Weekly Roundup, October 4 Edition

St. Francis and a Dominican preacher; papal fallout; sins of synodality; backwardist chasubles; Knox on enthusiasm; balls and a mazurka

Preliminaries

Welcome to this Friday’s edition of the Weekly Roundup.

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Happy feast of St. Francis to one and all!

The true St. Francis was a defender of Eucharistic reverence and liturgical correctness, a Catholic Christian who wanted to die a martyr preaching the Gospel to the Muslims, and who transformed Europe with his radical Christ-centered voluntary poverty and heroic charity. He is the opposite of a “woke” saint in every possible way. (For more, see my article “St. Francis of Assisi: Eucharistic Mystic and Reformer.”)

You might also like to check out Os Justi Press’s edition of the Little Flowers of St. Francis, containing reproductions of exquisite hand-colored block prints, as pictured above and below. Also available from Amazon.

St. Francis and St. Dominic lived at nearly the same time, and legend has it they met and embraced, recognizing Christ in each other. Certainly the combined effort of the Franciscans and the Dominicans “re-evangelized” Christendom in a profound way. That brings me to another book recommendation, which I’ve been meaning to mention for quite some time.

Preaching with a difference

Catholics who attend the TLM often receive the fringe benefit of good, orthodox preaching. However, a well-constructed sermon by a Dominican theologian, weaving artfully among the Propers and readings of the Mass, bringing in history, dogma, and saints, is not an everyday experience. The genre of homilies used to be hugely popular in European literature, as people would read them either for personal spiritual reading or in the family circle as a common Sunday recreation.

Fr Thomas Crean, OP, has given us a marvelous book of sermons for the Sundays and major feasts of the (traditional) liturgical year. All of them first appeared at Voice of the Family and are now conveniently gathered in one book, with a nick thick cover and flaps, and elegant typography. They are fairly short, written with the right level of eloquence (not too plain and not too flowery), and always deliver major insights. After you read one of these, you put the book down and say, “Man, that was good” (or words to that effect).

I would say that reading these sermons has deepened my appreciation for the sheer genius of the authentic Roman Rite (and I was already, you might say, quite appreciative of it! — but one never stops learning more to be amazed at and grateful for). The one-year cycle of Sunday and feastday readings is absolutely perfect and should never have been touched by the hands of barbarians. This book therefore serves not as admirable spiritual reading but also as a further level of education in defense of the Roman heritage.

(This book is not distributed by Ingram so I wasn’t able to add it to the Tradition & Sanity bookshop.)

Further fallout from the pope’s indifferentism

Fr. Thomas Weinandy — no traditionalist, as that term is typically used (I edited a book against his, Healy’s, and Cavadini’s bizarre views on liturgy) — has penned a devastating piece at The Catholic Thing. Excerpt:

Most importantly, to declare in an unnuanced way, that “all religions are a path to God,” and so inspired, is to give voice to the words of the Devil. Such assertions insult the singularity of Jesus as the Son of God incarnate, and that in him alone does one find salvation. The Devil rejoices when Jesus is degraded and demeaned, for he cannot tolerate the truth that Jesus is the universal Savior and definitive Lord.

Just remember, Fr. Weinandy is your “perfect JP2 Catholic”: conservative, charismatic, hermeutic of continuity, etc. He was the doctrine chief at the USCCB for a while. Therefore his protest is not a cranky minority view.

In response to the many errors spouted by the unhappy Holy Father in Southeast Asia, Bishop Athanasius Schneider — entirely true to the name he was given in religious life (his birth name was Anton; Athanasius was assigned to him in his order of the Holy Cross) — issued a short but resounding and crystal-clear Profession of Faith in Jesus Christ and His Church as the Only Path to God and to Eternal Salvation that you should not only read and assent to intellectually, but consider professing on your knees as an act of reparation. When people talk as if the Lord has abandoned His Church, I say: “No, obviously not: He has raised up prophets as He always does. When Judas falls, Matthias replaces him. The Church goes on. The Faith never dies.”

My comment — “I pray that a future holy & orthodox pope will appoint +Athanasius Schneider as Prefect of the Doctrine of the Faith” — received 1,000 likes on Facebook. May God someday grant us better rulers, political and ecclesiastical! Let us strive to become worthy of better rulers, and He will surely bring them from our midst.

Brief postscript: to be rigorously fair, Pope Francis seems to hold traditional views in one area (and perhaps only one?), namely, he is an anti-feminist. When he visited Belgium he really stuck it to the super-liberals there, and I rejoiced (for a change) to read his no-nonsense remarks.

Sins of Synodality

Probably most of you saw that there is apparently a new category of sin we are supposed to examine ourselves on, namely, “sins against synodality.” At the opening prayer service of the October synod:

As a writer, Fr. Raymond De Souza is sometimes very on, and sometimes very off. (I’m sure everyone thinks the same is true of me — especially my opponents!) However, his piece at First Things on the Synod was brilliant and quite amusing. If we don’t laugh, we will cry.

Originally ridiculed by many as a “meeting about meetings,” it never managed to demonstrate that it wasn’t. Way back in November 2021, still flush with excitement over the synodal process — with meetings at the parish, diocesan, national, continental, and planetary level still beckoning enticingly — Cardinal Christophe Pierre, apostolic nuncio in the United States, said that if synodality was a “meeting about meetings,” it would be a “purgatory.” Indeed, the very “idea of having a meeting about meetings” would mean that “we would certainly be in one of the lower rings of hell in Dante’s Inferno!”

The Inferno is back in session this week…. At the end of last year’s “assembly” — some four hundred participants gathered into small groups for several weeks — the final report called for further study on what “synodality” actually meant, two years of thrashing about inside it not having made that clear. Pope Francis took note and sent the conceptual and definitional work off to a “study group,” which will chew it over until June 2025. So this October’s Inferno will proceed without knowing what synodality means….

Details of the [aforementioned penitential] ceremony were not revealed ahead of time, but one expects a dramatic moment when Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, the Vatican’s doctrinal chief, rends his garments for having sinned against synodality. No figure in the Church has more grievously sinned against synodality, with malice abundantly aforethought. Last year, while the actual synodal assembly declined in its final report to address homosexuality and related issues, Fernández himself was secretly working to introduce the blessings of same-sex couples. That betrayal of synodality, released in the depth of winter from the frozen pit at bottom of the Inferno, shocked the Catholic world.

The fiasco—subsequently retracted on a geographic basis—dealt a lethal blow to synodality. If the highest authorities in the Church felt free to ignore synodal consultations—even while formally participating in them—then it was much worse than originally feared. There would be endless meetings about meetings to no effect, while elsewhere major decisions were taken without any meetings at all.

A key question on Tuesday will be whether Cardinal Fernández is able to confess his sins against synodality; he may lack sufficient contrition and the necessary purpose of amendment.

Aside from contrition and amendment, it may be hard to know what to confess at all. “Sins of abuse” are clear enough, but what about sins “against creation”? Are all those who flew to Rome guilty of carbon concupiscence or climate cupidity?

In the end, the Vatican chickened out, and had Schönborn confess “sins against synodality,” a bit ironic coming from the person who said that popular concerns about Amoris Laetitia should be dismissed because Roma locuta, while Fernández took on the more predictable “sins of using doctrine as stones to be hurled,” which, again ironically, isn’t something he himself ever seems to have been guilty of (would that he were):

I have my differences of opinion with David Torkington — his account of the early Church and of subsequent developments in spirituality is burdened with a problematic antiquarianism — but here he’s right on the money:

The fruitfulness and effectiveness of all later councils, conclaves, and synods depended on prolonged and serious arguments and debates of the participants who for many years had their minds, their reasons, and their hearts purified in profound contemplative prayer, as I have explained in all my most recent books. Their conclusions, therefore, would always be ultimately attributed to the Holy Spirit working through those who, through their prayerfulness, were at all times open to receive His wisdom. That is why, when announcing the results of their deliberations at the Council of Jerusalem, St. Peter uttered those famous words: “It has been decided by the Holy Spirit and ourselves” (Acts 15:28)....

When anthropocentric spiritualities predominate, any sort of discernment process, at any level, is fraught with danger because it can so easily be taken over by the self-serving ego within. This means that at the highest level, Synod on Synodality, for instance, is a means of government in which pre-decided decisions are ratified by carefully chosen sycophants in such a way that the faithful are deceived into believing that they are the work of the Holy Spirit.

Kudos to Kevin M. Tierney for coming up with the master definition of the Synod on Synodality: “A discussion about nothing, leading to a document about nothing, to be read by nobody.”

The October Synod and the Death of A Catholic Church

This much we know: the progressives will try to do as much damage as they can, before a combination of reality, mortality, divine intervention, and the sensus fidelium shut them down for good:

A study group established by Pope Francis to develop a synodal way of discerning Catholic Church teaching on so-called controversial issues, including sexual morality and life issues, has proposed what it calls a “new paradigm” that is heavy on situational ethics but minimizes moral absolutes and established Church teaching....

The group spoke of discerning doctrine, ethics and pastoral approaches by gauging people’s lived experience through consultations with the People of God and by being responsive to cultural changes. The group presented these sources as places where the Holy Spirit speaks in a way that can override and apparently contradict what the Church has already authoritatively taught.

The group, whose seven members include a controversial theologian known for questioning the existence of moral absolutes, described this approach as part of a “conversion of thought or reform of practices in contextual fidelity to the Gospel of Jesus, who is ‘the same yesterday today and always,’ but whose ‘richness and beauty are inexhaustible.’”

Honestly, that has to be some of the gayest gobbledygook I’ve seen in a while.

Robert Royal’s take is good too:

In addition to the also somewhat woolly synodal aims of “communion, participation, and mission” – all of which have been going on for 2000 years without benefit of the synod on synodality – there’s been a renewed emphasis during this process on a “new way of being Church.” For those too young to have been there, “being Church” – not being “the” Church (more on this below) – was an ungrammatical but stylish neologism in the decade or so after Vatican II. Its meaning was not very clear then either, but the phrase signaled the very latest in Catholic self-definition. The Synod’s leaning heavily on this 1970s coinage, which had gone into remission from roughly 1978 to 2013, doesn’t seem very likely to produce much that’s living and new and cutting-edge now, any more than it did then.

And yet… Synodality, together with many aspects of this pontificate, reminds me of the “ideological subversion created by radical Marxists to indoctrinate and weaken nations from within,” as described by Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov in the 1980s. In a famous interview he laid out the four stages in which this subversion would take place — and, in fact, has taken place. The most chilling part of the interview is his confident prediction that it would happen and that there was no way to stop it. The plan was already in motion. Libera nos, Domine.

Liturgical Musings

My new book from TAN, Turned Around: Replying to Common Objections Against the Traditional Latin Mass, will be released on October 8th (the publisher bumped up the date!—and, by the way, Amazon is already shipping copies). Kennedy Hall of a quasi-sister site, Mere Tradition, interviewed me the other day about the book. You can listen to our podcast here:

TURNED AROUND: Dr. Peter Kwasniewski Debunks Accusations Against the TLM

In my article this week at New Liturgical Movement, I look at the way in which liturgy uses parallelism to drive home theological and devotional truths, even as poetry and rhetoric use it for their own purposes. The illustration offered is Fr. Barthe’s close comparison of the numerous parallels between the old Offertory and the Roman Canon. This is not a useless repetition but a very deliberate program. I think you will find it illuminating of one of the major features of the traditional Mass.

Although I haven’t been writing at OnePeterFive as much as I used to (this Substack having become the platform on which I publish nearly everything), I did return to 1P5 in recent days with an article “The Repeated Gospel of the Little Children and the Givers of Scandal,” about how the traditional one-year Roman lectionary deploys Matthew 18:1-10 — that’s the passage on becoming like little children, avoiding scandal, and “their angels ever behold the face of the Father.” Turns out, some portion of this pericope is used seven times a year, falling into seasonal patterns like Ember Days. In the Novus Ordo, it’s used twice, and never in full.

One of the most striking features of the ancient Roman Rite is the way in which it repeats the same Gospel passages throughout the year on different occasions, often with interesting differences in ranges of verses chosen, as if, on the one hand, to drill this passage into us due to its overwhelming importance, and, on the other hand, to give in to the lure of a glistening jewel so beautiful it is worth taking up multiple times and turning about to see it sparkle from various angles.

Probably the biggest news out this past week was the announcement that the Vatican will be conducting an Apostolic Visitation of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter. Now, it is quite true that these visitations happen on a regular basis, and the last one having been ten years ago, it’s the usual time for another, so there’s no inherent reason to think this is a subversive maneuver. On the other hand, we know that traditional Catholics are on the hit-list of certain figures at the Vatican, and very definitely so in the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. My strong recommendation to all readers is not to speculate about it, or fret over it, but turn to the Lord in prayer and penance, asking for a good outcome; for the leadership of the FSSP to be given light and courage; for the visitators to be favorably impressed (as they might well be!); and for the Lord to bring an end to this reckless pontificate as soon as possible.

Michael Charlier made a somewhat amusing comment (German original here) on the language employed by the Dicastery:

It is still too early to comment on this [FSSP] announcement, and this is not the place for speculation. However, we do not want to keep quiet about the fact that the phrase: “to enable the dicastery to find out who we are, how we are doing and how we live, so that it can provide us with the necessary help if needed” has caused a certain amount of astonishment on our part. It is not as if the Fraternity of St. Peter were a recently discovered native tribe in the Brazilian jungle that no one has ever heard of and whose possibly very strange customs and traditions must first be researched to find out whether they might “need help” — for example, by setting up a hospital ward or a primary school. Who knows what all could be missing for people who have, for so long a time, lived so far from the blessings of modern civilization!

In the good news category, Clear Creek Abbey turns 25 years old! Their community currently number over 70 monks. You can read here a delightful letter from the abbot about the silver anniversary.

Gregory DiPippo reminded us that September 25th was the 20th anniversary of the death of Michael Davies. Davies was, hands down, the greatest English-language apostle and apologist for the traditional Roman Rite in the first decades of its attempted suppression. Nearly everyone from certain generations owes him a great debt, including myself. I heard him speak in person only once. Afterwards, I greeted him and asked if we could exchange letters. Always gracious, he gave me his address, and I promptly wrote to him asking him how I could become a full-time TLM apologist like himself! (At the time, I would have been in my mid-twenties.) I’ll never forget his reply a couple of weeks later: “Don’t even think of doing that full time, there’s no way you could support yourself and a family. Become a teacher and persuade your students of the value of tradition.” Well, that, in fact, is exactly what I did for the next twenty years. And then, through a series of unexpected openings, the Lord made it possible for me, at last, to fulfill that young man’s dream. Michael Davies: requiescat in pace.

In his post, Gregory makes a point that deserves underlining:

After 60 years of scholarly research and publication, it is now generally understood that most of the scholarly premises which underpin the reform were simply flat-out wrong. Indeed, this has become such a commonplace, at least among the more honest, that we have perhaps forgotten, (or perhaps the younger among us have never known), that in those mad years, men like Davies and Fr Bouyer who spoke against such errors were almost universally dismissed as cranks. (Fr Bouyer’s 20th anniversary, by the way, is less than a month away, on October 22.)

Meanwhile, the famous actress Brigitte Bardot gave an interview to Aleteia on her 90th birthday. The interview includes the following surprising but entirely accurate passage:

Q: Do you think it’s become too rare to bear witness to your faith when you’re a public figure?

BB: I carry my faith with me and I’m proud of it. On the other hand, I'm horrified to see all these outrages being inflicted on churches. It’s sacrilege!

Q: What is your vision of the Catholic religion?

BB: I think the Mass has lost its mystery and a certain warmth of soul. When I was a child, I went to church with my parents every Sunday. I remember the mystery that came out of this magnificent place. The priest would celebrate with his back to us, in Latin. It’s a shame we’ve modernized it. Celebrating in front of the faithful gives me the impression of a theatrical performance. I’d call myself a traditionalist. I’d like to see a revival of the Catholic religion with more respect and importance. There are so many people of good will and deep faith who are no longer practicing. So many churches are closed... You can't even go in to say a prayer. It’s dramatic. When I think that Notre-Dame burned down. It’s as if we’re living in satanic, negative, destructive times.

Yes, we know Bardot was hardly a good Catholic most of her life. Perhaps she has changed in her old age; many of us do. In any case, the truth of her words shines out.

Browsing over at Wikimedia Commons for something else, I stumbled across a photo of a display set up in a Catholic church somewhere, purporting to show today’s plebs “how the priests used to dress before The Council.”

Of course, they don’t even know enough to put the chasubles on the right way around. They’ve got them all backwards.

This is the level of ignorance you find among most Catholics today about anything pre-Vatican II, unless they are already integrated into the traditional movement. That’s why I cringe every time I hear about someone who’s going to give a lecture on “the liturgical reform.” Good luck, but I’ve seen where that usually goes: Hippolytus’s Canon, Latin as the ancient vernacular, versus populum as the “original” posture, medieval alienation of the people, etc. etc. In other words, warmed-over Jungmann (at best), without a clue that all of this has been overturned, even though the institutional church with its typical inertia is still mired in error.

Brief Book Review

My wife and I recently finished reading aloud Ronald Knox's magnum opus, Enthusiasm. It’s a book I’ve had on my shelf for decades (here’s a photo of my 1950 Oxford University Press copy) and always wanted to read, and now it’s done — took us a couple of months to get through it in our evening reading time. What a fantastic book! So profound in its insights into certain forms of “ultrasupernaturalism” (as he calls it), and so exquisitely beautiful in style.

The only slightly irritating part is that he quotes French all over the place, without translation, and (a) my French pronunciation is bad, and (b) my ability to translate on the fly is so-so. This meant often pausing and typing in a couple of lines of Bossuet, Fenelon, Arnaud, Guyon, or whoever into DeepL before continuing. In 1950, a British writer could assume that any educated person would be fluent in French, but someone needs to bring out a new edition of Knox with translations at least in the footnotes…

A full review is far beyond what I can manage at the moment but I will make two quick observations. First, it is clear that what Knox means by “enthusiasm” in its full set of qualities cannot be applied to the traditionalist movement. That being said, there are some parallels to be wary of, such as the tendency to splinter into factions and to condemn anyone who is not of our subgroup's way of thinking. Second, it is also clear that the Catholic charismatic movement, which didn’t exist when Knox published his work, would indeed fit the definition of enthusiasm he gives, and, as such, be worthy of skepticism, if not condemnation. He notes that all enthusiastic movements involve exaggerations and distortions of legitimate principles, and this is certainly the case with the charismatics.

For those who are deeply interested in such topics as Montanism, Donatism, Catharism/Albigensianism, Jansenism, Quietism, Quakerism, Methodism, Revivalism, and Pentecostalism, this is a book not to be missed.

Dancing Notes

The Michaelmas Dance organized by Dorothy Cummings McLean in Edinburgh was a great success. We need to see this kind of thing more and more in our communities!

If you’re on Facebook, you can watch a fine performance of one of the many marvelous traditional dances of Poland, the Mazurka.

Thanks for reading, and may God bless you!