Dr. K’s Weekly Roundup, June 13, 2025

Flashpoint Chartres, Towering Classics, Monarchy, Why Progressives Hate Latin, Mount Everest, and more

Chartres Pilgrimage

The 43rd annual Chartres pilgrimage came to a triumphant end this past Monday, with somewhere between 19,000 and 20,000 participants (hard to keep track of the exact number, but let’s just say it’s maxed out and they can’t fit another body).

May this be the future face of Catholicism, not the withered and desiccated pop version of the 1960s!

As always, it’s a flashpoint for ecclesiastical politics, if only because it’s just such a gigantic witness to the attractive power, resilience, and boldness of Catholic tradition. It doesn’t have to be a flashpoint, if bishops would just stop taking potshots at it and (more broadly) if they stopped expecting all Catholics to be excited about the bell-bottom liturgy of 1969. The Association that organizes the Chartres pilgrimage issued a wonderful and profound declaration about why this event exists, what it signifies (and what it does not signify), which I would definitely recommend to your attention.

Indeed, the French bishops sometimes even seem to contradict themselves, as if they don’t know whether to scold or to applaud. Thus, the local bishop of Chartres, +Philippe Christory, scolded the pilgrims ahead of time: “A Church is not a liturgical self-service, where everyone goes according to what moves their heart or according to their attachment to one language rather than another, especially Latin.”

(Your Excellency, the ultimate "liturgical self-service" is the Novus Ordo, in which every celebration is the result of choices made by individuals and committees among a plethora of options, vibes different from place to place or even hour to hour, and a thousand languages divide up the people—not the single old rite with inflexible rubrics that the Chartres pilgrims love for its unchanging peace and spirit of adoration.)

But then, the same bishop smilingly welcomed the pilgrims as they marched into town, and preached at their closing solemn Mass a message that might well have been on the lips of any traditionalist figure:

You pilgrims have walked, sweated, suffered, slept little, cried out, sung, and prayed. You moved beyond all comfort, supporting one another, guided by the spires of Notre Dame de Chartres seen in the distance. This vision gave you courage, you sang praise to the Lord. You deserve our admiration….

To stay on the path of Faith in our perverted society – Saint Paul speaks of a perverted society – it is necessary to have great desire…. A teenage girl, soon to be confirmed, wrote to me about her desire to “cleave to the Lord forever”. You who are in Chartres today, is it your desire to cleave to Jesus Christ all your life?…

The time has come for witnessing, but to be a witness, we must know the Word of God and courageously bring it to the people of our time. Jesus said, “He who is of God, listens to the words of God.” (Jn 8:47). However, the world does not listen to God: it listens to itself and closes itself to the voice of God. This is why Jesus needs you. It is likely that we will not always be accepted, but Jesus has warned us. This resistance is part of the transmission of Faith; it is even a criterion of authenticity.

It was the great Bishop Athanasius Schneider who offered the Solemn Pontifical Mass the day before, on Pentecost Sunday, under a tent decorated more appropriately than most churches built after 1965, with the congregation out in the open:

KTO is the semi-official TV station of the French bishops. It covered the Chartres pilgrimage, mostly in positive terms, including interviewing pilgrims who sang the praises of the Latin Mass, though also mentioning the pressure so that the NO is also celebrated in future editions, and remarking that not all current pilgrims are exclusive TLM worshippers. All in all, a rather positive segment (in French):

I think people are (slowly) waking up to the realities. This is just not going away, and if you try to stomp on it, you’ll only make people more ornery.

Kennedy Hall makes just this point in a powerful piece today at Crisis: “The Toothpaste isn’t Going Back in the Tube: Tradition and the War of Attrition.” A taste (mint-flavored, perhaps?):

Two notable events have taken place since Pope Leo XIV ascended the Throne of Saint Peter: Bishop Michael Martin of Charlotte angered pretty much every traditionally-minded Catholic in the Anglo-sphere, and 20,000 pilgrims, mostly young, marched the Chartres and attended an internationally televised/streamed Latin Mass said by Bishop Athanasius Schneider.

Bishop Martin’s actions became an international sensation and the documents leaked to the public came off like a temper tantrum by an unhinged ideologue who wanted to stick it to the Trads for not loving the New Springtime enough; whereas Bishop Schneider’s actions, along with the pilgrims, seemed simply Catholic and holy.

What we see in the dichotomous reception of these two events is indicative of an undeniable truth that the hierarchy must deal with, even if some want to ignore it: Tradition is winning and will win, whereas the experiment of the conciliar era will lose and is losing.

Aussie Pilgrimage

Chartres-like pilgrimages are springing up everywhere. I’ve discussed them here at various times. (Someone out there should make a website that lists every official TLM pilgrimage by country. On the other hand, maybe this will only make it easier for the Eye of Sauron?)

Here’s the equivalent in Australia: the Christus Rex Pilgrimage. Calling all Down Under: swell the ranks with pious faithful and offer up the hardships for the restoration of Tradition!

Benedictine Monastery in Sweden

“Catholicism in Sweden and Scandinavia, and especially the TLM part of it, is close to achieving something absolutely incredible. After working for it for almost 10 years, we have been blessed by having a traditional Benedictine start a hermitage/monastery here. Something that has not happened since the Reformation 500 years ago.” The monk is looking for help to purchase a farm with suitable buildings for a monastery—a very valid use of tithing donations, I’d say. You can find out more here.

Book Discussions

Morello revisited

This past Monday we published Sebastian Morello’s fine apologia for his book Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries, “Snuffing the Pyre.” Predictably, a good deal more discussion has ensued, to which Morello made a further response at OnePeterFive: “To Achieve Clarity, to Avoid Scandal: Some Statements on Christian Re-Enchantment.” I highly recommend reading it if you are interested in this conversation.

Tradition, Mariology, Veiling, and Sacred Signs

Kennedy Hall invited me on to his program to have a conversation about Vincent of Lérins and the Vincentian canon, John Henry Newman’s Mariology, the symbolism of women veiling at Church, and Romano Guardini on sacred signs. Our discussion explores the many interesting connections among these topics:

Here’s how I’d put the connections in writing:

Vincent in his Commonitory is famous for announcing the canon, or the principle of tradition: only what has been handed down counts as the Faith, any pure novelty must be rejected. But of course there are difficult examples, as even Vincent admits; and he also says that we can grow in our understanding and ability to express these truths, as long as we don’t deny the dogmas already in place.

That’s where Newman comes in. Not only was he inspired by Vincent to write his Essay on the Development of Doctrine, but his little book on the Virgin Mary is a perfect illustration of it. If you start with the idea that Mary is the New Eve—and he shows that this view is found among the greatest Church Fathers as something already traditional—then you can derive from it the rest of Catholic teaching on Mary, including the Immaculate Conception (take that, Eastern Orthodox!). (By the way, Catholics who apostatize to become Orthodox must publicly and solemnly reject the Immaculate Conception. I don’t think Our Lord, on the day of judgment, will remember kindly that repudiation of the superabundant redemptive grace He bestowed upon His Mother, the sinless Theotokos.)

That’s in the realm of dogma. The book Mantilla: The Veil of the Bride of Christ gives us a different example of tradition, in the realm of morals or customs, and shows that the Bible and the Church Fathers recognize it as morally appropriate for women to cover their heads at worship, as for men to uncover their heads. This was the opposite of both Jewish and pagan practices, and that was deliberate: Christian worship is qualitatively different, and this is one custom among many that reinforces that difference. The departure from a biblically-based, once universal practice can only be worthy of condemnation for Vincentian reasons.

Lastly, now that we are in the realm of worship, Guardini enters in, beautifully explaining to us in Sacred Signs the traditional building blocks out of which Christian worship is made—the meaning that can be found in our bodily postures, in objects and items, in times of the day, all of which God in revelation and the Church in her liturgy have carefully and consistently deployed, until the revolution of the 1960s. Once again, the Canon: we must adhere to what has been believed, prayed, and lived.

Is Monarchy Really the Best Form of Government?

Kennedy Hall welcomed on to his channel the one and only Charles Coulombe, to discuss topics raised by the latter’s recent book The Compleat Monarchist. For those interested in political history and philosophy, an episode to enjoy:

A new book out from Os Justi Press

The latest release is John O’Connell’s To the Praise of His Glory: An Introduction to Catholic Morality.

The author, who has taught religion to converts for decades, approaches his topic in logical steps, based on St. Thomas Aquinas. What is human nature, and what are human acts? How do virtues (and the Spirit’s gifts) perfect our actions? Where does law fit in? How is the moral life governed by “the mighty seven” virtues: faith, hope, charity, prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance?

O’Connell’s clear descriptions of venial and grave sins in regard to each virtue will be welcome to those looking to form their consciences rightly, without veering into either laxity or scrupulosity. The work closes with a presentation of the seven sacraments, which, together with prayer, are the chief means of receiving divine grace, growing in it, or recovering it when lost.

Ideal for converts, reverts, catechists, teachers, preachers, homeschoolers, and all who are simply looking for a clear guide to Christian morality, To the Praise of His Glory offers the “bird’s-eye view” that can otherwise be so difficult to obtain.

Liturgical Lessons

Ad orientem

A Benedictine monk has given us a wonderful essay, “Disorientation 180º,” on the significance of worship ad orientem (facing east, priest and people together), how it belongs to Tradition (with a capital T) and is therefore obligatory, how Paul VI was instrumental in undermining it, and the spiritual and psychological harm versus populum has caused.

We put our liturgy in the hands of…?

As more and more comes to light about the liturgical reform, it looks worse and worse: the arrogance and lunacy of these men was beyond belief. Don’t take my word for it; read Gregory DiPippo’s fascinating piece at NLM about their proposal to have no Gospel (!) on the Feast of Pentecost. This is what I meant when I argued, some time ago on this Substack that the reformers put everything on the table for surgery, and in this way set themselves against and above the entirety of tradition, against the very principle of tradition—regardless of whether saner heads prevailed in particular decisions.

What the Athenian says in Plato’s Laws

As recounted by Robert Keim in “What Is Tradition? Lessons Learned from the Albigensian Crisis”:

Any change whatever except from evil is the most dangerous of all things. When men have been brought up in certain laws, which by some Divine Providence have remained unchanged during long ages, so that no one has any memory or tradition of their ever having been otherwise than they are, then every one is afraid and ashamed to change that which is established. The legislator must somehow find a way of implanting this reverence for antiquity. Children who make innovations in their games, when they grow up to be men, will be different from the last generation of children, and, being different, will desire a different sort of life…. Not one of them reflects that there will follow what I just now called the greatest of evils to states…. Frequent changes in the praise and censure of manners are the greatest of evils.

Too bad almost no one who worked at the Vatican understood this in the 1960s. I’m reminded of a piercing statement by Richard Weaver in his famous Ideas Have Consequences:

I see no way to sum up the offense of modern man except to say that he is impious.... He has taken up arms against, and he has effectually slain, what former men have regarded with filial veneration. He has not been conscious of crime but has...regarded his action as a proof of virtue.

Worshiping at the shrine of the new

The mentality of Bishop Martin is perfectly skewered (as usual) by Fr. John Perricone in “Looking Backward in the Diocese of Charlotte”:

The Modern credo dutifully worships at the shrine of the New. They chant always a New Beginning, death to the past, never look back. No surprise that every modern dictator sings out of this songbook....

Only one thing from the “past” do the Moderns cherish: repression, quick and thorough. Echoes of that contradiction can be seen in America today: law-fare, virtue signaling, free-speech repression, organized pillaging, and exacting conformity. Any trace of the Old Ways is met with swift retribution and social shunning....

Something in the soul of men eventually stirs. A brave few remember. And what they remember is our noble Past—that Past with its truth, its wisdom, its solidity, its beauty, and its conformity with the soothing truths of human nature. A few quickly turn into an army. No longer do they want to worship the advance of time. They crave the Timeless. This return to the timeless is appearing in shocking numbers, to the chagrin of the aging gatekeepers of the Dead Past.

By the way, Bishop Martin is bringing in heterodox Franciscans to help “evangelize” the diocese of Charlotte.

Why progressives hate Latin

An excellent article at Unam Sanctam Catholicam, “Latin and the Contextual Understanding of Ritual,” answers this question. Excerpt:

For progressives the Mass is primarily didactic (about teaching), and even then under the dullest, most tiresome form: talking. Everything is explained away; nothing is left implicit. We have to be told what everything represents, told what everything means, told what the priest is doing at every moment. We can't appreciate the symbol as symbol; it has to be instructional, turned into a teaching lesson. There's no place for anything that creates ritual opacity, certainly not a sacred language like Latin. The current ecclesial zeitgeist is obsessed with the liturgy as pedagogy. It is so prevalent I am not sure some clergy can even think of it otherwise....

I, like many millions of Catholics today and throughout history, have found great solace in the Latin liturgy. I'm not stupid; I don't want a liturgy that talks to me like I'm a baby and thinks I am too much of a dullard for symbol and ritual opacity. For all the bloviating progressives do about the laity rising up, it's telling that they don't even trust us to understand our own cultural patrimony. That's because progressives don't actually care about the spiritual growth of the laity, our aspirations, or our struggles. They treat us the way Democrats treat black voters—as a monolithic bloc whose invocation gives justice and cover to all their abominations.

This topic is very much in the news (I suppose we can thank +Martin for that!). In “Latin Belongs in the Liturgy,” Antony Esolen writes:

The great majority of people who attend the Traditional Latin Mass do so without the slightest intention to fight against their bishop or against people who attend the Novus Ordo. They attend the Latin Mass because they feel they are deriving insufficient strength from the Novus Ordo.

That is not to doubt the validity of the sacraments. It is to feel that the rest is thin fare. Perhaps they find the sappy and narcissistic contemporary music to be empty also. Perhaps they are tired of the New American Bible and its drab, sometimes garbled, and sometimes misleading translations. Perhaps they find the chatty atmosphere not conducive to prayer. Perhaps the priest, on a whim, alters the words of the prayers or of the readings from Scripture. Or perhaps — and this is something that the bishop seems to find incomprehensible — they find a power in the Latin itself….

I have heard all my life that Jesus prayed in his mother tongue, so we must pray in ours. But we do pray in ours. The question is whether we will ever pray in any other. And here we cannot assume that we know exactly what Jesus and his apostles always did. Their vernacular was Aramaic, a close cousin of classical Hebrew. But Hebrew was still used in worship, and scribes studied the Hebrew texts; Aramaic translations in writing appeared somewhat later. And if Jesus and the apostles at the Last Supper sang a psalm, not only would the poem have been in Hebrew — it would have been in a poetic Hebrew that was not the Hebrew of the chronicles or of the public streets when the psalms were composed. For some ancient Hebrew words we find only in poetry, nowhere else.

A great article (read the whole thing).

A couple of quick comments.

1. Contrary to what people so often falsely say, I have never fought against the PEOPLE who attend the Novus Ordo. After all, I was one of them for decades, and so are many Catholics who are dear to me. I have only and always fought against the treacherous liturgical reform that deprived these good people of so much that was their birthright, their God-given inheritance. I will fight till my dying breath against the Novus Ordo, but only because I love my fellow Catholics and want them to have the best from the best.

2. There simply is no religion in the history of mankind, and no version of apostolic Christianity certainly, that did not make use of a heavily stylized, high-register language, an “aristocratic” and poetic speech, that even from day 1 would have seemed different to what attendees spoke as a vernacular. And the passing of centuries only accentuated this. Now, either this means every culture and every Christian church over millennia was fundamentally misguided, or... that we, who modernized and vernacularized everything, are the outstanding idiots.

Finally, my friend John Byron Kuhner, whose essays I enjoy so much, explains why “Etiamnunc Ecclesia Quantum in Lingua Latina Habeat Non Cognovit (The Church Still Doesn’t Realize What a Great Thing It Has In Latin).”

What difference does the Offertory make?

In a brilliant article, Dr. Michael Foley focuses on the significance of the traditional Offertory of the Mass. What essential purpose does it serve? The answer: to “consecrate” in the strict sense, that is, to set aside as dedicated to God for the sacrifice. He brings in German Lebkuchen as a dramatic foil. Read the piece; it’s very enlightening.

Transitioning to pre-1955

This week at New Liturgical Movement, Part 2 of the series on transitioning peacefully from the 1962 to the the pre-55 Roman Rite came out. Written by an experienced MC, the advice is highly practical and concrete. In conversations with clergy, one of the most common demurrals I hear is: “I’d love to do that, but it’s just so complicated, I’d hardly know where to begin.” Well, now you do!

Meanwhile, a photo of Pope John XXIII doing the pre-55 Good Friday ceremony, obviously not too concerned that he’s out of step with his predecessor’s “restored” Holy Week:

TLM on Mount Everest

Last month, Fr. Doohan offered a Latin Mass at a base camp, saying to fellow climbers: “Heaven has once again come down to Earth at its highest point.” The Register article doesn't mention it's a TLM, probably because the author is Andrew Likoudis. But you can see the maniple on the left wrist, and an independent source confirmed for me that this priest is indeed a TLM celebrant.

Other Articles Worth Reading

Hilary White describes “Modernia”:

In the last decade, it seems to be coming home to more people in the western world that there is something deeply wrong with our post-war, globalist civilisation, that it seems not only to be unliveable for greater numbers of us, but increasingly seems untenable itself; about to collapse under it’s own unsustainable weight. We feel that whatever it is we are living in (we haven’t been able to call it “Christendom” for centuries) is finally dragging itself to an ignominious end. And while we might mourn for the former greatness of the Constantinian Establishment, we are more worried about what’s coming next.... Whatever this is we’re living in, it’s not just broken, but built to fail. I call it Modernia. We’ll make an attempt to identify and diagnose it.

Anna Kalinowski asks at OnePeterFive if there are philosophical reasons to prefer natural over synthetic materials for clothing. Her prose is a delight to read.

Robert Keim explains why “The Albigensian Heresy Is a Cautionary Tale for Us All.”

A Gen Z poet, Kori Jane Spaulding, shares her heart-wrenching poem, “It Was the Damn Phones.”

Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J. addresses “Why Catholic communities are failing” (parishes, religious congregations, etc.), and asks what can be done to reverse the trend. Readers of T&S won’t be surprised by his answers.

In “A Catholic Lawyer Responds to the Bishops About Mass Immigration,” Kevin Kijewski pens a good, clear response to the myopic endorsement of open borders.

How did the family with the most saints in history go about education? A good question, which Robert Lazu Kmita takes up in “An Extraordinary Family of Saints and the Secret of Christian Homeschooling.”

Want to see more tradition and sanity?

A kind reader left this comment when she took out a paid subscription this week:

If you are not yet a paid subscriber, and if you enjoy the content you find here and think we should keep going long into the future, please consider joining the ranks of those who keep this Substack afloat and sailing:

If you’re already subscribed or you’d simply like to buy me a coffee:

If you’d prefer direct support through PayPal:

Thank you for your support, thanks for reading, and may God bless you!