Weekly Roundup, October 11 Edition

St. Cyril of Alexandria at the Council of Ephesus (mosaic in the Church of Our Lady of Fourvières in Lyon)

Happy feast of the Divine Motherhood of Our Lady!

October 11 is a perfect illustration of the basic problem of the Catholic Church in the 20th century.

In 1931, Pope Pius XI instituted the feast of the Divine Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary on October 11, to commemorate the 1500th anniversary of the Council, Ephesus, that had bestowed on her the glorious title Theotokos or God-bearing-One. This feast was placed on October 11. Thus, it’s not an ancient feastday (as neither was Christ the King, instituted by the same Pius), but fits into that slow and loving process of amplification by which the traditional liturgy has been enriched over twenty centuries with ever-new facets of devotion.

Pope John XXIII comes along and decides to open the Second Vatican Council on October 11, precisely because it was the feast of the Divine Motherhood of Our Lady.

Fast-forward to after the Council: Bugnini’s Consilium decides to abolish the feast and to conflate it with January 1st, which had been the Octave of Christmas and the Circumcision of Christ, but which would now be styled “the Solemnity of Mary Mother of God.” Lots of busy scissors and paste...

And then along comes Pope Francis, who canonizes John XXIII and declares that October 11 will be John’s feastday.

Hey presto!, October 11 has shifted from honoring the deepest mystery of the Virgin Mary — her being the Theotokos — to honoring Vatican II’s architect as elevated by the Council’s mutant progeny Jorge Bergoglio. As Ratzinger said in a different context, we now celebrate ourselves and our achievements rather than the mightiest works of God.

And now, with the “Synod on Synodality,” we have reached the summit of self-celebration. Our leaders stare at their navels in groups, repeat mantras, and write up bilge and hot air. It would be comical if immortal souls were not being lost to insanity and inanity across the world. Meanwhile, the pope diddles while Rome churns.

This is the kind of thing I had in mind when I maintained that the modern Church is characterized by a Nietzschean “transvaluation of all values.” Unlike his predecessor Pius XI, who cared enough about the dogmatic formulation of Ephesus to institute a feast in commemoration of its principal definition, Pope Francis once said, in a homily painfully reminiscent of the anti-theological slogans of the 60s and 70s: “Do I love God or dogmatic formulations?” As if these could ever truly be opposed.

The silver lining on this otherwise dark cloud is that, in spite of everything that has transpired, despite all the wickedness in high places, October 11 continues to this day to be celebrated as the feast of the Divine Maternity, in all communities and parishes that avail themselves of the traditional Missale Romanum. The feast has not perished; it has merely been eclipsed, and it will return in splendor to illuminate the Church after this night of self-celebration has passed.

Never fear: even people in Rome have lost interest in the third year of the moral therapeutic deism workshop:

Meanwhile, to show what he really thinks, Pope Francis announced that one of the new cardinals to be named in a consistory in December will be Timothy Radcliffe, a notorious, decades-long defender of sodomy and all things LGBTQ+. And I mean, a really explicit defender. Modesty, purity, and chastity forbid me from quoting quotes, but those who must know for scholarly reasons can find out plenty on the internet. It is actually hard at this point to feel shock, one is so benumbed by the past 11 years of scandal. Instead, I bury myself in my breviary and cry out “Exsurge, Domine!” Arise, O Lord!

As José Ureta rightly says:

The attack on Christian marriage is not new; it has deep historical roots, with the introduction of divorce during the Protestant Reformation, the enactment of civil marriage during the French Revolution and the notion of free love during Lenin's early years in power. However, the real acceleration of this battle can be traced to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Since then, societal changes and internal pressures have led to a growing divide in the Church herself. In February 2008, Cardinal Carlo Caffarra revealed that Sr Lucy, the last surviving seer of Fatima, had told him, "A time will come when the decisive battle between the kingdom of Christ and Satan will be over marriage and the family." This proclamation not only underscores the gravity of the situation but also foretells the trials that those defending the family would face.

My friend and colleague Gregory DiPippo, never one to spare the stinging treatment of truth when the patient most needs it, left a reminder on social media that John Paul II’s cardinalatial picks were even worse than Bergoglio’s:

In the consistory of 2001, JP2 made 44 cardinals, including: the mafioso Crescenzio Sepe, Walter Kasper, Mr McCarrick, “Dirty” Óscar Maradiaga, Cláudio Hummes, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor (in whose favor several better candidates were passed over for Westminster because they were “too Irish”), and Karl Lehmann.

The worst of today’s bunch is Radcliffe, who got the red hat as a consolation prize for being the one who had to announce to the Synod on Synodultery that The Dream Is Dead, the formal recognition that no one cares about Francis' pointless and meaningless vanity project. The rest of the collection of mediocrities and unknowns announced today could not do as much damage to the Church as JP2 did in that one consistory if they were all Napoleonic generals.

I had once pointed out something similar, but with even more examples.

What should our inner attitude be at a time like this? Phillip Campbell has shared a meditation with us this week that I would like to call “assigned reading” (as if I were still a professor and you in my classroom, or at least dropping in for a visit…):

A lot of Catholics ask me for advice on how to process what is unfolding these days. Events are really challenging people's paradigms of how they understand the Church, the papacy, and even the faith itself. They want desperately to understand how everything fits together—how can we process what we've witnessed within the framework of our beliefs? This causes people considerable anxiety, even agony; sometimes it consumes their spiritual lives entirely. They feel profound unease at not being able to account for every jot and tittle within their understanding.

One piece of advice I have been giving people is to remember that we don’t have to understand everything. The need to sort everything out and fit the pieces together in a logical schema is a necessity we impose upon ourselves. It is not something the faith demands of us; it is a product of our society’s left-brained, hyper-rationalist perspective that we honestly might not even be aware we are imbibing. It’s a perfectly acceptable answer to shrug your shoulders and say, “I don’t know what to think of all this.” The Psalm tells us, “Be still and know that I am God.” (Ps. 46:10)

The article emerged out of an exchange Phillip and I had some weeks ago, but he’s developed it far beyond anything I contributed. Please do yourself a favor and read the rest here.

Liturgical Notes

Big news first — my new book with TAN is officially out! Here’s a short video in which I explain why I wrote it.

You can order at TAN as a hardcover, an ebook, or an audiobook (this time, I did the reading for it, so you can be assured it’s got proper pronunciation, emphasis, and the like). The book is also on sale at Amazon, where it’s been the #1 release in “Ritual Religious Practices” for several days.

A few days ago Kennedy Hall interviewed me about Turned Around. We had a good time (as always). With God’s grace, I think we both opened up about what a huge emotional and spiritual impact the TLM had (and has) on us. I’m sure many will be able to relate:

Given my specialty, I always enjoy telling you about the best I’ve seen this past week on matters liturgical. The award in this category goes to Robert Keim’s magnificent commentary on a sublime prayer in the Roman Rite, the “Suscipe, Sancte Pater” in which the priest offers the host. I especially appreciate how Robert draws out the linguistic perfection in both content and sound, and asks whether the same could be "merely translated" into any other language (the answer being no, of course).

Let us recall that this is but one short prayer selected from the vast collection of writings in the Roman Missal. The traditional Latin liturgy is a rhetorical masterpiece of epic proportions, and the persuasive objectives of all this finely crafted language are the noblest imaginable: God’s glory, and man’s salvation.

Over at New Liturgical Movement, Michael Foley likewise continues to offer illumination on subtle details of our rituals, such as when he looks at the prayers before the Gospel, or at the pregnant phrase “In illo tempore” with which every Gospel opens.

Speaking of NLM, my contribution this past week took the form of preparing for publication a text hitherto unavailable online by the great Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddhin: “The Reactionary Vernacular.”

Whatever happens to Christianity, it can neither deny nor forget its Mediterranean roots. This is true of Christianity in Northern Europe, in the Western Hemisphere, and no less among the Afro-Americans. Origins are hard facts; and the past can never be unmade. Nor can we deny our Jewish heritage. Yet there are people among us who unconsciously continue the old Nazi warfare against Jerusalem, Athens and Rome. It is the Tower of Babel with all its linguistic confusions which they desperately want to rebuild.

That reminds me of this nugget of wisdom from Flannery O’Connor:

I am one of the laymen who RESIST the congregation yapping out the Mass in English & my reason besides neurotic fear of change, anxiety, and laziness is that I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music…

“Under the discipline of music”: what a delightful way to refer to the power of song to unify, direct, and elevate our otherwise discordant voices. Believe it or not, she wrote this in a letter on October 17, 1959 (see The Habit of Being, p. 356). The dialogue Mass was all the rage in some places. Thank goodness, it has mostly died out. I think Vatican II killed it off.

Last Saturday I addressed a group of knights of the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of St. George, on the topic “Beauty as Culture’s Finest Fruit and the Vocation of Nobility.” The liturgy was my primary example of a pinnacle and haven of beauty. It was a lovely evening, with wonderful conversation. My good friend Dr. John Pepino accompanied me. I was grateful for the invitation and hope to visit again.

Speaking of good knights… One of the Constantinian knights I was with this past weekend has been developing a splendid traditional Catholic app called Sanctifica. I definitely recommend checking it out. More functionality will be added over time, but it’s already quite helpful. If you have a smartphone (I don’t, but I know most people do), take advantage of it.

Theological Explorations

No, I don’t mean those of Karl Rahner…

At OnePeterFive, Dr. John Joy (author of the masterful Disputed Questions on Papal Infallibility) gives us a dense but important essay on how to reconcile the universal salvific will of God with the necessity for explicit faith in Christ in order to be saved. I think his exposition is just about the most lucid we could hope for in this delicate and difficult area.

Robert Lazu Kmita, whom I often mention, is unbeatable when it comes to restating the fundamentals of the Faith in a way that one will hardly ever hear anywhere else:

In an analysis of the way in which allegory is perceived nowadays, Professor Andrew Louth, well versed in the work of the masters of mystical exegesis—St. Dionysius the Areopagite, Origen, St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Maximus the Confessor—reveals the main cause for the current state of affairs: namely, the abandonment by some interpreters of the ecclesiastical universe, of the living tradition, the only environment in which Sacred Scripture becomes a gate to the ‘invisible’ world.... Nowhere can the elements of the symbolic universe be better perceived than in liturgy—that is to say, in the context of formal worship, played out between the two terms of the cosmological equation, God and Man.

Into the Tempest

Best article of the week

And the winner is… you guessed it, Sebastian Morello. His review of Rod Dreher’s new book is so much more than a review; it is a manifesto.

If the choice is between living in a meaning-vacuum and death, we will choose death. Meaninglessness is why suicide is the number one cause of death in the West among teenagers and young adults. At a macro level, this choice for death is seen in the decision of entire nations to stop inducting the few remaining children they have into their cultural and civilisational inheritance, while preventing further children by recourse to contraception- and abortion-technologies. In short, we cannot stand a life without meaning, and since we don’t know how to recover meaning, we’ve decided to annihilate ourselves.

Enter Dreher. Dreher thinks that we can recover meaning and purpose in our lives. Living in Wonder is his guide to this great recovery and an invitation to be part of it. The key, he tells us, is that of re-enchanting our world… but what exactly does he mean by this?

Good News

We need that, don’t we? Watch this gorgeous 4-minute video showcasing the 2024 priestly ordinations in Europe for the FSSP. You’ll see here some of the most poignant moments of the traditional rite of ordination. Most meaningful is the laying-on of hands, a gesture which can obviously be traced straight back to the New Testament; but perhaps most impressive, visually, is the unfolding of the chasuble at the end, and most moving is the footage of mothers unwrapping the ties on their newly-ordained sons’ hands.

Then, watch this 9-minute video in celebration of the traditional rite of marriage, recently entered into by this couple in Canada:

And have a look at these pictures from the 4th Annual Summorum Pontificum Pilgrimage in Washington DC.

I’d also like to promote Joshua Charles’s Great Rosary Campaign:

Thank you for reading Tradition & Sanity, and may God bless you all!