Over the years of my adult life, as I have gotten to know more and more intimately the traditional liturgy, theology, spirituality, hagiography, and cultural accomplishments of the Catholic Church prior to the temporary bout of madness that seized churchmen after the Second Vatican Council (and continues to hold too many in its grip), I…
The prospect of using aborted fetal tissue in the massively funded project to develop a COVID-19 vaccine — a particularly gruesome sign of the techno-barbarism of our age — makes when human life begins (and with it, human personhood), and how much we can know about it for sure, once again a pressing scientific and…
With the gradual thawing of restrictions on public gatherings, some dioceses have begun to issue new sets of regulations for Masses. These regulations often include a stated preference for Communion in the hand or even a forbiddance of Communion on the tongue. In this article, I will demonstrate two things: first, in regard to the…
The pandemic pandemonium of the coronavirus — in its volatile mixture of undeniable physical evils and the superimposed moral evils of social engineering by political elites only too happy to take advantage of a global train wreck — has brought before Christians once again the ancient question of why the good and the wicked alike…
The question may reasonably be asked: why, after fifty years in which the Novus Ordo has been given ample opportunity to “prove its worth” and has singularly failed to do so — years in which a minority of strong-willed priests, attempting to turn the tide against banality and irreverence, have for their pains been sent…
How often the saints pass by each year on the Church’s calendar, and we think: “Hmm, that saint — I wish I knew more about him,” and that’s it. In a better year than this one, we might be fortunate to assist at Mass that day and hear a set of orations asking for the…
I have developed an affection for a verse in Psalm 16: Propter verba labiorum tuorum ego custodivi vias duras, “On account of the words of Thy lips, I have kept the arduous paths” (Ps. 16:4). King David, to whom these words are attributed, knew what it was like to keep to arduous paths. At the…
Today, on the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in its capacity as the successor to the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, issued two decrees updating the traditional Missale Romanum (1962): Quo Magis, by which seven prefaces are added, and Cum Sanctissima, by which provision…
Growing up in the Novus Ordo, I was never accustomed to using a missal, nor did I ever see anyone else using one. Preacher said we had to take up our hymnal and follow it, but it was a rare bird who followed the Mass from a missalette. The vernacular was supposed to make everything…
In the following section of this article, Emily Sparks offers the following eyewitness testimony, with permission to use it, under her name. Looking back many years later, she regrets her well intentioned involvement in this panoply of abuses but wishes to share with readers a sense of “just how bad it is” at a typical…
Children will learn many things from the traditional Latin Mass that they are not likely ever to learn from the modern Mass of Paul VI. 1. The Mass is a mystery of faith, a holy sacrifice. The ancient rite enshrines and expresses in the most perfect way that the Mass is the re-presentation of the…
