Weekly Roundup: December 6 Edition

Christmas special offer; New interviews; Lots of good news; Favorite articles; Liturgical reflections; Political speculations

I wish one and all a happy feast of St. Nicholas of Myra!

Saint Nicholas of Myra and Bari, William Brindley (1832–1919)

Substack Christmas Special

You will no doubt recall my frequent praising of Robert Keim, whose Substack Via Mediaevalis has become my favorite one to read. I frequently include links to his posts, and he has more than once won my informal “award for best article.” In short, I think everyone should subscribe to Via Mediaevalis. Robert has just turned on paid subscriptions.

In honor of the approaching feast of Christmas, Robert and I have decided to team up for a special offer:

Anyone who takes out a paid subscription to Tradition & Sanity will get an automatic FREE yearlong subscription to Via Mediaevalis. You could view this as our version of a “BOGO” (buy one, get one [free]).

Once your subscription to Tradition & Sanity goes through, I will convey your email to Robert, and he will sign you up for a year of access to his outstanding Via Mediaevalis.

If you have already subscribed here but would still like to support Robert’s worthy work, please head over to his Substack and boost his base.

Now, on to our roundup, which will cover the past two weeks, as I was out of town last week eating treats like these reindeer pancakes prepared by my daughter:

Recent interviews

John-Henry Westen interviewed me on the occasion of my book Turned Around (which I hope some of you are enjoying reading; if you’d like a signed copy, please order from Os Justi). In preparation, JHW had asked lots of friends to give him their objections to the Latin Mass, if they had any. Then, in our conversation, he threw them at me like a fast pitcher in a high-stakes game. I think the wood made satisfying contact. You'll have to see what you think.

Joe McClane of A Catholic Take (ACT) also invited me to do an interview with him. It was a joyful and vigorous 42-minute conversation. He, too, was well-prepared, which I really appreciate (it can’t be taken for granted, alas).

Good News

There’s always more good news than we tend to think!

Completion of Notre Dame in Paris

After a fire in April 2019 that could have ruined, and certainly massively damaged, this masterpiece of Gothic architecture, the grand reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral is upon us this weekend. Although the internet has been buzzing with complaints about the poorly designed sanctuary and its Ikea-like implements, the fact remains that the renovation has been a success in every other aspect, as one can see from videos emerging in recent days:

And, as Karl Keating commented, the altar deposited by space aliens could easily be hauled out with a forklift (may God grant it someday).

The other good news in connection with Notre Dame is that President-elect Trump will be in attendance, along with many other dignitaries from all over the world. Notable for his absence will be Pope Francis, who’s going instead to Corsica to “close an international conference on popular religious traditions.” (You know, like all that Mayan and Amazonian stuff.) Major news outlets are reporting that he’s avoiding Paris on purpose. I leave you free to speculate about the reasons.

Pope Francis says something true

I include this as good news. The pope recently repeated his demand that homilies should be kept to 10 minutes or less. JD Flynn, giving Protestant-sounding reasons, says the pope’s wrong, but fellow Substacker Kevin Tierney tells us why he’s right for a change (like a broken clock twice a day): “In Defense of the Short Homily: Rescuing the Liturgy from the Nerds.”

Society will negotiate with Rome for new bishops

“We do not want to separate ourselves from Rome, we belong to the Church,” says Fr Stefan Pfluger, SSPX, concerning new episcopal consecrations.

We are not disobedient on principle or by system. Obedience is at the service of truth. The office of Peter is not an absolutist monarchy, but a service to the truth, a service to Christ, a service to the Church. We only have the right to violate obedience to the Pope when necessary so as not to violate the service to Christ and the Church.

I agree 100% with that paragraph.

Hearing this news, Joseph Bevan (of Two Families: A Memoir of English Life During and After the Council fame), who has been attending the Society’s chapels for a long time and has two sons who are SSPX priests, reflects on the danger of false alarms, purity spiraling, and mistrust.

The Society, be it noted, issued an anniversary statement on Archbishop Lefebvre’s famous November 21st, 1974, declaration. Today’s leadership entirely reaffirms it:

Fifty years ago, His Grace, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, published a memorable declaration that was to become the charter of the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X. A true profession of faith with eternal resonance, this declaration expresses the essence of the Society, its raison d’être, its doctrinal and moral identity, and consequently its line of action. The Society cannot deviate one iota from its content and spirit which, fifty years later, remain perfectly appropriate to the present day.

In an interesting follow-up interview, Fr. Christian Bouchacourt talks about the details that led up to this declaration.

Australia bans social media for those under 16

As reported by Zoltán Kottász:

Australia has become the first country in the world to ban social media for children under the age of 16. The ban was approved by the Australian parliament’s lower house on Wednesday, November 27th, followed by the senate one day later. The bill received cross-party backing, with 34 senators endorsing it, and 19 voting against. According to a recent survey, 77% of Australians also support the ban.

Sky News contributor Sam Crosby said the social media age limit is a “world first legislation,” something that the parents of Australia are “very much on board” with. A parliamentary inquiry in 2024 heard evidence from parents of children who had self-harmed due to social media bullying.

Children will be banned from platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X, but WhatsApp and YouTube, which teenagers may need to use for school work, may be exempted from the ban.

May this be the first of many countries!

To those who might object that this can’t possibly be successful, or that it shouldn’t be done at all, “Scott Galloway Explains Why Age Gating Social Media Is Both Necessary and Doable.”

New schools popping up everywhere

One of the most exciting things happening these days is the opening of many private Catholic schools, at all levels, that are adopting a unique blend of hands-on work and a liberal arts curriculum. The latest that has come to my attention is St. Joseph the Worker Academy in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It is being founded by two former students of mine from Wyoming Catholic College and is slated to open in the Fall of 2025. They definitely want to hear from interested parents and would also appreciate inquiries from prospective benefactors. I can vouch for the people involved: they are solid.

Why are private schools popping up at all levels? Because the system is broke and nobody gonna fix it. Private initiative for public weal, as Joy Pullman explains in her wide-ranging article at The Federalist: “Cowboys, Billionaires, And Pastors Break Tough Ground To Build Great Books Colleges.”

(By the way, could someone explain to writers that “And” and “To” should not be capitalized in a title? This is pretty basic stuff; presumably it would be addressed in the writing classes at the Great Books colleges…!)

Traditional Benedictine nuns now in England

The nuns of Gower, Missouri, have established new houses for their ever-growing community. This includes, for the first time, a house outside of the USA — in the United Kingdom, to be precise. Andy Drozdziak, writing for the Catholic News Agency, tells us how “Sister Wilhelmina’s order expands to English abbey founded by St. Thomas More’s family.” (Mr. Drozdziak, Sr. Wilhelmina’s body was found incorrupt, not “well-preserved” LOL.) Basically, there was a beautiful monastery that was going to be abandoned for lack of vocations, and, by God’s Providence, in come these wonderful traditional nuns. That is the way it is going to be in the future, and the more so, the more the Vatican II hippies die off. Sorry to be blunt about it, but it’s true.

Traditional Dominicans building new choir and pulpit

The Fraternity of St. Vincent Ferrer is a flourishing community in France of Dominicans who are still living their traditional charism with the liturgy proper to the Order of Preachers. (The rest of the Dominicans foolishly gave it up after Vatican II and younger members are struggling mightily to recover it, with mixed success.) They have been slowly beautifying their noble church with glorious medieval wood-carvings. The latest endeavor is the construction of choir stalls and a pulpit. Have a look at what they’re doing.

Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage in Rome

In spite of a chilly welcome from the Vatican, the number of traditionalist pilgrims who show up each October in Rome to pray at holy sites, especially St. Peter’s, continues to grow, as Stuart Chessman describes. One of the long-time organizers, Christian Marquant, summed up our current situation in a marvelous pithy phrase: “They have lost, but we have not yet won.”

A fantastic new book

Os Justi Press (the publishing company I run) has just released its latest title: Sebastian Morello’s Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries: Recovering the Sacred Mystery at the Heart of Reality. You can find out more from this 2-minute video, accompanied by the sweet strains of St. Hildegard of Bingen:

Favorite Articles

Best article of the past two weeks

Fr Pius Mary Noonan OSB, founder and prior of Notre Dame Priory, a Benedictine monastery on the isle of Tasmania, which I had the blessing to visit a few years ago, has written a most impressive article called “When the Path Forward Leads Back.” If there’s only one link you follow up on from today’s roundup, let this be it. A taste:

Around the middle of the twentieth century, it somehow became fashionable to think and to preach and to write that almost everything in the Church was in need of renewal. Our liturgical prayer needed renewal, our faith needed renewal, our moral lives needed renewal. In reality, the language of renewal has never been lacking in the Church. The work of spiritual masters and theologians throughout the centuries has always focused on ways to renew ourselves spiritually. Think for example of St Paul’s exhortation: ‘be renewed in the spirit of your mind’ (Eph 4:23).

The fundamental difference, however, with what happened in modern times was that our elders always considered that the forms they had received from antiquity were superior to anything they could surmise, and that what had to change was not the forms but themselves: their own approach to the mysteries, their own way of living. In other words, renewal in the sense of rejuvenation has always been part of the Church’s life, whereas the reforming of her structures, teachings and prayers was always considered to be either unthinkable or, if truly required, dependent upon truly holy men for its success.

The reformation of structures is fraught with grave dangers. When St Thomas asks the question as to whether or not human law should be changed whenever something better becomes possible, he surprises the reader with a quote from the Decretals that contrasts sharply with his accustomed equanimity: ‘It is absurd, and a detestable shame, that we should suffer those traditions to be changed which we have received from the fathers of old.’ Anyone familiar with St Thomas can sense his indignation rising.

Fr. Pius will be contributing regularly to this new venture from Australia, Oriens Journal.

“Mayan Rite”

You might recall the hubbub over the Vatican’s approval of an “adaptation” of the Novus Ordo (I won’t call it the Roman Rite when that’s exactly what it is not) with Mayan elements. I talked about this in my roundup of November 22. There I mentioned that the site Where Peter Is had published what they considered a blistering critique of the critics of the Mayan rite. But criticism is a two-way street. The excellent site Unam Sanctam Catholicam published a thorough refutation of the claims of Mike Lewis (though this is in some ways like shooting fish in a barrel). If you are interested in the Mayan business, check it out.

Tragedy and katharsis

Robert Keim, at Via Mediaevalis, offers one of the best accounts of Aristotle’s theory of kartharsis — the purification of emotion that takes place through dramatized tragedy — that you’ll find anywhere. He is trying to explain something that should seem puzzling to us:

The play ends with a scene of indescribable horror: Othello murders, in hellish fashion, his beautiful and virtuous wife; Iago murders, in hellish fashion, his true and valiant wife; and then Othello murders, in somewhat less hellish fashion, himself.

A work of literature like this raises many questions; here we will consider only one, and it may be the most fundamental and enigmatic of them all: Why does this play exist? From the synopsis above we might conclude that it was written as a form of punishment for remorseless criminals, or as a maniacal attempt to torment and terrorize unsuspecting audiences.

And yet, we know that this is not the case. We know that the play was written, if we may use so mundane a term, as entertainment. People voluntarily left the comfort of their homes to go out and see Othello (and a great many other tragic dramas). They actually paid money to see this play. People still pay money, and perhaps travel long distances, to see this play. Is this not utter madness? How can such behavior be accounted for?

Remember, this is the Via Mediaevalis that you will get a free one-year subscription to by taking out a paid subscription to Tradition & Sanity. Two Substacks for the price of one!

In a later article, “The Sacred Drama of the Sacred Liturgy,” Keim brilliantly shows how the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the ultimate re-enacted tragedy that transcends all our categories of art and brings about a katharsis far deeper than that of stage drama. Then, in his brilliant essay “William Shakespeare, Liturgist” (that one’s at New Liturgical Movement), he takes this one step further by arguing that without medieval Catholic liturgy there would be no Shakespeare — and that the cancellation of all Shakespeare instruction and performance would be nothing compared to the cancellation of the traditional Latin liturgy that inspired Western civilization to its highest achievements.

Objecting to violence in movies

Why do we think that depicting extreme and graphic violence is any less offensive than depicting explicit sexual acts? Good literature and good art know how to evoke or imply without having to hit the reader or the viewer over the head with voyeuristic ringside seats on human intimacy OR degradation. Anthony Campagna’s essay “Numbed to Violence” explains why this is unhealthy for us.

Hopeless or hopeful love?

Robert Lazu Kmita, whom I have mentioned here before, offers us an exquisite meditation on literature:

“Love is hopeful in Augustine. Love is hopeless in Hemingway.”

Minimalistic yet extremely dense, the above statement represents, for me, the core of Krause’s interpretation. The consequence that a love without sky, which permeates Hemingway’s vision, has on his characters is terrible: “Their love . . . cannot be sanctified because of the hopelessness they find themselves in.”

Risking a hasty generalization, I dare to say that Krause’s interpretation can be applied to the majority of modern classic authors, older or newer. Love is also hopelessness for most of the characters in Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Joyce, or in the novels of Fitzgerald and Murdoch (to name only a few renowned writers). It is a love that carries within it the burden of the curse of earthly eros, described by Plato in his Phaedrus. It is the only soul-energy available to those incapable of sanctity.

The crucial role of gratitude

An article at Unam Sanctam Catholicum explains why gratitude is pivotal in leading a happy life:

Experientially, reality is constructed out of what we focus on. This is why people living in the same society come to radically different views about things. By choosing to focus attention on different sets of facts, people come to different conclusions about the nature of the world around them. Attention, then, has an active role in determining what kind of reality we experience. What we give our attention to shapes the kind of people we ultimately become.

From a Catholic perspective, this has tremendous import when we consider the virtue of gratitude, which is profoundly connected to how we allocate attention. St. Thomas says that gratitude is a part of justice, whereby we render thanks for some good received; it is a sub-species of justice because it is a way of paying back a moral debt we owe to our benefactors, whether God or men. (STh, II-II, Q. 106, Art. 1).

But recognizing our benefactions requires that we be attentive to them: that we recognize them, focus on them, and live in intentional awareness of their presence. This calls for a mindset disposed to see the goodness of Providence in our daily lives. In other words, we cannot expect to cultivate the virtue of gratitude if we never focus our attention on the good things God gives us. Since attention plays such a formative role in how we experience life, we need to make a deliberate effort to be attentive to the manifold blessings God lavishes upon us.

Mothers are key

Mothers passing on Christian tradition are the real threat to the Revolution, argues Emily Finley at The Christian Imagination. We instinctively sense that she’s right, but why is she right to make this claim? Head over to read her deeply thoughtful piece.

Liturgical Reflections

Cum grano salis

People often ask me what my favorite hand missal is, and I always say, the 1945 St. Andrew’s. That's because it predates the Pacellian wreckage of Holy Week and removal of octaves, and contains generally good and valuable commentary throughout (though the text is tiny tiny).

However, you do have to be on your guard even here, because this was a product of the Liturgical Movement, and the LM had various “bees in its bonnet” all along, due to some poor scholarship that has subsequently met refutation. One of these hangups was their conviction that Mass was anciently celebrated versus populum. So you can find today, in the notes for Pope St. Clement, the sort of comment I underlined in red:

Always . . . cum grano salis.

If you are interested in the most comprehensive scholarly study of ancient altars and directionality of worship, check out Stefan Heid's magisterial work Altar and Church: Principles of Liturgy from Early Christianity, just published in English in 2024.

A Common-Sense Defense of the TLM

OnePeterFive is serializing a short new book by Dr. Edward Schaefer, who presents some of the fundamentals of traditionalism in an easy-to-access manner.

• In Chapter 1, for example, he explains how it is that one Mass can be said to be “holier” than another, even if both have valid consecrations.

• Chapter 2 looks at some of the obvious flaws of the New Mass. Of special note is his discussion of the change to the Offertory. Every historic rite in Christendom developed over time an oblative offertory, the purpose of which is simply to make explicit what the intention was all along — namely, to set apart the bread and wine for sacrifice. When the Novus Ordo junked this and replaced it with a Jewish table-blessing, the entire orientation was shifted in a way contrary to that intention. This does not invalidate the Mass, but it does make the so-called “presentation of the gifts” to be in tension with the sacrifice. And that tension is perfectly obvious in the fact that the Novus Ordo both presents itself as, and is typically treated as, a meal, a communion service, even if you can ferret out some references to sacrifice, and even if the Catechism still teaches the doctrine of Trent.

• In Chapter 3, Schaefer addresses Latin: “O Latin, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Thou art mysterious, beautiful, stable (in meaning)! Thou art mine, my Church’s, and everyone’s! Latin is part of my tradition and another reason why I will hold onto tradition forever.” The arguments given in this article, added together, make an overwhelming case against vernacularization.

• Chapter 4 speaks of the intimate connection between the way we pray, what we believe, and how we lead our lives (lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi). I especially appreciated how he connected the dots to show that the slow-motion dissolution of Catholicism was quite deliberately planned by its human and diabolic agents.

• More chapters are coming and I’ll share them in due course.

From Sainte-Chapelle in Paris (my photo)

Political Speculations

Writes Charlie Downes in “The Enterprise State”:

Your ideas are watertight, your principles are righteous, and your goals are just—but when the hour of decision arrives, will you be prepared to command the machinery of the state to impose your vision on the world?

This is the principal question of politics. Values are of paramount importance, but they are of no consequence if they are not backed by power.

Leftists have long understood this, and thus, they do not fear power—they wield it. Under progressive occupation, the state takes on a clear direction, and the law comes to be regarded as an instrument to be used in pursuit of their political goals. Think of their various watchwords: social justice, economic equality, progress, liberation, diversity, inclusion, and so on. This package of ideals imbues the state with a very particular teleology, and all who live beneath it are conscripted into its schemes and designs—whether they like it or not.

At The Josias, Jesse Russell reviews a new book called Invisible Doctrine:

Monbiot’s and Hutchison’s premise is that neoliberalism is the dominant Weltanschauung of the 21st century. And while everyone (or nearly everyone) frames their own personal worldview in neoliberal terms, it is, as the title of their book suggests, an invisible power. According to Monbiot and Hutchison, those on the right who call Kamala Harris, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama or any other progressive figure a communist or Marxist are only fooling themselves, for Kamala Harris, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama are neoliberals. Those who, in turn, call Donald Trump, George W. Bush, or Steve Bannon fascists or Nazis are, in the view of Monbiot and Hutchison, also fooling themselves, for Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and Steve Bannon are neoliberals as well.

As glad as we are that Trump won, we are still a far cry away from the social reign of Christ the King.

Charles Coulombe is an expert at vast-canvas essays, the kind that answer the question “How did we ever get to this point?” His recent “America and Europe: Where Are They Bound?” is a fine example, well worth a read.

Cardinal Müller offers us an astonishingly bold piece, “The Seven Sins Against the Holy Spirit: A Synodal Tragedy” that (in part) targets the secular politicization of Catholic institutions. I’ll admit there are passages where I’m not quite sure who or what his target is, but most of it rings loud and clear.

It is a sin against the Holy Spirit if one does not confess him as the divine person who, in unity with the Father and the Son, is the one God, but confuses him with the anonymous numinous divinity of comparative religious studies, the collective folk spirit of the Romantics, the volonté générale of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Weltgeist of Georg W. F. Hegel, or the historical dialectic of Karl Marx, and finally with political utopias, from communism to atheistic transhumanism.

Fortunately, some people wake up from their secular dogmatic slumbers. Catholic News Agency talks about a priest who shook off the sleep:

The long dominance of liberation theology is at the root of the decline of Catholicism in Brazil, according to Friar Clodovis Boff. Until 2007, the religious was an important theologian of liberation theology, although not as famous as his brother Leonardo, a former Catholic priest who is one of the founders of the movement, which gained popularity in the 1970s and emphasized freedom from poverty and oppression as the key to salvation.

Then, in a move that alienated him from his famous brother, Clodovis Boff published the article “Liberation Theology and Return to Fundamentals,” in which he accused liberation theologians of making the poor the center of theology instead of Jesus Christ.

Kevin Tierney, worth reading as usual, penned an article “The Power of Persuasion in an Age of Fragile Authority” about why certain rulers seem incapable of achieving buy-in from “the common folk.” We certainly see this happening with Pope Francis and the synodalists:

I think both the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party are suffering from a crisis of persuasion more than anything else. You can change policy and discipline with the stroke of a pen, yet it takes work and the power of persuasion to not only have those changes take root, but to convince people you have their best interests at heart. When you lack the power to persuade, you do worse than simply failing to persuade others. You begin to persuade yourself what you are doing is right, fundamentally blinding you from seeing the wider reality.

Indeed. And this is what is happening with the aftermath of the Synod on Synodality. We see “bishops against bishops, cardinals against cardinals,” exactly as Our Lady of Akita prophesied. This is necessary for the purification of the Church; it is necessary so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed, and the truth prevail. My “take” on Germano-Argentinian Synodality is courtesy of a Church Father:

I cannot help wondering about such madness in certain people, the dreadful impiety of their blinded minds, their insatiable lust for error that they are not content with the traditional rule of faith as once and for all received from antiquity, but are driven to seek another novelty daily. They are possessed by a permanent desire to change religion, to add something and to take something away—as though the dogma were not divine, so that it has to be revealed only once. But they take it for a merely human institution, which cannot be perfected except by constant emendations, rather, by constant corrections....

Once there is a beginning of mixing the new with the old, foreign ideas with genuine, and profane elements with sacred, this habit will creep in everywhere, without check. At the end, nothing in the Church will be left untouched, unimpaired, unhurt, and unstained. Where formerly there was the sanctuary of chaste and uncorrupted truth, there will be a brothel of impious and filthy errors.

That’s taken from chapters 21 & 23 of St. Vincent of Lerins’s Commonitorium, written circa AD 434.

If you want a good overview of the Synod, check out Matt Gaspers’s article “The Key to Understanding the Synod: ‘It Is a Continuation of Vatican II.’”

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Pray for the Pope

Here’s a good initiative: “9 Day Novena for the Conversion of Pope Francis,” from December 8 to 17 (the 17th being his birthday).

I do not presume to know or explain what is going on inside the pope’s soul, nor do I presume to understand completely the current crisis in the Church. What is clear to me is that something has gone seriously wrong in both the pope and the Church on earth, and therefore I pray for them (and for myself, a sinner).

I think this is something we can all agree is a good idea. It never, ever hurts to pray for someone’s conversion. God hears all prayers; He answers them as He pleases, with providential wisdom that surpasses our understanding. We do not need to understand everything — nor can we. But we do need to love and to pray.

Every day, I raise up a litany that includes these petitions:

For all good bishops, that they may be strengthened and exalted.
For all wicked bishops, that they may be converted or confounded.
For all mediocre bishops, that they may be awakened and stirred into action.

Whenever I pray the Kyrie eleison-Christe eleison-Kyrie eleison in the Monastic Divine Office, the first Kyrie is for the pope, the second for my bishop, the third for my pastor. “Nailing” the intentions to the ritual ensures that they are never forgotten.

That’s all, folks! Thank you for reading, and may God bless you as we pray through the season of Advent.