Dr. K’s Weekly Roundup, June 27, 2025

Good News, Detroit depredations, attack tracker, Chartres and the French predicament, Zen fortitude, political musings, Morello vindicated, and more

Peter Kwasniewski

Jun 27, 2025

I wish you all a very blessed feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Today’s roundup covers the past two weeks, so let’s dive in.

Good News

Growth in TLM attendance

New data indicates a larger percentage of practicing American Catholics are connected to the TLM than previously believed.

Festival of St. Louis

The full schedule for the Sixth Annual Festival of Saint Louis in St. Louis, Missouri, has now been announced. Its main events will take place on the vigil (24th) and feastday (25th) of the great French monarch and beloved patron. I participated a few years back and loved it. Highly recommended.

Website: http://festivalofsaintlouis.com/

Pontifical liturgies

Bishop Athanasius Schneider recently visited the United Kingdom and offered many pontifical Masses (in addition to other activities while there). It is so heart-warming to see a shepherd who loves all the people of God and generously imparts to them the riches of Catholic tradition.

A wonderful photo of the moment at a pontifical Mass when the deacon receives the bishop’s blessing and kisses his ring prior to chanting the Gospel:

May be an image of 7 people, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and text — At Ramsgate

One thing I love about the old rite is how it takes possession of the space in which it is offered and totally dominates it visually, to such an extent that even a fairly unremarkable modern church, not to say one that is distractingly modern, falls into the background as the worshiper's full attention is drawn into the rite itself. There are many reasons for this: not just the obligatory ad orientem, but the involvement of many ministers in symmetry and hierarchical order, the choreography amidst chant and silence, the customary use of rich vestments, and so forth. It is a sacred drama of such weight and moment that it makes the environment secondary.1 You see all this well captured in the following photo of Bishop Schneider’s pontifical Mass in Northampton Cathedral:

May be an image of 12 people, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and text

Flag torn down

A Catholic in Syracuse tore down an LGBTQ+ rainbow flag that was hanging in front of a Catholic church. We need to see more of this pro-active work.

Under the bus

The ghostwriter of Traditionis Custodes, Andrea Grillo, has been thrown under the bus by Sant’Anselmo. This was very likely the result of a phonecall from the Vatican, as Rorate Caeli relates. My only disagreement is that Grillo is not the most influential professor at the Anselmianum, only (tragically) the most influential among the coterie surrounding Roche. I’ve heard from folks on the ground that Grillo is something of a marginal figure at the Anselmianum and that students gravitate toward more normal faculty members these days.

Devolving in Detroit

Readers here will no doubt be aware of the antiliturgical depredations conducted by the Archbishop of Detroit, who, like his confrere in Charlotte, not only drastically reduced the number of TLMs in his diocese, but also attempted to ban, contra legem and ultra vires, the use of the eastward orientation in the Novus Ordo.

What we must recognize is that such bishops are acting against the common good of their local church because the restrictions and cancellations injure the parishes where the TLM had become a powerhouse of attendance and support. Moreover, they earn the resentment of their presbyterates and faithful. What price are prelates willing to pay to continue this senseless war?

While I’m not a “reform of the reform” guy (because I believe it’s ultimately a self-contradictory enterprise skating on the thinnest ice), at the same time I recognize the many positive “knock-on” effects the return of the TLM was having on parish Masses. This is too obvious to deny. As we’ve seen in Chicago, Charlotte, Detroit, and other places, even the traditional options available to the Novus Ordo are shut down by bishops who despise the TLM and the faithful who attend it.

The silver lining on the cloud is the opportunity for rethinking that situations like this afford to those who believe the “reverent Novus Ordo” may be an acceptable substitute for the TLM — or even, as per Adoremus Bulletin, “the way the Church needs to go in the present and the future.” If you fall into that category, I urge you to consider two challenging articles, one from Unam Sanctam Catholicam called “Bishops See Reverent Novus Ordo as a Gateway Drug,” and an article of mine from some time ago, “Why Restricting the TLM Harms Every Parish Mass.”

Tracking attacking

A new tool has been created to track all the places where bishops are actively warring against expressions of reverence and tradition, as well as places (sadly, far fewer) where positive steps are occurring. It will be helpful for research, publicity, campaigns, and the like:

For decades, Catholics attached to tradition were told to settle down, blend in, and be grateful for the reverent Novus Ordo. “You don’t need the old rite,” they said. “Just find a good parish with chant, Latin, incense, and ad orientem worship. That’s perfectly allowed.” Now we see the truth: they were buying time. The wrecking ball isn’t stopping at the 1962 Missal. It’s coming for every expression of sacred continuity. The target now is reverence itself.

For the record, I most definitely do not agree with the article that is linked at the head of that page; it is unintelligently pessimistic and ill-informed. However, the map itself and some of the further recommended readings are excellent. (They are asking readers to submit further information or corrections.)

Remember, they are coming for you next. Better make common cause with the trads before it’s too late.

How to help canceled priests

In wars, soldiers are injured. Valiant priests who live out their dedication to the traditional liturgy and their faithful devoted to it are often “canceled” in one way or another. We must help these priests to continue in the ministry to which God called them. But we must also be prudent about where we donate.

An important exposé was published that makes for crucial reading:

The Coalition for Canceled Priests has become one of the most troubling examples of mission drift I’ve encountered in my years of analyzing nonprofit operations.... Because this mission is so critically important, we have established a specific Cancelled Priest Fund under the Restoring Christian Culture Initiative to support these priests.

The Restoring Christian Culture Initiative and especially their Cancelled Priest Fund, headquartered at Sanctus Ranch where I spoke at a gala last Saturday, is eminently worth supporting with your tithing money (especially if you live in dioceses where the bishop’s hostility to you or your priests means no donations will be heading in his direction).

Why the “wars” are not going away

You sometimes find well-meaning people saying: “Why does there have to be tension between traditionalists and other Catholics? Why can’t we just get along? Couldn’t we settle for pluralism?”

I do believe we all want to get along, and pragmatically, a dose of Benedict XVI-style pluralism would be a welcome reprieve. But the trouble is, the disagreements we have are real, profound, and explosive in their consequences. Traditionalists have never shied away from this or tried to hide it; in fact, they plead with Church authorities to face the issues with honesty and integrity, something that has barely ever happened. (Ratzinger was a welcome exception.) In this way, I agree with Fr. Z when he recently wrote, in the same vein he has admirably pursued for years:

Everything starts with proper worship, the fulfillment of the virtue of Religion. As a Church we’ve lost a great deal of the sense of who we are because of the loss of the riches of worship. If we don’t know who we are, can we tell someone else? Why should anyone pay attention to us if we don’t know ourselves? Everything we do must start in worship and then be brought back to worship. This is the staring point for renewal and the goal in an dynamic that will end in earthly terms at the Parousia described by Joel and will continue in heaven in eternity. We Are Our Rites.

This, I am convinced, is why Cardinal Burke has already conveyed to Pope Leo XIV “his hope that the Holy Father will end the ‘persecution from within the Church’ of ‘those who desired and to worship God according to the more ancient usage of the Roman rite.’” Can Leo XIV end the liturgy wars? This is the question Damian Thompson poses at The Spectator (you can read his piece here).

Cardinal Burke has made his own view clearly known:

Church history, he said, shows that “doctrinal and moral corruption in the Church is manifested in the falsification of divine worship,” adding that “where the truth of doctrine and the goodness of morals are not respected, neither is the beauty of worship.”

Capture the imagination

Writes Robert B. Greving in “On Cardinal Burke and Hobbits”:

It is difficult, maybe impossible, to reach modern man through the intellect alone. His intellect has been so malformed by the culture and education that arguments rarely work. You must go beyond—or deeper than—intellect. You must go into his heart and soul, that is, his imagination, that realm of symbolism, ritual, ceremony, and gesture—things which we subconsciously yet more powerfully take into ourselves. It is no good telling modern man that something wonderful or holy is happening during the Mass. His mind has been numbed practically out of existence. He must experience that there is something profound here. You must appeal to his sense of wonder and awe, his sense of the numinous, of something different.

A French abbot agrees

From a recent interview with the Abbot of Fontgombault:

People who do attend this type of celebration [viz., the TLM] are sensitive to its contemplative, more God-oriented dimension. ... Drowning in a hyper-connected, noisy world where messages are omnipresent, they appreciate the silence and sobriety of the texts in the Vetus Ordo. This more expressive, less cerebral character seems to me to be a pastoral asset.... Looking for political reasons for this success is misguided. If the faithful go to these places, it is simply because they find something they're looking for.

Chartres pilgrimage under fire

The statement released earlier this month by the organizers of the Chartres pilgrimage, republished at Rorate Caeli, deserves to be read by everyone. The explanation here is very clear.

For our spiritual family, the traditional liturgy is quite simply the supernatural environment for our encounter with Christ. Its words, sacraments, Mass, offices, and catechesis have been for many of us the raw material of our faith, the vehicle of grace, the instinctive expression of our relationship with God: in a word, our mother tongue for speaking to the Lord, but also for hearing him. For others, these overtones have been the secondary but providential cause of a conversion or a radical renewal of faith. For many priests, this liturgy has become ‘visceral’ in the biblical sense, penetrating every fiber of their priestly being in an all-encompassing way. This is not a matter of vague aesthetic sentimentality, but of life, of breath, of the incarnate expression of faith. Those who believe that Christianity is a religion of the Incarnation understand that these mediations are in no way accidental, incidental or interchangeable by decree or prohibition. ...
For us to hear that a Mass according to the Vetus Ordo can easily be replaced by a Mass according to the Novus Ordo in Latin, ad orientem, with incense and Gregorian chant, is painfully indicative of the little consideration given to the vitality of and to the spiritual bond that harmoniously ties together the traditional practices of faith. We are told that the pilgrimage will finally be fully “of the Church” when it opens up to the Novus Ordo. We receive this with the same violence as a minority which is told that it will finally be accepted by the majority when it renounces its culture, when it waters down its richness to melt into the masses. ...
We recognize that the Church has been undergoing a major crisis for too long, a crisis of doctrine and liturgy. Herein lies a difficulty that we are aware of: the existence of traditional communities appears to some as a “living reproach” to other pastoral and liturgical methods, which some would like to force us to assimilate into.

Resistance to known truth

The French Bishops prepared a report on the desperate decline in vocations in their country — and “forgot” (or refused) to include the traditional orders, where vocations are on a steady rise:

Why? Because they are not supposed to exist. They must not be named. They are renegades who refuse the new paradigm.

Commentary from Silere non Possum:

There is also a glaring omission: no mention whatsoever of ordinations within traditionalist communities — those groups that regularly celebrate the Roman rite in its ancient form and are, in France, not only numerous but also notably young. These are not schismatic communities; they are fully in communion with the Pope. And yet they are systematically ignored, as though their very existence were to be erased.
Silere non possum has repeatedly pointed out that the true issue is not the choice of liturgical rite, but rather the ecclesial vitality, the youthfulness of the candidates, and the seriousness of the formative proposal these communities offer. That is what draws so many young men to them. The question thus arises: why are these communities ignored in a national report on ordinations? The answer is clear: ideology. An ideology that excludes what it cannot control, that silences what does not fit within its own cultural frameworks.

The damned stubbornness of the ecclesiastical apparatchiks is nothing short of astonishing. They simply refuse to acknowledge that any other way is possible than doubling down on the postconciliar “reform.” At this point, if the Lord Himself were to appear, telling the French bishops to take a different path, they would call Him a dissenter and a schismatic.

A true hero of the Faith

But not every bishop is this way. Cardinal Zen, under house arrest, celebrated a public Latin Mass in defiance of Traditionis Custodes and then brought the Blessed Sacrament out into the streets of Hong Kong in defiance of Communist prohibitions. He has more courage than vast swaths of Western episcopacies! Read more at the National Catholic Register: “Cardinal Zen’s Bold Latin Mass Statement Sends Multiple Messages to Hong Kong.”

Exile is temporary

Here is a message to remember at times like this:

In the cycles of history, including the history of salvation unfolded for us in Scripture, we see times of exile, and in those times, the varied responses people make to their exilic condition. It seems that we are living in a peculiar time marked by institutional self-exile, as if churchmen had become Pharaohs and Pontius Pilates. That is no excuse for failing to do what we can and must as sons of Abraham, children of Israel, and disciples of Christ; rather, it is the perfect opportunity to pray for and seek a return to Catholic tradition, having at its heart a liturgy that is worthy of — and truly communicative of — the most important work the Church does: offering to the Lord the holy oblation in peace, ourselves united, in faith and love, with the spotless Lamb.

From my book Close the Workshop: Why the Old Mass Isn’t Broken and the New Mass Can’t Be Fixed, p. 328.

Close the Workshop

Speaking of that book… It’s been receiving a good deal of attention lately, for which I am grateful.

With his signature combination of dry wit and pathos, Dan Millette reviews it over at OnePeterFive in “Dr. Kwasniewski and the Honest Truth”:

Realizations are messy and disorienting. What happened to the music? Blessings? Liturgical calendars? The Divine Office? The propers of the Mass? The rites of all seven sacraments. Morality. Theology. And why, Lord, why? I’ve learned that the differences between Tradition and “the Novus Ordo paradigm” are legion.
I recall vividly the precise moment I understood that the Novus Ordo Mass was broken, could never be fixed, did not want to be fixed.... Many years have passed. Many years of studying, listening, and thinking about the issue. Many years of discernment, conversion, and continual surprise. And then, out of thin air, the book I needed all along appeared earlier this year....
The chapters are lethal in their clarity and truth. The best arguments in favor of the Novus Ordo Mass are presented fairly and accurately and then, one by one, dismantled with unyielding prowess.... He [also] levels potential criticisms and questions at the TLM that, I am sure, most anti-TLM Catholics could not even begin to think of. The difference is that Dr. Kwasniewski can also provide insightful, satisfying answers to these objections.

Robert Keim takes one of Close the Workshop’s chapters as his point of departure in explaining why the medievals’ “allegorical” approach to the liturgy makes sense, and why contempt for this approach reflects badly on moderns:

Making drastic modifications to consecrated, inherited rites regarded as supremely important for the well-being of society and the salvation of souls—such would utterly contravene the medieval ethos, which insisted that innovation be distrusted, tradition be respected, and the noble past be preserved... A prodigiously symbolic liturgy will lose some of its appeal when those celebrating it and attending it dismiss, or even disdain, the medieval art of living a symbolic life. If, in an even worse scenario, that which replaces this allegorical spirituality is “the sterility of academic rationalism,” the liturgical rites of our ancestors are bound to seem inefficient, inaccessible, incomprehensible. It is rather unfair, though, to blame the liturgy for this, since people, not the rites, were the ones that changed.

If you’re interested in receiving a signed copy of Close the Workshop, you can order it here, from a special page at Os Justi Press. It’s also available from the book’s publisher, Angelico, or on Amazon.

The parish’s days are over

The geographical parish concept — that you “belong” to a local church — once made sense and served a good purpose in Christendom, but unless there is radical reform, its days of usefulness are largely over for serious Catholics. Such is the conclusion that emerges from Alexandria Chiasson McCormick’s “Was the Parish Made for Man—or Man for the Parish?”

In particular, when people say “You should stay in your parish and work on improving it!,” this often translates into: “You should spend years of frustrating Sisyphean labor rolling stones uphill, while sacrificing your children to whatever combination of bells and bananas your locale offers.” No. The order of charity dictates we seek first God’s glory, then the good of our souls, then the good of the souls entrusted to us, and after all that, the neighbors’ good.

Pre-55 Roman Rite

The excellent series at New Liturgical Movement on how to transition gently from the 1962 to the pre-1955 Tridentine rite continued with Part 3 on the Divine Office and concluded with Part 4. The fact that this topic is out in the open shows how far the movement has come in recognizing the deeper roots of the present malaise, and the need to take prudent but decisive action to rectify the missteps of many decades.

Stop the communal overemphasis

James Baresel makes the case in “Restore Individualistic Piety.” He argues that the Liturgical Movement was dominated by personalities who prayed best (or at least enjoyed doing stuff in) groups and that this is only one of many ways in which Catholics pray and should pray — even liturgically.

Thanks for reading Tradition and Sanity! This post is public so feel free to share it.

The Secret and the Preface Dialogue

Dr. Michael Foley continues his always fascinating exploration of the Latin texts of the Mass with an article “the Secret” and the Preface Dialogue. How I love insights like the following:

After the priest chants aloud the ending of the Secret, he and the congregation or choir chant aloud three rounds of dialogue. The last thing that the priest chanted was the word Oremus at the beginning of the Offertory Rite; now, we hear him sing the end of the Secret, per omnia saecula saeculorum. It is as if the Offertory were one great oratio, the middle of which was shrouded in silence.

I also love his further remarks about how the phrase “dignum et justum est” indicates Rome’s double inheritance of Athens and Jerusalem.

As it happens, the good Lord blessed me with lots of time in Foley’s company this past week in Waco, Texas. Here we are in front of his souped-up 1971 Camaro. Yes, we did talk about liturgy a bit…

Political Musings

I think it’s fair to say that the sympathy many conservatives felt with Trump has been rapidly eroding, thanks especially to the hawkish Zionist line he has been pursuing. At the same time, the Democrats continue to demonstrate a rabid progressivism that is one step away from full-fledged nightmare. It is a time when one might despair of the existing party framework, which seems utterly inadequate to the existential challenges of the day.

This Substack is not much focused on politics (and I plan to keep it that way, have no fears), but I will occasionally share philosophically interesting pieces in this vein that I come across. Thus:

Robin Phillips writes about “The King, the Machine, and the Community”:

Individualism and authoritarianism cross-fertilize each other in their mutual antagonism to embedded human community. Consider how, historically, the left has ping-ponged between anarchical freedom and totalitarian control – a polarity that goes back to the founding war of liberalism, the French Revolution. This polarity should not be surprising. At the heart of the liberal project is antipathy to hierarchy, whether it be a hierarchy of values (some things really are Good, True, and Beautiful, and cannot be privatized without risking civilizational collapse), or hierarchies of loves (I’m with Vance, not Pope Leo XIV, when it comes to Ordo Amoris), so that citizens become an undifferentiated mass of individuals, each existing in an unmediated relationship with the state....
But now the role of community, long suppressed in post-Enlightenment politics, is returning with a vengeance. On the left, the emergence of sex-based and race-based identity politics repudiates the long-standing tradition of individualism and associated ideas like free speech and personal autonomy. While offering lip service to personal autonomy, the new tribalism seeks to enforce revisionist virtues based on new social science theories about race, sexuality, and anthropology. But even while leftist radicals and identitarians are bringing community back to the center of political discourse, the vision of community they offer is one that many find oppressive because of how it divides society into a zero-sum contest between winners and losers.

Name-calling

Eric Sammons has a good editorial over at Crisis Magazine about the problem of name-calling in the internet age.

In our simultaneously quick and lazy ways of communicating, people have learned that the best way to neutralize and indeed dehumanize your opponent is simply to apply to him a label of opprobrium, so that he’s at an immediate disadvantage—one that he may not even be able to live down regardless of subsequent argumentation. It’s a cheap but very effective trick.

We are familiar, of course, with examples from the political sphere:

If you support Trump, you’re a “fascist”
If you don’t want little kids indoctrinated, you’re a “homophobe”
If you think property should be well distributed, you’re a “socialist”
If you disagree with Israel’s (or the USA’s) attack on Iran, you’re an “antisemite”

But there are plenty of examples in Catholic discourse, too:

If you question the wisdom of Vatican II, you’re a “heretic”
If you think the liturgy reform was a mistake, you’re a “dissenter”
If you disagree with a papal decree, you’re a “schismatic”
If you believe the old rite superior, you’re an “elitist” or “aesthete”
If you use the word magic positively, you’re an “occultist”
If you like anything from John Paul II, you’re a “Modernist”
If you question ultramontanism, you’re a “Gallican” or “conciliarist”

All this is tiresome, and shows a lack of self-control in speech, a lack of intellectual preparation, and a lack of the kind of patience that builds up community rather than tearing it down. We should all resolve to do better in this regard, since no one online is completely untouched by the bad habits of our time.

What’s in a name?

The question may well be asked: Is “conservatism” a meaningless word now? Can it be revived with a solid definition? Frank DeVito’s “Has Conservatism Outlived Its Usefulness?” probes the ambiguities and prospects involved.

Morello vindicated

Ross Arlen Tieken — a man who was a scholar and practitioner of the occult (he describes his background in some detail to establish his credentials in addressing the topic), and who converted to Christ and the Catholic Church because he came to see in them the fulfillment of all the partial truths he had glimpsed before — has weighed on the “occultism debate” with three potent pieces at his Substack El Antiguo under the common title “Against Sorcery, For Re-enchantment.”

In part 1, “Defining Terms,” he helpfully defines a host of terms, including sorcery, divination, spiritualism, gnosticism, superstition, occultism, New Age syncretism, magic, theurgy, hermeticism, astrology, alchemy, mysticism, symbolism, ritualism, and sacred geometry. Those who have been confused or scandalized by some of what has been foolishly asserted about Sebastian Morello will find this piece particularly helpful.

Part 2, “The Critical Arguments”:

My aim is not to attack these authors (they are fellow Christians), but to question the mood that has emerged—a mood of blanket suspicion toward anything that even hints of the symbolic, the mystical, or what some have hastily and inaccurately labeled “perennialism” or “the occult”. I use those terms here not as an accurate descriptor, but as the critics seem to use them: vague umbrellas covering everything from Neoplatonic cosmology to typology, from Giordano Bruno to liturgical aesthetics.
Importantly, at the outset I would like to commend the authors of the “anti-occult” for their vigilance against spiritual danger for individual souls. If their intention is to preserve fellow Catholics from dangerous spiritual error, their intention is good. But good intentions must still answer to the truth: are their claims accurate? My contention is that they are not.
The reductive, reactionary posture of these posts collapses necessary distinctions, dismisses the Catholic tradition’s own philosophical and symbolic richness, and risks replacing sacramental imagination with a kind of pragmatic rationalist moralism.

And part 3, “Against the New Puritanism”:

I think it is time to articulate something that is plainly occurring: the conversation is, in many cases, engaging in something far more spiritually dangerous than mere gatekeeping or the occasional odd take. It has revealed a posture of suspicion toward symbol, imagination, beauty, and metaphysics itself—a posture that cuts at the heart of the Catholic vision, and indeed the Orthodox vision, of Reality. Some have chosen to label their targets with the ominous sobriquet “The New Gnostics.” It is perhaps justified to return the favor. If there is a term for this increasingly rigid, suspicious, anti-symbolic mode of argument, it is this: The New Puritanism.

Finally, Tieken wrote a wide-ranging, competent, at times humorous review of Morello’s book Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries. While I don’t concur with Tieken’s every judgment, I recognize in him a man who well understands what he is reading and writing about.

A Cat Nap

Returning from singing at Mass, I threw my choir cassock and surplice on the bed, thinking I’d hang them up in just a bit... and then discovered that Weezer, with the unerring instinct of his kind, had found the perfect place for a nap.

Thank you for reading, and may God bless you!

Leave a tip for Dr. K

There are also particular reasons why the Novus Ordo cannot absorb the attention in the same way, and these are generally the reverse of the ones I mentioned: the versus populum is inherently distracting; there is too much talking; the use of mics and speakers causes sonic disorientation; the “ministers” are fewer and sort of scattered around; the vernacular keeps us plunged in the everyday rather than lifted to the eternal; and so on. It's as if the new rite were designed to diffuse and distract rather than to concentrate and elevate.