Letter to a Catholic Bewildered by Church Crisis

Dear Friend,

Thank you for writing to me with your questions and objections. I will plunge right in.

You note with sadness that, in your opinion, the SSPX is living “by a kind of privatization of religious authority.” You say they “operate in an ecclesially autonomous fashion.”

To me, the great scandal, indeed mysterium iniquitatis of our age, is that even our pope and bishops seem to be doing the same thing. They do not teach from the common deposit of faith—at least not with much consistency—but act as if their positions give them the same right as Christ had to say: “You have heard in the Law of Moses… But I say to you…” and then change up or confuse or undermine something that had been peacefully accepted for centuries or millennia. Frankly, there is a major epistemological and metaphysical crisis ravaging the West, and the hierarchy is caught up in it, rather like half-dead fish rushing with the tide. And thus, lack of unity is everywhere, not just among splinter groups: behold, the Catholic Church in 2026!

I do not deny for a moment that our hierarchs have authority, objectively; the Church continues and will never be destroyed. But they are doing their darndest to tempt the Lord and prompt His intervention (something for which I pray, genuinely).

I understand why you think the new liturgy must somehow in itself be perfectly fine because some of the faithful are sanctified through it, but I don’t think this opinion can withstand critique. For one thing, it is a rare traditionalist who would deny that God can sanctify man through minimal means. He can do so even without the sacraments; or with a scrap of bread and a thimble of wine in a labor camp, as we’ve seen with some heroic priests, especially under Communism.

But normally and normatively, the Lord in His Providence spreads out a banquet for the faithful’s nourishment, because He created us as the kind of creatures who benefit from it. The healthy attitude of a Catholic is to receive a patrimony gratefully and humbly, and to pass it on faithfully.

That was most definitely not done in the liturgical reform, and therefore it is like a giant gushing wound in the Church that will never stop bleeding until healing has occurred through restoration of continuity. I see the good fruits you’re describing as being somewhat like a blocked river that, in order to keep going, must find new channels to flow through, but meanwhile it produces a swamp that breeds mosquitoes. The water still flows… but there are consequences.