Dr. K’s Weekly Roundup, March 14 Edition

Good News (musical & iconic); Liturgical Lessons (fasting, pre-55, Low Mass, rebuilding, pageantry, weirdness); Theological Treasury (R & R, apologetics), Philosopher's Corner

Good News

Ancient tradition and modern music

The far-seeing Canon Coggeshall, rector of the St. Francis de Sales Oratory in St. Louis, and his superb music director James Marck, are to be warmly congratulated for programming Arvo Pärt’s Berliner Messe in the context of a Solemn High Mass for the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas last Friday. (They did only the Ordinary of the Mass, not the additional movements he wrote for the Votive Mass of the Holy Spirit.)

As many of you will already know, Arvo Pärt, who will (Deo volente) turn 90 this coming September, is the single most-performed living composer — and has been my favorite modern composer for decades. In fact, I’m a veritable groupie: I’ve got the scores of all his works, just about every recording ever released, and concert programs from many live performances (including the world premiere of his In Principio in Graz, Austria, at which Pärt and his wife Nora were sitting across the aisle in the same row of pews).

So, when I learned that this Mass was going to be sung in the context of a TLM — something I had always dreamt of but never thought I’d actually hear — I dropped everything and drove to St. Louis for the event (as I said, a groupie).

It was a sublime experience.

The tragic Kyrie, the stentorian Gloria, the luminous Credo, the lachrymose Sanctus, the contemplative Agnus Dei culminating in a radiant Dona nobis pacem... all of it, in spite of its modern idiom, matched surprisingly well with the awesome objectivity and majesty of the Tridentine Rite.

In particular, the interruption of the Sanctus prior to the Benedictus, which wouldn’t have been Pärt’s intention, meant that the music suddenly came to a suspended moment, almost like teetering on the edge of an abyss. There was a long silence for the consecrations, a collective held breath, and then, almost imperceptibly, the Benedictus resumed. It was utterly perfect.

Eternal Majesty

In a world of pop songs in earbuds and their lameduck knockoffs in too many churches, how wonderful it is to see initiatives like the following, so intelligent, grand, and enriching!

Musica Transalpina is proud to present the first American performance of Emperor Leopold’s Missa pro defunctis, which he composed for the death of Empress Margaret Theresa in 1673. The marriage between the Infanta Margaret Theresa and Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I was one of the most important dynastic alliances in history, so her untimely death was of immense historical significance. We are recreating the music that accompanied this historic event on April 3 & 6 so that you can catch a glimpse of the exquisite beauty of the Habsburg court in mourning.

• Free liturgical performance: Thursday, April 3, 2025 at 7 P. M., Ss. Peter & Paul, 515 West Opp Street, Wilmington, CA 90744

• Concert performance: Sunday, April 6, 2025 at 7:30 PM, St. Andrew’s, 311 North Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91103.

If you are anywhere near those places, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!

(I’d certainly take it anyday over the “hip-hop Mass” celebrated by Card. Wilton Gregory…)

New “Psalterium Romanum”

Let’s keep the musical good news rolling, shall we? Thanks to the learned and industrious Gerhard Eger, we now have a pre-Pius X Divine Office book with chant notation. Read more here.

Wyoming Catholic College receives a new icon

When WCC was founded back in 2005, it chose for its patron Our Lady under her title “Seat of Wisdom.” I wrote about this ancient and beautiful title here:

Our Lady as Seat of Wisdom and Ark of the Covenant

For all these years, however, the College never had an artistic depiction of its patroness to call its own, and relied on other already-existing artworks. This has now changed. The Class of 2023 pooled resources to commission an icon from British iconographer Martin Earle, and his work was finally delivered last week and blessed on the Sunday of Orthodoxy:

Liturgical Lessons

Brutalism

If you want to see some of the most sinister “churches” that the deranged mind of man has ever conceived, have a look at this post from Hilary White: “Why this church wants to hurt you; what is Brutalism?” Incredible.

Fasting

In two posts, “A Very Practical Study of (Traditional) Fasting” and “The Theory and Practice of Fasting in Medieval Christianity,” Robert Keim of Via Mediaevalis offers some of the most interesting and important information about fasting that I’ve ever seen, helping us to understand how our medieval forebears could have done so much of it — and how we could, too.

Pre-55 Holy Week

As interest continues to build worldwide in the recovery of the medieval or Tridentine (i.e., pre-Pius XII) Holy Week, I thought it would be helpful to mention, in addition to the resources already discussed in my post —

Emerging from the Liturgical Cave

— the existence of quite a few well-filmed pre-55 ceremonies available on YouTube. This was perhaps one of the strangest positive outcomes of Covidtide: since most congregations were banished to their homes, a lot of TLM apostolates carefully videoed Holy Week and especially the Triduum, and now they exist as a library of visual reference-points for the restoration of the rites. One particularly helpful library of pre-55 videos may be found here.

Length of Low Mass

In a short post, Fr. Z comments on several lines in the infamous turncoat interview with Cardinal Roche (you know the one: “I don’t have any problem with the Latin Mass, it’s just not to be the norm!”). It’s quite interesting to me that Roche reminisces about a saying he heard as a kid: “Remember, boy, it’s 20 minutes, amice to amice.” The saying as handed down in Latin actually was: “30 minutes, amice to amice.” Either Roche is misremembering or the priest himself was mistaken.

In my experience, that 10 minutes makes a big difference. A priest who knows exactly what he’s doing, has a competent server, doesn’t preach (ah, the bliss of a homily-free weekday Mass!), and has a smallish congregation (as is typical apart from Sundays or Holy Days), can easily do a Low Mass in 30 minutes that is utterly peaceful, reverent, and fitting. I’ve experienced it many times. If it takes notably less than 30 minutes, something is wrong; and if it takes (under the same specifications) significantly more than that, there’s also something not quite right.

On Roche…

The Pillar just came out with an article by Luke Coppen asking various liturgy commentators for their take on the Roche Interview: Gregory DiPippo, Fr. Anthony Ruff, Andrea Grillo, Joseph Shaw, and Austen Ivereigh. Ruff, Grillo, and Ivereigh come off as delusional, but see what you think.

Rebuilding the Walls

A new Substack of this name looks very promising, to judge from its opening “vision statement”:

The traditional liturgy is like a hedge, a living wall of cultus which defends us from the assaults of the enemy. What is more, it has grown up and over the bedrock and lattice of the Church’s deposit of faith in a gradual and organic way fusing itself with the same, such that if you tear down the one, you tear down the other.

In like manner, the liberal arts and classical tradition are a hedge of culture, strengthening the mind to seek truth and practise virtue against the lies and vice of the age. Generation after generation have since antiquity paid mind to their forebears and handed on the best of what has come before in a vital transmission.

Finally, living rooted upon the land, or otherwise deeply attuned to the creation of God rather than steeped in the artificial construct of the hyper-technologised world we find ourselves in, we are hedged in by the living wall of nature, by which we intuit and participate in God’s providential ordering of the cosmos, fortified by common sense and reality. Fathers and Doctors of the Church regarded creation and Scripture as the Two Books by which we rise, after the fall, to the knowledge and contemplation of God once more.

TLM, liberal arts, and back to the land… what’s not to love??

Pageantry is bad?

In a message released from Gemelli on February 28, the Pope urged MCs, gathered for a meeting at Sant’Anselmo, to adopt a litugical “style that expresses the following of Jesus, avoiding unnecessary pageantry or prominence.” That is so 1970s: you can just see flashing in your mind’s eye the posters of Godspell with the long hair and bell bottoms. As Grondelski rightly remarks:

When the pope warns against “pageantry and prominence,” I want to know how he will also protect against tacky and tawdry because the latter has often been the practical upshot of liturgical choices made ostensibly in the name of a “poor Church of the poor,” usually by the comfortably situated, not-poor liturgy and “worship” planners.

A Facebook friend commented:

Have these people ever considered that the poor might actually like “pageantry and prominence”? When your life is hard, it can be a real lift, which is something the Anglicans of the Oxford Movement understood very well when they established such parishes in the very poorest and most deprived areas of the country.

Cardinal Burke has said that many times, homeless people have thanked him after a pontifical Mass for what they experienced. It took them closer to heaven, when life on earth is very hard. Indeed, the splendor and majesty of liturgical rites are “not about you” (cleric) but in honor of the Lord, the King, who is worthy of our best, and who wants our hearts and minds to be lifted up beyond the humdrum to vistas of eternity.

Weird is “in”

Missed this when it first came out in January. Tracey Rowland’s “Making Christianity Weird Again” is quite a fine piece, which to my mind suffers from only one flaw: she fails to mention how the “weird” elements of Catholicism she praises and promotes were kept alive largely by the long-despised traditionalists, and that the battle has always been between tradition and modernity, not merely between supernaturalism and rationalism. Excerpt:

Consistent with the post-modern turn, pastoral strategists who spent decades promoting sacro-pop music and folk liturgies and modernized prayer books and manuals of ethical behavior devoid of any reference to God, grace, or sacrality, just “principles”, woke up to find themselves surrounded by a generation who want to study scholasticism, attend liturgies in Latin and, in the context of ethics, want to know how this or that act impacts upon their relationship with God.... The penetration of the natural by the supernatural is not banal, is not boring, is not a matter of bourgeois conformism. For the Catholic it’s beatific and for the unbeliever fascinatingly weird and different — and it’s what we need now as an alternative to a bland materialist cosmology.

Words of wisdom

“Because that which seems inevitable never is, it’s never in vain to resist it.”

The #1 enemy of the restoration of tradition is not a progressive pope, a liberal hierarchy, an apostate nation, or anything external. It is, I would dare to say, defeatism, resignation, cowardice, laziness, or any other form of throwing in the towel on the part of those who have been given the grace of tradition. Let us manfully cooperate with God’s grace to promote and defend what we know to be right, and resist the attack on it until our dying breath, regardless of how things turn out in our immediate locale or our all-too-brief lifetime. We are in this battle “for the long haul”; it is a multi-generational endeavor.

“It isn’t the hope of victory, but the necessity of struggle that makes the Christian warrior.”

(The quotations are from Jean-Pierre Maugendre, as translated by Stuart Chessman here.)

Theological Treasury

Schism or resistance?

Dom Pius Noonan, OSB, prior of the Benedictine monastery Notre Dame Priory in Colebrook, Tasmania, has an important article at Crisis Magazine, “Starting a Schism: So Easy It’s Not Funny,” in defense of the “R&R” (recognize and resist) position — that is, that we should acknowledge Francis as earthly head of the Church in spite of his notorious errors and crimes, some of which rise to the level of adjudicable heresy. Excerpt:

The visible head is essential to a body. The head can be sick, very sick, but if it dies, the body dies. The efforts of sedevacantists to try to explain how the office of the papacy could be “perpetual,” as Vatican I defined it, and yet disappear for a space of over two generations are not only unconvincing—they are contrary to the Faith. They stem from the refusal to accept that the Church comprises saints and sinners, good fish and bad fish, wheat and tares, even in the hierarchy until the end of time.

Another fundamental vice of the sedevacantist position is that, according to their theories, we must ultimately rely on some divine intervention to recover a true pope. No, the divine intervention has already taken place 2,000 years ago. Christ gave His Church all the means to face all the challenges to her unity and endurance that she will need till the end of time. We are not in some sort of new economy, as numerous heretics in history, including the modernists, have posited. But then again, we mustn’t be surprised. It has often happened that one error led to its opposite error being professed by opposing camps who were unable to see the truth with all its nuances.

Even if there are some finer points in the essay on which I have a different opinion, in general his view is mine, and I highly recommend this piece for those who are struggling with and under this pontificate.

Tradition or annihilation

Kennedy Hall asks whether this is, in fact, the only alternative facing us, and explains why the answer is yes. I agree with him 100%. Don’t miss this one.

Related: Richard Clements’ “The Solution to the Global Fertility Crisis,” a concise summary of the evidence that a rapid decline in human population can be expected in the coming decades and why it will cause massive social dislocations — together with the reasons why some, like Louise Perry, believe that humanity will thrive only in those places that have decisively rejected modernity’s pomps and works. To paraphrase Perry: “There is a God, and He doesn’t want us to be modern.”

Doing apologetics as if truth mattered

Timothy Flanders observes, in “Erick Ybarra and the Unfair Orthodox Debate”:

In my view, many Catholic apologists on Eastern Orthodoxy are too triumphalistic. They fail to make the necessary concessions to the Eastern Orthodox or take a view of the Papacy which is, in my view, not patristic and not tenable from the First Millennium sources. Not so with [Erick] Ybarra.

He is so concerned with truth that he will admit things about the Catholic side that many Catholics apologists seem embarrassed to admit. Because they do not admit these things, Catholic converts are sometimes converted on false hope, and they can quickly lose their faith when the going gets tough. As such, Ybarra truly converts souls to the very roots of the faith, which is a faith for which a Christian can suffer, not a shallow triumphalism that lacks roots in the Tradition....

This is why I always recommend Erick Ybarra for anyone looking for answers in the east-west debate, and unfortunately, I cannot recommend many other Catholic apologists on this point.

In the rest of the piece, Flanders explains why the Orthodox apologists often give themselves a break by proving negatives when they are incapable of proving positives.

Philosopher’s Corner

Analogion

Alerting philosophically-minded readers to a new Substack, Analogion, by Ryan David Mullins, whose initial posts are among the finest I’ve ever read. If you enjoy Byung-Chul Han, you’ll enjoy Mullins. Here’s an excerpt of his “From Eden to Algorithm: Humanity’s Curious Fall into Technological Temptation”:

The Book of Genesis, understood as more than merely a narrative of cosmic or human origins, provides an enduring theological and existential reflection upon humanity’s precarious position — caught between divine gratuity and technological striving, between contemplation and relentless mastery, between embodied finitude and limitless potentiality. Human existence, as depicted in Genesis, emerges as inherently situated within this tension: a delicate and often precarious negotiation between essence and existence, memory and possibility, tradition and innovation. The Fall vividly symbolises humanity’s primal temptation to collapse this tension, grasping prematurely at technological power and self-determined autonomy, and thus inaugurating our estrangement from creation’s original rhythms.

Also of keen philosophical interest: Robert Lazu Kmita’s “The Contemplative Significance of Mathematics in Pythagoreanism.”

Coulombe’s Company

A reminder that Charles Coulombe, one of the world’s greatest living exponents of monarchy, nobility, and all-around sane political philosopy, has extended to readers of Tradition & Sanity a 30% discount on his new Substack, Coulombe’s Company.

Romanticism as a dead end

Emily Finley’s essay “What is the Romantic Imagination?” gives us reasons for not glorifying Romanticism. As necessary a corrective to Enlightenment rationalism and materialism as it surely was, it also introduced a faux mysticism of the isolated emoting self, natural and free and capable of being anything — which collapses pretty quickly under the pressure of reality.

Insights from Hannah Arendt

It was Luther’s error to think that his challenge of the temporal authority of the Church and his appeal to unguided individual judgment would leave tradition and religion intact. So it was the error of Hobbes and the political theorists of the seventeenth century to hope that authority and religion could be saved without tradition. So, too, was it finally the error of the humanists to think it would be possible to remain within an unbroken tradition of Western civilization without religion and without authority....

However that may be, the fact is that the most significant consequence of the secularization of the modern age may well be the elimination from public life, along with religion, of the only political element in traditional religion, the fear of hell. We who had to witness how, during the Hitler and Stalin era, an entirely new and unprecedented criminality, almost unchallenged in the respective countries, was to invade the realm of politics should be the last to underestimate its ‘persuasive’ influence upon the functioning of conscience.

We have Robert Lazu Kmita to thank for collecting these and other insights of Arendt in his article “Hannah Arendt, the Fear of Hell and the Disappearance of Authority.”

While it’s bizarre to say the fear of hell is the “only political element in traditional religion,” her point stands: if you have removed entirely the fear of judgment by the ultimate Ruler — if, in short, you have said there are no ultimate consequences for evildoing — what stands in the way of any perversion whatsoever? Philosophy? Good luck with that. Even Socrates could see that men needed the “mythos” of Paradise and Hades in order to be morally aware and accountable.

Age of Illumination vs. Age of Enlightenment

But it is not the fear of hell or even the desire for heaven that defines Christian man; it is to be illuminated by the Holy Spirit so that one sees good as good and evil as evil, in contrast to Adam and Eve who sought to be “knowers” of good and evil in the sense of definers and determiners.

This is why I like Michael Warren Davis’s contrast between the “Age of Illumination” (i.e., Christendom under the reign of baptismal grace) and the “Age of Enlightenment” (i.e., mankind attempting to build reality by his own lights). His case reminds of that made by Dom Gueranger in his little treatise The Christian Sense of History, where he argues that a rigorous historian cannot exclude the divine, the supernatural, or the miraculous from his account of what happened in history. If he does so, he is prescinding from factual testimony and retreating into ideological filtration.

Catholic attitude toward modern science

I agree with Eric Sammons’s well-argued essay “A Truly Traditionalist Approach to Science Isn’t What You’ve Been Told.” It’s time we put to rest the idea that the normative stance of “traditional” Catholics is to be against the discoveries and theories of modern science. Obviously, we oppose them when they are interpreted or applied in ideological or unethical ways, as with scientism and materialism; but that’s precisely an abuse of scientific method. Sammons takes up two examples: heliocentrism and evolution. As he shows, the Vatican already came to terms with heliocentrism 200 years ago, in a battle royale that did not end well for the dogmatic geocentrists. As for evolution, dogmatism on either side is uncalled for.

Argue all you want for geocentrism and/or the direct creation of species, but do not say it is part of (capital-T) Tradition or that belief in one or the other is required of us as believers. It isn’t.

For lovers of language and literature

An excellent conversation between Andrew Thornton-Norris and Theo Howard, on the topic of the spiritual history of the English language.

Para mis lectores hispanohablantes...

Del blog Adelante la Fe:

Recientemente, nuestro estimado colaborador, el profesor Peter Kwasniewski, ha publicado un nuevo libro en español que merece un lugar preeminente en toda biblioteca católica digna de tal nombre. Con su aguda erudición teológica e histórica, lleva a cabo un estudio esencial sobre la siempre disputada relación entre autoridad y obediencia dentro de la fe católica, particularmente en tiempos de crisis como los actuales. Estas cuestiones, lejos de ser meridianamente claras para la mayoría de los fieles, suelen dar lugar a interpretaciones erróneas y actitudes equívocas que, en no pocas ocasiones, alimentan la confusión y contribuyen a la proliferación del modernismo dentro de la estructura eclesial, como aguas estancadas que nutren la decadencia doctrinal.

Además, me complace anunciar que haré una gira de conferencias por España este mes de julio, que comenzará en Sevilla (18 de julio) y terminará en Oviedo (25 de julio), con paradas en Córdoba (19 de julio), Toledo (20 de julio), Madrid (21 de julio) y Segovia (23 de julio). Si desea recibir información sobre los detalles, o si conoce a otras personas que lo deseen, por favor envíeme un mensaje a través de Substack o a través de mi sitio web personal https://www.peterkwasniewski.com/. También participaré en la peregrinación del 26 al 28 de julio de Oviedo a Covadonga. Si va a ir, ¡espero que podamos encontrarnos por el camino!

Thank you for reading and may God bless you!