Guest: Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, theologian, philosopher, composer, liturgical expert, author, founding faculty member of Wyoming Catholic College.
Description: How did we get the Novus Ordo — the New Mass? What led to it? Who was Archbishop Bugnini? Why didn’t more bishops resist the changes to the liturgy? What do we do now? This wide-ranging and frank discussion with Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, author of Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis and the forthcoming Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness: Why the Modern Age Needs the Mass of Ages, seeks to answer some of these questions, and more.
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Related Links:
- Peter’s author page at OnePeterFive
- Peter’s author page at Angelico Press, where his upcoming book will be released.
- Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis: Sacred Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and Renewal in the Church
- The Heresy of Formlessness – Martin Mosebach
- A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes – Evelyn Waugh, Cardinal John Heenan, Alcuin Reid (Editor)
- The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer: From Youth and Conversion to Vatican II, the Liturgical Reform, and After – John Pepino
- Sacred Signs – Romano Guardini
- The Spirit of the Liturgy – Romano Guardini
- Nothing Superfluous – Fr. James W. Jackson, FSSP
- Treasure and Tradition: The Ultimate Guide to the Latin Mass – Lisa Bergman
- Sacrosanctum Concilium – Constitution On The Sacred Liturgy, Vatican II
- Quo Primum – Papal Bull of Pope St. Pius V, 1570
- Letter Of His Holiness Benedict XVI To The Bishops On The Occasion Of The Publication Of The Apostolic Letter “Motu Proprio Data” Summorum Pontificum
- Apostolic Letter Given Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum On The Use Of The Roman Liturgy Prior To The Reform Of 1970
- Una Voce Wyoming
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Thanks Steve for this. I am listening right now and really, really would love to hear the answers to these questions.
Thought, I would thank you now, in case i forget.
My pleasure, and thank you for saying so. If I can get my act together, more podcasts should be coming down the pike soon.
Yup. You guys could have talked about this for hours and I would not have tired from listening. Please do get to those followup podcasts.
I had a very similar experience as your wife: a convert quite underwhelmed by the NO and then upon assisting at a TLM it just clicked “here God is treated like He’s GOD!”
Unfortunately I am stuck in a NO parish and my family is not up for traveling an hour to a Mass they don’t understand.
THANK YOU for this podcast and God bless 😉
Thank you!
I asked my parents several years ago, who grew up in Vatican l as young adults, and wondered why it was so “easy”
for all these novelties to take hold in the parishes. How was it that, for a time period, there was virtually no TLM to be found anywhere and the laity seemed to accept this, but a few?
I do not cast stones here, I simply ask. Perhaps I would have reacted the same way, almost in dismay, blind trust, or maybe without realizing what was being lost as my church altars were being ripped out, along with the altar rails.
Had Satan’s work already taken hold so firmly, to entice the laity and the priesthood.
How could a pope hope to gain laity with the change in Liturgy, all the while, knowing that many would be abandoned and have great difficulty in attending Mass with the changes? The Father of the Prodigal Son never left His House to get the lost, nor abandoned his remaining son…..He simply waited and welcomed him back on His terms.
Regarding trust, I find it impossible to trust most members of the Novus Ordo clergy, however orthodox they may be. As one who admits to suffering from scrupulosity, and who has no physical access to the classical rite and its associated sacraments, I find assisting at NO Masses just to fulfill my Sunday obligation almost unbearable, as all I hear in my mind is question after question: “Is this priest’s Mass valid? Does he have proper intention to confect the Sacrament? How do I know? Should I be here? Am I actually offending our Blessed Lord by assisting at this Mass rather than simply staying home?” The same applies to the confessional: “Does this priest really believe he has the authority to absolve my sins in the name of Jesus Christ? Can I trust any counsel he may offer? Does he even believe in mortal sin? Would it be better for me to simply stay at home and never go to confession, even though I know it is impossible for me to remain in the state of grace for the rest of my life?”
THIS is what 50 years of liturgical and theological anarchy has brought us. We no longer know who to trust and what to do, especially when there appear to be no good choices available.
LB236,
You don’t have to worry about the validity of confessions and consecrations by N.O. priests because otherwise this would mean that the Devil already has won over the Church.
Every time you confessed to a trad priest, I guess that even when you committed serious mortal sins he never refused to absolve you. Then in the same way when you sincerely confess a N.O. priest ALL your sins in the same way (even if a few ones look a bit “outdated” or ludicrous in his eyes) you aren’t supposed to know whether his absolution is valid or not, Jesus is behind him and already absolved you.
For the Eucharist, if sometimes the Consecration might have been dubious, certainly some trad and experienced exorcists like the late Fr Amorth would have warned us that consequently these purportedly consecrated hosts don’t “work” when used during exorcisms.
So far as I know I never heard such things.
At 1:05:22, Steve recounts learning of the attitude of many bishops who resisted, back in the “Indult Era” (1984-2007), requests for the Traditional Latin Mass from laity – and even pressure from prelates from Rome: “It’s the will of the Holy Father that you allow the people to have this mass. ” And the bishops often responded, “The Pope is not the Pope of my diocese.”
Which is entirely true, of course. But it rubs up against Dr. Kwasniewski’s earlier point that a key cause of so much of the Modernist Crisis has been rampant ultramontanism in the wake of Vatican I. This doesn’t sound terribly ultramontanist, though, does it?
But what we’re seeing is obviously a selective and superficial ultramontanism, at least in the post-conciliar era. It’s hard to find a bishop who will openly question or challenge the Pope; even liberal dissent from bishops (of which there has been so much) is typically cast in careful euphemisms and esoteric language. Obviously, at any rate, the ultramontanism on vivid, even crass display from certain prelates and lay figures in this pontificate was never in evidence in the past two pontificates. They’re ultra about the montane when it’s using the liberal ratchet.
But a true resolution of this crisis will need to entail restoration a balanced and traditional view of the authority – and limitations – of the Papacy.
Excellent observations. I find myself lately praying for the dissolution of the bishops’ conferences and a return to the traditional hierarchy. This would render unemployed a significant number of leftist agitators now masquerading as USCCB staffers, and I hope they find other jobs if this prayer is answered. Just not in the Church.
Apologies for the length of this post, but it might be useful to some.
The giant rupture post-Vatican II, now acknowledged by everyone, has caused conflict within countless families, civil war in the Church, and apostasy on a scale not seen since the 16th century and before that, in the time of Arius. Countless souls must have been lost. If people stop going to Confession and to Mass, how can they receive the Grace necessary to conquer concupiscence and stay free of mortal sin? And they did stop going to the Novus Ordo, by the million. Yes, it is plain that at the heart of the rupture is the Novus Ordo, and this is more than logical given that the Mass is the centre and summit of the Catholic Faith. So what is the nature of the rupture, seen most vividly in this Novus Ordo?
At its bottom-most level, it must be the Hierarchy’s loss of faith in the existence of God and the invisible world, which for any authentic Catholic should be the world that has most pull on his mentality, thoughts, conduct, and whole life. (This basic loss of faith involves too the loss of a sense of sin and of its seriousness. And so of course the Confessionals are mostly empty.)
It also represents – as the citations above prove – the fruit of a significant number of people within the Church who were seeking ways of robbing the Mass of its Catholic nature in order to appeal to German, Dutch, American, English and other protestants, to whom they already felt closer than they did to their fellow Catholics. I think we also have to accept that yet others actively wished to do the Church harm. These people comprised a broad section of modernisers. Some were Modernists who had kept a low profile since the time of Pope St. Pius X but who were still very much around, having found ready homes in the Benedictine Order and in the Society of Jesus. Their world-view was shaped by the seeming triumph of “historicity”, by the (coming, they thought) triumph of Marxism and its “truths”, and by the onward march of science and technology, and by the steamroller of the concept of evolution in all things.
A Novus Ordo was needed, they said, for the Modern Man formed by all these things, one which gives Man greater “dignity”. (But what they really meant was just the second round of the Protestant Rebellion, but this time from the inside. Hence the destruction of the priesthood via a new and loud emphasis on the idea of the “priesthood of all believers”). A Mass was needed for the (Marxist Collective) “community” where the individual soul was no longer called to say in his heart “I believe” but, along with the Collective, had to say “We believe”. The mind-set produced by this emphasis is one of “community”: thus the Mass as a “meal”. In fact, the Novus Ordo is the Collective at prayer (and all too often it is the Collective praying to itself, or simply the Collective meeting qua Collective with a prayer or two just to make it “actuate” itself).
And the Novus Ordo, by eliminating specifically Catholic doctrine about Sacrifice, would appease all those Lutherans and Anglicans to whom we had apparently been so nasty for so long.
With its centre of gravity not Christ above the individual soul (a vertical relationship) but the Collective (a horizontal relationship), there was needed a new physical orientation: priest and people face each other; the Tabernacle to which I knelt and prayed as a small boy had to be thrust out of sight into some alcove chapel. All barriers (altar rails) that “denied” the Collective its rightful dignity were removed so that the Sanctuary became the whole Church. New churches were built which appeared to be modelled not only on ancient Greek or Roman theatres where the Collective could gather round itself in the horizontal dimension, but directly on the model of the synagogue or the Masonic temple. The churches of all our forefathers had been built in another dimension entirely, vertically, in a line from the faithful to the deacon to the priest to God in His Tabernacle, an arrangement reflecting the nature of the Catholic Church itself and the proper worship of God.
Culturally, the Novus Ordo has been a catastrophe of world historical proportions. That the Church, repository of the greatest fruits of human endeavour in history, should have effectively turned its back on its cultural greatness is like the Irish monks of the 9th Century saying, “What the hell, the transmission of all that Greek and Roman knowledge is boring, let’s chuck all that parchment into the Atlantic and go and get drunk”.
Novus Ordo and Condemned Heresies
The Novus Ordo sleeps with many nefarious bedfellows. Iconoclasm (of an order not seen since the Iconoclastic Heresy of the Eastern Church or the so-called “Reformation”) is one of them: it has made our worship and our churches culturally utterly impoverished, and all of us are as a result greatly diminished. It is a real catastrophe.
* it is a Mass specifically created (the first time this has been done in history) to meet an imagined sociological need of a supposed “Modern Man” (who theologically does not exist);
* as the creation of a committee, it cannot possibly have any organic link with the venerable rite of at least 1,600 years which it replaced;
* it was, without question, deliberately designed to protestantise the Catholic Church;
* it has led to Christ and His Death on the Cross for us sinners being thrust out from the centre to the periphery, both literally and figuratively;
* it is so proud, trumpeting a “dignity” of Mankind that we sinners do not deserve;
* it is a cultural non-entity, a disaster;
* it banishes the soul’s private communion with God through noise and distraction, making such communion well-nigh impossible;
* it cries out on every side its sheer infantility;
* it is the deliberate collectivisation of the Church’s worship in Marxist and/or Masonic form;
Practically, there are as many forms as there are Masses. This has been admitted by the liturgical experts who, together with then Cardinal Ratzinger, participated at the Fongombault Liturgical Conference 2001 (whose proceedings were edited by A. Reid OSB in ‘Looking Again at the Question of the Liturgy’ 2003).
There is another charge, of real importance in these days of the rejection of even biological reality by the gender ideology supporters. The Novus Ordo is not manly but effeminate. As Cardinal Heenan of England said in 1967 after witnessing the ‘Novus Ordo Missa Normativa’ for the first time in Rome, “At home, it is not only women and children but also fathers of families and young men who come regularly to Mass. If we were to offer them the kind of ceremony we saw yesterday we would soon be left with a congregation of women and children.”
And another thought. How the modern Church witters on about the “signs of the times”! Yet it dumped the True Mass, which bound all Catholics of every race and language together, just as globalisation, world tourism and the intermingling of nations was just taking off. Some reading of the signs of the times that was! You just couldn’t make it up, it’s so pathetic.
In the end, some few years ago, I had to stop attending the Novus Ordo. If I had continued, I felt I would have simply lost my faith. Certainly I would have been bored to death by the sheer banality of it all, or moved to anger: the sight of laymen and women traipsing about the Sanctuary as if they owned it enrages me. As an altar boy, the Sanctuary for me was a holy place, not to be defiled by anything or anyone profane. It was a great honour for me to be on the Sanctuary at all.
We have to get the Traditional Mass back if we ever want the Church to triumph in this world. You can’t abuse it. Indeed, it is impossible to assist at it and NOT be a Catholic.
A bad priest can turn the Novus Ordo into straight-forward sacrilege (Buenos Aires Tango Masses, etc.) whilst a good priest has one arm permanently tied behind his back by it, which is why I believe that it cannot be reformed. By its very nature it’s not Catholic. The truth is that it is only because the sad figure of Pope Paul VI couldn’t stomach what Bugnini really wanted to do that we have a valid Mass now at all. And even so he had to be shamed into some kind of stand by the “Ottaviani Intervention” of Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci.
And in what does the difference fundamentally lie? It lies in a wholly different theology, about the Church (what it is, who is a member), about Our Lord Jesus Christ, about sin and Redemption, about one’s relationship with God, about Salvation. The Traditional Mass places me where the Faith says I belong, on my knees before God, knowing that only through His Grace can I be saved. The Novus Ordo puts me in the centre, in the place of God Himself, or at the very least, alongside Him. It assumes my deification has already been achieved. But the whole mood of the post-conciliar Church is one of presumption about our Salvation, isn’t it?
A few quotations:
Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, main author of the Novus Ordo, L’Osservatore Romano, March 19, 1965: “We must strip from our Catholic prayers and from the Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren that is for the Protestants.” (ie, we must stop being Catholics and change our religion!).
And again, in 1974, he said, “ … the reform of the liturgy has been a major conquest of the Catholic Church”.(These words of Bugnini should be pondered on in silence). Now would follow “The adaptation or ‘incarnation’ of the Roman form of the liturgy into the usages and mentality of each individual Church.”
Father Kenneth Baker, SJ, editorial February 1979 “Homiletic and Pastoral Review”: “We have been overwhelmed with changes in the Church at all levels, but it is the liturgical revolution which touches all of us intimately and immediately.”
Professor Peter L. Berger, a Lutheran sociologist: If a thoroughly malicious sociologist, bent on injuring the Catholic community as much as possible had been an adviser to the Church, he could hardly have done a better job.”
Professor Dietrich von Hildebrand: “Truly, if one of the devils in C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters had been entrusted with the ruin of the liturgy he could not have done it better.”
Cardinal Heenan of Westminster, autobiography “A Crown of Thorns”: “Subsequent changes were more radical than those intended by Pope John and the bishops who passed the decree on the Liturgy. His sermon at the end of the first session shows that Pope John did not suspect what was being planned by the liturgical experts.”
Cardinal Heenan warned the Council Fathers of the manner in which the periti could draft texts capable “of both an orthodox and modernistic interpretation.” He told them that he feared the periti, and dreaded the possibility of their obtaining the power to interpret the Council to the world. On 26 June 1966 The Tablet reported the creation of five commissions to interpret and implement the Council’s decrees. The members of these commissions were, the report stated, chosen “for the most part from the ranks the Council periti”.
Father Joseph Gelineau SJ, Council peritus, enthusiastic proponent of the post-conciliar revolution, wrote in “Demain la liturgie”: “To tell the truth it is a different liturgy of the Mass. This needs to be said without ambiguity: the Roman Rite as we knew it no longer exists. It has been destroyed.”
Cardinal Sarah, April 2017: The Church has experienced “devastation, destruction and wars” not only in the liturgy, but also in doctrine, morals and Church discipline. “More and more voices of high-ranking prelates stubbornly affirm obvious doctrinal, moral and liturgical errors that have been condemned a hundred times, and work to demolish the little faith remaining in the people of God”. (Catholic Herald).
Poor Cardinal Sarah! It is almost funny that half a century’s patient work by true Catholics who love the Church have eventually won the day and put our Hierarchy to such a shame that they no longer have any idea how to get out of the swamp they jumped into on their own initiative.
In calling the Novus Ordo and the Old Mass “two versions of the same Rite”, Benedict XVI was engaged in naive hopefulness at the very least. His “reform of the reform” was always doomed. Lovable as he was, he was trying to sell us a bottle of snake oil with his reform of the reform. You can’t put go-faster stripes on a Zhiguli and expect people to thin it’s a Bentley. In comparison with the True Mass, the Novus Ordo is a child’s scribble alongside a Caravaggio; it is a Damian Hirst dead cow in formaldehyde alongside Michaelangelo’s Pieta. They are different and mutually antagonistic things. The one is Catholic to the last syllable. The other is a cuckoo planted deliberately in the Catholic nest, to the latter’s almost mortal injury.
How to sum it all up? For myself, I believe that one can only conclude by saying that the revolutionaries who gave us the Novus Ordo hated the Church, hated Catholicism and hated Catholics; and after fifty years of the Novus Ordo, in the hatred for the Traditional Mass of their Episcopal and lay descendants is discernible the hatred of the demons for God, and for us, His creation.
Hello Comrade Chairman,
It also represents – as the citations above prove – the fruit of a significant number of people within the Church who were seeking ways of robbing the Mass of its Catholic nature in order to appeal to German, Dutch, American, English and other protestants, to whom they already felt closer than they did to their fellow Catholics.
As Fr John Hunwicke – himself a quite recent convert – once observed about ecumenism: “Ecumenism is fashionable in some Catholic circles. I have long suspected that ‘liberal’ Catholics, who profess a sympathy for Ecumenism, favour it because their real desire is to change their own Church so that it conforms to the paradigms of Liberal Protestantism.”
But I think many of us have suspected something like this for a long time.
Morning Richard. Indeed! The wasteland is now seen in all its “beauty” – a doulful, brown and blasted heath over which blows a bitter wind.
What charity you show, Great Stalin, in taking the time to lay all of this out in such systematic way. I’ve been asked by some newer to tradition to lay out the general “case” against the N.O. in a global way. Not so much on technicalities and valid/licit concerns, as with regard to the sorry gestalt of it all. Your essay provides that, and very well. Thank you!
Hi Julia, this Part III of an overall study. I can send the whole thing to you if you email me at [email protected].
I think this podcast of Steve’s with Peter Kwasniewski is very important too for those who are new to Tradition.
You are welcomed!
Yes, Steve’s Podcast (THANK YOU, Steve!) is indeed excellent.
I will email you for your full treatise. Meantime, rather along the lines of our continuing horror in the Church, check this from the U.K. —-
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/u.k.-diocese-tells-catholics-visiting-pagan-shrines-to-bow-bring-flowers-to
Astonishing that they can keep coming up with new ways to go wrong.
We are now into the period of straight-forward, brazen, unashamed apostasy.
Dear bro Benedict, you should put this (the whole text) publicly, on some blog or website, so more people can read it.
“If people stop going to Confession and to Mass, how can they receive the Grace necessary to conquer concupiscence and stay free of mortal sin?”
– This is it. I was for a years long sure about the reason nr. 1 of so common widespread apostasy among the Catholic people. Clerics as layman. The omission of the Sacrament of Confession, or doing it on improper way, plus taking the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist in an unworthy way and in the state of sin, – MUST be the main cause of the fall into every kind of sin, and the same keep sinning just more often and the sins becomes greater and greater. So after a while, from such Catholics you can expect every even unthinkable thing to say, do, write, or preach. We do not need to imagine what should happen with people who are mentioned here and are doing this way for years, even decades! And, especially those people whom job is the teaching of Catholic Faith! We don’t need to think about that, because we SEE it right now with our own eyes. We see those people and we recognize them easily in these days, because they are fallen so deeply, that they can’t recognize the truth and think they are doing great job.
“In the end, some few years ago, I had to stop attending the Novus Ordo. If I had continued, I felt I would have simply lost my faith. Certainly I would have been bored to death by the sheer banality of it all, or moved to anger:…”
– Very same case here.
“We have to get the Traditional Mass back if we ever want the Church to triumph in this world. You can’t abuse it. Indeed, it is impossible to assist at it and NOT be a Catholic.”
– This very important true, you are saying here in such short but very nicely and understandable way. There is, in the other way, when man assist at the NO, the big question about his catholic faith. My sincere hope is that there are still in the (far away) world, many NO Masses, and the priests, and the parishioners who satisfy our Lord…
Ivan, thanks indeed for the kind words.
One thing that came over very well in the podcast is the fact that the Novus Ordo requires a band leader or front man, and without it the “audience” is completely lost. So right.
This is what I mean by the infantility of the Novus Ordo – it’s turned grown adults into children in the kindergarten.
I believe you don’t mind,…if I will to say something about the ‘greater dignity’ too, that you’ve mentioned above twice in correct sense, which we should prefer and even have as one of the main goals according the new ‘modern catholic doctrine’.
If they really mean it in this way, just like that: “For the sake of greater dignity”, I am asking myself, why? Why should we make of this a goal, when we have learned by our Lord to do quite opposite:
“Because every one that exalteth himself, shall be humbled; and he that humbleth himself, shall be exalted.” (Luke 14,11)
The meaning and understanding of the word dignity must always be well-judged in what context it is placed. We have to be even more careful when we are trying to achieve some “even more dignity”.
For it is easier to conceal personal pride and arrogance under the guise of dignity, rather than modesty and humility. If we think in gradation comparison, dignity is exactly in the middle:
humility — modesty — dignity — pride — arrogance
So, it can be easily used as a trap! The effort and the desire for ‘greater dignity’, usually comes from that seducer and swindler, the father of all lies.
If I am humble and modest, then I am dignified too, as it befits to God’s child and servant.
But if I try to be (more) dignified, without to be first and for sure humble and modest, then this desire for greater dignity comes from pride and arrogance (albeit hidden).
And if I somehow succeed to achieve that greater dignity, then my pride and arrogance will most probably grow too.
I am going to copy this if you don’t mind. I think it’s terribly important.
Many years ago, (possibly twenty), I came across a magazine article dedicated to Bl. John Henry Newman; (unfortunately I no longer have the reference). the only small section of it that I still have tells us:
Clericalism has filled the sanctuaries with lay people performing all sorts of roles contradictory to their baptismal dignity in a clumsy ballet of amateurish sacerdotalism. Far worse than the triviality of its language and didacticism, our new clerical servitude of the laity, paraded as a promethean empowerment of the people of God, and its confusion of the anthropology of the sexes would have made [Newman] weep more holy tears than he shed in his own years. For he knew that the music of hell was not dissonance but banality; and he was certain that the politics of hell was not inequality but androgyny. (From memory, I recall that there was also the statement to the effect that; if Newman had been asked to hold hands during the Our Father, he would have gone apoplectic).
P.S. I would like, if I may, to read your essay in its entirety. If you are agreeable, my email address is: [email protected]
On its way!
Thank you Mr. Stalin for this documented comment. Perhaps I will show it to my Parish Priest, who is an excellent Priest, always with thoughts for the Virgin Mary and for JPII, but I think that he is not an enthusiast of the Latin Mass. He is now beginning his fifties. May be it is because the Latin was not the strongest subject taught at the Seminaries (I don’t know whether Latin was then relegated).
I think the clicking language of Kalahari bushmen is above Latin in most seminaries’ “favourite language” list.
I hope very much it helps him.
In regards to Benedict XVI, why didn’t he correct the mass instead of create more confusion?
Well, that’s the million dollar question.Why indeed.
Well, Kwasniewski actually talks about that in the podcast.
The number one lie was that Paul VI declared that the Latin Mass was strictly forbidden once the NO was enforced, and it remained so for 40 years, until Pope Benedict said it never was and issued Summorum Pontificum.
They have told us a great many lies. Lies upon lies.
There can never be an effective reform of the reform. What is needed is a return to traditional Catholic teaching and of course the traditional liturgy. The crisis in the Church is without doubt, a crisis of the liturgy. Regarding the novel teachings emanating from the Second Vatican Council, I am reminded by the movements that have sought, in one way or another, to either undermine the Church through hateful subversion or by naïve movements that seek to change the Church to fit a modern worldly outlook.
As you know, one demonstration of modernist thinking in the Church was recognized by Pope Pius X, most particularly, in the French Sillon movement of Marc Saigner. On the surface the aspirations of this movement appeared to be a reasonable defence for a Catholic democracy and a modernising protection for the Church against her enemies. The movement was supported by many French working class people, and was initially praised by bishops and priests. Pope Pius X indeed praised many worthy aspects of this movement and its adherents. However, Pope Pius X saw the dangers to the faith inherent in their ideas and so condemned the errors. Tragically, many of those errors were resurrected at the Vatican Council II and have gained a momentum that has greatly contributed to this present crisis. The present occupier of the seat of Peter condemns those who are loyal to the traditional teaching of the Church. It is a shame that he does not realizes that his brand of Catholicism has been wholly condemned by a very saintly and wise pope.
“The crisis in the Church is without doubt, a crisis of the liturgy.”
I’d say rather, the crisis in the Church, which shows itself most obviously in the liturgy, is actually a profound crisis of faith, in other words a spiritual crisis”.
Not sure what a spiritual crisis means. I can only understand and afirm belief in the Catholic Faith. And this is where I see a failure of belief. Lex orandi, Lex credendi. Anyway we know what we mean.
Bravissimo, Comrade! I just this evening was constrained to go to a vigil no mass…it was as you described, though the young priest is orthodox and good…and clueless…during Communion, a lady walked right to the altar and without even a nod grabbed a communion dish and began helping the priest and his collectives distribute the Lord…they do not know what they are doing, I think and hope!
A written transcript of this interview would be very helpful for those like me who are not enough fluent in spoken english thus being unable to understand some parts of it.
Wish there was a transcript available! I don’t have the patience to listen to it right now.
I’m going to see what I can do. Transcripts on shows of this length can be a bit difficult/costly. I’ve already reached out to someone who might be able to help.
Thanks, Steve. Please don’t stress about it. I’m just being lazy!
Another useful option is to download it, and listen whenever you want, when driving a car, or working in the garden, or walking trough the forest,…
I’ve been waiting for a pod-cast like this for a long time. Very informative and candid.
I would just like to thank all of you for leaving comments on this. Those among our audience who love our podcasts are die-hard, but podcasts usually get very little observable engagement.
It’s very helpful to get this feedback.
Very slick production, what with the rich female British voice. Inspired by Glenn Beck?
I wonder what the cost of a missal would have cost (equivalent to the US dollar today) back in the 19th century.
Very well said: The liturgy ought to make the acts of adoration, thanksgiving, petition, and contrition easier, not more difficult for us.
Speaking of market analysis:
$TRADS is Bullish, but need to push through resistance level at all time high since 1968. Expected breakout based on history, but this is not short-term. $LIBS will close below $0
Bravo!
This was a most excellent episode. I wish you and your guest could have had more time together. I have been involved in the traditional liturgical movement since the 80’s and I remember just how bad things were in the 80’s and 90’s. One question I oiled have loved to hear your guest comment on is: I understand that the liturgical brain trust at and after Vatican II was of the opinion that the rite must be updated, but once the ‘update’ happened the consensus from senior churchmen everywhere seemed to shift to a philosophy of ‘the old rite is dangerous’. It always seemed to me that they harbored an irrational fear of the Tridentine Rite and those who were attached to it. It seemed to me, at times, pathological. What was the philosophical and ideological cause of this radical shift in thinking? I would be curious to find out.
Wow, thank you so much for the material presented. I finally understand why I left the Church in the 80’s. The 70’s were very rough and rocky, plus I was in a religious community where changes took place on a daily basis without discussion. The mass no longer involved Christ and it became a social event and I lost interest. After a number of years away I started praying the Rosary and one day at work I decided I had to go to confession. Phoned the closest church, went to confession and attended mass that evening. Having found a wonderful, pious spiritual director I now attend the TLM and feel at home.