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Flash sale!
Sophia Institute Press has a huge sale going on at this moment, with many titles at not-likely-to-be-repeated rates. In particular, they have my little book True Obedience in the Church: A Guide to Discernment in Challenging Times for only $2 a copy (normally $15)! Here's your chance to stock up on copies to give away to clergy and seminarians, amicable conservatives, young trads, hyperpapalists who need a challenge, et al. A friend told me he got 4 copies plus shipping for $11.40.
Three new Substacks I personally recommend
It’s not difficult to find interesting Substacks to read; the difficulty is limiting the number of them to something manageable! However, every once in a while, a Substack arises that towers above the rest, or offers such a unique angle, with such polish and grace, that it instantly dominates its subject area. One example I’ve mentioned many times already is Hilary White’s The Sacred Images Project, which I can’t recommend highly enough. Three more have recently appeared, and I urge you to check them out.
The first is Via Mediaevalis by scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature, Robert W. Keim. I have never read a piece by him that I have not hugely enjoyed and benefited from. His recent articles on wonder, music, balance, and beauty are masterful miniatures, like those of the medieval manuscripts with which he lavishly sprinkles his articles.
The second is Kmita’s Library, the Substack of the most eminent Tolkien scholar in Romania, Robert Lazu Kmita — philosopher, novelist, and Catholic traditionalist. His initial array of articles is tantalizing in its diversity and complexity: how the use of symbolism is where we will find Tolkien’s religion in his fiction, and why he and Lewis utilize music in their cosmogonies; how literature must embody truth as well as beauty; how St. Hildegard of Bingen prophesied that the Antichrist would be of Christian origin, from the high ecclesiastical hierarchy, would justify sexual sins and omit divine justice, and foment schisms; why the possibility of extraterrestrial rational animals is ruled out by theology; and why our forefathers believed that Eden, or Paradise, was a real physical place still existing in the world. If that isn’t a spectacular start to a Substack, I don’t know what is!
The third is Maintaining the Realm, by American-born, European-trained medieval historian and architectural archaeologist Aaron Pattee. When I met him in person not long ago, his conversation was riveting as he described castles in various countries; the complex political hierarchy of the Holy Roman Empire; the surprising mobility within that world, where lower-ranking figures could work their way upward; the challenges of tracking genealogies when names change due to rank and place. He has now launched a Substack to delve into the discoveries he has made, which include Régine Pernoud-style overturnings of conventional views on the Middle Ages. Anyone with an interest in medievalia, knighthood, the Holy Roman Empire, social mores, period architecture, or legal history, should run (not walk) to his site and check it out.
Good news
There is good news everywhere — if only we look (or know where to look) for it.
At New Liturgical Movement, Gregory DiPippo shares with us a video of the ordination of eleven priests for the FSSP this past May, together with an illustrated commentary on the traditional rite of priestly ordination. If you’re not familiar with how the rite goes, it’s a good introduction.
The Carmelite nuns of Fairfield, Pennsylvania, continue to build, stone by stone, their monastery to last a thousand years. They are loyal to Roman and Carmelite tradition with the calm, peaceful, inflexible commitment of all true religious. Kingdoms may rise and fall, popes may come and go, but the nuns here will pray the same Mass and breviary for the sanctification of their souls and the good of the whole Church. They just announced that they’ve raised over a million dollars in their latest capital campaign. Pretty good for nuns who don’t use email and don’t leave their cells!
San Damiano College for the Trades in Springfield, Illinois, is expected to open in the fall of 2025, offering Catholic liberal arts education integrated with practical training in a trade. Former Wyoming Catholic College professor and personal friend Dr. Kent J. Lasnoski is teaming up with Bishop Paprocki to extend this new and affordable opportunity to young people. You can read more about it in this interview.
The “Chartres pilgrimage of Spain” — from Oviedo to Covadonga — was a greater success in its fourth year than ever. Many galleries of photos may be found at the Facebook page of Fr. José Miguel Marqués Campo. Lots and lots of children and youths. Even in Europe, in this darkest of Dark Ages, the flame of Faith still burns and will burn to the end of time. A succinct writeup with a good selection of pictures may be found here.
Mass of the Ages is working hard to identify and comprehensively train 1,700 priests to celebrate the Traditional Latin Mass. They have the tools, the zeal, and the momentum. Watch this 5-minute video and lift your spirits:
Understanding the Enemy
Austin Ruse is quite right: “To lefty Catholics, the great evil is ‘conservatism,’ so they will support anything that opposes it, and criticize anything that advances it.” Actually, it’s not conservatism per se, but any presence of Tradition. Once one appreciates this fact, one can see that the battle we are fighting is not about this or that “external,” but about the heart and soul of Catholicism.
If the planned interior renovation of Notre Dame in Paris goes forward, it will become yet another empty monument to modernism, a dead soul inside a living body. The building is from the age of faith; the interior will be from the age of atheism. This is yet another illustration of how, for a certain kind of modernist, anything goes except tradition; it must be categorically excluded.
That reminds me of a text with which Anne Hendershott made me acquainted. On October 9, 1774, American Founding Father John Adams attended a Catholic Mass in a chapel in Philadelphia during the First Continental Congress and found it so weird that he wrote about it in a letter to his wife, Abigail:
The poor wretches fingering their beads, chanting Latin, not a word of which they understood, their Pater Nosters and Ave Marias. Their holy water—their crossing themselves perpetually—their bowing to the name of Jesus wherever they hear it—their bowings, and kneelings, and genuflections before the altar. The dress of the priest was rich with lace—his pulpit was velvet and gold. The altar piece was very rich—little images and crucifixes about—wax candles lighted up. But how shall I describe the picture of our Saviour in a frame of marble over the altar, at full length, upon the cross in the agonies, and the blood dropping and streaming from his wounds. Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear, and imagination. Everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.
What I find fascinating about this is, first, that John Adams recognized the powerful sensory appeal of Catholicism’s ritual tradition, and, second, that his critique, as an unbeliever, sounds uncomfortably the same as that of the avant-garde liturgists of the 20th century. Presumably those liturgists had found a way to “break the spell,” as Luther had done…
Case in point: Turns out the papal nuncio to France, who is a softy on abuse and cracks the whip on the TLM, prays daily in front of Rupnik mosaics. You couldn’t make this stuff up. Such a one has definitely broken free from the allurements of faith.
Best article of the past month
This is not an easy award to give, but it’s not surprising that I should end up bestowing it on an essay by Sebastian Morello, “On Killing Our Elders.” An excerpt:
In a traditional society, the elder is a source — a treasury, even — of social and communal knowledge that allows a given community to live in a way that is contiguous with their ancestors. That is, the elder is a bridge between the generations down the centuries that conserved and protected the community against all odds, and those generations’ living beneficiaries. Put another way, the elder both represents and embodies everything from which modern man seeks to emancipate himself. Hence, modern society not only has no place for the elder, but it must actively pursue the elder’s disappearance, either by making him perpetuate his youth through cosmetics and technology, becoming by steps a freak of nature; or by hiding him away in a care home; or increasingly by developing the necessarily sophisticated and sophistical arguments to justify murdering him with ‘dignity.’...
‘Modernity’ is merely the term for that time in history that is both intellectually and practically devoted to atheism in its various ideological forms. Modernity is, at the deepest level, a break with everything prior to it, for everything prior to it was intensely religious. Unfortunately, by being thus devoted to atheism, modernity possesses neither meaning nor purpose. In turn, our civilisation is rapidly collapsing and the alienation that modern man experiences—from himself, his neighbour, and his world—is intensifying at a rate that makes the approaching decades look very alarming. And through this process of “biting our chains,” as Joseph de Maistre put it, we are now drifting into the abyss. Amid such a process of entirely breaking with the past, there is no place for the elder—who is, as it were, the very chain that is being bitten.
This fits in snugly with the analysis I offered here at T&S of how the Novus Ordo breaks with the past. The postconciliar liturgical “reform” was driven by “experts” who called into question — and redacted or rejected altogether — huge swaths of prayer inherited from our ancestors, the sum total of elder wisdom in liturgical form. The council that sought to renew the Church’s youth emptied churches, extinguished religious orders, profaned the sacred. Where growth can still be seen is either where the natural law is still followed (the global South) or where an ancient rite that speaks of “God who giveth joy to my youth” has returned. Obviously, we need both adherence to the natural law, and adherence to the divine law exhibited in the providential unfolding of the sacred rites.
The primary tendency of intellectuals is to think themselves better than the tradition, better than the witness of the saints of yore, better than the common man who loves to kneel at low Mass and pray his beads. They are oh-so-superior to those grubby superficial pieties, sentimental devotions, incredible legends, etc. This pridefulness is a path to damnation.
On why the itching desire to transform or otherwise unnaturally change aspects of the Church into something supposedly more valuable, or at least more appropriate for our times, is doomed to failure, see Julian’s latest piece at Crisis Magazine: “Pontifical Alchemy Doesn’t Work.”
Fulton Sheen and the Demonic
Readers of T&S will know that I have some hesitations about Archbishop Sheen. Nevertheless, when he’s on, he’s on. A new Emmaus Road book gathers together all of Sheen’s reflections on the demonic, some of them never published before. I was particularly struck by this passage (h/t Fr. Z):
The liturgical books issued by Paul VI run away from the Cross by downplaying the Mass as the Sacrifice of Calvary, by downplaying asceticism and mortification (both in the texts and in the rubrics), by diminishing mentions of the devil and evils to be overcome, and by the loss of abstinence and fasting. Then there is the optional but by now nearly universal versus populum stance that dissociates the Mass from the prominent crucifix above the altar, in the direction of which the priest should be offering. Starophobia.
Similarly, the drastic decrease in Eucharistic devotion is not an accident of the liturgical reform, but a predictable consequence of its ecumenical and anthropocentric reigning ideas. Phillip Campbell shows, in a fantastic article, how the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation necessarily emanates a certain kind of liturgical and devotional cultus—and how it is clear that some of our bishops are Protestants in regard to this dogma. Especially striking is the language the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles (1563) directed against the veneration and adoration of the Eucharist, which is almost verbatim the same as the language used by progressive Catholic theologians: “The Sacraments were not ordained of Christ to be gazed upon, or to be carried about, but that we should duly use them.”
Campbell comments:
The Church of England ultimately came out strongly against traditional Eucharistic devotions because it was clear that they were intimately linked with the power of the priest to confect the sacrifice of the Mass, and hence to a Catholic understanding of the sacrament of Holy Orders, which was the sacrament most fiercely attacked under Henry's reform. The prohibition against gazing upon the sacrament refers to Eucharistic Adoration, and carrying the sacrament about to the processions. Note also the Anglican statement that “we should duly use” the sacraments; this focus here on the use of the sacraments will be standard parlance in Protestant terminology, as contrasted with veneration or exhibition of the sacraments, as is common in Catholicism, which the Protestants (like Bishop Stowe) viewed as inappropriately passive. This is also related with the ideas of the Lutherans that Christ was present in the sacrament only so long as it was being “used.”
If this sounds like sacramental utilitarianism, it is. God Himself is thus reduced to a useful means to human ends (and nowadays, humanitarian projects), rather than being the ultimate end toward which all of our activity is directed. And this is why Fr. Richard Cipolla can rightly say, reflecting on the prospects and pitfalls of the recent Eucharistic Congress:
As good as adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is for the spiritual health of a parish, it cannot take the place of the Mass, which is the very heart of the raison d’etre for the existence of a parish church.... Holy Communion is indeed a great gift of real grace, but it is not why we have a Sunday obligation to be present at Mass. The obligation is to worship God in spirit and truth, that worship that is an icon of the eternal worship of heaven…. The root cause of lukewarmness and disbelief is how the Mass is celebrated in most parishes, especially on Sundays. It is the refusal of both bishops and priests to acknowledge this that keeps the Church in this country in the vapid bondage in which it finds itself.
Concerning “vapid bondage,” Fr. Robert McTeigue asks what happens when whole swaths of the Church cease to aspire to anything beyond people showing up for Sunday Mass and dropping a check in the basket, and Leila Marie Lawler takes up a similar point, issuing an indictment of the US bishops’ hypocrisy and lack of repentance for the Covid lockdown:
The Eucharistic Revival isn’t, as claimed, a grass-roots initiative, and fails to take into account a penetrating blow to the hearts of the faithful in the US and around the world, a blow inflicted by the very hierarchy that now claims to seek to impart love for the Eucharistic Lord.
Quite a different case was the American prisoner of war who, upon returning from Vietnam to an unrecognizable “reformed” liturgy, utilized the techniques he had developed under torture to block out all that was happening around him at Mass — until decades later he rediscovered the Latin Mass, and felt as if he had been released from prison once more.
Dom Alcuin Reid & Charles Coulombe
The homily preached by Dom Alcuin Reid, OSB, prior of Brignoles, for the 11th Sunday after Pentecost, powerfully captures the essence of traditionalism; truly it’s among the best short accounts I’ve ever seen and might therefore serve well to share with others.
Why the fuss? If the more recent forms of the liturgical rites are valid (which of course, when celebrated according to the mind of the Church, they are), what is the issue? If in 1969 the Holy Father wanted everyone to adopt them, and the Holy Father wishes the same today, why court disobedience in refusing so to do?
The answer is found in this morning’s Epistle: tradidi quod et accepi [I have handed on that which I received]. Or to put it more precisely, the (valid) new liturgy is not traditional. It is not the passing on of that which the apostles of the day (including the successor of St Peter) themselves receive (even moderately reformed, as willed by the most recent Oecumenical Council). It is a novelty in Christian liturgical tradition, in radical discontinuity with that which it seeks to replace."
In this connection, Charles Coulombe reminds us of a distinction we can never insist on too much:
Power is the ability to make things happen—to be able to convince or to force oneself or others to do something or other; to have the resources with which to do or make others do what one wishes.... Authority is the right to say what ought to be done. Thus, the doctor has the authority to tell the patient what to do. In Church, State, and private life, authority has traditionally been used to regulate the use of power to a specific end: the Common Good. Equally opposed to this is the indiscriminate use of power—all-against-all, which is anarchy; or the use of power for purely private and personal ends, without regard to authority or its law. This is always criminal; but when it is done by rulers with authority, it is despotism.
Writes Raymond Kowalski:
I get little solace from the idea that some future pope will come along and undo the Francis papacy. Not that I don’t think it could happen. But what is the point of a religion that changes from time to time depending on who is pope?
Exactly. And that is why hyperpapalism is not Catholicism, and vice versa. If there is no permanent principle other than the will of him who is in power, then there is no divinely revealed religion founded on Christ and the Apostles.
We Catholics receive a rather sharp rebuke from the well-known Protestant philosopher, Carl Trueman, who notices that authorities (or powers) in the Catholic Church today don’t — shall we say — use their authority or power for the good, and in fact, abuse it for evil (for inaction when action is called for is an evil):
This is perhaps the Achilles Heel of the Catholic Church: allowing its name to be used by those whose war against human nature on issues of life, sexuality, and gender is so completely at odds with Christian teaching. Certainly, the child abuse scandal has severely damaged the Church’s public witness. But so has the failure to deal with those many politicians who use the Catholic label when it suits them but never allow the Catholic Church’s clearly stated positions on such matters as abortion to interfere with their chances of elected office....
Unfortunately, the purchase price of Catholicism's institutional unity often seems to be the hierarchy’s practical indifference to actual doctrinal and moral unity. If a church opposes abortion but never holds its people to account on the issue, then the question of what “opposes” means becomes rather pressing....
It is not enough for the church to show that she takes the sacred seriously only when it is attacked by the encroaching paganism of the world around. Such criticism will only have credibility when it arises out of a consistent concern for the sacred within the church.
When the pope and the bishops begin to anathematize and excommunicate pro-abortion politicians, then it will be possible to start hearing what they have to say on other topics; for until then, the background noise of the incoherence is too deafening to hear whatever they might be muttering.
Litany of Importunity
The following litany was originally proposed to me by a friend and reader of NLM, who sent me raw materials and asked me to complete it. This I gladly did, and now share with you the result. Regardless of whether or not the rumors about future actions against the liturgical tradition of the Church prove true, there can be no question that the Church is oppressed by false churchmen, wolves in sheep’s clothing, tares masquerading as wheat, and that we should plead with the Lord for deliverance, using the bold words He Himself has given us in Holy Writ.
You may find the litany here.
Urban Hannon once again
Meanwhile, Hannon’s little book Thomistic Mystagogy continues to attract attention and high praise, most recently in a glowing review by medievalist and translator David Foley, who says, inter alia:
Every comment that St. Thomas makes on the text of the Mass or the elements of its celebration equally embraces the Doctor’s painstaking study of the tradition—in particular, the writings of the Fathers and medieval masters—and his total abandonment to contemplating the sacred mysteries. Being perhaps the pre-eminent example in history of a rational animal, St. Thomas does not share with some of his contemporaries an extravagant enthusiasm for allegorical interpretation, yet his intellect was wholly alive to the spiritual realities veiled beneath every word and gesture of the Mass.
Consequently, his exegesis possesses something from all of the four senses according to which the medievals interpreted Scripture: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. Like the inspired words of Sacred Scripture, the apostolic liturgy is inscribed with many dimensions of meaning, such that it can signify diverse things at the same moment.
Hence, according to St. Thomas, the use of incense in the Mass is simultaneously historical (being derived from the ceremonial precepts of the Old Law), practical (it dispels foul odors, with which medieval churches must have been amply furnished), and mystical (it represents the sweetness of the good odor of Christ diffused through the hierarchy of His Church to all of her members).
Another particularly delightful specimen of Thomistic exegesis is his extended discussion, adapted from the commentary of Pope Innocent III, of the eight different sets of the Sign of the Cross made throughout the Mass.
And lastly, for any Italian readers out there…
Buone notizie per i miei lettori italiani
Il mio ultimo libro in italiano è stato appena pubblicato! Rivendicare la nostra primogenitura cattolico-romana (originale: Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright). Per saperne di più, consulti la pagina dell’editore.
Thank you for reading, and may God bless you!
Good morning.
How can I get a couple of the Tradition & Sanity articles sent to me via email & not a link? I am trying to print & send these to my son, Eric Manuel.
Thanks.
Wow, a lot to digest, and all of very thought-provoking and very true. I'm glad you keep on top of these brilliant assessments and share them with us. The story of that prisoner in Vietnam makes one cry... so does the story of the prelate praying before Rupnik "art." Lord, help us!