On June 13, 1691, a Spanish expedition arrived at a great and broad river set amid rolling plains in the province of Coahuila y Tejas. Delighted with the country, which Governor Domingo Terán de los Rios called “the most beautiful in New Spain,” the Spaniards named it, San Antonio de Padua, “because it was his day.” On the 14th, which was the Feast of Corpus Christi, Father Damián Massennet, a Franciscan, arranged for Masses to be said at the site, and later recorded the events in his diary:

I ordered a large cross set up [on the 14th], and in front of it built an arbor of cottonwood trees, where the altar was placed. All the priests said Mass. High Mass was attended by Governor Don Domingo Terán de los Rios, Captain Don Francisco Martinez, and the rest of the soldiers.... The [Payaya] Indians were present during these ceremonies....

The Mass crowned the long journey made from Mexico, and marked the future mission site and city that would famously bear the name of Saint Anthony. Around the humble altars raised near the fertile banks of the San Antonio River grew a uniquely Christian civilization, marked in its very foundations by Franciscan spirituality.

The beautiful Mission churches built to house the Mass sheltered the faith of the people of San Antonio through poverty, plague, and war. Continually ruined and continually rebuilt, four of the five original mission churches today serve as parishes, a testament to the deep faith planted by the missionaries so many centuries ago. For the poor and the pilgrim alike, the crumbling stones still point upward, echoing the eternal “Sursum Corda” they were built to serve.

Mission San Francisco de la Espada

Mission San Francisco de la Espada was “the first mission in [the province of] Texas, founded in 1690 as San Francisco de los Tejas near present-day Weches, Texas. On March 5, 1731, the mission was transferred to the San Antonio River area and renamed Mission San Francisco de la Espada. A friary was built in 1745, and the church was completed in 1756.”1 Mission Espada was one of the most remote of the missions, and therefore in constant danger from the Apaches. Several church structures were erected and then were subsequently torn down because they were unsafe.

Following complete secularization in 1824, Mission Espada was neglected for many decades. Thanks to the heroic efforts of Fr. Francis Bouchu, a complete restoration was completed in 1907. Of the ancient structure, only the facade remains, yet the mysterious herradura (horseshoe arch) and Espadaña (bell tower), like the remains of the outworks surrounding the small church, speak enduringly of ages past. Each stone reflects the unique harmonization of cultures that was the fruit of the sacramental life in the missions.

The interior of the Espada church is lovingly Franciscan. The austerity and simplicity of the building is counterpointed with the evocative statues in polychrome, a unique colonial painting style that layered multiple colors of paint and gold leaf on wooden statues. Local tradition claims that the 18th-century statue of Saint Francis of Assisi once held a sword (hence the name of the Mission, “Espada”), a possible allusion to an episode in the life of St. Francis recorded by Saint Bonaventure, who identifies the sword with the Holy Cross. Saint Bonventure recounts that on Mount Alverno, Saint Francis “rejoiced at the gracious aspect wherewith he saw Christ, under the guise of the Seraph, regard him, but His crucifixion pierced his soul with a sword of pitying grief.”

Espada remains a deeply prayerful and meditative place. Descendents of the original families still come there to pray, drawn to the faith of their ancestors who built the churches, tilled the ground, and sanctified their lives under the paternal hands of the missionary priests. One may sense at Espada the paradox of an edifice of invisible spiritual height hidden in heaven, though its base rests on the most humble foundations.

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Today, I am pleased to present to Tradition & Sanity’s readers a number of representative excerpts from David Sonnier’s newly-released memoir Rites and Wrongs: One Man’s Struggle for the Latin Mass in the U.S. Army (Os Justi Press). Enjoy! —PAK

Chapter 1: The End of an Era

On a hot August afternoon in 1997 I was standing in the office of the senior Fort Bragg chaplain, a Colonel and a Catholic priest. By all expectations our meeting should have been cordial. I have always had the highest respect for priests, and the two of us seemingly had everything in common. We were both serving in the U. S. Army, we were both Catholic, and both of us were field grade officers assigned to Airborne units at Fort Bragg. It should have been a pleasant encounter, but instead he was shrieking at me like a raving lunatic. He was frothing at the mouth and spit was flying. A vein in his forehead was popping out. He wiped his profusely sweating brow.

“I just want to talk about our request,” I said. “There’s nothing to talk about!” he shouted back. “But Cardinal Ratzinger...”

“I don’t answer to him! Go to him! Don’t come to me!” Spittle was flying.

I stared at him, speechless, waiting for some inspired words to come to me, or maybe time for him to gather his wits. He quit panting, sat down behind his desk and pretended to be reading a report. After a few seconds he looked up:

“This meeting is over. Finished! Get out of here!” he barked. I didn’t leave. He stood again.

“Get out of here!” Now he was screaming. “Get out of my office! You piss me off!”

I still didn’t leave.

“You are dismissed, major! This meeting is over! Now get out! Go!”

I just stood there until he reached for the phone. “Listen, Major, you get the hell out of my office now or I’m calling the military police!”

I turned slowly and left, walking absentmindedly out the door and back to my pickup truck.

Maybe I should have stayed and allowed myself to get arrested. That would have caused a stir! The headlines would scream “Green Beret Arrested for Harassing Chaplain!” News involving deranged Green Berets were a hot item, guaranteed to boost newspaper sales. It would have been a huge embarrassment for the commander of Army Special Operations Command (SOCOM) to have his executive officer show up on the blotter report. The general would probably fire me, but that was the least of my concerns.

The larger concern was that any such publicity would be turned against our efforts to have a Latin Mass held in a Fort Bragg chapel. In 1997 there were very few Catholics who even knew that the traditional Latin Mass was an option, and far fewer still who were dedicated to making that option a reality. There was no Latin Mass authorized by any diocese anywhere in the Carolinas, and for some time we had been sending petitions to anyone who would listen. Most people who would hear about a confrontation between a Catholic chaplain and someone inquiring about a Latin Mass would put the blame squarely on “those Latin Mass people.” I had seen how the media was used to manipulate public opinion. Thanks to their efforts, the old rite was largely unheard of and it would remain so for many more years until the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI and his 2007 motu proprio Summorum Pontificum.

I stood awkwardly by my pickup truck staring into space, wondering what to do next. An enlisted soldier saluted as he passed, jarring me back to reality. But the drive back to my office pulled me back into a dreamy reflection on the past sixteen years, which had landed me here in this confrontation on this day.

Chapter 3: A Spiritual Awakening

“I’m telling you for the last time. You should go to the Latin Mass.”

Yes, he had suggested this several times already, and for one reason or another I had never really heard him. Maybe I had not taken it seriously because we already had a parish, and we had deliberately selected a house to rent that was close to it. It was conveniently located, so I didn’t want to think about going elsewhere.

But I was all ears now. A Latin Mass! His suggestion evoked images from my youth: a priest facing a high altar, clouds of incense hovering over him, stained glass windows, bells, music, silence, and prayers whispered at the altar.

Lorri was leaving the next day with the baby to spend a week or two with her parents on the Mississippi coast. She would not even be home on Pentecost Sunday, so this was a convenient time to take Will up on his suggestion. I wouldn’t have to worry about running late, the baby crying, or having to look for a good place to park. I could do a reconnaissance by myself, and maybe it would turn out to be something good for us. We were ready for anything that was both Catholic and an improvement on our current situation.

I thanked Will for the kind invitation and wrote down the directions. He suggested that I arrive fifteen minutes early for the Rosary. This was a devotion that my family had sometimes practiced when I was young, and that I had not seen practiced in a church for many years. I already felt drawn to this parish. Holy Family Catholic Church in downtown Dayton looked like any typical Catholic Church built before the 1960s and 1970s. In other words, it looked like a church. As I entered, it also felt like the Catholic Church I vaguely remembered from my childhood. There were no felt banners, there were no lay people running around at the altar preparing for their various ministries, and there was no noise aside from an occasional cough. The only babbling came from a baby in a pew somewhere in front of me. The women were all modestly dressed and veiled. Someone began leading the Rosary, and I heard a few familiar thumps as kneelers were dropped.

Perhaps the most significant date of my life was Pentecost Sunday, 1993. I was unprepared for what followed. The Rosary having concluded, the priest processed in wearing vestments of a type that I hadn’t seen in ages, following altar boys wearing what I now know to be cassocks and surplices. It was when the choir began singing the Vidi Aquam that I was instantly transfixed. I had not heard Gregorian chant since I was a young child, but it was nostalgic and familiar. It sounded magnificent with the subtle organ accompaniment, and it brought back memories of how the Church was when I was in the first grade. The nuns who taught at my school sang at High Mass, and it sounded like this. As the priest began the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar, the Choir began singing the Kyrie of the Mass of the Angels, or Mass VIII. I quickly found this sung prayer in a small red missalette in the pew, with the text of the Mass on the left page and the translation on the right.

Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison, Christe eleison, Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison.

As the Gloria in excelsis Deo began I got chills. There was something supernatural happening. I didn’t know any Latin at all, but that minor detail seemed to be of no consequence. The prayers were directed to God, and the translations were readily available. Unlike the indecipherable babbling noises that I had heard the previous weekend which were supposedly directed to God, it was now clear that these prayers really were directed to God, weighted with centuries and millennia of meaning. The priest and the congregation all faced in the same direction as he led the congregation in prayers. To God.

The priest chanted the Epistle and Gospel. None of it was delegated to the laity. There were no short-skirted women flitting around the altar. There were no announcements of birthdays, no suggestions to turn and meet our neighbors in an awkward “sign of peace,” and no requests for all visitors to stand. There was no applause. There was no guitar music.

Within moments I knew I had found my spiritual home. This was absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, exactly where I belonged and God, in His infinite mercy, had led me here.

The priest gave a homily that didn’t include the slightest trace of ideology. In the 1990s it was typical for priests to use the pulpit to condemn the sins of bigotry, intolerance, and not being open to change. It was acceptable for priests to elaborate endlessly on the same political narratives that were already being trumpeted by the media, and hearing them repeated from the pulpit always put me to sleep. We all knew by then that abortion was murder, but we had never heard a priest condemn it in the setting of a homily. I breathed a sigh of relief because today I wasn’t going to have to tune out some secular political agenda. I remained transfixed until the end of Mass. When it ended, there was no rush for the door, there was no talking, and it was several minutes before people began quietly leaving.

I waited outside the church for Will and his family. As it turned out, they were all members of the choir, and I met one or two other choir members that day. Will invited me to lunch, and since my wife was out of town and I was full of questions, I gladly accepted the invitation.

Will and his family lived in officer housing at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. He fired up the grill on the back porch and began cooking while I peppered him with questions. My curiosity was overwhelming, and he probably felt that I was interrogating him. Each answer he gave led to a dozen new questions….

“Didn’t Vatican II do away with Latin?”

“No. The Vatican II document on the liturgy clearly states that Latin and Gregorian chant should remain in the Mass.”…

As he continued, I found it difficult to believe that everything he was telling me was true. The Second Vatican Council had never required that Latin be removed from the Mass, and Gregorian chant was also to have been retained. Really? He sent one of his daughters to fetch a large, yellow book with “The Second Vatican Council” written on the cover, and read directly from it: The use of Latin is to be preserved in the Latin rites. (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, no. 36)

The treasury of sacred music is to be preserved and fostered with great care. (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, no. 114)

The Church recognizes Gregorian chant as being specially suited to the Roman liturgy. Therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services. (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, no. 116)

Latin and Gregorian chant were both supposed to have been preserved? Until that day, I had not heard the first word of Latin or the first note of Gregorian chant in any church that I regularly attended since I was a child! Instead, we had been told repeatedly that Vatican II changed the Mass from Latin to the vernacular, that is, the local, commonly spoken language. We had been told this repeatedly. My head was spinning, and a dreadful thought began to cross my mind. Had we been lied to for all these years? Was it possible that Catholics knew their Faith so poorly that we had all been tricked? Unless someone had access to the actual documents of the Second Vatican Council, how would they know?

Perhaps Will was lying. I watched him as he fiddled absent-mindedly with the grill. It didn’t seem possible that he was making this up. He had been so knowledgeable about all things Catholic. But either he was lying or most of the hierarchy of the Church had been lying to the faithful for years. If what he was saying was true, why was I hearing it from him, and not from a priest or bishop? Or why wasn’t it in Catholic magazines and newspapers?

Will explained: “It was the way these documents were written. That was the catch. There was ambiguity built into these declarations leaving loopholes big enough to drive a truck through.”

He picked up the large book again [the Documents of Vatican II]. It was about the size of the Dayton phone book.

“Let me give you an example: ‘The use of Latin is to be preserved in the Latin rites, but since the use of the vernacular, whether in the Mass, the administration of the sacraments, or in other parts of the liturgy, may frequently be of great advantage to the people, a wider use may be made of it, especially in readings, directives and in some prayers and chants.’ See? There’s a loophole. The Mass is supposed to be in Latin, but . . . and that word ‘but’ gives them license to do whatever they want.”

From that moment on, I have never been able to reconcile what was written and proclaimed in the Second Vatican Council document on the liturgy with what actually happened. It made no sense then, and it makes no sense now. For centuries people are praying in Latin every Sunday, and then suddenly the highest authority in the Church says, “You can use more vernacular language in your prayers if you want.” And then the bishops take that new guidance and proclaim: “Latin is now forbidden!” It’s all a lie. There is no way that anyone could interpret the clear text of the Second Vatican Council document to be a call for the elimination of Latin from the liturgy, but that is what had been done.

Will continued, “Here’s another example: ‘The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services. But other kinds of sacred music, especially polyphony, are by no means excluded from liturgical celebrations, so long as they accord with the spirit of the liturgical action . . .’ See? Another loophole. Other kinds of music can include guitars or bongo drums.”

“Polygamy? What?”

“No, polyphony. It’s a type of music, usually in four parts that go in different directions, but with the same text, and the parts harmonize with each other. You’ve probably heard it in recordings or concerts. But probably not at Mass.”

So, according to the highest authority in the Church, Gregorian chant was best for the liturgy, but other types of music could be allowed. That had somehow been interpreted as a call for the complete elimination of Gregorian chant. This wasn’t someone taking advantage of a loophole, it was an outright lie.

I was getting a headache. It was too much. How was this even possible? There had to be more to it. Intellectual honesty requires humility, and obviously there were some additional facts bearing on this situation that I would have to research. Now that I was awake, I resolved to do whatever was necessary to find out what was going on.

As for the Catholic magazines and periodicals that had all along been reporting on what was happening as events unfolded after Vatican II, they did exist. Will gave me some copies of The Wanderer and The Remnant as I was leaving.

I was still skeptical, and I had a headache.

Chapter 11: De Oppresso Liber

Any correction to the situation would have to come from the pope himself. For now, those Catholics at Fort Bragg who longed for the traditional Mass had few good options. However, by now we had discovered how to find the many private chapels scattered across the landscape. While driving home on vacation or visiting relatives or friends in other states, we would find a group of Catholics that had established a private chapel so that on one or more Sundays a month Mass would be held in a storefront, the conference room of a hotel, or even in someone’s home. We attended a number of these in various locations while traveling. In each case, the diocese in which the private chapel was established was a diocese in which the bishop had not made provisions according to the guidelines of Ecclesia Dei. We timed our visits to Mississippi to be there on a weekend when Bishop Howze was offering the Latin Mass in the Cathedral in Biloxi.

Bishop Joseph L. Howze gave us the moral courage and strength to not be intimidated by the meanness and intolerance of the chaplains we encountered. He was quite unusual. He had grown up as a Protestant in the Deep South, but due to the excellent influence of Catholics around him he eventually embraced the Catholic faith and pursued his calling to the priesthood. After a series of assignments, he became auxiliary bishop in the Diocese of Natchez-Jackson in 1972, and then became the first bishop of the Diocese of Biloxi when it was created in 1977. Immediately after Pope John Paul II issued the 1984 indult Quattuor abhinc annos, allowing bishops to authorize the Latin Mass, he began offering the old Mass in the Cathedral. He then gave a universal indult for the priests in the Diocese of Biloxi. In a 1992 interview with The Latin Mass magazine he said, “I announced in my clergy bulletin that any priest who wanted could say it [the TLM] any other Sunday but the Sunday that I do, the first Sunday of the month. But . . . I haven’t gotten one response.”

He also told me this personally, adding that he was hoping that some Latin Mass communities would form within the diocese, and for that one Sunday every month they could all go to the Cathedral for a High Mass. He was disappointed that it never happened.

“I think the priests in the diocese didn’t like me very much because I’m black,” he once told me, after he retired in 2001.

“They didn’t like you because you’re Catholic,” I muttered.

He also said that he was ashamed at the treatment of the “Latin Mass people” by other Catholics.

“It reminds me of the way our people were treated,” he said.

The meaning was clear. It reminded him of the way blacks were treated in the Deep South when he was growing up. We often visited him during our trips home to Mississippi, even when we couldn’t get there for his monthly Latin Mass. We continued to correspond with him long after he retired.

We also continued to periodically host a circuit priest who was willing to visit our residence once a month and offer Mass for one or two other families and a few servicemen. God finds ways to turn evil into something good. I began studying Gregorian chant on my own, with no guidance, and learned to play the “organ,” which was just a keyboard that had organ settings. I had studied music only for a few years in my youth, but it came back quickly. Had a public Fort Bragg Latin Mass Community actually come together, I would have been too busy organizing altar boys and scheduling events to have discovered that I had been blessed with a gift of understanding music. We had the clandestine Latin Mass once a month, at most, but it always brought us a great sense of relief. When our fourth child, Louis, was born we had him baptized in the Maronite rite. As is the case in many of the Eastern rites, one receives the Sacrament of Confirmation at the same time, so he was confirmed as well as baptized. We invited the Bonomettis, our friends from Alabama, to be his godparents. The fact that this baptism included the rite of exorcism, as the preconciliar Latin rite did, was not lost on us. From that time on, the rest of our children would be baptized in the traditional Latin rite.

Chapter 20: Farewell

Lorri and I had become friends with many of the Belgian Catholics while living there. Most of the families at L’Institut Saints Pierre et Paul, where our oldest three children went to school, were dedicated to the traditional Mass, and they were all invited to my retirement ceremony. We had met numerous Catholics at a small parish church we attended on Sundays in Cortil-Noirmont, a remote location with a particularly good priest. We had made new friends on an annual pilgrimage that started in Dinant and ended about ten kilometers away at Notre Dame de Foy, a church built in 1623 that had become a pilgrimage site.

The SSPX was renovating an old church in the downtown area of Brussels as we were preparing to leave Belgium. Saint Joseph’s was an Italian-Renaissance-style church built between 1842 and 1849, in the Leopold district. From the time it was consecrated in 1849 until sometime in the 1980s it was entrusted to the Redemptorists. As religious life and Mass attendance plummeted after the Second Vatican Council, the Syrian Orthodox took it over for a few years. In 2001 the SSPX bought it.

Sometime before departing the country we heard about their first Mass and we made it a point to attend. We had never attended Mass with the SSPX until now. As we entered the packed church and looked around, to my surprise there were dozens of people that we knew. Apparently, attendance at Mass with the SSPX was something that many of our Belgian Catholic friends did but nobody discussed. People that I knew from our choir at Cortil-Noirmont were participating in the choir, which sang a beautiful polyphonic Mass. People we knew from our children’s school, L’Institut Saints Pierre et Paul, were seated next to us. The SSPX bishops would not have their excommunication lifted for a few more years, but it was then and there that I began to fully comprehended the extent of the injustice that had been done. This was where the large families were. This was the vibrant, youthful crowd that would be the future of the Church. These Catholics had managed to aquire a beautiful old church and preserve the traditional Catholic liturgy, doctrine, and prayer life without the blessing of the hierarchy, but they were supposedly the culprits. Meanwhile, so many other magnificent churches and cathedrals throughout Europe sat empty because the liturgy and spirituality that they had been built for was now forbidden.

Epilogue

The recommendations [for the military archidiocese] thus far have focused on the liturgy, the Mass, and the urgent need to lift restrictions on traditional forms of Catholic worship of both the East and the West. The primary reason we have chaplains in the armed forces is for battlefield ministrations. As important as the Mass is, Catholic chaplains are irreplaceable on the battlefield to offer baptism, confession, and extreme unction. Unlike with the Mass, these sacraments, even in their traditional form, can be administered in the vernacular, except for prayers of exorcism and absolution. Last rites are sometimes administered to those who may not even be conscious. To restrict traditional priests from the military chaplaincy is to potentially deny battlefield sacraments to injured or dying servicemembers. An injured or dying soldier would not complain about Latin or any other language used to apply sanctifying rites.

Finally, there is something even more important at stake, and that is the loss of a traditional Catholic understanding of morality in the declaration and conduct of war and the use of deadly force. The contemporary understanding of moral conduct in the profession of arms is at an all-time low. A young Catholic officer recently pointed out to me that nobody in his chain of command seemed to know anything at all about the just war criteria laid out by St. Thomas Aquinas, and in some cases, they have never even heard of it. There are, in fact, very strict limitations on the use of deadly force that go beyond the laws of warfare laid out by the Geneva Conventions, UCMJ, and other U. S. laws. Those restrictions should be well known and understood from the highest level of national command authority down to the platoon level. Instead we find that deadly force is thrown around at the whim of whoever happens to be president at the time, with no apparent consideration for the loss of human life. There is no way that this would be supported or even tolerated by our armed forces if the ranks were full of tradition-minded Catholics having a proper understanding of the just war guidance given to us by St. Thomas.

Where, among the senior officers, do we find any Catholics voicing objection to the improper use of military force? One of the unfortunate results of this free-for-all prevailing in the post-conciliar era is the widespread notion that rules are optional. The blatant disregard of liturgical laws, and the inclusion of practices condemned in the strongest terms throughout the history of the Church, including in 1970, 1980, and 2004, are just a symptom of the ongoing post-conciliar corrosion of Catholic influence within our military. This book described a pattern of the type of misbehavior that further corrodes the desperately needed Catholic influence on our use of military force. The behavior of the senior chaplains and the AMS during the period covered in this book was somewhat like that of petulant children who, upon discovering that there were no consequences for their disobedience to the pope, did what they wanted.

How can the officers and senior NCO leadership of a large and dangerous military be spiritually guided by priests who don’t honor the spiritual authority over them? If these priests disregard the guidance of the Church in what they wrongly consider to be “little things,” such as liturgy, will they be up to the task of providing spiritual guidance in questions of life and death in the use of deadly force? Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi — how we pray shows and shapes what we believe and the way we live. The doctrinal and liturgical traditions of the Church come as a package deal. Discarding the traditional liturgy has brought America to a dark place, where the most monstrous behavior and barbaric acts are tolerated by our military because the Catholic understanding of just war and the value of human life have become collateral damage.

The contempt and disregard that the AMS had for Ecclesia Dei (1988) as described in this book was followed by a similar disregard for Summorum Pontificum (2007). It is absolutely time to end this kind of thinking, and time for the AMS to understand that a greater respect for Catholic tradition is demanded by circumstances. The tradition of the just war has been nearly completely lost through the past decades of post-conciliar chaos. The U. S. military can be influenced in the direction of a greater respect for human life if the AMS will take the simple step of inviting traditional priests into the Catholic chaplaincy and promoting a traditional form of worship. Such a step would undoubtedly end the lamentable shortage of Catholic chaplains. The spiritual health of our service personnel is at least as important as their physical health. We cannot continue to deprive them of the ministrations of excellent traditional Catholic priests out of slavish obedience to an agenda from the 1970s.

I hope and pray that those able to remedy this situation will be emboldened to fight the good fight.

To find out more about David Sonnier’s eloquent memoir, visit its page at Os Justi Press. The book is also available at all Amazon sites around the world (e.g., here in the USA).

The following meditation is developed from remarks I shared at a recent youth retreat; I share them now in honor of the Feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. —PAK

Basic truths

We would not even exist if God was not every moment causing us to be. We would not be able to act without Him acting in us. We cannot achieve virtue, holiness, or happiness without Him. Jesus put it best: “Without Me you can do nothing” (Jn. 15:5). We have a profound need to pray every day. Our interior life will wither up and eventually dry out if we do not have recourse to prayer every day. And when we lose our interior, we become an empty shell.

Our Lord says in the Gospel of John:

No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. (Jn. 15:15)

He has given us the gift of His friendship by sharing His life, His truth, His peace, His grace with us. We can describe the Christian life as an ongoing conversation with Christ, so that our friendship with Him can grow ever deeper. When we die and come before Our Lord, we want Him to recognize us as familiar friends and welcome us into His kingdom. We want to hear Him say: “Come in, friend, I have been expecting you and waiting for you these many years, and have so much enjoyed getting to know you during your lifetime that I look forward to dwelling under the same roof with you forever.”

At the same time, Jesus is not merely a friend like any other friend we might have; He is the Lord of glory, the great King over all the earth, the one who knit us together in our mother’s womb, the one who saved us by the outpouring of His blood on the Cross, the one who will be our Judge, merciful and just. Our relationship with Him should therefore be characterized not only by familiarity and intimacy, but also by the most profound worship, reverence, and self-surrender. The first and most proper response to the God-Man is adoration, falling to our knees like those who approached Christ when He walked on earth—just as we do before the Blessed Sacrament today.

Let God enter

This ongoing conversation with the Lord happens in many ways—in personal prayer, whether formal or informal, with or without words; in reading and pondering Scripture; even in our contacts with other people, in whom we try to see Christ and relate to Him. But the highest and most exalted encounter with Our Lord in this life takes place in the public prayer of the Church, what we call her “sacred liturgy,” which consists of the rites of the sacraments, the Divine Office, and, above all, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, in which Our Lord makes Himself present in our midst so that we may give perfect worship to the Father in union with Him and receive Him as the bread of wayfarers, the food of immortality.

He wants us to live His very own life; He wants us to breathe with His Spirit; He wants to touch our soul and body with His healing, transformative Presence. St. Athanasius said: “God became man that man might become God.” If you want God to become your own and yourself to become God’s own, then you must let God enter you in the way He has chosen: under the form of bread, as your nourishment, as the most basic good without which you would die of starvation.

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We are pleased to publish today a guest article by Esther Berry of the delightful Substack The Literate Woman. She is responding to a rather peculiar article titled “You Think You Love the Traditional Mass.” I thank Prof. Berry for recording the voiceover as well. In order to allow this article to reach the maximum number of readers, I have removed the paywall. —PAK

It is often forgotten that the authors of the 20^th-century liturgical reform were marked by a strong optimism with regards to the visible fruits of their project for the Catholic Church of the future. In hindsight, by nearly any available metric, it is clear that they were mistaken. It was in the spirit of this optimism that Paul VI said in his address to the Italian bishops in 1964:

The liturgical reform opens to us a way to reeducate our people in their religion, to purify and revitalize their forms of worship and devotion, to restore dignity, beauty, simplicity, and good taste to our religious ceremonies. Without such inward and outward renewal there can be little hope for any widespread survival of religious living in today’s changed conditions… Promote sacred song, the religious, congregational singing of the people. Remember, if the faithful sing they do not leave the church; if they do not leave the Church, they keep the faith and live as Christians.1

And, in a general audience in 1965:

It will be the liturgical life, carefully nurtured and fully assimilated into the minds and practice of the Christian people, that will keep awake and alive the religious sense in these secular, desacralized times, and that will give to the Church a new springtime in its spiritual, Christian life.2

Now, sixty years later, we are still coming to terms with the massive exodus from the Catholic church which occurred just when a “new springtime” was expected. At the same time, we find ourselves wondering why in the world young people disproportionately flock to the traditional liturgy which was officially sidelined before they were born and remains under heavy censure from Rome. We were told quite definitively that traditional liturgy was uniquely unsuited for modern times; it is therefore very strange that young people seem to like it so much. If these are the first blossoms of a new springtime, they appear to be happening in the wrong place.

A recent article at Christendom Quarterly, incredulously named “You Think You Love the Traditional Mass,” has an explanation for this. It is not the case, as many Gen-Z zealots claim, that they love the ancient liturgy because it is beautiful and meaningful. Of course they claim to like it. But, in truth, they do not.

I feel equipped to answer this partially because I am a Gen-Z convert to Catholicism who thinks she likes the Latin Mass. My husband is a Gen-Z cradle Catholic who was raised in a standard Novus Ordo parish, and he also thinks he likes the Latin Mass. Depending on where we live, we sometimes attend the Roman Rite and sometimes attend the Melkite Rite, which of course offers the similarly ancient liturgy of John Chrysostom. We think we like that too.

The argument of the article in question is quite simple.

First, it is not possible for someone who is not brought up in the world of the Latin Mass to like it, to find it compelling and beautiful on its own terms. Second, people who do not find the Latin Mass beautiful and compelling would not attend it purely based on intellectual convictions about the liturgy, but for some other extrinsic reason. And third, the other reason, the true motivation underlying the Gen-Z excitement about traditional liturgy, is an attraction to a culture of stability and seriousness. Therefore the liturgy wars are not really about liturgy, because what young traditionalists like is not the liturgy; it is something else, and we ought to talk about that instead, and focus our efforts at renewal there.

To the first point, the extent to which tastes are determined by education has been debated for a long time. Aristotle made a pretty compelling case that if you were not brought up correctly you were pretty much toast. And there is something to this! The author of the CQ article, drawing on their experience as a teacher, points out that children who did not grow up reading books, real books, full of difficult and arcane language, are simply unable to love them when they are older. I am twenty-five, and so the college students I teach are only a handful of years younger than I am, and I see what she’s talking about as well—that children who didn’t grow up reading have a great deal of trouble getting into it as adults. As the author argues,

We are shaped by the things we see and taste and hear as a child, and the way we see, taste and hear them. This atmosphere, more than anything else, determines which beauties a child can know, and which he cannot fully comprehend. Almost invariably, these capacities or limitations follow the child into adolescence and adulthood.

For good or ill, this is how human nature works, and it is true for more than just words. This is the way we are with music and art and a thousand other things. But most importantly, it is the way we are with the Mass itself.

This is a good argument, and there is plenty of evidence to back it up. But it proves far too much. If the experience of Medieval Catholics “was an experience of life so distinct from our own that it was a difference of kind, not merely a difference of degree,” if “we have been raised in a culture that trains the eye for the fast cut, trains the brain for the scroll, and trains the heart for the dopamine hit,” and so the only kind of worship we are still fit for is “something that satisfies our attention spans and individualism,” then it is not at all clear why we should stop at the Novus Ordo. After all, the New Mass was developed in a time before short-form video content. To really be fit for our times, wouldn’t it have to be even shorter, even snappier, more digital, with even less ritual and obscure “spiritual” content? And one could make—and many have done so—just the same argument about Catholicism itself, or about Christianity. How could we dare to say the same creed or offer the same worship as people who lived in a time so different from our own? What use is Scripture to such a wretched people? What use is Homer?

But perhaps more pertinently, the argument that we cannot appreciate something we are not educated for directly undermines the third point of the article, which is that, given that young people are not, as they claim, drawn to the liturgy itself, it is more plausible to think that what they are attracted to is the rigor and community which could, of course, in principle be found elsewhere.

Locating the appeal of the TLM in culture instead of liturgy is no solution to the stated conundrum—the lack of requisite education for a genuine love of the ancient liturgy—because education is also important for an appreciation of culture. If the children of this generation are so unused to the beauty of liturgy and ritual that they simply cannot be drawn to it, wouldn’t it be similarly implausible that they be drawn to a culture that they do not inhabit, or to a sense of seriousness and discipline they have not experienced elsewhere? If education is totally determinative, why would phone-addicted teenagers be so compelled by seeing “teenagers who are not on their phone at Mass”? How could only-children in a country with a below-replacement birthrate find themselves choked up at the sight of “families with five children where the oldest knows how to hold the baby”?

Either it is possible to be compelled by a great beauty that you were not acclimated to as a child, or it is not. If it is possible, it is quite plausible that (as many young traditionalists claim) the Latin Mass itself has this compelling power; if it is not, then being drawn to communal seriousness remains exactly as impossible as being drawn to medieval liturgy. I do not see why the heart that is impenetrable to Gregorian chant should be melted by Gregorian rigor.

Apparently there is some mysterious mechanism by which someone who was not properly educated is able to be deeply affected by beauty nevertheless. I have no argument whatsoever as to exactly how this works, or what its limitations are; I only know that both things are true, that education is crucial and in many ways determinative, and that encounters with the True and the Good and the Beautiful frequently exert a mysterious, transformative effect on even serious degenerates. The interplay between these two principles is extremely obscure even on the natural level, let alone when we are speaking—as we are—about a locus of supernatural grace. Some things transcend time, and culture, and even serious deficiencies of education. Some things speak to human beings as human. Many people, even great saints, have thought that the liturgy was one of those things. And if this is the case, then one would expect a people systematically deprived of symbols and rituals and beauty to be even hungrier for them, to respond to them with a peculiar fierceness, with the eagerness and desperation of a starving man who has just stumbled across bread.

At the time, in the upheavals of the 1960s, it sounded like a pretty good argument to say that modern man is unsuited to ancient liturgy, that we so utterly lack the symbolic and aesthetic vocabulary of our forefathers that it would be hopelessly naïve to expect our young people to willingly attend obscure, theurgic rituals. That was the theory advanced at the time of the liturgical reform. They thought they knew for a fact that the ancient liturgy, with its incense and incantational repetitions, its obsessive kissing of the altar, the obscurity of the language, the hiddenness of the hands of the priest, a thousand things going on quietly and hiddenly with only the participation of heart and intention—all this they were confident was utterly ridiculous for the modern man. But that was not known a priori—it is, and always has been, a guess. It is not an ironclad axiom about human nature; it is a particular hypothesis about how human nature works in the concrete. And if young people being drawn in droves to a medieval liturgy despite their modern miseducation is not counterevidence to this hypothesis, what is? What could ever be? One senses we may be dealing here with a filter that refuses to allow evidence that does not harmonize with a certain presupposition, rendering the claim for all intents and purposes unfalsifiable.

Even if we are unsure about the motivations of young zealots, even if we have reason to hold them in suspicion, I would argue it is better not to err on the side of cynicism when we are surprised by wholesome proclivities of young people. Growing numbers of young people claim, at least, to like classical music. A recent Forbes article, entitled “Why Gen-Z is Falling in Love with Classical Music,” reports:

Orchestras are reporting a surge in younger audiences that rises above a novelty trend. A 2022 Royal Philharmonic Orchestra tracking survey found that 65% of people under the age of 35 regularly listen to orchestral music. The group is “now more likely to be listening (to orchestral music) than their parents,” the report found.

Maybe this is a fad. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe young people just think they like classical music, but actually they like the aesthetic of sophistication or some such thing, and maybe it’s simply impossible to learn to love beautiful music you didn’t grow up with. But when an apparent resurgence of appreciation for beauty among young people is occurring before our eyes, I think we ought to refrain from asserting that such a thing is simply not possible, since according to our ironclad psychological theories young people ought to only like rap and rock-‘n’-roll. What if we’re wrong? If there is even a chance that someone really is beginning the fragile process of falling in love with the sort of enduring beauty and meaning that they have been starved of their whole life, the last thing in the world we should do is scoff and “call their bluff.”

Of course, many opponents of the Latin Mass believe that it is not like a symphony at all, that it’s not really as beautiful as its proponents assert, that its relative merits are overstated, and so on. Others believe that although it is beautiful, it ought nevertheless to be banned. The argument in the essay I am critiquing is neither of these, but a stranger one: that the TLM is supremely beautiful, that it ought not to be banned, and yet that the people who go to it should straighten up and admit to themselves that they are not there because it is beautiful, but for some other reason altogether.

As paradigmatic of regular TLM-attendees, the article cites the experience of a contributor in their thirties, who says:

I’m frustrated because, having attended Latin Mass, I know intellectually that it’s better, higher, and some part of me understands that it is more beautiful… but because I was raised on [Marty Haugen], the emotional resonance just isn’t there. It doesn’t feel like “home” yet, somehow.

The author maintains that this is the experience of “nearly all the people packing pews at TLMs.” Although some young traditionalists say that it is lifechanging, that it is beautiful and mysterious, that it nourishes their souls, we know for a fact that such a thing is impossible—and so, presumably in the spirit of synodality, we had better not listen to them. This occasions the second point of the article: people who do not feel “at home” with the TLM, but go nonetheless, must go for some other reason besides an intellectual conviction that it is good and beautiful.

As I have said, I do not think that this discomfort and frustration is everyone’s experience. It is not, for instance, mine, or that of many people my age whom I know well. But even given that this is some people’s experience of the TLM, I do not think in the least that this means that their commitment to the liturgy as such is ephemeral. It speaks more to the contrary. When we see young families commuting unwieldy distances to attend traditional liturgies, only to grit their teeth through services they do not understand and have difficulty appreciating, I do not think the proper response is to assume that they are not as committed to the liturgy as they say they are. Perhaps we should take them at their word that they just want to be around something they know is objectively beautiful, something glorious and ancient, even if they do not fully understand it, even if it is difficult and frustrating for them because it goes against the grain of their upbringing. Perhaps they genuinely believe that great things take, and deserve, our time and effort, and that the slow progress we make in such an endeavor, painstakingly rebuilding what should have been habitual, is worth more than instant and easy comprehension.

I understand the urge to look at someone who admits that they go to the TLM because they believe it is beautiful, ancient, and worthy, despite the fact that they do not emotionally resonate with it, and assume that they must be emotionally resonating with something else—the community, say, or the general sense of seriousness. But this would only be a necessary consequence if subjective emotional resonance was the only kind of motivation, and it is not. In many times and cultures it has been speculated that, once in a while, people do what they believe is right, or act in accordance with what they know to be true, even if it is difficult or painful for them.

Gen-Z, more than any other generation, is keenly aware that the world we might have inhabited has been polluted and exploited and carried away by those who came before, that aspects of the Real that were previously regarded as the universal inheritance of all human beings—marriage, family, music, art, dancing, clean air, walkable neighborhoods, gathering with friends, home-cooked food—have been denied to us by those who took them for granted. Is it inconceivable that we might fight tooth and nail to get them back, even when we can hardly remember what they look like? Is it totally implausible that, for instance, young parents who did not grow up listening to classical music might try to get into it as adults because they know it’s timeless and wonderful and objectively beautiful and they want their children to grow up with it?

There certainly exist young people whose attraction to the ancient liturgy is a byproduct of some other unexamined appetite that could just as well be satisfied elsewhere. But I heartily disagree that they are the majority. And furthermore, I think that there is something real, even noble, even universal, in the yearning to give your own children the opportunities you never had. To some extent, this is the lot of all adult converts. “Yes, it’s true my parents and grandparents took away the chance I have at fully being immersed in the religion of my fathers,” we admit. “And that fact is irreparable. But that is precisely why I cannot bear to do the same thing to my own children. No, my children will grow up in it. They will live in its glow. They will have the inheritance that was denied to me and one day they will appreciate it more deeply than I ever could.”

Preliminary note: A question I’m frequently asked is: “What book would you recommend for getting up to speed on the whole business of Vatican II?” Naturally, the answer depends on how deep a dive one is looking for. Roberto de Mattei’s The Second Vatican Council—An Unwritten Story is ambitious and eye-opening, but it’s also over 600 pages. Henry Sire’s Phoenix from the Ashes is a superbly rewarding read, though it covers much more than Vatican II. Bishop Athanasius Schneider’s Christus Vincit ranges widely over many topics, from the last Council to the liturgical reform to the highs and lows of the papacy to more recent troubles. Any of these books would be worth every bit of time one might give to it.

However, back in 2022, I edited a pithy and punchy collection of the best writing from conservative and traditionalist authors on the sixtieth anniversary of the Council’s opening: Sixty Years After: Catholic Writers Assess the Legacy of Vatican II (also at Angelico and Amazon). I like the book because the chapters are short and to the point, expressing with a high degree of clarity the various reasonable positions one might take on the phenomenon and consequences of the Council. For example, you get positive takes from Larry Chapp and George Weigel, but you also get sharp critiques from journalists and theologians, e.g., Ross Douthat, Fr Claude Barthe, Gregory DiPippo, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Fr John Perricone, Eric Sammons, and others. I myself have a substantial chapter in the book detailing the reasons I am a Vatican II skeptic. The fact that authors are often responding to one another makes the book lively. The whole thing comes in at 178 pages.

Today, I’ll share a number of my favorite passages that I marked as I was reviewing the page proofs. —PAK

Christian Browne

The Council did not achieve its ends…and its bizarre and disastrous “implementation” cannot be separated from its history. Although a factually inaccurate conflation, the Council by now has been nearly identified with the Novus Ordo and all the changes to Catholic life and practice that came in its wake.

Thus, the defense of Council’s commencement, its documents, or what this or that bishop really said, retains at this point only an intellectual appeal; as a practical matter these sorts of points mean nothing, because they came to nothing. We know that the Council did not order the elimination of Latin in the Mass and the implementation of Communion in the hand. We get it. But these things happened after the Council and were done in its name. The present pope and his curial officials invoke the Council as the infallible authority for all that has come after it. To question or critique these postconciliar practices is to reject the Council, we are told!

Sadly, the defense of the Council per se, therefore, becomes nothing more than an effort at historical accuracy. It tries to explain (usually in the best light possible) why the Council was thought necessary and the lofty goals of (some) of its participants, but it has almost zero practical application for the resolution of the roiling crisis that the Council unleashed. (13-14)

When I was awakened to the Faith at the age of fourteen, I knew nothing about Vatican II or the Latin Mass. But from the first, I felt instinctively that something was amiss in the Church that I loved. I saw the great and unused marble altar affixed to the wall of our high school chapel with a Latin inscription above it; I saw old yearbook photos of the many Jesuits in their cassocks; the boys kneeling at the daily Mass; the emphasis on classical learning; the Sodality of Our Lady. I knew, by a sort of sensus fidelium, that the guitars and the hand-holding and the felt banners and the bad hymns were alien to the Church. (14)

I do not subscribe to the ideological effort to suppress reality, for it is this effort that prevents the Church from fairly and justly judging its past—praising what is praiseworthy, but discarding that which is harmful or the product of false and misplaced hopes. (14)

The allure of progress is powerful, but, like the unclean spirit gone out of the man only to return with seven more, it can leave its object in worse condition than that in which it was found. (15)

Philip Campbell

At a certain point I realized—as many of us have—that the progressives don’t care what Vatican II said. They don’t view the Council as a series of teachings; rather, they view it as an event. And not just any event, but an event whose nature is metahistorical. It is not merely another step in the long path of historical development; it is a paradigm-shattering upheaval that breaks the fourth wall of history, purporting not only to change the historical trajectory of the Church but to remove the Church entirely from the bounds of history and tradition. What do people with such lofty visions, such grandiose pretensions, care about the precise definition of participatio actuosa, the rubrics of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, or any other considerations that are merely textual? (19-20)

There is no more useless endeavor than to search for “the real Vatican II.” One has a better chance finding the Fountain of Youth or the Ark of the Covenant. That’s because there is no “real Vatican II” that can be found by documentary analysis alone, and it is a most fruitless search to think otherwise. Vatican II can’t be found solely in the documents any more than the French Revolution can be found by reading the Declaration of the Rights of Man. (22)

Larry Chapp

The council fathers understood that the often legalistic and superficial “contractual Catholicism” of the Church of that time had led to an infantilized laity who tended to view the whole enterprise as an effort in “following the rules” established by the hierarchy. (29)

To which I reply: well—have we escaped that? Really? Catholics who haven’t left are still just as tempted by legalism and by slavish turn-a-blind-eye obedience.

Second, there is the traditionalist view, growing in popularity, that the Council, though not in explicit doctrinal error, was nevertheless riddled with ambiguities. These ambiguities were caused by the need for compromise between the warring conciliar factions which allowed enough loopholes to exist for the aforementioned progressive takeover of the postconciliar interpretive spin to succeed. Furthermore, since the Council was by its own self-definition meant to be a pastoral Council, the disaster that followed can only mean that the conciliar project was, by definition, a failure. (31-32)

But this is obviously correct: it’s not a “view.” All the serious historians of the Council have documented it.

John Daniel Davidson

In making his argument this way, Weigel tries to eat his cake and have it too. Every positive development in Catholicism since 1965 is because of Vatican II; every distortion or pathology is a misapplication of Vatican II. He cannot admit that perhaps there was something about the Second Vatican Council that invited the pathologies and ruptures, that so far from a legacy of a renewed Catholicism, the legacy of Vatican II is one of deep division within the faith and a weakening of the church’s authority in the eyes of a watching world. That maybe, after all, it was not worth it. Why is it, for example, that the truth about Jesus Christ proposed by the Catholic Church resonates most powerfully today when the Church speaks in its ancient, pre-Vatican II voice? (39)

These families and converts are not being drawn to the Catholic Church and devoting themselves in ever-growing numbers to its most ancient forms of worship because the postconciliar church became more global, or because there is now a greater role for women and laity in the cele- bration of the Mass, or because Vatican II urged Catholics to read the Bible more. They are the future of the Catholic Church,5 and they owe the expressions of their faith more to the reforms of the sixteenth-century Council of Trent than to the twentieth-century Second Vatican Council.

If Weigel cannot see why these Catholics are drawn to the light and beauty of the ancient faith amid the wreckage of a dying civilization, then I hazard to say he has painted himself into a corner. Having convinced himself that something was profoundly wrong with the Catholic Church in the immediate post-war years, he must contend that the harsh medicine of Vatican II was the only cure. But sixty years later, it is hard not to conclude that the cure was worse than the disease, that it was in fact a slow-working poison, and that harsher medicine will yet be required to cure what ails the Church today. (40-41)

Gregory DiPippo

Just as the bishops who attended Constance did not bother to attend the next council which they themselves had called for, the bishops who wrote (with their periti) and approved the documents of Vatican II seemed afterwards to care little or nothing for what they had written…. I have yet to see a convincing explanation of why I or anyone else should show an enthusiasm for the texts of Vatican II which their own authors never showed. (49)

Michael Brendan Dougherty

For modernist Catholics, Vatican II was the one true event, one that transformed Catholicism as it had been understood and practiced for centuries into Pharisaism and then tried to redirect Christian energies into deconstructing the old church. (60)

Ross Douthat

The Second Vatican Council failed on the terms its own supporters set. It was supposed to make the church more dynamic, more attractive to modern people, more evangelistic, less closed off and stale and self-referential. It did none of these things. The church declined everywhere in the developed world after Vatican II, under conservative and liberal popes alike—but the decline was swiftest where the council’s influence was strongest….

And if anything, post-1960s Catholicism became more inward-looking than before, more consumed with its endless right-versus left battles, and to the extent it engaged with the secular world, it was in paltry imitation—via middling guitar music or political theories that were just dressed-up versions of left-wing or right-wing partisanship or ugly modern churches that were outdated ten years after they were built and empty soon thereafter. (65)

Even if the council’s changes did not officially alter doctrine, to rewrite and renovate so many prayers and practices inevitably made ordinary Catholics wonder why an authority that suddenly declared itself to have been misguided across so many different fronts could still be trusted to speak on behalf of Jesus Christ himself. (66)

For most people, Catholic faith isn’t an idea you’ve chosen that then has corollaries in practice (like get to Mass on Sunday). It’s an inheritance that you get handed and have to decide what to do with…. The church is in competition with a million other urgent-seeming things, and in its post-Vatican II form it has often failed to establish the importance of its own rituals and obligations…. Decline continues because of cultural priorities rather than beliefs. (69-70)

What really breeds cynicism is when the church behaves like the Soviet empire in its dotage and demands constant encomiums to the wisdom and success of a now decades-old renewal project, when everyone can plainly see it’s presiding over crisis and decline. (73)

Matthew Hazell

Hazell’s contribution consists in a translation, with commentary, of a speech given at Vatican II by Cardinal Montini (the future Paul VI) on October 22, 1962, concerning the liturgy. Here are some choice excerpts:

We must not forget Saint Paul’s eloquent teachings in 1 Corinthians 14, that is to say, he affirms that he who prays in the Church must understand with his mind what he utters with his mouth, and must answer “Amen” knowing what he is saying. The Liturgy was instituted for men, not men for the Liturgy. It is the prayer of the Christian community; if we desire that this community not abandon our temples, but that they may willingly approach them, and there have the interior life of the soul formed and express their faith worthily, the hindrance of a language that cannot be understood, or is appropriate for only a very few, must be removed, prudently, but without delay or hesitation. Whatever does not attract our people to participate in divine worship but alienates them from it is to be examined, as is excellently stated in n. 24 of the constitution. (92)

My comment: the supreme irony! Today we have packed TLM communities not only willing but eager to go to “their temples,” e.g., Catholic churches, for the supposedly inaccessible Latin liturgy that, in fact, has nourished their interior life—and now church authorities are trying to violently take it away from them. So much for pastoral care!

Likewise, the principle of reducing ceremonies to a simpler form seems commendable to me, not in order to diminish the beauty and rich meaning of worship, but to ensure that the brevity of the ceremonies may be properly considered and that repetitions and all complications be avoided; the liturgical reform here announced is supported by this principle, very appropriate and in keeping with the character of the men of our age, even pious and faithful ones. (92)

Stripping away, denuding in the name of transparency, never did spark enduring romance; it’s more likely to provoke boredom or disgust, or, at best, a short-sighted utilitarianism.

Jean-Pierre Maugendre

All this was imposed with an unheard-of brutality. This brutality was certainly in opposition to the official discourse on “listening, openness, dialogue, respect for others, and the acceptance of differences,” but it was necessary because all these upheavals did not in any way respond to the demands of the Catholic faithful themselves. (125)

While it is fashionable to denounce clericalism, the years following the Council were primarily those of unbridled clericalism…. “The evangelization of those who were far away could be done only after the eviction of all those who were only falsely close.” (126)

Maugendre quotes a Protestant historian who wrote in 1975:

“An important part of the clergy of France constitutes today a social, intellectual, moral, and spiritual sub-proletariat; of the great tradition of the Church this fraction has often kept only its clericalism, intolerance, and fanaticism. These men reject a heritage that crushes them, because they are intellectually incapable of understanding it and spiritually incapable of living it.” (131)

John Pepino

Causes of decline:

The discrepancy between “official Catholicism” after Vatican II and traditional popular piety [is worthy of note]…. Some elements of the liturgy, while seeming secondary to intellectuals, are actually psychological and anthropological determinants. He mentions the abandonment of Latin, changing pronouns to address God (“Thou” vs. “you” in the English context), Communion in the hand, the minimization or scuttling of former obligations, and so forth. (137-38)

Changes in official teaching turn humble folk into skeptics. Indeed, an institution that admits to having been wrong yesterday may well be wrong today, too. In this respect, Cuchet focuses on the sudden silence in the pulpits (as tracked in parish bulletins giving the topic of the homily) regarding the four last things (Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell); it gave the impression that the clergy had either ceased to believe in them or no longer knew how to discuss them. (138)

More fundamentally, Cuchet speaks of “a collective exit from the culture of obligatory practice under pain of mortal sin.” (138)

The permission to anticipate Sunday by attending Mass on Saturday evenings participated in the desacralization of Sundays, whose focus now shifted to leisure (which the now widespread ownership of television sets and automobiles made that much more available). (139)

A whole complex of shared values, to some extent held together by a system of obligations indexed on a strong sense of the connection between religious practice and one’s eternal destiny, and incarnated in seasonal practices (recurring feasts and fasts, rites of passage), was the body of Catholicism, while the soul in this analogy was actual personal assent to the truths taught and, in fine, commitment to Christ. Many of what Cuchet calls the clergy’s “false good pastoral ideas” (i.e., good intentions with disastrous results) derive from the Platonic notion that separating the soul from the body would be to the former’s benefit. Instead, of course, death ensued, and our world stopped being Christian. (140)

George Weigel

The extraordinary growth of the Catholic Church in sub-Saharan Africa—where Catholicism now counts hundreds of millions of adherents, many of them first- or second-generation Christians—was accelerated by the council’s promotion of native African clergy and religious orders…. (154)

False statement: simple numbers, yes, but not proportion or rate of growth. In fact, the Church in Africa is falling behind the growth of Protestant and other kinds of sects, to which Catholics often defect. See the book I edited called Is African Catholicism a “Vatican II Success Story?” (Os Justi Press, 2025).

In 2022, the vibrant parts of a globalized Catholicism are those living John XXIII’s original intention for Vatican II as a council that would renew the Church for its mission of sanctifying an often claustrophobic, self-absorbed, and frightened world. (159)

This seems to admit that the original intention had not successfully imposed itself or had become derailed. Indeed, the best aspects of John XXIII were his traditional ones.

Thus the Council had many theological and doctrinal accomplishments to its credit. These were crucial to rekindling that radical, Christ-centered faith that would be the source of a revitalized Catholic mission to convert the modern world. Similarly, the Council’s rejection of Catholic triumphalism was good in itself and necessary for its mission: “It was both necessary and good for the Council to put an end to the false forms of the Church’s glorification of self on earth, and by suppressing her compulsive tendency to defend her past history, to eliminate her false justification of self.” (162)

In Christus Vincit (see page 126), Bishop Schneider shows that it was just the opposite: there was never a council in history that involved so much self-exaltation, so much navel-gazing, as Vatican II. It was, he says, an exercise in triumphalist clericalism.

Weigel cites Ratzinger:

“We must rediscover that luminous trail that is the history of the saints and of the beautiful—a history in which the joy of the Gospel has been irrefutably expressed throughout the centuries.”

Indeed. That is why we must adhere to the same traditions they did.

It [the world] would be converted by the Church offering more beauty than the world could manage to create. (163)

This is meant as a statement of why Vatican II was necessary. Yet there was 10,000 times more beauty to be found in the Church before Vatican II; and where beauty has returned, it has done so in decidedly traditional contexts. I don’t see how anyone can dispute this.

Where Catholicism is alive today, and Vatican II well-received and implemented, it is because local churches have embraced holiness and beauty as evangelical and catechetical pathways toward a Christocentric future. (163)

For example, trad communities…

The foregoing excerpts are from Sixty Years After: Catholic Writers Assess the Legacy of Vatican II.

When you study the annals of history, and when you consult the records of memory and experience, you can see plenty of examples of pagans—unbelievers—who appear to have, and to exercise, certain moral and intellectual virtues. They may excel in those virtues beyond those who are believers. Some pagans can even exemplify heroic self-sacrifice.

Christian theology teaches that charity—the love of God for His own sake and the love of our neighbor on account of Him—is the “form” of the virtues, that is, it is what makes all virtues to be true virtues in God’s eyes. St. Augustine went so far as to say that “the virtues of the pagans are vices.”

How can we square these things? Can pagans really have virtues? Or if we say this, do we undermine the radical primacy of God’s grace for doing good?

The question actually involves several related questions, so it is a knot with many interrelated threads. That makes it a good question, a very deep question, and therefore not easy to answer.

To begin with, St. Thomas makes clear in his treatise on the virtues in the Prima Secundae in the Summa Theologiae that there are two modes of human virtue based on two different ends. All virtue is for the sake of the end or goal of human happiness, but there are two forms of happiness: the relative happiness of this life, and the perfect happiness that is eternal. Both forms are willed by God, though the earthly is subordinated to the heavenly and should minister to it.

The Greeks, above all Plato and Aristotle, had faint inklings of the soul’s beatitude; Plato saw that the intellect could rest only in the vision of the Good Itself, and Aristotle recognized that the highest and defining power in man, the intellect, was ordered to the contemplation of God as its fulfillment. Only Christianity revealed the vocation of man to the beatific vision of God, when, as St. John declares, “we shall see Him as He is,” when we shall participate in His very life—something a pagan thinker could hardly have dared to propose.

Correspondingly, there is a natural mode of virtue which is ordered to the natural happiness of this earthly life, which for the Greek philosophers is perfected in contemplation of God as naturally knowable by reason; and there is a supernatural mode of virtue which is ordered to the supernatural happiness of the life of the world to come, and of which the necessary premise is the infusion of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. For example, St. Thomas will speak of a natural and supernatural mode of the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance). The same applies to the many other virtues enumerated in ancient ethics—numbering over a hundred!—which St. Thomas discusses in the Secunda Secundae.

It should be noted that the theological virtues have only a supernatural mode, because they come from God and are directed to God. The cardinal virtues of the pagans were ordered to happiness in this life, but when we possess the gift of sanctifying grace and charity, the exercise of these virtues then becomes ordered to a supernatural end as well, to which earthly goods are subordinated.

Then we must ask: Are we so certain that all pagans lacked charity? Obviously, many pagans both past and present lack charity—even many Christians lack charity. But were the ancient pagans necessarily entirely excluded from the life of charity?

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As my goal today is to outline the innovations of William of Ockham, I will begin with his moral theology, which picks up where Scotus left off.

Four distinct theses constitute the foundations of Ockham’s ethical theory.

1. There are no natures and no divine ideas of natures.

2. God has unbounded power to determine moral legislation and exempt from it.

3. The human will is autoteleological.

4. The normative value of right reason—the very rightness of right reason, so to speak—is subordinate to the dictates of the divine will.

1. No natures and no divine ideas

For St. Thomas, “a divine idea is nothing but a given way in which God views his essence as capable of being imitated by a creature. Prior to the actual creation of a given entity there is a divine idea to which that creature will correspond if it is ever brought into actual being.”1 Such an Idea captures not only the existence of the individual, but the essence of which the individual is a particular expression or instance. This is another way of saying that God knows John not only as John, but also as man, as animal, and as substance. As each of these, certain conditions and certain acts will be suitable for John’s perfection, others harmful to it. Rightness and wrongness of possible human acts will obtain regardless of whether or not John ever comes into existence. The creature’s essential foundation in the divine intellect makes it possible to speak absolutely of what is healthy and unhealthy, appropriate and inappropriate, good and evil, for the creature.

For Ockham, in contrast, the concept in God’s mind is not the “archetype” of any given nature; each idea is nothing more than the individual creature qua producible. For Ockham, the vocabulary of ideas is more a projecting of our own thought-process onto God than a reflection of the way the divine intellect actually is or operates. It may be difficult to say exactly what a divine idea can be after Ockham has applied his razor to it. But an important corollary cannot be evaded: there is no such thing as the ‘essence of man’ in the divine mind, there are no eternal types behind natural forms. God does not create John, James, and Peter as three instances of man, three circumscriptions or projections of an eternally-known archetype with its own inner structure and suitable perfection. He made John, James, and Peter as three individual absolutes who, by His free choice, happen to have the same basic set of characteristics. Do they share in human nature? No. Is there such a thing as humanity? No. They share in nothing. There is no all-embracing idea of what they are. Each man is a new and different creation not only in his material individuality but in his very essence. (For Ockham, there is neither a real nor a formal distinction between essence and existence.2) “Now what God wills are singular existents, each of which is independent of all the others. Any connection between them, any ordering of one to the other, is the result of that creating will.”3

2. God has unbounded power to determine moral legislation and exempt from it

In the field of ethics, Ockham is most famous for having entertained dazzling theses about the power of God over the content of morality. Once moral truths are accepted as having the status of revealed truths suspended by a thread from divine omnipotence and liberty, the entire created order, the moral law not excepted, is seen to be utterly contingent,

in the sense that not only its existence but also its essence and character depend on the divine creative and omnipotent will.… There are [for the tradition] acts which are intrinsically evil and which are forbidden because they are evil: they are not evil simply because they are forbidden. For Ockham, however, the divine will is the ultimate norm of morality.… God can do anything or order anything which does not involve logical contradiction. Therefore, because, according to Ockham, there is no natural or formal repugnance between loving God and loving a creature in a way which has been forbidden by God, God could order fornication. Between loving God and loving a creature in a manner which is illicit there is only an extrinsic repugnance, namely the repugnance which arises from the fact that God has actually forbidden that way of loving a creature. Hence, if God were to order fornication, the latter would be not only licit but meritorious. Hatred of God, stealing, committing adultery, are forbidden by God. But they could be ordered by God; and, if they were, they would be meritorious acts.4

Ockham is not, of course, suggesting that adultery, theft, or hatred of God are legitimate in the moral order of the world in which we find ourselves. But that is a matter of fact. As Ockham writes:

I say that although hate, theft, adultery and the like have a bad circumstance annexed de communi lege, in so far as they are done by someone who is obliged by divine precept to the contrary, nevertheless, in respect of everything absolute in those acts they could be done by God without any bad circumstance annexed. And they could be done by the wayfarer even meritoriously if they were to fall under a divine precept, just as now in fact their opposites fall under divine precept.… But if they were thus done meritoriously by the wayfarer, then they would not be called or named theft, adultery, hate, etc., because those names signify such acts not absolutely but by connoting or giving to understand that one doing such acts is obliged to their opposites by divine precept.5

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One contemporary monastic author I especially enjoy reading is Fr. Luke Bell, a Benedictine monk of Quarr Abbey. He has published a number of richly meditative books with Angelico Press: The Meaning of Blue; Staying Tender; The Mystery of Identity; and Truth in Person. While I don’t agree with all his views, I find his books to be intellectually and spiritually rewarding. Below are favorite passages from Staying Tender. Enjoy! —PAK

Stability vs. itinerancy

The contemplative tradition is about abiding in this Absolute and finding life therein, a life that is in an open-hearted communion with others in the depth of their being. It is about abiding and it abides. Its practice is characterized by abiding. One of the vows a Benedictine monk takes is that of stability: that he will abide in the monastic life, and normally in one place, for his whole life. It is perseverance in this, not learning or practical skills, that determines if someone can become a Benedictine. …

All of this is a practical expression of a spiritual truth: that God abides and by abiding in Him we find life and love. As the monastery is the place of worship of God and of prayer—both because of how it is ordered and because of who is there—it represents the New Jerusalem where God is all in all. Abiding there in the right spirit (which is basically not a complaining spirit) is a means of abiding in God.

The spiritual truth that has its expression in perseverance in the monastery can also be expressed by not abiding anywhere in this world. Mendicant friars are always moving to a new place, always on a pilgrimage, because nothing in this world abides as God abides. While a monk will allow abiding in one place to point beyond itself to abiding in God, a friar will let abiding in God alone teach that “here have we no continuing city, but seek one to come.” Spiritually they are identical in their rootedness in God, the one signifying this by being in one place, the other by not being in one place. The created world both shows and conceals the divine and so can speak of it both positively and negatively. It images abiding in God in a settled place of residence; it shows, through those whose lifestyle is itinerant just as their Lord’s was, that it cannot offer the absolute abode which is God alone. (12-13)

Contemplatives are not cut off

A sister in a Carmelite monastery who in her daily two hours of personal prayer has left behind all concern for things that are below, whose life is “hid with Christ in God,” who is for that time no longer wrapped in the words and concepts that we use for “things on the earth” opens the world to an infinite blessing. A Carthusian monk, whose conversations with those outside the monastery have all but ceased, who speaks with his own fellow monks only once a week, who abides for life in the silence of the cloister is, through the Spirit that unites, as close in the depth of his heart to every person on the planet as anyone whoever. (16)

The contemplative spirit can never die. It is not that this world (the form of which is passing away) sustains it: rather the contemplative spirit is the reason this world is not dead. Souls open to the Divine Artificer, the Creator of all, open the world to its life. (17)

Right and wrong abodes

To be of no fixed abode here on earth would, it seems, to be more liable to vicissitudes, even to be disreputable, yet everything under the changing moon is subject to variation and decay. To invest one’s heart “where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal” is to walk into heartbreak. Rather, says the Apostle, “Seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.” The heart so set is “hid with Christ in God” and so steadfast—even steadfastly tender—amongst this world’s changes. (25)

Activism’s diminishing returns

What all the talk of “evangelizing” and “being dynamic” etc. misses:

Peter promulgates the abiding, John receives and rests in what abides. Peter shows the eternal to this world; John beholds the eternal in the next. The emphasis is: Peter loves; John is loved. Loving the Lord is what equips the Christian to care for others—that is why the Lord asks Peter about this three times—but it is “the disciple whom Jesus loved” who models a Christian’s essential identity. Love for the Lord begins with His love of us. St Teresa of Ávila pointed to the heart of Christian life when she spoke of “taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us.” That knowing we are loved is the beginning of everything and the reason that retreats—frequent short retreats and regular longer ones—matter so much. The Christian disciple can and should sometimes take a break from the Petrine-style active proclamation of Christian truth, but his or her believing heart needs always to know the Lord’s love. (29)

What science misses

To come to the Lord Jesus with openness and trust, willing to receive all that He wants to give, is to know more than all the secrets of the universe. (30)

We receive our history

It is the Holy Spirit who unites us to Peter and John, and indeed to the whole Church. The Holy Spirit brings about the Church, gathers its members into one living body, is the soul of the Church. Monday, the day of the Holy Spirit, is the day to remember this. The contemporary tendency is to think of our belonging to each other as something negotiated by independent individuals. Yet it is not like that at all. We do not come on the scene as fully formed human actors. We enter as Monday’s creatures, little children. We do not have words; we receive them from other people. We do not have food; we receive it from others. We little by little learn to take part in a conversation that began long before we were there, like people turning up late at a party when most people have gone and those left have started washing the glasses. We can only contribute what we are given and if we are thanked for it that is in the spirit of courtesy of a hostess who thanks her guest for handing her the plate on which are the cheese straws she made herself. We do not have a history; we receive it from those who are older than us. (32)

Old but vital

When Jesus says, “I am the vine, ye are the branches” He gives us a symbol full of implications. A vine can be very old, with thick gnarled branches; at the same time it bears fresh grapes, young and vital. Such is God: ever ancient, ever new; venerable and vital. (38)

Recurring patterns stabilize

It is not only the daily and the weekly patterns of worship that help us to abide in what does not pass: it is also the yearly cycle of praise. This is so above all because it is patterned after Christ’s life, so that it leads us to abide in the One who abides. His birth, His showing to the nations (the Epiphany), His baptism, His transfiguration, His entry into Jerusalem, His death, His resurrection, His ascension into heaven are all marked liturgically so that the year becomes His life and the repetition of the year’s liturgy brings us into that abiding life. (45)

The ever-present quality of the cycle of the liturgy is a stepping out of time. Liturgy is essentially about stepping out of time to be present to eternity and in particular to the One who is eternal, Jesus Christ. (45)

Battle needs to be undertaken to contemplate the abiding: we need to struggle against the passions which lock our hearts onto the passing things of this world instead of eternal goods. (51)

Loving creation in God

This is spiritual love; its intimacy is closer than that of love of other sorts, though it can be within other sorts of love. God is closer to us than we are to ourselves, and so in God we have that sort of intimacy with others. We see with the eyes of the Spirit those we pray for. We touch dear ones in prayer.

Consecrated celibacy has a special reach here. John Milton wrote of “the sun-clad power of chastity.” Its love is like the sun because the sun’s light and warmth reach everywhere: its love is in God and God is everywhere present. And it changes everything. In loving Christ we love God. And as love of a particular person makes special the city in which that person lives, so love of God changes the whole of creation for it all speaks of Him: the lion of His majesty, the dove of His peacefulness, the peacock of His beauty and so on. Most particularly, people speak of Him. Each person holds the whole of creation in his or her thoughts. Each person is an image of the Creator’s presence in His creation. To love God is to love that presence; it is to love those people and their apprehension of the Creation; it is to love creation afresh. (72)

The ultimate Presence

This best gift is offered to us wherever we are: God becomes present in humanity’s isolation so that His communion reaches even there. The cross gives us the Eucharist. This is a physical spiritual communion, for the Lord has promised: “He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth (μένει/menei) in me and I in him.” This is a “hard saying.” Yet it is no more hard than saying the Word was made flesh, that the Son of God walked among us. Heaven comes to us where we are, in all the desolation of that place, so that we may go to heaven. We are offered a dwelling, an abiding that goes beyond this world, and invited to “labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth (μένουσαν/menousan) unto everlasting life.” (76)

He is really and abidingly present in both His humanity and His divinity to the end, giving Himself to us in unreserved love. (77)

When we talk about the Eucharist and the Blessed Sacrament, we are also talking about Mary who is as it were the tabernacle. The “yes” of Mary to the Angel Gabriel is a yes that echoes through eternity. Therefore she is spiritually present when Jesus is present in the Blessed Sacrament. It is her openness to God that makes possible the yes, the nothing but yes, that we have in Christ.16 His yes to us blossoms in our yes to life and what it sends us, in our yes to others, and to Him. His presence affirming us and the affirmation we give comes through Mary. Jesus incarnate through her is in the Blessed Sacrament. The feast of Corpus Christi, when we celebrate that presence, is like having Christmas in the summer.1 (79)

We know how to put limits on what we say out of love: God in His Word is the same. Jesus as a baby is wrapped in swaddling clothes; the Lord is with us as a prisoner of the tabernacle as, more terribly, he was a prisoner when He was condemned to death. That limitation is accepted by God. This is a perfection in God, just as the pianist, cook or conversationalist have something extra in the holding of their tongues: not more skill, but more love. (80-81)

How limit and infinity go together

The infinite can be given something by the finite. Limitation adds something to unlimitedness. If you think about an infinite series of numbers you come to a halt when you try to imagine whether the final number is odd or even because of course if it is odd there could be an even one after it and vice versa. So in truth the infinite is an order of reality different from that of the finite and if there is this difference, then the finite adds something to the infinite, the limited adds something to the unlimited: particularity.

That is what the presence of the Lord in His earthly life and in the Blessed Sacrament is doing: it is adding something. God comes to us as a particular person and in a particular way. This is a comfort. To compare the sublime to the mundane: however efficient a company’s online dealings are, it really helps if there is someone you can talk to if things go wrong. This is a plus, not a failure to construct the perfect algorithm.

Pursuing this line of thought, we can say God is not limited by His unlimitedness or we can say with Nicholas of Cusa that God is the coincidence of opposites, the infinite and the finite. God transcends the infinite by accepting limitation. He lives in eternity in which the limitations— essentially separations—of time and space are absent. Nonetheless He accepts these limitations with the concomitant loss and sorrow of separation in order to walk among us. (81)

The vulnerability of Christ

What is going on here—in the Incarnation— is that Our Lord is putting Himself in a position where He relates to people. There is the possibility of reciprocity, of His receiving as well as giving, of love and friendship. As when He walked the earth, so in His presence in the Blessed Sacrament, Our Lord is wanting friendship…. So He invites a relationship with us by putting Himself in a position in which He can truly receive from us…. In order to enter into that friendship with us, He has to be vulnerable. (82)

In the Blessed Sacrament His tender vulnerability is prolonged: He waits for someone who may never come, offering friendship that may not be accepted…. The Lord in the Blessed Sacrament enters into such a vulnerability: that of being there for us in a way which we can ignore, the vulnerability of being able to receive from us that which we are able to deny giving, a true human vulnerability. (83)

God is omnipotent as we say in the creed but God is also the coincidence of opposites, so God is the most vulnerable as well as the most powerful. He transcends omnipotence, choosing to be vulnerable for the sake of love. That vulnerable presence is with us in the Blessed Sacrament. Our Lord suffers as He suffered on the cross because He is not accepted and He is not allowed to heal. The suffering is ongoing. The physical agony of the cross is an instantiation of that deeper pain of not being accepted and allowed to care for the one who is loved. (84)

Both the vulnerability and the victory are truly present in the Blessed Sacrament…. it is a real ongoing presence of His awesome personal love both vulnerable and victorious. (85)

Suffering softens or hardens

One way or another we all know the heat of affliction, but it can cook us different ways: like a potato that becomes soft in the center the more it is baked or like an egg that becomes hard in the center the more it is boiled. How we accept what happens to us determines which way it is. We do not have to undertake this acceptance alone. It has in one sense even been done for us; certainly, the grace of acceptance has been won for us. (99)

Faith overcomes the tendency to invest in “things on the earth” as though they offered an abiding home. (111)

Scientism = death

The notion that what can be established by measurement and calculation about this sublunary world is somehow an absolute is a diabolical lie. Making the foundation of life “evidence based” is the attempt to live from death, for the measured is what is not moving on and the recorded is fixed, like the duchess’ portrait on the wall. That is not to say that science as we know it cannot give useful insights, simply that the true absolute transcends what we know through our senses. The error is to suppose that what we know in space and time is a closed system which can be explained in terms of itself. Anything built on this supposition is subject to the fire of the apocalypse as the divine truth subsumes it. We are called to live from the stable, but now largely forgotten, perspective that understands that everything is sustained by the divine, instead of from the aberrant instability of a this-worldly view. We have to lose the life that leads to decay and death because it is rooted in what is passing to find life that is true and eternal because it rests on the rock who is Christ. (117-18)

The above quotations are from Fr. Luke Bell’s Staying Tender (Angelico Press, 2020).

1

Something emphasized all the more by the pre-55 practice of using the Preface of the Nativity for it!

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Any well-educated Catholic is likely to say that Francis was the worst pope ever. Manifestly, there has never been a pope responsible for a larger number, variety, and gravity of doctrinal errors than he, and as for moral corruption, one need only look at the long list of criminals he protected or promoted to see that he could have been put behind bars multiple times if there were any justice to be had in the upper echelons of the hierarchy. All this has been thoroughly documented in Dominic J. Grigio’s The Disastrous Pontificate: Pope Francis’ Rupture from the Magisterium, about which you can read my interview with Edward Pentin here.

However, let’s not forget that there are ways in which Paul VI was much more radical than Francis. Montini initiated and brought to completion a liturgical revolution the likes of which had never been seen in the entirety of Church history, and compared to which—in the perspective of what actually molds and marks the daily lives of Catholics, in keeping with the axiom lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi—Bergoglio’s acts were like a kitten making muffins. Whatever errors or crimes Francis committed, he never radically changed every single rite performed by the Catholic Church in its public worship. That alone places Montini in a category all by himself. Incalculably more harm has come and will come to Catholics from the liturgical reform than from anything Bergoglio ever did or said.

There are also ways in which the chief architect of the Novus Ordo, Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, was more radical than either of them—as when he wanted to “reform” the Rosary by cutting down its useless repetition, a piece of insane effrontery that even one as sympathetic to reform as Montini quashed like a mosquito. (I give the full story of that episode elsewhere.)

However, there is a key area in which Bergoglio is more radical than Montini, and Montini than Bugnini.

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The end of the Middle Ages is every bit as complicated as its beginnings, or probably more so. If what we refer to as “medieval philosophy” was born out of a sweeping effort to harmonize, unify, and illuminate diverse fields and methods of knowledge by the twin lights of faith and reason, it experienced its demise in just the opposite way—by an ever-increasing dissolution, by competing and contradictory forces tearing asunder the cautious, delicate synthesis of the thirteenth century.

If the golden age of scholasticism was characterized by a dialectic of diversity-in-unity and unity-in-diversity, the age of so-called “decadent scholasticism” was characterized by an open battle of diversity against unity, with unity violently imposed upon diversity.

In the remaining posts, I shall offer a series of observations on what happened in the late thirteenth century and in the fourteenth century—or, as it seems to me (and to many others), what went wrong. I will point out along the way the birth of ideas and approaches we tend to think of as distinctively “modern.”

It was once commonly asserted that the birth of “modernity” took place at the time of the Protestant Revolt with its background in the Italian and Northern European Renaissance movements, but this was a superficial idea. It is largely agreed upon today that the crucible in which modernity was forged was, in fact, the late Middle Ages—an era marked by nominalism and skepticism, ever-increasing moral corruption in the Church and in the State, famine, plague, and warfare, and the novel heresies that will always arise in a restless age. It was all these things that produced the Protestant rebellion and made the reform of the Catholic Church a life-or-death matter.

In my opinion, the best way to catch a glimpse of late medieval philosophy is to focus on some of its more controversial figures and their positions. It’s a bit like immersing yourself in a language rather than trying to learn it by hearing someone talk about it or by reading a textbook. Or better, if you want to know about Indian food, you have to eat Indian food, you can’t just read a cookbook. The same is true for philosophy—you can only know it by entering into it, by feasting or, at least, tasting samples.

In what follows, I will offer you spicy samples of the kind of things that were said after the death of the High Medieval Masters—by which I refer above all to Bonaventure (1221–1274), Thomas (1225–1274), and Albertus Magnus (c. 1200-1280). The great figures of the next generation were John Duns Scotus (1265–1308) and, shortly after him, William of Ockham (ca. 1280–1349). Each of these figures was destined to found a “school” named after him. Bonaventure didn’t really, but the others did: Thomists who followed Thomas, Albertists (or Albertinists) who followed Albert the Great, Scotists who followed Scotus, and—you were about to say Ockhamists, but in fact the followers of Ockham were generally referred to as “nominalists,” although modern historians tell us that they should rather be called “conceptualists.” This is an extremely subtle point and, even though it’s partly true, we may continue to call them nominalists.

If we want to find out why the Thomistic synthesis of faith and reason crumbled, we need to spend our time with Scotus and Ockham.

Parthenius Minges writes:

Scotus seems to have changed his doctrine in the course of time, or at least not to have been uniformly precise in expressing his thought.... Many of his works are unfinished. He did not write a summa philosophica or theologica, as did Alexander of Hales and St. Thomas Aquinas, or even a compendium of his doctrine. He wrote only commentaries or treatises on disputed questions; but even these commentaries are not continuous explanations of Aristotle or Peter Lombard. Usually he cites first the text or presupposes it as already known, then he takes up various points which in that day were live issues and discusses them from all sides, at the same time presenting the opinions of others.... In the heat of controversy he often uses expressions which seem to go to extremes and even to contain heresy. His language is frequently obscure; a maze of terms, definitions, distinctions, and objections through which it is by no means easy to thread one’s way. For these reasons the study of Scotus’s works was difficult; when undertaken at all, it was not carried on with the requisite thoroughness.... Nevertheless, there is in Scotus’s teaching a rounded-out system…. a system worked out in minutest details.1

Let’s look at some of the basic principles of his philosophical and theological teaching. I will comment on how he agrees with or differs from St. Thomas.

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One of the most important and powerful manuscripts I’ve ever read is Sebastian Morello’s Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries: Recovering the Sacred Mystery at the Heart of Reality. Indeed, that was the reason I had to publish it! To say that it has the potential to shift one’s worldview is to put it lightly. For those who are already skeptics about modernity and its empty promises, Morello brings the entire set of problems into the sharpest focus, while also placing it on a genuinely supernatural foundation—the only vantage from which one might begin to discern a proper response, beginning with one’s own heart. This book stirred up a lot of controversy online but sadly most of it really seemed to miss the point, as the excellent discussion between Dr. Morello and Dr. Minerd showed. In keeping with the purpose of “The Professor’s Bookshelf,” I have gathered some of my favorite passages below for those who have not yet read the book and would like to get a taste of it, or, for those who have, as a welcome refresher. —PAK

Obstinate traditionalism

In the struggle to survive our civilisation’s rapid unravelling, we will have to contend with the rise of goetia—that is, of sorcery—among those intent on enslaving us. Certainly, from its inception, modernity has been satanical, but, as C. S. Lewis famously noted in his Screwtape Letters, not always overtly so. More recently, however, our epoch has become openly and visibly demonic in its music, fashions, moral commitments, bodily mutilations, and paraliturgies. My personal response, perhaps more through disgust at what I observe than by any chosen decision on my part, has been to double-down on my obstinate traditionalism in all things: in religion, in aesthetics, in culture, in morals, and in everything else. (xviii-xix)

Traditionalists receive a hard time in the institutional Church partly because her acceptance of modernity has meant that she has grown alien to herself. (xx)

Zombie apocalypse vs. Christian theurgy

Modernity, I have come to see, is ultimately a conjuring of black magic by which the mind is hexed with abstractionism, rationalism, scientism, mechanisation, and all the various ways we are rendered sightless by the blinding of the mind’s eye. The universe, in turn, has ceased to be a meeting place of God and man, and has become lifeless stuff to be utilised—for what ultimate end we do not know, and nor do we trouble ourselves with such a question. We have, consequently, become a people without wisdom, and given that wisdom is the lifeblood of the mind and the animator of the heart, we are rightly judged dead. As many have pointed out in recent years, that is likely why the only mythos that late modernity has been able to produce (and reproduce in a thousand different ways) is that of the “zombie apocalypse,” for such a mythos cathartically and allegorically presents to us our current condition.

The antithesis of seeing the world with the eyes of a zombie—that is, with the eyes of a soulless consumer who mindlessly devours all life he encounters—is that of apprehending the world as living, as God’s own theophanic self-communication, and as the primordial cosmic liturgy. This “sophianic vision”—though I did not put it like that at the time—is what I discovered Aquinas’s ontology to entail, what the Christian humanists of the Northern Renaissance knew the Protestant revolt would eclipse, and what the counter-revolutionaries of the eighteenth century understood the rise of ideology in modernity would finally eradicate—sweeping away Christendom with it.

Part of adopting a premodern mind is first acknowledging that every people in history has accepted that our world is a world pregnant with magical forces and the activity of spiritual beings. And Christianity has never denied that curses, hexes, and many kinds of evil spells exist, or that evil spirits can be contacted and succumbed to, in order to attain evil ends. So too, Christians—alongside their practices of meditation and contemplation—have ever believed in sacred magic, or “theurgy,” but they have held that such magic possesses the power to conquer demons and sacralise the world only when united to the eternal and singular priesthood of Jesus Christ, and to this baptised theurgy Christians have given the name of liturgy. This brings us to the great political work to which Christians ought to be dedicated, namely the endeavour to establish liturgical nations in fraternal union with each other, for the alternative to such a civilisation is the accursed dominion in which nations are first fragmented and then dissolved altogether in the grey mass of a diabolical slave settlement. (3-4)

Pre-eminence of mystical life

It is this conception of the world as a realm that, when known properly, reveals itself to be a cathedral, that I repeatedly attempt to defend throughout this book. Again, creation is the emanation of the Godhead—a true source of revelation—and as such, at the most fundamental level, the cosmos is inherently and intrinsically personal. To realise that the cosmos is God’s iconography is to be in right relation with it, which is the first step on the path to right relationality with its Source, Who, like Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven, is ever pursuing us through its arboreal ways.7 Then, one enters the joy of contemplation wherein is encountered the “transfigured face.” And this life of the embodied soul is, I suppose, the primary object of deliberation throughout this volume.

The pre-eminence of the mystical life understood not as spiritual ascent out of the created order, but rather as embodied induction into shared life with a personal God who meets us in the world that is an emanation of His own inner life, is emphasised by me largely because I observe that in the epoch of ideology—namely, modernity—we have lost a sense of the existentiality and immanence of the Sacred Mystery.

Tragically, this spiritual blindness has encroached on many aspects of religious devotion and piety. In turn, religion is understood ever less as ongoing transformation through the liturgical and sacramental life, and it is instead understood as mere intellectual assent to doctrinal propositions and spiritual ascent away from the concrete reality in which we find ourselves. Religion is hence tacitly reframed for a people formed by virtual reality lived from an online existence. Unfortunately, such a life is no life at all. And the upshot is the reduction of Christianity, or whatever we mean by Christianity today, to a base species of ideology, just one among a plethora of squabbling ideologies in the modernist arena of competing “systems.” The repackaging of what should denote the transformation of our nature by the supernatural love of the Incarnate Logos as another rationalistic modernism strikes me as nothing other than blasphemous. (10-11)

Breaking the spell

The Lord walks among us. To see Him, we have only to break the spell that blinds the eyes of the spirit. When, like Tobit, through our communion with angels, the excrement of our epoch falls from our eyes, and we behold creation as it is, as a wondrous cathedral wherein the great cosmic liturgy of God’s emanated goodness unfolds, we can do nothing other than praise Him. The Christian life, understood as absorption into the cosmic liturgy of the created order, reflected and redeemed by the bridal liturgy of the Church, through which the whole world calls out to its Maker in nuptial love, is the way it was lived in the Church’s monastic genius. The ebbing of the role of monasticism over the centuries is in large part to blame for the lamentable condition in which the Church finds itself today. (12)

Hildegard: “The devil detests . . . precious stones; for he remembers that their beauty was manifest on his own spiritual body before he fell from the glory that God had given him. (14)

As I suggest, the priest on whom I mercilessly pick is under the Cartesian spell. This shouldn’t shock us, for it is obvious that this spell is one that has hexed the whole Church. It is unfortunate that the priest’s status as an exorcist persuades the faithful that he holds an oracular position among them, thereby perpetuating the spell. But again, that should not surprise us, for once we lose—on account of Cartesian dualism—a sense of God’s declaration of Himself in the created world to which we are all privy as its rational part, the need for gurus with elite knowledge becomes paramount. Indeed, that is why the primacy of the didactic—rather than liturgical—role of the pastor follows so seamlessly from the view found in Protestantism that the world is so utterly corrupted by the Fall that it cannot itself be a species of revelation, and why since the Catholic Church adopted Cartesianism as its dominant worldview, Catholics have by necessity taken on the likeness of Protestants. (15)

From God’s cosmos to the inner self

The fact that substances, by existing as the things they are, disclose themselves, reveals that they necessarily find their fulfilment in mind. Given that things are inherently intelligible in this way, and thus convey their intelligibility, according to the ancients they must be emanations of mind, Divine Mind, and by virtue of that intelligibility they disclose themselves to our created minds. Hence, at least in the premodern worldview, the cosmos is divine communication, and like any communication, it is an interpersonal declaration that achieves its finality in the realm of intellect, by which in turn the realm of intellect is brought to perfection. (16)

If the arts fail to bear witness to beauty, politics to justice, medical practice to human health, cultivation to conservation, or education to truth—that is to say, if a given civilisation were to become characterised by ugliness, injustice, medical malpractice, the pollution of the earth, and the dissemination of error—then this should be understood as symptomatic of epistemic alienation from being itself, indeed as the divorce of mind itself from reality. (Lucky, then, that there’s no indication of that happening around us!) (16-17)

Ignatius’s order is widely credited with leading the charge against the Protestant revolution, and no doubt it did. But fascinatingly, the anthropology of the so-called reformers, namely that of the “inner self” making a personal religious commitment—rather than the integral, relational person being sanctified by induction into a visible and liturgical community—is reflected precisely in the anthropology and consequent spirituality of Ignatius and his followers. … (18)

I am merely noting that this shift, from incarnational and communal religiosity to that of the inner self was one tacitly adopted by the Church’s most influential order in the modern age, and that this is relevant for understanding how we arrived at where we are. (19) [And with it, the possibility of totally upending the liturgy and throwing out any and every custom.—PK]

By the time the Second Vatican Council was convened in the 1960s, Cartesian conceptions concerning our nature and how true religion works in relation to our nature were not even defended by the fashionable theologians of the day; they were simply taken for granted, and deemed uncontroversial assumptions to be presupposed by all Catholic theology. The Scottish Dominican friar, Fergus Kerr, in his highly commendable work entitled Theology After Wittgenstein, has done a remarkable job of compiling many examples of such Cartesianism prevalent among the leading advisers of that unhappy Council. He demonstrates that Cartesian dualism was indeed the house anthropology of the nouvelle théologie, and in turn was uncritically woven into the modern theology from which the Council developed its texts. (21)

Besides the moral complexities that easily arise from a commitment to Cartesian dualism, to which I have just alluded, there are other grave consequences to thinking of ourselves as “minds.” One upshot of such a view is, as I’ve noted, that of attributing a causal power to ideas that they do not possess. Combine that with a privileging of the mechanistic metaphor that predominates in modernity, and ecclesiastical leadership ceases to look like shepherding or gardening—the classic metaphors for ecclesiastical leadership—and it starts to look a lot more like engineering. The engineering conception of ecclesiastical leadership found itself on steroids during the Second Vatican Council, during which a new manual for the Church’s existence was developed in the form of non-dogmatic documents that were meant to lead to a new Pentecost for a new Church altogether. Out of ideas, a reality was meant to just spring to life—after all, apparently, we’re all just minds, so why wouldn’t things work like that? In that Council we have a clear example of what I have been describing: ideas are privileged, the entity in question—in this case, the Church herself—is analysed under the mechanistic metaphor, a manual is issued, and we’ve been toiling under ecclesiastical engineers ever since. (26)

Sacred places and blessings

In truth, there is no such thing as sacred space, only sacred places. For a space is a measurable, quantifiable area, interchangeable with any area of the same measurability. A space is an abstraction that exists only in a Cartesian world. Whereas sacrality is a quality, and by this quality a space becomes this space, and hence not a space but a place. A place is particular, and once a given place has been sanctified, it is no longer transferable or interchangeable with any other equivalent space—for no such space can exist. A sacred place is in the most extreme sense a place, which can be reverenced, but cannot be replaced without being desecrated. (31)

Acceptance of the Cartesian error is now found throughout the Church’s official praxis. Consider the curiously-named Book of Blessings, which replaced the Roman Ritual following the Second Vatican Council. On opening it, one discovers that the Church’s official book of blessings is no longer in fact a book of blessings. The so-called blessings therein quickly reveal the underlying assumption of the revised text, namely that the world out there does not need to be sanctified, apparently, for only selves can be holy. Let me offer you one example from the Book of Blessings, the prayer for house blessings, literally a blessing to make a particular place sacred and still one of the most-used blessings among practicing Catholics:

Lord, be close to your servants who move into this home and ask for your blessing. Be their shelter when they are at home, their companion when they are away, and their welcome guest when they return. And at last receive them into the dwelling place you have prepared for them in your Father’s house, where you live for ever and ever. Amen.

Note that in the new blessing for homes, no home is blessed. This example is so typical of the entire text that a friend of mine who was involved in publishing the Book of Blessings refers to it as “the Book of Prayers for People in the Presence of Stuff.” (Intriguingly, such a view—that neither things nor bodies nor places can be blessed, but only interior spirits—is not unprecedented; in the thirteenth-century text entitled The Summa on the Cathars by the ex-Cathar and Dominican, Brother Rainerius, it is stated that this belief was an explicitly declared tenet of the Albigensian, Manichaean heresy.) (32-33)

Fr [Pierre] Antoine considers it a spiritual—even, he says, mystical—exercise, actively to desacralize anywhere that may be deemed sacred to the faithful. (34)

Christianity…is not a disembodied religion. In fact, it teaches that grace can be received when in some places and not in others, and also by putting onto or into one’s body some substances and not others. The Christian religion is embodied in the extreme, and holds that redemption incorporates material reality—including the body and all its passions—which will be fully realised at the final resurrection and the unification of heaven and earth at the Eschaton. In short, for Christians, there is no such thing as stuff.

Hitherto, what I have been attempting to convey is that, for complex reasons, the Church, over time, changed its conception of itself, from an institution whose mission was that of seizing literal earthly regions of Satan’s principality and placing them in Christ’s Kingdom, to one whose mission is the imparting of ideas and sentiments to inner selves. Thus, the Church went from a visible, liturgical, social reality to an option among ideological competitors. Indeed, Catholicism could never have degenerated into an internet genre—which is almost solely what it appears to be today—had this change of ecclesiastical self-understanding not taken place. (36-37)

The institutional Church has become possessed by a spirit perfectly antithetical to its existence. Are there any solutions to the problem that I have been sketching? I certainly do not have any ideas, programmes, or schemas for undoing what I have described. And felicitously so, given that any such proposals would perpetuate the problem, not solve it. For it is not to ideas that we ought to look for solutions, but to practices and places. Happily, the traditional movement of the Catholic Church is doing precisely this, quite intuitively. (37)

I dare say we must rediscover our liturgy as a baptised form of “theurgy,” a term largely gone from Christian theology today, but one that was repeatedly deployed to discuss Christian worship by such an eminent authority as St. Dionysius the Areopagite. By Christian theurgy, I mean the fulfilment of all religious sacrifice, during which those offering the sacrifice commune with the divine spirits and call God down into the inner chamber as they chant the sacred words and perform the sacred rituals. (38-39)

Loss of institutional authority

Since the late nineteenth century, the faithful have been subjected to ever more regular, and ever longer, papal encyclicals and exhortations. Under the pontificate of Pope Francis, these have taken the form of very long essays, mostly comprising observations and occasional hints at the revolutionary direction behind their authorship. It is almost as if Pope Francis is begging to be taken seriously by the faithful for a moment, as he feigns speaking to them on an equal footing. This, though, is not at all how he has actually governed the Church, bypassing canon law and settled theology as he pleases, and persecuting those members of the faithful who won’t, so to speak, get with the programme. This, of course, is exactly what belongs to the psychology of an abusive man: he oscillates from begging to be loved and listened to, to throwing his fists around. A central reason why abusive people behave in this way is because they have lost authority. They can no longer be believed or trusted, and so they resort to begging, sentimental gestures, and then violence. (46)

In the so-called age of ecclesiastical collegiality, there is zero collegiality. The whole thing is a smokescreening exercise. Attempting to make sense of this situation, the faithful have increasingly fallen back on the sensus fidelium to “tap into,” so to speak, the true faith of the ages that is being covered up with recurrent acts of clerical voluntarism. The Church’s government knows that this is what has happened, and thus diabolically sought to imitate the sensus fidelium through Francis’s “synodal process,” so that it appeared that the “sense of the faithful” conveniently affirmed the revolutionary direction of the governing clergy. (51)

This crisis has moved the Church into a new mode of existence: the Church’s government has lost its authority, and the faithful should not only expect an intensification of mistreatment by arbitrary power from the hierarchy, as the hierarchy fails to come to terms with this reality, but the faithful will also need to work out what it practically means to be a faithful Christian in this new epoch.

Many today, looking around at the spiritual wasteland that is the West, seek to satiate their deepest religious thirsts by turning to romantic ideas of pre-Christian paganism, nature-worship, and New Age spirituality. Otherwise, they look east to the mysticisms of Asia, especially those of Buddhism and Hinduism, both of which have the added advantage of easily accommodating the individualism, solipsism, and anthropological dualism which have colonised the Western mind since the so-called Enlightenment. I threw myself into all these spiritualities, in fact—a sequence that culminated in my conversion to Catholic Christianity on the south coast of India in early adulthood, and I’m certain that God drew me out of the West that I might encounter His Church beyond its visibly corrupt and decadent occidental condition. (53-54)

Breaking free from rationalism

In the current situation, it seems that the remaining Church’s faithful will persevere by opting to double down on the devotional life. This is exactly what all the committed Christians I know are doing. They’re taking stock of the collapse of our civilization and the utter sterility of the institutional Church in the face of it, and in response they’re deepening their spiritual lives and clinging to Christ. The reason for which the Church exists is the union of its members with the Triune God. And when the hierarchy’s members forget this in their pursuit of worldly ambitions, God’s people must consider what lies within their own spiritual repertoire and mine those resources to cultivate as far as possible the richest interpersonal relationship with Jesus Christ that they can; or better, that He can cultivate in them.

It seems to me that the paradigm of rationalism—with all its chaotic relationships, ugly architecture, shallow sentimentalism, fetishization of abstractions, legal positivism, and blindness to persons—to which the institutional Church has conceded so much moral territory, must be overcome if we are to recover the primacy of the mystical in the life of the Church. The challenge before us, then, is that of recapturing the theocentrism on which our civilisation was built. The Gospel, which the Church is meant to proclaim, is the means by which to do that, and the sacraments possess the power to effect the transformation that’s needed. Breaking out of the prevailing rationalist paradigm, however, is the fundamental precondition for recovering the theocentric paradigm that is its antithesis. And such a deliverance may mean that we will have to be more open to a broader Western spiritual tradition which has always been bound up with mainstream Christian spirituality, but which cannot be accommodated by the rationalist paradigm and thus has been eclipsed in recent times. (55-56)

At present, what we’re witnessing in the secular West is the frustration of natural religion, unfulfilled by supernatural religion, haemorrhaging within the physicalist paradigm of modernity. The spirit of modern Western man is like a faulty pressure cooker that’s going to explode, and every attempt to fix the problem pushes him further into the false and malignant solutions of individualism, statism, transhumanism, and all the deceitful promises of the technological age that drive an ever-greater wedge between our condition and any reconciliation with God’s creation—and ultimately any meeting with Him. (65)

Catholics who have retained the organic conception of the Church as the institution that gifts to the baptised the virtues of right relationality with God—a conception of the Christian as a liturgical creature—have for some time now been actively persecuted by the incumbents of the Church’s highest offices. Such Catholics are seen as betrayers of the modern project of Enlightened man, whom the Church’s leaders have enthroned in their demotion of Christ the King. And in seeing such Catholics in this way, the Church’s government is entirely correct. (66)

Having lost a sense of the supernatural, and having theologically justified this loss by decades of conflating the natural and the supernatural, the Church has lost a sense of its very purpose. What is now left is power, and a craving for power within a petty and dying bureaucracy. The Church’s government has long run on the fumes of its previously held authority, but the engine is now choking and the whole institution is rapidly grinding to a halt. In a feeble attempt to hold onto the last vestiges of authority, the Church’s government has resorted to the habitual exercise of arbitrary power, which, ironically, is further accelerating the erosion of clerical authority. (69)

We reduced all insight, inspiration, understanding, comprehension, contemplation, appreciation, observation, discernment, and awareness to the one quantitative category of “information,” and thereby emptied our minds of all that really matters—and the world we have made around us reflects this cognitive corruption. (83)

Master, a blessing

Having rejected the life of nature, which the life of grace elevates and transforms, people in such unions nevertheless wanted to be blessed by the Church. The Church’s leaders, as we should have anticipated, yielded. But the question remains: what is this strange, intangible thing called a “blessing” that is coveted by those who reject the worldview to which it belongs? And why is it so important that even deviants and secularists desire to receive one?

Maybe, one might suggest, the desire to receive a blessing stems from nothing more than a basic need for approval. But had the Church merely issued a memo declaring that it approved of—or at least did not condemn—homosexual unions, that would have been widely deemed insufficient. The immediate response would have been to ask, “Then why can’t we receive a blessing?” The fact is, as embarrassing as it might seem, we still believe that special words said with special concentration, perhaps combined with special gestures and special artefacts, can possess a special causal power when aided by special, powerful spirits. That is, we still believe in magic, even the most secularised among us. (92)

Liberalism’s slavery

In the decades immediately following that colossal war of the egregores, the nations of the West embraced the rapid atomisation of the individual, the disunion of the sexes, the erosion of the family, the dissemination of pornography, the murder of the unborn, and the celebration of homosexuality, all aided and fomented with legislative acts. Ancient cities were transformed into colourless, concrete pens. Our musical tradition was discarded in favour of a thudding, torturous background noise. Our clothes were replaced with plastic coverings made by distant child slaves. And all the while, we were told that the name of what we beheld was “freedom.” The war’s veterans were condemned to look on with bewilderment as the lands for which they’d fought were remade into an earthly hell. Even now, all the curses of the egregore of liberalism can hardly be questioned—even by self-identified “conservatives” (who quickly learn to celebrate them anyway)—without receiving a tirade of outrage from those under the spell of “progress.” (94)

Kings & monks vs. bourgeoisie & bureaucrats

The whole mystery of the corporate person of the nation—which is a true person who can be blamed, honoured, and even discipled (Matthew 28:19)—is distilled into the individual person of the monarch. For a sceptred nation, the truth of the national genius is concentrated in the monarch and revered as such. Hence, at the deepest level, monarchy—especially sacral monarchy—by being a truth embodied, achieves the perpetuation of the Mystery of the Incarnation in the temporal arena.

By this mystery of royal theurgy, this incarnate blessing upon a nation, monarchy always stands as a living refutation and practical safeguard against the reign of egregores. If Europe is ever to become Christendom again, it will first need to be freed from the egregores that now control it, and the royal houses will thus have to play a central role in this deliverance. (95)

A major aspect of this development was the class transformation of European society, which in turn changed the class dynamic of the Church. In the Middle Ages, it was landed aristocracy that populated monasteries just as much as the peasantry, two social classes characterised by loyalty to place and locality. But as the bourgeois class swelled down the centuries, its members—who were characterised by their attachment not to place but to commerce, and possessed a managerial mentality rather than one formed by noblesse oblige—began slowly to populate the Church.

In late modernity, the Church’s supreme office, the papacy, got its first middle-class pope, when hitherto this office had been occupied only by nobles and peasants. Pope Paul VI had all the characteristics of a middle-class manager. He was a social climber with a sympathy for tabula rasa ways of governing. Just as the bourgeoisie, with their privileging of ideas over realities—and their pathological impulse, rooted in rationalism, to conform the latter to the former—had overseen every modern revolution, so too Pope Paul oversaw an analogous revolution in the Church. He reduced the sacred liturgy from a mystical conduit of grace expressed in a sacred language to a vernacularised, didactic exercise to entertain a new, educated population.

In times of political revolution, typically a bourgeois progressive takes control, calls into question the organicism of the polity, and then claims to create a new nation altogether out of a paper constitution, which he then enforces through a network of similarly bourgeois, servile collaborators. So, too, the same model unfolded in the Church of the 1960s. With the Council that John XXIII had left him, Pope Paul oversaw the creation of a new ecclesiology from new non-dogmatic documents, for a new Church with a new liturgical culture, all born from a “new Pentecost.” Since then, the Church has continued to recruit the most unremarkable, bourgeois managers into its clerical ranks, and by so doing her culture has completely changed—by which I mean nothing complimentary.

Management vs. monasticism

To this day, the monastic and contemplative life is routinely attacked by those at the highest echelons of the Church, and a mediocre episcopal caste of stale administrators oversees decline whilst recurrently insisting that some new catechetical programme will solve the problem of the widespread crisis in faith induction and faith retention. Ideas, always ideas, will get us out of the crisis, so they think. (I am not convinced, of course, that they really see the apostasy of the Church’s members as a crisis at all.)

What these ecclesiastical managers will certainly not do is acknowledge the signs of life that actually exist in the Church. (109-10)

Indeed, the Orthodox will likely never entertain the prospect of reunification with us Latins until Pope Francis has been personally and publicly condemned by a future pope, and there is also some explicit declaration that papal power cannot be exercised for the destruction of that which it exists to protect (it is astonishing that this even needs to be said). And while I think that—if the Lord does not come in majesty beforehand—such a condemnation and doctrinal clarification probably will eventually take place (given that the alternative is the utter implosion of the Church under the weight of the monstrosity which the papacy has grown into), it likely will not happen any time soon. (114-15)

The desire to maintain the post-Conciliar concordat with the unconverted world and its ideology of liberal progressivism, the inflated managerial power of the episcopacy, and the lack of lay temporal power to keep episcopal toerags in check, has coalesced to create an episcopal class who will seek out and destroy the slightest sign of life in the Church. This problem will not be changed until, with the rejection of the centralisation that it has undergone, episcopal and papal power is reduced to what it ought to be: the authority to teach the Catholic Faith, sanctify the faithful with blessings and sacraments, and govern the Church in accordance with subsidiarity. (116)

The antithesis of the liberal privatisation of religion is the Benedictine consecration of the landscape and its seasons, in which all nature is assumed into the liturgical rhythm of the Church. (118)

Even if the diagnosis of MacIntyre in After Virtue is correct—and I don’t doubt the diagnosis—perhaps we do not need a new and very different St. Benedict. Maybe we need an old and very similar St. Benedict. We need monasteries. We need men and women consecrated to God, to vow to be obedient to their rule, convert their habits from those of modernity to those of grace, and stay put in the place in which they are. In short, we need nothing novel, fresh, innovative, or anything at all consonant with such unpleasant adjectives. We need old-fashioned, traditional Benedictines, and we need them everywhere. Without a stable Christian life, there is no Christian living. That is how the Church of the future will survive the looming dark ages, just as it survived the last dark ages: by the daily prayer and labour of the sons and daughters of St. Benedict. (119)

Overthrowing the elders

The reason why our ancestors in each premodern age could depict themselves, the saints, and the biblical characters standing upon Calvary in contemporary dress is because they saw themselves as belonging to the same civilisation as that whose genesis began on that very hill—and so they did. That is, they held the story given to them in Holy Writ and their own story to be the same story. We moderns, on the other hand, even those who believe in the Christian religion, cannot help but look at the religious deposit that actuated our civilisation as the cult of an alien species.

“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 Edmund Burke 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.

As the example of sacred art indicates, the one institution that ought to be able to affirm the role of the elder is the Church. The Church, in fact, lives by reverence for elders. Sacred Scripture is the story of the patriarchs, the apostles, and the disclosing of a Father-God. The Church’s theology is orthodox only insofar as it does not depart from the doctrine of the Church Fathers. The Church, both clerical and lay in its constitution, is, if you like, the society in which the charism of the elder is supernaturalised and rendered sacred and sacrosanct.

Tragic it is, then, that the Church’s current hierarchical incumbents seem, generally speaking, to be neither elders themselves nor to love their elders. They appear as frustrated rascals who have undergone all the humane development and civilisational induction of Tolkien’s orcs. Perhaps this ought not to surprise us. After all, the men who fill the Church’s higher offices today were all formed in the crucible of the Second Vatican Council’s progressive theology, and their intellectual habits were fashioned by daily exposure to the so-called liturgical “reform.” The “experts” who subjected the Church’s liturgical heritage to ongoing experimentation did so on the grounds that it was somehow legitimate to call into question—and redact or even reject altogether—huge swathes of prayer and mystical experience inherited from our ancestors in religion, the sum total of elder-wisdom in ritual form.

The very Council, then, that claimed power to renew the Church’s youth in fact emptied the churches, and by so doing it aged the Church rapidly, in turn aging the civilisation she once animated, as Valentin Tomberg observed. And this process of aging the Church, far from recovering her charism as the Great Elder of our civilisation, merely rendered her decrepit. (123-24)

Childish or childlike?

In the Lord’s dialogue with Nicodemus (John 3:1–21), two paths are presented to us: the path of forever seeking the return to your mother’s womb, and the path of the Spirit. The former leads you to become spiritually childish, and the latter spiritually childlike. Between those two conditions of soul is the void between hell and heaven. (125)

As happens in every instance of modernity’s break with nature and tradition, we haven’t actually got rid of that from which we have sought to emancipate ourselves, but only replaced it with a degraded version of the same thing. … We threw out liturgical religion and have since largely created the modern world by way of pseudo-liturgical spectacles. Modernity is characterised by the tragic and desperate attempt to emancipate ourselves from that for which we immediately make a rubbish counterfeit. (126)

Whereas in the former example, the therapist is thought to bypass experience and embodied knowledge by way of a qualification, the young priest is thought to do so by way of his ordination. It is thought that, somehow, whatever he has received by supernature isn’t going to transform his nature but circumvent it altogether. This inversion of Christian anthropology, which supposes that some “special grace” can aptly substitute for the unfolding of human experience in time, comes from the kind of abstractionism that is the hallmark of the modern mind. Thus, one can see how what often passes for traditional Christian piety and obedience might be nothing more than the deleterious assumptions of modernity masquerading as true religion. (127)

Corrupt, deranged, and downright evil

The traumatised generation that had suffered the bloodbaths of the twentieth century wanted to free themselves and their children from all the history that had led up to those conflicts, when in fact those wars were the supreme creations of modernity, its final birth pangs. (129)

The modern mind is an observing mind and not a participatory mind. The observing mind is a mind a step removed from reality, rather than in union with it. And it is precisely our proclivity for observing everything, rather than becoming mentally absorbed in reality, that not only makes our observation so blind but ever escalates our modern sense of alienation, from each other and from the world. (132)

The Church, in its human aspect, is eating itself. The Church has become the great Ouroboros which she was established on earth to replace with the Holy Cross. Those who are scandalised out of the Church will, I am sure, receive some mercy in the end. Since I became a Roman Catholic many years ago, and especially during the seven years I worked as a Church official in the UK, in the institutional Church I have met some of the most corrupt, deranged, and even downright evil people I could ever imagine encountering. Were it not for my conviction that all meaning and purpose in this vale of tears flows directly from the heart of Christ, and that outside the maternal care of His Mother there is only the darkness of the diabolical realm, I would have left the Catholic fold a long time ago.

Fortunately, by His grace, I know Him to be the Truth, and so with Him I remain. It is a great source of sorrow to see how the Church has grown so very alien to herself. One autumnal evening, I attended a lecture in London by a retired Harvard Professor of Hindu Studies. It was in fact a lecture on the Rhineland Mystics. I learned more in that hour, in a talk delivered by a Hindu about the mystical tradition of my own religion, than I had from all the homilies I’d heard over the preceding decade and a half. That is truly a scandal. One sometimes feels that it’s only possible to discover authentic Catholicism if one flees the official institution for those corners where people, by virtue of their disassociation with it, are free from the petty power-games and clericalism of the modern Church.

If the hierarchy spent only half the time on disseminating the mystical and liturgical tradition of the Church that it does on destroying our own liturgical inheritance, it could drag us out of the nihilism of the secular age in the flash of a moment. Hence, it surprises me not that people, still longing for a spiritual life and some induction into a living tradition, and seeing that the institutional Church cannot satiate their deepest desires, gravitate towards the works of the perennialists and the modern Sufi scholars. Those people who stumble in the dark and eventually find perennialism and Sufism are themselves orphans, and the Church is the parent that has abandoned them. (143-45)

Not a contract but a covenant

Many—perhaps most—Christians are just as under the spell of modernity as everyone else, having allowed modernity’s prejudices and assumptions to colonise their minds, willingly or not. […] Having accepted the overly rationalistic, reductionist mentality of modernity, we tend to think that Christianity is solely about a contractual agreement with a “Lord and Saviour” in exchange for which we are handed eternal life, or that it’s a mere intellectual assent to doctrinal propositions, or that it’s a helpful moral framework. Basically, the mystery and the wonder are gone. Worship and miracles—that is, I-You encounter with God through the transformative mystery of His love—has become little more than Christianity’s window dressing. (163)

“If nothing has intrinsic sacramental value,” writes Dreher, “then the best way to measure the value of things is by putting a price tag on them.” And it was only a matter of time, he says, before we applied this view of the world—and how the only meaning the world can possess is that which it derives from the market—to our very own bodies. The sexual revolution and all the unhappiness that has come with it, then, is inseparable from the desecrating process of bleeding the world dry of intrinsic meaning and purpose. […] There is a simple reason why the internet is so dangerous according to Dreher: it “destroys our ability to focus attention.” Poor attention among modern people is a catastrophe, Dreher thinks, because the theocentric, participation-emanation view of the cosmos is only recovered by way of the ability to attend to it and thus really see reality. (164-65)

The internet has allowed us fully to adopt an anthropological dualism that separates self and body as if this conception of human nature were not a controversial hypothesis requiring demonstration but a truth to be assumed. Now, through technology, we are seeking to make the fiction of Descartes’ “self”—that is, the ghostly res cogitans encaged in the fleshly prison of the res extensa—an existential reality…. (166)

Either you see yourself as reality’s author at the centre of everything and thereby land yourself in a meaningless world, or you surrender yourself to something bigger than you in an act of self-renunciation—of kenosis, to use the theological term of art—by virtue of which your life can be flooded with meaning and purpose. (167)

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Preliminary note: As you may imagine, I correspond with a lot of people around the world, and receive a huge number of emails. Often these communications contains fascinating and important historical information. The following letter from a reader is, for reasons that will become quickly apparent, well worth sharing as widely as possible for the background it furnishes, especially for the large number of Catholics who were not alive during the 1960s and who have no idea how bad it was. In particular, there is a tendency among Catholic conservatives nowadays to soft-pedal the evils of the Council’s aftermath, as if to accuse traditionalists of exaggeration. Nothing could be further from the truth. Without delay, let’s dive in.—PAK

Dear Dr. Kwasniewski,

I have just finished reading three of your books—Close the Workshop, Turned Around, and The Once and Future Roman Rite. All were excellent. Close the Workshop in particular is very useful because it really gets to the specifics at the heart of the matter. I’m planning to purchase extra copies just so I can give them to the many “liturgical ignoramuses” I meet. (Getting them to read through the book will probably involve an extra novena or two on my part and perhaps even a pilgrimage to Lourdes.) I’ve been listening to your various interviews on YouTube and especially enjoyed the lengthy one with Matt Fradd (Pints with Aquinas), which was particularly good and informative, as was the moderated discussion with Dr. Larry Chapp about the theological background, implementation, and effects of Vatican II.

About 25 years ago, I read through Michael Davies’ books on the liturgical revolution, which were recommended to me by a priest who was a friend of our family’s (one of the “old-fashioned” orthodox and TLM-loving kind who were basically shunned and “cancelled” everywhere during the 70s, 80s, and 90s). During some podcasts, I want to yell out at the screen: “You’re forgetting to say what actually happened to people after the great liturgical changes that were made between 1964 and 1969!”

Let me tell you about what happened to my family here and in Holland. Catholics in Holland referred to this as: De grote Verwarring—the great confusion—something quite a bit more serious in meaning than the somewhat facile characterization typically used by Bishop Barron and Dr. Chapp, “the silly season.” Let me tell you what happened to nearly 70% of the Catholic faithful in Europe and North America and why they left the Church.

I’m writing this to give a bit more “background” about this part of the Novus Ordo story; in some ways it’s comparable to what happened during the Covid pandemic—there was a tremendous amount of utterly unnecessary societal upheaval, but the government agencies who were responsible have yet to (and likely never will) utter a word by way of apology. Likewise, the Church today is in a similar situation.

I think it’s necessary to provide some background about myself in order for my recollections about what historians have called “wie es eigentlich gewesen” (what actually happened) to make sense.

Born in 1957, I am a typical Baby Boomer who grew up in Vancouver, B.C., as a first generation child of Roman Catholic Dutch immigrants who came to Canada shortly after WWII. Our family was not really overly strict, but rather, because of the sobering events experienced by my parents during the War, perpetually wary, distrustful, and suspicious of most of the liberalizing cultural tendencies present everywhere during the 1960s and 1970s. My father worked as an engineer at UBC and had spent most of the war in a German forced labor camp. My mom lived in a small farmhouse—one of fourteen girls, three of whom became professed nuns!—and my mom’s only younger brother became a Mill Hill Missionary and lifelong theologian in London, England, educated at Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen. Mom worked as a midwife during the war years while the houses next door to her were occupied by the German Wehrmacht.

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The High Middle Ages

The high Middle Ages can be called, without fear of contradiction, the Golden Age of Catholic Europe, the “Age of Faith.” Even if one may not wish to go so far as the Catholic historian James J. Walsh who dubbed the thirteenth “the Greatest of Centuries,”1 it would be hard not to swoon with admiration at the persons, events, and accomplishments of this magical century—a century of lofty Gothic cathedrals and Summas of theology, bustling universities and public debates, law schools and hospitals, flourishing monasteries and convents, dynamic new religious orders (especially the Franciscans and the Dominicans), steady population growth across Europe, technological and scientific discoveries,2 exquisite mastery of arts and crafts such as stained-glass window production and manuscript illumination, the spread of troubadours, lyric poetry, and epic poetry (El Cid, legends of King Arthur and of the Holy Grail, the Nibelungenlied, the Romance of the Rose, the Divine Comedy), the code of chivalry, an unprecedented status accorded to women, widespread religious devotion among the people and their rulers. It was the century of St. Francis and St. Dominic, St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Louis IX and Dante. One could go on and on.

For our purposes, the most noteworthy feature of the period was its radiant, confident synthesis of human and divine wisdom. It was not accomplished without many difficulties, some of them severe, but it did happen in the end.

Without a doubt, the most momentous intellectual event of the high Middle Ages was the rediscovery of Aristotle in the West. It wasn’t as if the name or writings of Aristotle were entirely unknown.3 But up until the middle of the twelfth century, men had only some of the logical works of the one whom they called “the Philosopher”—the logica vetus, made up of the Categories and the Peri Hermeneias plus Porphyry’s Isagoge and Boethius’s Divisions and Topics, and a few chapters from the Ethics.

Starting in the twelfth century and peaking in the early thirteenth, the university cities were inundated with new translations of many major works of Aristotle hitherto unknown—the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics and Sophistical Refutations, the Physics, On the Soul, On Sensation and the Sensible, On Generation and Corruption, Parts of Animals, The Motion of Animals, On the Heavens, the Metaphysics, the Nicomachean Ethics, the Politics, and others, too. From our vantage so many centuries later, we can hardly begin to imagine the confusion this caused at first, and the revolution it ultimately brought about in Western thought.

A former professor of mine suggested the following thought experiment. Imagine that you were merrily going along with Einsteinian relativity as your basic paradigm for physics (and were priding yourself on how far you’d come along since the classical mechanics of Newton). A physicist discovers in a desert cave a stash of manuscripts. They are carefully examined and translated. The realization occurs: these manuscripts contain a working-out of physics far in advance of anything we have ever dreamed of—they go further beyond Einstein than Einstein goes beyond Newton. We don’t even have the vocabulary to make sense out of them yet, let alone the conceptual tools. Suddenly, in a matter of years, everything in the world of science has been turned upside down, and everyone is scrambling to make sense of it all. Some are so excited about the new physics that they simply throw out the old and become one-track minds. Some are so attached to the old physics and so anxious about the effects of the new that they try to get the new ideas prohibited or banned. Others are confused and can’t make heads or tails of the situation. Finally, there are a few who seek harmony and integration between the old and the new. In all cases, there is a flurry and a bustle and a sense of tremendous excitement and trepidation, with colossal paradigm shifts beginning to occur.

Well, this is more or less what happened with the influx of Aristotle’s writings into medieval Europe via the Arabs, during the lifetime of St. Thomas Aquinas. At the University of Paris in 1210, the works of Aristotle on natural philosophy were declared off-limits for public lectures. This prohibition had no parallel at Oxford, which is why initially the English had an advantage in coming to grips with his thought.

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Henceforth, Saturday posts will be free and open to the public. Unlike Monday and Thursday articles, which always have voiceovers (either me recording the post or another T&S writer), Saturday posts will not have voiceovers.

Preliminary note: If you have read any book by Anthony Esolen, you will know how delightful it is to read his gorgeous prose and be nourished by his deep insights into the truth of things. Among all the living Catholic writers I know, he is the most sensitive to linguistic beauty and rhetoric. One of my favorite books of recent years is his commentary on the Prologue of John, In the Beginning Was the Word, where, as a poet himself, he approaches John as a poet, and finds a partnership between theology and sublime art that propels the message God wishes to reveal through him. I will share below some favorite passages but really the entire book is chockablock with such wisdom. I am particularly struck by how relevant his comments are to many debates in the contemporary Church, including liturgical ones that he barely touches on. This book makes for excellent spiritual reading for all who attend the TLM, as it gives such a prominent place to the first fourteen verses of chapter 1. —PAK

Who’s more credulous?

Grant that John was no impostor. Could he have been an ignorant and credulous dupe? That was the line that the nineteenth century skeptics took. Scholarship is a prophylactic against credulity. But is it, really? Not if we examine the history of the past century, or the current fads of madness in our universities. People in the intellectual professions are usually the first to be fooled: they can reason their way into lies. Who but a comfortably padded and insulated professor could believe that women en masse could make soldiers as well as men? Who else could believe that socialism could eliminate human ambition, envy, and greed? But Peter and Andrew and James and John plied a trade that demanded attention to realities. You could not theorize your way around a dangerous body of water like the Sea of Galilee. You must know about wood, pitch, nets, fish, clouds, wind, rain, season, time of day. More than your livelihood, your life depended on it. (xxi-xxii)

Anti-word

The first prominent city in Genesis is Babel, emblem of the greatness and the folly of Babylon, and forever after the type of human confusion. Babel is the anti-word, the sign of human language itself falling into change and decay, into misunderstanding and strife. (11)

Suspicion

Note well: scholars are not to be trusted when they trim, flatten, or brush aside, for it is always more comfortable to make less of a great thing than to make less of yourself. Be suspicious whenever a scholar appears to set himself and his learning higher than the thing he is teaching about. (38)

We are the stories we tell ourselves

We are accustomed to stories that begin at a certain point, usually with a problem, and that work their way toward triumph or tragedy or, if you are many a modern author, an anti-triumph that yet makes some kind of declaration. Look at the stories man tells about himself. The people of Athens, with Athena casting the tiebreaking vote, acquit Orestes of murder, but the goddess invites the prosecuting Furies to look kindly upon the city, and when they agree, when they set aside their agony and vindictiveness, they become the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones. That is how Aeschylus, the most pious of the Greek tragedians, gives us the history of mankind proceeding from blood vengeance and pride, to justice meted out by a community of free men, men who still honor the old bonds of blood. Man ascends and becomes an Athenian. Or, to fall a bit from the sublime, people wrest their sustenance from a forbidding land, and gradually free themselves from darkness and superstition, giving themselves entirely to technology, so that they finally invent tractors, and all is well. Man ascends and becomes Henry Ford. Or, to fall farther, he invents synthetic estrogen, and becomes a liberated woman with a mortgage and no children. Call it progressive quicksand. The story goes somewhere, but the somewhere does not satisfy. We long not for progress but for transcendence, that which alone makes any sense of progress.

In the Christian story alone, and here I include the whole story of the children of Israel and the far-seeing and inward-enlightening visions of the prophets, do we find progress and return, consummation hidden in what is no bigger than a mustard seed, transcendence in the unseen action of a little yeast. I mean that here and here alone are all these things true at once: the story of mankind is the story of each man, singly, and really, not figuratively; mankind and each man has a beginning, and the end he strives for is already incorporated in that beginning; the end does not obliterate the beginning, but recovers it and redeems it and raises it to glory; and the end, a new heaven and a new earth, is among us now, but is not yet, and is in the flesh, yet a flesh that is as absolute light by comparison with the shadows we bear about with us. (54-55)

Real history

We are thus always enjoined to enter more fully and bravely into the real history of the world, which is the story of man’s salvation, wholly the work of Christ and therefore also the work of those in whom Christ works, and who become more truly themselves by it—or rather become themselves for the first time after all. (61)

Atheism blinds the eye

I do not need to give witness that life given up to the “world” is on a highway to disappointment and exhaustion. The worldly themselves testify. The atheist of our time does not rejoice in the beauty of the world around us, a beauty which might lead him to the threshold of faith. Instead he lays stress upon what he sees as its cruelty, its wastage, its ugliness, its unmeaning. The cosmos for him is no longer a cosmos but a chaos. The amoralist of our time does not rejoice in the beauty of the natural virtues, a beauty he does not feel. Instead he insists that there are no such things at all, so that he may indulge himself in vices that a healthy people would consider disgusting, unsightly, base, and abominable. Every one of our arts has reeled back into the beast. It appears that to love the created world as it deserves to be loved, man must not demand from it what only God can give. Man must not be of the world, if for no other reason than that he might love the world he is in. “Seek ye the kingdom of God,” says Jesus, “and all these things shall be added unto you” (Lk. 12:31). (61-62)

Gratitude

Gratitude is the virtue whereby the receiver of a gift participates in the generosity of the giver. The gift is free, and the thanks are free, and by “free” I mean more than that these things are uncompelled. They are free in an active and creative sense: they bespeak a soul that is free with itself, ready to give, flowing forth. Praise is the purest expression of gratitude, because then the gift is no third object but the very existence of the one whom we praise. It is the fundamental affirmation, as Josef Pieper puts it: “How good it is that you exist!” Not for your use, not for what you provide, but merely that you are: that is why we praise someone when we are at our most innocent and free. (70)

Nabbish rubbish

John is afire with poetic inspiration now (in verse 13), introducing several motifs, weaving them together in the braided form we have seen before, and returning, at the climax of the sentence, to two motifs of the greatest significance, the one in contrast with the other: man and God.

The New American Bible translators, allergic to poetry, render the sentence in the form of a coroner’s report: “Who were born not by natural generation nor by human choice nor by a man’s decision but of God.” The dreadful result has John saying the same thing twice, in “human choice” and “a man’s decision.” What is the difference? It is like saying that not only did a man not choose it, he also did not decide upon it—so there. The verse, one of the most powerful and suggestive in all of Scripture, collapses into a sentence characterized by abstraction and redundancy, and all the meanings of blood, flesh, will, and man, and all their echoes throughout the Old Testament and the New, are smothered. What was their grudge against John that they should treat him so poorly? (81)

Archaic language for a reason

Think of the difference between seeing and beholding. My dog can see. Even a blind man can see, in a figurative sense. He may say, “I see,” meaning, “I understand.” But only a rational being can behold, because only a rational being can hold the object of his vision at a distance, to look upon it, to enter into its beauty or terror or grandeur. Think of an artist standing back from his painting, to see it as much with his mind and heart as with his eyes. Seeing may be a mere physical action. Beholding must be an intellectual action, and you can behold without understanding what you behold. Indeed, if you understood fully the object of your gaze, I might say that you could behold it no more. For you it would be a dead thing, pinned to the wall of facticity.

At this point someone may object that we no longer use the word behold in ordinary speech, so we should not use it in a translation of the Bible. That objection is foolish. Let me try to explain why, because Christian congregations seem these days to believe that there is something special about the demotic.

The objection assumes that Jesus and the people he preached to and the evangelists who spread the good news were as indifferent to poetry as we are. But in this regard, as I have tried to show, we are the bizarre ones, the outliers. Every human culture but our own has had its characteristic poetry, beloved by ordinary people and passed down from one generation to the next. And indeed Jesus often preached in poetic form, so that his words might strike the heart more powerfully, and the mind might retain them more readily and surely. The objection also assumes a linguistic monotone, a single register for all human enterprises. But again, we are projecting our unusual dullness upon others. Because all human cultures have their poetry, all human languages have a range of registers, including the poetic and the sacred. A man does not pray in the same words he uses to buy a mule. A man does not court a woman in the same words he uses to buy a mule, or at least he has not been known to do so in the past.

When Jesus and his apostles prayed and sang hymns at the Last Supper, it was probably in Hebrew, the old sacred language from which their everyday Aramaic had derived. If they sang a Hebrew psalm, the Hebrew they sang was not like the prosaic Hebrew of the historical books, such as the Chronicles. Some Hebrew words that we find in the psalms or in the poetry of the prophets we find there and there alone. So, for the translator, it is more precise, more faithful to the original, not less, to search for a poetic word that conveys a special meaning, rather than to settle for an ordinary word that misses both the meaning and the emotional and sacral force. (92-93)

The good of inequality

“The function of equality,” says C. S. Lewis in his essay, “Membership,” “is purely protective. It is medicine, not food.” It is “a quantitative term and therefore love often knows nothing of it.” It is a prophylactic in the secular state, to guard against evils, “but in the Church we strip off this disguise, we recover our real inequalities, and are thereby refreshed and quickened.” Jesus never talks about equality. He talks about love. He never talks about how in the kingdom of Heaven all shall be the same. He says that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. (105)

Private religion?

Regarding Jn 1:16, “we have all received…”:

Perhaps the plural is a special revelation for us, as we in the western world are encouraged to affirm a contradiction in terms, namely, the privacy of religion. There can be no such thing, even if we think of it from the human side alone, since man is always and ineluctably a social being. He can no more have a private religion than he can have a private culture, a private society, or a private nation. Religion, culture, society, and nationhood may be many things, but private is not one of them. We can look at it also from the side of the divine. When Jesus is asked which of the commandments is the greatest, he replies thus: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God will all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Mt. 22:37–40) (107-8)

I… or we… or both?

I might put it this way. Man in his fallen nature is always in danger of losing his grasp upon the first person pronouns. His “I” is often a simulacrum, a piece of play-acting, a disguise, a muddle of fads and fashions in speech, clothing, behavior, and opinion. His “we” is a political caucus, a loose association, a tribe, or a mob. In Christ, he becomes a new creation, and he can say, with Saint Paul, “Not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20), living for God and for all men, in the “we” of the Church. (109)

Marriage

Moses speaks for God. He was the first and the greatest of all the prophets: “And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face” (Dt. 34:10). Yet one thing that Jesus does consistently is to place Moses in a subordinate and relative position. When Jesus says, boldly, that divorce is evil, for “what therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Mt. 19:6), the Pharisees press him further, asking him why Moses incorporated divorce into the Law. And Jesus replies, “Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so” (Mt. 19:8).

Let us think about this carefully. As we have had many an occasion to see, a variety of times are present to Jesus at once. We have “the beginning,” Greek arche again, and Hebrew reshith, referring to the original intentions of God the Creator; and notice that Jesus speaks authoritatively about that time in the beginning, as if he were present there. Then we have the time of Moses, which time includes the Pharisees who are speaking to Jesus right now. Moses permitted divorce because of the hardness of your hearts, he says, as if they were among the wayward and stiff-necked people who so often gave Moses cause to grieve. Then we have the time of Jesus, who returns to the beginning. He does so not as a lover of the archaic, for “new wine must be put into new bottles” (Mk. 2:22), but as a redeemer and restorer: “And I say unto you, whoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery” (Mt. 19:9).

That high and holy view of marriage, by the way, is implied by Jesus’s miracle at Cana (Jn. 2:1–11), his use of the marriage feast as an emblem for the kingdom of God (cf. Mt. 22:1–14), his casting himself in the role of bridegroom (cf. Mt. 25:1–13, Mk. 2:19–20), the Baptist’s referring to him as the bridegroom (Jn 3:29), and the great revelation that the Church herself is the bride of Christ. So says John of the Apocalypse: “And the Spirit and the bride say, Come” (Rev. 22:17). (110-11)

God’s existence

I have sometimes met people who say that they do not believe in God because they lack the evidence. They never tell me what evidence they are looking for. And what evidence can there be? If I see a print of a shoe in the mud, I infer that someone wearing a shoe has walked through my yard. It is a sign that one material thing, the shoe, has had an observable effect upon another material thing, the mud. The print functions as a sign because of the specific and finite characteristics of the two objects. Not everything is a shoe, and not everything is mud.

But God is ever in act, wholly, in every cranny of space, in every least flicker of time, in every tiniest bit of matter, in every working of every physical law that he himself has willed into being, so that he is as it were secreted away by being everywhere, rather than sipping some ambrosia upon Mount Olympus. He is also, unlike the Stoic abstraction of a Mind permeating all things as water permeates a sponge, a personal Being. He is not background radiation. How do you come to know a Person? Not by inferring his existence. That can be done without faith, hope, or charity. Satan knows that God exists. “The devils,” says Saint James, “also believe, and tremble” (Jas. 2:19).

You come to know a Person by encounter. God is no boor, forcing himself upon us. He would be sought. He gives us both the command to love Him, and the adventure of the quest. He honors us with a world that is wide open. By his nature he is hidden in his own unfathomable depths, and that might cause us to despair, except that he has come to us. (121-22)

Irrational refusal to believe

Suppose someone says that there is no proof that Jesus is the Son of God. He wants a sign. We have plenty of signs to give him. We give him the miracles that Jesus performed. Then he says that those miracles could not have happened, but that the accounts were made up by the disciples. And so we are damned both ways. He demands a miracle, and when we give him a miracle, he will not accept it, because it is a miracle, and he says that miracles are impossible. He will say that the history of the world is full of charlatans and sleight-of-hand artists. We then beg him to name for us a single charlatan or sleight-of-hand artist who did the things Jesus is reported to have done, and who said the things that Jesus said, things that, as I have noted, make the wisest moralist, a Lao-Tzu or Emerson or Epictetus, sound like a garrulous peddler of platitudes by comparison.

Then he may concede that Jesus was a great teacher. But when we beg him to notice that much of what Jesus taught was about who he is, they say that he was mistaken about that, or that his disciples made it up afterwards. So Jesus is a great teacher, and almost in the same breath he is a dupe; or the apostles are the slow addle-pated creatures they appear to be in the gospels, and almost in the same breath they are the crafters of a conspiracy unparalleled for its diabolical genius. What do people want? The apostles are illiterate and credulous laborers, and before the sentence is over they possess the strategic powers of Hannibal and the intellectual cunning of Socrates. We are damned both ways.

We see the same phenomenon at work when people say that the gospels of Matthew and Luke must have been written after the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70, because Jesus is obviously portrayed as foretelling it, in apocalyptic terms (Mt. 24, Lk. 21). Here I must confess complete astonishment. It required no man of keen insight into human history to foretell that the Romans would finally lose patience with the Jews and raze their capital to the ground! The Romans had been putting down rebellions there for a long time, and in the time of Jesus relations between them and the Jews were clearly tense, at best. The Barabbas whom Pontius Pilate released instead of Jesus was “a robber,” says John (23:19), using a word that suggests not petty thievery but sacking and plundering. Luke puts it more strongly: Barabbas “for a certain sedition made in the city, and for murder, was cast into prison” (Lk. 23:19). Caiaphas the high priest says that it would be better for one innocent man to die than for the whole people to perish, meaning that they must do what they can to keep the Romans from destroying them (Jn. 11:50). Why then must we think that the Son of God could not do what an ordinary political observer could do? (128-29)

Love gives sight

The theologian is not in the same position as is the physicist or even the historian. The physicist studies matter as matter, outside of himself. If he sins against his brother, still the hydrogen atom has one electron and not two. The historian may be involved with his subject in a human way, just to understand better the ways of men on their own terms. Still, Booth fired the shot in Ford’s Theater, and Lincoln fell. But one who wishes to say things about God and his Anointed One cannot treat the matter in that way, because we are in the realm of personhood here, the ultimate Person, who calls to each man as a person, saying, “Seek my face” (Ps. 27:8). The theologian cannot elude the call. God is not a respecter of pretended impersonality.

The theologian should attempt to treat as intelligently as possible the material and historical circumstances surrounding the person of Jesus and his life, but ultimately he must face the question that Jesus posed to the apostles: “But whom say ye that I am?” (Mt. 16:15). And here he must answer. He may wrap himself around with the fat of sentimentality, and pose as someone who feels deeply for the man who was so poorly understood by the religious people of his time. I suspect, however, that they who crucified him understood him better than the sentimentalist does. The question, in any case, is not whether Jesus deserves our esteem. To hell with human esteem. The question is whether we look to him as our savior, even if it means being nailed to a tree beside him.

If the answer to that question is yes, if we confess that Jesus is Lord, then despite our stupidities, our cowardice, our wickedness, and our sad attempts to be pure in heart for a single hour, we cannot treat of Jesus and the gospels as we treat of anyone or anything else in the world. We must come to know him. The theologian is the person who knows Jesus. The theologian is the person who prays, who obeys even if by fits and starts the invaluable commandments that Jesus gives to us as a grace, and who then attains what Jesus has promised him: light.

It is a commonplace of scholastic theology that love follows upon knowledge. The intellect sees what is good, and the will, in obedience, follows upon the vision, and that desire is what we call love. But love, says Richard of Saint Victor, opens us up to see. Where there is love, he says, there is an eye for seeing. (135-36)

What a codicil!

If I have said anything in this book that places a stumbling stone between any soul and the Lord, I pray that the Lord will not hold it against me, because I intended no such thing; and I beg such a soul to set the book aside and pray. If I have said anything that removes a stumbling stone between any soul and the Lord, it is none of my doing but his, the Lord’s. And I say with the thief, “Lord, remember me when thou comest into my kingdom” (Lk. 23:42). (136)

The foregoing excerpts are from Anthony Esolen’s “In the Beginning Was the Word.” If you’d like to read another passage from it, on what makes Christ unique, you will find it here at OnePeterFive.

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Angel Studios released the film Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. on November 22, 2024. It celebrated the German Lutheran pastor as a Christian hero of Nazi resistance. Undoubtedly he was a man who lived out his convictions and who died in accord with his conscience. In that sense, he is a “martyr” in the broadest possible sense—the sense that would include both St. Thomas More, killed by Henry VIII, and Thomas Cranmer, killed by Queen Mary in the short-lived Catholic restoration after Edward’s death.

Obviously, this is not the meaning of the word “martyr” as used by Catholics in their liturgical worship and veneration of the saints. But I need not stress the obvious.

The question remains: Should Catholics celebrate Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a great Christian witness?

The answer is unequivocally no.

In his book The Triumph of Romanticism, Fr. Gerard Steckler helps us to understand why:

At length, after having started to influence Catholic theology, religious existentialism in turn succumbed to the radical Christianity of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who managed the remarkable feat of extracting the religion out of Christianity and thus paved the way for the increasing identification of humanism and former Christian principles. (243)

Let’s listen to Bonhoeffer himself, sounding quite like Pope Francis:

Again and again I am driven to think about my activities, which are now concerned so much with the secular field. I am surprised that I live and can live without the Bible for days. . . . I feel the resistance growing in me against all religiosity (das Religiöse), sometimes reaching the level of an instinctive horror—surely this is not good either. Yet I am not a religious nature (eine religiöse Natur) at all. But all the time I am forced to think of God or Christ, of genuineness (Echtheit), life, freedom, charity—that matters for me. What causes me uneasiness was just the religious clothing. (253)

I am constantly moved by the question what Christianity really is, or who Christ really is, for us today. The time in which everything could be said to men by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over. So too is the time of inwardness or conscience, which means the time of religion in general. We are moving toward a completely religionless time. Men as they are simply cannot be religious any more. (254)

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The “Dark Ages”

History is written by the victors, and that’s why we refer to the “Middle Ages” as middle: for English and German Protestant historians, these hundreds of years stretching between antiquity and the Reformation were just a long, grey, undifferentiated wilderness of cold logic-chopping and mass idolatry—something “in the middle” between the worldly glories of ancient Greece and Rome, and the evangelical fervor of the Reformers. It’s a silly picture having nothing to do with reality.

So too with the phrase “dark ages,” which used to be quite common, but is now frowned upon by serious historians. True, these were rough times, with brutal men and poor living conditions, and a European map split into countless tiny political islands. But they were also a time of great, though largely hidden, promise: the age of the foundation of thousands of Benedictine monasteries, bastions of Christian learning, preservers of classical wisdom, beacons of holiness, fortresses of social stability. These monasteries were to become the backbone of European society.

Monastic culture was spiritually rich beyond belief.1 The monks did far more than copy manuscripts; they commented, collected, annotated, distilled, digested all the sources at their disposal, and passed them on improved to their successors. They developed architecture, music, and all the arts and sciences. Most of all, at their best, they lived lives of devotion to God and longing for heaven which indelibly stamped the whole of medieval culture with a sort of “consecration in truth.”

The young boy Thomas from the town of Aquino, for example, was sent by his parents to the nearby Benedictine abbey of Montecassino to receive a thorough classical education (a foundation that evidently served him well) and a training in monastic piety (which he also got, and carried with him for the rest of his life, in his Dominican vocation). In fact, the very last writing of Thomas Aquinas was a short letter dictated en route to the Council of Lyons, affectionately addressed to the Abbot of Montecassino, whose community was struggling with a difficult passage in St. Gregory the Great and asked for his help. Shortly after that, Thomas died at the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova. On his deathbed, at the prompting of the monks, he briefly commented on the Song of Songs, a book he regarded as the high-point of the Old Testament. In this, he showed himself a perfect child of the monastic world that reared him.

The monks were noted above all for lectio divina, the loving, patient attention to the word of God, the daily practice of pondering Scripture until it becomes second nature and opens up its secrets. We must never forget that medieval philosophy took place in a context saturated with the word of God. The ultimate attainment for the medieval student was to become a Magister in sacra pagina, a Master of the Sacred Page. Someone who had this degree was officially judged capable of commenting insightfully on any book of Scripture, drawing generously upon the Fathers of the Church, the monastic writers, pagan authors, and any other sources that could illuminate the text and its levels of meaning.

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Henceforth, Saturday posts will be free and open to the public. Unlike Monday and Thursday articles, which always have voiceovers (either me recording the post or another T&S writer), Saturday posts will not have voiceovers.

Preliminary note: Today I am delighted to share with you chapter 8 of Joseph Bevan’s hugely entertaining and very inspiring book Traddy Daddy: Memories and Thoughts of the Father of a Catholic Family. The chapter’s called “A Very Common Story” and tells about Joseph’s friend Jack, who, when he heard that this book was being written, asked if his story, dating from 1993, could be included in it as an illustration of many of the points Joseph dwells on. I’m glad the story’s in there, because it reveals a lot about the situation in the Church and the reasons why many faithful have sought refuge in the chapels of the Society of St. Pius X. Read and see. —PAK

I am from a Catholic family which happily attended the Novus Ordo Mass in our local parish, some five miles away from our home, in Chipping Sodbury. My father regularly played the organ at Sunday Mass and Mum cleaned the church. My two sisters and I helped out with the singing which usually consisted of hymns, English congregational masses and, occasionally, plainsong. Our parish priest, Father Ignatius, had his eye on me from the start as he had noticed a seriousness and a piety which, he felt, pointed towards a priestly vocation. We rarely went to confession or anything like that, but I did notice how I had begun to take my prayer life seriously and started to read spiritual books as I became more involved in parish life.

When I turned eighteen Father Ignatius asked me to “do the readings” at Mass, only the first two, mind, as he himself always read the gospel. Owing to the slight reticence and, how shall I put it, reluctance on the part of the thinning congregation to help out during the services, we were left with me and my family singing, serving, and doing the readings.

I was usually called upon to do the “bidding prayers,” which Father Ignatius, who was trying to introduce changes, asked me to compose and which he quickly checked before the start of the Mass. He encouraged me to mention in the prayers anything which was topical, and much was made of any worldwide wars and famines in Africa. During these conversations I had with the priest, I couldn’t help noticing his annoyance at being compelled by the bishop to make the liturgy more “dynamic.” In the summer months, I would announce from the lectern: “Let us pray for all those who are away on holiday at this time...” and also: “We pray for Bishop Jim, who will be received in audience by the Holy Father next week.” After each request, Father Ignatius would intone: “Lord, hear us!” and the reply would be muttered by all present: “Lord, graciously hear us!”

One Sunday, Father read out the latest pastoral letter from Bishop Jim, which was on the subject of vocations. The bishop quoted a short passage written by a nun who recommended the religious life because “it was fun!” After reading out this last sentence, Father visibly winced and afterwards preached a sermon on how he wasn’t surprised at the lack of vocations, which, he maintained, was caused largely by the search for “fun” on the part of those who generally trivialised the religious life.

An Interview

Encouraged by the parish priest, with whom I had long interviews, I decided that I should meet the diocesan director of vocations to see if I had the requisite disposition to study for the priesthood. This was duly arranged and one day, I think it was a rainy Tuesday morning in July, I took a bus to the diocesan offices in Bristol. I sat for a while in a sitting room with a cup of coffee and studied back numbers of the Tablet until I was approached by a man in a tracksuit who held his hand out for me to shake. The letter inviting me to the interview was signed “Terry Dowding (Fr)” so I knew this was a priest and yet, as he stood before me, there was no physical clue as to his clerical state.

“Hello, Jack!,” he said, “my name’s Terry Dowding, good to see you. Come into my office and we can have a chat.” His room was light and airy, but I was overwhelmed by the odour of tobacco. When we had sat down, he behind a large oak desk and me in a folding chair, facing him, he pulled out a packet of cigarettes and offered me one. I declined, being a lifelong nonsmoker.

“Before we get down to business, Jack, I want to ask you, have you ever been involved with the Tridentine Mass or any such thing?”

“What is that?” I asked, mystified.

“Oh, you know, some people call it the Latin Mass, or the Old Mass. Surely you know about all that, don’t you?”

I thought for a moment. “Well . . . ” I started. Father Terry sat bolt upright, his eyes widening. “Yes?”

“I’ve read news reports about Latin Mass people disobeying the Holy Father, but otherwise I have had no personal experience of any of that sort of thing.”

The priest relaxed. “Well, thank the Lord for that! I thought we would just get that out of the way first.”

Father Terry took a last deep drag of his cigarette and, as he blew out the smoke thoughtfully and crushed it into his saucer, he studied me.

“Jack, tell me, what exactly do you think the job of a priest is?”

I was expecting this question and had prepared my answer, thanks to some prior coaching by Father Ignatius.

“To save his soul and the souls of his flock.”

Upon hearing this, Father Terry smiled, and this developed into a kindhearted guffaw, followed by coughing and spluttering, common amongst heavy smokers.

“You don’t really think that, do you?,” he choked. “Someone’s told you to say that, haven’t they. Now tell me what you really think, Jack.”

I pondered my reply, worried that my next answer would produce even more merriment, so I decided to play safe.

“I would love to hear your own views, Father, that’s why I’ve come.”

“Forget all this ‘Father’ nonsense, call me Terry.” Terry fished out another cigarette, lit it and blew out more smoke. My eyes were beginning to water. “Jack, you can’t do any good in the Church unless you address the real problems faced by real people who are in your care. Only after you have gained their trust and respect will they be prepared to open up and receive spiritual help. What’s the use of telling a single mum, who is worried about paying her electricity bill or her rent, that she’s not to worry because Jesus will save her? The life of grace and the striving for perfection is of no use to someone in prison for murder when you visit him.” “But how can I, as a parish priest, God willing, improve the lives of anybody?,” I asked.

“You have to get involved in their lives. You do this by meeting as many people as possible, chairing committees, raising funds for the local school, marriage advice . . . the list is endless. You have to establish a public profile. Then the religious side will follow.”

I was confused: “But I have no skills in all the things you’ve mentioned, all I can do is pray and study.”

He was ready with his answer: “That’s what they will teach you at seminary. Nowadays at least half of your training will be spent outside the college, and you’ll be placed in a thriving working-class parish in a big city. After that, you will be bubbling with enthusiasm for your future work as a priest. Theology and canon law count for very little these days. Your priestly mission is ten percent knowledge and spirituality, and ninety percent people.”

“I’m sorry to admit this, Father, but I’m naturally a very shy person.”

“The seminary will teach you people skills, such as public speaking, how to deal with confrontational issues, and how to develop your personality. Seminaries nowadays place a lot of emphasis on psychology, and they even explore your inner sexuality. Have you ever slept with a woman, Jack?”

I was taken aback. “Certainly not!” I replied.

Quick on the uptake, Father Dowding was ready with his next aphorism: “I ask you, Jack, how can you love God if you’ve never loved a woman? You’re not gay by any chance, are you?”

I was shaken by this question and, although I opened my mouth to reply, no words came out.

“Don’t get me wrong, though. I wouldn’t have minded if you were. It’s just something the seminary has to be aware of. Of course, you’re not homophobic, are you?”

“No, of course not!”

“Oh, that’s good. We have to show love and tolerance towards people of all sexualities these days. When you go to seminary, they will carry out full psychosexual profiling for you, just to make sure that we have no skeletons in the cupboard.”

Father Terry suddenly stood up and pushed back his chair. That was obviously the end of the meeting. I asked him what happens next, and he said that someone from the vocations department would write to me in due course and that I was not to worry as I was definitely “in.”

Jack Goes to the English College

On the tenth of September, I alighted from the taxi at Via di Monserrato in Rome and lugged my heavy trunk to the ornate door of the Venerable English College. I rang the bell, which I could hear echoing inside. After waiting for a few minutes, I rang again and nobody answered, so I tried the latch, and the large oak door swung open. Upon entering I could see that there wasn’t a soul about, in spite of my calling out, and so I sat on a bench and waited. After about ten minutes, I heard the sound of loud cheering and thumping and finally a door at the end of the hall was flung open and a crowd of young men emerged, all shouting gaily at the tops of their voices. One of the men approached me and exclaimed: “England won the rugby!” I made some gesture of acknowledgment, and he said: “C’mon, I’ll show you the chapel.”

As we entered the church, the first thing I noticed were two electric guitars which had been left on the back pew in perpetual adoration. Underneath the altar, really a table, was a mysterious gold box. I was told that it was time for “holy hour” and I was shown to my place where I sat down. I was wearing a dark suit but, as they wandered in, I noticed that most of the other young men seemed to be wearing shirtsleeves and jeans. There were about twenty young men, which was very few indeed, I thought. There were a few older men who were wearing clerical garb, but I saw no one in a cassock. I assumed that these men were the college professors. At supper later that evening, I noticed that there were about twelve round tables, nine of which were empty and lacked coverings, and I guessed that the number of students was relatively small. The holy hour consisted of some readings, a meditation and, finally, a student crooning at a microphone whilst strumming a guitar.

In spite of the small numbers of residents rattling around in a huge building designed to accommodate at least a hundred, I found the noise levels generally intolerable as pop music, which I loathe, echoed around the place and people seemed to talk in loud voices. At 10pm we were told not to make a noise, but the authorities seemed to have no problem with the students listening to their music on headphones. It was a very noisy place and the opportunity for quiet prayer and recollection was almost nonexistent and, if anything, discouraged. My parish priest, Father Ignatius, was here in the 1960s and he had described to me the seminary life in his day, suggesting that nothing had changed since then. The priest had warned me about “custody of the eyes,” which meant that one normally went about one’s business in a state of recollection and avoided looking other people in the eye. That custom was now nowhere to be seen. In actual fact the whole institution must have undergone such huge changes since his day that I was often left wondering whether it was really a seminary at all. The reason I say that is because great emphasis was laid on psychology, hours and hours of it, and often these sessions were supervised by a silvery-haired lady in a cardigan, who we were encouraged to address as “sister.”

As the weeks went by, I befriended a seminarian who, like me, appeared to be disenchanted with the priestly training and our friendship started when he caught my eye during Mass, for as the guitar group had struck up with “Lord of the Dance,” I definitely saw him rolling his eyes and smirking furtively. His name was Anselm and after holy hour one evening, Anselm invited me to his room for what he termed “a quick snifter.” I was assured by him that it was perfectly okay for students to visit each other in their rooms and have a drink together. I wasn’t so sure about this but didn’t dare ask anyone about it.

“Have you ever attended a Tridentine Mass?” He asked lightheartedly, as we sipped our glasses of Limoncello in his bedroom. I said that I certainly had not, and he admitted that he, and a few others, occasionally sneaked off for a Friday evening Mass at Via Urbana, about half an hour’s walk away. “You’re welcome to come with us, but for God’s sake, don’t tell anyone!”

I shuddered at this idea as I wouldn’t dream of being disobedient. But I was curious. Why was that the first thing Father Terry had been obsessed with during my interview? Surely it cannot be that bad. “Think about it anyway,” Anselm said. “I’m sorry to say this, but the truth is that a few of us can’t stand the goings-on at the English College. So, rather than complain and get chucked out, we prefer to keep our heads down and hope to get ordained. Once that happens then they’ll all be in for a huge shock! We are a growing number now, but we have to keep everything deadly secret. Almost like the life of a recusant priest in England during the sixteenth century.”

“What else do you get up to, then?” I enquired.

“Usually, we meet up most evenings and pray the rosary or the breviary together.”

“Breviary?” I asked. “What’s that?”

“It’s regarded as the heart and soul of priestly life. Before it was modernised and now fallen into disuse, every priest was obliged to say his breviary every day on pain of mortal sin.”

“Mortal sin?” I exclaimed. “Never heard of it.”

“Ho-ho!” exclaimed Anselm. “You’ve got a long way to go, haven’t you? Have you never read a catechism?”

“You mean the Catechism of the Catholic Church?”

“No, I do not! That book is a watered-down sales manual for Vatican II. I’ll lend you my Catechism of the Council of Trent if you like.”

I hesitated at this, my friend adding: “Oh . . . never mind!”

I said: “My director of vocations in my diocese told me that the life of a priest is ten percent spirituality and ninety percent people.”

“He said that, did he? The truth is that it’s the other way round.”

“How does that work?”

“Well, the purpose of seminary training is to fortify and prepare yourself spiritually for your priestly life through the grace of God. You do believe in God, I suppose?” he chuckled.

“Of course I do!” I exclaimed, reacting badly to his attempt at sarcasm.

“But do you love God?”

“Well . . . love is too strong a word . . . ” I allowed my built-in English reserve to kick in; we are far too sophisticated to use such language.

“To be a priest you must not only love God, but you must also be in love with Him.”

“How can I do that?”

“If you follow our routine of prayer, meditation, daily rosary, and the breviary, God will grant you the gift of love. But you must ask for it.”

“How will I know when I’m in love with God, as you put it?”

“That’s difficult,” he replied. “I can assure you of one thing though. If you really love God, you will develop a horror of sin and . . . also . . . you’ll hate the Novus Ordo Mass! There! I’ve said it!”

I was anxious. “I’m not sure I signed up for all that. I thought a priest was meant to make the world a better place by helping people.”

“You sound like an ordination candidate in the Anglican Church. Perhaps you don’t really have a vocation then.” He replied gloomily. “Anyway, we’ll see.”

I had never met a “traditionalist” (as my father called them dismissively) until now and I can see why Father Terry was so cautious. Was my friend right, though? If so, then what am I doing here? I went to bed that night in an anxious state and, just before closing my eyes, there was a soft knock at the door. In walked Anselm, who chucked something onto my bed.

“This is a rosary plus a leaflet which will tell you how to say it. Goodnight!” And he was gone.

I was in a such a state of turmoil and indecision that I blurted it all out to the spiritual director who had been allocated to me. I was careful not to mention what my friend had labelled “hot topics.” He was an elderly priest with a kindly twinkle in his eye, and he had no hesitation in his advice:

“Look here, Jack. You’ve not been here for five minutes and you’re beginning to have doubts. That’s all very normal and even healthy. We shouldn’t take anything for granted. Just join in the life of the seminary with more commitment. Offer to do the readings at Mass, for example.”

I left the spiritual director’s room with a heavy heart. The “seminary life” to which he referred was becoming repellent as students vied with each other to be more and more progressive. Anyone showing reserve risked being labelled a “traditionalist” and could eventually be ejected. I assume this is why a number of the secret trads started to develop beards, grow their hair, and dress more shabbily, so as to establish their progressive credentials.

That night, and for no particular reason, I knelt down by my bed and, with the help of the leaflet, recited five decades of the rosary. As I did so, I meditated on the scenes of Our Lord’s passion, as instructed by the paper in front of me. I slept well, having been overcome by an inner peace which I had never experienced before. The following morning, when I awoke, my mind was settled, and I knew what I had to do. After breakfast I sought out my friend Anselm and told him that I wished to attend their prayer meetings in his room. I also stated my intention to accompany his group to the Tridentine Mass on the following Friday evening. I could see that Anselm was elated, although he quickly adopted a serious expression.

“In God’s name, not a word to anyone about this. If we’re discovered, that will be the end of us,” he whispered as he cast his eyes around, checking for eavesdroppers. From then on, I wholeheartedly participated in daily seminary life, being as helpful as possible. I even allowed a growth of stubble on my face so as to avoid suspicion. The craziest thing of all was that the more rebellious I became, in terms of objecting to any conservatism or promoting radicalistic ideas, the more the authorities approved of me and smiled on my deceptions. One of the hairier of my fellow students agreed to teach me how to play the guitar, and this met with universal approval on the part of the professors.

I can only imagine how an American citizen must have felt to enter a “speakeasy” for the first time during prohibition in the 1930s— that feeling of dread mixed with thrilling excitement as he took the plunge and broke the law for the first time. I had identical sentiments as I entered the Society of St Pius X chapel in Via Urbana that Friday evening. There were four in our little group, and we sat at the back. There were a few old ladies in front of us, who were praying the rosary out loud before Mass, and a mother struggled with two noisy toddlers. As I took my place on the wooden bench and looked up at the altar, I experienced a surge of happiness and relief. I had “come home,” and yet, I had no idea until then where or what “home” was. All the nonsense, contradictions, worries, and doubts which had accumulated in my head over the years seemed to simply evaporate. I knelt down, or rather I collapsed down on my knees, a bell tinkled and in walked the priest with a young man wearing a black cassock and a cotta. No “good evening!” He started Mass facing the altar and was answered in whispers by the server. I was utterly overcome by the reverence and simplicity of the rite and when I rose to receive communion, I felt a touch on my elbow. I glanced at Anselm, who was next to me, and he said: “Not this time, I’ll explain later.” Not going to communion— why not? I was mystified because I was always told that not going to communion was a bit like being invited to a meal and refusing to eat anything.

As we emerged from the chapel into the street and made for a nearby bar, I noticed a man astride a stationary bicycle, who was watching us closely from inside the porch of a building nearby. He was bearded and I recognised him as one of our fellow students at college. I said nothing about this to my companions but had the certain feeling that the game was up for all of us.

You can guess the rest! We were summarily dismissed from the English College without even receiving the courtesy of an interview with the rector, which was a relief. We found on our return a note for each of us requesting that we vacate the building first thing the next day and, in the meantime, we were “excused” all activities.

The one thing I had learned from my short stay at the seminary was that I did not have a vocation to the priesthood. To be more specific, I knew that I was not called by God to the “sacrificing priesthood,” which would make huge demands upon me, but rather my short life at the English College was preparing me for something completely different. The whole seminary system was designed to produce a generation of “ecclesiastical salesmen,” like the Anglican ministry, and as I sat in the plane as it lifted off the runway at Rome airport, I knew that the whole idea of becoming a priest in the Novus Ordo Church had sunk with all hands. The effect of my first visit to the Tridentine Mass, though, was to clear my mind and banish all my lingering doubts, and for that I am eternally grateful to my confreres.

When I left seminary, I decided to qualify as a Chartered Accountant and went to live in London. I established contact with the Fathers of the London Oratory, who were most welcoming, and, finally, ended up going to Mass regularly with the Society of St Pius X.

(The end of Jack’s account.)

The foregoing was taken from this book:

On 19^th March, 2016, Pope Francis signed an Apostolic Exhortation called Amoris laetitia (often translated as “The Joy of Love”). The document was published on 8^th April of the same year. In its English translation, it runs to two hundred and fifty-four pages.

This ‘Exhortation’ caused an immediate furore. It is well-known that four cardinals submitted dubia to Rome asking the pope whether he wished to overturn the teaching of the Church about universal moral truths, intrinsic evils, and the impossibility of receiving Holy Communion if one is living in an adulterous relationship. It is also well-known that these questions were left unanswered. Some people may also remember a theological critique signed by around 45 pastors and scholars and sent privately to the college of cardinals and the Eastern Catholic patriarchs, which proposed varying theological censures of no less than nineteen propositions drawn from the ‘Exhortation’.1

There is, however, a paragraph in this ‘Exhortation’ which has not been much discussed, even though it was touched on in the study just mentioned. This is paragraph 159. Here, Pope Francis raised the question of the relative merits of marriage and virginity.

Now, the Church has a teaching on this subject which has been dogmatically defined. The Council of Trent, faced with Protestant denials, was obliged to reaffirm the Church’s faith on this point. It did so on 11th November 1563, in its twenty-fourth session. Even though the bishops in this session were concerned mainly to uphold the holiness and sacramental nature of Christian marriage against the Reformers, they wished also to guard against an exaggeration of their teaching which would favour attacks made by these same Reformers upon religious vows and the religious life.

Accordingly, the council Fathers made the following definition: “If any one says, that the marriage state is to be placed above the state of virginity, or of celibacy, and that it is not better and more blessed (melius ac beatius) to remain in virginity, or in celibacy, than to be united in matrimony; let him be anathema.” That is the 10^th of Trent’s 12 canons on matrimony.

The bishops here were of course not inventing a new doctrine. One hundred years earlier, the Council of Florence had said much the same in its Decree for the Jacobites. Trent, in fact, was declaring by solemn judgment that which had been held and taught by the Church from the beginning in a more diffuse way. In the 4^th century, for example, St Jerome, St Ambrose and St Augustine had been eloquent in praising Christian virginity against innovators such as Jovinian and Vigilantius. St Augustine, in particular, had warned of the need to avoid two opposed errors: either condemning marriage as bad or else equating it with virginity consecrated to Christ, “as though either the good of Susanna be the lowering of Mary: or the greater good of Mary ought to be the condemnation of Susanna” (On Holy Virginity, 19). Underlying the statements of the Fathers, of course, was the teaching of St Paul to the Corinthians: he who marries does well, and he who refrains from marriage does better (1 Cor. 7:38).

As with all the definitions of Trent or of any other ecumenical council, this one remains binding on the Christian conscience for all time. Pope Pius XII noted in his encyclical Sacra virginitas that the Tridentine definition sets forth “a dogma of the faith” (SV 32). Hence, anyone who obstinately doubts or denies that it is better and more blessed to remain in virginity, evidently for the sake of the Kingdom of God, than to be united in matrimony loses the faith, falls under anathema and is separated from the Church. Accordingly, the 2^nd Vatican Council, in its Decree on Priestly Formation, required that clerical students be taught not only “the duties and dignity of Christian matrimony”, but also “the surpassing excellence (praecellentiam) of virginity consecrated to Christ” (Optatam totius, 10).

With all this in mind, we can look at paragraph 159 of Amoris laetitia, where Pope Francis asks about the relative value of marriage and virginity.

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(Part 1 here)

In the true philosophic spirit, our primary focus should not be historical, biographical, or cultural issues, but the rei veritas, the truth of the matter. As St. Thomas put it, “Who said something is of less importance than what he said, and its truth or falsehood.” The soul, as form of the body, is incidentally subject to time and place, but in itself, as an intellectual substance, the soul transcends time and place. The mind is no prisoner of age or race or sex or state. The thoughts of Plato, of Bonaventure, of Pascal, of Newman, are as contemporary to us as our own thoughts, and what they say to us stands or falls according to how well it mirrors reality, not how it flatters our taste or follows fashion.

All this being so, it is also important and valuable to know something about the context within which a philosopher has worked, the kind of world he was born into, the setting of his activity, the influences that surrounded him and impinged upon him. It’s difficult to get a clear picture of all this, for the realm of particular details is boundless and bottomless. Massive histories of the Middle Ages have been written and will continue to be written, for it is an age of extraordinary richness. My intention here is simply to provide a bird’s eye view of medieval philosophy—the rough “periods” into which it can be divided, and its main sources or inspirations.

It is notoriously difficult to divide history into periods—so difficult that you routinely find historians saying “all divisions are arbitrary,” which is going a bit too far. The truth of the matter is, divisions are useful fictions that can have more or less basis in known facts. I call them “fictions” because nobody ever wakes up and says: “Today (or this year or this decade), I know that a new period is starting in history.” There are always gradual transitions combined with sudden shifts or eruptions, with the result that change in history is more like a subtle gray scale with occasional blotches, or the change in light from dawn to dusk with the occasional shooting star, than a series of neat compartments. History is more like a lava flow with layer on top of layer, or (to shift metaphors) a huge quilt made up of thousands of little pieces. The closer you look, the more you see your convenient generalizations evaporate.

Still, when all is said and done, there are large discernible periods that can be defined in terms of shattering events, powerful personalities, the demise of old patterns of thought or behavior and the emergence of new ones. As much as I would like to take into account the political, economic, and military history of Europe, I will focus on intellectual developments, but you should bear in mind that these never take place in a vacuum.

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It cannot have escaped the attention of anyone who is even moderately aware of ecclesiastical affairs that the single most orthodox, articulate, dynamic, courageous, involved, precise, and profound Catholic bishop in the world at this time is Athanasius Schneider, who, as an auxiliary bishop from Kazakhstan, stands like a veritable shepherd boy like David facing the global Goliath of apostasy, corruption, indifference, and heresy. And what better day to honor him than on this feast of St. Athanasius of Alexandria, who almost singlehandedly battled against a worldwide episcopacy that had drifted into heresy or had fallen into a mute cowardice?

Over the years it has been my privilege to meet and speak with His Excellency on a number of occasions, to exchange letters, to work on projects together, to sing in the choir at his high Masses, to serve his low Mass, and, most memorably of all, to join my prayers to his at the altar as he celebrated a solemn pontifical Mass for the wedding of my son and daughter-in-law. But even if I did not know him personally, I feel I would still love and venerate him simply on the basis of reading his wonderful words, which pour forth with anointed profusion in the form of articles, statements, podcasts, and books, all of them widely disseminated and, I believe, decisively shaping the future of orthodox Catholicism.

Because the time we have for reading is limited and there’s always fierce competition for it, I’ve decided to publish today some of the finest passages from a few books of his that readers may not be familiar with: The Catholic Mass; A Shepherd Solicitous for the Whole Church; and The Springtime that Never Came (which happens to be on sale at Sophia at the moment). In this way, you can acquire at least some of the wisdom on offer in them, and perhaps be moved to acquire the books for future spiritual reading.

The Catholic Mass: Steps to Restore the Centrality of God in the Liturgy

The Novus Ordo Missae weakens the essential, sacrificial aspect of the Mass. This is most clearly seen in the new Offertory Prayers, which are essentially prayers for the blessing of a meal, emptied of their properly sacrificial meaning. This is dangerous because in the tradition of the Church the Offertory was always considered a small canon. All of the Eastern liturgies have prayers and gestures that are expressly sacrificial in the preparation of the gifts. The Holy Mass respects the way of salvation history, which anticipates in symbol a reality that is to come. The Old Testament anticipates the New but the New was hidden in the Old: “God, the inspirer and author of both Testaments, wisely arranged that the New Testament be hidden in the Old and the Old be made manifest in the New.”

The Sacrament of the Eucharist is a threefold sign, commemorative, signifying, and prognostic — that is, it commemorates the saving event of the past, signifies its sacramental presence in the present, and opens our vision to the definitive reality of eternal life in the New Jerusalem. This perspective of salvation history must be respected in the liturgy. The traditional Offertory Prayers date back to the ninth century, or even earlier. The Offertory is meant to point to the Cross, so the Church expresses in a solemn and somewhat drawn-out manner the intentio, i.e., what she intends to do, which is not to carry out a simple meal, but the greatest action, which is the sacrifice of Christ. That is why the Offertory must necessarily express the sacrifice that is to be offered. In the Offertory Prayers of the Novus Ordo Missae, on the other hand, the intentio expresses the aspect of a meal, or banquet. That is why the new Offertory Prayers are dogmatically, doctrinally, and spiritually defective and should be replaced by the ancient prayers, which correspond to the spirit of the universal Church of all times, and in particular to the spirit of the liturgy of all the Eastern Churches. (88-89)

In fact, the essence of the Mass and its final cause consist in its sacrificial character. In the Novus Ordo, on the other hand, the Offertory prayers express as the intention of the offering and preparation of the gifts, the reception of the Body of Christ and Blood of Christ, i.e., the aspect of the banquet. By expressing such a limited intention, these prayers are theologically ambiguous, and fail to recall the warning expressed by the Council of Trent: “If anyone says that in the Mass a true and real sacrifice is not offered to God; or that to be offered is nothing else than that Christ is given to us to eat, let him be anathema.” (90)

There is a great pedagogical wisdom in the ancient rite of the Mass. The blessing comes after the Ite missa est as if to tell the faithful: “do not leave immediately, stay longer to receive the blessing.” Even the priest does not depart the sanctuary immediately after giving the blessing but goes to the side of the altar to read the Prologue of St. John. And so the faithful are invited to remain in church and not to leave in haste. In these moments, Jesus is still in the body of the priest and in the bodies of those who have received Him sacramentally. Both priest and faithful, while listening to that beautiful text from the Prologue of St. John’s Gospel, especially its central words Et verbum caro factum est, ought to consider that the mystery of God’s Incarnation has been fulfilled in them, too, in an individual and personal way, through sacramental Communion. The Church knows that there can be superficiality, especially in the celebrating priest. And so she constrains him to remain at the altar and to pray the Prologue of St. John, responding with the last words, Deo gratias. (157-58)

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