymond shows in “Bad Theology Is at the Heart of Declining Numbers,” statistics show a direct correlation between orthodoxy and religious affiliation, undermining the claims of liberals, progressives, and modernists that a Church that doesn’t “change with the times” is doomed to fail. The contrary, in fact, is true.

When bishops believed in straight talk

Jerome Stridon returns with a fantastic article at OnePeterFive on two key Brazilian figures in the conservative party at Vatican II that attempted damage control on the progressivist tendencies: Bishop Geraldo de Proença Sigaud and Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer. It is fascinating to read their “vota” or wishes for the Council, submitted ahead of time to Rome at the request of John XXIII.

The first thing that leaps off the page when reading the vota of these two prelates is that – whatever one thinks of the content – they speak with a clarity and a conviction to which most contemporary bishops have no longer accustomed us.... Both Brazilian bishops called for an updating (by way of expansion) of Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors. This does not occur in the Vota of Lefebvre and Carli, although there is no doubt that Lefebvre at least, in light of his writing after the Council, agreed.

Synodality against episcopacy?

That is the title of a new article by George Weigel, who writes:

There have been many ironies in the ecclesiastical fire over the past twelve years. The revival of papal autocracy among Catholic progressives, and the consequent degradation of bishops, is surely one of the most striking—and most concerning.

Indeed.

And… are we “Roman Catholics”?

There was a piece circulating online this past week that argued we shouldn’t use the phrase “Roman Catholic” to describe those who belong to the Church founded by Christ on the Apostles. I will leave it to others to respond in more detail, but I would only point out that what really needs to be seen is that “romanity” (romanitas) is an essential trait of the Catholic Church — and romanitas does NOT mean either the Roman Rite or ultramontanism. For a full explanation, see Alan Fimister’s brilliant book The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man: ‘Romanitas’ as a Note of the Church.

Liturgical Lessons

Disappearing Daniel

The Epistle at the traditional Latin Mass for the Tuesday of Passion week is the wonderful scene of Daniel thrown into the lion’s den by his enemies and expected to be scarfed down like cat food, but liberated after a quiet week inside the zoo, and a nourishing meal courtesy of his co-prophet Habakkuk (with rapid-flight angelic service long anticipating the current craze for home delivery). In my article this week at New Liturgical Movement, “Daniel and Habacuc in Passiontide: Postwar Casualties,” I ask why the liturgical reformers might have yanked this reading out of its age-old place in the Roman rite.

Communion rails returning

A much-ballyhooed article at the National Catholic Register, “Communion Rails Return as Churches Embrace Beauty and Reverence,” has been shared all over the place online this past week. The news is welcome; obviously putting back the rails is a good thing, a step in the right direction.

What baffles me is the naive tone of excitement, as if we’ve just discovered a great idea: “Communion rails help people to appreciate what is happening at Mass and whom we are receiving!”

But we knew all this, for HUNDREDS OF YEARS, when everyone knelt for Communion, and usually at a rail. Tradition has the answers. It was modern churchmen who were too stupid to understand (or perhaps deliberately seeking to undermine the old faith), and now, decades later, we are piecing the rubble together, clawing our way back to rightness.

Good... as far as it goes. But this process will be piecemeal, incoherent, and above all vulnerable, until we get back the whole enchilada. And until we believe that tradition is worth defending and dying for, instead of surrendering it the moment someone in “authority” barks at us that we must give it up under “obedience.”

The contrast between Oakland and Tampa

Emily Finley, in “A Tale of Two Cities: ICKSP Kicked Out of Oakland, TLM Sheltered in Tampa Bay,” makes this broader observation:

The traditional Latin Mass has preserved an ancient ritual and is full of the very richness of symbol for which modern man longs desperately. We needn’t imagine a distant past in which primitive peoples could access the divine, and try in vain to “recover” it. We have the ancient past and access to the divine every day in the ancient Liturgy. The beauty and attraction of the TLM is that it fulfills this need for truth that is not mediated through the rational faculty. It speaks to us immediately, on a non-rational, imaginative level. Because the TLM harnesses the imaginative power of the human mind by tapping into its ability to receive truth through symbol, it is here to stay. And it will only grow.

Pre-55 Holy Week Interview

Gregory DiPippo, editor of New Liturgical Movement, spoke with Christopher Jasper of the Gregorian Chant Academy about the various reforms of Holy Week as well as broader questions concerning 20th-century liturgical reform. If you enjoy Gregory’s work (and what knowledgeable person doesn’t?), you will doubtless find this an interesting conversation:

Good sacred art is not optional

English iconographer Aidan Hart recently gave an excellent lecture, “Search for Novelty is Profoundly Secular,” in which he argues that the purpose of sacred art is to give us a vision of creation renewed and transfigured. If our church art fails to do this, it is not only not fulfilling its purpose, it is leading us astray into an anti-theosis (my language, not his, but that is the idea).

An unsung hero

The Italian poet, translator, and essayist Cristina Campo, who died in Rome in 1977, is gradually becoming recognized as one of the most extraordinary voices of our times. She was instrumental in the emergence of the traditionalist movement. Find out more about her in Jaspreet Singh Boparai’s fine article at The Lamp.

Is the Novus Ordo antisemitic too?

Dr. Joseph Shaw has just penned a mighty article, “The Liturgical Reform and the Jews: Revisiting the Memorandum of the American Jewish Committee,” in which he demonstrates that the new liturgy of Paul VI, whatever other faults it may have, does not (taken overall) reflect any different attitude toward the Jews than the old rite does, which means the argument some have made against the return of the old rite — namely, that it is antisemitic, as compared with the new one — is balderdash. Fr. Hunwicke, may he rest in peace, also made the same observation, but Dr. Shaw has fleshed it out with more evidence.

Are trads neo-Jansenists?

Shaun Blanchard is such an odd duck scholar. He loves loves loves when the Jansenists anticipate modern liturgical reforms, but then co-authors, with Richard Yoder, a long Commonweal article called “A Rival Magisterium,” unfavorably linking traditionalists to all the weirder aspects of Jansenism (his dig at Sister Wilhelmina feels particularly low-class), even when it’s a stretch or when he goes out of his way to cite fringe trads rather than the more intelligent and scholarly ones. This, my friends, is what advocacy scholarship looks like, and it isn’t pretty.

That being said, I benefit from reading his articles because the history of Jansenism is indeed fascinating and there are lessons to be learned from it (as well as from how progressives like Blanchard and Yoder interpret it).

Another Boomer goes to bat

Fr. John F. Baldovin, a major proponent of the 20th-century liturgical reform, published a lengthy article in America, “Where is God in the liturgy? A way forward for reform and renewal” (behind a paywall), in which he outlines why he thinks the traditional Roman Rite should be abolished altogether.

Frankly, what it shows is the intellectual unseriousness of the reformist point of view: it is a tired rehearsal of the same semi-Pelagian “we can fix our liturgical problems if only we put our minds and hands to it” mentality that we’ve been hearing about for decades (what I called elsewhere “crocodile tears and hand-wringing,” which begins at the tippety-top).

Here’s a paragraph that particularly caught my eye:

If one seriously reads critics of the reform like the writer Peter Kwasniewski, one finds an underlying anthropology and ecclesiology that reject modern Catholicism altogether. For Dr. Kwasniewski and many of his fellow traditionalists, modernity is a disaster for the Christian faith, and Vatican II is a perfect instantiation of that disaster. Rejecting the liturgical reform goes hand in hand with rejection of the church’s encounter and dialogue with modernity (Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World), of ecumenism, of interreligious dialogue, of religious freedom, of the relation between Scripture and tradition, and of an ecclesiology rooted in the common baptism of Christians as the people of God. In other words, Vatican II and all that follows must be rejected as a whole. No half-measures are allowed.

I don’t know how seriously Baldovin has read my work, because this summary is only partly true, and would need a number of qualifications. However, I will gladly say it is overall more true than false!

Where we meet God

Frank X. Rocca has a new article in The Atlantic, “The Catholics Who Have to Worship Somewhere Else: How the Latin Mass split the Church” (also behind a paywall), in which he talks about the failure of Pope Francis’s Traditionis Custodes to bring about the unity it cynically invoked as its motivation. The following passage struck me:

When he issued the decree [TC], Francis said he was trying to preserve unity in the Church, where the liturgy had become a point of particular conflict in his campaign to modernize the faith. But whether the pope seeks unity through reconciliation or suppression, he’s not succeeding. The edict has hardened and widened divisions among Catholics, alienating the Church’s small but young, ardent, and unyielding group of Latin Mass loyalists.... Whereas some Catholics seem to have begun attending the Latin Mass in direct response to Francis’s decree, Harvey says that her reason for going has little to do with Church politics. It’s simpler: “This is a place where we more easily meet God.”

Other News and Views

The end of a grim era… or is it?

Everyone has heard that Theodore McCarrick died and went to his judgment. Rorate reports:

Former Cardinal and Archbishop of Washington Ted McCarrick, serial abuser, and a man who was the very embodiment of the Vatican II hierarchy, died today [April 4]. He was a major influence in the election of Francis (for which he worked from the outside), until he was unmasked. The entire liberal hierarchy of the United States today is directly related to him. His influence is present in the Vatican even today — for instance, his former secretary was one of the main promoters of a recent beatification, as revealed this week by The Economist.

At least the USCCB is parting ways, at last, with federal funding. That is good news: perhaps we will start to see targeted grassroots charitable activity instead of socialist-bureaucrat bedfellows.

Romanticism’s legacy

Emily Finley continues to explore the cultural genealogy of modernity:

Primitivism, paganism, romantic naturalism, the occult, and a crusading humanitarianism that manifests at the individual and national levels are, I would contend, inheritances of Romanticism. Not all that is Romantic is bad. However, at this late stage of cultural and political degeneracy, we should consider where these trends originated and examine their defining features. The blanket diagnoses of “cultural Marxism,” “neoliberalism,” “Leftism,” etc., although often accurate, require further digging to get to the root of the pathologies, which lies in a particular quality of imagination. As Christians, we know that the real font of evil is human sinfulness, but trying to understand the “sham spirituality” of the Rousseauistic variety will help us better to recognize pernicious trends within modernity and help us to resist them.

One of the most insidious legacies of Romanticism is the impossible and inhuman idealization of romantic love and perfect fulfillment. This is a subtle form of idolatry, as it shifts the goal of human happiness away from God, where alone it is to be found, and toward another creature, who, in any case, is bound to disappoint such an infinite longing. Rather, JRR Tolkien had it right when he called spouses “partners in shipwreck.” Hence, I welcome this short but incisive article, “The Prince Charming Problem,” by John Grondelski.

Don’t be too apocalyptic

Over at Crisis Magazine, Eric Sammons talks about why preoccuption with end times speculation is unhealthy. A good reminder, as we sometimes are too easily drawn into the labyrinthine byways of apparitions, locutions, prophecies, interpretations, forecasts, and so forth. Not that we should dismiss such things with a skeptical wave of the hand, but neither should we prioritize them.

Are you a fascist?

Greg Schlueter, “The Left’s Fascist Fashion Show (The Emperor Has No Clue)”:

The words “fascist” and “Nazi” have been slung about like Cro-Magnon battle clubs by those who fancy themselves modern prophets yet are entirely bereft of understanding or reflection. These terms have become the rhetorical equivalents of the emperor’s imaginary robe: indicators of virtue to the indoctrinated but seen as utter nonsense by anyone daring to look with unclouded eyes.

And here’s the staggering irony: the ones hurling these accusations—often self-appointed guardians of democracy and tolerance—are the ones most resembling fascists themselves. To understand just how absurd these slurs are, we need to return to what fascism actually is.

BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT

Lastly, I’m thrilled to announce the latest release from Os Justi Press, Mantilla: The Veil of the Bride of Christ. This is the most thorough, insightful, and serene guide to veiling ever written — one that will equip you with answers to your own questions as well as the never-lacking questions of friends, relatives, and strangers.

Resting her account on Scripture and Tradition as interpreted by the Church Fathers, St. Thomas Aquinas, and papal, liturgical, and canon law texts, Anna Elissa — a wife, mother, psychiatrist, and lay Dominican — offers arguments of fittingness on behalf of veiling, responds to common objections against it, offers practical advice for choosing, wearing, and even designing mantillas, and shows how the veil contributes to a Eucharistic way of life that treats femininity as a gift, a treasure, and a mystery.

To illustrate and verify her points, Anna Elissa presents a substantial collection of testimonials from women of all ages about their experience adopting and wearing the veil — and from men, too, including clergy, about why they value the practice and its return.

Appropriately for a book about the language of signs and beauty, Mantilla is graced with exquisite artworks in color.

In his foreword, Apostolic Nuncio Archbishop Antonio Guido Filipazzi describes the book as a “beautiful surprise.” Whether you are a long-time veiler, a skeptic of veiling, or simply curious to learn more, this is the book for you!

You can find out more about it either as the Os Justi Press website or at Amazon outlets.

Thank you for reading, and may God bless you!