Weekly Roundup, August 8, 2025, and ASSUMPTION SPECIAL (25% OFF)

ASSUMPTION SPECIAL

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Now we move in to our favorite Friday routine!

Cardinal Newman

Readers of this Substack have seen parts 1 & 2 of my series on Newman, with part 3 coming out on Monday.

I continue to be amazed at how foolish some online commentators are, who are ready to throw Newman under the bus — a great saint, scholar, and defender of Tradition. Our ally, whom God has given us precisely in this moment of need. Wouldn’t it be just like Divine Providence to turn against His enemies their faulty or mendacious rationale for making Newman a Doctor? So what if they want to hold him up as a supporter of evolutionism in doctrine? The reality is, he refutes them, root and branch, and any honest man who is still literate is capable of seeing this for himself. God has the last laugh.

Let’s not forget that Newman was the first great Catholic theologian to defend a robust role in the Church for an educated laity. If he were here today, he’d be cheering us on. My collaborator here and good friend, Sebastian Morello, wrote to me, anent this very matter:

I think what's going on with Newman is this.

If you take the time to study him (as I have done, for YEARS), then you see that he is profoundly traditional, a defender of all things good, true, and beautiful, anti-modern in all the right ways. Sure, he has his own opinions about this or that “question of the day,” and there’s ample room for disagreement with any Doctor of the Church — no one says they are infallible, only that they are both holy and wise, with a special gift of penetration into Divine Revelation.

This being the case, if you’re a liberal, a progressive, or a modernist, the only way to deal with a figure like Newman (who is too great to ignore) is brazenly to lie about him and make others accept the lies. Scoundrel are not troubled by lying; they lie boldly, confidently, in your face, while keeping a straight face.

And then you watch the fallout, as pathetic excuses for commentators all over the internet fall for this bait — hook, line, and sinker. You have innumerable people talking ABOUT Newman who have read perhaps 10 pages of him or less, and who, if they had self-respect and honesty, would realize they are out of their league, as much as are those who try to talk about Thomism without having made a serious study of St. Thomas. (And there are always plenty of people, I find, who are ready to share with you their criticisms of Aquinas, in spite of their skin-deep knowledge.)

I can’t express how much delight it gives me to know that Newman, who has guided so many souls into the Catholic Church, will be among our Doctors.

Development of Doctrine

But what are we to make of this apparently slippery notion? If you want to read one and only one article about Newman, make it this one: the Rev. Dr. Stephen Morgan’s “Hijacked Development.” Excerpt:

Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, has repeatedly cited Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) to defend controversial interpretations of documents such as Amoris Laetitia and Fiducia Supplicans. In both cases, Newman’s theory has been used to claim that the Church is not reversing her teachings but developing them—suggesting that it was possible to adapt pastoral practice while preserving doctrinal principle, as if the one does not act upon the other in the order of reality…. But is this truly development—or doctrinal mutation disguised as mercy?

Such appeals to Newman are both theologically irresponsible and intellectually incoherent. Newman’s seven notes of what he called “authentic development” offer not a license for change, what he called “corruptions,” but tools for discerning fidelity. Far from endorsing rupture, Newman defended the Church’s integrity and the continuity of her doctrine against those who, then as now, seek to remake the Church and her doctrine in the image of their own age. By applying Newman’s method rigorously, we can expose false developments, navigate confusion in the Church, and recover hope rooted in continuity, not novelty.

If you finish that and are looking for more, read Anthony Esolen’s “Premises Have Conclusions,” where he deftly ties together the situation in Detroit and the contrast between development and decay of doctrine.

Then, read Edward Feser’s “Newman on Capital Punishment: Consistency is Key in Catholic Doctrine.” (Yes, Newman, like every other Doctor of the Church, defended the morality of the death penalty administered by the State, regardless of what they thought about how widely or narrowly it should be used. Only a heretic would deny this point.)

Speaking of the situation in Detroit, Darrick Taylor offers an absolutely withering social commentary in his “Revolt of the Janitors: On the Detroit Massacre.” (Lest people be tempted to despair about the hierarchy, Fr. Glen Tattersall of Melbourne reminds us of just how friendly recently-deceased Bishop Peter Elliott was to the TLM community and how forcefully he condemned Traditionis Custodes; moreover, Timothy Flanders discusses several tradition-friendly prelates in his latest news post. There seems to be a real “battle royale” shaping up now between the allies of Francis and the allies of tradition.)

Incidentally, since the abuse of Newman occurred primarily during the reign of Francis, it is opportune for Phillip Campbell to remind us that there is no particular reverence owed to a pope just because he has passed on from this life to the next:

The level of respect we owe to a pope is distinctly different whether he is alive or dead. While he lives, we owe him obedience, obsequium religiosum, the reasonable benefit of the doubt (I stress “reasonable”) and all that good stuff. But when a pope has died? All I owe him at that point is the basic charity we owe to any of the deceased—to pray for the repose of his soul, and to not spread malicious lies about him. But some people act as if there is some sort of special deference due to a dead pope. There isn't. I don’t have any obligation to protect a dead pope’s reputation, to explain away his statements, to defer to his purely prudential judgments, or cover his nakedness like a son of Noah. Once a pope has passed beyond the veil, his soul is judged by God, but his deeds are scrutinized by the ruthless lens of history, and this is fitting.

Of course, we must adhere to the magisterial teaching of previous popes, but the submission we owe to magisterial teaching is due to the teaching, not the man. When I assent to, say, the propositions of Clement XI’s bull Unigenitus (1713), it is not because I owe some personal submission to a pope that has been dead for over three hundred years. Rather, it's because Clement XI's document authoritatively expresses the teaching of the Gospel. Yes, yes, I realize that it is only authoritative because it was issued by a pope, but don’t get Jesuitical here; the point is, once a pope is dead, I don’t have to watch what I say about him in any special way beyond the bounds that govern how Christians speak about the dead in general. There’s no special category of “pope respect” due to dead pontiffs.

And this further comment is as true as true can be — and completely lost on the hyperpapalists and sedevacantists:

In that vein, I think Traditionalists need to admit that the popes went too far in stressing papal authority during the pontificates of Pius IX to Pius XII. I am not speaking of any official magisterial teachings, by any means. I am speaking, rather, of what I might call the “culture of submission” that was cultivated between around 1870 and 1958.

Under Christendom, papal authority was generally enforced in Catholic countries by the civil authorities, whose duties and responsibilites to the Holy See were spelled out in concordats made with the Roman pontiffs. As first the Papal States and then the monarchies of Christendom fell, the popes were compelled by necessity to lean heavily into the moral and ecclesiastical authority of their office to leverage obedience. This is understandable; with every other bastion of Catholic civilization falling into ruins, it stood to reason that the papacy would become a point of rallying for beleagured Catholics the world over.

What emerged was a culture of submission, nursed by the popes and eagerly embraced by Catholics. In my opinion, this culture of submission was characterized by ecclesiastical statements, assumptions, and processes that can best be described as exaggerating or inflating the pope’s importance. We all know from our experience of the post-Conciliar world that there can be a non-official “spirit” of the age active within the Church that goes far beyond anything justified by dogmatic teaching. Why should we assume this is unique to our own time? There seems to have been a Spirit of Vatican I just as surely as there’s a Spirit of Vatican II.

It was Newman, once again, who did so much to dispel nonsensical notions about what is and is not Catholic dogma. Erick Ybarra’s post on “St. John Henry Newman Dispels Mythology Surrounding Papal Infallibility and the Exoneration of Pope Vigilius (+554)” is a marvelous example of Newman bringing to bear his God-given intellect on difficult questions, showing that the Catholic Church’s teaching is always reasonable—including on the papacy.

I’ll admit that I haven’t had a chance to watch this yet, but Brian Holdsworth produces consistently high-level material, so I have no doubt this will be… could I say… Holdsworthy?

Why classical/liberal education is a must

One of Newman’s most famous works was The Idea of a University, which has lost not one bit of its relevance.

Here’s a lecture I gave at the recent Catholic Family News conference, in Orlando, Florida, which will be of interest to all educators, homeschoolers, Great Books enthusiasts, lovers of John Senior and John Henry Newman, alumni of Newman Guide schools, et al.:

Two new books from Os Justi Press

As a long-time reader of New Liturgical Movement likes to say, “The hits keep on comin’!”

Liturgical Travels Through France

A new series, the Os Justi Studies in Liturgical History and Reform, under the general editorship of Matthew Hazell, has just been launched with its first volume — by far the most ambitious project Os Justi Press has yet undertaken: the first English translation of Jean-Baptiste Le Brun des Marettes’s Liturgical Travels Through France (1718). Here’s the short description:

From France’s 130 cathedrals, 1,500 monasteries, and hundreds of collegiate churches—served by over 10,000 canons alongside thousands of minor clerics and laymen—and from their ancient choir schools, famous ensembles of choristers and musicians, and grand organs, the sacred ceremonies of the Ancien Régime unfolded in a vast and intricate rhythm.

Daily life was punctuated by the ringing of bells; regular cycles of processions around the city by the clergy, religious, and confraternities; feast days; pilgrimages to local shrines; and other fiercely guarded local rituals. From the king’s magnificent chapel at Versailles to the fields of the humblest rural parish, the Church’s calendar and ceremonies formed a sacred landscape in which every Frenchman’s life unfolded, shaping his experience of time and place, reinforcing personal, local, and national identities and binding together the stratified society of early-modern France with a common ritual life.

It is this charming and long-vanished world that the first-ever translation of Le Brun’s Liturgical Travels Through France brings to modern English readers, accompanied by copious notes and an extensive introduction that provide context for the original work and show its (at times surprising) relevance to current debates. The volume is enriched with dozens of contemporary plates as well as introductory essays and appendices by Claude Barthe, François Hou, and Shawn Tribe.

This detailed, affectionate, opinionated guide to the ritual life of a Baroque empire before revolutionaries burned it to ashes will bring delight to all lovers of traditional Catholic rites and ceremonies and all who take an interest in ancien-régime France and the history of clerical and religious life.

Available in paperback, hardcover, and ebook, from Os Justi or from Amazon.

Those who would like to learn more about its content will find interesting articles at New Liturgical Movement, Canticum Salomonis (“Liturgical Treasures of Pre-Revolutionary France,” where the Foreword by Fr. Claude Barthe may be viewed), and Rorate Caeli (“The Broad Ocean of the Latin Rite: What True Liturgical Diversity Looks Like”).

And . . .

Prayers in Honor of Saint Thomas Aquinas

If you’ve been paying attention to the Dominican world, you’ll know we’ve hit some huge Thomistic anniversaries: in 2023, the 700th of Aquinas’s canonization; in 2024, the 750th of his death; and in 2025, the likely 800th of his birth. A special celebratory publication was in order!

Now, books that contain Aquinas’s own prayers and poems are fairly plentiful. But a convenient collection of traditional prayers and devotions IN HONOR OF St. Thomas? Didn’t exist.

I am therefore delighted to announce a beautiful prayerbook that brings together the finest of this literature:

• The Little Office of St. Thomas Aquinas

• Antiphons & Responsories from the Office of St. Thomas Aquinas

• Prayer of the Angelic Warfare Confraternity

• Prayers to St. Thomas, Patron of Catholic Schools

• Prayer Before Studying St. Thomas

• Litany in Honor of St. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of the Church & Patron of Chastity

• The Six Sundays in Honor of St. Thomas Aquinas.

These devotions help us to relate to the Angelic Doctor as first and foremost the Lord’s beloved friend, a miracle-worker, an intercessor before the throne of God, a powerful member of the Mystical Body in its heavenly glory—one who merited to be hailed as “the holy teacher, citizen of the heavenly courts, splendor of the world, guide and light of the faithful, pattern, path, and law of all morality, vessel of virtues.”

All prayers are given in both Latin and English, on facing pages. (The meditations for the Six Sundays are only in English.)

Ornamented with many classic engravings of famous scenes in the life of the Angelic Doctor.

Available in pocket-sized pamphlet (4”x6”) or a hardcover with dust jacket (5.5” x 8.5”), from Os Justi or from Amazon.

Liturgical Lessons

Old Ways?

A secular paper in Charlotte has picked up on the travesty taking place there, and covered it pretty well: “In Charlotte, Catholics May Have to Give Up the Old Ways.” Of course, the author, not fully understanding his subject, doesn’t realize that we will NEVER give up the Old Ways. Let’s take inspiration from these photos of clandestine Masses offered during the Cristero War:

One language for the Latins

Rev. Stanislav Přibyl’s “Gabon and Prague, Africa and Europe Brought Together by the Traditional Latin Mass” starts off with a particular anecdote but then widens to a consideration of the value of a single language for Latin-rite Catholics the world around:

On Sunday, June 22, 2025, the Second Sunday after Pentecost, the Minister of Defense of the Republic of Gabon, Major General of the National Gendarmerie, Ms. Brigitte Onkanowa, attended Holy Mass in the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Charlemagne the Emperor in Prague, commonly known to Praguers as Karlov....

The minister was in our Republic on a business trip and expressly wanted to attend the traditional Latin “Tridentine” Mass on Sunday. It was clear that this was her personal preference, as the Catholic Church in her country attracts the faithful mainly because of its widespread celebration of traditional Masses.

It turns out that Africans do not necessarily need liturgical dances to affirm their cultural identity, which are almost imposed on them by Europeans as something supposedly authentic that they should exhibit for us....

Above all, the Minister’s visit was a lesson in true Catholicism. Mrs. Onkanowa was moved by the opportunity to experience in Mass exactly what she knows in her country in equatorial Africa, many thousands of kilometers away from the Czech Republic. She felt at home in the church in Prague, just as she did in the Gabonese capital of Libreville. She was experiencing what for centuries had been taken for granted by Catholics....

It is as if here, in the church founded in 1351 by our Father of the Nation, Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, a Pentecostal miracle were taking place again, naturally in a form adapted to the present day: “We Germans, Austrians, and French, inhabitants of the Visegrád countries, Italians, Scandinavians, Brazilians, Indonesians, Hong Kongers, Taiwanese, Americans, and Canadians, sub-Saharan Africans, Britons, former Protestants and charismatics, Australians and Lebanese Maronites, even Trinidadians and Tobagonians: let us all experience the great works of God together!”

What’s the real youth music?

Choir director Mark Haas writes about his experience teaching chant to young people:

We must stop underestimating our youth. They do not need us to dilute the Church’s treasury of sacred music in order to make it accessible. They need us to lift them into it. The real “youthful music” of the Church is the music that lifts the soul, teaches discipline, cultivates wonder, and draws one deeper into the mystery of the Eucharist.... At our Chant Camp, the youth did not perform—they prayed. And in doing so, they discovered what the Church has always known: Gregorian Chant is not merely music. It is the song of the Church, the voice of the Bride singing to her Bridegroom. And it still speaks—clearly, powerfully, and beautifully—to the hearts of the youth.

Gabriel García Moreno

On August 6, 1875, we remembered the 150th anniversary of the assassination of the Ecuadorean president Gabriel García Moreno, possibly the greatest modern Catholic politician and the one who bore the most perfect witness to the social kingship of Jesus Christ. In spite of many “liberalizing” reforms for his country, his counterrevolutionary conservatism was a constant irritant to the anticlerical and freemasonic elements that plotted his death. That the president was a saintly Catholic is difficult to dispute. In particular, one should note the centrality of the Holy Mass to his life. Read more in my article this week at NLM.

Bishop Varden

Today’s young Catholics are not ungrateful for the Council’s great gifts, but unable to proceed with their grandparents’ mindsets, uninclined to flog dead horses, unenthused by fossilized projects of aggiornamento when the sun has set on the giorno by which they were defined. What they long for is to awaken the dawn, to know the saving power of Christ, the same today, yesterday and always, yet making all things new, often enough by exploding time-bound dichotomies.”

Those are the words of Bishop Erik Varden of Trondheim, Norway, one of the most creative and searching thinkers among the episcopacy today. While not a traditionalist, the premises are already in place…

Religious rites and stability

Prof. Tomasz Dekert’s latest academic article, “Twentieth-Century Changes in Catholic Liturgy and the Place of Truth in Religious Culture: A Discussion with Chantal Delsol,” is well worth a read for serious students of liturgy. Here’s the abstract:

This article explores the transformative changes in Catholic liturgy during the twentieth century and their implications for the stability of religious meaning and cultural identity in the West. In critical dialogue with Chantal Delsol’s diagnosis of the decline of Christianitas, this study argues that the reform of ritual following the Second Vatican Council, rather than political entanglements, played a decisive role in weakening the public credibility of Catholic truth claims. Drawing on Roy A. Rappaport’s theory of ritual as a stabilizer of cultural meaning, the author analyzes how this postconciliar liturgical reform altered the semiotic structure of Catholic worship—shifting communication from indexical to symbolic forms and reorienting the liturgy from a vertical–concentric order to a more decentralized horizontal dynamic. The chosen method combines theoretical reflection with liturgical anthropology to assess how changes in the Roman Missal, ritual posture, and spatial arrangement disrupted the transmission of canonical messages. The conclusion suggests that this semiotic transformation undermined the liturgy’s capacity to ritually confirm the truths of faith, contributing to the broader civilizational disintegration observed by Delsol. Ultimately, this article contends that any future revitalization of Catholic culture will depend less on political influence and more on recovering the liturgy’s ritual capacity to sustain belief in transcendent truth.

More pilgrimages, less chatter!

The Marie Reine du Canada Pilgrimage, this year from Aug. 30 to Sep. 1, has been going for 22 years, but its numbers need to be swelled. Find out more here, and if you’re in the vicinity of Ottawa, make a point of participating.

Anchor in the hurricane

Amanda Evinger reviews my book Bound by Truth over at Catholic Family News:

Bound by Truth is a sort of “compendium of Sacred Tradition” which helps the heartfelt, inquisitive, soul-searching Catholic grapple with the issues of authority, obedience, tradition, and the common good.... Throughout the book, Dr. Kwasniewski helps traditionalists to gain a balanced view of Catholicism, encouraging us to avoid developing or nurturing disordered views of Catholicism and the Church.... Bound by Truth, as well as other traditional theological works which make the fullness of Catholicism come alive, have served as anchors for me amid the enigmatic, hurricane-prone post-Vatican II seas. I am incredibly grateful to Our Lord for bringing them into my life.

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Other articles

Can AI produce “art”? Daniel Mitsui thinks the answer is a resounding no:

Hildegard of Bingen wrote something beautiful and profound concerning music, which I think can apply to all art. She said that humans carry within themselves a dim memory of Eden. The reason that a melody appeals to us is that it is like a distant echo of the voice of Adam before the Fall. Art, whether musical or visual, is connected to our nostalgia for Paradise. Art, and sacred art especially, makes people better by drawing them closer to that beatitude. Ultimately, art comes from something higher than us, something that our fallen selves cannot fully comprehend. No computer program bears within itself the half-remembered dreams of Paradise, and therefore no computer program can comprehend the true source of art, even a little.

“AI art” attempts to build a bridge between a virtual world of pure quantity and the world of human sense perception, not between the latter and the higher reality of beatitude. The question it “asks” of its art is not: “Is this true, good and beautiful” but rather: “Is this what the person typing the prompt probably wants as an answer?” This represents an ontological shift downward, away from God. At its very best, it attains a level just shy of where real art begins.

Rosaria Butterfield’s “The Dead End of Sexual Sin” has been making the rounds and I will say it’s deeply moving and full of beautiful insights into life in Christ. I wish she would become Catholic and thus be equipped with further weapons for the spiritual battle. Meanwhile, thanks be to God wherever and whenever the grace of Christ is at work.

Fr. Robert P. Imbelli discusses what he sees as Leo XIV’s “interior compass.” What I think all of us want to know is how in the world Leo will clean up the mess left to him by his predecessor(s) — what concrete steps he will take to translate this Christocentrism into practice. Celebrating ad orientem the other week was a good concrete step, but until Traditionis Custodes is rescinded, the internal chaos in the Church will not begin to be healed.

The Filiae Laboris Mariae are offering good online classes free of charge, though donations are welcome:

More information here, including exact dates (classes begin in September).

Thanks for reading and may God bless you!