In addition to Dr. Kwasniewski’s recent article, “Incense: Sacramental of Devotion,” I highly recommend his article “Benedictine Monks on Incense: Sourcing It and Making It” at New Liturgical Movement, as well as Dr. Michael Foley’s “The Offertory Incensation, Part I,” at the same site.

Anyone who has attended a Solemn High Mass in the Traditional Roman Rite can sense that it is angelic. There is something so radiant about its mystery, so arresting about its loveliness, so fearful about its goodness, that we, like children, seem to feel the presence of the holy ones before we ever learn to examine the Mass prayers to chart the number of angelic invocations our missal contains. The majesty and seriousness of the Traditional Roman Rite of the Mass, its great periods of reverent silence, its rubrics so ordered and harmonious, all reflect the presence of the angels, whom the saints assure us assist at Mass in numbers beyond all reckoning.

One important angelic invocation in the Solemn Mass, of which the Novus Ordo is sadly and strangely bereft, is found in the blessing of incense before the Lavabo. The priest prays,

Per intercessiónem beáti Michaélis Archángeli stantis a dextris altáris incénsi, et ómnium electórum suórum incénsum istud dignétur Dóminus bene+dícere, et in odórem suavitátis accípere. Per Christum, Dóminum nostrum. Amen.

May the Lord, by the intercession of blessed Michael the Archangel, who standeth at the right side of the altar of incense, and of all His Elect, vouchsafe to bless + this incense and receive it as an odor of sweetness: through Christ Our Lord. Amen.

Every holy thing is both an unmerited grace for which to thank God, and a doorway to contemplation. Thus, the Fathers wrote whole sermons on single words of Sacred Scripture, and dwelt in awe on the ceremonies of the Liturgy. Likewise, it behooves us to linger for a while in this precious prayer, dwelling on the image of the Angelic Prince offering incense at the Throne of the Most High. May this meditation in his honor lift our hearts as an evening sacrifice, and may the intercession of the angels “fill us with the flame of everlasting charity.”

An Everlasting Offering

The association of the Holy Angels with the offering of incense is equally ancient, biblical and liturgical. In the Book of Exodus, God instructs Moses as to the ceremonies and the adornment required for the Ark of the Covenant:

Thou shalt make also a propitiatory of the purest gold: the length thereof shall be two cubits and a half, and the breadth a cubit and a half. Thou shalt make also two cherubims of beaten gold, on the two sides of the oracle. Let one cherub be on the one side, and the other on the other. Let them cover both sides of the propitiatory, spreading their wings, and covering the oracle, and let them look one towards the other, their faces being turned towards the propitiatory wherewith the ark is to be covered. (Ex. 25:18-20)

The “propitiatory,” or covering for the Ark, was also known as the Mercy Seat. The Mercy Seat lay behind a veil, and in front of the veil was the Altar of Incense, upon which Aaron was commanded “to burn an everlasting incense before the Lord throughout your generations.”

In the building of the Temple, Solomon covered the Altar of Incense with gold. St. Bede associates the offering of incense at this altar with angelic innocence and purity of heart:

[The altar overlaid with gold] signifies typically the life of the perfectly righteous who are, as it were, placed near the oracle and giving up the basest pleasures concentrate all their attention merely on entering the kingdom of heaven. Hence quite appropriately it was not the flesh of victims that was burned on this altar but only incense, because such people no longer need to sacrifice in themselves carnal sins or seductive thoughts but only offer up the fragrance of spiritual prayers and heavenly desires through the fire of eternal love in the sight of their creator.1

The Mosaic-Solomonic type is revealed in its striking fullness in the Book of Revelation, where

Another angel came, and stood before the altar, having a golden censer; and there was given to him much incense, that he should offer of the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar, which is before the throne of God. (Rev. 8:3)

The celestial service of St. Michael and the angels in Heaven, radiant with God’s own Justice, enflamed with His tender Mercy, alight with wonder and innocence, pure and noble, strong and peaceful, is the pattern of all worship. Thus, incense symbolizes prayer; and prayer is the very breath of the angels. Cistercian Abbot John of Ford wrote,

This is without any doubt the sublime justice of the angels, to contemplate God sublimely and stretch out to him with all their strength. Then this is their peace, that they mutually take delight in the Lord with the most selfless love… Finally, joy in the Holy Spirit, the fruit…of justice and peace, is the fragrance of their same trees. This is a scent most delicious to God and to their own selves, and they never cease to breathe it out from their own very beginning.2

When with St. Michael we contemplate Christ, “the most beautiful of the Sons of Men,” we too are enflamed, purified, and refashioned according to His likeness. Love, like a sweet savor born in fire, arises to Heaven in the form of solemn praise, refashioning us in the depths of our being, until we are of one heart and voice with the glorious angels beholding His very Face before the Throne.

The Tears of a Tree

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Fr. Jonathan Robinson (1929–2020), founder of the Oratory in Toronto, published his wide-ranging and penetrating book The Mass and Modernity: Walking to Heaven Backward in the first year of Pope Benedict’s pontificate—a pontificate destined to give considerable impetus to a “new Liturgical Movement” of which Summorum Pontificum of 7/7/07 remains the most eloquent symbol.

The Mass and Modernity conveys both the clear vision of its author and the stubborn challenges of the moment in modern Church history at which he was writing. Fr. Robinson seemed to recognize that much had gone dreadfully wrong not only in the implementation of the reformed liturgical rites but in the very principles underlying their engineering. Thus, he writes of the reform:

Instead of improvement, though, there has been loss: a diminishment of that ability “to reach out and touch the Divine” that was once the central thrust of the liturgy….

The principles behind the changes were the result of absorption by many in the Church of ways of thinking that are incompatible with Catholicism….

The most important factor in creating the present unhappy situation was a misreading of the modern world by those responsible for creating and implementing the norms for the implementation of the liturgical reform….

The deformation of the liturgy has to be understood as the result of cultural and intellectual forces that will have to be recognized before anything very serious can be accomplished in the way of serious liturgical reform….

Present liturgical practice has in fact reinforced a good deal of the anti-God initiatives and false teaching about community. In this way the [reformed] liturgy itself has exemplified and deepened modern trends that in my view are destructive, not merely of liturgy, but of the Catholic world view itself.1

As you can see, Fr. Robinson was quite frank about the problem, not beating around the bush as so many others have done (and continue to do).

Yet—and here is the aspect where he seems to be more a man of his time—he hesitated to recommend a wholesale return to the traditional rite in its preconciliar form:

We seem to be faced with the following situation. On the one hand, for a variety of reasons, a full-scale return to the Old Rite is neither possible nor desirable; yet, on the other hand, the New Rite has failed to win hearts in the way the Old Rite used to do, nor is it succeeding in its aim of presenting through its actions and words the sacrifice of Christ that takes away the sins of the world. I think the only way out of this morass is to move the Novus Ordo to what the Old Rite in fact was: the worship of the transcendent God, through participating in the sacrifice of His Son. The role of the Old Rite in this will be to provide a standard of worship, of mystery, and of catechesis toward which the celebrations of the Novus Ordo must be moved.2

You can hear in these words the hoped-for “reform of the reform” that once animated many lovers of the work of Joseph Ratzinger.

When, some years later, Fr. Robinson agreed to contribute the Foreword to my first book, Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis (2014, rev. 2015), he was still of this mindset: the usus antiquior is a valuable treasure of the Catholic Church and should be available, but more important still is taking its rubrical orderliness, sacral aura, and spirit of solemnity as exemplary for all celebrations, including those in the Novus Ordo. To be honest, that’s where many of us once were; it was a relatively easy and good place to be back then, when it seemed to be doable, to have Roman support, and to combine “the best of both worlds.” Now, of course, its emptiness, impracticability, and incoherence have been thoroughly revealed—the subject of my 2025 book Close the Workshop: Why the Old Mass Isn’t Broken and the New Mass Can’t Be Fixed.

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One of the most remarkable mystics of the twentieth century is also, paradoxically, one of the least well-known: Mother Yvonne-Aimée of Malestroit (1901-1951). Her life was filled with such numerous and exceptional mystical phenomena that the Vatican in 1960 actually placed a moratorium on publications about her. The famous Mariologist and hagiographer René Laurentin obtained permission from Cardinal Franjo Seper to write a book on her, and he later obtained permission from Cardinal Ratzinger to publish it. The French original was entitled Yvonne-Aimée de Malestroit, Un Amour Extraordinaire (O.E.I.L., 1985; repr. Guibert, 2012); the biography finally came out in English in 2024, translated by Jim Gallagher:

Years before I knew of this biography, I had already been introduced to Mother Yvonne by good Benedictine friends who had taught me her beautiful prayer “O Jesus, King of Love, I put all my trust in Your loving mercy” (or “merciful goodness”: “O Jésus, Roi d’amour, j’ai confiance en votre miséricordieuse bonté”), which I pray every day, multiple times.1

Then Angelico Press invited me to review the page proofs of Gallagher’s translation of Laurentin, which I eagerly agreed to do. Excerpts really cannot do any justice to a life so glowing with light, so crushed by suffering, and so exalted by divine ecstasy, but I still would like to introduce readers to Mother Yvonne, in the hopes that at least a few of them will be struck by what they read and will seek out the full biography.

Let me sum it up by quoting what I heard another well-informed person say: “Mother Yvonne is the ‘female Padre Pio’ of our times.” All the astonishing miracles you’ve heard about in connection with Padre Pio are found in analogous form in her life. I, for one, give thanks to the God of marvels for raising up such inexplicable, indefinable, incomprehensible persons, who are not only proofs of His existence, but, far more importantly, proofs of His jealous and overwhelming love.

Many of the excerpts below consist either of Mother Yvonne’s diary entries, or her counsels to her nuns, or of words she heard the Lord speak to her.

“It is night, total night. But I am trying to love the dark, and I’m beginning to get there. It’s not easy” (Letter to Miss des Georges, May 10, 1930, no. 135). (142-43)

“I shall water your heart with the delicious water of my heart. Accept the clouds. I’m hiding behind them.” (148)

“I don’t like a holiness that grows too quickly. It is cheap wood. It can lead to pride. Our failures give us experience and humility. Jesus loves souls who do not get discouraged but start again” (Articles, p. 25). (149)

She set about restoring the liturgy, according to the authentic tradition of her order. “We are learning to make the bows . . . a bit deeper than before, but it’s very beautiful. The chants were revised by the fathers of Solesmes. So everything is perfect and liturgical,” she wrote to Miss Bato. (May 18, 1933, no. 319) “To abandon oneself to the liturgy, isn’t it to be led, lifted up, moved by love? Isn’t it by the liturgy that you attract our attention, oh my Jesus, above all the undertakings of your love for us?” she would write later. (Notebook, April 18, 1942, no. 179) (152)

“Our sanctification is the work of each day. It is not to go over our past, which is left to the divine mercy. It is not to think of the future, which we abandon to the wisdom of the Good Lord. It is to content ourselves with the present manifestation of the divine love under whichever form it comes. It is now!” (Letter to the novitiate, September 9, 1933, no. 562) (153)

“My child, life is a small sum of money which you must spend only on the service of God.” (153)

“Above all, be kind. Kindness is what is most Godlike and most disarms people.” (January 22, 1934, no. 50) (154)

“This morning I went to draw from the well of truth. I was alone in the chapel. I stepped onto the sanctuary and sat on the step of the altar. There I drew on him, him the good Lord who has no other wish but to have us participate in his joy. So, my little sisters, let us be as one in the intimate joy of the Holy Trinity who lives in us; in the Father who in an eternal present now begets in us his Word; in the Word who, in us, never stops praising the Father, in the Holy Spirit who, in us, is the substantial joy of the Father and of the Son.” (Letter to the novitiate, September 4, 1934, no. 448) (155)

“If I were to look at my faults and failings then there would be something to be scared of. But I found it simpler to entrust myself completely to him who wanted me here. If I had looked at myself too much I know that I would have lost my peace and my joy. But in looking at him I found strength and abandonment. And looking at my mothers and my sisters, who all appeared so happy, I felt my heart open wide. . . . My fears melted away in love” (Letter to the superior of Douarnenez, May 15, 1935, no. 246). (157)

“Holiness does not consist of doing extraordinary things. It consists uniquely of letting yourself be consumed. Many do not know how to forget themselves. If they continue, that will end up stopping the flow of grace” (Articles, p. 135). (159)

Then Jesus reassured her about her interior life and conduct, which she sometimes had doubts about:

“You have served me well and your deficiencies have never offended me. You have been able to remain hidden and often not understood, living your poor life, attentive to my least desire, not allowing to enter into your mind, nor your heart, nor into your will, the least indocility.

“You have not asked why, nor expressed fear, nor excuses. You are the most loving and most docile of my creatures, you have allowed your flesh to be tortured, expiating the faults of my blind sons, taking their crimes upon yourself. . . .

“You are a tender and hidden spouse . . . your heart is like a candle that never burns out, and like incense rising constantly toward me. . . . You are a torch of fire burning in the night, you are like a dazzling sword fighting [for] the causes I charge you with. Your role will expand more and more, but you will serve me yet a while in secret . . . you who go without hesitating where I tell you to go, who say what I want you to say, who keep quiet at a sign of my hand.” (Ibid.) (168)

“See how you invade my heart, my blood, my flesh, my mind, my soul. I am no longer in this moment the poor small and fallen being that must die; I am she to whom God comes to tell a secret. . . . Here I am, free with the freedom of the angels. . . .” (169)

“Don’t worry about the inevitable demands stretching your reason and common sense. It has to be, and I don’t mean that you won’t be marked and affected by certain painful things but your heart will not be broken. You’ll see. You’ll come out of it more dazzling, you will radiate a clear light, radiant and beneficent.” (170)

“I’m fully aware that I can’t manage to do everything and he only asks me to do well all that I am able to do…. Don’t try to do everything. Possess myself in God, possess God, be possessed by him; everything is in that.” (171)

What’s more, vocations were becoming rarer. Catholic Action, then at its height, was casting a shadow. Don’t become a nun, you’ll be more useful in the world, seemed to be the advice all around: “This shortage is due in large part to priests who don’t know how to encourage vocations, nor direct them,” observed Mother Yvonne-Aimée, “not to mention those who prevent them from reaching, and turn them away from, the convent door, so as to keep the elite in the Catholic movements. Forgive me for laying out so boldly my thought but it is the divine thought and it is why I go there with so much assurance . . . with you” (Letter to Bishop Picaud, January 28, 1946, no. 83). (196)

“What merit would you have if you always had the joy of having worked well? It’s not at those times that you give the most. You’re satisfied— and it’s good that you have this joy in order to continue a task that is not at all pleasant for you.

“But believe me, it’s when you carry on without the taste for it, when you speak without knowing the result…it’s when you simply do your duty conscientiously and solely for the love of God that you give, you gain, you purchase! And everyone — more or less obviously — but every one of us, must know these feelings of weariness. . . .

“And in no way must we ever let them sadden us. . . . I am not reassured when I hear someone boast that he is successful in everything he does. That can’t be, or can only be for a time. It is not the ordinary path by which God leads souls.” (January 20, 1946, no. 64) (204)

Yvonne-Aimée of Malestroit: An Extraordinary Love by René Laurentin is available from the publisher or from Amazon.

Our English contributor Fr. Thomas Crean, OP is a superb dogmatic theologian, whose work I always enjoy publishing. In this admirable essay, he has navigated just about every treacherous shoal without crashing against the rocks. I even like how he handles the canonization question, on which he and I differ (as can be see in print). The views expressed in this essay are eminently reasonable, and I believe they could actually serve as a serious basis for unification talks, if such were desired on both sides.—PAK

How might peace be achieved between the authorities of the Church and the Society of St Pius X? We can approach the question in two ways: the strictly doctrinal, and the practical.

Doctrinal

From a doctrinal point of view, it should not be difficult for the SSPX to be recognised as Catholic. Now more than half-a-century old, the Society, unlike many clerics currently “in canonical good standing,” has not denied any dogma defined by the Church or taught by her universal and ordinary magisterium. This in itself is a sign that the Society, despite having “impaired communion,” at least from the sociological point of view, with the rest of the Church, is nevertheless not in a state of schism: at least if St Jerome was correct when he stated that “there is no schism that does not devise some heresy for itself, that it may appear to have had a reason for separating from the Church.”1

The Second Vatican Council

The protocol signed by Cardinal Ratzinger and Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988 is a natural and useful starting point in the quest for doctrinal peace. As a statement of doctrine, it was not repudiated by the archbishop: he simply came to believe, rightly or wrongly, that Pope John Paul II and the Vatican could not be relied on to protect his priestly society, in the face of the almost universal hostility toward it of the episcopate at that time.

This protocol recognises the pope as the head of the body of bishops, and the rights of the magisterium as laid down by Lumen Gentium in the Second Vatican Council. It also requires of the SSPX a “positive attitude of study and communication with the Apostolic See” of anything in the conciliar documents, or in later reforms of liturgy and law, which does not appear easily reconcilable with tradition. This last requirement is a reasonable one: after all, why would any Catholic want to have any other kind of attitude?

It is evident that the SSPX must accept that the Second Vatical Council was a legitimately convened ecumenical council which therefore enjoyed the right of teaching, and that its documents were duly promulgated. The popes have repeatedly declared that it was such a council, and to suppose that popes could err on such a question would be to destroy the visibility of the Church. As Gregory Mammas, one of the Greek bishops reconciled to the Church at the Council of Florence, warned the intransigent bishop of Ephesus, Mark Eugenikos, those who reject an ecumenical council “always receive some new name”—other, that is, than that of Catholic.2

Since Archbishop Lefebvre, the founder of the SSPX, was a prominent figure at Vatican II and signed its documents,3 it should not be difficult for the Society to recognise that council as indeed having whatever authority it claimed for itself. Nevertheless, one occasionally hears it argued in so-called “Lefebvrist circles” that by designating Vatican II as a pastoral council, the pope and the bishops renounced their power of using it to teach, and that as a result its documents enjoy no kind of claim on the assent of the faithful. This argument is sophistical, and in fact relies on the same division between the doctrinal and the pastoral that so many Catholics rightly protested against during the pontificate of Pope Francis. What else are the faithful to pasture on, if not the truth?

Obviously this requirement to accept Vatican II as a legitimate ecumenical council does not imply that the SSPX are obliged to accept the truth of all the propositions contained in its documents, or the wisdom of all its exhortations, recommendations, suggestions, or injunctions. Rather, the members of the Society, like everyone else, are obliged to accept its documents according to the usual norms for such reception. These norms include the duty to accept anything in the documents that is taught definitively, the right to request clarifications about teachings whose meanings are ambiguous or which appear to contradict or to be hard to reconcile with the tradition of the Church, and the duty to reject any manifest errors that have slipped into the texts.4

Religious liberty, collegiality, ecumenism

There are three topics within the conciliar documents that are frequently presented as obstacles to doctrinal peace: religious liberty, collegiality, and ecumenism. Often, official or unofficial spokesmen for the Society will say that Vatican II erred on these points; they may seek to save the indefectibility of the Church by adding that Vatican II did not fulfil the conditions necessary for infallible teaching when it spoke in these three areas.

In reality, none of these three topics should be a barrier to doctrinal peace between the SSPX and the Holy See, for the following reasons.

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The liturgy is the highest and the holiest expression of the thought and intelligence of the Church, simply because it is carried out by the Church in direct communication with God, in confession, in prayer and praise.1

Prosper Louis Pascal Guéranger (1805–1875) was ordained a priest in 1827 and became Abbot of the newly-established monastery of Solesmes in 1837 at the age of 32; his protégé Cécile Bruyère later became first Abbess of Solesmes’ sister house, Saint Cecilia, at the age of 24. The story is told that when Dom Guéranger was criticized for having chosen such a young nun to be abbess of a new monastery, he replied, with a twinkle in his eye: “Youth is the only fault of which we are automatically cured with the passing of each day.”

This pair of facts—that he became abbot at 32 and Cécile abbess at 24—hints at the preternatural maturity and enormous energy of the movement to restore Benedictine monasticism in post-revolutionary France, where it seemed nothing could stop the Catholic revival, romantic in spirit and ultramontanist in politics.

Dom Prosper Guéranger was that unusual combination of a man of action and a man of letters. Like Nehemiah’s description of the rebuilders of Jerusalem—“Those who carried burdens were laden in such a way that each with one hand labored on the work and with the other held his weapon, and each of the builders had his sword girded at his side while he built” (Neh 4:17–18)—Dom Guéranger founded monastic communities and guided their growth, at the same time battling against a host of contemporary French foes—Jansenism, Gallicanism, naturalism, and liberalism—and defending the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception (1854) and papal infallibility as defined by the First Vatican Council (1870).

Were Guéranger alive today and had he the advantage of seeing the ways in which even good things can be corrupted (corruptio optimi pessima…), he would no doubt bitterly regret and repudiate the double misunderstanding of papal infallibility dominant in the period after the Second Vatican Council: on the one hand, some people limit the authority of the papacy to an almost non-existent exercise of extraordinary definition in order to justify their moral libertinism—usually contraception—while others drape this mantle of authority over any and all papal words and deeds, especially when they support the abandonment of Catholic Tradition. The great Benedictine founder would rightly have regarded both camps as odious.

Guéranger’s spiritual vision culminates in the primacy and centrality of the sacred liturgy: the opus Dei or work of God par excellence to which the monk and nun are wholly consecrated, but for which every Christian man, woman, and child has been equipped and set apart in baptism, as a royal priesthood, a holy nation (cf. 1 Pet 2:9).

It is thus eminently fitting that he is best known today for his The Liturgical Year (L’Année liturgique), a leisurely fifteen-volume tour of the feasts and seasons of the Catholic calendar, left unfinished at the time of his death but quickly completed by his disciples, and once again made available in a new and most beautiful edition from St. Austin Press—all the more timely, as ever more Catholics rediscover the riches of the classical Roman rite.

(This is a limited edition of only 100 sets. Other sets are also available, from, e.g., Preserving Christian Publications and Loreto Publications.)

On a more scholarly side, the Institutions liturgiques, originally published in three volumes (1840, 1841, and 1851) and posthumously republished in four volumes (1878–1885)—and now, fortunately, available in English in the form of a skilful one-volume abridgement from Os Justi Press—is a groundbreaking work in every sense, abundantly justifying Dom Guéranger’s reputation as the father of the Liturgical Movement.2

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Given the continuing efforts of sedevacantists to lead the faithful astray, I have chosen to republish this important essay as a free post. Due to some unfortunate technical difficulties, the bulk of this essay had been lost on the internet (clicking “continue reading” led to a blank page), so it is now restored in its integrity. While it is true that lengthy efforts have been made to refute Fr. Crean’s arguments, I am convinced his case prevails, with the benefit of a simplicity that is recognizably Catholic and common-sensical.—PAK

Shortly before the Ascension, Our Lord said to the disciples, Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world. Since this is a divine promise, it has been not only kept, but superabundantly kept, and so Christ remains with us in more than one way. He is substantially present wherever the Blessed Eucharist is consecrated and preserved. As regards His divine nature, He is present with the Father and their Holy Spirit in the soul of every person on earth who is in a state of grace. By His power, He is as intimately present to the whole earthly Church as the head is to the body, and so He keeps her in being until the end of time. This last manner of presence gives rise to what is called the indefectibility of the Church.

Theologians debate the details of this indefectibility. But all of them agree that it embraces at least three things: the faith, the sacraments, and the hierarchy.

(1) The faith delivered once for all to the saints (Jude 3) is preserved in every age. While every believer has his part to play in this work of preservation, the principal place belongs by divine decree to the bishops, the successors of the apostles. As St Irenaeus of Lyon declared in the second century, the bishops who succeed to the apostles and to the sees that they founded have been granted “the sure charism of the truth”. These bishops maintain this faith not only by their public preaching and writing but also by the documents to which they are publicly pledged: above all, Holy Scripture, but also the creeds and definitions of the councils and the popes.1

(2) The seven sacraments, likewise, are preserved by Christ until the end of time. He causes them to be in every age the unfailingly efficacious means by which God is glorified and human beings are both set free from sin and sanctified for eternal life within the kingdom of heaven. God doth not give the Spirit by measure, says St John the Baptist, speaking of baptism and the Son of God (Jn. 3:34). We can understand this to mean, among other things, that however many people have already received grace through baptism and the other sacraments, Christ can always give more grace; and this He does, whenever those who receive them put forward no hindrance.

(3) Thirdly, the hierarchy of bishops in union with each other, and united to St Peter and his successors as their earthly head, has been preserved by Christ since His Ascension and will remain intact until His return at the end of time. As the word ‘hierarchy’, literally ‘sacred rule’, implies, these bishops have the right to govern the Christian people, and the baptised have the corresponding duty to obey their bishop in sacred matters. The New Testament asserts this duty in clear words: Obey your prelates and be subject to them (Heb. 13:17).

We should note that these three elements of indefectibility are not only preserved, but preserved within the Catholic Church. The doctrine of indefectibility does not simply state that some people on earth will always be professing the true faith, administering valid sacraments, and possessed of episcopal orders. It states that the Catholic Church will always be professing the true faith, administering the sacraments, and structured by the episcopacy and the papacy. And the Catholic Church is an empirically identifiable organisation, by which I mean that it can be distinguished from other societies by the application of criteria accessible to the senses, even by a person without faith. From this point of view, the Catholic Church is no different from the Southern Baptist Convention, FIFA, or the Locomotive Club of Great Britain.

The criterion by which we may identify the Catholic Church is the papacy; she is the society governed by the man who succeeds to St Peter, according to the norms in force at the time of the succession. In this way, the Church in 2026 is one and the same society as the body of disciples that witnessed the Ascension on Mount Olivet almost two thousand years before.

Where the Catholic Church differs from the Southern Baptist Convention or FIFA is that it has a divine promise of perpetuity; which means, since it is a visible society, perpetual visibility.

Our Lord promised that it would be a city on hill that cannot be hidden (Mt. 5:14). This historically continuous and recognisable society will always have bishops who teach and administer the sacraments: and they will do so legitimately, since they will be governing some definite portion of Christ’s flock over which the Holy Spirit has set them (Acts 20:28).

The Fathers of the First Vatican Council, in 1870, spoke eloquently of this visible perpetuity of the Church:

The eternal shepherd and guardian of our souls, in order to render permanent the saving work of redemption, determined to build a church in which, as in the house of the living God, all the faithful should be linked by the bond of one faith and charity. Therefore, before He was glorified, He besought his Father, not for the apostles only, but also for those who were to believe in Him through their word, that they all might be one as the Son himself and the Father are one. So then, just as he sent apostles, whom He chose out of the world, even as He had been sent by the Father, it was in like manner His will that in His church there should be shepherds and teachers until the end of time (Pastor Aeternus, preamble).

Furthermore, as Pope Leo XIII would remark in his encyclical Satis Cognitum, since Our Lord made St Peter alone the foundation of the Church, these shepherds and teachers must remain united to the successor of St Peter, under pain of becoming “a lawless and disorderly crowd” (SC 15). Hence, Vatican I defined that it is by the institution of Christ, that is, by divine law, that blessed Peter has “perpetual successors in the primacy over the whole church”, and it defined, too, that the Roman pontiffs are these successors.

Pope Leo XIII summarises this double necessity, of both a papacy and an episcopacy within the visible Church of Christ, in these terms:

He who made Peter the foundation of the Church also “chose twelve, whom He called apostles” (Lk. 6:13); and just as it is necessary that the authority of Peter should be perpetuated in the Roman Pontiff, so, by the fact that the bishops succeed the Apostles, they inherit their ordinary power, and thus the episcopal order necessarily belongs to the essential constitution of the Church.

Applying these truths to sedevacantism

Why do I recall these elementary truths of Christian doctrine? Since the Second Vatican Council, some Catholics have been scandalised by the spread and tolerance of heresy within the Church. By ‘scandalised’, I do not mean simply shocked or saddened; I use the word in its technical sense, of ‘caused to stumble’. Among these are the so-called sedevacantists. Rightly desiring to defend the indefectibility by which the Church adheres to the truth, they fall into denying her indefectible visibility.

Sedevacantism is sometimes characterised as a form of Protestantism. This is inaccurate, since the sedevacantist does not believe that he has the right to determine the meaning of God’s revelation by his own private judgement, which is the essence of Protestantism. Nor, though it is a schism, is it the same kind of schism as that of the various national Orthodox churches. Unlike these bodies, the sedevacantist admits in principle the definition of the First Vatican Council that by divine law, the Roman pontiff is the successor of St Peter and therefore has primacy of jurisdiction over the whole Church. He therefore also admits that all other bishops are bound to subject themselves to a reigning Roman pontiff in order not to be a mere “lawless and disorderly crowd”. What he denies is that there have been any Roman pontiffs, in God’s sight, for some sixty or seventy years; most commonly, since the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958.

The sedevacantist thesis emerges as the conclusion to a syllogism:

The Roman pontiffs acting in their official capacity cannot teach errors against the faith; but the men generally accepted in recent decades as the Roman pontiffs have taught such errors when acting in an official capacity; therefore they were not truly Roman pontiffs.

The errors in question will be variously listed by different sedevacantist authors, but those that have been most frequently mentioned down the years are the following:

• religious liberty as taught by the Second Vatican Council;

• religious indifferentism as (allegedly) taught or encouraged by this council and subsequent popes;

• the new sacramental rites, especially that of the Mass, promulgated by Pope Paul VI; and

• the provision in the 1983 Code of Canon Law for administering Holy Communion to non-Catholics in certain circumstances.

Now, there are several ways in which one might respond to the sedevacantist thesis. One might point out the importance of distinguishing between papal teaching issued ex cathedra and lesser kinds of teaching. Thus, Bishop Gasser, who at the 1^st Vatican Council had the task of explaining the meaning of ‘papal infallibility’ to the assembled bishops before their vote, made this important statement:

Not just any way of proposing doctrine is sufficient, even when the Pontiff is exercising his supreme office of shepherd and teacher. It is necessary that the intention of defining doctrine be manifest, and of putting an end to uncertainty about some doctrine or matter to be defined, by giving a definitive judgement, and proposing that doctrine as something that the universal Church must hold.2

Again, one might point out the importance of distinguishing between different senses of the same words. Thus, a sedevacantist author may aver that Pius IX solemnly condemned religious liberty while Paul VI and subsequent popes have taught it.

But to say that ‘religious liberty’ is a heresy is rather like saying that ‘predestination’ is a heresy. There is indeed a heretical sense of predestination: that God created some people in order that He might damn them. There is also a Catholic sense of predestination, which is that taught by St Paul, St Augustine, and St Thomas Aquinas: that those who are saved by God’s mercy might have been justly allowed to die in their sins, actual or original.

Likewise, there is a heretical, or certainly an erroneous sense of religious liberty: that the civil power is not competent to recognise religious truth, and so ought never to prefer one religion over another. And there is a Catholic sense of religious liberty, which is that no threats to life, property, or freedom should be used to induce non-Christians to accept baptism.

Or again, one might urge upon a sedevacantist brother the need to distinguish more clearly between dogmatic and disciplinary decrees, or between teachings and actions. A provision in a code of canon law is not a definition of faith: Catholics are free to hold that the modern provision for giving Holy Communion to non-Catholics, mentioned in canon 844 of the present code, is misguided, without having to conclude that the man who issued it could not have been a pope.3

Again, the promulgation of a new sacramental rite, even if expresses some doctrine less clearly than before, is evidently not a denial of that doctrine.

Still less is every action of a pope a norm of faith. When St Peter briefly shunned table fellowship with Gentile Christians, one might say that his action implied that the Gentiles had not been fully cleansed by baptism; but he did not teach this, let alone demand on pain of excommunication that all Christians accept it. When Pope John Paul II invited representatives of ‘all world religions’ to come and pray for peace at Assisi, he probably gave many causal onlookers the (disastrous) impression that one religion is pretty much as good as another; but I do not believe that he himself believed this; still less did he teach it; least of all did he demand that other Catholics believe it. No churchman, after all, is impeccable. If a churchman sins and thus fails to obey God in his actions, does he lose office for implicitly teaching the heresy that “God is not to be obeyed”?

Yet while the different topics raised by sedevacantist authors are important, it is not in fact necessary, in order to respond adequately to their thesis, to go through the litany of charges one by one. It is sufficient to note that their position is self-contradictory.

These authors hold, rightly, that the Catholic Church cannot fail. They then use this true principle as a reason to condemn as impostors the popes of the past sixty years, and all the bishops who have held communion with these popes. But if this were correct, the correct conclusion would be that the Catholic Church had indeed failed. If there were no longer any popes or diocesan bishops, then Christ would no longer be with His Church, as He had been from the Ascension until the death of Pope Pius XII – and the New Testament would have strangely failed to warn us in advance of this momentous change.

Let us recall that the Church is a visible society, defined by reference to the papacy, through which Our Lord instructs, sanctifies, and governs His members. If there is no pope and no office-holders with the right to choose a new one, then this society no longer exists. Any men who are still teaching true doctrines and conferring valid sacraments are therefore not Catholics, since one cannot be a member of a society that does not exist. Contrary to Our Lord’s promise, there would no longer be any divine city set on a hill. There would be only the ruins of a city, from which men had taken bricks and stones to fashion for themselves a hovel in the valley.

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Videos of Recent Lectures

I haven’t been putting many lectures up on my YouTube page in recent months, but that’s now changed, with two new videos up, and a third to come soon.

My Catholic Identity Conference talk went up a few days ago: “The Traditional Latin Mass—What Truly Unites All the Clans.” After I delivered the speech, Bishop Athanasius Schneider said to me: “Your lecture is very precise, rich, and a good synthesis of the roots of the current crisis in the Church.” Here’s a taste:

The unity of Catholicism comes not from blind obedience to superiors but from professing one and the same faith, from being orthodox. The term “orthodoxy” means both right worship and right belief. It means worshiping God in a traditional apostolic rite and holding the deposit of faith....

Unity does not mean and has never meant uniformity. And in a time of crisis, we actually need “all hands on deck.” Whatever our differences as traditionalists may be—some of them legitimate, some of them debatable, some of them regrettable—now is not a time to wage war against one another, when we are threatened with liquidation at the hands of the worshipers of modernity.

Now is a time for mutual charity, as of brothers baptized into Christ, soldiering for their King; mutual toleration, as of patriots who disagree about civic policy but love their fatherland and are willing to die for it; mutual understanding, as of sympathetic souls enflamed by the same longing for divine beauty and holiness; and, last but not least, friendly cooperation in common endeavors.

This is not to promote a “lowest common denominator” approach; I would prefer to call it a “highest common good” approach! For God is the common good of the entire universe, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, and in the Holy Eucharist is contained the Real Presence of that common good, to which, or rather, to Whom, God’s mercy unites us. Nothing could be more important to focus on and prioritize than this Divine Fire of Charity—and how we approach Him, praise, adore, and receive Him.

I have also posted my Illinois talk, “Why Divine Worship Needs the Power of Non-Verbal Language” (this is one of my favorite topics to speak about!). The video includes a substantial Q&A section where, in place of mumbled questions from the audience, I have inserted typed-out questions on screen.

A couple of weeks ago I announced my new book. Here’s an “unboxing video” where I talk about it some more:

Upcoming Events

For readers who live in Europe:

Saturday, October 24, 2026
Nijmegen, Netherlands

“The Thomistic Virtue of Religion: From Sacred Order to Mystical Union”

Filosofie & Geloof (Philosophy & Faith) Study Day, 9:30am to 7pm
Symposium on Ethics and the Human Relationship with God
Pelgrimshuis Casa Nova
Pastoor Rabouplein 5
6564 BP Heilig Landstichting

(Please register here by October 18; Holy Mass in the traditional rite will be offered at the start of the day.)

Sunday, October 25 (Feast of Christ the King)
Brussels, Belgium

“Living the Liturgy as the Font and Apex of Catholic Life”

Het Oude Klooster Maleizen (Servi Jesu et Mariae)
Terhulpensesteenweg 708
3090 Overijse
Time: 3pm

(Free and open to the public; will be followed by Q&A and booksigning)

Tuesday, October 27
Brussels, Belgium

“Why Christ Is King of Family and Society—and How We Embrace His Reign”

Location: Het Oude Klooster Maleizen (as above)
Time: 7:30pm (Free, but open to men only, as it is being sponsored by and for a men’s group; register by contacting W.jambon@gmail.com)

Saturday, October 31
London, UK

“The Heavenly Model of the Earthly City”

Symposium on Catholic Social Teaching:
The Church’s Remedy for Modernity
Location: Cabrini Community Campus,
Honor Oak, London, SE23 3LE
Time: 2pm to 6pm

Featuring a second lecture by Dr. Sebastian Morello, a panel discussion with Os Justi Press authors, and a public Q&A followed by multi-author booksigning. Free and open to the public, but the organizers ask you to RSVP here.

Castellani

I'm delighted to announce Os Justi Press’s latest release: Christ and the Pharisees & Other Short Works by Leonardo Castellani (1899-1981).

A prolific author of about fifty books and a thousand articles, Castellani is widely revered as one of the greatest modern Argentine writers in multiple genres. Yet until now, English-speaking audiences have had almost no access to his remarkable body of work — a lacuna decisively changed by this new anthology, the first of its kind, equipped with a substantial introduction by the translator, Sebastián Randle.

A student of Cardinal Billot's, a pugilist for orthodoxy at a time of progressive disarray, and a faithful old-school Jesuit who fell afoul of his superiors and suffered years of marginalization, Castellani was at the same time unafraid to poke holes in conventional pieties and complained about unhealthy trends in the Church years before the Vatican II debacle brought many latent weaknesses to light.

Above all, Fr. Castellani was a supremely observant reader of Scripture and one of its finest modern commentators, capable of breathtaking insights into familiar texts, especially the Book of Revelation. All these characteristics are on full display in this enlightening and entertaining little volume, an ideal introduction to the wide scope of Castellani’s genius.

Christ and the Pharisees is available from the publisher in paperback, hardcover, or ebook (at that link you can also “look inside” to see a sample). I also made a video in which I talk about the book and share a couple of passages from it to give you a sense of his marvelous style and wit:

The book is also available from all Amazon outlets.

Speaking of Os Justi Press… our books continue to make waves (as they should!). Here’s a review of one of them, by distinguished professor of Christian literature and mystagogical mixologist Dr. Michael P. Foley:

Review of Abbé Claude Barthe, The Seven Sacraments, Past and Present: A Short Critical Study of the New Rituals

An incredible sale

While of course I appreciate it when people purchase my books from me directly (via the Os Justi Press site where I make signed copies available), I do want to tell you about a knock-your-socks-off sale going on right now at TAN Books: they are giving customers 70% off nearly all Latin Mass books and resources, including my four books from TAN (well, three books and a pamphlet), namely, Turned Around; Once and Future Roman Rite; Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence; and Ad Orientem:

This is a great time to stock up on copies to distribute! (For instance: maybe someone in Gaylord, Michigan, could buy a ton of Ad Orientem pamphlets and flood the diocese with them…)

A postscript of sorts

The Substack Oriens Journal—always worth reading—has announced that it will be running a series of articles in which official representatives of the SSPX will be presenting their case in writing, with charitable responses from those who disagree with them.

Oriens Journal

The Challenge of the SSPX: The Theological Question at the Heart of Traditionalism

We are announcing today Friday, October 16 that the Oriens Journal will publish the first of what we hope will be a series of articles from the SSPX. In them, a priest member designated by the Society for its public defence will explain and defend the Society’s positions, and the reasons for the actions taken since Archbishop Lefebvre founded it in 1970…

Read more

9 days ago · 47 likes · 21 comments · Oriens Journal and Fr Matthew Solomon

Although one can see some precursors to this kind of dialogue over at OnePeterFive and Pelican+, I would say the project as they have set it up is unique, and a true opportunity for mutual understanding. As you’ll discover in the inaugural post inserted above, the purpose and methodology are clear and Catholic. A highly commendable initiative and one worth following.

Allow me also to recommend Lint Hatcher’s new Substack Lost in the Church. His latest post there well captures the pendular back and forth of so many Catholics who are simply trying to find the truth in a chaotic period of time. I find that Hatcher has a wonderful way of finding the right words for what most of us are thinking and feeling, in a way that helps us to be more patient, more compassionate, and more thoughtful:

Lost in the Church

Apologia Pro “Waffling”

When we first encounter the cause of Tradition, there is a tendency to rush ahead and get a bird’s eye view…

Read more

8 days ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Linton Hatcher

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Sir Robert, Lord Winston, at 86, is not just an elder statesman of the science of human fertility, but may be said to be a major founder of the IVF industry: IVF being in vitro fertilisation: the creation of a human being outside the womb, in vitro, in glass, that is to say, in a test tube. As can happen with pioneers, he is not altogether pleased with what he helped to create: I don’t mean the human beings who have been born as a result of the procedure, but the $23 billion industry which exploits their would-be parents.

This emerged in a recent interview on the Triggernometry podcast, headlined “The IVF pioneer who says his own industry is lying”. The natural desire for children, for all the low birthrates of much of the world, has provided easy prey to those who use the techniques Winston developed to rake in staggering amounts of money. In the interview, Winston, loaded with honours for his work as he is, including a peerage, pointed out IVF’s shockingly low success rate: even after six attempts only 34% of patients end up with a baby. As he put it: “In Vitro fertilisation becomes a torture because you end up with women, if they can afford it, going for 18 cycles of IVF, they become professional patients.”

Equally shocking is the fact that the financial incentives for IVF clinics are such that they have no interest in investigating why a couple has not had children naturally. In many cases, Winston explained, relatively simple and inexpensive (and, one could add, ethical) medical interventions could deal with the issue, or the problem could be solved by weight loss, or simply by perseverance. Once a couple has come through the doors of an IVF clinic, however, they are on a production line that leads though multiple invasive medical techniques, if not to a bouncing baby, then at least to a hefty bill.

It was interesting to hear the father of IVF tell these home truths, which tend to be swept under the carpet by the media. He has already been cancelled to an extent, in fact, for saying on the BBC Newsnight programme that human beings cannot change sex (he’s never been asked back). However, it is not that uncommon for pioneers to be disappointed by what is done with their ideas.

For example, Larry Sanger, one of the two founders of Wikipedia, has so annoyed the Wikipedians with his criticisms that he has been permanently banned from editing it. Again, plenty of political revolutionaries have been distressed by the way their revolutions have panned out, and indeed nearly all of the early leaders of the French and Russian revolutions ended up being murdered by their comrades. However, Lord Winston has something in common with the likes of Robespierre and Trotsky in that, while he has a lot of harsh things to say about how his work has been developed and used, he is unwilling to question its first principles. In his case, this would be the wisdom of separating the generation of offspring from the marital act.

Read more

Given the relevance of this post for clergy and faithful everywhere, I am publishing it without a paywall.—Dr. K

On October 8, 2026, Most Rev. Jeffrey J. Walsh, Bishop of the Diocese of Gaylord (Michigan), issued three decrees concerning the sacred liturgy.

Let me start with the positive side. The lengthiest decree, entitled “Particular Law Regulating Decorum in the Celebration of Holy Mass in the Diocese of Gaylord,” has much to commend it, within the confines of the Novus Ordo (regular readers here will know where I stand on this liturgical form).

For example, he says the liturgy should be “celebrated with the fullest possible fidelity to the rites and texts approved by the Church, and with a dignity, beauty, joy, and reverence befitting the Mystery it makes present” (Preamble).

He notes that all ministers must act in conformity with the “rubrics and norms” of the liturgical books (Art. 1.1), that no minister may fool around with them (Art. 1.2), and that substitutions and inventions must not be indulged in (Art. 1.3).

He encourages “solemnity” of liturgy on major feasts and Sundays, promotes the chanting of Mass parts, burning of incense, and ringing of bells (Art 2.4; Art. 4; Art. 5), and an appropriate place for silence (Art. 3). (Honestly, I haven’t ever seen a modern bishop promote the use of bells, so this is a pleasant surprise!) He even notes that sensitivity to smoke should not be an excuse to avoid incense, but instead a Mass may be stipulated as incense-free, or the quantity and quality may be regulated.

He calls for vessels of precious metal (Art. 6), and repeats that priests are obliged to wear chasubles (Art. 7). Most remarkably, he echoes St. Pius X in saying “the singing of the Mass, not merely singing during the Mass, is preferred, following the hierarchy of liturgical texts” (Art. 8)—though one might have wished for an explicit mention that the normative chant of the Roman Rite is the Gregorian, as specified by Sacrosanctum Concilium and numerous subsequent documents.

I will come back to the end of this document below. Presently, I will turn to the other two decrees, about which, unfortunately, I can find only a single positive thing to say in each case.

The second decree is entitled “Particular Law Regulating the Celebration of the Mass ‘Versus Populum’ and ‘Ad Orientem’ in the Diocese of Gaylord.” We’ll post the images this time, as there are only two pages:

This is a fine example of a decree that can have no legal force, because it is premised on several factual errors.

1. The practice of versus populum (saying Mass facing the people) was not “restored,” because the original and authentic tradition was ad orientem (priest and people together facing eastward); it’s not like that was a deviation that had to be corrected. For a complete account of why Christians have always faced east in their worship, see either my booklet Ad Orientem: The Direction That Changes Everything (TAN, 2026) or chapter 1 of my book Turned Around: Replying to Common Objections Against the Traditional Latin Mass (TAN, 2024).

2. As numerous authors have explained, the Latin of no. 299 of the GIRM does NOT mean that Mass must be celebrated toward the people whenever possible. It means the altar should be freestanding so that it can be incensed all around, and so that Mass may be celebrated versus populum. For a full explanation, see Fr. Zuhlsdorf, “What does GIRM 299 really say?” (as well as this, this, and this).

3. Most importantly, a bishop’s local law cannot trump universal law, and the universal law clearly allows (indeed, presupposes) Mass ad orientem, as I have demonstrated in my article “The Normativity of Ad Orientem Worship According to the Ordinary Form’s Rubrics.” Analogously, a local bishop cannot mandate communion in the hand, given that communion on the tongue is still permitted, indeed is the universal norm.

4. The other bizarre thing about this decree is that the bishop attempts to forbid ad orientem for Sundays and Holy Days, while allowing it for up to two weekdays! How confusing is that? Once people understand why the priest should be properly oriented, they will simply prefer this all the time; and it will displease everyone to have the priest turning this way or that depending on the day of the week. Does no one think these things through?

5. Sadly, the way the bishop speaks about ad orientem in the decree makes it sound as if it’s something rather dangerous, slightly naughty, and potentially distressing for the people. Granted, some pastoral preparation is always needed, but it’s not rocket science, and it’s not hard to get used to the traditional way; in fact, it’s far more intuitive.

Then we come to the third decree: “Particular Law Regulating the Use of Ministers in the Celebration of Holy Mass in the Diocese of Gaylord.” Once again, let’s have a look at this two-page thing:

This decree, I’m afraid, is equally baseless.

1. The view that so-called “lay liturgical ministries” stem from baptism and are not related to orders is an error, seen against the unanimous witness of Eastern and Western Christian liturgy and theology. For a detailed treatment of this, see my book Ministers of Christ: Recovering the Roles of Clergy and Laity in an Age of Confusion (Crisis Publications, 2021). For something online, I recommend Bishop Schneider’s “The Significance of Minor Ministries in the Sacred Liturgy.”

2. The bishop seems to imply that there is some kind of obligation to utilize lay ministers, but existing legislation allows rather than mandates lay ministers—and that makes considerable difference when it comes to pastoral policy at the parish level.

3. The custom of reserving such ministries to men is ancient and laudable, as was discussed in this post:

4. Indeed, the standing law of the Church is that no diocese, and no individual priest, is obliged to admit females to altar serving. By taking this step, the bishop once again places himself outside of universal norms.

5. Most absurdly of all, the bishop specifies 100 communicants (!) as the threshold at which EMHCs (Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion) are required in order to avoid unduly prolonging the time of communion. Against this, the 1997 document On Certain Questions Regarding the Collaboration of the Non-Ordained Faithful states:

   Extraordinary ministers...may also exercise this function at eucharistic celebrations where there are particularly large numbers of the faithful and which would be excessively prolonged because of an insufficient number of ordained ministers to distribute Holy Communion.... To avoid creating confusion, certain practices are to be avoided and eliminated where such have emerged in particular Churches: ... the habitual use of extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion at Mass, thus arbitrarily extending the concept of “a great number of the faithful.”

   Many other documents say the same, as I cover exhaustively in an old article (these errors have been around for quite a while) and in my book The Holy Bread of Eternal Life: Restoring Eucharistic Reverence in an Age of Impiety (Sophia Institute Press, 2020).

6. I hate to say it, but if your idea of a Mass unduly prolonged is that 100 people have to receive communion from a single priest, you need to see a psychiatrist about impatience struggles, or at least you need to do some more serious spiritual reading. I recently attended a conference where about 500 people received, kneeling down in lines, from a single priest. Yes, it took a while. So what. We prayed.

7. Thus, this decree has no legal force either.

As mentioned above, I’ve written two books about the topics of these two decrees, demonstrating exhaustively and unanswerably that there is no basis whatsoever in the Catholic tradition for “lay ministers of Holy Communion” and for female ministers of any kind. This is sheer novelty, and harmful novelty at that, the effects of which compound over time like a usurious loan. I challenge everyone who supports these practices to read the books and see what they think afterwards:

***

OBJECTION: So what if the second and third decrees have no force? A priest couldn’t disobey them without suffering punishment. He would be removed, canceled, suspended, etc. The bishop has all the power and the priest has none.

RESPONSE: You’re saying the priests would be hung out to dry; they’d be victims of thuggery. That would not be far from the truth. However, it’s not entirely true that priests have no recourse; they could submit dubia to the Dicastery for Legislative Texts as the priests of the Charlotte diocese did, and this action would suspend the decrees, as far as I understand.

And now I come, at last, to the single positive thing I can say about the second and third decrees:

“Masses celebrated according to the 1962 Missale Romanum are governed by their own norms, so that the particular law promulgated herein does not apply to them.”

The same language is used in both documents.

In this simple sentence, we learn the ultimate solution to the priests’ problems: fleeing the battle-scarred, muddy no-man’s land of the Novus Ordo for the green pastures of tradition.

Surely, very few priests will ever actually do this, but those who already understand the wisdom of tradition know, in their heart of hearts, that they should; that the modern approach has gone badly wrong; that pushing hard on the rupture-points between the tradition of the Church and its attempted replacement is not healthy for the priests or for their people. That all of this is a recipe for frustration and worse—resentment, burnout, loss of vocations, doubts…

Unfortunately, there is a somewhat menacing “Article 11” in the first of the decrees, and its provisions leapt out at me upon a first reading:

1. The Vicar for Clergy, Vicar Forane, or other delegate of the Bishop may, in the course of pastoral or canonical visitation, verify observance of this particular law.

Visitations to parishes to verify observance…

2. Persistent or willful disregard of the rubrics of the Roman Missal, or of this particular law, is to be addressed first by fraternal correction and formation; where this proves insufficient, the matter is to be referred to the Bishop for such further action as the law provides (cf. c. 1364 §2 and related canons, as applicable).

Detailed observance of this bishop’s exact will, when it comes to having altar girls, female ministers of Communion, versus populum Masses, etc. etc….

Them’s fightin’ words, as the saying goes.

P.S. Here’s what a distinguished music director and musicologist said when I shared these decrees with him:

It’s a mixed bag. I can see that he’s trying to do the right thing, and I applaud him for actually legislating rather than supposing that encouragement on its own will achieve the kind of change that is needed. It sets a helpful precedent for other bishops. The decree on versus populum makes an elementary mistake in its reasoning, and since he lacks authority to forbid what the Roman legislation regards as the norm, anyone who wants to appeal would be able to make a case worth hearing (not that I would assume any more). The one about lectors and acolytes... where to start? What he says about music is not so bad, but it would be easy to improve on it.

That was my impression: a well-intentioned bishop who is totally out of his depth on these questions, and/or who is advised by those who are only half-educated (which, to be honest, is about 90+% of the clergy these days, mostly not through their own fault but because the seminary system is so broken, and the accumulated customs are so bad).

Every now and then, a book appears that ought to have a much wider impact and readership than it receives. As a writer who has worked with a dozen publishers and as the director of a publishing house, I am well acquainted with the variables and dynamics. Chance and luck play a much greater role than anyone on the outside might guess. A book’s cover or title might fail to gain attention or, on the contrary, might deflect it—for example, if there’s a Latin phrase, or the visage of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, either might “scare people away”—all the more, both!

I believe that Fr. Serafino Lanzetta’s study, Super Hanc Petram: The Pope and the Church at a Dramatic Moment in History, is a book of remarkable lucidity, charity, and theological profundity—and an example of a book that has not yet found the readership it deserves. One of the very strange effects of the fast-moving social media age in which we live is that Catholics are likely to consider the Francis pontificate to be “a thing of the past,” something not worthy thinking about or studying—as if the Church can simply “move on” and ignore the damage he has done, the doctrinal errors he has sown, the institutionalization of abuse for which he is responsible. On the contrary, Catholics need to have memories that store up decades, centuries, and millennia; we need intellects that range from eternity across time.

Bluntly said: we need to derive fruit from the Francis papacy by allowing its challenges to refine our understanding of the papacy and of genuine Catholic doctrine. That is what Lanzetta’s book accomplishes. The following excerpts will give you a good taste of it.

From the foreword by Roberto de Mattei:

The first and most important contribution this book offers is of an ecclesiological nature. Father Lanzetta seeks to define accurately the pope’s role and the institution of the papacy. He shows the danger of giving precedence to pastoral care over doctrine, to action over being, to the person of the pope over the institution of the Church. Original and interesting reflections are dedicated to the correct relationship between the pope and the Church. There is no Church without the pope, Father Lanzetta affirms, but neither is there the pope without the Church. The formula ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia must necessarily and ontologically correspond to ubi Ecclesia, ibi Petrus.

Peter is the rock of the Church; he is the one who in himself serves as the foundation for the building up of the Church; Peter’s faith is the presupposition of his constitution as a rock. “Faith is united to the person and therefore we could speak of Peter, the pope, as a believing person. Faith is the reason for his being a rock and the rock, which is his own person, is in turn based on faith in Christ and on the faith of the Church.” To put Peter’s personal faith before the faith of the Church is to slip into subjectivism and dogmatic relativism. Hence, there is a profound unity between the person of Peter and the faith of Peter. (viii)

The rest of the quotations are from Fr. Lanzetta.

We must understand in what way Peter is kepha—in name and in fact, by virtue of his faith in Christ—to be able to grasp if and under what conditions this rock might be allowed to crumble without the Church itself crumbling. We must reflect on this pair of realities, pope-Church, and show their profound unity in a hierarchical relationship. This relationship includes distinction, with not Peter, but Christ, at its center; Peter is dependent upon Christ and the Church. The love and honor due to the pope is indisputable, amplified to the utmost with the dogma of the Roman Pontiff’s infallibility. All this is certainly Catholic and must remain so.

But one cannot deny the risk of excess—of accentuating the role of the pontiff to such an extent that the Church, and thus the Faith, is seen as in some way dependent on him as an individual man. In reality, it is the pope who depends on the Church and on her faith, and not the opposite. His action should be circumscribed within the confines of the mystery-Church of which he is the foundation, within the confines of the Church’s doctrine of faith and morals. The Church in some way precedes the pope in her being constituted as ekklesia and as a salvific body on the foundation of the Twelve by virtue of the offering of the Body of Christ. The pope is the servant of this mystery, for he must preserve its unity and never propose a confused multiplicity of teachings, even if speciously justified in the name of pastoral action. (xiv)

The notion of integral ecology, which had man at its center, as the sole creature to be made in the image and likeness of the Creator, has now become the ecology of the Earth, of nature, while man is somehow criminalized, together with all modern technology, for having exploited “Mother Earth.” If the Earth takes the place of man, what will be the theological and moral standard of the social magisterium? The Earth without man portrayed in Laudato Si’ is man without Christ in Fratelli Tutti. (xvi)

It seems that while the figure of Pope Francis stands out on the world stage, the role of the pope and the divine institution of the papacy have been obscured. There is a noticeable rift between person and ministry. (2)

Important for the sedevacantism question:

There is a profound unity between the person of Peter and the faith of Peter. They are so united that they are no longer separable, unless a pope chooses to be unfaithful to his mission of being the rock, to renounce believing and thus to renounce confirming his brethren. It is Peter himself who, chosen by Christ, is founded on the immutable rock of the Faith and this rock is Christ alone. Christ founds the faith of Peter and therefore brings into being the person of the pope as the rock of the Church. In this manner Christ establishes the Church on a firm and unchanging foundation. Even if the faith of this or that pope were to fail, Peter’s faith would never do so, as it is always a divine gift of interior illumination.

When a pope renounces the exercise of his munus proper, which is confirming the brethren in the Faith, and even goes so far as teaching ambiguous doctrines verging on heresy, that does not immediately mean that that pope is not a true pope. Rather, we would need to ask how it is possible for the faith of a pope to fail. Although raised to the highest degree of dignity in the Church, with a grace proportionate to his state, he still remains Simon—someone who struggles to become Peter and lets himself be dazzled by various temptations, by the spirit of the age which from time to time proposes an easier way, a way that is not that of the Cross. Simon would prefer Jesus to refrain from going to Jerusalem to be crucified and to die, but is rebuked in no uncertain terms, because he had become like Satan, one who divides man from God (cf. Mt 16:21–23). Peter, on the other hand, once he repented, allows himself to be crucified like the Master. (20-21)

When Jesus declares Peter blessed for having correctly professed faith in His divinity, He also highlights the fact that that faith was not revealed to him by flesh or blood. In other words, it is not the fruit of his human ability, but revealed by the Father who is in heaven (cf. Mt 16:17). This supposes that there could be a pseudo-faith or an erroneous teaching stemming from the flesh and blood of Peter, that is, from that material and this-worldly man that Peter still remains.

This can be seen, for example, in Peter’s duplicitous behavior, when he ate with the pagans and then kept himself apart from them out of fear of the circumcised (cf. Gal 2:11–14). Paul had to correct him publicly. If he had not, this ambiguous pastoral behavior, based on a doctrinal ambiguity about the Torah’s role as it related to faith in Christ, which operates by means of charity, would have led to two Christian communities being created: one comprised of the pagans and the other, more orthodox, of converts from Judaism. Peter would thus have been the cause of scandal and schism in the Church. But Paul justly opposes him openly (cf. Gal 2:11).67 Rare are those in our day who, like Paul, have the courage and determination to do likewise in similar circumstances. (22-23)

Peter must believe with the whole Church; he must profess his faith correctly so that he can confirm others in that same faith. Faith is above the pope and is therefore the only thing capable of judging him. In one of his sermons, Innocent III expounded this very important doctrine: faith is so necessary to the pope that, while for all his sins God alone is his judge, for sins committed against the Faith, he can be judged by the Church. This principle can already be found in the Decretum Gratiani, where there is an assertion attributed to St. Boniface (bishop of Mainz and quoted by Ivo of Chartres), according to which the pope can err in the Faith, therefore he cannot be judged by anyone except when he deviates from the Faith.

Canon 1404 of the CIC, which reads “prima sedes a nemine judicatur” underlines the injudicability of the Roman Pontiff as supreme legislator. He who makes the law is not judged by the law. This is canon law, above which, nevertheless, there is the immutability of the Church’s faith as received and transmitted. The law is made in accordance with the faith of the Church and for the sake of protecting this faith. Just as the Code of Canon Law depends on divine Revelation, so the pope depends on the faith emanating from divine Revelation itself. It follows that the “Bishop of Rome who leads the first See as Successor of Peter is not above the Gospel or the Church. Nor can Peter’s Office be understood by analogy to an absolutist czar or dictator.” (30-31)

Faith therefore judges Peter, and the holy faith alone. In this sense, when the Church remains united as a believing body, the union of all the members with their Head in the one sensus fidei is superior to Peter and judges a Peter lost in the meanderings of human and worldly thought. The infallibility in credendo of the Church precedes the infallibility in docendo. In such a case, even the humblest baptized person who professes the Symbol of Faith would be authorized to rise up and correct the miscreant pope.

The view is currently fashionable that the pope’s infallibility (ex cathedra) would prevent the person of Peter from losing the Faith or from falling into doctrinal or moral errors. However, this is akin to saying that faith is the property of the pope or that it is the pope who makes the Faith. The Faith, instead, precedes Peter and only in this way infallibly establishes the Church. A pope who became a heretic in a formal way would contradict his Petrine ministry, but this would not mean that the Church would fail, since the gates of hell have no power against it.

Furthermore, the pope who became a heretic would not demonstrate that he is not a true pope, but only that he is a pope without the faith of the Church, one with a human faith in a heretical doctrine—just as Judas’s betrayal of his ministry does not mean that he was not a true apostle, or as Peter’s denial of the Lord at the culminating moment when he should have borne witness to Him does not mean he lost the munus to confirm his brethren. These lapses prove only that Judas and Peter, in different ways, were unfaithful to the grace of their ministry. (37-38)

The pope’s power does not absorb that of the bishops due to the fact that both the papacy and the episcopate are of divine institution. The pope is given neither the right nor the power to change the rights and duties of the episcopate. (39)

At the end of this chapter, we wish to summarize the main assumptions and the conclusions reached. Peter is the Rock of the Church, that is, the one who with his person, chosen by Christ, serves as the foundation for the building up of the Church. To be this and to remain a “rock” despite the waves and calamities to which Christ’s ship is subject, he must be subject to the Word of God; he must remain faithful to that faith which he professes insofar as he is illumined interiorly by the Holy Spirit. The faith is a gift of Christ to Peter, so that the latter, by believing, will confirm his brethren. Only by believing with the Church and with her uninterrupted traditio can he confirm his brethren. The faith precedes Peter, just as Christ precedes the Church. The Church, the believing Body, united to its divine Head by virtue of the Holy Spirit, always therefore precedes the person of Peter—and every other bishop who succeeds the Fisherman of Galilee—not only chronologically but also ontologically. For Peter to be a rock for the Church and not a stumbling block, it is therefore necessary that he be a persona credente. If the Faith is the reason for his being a rock, the rock, which is himself, must be founded in turn on faith in Christ and on the faith of the Church.

If Peter decides not to believe with that faith which he receives as a gift, he will not be able to confirm his brethren. Yet he will not, for that reason, lose his office. This is the greatest mystery to be reckoned with. A man could be pope because he was elected to fill this office, without actually being that for which he was chosen. Such a situation would surely provoke unprecedented doctrinal confusion, causing disruption due to the absence of a sure guide and the obfuscation of the office of unity to which Peter is called. It would be a sort of Holy Saturday of the absence of Christ, where, however, faith does not vacillate because it is all in the Heart of Mary, the Heart of the one who believes in an immaculate manner as the Church-Spouse and thus sustains the Church in her darkest moments. (41-42)

The problem is the silent apostasy in the Church, completely atypical because it is not the rejection of the Faith sic et simpliciter, a refusal to believe as such, but the transformation of the Faith into something else. We are faced with a liquid apostasy, which has its roots in the tried and tested attempt to separate the doctrinal aspect of Revelation from the pastoral one. (52)

This notion appears to be quite widespread today, and quite popular in the Church among prelates and theologians. What is newer is always better. It is not simply the pursuit of novelty that captivates, but rather the idea that in the new, in the present becoming, there is a better awareness. A new pope abrogates a previous papacy, abrogates a missal, establishes a new practice, inaugurates a new tradition, or rather a new way of understanding tradition. In other words, there is a continuity of becoming, rather than a continuity of being. Becoming precedes being and Heraclitus triumphs over Parmenides. (100)

It is undoubtedly commendable to hope that one day men will unite in common values, renounce selfishness and injustice, forego waging war, and abandon the lust for power which reduces God’s holy creation to a consumer wasteland. However, one cannot ignore the reality of original sin, which has deeply wounded man both in himself as well as in his relationship with God, and therefore, with the whole of creation. Yet there is no reference to original sin in the papal document [Fratelli Tutii], nor to the notion of salvation in Christ, who, by dying for us, reconciled us with the Father, and thus restored the conditions for reconciliation between all men.

The desire to create a new, fraternal, and reconciled world apart from God and His Son, Jesus Christ, is yet another false promise of the ancient serpent of Genesis: you will be like gods, you will choose—instead of God and without Him—what is good and what is evil. Your life is in your own hands. That promise, however, turned out to be empty and ruinous from the start. The man, Adam, who opted for this do-it-yourself approach, did not establish, along with his descendants, a closely knit and happily united human family. The egotism inherent in the sin of disobedience to God has inclined him instead to a universal, fundamental, and destructive selfishness. (108)

The vision of time starting from eternity is lacking in Francis’s encyclical, and this deficiency has the result of shrinking the discourse to the here and now, to the moment in which we are living. (110)

The formal object of an encyclical letter is therefore missing: God who reveals Himself and the faith that emanates from divine revelation, which distinguishes a pontifical encyclical from a mere missive, enabling it to be inscribed in the long line of an authentic and ordinary magisterium. (111)

The unity shattered by original sin and pride is re-formed in the Son, so that whoever possesses the Son, professing faith in Him, also possesses the Father, but whoever denies the Son and finds an alternative filiation-fraternity does not even possess the Father, has no God (cf. 1 Jn 2:23). (113)

The Good Samaritan, in reality, is Jesus Himself…. It is in Christ that the concept of “neighbor” acquires a universal connotation. This is the case, moreover, with the mystery of the Redemption: He died for all so that all might be redeemed from evil and sin and brought back to God. Thus, all those who live might no longer for themselves but for Him who for their sake died and was raised (cf. Eph 1:7; 2 Cor 5:15). There is no trace in the parable of the Good Samaritan of a merely human love, nor of an altruism with philanthropic traits; it contains the revelation of Christian love, of God’s love put into practice (cf. 1 Jn 4:7). “Love is of God” (ibid.) because “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). There is no anonymous, neutral, religiously indifferent love. Neither is such a love present in the Gospel, nor in the world, nor in the life of Christians who live in the world, since, if Christ died for all, “all have died” with Him (2 Cor 5:14), that is, all are redeemed by His Blood poured out for many (Mt 26:28). (115-16)

Of the possibility that someone might be cast by the wayside of life due to sin against God, there is no hint. (117)

This [blessing of homosexuals] is truly something unheard of and unprecedented. Now the battle is being fought openly in the Church and not over an article of faith, such as, for example, at the time of Arianism, the theandric mystery of Christ, but over an even more basic issue, one which undergirds the Faith. Therefore, if this truth collapses, the edifice of Revelation inevitably collapses.

At stake is the question of man as created by God and mankind’s identity as male and female; marriage as a natural and supernatural covenant between man and woman, and therefore the Church as a spousal mystery. If the complementarity between man and woman falls, a fortiori the typological-spousal signification of Christ and the Church falls. If the mystery-Church falls, the sacraments are abolished, grace is annulled, and much more besides, with a devastating domino effect, the preliminaries of which are already in Amoris Lætitia. This is an extremely serious situation. Behind the apparent mercy in blessing all kinds of love, because after all “love is love,” is the anthropological lie of the man who wants to create himself, without God and against Him. It is resuscitated Eden, where the real teacher ex cathedra is the devil.

We are facing a revolution that lays hold of what is truly essential, natural, human. But like all revolutions that glory in the name, its cessation is never predictable. The one we face has gone even further. It does not stop at man. It next tries to replace human nature, created and redeemed man, with green nature, with trees and rivers. The anthropocentric turn of Gaudium et Spes, blessed by Paul VI, criticized during the Council by Karl Rahner but then promoted and developed explicitly by him in the postconciliar period, is now just a rainbow reminiscence of cravings and instincts blessed with lots of holy water.

At the center, however, is no longer man, certainly not Christ, but Mother Earth. Ecologism is the new soteriology, and climate change experts its prophets. Quite a few dioceses, for example, are now committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2030 in parishes and curial buildings. But whether people still go into these buildings seems not to be a matter of pastoral concern. Astonished, one wonders how it could have come to this. What went wrong at the philosophicaltheological level to make possible proposing the salvation of the planet, the condemnation of “green sin,” while opening the door to real sin and human misery? Christ is not there, but after all, His absence does not even seem that relevant to us. Christ has become a means to talk about something else. His name allows one to give oneself a name, Christian, in today’s multicultural and syncretistic Areopagus, yet God seems to be just a name, one that comfortably brings together the most diverse religions. He Himself doesn’t matter much anymore. (165-66)

Ultimately, we seem to be trapped in a self-aggrandizing labyrinthine circle, where conciliar is synonymous with synodal, synodal synonymous with Church, and Church synonymous with the Second Vatican Council. (168)

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When I was in high school and college, I wrote a good deal of poetry. It started off free-form, in that lazy way moderns have, but soon, under the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Francis Thompson, T.S. Eliot, and like representatives of “The Other Modern,” I began to try my hand at more traditional forms. The high point was a one-act play, written in heroic couplets, about the destruction of a monastery by French revolutionaries, written at Georgetown University in the fall of 1989, a bicentennial opportunity that could not be missed, at a location that was gorging on the revolution’s fruits. Then, in a sort of puritanical phase, I destroyed all of this verse—a foolish act I now regret. But one poem somehow escaped the purge. It’s not my best, but it has sentimental value… and it is relevant to my story.

Church light-filled! stretto-spires heavenward flying
To greet God, Maker, Master, Harmony
Of souls; Church truth-belov’d, deceit-denying,
Inflamed with amorous divinity:
O mighty Chartres (in glass a thousand tales
Beyond world’s ends), stone bends to supplicate
The faithful Virgin, whom our prayer assails
Meek, confident. “I bid thee, hurl this weight
Of sin into the sea, a mountain planted
Deep.” Thus the villager; thus lord and king,
All men, athirst for light, contritely panted,
Pilgrims laved and fed at grace’s spring.
O Virgin, glass-beheld, in sculpture fair,
I beg thee: Hear with living ears my prayer.

I wrote this poem in high school not because I had already been to Chartres cathedral or had immediate prospects of visiting, but because I had just finished reading Henry Adams’s Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, in which a cultivated agnostic enthuses over medieval Catholic France. I was inspired, too, just by his telling of the travelogue, by his array of impressions.

The year in which Henry Adams privately published Mont Saint Michel and Chartres—1904—happens to have been the same year in which the French liberal unbeliever, Marcel Proust, published an article in Figaro, “The Death of Cathedrals.” The similarities are remarkable: two introspective intellectuals, cultured agnostics on opposite shores, who were fascinated by the glories of Gothic art and architecture (“the masterpiece that is the medieval cathedral, with its thousands of painted or sculpted figures, its chants, its services, is the noblest of all the works to which the genius of France has ever risen,” writes Proust)—cultural relics of what was, to them, a superannuated religion, yet a religion whose relics, transmitted down through the ages, still touched and healed their fellow men in the present time.

Surely Proust and Adams must have had analogous experiences in order to write as movingly as they did of the incomparable value of the French churches born of divine faith. Proust in particular saw, or rather felt, that the edifices built for this sublime cultus cried out to be worshiped in, for that was their soul, their source of life: “The most beautiful works of French architecture and sculpture…will die on the day that they no longer serve the worship for which they were born, which is their function just as they are its organs, which explains them because it is their soul.”­

The most famous chapter in Adams’s book is entitled “The Virgin and the Dynamo”: a contrast between the Queen of Heaven whose devotees at Chartres built her a marvelous shrine full of radiance, and the impersonal forty-foot electrical generator that Adams had beheld at the Great Exposition in Paris in 1900, symbol of a mechanistic, industrialized civilization. This contrast—whether cast in terms of Adams’s competition between a virgin mother’s shrine and a lifeless generator, or in Proust’s more subtle opposition between the effete aestheticism of Bayreuth or scholarly reconstructions of ancient tragedies and the living Christian faith that sustained the rites still celebrated in the places built to house them1—invites us to consider the two aspects from which technology can be evaluated: quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative superiority means, for example, being able to lift a larger number of heavier objects faster, or being able to produce more books more quickly. Qualitative superiority means being able to craft a beautiful object such as a statue, a stained-glass window, or an illuminated manuscript, even if it takes a very long time and the objects are comparatively few in number. This distinction having been made, it is easy to draw the conclusion that medieval technology was superior to modern in a qualitative sense, while modern technology is superior to medieval only in a quantitative sense. In the end, which is the more important of the two?

“In the modern world of measurements,” writes André Gushurst-Moore, “success is defined in physical terms, by that which is faster, bigger, taller—the celebration of power.”2 One is reminded of the difference between the ancient Roman lectionary still contained in the Tridentine missal, as perfectly suited for its purpose as a slender Gothic column or a vaulted arch, and the modern multi-volume lectionary used for the Novus Ordo, a heaped-up pile of Soviet-style apartment blocs.

In 2015, about twenty-five years after writing that poem, I finally made it to Chartres (in fact, almost exactly eleven years ago, for the visit happened at the start of October). I was not among those jolly, flag-bearing strong souls who make the trek by foot singing through mud and rain on the famous pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres—one might say, from the Dynamo to the Virgin. The grace of this visitation came rather during a father-son trip made while I was on sabbatical.

My son and I arrived at the sleepy medieval town on a train from Paris. Given our limited time, we had had to make a difficult choice: visit St. Denis, the first of Gothic churches, or Chartres, the finest of them. St. Thérèse’s “I choose all!” strategy was not going to work in this situation. We agreed on Chartres, the very name of which is like sweet mead or glistening water.

When I first caught sight of the spires, my heart began to race. As we drew near, I fell in love with her face, which I knew was no mere façade but an earnest of the vastitude within, as in the verse omnis gloria eius filiae regis ab intus (Psalm 44:14).3 And when we entered, and my eyes had adjusted to the soothing half-light, I was transported out of myself and did not return to my shoes for a long time: my mind was soaring elsewhere, my eyes lost in dizzying vaults and shimmering glass. I do not know how to describe my feelings, except to say with Dionysius the Areopagite: it was no mere learning of divine things, but a suffering of them.

After we had left, I wrote the following in my journal.

“October 1. Chartres Cathedral is, indeed, a ‘miracle in stone and glass.’ I have never seen a church more beautiful than this. Nothing in Rome can even begin to compare with it. It utterly lacks the pomposity, worldliness, self-importance, and humanistic vanity of the Renaissance structures of Italy, the self-conscious triumphalism of the Counter-Reformation Baroque. It is grand but always turned heavenwards—and turning one’s soul heavenwards. There is deep humility and prayer built into, nay fused with, this immensely impressive edifice. Everywhere God is glorified in His saints, in the light that pours through the windows, ever shifting as the day proceeds, in the colors, the eyes, the sculptures… I said to J.: it is nothing less than the Bible in glass and stone. To say that medievals who could understand these images were ‘illiterates’ would be to say that moderns who cannot are idiots.

“Baroque art stresses God become man, heaven penetrating into this world—in the sacraments, the Eucharist, the priesthood, the Church visible as a body. It is deliberately sensual, bodily, plastic, dramatic. Gothic speaks rather of man aspiring to God, earth being lifted up to heaven, the ascent of the soul via Christ to God. It is straining to leave the body, to let the light suffuse and transfigure everything visible so that it might shine with intimations of divinity and immortality. The light-colored stone works together with the great height and the exquisite windows to create an effect of weightless uplift: Sursum corda. It is not so much dramatic as symbolic—more prayer than propaganda. It delivers its message with the existential shock of beauty. But how many are receptive to this shock anymore? Sure, every visitor can say: ‘It’s lovely’ or ‘it’s amazing,’ but does it have a deep and lasting impact on them? In these times, when everyone’s eyes are glued to smartphones, when their ears are stuffed with earbuds, the words of Jesus take on a pitiful sound: ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear; he who has eyes to see, let him see.’4

“Nothing we have done in architecture could even compare with Chartres, let alone equal it or surpass it. Built by people with so little technology compared to ours! But they had faith, vision, wonder, ambition, and the desire to give God the greatest and best. Yet moderns are arrogant, and put down the Middle Ages. This shows how blind we really are (or have become).

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I’m pleased to publish today a guest article by Linton Hatcher, a writer and illustrator who created Rondo-nominated WONDER magazine, which traces how the numinous can be found in all manner of oddball popular culture. He is currently at work on a science-fiction graphic novel, “Send in the Clowns,” and writes at his new Substack “Lost in the Church,” which I highly recommend. In my correspondence with him, I’ve found him to be consistently deeply insightful about the situation in the Church; one exchange in particular led to this essay, which I commend to your attentive reading.—PAK

So, there I was: attending the first night of our parish’s weeklong Eucharistic Congress. The whole point of the event—organized by a parishioner I knew—was to pray steadily before the very Presence of Our Lord for our parish, for the Church, for the entire world.

The Eucharist was exposed in the monstrance with ceremony and reverence. Adoration followed.

Then, the organizer approached the ambo, made sure the microphone was working, and began to introduce a speaker. “From Steubenville!” she was careful to emphasize. As she spoke, she seemed to realize furtively: the monstrance remained on the altar, the Host remained exposed. She blinked. She offered a tiny bow. She continued. “Like I said, from Steubenville…!” The speaker stepped up from one of the pews. She, too, seemed momentarily taken aback. But she dove into her presentation, pacing back and forth in front of the altar.

I was shocked. There was the Lord. On the altar. Truly present. We should be on our knees—adoring.

I gazed around, bewildered. There was our kind, faithful priest from Africa, his arm casually draped across the back of his pew. There were the “old Catholics,” by which I mean the retirees who attend morning Mass every day, and who faithfully pray the Rosary afterward. I knew these people were devout. Yet, there they were: smiling, chuckling—not at all affected as I was.

Was I in the wrong to be disturbed? A snob? A troublemaker?

I went home and did a bit of research. Turns out: back in the day, should a talk be given during extended adoration, it was common practice to veil the monstrance. I wasn’t crazy after all. The pain and bewilderment I felt was true.

Veiling the monstrance was a simple matter. I reached out to our pastor and asked if, for the rest of the Congress, something along those lines could be observed. No reply.

There is a thorn in my poor cerebellum. This thorn is triggered when a priest (or an entire diocese) defends the Real Presence, yet persists in actions—choices of form—that undermine that very reality. The frequency of such choices suggests, not occasional mistakes, but a bona fide syndrome.

It was with great interest, then, that I read a recent article by Peter Kwasniewski in which quotations from Yves Chiron’s biography of Pope Paul VI illustrated precisely the same contrast: in his writings, Paul VI takes a firm stance against Modernism, in favor of traditional Catholic doctrine, and yet, in his actions, Paul VI ventures—one might even say sprints—in the opposite direction.

Naming a thing sometimes reduces the pain it causes. Based on Chiron’s biography and on Martin Mosebach’s book The Heresy of Formlessness, it struck me that perhaps Giovanni Battista Montini experienced—as a lens through which he saw the world—a “predisposition toward formlessness.” Let me explain.

Rooms Without a View

“All bishops had been consulted on the opportunity of authorizing the distribution of the consecrated host into the hands of the faithful,” writes Chiron. “The majority of the bishops of the world were…hostile to a modification of tradition on this point.” Paul VI, too, “was personally hostile to communion in the hand.” Nevertheless, “out of concern not to hinder the liberty of episcopal conferences, and anxious to respect diverse opinions, Paul VI refused to establish a common law for the Church on this matter.”

This is but one example of many. That this could occur within one individual suggests, at some fundamental level, a bifurcation between content and form. Content sits in one mental room. Form in another. A solid wall divides the two. Somehow, Paul VI was capable of living this way—affirming the content of the Faith on the one hand, while on the other pursing experimental forms that diminished the perennial lex orandi that incarnated that same content in the lives of the faithful.

The average layperson, by and large, does not have content in one room in his mind and form in another, so that one may do whatever one likes with form, while leaving content intact. When “what we have always done” is radically altered—even with the claim of returning to a more vital, early Church expression—a centuries-old interdependence of form and content is shattered. The laity balk. And walk.

As Martin Mosebach puts it, “If people who have been kneeling for a thousand years suddenly get to their feet, they do not think, ‘We’re doing this like the early Christians, who stood for the Consecration’; they are not aware of returning to some particularly authentic form of worship.” Instead:

They simply get up, brush the dust from their trouser legs, and say to themselves, ‘So, it wasn’t such a serious business after all.’ Under such circumstances, anthropologically speaking, it is quite impossible for faith in the presence of Christ in the Sacrament to have any deeper spiritual significance, even if the Church continues to proclaim it and even if the participants of such celebrations go so far as to affirm it explicitly.

Shades of the Eucharistic Congress!

Paul VI witnessed an unanticipated collapse in the laity’s response. He frantically attempted to fix this. But—if our theory holds—he saw through the lens of bifurcation. He had no other set of eyes. He rushed to the Content Room! Affirmed the Creed! And left the new “orientations” of the Form Room entirely in place, to do their work, as they necessarily will.

A “Two-Story” Model

Is there a sociological term for this bifurcation? Does it show up in other areas of life?

I am put in mind of something I encountered in the writings of Dr. Francis Schaeffer, back when I was an Evangelical. Schaeffer proposed a Two-Story structure in modern minds. The Lower Story deals with the “real world” where, it is taken for granted, truth can be had only by way of the scientific method. Reason is associated with this Lower Story—exclusively. The Upper Story—in the clouds, as it were—deals in faith, meaning, beauty, moral notions, none of which are (according to “science”) credibly tethered to reality.

There is no staircase in the Two-Story structure. The Upper Story just sits there. Apart. And yet, the modern mind desires belief, meaning, purpose. So, an attempt is made to enter the Upper Story—by an irrational “leap of faith.” Faith being, by nature (again, in this view), removed from reason.

Is there something helpful in this model? Certainly, we find a similar concept: two rooms in the human mind, separated, where wholeness should exist. What I want to know is: “Where are the stairs?” And, not insignificantly: “Of what does the staircase consist?”

Sunk deep in scientific materialism and existentialism, Western thought, Schaeffer insisted, had crossed a “line of despair” beyond which the Average Joe had no credible methodology for establishing truth in religion or morality. Thus, while the ancient mind possessed a holistic, built-in staircase, the modern mind woke up in the very same house—the human condition—and gazed about, asking, “Excuse me, but where are the stairs?”

Paul VI refers to this plight when he states: “The new way of religion which the current liturgical reform intends to restore” is, of its very nature, a “response to the character and needs of modern man.” So, wait a minute… Did Paul VI set out to build a new staircase? And was this because, at some fundamental level, he found himself sympathetically aligned with modern man? Because he “saw” as modern man “sees”?

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PRELIMINARY NOTE

From October 1 to 8, I am offering 25% off on subscriptions to Tradition & Sanity.

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Why should you consider taking this step now? Have a look at these comments from some long-time readers (click to enlarge):

Thank you for taking advantage of this opportunity to keep Tradition & Sanity hale & hearty. Now on to our book of the day. —Dr. K

It would be difficult to introduce Paul Claudel (1868–1955) in a few words, but I shall assume that readers of this Substack have already heard of him, and therefore we can proceed directly to his intricate and moving verse. I don’t know how French Catholics would see it, but to me, Claudel is like a French T.S. Eliot: sophisticated, allusive, erudite, lyrical, nostalgic, modern in style but antimodern in sentiment. One of the things that makes Claudel so special, for me at least, is that he was utterly steeped in the traditional Roman rite that played so great a part in his conversion, and, as you will see, his verse is saturated with liturgical allusions. I hope you’ll enjoy these favorite lines that I gleaned from his Five Great Odes, published by Angelico Press (you can find it either there or on Amazon). —PAK

In the silence of silence
Mnemosyne sighs.
Eldest—Memory—this one who does not speak. And yet
the same age as the others.
She listens, she considers.
She feels (she is the inner feeling of the spirit),
pure, simplex, inviolable. She remembers.
She is the weight of the spirit, its density. She is
the ratio expressed in a beautiful figure,
and she is posed in an ineffable manner
on the very pulse of Being.
Interior hour: she is the exhaustless treasure
and the well warehoused source;
she joins with the time that is not time
and is expressed by language.
But she does not speak; she is busy with not speaking.
She coincides.
She possesses and remembers…. (23)

I am an initiate of silence; there is an inexhaustible ceremony,
there is a world to take by force, an insatiable poem
to fill with the growing of grains and every fruit. (33)

I want the life without which everything is dead.
Life itself, for all the rest is mortal and kills me. (39)

As the tree in each new springtime
laboring by its very soul invents
the green, the same which is eternal, creates from nothing
its pointed leaves,
I, human,
know what I make,
from the dust of earth and from this power
of birth and creativity
I make use, as master craftsman,
I am in the world, exercising in all places
my inborn knowledge.
I know each thing and each thing knows itself in me.
I carry to each thing its deliverance.
By my work
nothing remains alone, but is linked
with another in my heart. (42)

And you who are perfect Being itself, you have not failed
to see that I, too, exist!
You see this man that I have made myself into, and you see
this being that I hold from you.
Oh, my God, my being sighs to yours.
Deliver me from myself, deliver this being from contingency.
I am free, but deliver me from freedom.
I can well see the ways I might not be, but there is only one way
to be: that is to be in you, who alone are truly yourself….
What is necessary for me is to remember you. (43)

You are visible in this world as you are in the other.
You are here.
You are here and I can be nowhere save with you. (44)

So hail! world new to my eyes, world now total!
Entire creed of things visible and invisible,
I accept you with a catholic heart.
Wherever I turn my head
I envision the immeasurable octave of creation.
For now the world opens itself to me again, and no matter
how vast its span, my gaze sweeps it
from one end to another. (45)

I do not see you, but I am contained along with
these beings whom you see.
We do not give but what we receive.
And since all things from you
have received being, in time
they return the eternal.
And I,
I have a voice, I listen, I hear the sound
made by what is eternal.
My voice, my breath, is water, such pure water
as nourishes all things, and so all things
fold themselves into my voice.
I mean the voice with which, by you, I make eternal words.
I can name nothing but what is eternal.
The leaf yellows, the fruit falls, but the leaf in my verse
will never wither,
nor the fruit ripen, nor the rose wilt.
Oh, the thing may die, but the name within the spirit,
which is my spirit, no more will die.
This is the escape from time.
And I who make things eternal with my voice—
make me entirely
that voice, a word wholly intelligible.
Free me from the slavery and the weight of inert matter.
Clarify me! Strip me of miserable shadows
and make me at last
only that within me I most obscurely desire. (47-48)

God who baptized the chaos with your Spirit
and who at the Easter Vigil exorcizes, by the mouth
of your priest, the pagan font,
with baptismal water you sow our human
clay, glorious, unsuffering, undying….
As premise contains and desires conclusion,
so the body of glory yearns beneath the body of clay,
as the night
yearns to be dissolved in visibility. (48-49)

Oh my beloved, I am not a god,
And my soul, I cannot share it with you
and you cannot take and contain and possess me. (51)

Open the door, and the Wisdom of God is before you,
like a pillar of fire or like a crowned queen. (54)

Be blessed, my God, who have delivered me from idols,
who have made me to adore you alone, and not Isis or Osiris,
or Justice or Progress or Truth or Divinity or Humanity
or Art or Beauty—
all these abstractions which you have not permitted, nothing—
nor even to adore the Void left by your absence….
These words are sound without voice, name without person,
the unclean spirit is in them which fills deserts
and all empty things.
Lord, you have broken the bonds even
of books and ideas, of idols and their priests,
and you have not permitted Israel to suffer
the yoke of the Effeminate. I know you are not the God
of the dead but of the living.
I shall not honor
phantoms or puppets, whether Duty or Freedom,
nor Diana nor any resplendent god, nor some
sacred cow. (58-59)

Lord, it is not lead or stone or rotting wood itself
you have enrolled in your service,
and no one can fortify herself in the likeness of him
who said, I will not serve. (60)

Savants, epicureans, masters of the novitiate of Hell,
practitioners of the Way of Nothingness,
neither Brahmin nor bonze nor philosopher,
your counsels, Egypt,
your methods, demonstrations, and discipline,
nothing reconciles me, I am living in your abominable night,
I lift my hands in despair, I lift my hands in the trance
and transport of deaf, savage hope.
Who no longer believes in God, no longer believes in Being,
and who hates Being, hates his own existence.
Lord, I have found you.
Who finds you, has no more taste for death. (61-62)

Whoever shares the will of God
must also share his silence.
Be with me wholly. Let us together fall silent to all eyes.
Whoever gives life must accept death.
Be blessed, my God, who have delivered me from myself,
who keeps me from placing my well-being in myself—
in the narrow dungeon where Teresa saw the damned enclosed,
but in your will alone,
in no other good or well-being,
but your will alone.
Be blessed because you have not abandoned me to myself,
but you have accepted me as something that will serve,
good enough for the end you devise.
You have no more fear of me as you do of the rich
and the proud whom you send away with nothing.
You have put your power in me, power which is your humility,
your power to make
yourself nothing for the sake of your works…. (65)

Be blessed because I do not remain unique,
existence has come of me, the quickening of this immortal
child, and because in this image that is forever
real, this soul joined to a body,
you received shape and dimension from me.
It is no lifeless weight of stone I hold in my arms
but a little human being, crying and waving arms and legs.
And here I am reunited with ignorance, with the generations
of nature, and ordered to an end strange to me.
You, newly arrived, I may look on you at last.
You, my soul, at last I can see your face,
like a mirror I’ve just withdrawn from God
and still holding no image but his.
From me has been born something other….
yes, there is born from me something new—
yet with strange resemblance.
To me, and to the deep roots of all my ancestors
a new being is born.
We have been necessary, each in her generation,
it is the special will of God that has prepared
the blood and the flesh of every man and woman.
Who are you, newcomer—stranger? And what will you do
with what belongs to us?
I see, in the certain color of your eyes,
how you position our heart in a certain place. (66-67)

As no man comes from himself, no man is for himself alone. (67)

Seize close the living text, your living God
in this breathing book.
Pluck the fruit that belongs to you, this word
spoken to you alone. (68)

On Joshua:

Idols hold no beauty for him, Satan holds no interest, he knows
there is no being in things which are not.
The humility with which he halted the sun,
the modesty with which he measured the tribes and everything
that was given to him,
that Land of your promise, palpable…. (69)

Evening approaches, stay with me, my Lord!
Do not let me go the way of Voltaire and Renan,
Michelet and Hugo and the rest of the scabrous crew.
Their souls are with those of dead dogs and their books
are fit only for the dungheap.
They are dead, and their names now are no more
than symbols of poison and decay.
For you have scattered the proud and they cannot come
together again,
nor can they understand, they can only destroy and dissipate,
and they cannot create, only assemble things, parts
that do not make a whole.
Let me see and hear all things by the word
and hail each thing by its own true name, with the word
which made and makes it.
You see that earth which is your innocent creature.
Free her of the yoke of the infidel and the impure—
was it not for you that she was made? (70)

I stand here like a priest in golden robes,
upright before the glowing altar,
only his hands and face the color of human skin,
and tranquil he looks, face to face,
in the force and fullness of heart,
at his god in the monstrance, knowing perfectly
you are there in back of the seeming bread. (71)

I say that there is nothing in nature
made without design, or that is not
addressed to the man and the woman,
and like light for the eye and sound for the ear,
so each thing is for intelligence to distinguish, to grasp,
each thing, I say, is continuous with the intelligence
which makes it anew from the element it recovers…. (77)

This is spoken in the name of grace:

I cannot be reached by reason alone and you cannot do
as you like with me. I sing and dance.
And I do not wish you to love any woman but me, me only,
for no other is as beautiful as I.
And you will never be old for me, but always younger,
more beautiful, until you too are immortal, with me. (78-79)

Whoever has bitten into the earth,
he keeps that taste between his teeth. (88)

See how you are no longer free and how you have
let others into your life,
how you are under necessity like a god,
inseparable, without whom you cannot live….
to my soul belongs the necessity of your soul. (93)

Once I knew passion but now, none—save the longing
to know God in his fixity and to find truth by attention….
Whatever makes a racket gets heard, but who will bear
witness to the spirit that thinks? (94)

My God, who have made all things to be given,
give me desire to the measure of your mercy,
so that I may give in turn what is given to me
to those who can receive it. (95)

How shall God enter your heart if there is for him no place,
if you make no dwelling for him? There can be no God
for you without a church, as all life begins from a single cell. (98)

My God, I recall the darkness where we were face to face,
those somber winter afternoons in Notre Dame,
I all alone, low down, lighting the face of the great bronze
Christ with a cheap candle.
Everyone, then, was against us, and I answered
not a word—science, reason.
Faith alone was mine and I looked on you in silence,
like a man who chooses his friend.
I have been down in your sepulcher with you.
And now where are the mighty of this world, who sought
to flatten us?—Just a few obscene tragic masks at my feet.
I have not moved, but the limits of your tomb
have become those of the universe. (98)

Like a man in winter who breaks bread
and crumbles it to feed the littlest birds,
so with the prayers of my rosary in my hands,
I nourish souls in purgatory. (103)

Beginning anew in the dark ages:

A little light overcomes much darkness. Let us not
trouble ourselves with that which lies without.
Let us not judge for fear of being judged,
nor curse the present that is with us, our eternity.
Like the monk returning to his plundered monastery,
and it seems to him as beautiful dressed
in sackcloth and ashes as on the day of its dedication,
when the bell tower, a hundred feet high,
like a great ship’s mast, stood in the sunlight
clearer than wine,
with four bronze bells new and golden and pure like lilies.
For what should he lack there amidst ruin,
so long as he has his book and his abbot to guide him?
See him sit down once more and, having made
the sign of the Cross, set himself to the old task,
he sets the Gospel before him to copy,
he begins once more to draw the large first letter,
gold upon purple. (106)

Veneration of our ancestors:

Shall we be less pious than the pagans,
who did not believe that ever they could cease
to do right by the dead, and the dead by them?
We are not children of dogs and wild beasts,
our forebears were not empty shadows,
but we have come from their real flesh and real souls,
as truth does not come from lies
nor does truth become fantasy or false. (107)

The action of grace has been accomplished,
the mass has been said,
Let us go in the peace of the Lord.
Like a leper whose wounds have been closed,
who is clean now, who walks in new skin,
so is the man who goes in peace, disburdened of his sin.
Like Elias, who walked thirty days to Mount Horeb,
to one of God’s dwelling places,
having eaten strength from the bread
cooked hastily over the ashes,
And like the Hebrews who, staff in hand,
according to the prescribed rite,
eat the Paschal lamb with feet firmly planted,
standing upright,
so we, like the patriarchs fleeing Sodom,
camping in lean-to and tent,
walk onward, for we have no homes,
we have here nothing lasting and permanent.
This morning we have eaten in the house of our father,
few children for such a feast and such fare:
for it is the very flesh and blood of our Lord
in this wine and bread,
who died for us sinners, willingly, as we have read.
Few who remain faithful, but when we will be
fewer still, our faith will not diminish,
For the promises of God do not pass away, though like smoke
upon the wind are the words of men and women,
brief laughter crackling like thorns in the flame.
But we have eaten the flesh and blood of the One
who died and rose up again.
Lord, I am not worthy to offer you shelter,
but you have only to speak and whoever you love is cured.
Now mass has been said, the deep action of grace
has been made over,
so let us go in the name of God, the doors of the church
stand open.
It is hard to leave this place, your tabernacle,
to leave and take again to the old ways, over shifting sands,
through impassable thicket and bramble,
hard to change your eternal words for the mere
rumors of human speech.
Yet we shall adore you, for that is your wish.
Happy, whoever already shares your cup in your holy place,
but the long route, the slow defeat yet remains for us.
Here is the exterior world and our mundane duty,
without despising my neighbor, loving my neighbor
if I can, without violence or passion or iniquity,
Keeping the Ten Commandments better
than I know how to do,
praying morning and night, and giving
to each what he’s due. (109-11)

It is not my duty to understand, but to pray
in love and trembling.
Let me see you, Lord Jesus, with these eyes full of tears,
in the day of your Second Coming. (113)

For you have ordained neither that we should conquer,
nor be deceived,
but that we should keep the deposit of faith intact
which we have received. (115)

I believe without changing one point
what my fathers believed before my time. (118)

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I encourage you to read this post to the end, as it contains very important news on every aspect of my Substack—and special offers!

Long-time readers will recall Tradition & Sanity’s inaugural post on April 13, 2023, in which I announced why I was launching it:

I claimed:

In the face of unprecedented attacks on Catholic doctrine, morality, and liturgy, there’s never been a better time to say “What happened?” and “Where do we go from here?”…

The fundamental principle behind this Substack is that which Benedict XVI enunciated on 7/7/07: “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place” (Con Grande Fiducia).

I call this the “sacred and great” principle.

To my mind it covers far more than liturgy—even if liturgy is the still point, the axis around which Catholicism revolves, both here on earth and in the world to come where the Lamb once slain, bearing His glorified wounds, receives the homage of all creation and offers its worship, gathered into His Heart, to the Father Almighty. No, the principle goes well beyond this, permeating the whole of reality.

All of the riches that have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, indeed all of the riches that have developed beneath her protecting mantle and under the shadow of her wing—the fine arts, the great music, architecture, painting, sculpture, and poetry, the luxuriant garden of patristics, the towering fortresses of scholastic philosophy and theology, the schools of spirituality, devotions of every sort, the “other modern” that consists of fruitful engagements with tradition, the nearly infinite ramifications of the multitudinous epiphenomena of Catholicism—yes, it behooves us to preserve all of this, to ponder what is good, noble, true, right, beautiful, and holy, and to give it a proper place in our hearts, in our churches, in our world.

That was almost three and half years ago.

And now, over 600 (!) posts later, I believe, before God, that I have remained true to what I set out to do. Nor has the mission become any less urgent; if anything, the contrary.

Tradition & Sanity started from scratch, and slowly grew until it ranked high among all the “Faith & Spirituality” Substacks the world over (and we still rank high). Thanks to an ever increasing number of subscribers, I was able to invite guest contributors whose work has added richness and variety—among them, Angela Cuba, Joseph Shaw, Sebastian Morello, Fr. Thomas Crean OP, Anthony Jones, Esther Berry, Linton Hatcher, Jeremy Holmes, and Thomas Storck.

The Pelican Phase of Tradition & Sanity

About a year ago, on October 7, 2025, a group of Catholics launched a major initiative called Pelican+. It quickly gained momentum and popularity. Our vision was to create a new platform that would offer features and advantages that other platforms lacked.

On the one hand, we created what we set out to create: the Pelican+ app offers users many different kinds of podcasts, articles, and interviews, a large library of written and recorded prayers, a library of Gregorian chants and sacred music, a library of ebooks and audiobooks including the Gospels, Roman Martyrology, and Butler’s Lives, a full series called Coffee & Catechism, daily liturgical calendars (pre-55 and 1962), Divine Office prayers in multiple formats, programs for families and children, the entire vault of Mass of the Ages… and a lot more. In fact, if you were to visit the app every day and watch or listen to one thing, it would take years to go through all that we have there. And we are still adding on to it, week by week.

On the other hand, we underestimated a few realities that became apparent over time.

First, many Substack users are very attached to this platform, which has been a crossroads of serious writing and reading for many years now. And even though AI slop began to seep in like uncontained sewage, Substack took the remarkable step of identifying the AI slop. Yes, it’s a very crowded space these days, with more noise and distraction than used to be the case, but overall it’s a good platform and I do understand why many readers of Tradition & Sanity simply didn’t want to transition over to Pelican.

Second, we underestimated the extent to which some of the readers of Tradition & Sanity were only ever interested in this Substack, and not in the other content we made available on Pelican. They wouldn’t have objected to it, of course, but they simply weren’t “into” it. Instead, they came here to read my work (and, probably, the work of those who directly write for me), and they wished to support me financially. In other words, their focus was on Dr. K’s work, not on Pelican+.

Thus, it was a mistake to try to elevate Pelican+ over Substack in such a way that readers were faced with an “either/or”: either you read my work at the new place, or you don’t gain full access to it. As a result, a good many readers de facto gave up access to my paywalled writing, and perhaps some walked away in frustration. I apologize for that, and I think readers who have remained here will be happy with what I am announcing today.

I’d also like to issue a heartfelt apology to any readers who were confused or stymied or frustrated by any aspect of the Substack/ Pelican relationship—e.g., a subscription unexpectedly running out, or not being able to access one or the other platform when you thought you should be able to. If anyone has any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me.

Another very unfortunate thing is that, at one point, Pelican suffered a data loss that affected a good many of my older articles, such that the full text can no longer be found either there or here. We’ve worked on recovering the data but it’s a long road.

In short: Pelican+ is still in operation; it still offers individuals and families access to extraordinary traditional Catholic content; I am still connected with it, still recommend it, and am still posting my T&S articles on it. I encourage you to check out what it offers, because its sum-total of offerings is unique in the world of Catholic media.

Returning to Substack as the Base

That being said, my focus as an individual writer has returned to this Substack. This has several practical consequences.

Firstly, the revenue that comes to this Substack will be used exclusively to support me, my apostolate as a defender of Catholic tradition, and my occasional guest writers. This Substack is no longer integrated into Pelican+ as a “tributary”; it is an independent, self-governing website. Thus, your paid subscription here is a crucial way of supporting me and my team. If you like the work I do on behalf of the TLM and everything else true, right, holy, beautiful, and good, this is the most direct way to support it.

Tradition & Sanity is still going strong, thanks be to God, and thanks be to you! But I will be honest and tell you that we’ve seen a lull, and my goal is to restore T&S to its full glory as a major vehicle for spreading the good news of tradition.

Secondly, you’ll see periodic discounts and special offers, connected (naturally!) to the liturgical year. If we’re going to rebuild this Substack, we need large numbers to invest in it.

Thus, for the first week of the month of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary, I am offering a 25% discount on all paid subscriptions, which will give you full access to the twice-weekly paywalled articles as well as the plentiful and valuable archives:

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(Don’t forget that I record a voiceover for every Monday and Thursday article; if you subscribe, you’ll gain access to those podcasts—which many have told me are very handy for commutes, household chores or yardwork, long drives to Mass, or even homeschooling enrichment!)

Thirdly, I am reactivating the “Guardian of Tradition” membership level, for those who wish to invest more significantly in the future of Tradition & Sanity. Those who choose that option will receive, if they wish[*], an inscribed and signed hardcover copy of my latest book, Mystic Rose in God’s Fair Garden Growing: Our Lady on Prayer, the Mass, and Union with Christ. (I’ll say more about this new book below.)

[*] I will reach out privately to ask an address to ship it to.

A Work of Liturgical Prayer

Early on, I promised my readers that I was going to pray for them each week. Here’s what I said on the one-year anniversary of this Substack:

I’ve prayed for you nearly every Thursday of the past year. When I’m at the morning Low Mass, I offer my share in the Holy Sacrifice for “all the readers, subscribers, and benefactors of Tradition & Sanity, and for their families.” I promised I’d do this, and I’ve done it with joy, and will continue to do it. I’ve also prayed for the special intentions that some of you have shared with me.

From a supernatural point of view, we are in a spiritual battle, and we need God’s grace. Every day. This Substack is not just about ideas; it is about realities that bear on our salvation, and on the good estate of the entire Church. Prayer is not an afterthought.

I returned to this theme on the second anniversary:

I am still praying for you on Thursdays at Mass. At the Memento of the living, I offer this Holy Mass for you. That’s simply what I do, rain or shine. I am in your debt, as I couldn’t do this without you.

And, indeed, that has remained true: every Thursday I offer my share in the Mass and Holy Communion for you and your intentions. I view this as a collaborative enterprise. If you are a Catholic, we are members of the same Mystical Body; grace circulates among us as our lifeblood. (And if you’re not a Catholic, I still pray for you, that one day we may belong to, and partake of, the same body.)

On that same second anniversary, I also wrote the following, which I couldn’t really improve on:

Anyone who knows me well knows that I am uninterested in everything to do with numbers and money, except when cornered by the IRS and forced to disgorge, or when trying to figure out which home repairs can’t be delayed any longer—you get the idea. Many of my students readily applied to me the old “absent-minded professor” label.

The point is, I hate to plead for subscriptions, but once in a while I have to do so, because, after all, I am trying to make a living as a writer. And the same holds for the other writers whom I’ve invited, so that Tradition & Sanity can solidly become THE traditionalist Substack par excellence.

So, please, take advantage of this special offer of 25% off, which lasts for a limited time (October 1 to October 8):

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More personal & professional posts

Fourthly, you will see an increase of the kind of personal and professional posts I used to make at my Substack, announcing upcoming lectures, highlighting new books of mine or books published by Os Justi Press, and sharing a miscellany of items of potential interest to tradition-loving Catholics.

Again, this Substack is where to go, now, if you wish to follow and support my work specifically and personally.

I hope, in short, to make this Substack more like it was “in the old days,” and I am counting on you to help me achieve this relaunch and revitalization.

One last point and a very important one: I have NEVER used AI to compose any article here, and I never will. The same rule holds for all the contributors to T&S. This is our sworn guarantee. I once caught a contributor using it, learned my lesson (as you can read here), and removed all his items from the archives.

New book on Our Lady

I’m delighted to use this post as the occasion for announcing my new book: Mystic Rose in God’s Fair Garden Growing: Our Lady on Prayer, the Mass, and Union with Christ (Arouca Press, 2026). You can see the full cover spread above.

The description:

The Blessed Virgin Mary is the authoritative guide to living the Christian faith—above all, when it comes to its pulsing heart, the Holy Mass.

Thus claims Dr. Kwasniewski in this refreshing book, which weaves together theological, liturgical, and devotional insights into Our Lady. Disclosing the subtle splendors of the Holy Rosary, the author draws out its intimate kinship with the Latin Mass and shows the place it ought to have, next to the Divine Office, in a Catholic’s life of prayer; he discovers unsuspected riches in the familiar Leonine prayers; he unfolds the meaning of select Marian feasts and apparitions, specifying the obligations a Catholic has toward approved private revelations.

Nor do these pages shy away from controversial questions, such as: why Fatima deserves to be accepted and Medjugorje rejected; how the vision of Knock provides a key to understanding the crisis through which we are passing; why the traditional Roman Rite is profoundly Marian in its principles and practice, whereas the modern rite imposed in 1969 is anti-Marian, endangering the Church’s vocation as virgin, bride, and mother; and why the Holy Theotokos should be held and hailed as mediatrix of all graces and co-redemptrix.

And since the Queen of Heaven is “all beautiful,” the book pays her loving homage with dozens of full-color artworks to nourish the imagination.

Mystic Rose in God’s Fair Garden Growing will help Catholics come to a deeper appreciation of—and an ever more constant reliance upon—“the mother of fair love and of fear, of knowledge and of holy hope.”

The Table of Contents:

The book features over 40 color illustrations. The luxuriant layout, with wide margins and handsome typography, is a joy to behold.

Here are a few of the left/right spreads as samples (the colors are more vibrant on the printed copy than in these screenshots):

Alex Barbas (director of Arouca Press) and I worked overtime to have Mystic Rose ready for the month of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary. We are taking orders, and we’ll ship the books as soon as they are in stock!

If you’d like a signed copy, you can get it from the Os Justi Press site.

If you’re a customer in Canada and you’d like to give your business directly to the publisher, your best bet would be Arouca Press, located in Ontario.

If you live outside of North America, the Amazon site nearest you is the best way to get this book without paying exorbitant shipping.

***N.B. Fulfillment of orders will take place later in October.

I hope you’ll consider picking up a copy of Mystic Rose for meditation, to enrich your understanding and love of our heavenly Mother and Queen.

A Last Appeal

From today until October 8, I am offering Tradition & Sanity at 25% off:

Get 25% off forever

To long-time subscribers; to new subscribers; to everyone who has ever supported this apostolate, thank you, and may God bless you!

I’ve left the comments open to everyone; feel free to give me feedback below.

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In my home library of several thousand volumes, only a few authors enjoy the privileged status of occupying several shelves exclusively their own. No one will be surprised to hear that Aristotle and Aquinas are among them; in the music section, Arvo Pärt and G.F. Handel; and for pleasure, P.G. Wodehouse. Joseph Ratzinger belongs to this limited circle of authors whom I regard so highly that I have acquired nearly everything they wrote.

It would be difficult for me to reconstruct at this point the sequence in which I read his works, but for sure it started with The Ratzinger Report. I remember eagerly awaiting each subsequent sparkling interview—Salt of the Earth, God and the World, Light of the World—much as fiction fans might look forward to the latest release by a favorite novelist. As a professor, I sometimes assigned Called to Communion as a text in ecclesiology, Behold the Pierced One as a text in Christology, and Truth and Tolerance as a text in missiology.

At the International Theological Institute in Austria where I taught from 1998 to 2006, I enjoyed the privilege of teaching alongside Fr (then Dr) John Saward at the time he was putting finishing touches on his translation of The Spirit of the Liturgy. Although I had already fallen in love with the classical Roman rite by experiencing it in its recited and sung forms, it was Ratzinger who first opened my eyes to why I loved it—the theological and spiritual rationale. He made my own mind and heart intelligible to me, gave me the language with which to express what had been, prior to that, little more than an intuition and an attraction.

In discussing The Spirit of the Liturgy with fellow appreciators over the past two decades, especially members of the clergy, I learned that it had had the same powerful effect on many of its readers. At last, we had found a highly literate, sophisticated, rather audacious modern theologian who nonetheless knew and loved the Catholic tradition, explained its meaning, rebuked its assailants, and advanced its recovery. That he was the right-hand man of John Paul II and followed him to the Chair of Peter only added to the momentary elation of recovering territory after a series of brutal annexations.

Rejoicing there was, and plenty of it, in the small town of Gaming on that day in April of 2005, when the faculty and students of the ITI learned that Ratzinger had been elected pope. We heard the bells of the town church start ringing like nobody’s business and we knew something was up. (When bells ring like that in Europe, it means one of three things: someone has died; a war has begun; or a pope has been elected!) My wife and I took a short walk downtown to the apartment of some friends who had a TV, and they shouted to us from their upper-storey window: “It’s Ratzinger! Raaaatziiiingerrrrrr!” The rest of the day and week was passed in a sort of stupor, as the magnitude of the event sank in.

It’s actually very difficult to convey to younger people the utter improbability of Ratzinger being elected pope at all. It would be something like Card. Sarah or Card. Müller having been elected pope in the last conclave. As we now know, Bergoglio was the other candidate in the running at the 2005 conclave, and when he lost, most of the progressives figured his chances were over. Little did we know, in that “honeymoon” phase, the horrors yet to come—horrors triggered by the abdication of the pope we admired so much.

Upon Ratzinger’s death, a steady stream of commentators struggled to pinpoint his “greatest work” or “lasting legacy.” When it comes to such a versatile and influential figure, it would not be easy to do that; rarely has anyone in the last hundred years spoken with as commanding a breadth and depth of knowledge as Ratzinger possessed, or with comparable rhetorical finesse. Indeed, it is easy to make the case that no pope since Prospero Lambertini (Benedict XIV, r. 1740-1758) has been his equal in learning or theological acumen. Besides, we are not as well-positioned to make judgments about legacies as men will be twenty-five, fifty, or a hundred years hence.

That being said, for me two moments stand out as permanent points of reference.

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PRELIMINARY NOTE

This coming week, I’ll be on a lecture tour taking me across the Midwest to the East and back: once in Illinois, twice in Pennsylvania, and once in Indiana. Join me at any of these events if you can make it—I’m always delighted to meet readers in person (a rare gift!).

Wednesday, September 30, 7pm, Burr Ridge, IL (open to public)

Thursday, October 1, 7pm, Ambridge, PA (open to public)

Friday, October 2, 4pm, Pittsburgh, PA (register here)

Sunday, October 4, 6pm, Carmel, IN (with dinner; register here)

Full details in the flyers below.

Now to today’s feature!

As many of you (probably nearly all of you) know by now, I direct a publishing company called Os Justi Press. I founded it about 10 years ago, initially with the idea of reprinting old books. That’s all we did for a while.

Then, almost exactly 4 years ago, I read John P. Joy’s article series “Disputed Questions on Papal Infallibility” and was so deeply impressed that I asked him if we could publish a revised and expanded version as the first book in a series to be called “Studies in Catholic Tradition.”

Things really began to take off from that point.

Now there are 16 volumes in that series (the last being Lumen Christi: Defending the Use of the Pre-1955 Roman Rite); and it has been joined by two more series: “Theological Classics” (comprising, at this time, works by Vincent of Lerins, John Henry Newman, and Romano Guardini), “Studies in Liturgical History and Reform” (including first-ever translations of Guéranger and Le Brun des Marettes, and two others to be discussed in just a moment), and now, “The Distributist Bookshelf.”

Outside of those series, we have published many dozens of books, in the areas of liturgy (our specialty), dogmatic and moral theology, Sacred Scripture, vocations, culture and the fine arts, literature, historical biography, political and economic philosophy, pamphlets, foreign-language books, prayer books, and much more. The catalog now numbers well over 100 titles and continues to grow month to month. It has also developed into a family business: my son does the graphic design, advertising, and website management; my daughter-in-law assists with publicity; and my wife helps with manuscript evaluation and mailroom tasks.

The reason I mention all this is simply that, in times past, I used to share announcements of new Os Justi publications on this Substack, and although I have done it a little bit in recent times (at the very end, I’ll link to a bunch of relevant Substack items), I’ve fallen far behind, and would like to remedy that with the present post.

Let me start with the book that has taken the Catholic world by storm: Hanael Bianchi’s A Liberal Revolution: The Implementation of Vatican II in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

While the Second Vatican Council has generated a large scholarly corpus, A Liberal Revolution is the first history to be written of a diocese in the years immediately following it. Using the important see of Baltimore as a case study, and drawing exclusively on primary sources such as newspaper accounts and archival materials, Hanael Bianchi reconstructs how the Council was implemented and experienced on the local level.

The claim that the Church “embraced the modern world” after Vatican II is well known; this book sharpens it by focusing specifically on liberalism as the framework through which implementation took place. The study begins by tracing the dismantling of inherited traditions, then turns to the rise of individualism within Catholic life and governance, before arriving at its most original contribution: an analysis of the emergence of a dense church bureaucracy that embodied and enforced a liberal worldview.

Although the story told in these pages is a tragedy, A Liberal Revolution is no polemic; rather, it is a work of historical analysis grounded in years of research. It will not only contribute to the scholarly understanding of Vatican II and its aftermath but also offer guidance to Catholics seeking a path toward genuine renewal, grounded in a thorough and accurate assessment of what actually happened.

Bianchi’s book has been the subject of many reviews already. Here are a few: Anthony Esolen’s “Destruction Comes Also From the Ground Up” (Crisis Magazine); John Pepino’s “A Liberal Revolution masterfully chronicles post-conciliar confusion and decline” (Catholic World Report); Adam Tate’s “Liturgical Reform Case Study: the Catholic City of Baltimore” (OnePeterFive); James Green’s “The Novelty That Wore Off and the Bureaucracy That Didn’t” (Grain of Wheat); and Kevin Tierney’s at his Substack. The author also did a podcast with Darrick Taylor on Controversies in Church History. And I’m sure there will be more to come, as the book continues to reach more and more people with its potent message—all the more powerful because of the author’s sober restraint and scholarly rigor.

Or, if you just can’t get enough of those groovy period photos…

Hilaire Belloc redivivus

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) is truly one of the greatest Catholic writers of the 20th century. The author of some 150 books, he redefines the meaning of the word “prolific.” He specialized (if that’s the right word for someone so versatile) in history, biography, essays, travelogues, and poetry.

While some of his works have always remained in print, others, sadly, have gone out of print, and are very hard or impossible to come by.

As I share in this personal reflection, I first fell in love with Belloc in high school, when a chance discovery at a bookstore allowed me to acquire a hefty stack of his works, which I then devoured in my plaid reading chair at home:

The value of Belloc’s work abides, because he brings a philosophical and religious vision to history that enables him to make more sense of the vast tangle of details and their implications than is often to be found among secular historians, in spite of their deep but narrow scholarship.

Os Justi Press has now positioned itself as a major republisher of Belloc’s writings. In this video I introduce our new series “The Distributist Bookshelf”; our matching set of three beloved Belloc classics (The Path to Rome, The Cruise of the Nona, and The Four Men); our collaboration with Mysterium Press of England as the exclusive US distributor of their new editions of Belloc biographies (Cranmer, Cromwell, Wolsey, James II, Charles I, Charles II); and our five new reprints... with more on the way!

The five reprints pictured above bring back works that have long been out of print and hard to obtain. Details:

• Belloc worked assiduously against the anti-Catholic bias of the official “Whig” history of England. Generations of Protestants had distorted the history of the Isles in their favor; armed with his vast knowledge of the historical record, Belloc set about telling a truer story. A Shorter History of England, a substantial (almost 700-page) text filled with maps and charts, is Belloc’s careful abridgement of his four-volume History of England.

• Many begged Belloc to write a full biography of Chesterton. When finally he wrote his short book On the Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters, he professed that it was but “notes of a friend,” saying: “My chief claim to know and interpret Chesterton is, of course, a permanent and active personal friendship... we were very close companions for more than 30 years.”

• In Towns of Destiny, the great traveler pays tribute to places saturated with cultural, spiritual, and political significance. The ancient layers of the countryside and storied urban centers spring to life as Belloc traverses the African shore of the Mediterranean, the Iberian peninsula, France, and the Rhineland, sharing vivid tales and learned commentary.

• A collection of various magazine articles, Places was published during the height of the Second World War; one sees Belloc mourning for the passing of the old Europe. He writes in the introduction: “I have here collected many an impression of travel of the sort which I fear can never be repeated in a ruined world.”

• Belloc’s encounters with nature were often the starting point for musings of a philosophical bent, such as the ones collected in The Silence of the Sea and Other Essays. He writes: “What I most love in the sea is its silence... Because the sea lives (while the land lies inert) we cannot think of it as dumb: nor is it. But it speaks in a veiled fashion as do the oracles of the Gods.”

There’s an automatic 15% discount on all five as a set once you put them in your basket and begin the checkout.

You can find all of our Belloc books at this link.

The Distributist Bookshelf

“The Distributist Bookshelf” is a freshly typeset library of important works that synthesized and developed Catholic Social Teaching in the modern era. We’re kicking it off with four reprints in paperback and hardcover editions:

In Economics for Helen, an insightful study of wealth, property, money, and economic processes, Hilaire Belloc lays out his subject with the clarity of a handbook for youths. Foreword by eminent proponent of CST, Thomas Storck.

In The Servile State, a work admired even by anti-distributists, Belloc seeks to explain the increasing discontent of modern capitalist societies. Writing after Tocqueville and Marx, Belloc shows his debt to their practice of viewing social and economic life as expressive of fundamental intellectual forms. Foreword by James Matthew Wilson; afterword by Joseph Pearce.

G.K. Chesterton, author of Utopia of Usurers & Other Essays, understood that the small does not defeat the large by imitating its scale; it persists by refusal to be conformed to its errors. Instead of offering readers optimism, he offers them truth—a refusal to consider the battle between traditional sanity and modern madness finished. Daniel Schwindt’s introduction sets the work in its historical context.

Chesterton was commissioned to write What’s Wrong with the World for a “broad” audience, so he focuses on what is wrong with the world not from an expressly religious perspective but from a social perspective. He identifies four culprits: Big Government, Big Business, Feminism, and Public Education. Foreword by Dale Ahlquist.

There’s an automatic 10% discount on all four as a set once you put them in your basket.

And, as the ad below shows, we’re working on several more for the series:

Books connected with the sacred liturgy

Originally published after Dom Prosper Guéranger completed his three-volume Liturgical Institutions (1840–1851) yet prior to his final (ninth) volume of The Liturgical Year (1841–1875), Abbé Henri Dutilliet’s Little Liturgical Catechism (1860) bridges his master’s two monumental achievements in a comprehensive distillation of the Roman liturgy and the Church’s annual cycle of worship.

Despite his encyclopedic effort, his book went out of print and was forgotten—until the famous decadent-novelist-turned-Benedictine-oblate Joris-Karl Huysmans discovered it in a bookshop in the early 1890s and saw in it a remedy for the “ignorance of the Sacred Liturgy” he had observed among the faithful in 1896. Nor has the need for education ceased 130 years later, when the traditional rite so beautifully expounded in this catechism has returned to more and more churches. It is thus fitting to bring Dutilliet’s marvelous catechism to light for our times, even as Huysmans did for his.

Expanded with notes that explain unfamiliar terms or point out differences between the Tridentine rite about which this catechism speaks and the twentieth-century modified versions of it, this first-ever English translation of Dutilliet’s text intends to offer the faithful “the enduring enchantment of the admirable year of the Church” and the understanding that “all in her worship is full of meaning; nothing is left to hazard; no detail, however minute, is without purpose.” Reading this catechism is not only a painless way to acquire much learning in a short time, but a haunting reminder of just how much has been lost in the postconciliar Church—and how much we stand to gain by its restoration.

The Lectionary for Mass, drawn up by Group XI of the Consilium ad exsequendam, is often held up as one of the greatest achievements of the post-Vatican II liturgical reform. Yet until recently, the full details of their discussions and labors have remained unpublished, accessible only to archival researchers and specialist scholars.

Matthew Hazell’s The Post-Vatican II Reform of the Lectionary: The Schemata of Group XI—part of our Studies in Liturgical History and Reform series— offers an English translation of the Latin and French documents of Group XI in their entirety. In fact, this is the first time the complete documentation for any of the Consilium study groups has been made available in translation! The process of the reform of the lectionary can thus be traced through the various draft orders of readings as well as the debates among the members and consultors of the Consilium. Hazell’s detailed introduction contextualises the reforms within the history of the twentieth-century liturgical movement and the Second Vatican Council, while appendices contain supplementary material such as the weekday orders of readings used experimentally in certain countries during the 1960s.

By making the primary source documentation more accessible to all, this volume of 512 pages, with abundant charts, notes, and bibliography, contributes to further critical study and exploration of the Novus Ordo lectionary and the post-Vatican II liturgical reforms more generally.

When the Sulpicians were at their height

Here we have reprints of a pair of very fine works from a 19th-century Sulpician of Paris.

The Divine Office by Louis Bacquez (1820-1892; his name is sometimes given as Bacuez) supplies a need felt among the clergy and others who for a book that treats practically of the Divine Office, with sound advice and numerous aids for achieving a more fruitful use of the Roman Breviary in daily prayer and meditation. Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, testified in 1885:

“We are all apt to turn from the substance in our hands to the shadows that allure us. To say the Holy Mass, even in the midst of our infirmities, as the Holy Mass ought to be said, would lift us in ascending towards God to a nearness which we can hardly conceive; for the Holy Mass is a daily renewal of our union with our Divine Master.

“To say the Divine Office as it ought to be said would fill us with inexhaustible matter of mental prayer, for it is the work of the Holy Ghost and of the Saints. The seven hours are seven visits day by day to the heavenly court; our voice is united to the eternal adoration; and our daily Office ascends in the golden censer with the prayers of the Saints.

“The translation of this most edifying work from the walls of Saint-Sulpice, the source of so much sacerdotal perfection, comes to us most opportunely, and we heartily commend it to the use of the clergy and of the faithful.”

Minor Orders, a series of meditations, will help the reader better appreciate and honor the Church’s ancient Minor Orders and, if he himself is due to receive them, will prepare him to enter upon these offices with optimal dispositions. Between receiving tonsure and subdiaconate, the seminarian in the Roman Rite is ordained to the minor orders of porter, lector, exorcist, and acolyte. Thus, it is well worth his time to meditate on the nature of these orders—the powers they confer, the virtues they require, the duties they impose, the graces to which they entitle their recipient, the fruits they ought to produce.

Nothing could be better suited to touch his heart, to make him feel the necessity of growing in perfection and raising up ardent prayers for divine assistance, as he comes to partake in diverse ways of the singular High Priesthood of Jesus Christ, the Mediator between God and man.

A luminous Foreword by Bishop Athanasius Schneider, exclusively found in this edition of Bacuez’s work, furnishes an historical overview and theological defense of the traditional minor orders, which, thanks be to God, continue in the Catholic Church thanks to the traditional institutes that have never ceased to confer them.

Based on the diaries and notes of Cardinal Ferdinando Antonelli, a pivotal figure in the Catholic Church’s liturgical reform movement for over twenty years, Nicola Giampietro’s now-classic work The Development of the Liturgical Reform reveals many important details about the forceful personalities that drove the process from Pius XII to Paul VI, the systems and methods by which decisions were made, and the competing principles invoked, with at times chaotic results. Out of print for some time, Os Justi Press has brought it back:

Here’s what some rather important figures had to say about it when it first came out in Italian:

“This book is an important contribution to the study of the liturgical reforms of the twentieth century... Antonelli embarked with considerable enthusiasm on the reform...and continued to participate in this project until 1970, when he felt that his moderate approach to liturgical renewal was abandoned. In Antonelli’s judgement, the lack of sound theological foundations made the Consilium...diverge significantly from the genuine renewal desired by the Second Vatican Council.” —Antonio Cardinal Cañizares Llovera, former Prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship

“Cardinal Antonelli’s notes reveal a man of great faith and of the Church struggling to come to terms with some of the inner currents which influenced the work involving the Consilium. What he wrote in these diaries reveals quite candidly his feelings of joy as well as of sorrow and at times of fear at the way things were being made to move along, the attitudes of some of the key players and the sense of adventurism which had characterized some of the changes that had been introduced.... Above all, it is a timely study which would help us to see another side of the otherwise over-euphoric presentations of the conciliar reform by other contemporary authors.” —Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, former Secretary of the Dicastery for Divine Worship

“Nicola Giampietro’s book presents views that raise questions and provide considerable material for discussion about the liturgical reform before and after the Second Vatican Council.” —Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, La Maison-Dieu (2002)

Not exactly three nobodies!

If you’ve ever read the Song of Songs (also called the Canticle of Canticles) in the Old Testament, you probably had more than a few questions about it! What is this very sensuous book about a lover and a beloved doing in the canon of Scripture? In his book Wounded I Sing, Timothy Kelly, a professor of theology at the International Theological Institute in Austria, argues that Christians are uniquely positioned to unlock the mysteries of Solomon’s Song, which opens its secrets more and more as we read it in and through the Heart of Christ.

When the Word became flesh, the transcendent God of love reached down into our mortal, passible nature to join it as a man joins his betrothed, and upon the Cross He accomplished a bodily-spiritual nuptial covenant with the Church and every baptized soul that He renews, day after day, in fleshly-and-spiritual Eucharistic communion. What the Hebrews longed for as yet-to-be-attained in the Messianic age, the Christian receives as now accomplished in the sacrifice and sacrament of the Lord's Passion—yet this, in turn, is the foretaste and pledge of something far greater: the eternal wedding feast of the Lamb.

The dynamism of eros that characterizes the Song reveals both the fiery love of the Divine Lover and the yearning of His beloved to be inseparably one. This is the essence of the Christian life and no book in the entire Bible conveys it better. No wonder the Fathers and Doctors wrote more commentaries on the Song of Songs than on any other book. No wonder it entices and baffles us. We can be thankful to Dr. Kelly for synthesizing all of this—drawing especially on St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Matthas Scheeben—into a readable guide that opens one magnificent vista after another. An exemplary work of Thomistic synthesis, with the clarity of Garrigou-Lagrange and the eloquence of Pieper.

Speaking of Thomists and Scripture…

The Book of Revelation depicts Jesus as a lion who has conquered (Rev. 5:5). It also depicts Him as a Lamb that was slain from the foundations of the world (Rev. 13:8). But what has Jesus conquered? And how has he done so? The Bible also repeatedly refers to Jesus as our “savior.” But what does Jesus save us from, and how does he do so?

Daniel Waldow’s The Lion Has Conquered is a highly readable introduction to Catholic soteriology—the branch of theology that seeks to answer these questions—as expressed in Scripture and Tradition, and informed throughout by the luminous writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. It guides the reader through fundamental principles, issues, and questions, such as the nature of and relationship between sin, punishment, death, and hell; the purpose of ritual and moral sacrifices in the Old Testament; the salvific function of the Incarnation, public ministry, and Paschal Mystery of Christ; the objective work of Christ and our subjective participation in that work; cooperation between grace, good works, and the heavenly reward; the salvific function of Baptism, Penance, and the Eucharist; and the relation between the sacrifice of the Cross and the sacrifice of the Mass.

If you’ve made it this far… here’s a heads up for next Thursday’s post:

Major announcements coming on October 1st!

Appendix

As promised above, here are Tradition & Sanity posts in which other Os Justi Press publications are discussed:

Thank you for reading, and may God bless you!

Preface

Fr. Joseph Fessio, SJ, is a man who needs no introduction. Most famous for being the founder of Ignatius Press, he played an important role at the 1987 Synod of Bishops that few Catholics today are aware of. He was one of twenty experts appointed to that synod by Pope John Paul II, which discussed lay ministries among other topics, and which led to that pope’s apostolic exhortation Christifideles Laici, in which he famously criticized the “clericalization of the laity.”

In a paper distributed to the participants, Fr. Fessio presented in broad outlines the case against female laity being admitted to liturgical ministries such as acolyte and lector. This text seems to have been published in Origins 17/32 (January 21, 1988), but I discovered it in the fairly obscure newsletter of the St. Joseph Foundation, which is where the text I have scanned and reproduced below came from. At the time, Fr. Fessio was a member of the Foundation’s National Advisory Committee.

While Fr. Fessio’s arguments are sound and strong, and apparently persuasive enough to have caused the synod to waver on the question, he and those who took the traditional stance lost the battle. Infamously, John Paul II would cave on female altar servers (as Paul VI had already caved on women as substitute readers), and Francis would introduce a further rupture by legislating that women can be “instituted” acolytes and lectors. Such nonsense has nothing to do with the traditional Minor Orders and Subdiaconate, which are part of the Church’s immemorial tradition and still remain in use today in traditional institutes of apostolic life and religious communities. My book Ministers of Christ is dedicated to the explication and defense of these lower Orders as well as the refutation of the feminist novelties.

Without further ado, here is Fr. Fessio’s superb intervention from 1987. May it be read far and wide. —PAK

I. Introduction

In the discussions of the possible admission of women to the stable non-ordained ministries of acolyte and lector and also of the admission of women to the function of acolyte as altar servers, the impression has often been given that the main or only reasons against such admission are of a cultural, pastoral or psychological nature. In particular, some have said there seem to be no intrinsic reasons of a doctrinal or theological character against such admission.

The purpose of this brief expose is simply to outline some of the major philosophical and theological elements which many theologians consider relevant to this issue. There is, of course, an a priori presumption in favor of the existence of such theological arguments, since it is unlikely that a consistent 2,000-year tradition of the Catholic Church across many ages and cultures would be based on merely contingent or culturally conditioned foundations. The intent of this expose is neither to be complete and detailed nor persuasive in its argumentation. This would require much greater scope that the brief outline of relevant philosophical and theological elements presented here. Moreover, the limitation to such elements is not meant to neglect or deny the very many weighty arguments which can be brought to bear from the cultural, pastoral and psychological perspectives. But the intent is to indicate that what may appear to be merely a matter of ecclesiastical discipline in fact involves principles derived from philosophical anthropology, Trinitarian doctrine, Christology, and ecclesiology.

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Those who answer “yes” to the question posed in the title usually seem to take it for granted that we will somehow always have a majority liberal-progressive Church in which trads are an “insignificant minority,” fighting an impossible uphill battle, doomed to lose.

But this is patently absurd. The liberals are undermining themselves in all kinds of ways. Their worldview is self-destructive and does not promote real buy-in to any coherent form of Catholicism (as we can see very evidently with the parodistic and parasitic “synod on synodality”). All the statistics in the West are showing decline—demographic implosion from the lack of offspring, church closures, consolidations, inadequate vocations, drifting and apostasy. Sociologists of religion have frequently pointed out that liberalization diminishes commitment, while reaffirmation of core principles and practices strengthens it. In a few decades, the only Catholics left will be (broadly speaking) traditional ones. Just consider the Amish, who are poised to overtake all the mainline Protestant branches, simply by quietly growing, growing, growing.

It may very well be the case that some kind of giant empty mollusk of bureaucracy, a German Church or a Synodal Church or whatever, may, decades from now, still be lurching along the path of its own slime, or, like a cockroach, fail to perish in the nuclear winter, but it will not be the Church of Christ recognizable to believers—or even to a half-alert sociologist—by its continuity of doctrine, morals, and worship.

In a nutshell, the traditionalist maintains that, once secularism has done its very worst (and we can be quite sure we haven’t yet seen the worst it can do), the Catholics left standing when the dust settles will be recognizably Catholic, whether they’ll be called “traditionalists” or not (the name is not, after all, so important, compared to the reality it picks out), and the same historic religion will continue—no doubt in poorer and humbler circumstances, but with a fervor and a clarity that will stand in sharp contrast to the bloated, well-funded behemoth of cultural flaccidity that the media today lazily call “the Catholic Church.”

Now, an objection can be and certainly has been raised:

“Regarding the issue of obedience, Dr. Kwasniewski, you’ve written a lot about how we should obey church leaders unless something they teach or command is clearly contrary to what has always been believed, taught, and practiced. Okay. But that can be tricky in practice. Much of what comes out of the Vatican is phrased in indecipherable mush-speak. Most of us do not have much if any theological training to parse out the tough cases. (For instance, I am reading John Joy’s Disputed Questions on Papal Infallibility wherein it is clearly shown that questions of a seemingly slam-dunk quality are, in fact, debatable.) There are times when the ‘trad filters’ don’t seem to help and may in fact hurt the discernment process. While I believe those who advocate the path of lay resistance to what could be bad or even heretical teaching are sincere and trying to offer some clarity in what Brian McCall calls a ‘conundrum,’ I wonder if the path of ‘justified disobedience’ becomes, for the tradosphere, what ‘conscience’ became for the progressives? In short: what began as a defensible project in the face of manifest confusion over time becomes a way for some to pick and choose which parts of the program to follow, playing right into our concupiscence-infected natures.”

Yes, of course this is a worry. But it is a worry from which we cannot entirely escape, since we are living in a world in which they are “rival versions of Catholicism,” each being pushed very heavily, whether by the institution or by cohorts of the faithful. The “meaning of Catholic” (to use an expression of Timothy Flanders) is not, in our times, as clear as it used to be or ought to be.

In a relatively calm and healthy period of Church history, it is possible to receive the faith as a child, in a simple catechism, and live it without ever having to delve into theological, historical, canonical, or any other subtleties. This is not such an age. When there is great confusion, individual Catholics by the power of their Confirmation must step up to the plate and do some heavier lifting (pardon the mixed metaphor). There is no other way: we must educate ourselves to the extent we can, and then do the best we can with what we have learned of the truth. (I wrote recently about how we nail our “pitons” into the cliff as we climb.)

In the end, the safest way is always to rely, whenever possible, on authoritative sources that we know are authoritative and always will be. What are these?

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An author whom I find alternately delightful and frustrating is Stephen R.L. Clark. I’ve read many of his books, always with profit, and always with puzzlement. He has a vast encyclopedic knowledge of his subjects but he can waffle and occasionally undermine his own arguments by his diffidence and sense of irony. Still, it’s worth reading an author for a sentence like this: “The world is composed of cooperating and conversing subjects.” Yes, that’s it—that’s exactly what materialism, with the nihilism born of it, does not see, or refuses to see.

As a taste of Clark’s distinctive philosophical-poetic approach, today we’ll look at some passages from his 2023 book How the Worlds Became: Philosophy & the Oldest Stories. As usual, page numbers will be in parentheses.

Philosophers, it is popularly supposed, must argue from clearly correct premises by inexorably logical steps to their often surprising conclusions, following “the argument” where it alone might lead. They must have shed their personal or cultural prejudices, and only accept “objective” propositions of a kind that require no special moral or religious virtue, nor any long apprenticeship or cultural context, to discern. That this claim itself has a special history, and rests on largely unargued premises, is usually forgotten. Nor is it acknowledged that such an intellectual parsimony leaves us necessarily ignorant of almost everything we once thought we knew. (2)

The Song of Songs, for example, is not a historical document recording the thoughts and actions of a particular woman and her man, even if—which is possible but unproven—this was the original intention of the poet who wrote it. Its significance, as part of Scripture, is for the faith community which put the texts together to determine. (13)

Shuve argues, plausibly, that Christian commentators who (as we say) “allegorized” the work did not do so to cover up the supposedly salacious “real meaning”: they took the obvious, “commonsensical” reading to be about the relations of Christ and His Church, as Rabbinic commentators likewise took it to be about the relations of God and His people. (13n25)

“Awareness of the divine begins with wonder,” Heschel writes, and “wonder or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is therefore a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is.” (37)

Dio Chrysostom, on the immediate non-verbal grasp of mystic rites by any normal human being:

“It is very much the same as if anyone were to place a man, a Greek or a barbarian, in some mystic shrine of extraordinary beauty and size to be initiated, where he would see many mystic sights and hear many mystic voices, where light and darkness would appear to him alternately, and a thousand other things would occur; and further, if it should be just as in the rite called enthronement, where the inducting priests are wont to seat the novices and then dance round and round them—pray, is it likely that the man in this situation would be no whit moved in his mind and would not suspect that all which was taking place was the result of a more than wise intention and preparation, even if he belonged to the most remote and nameless barbarians and had no guide and interpreter at his side—provided, of course, that he had the mind of a human being? Or rather, is this not impossible?” (43)

So also Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 166: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not merely conjecture them and seek them as though obscured in darkness or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon: I see them before me, and I associate them directly with the consciousness of my own existence. The former begins at the place I occupy in the external world of sense, and it broadens the connection in which I stand into an unbounded magnitude of worlds beyond worlds and systems of systems and into the limitless times of their periodic motion, their beginning and their continuance.” (54n8)

Think of Ember Days:

Times and seasons create our lives together, and we celebrate the returning seasons rather than submit to a drunkard’s walk through life, without rhyme or reason. (58)

Quoting Blake (this was one of Malcolm Muggeridge’s favorite quotations too):

When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a Guinea? O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty. I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro’ it and with it. (79)

Quoting Proclus, reminiscent of Dionysius on why lowly divine names are sometimes better than lofty ones:

It seems to me that the grim, monstrous, and unnatural character of poetic fictions moves the listener in every way to a search for the truth, and draws him towards the secret knowledge; it does not allow him, as would be the case with something that possessed a surface probability, to remain with the thoughts placed before him. It compels him instead to enter into the interior of the myths and to busy himself with the thought which has been concealed out of sight, by the makers of myths and to ponder what kinds of natures and what great powers they introduced into the meaning of the myths and communicated to posterity by means of such symbols as these. (89-90)

We can “know” things “from the inside,” because we are ourselves “inside.” There are at least two implications, a metaphysical and an epistemological. Metaphysically, the Platonic claim is that reality is essentially a “minded” affair— rather than imagining an array of atomic or more familiar bodies, with no more than “primary” or “objective” properties (that seem to dissolve into merely nominal attributions), we are to conceive that colours, topologies, virtues, principalities and powers are real elements of an eternal Intellect. These are in turn reflected or refracted in our phenomenal worlds: rather than supposing that there are first distinct individuals, from which we abstract some conception of universals, we are to acknowledge that the first discriminable realities are “noetic,” related to each other not by their disposition in a preexisting “space” but by their rational associations. (98)

The words Philo—so true!:

It is a hard matter to bring to a standstill the soul’s changing movements. Their irresistible stream is such that we could sooner stem the rush of a torrent, for thoughts after thoughts in countless numbers pour on like a huge breaker and drive and whirl and upset its whole being with their violence . . . . A man’s thoughts are sometimes not due to himself but come without his will. (101)

Clark continues:

The thoughts, feelings, images that sweep across our consciousness, and that may briefly absorb us are not the same as the self, considered simply as that consciousness. Our error is to identify with the passing thoughts and feelings. Our release is to draw ourselves back from them, even from those with which we are most tempted to identify.

“It is not necessary to examine every problem and every thesis but only one about which doubt might be felt by the kind of person who requires to be argued with and does not need castigation or lack perception. For those who feel doubt whether or not the gods ought to be honoured and parents loved, need castigation, while those who doubt whether snow is white or not, lack perception”: Aristotle, Topics 1.105a4–8 1.11. (107n69)

The so-called “hard problem of consciousness” is indeed an artefact, an effect of that initial decision that the world is really made only of “objects.” Our predecessors were wiser— or at least more innocent: they had not imagined the merely material into being, and therefore took it for granted that the world was composed of cooperating and conversing subjects. … The Rabbis were wise to make the personal element of the Genesis story clear. We may need to face up to our fears, and realize that “religion” is not seeking “explanations” but acknowledging the mystery of being. We do still live in a world of beings, not of things. (120-21)

Citing Plato—this is the “Proof Texter”:

“When he thinks that he is reasoning he is really disputing, just because he cannot define and divide, and so know that of which he is speaking; and he will pursue a merely verbal opposition in the spirit of contention and not of fair discussion.” (168)

What has been called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics is a sort of confirmation that we have the root of the matter in us, that our intellect is a spark of the universal reason, an image of the God on whom everything depends. Or else, of course, we should rather abandon that conviction, and with it any confidence that mathematics is more than a sometimes-useful fiction. The “success” of science can only be pragmatic, parochial, transient, and we have no reason to extrapolate the patterns that we happen to see here-now to a vastly wider world. Nor can we reasonably suppose both that there are no universal binding obligations (that is, that there is no God) and also that there is a universal binding obligation to pursue “the truth.” If atheistical naturalists are correct we cannot reasonably expect to discover truths beyond, at best, the parochial, nor do we have any obligation to try. … (175)

Conversely, if we can and should pursue and prefer the “real truth,” then a form of theism is, essentially, correct: we really should listen to reason. … There is a single source for all things; this source is expressed in the Logos, and the Logos is, at least, available to us. This does not constitute a “proof” of those dogmas— I doubt if there are ever any final or conclusive or universally persuasive proofs of anything— but atheistical naturalists are at least condemned to a more incoherent doctrine than are theists, as they must believe simultaneously that creatures like us are very unlikely to be equipped to understand the cosmos (or even have reason to want to), and that they themselves know enough to know that theism is mistaken. (176)

Quoting Durkheim:

The believer who has communicated with his god is not merely a man who sees new truths of which the unbeliever is ignorant; he is a man who is stronger. … Whoever has really practised a religion knows very well that it is the cult which gives rise to these impressions of joy, of interior peace, of serenity, of enthusiasm which are, for the believer, an experimental proof of his beliefs. The cult is not simply a system of signs by which the faith is outwardly translated; it is a collection of the means by which this is created and recreated periodically. (177-78)

Plotinus—my experience often at Mass:

It is there that one lets all study go; up to a point one has been led along and settled firmly in beauty and as far as this one thinks that in which one is, but is carried out of it by a kind of swell and sees suddenly, not seeing how, but the vision fills his eyes with light and does not make him see something else by it, but the light itself is what he sees. (182)

Names—that is, “true names”—embody real natures: the things as they are understood in the original language, or in the “mind of God.” The Name, as much as the statue, is the god’s active presence. (196)

The land of Canaan, it was supposed, was His to give His people, and to cleanse from squatters. And the only way that this could seem possibly true was for the Lord also to be the Creator and thereby the Owner of all lands and peoples. He must therefore stand outside the natural order, as its sole origin and master. At the same time, that Lord was introduced from the beginning, exactly, as the Liberator from all oppressive masters— including the lesser “gods” and their human or demonic servants. (201)

Ceremonies and sacred places are the place where Heaven meets Earth— that is, the hope of a bright eternity is given temporary form here-now. (203)

Quoting Boethius:

“I may say quite firmly that if those things the loss of which you complain of were really yours, you would never have lost them.” (204n58)

Chesterton:

It [the popular instinct] has a very well-grounded guess that whatever is done swiftly and systematically will mostly be done by a successful class and almost solely in their interests. (230)

We shall prevail by ordinary, domestic, virtues, combined with cheerful resistance to all would-be tyrants (and a lot of cunning). (256)

Theodore Parker:

“Will you fear lest a wrong should prove immortal? So far as anything is false, or wrong, it is weak; so far as true and right, is omnipotently strong. Never fear that a just thought shall fail to be a thing; the power of God, the wisdom of God, and the justice of God are on its side, and it cannot fail,—no more than God himself can perish.”

BRILLIANT – G.K. Chesterton:

Science is the study of the admitted laws of existence; it cannot prove a universal negative about whether those laws could ever be suspended by something admittedly above them. It is as if we were to say that a lawyer was so deeply learned in the American Constitution that he knew there could never be a revolution in America. Or it is as if a man were to say he was so close a student of the text of Hamlet that he was authorised to deny that an actor had dropped the skull and bolted when the theatre caught fire. The constitution follows a certain course, so long as it is there to follow it; the play follows a certain course, so long as it is being played; the visible order of nature follows a certain course if there is nothing behind it to stop it. But that fact throws no sort of light on whether there is anything behind it to stop it. That is a question of philosophy or metaphysics and not of material science. (265-66)

Maintaining order and proper ranks is not an unworthy project: how else, we may reasonably ask, shall we avoid dissolution? Those who resent and vilify all “organised religion” have never fully considered what disorganised religion might be like: a world in which we all do exactly what we please, in the name of our own personal “truth,” made “true” merely because we assert it. (275)

***

Clark’s books may be found at, e.g., Angelico Press, or on Amazon.

The indulgence offered by the Holy Father in honor of the 800th anniversary of the Transitus of St. Francis (Oct. 3, 1226–Oct. 3, 2026) is available until January 10, 2027. The requirements for fulfilling the indulgence can be found here.

Giovanni Bernardone lay dreaming in Assisi. Forgotten for a time were the bloody fields of Collestrada, the year long night of imprisonment, and the illness that crippled his body, for he was born to be a knight, and adversity only heightened his valor. He hungered to reclaim the glory lost in Perugia. In his restlessness, he had that very day for the love of Christ given all his fine livery to a poor knight he met along the road.

Beneath the veil of sleep, he saw a spacious palace adorned with a “lovely bride,” and “filled with arms and military ensigns, all marked with the Cross of Christ, to make known to him that his charitable deed done to the poor soldier for the love of the King of Heaven should receive an unspeakable reward. And when he asked for whom all these things were reserved, a divine voice answered him that they were for him and his soldiers.”1

With utter simplicity, upon awakening, “he endeavoured, therefore, to go to Apulia to win knighthood; and after making the needful preparations on a lavish scale he hastened toward the attainment of the knightly dignity.” In a subsequent vision, he was admonished to return home and to serve the “God of infinite riches,” rather than a poor mortal, and to await the spiritual work that the Lord would have him do.

Thus, St. Francis of Assisi, like the child David, laid down his weapons of iron to take up the arms of the Spirit. Bare-breasted and “owning nothing but his harp,” Francis, a new man, walked among the woods of Umbria singing the praise of God, who by divesting him of every worldly defense, had so richly endowed him with the Holy Cross, that royal sign in which Christ our King forever conquers, forever reigns, and forever rules.

Mystical Marriage

St. Francis’ conversion occurred sometime around the turning of the year 1205. It is illustrative of the spiritually fallen state of his own time that he innocently misinterpreted the divine directive from the Crucified Lord to “repair the Church” as a call to physically repair the crumbling churches in the neighborhood of Assisi.

Materialism and heresy had set the Church tottering on her foundations, and neglect of divine service had led to a loss of faith everywhere. Seeing so many Christians valuing worthless things and leaving eternal things to ruin, St. Francis, a most ardent knight, took Lady Poverty for his own bride. They were henceforth inseparable partners in the terrible struggle for souls.

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