How to Obey the Church
This idea is echoed by the Memoriale Domini, the 1969 Instruction forbidding (with the inevitable exceptions) the reception of Holy Communion in the Hand.
Cardinal Roche on the Vatican II Rupture
I find myself, here, and not for the first time, defending the words of the Second Vatican Council against an interpretation which would impute to them theological novelties incompatible with the perennial teaching of the Church.
The Schismatic Trads Were Right? Francis’ New Rescript on the TLM
We have now heard from the Holy See in unambiguous terms that the integration into parish life of Catholics attached to the older Missal is a thoroughly bad thing. The ones with a schismatic mentality, whatever that was supposed to mean, are the good ones: or at least the less bad ones.
International TLM Lay Group Appeals to All Catholics of Good Will
What we do know is that we are justly afflicted for our sins, in all the suffering which God permits to fall upon us, and that God is above all factionalism and ideology.
Why British and Commonwealth Catholics Venerate their Protestant Monarch
Above: then Prince Charles, now the ascended King Charles III, kisses the hand of his mother, her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Photo credit MSN. The spectacle is undeniably impressive, though predictable and in part long-planned. Even those whose own values do not align with the underlying message can but stand in awe, in fact,…
Pope Francis’ Liturgical Longing
Desiderio desideravi: “with desire have I desired,” Our Lord said to His Disciples before the Last Supper, “to eat this Pasch with you.” The quaint Latin phrase is a literal translation of the Greek of the Gospels (Luke 22:15; Matthew 13:14), but it is no less quaint in Greek. It is in fact an expression…
Obedience, Disobedience, and Rash Obedience: a Virtue in a time of Crisis
There has long been a strange asymmetry between conservatives and progressives in the Catholic Church. Theological conservatives—priests and bishops as well as lay people—have prided themselves on their obedience, and progressives have flaunted their disobedience. To give the most extreme examples, progressive bishops would make their chums laugh by talking about how they had tossed…
The FSSP and Pope Francis’ Roller-Coaster
The Wild Ride It took some time for everyone to adjust to the violent overthrow of thirteen years’ pastoral arrangements, policies, and attitudes by Pope Francis’ Apostolic Letter Traditionis Custodes (TC), not least because of the way it was promulgated, to come into immediate effect, on a Friday. The implications needed thinking through, canon law…
Why Our Forebears Defended Latin in the Liturgy
I have been reading the Traditionalist classic, Tito Cassini’s The Torn Tunic, first published (in Italian, La Tunica Stracciata) in 1967, reprinted by Angelico Press. It is an impassioned, indeed ferocious, statement of the case for liturgical traditionalism, written and published before the Novus Ordo Missae was promulgated. Casini, like most Catholics of the time,…
50 Years Ago: Non-Catholics Petitioned the Pope for the Latin Mass
Vladimir Ashkenazy and the “Agatha Christie” Petitioners What do the writers W.H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, Jorge Borges and Francois Mauriac, have in common with the composer Benjamin Britten, the guitarist Andrés Segovia, and the philosophers Augusto Del Noce and Jacques Maritain? They all signed an international petition in 1966 begging the Holy See not to…
Ethnic Diversity and the Latin Mass
In a recent article in the Illinois Times, Massimo Faggioli, a theology professor at Villanova University in Philadelphia, is quoted as follows, of a specific Traditional Mass location: It’s not an accident that all of these Catholics at the old Mass are white, because one of the things that happened after Vatican II was an…