Weekly Roundup, September 13 Edition

Posted on by Vaseline

Photo by Fr Lawrence Lew OP

Welcome to all the new readers who have joined us here at Tradition & Sanity in recent weeks!

I’d like to say a big thank you to those who took out a paid subscription in response to my appeal two weeks ago (remember the blue sunglasses?).

Long-time readers as well as new ones, please support the long-term life of this Substack by opting in to the weekly exclusives and the archives:

Moreover, allow me to wish everyone a blessed Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on the 14th!

Now for this week’s roundup.

Robert Moynihan and Matt Gaspers (the latter newly working for Inside the Vatican) welcomed me to their podcast last week. We took as our point of departure the claim in my Gardone lecture that the Novus Ordo is solely modern in content due to the principles and methods used to compose it, such that it marks a decisive rupture with all preceding apostolic liturgical traditions. We looked into the implications of this for the “man in the pew” and asked “where we go from here.” A very enjoyable and, I think, clarifying conversation.

I was reminded the other day of a fine essay by a priest that appeared back in 2022, arguing a viewpoint similar to mine in the Gardone lecture. It’s very good, please check it out: “The Current Crisis of Faith in the Church Has Its Ground in the New Mass” by Fr. Michael Gurtner.

The following view is pretty standard textbook fare for both Protestants and progressive Catholics:

The history of liturgy after Constantine is a passing from the holy to the sacred, that is, from informal spontaneity and improvisation to formal rigidity and fixity, from humble homes of hospitality to grand worldly churches rife with sacerdotalism, from the post-religious breakthrough represented by Christ the New Man to the reasserted paganism of regimented rituality. And so forth. In short, “the pagans flooded the imperial church,” and the early Christian “breaking of bread” was swept away.

In a recent article for NLM, I explain that this is the key to understanding what happened in the 1960s & 70s:

If you dig, dig, dig, you will always find this antiquarianism at the root of all the arguments in favor of the liturgical reform. It is the essential premise, the unquestioned axiom, the point of departure. It is not a Catholic premise and cannot yield anything worthwhile. In fact, it will yield interminable disagreements because there is no way to arrive at a definite, knowable, actionable truth; everything is lost in the mists of speculation and imagination, subject to the agenda of a given sect of antiquarians.

Read the rest here.

Oh, there are many, many reasons.

Phillip Campbell’s article “Why I’m not Orthodox” is admittedly overstated and oversimplified, but I will say that I’m sympathetic to his point of view. I too could use the same headings to list my reasons for not ever feeling tempted to become Eastern Orthodox. And this I say as someone who has always been very willing to profit from Eastern Christian writers, to venerate icons, to attend Byzantine Divine Liturgy with the Ukrainians, and so forth. I have no axe to grind, but neither do I feel any undertow pulling me along.

What is frustrating about being Catholic today has nothing to do with the Catholic religion and everything to do with an assortment of idiots (and worse) who are running (and ruining) the Church on earth as far as God permits them. And we can be sure He will permit them only so far before the tide shifts and restoration gains the upper hand.

The Catholic intellectual tradition, liturgical monuments, spiritual resources, and cultural heritage are breathtakingly beautiful, coherent, and compelling. The trouble is the modernist and lavender mafia campaign to bury them and replace them with tawdry junk.

As Stuart Chessman comments:

Inevitably, the renewed interest in Catholicism among the downtown bohemians is decidedly for traditional Catholicism. For is not the present Catholic Church establishment itself the incarnation of “bourgeois” conformism and philistinism?

Courtesy of Fr. Z, here’s a fantastic text from St. Basil the Great’s Letter 90, written at the time of the Arian crisis (emphasis added):

The evils which afflict us are well known, even if we do not now mention them, for long since have they been re-echoed through the whole world. The teachings of the Fathers are scorned; the apostolic traditions are set at naught; the fabrications of innovators are in force in the churches; these men, moreover, train themselves in rhetorical quibbling and not in theology; the wisdom of the world takes first place to itself, having thrust aside the glory of the Cross. The shepherds are driven away, and in their places are introduced troublesome wolves who tear asunder the flock of Christ. The houses of prayer are bereft of those wont to assemble therein; the solitudes are filled with those who weep. The elders weep, comparing the past with the present; the young are more to be pitied, since they know not of what they have been deprived.

Fr. Z comments:

The young are rediscovering what they have have been cheated out of.  That’s one reason why particular wolves are ravening in certain dioceses.   They will do anything to keep the young away from what has been handed down and, instead, lock them into the “fabrications of innovators.”

Quite so.

Earlier in the summer, rumors were swirling about a major TLM crackdown from the Vatican. There is no question that a document with that intention was circulating in the Vatican; but it seems to have been quashed by a combination of internal political advice (“This won’t be advantageous to you, Holy Father”) and the external pressure of petitions from eminent people (“Holy Father, the human rights activist Bianca Jagger says you shouldn’t do this…”). At OnePeterFive, Timothy Flanders offers us a good summary of what we know about what happened.

After Traditionis Custodes, absurd rules were put into place about how the TLM could not be celebrated in a parish church anymore, or advertised as having any kind of connection to a parish. (One could hardly make this stuff up, it’s so bad.) Nevertheless, zealous Catholics rose to the challenge of making lemonade from lemons, and the result of their labors has often been better than parish churches! A case in point:

Studio io Design recently unveiled a project they were involved in which saw the repurposing of a former dining hall as a chapel at Our Lady’s Healing Center in Seadrift, Texas. The project in question shows how a great deal can be accomplished with only a very little and this is particularly pertinent in an period of time when creative solutions are being sought for non-parish church settings for the usus antiquior and the like.

This chapel used to be… a cafeteria:

See more pictures here.

More good news: Canticum Salomonis is pleased to announce the publication of a pocket-sized edition of the traditional Roman Office of the Dead, featuring the full Office (Vespers, Matins, and Lauds) according to the 1568 Roman Breviary. This edition includes the Latin text with a facing English translation, along with the additional orations from the 1614 Roman Ritual. The English translation of the psalms follows the original Douay-Rheims version with modernized spelling. The booklet also features a meditation on the mystical significance of the Office, drawn from Dom Prosper Guéranger’s The Liturgical Year, and a section for recording prayer intentions.

More info and links here (at the very end of the post).

And even more good news! St. Augustine says, in De Doctrina Christiana, that if you’re not reading the original Hebrew or Greek of the Bible, you should have a bunch of different good translations on hand to study and compare with one another. There will never be a “perfect” translation, but the notes in the Ignatius Study Bible (RSV-CE) are really, really helpful. And now, after many years of waiting, Ignatius is rolling out the complete Study Bible, full of all the commentaries on the OT and NT:

(Photo courtesy of Mark Brumley’s FB page)

You can pre-order this in hardback or leather here. N.B.: This does not seem to be available yet at Amazon, so your only shot at a pre-order is via the publisher (which is better anyway).

Lastly, if you are wondering what it looks like to rebuild Catholic culture in the midst of the modern wasteland, look no further than the Festival of St. Louis, which takes place every year on August 25th in the city named after the great French king. An inspiring photo gallery may be found here.

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A headline, not from Babylon Bee, but from La Croix International:

May be an image of 11 people and text

Because, dontchaknow, zero waste is among the top priorities of the Church.

In his recent pastoral visit to Indonesia, the pope, in a multireligious gathering, refrained from mentioning the Trinity or making the sign of the cross, preferring instead to give a generic blessing “valid for all religions.” I think Pius IX might have something to say about indifferentism; indeed, I recall a line in the New Testament: “For he that shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of him the Son of man shall be ashamed, when he shall come in his majesty, and that of his Father, and of the holy angels” (Lk 9:26). But I guess some modern Catholics don’t buy this archaic business about majesty, and paternity, and angels, and all that.

One of the characteristics of Freemasonry is the decisive rejection of Christian dogma in favor of a panreligious symbolic humanism. Hmm. There’s a very interesting article about this at the European Conservative, “The Heresies of Masonic Ritual”:

The most obvious implication of Masonic ritual is that man is responsible for his own salvation, a position which inevitably denies the Incarnation and therefore the Trinity. This view is plainly illustrated by the presence in every lodge of two stone ashlars, one rough-hewn, the other a perfect cube, representing respectively the unenlightened soul and the soul after Freemasonry has enlightened it. It is also dramatically portrayed in the Third Degree re-enactment of the murder of Hiram Abiff, the fictional architect of King Solomon’s Temple, who is used to represent the enlightened soul, done away with by unenlightened villains desiring to gain the Masonic secret. Attempts to revive Hiram by the Masonic application of fraternal love, knowledge, and reason fail; but the soul is then revived by the light which is found within the well-formed Mason’s breast.

I am always surprised to find out there are people who think it makes no difference whether or not Bugnini was a Freemason. (I delved into this topic in greater detail in an article at OnePeterFive called “Does It Really Matter if Bugnini Was a You-Know-What?”)

Regardless of his affiliation, it is not hard to see that a new theology called for a new rite, new architecture, new music, new everything.

The original traditionalists directly confronted the outrageous claims of “reformers” in the 1960s and 1970s, so they knew intimately the errors and lies that churchmen were acting on. Today, many decades later, there is a great deal of ignorance about what was actually being said and done back then, and this makes defenders of the liturgical reform guilty of incredible naivete at times — they don’t realize that their own “moderate” or even “conservative” take on things was not the original plan of Paul VI and his Consilium and would have been rejected out of hand by most of the men involved. In short, whether you want to critique the reform or defend it, you need to do your homework about what the Great Plan was — because that was the guiding star for the upheavals.

If, for example, you ever wanted to know why suddenly so many hideous, barren, modernist churches were constructed everywhere in the world from mid-century on, all you need to do is read the piece published last week at Liturgical Arts Journal: “New Ecclesiology, New Liturgy: Exploring the Rationale of Post-Conciliar Liturgists and Why They Changed Church Architecture.” You can hear the explanations straight from the mouths of the protagonists. This is not rad trads speaking; it’s the very guys who brought you the kind of church you see in the photo on the right.

Honesty demands we do our homework.

Unam Sanctam Catholicam’s latest video is a very fine 10-minute meditation on how we should think about and deal with the crisis in the Church at this time. Although the mystery of iniquity will never be transparent to us, we know that the Church has been weathering storms for every moment of her existence, and that Divine Providence delivers her from one tempest after another. We know that God is calling us to be the saints of this day and age. We were made for these times, and He will sustain us, come what may, if we do not abandon Him in faith and in prayer. Indeed, the one thing no one can ever take away from us is our faith and our prayer, rooted in the charity poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us.

Having this mind in us does not make difficulties evaporate. It does not make our age any better; indeed, there is every reason to believe our crisis is the worst, because it is an ecclesiasticial autoimmune disease that has no parallel in Church history. But having this mind in us decisively changes our stance, and this is what counts for our sanity and salvation. When we respond to curses with blessings, to evils with goods, to ugliness with beauty, to errors with truths, we are, bit by bit, ushering in the next age that God wills to bring about through us.

Substack is a wonderful environment for building communities of like-minded readers and writers, passionate about things that really matter. I’ve mentioned already some Substacks I enjoy reading, but I’d like to call your attention again to my favorite four.

First, Robert Keim’s Via Mediaevalis, which has recently published a series on poetry that is, in my opinion, unparalleled for depth and beauty, while managing somehow to remain succinct:

  1. The First Language of the Soul

  2. “This Book Is Called a Garden Enclosed”

  3. What Fire and Sword Cannot Unmake

  4. A (Modern) Reader’s Guide to Medieval Poetry

  5. Roland, El Cid, and an Anglo-Saxon Seafarer

Then there’s Aaron Pattee’s Maintaining the Realm, where you will find magnificently researched overviews of medieval history and architecture, such as his recently post on “What is Pre-Romanesque”?

Well-known to readers here, I’m sure, is Hilary White’s Sacred Images Project, which continues to go from strength to strength. It’s not just about beautiful art, it’s about the meaning of art — of sacred art in particular — and why we need to purify and elevate our understanding of it. But it is also about the need to recover an authentic Christian spirituality fit for these desert times. Hence, Hilary has lately been discussing monastic spirituality. Be sure to check it out.

The last I’ll mention is Kmita’s Library by Romanian Tolkienologist Robert Lazu Kmita, an eclectic, wide-ranging, thought-provoking platform that often argues exactly the opposite of the typical modern Western consensus. You never quite know what the next post will be about! The latest is entitled “One anti-Christ or many anti-Christs?”

(Kmita, it should be mentioned, writes for quite a number of periodicals and sites. I can recommend his recent “Tolkien’s Paradise” at the European Conservative and his “The Hyperpapalist Interpretation of Pastor Aeternus: Why Modernists and Sedevacantists are Both Wrong” at OnePeterFive.)

Now for something lighter. Here’s a poster spotted at the Oratory in Toronto; a kind reader sent me the photo. May the Lord give me the grace to be worthy of being found in the company of such a list of objects and writers!

May be an image of 1 person and text

By the way, if I was living up there, I would be present at every one of those Bach organ concerts!

Just last week, my wife and I attended a concert at the University of Nebraska featuring a recorder, lute, and viola da gamba trio playing Couperin, Weiss, Handel, Telemann, Vivaldi, and Bach. The Baroque is supreme. Here’s one of the works they performed, which I was not familiar with before:

Thanks for reading, and may God bless you!

Please keep our family in your prayers in a special way this weekend. More news later…

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