The following letter and my reply are a real exchange. The priest kindly permitted the publication of a version in which identifying personal details have been removed. We believe that there are now many priests in a situation of conscience similar or even identical to what is described here, and that reading this may help…
The indefatigable blogger Fr. Dwight Longenecker is at it again. In a new article from March 15, 2019, entitled “Tradition is the Democracy of the Dead,” he writes to assure us that he is a lover of tradition — but not excessively. He rightly says one should be or become Catholic for the sake of…
Author Martin Mosebach, who is not a fan of interrupting sacrosanct actions, suggests in The Heresy of Formlessness that the priest’s sermon metaphorically rends the liturgical garment in two. Mass begins with what is sacred, gets abruptly disconnected by human speech from the sermon, then resumes with the sacred mysteries. As Mosebach explains, “when the…
The Church is in the midst of a battle between warring ideologies in the secular and ecclesiastical courts. One combatant is a certain confederation of groups that push for the normalization of homosexuality in the Church and the redefining of sacramental marriage. The other combatant is the traditional, orthodox wing of the Church that promotes…
In G.K. Chesterton’s story “The Queer Feet,” Father Brown says: A crime is like any other work of art. Don’t look surprised; crimes are by no means the only works of art that come from an infernal workshop. But every work of art, divine or diabolic, has one indispensable mark — I mean, that the…
The top-down annihilation of a developed orthodoxy into a mad-glad tambourine session seems to have been successful for a few decades. As I grow older in the Catholic Church, I’ve gradually become aware of the various effects of this post-conciliar crumble. But it’s another thing altogether experience it firsthand – especially in the sacrament of…
A university student once sent to me the following heartfelt letter. He expresses well the thoughts and feelings of many young Catholic men and women his age, who are open to a vocation from the Lord, but struggle with how to think about the whole matter. In my response, I try to clear away some…
In my 21 years in Japan, I have attended three funerals. The first, for my wife’s godmother, was a Catholic one, while the other two were not. As my wife is Japanese and is the only Catholic in her family (she converted in her mid-twenties), whenever there is a death in her family, the funeral…
You will often hear from people who lived through the “great” post-Vatican II reform of the Mass that, despite the loss of reverence and sharp drop in attendance, it was good to have the Mass in the vernacular. Surely, understanding what goes on in the Mass is important. Yet, surprisingly to some, understanding every prayer…
My article “Twelve Reasons Not to Prefer the Novus Ordo” was greeted with a barrage of snide remarks, flustered dismissals, relativistic claims about “tastes,” and soberly framed objections. As a philosopher and theologian, I care little for empty rhetoric, but I care very much about rational objections, which deserve a response. I have seen every…
When the day comes where you bury your head in your hands and say, “This cannot be right,” start your search for the nearest Latin Mass. I am talking here about Mass in the “extraordinary form,” the Tridentine Mass, the usus antiquior, the Mass according to the Roman Missal promulgated by St. John XXIII in…
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