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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A person I was corresponding with once wrote that he was “wrestling within himself about what is the right attitude to take toward tradition.”

I replied: “Perhaps you were speaking rhetorically; for surely it is obvious that tradition is to be preserved unless there is a demonstrable corruption in it? And by that, I mean something like a typographer’s error in a printed missal (as happened commonly enough in the Renaissance period), or a legitimate custom distorted past recognition due to the superstition of a group of enthusiasts somewhere.”

The fact that in this post-Vatican-II period we tend to view tradition as problematic, as something to be “wrestled with” until we figure out what to do with it, is not a sign of our sophistication but a sign of our decadence.

Of course, tradition presents us with many challenges, and to that extent it should prompt us to wrestle with our own interpretation of events, symbols, and ideas. But tradition as such is something we should humbly stand before and learn from. We let it challenge us; we do not decide whether it should do so.

Piety and meekness

Fr. Matthew McCarthy, FSSP, once preached:

If we extend Augustine’s notion of piety to include not only [accepting] the Scriptures but [accepting] the whole Catholic tradition, the pious do not condemn what they do not yet understand and thus render themselves unteachable, but rather offer no resistance—are meek—and thus can be formed by that tradition. And note the order: it is not on account of understanding that one embraces the tradition: rather, the meek and pious must first be formed by the tradition to come to an understanding of it: understanding and wisdom are the highest and last of the gifts, preceded by piety….

Then, speaking of those who lack this piety, who set themselves up as judges over tradition, Father said, again citing Augustine:

They are not without influence in the highest levels of the Church. They are “rendered unteachable” and thus “venture to condemn that which seems absurd to the unlearned.” Masters of sophistry, dishonouring millennia of tradition, they set aside [in the new lectionary] not only the words of St Paul, but even of Our Lord Himself. As one commentator asked: “Do these men not fear God?”

We must combine piety toward our forefathers with meekness toward our inheritance, which excludes any revolutionary overthrow:

Meekness and piety are two facets of stability. On account of piety, the tradition directs successive generations to that perpetual and stable inheritance: and meekness, stability of desire, prevents being diverted from that end.

Choosing the island over the mainland

In his treatise Against the Donatists, St. Optatus of Milevis writes:

The Church is rightly called Paradise, but it belongs to the wide world. Nor do I pass over the fact that you have said openly that the Church is (as we believe) a Paradise—a thing which without doubt is true—a garden in which God sets His little trees. And yet you have denied to God His rich possessions by compressing His garden into a narrow corner, claiming without reason everything for yourselves alone. Surely the plantations of God, through different precepts, have different seeds. The just, the continent, the merciful, the virgins are spiritual seeds. Of these seeds God raises little plants in His Paradise. Grant to God that His garden be spread far and wide. Why do you deny to Him the Christian peoples of East and North, also those of all the provinces of the West and of innumerable islands—with whom you share no fellowship of communion—against whom you—few in number and rebels—are ranged, in isolation?

The attitude of the modern liturgist, who cuts off the witness and practice of Christian peoples of many centuries and provinces, choosing only his isolated narrow corner of modernity and claiming superior judgment over them, is in this respect identical to the Donatist’s attitude criticized by Optatus. Both the ancient Donatist and the modern liturgist are ecclesiological separatists, confiners, compressors, deniers.

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I once taught a course on medieval philosophy that began with St. Augustine and ended with John Duns Scotus. Ambitious, to be sure, but no more so than what many university “survey courses” stipulate; indeed, some of them are so foolish as to try to cover the period from Boethius to Descartes, and some, even more foolish, skip from Aristotle to Descartes.

I decided to focus on five figures whose greatness and influence no one could possibly dispute:

• St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), the Doctor of Grace

• St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), the Father of Scholasticism

• St. Bonaventure (1221–1274), the Seraphic Doctor

• St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the Angelic Doctor or Common Doctor

• Bd. John Duns Scotus (1265–1308), the Subtle Doctor or Marian Doctor

It is my plan, here at Tradition & Sanity, to share with you a miniature version of this course, in which we will get to know these figures and their important contributions better. I shall do so in six relatively short parts.

Medieval philosophy was amazingly diverse and colorful. You find, of course, much attention paid to metaphysics, to abstruse questions of being and essence, substance and accident, the transcendental attributes of being, and so on. You also find sharp, detailed analysis of ethics, including tough cases in medicine, law, and economics. You have thorough systems of logic which vie with, and in many cases surpass, the symbolic logic developed in the twentieth century. A discipline called speculative grammar raised searching questions about language and linguistics.

More surprisingly, at least to modern people who have not been trained in medieval history, we find throughout the Middle Ages a fascination with nature, the natural sciences, and empirical data, and in the later period a flourishing of experimentation in physics, chemistry, biology, and their subdisciplines.

For example, Robert Grosseteste, a great bishop in England, was not only a superb linguist in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but also a renowned scientist with discoveries in optics to his credit, and a penchant for mathematical theorems. Roger Bacon (ca. 1214–ca. 1292), a cranky Franciscan usually in trouble with the authorities, undertook a massive project of organizing natural-empirical knowledge, predating by centuries the more famous Bacon of England, Sir Francis Bacon. John Buridan of Paris was investigating projectile motion well before Galileo Galilei was dropping lead balls from the Tower of Pisa. In fact, most of the theories that modern figures like Leibniz and Newton get credit for were already being discussed in rudimentary form in the late scholastic period, which gave birth to what is usually called “early modern philosophy.”

The eminent historian Etienne Gilson caused a major stir in academic circles of the early twentieth century when he published his first great monograph, a book on Descartes, in which he showed that nearly every idea that people considered original in Descartes had been stolen, sometimes verbatim, from the late scholastics whom Descartes studied either with the Jesuits at La Flêche or on his own.

There was more, too, going on in the Middle Ages: philosophy of history, philosophy of poetics and of the beautiful, music theory, grand symbolic liturgical dramas in which ethics, theology, romance, and music combined forces. There was legal theory and the formulation of international law; development of medicine, medical ethics, anatomy, zoology, botany. The first stirrings of modern economics date from the thirteenth century. And all this was going on not only among the Christians but, to varying degrees, among the Jews and the Muslims, too, who made their own contributions. As far as the arts and sciences are concerned, the Middle Ages were a period of incredible fertility of thought and culture, breathtaking diversity of interest, and an unparalleled depth of analysis and synthesis.

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Last week, I read my favorite passages from the first seven-eighths of Fr. Gerard Steckler’s book The Triumph of Romanticism. But there’s a lot of wonderful content in the final eighth of the book, rather like a fireworks show in which the finale packs the grandest punch. While I would encourage you to read or listen to last week’s installment, and, of course, to read the entire book (the whole thing’s entertaining and enlightening), you can also simply start with this post, as it stands by itself. As before, I will read the passages, and mention at the end of each one the page number or range, in case you’d like to look it up in a copy of the book.

On Tillich and modern Protestant thought

[Paul] Tillich influenced the course of modern theology in many ways. Since his writings, Christianity has engaged in dialogue with the cultural situation of the day. Christianity now criticizes its own historical embodiment as a particular religion in an effort to seek the ultimate in ultimate concern. He calls religion the “depth of culture,” failing to see the essential distinction between the two because of his refusal to accord a revelational dimension to religion. His views on secularism and “religious socialism” were intended to meet the original Marxist criticism of the bourgeois capitalist society as producing estrangement. Through grace, he believed, men are united to the divine and to one another in a free association called religious socialism (thus agreeing with the religious nature of socialism as proposed by our anonymous Soviet dissident). Hereby he evidenced a remnant of the traditional doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, a fraternity of Christians made intelligent and holy by Christ their Head. In typical Protestant fashion, he argued that since the Church was in no way closer to than further removed from the sacred, neither was the world of the secular. Tillich managed to think that, with such a claim, he had successfully sacralized the secular. In reality, Luther’s principle that one should work out one’s salvation “in the world” ended in the total secularization of the secular, not its sacramental elevation. [247]

[Quoting Tillich directly:]

“Religion cannot come to an end, and a particular religion will be lasting to the degree in which it negates itself as a religion. Thus Christianity will be bearer of the religious answer so long as it breaks through its own particularity. The way to achieve this is not to relinquish one’s own religious tradition for the sake of a universal concept which would be nothing but a concept. The way is to penetrate into the depth of one’s own religion, in devotion, thought and actions. In the depth of every living religion there is a point at which religion loses its importance, and that to which it points breaks through its particularity, elevating it to spiritual freedom, and with it to a vision of the spiritual presence in other expressions of the ultimate meaning of man’s existence.” [247-48]

If Tillich believed all the nonsense he proposed, there is no evidence for it. He consoled himself in homosexual activity. [248]

Why self-knowledge is impossible apart from living in God

Atheistic existentialism has a faulty notion of the subject or existent; it initially errs in making the individual subject play the central role in its reflection. But man can know subjects only by making them objects. One cannot know himself as a subject by reflecting on himself. (Such was Descartes’s mistake.) Subjectivity is intuited, felt, and therefore is not a form of philosophic knowledge. A subject is ineffable and unknowable. One does not know oneself by reflecting on oneself. Only one can really know the self as subject: God, whose essence is to exist, and who is therefore perfect. “God’s being includes in itself life and wisdom, because nothing of the perfection of being can be wanting to Him who is subsisting being itself.”

God is the transcendent subjectivity to which all subjectivities are referred. To be known by anyone other than God is to be known imperfectly. To be known by God is to be known as subject. God has no need to objectify the individual human person. The hidden recesses of one’s subjectivity are obscure to one’s self. To God alone is the self uncovered: “If I were not known to God, no one would know me. No one would know me in my truth, in my own existence. No one would know me—me—as subject.” Scripture confirms: “Your Father who sees what no man sees will repay you . . . your Father who sees what is hidden will repay you” (Mt 6:4–18).

Without God no one would give me justice. To be known by God is to be understood, for God alone knows all the travail and the wounds and the unrequited love and impulses of good will that mark each individual’s earthly odyssey and trial. The deep knowledge possessed by God is therefore a loving knowledge: “To know that we are known to God is not merely to experience justice, it is also to experience mercy.” No matter, consequently, what people are, single men and women in the world, married, celibate in religious life or clerical life or in secular institutes, they must first cultivate their garden (as distinct from the gardens proposed by Voltaire and implied by Rousseau) so that they can have a basically right attitude toward those entrusted to their care. They will never know their husbands or their wives or their children or their friends or their counselees or their parishioners until they know God who is their self, their transcendent subjectivity, Him in whom Christians “live and breathe and have their very being” through Jesus Christ the incarnate Word. All men must deepen their interior lives sufficiently in order to realize their humanity.

The New Testament has confirmed this: “I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me.” “For me to die is gain, to live is Christ.” “Live in my love as I live in my Father’s love.” “I am the Vine; you are the branches.” “What you hear whispered in secret, shout it from the housetops.” “If anyone love me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make our home with him.” “The Spirit of Truth . . . is with you, he is in you.” God is the higher subjectivity of the subjective person, he is the personal basis of the personal subject, he is the trigger for the personality of the individual. God is the self of the self (one’s real self) that allows one to really become the self. Far from any pantheism in this, each human is created being, participative being, totally contingent. Only the saints have real personalities, and even theirs are at best constantly improving.

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I have been quiet about the Society of St. Pius X for some time because, on a practical level, during Lent I went off of social media where the discussion has been energetically pursued, but, more importantly, on a theoretical level, because I wanted to watch, read, ponder, and arrive at clearer ideas without rushing into immediate reactions to this or that perspective.

Yves Chiron, in his magisterial work Between Rome and Rebellion: A History of Catholic Traditionalism with Special Attention to France (Angelico, 2024), tells us about the reaction of a key lay writer in France in 1988:

Jean Madiran, one of the most trusted voices in traditionalism at the time, was unwilling to take a public stand for or against the consecrations before the event. In the newspaper Présent, he published press releases and statements both from those in favor of the consecrations and from those opposed. This was not a refusal to choose, but a more general view of the situation. He did not want “the whole religious problem to be reduced to [this] single question. . . . The decisive question remains that of the Mass, the catechism, the traditional version and interpretation of Scripture.” (324)

Jean Madiran deliberately refrained from giving his own view because he believed it was more important for him to continue to be a simple apologist for Catholic tradition and the traditional Latin Mass wherever and whenever they existed. In other words, he wished to avoid being pegged as “exclusively” a supporter of this or that group within the broad traditionalist movement.

For the same reason, I, too, have no intention of coming down publicly for or against the SSPX consecrations in July.

That is not because I do not think the matter is of grave importance. On the contrary, I take this approach because I perceive the enormous complexity of the situation as seen from various angles, and because I have great respect and love for people on both sides of the divide. Indeed, I have good friends within the Society as well as good friends who are utterly anti-Society, and I am genuinely sympathetic to them all, for I see the valid points each one raises, the compelling arguments they offer, the contrary conclusions they reach, with evident good will and love for the Faith.

The only people for whom I have little patience are those who think it’s an obvious and tidy business one way or the other—who do not have even the slightest sense of anguish or doubt or dismay; those who, with authoritarian rigorism, simply want the Holy See to crush the Society with thunderous anathemas and banish them to the outer darkness, or, on the contrary, those who have already written off Leo XIV and the entirety of the Vatican as unregenerate Modernists, blasphemous idolaters, homosexual mafiosi, or what have you.

No, reality doesn’t fit into such cartoon boxes.

I have never made an attempt to hide my support of the Society chapels as a place of refuge for those who have no other Latin Mass option within reasonable driving distance. Thus, back in 2019, I published “Is It Ever Okay to Take Shelter in an SSPX Mass?” at OnePeterFive, an article that has been read tens of thousands of times. Another popular article of mine, at my Substack, is called “On the SSPX and the Situation of Catholics ‘in the Trenches,’” which was later developed into a chapter of my book Bound by Truth: Authority, Obedience, Tradition, and the Common Good (Angelico, 2023).

Yet neither have I made any attempt to disguise my clear preference for Ecclesia Dei institutes that work together with the diocesan structures—I have lived near and attended both ICKSP and FSSP parishes—and I reject the claim that these institutes have had to make fatal compromises in order to retain and transmit traditional liturgy, discipline, and doctrine.

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Britain’s current Labour Party government recently legislated to exclude the last hereditary peers from the House of Lords, where they have since time immemorial been voting on and amending legislation. Since the Blair government’s reform in 1998, the number of hereditary peers has been limited, and when one died another was elected, by the hereditary peers themselves, to replace him. Now that interim system has finally gone.

Like most democracies, Britain has two “chambers” of its legislative body. One is directly elected from one-member constituencies (that is, voters in a specified area elect a single Member of Parliament); the other is the House of Lords. For many centuries this was entirely made up “hereditary” peers, that is, peers whose title, and right to sit in the House of Lords, could be inherited by their descendants. New peers were created, and in recent centuries it was the government of the day who would ask the king or queen to “ennoble” people, who would join the House of Lords. From 1958 only “Life Peers”, whose descendants would not inherit, were created. Now the Life Peers are all we will have left: men and women nominated by a government, usually within the last 30 years at most, since people tend to be given peerages late in life.

It seems obvious that the system of having a body of people who simply inherited the right to vote in a legislature is anomalous: indeed, it will strike many people as quite mad. It has this in common, of course, with many features of the British constitution, and to an extent with many features of many constitutions. America’s Electoral College is not something anyone would think up if they were drawing up a constitution today, nor is the convoluted relationship between the French state and the Catholic Church, or indeed the borders of San Marino.

Indeed, the world is full of strange things, and among the strangest are the ways that second legislative chambers are distinguished from first ones. There would be no point electing them the same way as the first, but if they are elected in a different way they will not always have the same political complexion. This tends to lead to the deadlock between the two chambers which is such a familiar feature of the American system, and it is something constitutional experts try to think of ways to avoid.

It is for this reason that members of a second chamber can be, like Ireland’s second chamber, the Oireachtas, wholly or partly appointed. The historic British system worked as well as it did because the House of Lords had an attitude of deference towards the House of Commons, particularly on the budget and on “manifesto pledges” (anything that had formed a part of an election campaign). The weakness of the Lords’ “mandate” was not a problem, but something that enabled the system to function. Then again, the government of the day could add its own supporters to the Lords, to rebalance the membership.

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Fr. Gerard G. Steckler, S.J. (1925–2015) is a priest known to relatively few people. He was a beloved chaplain at Thomas Aquinas College in California from 1982 to 1993, where I got to know him well as my spiritual director between 1990 and 1993. During that period he gave me an unpublished manuscript he had written, bearing the title The Triumph of Romanticism.

Years later, in one of the countless letters we exchanged in a longlasting correspondence, he told me to edit the work for publication. It took me a long time to fulfill that request but finally, I published the book with Os Justi Press; I considered this action to be the joyful repayment of an old debt.

Today, in this first episode of the Professor’s Bookshelf, I will share some of my favorite passages from this eminently quotable book. We’ll start this week and finish up next week. As I read the words, I can hear them coming from Fr. Steckler himself—a tall, wiry man with a shock of white hair and a half-smile, half-scowl on his face, chomping on a cigar, and thinking ten steps ahead to his next wry remark. He had a dry wit and did not suffer fools lightly. His learned opinionatedness, combined with his unshakable fidelity to the Lord and to the Catholic Faith, made him an unforgettable specimen of the old-school Jesuit. It was a privilege to know him.

As I read the following, I’ll mention the page number at the end of each passage, then pause before reading the next.

Voltaire endowed his modern man with an ability to understand all that was understandable, but he was almost as pessimistic as Aristotle about producing intellectuals who could know as much as he did. [page 2]

The November Revolution in 1917 was the overwhelming event as Tsarist Russia became the communist U.S.S.R. Lenin was arguably the most significant political figure since Charlemagne. For all that, the Russians remained the same: manipulators of men, expansionists, Janus-faced, that is, too skeptical (the result of an exaggerated rationality) and too mystical (the fruit of an exaggerated revelation that they were divine). [9]

The ideologues of the age of realism were Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin, none of them as intelligent as Mill and therefore more influential for an uncritical age. [53]

Intellectuals later questioned the sweeping claims of progress built on science, but the common man never wavered in his belief that, all evidence to the contrary, materialist progress is as certain as evolution. [54]

The nineteenth century culminated in an optimism that was Comtean, Darwinian, Bergsonian—in a word, total. So Europe continued to ripen for the slaughter. [55]

Exemplifying his schema, he [Taine] pointed to the religious music of a Protestant church. Protestants liked “grave and monotonous melodies” as manifesting their idea of the sort of worship man must give to God, worship “which has modeled the architecture of the temple, thrown down the statues, removed the pictures, destroyed the ornaments, curtailed the ceremonies, shut up the worshipers in high pews which prevent them from seeing anything.” In turn, this kind of relationship between man and God stemmed from a more general cause, the emphasis on the personal approach each must take toward his God: “It is this which has enthroned doctrine and grace, lowered the clergy, transformed the sacraments, suppressed various practices, and changed religion from a discipline to a morality.” [60]

Whatever else Charles Darwin was, he was certainly, by his own admission, one who, not possessing the power of abstraction, could not use it. He was one of an increasing tribe who pontificated on realities beyond their mental actuality and therefore had no business speculating on the nature of natures or on divine beings…. Charles Darwin fathered the many whose expertise in the knowledge of facts about one subject merits them the sobriquet of “expert” and therefore encourages them to pronounce on anything about which they are questioned or about which they wish to speak. [69–70]

Natural selection from accidental variations which leads to new species was a pseudo-reasoning interpreted in turn by minds consonant with the age as “progress without purpose.” The optimism of the age fitted in well with such a meaning. Not much extrapolation was required to form an ideology called Darwinism, the belief that if no purpose and design reigned in the universe, neither were there any fixed moral values. All kinds of conveniences and terrors have flowed from this. The seventeenth-century scientific revolution may have dethroned man from the center of the universe, but at least—exulted Blaise Pascal—the thinking reed that was man had discovered that. Darwin metamorphosed man from a thinking reed to the unthinking product of random variations. Arthur de Gobineau had said, “Man may not have descended from the apes, but he is rapidly getting there.” [71]

Darwinism killed spiritual man made in the image of the divine Trinity. Darwinism decisioned God a generation before Nietzsche’s dramatic knockout. [73]

Doubtless, dialectical materialism was the unique “contribution” of Karl Marx to the potpourri of ideas he tried to plaster together. The physical was the metaphysical, and it was deterministic! “Why” it was deterministic he did not need to answer, for what he said had to be true! He attempted to reconcile positivistic determinism and the free activity of insightful men like himself by saying that the sharp-witted could know which way history was going, and indeed sometimes had to give it a helping hand. Here certainly was a clever combination of activism and determinism…. Christians did not know what God had in mind, but Marx knew what predetermined road matter was taking! [75]

If Christ had come to give men bread from heaven, Marx proffered them bread from the bakery. The wonderful always gives way to fantastic mental fornications when humans try to improve on the intelligible nature of reality. [76]

Lenin knew his master well enough to be selective about which of his statements were true! Hebraic and Christian in his ancestry, his attitude was triumphalist. In utilizing an inheritance from an ancient and supernaturalist past, he was the giant of the intellectual thieves of his time. [78]

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I’ve been surprised at the extent to which Catholics nowadays seem to be unfamiliar with the fact that all the business on synodality as promoted by and under Pope Francis is simply a warmed-over, church-wide application of a model that was already (disastrously) implemented in the Netherlands in the 1960s.

We learn about this in the fascinating study by Yves Chiron called Between Rome & Rebellion: A History of Catholic Traditionalism, with Special Attention to France. Let’s hear it from the author, one of the greatest living Catholic historians:

“The Dutch bishops accompanied it, and tried to limit its disastrous effects, but also, through some of their initiatives, encouraged it. A month before the end of the Second Vatican Council, they announced in Rome itself that a ‘provincial council’ would be organized in the Netherlands ‘to implement Vatican II.’ It was eventually called a ‘pastoral council.’ It was a broad consultation that was not limited to bishops and theologians and was not organized in any single place. It took place all over the country, beginning on November 27, 1966, and lasted several years. It was the work of some 12,000 work groups in which bishops, priests, religious, and laity were involved. During the meetings, which often took place in the presence of the press and under the watchful eye of the cameras, all subjects concerning the Church and the life of Christians were discussed: the expression of the faith, authority in the Church, the ministries, priestly celibacy, the reform of religious life, relations with non-Catholics, conjugal morality, etc.” (p. 154)

Sound familiar?

In his related book (also excellent!), Paul VI: The Divided Pope (pp. 258–59), Yves Chiron discusses other aspects of that event, contrasting the harsh treatment meted out to traditionalists with the mild and vacillating treatment given to the openly heretical Dutch:

“Father de Nantes, contesting the sentence, demanded that his writings be examined by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. They were; their author was summoned twice to Rome to be heard by the Congregation, which finally published in August 1969 a ‘notification’ which, curiously, did not condemn his theses but declared simply: ‘In rebelling in this way against the Catholic magisterium and the hierarchy, Fr de Nantes disqualifies the whole of his writings and activities.’ This ‘notification’ against a theologian was the first the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had made since the Council and the reform of the Holy Office. Other, generally progressive, theologians such as Hans Küng (whose works had already been examined by this date by the same Congregation) were never the object of any sanction during the pontificate of Paul VI. This resulted in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith being accused of partiality.

Continue reading, or listen, at Pelican+

N.B. Paying subscribers of this Substack will now have access to full articles right here. Pelican+ remains my main base (and I encourage you to try it out, as it offers many good things that have no parallels on Substack), but you now have two ways to obtain access to the thrice-weekly posts at Tradition & Sanity.

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There is a strange tendency nowadays to think that the external aspects of a thing matter very little, while the “inside” is all that counts. For example: as long as you’re “a good person on the inside,” it doesn’t matter what you look like, how you dress, how you speak, what music you listen to, or even (taken to an extreme) what religion you profess.

There is a grain of truth in this view: one’s height or build or skin color, for instance, are not moral qualities; sinners and saints come in all colors, shapes, and sizes. The problem is rather that we are too quick to forget how the outside wells up from within, how it often reveals to us just what is in the heart. A good person will dress modestly, speak respectfully, and listen to music that builds up a noble character instead of assaulting it—and all this, because of dispositions in the heart, invisible to men’s eyes but visible to God’s. The profession of a religion, while obviously done with external words and gestures, is rooted in the deep soil of the soul, and shows outwardly what a man’s most intimate worldview and priorities are.

The British philosopher Roger Scruton comments:

There is truth in Oscar Wilde’s quip, that it is only a shallow person who does not judge by appearances. For appearances are the bearers of meaning and the focus of our emotional concerns. When I am struck by a human face this experience is not a prelude to some anatomical study, nor does the beauty of what I see lead me to think of the sinews, nerves and bones which in some way explain it. On the contrary, to see “the skull beneath the skin” is to see [merely] the body and not the embodied person. Hence, it is to miss the beauty of the face.

With perfect consistency, therefore, our medieval forebears would never have agreed with the platitude “you can’t judge a book by its cover.” For they spent enormous sums of money on Evangelaries or Gospel books with heavy bindings of gold, silver, and jewels, so that it was perfectly obvious that this book held the very words of God Himself, and deserved our utmost veneration.

The sacred liturgy, too, holds the very words of God—indeed, astonishingly, the Mass holds God Himself, the Word made flesh. It is utterly inconsistent with its inner content that the outward form of it should be anything but glorious, majestic, beautiful, solemn, reverent. We should be able to judge this book by its resplendent cover, that is, the Mass by its appearances, musical, textual, ceremonial; we should be able to see the heart in the actions. We should not “miss the beauty of the face.”

Nowadays we hear a lot of emphasis on not paying too much attention to externals in the Mass but just remembering that “Jesus is present.” To lapse into a bit of slang: Sorry, this ain’t gonna cut it.

Continue reading, or listen, at Pelican+

N.B. Paying subscribers of this Substack will now have access to full articles right here. Pelican+ remains my main base (and I encourage you to try it out, as it offers many good things that have no equivalents at Substack), but you now have two ways to obtain access to the thrice-weekly posts at Tradition & Sanity.

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Anastasis

by Peter Kwasniewski

They tried to cast him down,
The demons and their prince,
From temple’s roof in town,
But Christ did not evince
A moment’s giving in;
In him there was no sin,
The devil could not win.

They tried to put him down,
The pharisees and scribes,
With disapproving frown
They launched at him their jibes.
But Christ refuted all;
His logic made them fall,
Which swelled their hateful gall.

They tried to beat him down
With stripes upon his back
And thorns to form his crown;
No muscle did they lack.
But Christ, although he fell,
Stood up each time as well,
To save our souls from hell.

They tried to keep him down,
Imprisoned in the cave;
The temple guard’s renown
Depended on this grave.
But Christ rose from the dead,
Dispensing quakes and dread,
Till enemies had fled.

Their trial was in vain,
In vain the doom they willed;
The Life could not be slain,
The Word could not be stilled.
On Easter morn, the Light,
Unconquered by the night,
Arose with blazing might.

A Prayer by St. Charles de Foucauld

No matter what happens to me in life, my God, thank You for everything, thank You for everything, thank You for everything! I am happy, my God, I am happy! I have received my share of happiness: You are risen. Alleluia! You are risen, You lack nothing, You are happy for eternity, I am happy! Alleluia.

And yet I still lack something: that is to obey You, to do Your will in everything, to do exactly what You want of me until my dying breath and at every moment… What You want of me is essentially and ultimately to love You and to make You loved with all my strength for the time that remains to me to pass on earth: this comprises everything, for everything is contained in love...

Continue reading, or listen, at Pelican+

N.B. Paying subscribers of this Substack will now have access to full articles right here. Pelican+ remains my main base (and I encourage you to try it out, as it offers many good things that have no equivalents at Substack), but you now have two ways to obtain access to the thrice-weekly posts at Tradition & Sanity.

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On social media some time ago, a priest posted the following tribute to the New Mass:

I love the new order of the Mass. It’s the Mass that has fed me my entire life. It’s the Mass I celebrate with joy as a priest. It’s the Mass that has brought grace for me and my people. It’s the Mass in which I have unfailingly found God. I love its rhythms. I love its simplicity. I love its focus. I love its sense of organic spirituality. I’ve found rest in it. The new order of the Mass is where I discerned my vocation. It’s where Jesus has met me on good days and bad, in sickness and in health, in my times of fidelity and infidelity.

I’ve attended the Byzantine Divine Liturgy. It was transcendent. I’ve attended the Traditional Latin Mass. It was solemn and elegant. I’ve both attended and concelebrated the Anglican Use. It was, to be as British as possible, brilliant. I loved them all. I’ve honored the men who celebrated them. I was moved by the congregations attending them. Nothing in my experience of them made me think for one instant that the ordinary form was defective. Nothing led, or could lead, me to believe that the Mass which holds the hearts of the vast majority of Catholics is in any way second-class.

I will never say a word against any legitimate form of the Eucharist. Why? Because it’s THE EUCHARIST. That’s first and foremost. But also because, as the Second Vatican Council reminds us, every legitimate rite is equal in dignity, and an expression of Tradition (SC 4).

But I think people forget that means the new rite of the Mass is ALSO equal in dignity to all the others, and a valid expression of Tradition. The Father does not give his children stones in place of bread. He would not—DID not—allow the Church to institute a second-class liturgy. I don’t know why so many people have so little trust in Providence as to be convinced He did.

There are abuses. But there have been liturgical abuses since the beginning of the Church. Liturgical abuses in the Traditional Latin Mass are why numerous popes and the Council Fathers started the liturgical renewal in the first place. Liturgical abuses are why Dom Prosper Gueranger did such heroic labors to purify the liturgy. No rite, at any point in history, has been invulnerable to abuse. No rite, at any point in history, became any less a valid rite just because sinners abused it.

Today, in all innocence, a gentleman my age told me that he’d been led to believe that when one developed spiritually, one would leave the new rite of the Mass for the older form. He was sad, because he didn’t want to go to the older form, but he’d been led to believe that’s what “spiritual” people did. I was horrified. Who had led him to doubt the Church so deeply?

But I also understood. There are soooooo many voices out there either attacking the Church’s ordinary rite or damning it with faint praise. I’ve seen absolutely no one credible coming to its passionate defense. Of course the gentleman got the impression that he had to abandon the Church’s official Mass. The only voices he ever heard said that’s what all “serious” Catholics do. I doubt he’s alone in that misapprehension.

I will never say a word against the Traditional Latin Mass, or any other legitimate rite. I wish others had the faith to also refrain from attacking the new form of the Mass. It’s approved. It’s a monument of Tradition. It’s the daily bread of countless believers. The new order of the Mass is beautiful. It makes mystics. It feeds saints. And I love it dearly.

I know I’ll be murdered in the comments for this post. So many people believe that the Church’s ordinary Mass is essentially defective. It’s like hearing nails on a chalkboard for some to hear the Novus Ordo praised. I’m not going to get into ugly fights with fellow believers. There’s no need. And I can’t let it shred my soul. I just wanted to express my appreciation for the Latin Church’s ordinary rite of the Mass.

It’s my home. It’s where I find God. It’s a liturgy approved by Him. And it need take second place to no other rite or form. Because the Church solemnly tells us that they’re all alike in dignity, and all an expression of Tradition. Don’t be afraid to love the Mass where you’ve met God your entire life. The Church loves it too. And so does God.

As soon as this gushing tribute was posted, it began accumulating comments of two sorts: the kind that patted the author on the back for a job well done, and the kind that pointed out how unsustainable his position is.

One friend of mine took him to task in comments as irrefutable as they are succinct:

A. “Nothing led, or could lead, me to believe that the Mass which holds the hearts of the vast majority of Catholics is in any way second-class.” Always the same hackneyed refusal to acknowledge the most basic fact about the post-Conciliar liturgical reform: since it was introduced, the vast majority of Catholics have stopped practicing the Faith altogether, and no form of the liturgy “holds their hearts.”

B. “The new order of the Mass is beautiful.” Well, no, it isn’t. It is usually very, very ugly, and very rarely, it is done with some sincere effort at beauty. But even at its most beautiful, it is still a gross impoverishment of the liturgy on every level. You know how we know? Because if it weren’t, the gentleman who occasioned this EXTREMELY convenient anecdote would have immediately understood what the problem was with the assertion made to him, and laughed it off. The fact that he didn’t says everything about the totality of failure of the post-Conciliar liturgy.

C. “Simplicity, focus, organic spirituality...” Even though it departs in every way from every known traditional liturgy in Christian history—except for those of the Protestant reformers?

D. “All [rites] are an expression of Tradition.” No, the Novus Ordo isn’t that, and it doesn’t take much to see that almost every supposedly “traditional source” for it was modified or corrupted.

E. “There are soooooo many voices out there either attacking the Church’s ordinary rite or damning it with faint praise. I’ve seen absolutely no one credible coming to its passionate defense.” This itself is to damn it with faint praise. If the NOM were so beautiful, traditional, nourishing, and mystic-making, surely there would be an abundant literature celebrating this in a plausible and attractive way. But there isn’t. And that’s because it can’t be done. And it can’t be done, because the thing itself is like a committee meeting one sits through.

F. “There have always been liturgical abuses.” Notice how he shifts the conversation to abuses. But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about RITES, the Roman one and the Paul VI-Bugnini one.

My own response was even shorter:

There is a lot of good will in this post, but also a lot of naivete. It’s much harder to praise the new rite once you see all that was hacked away in the 1960s from the Holy Mass as it developed over centuries—and the spurious or dubious reasons why this was done, together with the immense harm caused by this rupture and loss. One can only see the loss after being immersed for a while in the tradition, where it is like moving from cartoons to the Sistine Chapel. I’m not speaking about the Eucharist, but about everything else—the entire rite or ritual, its texts, its music, its rubrics.

Having received a ton of flak for those words, I made this rejoinder to my critics:

Continue reading, or listen, at Pelican+

N.B. As announced in a separate post today, paid subscribers of this Substack will now have access to full articles below the paywall. I still encourage you to try out Pelican+, but now there are TWO ways to obtain access to the thrice-weekly posts at Tradition & Sanity.

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Dear Readers of Tradition & Sanity,

I wish one and all a very blessed Easter!

Almost exactly 3 years ago—on April 13, 2023, to be precise—I started up this Substack with a post called “Why Here, and Why Now?” The enterprise grew slowly but surely until it reached its maximum readership this past fall, ranking in the top 25 in the Faith & Spirituality category of Substack.

When I joined Pelican+ as a co-founder and helped launch it in October 7, a good number of readers migrated over there with me, as I had invited them to do: it had become my new base of operations, and, as of December 1, my articles were appearing in full only there.

However, as time passed, it became clear that some Substack readers were not planning to come over to Pelican+, or perhaps had not yet found the right time or incentive to do so. On the other hand, some of our most supportive Pelican+ subscribers still wanted to be able to read certain things at Substack or to share them with other Substack readers — and they also asked us for a way to watch the Pelican+ exclusive podcasts on their TVs. (More on that in a minute.)

Big news

We have listened to these desiderata and have come up with a brilliant solution. Let me lead with the most important aspect for devoted readers of Tradition & Sanity:

Starting today, Thursday, April 9, all of my articles, in addition to being published over at Pelican+, will also be published HERE on Substack, in full, behind a paywall. So, as long as you have taken out a subscription at one or the other place, you can read them at either.

But that’s not all. This is just a slice of a larger multi-pronged initiative we have just launched, called Pelican Passport.

I’ll let my colleague Dan Sevigny explain it (copying from his post over here on Easter Monday):

Your Passport Is Stamped — And So Is the Mission

Today, Pious Pelican Media launches something that has never existed before in Catholic media — and you, our Pelican+ community, are hearing about it first.

This morning we are introducing the Pelican Passport: a unified cross-publication access system that connects five Catholic Substack publications under a single credential, powered by infrastructure our team built from the ground up. No one in Catholic media has done this. No one in Catholic media can do this — because no one else united together and built what we built.

And here is what matters most to you, right now: your Passport has already been issued. Every Pelican+ Premium Member and every Founders Club member receives the Pelican Passport automatically, as part of your membership — giving you another way to consume the content you love and another way to share it with the Catholics in your life.

What the Passport Does — And Why We Built It

The Pelican Passport is simple from the outside: subscribe to any one of five PPM-owned Substack publications, and your subscription automatically unlocks all five. One decision. Five publications. No separate logins, no duplicate payment, no manual setup. The infrastructure handles everything within 24 hours.

What makes this possible is anything but simple. Our development team built proprietary infrastructure specifically for this purpose — connecting five independently operating publications into a single unified network, with automated daily access management that keeps every subscriber current without any manual intervention. When a new publication joins the network, every existing Passport holder benefits automatically.

This is proprietary infrastructure. It does not exist anywhere else. No other Catholic media organization has built it. Pious Pelican Media has — and what launched today is the result.

Now — About That TV App

We have heard you. Loudly, and often. “Can I watch the shows on my television?” The answer is yes. And as of today, that answer extends to everyone in the Pelican ecosystem.

Through the native Substack TV App, every Pelican+ member and every Passport subscriber can now watch all 14+ weekly Pious Pelican shows directly on their home television. Not on a laptop propped up on the kitchen counter. Not on a phone. On the television — where you actually want to watch.

No additional setup. No extra cost. No new platform to manage. It is already built into the Substack ecosystem you are now part of. Open the app, find your shows, press play.

This is a significant moment. We evaluated building our own television delivery infrastructure — the cost was tremendous. The Substack TV App delivers the same result, and what we saved goes directly back into the content you love.

Your shows. Your television. Starting today. (Subscribers will need a smart TV or adapter — Fire Stick, etc. — to access the Substack TV app.)

A Word on Big Tech — And Why It Will Never Own Us

We are using the Substack ecosystem strategically, and we want to be transparent about what that means.

Big Tech platforms have demonstrated, repeatedly, that they are willing to restrict, suppress, and remove voices they disagree with. This is not a hypothetical risk for Catholic, traditional media. It is a documented reality. We know this. We have planned for it.

The Passport ecosystem lives inside Substack. That means we benefit from Substack’s reach, its recommendation engine, its built-in tools for discovery and conversion — and we are grateful for every one of those advantages in service of the mission. But our content, our subscriber relationships, and our library are not owned by Substack. They are not owned by any third-party platform.

Pelican+ is our own. It is a proprietary platform — built, owned, and operated by Pious Pelican Media. Our full content library lives there. If anything changes on Substack, our content remains. If we are suppressed anywhere on social media, our members still receive everything through the app they paid for directly. No algorithm. No policy change. No platform decision can take that away.

We use Big Tech’s infrastructure where it serves the mission. We will never be held hostage by it.

Five Publications. One Passport. Already Yours.

Pious Pelican Media owns and operates five Substack publications. Three — Tradition & Sanity, Mere Tradition, and The Meaning of Catholic — are founding collaborator accounts, part of the Pious Pelican vision from the very beginning. Two launch today [Easter Monday]: The Pelican Brief (PelicanBrief.news) and PelicanStack (PelicanStack.com).

As a Pelican+ Premium Member, Founders Club member, or a paid subscriber to a Pelican Passport Publication, you now have complimentary access to all five. Within 24 hours of subscribing the first time, you’ll have access to:

• The Pelican Brief — daily Catholic news, multiple articles every day, and The Pelican Brief Daily (Monday through Friday)

• PelicanStack — all 14+ weekly Pious Pelican shows within the Substack ecosystem, plus The Pelican Brief Weekly — and all of it streamable on your television through the Substack TV App

• Tradition & Sanity — the incredible writings of Dr. Peter Kwasniewski and his friends

• Mere Tradition — Kennedy Hall’s take on faith and culture

• The Meaning of Catholic — exploring what it means to live the faith with Timothy Flanders

• With more Passport Partners coming soon.

You can manage exactly which publications send to your inbox — turn any of them on or off, set your notification preferences, and curate your own experience. No inbox overwhelm. Full control.

But Here Is What You Need to Understand

The Pelican Passport is a doorway. Pelican+ is the cathedral behind it.

The Substack ecosystem gives new readers and viewers a taste — real, substantive, high-quality content. But it is a taste. What you have as a Pelican+ member is something categorically different, and we want to make sure you know exactly what that means.

Martyrs & Miracle Men — our acclaimed audio dramas, produced at a level that rivals anything in secular media. Stories of the saints, told with craft and reverence. These live in Pelican+, and nowhere else.

The Complete Prayer App — built for the rhythm of Catholic life. Daily prayer, formation, and the tools to anchor your faith in the actual texture of your day. One of the most beloved features among our most engaged members.

Hours of Sacred Chant — a library of chant that fills a home, a commute, a quiet moment after the kids are in bed. Formation through beauty, available only at Pelican+.

Special Series — exclusive themed content created only for Pelican+ members. Not redistributed. Not previewed. Yours.

E-Books and Audiobooks — written and recorded formation resources you can take anywhere.

Documentaries — long-form visual storytelling on faith and culture, told with the care the subject deserves.

Live Events — access to every Pious Pelican in-person and virtual event.

Children’s Programming and Television Programming — coming soon, and coming to you first.

And there is more coming — very soon. Pelican University and Pelican Coaching are both launching later this month. Formation programs, courses, and coaching built for Catholics who are serious about growth. More details are on their way. Watch for them.

Coming This Month on Pelican+: The Complete Audio New Testament

One more thing — and this one has been quietly in the works.

This month, Pious Pelican Media is releasing the complete Audio New Testament, narrated by Kennedy Hall.

Every book. Every chapter. Fully recorded. Kennedy’s voice, his faith, and his reverence for the sacred text make this something genuinely different from anything currently available. This is not a performance. It is a proclamation — the Word of God, narrated by a man who lives it.

It is coming to Pelican+ this month. Stay close.

What This Is Really About

Let me be direct about the larger purpose here. The Pelican Passport is not a pivot. It is not a cost-cutting measure. It is not an experiment. It is a deliberate, strategic expansion of the Pious Pelican footprint — designed to bring our content in front of Tradition-loving Catholics around the world who haven’t found us yet.

There are Catholics on every continent who would love what we produce. They follow Catholic voices on Substack. They share content with friends and family across time zones. They are exactly who Pious Pelican Media was built to serve — and until now, many of them have never encountered us.

The Passport changes that. By publishing in the Substack ecosystem — a platform where Catholic readers already live, already search, and already share — we put the Pelican name in front of those readers at the moment of their greatest openness. They encounter a compelling article or video. They want more. The quality of what they find does what quality always does: it builds trust. It creates loyalty. And eventually, it brings them home to Pelican+.

This is how we grow. Not by diluting what we offer. Not by reducing our standards. But by going to where our people already are — giving them something genuinely excellent at a price they can say yes to — and walking them, gradually and graciously, toward the full experience.

The Substack ecosystem is the on-ramp. Pelican+ is the destination. And now, as a Passport holder, you have five more publications to put in front of every Tradition-loving Catholic you know.

Share them. The mission grows one reader at a time.

So, the above explains why you’ll start to see the following familiar button go up again — albeit with a new message:

Why Pelican+?

All that being said, I would like to reiterate a point Dan made above. While you’ll be able to read all the Tradition & Sanity articles simply by subscribing to this Substack (and you’ll gain access to the four other Substacks as part of the same subscription — what a fantastic deal!), nevertheless, the full-length podcasts, movies, specials, audiobooks, ebooks, chant recordings, and so forth are found only at Pelican+.

In short:

• If you take out a membership there, you’ll be issued a free “Pelican Passport,” giving you access to all the stuff we’re doing here on Substack — none of which is unique to Substack, and all of which is “at home” at Pelican+.

• Whereas, if you subscribe only in Substack, you won’t have access to all the Pelican+ content.

The two scenarios are not interchangeable!

You’ll get more bang for the buck if you sign up at Pelican+, because by doing so, you’ll have access not only to what is there (which includes vastly more than Tradition & Sanity), but ALSO you’ll get full access to my paywalled Substack posts — if you prefer to read them here.

I believe that Pelican+ offers something unique — a singular combination of personalities, features, prayers, recordings, music, documentaries, family-friendly programs, and more — that are not to be found on Substack.

We have brought together an impressive group of contributors and we continue to grow, with very exciting announcements about Pelican University soon to come.

Just to take one example: Pelican+ makes living according to the liturgical seasons and entering deeply into the Church’s year that much easier, with Gregorian chant, classic devotions, readings from famous works of saints, and moving dramatizations:

For this reason, I would definitely encourage you to check out Pelican+ if you haven’t already (and here’s a discount code for a membership).

That’s plenty of news for today. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to write them in the comments here, or to contact me via my website; or you may write to our support at team@piouspelican.com.

Thanks for reading and may God bless your Eastertide!

Yours in Christ,
Dr. Peter Kwasniewski

P.S. Please be aware that you may initially receive more emails than you would prefer — e.g., you might get something from Substack and from Pelican, or from multiple Substacks. It is easy to change the settings (in either place!) so that you will receive ONLY the emails you wish.

Why am I sharing a 3D topographical map of the USA?

It’s the metaphor that was in my mind as I reflected on the way the readings in the old liturgy vary over the course of the year.

Most of the USA is relatively flat, but in the West you have the impressive mountain ranges that seem to rise up with sudden grandeur.

Similarly, in the old rite, most days have two rather short readings, an Epistle and a Gospel. But at Ember Days, four times a year, you have multiple readings, sometimes a whole string of them. During Holy Week, you have all four Passion accounts: Matthew on Palm Sunday, Mark on Holy Tuesday, Luke on Holy Wednesday, and John on Good Friday. Wednesday of the fourth Week of Lent and again Wednesday of Holy Week you have two Epistles. At the traditional Easter Vigil you have twelve prophecies. Sometimes the readings in the old lectionary are very, very long, and sometimes they are only a verse or two.

It’s all very organic, growing and shrinking with the days and seasons of the liturgical year. Simply from a human point of view, it makes for a very interesting liturgy: you are “thrown off” by this variation, it catches you by surprise perhaps; it makes you think. And that’s not even bringing in the variations in the propers, where you sometimes have a Gradual & Alleluia, other times a Gradual & Tract, other times just a Gradual, still other times two Alleluias. On certain days in Lent, you kneel in the middle of the Tract. During the Pentecost octave, you kneel during one of the Alleluias. And so forth.

The new lectionary is ploddingly rationalistic by comparison: almost always two moderate-length readings every day, three moderate-length readings on Sundays and feastdays, and nothing “weird” like Ember Days, the four Passions during Holy Week, or those seemingly random second epistles on this or that Wednesday. It’s the kind of thing you’d get from a committee whose idea was to fit everything into a predesigned template, within certain parameters. A Bauhaus liturgy from an industrial age.

As Gregory DiPippo once pointed out, the first person to challenge the theory that the Roman Rite originally had three readings on feasts and Sundays, Msgr Aimé-Georges Martimort,¹ noted that all historical lectionaries have these kinds of irregularities for special occasions. For example, the Byzantine Rite in Holy Week has Gospels at Orthros and the Liturgy of the Presanctified has no preceding NT Epistle and no Alleluia, while the groups of three OT readings at Vespers on Holy Thursday and Good Friday have an irregular structure, with an extra prokimen between the first and second. The Royal Hours and Jerusalem Matins both have synaxes of readings with an atypical arrangement as well.

All that’s to say: the “irregularity” of apostolic Christianity’s traditional rites is one of their most attractive features, psychologically speaking. (Naturally, much more could be said about the theological fittingness of the choice of readings themselves, but here I’m looking at something more “structural.”)

Thus, when I write “in praise of irregularity,” I am by no means making a plea for bending and breaking the Church’s matrimonial rules! The irregularity to which I refer is none other than the many beautiful differences that characterize the various seasons of the liturgical year in the usus antiquior. The traditional rubrics, texts, and chants of Lent and Easter bring the contrasting characters of their seasons strongly to the fore: in Lent we suppress the Alleluia while in Paschaltide we sing it repeatedly; the Gloria disappears and then returns with exultation; the Gloria Patri drops away in Passiontide and enters the liturgy anew with Easter. There are many such elements and structures of differentiation, and while the Novus Ordo retains some of them, most of them were abandoned or rendered optional, which has tended to mean rarely-chosen, for reasons I explain elsewhere.

The traditional Latin Mass and Divine Office display a plethora of differences between seasons as well as on certain special days of the year, be it Ember Days, Rogation Days, All Souls, Candlemas, or what have you. These irregularities or deliberate departures from the “standard” approach magnify the psychological power of the rites and augment their spiritual impact. They also help worshipers enter more deeply into particular mysteries, seasons, or feasts by, on the one hand, startling them out of rote habit, and, on the other hand, building up over the years subliminal associations that reinforce the particular graces besought by the Church at that time.

Continue reading, or listen, at Pelican+

The Paschal Lamb Addresses His Sheep

by Peter Kwasniewski

I taught that men should ask, should seek, should knock,
I gave them master-keys to every lock,
I spoke in stories to divert the proud,
I healed the humble sick within the crowd.

The message fell, at first, on rocky soil;
Instead of asking, most prefer hard toil.
Can those contented with themselves, their lot,
Find liberty to seek what they have not?

Will any locked within his selfish cell
Grow restive at the bonds of self-made hell?
And yet, my teaching comes to be fulfilled
In ways no man has understood or willed.

To Pilate, Joseph came and asked for me,
Or rather, for my body from the tree.
The soldiers sought me out. Make no mistake,
It was to break my legs—not for my sake.

One guard, he thrust his spear into my side,
A knocking that was rude but freed the tide.
No courteous waiting for an opening door;
The gate was breached, my blood flowed out the more.

Not blood alone but water mingled in,
The one to pay, the other wash, all sin.
The soldiers did not grasp my cause of death:
I died because I chose my final breath.

To ask, to seek, to knock, will bring you more
Than Joseph or the Romans had before;
He got my corpse, they saw my bursting heart,
But you, my friends, will have the better part.

My death becomes your life in watery birth,
My flesh becomes your food on pilgrim’s earth,
My blood inebriates your sober state,
And lifts you far above your mortal fate.

These are the fruits that grow on Calvary’s hill,
Draw near in faith and take from me your fill.
With joy you shall draw water from my springs,
Shall be the heirs of kingdoms fit for kings.

Two Prayers

For the Traditional Movement

O Lord our God,
if Thou dost not build the house,
in vain do its builders labor.
We beseech Thee to inspire with Thy Holy Ghost
all those who labor to build up Thy sacred house,
that Thy people may worship truly and fully,
may worthily receive Thy Holy Sacraments,
and may thus be filled with the abundant grace
obtained through these sacred gifts.
Through Our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son,
who liveth and reigneth with Thee
in the unity of the Holy Ghost,
God, for ever and ever.
Amen.

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The great English writer Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson believed that, because the Church is Christ’s Body extended over time and space, the life of the Church as it unfolds throughout the course of history must follow the pattern of the earthly life of Christ. His divine-human life is the pattern of her own origin, growth, and destiny, for He lived her life in concentrated form, and weaves anew the tapestry of His mysteries as each century passes. If the Church is Christ’s bride, she will enjoy a perfect union not only with His triumphant entry into Jerusalem and His glorious resurrection, but also with His sufferings, His passion and death on the Cross. Christ is the microcosm, and His Church, journeying through history, is the macrocosm which mirrors His own earthly mission.

Christ was born in humble surroundings, the son of a virgin, protected by a guardian; His Church is born from the humble throne of the Cross, the handiwork of the virginal High Priest, shrouded with a protecting veil by His Mother.

Christ was obscure in His hidden life at Nazareth; the Church, too, remains hidden beneath the surface of the Roman Empire, and slowly comes to light as paganism exhausts itself in lupercalian gasps.

Christ came into public prominence and was subjected to persecution by the authorities; His Church is the subject of imperial anger, sword, and fire.

Christ was crucified by His own people; His Church will be martyred in every land where she dwells, as long as she gives living testimony to His Gospel.

Christ is risen from the dead; His Church rises like the phoenix from every bed of ashes into which she seems to be dissolved.

The cycle began long ago and will continue until the end of time. Whatever was made manifest in the life of Christ will take place within His Church, in her sacred history. In every age of the Church there will be obscure births, a hidden and a public life, trials and crucifixions, resurrections and ascensions. The whole of reality exists from Him, through Him, and towards Him: He is Alpha and Omega.

Wisely did the fathers of the Council of Nicaea name Pontius Pilate in the Christian Creed. For all time he represents the profane world. His voice can be heard across the centuries uttering the cry of despair “What is truth?,” which has become the modern question par excellence. Thinking himself generous and fair, Pilate haughtily “finds no crime” in Christ, the very Sun of Justice (cf. Jn 18:37–39). In the eyes of the contemporary West, Christ is nothing but a moral teacher, thanks to the efforts of Thomas Jefferson and his Enlightenment peers who felt quite comfortable with Pilate’s cowardly indifference. Having judged Christ innocent, the ruler hands the master over to the slaves to be crucified.

Pilate foreshadows the modern democratic leader, appealing to the people for a final decision and washing his hands of their irrational choice, while the Sanhedrin gloat over the conquered prophet: Iesus Nazarenus Rex Judaeorum. Here we see the frightening consequence of indifference to truth: the Good is handed over to be crucified, in favor of Barabbas, an insurrectionist, a rebel from order, a violator of natural law. The monied rulers and avaricious slaves who populate our cities, from America to Europe, the Middle East to the Far East, acknowledge Caesar—the secular city, the civil state, the temporal realm—as their sole king. We who wish to follow Our Lord hail a different, higher, nobler, immortal King: Gloria, laus et honor tibi sit, Rex Christe, Redemptor.

Almighty Father, draw all men to your Son, draw them into the bosom of His holy Church.

Lord Jesus, King of kings and Lord of lords, draw us all into the safe haven of your Sacred Heart, that we may not be lost in the growing confusion and darkness, but remain ever united to you in a love that knows no end.

O Holy Spirit, raise up prophets of conviction and preachers of truth in your Church, to confront and unmask the lying spirit in the mouth of the false prophets (cf. 1 Kgs 22:22).

O Holy Trinity, eternal, unchanging Good and source of all life, save us, have mercy on us, for You are gracious and you love mankind. Amen.

“O God . . . hear me as I tremble in this darkness and reach out your right hand to me. Hold your light before me and call me back from my wandering, so that, with you guiding me, I may return again to myself and to you.” (St. Augustine)

Man cannot find completion or rest in himself, but only in one who is other than himself. His entire life, from infancy to adulthood to old age, is marked with a need for others, and within this neediness there abides a desire for the Other who will complete him and bring him rest.

He is capable of discovering through reflection that in this world he is always in some way estranged not only from God, but even from himself; what is more, he can see that the former is the cause of the latter: I am not myself because I am not yet perfectly united to my origin and end.

From their long experience of conversion and love, the saints know this truth better than anyone else. William of St. Thierry prays to the Lord: “As long as I am with You, I am also with myself; but I am not with myself as long as I am not with You.” His friend St. Bernard of Clairvaux agrees: “He who gave me Himself, gave me back to myself.” They are good disciples of St. Augustine, who said: “Unless my being remains in Him, it cannot remain in me.”

Above all other times of the Church’s year, Holy Week reminds us of this fundamental lesson. The Christian sacramental life solemnly enacted in liturgical ceremonies and their devotional echoes is a school that opens our eyes more and more to the presence and absence of God—to His majesty and beauty, and to the misery and darkness of fallen man. The public, cultic worship of God aids in divesting man of himself (the old self, his own “property”) and clothing him with Christ—or better, changing him into Christ from deep within, thus realizing the soul’s innate potential to be what God created it to be: a clear and beautiful image of Himself.

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A Poem: “Why All This Waste?”

by Peter Kwasniewski

Why all this waste?
This waste of silk and linen, gold and silver,
Incense, marble, rarest woods and precious stones,
Particolored glass, and iron curiously wrought,
Contrived, collected, and deployed in one small space
When everywhere without,
The poor in multitudes unnumbered
Shiver in ramshackle huts and threadbare rags,
Begging or stealing their next life-saving morsel,
None the better for the temple’s gaudy exhibition.

Let her alone.
Let Holy Mother Church alone,
For she hath done a beautiful thing to Me,
Which every age to come shall gratefully recall
And ever profit by.
She hath prepared My body for its burial,
My burial in the heart of each poor sinner,
That, deeply buried there,
In sight and sound and scent,
I may be welcomed, honored, and adored
As hidden Lord of soul and flesh,
First, Last, innermost and highest,
Who, rising into glory,
Will raise the One in whom I live.
This the poor man needs
If he would bear his deprivation,
If he would know the glorious destiny
To which I summon him.
This the rich man needs
If he would spend his wealth
On goods for Me and for men,
Which will not drag his soul to hell.

Quiet, Judas.
Let cease your noisy cavils.
The love of things corrupts your love of Me.
The one who loves the world
Becomes its slave
Unless he offers it to Me,
In the temple of my Church,
In the temple of your heart.

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
For they shall inherit the new earth
And the new heavens,
Foreshadowed here upon this glorious altar,
In this sanctuary sublime.
Mary hath chosen the better part—
She hath chosen to sit at my feet
And lavish all her substance on my flesh
And listen to the secrets of my heart—
And it shall not be taken from her.

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It must have been a strange, ghostly sight. In the black midnight, thick with an oppressive, sad air, Margaret Clitherow rose from her knees at the tolling of the bell. In silence, she exchanged her woman’s clothes for a shroud that she had sewn with her own hands. Mrs. Yoward, her jailor and sometime companion, carefully observed how the prisoner knelt and prayed in stillness for three hours. As the shadows cast by a thin fire flitted around Margaret, did Mrs. Yoward see an image of Our Lady kneeling before St. Gabriel, or did her soul tremble in the eclipse of Calvary? For the clock told the day of Margaret’s execution, which was both Lady Day and Good Friday of that year.

At three o’clock in the morning, Margaret arose once more from her prayers. She laid herself down flat before the fireside. Mrs. Yoward saw the helpless form of the woman on the floor; but Margaret saw the flames.

White in her shroud and small, she lay like the host on the paten. Hers it had been to mother the priests in hiding, to adorn the secret altars, to hallow the martyr’s bones with repentant, innocent tears. In her agony, the faces of those whom she loved passed before her eyes. She had been separated from a loving husband, and torn from her children, save one, whose tiny heartbeat she could feel in her womb. Margaret and the little child were condemned to suffer death peine forte et dure, that is, the strong and severe death of pressing—a sentence that broke the most cruel and notorious felons.

Few could understand the torment of her womanly heart, and fewer still its mystic secret: love is strong as death, jealousy as hard as hell, the lamps thereof are fire and flames.

Margaret Clitherow had given Christ all. Only one gift remained: the immolation of her life in union with the Immaculate Victim. With the clear-eyed vision that is the reward of the clean heart, she contemplated the wedding feast of heaven, and those happy souls who had made their robes white in the blood of the Lamb. She had often called the day of her martyrdom “her marriage.”

Thus, in the lonely room on the Ouse Bridge, Mrs. Clitherow rehearsed her death while the astonished onlooker watched in the gloom. After fifteen minutes, Margaret returned to her bed. Could Mrs. Yoward have caught a look of joy in Margaret’s eyes as she arose, or heard in that silence an echo of the prayer that shakes the foundation of the world: “Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum?”

Fires at Home

The human heart, like the hearth, must be constantly fed and tended in order to produce light and warmth. God has mysteriously made woman the natural custodian of both, granting to her a unique ability to unify the home and to nurture the spirit. By all accounts, Margaret Clitherow excelled at these supremely important tasks, which will be the joy and the glory of womanhood until the end of time.

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One of the worst distortions perpetuated about the saints, by “pious” authors and enemies of the Church alike, is that the saints were a gloomy bunch, bent over under the weight of grim penances, banishing the sunlight from their chambers, closed off to joy, laughter, and playfulness.

Anyone who knows about the saints, or anyone who has met a saintly person, would never for a moment recognize them in such a description. In fact, one of the signs necessary for a person’s canonization is cheerfulness!

St. Francis of Assisi went into raptures over God’s goodness in creation, he played and did antics, singing out his joy as he walked the roads of Italy. St. Catherine of Siena, a stigmatist, had enough gumption to tell the Pope to keep his mouth shut for prudence’s sake. St. Lawrence made a joke on the gridiron: “Turn me over, I’m done on this side.” And what of the sometimes mischievous St. Philip Neri, who shaved off half his beard for humility’s sake, and ordered a penitent to release a pillow’s worth of feathers? Or St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who teaches us “secrets of joy”? If one reads the Magnificat of Our Lady, there is not an ounce of gloominess there.

The saints knew one crucial secret that most people no longer know: joy is rooted in the love of God. Modern people try to be happy without God, but this is sheer folly, because God is happiness. God is identical to happiness, He is infinite blessedness, and whenever we attain any degree of joy or peace it is only because we have drawn nearer to Him. To seek happiness elsewhere is the result of an illusion, a deception.

We have to keep in mind that God did not create suffering and does not want His children to suffer. Suffering is an evil, it is not good for its own sake. The world as God made it is good through and through; it is man who introduces evil into this world, and the sins of certain men have proved to be the cause of great suffering for others. God does allow this suffering because through it He can purify us of our own sinfulness and make us more worthy of His boundless love.

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A Poem: “Deathless Shepherd”

by Peter Kwasniewski

The deathless shepherd who should be
revered—”I am who am”—
Himself becomes the Servant; he
Becomes the slaughtered Lamb.

The one unseen, unheard, all past
The realm of mortal ken,
Takes flesh and face and voice;
at last He’s fellow man with men.

Unchanging Word in changing speech
Expressed, come down to earth,
To places where no light could reach
Until this piercing birth.

What fellowship hath Christ the Son
Of God with sons of wrath?
The answer, clearly, would be none,
Without the blood-won bath.

Upon the Tree he spilled this wine
Of love—it trickled down
From branch to branch, from vine to vine,
A flood enough to drown

All sins, all crimes, all guilt and pain
Of heaven’s loss and hell’s
Encroaching, shadowy domain—
All this, the Blood repels.

Bright Liquor, crimson Draught, I drink
In faith the life You give
In all I do or say or think,
That dying, I may live.

I cry to You, with heart and voice,
“O King, be king of me!
Transpierce my sense, my mind, my choice
To set my freedom free.

A Prayer for the Triumph of the Catholic Faith

by Bishop Athanasius Schneider

Almighty and eternal God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we kneel before Your Majesty, and thank You from the depth of our soul for the inestimable gift of the Catholic Faith, which you have deigned to reveal to us through Jesus Christ, True God and True man. We received this divine light in holy baptism and have promised You to keep this faith inviolate until death.

Increase in us Your gift of the Catholic Faith. By Your grace, may it be strengthened and made unshakeable. Daily increase in us the understanding of the beauty and profoundness of the Catholic Faith, that we might live in the deep joy of Your divine truth and be ready to sacrifice all things rather than compromise on or betray this faith. Grant us the grace to be resolved to undergo a thousand deaths for even one article of the Creed.

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