Against very strong competition, it may be that the transformation from the stark and deep Requiem Mass to the light celebration of the deceased person's life in the Novus Ordo may have been the most catastrophic change of Vatican II - because the people closest to the deceased - their families, their friends - no longer pray for their souls, because they think they immediately arrived in Heaven. Bishop Sanborn has remarked that the theme of these Masses are "Mom's making spaghetti for God," or "Dad's playing golf with God in Heaven."
We can see this change of attitude towards the dead in modern Catholic cemeteries. Instead of images of crosses, rosaries, patron saints, and angels, we see engravings of motorcycles, muscle cars, dogs, cats, fishing rods, even photos of the deceased acting silly. As a student of the History of Religion, this is striking, because it is, whether people realize it or not, a revival of the pagan idea of grave goods to accompany the deceased who will use them in the afterlife. Instead of "On Earth as it is in Heaven," it is the inverse - "In Heaven as it is on Earth."
I appreciate this post more than I can say, Dr. Kwasniewski. Having cared for and watched my husband die recently, I became most aware of the absolute rupture in that which is the Requiem Mass of the Ages for a departed soul and that which passes for the celebration of a life lived in this vale of tears with no reference to the eternal consequences of the temporal punishment for sin. Confession, when the 5 things necessary for a good one have been accomplished, only remits part, not all,of the temporal punishment.
The doctrine of Purgatory has been conveniently put aside and the focus becomes a human ritual where we play up the earthly life of the departed and satisfy ourselves with the declaration that "they're with the Lord", hunting and fishing and bouncing on clouds in Heaven.
If we take this mentality to fruition, then by all means euthanize the elderly because all dogs go to Heaven anyway.
If everyone canonized at a New Right celebration of life is with the Lord, there is no reason for redemptive suffering, thus no reason to care for someone who is dying.
The worst part of the Novus Ordo funeral Mass, in my opinion, is this Prayer of Commendation, which effectively canonizes not just the deceased person but EVERYONE in attendance!
Look at the third-to-last line below. Utterly presumptuous.
"Into your hands, Father of mercies,
we commend our brother/sister N.
in the sure and certain hope
that, together with all who have died in Christ,
he/she will rise with him.
(We give you thanks for the blessings
which you bestowed upon N. in this life:
they are signs to us of your goodness
and of our fellowship with the saints in Christ.)
Merciful Lord,
turn toward us and listen to our prayers:
open the gates of paradise to your servant
and help us who remain
to comfort one another with assurances of faith,
until we all meet in Christ <- HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE TO AFFIRM???
and are with you and with our brother/sister for ever.
We ask this through Christ our Lord."
No wonder most Catholics today believe all they need to do to get to Heaven is die, without any need to follow the Commandments or persevere in the state of grace. Only God knows how many souls have been eternally lost due to such presumption. Absolutely tragic.
The other thing that makes me cringe is when I see "Together Forever" on tombstones. I'm sorry, but this is presumptuous. Rather, it should say "R.I.P." or "My Jesus, Mercy" or "Jesu Juva" or "Spes nostra" or something like that.
My dear Aunt Lorraine was also my Godmother https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/nwitimes/name/lorraine-owens-obituary. She passed away about 8 weeks before her 96th birthday in 2022. It had been about a year after returning to the sacraments in the traditional Latin Rite after deserting the Novus Ordo in 1974 at age 14.
The funeral mass in West Virginia was one of the celebratory Novus Ordo funerals. It was filled with music, stories, and communion in the hand, of which I did not partake. Her body was then sent out for cremation.
When the cremated remains of Aunt Lorraine were returned to her original home town of Whiting, Indiana, a more formal Novus Ordo funeral mass was said before taking her cremated remains in their little marble box to the cemetary to be buried next to my Uncle Frank, who passed away in 1980 from cancer.
Although the service was more formal, it was still lacking, as I observed when following the rubrics and liturgy in my 1962 missal.
Aunt Lorraine loved her community in West Virginia, and would never leave her church there to move back home to Indiana after being widowed a second time.
Both masses had beautiful music, unlike the standard NO masses dissonantly have, thankfully.
I’ll take the Usus Antiquitor from now on, thank you very much. Pray I can get the traditional funeral and burial my body needs and my soul needs even more.
A few months ago I attended a funeral mass for my cousin and I was appalled. I actually left angry. I can't really add anything else as the post has covered it all.
Yes. And yet, even in this thread, we can see how certain people deny the problem. All I can say is, I've heard HUNDREDS of stories like the ones I shared, and all you have to do is mention funerals to get eye-rolls from serious Catholics.
This Mass as it is usually conducted in the NO is one of the worst experiences in my spiritual life, though there are so many in the NO. (recently a priest almost threw the sacred host into my mouth because I was kneeling and received on the tongue). The horrible saccharine music that is so banal at the NO funerals always makes me want to stand up and scream. When you place the Dies Irae against this music and the Mass itself, you understand there is an unbridgeable chasm between the 2 rites. It is truly reprehensible. Thanks for going into such depth as to the deeper reasons we feel so violated.
This is a brilliant and timely essay, Dr. Kwasniewski. As in the Requiem Mass, the traditional Office of the Dead pierces and convicts the soul of the living with the anguish of the dead: "In peace was my bitterness most bitter." Among the tragic effects of the modern experimentation that you listed, one of the most devastating is that we (the living) are not convinced by praying for the Dead that we must also pray for a holy death for ourselves and our neighbors.
Didn't the old books of devotion used to repeat endlessly, "Remember your last end?" This is the ethos of Tradition itself. The dead were yesterday as we once were. We will soon be like them. Our obligation to pray for them is so very serious. In their turn, they are forever grateful: "Have pity on me, have pity on me, at least you who are my friends, because the hand of the Lord hath touched me." (Job 19).
I asked Grok for U.S. Catholic data. The peak for membership was in the early 60's, with 35 million Catholics, and a weekly Mass attendance rate of approx 75%.
Since then, there's been numerical increase due to massive Hispanic immigration, although that is showing significant losses as Hispanics are exiting Catholicism for Evangelical, Pentecostal, and 'none.' Omitting the Hispanic sector for comparison purposes, the Non-Hispanic U.S. Catholic membership now stands at 32-34 million, with a weekly Mass attendance rate of 24% in 2025, after returning to pre-Covid pandemic levels.
Each year, 1.2-1.5% of adult Catholics leave or become inactive. About 43% of cradle Catholics disaffiliate over a lifetime. We have never recovered the numbers we had in membership or Mass attendance that we had in 1960.
The plunge in numbers of priests, professed religious, seminarians, Catholic- affiliated institutions, has been even more stark. Per the data, you can see the post-Vatican II period has shown catastrophic losses.
That illustration is charming...except that the servers in their Medieval haircuts look a little too much like "altar girls." On a more serious note: my wife and I decided to sell our cemetery plot where some of my family are buried and buy plots at the traditional chapel where we normally go to Mass. The reason? So we can be sure someone will pray for us after we have died. That accords with my daily affirmation: "I need all the help I can get!"
I never realized that the word “soul” was not in the NO Funeral Masses and I’ve attended countless services for the dead in my past life. Thank you for pointing this out. Modernism is wrong on all levels.
I grew up with only the NO mass and still attend NO mass (TLM was never available where I grew up, and no TLM available near me) - I am not elderly either - but no one, not my parents, not clergy in my formative years ever taught someone who dies immediately goes to heaven. The only ones we know for certain who are in heaven are the saints and angels, and those martyred. All our baptized Catholic family members, friends, associates who are not saints nor martyred we continually must pray for their reposed souls until we too fall asleep. And we must pray for those reposed souls too who do not have anyone praying for them. And this must be taught/passed on to future generations. That’s what I was taught, believe, and practice.
I literally cringe when I hear people assume someone who has died - not canonized or martyred - yet they say is in heaven. Even more cringey when I hear it said about non-believers un-believers who spent their earthly life denying and rejecting Christ and his Catholic church by the way they lived.
At the end of the Octave of All Saints, I attended a Requiem Mass. I want that for myself. Absolutely. I have told the person who will likely handle my arrangements many, many times, and have mentioned it to other loved ones semi-privstely and in more public settings, too...
I just attended a Novus Ordo funeral yesterday.
White vestments for the priest. White pall, black cross woven into it and central IHS insignia. Paschal candle, front and center. Versus populum... of course.
Soprano cantrix who applied a gospel-style elongation and fracturing of syllables to her renditions of 70s hymns with a synthetic harp accompaniment. Panis Angelicus at Holy Communion.
Father did mention the Eucharist in the homily, which went on for a bit and, honestly, I think that influenced his choice of Eucharistic prayer. Eucharist, though, as Holy Communion, not as the Sacrifice **of** the Eucharistic Lord - that's a distinction I believe more people need to appreciate, and it was not mentioned.
In sum, the homily -
Yes, Ray received Holy Communion in life and that was a source of strength for him, and that's the same Lord that will be on the altar shortly and will give strength to us. We need to pray for Ray who is now part of the Church that may be in purgatory - I don't know - being purified. There is the Church here, and the Church in heaven as we celebrated on All Saints' Day, and the Church in purgatory.
Reverent manner of the priest from beginning to end, who frequently uses the Roman Canon. But not that day. Middle-aged man in alb serving as altar boy to prepare and hand over the thurible when needed. No announcement to any non-catholics possibly present about the reception of Holy Communion. Commendation, thankfully read without embellishment, in Paradiso sang in the preciously-mentioned manner.
A reverent Novus Ordo funeral. But a Novus Ordo funeral.
I have written often about the jarring difference between what goes on before and after the Funeral Mass of a first responder or military member and what goes on during the Mass. The precision and devotion of the honor guard and all accompanying ceremonies as compared to the way the Mass is offered and the contents of the average funeral homily...
I thought about that as the casket arrived in the back of the Church, the pall was removed, and the National Colors (US Flag) were placed back over it.
Dear Dr. Kwasniewski, Outstanding article that I will be emailing to scores of Vatican II "demonically disorientated" people I know, as you know I once was while in the seminary from 1968-1975 in the immediate aftermath of Vatican II. It's patently "TRUE" what Mr. Andre Gushurt-Moore says in his book Glory in All Things: St Benedict & Catholic Education Today: "... that the post-human world has arrived for many in our world, as the sacred & the transcendent disappear from view." In regard to that reality, the self-proclaimed "Progressivist" Pope Paul VI, his Freemason buddy Msgr. Annibale Bugnini, the architect of the Novus Ordo Mass together with his 6 Protestant minister cronies "made certain" that there would be no emphasis "whatsoever" on "the sacred & the transcendent" in any of the new liturgical practices they introduced to the Novus Ordo (New Order) Mass/New "Age of Aquarius" Mass. I shall "never" forget all the Disco & Clown Masses we had in seminaries and convents back in the late 60's. On another subject you addressed in your article, that I absolutely concur with, in the Novus Ordo Mass for the dead, there is no mention of what Jesus teaches in Holy Scripture, that only those who enter through the narrow gate will be saved (Matthew 7:13-14). This metaphor of course signifies that salvation is a "narrow path," requiring genuine faith and obedience to God's will. Jesus contrasts this with the "broad road" that leads to destruction, where "many attempt to enter but fail!" The narrow gate symbolizes the "exclusive path" to eternal life, emphasizing the importance of placing one's faith in Him alone (John 14:6).
All that and much more "went out the window" with the adoption of Vatican II's "anthropomorphic/horizontal theology" as you so eloquently point out in your article. Again, well done professor.
Against very strong competition, it may be that the transformation from the stark and deep Requiem Mass to the light celebration of the deceased person's life in the Novus Ordo may have been the most catastrophic change of Vatican II - because the people closest to the deceased - their families, their friends - no longer pray for their souls, because they think they immediately arrived in Heaven. Bishop Sanborn has remarked that the theme of these Masses are "Mom's making spaghetti for God," or "Dad's playing golf with God in Heaven."
We can see this change of attitude towards the dead in modern Catholic cemeteries. Instead of images of crosses, rosaries, patron saints, and angels, we see engravings of motorcycles, muscle cars, dogs, cats, fishing rods, even photos of the deceased acting silly. As a student of the History of Religion, this is striking, because it is, whether people realize it or not, a revival of the pagan idea of grave goods to accompany the deceased who will use them in the afterlife. Instead of "On Earth as it is in Heaven," it is the inverse - "In Heaven as it is on Earth."
Brilliantly said. I agree entirely.
I appreciate this post more than I can say, Dr. Kwasniewski. Having cared for and watched my husband die recently, I became most aware of the absolute rupture in that which is the Requiem Mass of the Ages for a departed soul and that which passes for the celebration of a life lived in this vale of tears with no reference to the eternal consequences of the temporal punishment for sin. Confession, when the 5 things necessary for a good one have been accomplished, only remits part, not all,of the temporal punishment.
The doctrine of Purgatory has been conveniently put aside and the focus becomes a human ritual where we play up the earthly life of the departed and satisfy ourselves with the declaration that "they're with the Lord", hunting and fishing and bouncing on clouds in Heaven.
If we take this mentality to fruition, then by all means euthanize the elderly because all dogs go to Heaven anyway.
If everyone canonized at a New Right celebration of life is with the Lord, there is no reason for redemptive suffering, thus no reason to care for someone who is dying.
A very slippery slope.
You are right on target.
May the soul of your husband rest in peace, truly, and may the Lord give you comfort in this time of grief.
The worst part of the Novus Ordo funeral Mass, in my opinion, is this Prayer of Commendation, which effectively canonizes not just the deceased person but EVERYONE in attendance!
Look at the third-to-last line below. Utterly presumptuous.
"Into your hands, Father of mercies,
we commend our brother/sister N.
in the sure and certain hope
that, together with all who have died in Christ,
he/she will rise with him.
(We give you thanks for the blessings
which you bestowed upon N. in this life:
they are signs to us of your goodness
and of our fellowship with the saints in Christ.)
Merciful Lord,
turn toward us and listen to our prayers:
open the gates of paradise to your servant
and help us who remain
to comfort one another with assurances of faith,
until we all meet in Christ <- HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE TO AFFIRM???
and are with you and with our brother/sister for ever.
We ask this through Christ our Lord."
No wonder most Catholics today believe all they need to do to get to Heaven is die, without any need to follow the Commandments or persevere in the state of grace. Only God knows how many souls have been eternally lost due to such presumption. Absolutely tragic.
I agree.
The other thing that makes me cringe is when I see "Together Forever" on tombstones. I'm sorry, but this is presumptuous. Rather, it should say "R.I.P." or "My Jesus, Mercy" or "Jesu Juva" or "Spes nostra" or something like that.
My dear Aunt Lorraine was also my Godmother https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/nwitimes/name/lorraine-owens-obituary. She passed away about 8 weeks before her 96th birthday in 2022. It had been about a year after returning to the sacraments in the traditional Latin Rite after deserting the Novus Ordo in 1974 at age 14.
The funeral mass in West Virginia was one of the celebratory Novus Ordo funerals. It was filled with music, stories, and communion in the hand, of which I did not partake. Her body was then sent out for cremation.
When the cremated remains of Aunt Lorraine were returned to her original home town of Whiting, Indiana, a more formal Novus Ordo funeral mass was said before taking her cremated remains in their little marble box to the cemetary to be buried next to my Uncle Frank, who passed away in 1980 from cancer.
Although the service was more formal, it was still lacking, as I observed when following the rubrics and liturgy in my 1962 missal.
Aunt Lorraine loved her community in West Virginia, and would never leave her church there to move back home to Indiana after being widowed a second time.
Both masses had beautiful music, unlike the standard NO masses dissonantly have, thankfully.
I’ll take the Usus Antiquitor from now on, thank you very much. Pray I can get the traditional funeral and burial my body needs and my soul needs even more.
A few months ago I attended a funeral mass for my cousin and I was appalled. I actually left angry. I can't really add anything else as the post has covered it all.
Yes. And yet, even in this thread, we can see how certain people deny the problem. All I can say is, I've heard HUNDREDS of stories like the ones I shared, and all you have to do is mention funerals to get eye-rolls from serious Catholics.
This Mass as it is usually conducted in the NO is one of the worst experiences in my spiritual life, though there are so many in the NO. (recently a priest almost threw the sacred host into my mouth because I was kneeling and received on the tongue). The horrible saccharine music that is so banal at the NO funerals always makes me want to stand up and scream. When you place the Dies Irae against this music and the Mass itself, you understand there is an unbridgeable chasm between the 2 rites. It is truly reprehensible. Thanks for going into such depth as to the deeper reasons we feel so violated.
In thr Traditional Latin Mass practiced at my Catholic Church, we pray for the dead often
Yes, of course, and thanks be to God!
This is a brilliant and timely essay, Dr. Kwasniewski. As in the Requiem Mass, the traditional Office of the Dead pierces and convicts the soul of the living with the anguish of the dead: "In peace was my bitterness most bitter." Among the tragic effects of the modern experimentation that you listed, one of the most devastating is that we (the living) are not convinced by praying for the Dead that we must also pray for a holy death for ourselves and our neighbors.
Didn't the old books of devotion used to repeat endlessly, "Remember your last end?" This is the ethos of Tradition itself. The dead were yesterday as we once were. We will soon be like them. Our obligation to pray for them is so very serious. In their turn, they are forever grateful: "Have pity on me, have pity on me, at least you who are my friends, because the hand of the Lord hath touched me." (Job 19).
I asked Grok for U.S. Catholic data. The peak for membership was in the early 60's, with 35 million Catholics, and a weekly Mass attendance rate of approx 75%.
Since then, there's been numerical increase due to massive Hispanic immigration, although that is showing significant losses as Hispanics are exiting Catholicism for Evangelical, Pentecostal, and 'none.' Omitting the Hispanic sector for comparison purposes, the Non-Hispanic U.S. Catholic membership now stands at 32-34 million, with a weekly Mass attendance rate of 24% in 2025, after returning to pre-Covid pandemic levels.
Each year, 1.2-1.5% of adult Catholics leave or become inactive. About 43% of cradle Catholics disaffiliate over a lifetime. We have never recovered the numbers we had in membership or Mass attendance that we had in 1960.
The plunge in numbers of priests, professed religious, seminarians, Catholic- affiliated institutions, has been even more stark. Per the data, you can see the post-Vatican II period has shown catastrophic losses.
That illustration is charming...except that the servers in their Medieval haircuts look a little too much like "altar girls." On a more serious note: my wife and I decided to sell our cemetery plot where some of my family are buried and buy plots at the traditional chapel where we normally go to Mass. The reason? So we can be sure someone will pray for us after we have died. That accords with my daily affirmation: "I need all the help I can get!"
I never realized that the word “soul” was not in the NO Funeral Masses and I’ve attended countless services for the dead in my past life. Thank you for pointing this out. Modernism is wrong on all levels.
I grew up with only the NO mass and still attend NO mass (TLM was never available where I grew up, and no TLM available near me) - I am not elderly either - but no one, not my parents, not clergy in my formative years ever taught someone who dies immediately goes to heaven. The only ones we know for certain who are in heaven are the saints and angels, and those martyred. All our baptized Catholic family members, friends, associates who are not saints nor martyred we continually must pray for their reposed souls until we too fall asleep. And we must pray for those reposed souls too who do not have anyone praying for them. And this must be taught/passed on to future generations. That’s what I was taught, believe, and practice.
I literally cringe when I hear people assume someone who has died - not canonized or martyred - yet they say is in heaven. Even more cringey when I hear it said about non-believers un-believers who spent their earthly life denying and rejecting Christ and his Catholic church by the way they lived.
At the end of the Octave of All Saints, I attended a Requiem Mass. I want that for myself. Absolutely. I have told the person who will likely handle my arrangements many, many times, and have mentioned it to other loved ones semi-privstely and in more public settings, too...
I just attended a Novus Ordo funeral yesterday.
White vestments for the priest. White pall, black cross woven into it and central IHS insignia. Paschal candle, front and center. Versus populum... of course.
Soprano cantrix who applied a gospel-style elongation and fracturing of syllables to her renditions of 70s hymns with a synthetic harp accompaniment. Panis Angelicus at Holy Communion.
Father did mention the Eucharist in the homily, which went on for a bit and, honestly, I think that influenced his choice of Eucharistic prayer. Eucharist, though, as Holy Communion, not as the Sacrifice **of** the Eucharistic Lord - that's a distinction I believe more people need to appreciate, and it was not mentioned.
In sum, the homily -
Yes, Ray received Holy Communion in life and that was a source of strength for him, and that's the same Lord that will be on the altar shortly and will give strength to us. We need to pray for Ray who is now part of the Church that may be in purgatory - I don't know - being purified. There is the Church here, and the Church in heaven as we celebrated on All Saints' Day, and the Church in purgatory.
Reverent manner of the priest from beginning to end, who frequently uses the Roman Canon. But not that day. Middle-aged man in alb serving as altar boy to prepare and hand over the thurible when needed. No announcement to any non-catholics possibly present about the reception of Holy Communion. Commendation, thankfully read without embellishment, in Paradiso sang in the preciously-mentioned manner.
A reverent Novus Ordo funeral. But a Novus Ordo funeral.
I have written often about the jarring difference between what goes on before and after the Funeral Mass of a first responder or military member and what goes on during the Mass. The precision and devotion of the honor guard and all accompanying ceremonies as compared to the way the Mass is offered and the contents of the average funeral homily...
I thought about that as the casket arrived in the back of the Church, the pall was removed, and the National Colors (US Flag) were placed back over it.
Brilliant as usual sir. Perhaps you can comment/write about 30 Gregorian Masses?
Not going to have a Novis Ordo Mass or Burial. Must Pre-arrange. It’s a long process, but quite pleasant. I think it requires Faith.
Dear Dr. Kwasniewski, Outstanding article that I will be emailing to scores of Vatican II "demonically disorientated" people I know, as you know I once was while in the seminary from 1968-1975 in the immediate aftermath of Vatican II. It's patently "TRUE" what Mr. Andre Gushurt-Moore says in his book Glory in All Things: St Benedict & Catholic Education Today: "... that the post-human world has arrived for many in our world, as the sacred & the transcendent disappear from view." In regard to that reality, the self-proclaimed "Progressivist" Pope Paul VI, his Freemason buddy Msgr. Annibale Bugnini, the architect of the Novus Ordo Mass together with his 6 Protestant minister cronies "made certain" that there would be no emphasis "whatsoever" on "the sacred & the transcendent" in any of the new liturgical practices they introduced to the Novus Ordo (New Order) Mass/New "Age of Aquarius" Mass. I shall "never" forget all the Disco & Clown Masses we had in seminaries and convents back in the late 60's. On another subject you addressed in your article, that I absolutely concur with, in the Novus Ordo Mass for the dead, there is no mention of what Jesus teaches in Holy Scripture, that only those who enter through the narrow gate will be saved (Matthew 7:13-14). This metaphor of course signifies that salvation is a "narrow path," requiring genuine faith and obedience to God's will. Jesus contrasts this with the "broad road" that leads to destruction, where "many attempt to enter but fail!" The narrow gate symbolizes the "exclusive path" to eternal life, emphasizing the importance of placing one's faith in Him alone (John 14:6).
All that and much more "went out the window" with the adoption of Vatican II's "anthropomorphic/horizontal theology" as you so eloquently point out in your article. Again, well done professor.
Larry
In the spirit of this post, you might enjoy this song: https://youtu.be/MroxMuMaKpE?si=TaRZTAyI1Y_FMJOW