(Just one tiny little thing: those who have committed adultery are not prohibited from receiving 'the sacraments' since obviously Confession is a sacrament that they are very much encouraged to receive. This term 'the sacraments' is used very clumsily in a lot of Catholic media and it needs to stop.)
What you say is true. But alas, some progressives want to say adulterers can receive confession without confessing their cohabitation and without intended to end it. So perhaps in a way it is true to say that adulterers, qua adulterers, are barred from the sacraments.
I still recall my excitment when BXVI became pope 20 years ago. I thought of him at the time as JP2's doctrinal pitbull, keeping the modernist wolves of the Church at bay. He was really a moderate by today's standards as he attempted to both justify and mitigate the rupture of V2. His "ordinary and extraordinary form" distinctions of the Mass was akin to a Ford CEO telling us the 1974 Pinto was just as good as a 1967 Shelby and that we ought to buy the former if we have a choice. The bitter reality is that these were not only not forms of the same rite but reflected different Catholic religions.
Yes. I agree. What I tell everyone is that Ratzinger made me a traditionalist, but by that very fact, I had to go beyond his position, which to me seems like an impossible attempt to have the old religion and the new religion coexisting side-by-side. An understandable project but ultimately a self-contradictory one.
Thank you for the needed sober assessment of Ratzinger/Benedict. His legacy is very much a mixed one, but I will always have a soft spot in my heart for him despite his lapses. What is disheartening is to hear trads denouncing him in toto. (One of the most egregious trad errors, along with sometimes going far beyond lamenting the hardness of the Jews' heart into outright anti-Semitism.)
I have never said a bad word about Ratzinger as a man, and I say nothing but good of the principles of liturgy that he articulated so well for so many decades. His writings are what made me a traditionalist. He himself, for various reasons, could not follow out his own principles to their consistent conclusions.
No. Sometimes a man is greater than his theories; sometimes he is less. Leo XIII once talked about the "fortunate inconsistencies" in politics, whereby those who claim to exclude the Church end up making room for it in practice. I think something similar can happen with theologians. After all, no one is simply his ideas. Everyone has a combination of beliefs, ideas, commitments, aspirations, intuitions, emotions. Not even an angel, as pure intellect, can be identified with his own thought, for his essence is prior to his activity.
I had missed the Bishop Barron interview with Shapiro. That is a painful response to hear. As always, thank you for your clear and insightful analysis.
Great series of articles! You write "The one and only safe path is to stick to what we know to be certainly true". You might consider explaining how we are supposed to do that.
This gets to the nub of things, thank you so much. My problem with the Trad world is the whiff of triumphalism: “Do you reject the world, the flesh, and the devil? The Council and all its pomps and works?” There’s a sense that some higher/deeper membership in the True Church hinges on how firmly one stands athwart the world since 1968, 1864, 1517? It can almost be like a gnostic sect that knows to reject all the visible signs; but despite Sheen’s chilling description of The Ape of the Church, that cannot be right. I despise having to “be my own theologian” and God cannot have pinned our salvation at this point on following the right Substack.
Modernism is slippery, but God isn’t. How much nuance does the faith allow? Grievous times for those who simply wish to love God and neighbour as needed, not to mention exhausting.
Dear Dr. K. Your footnote slap at the SSPX is entirely unfair. The principled stand taken by Abp Lefebvre should not be dissmissively set aside by use of perjorative labels in a footnote having little to do with your stated subject. Surely the SSPX deserves better from you than that. The issue is, what should be done in the midst of the greatest crisis the Church has ever known? There are no roadmaps. The principle, articulated by Abp Lefebvre, of accepting the authority while rejecting that which contradicts the faith has drawn criticism from all sides, but it has been the touchstone that has preserved tradition and the fundamental reason the FSSP, which you favor, exists. Your disagreements with the earlier changes accepted by the SSPX is based on your eminent scholarship, but the limits of papal authority are merely academic until someone is willing to stand up and say, Enough! We will not follow you in this! And to date, that person has been Abp Lefebvre and after him, the SSPX. You certainly are more fair-minded than your footnote expresses and, if you're going to take issue with their position, you can do better than the charicature in your footnote.
I respectfully differ, Jim. While I am the first to admire Archbp. Lefebvre for his courageous and principled stance against the autodemolition of the Church, it remains true that he did not grasp the liturgical question in all its relevant dimensions. He was very willing to have the first part turned into the vernacular, for example, and was open to other modifications including the 1965 missal UNTIL he realized that doctrine was at stake in the Novus Ordo; and this led him to seize on 1962 as a rock of safety prior to the Council. Nevertheless, the changes in the 1950s were all ordered to the eventual goal of the Novus Ordo - indeed, the very same architects were at work on all these projects - and so the position is incoherent.
And with all due respect, as I have followed your work in recent years, you are outstanding in your liturgical scholarship, and, yet, if one is going to actively refuse a liturgical change promulgated by a Pope and wishes to remain Catholic, opposition based mostly on liturgical grounds strikes me as skating on thin ice. The more solid ground being opposition based doctrinally on all that the Church had taught before. What I understand of Abp Lefebvre’s position is that he chose the 1962 Missal as a prudential decision when he was still trying to get the Vatican to “allow the experiment of tradition”. He also recognized the authority of the Pope over the liturgy - something that I believe you yourself also recognize, but with different limits and perhaps for different reasons. Abp Lefebvre never “made it personal” regarding the perpetrators of the liturgical change. His position is coherent, and it avoids arguements that could boil down to personal preference. Of course, you can disagree, but the heart of my comment is that I don’t see that you give the position its due in your footnote and that your charactization of their position in your footnote amounts to a charicature, and to that I would add that your response above, that Abp Lefebvre was led to “seize on the 1962 as a rock of safety” as though he was being swept away in a torrent I see as more of the same. My responses are to hopefully balance the picture somewhat. Should the SSPX re-evaluate wrt the 1955 Holy Week and/or incorporate liturgical rationale going forward? Perhaps, but the questions then become - where does one stop and at what point does principle become preference? Yours fraternally, Jim Sember
These are complex matters and I do not fault the Archbishop for landing where he did and with the reasoning he used. I would merely say that we know a lot more now about what happened and why, and the SSPX leadership should accordingly see the roots of John XXIII and Paul VI in (sorry to say it but it's true) Pius XII and Pius X. Not that those popes were not outstanding in many respects, but the way they exercised the papacy paved the way for the Council and its aftermath. Regarding the argument of "where does one stop," I have devoted an entire book to that -- "The Once and Future Roman Rite" -- where I demonstrate that the answer is not as arbitrary as one might think from the outside:
I appreciate the reference to Spe salvi, 44-46. I remember reading that and being jarred. That encyclical was what started me thinking maybe Ratzinger's 'hermeneutic of continuity' thing was a sham. And by the way, that teaching is just antithesis (i.e., anti-Christ). Pretending that it's an Hegelian 'synthesis' is a slander on Hegel.
That was fantastic. Thank you.
(Just one tiny little thing: those who have committed adultery are not prohibited from receiving 'the sacraments' since obviously Confession is a sacrament that they are very much encouraged to receive. This term 'the sacraments' is used very clumsily in a lot of Catholic media and it needs to stop.)
What you say is true. But alas, some progressives want to say adulterers can receive confession without confessing their cohabitation and without intended to end it. So perhaps in a way it is true to say that adulterers, qua adulterers, are barred from the sacraments.
Ah ok. I see where you're going with that. That is a quandry
That's a nice photo of Francis standing in the mess.
I still recall my excitment when BXVI became pope 20 years ago. I thought of him at the time as JP2's doctrinal pitbull, keeping the modernist wolves of the Church at bay. He was really a moderate by today's standards as he attempted to both justify and mitigate the rupture of V2. His "ordinary and extraordinary form" distinctions of the Mass was akin to a Ford CEO telling us the 1974 Pinto was just as good as a 1967 Shelby and that we ought to buy the former if we have a choice. The bitter reality is that these were not only not forms of the same rite but reflected different Catholic religions.
Yes. I agree. What I tell everyone is that Ratzinger made me a traditionalist, but by that very fact, I had to go beyond his position, which to me seems like an impossible attempt to have the old religion and the new religion coexisting side-by-side. An understandable project but ultimately a self-contradictory one.
Thank you for the needed sober assessment of Ratzinger/Benedict. His legacy is very much a mixed one, but I will always have a soft spot in my heart for him despite his lapses. What is disheartening is to hear trads denouncing him in toto. (One of the most egregious trad errors, along with sometimes going far beyond lamenting the hardness of the Jews' heart into outright anti-Semitism.)
I have never said a bad word about Ratzinger as a man, and I say nothing but good of the principles of liturgy that he articulated so well for so many decades. His writings are what made me a traditionalist. He himself, for various reasons, could not follow out his own principles to their consistent conclusions.
What is the distinction btw Ratzinger as a man and Ratzinger as a theologian? Are they not one and the same?
No. Sometimes a man is greater than his theories; sometimes he is less. Leo XIII once talked about the "fortunate inconsistencies" in politics, whereby those who claim to exclude the Church end up making room for it in practice. I think something similar can happen with theologians. After all, no one is simply his ideas. Everyone has a combination of beliefs, ideas, commitments, aspirations, intuitions, emotions. Not even an angel, as pure intellect, can be identified with his own thought, for his essence is prior to his activity.
I had missed the Bishop Barron interview with Shapiro. That is a painful response to hear. As always, thank you for your clear and insightful analysis.
Appreciate the call to faithful Catholics to reject false teachers.
Great series of articles! You write "The one and only safe path is to stick to what we know to be certainly true". You might consider explaining how we are supposed to do that.
This gets to the nub of things, thank you so much. My problem with the Trad world is the whiff of triumphalism: “Do you reject the world, the flesh, and the devil? The Council and all its pomps and works?” There’s a sense that some higher/deeper membership in the True Church hinges on how firmly one stands athwart the world since 1968, 1864, 1517? It can almost be like a gnostic sect that knows to reject all the visible signs; but despite Sheen’s chilling description of The Ape of the Church, that cannot be right. I despise having to “be my own theologian” and God cannot have pinned our salvation at this point on following the right Substack.
Modernism is slippery, but God isn’t. How much nuance does the faith allow? Grievous times for those who simply wish to love God and neighbour as needed, not to mention exhausting.
Dear Dr. K. Your footnote slap at the SSPX is entirely unfair. The principled stand taken by Abp Lefebvre should not be dissmissively set aside by use of perjorative labels in a footnote having little to do with your stated subject. Surely the SSPX deserves better from you than that. The issue is, what should be done in the midst of the greatest crisis the Church has ever known? There are no roadmaps. The principle, articulated by Abp Lefebvre, of accepting the authority while rejecting that which contradicts the faith has drawn criticism from all sides, but it has been the touchstone that has preserved tradition and the fundamental reason the FSSP, which you favor, exists. Your disagreements with the earlier changes accepted by the SSPX is based on your eminent scholarship, but the limits of papal authority are merely academic until someone is willing to stand up and say, Enough! We will not follow you in this! And to date, that person has been Abp Lefebvre and after him, the SSPX. You certainly are more fair-minded than your footnote expresses and, if you're going to take issue with their position, you can do better than the charicature in your footnote.
I respectfully differ, Jim. While I am the first to admire Archbp. Lefebvre for his courageous and principled stance against the autodemolition of the Church, it remains true that he did not grasp the liturgical question in all its relevant dimensions. He was very willing to have the first part turned into the vernacular, for example, and was open to other modifications including the 1965 missal UNTIL he realized that doctrine was at stake in the Novus Ordo; and this led him to seize on 1962 as a rock of safety prior to the Council. Nevertheless, the changes in the 1950s were all ordered to the eventual goal of the Novus Ordo - indeed, the very same architects were at work on all these projects - and so the position is incoherent.
And with all due respect, as I have followed your work in recent years, you are outstanding in your liturgical scholarship, and, yet, if one is going to actively refuse a liturgical change promulgated by a Pope and wishes to remain Catholic, opposition based mostly on liturgical grounds strikes me as skating on thin ice. The more solid ground being opposition based doctrinally on all that the Church had taught before. What I understand of Abp Lefebvre’s position is that he chose the 1962 Missal as a prudential decision when he was still trying to get the Vatican to “allow the experiment of tradition”. He also recognized the authority of the Pope over the liturgy - something that I believe you yourself also recognize, but with different limits and perhaps for different reasons. Abp Lefebvre never “made it personal” regarding the perpetrators of the liturgical change. His position is coherent, and it avoids arguements that could boil down to personal preference. Of course, you can disagree, but the heart of my comment is that I don’t see that you give the position its due in your footnote and that your charactization of their position in your footnote amounts to a charicature, and to that I would add that your response above, that Abp Lefebvre was led to “seize on the 1962 as a rock of safety” as though he was being swept away in a torrent I see as more of the same. My responses are to hopefully balance the picture somewhat. Should the SSPX re-evaluate wrt the 1955 Holy Week and/or incorporate liturgical rationale going forward? Perhaps, but the questions then become - where does one stop and at what point does principle become preference? Yours fraternally, Jim Sember
These are complex matters and I do not fault the Archbishop for landing where he did and with the reasoning he used. I would merely say that we know a lot more now about what happened and why, and the SSPX leadership should accordingly see the roots of John XXIII and Paul VI in (sorry to say it but it's true) Pius XII and Pius X. Not that those popes were not outstanding in many respects, but the way they exercised the papacy paved the way for the Council and its aftermath. Regarding the argument of "where does one stop," I have devoted an entire book to that -- "The Once and Future Roman Rite" -- where I demonstrate that the answer is not as arbitrary as one might think from the outside:
https://www.amazon.com/Once-Future-Roman-Rite-Traditional/dp/1505126622/
(Incidentally, I see it's on sale at Amazon at the moment.)
I appreciate the reference to Spe salvi, 44-46. I remember reading that and being jarred. That encyclical was what started me thinking maybe Ratzinger's 'hermeneutic of continuity' thing was a sham. And by the way, that teaching is just antithesis (i.e., anti-Christ). Pretending that it's an Hegelian 'synthesis' is a slander on Hegel.