A Reasonable Picture of Papal Authority in a 1950s Catechism

Yesterday was, of course, the feast of the Chair of St. Peter (formerly, the feast of Peter’s chair at Antioch, with January 18 as the feast of Peter’s chair in Rome). It seems a good moment to share some pages from a catechetical resource from the 1950s and to ask ourselves how the office of the papacy was presented at that time.

The title is A Manual of Religion: MY CATHOLIC FAITH—A Catechism in Pictures. The author is Louis LaRaviore Morrow, SDB (1892-1987). The text was initially copyrighted in 1949; the Sarto House reprint is of the 1954 edition. So this lands us straight in the period of Pius XII, when, as can be seen from many famous photos, papal (self-)glorification had reached astounding heights. Here’s just one of countless examples:

It is thus pleasantly surprising to see how Fr. Morrow treats the papacy.

On the first page of the pertinent section, he clarifies that “infallibility” means freedom from error and is to be distinguished from “impeccability”, or freedom from sin. The pope, like every one, is capable of falling into sin; but the Church cannot teach error. Notice the subtle pivot from the pope to the Church. The whole Church (or the pope speaking expressly on behalf of the whole Church) would have to err in order for the promise of Christ to fail.
 

On the second page, examples of infallible doctrines and morals are given; they are major ones like the Trinity and obeying the Ten Commandments. The mission of Christ and his apostles must continue in all the Catholic bishops and priests so that the truth may reach all men. All Christians agree that the Apostles were infallible; but God loves us as much as He loves the first Christians, so He will make His Church infallible in all ages. Morrow notes that infallibility is involved when the faithful are told “exactly what to believe and what to do in order that they may be pleasing to God and save their souls.”

To underline his point, Morrow states that “the Catholic Church, from the twentieth century back to the first, has not once ceased to teach a doctrine on faith or morals previously held, and with the same interpretation.” He serenely proclaims, “No Pope ever considers himself above the laws of the Church and of God” and “The Church cannot change its teachings on faith and morals.... Year after year the Church proclaims the same unchanging doctrines. Her doctrines need no reform, for they are of Divine origin, the work of the Incarnate God.”
 

Then, in section 68, we get into the “sphere of infallibility.” Morrow writes with precision: “The Church teaches infallibly when it defines, through the Pope alone, as the teacher of all Christians, or through the Pope and the bishops, a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by all the faithful.” He provides two examples: the 1854 definition of the Immaculate Conception by Bl. Pius IX and the 1870 definition of papal infallibility at Vatican I.

He stumbles a bit when nonchalantly stating that we know canonizations to be infallible, when in fact this is a disputed question (and the minority position has plenty of powerful arguments on its behalf).
 

Resuming his earlier point, Morrow says “the Church teaches infallibly through the Pope alone, when he speaks officially (ex cathedra) as the Supreme Head, for the entire universal Church.” Then he goes carefully into the conditions. “He must pronounce himself on a subject of faith or morals... He must speak as the Vicar of Christ, in his office as Pope, and to the whole Church... He can teach without speaking infallibly, as in his encyclical letters.... Should the Pope, like Benedict XIV, write a treatise on Canon Law, his book would be written in a private capacity, and liable to error, just as the books of other theologians... He must make clear by certain words his intention to speak ex cathedra.”

After some remarks on councils, the chapter concludes with the common view that “the daily ordinary uniform teaching of the Church in every place in the whole world is infallibly true.” And it is precisely on this basis that we can know that so many things that have been said in the past fifty-plus years are false, because they conflict with what had been universally taught in the Church by all popes and bishops, as can be seen, e.g., on the death penalty question, where hundreds of approved catechisms over many centuries teach exactly the same thing.

 

In general, we may say that Morrow’s treatment is typical of most Catholic textbooks, and represents a far more modest account of the pope’s authority and its exercise than one would be able to infer from those who talk glibly of the Holy Spirit speaking practically non-stop through His personal choice who now sits in the papal throne. It is well to remind ourselves that our predecessors, although they were at times naive about their ultramontanism, were not stupid.

Rebuilding Authentic Catholicism upon the Ruins of the Conciliar Experiment

I was invited to do the following interview by the Italian magazine Radici Cristiane, edited by Roberto de Mattei. It appeared in the April issue under the title “L’«usus antiquior» ci salverà – Intervista al dott. Peter Kwasniewski.” The original English text is reproduced below, with permission of Radici Cristiane.

Radici Cristiane: We are going through an historical period of crisis in the Church. Just think of the decline in vocations, churches more empty everyday, abuses in the liturgy more and more numerous ... However, in churches where Mass is celebrated in ancient rite, there is a very high presence of young people. How can this be explained? 

Dr Kwasniewski: The phenomenon is not difficult to explain. The contemporary world presents constant temptations to young people, whether in the attraction of intellectual fads or in the ubiquitous moral snares of unchastity and other vices. For this reason, most youths in the Western world are corrupted by the time of adolescence: they are practical atheists, hedonists, materialists, bored, indifferent to truth, addicted to easy stimulation. If, in the midst of this degrading morass, there are any young people left who really want to go against this trend and lay claim to the Christian Faith, they will be looking for something serious, demanding, countercultural — something that can satisfy the searchings of the mind and the desires of the heart.

Young people in the West have to fight to believe and to worship. So there has to be something to fight for. The ancient Roman liturgy and the customs, beliefs, artistic culture, and worldview that tend to go along with it offer the kind of rich, complex, all-encompassing framework of meaning that inspires confident self-surrender, the pursuit of virtue, the motivation to keep living and to share life generously. People are drawn upwards by the worship of the transcendent God and forwards by the pride of receiving and delivering a great inheritance. It gives us a sense of belonging at a time when so many are rejecting their families, their cultures, their identities, their very selves; it gives us a sense of stability in an age that is formless and void.

The new liturgy was designed to appeal to modern people. Why do you think it has failed?

The reformed liturgical rites are characterized — both in their official books and in the universal manner in which they have been implemented — by a very modern emphasis on autonomy, spontaneity, local “ownership,” popular and secular styles of music and art, and an utter contempt for the way our ancestors worshiped for as many centuries as we have records.

This is not only unattractive for serious searchers, it is positively nauseating. No church will ever flourish when, instead of initiating people into divine mysteries that are seen, heard, and felt to be mysterious, awe-inspiring, fearful, timeless, it merely hands them over to a banal and verbose prayer service of contemporaries imprisoned in their contemporaneity.

The number one cause of the exodus of youth is that the “Vatican II Church” has absolutely nothing to offer young men and women — spiritually, morally, intellectually, culturally — that could spark their curiosity, awaken their conscience, capture their imagination, or open before them a path that is utterly different from the one our society is treading.

The Progress of Vatican II with Modern Youth

In your article “How the Best Attacks against the Traditional Latin Mass Fail,” you quote Dr. Alice von Hildebrand saying that the devil hates Mass in ancient rite. Why?

The devil hates discipline, order, beauty, humility, self-sacrifice, liturgical praise, tradition, and the priesthood. The ancient Roman liturgy — and I’m speaking here not just of Mass, but also of the Divine Office and all the sacramental rites — is permeated with order and beauty. It calls for immense humility, discipline, and self-surrender on the part of the ministers who undertake its correct and fitting celebration. It deliberately suppresses individuality and the desire to “shine” or to “be oneself” as the phrase is currently used. It is ordered to the adoration and glorification of God, with Christ Himself as the High Priest, and everyone else as the servant. Paradoxically, it edifies and benefits the faithful themselves precisely because it is theocentric and Christocentric, not anthropocentric like modern philosophy and culture.

Lucifer, the most beautiful of God’s creatures, fell in love with himself. His sin was one of egocentricity, self-celebration. Therefore any movement in liturgy towards freeing or applauding or celebrating or cultivating the “ego” of the ministers or the faithful is diabolical in its origin and effect. The Church in her God-given wisdom had always understood the danger of the unleashed “charismatic” personality and had guarded against it by rites notable for their objectivity, stability, precision, dogmatic clarity, ascetical requirements, and aesthetic nobility. These characteristics, in and of themselves, counteract certain recurring tendencies of fallen human nature, such as emotionalism or sentimentalism, relativism, ambiguity, haphazardness, indulgence, and aestheticism (of which utter lack of taste or carelessness of appearance is a peculiar genetic mutation).

The ancient liturgy gives the unambiguous role of sacramental mediator to the priest and, in varying degrees, to his assistants. This mediatorial role is a living icon of the Incarnation of the one Mediator between God and man, against which Satan rebelled. The one “liturgical reform” Satan is always seeking is to pull the Church away from the Incarnation, from a sacramental economy rooted in the Eucharistic flesh of Christ, and from the whole structure of rites, ceremonies, and prayers that embody it.

In every aspect, the usus antiquior is like a perpetual exorcism of the devil, pointing over and over again to the incarnate God’s triumph over the ancient enemy of human nature. The very fact that the new liturgy abolished or abbreviated exorcisms wherever they were found — in the rite of baptism, in various blessings, in the very rite of exorcism itself! — speaks volumes.

Really, there is so much one could say to unpack this extremely perceptive remark of Dietrich von Hildebrand, as reported by his wife. One could write a book on it: “The Devil’s in the Details: The Postconciliar Liturgical Reform and the Spirit of Satan.” One wonders if the confused and tormented Pope Paul VI was sensing the same truth when he said in 1972, only shortly after the introduction of the monumental rupture of the Novus Ordo: “From some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.” Perhaps that fissure was nothing else than the incessant liturgical reforms of the 20th century, which culminated in a change in the lex orandi of earthquake proportions.

Crossing out the Cross: psychotherapy for unbelievers

At the convention for the tenth anniversary of Summorum Pontificum, it was said that “celebrating the ancient rite means looking with hope to the future.” How is the return of the usus antiquior an effective way to counter the crisis of the Church we are living in these times?

The solution to the mess into which we have fallen through a long series of bad decisions is simple and at the same time exceedingly hard: we have to make the opposite decisions, again and again. The Church needs to stop thinking about new strategies, new programs, new pastoral initiatives, or any statistical measure of success, and resolutely throw herself again into the proclamation of the full Gospel, including its “hard sayings”; the celebration of solemn and beautiful liturgy; the building of monasteries and religious communities on the foundation of the usus antiquior; the cultivation of an intellectually robust curriculum in seminaries and universities; an encouragement of large families, as in the old days, and the promotion of homeschooling. Only by taking a seriously countercultural path is there any long-term hope for Catholicism. As a believer, I am convinced that the Faith will survive and prosper again, but only where such things are being done, or to the degree that they are being done.

What can be done to transmit to and make understood by future generations the importance of Mass according to the usus antiquior?

First and foremost, the number of places where the ancient liturgy is offered must continue to increase, in spite of all pressures to the contrary. In this time of official hostility, especially in Europe, priests will often have to learn the old Mass and say it in secret, as the undercover Jesuit missionaries in Elizabethan England had to do in their century.

As no man can believe what he has not heard, so no Catholic can learn how to think and live as a Catholic without having access to the preeminent treasure of the Faith, namely, the Roman rite in its fullness. Whenever and wherever these Masses are offered, worshipers will invariably show up at them.

I remember in college we had a chaplain who offered the traditional Latin Mass privately, but everyone who cared to know knew that it was taking place, and many students availed themselves of this opportunity — including future members of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter. This is how I was introduced to the old rite: as a disciplina arcani, just as in the early Church! And even now, so many years after Ecclesia Dei and Summorum Pontificum, it’s still often the case that we must fight to win territory for the Mass of the Ages.

Many people today are “converting” from Novus Ordo “Catholicism Lite” to the traditional Catholic Faith, prompted in part by the travesty of Pope Francis’s pontificate. But there are also children growing up in Catholic families who drink it in with their mother’s milk, so to speak; for them, learning the ancient liturgy is no different from learning the alphabet or the catechism. I know quite a few adults in the USA who, having faithfully assisted at the old Mass from their childhood, have never attended a Novus Ordo, or who see it for the first time when they get to college. To me, this is an enormously hopeful sign: a new generation of people uncontaminated by the false assumptions and principles of the liturgical reform, who can carry Catholic tradition forward into the future, and who, coming from outside, can easily see the Novus Ordo for the wreckage it is and will always be, no matter how much it is dressed up and made to look pretty.

Passing on the tradition, one Mass at a time

Do you think there are weaknesses in the traditional movement that might need to be overcome?

Yes, I think we can often take for granted the riches we have, almost “hoarding” them, and not going out of our way to try to bring others into the movement so that they can be blessed with what we, through no merits of our own, have discovered and couldn’t live without.

In spite of what I was saying about secrecy, most of the time we are (at least for now) “above ground” and fully capable of advertising what we are doing and why. Those who love the Church’s traditions need to be intelligently zealous about promoting the usus antiquior, through pamphlets and publications, lectures, conferences, social gatherings, study groups, invitations to strangers, and above all, tolerance for those who are showing interest or starting to come but who are not yet “on board” in regard to how they speak or dress, what their social and political views are, etc. We need to be very patient with them, remembering that — given how much the Faith has been hidden and even suppressed in the past half-century — an intellectual and moral conversion to authentic Catholicism can take a very long time, sometimes years or decades. In my own life, it took many years of experiences, conversations, and study to reach the conclusions I hold today, and yet now, as I look back, it all looks so obvious. As a result, I always try to remember how things used to look when I was an ultramontanist or papolater, and how they look to me now.

How sad it would be if inquisitive people felt shunned or unwelcome among us. I know there have to be standards of dress and behavior, but somehow we need to keep trying to reach the mainstream Catholics, and even the so-called “nones,” the people who have no religion at all. The mightiest work of evangelization ever undertaken will be, in the future, the rebuilding of authentic Catholicism from the ruins of the conciliar experiment.

Visit www.peterkwasniewski.com for events, articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press (e.g., Benson, Scheeben, Parsch, Guardini, Chaignon, Leen).

Dr. Kwasniewski’s Upcoming Lectures in Minneapolis, January 9 & 10

Next week, on Wednesday and Thursday, I will be in Minneapolis giving talks, as follows.

“Why Catholic Tradition is Not Optional or Incidental—Especially in the Liturgy” 

(Open to the general public)

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

6:30 p.m. Traditional Latin Mass
          The Church of All Saints (FSSP Parish)
          435 4th St NE, Minneapolis, MN 55413

7:30 p.m. Dr. Kwasniewski’s Presentation, Q&A
          St Maron’s Catholic Church (two blocks away)
          600 University Avenue NE, Minneapolis, MN 55413

St. Anne's

“Ten Ways to Get More Out of Mass, with the Help of Catholic Tradition” 

(Please note: This event reserved to men and boys)

Thursday, January 10th 

6:45 p.m. Rosary
7:00 p.m. Dr. Kwasniewski’s Presentation, Q & A

          Church of St Anne
          200 Hamel Rd, Hamel, MN 55340

I look forward to meeting whomever attends either event. My books will be on sale and I will be glad to sign copies.

Exclusive NLM Interview with Archbishop Sample: Why Young People Are Attracted to Traditional Liturgy

Archbishop Sample offering the Holy Sacrifice at the National Shrine

NLM is pleased to present the following transcription of an interview conducted by Julian Kwasniewski with the Most Reverend Alexander K. Sample, Archbishop of Portland, in connection with the Sacred Liturgy Conference in Salem, Oregon, June 27–30, 2018. Much of what his Excellency says is highly pertinent to the Youth Synod taking place at the Vatican this month. This interview is published here for the first time.


Julian Kwasniewski: First off, I just have to say thank you for agreeing to this interview.

Archbishop Sample: I want to encourage you young people, and especially young people who are serious about their faith and about the sacred liturgy. I want to do everything I can to encourage you.

JK: The first question I want to start with is very simple. What is a priest?

AS: It is a simple question and it might strike someone as kind of an odd question — we all “know” what a priest is because we see them. But do we really understand who the priest is?

I think over time, perhaps particularly since the Council, there has been a reduction, if you will, in people’s understanding of the nature of the priesthood and its place within the Church. A lot of people have come to see the priest as what he does. The focus is what the priest does. Even that has changed a lot, but I think the average person might say the priest celebrates Mass, he hears confessions, he supervises the parish, he administers things. They see his functions; they don’t see his identity. That is key: his priestly identity. Who is he? It’s not so much what he does; it’s who he is, because everything he does flows from who he is.

So who is he? He is a man chosen by God, called to this order and through the sacrament of Holy Orders, through the laying on of hands and the prayer of the church; he is sacramentally configured to Christ the High Priest. There is that an ontological change that takes place in him, change on the very level of his being. He becomes something new, since his soul is forever marked with the character of the priesthood, so that he can minister in the Church in the person of Christ the head, in persona Christi capitis. So there is a close identification between the ordained priest and the High Priest, Jesus Christ; he is called to be an alter Christus, another Christ. All Christians are by our baptism called to be other Christs, but the priest in a particular way represents Christ in the Catholic Church.

He participates in the tria munera, the threefold office of Jesus Christ, as Priest, Prophet, and King. The priest is ordained to teach, to sanctify, and to rule or govern God’s people in the name and person of Christ. He is to teach the doctrine of the Church, always according to the mind of the Church and in harmony with the magisterium. He is a sanctifier; he is the one who sanctifies God’s people, especially through the sacraments, and most especially through the celebration of Holy Mass and the hearing of Confession. He is a shepherd, the guide of the community, he points the way to eternal life.

If we understand who the priest is in this sense — the sense in which the Church understands who the priest is — then we see that all the functions that he does and all the things he does flow from this essential identity.

Celebrating a pontifical Mass in Rolduc

JK: I wonder if you could tie that in with the recent Corpus Christi procession that you did, since it seems to manifest the three gifts you were talking about: it is a witness to the Church’s teaching; it publicly witnesses to the ruling position of the Faith in society; and it is a practice that can sanctify us who participate in it.

AS: Right. As I was processing with Our Blessed Lord in the Holy Eucharist through the streets of Portland — and we went through a part that is a very secular area — all I kept thinking to myself was, “Lord Jesus, take possession of these streets, these streets belong to you. Reclaim them, Lord Jesus.” And when we were in the park for the Rosary and Benediction before we turned around, and headed back to the Cathedral, that was my prayer. People were walking by and amazed at this group of people marching and praying. I’m sure many of them were thinking “what is this thing you have on the altar there,” and of course, it was Our Blessed Lord. But I kept thinking to myself, “Lord, these streets belong to you. Reclaim and sanctify them.”

JK: How would you relate this experience of Eucharistic adoration to your episcopal motto: Vultum Christi Contemplari. What does your motto tell us about what you just said?

AS: I took my motto from the writings of St. John Paul II, who I consider my patron saint, quite honestly. I have no connection to him by name, but I really do consider him my patron saint now. He has been a great inspiration to me; I’m not sure I would be a priest today if it was not for him.

This idea of contemplating Christ’s face was something that John Paul II wrote a lot about. In Novo Millenio Ineunte, he recalls the scene in the Gospels where the Greeks come to Philip and they say, “We want to see Jesus.” The Holy Father picks up on that idea and says that this question, “we want to see Jesus,” is a question that is really in the heart of every person in the world today. Even if they don’t know it, they want to see the face of Jesus. He said they don’t want Christians just to talk about Christ — the world wants us to show them Christ. That’s our job: to let the light of Christ’s face shine before the generations of the new millennium. But, he goes on to say, our task would be hopelessly inadequate had we not first contemplated His face.

So he said we must contemplate the face of Christ. We must know Him intimately and deeply, we must cultivate that close personal relationship with the Lord, in order for us to show Him to the world. It’s very close to my own spirituality of prayer and being in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament and just contemplating Christ’s presence in His Face. This is where my motto came from.

Later, in his last encyclical, Ecclesia Dei Eucharistia, John Paul II put it very bluntly: This is the task that I have set before the Church at the beginning of the new millennium, Vultum Christi contemplatri, to contemplate the face of Christ. And then he also speaks of the Marian dimension which he develops in his pastoral letter on the Rosary, that we contemplate the Face of Christ through Mary in the praying of the Rosary.

JK: Do you think the pope’s emphasis on contemplation is related to the problem of activism in our times?

AS: Yes. John Paul II is saying, “Church: This is your task. To first contemplate the face of Christ ourselves so that we may then let it shine before the nations.” Since we cannot give to the world what we do not have, we must first know Christ before we bring Him to others. For a Catholic in the world (not a contemplative religious), there must be a balance between contemplation and work, knowing Christ deeply and intimately, adoring him in prayer, in order for one to effectively carry on the apostolic works of the Church.

JK: It seems that many young people these days are rediscovering contemplation and an ability to give themselves joyfully to Christ through loving the Latin Mass and the old liturgical prayer of the Church.

AS: That’s a very good point, and it’s a point I made in the homily I gave at the Solemn Pontifical Mass at the National Shrine in Washington D.C. You know, the Church was filled with young people!

A lot of times, priests expect that if you go to a Traditional Latin Mass according to the 1962 missal, the church will be filled with grey hair, old people filled with nostalgia for days gone by, and that they have a sort of emotional attachment to the liturgy they grew up with.

But more and more, the majority of the people in the church at these masses are people who never lived during the time when this was the ordinary liturgy, that is, before the Council. If you are under a certain age (and that age is getting higher and higher), you never experienced this liturgy growing up. And yet young people — which is something Pope Benedict XVI said in his letter to the world’s bishops when he issued Summorum Pontificum — have discovered this [form] too, and have found it very spiritually nourishing and satisfying. They have come to love and appreciate it.

That is amazing to me: young people who have never experienced this growing up in the postconciliar Church, with the Ordinary Form (sometimes celebrated well, sometimes very poorly with all kinds of aberrations and abuses), have still discovered the Latin Mass and are attracted to it.

JK: What, in your view, accounts for that attraction?

AS: I would say its beauty, its solemnity, the sense of transcendence, of mystery. Not mystery in the sense of “Oh, we don’t know what’s going on,” but rather, that there is a mysterium tremendum celebrated here, a tremendous mystery. The liturgy in the old rite really conveys the essential nature and meaning of the Mass, which is to represent the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ which he offered on the Cross and now sacramentally, in an unbloody manner, in the Holy Mass.

I think young people are drawn to it because it feeds a spiritual need that they have. There is something to this form of the liturgy, in and of itself, that speaks to the heart of youth. Young people will continue to discover this, and they will be the ones who carry forward the Extraordinary Form when the older generation goes to their reward. Certainly this will be young people of your generation, but ... I’m 57. I was baptized in the old rite, but by the time I was aware and cognizant of Mass, we had already come to the new liturgy. So everybody younger than me has no experience really of this liturgy. Anyone under my age could be considered “young” in discovering this beautiful liturgy!

JK: Your Excellency, what would you say is the most important element of tradition for the Catholic youth to hold and cherish at this time?

AS: I think what young people need to do first is to discover — and many have — the Church’s tradition. Many young people have been deprived, in a certain way, of our Catholic heritage, of the great tradition which is ours in the Catholic Church. I know for myself I feel I was ... I don’t want to say cheated because that sounds like someone did it intentionally out of ill will for me ... but I feel like I was deprived of real teaching and appreciation and contact with my Catholic culture and my Catholic tradition and where we come from. I lived in and grew up in an age when there was this attitude that the Church had, in some way, hit a reset button at Vatican II, and that we could let go of all the past, as if the Church needed a new beginning and a fresh start.

You are far too young to have lived through that experience, and you are very blessed to live in the time that you do, because there was nothing like this for me when I was growing up. I grew up in a time when all of those things in the past had to be cast aside. Even something as simple as the Rosary, it was kind of discouraged — or if not discouraged, it was certainly not encouraged. I never saw Eucharistic Exposition and Benediction until I was a college student. I never knew such a thing existed. I grew up when there was a lot of experimentation with the Mass, always trying to make it “fresh and new.” There was a period of time growing up when you came to Mass on Sunday, and you just didn’t know what was going to happen next! The changes were coming so fast, and not just changes but experimentation and aberrations. So I was deprived of any contact with my tradition; I discovered it, on my own, as a college student.

JK: Was the liturgy the only area in which you felt deprived of contact with tradition, or are you speaking more broadly?

AS: In ‘tradition’ I would certainly also include the teachings of the Church that I never learned. I never understood what the Mass was — and I went to 12 years of Catholic school. If you has asked me what the Mass meant, I would probably have told you that it was a reenactment of the Last Supper, the last meal which Jesus shared with His disciples and in which He gave them His Body and Blood ... which is part of the truth. But the idea that the Mass was in any way a sacramental re-presentation of the paschal mystery, that Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary was made truly, sacramentally present at the altar — and that it is an altar, and not just a table! — that would have been a foreign idea to me.

So certainly part of the tradition is that young people need to be deeply in touch with the Faith, what we believe, what the Catechism teaches. Young people must not take it for granted that what they have received in education (whether in a Catholic school or a religious education program) is an adequate formation in the Faith. They need to really delve into the teachings of the Church, the Catechism, they need to read good, solid books and articles, and other media forms, whether internet or movies. So that is part of it.

But of course, a big part of our tradition is our liturgical tradition. It’s in our DNA — and that’s why many are attracted to the traditional forms of the liturgy — because it’s in our Catholic DNA. Young people need to acquaint themselves with the richer, deeper tradition. Vatican II did not hit a reset button. Although, perhaps, the tradition needed to be renewed and refreshed, it never was meant to be destroyed or cast aside.

Pontifical Mass at Rolduc

JK: Would you put sacred music into this category, too?

AS: The rich liturgical tradition of the Church includes her sacred music. We don’t have to have pop music at Mass. The first time I heard Gregorian chant was when I was a college student. I’d never heard of chant before. When I heard it in a music appreciation class at a secular university, I hadn’t a clue what it meant, but it instantly spoke to my heart—instantly. The first time I heard it I was moved, really moved. So there is this rich liturgical, sacred music tradition that we need to recapture, recover, that young people need to learn about.

Moreover, we should all have devotions in our life. Devotions extend what the liturgy begins. Things like the Rosary, the chaplet of Divine Mercy, Eucharistic Adoration, other devotions to the Blessed Virgin, having favorite saints, patron saints that you pray to, Stations of the Cross…All these rich parts of our Catholic devotional tradition feed the life of faith and extend what we experience in the sacred liturgy, but also lead us back to it.

JK: Do you have any additional advice for young traditional Catholics trying to recover their tradition? 

AS: I’d say there is a tendency sometimes to see these things — doctrine, liturgy, devotions — in opposition to things like works of charity, works of mercy. I would emphasize that we must not get to a place where all we are concerned about is being of right doctrine (orthodoxy), having right liturgy (orthopraxy), good sacred music, that we are doing all the right devotions. If we are not doing works of mercy, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, if we are not taking care of the poor and disadvantaged, then we are not living fully our Catholic faith. That’s part of our tradition too!

I think traditional-minded Catholics should not let, perhaps, the more liberal elements in the church co-opt the works of justice and mercy as being “something of the new Church.” Catholics have always been steeped in the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. The Church of the ages is the one that built hospitals and took care of the sick and the poor and the dying, built schools to educate poor children without opportunities.

The works of justice and mercy are also very much a part of our tradition, and I would caution young people not to get so focused on the other elements we spoke of that they forget that Jesus teaches us to love, to serve those who are in need. Remember the parable He gives us on the Last Judgment, when he separates the sheep from the goats. He does not separate them based on whether they are praying the traditional prayers or not. He separates them based on “when I was hungry did you feed me, when I was thirsty did you give me to drink, when I was homeless, did you shelter me, when I was sick and in prison did you visit me?” This is the basis of the judgment… it’s not an either/or!

This is a tendency I see: if you are a “progressive Catholic,” you are all about the social justice issues, taking care of the poor, working for justice and everything, but your liturgical worship tends to be a bit off and maybe you reject other moral teachings of the Church, while sometimes traditionally-minded Catholics are characterized as being all about the Mass, and right worship, right music, right devotions, the right vestments, orthodox teaching, and don’t care so much about the poor and works of mercy.

We’ve got to pull this together: it is not an either/or, it is a both/and in the Church. The works of mercy go back to the apostolic times, go back to the Acts of the Apostles; as St. Paul says, we must always take care of the poor. This is deeply traditional in our Church.

Archbishop Sample with prison inmates

Gaudete and Rorate Photopost (Part 1) - Zeal for Catholic Tradition

The response to our request for photos of Gaudete Sunday liturgies and Rorate Masses has been really remarkable, much greater than it was last year, and there are enough that we will make at least two posts of them, possibly three. If you sent photos in, but don’t see them here, know that they will definitely be posted, and that we are very grateful for your submissions. (I put them up in the order they are received.)

I think it important for us to briefly consider something about this. Rose vestments are not just optional, but can only be used twice a year, while Rorate Masses are entirely optional. It should be an encouragement to us all to see how many Catholics are not just letting these things drop as unimportant or inessential, but rather, positively encouraging and promoting them as part of our tradition and heritage; not asking “Why was not this vestment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?”, getting up extra early for Mass before sunrise. So thank you all also for your good example - evangelize through beauty!

Mater Ecclesiae - Berlin, New Jersey

St Stephen - Portland, Oregon

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The Antiquity of Liturgical Tradition - An Example from the Ambrosian Rite

This article is mostly the work of our Ambrosian writer Nicola de’ Grandi; I translated it from Italian, and added the paragraphs on the Ambrosian arrangement of the Sundays after Pentecost, and the Roman Rite’s use of the pericope of the adulteress.

In the Ambrosian Rite, there are only fifteen Sundays formally named “after Pentecost”, and if Pentecost is very late, as few as eleven may be actually celebrated. The series is interrupted by the Sundays “after the Beheading of John the Baptist,” of which there may be four or five, followed by the first and second Sundays of October. On the third Sunday, the church of Milan commemorates the dedication of its cathedral, followed by three Sundays “after the Dedication.” The largest possible number of Sundays after Pentecost is therefore 26, whereas it is 28 in the Roman Rite, since the Ambrosian Advent begins two weeks earlier, on the Sunday following St Martin’s day.

This past Sunday, the second of October, is named in the most ancient Ambrosian missals “the Sunday before the Dedication,” or else “before the Transmigration of the church.” Until the middle of the 16th century, the city of Milan had two cathedrals, on either end of the great modern Piazza del Duomo. The second title, “ante Transmigrationem Ecclesiae”, refers to an ancient tradition, attested in the 12th century Ambrosian Ordo of Beroldus, that placed on the Sunday of the Dedication one of the liturgical year’s most solemn events. All of the liturgical furnishings and books were taken in a grand procession, led by the archbishop, from one of the two cathedrals, in this case the “summer church” dedicated to St Thecla, to the “winter church”, dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The other such occasion was no less than Easter itself, on which the procession was reversed.

A page of an Ambrosian Missal printed in 1522; the Mass of the Sunday before the Dedication.

The Gospel of the second Sunday of October is John 8, 1-11, the famous “wandering pericope” of the woman taken in adultery. This passage occupies a uniquely important place in the Ambrosian tradition, since it is attested, together with three others, in the most ancient source directly related to the rite, the Codex Sangallenis, sometimes called the “king of palimpsests.” (A palimpsest, from the Greek for “scraped again”, is a manuscript whose original writing has been scraped off so that the paper or parchment can be reused. In many cases, the original writing can be recovered; several palimpsests are valuable witnesses to certain ancient texts.) A portion of this extraordinary codex, which is kept in the library of the monastery of San Gallen in Switzerland. contains what the most recent scholarship considers to be the remains of an ancient Ambrosian “libellus missarum,” (small book of Masses), dating back to the 7th century.

What makes this a witness of such exceptional importance is that St Ambrose comments upon the same passage in the so-called “Second Apology for King David,” a stenographer’s record of sermons which he preached over two or three days in the year 388. At the very beginning, he says “The reading of the Gospel … in which you heard of the adulteress brought before Christ, and sent away without condemnation … (Apol. David altera 1,1).

St Ambrose creates a parallel between the David’s adultery with Bathsheba, in which he sees a prefiguration of Christ’s love for the Church, and the adultery of the sinful woman justified by Christ. He justified the adulteress of many husbands, as he says, because she is a figure of the Church, (in the broader sense of God’s people, in the Old and New Testaments) that sought the Word of God in many places until she found it in Christ, and was absolved and purified by Him.

Christ and the Adulteress, by Rocco Marconi, ca. 1525

The adulteress, therefore, is the Church, whom Christ hastens to meet on the following Sunday, on which He is united to Her, consecrating and sanctifying her. “And therefore she was waiting about,” says St Ambrose, “and everywhere sought the Word of God, because she was wounded, because she was naked, because she was an adulteress in all things, although without blemish in Christ, as she sought a redeemer in her wretched body. Christ joined her to Himself, in order to make her immaculate; He united Himself to her, in order to take away her adultery.”

The ecclesiological interpretation which St Ambrose gives to this passage is also suggested by its placement in the traditional Roman lectionary, on the Saturday of the third week of Lent. The Epistle at that Mass is the longest in the entire Missal, the story of Susanna (Daniel 13), who already in the early third century was seen as a symbol of the Church, and the two elders who wish to seduce her as a symbol of Church’s persecutors. Susanna, therefore, is the symbol of the Church in her fidelity to Christ, and the adulteress of the Church redeemed by Christ when she has been unfaithful to him.

But even more noteworthy is the fact that St Ambrose, as he continues his preaching, then cites the Gospel passage John 10, 22-30, in which Christ pronounces the words “I and the Father are one”, which the Ambrosian Missal assigns the following Sunday of the Dedication of the Church. This episode takes place during the Jewish feast of the dedication of the temple in Jerusalem, known in Greek as “Encænia – the renewal.” As St Ambrose explains it, “What belongs to the nature of divinity is set forth in the reading of the Gospel, which you have devoutly followed, when you heard read out the word of the Son of God, ‘I and the Father are one.’ ” The same passages, with the same interpretation, and similarly placed next to each other, are therefore found in the writings of St Ambrose himself, before the long gap in the written sources after the 4th century, only to reappear after this long silence in the 7th century “libellus” contained within the codex at San Gallen.

This forms an exceptional witness to the Milanese church’s ability to jealously guard and preserve not only the essential characteristics of its own order of readings, but also the traditional interpretation of the scriptural passages contained therein, even over the course of the centuries from which no written liturgical source survives.

The Preaching of St Ambrose, by Bernaerd van Orley, 1515-20

FSSP Ordinations in Auxerre Cathedral

The website of the Fraternity of St Peter’s European seminary at Wigratzbad, Germany, has posted photographs of the priestly ordinations held this past Saturday in the cathedral of Auxerre, France. His Eminence Jean-Pierre Cardinal Ricard, archbishop of Bordeaux, ordained Fathers Pierre-Emmanuel Bonnin, Cyrille Perret, Antoine de Nazelle et Sébastien Damaggio. (Shown from left to right before processing into the church.)

Here is a just a small selection (which was not easy to make among so many beautiful images) of the more than 200 photos; the complete set can be seen via Googlephotos or Flickr. Below the break, you can see a photo of one of the most beautiful customs associated with the traditional ordination rite, although not formally part of it. After the priest’s hands are anointed, they are bound with a cloth to keep the oil in place for the rest of the ordination ritual. Once the ritual is complete, he presents the cloth to his mother; it is a long-standing tradition that when a priest’s mother dies, she is buried with the cloth between her hands, to symbolize that she gave a priest to God, and will be rewarded for this in heaven. (Last year, we posted a photo of a priest giving the cloth to his mother to our Instagram account, which automatically reposts everything to our Facebook page, where it surpassed every record for views and likes by an enormous margin.)

NLM is very happy to offer warmest congratulations to the newly ordained priests and to their families, as well as to the Fraternity of St Peter, and likewise, our thanks to Card. Ricard for his pastoral solicitude on behalf of the Fraternity and the faithful who follow the traditional liturgy. In this season when so many priestly ordinations are taking place throughout the world, let us remember to thank God for all the blessings and mercies He gives us through the ministry of the priesthood, for the families in whom religious vocations are born and fostered, to pray for their increase, and for all of our bishops and clergy.

The sermon, preached at the beginning of the ceremony, rather than after the Gospel.

Fr John Berg, the Superior General of the F.S.S.P., reads the call to orders.

Towards the end of the Litany of the Saints (for which the ordinands prostrate, while all other kneel), the bishop rises, receives his crook and miter, then turns to the ordinands, and sings the invocations, “That Thou may deign to bless + these chosen ones. - That Thou may deign to bless + and sancti+fy these chosen ones. - That Thou may deign to bless +, sancti+fy and conse+crate these chosen ones.”, making the sign of the Cross over them where I have put the + sign.

The imposition of hands by the bishop.

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