The recent Open Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church, accusing Pope Francis of heresy, precipitated a large number of commentaries. A common response was to cite ecclesiastical law for the proposition that “no one judges the pope” and then ask, “So what is the point of accusing him of heresy?” This is another…
Recently, my grandson Thomas received his first Holy Communion at a parish I have visited only a few times. My wife and I assist at Mass at a different parish, in part because it offers the traditional Latin Mass. The day after Thomas’s first Holy Communion at the Novus Ordo church, some children at our…
As a Millennial who was weaned on the Novus Ordo Missae, I have been inescapably molded by its main architect, Abp. Annibale Bugnini. Yet there is so much that I didn’t know about Bugnini and his revolution of the liturgy. I didn’t know, growing up, that a man infamously alleged to have been a Freemason…
Now that more and more Catholics are becoming aware of the many differences between the traditional rite of baptism that the Church used for well over a thousand years and its efficient, community-friendly, exorcism-free replacement at the hands of Paul VI, devout men and women have much reason to lament benefits of which they or…
Over the years, many people have written to me for advice about attending Mass when their local situation is deplorably bad. The most common scenario I have been asked about is the following: “Our local parish has only the Novus Ordo, and it’s celebrated with altar girls, extraordinary ministers, communion in the hand, and music…
Cardinal Cláudio Hummes feels he is close to completing a project conceived of many years ago and tenaciously carried forward: the project of obtaining permission from the Vatican to ordain ad experimentum married men of a certain age (one hypothesis is over 50 years old) to account for the lack of priests in the center…
Until just a few weeks ago, I knew precious little about my mother’s side of the family. She passed away young, when she was 39 and I was 10; that was in the late 1970s. Other than her sister, who moved out to California not long after my mother’s death, I don’t remember ever meeting…
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…
