Emerging from the Liturgical Cave

Stages on the way: from Novus to Vetus; from 1962 to pre-1955

“The Blue Grotto of Capri” (1870; cropped and enhanced)

Special Perk Today

Recently, Sebastian Morello, Nicholas Cavazos, and Timothy Flanders took part in a discussion of Platonic elements in St. Thomas, a topic on which Morello published his important work “The World as God’s Icon: Creator and Creation in the Platonic Thought of Thomas Aquinas.” Paid subscribers to Tradition & Sanity can access this more than hour-long conversation by means of a link embedded beneath the paywall. ~PAK

Before the internet exploded with traditional Catholic resources, there were fairly predictable paths along which Catholics discovered tradition. Here’s one version of the story.

Jane and Joe wander into a Low Mass or a High Mass, having no idea what it is, and decide to stay. They find it strange but somehow appealing. They go back a second time. They learn that this is how Catholics “used to worship.” Within a few months (maybe less), they are hooked; this is now their standard Sunday Mass.

Eventually they get to know people in the TLM community and are invited to a baptism. This baptism is like nothing they’ve ever seen before. It starts at the back of the church with exorcisms of salt, water, and the baby, and proceeds to claim the child for the Holy Trinity and the court of heaven. The whole ritual is profoundly moving and deadly serious. Jane and Joe start to realize that it’s not just the Mass that was tampered with after Vatican II, but baptism too, and the blessing of holy water, and, well, probably every rite the Church uses.

As they grow in their faith, they find out that some Catholics used to pray Prime and Compline, the shorter morning office and the nighttime office, so they buy a copy from Angelus Press and start to do the same, as their schedules allow. In the process, they come to learn that the Divine Office or Roman Breviary, which was renamed the “Liturgy of the Hours” after Vatican II, was also massively changed: for example, Prime was abolished, the psalms were spread out over a month instead of a week, and lots of psalm verses were removed because they were deemed too difficult for modern Christians to handle. In other words, Jane and Joe gradually discover how the entire public worship of the Catholic Church was altered, leaving not a stone upon a stone — or perhaps, leaving about as many of the stones as one finds in the wailing wall of the Jerusalem temple thrown down by the Romans in AD 70.

Several years into their attendance at the Latin Mass, some friends of theirs in another state who happen to attend a parish run by the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest tell them on the phone: “We’ve just been to the most incredible Holy Week liturgies! It was like nothing we’ve ever seen before!” As their friends describe the highlights, Jane and Joe feel puzzled. They thought that their nearby parish, which offers the “TLM,” was doing “the traditional Holy Week” — and yet their friends’ description doesn’t quite match up. And in this way, Jane and Joe graduate into that select group of Catholics who understand that major changes were already underway prior to the Second Vatican Council.

Nowadays, however, thanks to that great “equalizer,” the internet, Jane and Joe might not have followed such a slow and meandering path to enlightenment. Perhaps they would start listening to “Sensus Fidelium” and get red-pilled in a matter of weeks. Perhaps they would watch a livestream from an Institute parish and go from 1970 to 1570 in less than five and a half seconds. This is both a good situation and a problematic one. It is good in the sense that the information is no longer hidden away or difficult to find. Yet it is problematic in that Catholics are seldom equipped to make sense out of all that they’re coming to learn and how to navigate the thorny questions that inevitably arise about the pope’s authority, the Church’s fidelity to tradition, the duty of obedience (and the limits thereof), and so forth.

The free flow of information offers access to much that is good and much that is misleading or even flat-out erroneous, without offering any guidance — and as for the bishops, with few exceptions they have long since abandoned any real commitment to the office of instructing the faithful in authentic Catholicism. I once knew a bishop who objected to my defense of worship ad orientem because he said “it went against what the Church teaches.” When I told him that Christians had worshiped facing eastwards for almost 2,000 years and that there was not a single document from the Council or from the Vatican that requires Mass to be said facing the people, he was astonished. With bishops this ignorant, we are, in fact, better off learning from the internet. Still, the problem remains: What do we do when we discover that things are not the way we first thought they were? And when this happens multiple times?