A Letter to All Our Readers & Weekly Roundup

Organic development, Latin vs. vernacular, Ephesians 5, weekly favorites, the Spanish edition of "Bound by Truth," and more

Dear Readers,

Since its launch in April 2023, the Tradition & Sanity Substack has published over 250 articles: theological essays, liturgical analyses, spiritual meditations, explorations of art and artists, in-depth commentary on current affairs, book and movie reviews, roundups of the best online writing, and more.

Our commitment to quality, variety, and candor has won for Tradition & Sanity the current #21 rank in all religion-related Substacks worldwide. As far as I know, it’s the only ranking traditional Catholic Substack.

But I have to be honest with you. T&S has been in a lull for a few months. The number of free readers keeps growing, but the number of paid readers is not keeping up with it. We plateaued a while ago at just under 800, and can’t seem to grow past that mark.

I understand, we are in hard times economically. All of us are there.

Nevertheless, if you enjoy and benefit from the content at Tradition & Sanity, and would like to see it keep going strong, please take the next step and become a paid subscriber!

Julian and I need your support if we are going to be able to devote to this Substack all the time it takes to produce the quantity and (more importantly) the quality of work we are striving to produce here. Week after week. Every Monday, Thursday, and Friday.

And to sweeten the invitation, for the next week, we are offering 20% off all subscriptions (monthly or yearly):

In addition, we love your comments on the articles and we respond to each comment that calls for a response. We are engaged with you as writers (and we’re also engaged as readers with other Substacks: in our opinion, this platform is where the best writing and conversations are happening online).

Speaking of engagement…

What T&S Readers Are Saying

Here are some recent comments from readers of this Substack, saying why they have chosen to take out paid subscriptions.

Joseph E. Krugger:

My wife and I are cradle Novus Ordo Catholics who started attending TLM less than a year ago. We both fell in love with the richness and reverence of the liturgy immediately. Your writings have been very valuable to us in fully forming and informing ourselves on tradition.

Margaret Rewolinski:

I supported your work because from your writings, I am learning so much about the truth, beauty, spiritual depth and richness of my Catholic faith and the Traditional Latin Mass. Thank you very much.

Jim Warner:

The fight for the *real* Lex Orandi of the Roman Rite is the most pivotal fight to be undertaken in this time for the restoration of Christendom and I am delighted to be able to support this specific endeavor to this end.

Cornelia Hart:

Your writing is masterful, and you provide insight and understanding to our predicament as traditional Catholics... and you do it all with charity! Well done, Dr. K.

Daniel Marčinko:

I supported your work because of the good array of topics you touch upon and because of the quality of your writing.

Another Daniel:

The incredibly high quality of the content. I almost never take out paid subscriptions for Substacks, but the free content is so engaging and I really want to have access to everything.

Damien Madden:

As a born & raised Catholic I've always followed my faith as I understood things. I had trust in the clergy and respected Catholic traditions (and still do). However the gradual understanding that modernism was the combination of all past and present heresies has posed for me the challenge that I must strive to relearn and understand my faith in greater depth to combat and defeat it.

Caitlin McMahon:

My husband and I have been reading your books and articles for years, and you contribute immensely to our understanding of the Faith in its integrity and our perspective on church events.

Abigail Prohaska:

I see it [T&S] as essential missionary work and your articulacy and broad-based erudition plus humour help me reason out and express my opinion on controversial topics, social and religious, and I love any article to do with music and cultural history, which is of course grown from our Catholic civilisation. Please keep on keeping on.

A reader with the tag “infoprag”:

You love Holy Mother Church... and you know what you’re talking about.

There are many more comments like this from paid subscribers, who indicated that I was free to share their remarks. Thanks be to God that the content here is so useful and meaningful to readers!

T&S also reaches Catholics outside of the usual trad circles. For example, Mike B. writes:

I am a big fan of Alistaire MacIntyre. He has convinced me, from a philosophical standpoint, of the importance of tradition for proper human flourishing. (I also like DC Schindler a lot.) And while I do not search for the Latin Mass, I do need a parish that puts God and our relationship with Him through Holy Church first and foremost. Thank you for your important work.

The Bottom Line

At Tradition & Sanity, as you know, there’s no invasive advertising; no political correctness; no ecclesiastical interference. Nobody pushes us around and nobody pushes you around.

That also means, no funding of any kind from those typical sources.

YOU are it — you are the ONLY ones supporting Julian & me as writers here, by means of your paid subscriptions.

Now is the time to join the sustainers and patrons of Tradition & Sanity who have enabled us to continue for close to 17 months now. If you’re not already a part of our vibrant Substack base, what are you waiting for?

Julian and I are truly grateful for your support of our vocation as writers and of this Substack’s apostolate (for such we consider it), launched into a world that desperately needs more of both tradition and sanity. We look forward to sharing our work with you for years to come, Deo volente!

I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth mentioning again: every Thursday at Holy Mass, I offer my part in the sacrifice for the intentions of all my Substack readers, and ask God to give you and yours the graces of which you are most in need. I renew this prayer at Communion time. It gives me joy to remember this body of readers — some of whom I have gotten to know personally thanks to repeated comments and messages! — before the Lord whom we all wish to love, serve, and adore, and be with forever.

Other Ways to Help

If you’ve already taken out a paid subscription (thank you), or if you’re not yet ready to take that step, there are a few other ways you can help support Tradition & Sanity, i.e., keep its writers in coffee and calories as they cogitate.

Now we will return to our usual program!

Where Exploded Errors Thrive

I imagine that some readers of this Substack have heard of Michael Lofton, a minor YouTube celebrity who has defended nearly everything Pope Francis has ever said or done, who asserts a nearly unlimited papal power over liturgy and just about everything else except settled dogma (and even then, one can’t be quite so sure anything is really settled for a hyperpapalist…), and who does not miss any opportunity to rail at traditionalists for their supposed errors. Not surprisingly, he has acquired a considerable following among those who are even more ignorant than he is, and who look to him to vindicate a sort of “muscular” top-down establishmentarian Catholicism that obviates the need for hard thinking about papal errors, heresies, scandals, and crimes, and puts the totality of Catholic life at the mercy of whoever is seated in Rome.

To give you an example of the kind of “work” for which he is known, in a recent video he asserts that we can’t talk about a “Mass of the Ages” because the Mass has always been changing; that every liturgy was originally in the common language of the people (and therefore, by implication, liturgy should be in the vernacular, and the Latin Church was wrong for over a thousand years to maintain a language that was no longer spoken by most); and that “liturgy” means “work of the people.”

Good grief. This is like an agenda lifted from the shadier partisans of reform circa 1930s or 1940s — not something from 2024, when such progressivist liturgical views have long since been exploded by serious scholarship.

I tried to leave a comment on his video, but of course he did not allow it. That’s how it works with folks like this who can’t stand a challenge to their false claims. In any case, let’s consider his points, since they are all too familiar from the shallows of internet discourse.

1. That liturgy has changed organically cannot be denied; but this is a far cry from a violent overturning of tradition. This is obvious to anyone who knows anything about the history of the Roman Rite, which shows much more continuity than change, and next to which the thousands of changes made in the 1960s, at micro and macro levels, look (and are) truly revolutionary. I’m quite sure Lofton never took up my challenge, years ago, to read Michael Fiedrowicz’s outstanding book The Traditional Mass: History, Form, and Theology of the Classical Roman Rite, because if he had, he could not be making the claims he does.

   
   There is a vast literature out there on this question of liturgical development, but one would never know it from the hyperpapalists. Here’s a lecture of mine that drives a sharp stake through the heart of the false claim that “liturgy has always been changing,” ergo, any and all change is just fine and there’s no such thing as “the Mass of the ages.”

2. Liturgical sacral or hieratic languages developed in many spheres and are by far the most common linguistic trait of liturgy — indeed, a trait of every organized religion. Such worship-languages never were, and were never meant to be, simply “the vernacular,” as I demonstrated in my article “Was Liturgical Latin Introduced As (and Because It Was) the ‘Common Tongue’?” and in my lecture “Why Latin Is the Right Language for Roman Catholic Worship.” At the end of my article “The Byzantine Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and the Novus Ordo — Two Brothers and a Stranger,” I give some examples from the East, helpful for rebutting the claim that Eastern Christian liturgies favor the vernacular. (The last-mentioned article became a chapter in my book The Once and Future Roman Rite.)

3. For goodness’ sake, “liturgy” (leitourgia) does NOT mean “work of the people.” It was the Presbyterians in 1888 who first proposed that mistranslation. What it actually means, linguistically and theologically, is explained in my article “Refuting the Commonplace that ‘Liturgy’ Means ‘Work of the People.’”

More on Language

Over on my YouTube channel, a viewer left a comment to the effect that “it can’t possibly make sense to keep the liturgy in a language the people don’t understand; it violates what St. Paul said about understanding prayer. And language is about communication.”

There’s a lot that can be (and has been) said in response, but here are the thoughts I chose to share with him (and now with you).

I am certainly not denying that intelligibility is a desirable trait of language. What I am saying is that (1) the liturgy is primarily directed to God—He is the one to whom the Church offers her worship, and both He and she understand well what is being said; and (2) the Latin liturgy is not as inaccessible as this objector imagines it to be. The texts are fairly limited, the vocabulary repeats, the chants are memorable — and best of all, we have a lifetime to absorb these things.

The use of language in worship is not about easy communication but about profound communication, and that is where the numinous atmosphere is so valuable. The Mass ought to enkindle in us a desire to understand it due to how prayerful an experience it offers, rather than starting off on the assumption that we’re simpletons who have to be spoon-fed with knowledge-bites that run the risk of leaving us bored.

Moreover, arguments from antiquity can be very weak. So what if the first Christians used a vernacular language? Does that mean there was no room for a different kind of emphasis over time? Many things were unique about the first generation of Christians, and there are aspects of their life we can admire but cannot emulate, even as we can never have equals to the Apostles. The Church continued to develop her liturgical rites and dogmatic teachings for many, many centuries, and no one ever objected to that process of unfolding, as long as it was built on what was already inherited: “Tradidi quod et accepi” (I have handed on that which I received).

This is how Providence wanted it to be. So we do not take the fragmentary indications of first-century Christianity and somehow turn them into a strict blueprint or straitjacket.

In lieu of further argumentation on the question of Latin in the Mass, I’d like to copy something that appeared in a recent issue of the Angelus magazine, in an interview with an ordinary Catholic family. Here’s what the Mom says about her and her family’s transition to the TLM from the Novus Ordo:

Feeling lost in the new language, not knowing where we were at or what was going on, created such a learning curve. Was it really better having things in a different and often inaudible language? Having to bring ourselves back down to child-level understanding was humbling and I resigned myself to just sitting and absorbing what I was seeing.

I spent the first year not trying to follow along, not trying to understand, just observing and listening. Watching the priest as carefully as I did, I came to the realization that while I didn’t know what was going on, one thing I knew for certain was that the priest absolutely believed in whatever it was that he was doing. His total reverence and solemn attitude from start to finish are what convinced me.

Over time, things started to become clear. We found books to read, videos to watch, we asked questions and just kept going. The more we attended, the less confused we felt by the “language barrier.” George [her husband] picked up on things right away, and my kids, having grown up in the Latin Mass, know all sorts of prayers and chants in Latinn without any extra effort on their end. I love the language and feel so much more comfortable with it.

In the end, I have found comfort in not needing to “understand” every single thing. Once I got over that hurdle, I could just sit and enjoy all of the beautiful prayers and chants without ever feeling “lost.”

I submit that the above first-person account accurately reflects the attitude or mindset of most Catholic laity throughout most of history: not knowing or needing to know everything, but coming to know certain things very, very well, in a visceral and heartfelt way that goes well beyond rational understanding (though not contradicting or excluding it). And I maintain that the use of Latin as well as the inaudibility of certain parts of the liturgy contribute very much to this deepening of encounter between us and the Lord.

It seems to me that many who object to Latin in the Mass would cease objecting if they only attended the TLM long enough to give it a chance to show them a dimension of liturgical prayer so much deeper than mere rational/verbal comprehension. It’s like convincing someone that there is a form of prayer deeper than vocal prayer. Indeed, just as there is a mode of human love more immediate, intimate, and wordless than conversation, so there is a mode of divine love that is the same. The traditional Mass does not, of course, dispense with words and meanings, yet its spacious “architecture,” with plenty of room for silence, privacy, and freedom, teaches us a different relationship to words and meanings than that of mastery over them on account of literacy and vernacularity. We are humbled like little children, as the lady said above, and we submit to a higher form of learning that masters us.

Do We Still Believe Sacred Scripture?

Many have been talking this past week about the new lectionary’s optionalizing (at least in the USA) “objectionable bits” of Scripture, with Ephesians 5 as the poster child.

One of the signs of the Novus Ordo’s departure from orthodoxy is the way it treats certain parts of Scripture as “discretionary.” The lectionary either removes “difficult” verses altogether or, as in the case of Ephesians 5, leaves the choice up to the reader/celebrant/parish committee. It so happens that the optional parts are the things that no longer make sense to modern Westerners, or worse, are things they actively reject.

At Crisis Magazine, a lector tells us what happened when he read the full version of Ephesians 5 at Mass. Let’s just say, the priest in his homily was quick to contradict it. And churchmen have been acting this way now for decades. They are embarrassed about the Word of God. Pope Francis clearly is embarrassed by the Word of God.

The TLM lectionary doesn’t have as much of the Bible in it, no question; but what is has are lots and lots of difficult passages that you can’t explain away. The old one-year lectionary brings you face to face with hard sayings all the time. For example, this past Sunday we heard St. Paul in the Epistle (taken from Galatians 5) giving us straight talk:

The works of the flesh are manifest, which are fornication, uncleanness, immodesty, luxury, idolatry, witchcrafts, enmities, contentions, emulations, wraths, quarrels, dissensions, sects, envies, murders, drunken­ness, revellings, and such like; of the which I foretell you, as I have foretold to you, that they who do such things shall not ob­tain the kingdom of God.

Every year on the 14th Sunday of Pentecost, this is the message we hear. And there are many more passages like that one in the traditional annual cycle of readings. Indeed, the old lectionary leans into tough passages like this, to ensure we are examining our consciences in order to receive Holy Communion in a state of grace.

Returning to Ephesians 5: let’s not forget that this passage is proclaimed at the traditional Nuptial Mass every single time (no options!). Holy Mother Church in her wisdom placed it there, as it contains the most decisive advice for both the bride AND the bridegroom:

Let women be subject to their husbands, as to the Lord: because the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church. He is the saviour of his body. Therefore as the church is subject to Christ, so also let the wives be to their husbands in all things. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her… Let every one of you in particular love his wife as himself: and let the wife fear her husband. (Eph 5:22-25, 33).

Reflecting on this passage, it strikes me that those who do not wish the Church to be subject to Christ would also not wish wives to be subject to their husbands. That is, to put it more broadly, they would embrace feminism, with its attempt to blot out the natural and objective distinctions of the sexes, as well as the liturgical echoes or reflections of those distinctions. By God’s design, the natural order is the foundation of the supernatural order, and provides its symbolic language.

It doesn’t really matter which end you start from. If you are a progressive about doctrine (i.e., you don’t want the Church to be subject to Christ), you will end up supporting feminist positions. And if you are a feminist about liturgical ministries, this will have an inverting and distorting effect on your ecclesiology and, ultimately, your conception of fidelity in doctrine, whereby the bridal Church stands in fear and reverence toward her Lord.

Ephesians 5 illuminates the theological link between agitating for doctrinal change and advocating feminist policies. We can see this link demonstrated past all doubt by an article published this past week at progressive hyperpapalist website Where Peter Is, in which the author has the audacity to say that what God really wanted to reveal through St. Paul is not the headship of the husband, but something else: “mutual submission [is] the heart of what God is revealing through St. Paul’s letter.” Here is the voice of liberal Protestantism: a spirit that denies parts of divine revelation when they do not harmonize with the Zeitgeist.

All the more reason to return, quam primum (as soon as possible), to the immemorial lex orandi of the Roman Church.

A Prayer

Here’s a prayer I’ve been reciting for a decade or more, every day. You might like to pray it, too:

O Lord, remember in Your kingdom
all religious, clergy, and laity throughout the entire world
who are dedicated or drawn to the usus antiquior.
Bless us, govern us, defend us, purify us, and multiply us
for the good of souls, for the restoration of your Church,
and for the glory of Your Holy Name. Amen.

More Bevan

A week ago at Tradition & Sanity, I shared excerpts from Joseph Bevan’s fine new memoir Two Families. (One reader picked up a copy and reported: “Thanks for the recommendation! I am reading it and I can’t put it down, it’s that good.” I agree.)

In my article this past Monday at New Liturgical Movement, I share some more passages — this time (as befits that website) leaning in the liturgical and musical direction.

Favorite articles this week

On marriage, family, and morals

• Anna Davis, “Changing the World, One Outfit at a Time”

• Theo Howard, “The Lost Boys of the Internet and the Spiritual Dangers of Metamodernism”

• Daniel DeLiever, “Family or Misery? The Question of Modernity”

• Jonathon Van Maren, “There is no place for Orwell’s ‘thought police’ in 21st century Britain”: An Interview with Isabel Vaughn-Spruce”

On poetry and psalms

• Robert Keim, “The First Language of the Soul” (i.e., poetry)

• Robert Keim, “This Book Is Called a Garden Enclosed” (on the centrality of the Psalms)

On liturgy

• Madeleine Kearns, “The Young Catholic Women Bringing Back Veils”

• Matthew Hazell, “‘Expert Consensus’ in the Post-Vatican II Liturgical Reforms: More Half-Truths and Dated Scholarship” — If you pray the Liturgy of the Hours, have you ever wondered why the NT hymns seem so darn awkward? (Especially for singing?) Well, the answer is… they’re not hymns and were never meant to be used that way.

Miscellaneous

• Christopher P. Wendt, “Our Lady’s Mountain” (on a Kilimanjaro pilgrimage)

• Msgr. Richard C. Antall, “Uncertain Trumpets: Cardinal Cupich and Pope Francis”

• Eric Sammons, “Why Synodality is a Sham”

• Aaron Pattee, “Why Study Art History?”

¡Un nuevo libro en español!

Obligado por la verdad: Autoridad, obediencia, tradición y bien común se publicó en inglés a finales de 2023, y ahora ya tenemos la edición en español. Este libro lo considero mi examen más importante de los temas mencionados en el subtítulo: la autoridad, la obediencia, la tradición y el bien común. No podemos entender bien nada de la Iglesia católica actual (y en particular del papado) a menos que tengamos una sólida comprensión de estos conceptos fundamentales.

El libro está disponible en rústica, tapa dura y ebook en cualquier sitio de Amazon, por ejemplo: En España / En México / En EE.UU. (Puede ver un extracto más extenso en cualquiera de estos enlaces.)

Now that’s a steal!

Last but not least, TAN has got a site-wide Labor Day sale going on, which includes my Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence: Three Gifts of God for Liturgy and for Life — a $30 hardcover, on sale for only $10.

Maybe now’s the time to pick up a copy not only for yourself, but for a choir director you know, a singer, a musician, dare I say, a pastor… We need lots more good music in our lives, and especially in our churches. May this book make a small contribution to that effort.

Thank you for reading, and God bless you!