Weekly Roundup: November 22 Edition

Mayan Rite, Papal Funeral, Immaculate Conception, Pedro Arrupe, Chasubles, Epochal Change, and much more!

I wish one and all a blessed feast of St. Cecilia, patroness of musicians (and therefore, most dearly beloved to me)! To any Cecilias reading this (and however you spell your name), happy name-day!

Diego Rivera, [Creation], based on Mayan mythology (source)

Mayan Rite, New Papal Funeral, and Candid Cardinal

At the top of the news cycle, we had the announcement that the Vatican has given the provisional green light to a version of the modern rite of Paul VI “inculturated” for Mayans in Mexico, by the inclusion of ritual dances, women performing the “ministry” of “incense bearers,” and laymen and laywomen leading certain Mass parts as if the principal celebrant of those parts. The basic facts are accurately recounted by Michael Haynes. The “Mayan rite” (or perhaps, to be technically accurate, the “Mayan use”) is now a thing. (If you want some more juicy details, this article, from April 2023, has got them.)

But just in case you forgot, the traditional Latin Mass ain’t the Roman Rite.

One often feels like pinching oneself to be sure one isn’t stuck in a bad dream. Alas… that’s where we are: the most venerable, most widespread liturgical rite in Christian history is now officially a non-rite (because there’s only “one unique” form of the Roman Rite, and it’s Paul VI’s, remember?), and its remaining outposts are to be hunted down one by one, but, for some descendents of indigenous Mayans, we will invent a new flavor among the 1,001 flavors already on offer in the Baskin-Robbins Novus Ordo. It’s at a time like this that one realizes: we are actually not talking about the same religion.

I guess we can be grateful that the Vatican is making it as easy as possible to know the difference between truth and error.

There have been two extremes in reacting to this news. On the one hand, we have Where Pachamama Is accusing trads of lying by saying that this move represents an introduction of pagan elements. Well, it is full of bizarre adaptations that have no roots in Catholic/Christian tradition and certainly seem to come from the pagan background. On the other hand, we have some hotheads calling it a “demonic rite.” That’s as escalatory as Joe Biden approving US-controlled missiles for launch deep into Russia. No, there’s a difference between this and a Satanic black Mass.

The root problem is, the Mass shouldn’t be toyed around with like this, as if it’s some kind of social experiment that we can modify to our heart’s content. That’s totally foreign to the orthodox mentality, which conserves the rites for the traditional wisdom they contain, and quietly demands that we submit our minds to them to be formed by them.

Still, it must be admitted that the Novus Ordo as such was produced with this mechanistic mentality, as a “banal, on-the-spot fabrication” to use the memorable words of Joseph Ratzinger; and therefore we cannot be surprised that new “uses” will be rolled off the assembly-line.

In just the same spirit, Pope Francis rolled out a new edition of how a pope’s funeral should be conducted. This is no minor change but a major overhaul, still further simplifying, abbreviating, and dumbing-down the rite, showing Francis to be an emulous successor of Paul VI, as if the Church had pressed the “pause” button in 1978 and then unclicked it in 2013. Just when you thought a modern funeral couldn’t get any more eviscerated of meaning, a ’68er steps in to show that the process has not yet reached rock bottom.

A future pope should restore all pontifical ceremonies and, as part of that, the traditional papal Requiem Mass in all its tragic, otherworldly glory. Our rites are a glimmering forest of transformative symbols, not a silly and tedious lesson in faux humility.

Maike Hickson ran an interesting article at LifeSiteNews about how Cardinal Dario Castrillón Hoyos, the prelate at one point in charge of the Ecclesia Dei Commission, admitted to Bishop Bernard Fellay in 2005 that the Novus Ordo rite of the Mass was “defective.” Unfortunately he did not elaborate. Maike asked me for comments, which I gave her:

It’s quite unpastoral, when you think of it, to continue to inflict something defective on the people of God. I mean, would a mother put her child in a boat she knows is defective? Surely not.

Of course what Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos said would no longer seem striking to us today, since pretty much everyone admits by now that there are defects in the reformed liturgy – defects caused by the extreme haste of the process, by the suppression of key parts (including very ancient parts) of the Roman Rite, by the introduction of many options and moments for improvised comments (which Ratzinger considered a huge weakness), and more. We might consider how Cardinal Sarah, who once headed the liturgy dicastery, has pointed out many things lacking in the new rite, including the rich medieval Offertory prayers.

Back in 2005, however, a statement about ‘defects’ in the new rite would have been a startling act of honesty from someone in His Eminence’s position, and an occasion of embarrassment to be sure, since officially no one was supposed to say anything negative about either the Council or the reforms executed in its name.

What is interesting to me is that the current Vatican regime, under Francis, and with Roche now in Sarah’s former position, has returned to this intransigent, ideological stance, and we can only dream at the moment of an honesty like Castrillón Hoyos’s.

To forestall a flurry of objections, I do know — and I encourage everyone else to understand — that there are many ways, more or less grave, in which a liturgical rite can be defective. There are four qualities of liturgy:

1. validity

2. licitness

3. fittingness

4. authenticity

For the record, I do not think, nor have I ever thought, that the Novus Ordo is defective as to its validity, but it can and does involve defects in the other three areas. I discuss all this in a lecture posted at NLM, for those who wish to delve into it. Having these distinctions clearly in mind is a game-changer for intelligent conversations.

Letters on Liturgy

I returned last week to OnePeterFive with the publication of a series of (real) letters in which an interlocutor and I try to get at the deepest roots of the enormous difference many Catholics perceive experientially between even the “reverent Novus Ordo” and the traditional Latin Mass. Here’s how it begins:

My family and I are attending the Latin Mass more and more often these days, and finding it exerts, to our surprise, a strong pull. I say to our surprise, because for such a long time we were die-hard devotees of the reverent Novus Ordo.... But the confidence that once came easily is now wavering.... After the TLM, I feel as though I’m in a heightened state of contemplation which remains until I get up to leave. Again, this rarely happened with the Novus Ordo, and when it did, it didn’t occur in the same expansive and effortless way. Every few years, God seems to surprise me in a manner that renovates my entire outlook. This feels like such an occasion. I’m full of wonder and in search of a doctrinal basis for what I’m experiencing.

Read the rest here. The letter exchange surprised me with just how popular it was — I think it gave words to what many have experienced.

In an article on a cookbook that features great Christian art, the following paragraph leapt out at me:

Often, there is an unfortunate tendency to dumb down art and literature and ideas when introducing them to children. Of course, there are plenty of books and paintings that aren’t suitable for young eyes and minds, but by turning everything into a cartoon or an abridgment, we risk harming a child’s sense of wonder. We also underestimate their powers of observation and the importance of imparting our shared tradition to them through age-old art, music, literature, and more.

The parallels with the past six decades are easy to see. Let’s rewrite the above, just a bit:

Often, there was an unfortunate tendency to dumb down liturgy for laity. By turning everything into a cartoon or an abridgment, we risk harming believers’ sense of wonder. We also underestimate their powers of observation and the importance of imparting our shared tradition to them through age-old art, music, literature, and more.

As illustrated by the following graphic (where the lower right corner should really say “in the 1960s”). The new rite was rolled out at a low-point in Western culture and has never risen much above its origins, even if here or there the memory (or parallel presence) of the upper left corner has inspired better efforts:

Immaculate Conception confusions

Sticking with liturgical matters for a moment…

There’s been a fair amount of kerfuffle about the whole business of December 9th as a transferred holy day of obligation in the USA this year, thanks to an exchange between an American bishop and the Dicastery for Divine Worship.

For decades (and for poor reasons), the US bishops have been conditioning everyone to think that Saturday/Monday holy days are not of obligation. And now, hey presto!, Monday the 9th is a day of obligation. Fine, as far as the Novus Ordo calendar goes; but some more consistency and better lead-up would have been a good idea.

Meanwhile, they don’t even bother to think about the rubrics of the ’62 missal — where the Second Sunday of Advent on December 8th is supplanted by the Immaculate Conception — because the faithful who go to that simply don't matter at all; we might as well be toads on the road. Peripheral and at the margins, as it were. And thanks to the same DDWDS, Latin Masses keep getting shut down, so that there are Catholics out there whose options — even for Sunday, let alone for Monday — are grim, to say the least. I hate it when people from conservative parishes or dioceses say “Stop complaining, suck it up, just go to your local Novus Ordo.” Those people obviously do not have much information coming to them from outside their own bubble.

In cases like this, what is required is a good dose of Catholic common sense. According to the moral theologians, no one is obliged to go a huge distance to get to a Mass, and no one is obliged to go to a Mass that poses “spiritual harm either to oneself or to another” or that may lead one to sin (this is the language of preconciliar moral theologians).

No one who knows my work can imagine for a moment that I am not in favor of people going to Mass as often as possible, even daily. But I am also well aware of the deplorable liturgical situation for a lot of Catholics these days, and this can change the nature of our obligations.

So, by all means, if you have the FSSP or the ICKSP or a diocesan TLM nearby on Monday, December 9th, you’re all set. Go to Mass, it’s for your good, and more importantly, it’s for God’s glory and honor. (Remember, any Catholic rite fulfills the obligation — so if there’s an Eastern rite, you can avail yourself of that as well, even if it’s not a Marian celebration.)

In other situations, you have to discern prudently what ought to be done.

My series on this question at Tradition & Sanity, “The Sunday Mass Obligation in a Time of Liturgical Crisis,” was among the most widely-read and shared posts from this Substack. I go into all the relevant details for forming an upright conscience on this matter. Here’s the link to the first, and from there you can get to the rest.

For those who prefer video/audio, the content of the Substack posts was turned into a lecture that can be found on my YouTube channel.

Meanwhile, Fr. Z imagines the letter that a good bishop might pen to his flock concerning the Holy Day…

Liturgy teaching authority

Will Haun gave a lecture at CUA Law School, as part of their “Faith in Action” series, in which speakers address how their Catholic faith influences their vocation. In his talk, “Integration and Separation,” Will explains how attending the TLM, which brought many fruits to him and his family, opened the grace for him to see the Church as a real, legal authority, which in turn sheds a distinctive light on how the Church as a societas perfecta (“perfect society”) should approach the American separation of Church and State. Ironically, in the modern liturgy, a lex orandi expressive of this truth of the lex credendi is almost completely absent — even though ecclesiastical power is used and abused more recklessly than ever.

Concerning canonizations

(And I mean that in both senses…) It was announced that Pedro Arrupe, the general of the Jesuits who presided over their transition into liberation theology and helped turn “S.J.” into the term of opprobrium it has become, has moved closer to beatification. Now, no serious theologians think that beatification is an infallible act of the Magisterium, but a lot of theologians think that canonization is. This, however, is a position that deserves to be vigorously challenged, as indeed it has never been definitively taught by the Magisterium, and there has always been a vocal minority rejecting it. If this is a topic that interests you — or even if you are simply disturbed by some of the canonizations of recent decades — the book for you is: Are Canonizations Infallible? Revisiting a Disputed Question, an anthology I edited and contributed to back in 2021.

The distinguished contributors to it thoroughly hash out the issues, including every quotation and argument you can possibly think of, on both sides. It’s a really in-depth study, and if you want to see traditional arguments against the infallibility of canonizations, pick up a copy.

Turned Around

My latest book continues to make inroads.

• Fr. Z recommends it: “New book SHUTS DOWN the old chestnut objections to the Traditional Latin Mass. Get ready to respond to objections and to deepen your understanding.”

• Fr. Robert McTeigue, one of the good Jesuits (indeed, a great one!), interviewed me on his show The Catholic Current. Our topic: “Why Not the Traditional Latin Mass?” Fr. McTeigue said he loved this book and wants everyone to read it. (Please!)

• John-Henry Westen and Joe McClane both interviewed me this past week as well, but those videos haven’t gone up yet. I’ll be sure to share them when they do.

Parallel developments in East & West

How often have I heard Eastern Christians (whether Catholic or schismatic) say something like the following: “In the West, you kept on changing over time, but in the East we always retained the ancient ways. Our liturgy, our churches, our vestments, always the same, while yours evolve.”

Well...

I’ve learned through study that this isn’t (wasn’t) so. Granted, relatively speaking there is less change and more continuity in the East, but there are still developments. The texts and ceremonies of the liturgy were elaborated over time and reached maturity well after the period of the Church Fathers; the layout and decoration of churches has seen multiple variations; and, the concern of a wonderful LAJ article on Nov. 18th, the Greek equivalent to the Roman chasuble has also evolved, and in a parallel way. Anyone with an interest in the history of Mass vestments — especially as it concerns the organic shift from “Gothic” to “Roman” — should not miss this piece.

Favorite article of the week

The gold medal goes to a sizzling-hot piece from the Argentinian blog Caminante Wanderer, translated at Rorate Caeli: “The Church Facing an Epochal Change: Trump, the Global Defeat of Wokism and the Mainstream Media, and the Upcoming Conclave.” The author, Rubén Peretó Rivas, writes with uncommon clarity and verve.

I had the pleasure of meeting him in Rome a couple of years ago at a Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage conference. Here we are together on a panel:

If there’s only one link you click through from today’s Roundup, please make it this one!

Other worthwhile articles

Modernism is a stubborn weed

Greg Cook, talking about life in and around 1968, crafts this wonderful analogy:

St. Pius X succeeded in checking modernism, but not eradicating it. A suitable analogy comes from my backyard, courtesy of a certain noxious invasive species—Japanese knotweed. The plant was inexplicably brought here decades ago as an ornamental. A cursory look suggests a similarity to bamboo, though I don’t think there is any close genetic link. The stocks can easily be cut down or even pulled up, but that is not enough to get rid of it. Fire will not work, and neither will chemicals. It can be partly smothered but that only delays its emergence. The plant spreads and reproduces through underground rhizomes, and even a small piece can take root. Therefore, the only recourse is to dig out the affected area to the depth of several feet. Otherwise the plant keeps coming back, exhausting the property owner’s patience and resources. Modernism likewise was ready to spring back to active life once counter-measures ceased or were at least relaxed.

Tolkien’s protoevangelium

The same writer speaks movingly, in another post, of what he learned, as an unbeliever, from the Catholic worldview that subtly pervades the subcreated world of J.R.R. Tolkien?

What knowledge and virtues did I learn from the great English philologist?

From Frodo and Sam I learned lessons in friendship, courage, and devotion. From Aragorn I drank in lessons in duty, bravery, and humility. Boromir showed me about wrongly-directed desire but also repentance. His father Denethor manifested pride and despair. Saruman demonstrated how wisdom can be corrupted by the lust for power, whereas his brother wizard Gandalf revealed the perfection of wisdom through patience and perseverance. Faramir taught about filial obedience, religious duty, piety and thanksgiving. Eowyn gave a lesson on the proper roles for the two sexes. The Hobbits embodied innocence. Tom Bombadil was the unfallen Adam. Gollum exhibited the tragic effects of a soul and body bent by sin. Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam, in their wealth, modeled charity in their community to those in need.

In his writings about the earlier ages of Middle Earth, Tolkien depicted a version of creation sung into being, and in those times there are those of the blessed peoples and beings who reject their proper role and seek their own desires and pleasures. For instance, in Tolkien’s Numenor, reminiscent of fabled Atlantis, we can recognize the fear of death, rejection of mortality, and titanic hubris of that era…and ours.

For all these reasons and more, I credit Tolkien with a significant role in my eventual reception into the Catholic Church. What I first saw through the adventure-hungry eyes and imagination of a naïve teen, I still grasped as a jaded adult, and later came to deeply appreciate as a middle-aged man.

Flee from false revelations

An important study was published at Rorate Caeli: “The ‘Spiritual Diary’ of Elisabeth Kindelmann on the Flame of Love contains grave theological errors and cannot be from God.” Its author, Zsolt Orbán, shows that many ludicrous or offensive or erroneous passages are to be found in the Diary — but they were conveniently “left out of” the approved edition. This is not how approval of private revelations is supposed to happen. If there are problems like this, the tree gets the axe at the root.

Flee, too, from false preachers

The new papal preacher Pasolini, appointed to replace progressivist dinosaur Cantalamessa, is a flaming proponent of a homosexualist reading of the Bible. Popesplainers, howzabout this one? Come to think of it, that new streamlined papal funeral rite is looking better all the time… at least it ought to be tried out soon, just to see if it goes smoothly…

Amen, I say to you

If you attend the TLM, you’ve probably noticed by now that in the “leftover” Sundays at the end of the liturgical year — usually called “Resumed Sundays after Epiphany,” since in the old rite we never “waste” Sundays and if they don’t get used after Epiphany thanks to an early Easter, they’ll be recycled after Pentecost — we repeat week after week the Communion antiphon “Amen, dico vobis.” Where does this seemingly “out of left field” antiphon come from? Read this fascinating article to find out.

Protestant generosity to the devil

Last year my wife and I read aloud Carlos Eire’s fascinating book They Flew: A History of the Impossible when it first came out, and loved it. I’m so glad to see that a long review of it has now appeared, especially for those who don’t end up reading the book. Here’s a very interesting excerpt (and the review is written by a Protestant... albeit perhaps a wavering one!):

Eire discussed Luther’s influence on the Protestant tendency to disbelieve in God’s miraculous action in the everyday world. He writes, “Despite his core principle of scripture alone, Martin Luther—like many of his contemporaries—ascribed many functions to the devil which are not explicitly found in the Bible.”

Inadvertently, many Protestants married themselves to an inconsistent Biblical hermeneutic: while claiming that God could not (or would not) do anything that wasn’t explicitly detailed in scripture, the Devil—a creative artist—was able to do much more than is written. Not only did they deny the Holy Spirit the power to continue working new mysteries, they claimed any such signs were purely and completely of Satan. According to this way of thinking, the Devil—not the Holy Trinity—had more creative license. These beliefs became so inseparable from their theology that little devotionals known as the Teufelsbuch (the devil’s book) became popular to warn people of daily demonic threats from folk customs, herbal medicine, and even good works including (but not limited to) pilgrimage, religious artifacts, sacramental confession, and other religious rituals….

I, as the Protestant reader, began to wonder if perhaps the test of Protestantism all along has been to try the grace of God by faith without works. This theological rift is even more starkly observable today. Present-day Protestantism is fragmenting into sects that are too often stripped of most things that are good and beautiful. There are only minorities who try to cultivate mysticism, and this while too often skirting around returning to any semblance of hierarchical authority. The descendants of Reformers remain willing to give the Devil the glory that God supposedly doesn’t want anymore.

Speaking of the devil… why would any Catholic go off to Mexico to participate in a pagan ayahuasca ceremony that opens doors to spirits from the other world? Rod Dreher asks this question about Sohrab Ahmari, who did just that.

Charismania

It’s about time someone is providing, in a digestible format, a thorough debunking of the modern notion of “speaking in tongues.” Spoiler alert: it’s not biblical and it’s no part of Christian tradition until modern Protestantism, whose errors then invaded the Catholic Church.

Somewhere along the way, there was a monumental shift in Christian scholarship in both Catholic and Protestant circles on the gift of tongues to accommodate the growing Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. This shift originated in the scholarship of the German Higher Critics, a class of intellectuals imbibed with the errors of Rationalism and who sought to explain away the miraculous in the New Testament. For the Higher Critics, there could be no way that anyone could miraculously speak another language or miraculously hear a foreign language in their own tongue; therefore, what was recorded in the New Testament was the result of a spiritualization of a natural phenomenon of religious emotion, wherein those who had the “gift” were merely praising God with ecstatic utterances that sounded strange or foreign.

A warning against rationalism

Rationalism has been the death of theology, exegesis, and liturgy, as all underwent “reform” in its name and by its methodology. It is easy to see that both progressivism and a certain brand of neoscholastic manualist traditionalism are the rotten fruits of this tendency.

Thus Robert Lazu Kmita in one of his latest posts at Kmita’s Library (which, again, I highly recommend):

If we were to inquire of Saint Bonaventure (1221–1274) about the root of the current crisis in the Church, we might be surprised by his response. The Seraphic Doctor, deeply engaged in issues pertaining to the end of history, condemns the apocalyptic dimension of a strictly rational-speculative theology and its resulting implications. The proliferation of this speculative thinking, influenced by Aristotle and Averroes, had given rise to heretical doctrines such as the eternity of the world and causal fatalism. For Bonaventure, this trend signified the unmistakable indication of the opening of the bottomless pit mentioned in the Book of Revelation (9, 1-2) and the emergence of the smoke of heresies that obscured the ‘sun’ of supernatural faith….

Instead of preferring the direct knowledge of God, which requires humility, patience, and perseverance, one chooses an external form of knowledge (focused on the ‘material nature’) that leads to neglect and, ultimately, to forgetting the mystical purpose of life–union with God and direct knowledge of the Creator. This forgetting begins with the willing omission of the contemplative knowledge in favor of an inferior, mediated form of knowledge. And this is absolutely foolish, says Saint Bonaventura. For it is as if, when you can know a person directly, face to face, you prefer to know them through a mirror.

When is less technology better?

This is the question Julian poses in his latest for Crisis Magazine: “Pushing Buttons — Off and Otherwise.”

Catholic Land Movement

“What in the world is this?,” you ask. Here’s a 10-minute video in which Andrew Ewell introduces it. There are now hundreds of families involved.

That’s all, folks! Thanks for reading, and may God bless you.