The following guest post was written by Father Eric Andersen, pastor of St. Stephen Catholic Church in Portland, Oregon. St. Stephen’s is a parish which offers both forms of the Roman Rite. Many Catholics do not know their liturgical heritage. Experiencing a Solemn Traditional Latin Mass for the first time can seem so unfamiliar. At first, one…
You were born in 1938. You grew up in a parish where multiple Sunday Masses were packed with Catholics. Some of your earliest memories are of the hats and veils the ladies wore as the final touch on their Sunday best, the men’s dapper suits and polished shoes. You learned your catechism in Q&A form—and…
While my parents are well within the Baby Boomer age range, they were not hippies. But if they had been, and if there were extant film footage that depicted them frolicking in mud pits at Woodstock, or holding up “Drop Acid, Not Bombs” picket signs, I would not let my children see it. If such…
I once received a humdinger of a piece of anti-fan mail from a lady in Europe who was quite incensed by the lecture at Steubenville that became chapter 1 of my book Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness. Recently re-reading it, I thought it might be interesting to share what she wrote, and then my response to…
A young adult of strong faith and an admirable family piety sent a letter to me last summer with certain questions and concerns that I believe will resonate with many other readers of OnePeterFive. I will share first the letter, and then my response (with all identifying details removed). * * * Dear Dr. Kwasniewski,…
Today we want to relaunch an initiative which seems to us both legitimate and desirable, at a moment in which the sense of the sacred is being continually eroded, also within the Church, by other concerns and priorities, often linked to passing fashions. We reprint here a letter which the ex-Prefect of the Congregation for…
In my article “The Fifty-Year Descent to Footnote 351: Our Progressive Desensitization to the Most Holy Eucharist,” I spoke of how the liturgical reform’s many sudden and drastic changes in ritual and ceremonial have contributed to a continual erosion of belief in the Mass as a true and proper Sacrifice and in the Real Presence…
In January 2016, OnePeterFive reported on the Pontifical Mass in the old rite celebrated by Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong at the Asilo dela Medalla Milagrosa Chapel, during the International Eucharistic Congress (IEC) in Cebu City, Philippines. At that time, there was no regular Latin Mass in the Archdiocese of Cebu, the largest archdiocese in…
It’s been a rough year for the Catholic Church, with traditional Catholic teaching under constant attack, so I want to share some positive things I experienced in 2017. I traveled to two different places outside the United States that have been working to restore the traditional Latin Mass. In April of 2017, I was privileged…
There is a hierarchy of language. This is true for secular politics and cultural commerce, as well as in terms of religion. In this hierarchy, some languages are higher than others. JRR Tolkien, a philologist at Oxford, was quite aware of this. In his fictional world, which we know through Lord of the Rings, the…
In his Monday column at First Things, Italian journalist and veteran Vatican-watcher Marco Tosatti gave voice to what had previously been little more than a whispered rumor: that a group was at work, with Vatican knowledge and support, on a kind of interfaith liturgy: [T]here is the matter of the “Ecumenical Mass,” a liturgy designed…
