Weekly Roundup, December 13 Edition

Veronese, The Martyrdom and Last Communion of St. Lucy (source)

Happy feast of St. Lucy, happy recent feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, happy octave of the Immaculate Conception, and happy Gaudete Sunday (coming up)! Don’t you just love this time of year? It’s hard to keep a semi-penitential spirit in Advent where there are so many plausible occasions for parties! (Not that I’m advocating that, mind you…)

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Good News

We’ll start with my favorite heading!

“Traditional Catholic leatherworking”

is not a string of words you see very often, but it’s good to see that it exists: meet the ladies of Roman Rite Crafts.

New traditional publisher

Veronica Nygaard at OnePeterFive tells us about a new Catholic publisher, a family business, offering beautiful books of ascetical-mystical theology and Catholic devotions: Cor Jesu Press. I’ve received a number of their books and find them well-edited and beautifully printed.

Gorgeous Marian vestments

Basking in the afterglow of the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, we can rejoice in the majestic Guadalupe chasubles that the vestment atelier Sacra Domus Aurea has been sewing in recent years. You can read more and see more pictures in the feature article at Liturgical Arts Journal.

One good renovation after another

If you haven’t noticed, I tend to cite Liturgical Arts Journal just about as often as I cite New Liturgical Movement. The reason is, I not only love the fine arts in themselves, but I also find it deeply uplifting and inspiring to see the abundance of good art that is making its way back into our churches, our sanctuaries, our sacristies, our religious communities, our schools, our homes. If you want to be dazzled, go and check out the Catholic Artists Directory. Here’s a screenshot of the landing page:

The composer Mark Nowakowski also recently expressed his hopefulness about the rebirth of arts taking place at this time in the “traditional core” of the Church.

Anyway, one of the most popular series at Liturgical Arts Journal is their “Before and After” series, showing either plain or ugly churches that have been utterly transformed by a carefully planned and well executed artistic program. Here’s a recent example. The before wasn’t even all that bad — but the after is breathtaking!

When I look at a church like this, I always think: “It’s just crying out for a TLM.” Someday, I believe this good news will be added to the rest.

Korea launches newest Una Voce chapter

As announced by the Fœderatio Internationalis Una Voce (FIUV):

The Council of Una Voce International has voted to welcome the Liturgical History Study Association (LHSA, Korea) as a member of the Federation. We have been in touch with a founders of this association for some years, and are delighted that they have taken the step to establish a formal association and to apply for membership of the Federation. Korea takes its place among a good number of associations in Asia: China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Japan, and the Philippines. These are all nations with a rich Catholic heritage, going back to the 16th century, and with their own saints and martyrs who were formed in the Traditional Mass.

I read recently that the TLM is now celebrated in 95 countries. While it’s certainly taken hits since July 16, 2021, I think it’s fair to say that nothing Francis, Roche, Viola, Grillo, or anyone else does is going to obliterate this treasure of the Church; and if it holds on, as it has done now for 60 years (since 1964, when the first gross effects of Sacrosanctum Concilium were felt), it will surely grow again. Succisa virescit: cut down, it grows back.

Here’s a photo of the TLM being offered in Korea, in the company of the Korean martyrs who, of course, knew only this Mass:

Speaking of the International Una Voce Federation, they’ve just released the latest issue of their online journal, Gregorius Magnus. Always good and interesting pieces in there, with news from all over the world.

Boy bishop

A great medieval custom for December 6th lives on at the Chavagnes boys' school in France. Each year on the feast of St Nicholas, in accordance with the old English tradition, a boy-bishop is appointed from among the students to preside over the celebration of Vespers, and at high table for the meal following. See NLM for more photos of this charming occasion!

Notre Dame Cathedral

As everyone knows, the cathedral was reopened and rededicated, which is obviously good news. So I could have put it in the foregoing section. The music was excellent (except for the awakening of the organ, which was too Messiaenesque, too little Widor-Franckish). Prince William, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk came, but Pope Francis stayed far, far away.

However, something must be said about the dreadful vestments and furnishings… Let’s just say that modernist art has always required a sort of gnostic justification. “Don’t trust your carnal senses; be more spiritual, and then you’ll SEE!” Such a premise relies on a Cartesian anthropology that splits man into the external, material, and bodily (the res extensa) — not really me, not the locus of meaning — and the interior, cognitive, spiritual (the res cogitans) — that’s me, and the locus of all meaning. For a Cartesian, the greatness of a work of art is its mental rationale, not its actual appearance.

It’s been said that Frenchmen are either Cartesians or Pascalians. We might say that the architecture of Notre Dame is Pascalian, but the new furnishings are Cartesian. That is why they clash so obviously: it is the clash of incarnational Christianity with gnostic modernity.

Robert Royal (“Between the Dog and the Wolf”) connects the rededication of Chartres with the dismay of faithful Catholics over being largely abandoned by the hierarchy. Speaking of which…

New cardinals

At this point, no one should be surprised that a lethal miasma continues to emanate from Rome. Opinions seem to differ about just how bad the college of cardinals actually is. (Pentin’s and Montagna’s website offers the fruits of several years of research in this regard.)

On the one hand, Pope Francis just made one of the most notoriously pro-LGBT theologians, Timothy Radcliffe, OP, a cardinal. Here is a Dominican who says that homosexual acts can be “Eucharistic” and “expressive of Christ’s self-gift,” a perverse and blasphemous opinion that he has never retracted, and that fits in with much else he has written and done. In my view, making a solidly pro-LGBT priest a cardinal fits in with the whole pattern we have seen in the Francis pontificate:

1. “Who am I to judge?”

2. Protection and promotion of sexual abusers

3. Gutting of Pontifical Academy for Life

4. Fiducia Supplicans

5. Everyone, everyone, everyone

6. A special Jubilee 2025 day for LGBT

With such a mountain of consistent evidence, anyone who’s still saying stuff like “Oh, the pope’s just been misunderstood” or “People are telling lies about him” or “It’s his underlings, not him” will be required to answer, in the dread day of judgment, for stopping his ears to the truth and refusing to defend the faith against its enemies.

On the other hand, Rorate Caeli — hardly an optimistic website (and I say this as someone who has written for them for over a decade!) — published a lengthy exclusive by Serre Verweij called “The Upcoming Conclave: A Close Look at the College of Cardinals.” Verweij actually thinks the overall situation in the college is not nearly as bleak as most people think it is, and gives a lot of concrete reasons to back up his view. He believes that it’s extremely unlikely that a “Francis II” will come out of the next conclave.

The College of Cardinals Report

You know how churchmen are always talking about the need for transparency, accountability, coresponsibility, synodality, and all that other… stuff? Even though they don’t practice any of it? Well, go figure: it’s the laity who need to step up to the plate and make sure it happens. The well-known journalists Edward Pentin and Diane Montagna have just launched a magnificent website called The College of Cardinals Report, of which Diane is the Executive Director. This new site, built by an international team of researchers, offers detailed profiles and in-depth reports on each and every member of the college, ahead of the next conclave.

Those who use the website — and we can imagine that not a few bishops and cardinals will be among them — can find out exactly who these men are, and where they stand on a host of issues. The amount of research that has gone into this site is simply mind-boggling: head over and take a look. “The project aims to be a lasting resource for members of the Sacred College, and to inform the media and anyone interested in who could one day be pope,” say Montagna and Pentin.

Does a heretic pope fall from office?

“Is the pope Catholic?” used to be a way of affirming the obvious, and “Are you more Catholic than the pope?” used to be a reproach. Now, the one is all too sober a question, and the other is a no-brainer.

That is why I am not surprised that the question of whether Francis even is the pope, and what it takes for a pope to cease being pope, continues to be discussed at a high theological level among men of unquestionable integrity and intelligence: such men as Dr. John Lamont, Dr. Joseph Shaw, Dr. Edmund Mazza, and Fr. Brian Harrison.

If you do not have the temperament, the need, and/or especially the time to delve into these things (for the articles I’m about to link, all together, would constitute a small book), do not fret over the debate. We laity can talk all day long, but only God in the end will be able to intervene and put things right again, and only the bishops and cardinals have the actual power to do something directly about the situation. If you were forced to choose between reading another essay on the papacy and praying a rosary or part of the divine office, I definitely recommend doing the latter — pray for the pope’s conversion or replacement, and for the healing of the Church on earth.

Still, for those of a more theological bent, I share these articles because there are important questions we can examine, and the work that is being done here is laying the groundwork, I believe, for a broader consensus about the nature and limits of the papacy, and how we should think about the crisis we are living through.

I will simply list here all the components in the latest round of debating.

• John Lamont, “What Are the Consequences of Francis’s Theology?” (Rorate Caeli, October 28, 2024)

• Joseph Shaw, “The Problem of a Heretical Pope: a Reply to John Lamont” (OnePeterFive, November 4)

• John Lamont, “Dr. Lamont’s Reply to Joseph Shaw on Francis”

• Fr. Brian Harrison, “Is Francis Pope? A Priest’s Reply to John Lamont”

• John Lamont, “Reply to Fr. Harrison on Francis and Heresy”

• A Benedictine Monk, “Certain Truth, or Mere Probability? Reply to Lamont and Harrison”

• Dr. Edmund J. Mazza, “Is Francis Pope? My Reply to Fr. Brian Harrison”

I am told that more responses are on the way at OnePeterFive, before the debate — at least at that site — is officially closed by the editor (so that it does not go on forever). I will, of course, include new articles in a future roundup.

It seems fitting to conclude this section with a mention of an article over at Crisis Magazine that packs quite a punch: Michael Hoffman’s “Putting the Nail in the (Pope’s) Coffin.” Talking about Francis’s recent revision to the ritual for a pope’s wake, funeral, and burial, Hoffman well expresses the sinister undercurrents of the virtue-signaling drive to simplify and suppress.

Our culture has acquired a gnostic hatred of earthly beauty. It shows in our architecture, our clothes, our food, and in Francis’ new funeral. We cannot believe that anything that comes from riches can be good. There are always “better ways to spend our money” than on the foolish excesses of beauty. In the medieval world that created the soon-to-be-forgotten papal funeral rite, though, this was not so....

While the medieval saw a human representation of divine things in the rich symbolism of their papal funeral, the modern sees only vast sums of dirty money. Perhaps this is because we think a great deal about money. Judas, the treasurer of the apostles, thought a great deal about money, and so he only saw three hundred denarii—almost a year’s wages—wasted when Mary bathed the feet of Jesus in oil (John 12:4-8). The fact is that there is something truly good about beautiful things—even if they cost money.

Synodality against Sacerdotality

Vigilius, a German priest-theologian whose work I've shared a number of times — you might recall that he’s written the best critiques of Francis’s pontificate that I’ve ever seen (e.g., here, here, and here) — has just written a new and absolutely splendid essay, “The Disintegration of the Priesthood.” It’s a must-read if you want to understand the German Synodal Way and how it might play out more broadly across the Church, in terms of the attempt at diluting and dissolving the sacerdotal ministry.

Although this is somewhat to the side of his main argument, I found the following section just wonderful, and wanted to share it:

The rite of the Mass has its prefiguration in the historical Last Supper, in which Jesus liturgically makes present this event even before His physical sacrificial death: “This is my body, which is given for you”. This act is also only conceivable if the future sacrificial event in God’s eternity, which knows no temporal extension, always already exists in its transfigured form and is made present in the Upper Room through Christ by virtue of the mediating power of the Holy Spirit.

At this point, I would like to make a liturgical-theoretical parenthesis. One of the favorite habits of liberal liturgical practices is to give the Eucharistic celebration a form that is as close to everyday life as possible, following the simplicity of the Last Supper. Clay dishes are preferred. It is not plausible to these protagonists why the liturgical form of the Church’s celebration of Mass should differ from that of the Cenacle. However, there is a theological reason for this difference. The subject of the Lord’s Supper is not yet the Church, which is established in the first place by Christ’s earthly act of the Lord’s Supper and the subsequent sacrifice on the cross as well as the sending of the Holy Spirit made possible by it. Once the Church has emerged from these events, the same sacrifice of Christ is then offered through His sacramental self-representation in the priest. Only now does the Lord’s Supper become the celebration of the Church, the Mass, in which the risen and invisible Christ now acts in the Church’s mode of mediation. And this inclusion of the Church has a strong effect on the ritual question. It is precisely the Church’s mode of mediation that prohibits the imitation of the Lord’s Supper. Precisely because it is about the identity of the event, the rite strives for an artificial stylization that would have been completely inappropriate to the earthly act of Jesus itself.

An imitation of the Supper only gives the semblance of authenticity, whereas in fact it is the opposite of it. When we encounter groups that re-enact the Last Supper scene, we can be sure that the belief in the sacrificial character of Christ’s death and the eternal liturgy of the sacrificial lamb—and thus the identity of the historical sacrifice with the Church’s celebration of the Mass, which is mediated by the Holy Spirit—has disappeared. For this reason, the Mass is deflated into a mere celebration of the meal, in which everything depends on our own performance of reminiscence, which seeks scenically to actualize something that is past and inevitably becomes trivial. This applies to Eucharistic celebrations in swimming trunks on air mattresses as well as to the liturgies of the German Synodal Way.

On the other hand, those who believe in the formally differentiated but substantial identity of the Lord’s Supper, the death on the cross as an act of sacrifice, the heavenly liturgy, and the Holy Mass will endeavor to shape the rite in such a way that it most adequately manifests the theological content of the event and the veneration owed to the sacrificial Lamb.

Liturgical thoughts

Leila Marie Lawler on the phenomenology of concelebration:

Can we really say that surrounding the altar with priests has made the sign of consecration more real to the person in the congregation, hearing Mass that day, than if had he been there in 1945 and experienced it offered by one priest, facing away from him?... If the goal of this choice is more sense of participation for the laity, does a huddle, an exclusionary posture of many, rather than just one, clergyman convey that sense?

Joseph Shaw on fighting the anti-Advent spirit:

On the first Sunday of Advent, in place of green, priests celebrating the Mass don vestments of violet, the color of penance, and the Gloria is not said. In this respect, Advent resembles Lent: just as we do penance as we await the liturgical celebration of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, so we do as we await his birth.

Nevertheless, Advent is a carefully calibrated penitential season. Whereas there is no Gloria, there is an Alleluia. Advent has not, historically, usually been regarded as requiring the same degree of penance as Lent. A penitential season leading up to Christmas enters the Church’s historical record in France in the year 480, with fasting three days a week from St. Martin’s Day (November 11), but as it spread to other countries, it became shorter and less severe.

Rorate Caeli reports that the Archdiocese of Washington DC continues its tailspin into financial disaster. In spite of priests pleading with the Archbishop two years ago that the TLM faithful were among the most generous and dedicated in the diocese, Wilton Gregory still canceled most of their Masses — torpedoing successful parishes in the process. Outside the Old Testament it is rare to see the hand of divine wrath extend from heaven to strike down the sinner, but if a bishop offends God to this extent, he deserves to have his diocese collapse, until a worthier candidate can assume the chair.

Favorite articles of the week

As always, much to choose from, and many items that I will ignore to keep this roundup manageable for readers.

First, “Christ, King of Families,” a great article by David Torkington. Excerpt:

The true reason why Christ went to the Marriage Feast of Cana was to show that the Kingdom that He said would be coming soon would be based on ordinary Catholic families and a new form of hybrid love that would be generated there, where ordinary human love would be suffused and then transformed by divine love. That was the meaning of the changing of the water into wine—to symbolize that in the Kingdom that was coming soon the family would be paramount.

It would be paramount because it would be there that the divine love received in baptism would mix, mingle, and merge with ordinary human love to produce a quality of supernatural love that had never been seen before. When it was experienced by a decadent pagan world, this love that was the wine of the New Kingdom on earth would transform a pagan empire into a Christian empire in such a short time that it still baffles secular historians.

The only way to evangelize the modern pagan world today would be once again through the family. If we do not realize this, then our enemies do—and that is why they are trying to undermine and destroy the family which stands in the way of the neo-pagan world they want to reconstitute.

Adam De Gree talks about “Rehabilitating Fate”:

The funniest thing about teaching history is to see it living through the students. Rousseau, Laplace, Descartes, and Marx walk into my classroom every year. So do Jefferson, Kant, and Locke. The myths they created shape my students’ minds far more than any teacher ever could. In the end, the question is not whether my high schoolers will grow up believing in myth or not. It is whether the mythology that informs their lives will help them live gracefully, or lead them into the abyss.

I continue to be mightily impressed with St. Hildegard of Bingen’s eschatology. Here is Robert Lazu Kmita of Kmita’s Library quoting her interpretation of the Gospel about the end of the world:

There will be ‘signs in the sun and the moon and the stars,’ that is, portents in Christ so that those in error will oppose the humanity of the Savior, and in the church when heretics will attempt to attack the church, and among priests, teachers, and the spiritual people when they will turn away from the truth toward falsehood. And ‘upon the earth,’ namely, among worldly people, ‘[there will be] distress of nations,’ clearly of different nations, so that the errors of one people and province will contaminate another people and province and will turn [them] to faithlessness. From the perplexity that the sound of the sea, resounding shamelessly, and of the waves will emit, Antichrist will summon many storms of errors, and Antichrist’s own heretical ministers will run to and from through the entire world with their falsehoods and deceptions.

For ‘the powers of heaven,’ namely, the bishops and the leaders in the church, who like columns ought to uphold strongly all the institutions and mysteries of the church that belong to heaven, ‘will be shaken in fear and doubt,’ so that they withdraw, not daring to defend or to speak openly about righteousness and the things that look up at God.

Who could have described our times better?

Anthony Esolen perfectly captures the spirit of modern “church reformers”:

What is left of tradition has been overtaken by scholars peddling the same nostrums in Scotland as in San Cristobal de las Casas. These nostrums they get not from close and reverent study of the past but from notions in the current air, such as a chirpy reporter reading from a cue card might pronounce on television.

That is why we would be shocked to find them recommending, precisely as a return to tradition, anything more warlike than our bland acceptance of safety first and last, more patriarchal than our sexual indifferentism, more ascetic than our assumption that happiness is a warm puppy, or more dynamically hierarchical than groups of complacent people sitting at a round table to discuss the feelings they imagine they have.

I think part of the reason we are fascinated by the Middle Ages is that they show us a world in which up is up and down is down, God and man are real, male is male, female is female, and the faith is everywhere, like a blessed atmosphere of purest air and cleanest water. It’s just the opposite of nearly everything we have to deal with. Obviously God put us right here, right now, for good reason, and we’ve got to “get on with it,” but I do believe He also wants us to be inspired, consoled, and challenged by the Age of Faith. That may very well be a golden key to ever having a second Age of Faith.

“What would draw northern Europeans from hearth and home to progress thousands of kilometers on foot through forests, rivers, and deserts into a territory with a completely different culture and attempt to wage a victorious war against its inhabitants?,” asks Aaron Pattee of Maintaining the Realm. He delves into the motives behind the Crusades and shows why the modern narrative about them is off-base.

Another tremendous article by Robert Keim over at Via Mediaevalis (why do I feel like I’m saying that every single week? because I am!):

Medieval Christians entered into the Bible, and dwelt there. Accustomed to traveling by foot, they were content to move slowly — from scene to scene, from verse to verse, from word to word. In their journeys through the Book of Scripture, they found that which was clearly present; they saw also that which was hidden; they noticed even that which was absent. And they kept these things, pondering them in their hearts. When the day was far spent, and the tolling of the bell or the lowing of the cows called them back to the Book of Nature, they looked out from within the literary world of the Bible and saw their material world as through a lens — the lens, that is, of divine Story.

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Two restful photos

Here’s our Russian Blue, taking a nap in one of his favorite spots — next to the bay window in the living room, half-wrapped in the sheers.

I’m grateful to God for creating cats. They remind me to take a deep breath and relax (well, at least for a few minutes).

And here’s the sky that greeted me the other night when I stepped out of the basement of my church after choir practice:

The little moon floating in the rosy clouds above the trees reminded me of Our Lady, pulchra ut luna, “fair as the moon,” who is also the Rosa Mystica. May she crush the devil, over and over, with her immaculate foot, and pray us into paradise.

Thanks for reading and may God bless you!