Dr. K’s Weekly Roundup, January 3, 2026
I wish you a very blessed and grace-filled New Year of Our Lord, 2026.
Have you ever heard people say that January 1st was originally a feast in honor of Mary, the Mother of God, and then only later became a feast about the Circumcision of Jesus (as it is on the TLM calendar)? That’s the kind of nonsense that was taught in the universities and influenced the NO calendar. In reality, the story is much more complex, as Gregory DiPippo explains:
It is a commonplace of pre-Conciliar liturgical scholarship that the title of today’s feast as that of the Circumcision is a later development in the Roman Rite, imported from the Gallican Rite and elsewhere. The revised Butler’s Lives of the Saints states “On the whole it would seem that outside Rome—in Gaul, Germany, Spain, and even at Milan and in the south of Italy—an effort was made to exalt the mystery of the Circumcision in the hope that it might fill the popular mind and win the revelers from their pagan superstitions. In Rome itself, however, there is no trace of any reference to the Circumcision until a relatively late period.” Similar statements are made in the Catholic Encyclopedia article on the feast, in the Bl. Schuster’s The Sacramentary, in Dom Suitbert Bäumer’s History of the Breviary, and in Mons. Pierre Battifol’s History of the Roman Breviary. This assessment is based on a very superficial reading of the day’s original title and liturgical texts; in reality, the Circumcision was a prominent feature of today’s liturgy from the very beginning.
Today is also the octave day (pre-55) of the feast of St. John the Beloved Disciple. The Benedictus antiphon on his feast reads: Iste est Ioánnes, qui supra pectus Dómini in cena recúbuit: beátus Apóstolus, cui reveláta sunt secréta cæléstia (This is John, who leaned at supper on the bosom of the Lord. O Blessed Apostle, to whom heavenly secrets were revealed).
St. Peter represents the institutional and juridical dimension of the Church; St. John the mystical, sacramental, doxological. Outer structure and inner life. Bones and flesh.
Both are necessary for a healthy Church, even as two legs, two arms, two hands, two eyes, two ears, two lungs are needed for optimal living. Both harmoniously subserve the ultimate purpose of the Mystical Body: union with God in Christ.
When the Johannine principle is diminished or forgotten and the Petrine is exalted to a be-all and end-all, one lapses into institutionalism, legalism, hyperpapalism—a sclerosis of living tissue. Characteristic of this excess is the degeneration of liturgy into sentimentalism or utilitarianism, and the denigration of mystery, awe, beauty, and the interior life.
The opposite error occurs when the Johannine is exalted at the expense of the Petrine—something seen in a moderate form with Eastern Orthodoxy, and in an extreme form with occultism.
Undoubtedly there will be times of tension between the Petrine and Johannine principles, but they can and should work together fruitfully, even as Peter and John ran together to the empty tomb, and paid homage to the mystery they could not comprehend. Of them, one could say, analogously, that no man should put asunder what God hath joined together.
To all of us, two examinations of conscience can be posed: Do you respect the papacy as an integral element of the Mystical Body of Christ on earth, and communion with the pope as a sine qua non of fidelity to the Lord’s will? Do you respect the primacy of the interior life and the providential fullness of liturgical tradition, which it is ours to receive humbly, not to overmaster like industrial lords?
Liturgical Lessons
Ross, part 2
In last week’s roundup, I mentioned Ross Arlen Tieken’s superb essay “First Principles of Liturgical Realism.” Tieken has since published a second part, “On Eros and Perception.” A taste:
The Liturgy, by putting us into direct, graced contact with the Triune God, cleanses our perception and increases our desire for heaven. Holiness is an acquired taste; the liturgy is where that taste is acquired. Holiness is a privileged way of seeing; liturgy is where the scales are slowly peeled off the eyes.... Proper perception then requires proper interior and imaginative and symbolic formation; Objects reveal themselves only after one becomes worthy of perceiving. Again, this is done primarily through the praxis of the liturgy; one should not be surprised that dissecting and analyzing reveals no non-material properties; nothing could be as fundamentally unworthy as destroying the thing you wish to understand.
The original epistemological mistake of modernity is the privileging of human discursive thought (Reason) above all other forms of knowledge. But ever since reason destroyed itself—in the thought of Hume, for instance—the deChristianized West has been scrambling for a new epistemology. It has never succeeded, and the experiments have gone sour, turned to ashes in our mouths. Having “given up” on knowing and loving Reality—we’re not even sure it exists—we are only concerned now with utility, either social or material, elevating techne (previously thought to be the lowest form of knowledge) to the highest honor in our culture. We may not know what things are, but we know how they can be used.
But this has led to a view of the material world that is, frankly, disgusting. We use land and “resources” like they are mere raw material for our consumption, and so the land has been destroyed. We use humans like vessels for our pleasure, and so the people become nothing more than objects. And we use the Church as a sort of social club or moral school, and so the Church has lost its air of Mystery and Reality. We have attacked all things with our discursive utilitarianism, and have left destruction and desecration in our wake....
This tie to the agricultural year—part of Christ’s sanctification of time—is clearly and fully expounded in the Gospels, in which all of the parables that Christ uses to instruct his faithful are fundamentally agricultural and seasonal. This is not simply a condescension to his followers, but reveals the Real at the heart of creation; that the Earth herself cries out to God in her seasons. Among Liturgical Realists, you will find a clear rejection of the industrialized human environment, of which the modern city is perhaps the most salient example. This is not romanticism of the rural, but rather a constant re-grounding in Reality as it has been given to us. Human constructions are not in themselves evil unless they twist, distort, and diminish the Reality that God has blessed us with and there is no better example of vandalism, extraction, and derealization than a human prison made of artificial materials and completely shielded from the seasons. The City is not an evil if it complements and heightens the dignity of the farm and the wilderness, but the City is an evil if it shields its occupants from Reality; which is in fact the state of most cities on Earth today. This is the City of Cain, not the City of Jerusalem.
Adversus populum
We need to know well the history of how the error and travesty of versus populum (or, as one wag calls it, adversus populum) worship was imposed—or rather, inflicted—on Catholics everywhere. For, as long as the error endures, souls will be malformed. The stakes are that serious.
Luisella Scrosati once again aids us in this endeavor:
A constant feature of revolutions in the liturgical sphere is the encounter between novelty and antiquity, the convergence between progressivism and archeologism.... It is quite evident that Nußbaum’s interpretation of the archaeological data is strongly influenced by prejudice, which, among other things, clouded his view of the numerous written testimonies according to which the orientation of prayer was an established fact, and even attributed to the teaching of the Apostles themselves.
Unity and pluralism can and should coexist
Fr. Michael Rennier has a really marvelous reflection, “What does it mean to be Liturgically Traditional?,” that I would encourage everyone to read.
He takes Le Brun des Marettes as a point of departure for discussing why […]