Follow-up on Disposing of Candle Wax

On June 28, 2021, I posted an article at NLM entitled “Piously Discarding Blessed Wax: A Quodlibetal Question,” and presented a few viewpoints about what should be done with stubs and scraps from blessed candles. May they be thrown away like other debris, or must they be melted down, burned down, buried, or left on the earth like other blessed objects?

At the time, I offered various arguments on both sides, but then put my backing behind a response given to me by a Dominican priest and Thomist, saying that such candle bits should be treated in a special way.

After thinking about this for some time, I have come to agree with those in the comments who disputed this answer (the comments back then on NLM were of high quality; sadly, almost no one comments anymore, and I realize that is because comboxes have seen their day; yet I maintain they are more useful than social media comments because the latter are almost impossible to find after a while, whereas the comments attached to a blog post are right there where you need them).

Here is my reasoning: the wax remnants, once they are no longer a candle in form and no longer capable of serving as a candle, have lost what is required to be a candle, and so the blessing of candles does not “hold,” even as (to use a much grander example) the Real Presence ceases the moment the accidents of bread and wine are corrupted in the one who consumes them. When the species can no longer be recognized as bread and wine, no Real Presence under those species is possible. Similarly, when the species (the appearance and function) of a candle is not there, there is no candle left.

The blessing of the wax as mentioned in certain prayers is not a blessing of the material only, but of the material as formed into a certain instrument for glorifying God or honoring the saints. This is the common-sense point of view.

By the way, nothing beats the irreverence I once saw at a shrine in Greece where an employee, who seemed slightly irritated to be working there, came in every so often and simply threw out all the candles that pilgrims had lit, sometimes minutes before, to make room for new candles. There was money to be made – forget about the pious intentions of those who paid 2 Euros for a candle that would burn before the icons! Probably those candles had not been specially blessed, but it was still one of the most unedifying sights I’ve ever seen.

It seems different with objects that, though damaged, retain enough of their form to be recognizably the same thing and perhaps even partly useful for their purpose. For example, a crucifix with a broken arm, or with the corpus detached from the cross, may not be acceptable for mounting in a church or at home, but it remains a crucifix and should be discarded by burning or burying. Similarly, a rosary that has fallen apart into segments and can still be repaired should still be treated as a rosary; but when it falls apart beyond repair or when no repair is intended, it should be buried. It is quite different with wax scraps, which have no more than their bare material in common with functional candles.

Nevertheless, there is of course nothing wrong with burning the extra wax in a bonfire (it makes the fire go stronger), and if it’s beeswax, it should be recycled into new candles given the value and quality of the material.

“Mystic Rose in God’s Fair Garden Growing”: Dr. Kwasniewski’s New Book on the Blessed Virgin Mary

In this month of the Most Holy Rosary, I am delighted to announce my new book: Mystic Rose in God’s Fair Garden Growing: Our Lady on Prayer, the Mass, and Union with Christ, published by Arouca Press.

The Blessed Virgin Mary is the authoritative guide to living the Christian faith – above all, when it comes to its pulsing heart, the Holy Mass. Mystic Rose weaves together theological, liturgical, and devotional insights into Our Lady, drawing out the subtle splendors of the Holy Rosary and its intimate kinship with the Latin Mass, discovering unsuspected riches in the familiar Leonine prayers, unfolding the meaning of select Marian feasts and apparitions, and specifying the obligations a Catholic has toward approved private revelations. For NLM readers it should be pointed out that there is abundant discussion of the liturgy in this volume, even if that is not its primary focus.

Nor do I shy away from controversial questions, such as: why Fatima deserves to be accepted and Medjugorje rejected; how the vision of Knock provides a key to understanding the crisis through which we are passing; why the traditional Roman Rite is profoundly Marian in its principles and practice, whereas the modern rite imposed in 1969 is anti-Marian, endangering the Church’s vocation as virgin, bride, and mother; and why the Holy Theotokos should be held and hailed as mediatrix of all graces and co-redemptrix.

And since the Queen of Heaven is “all beautiful,” the book pays her loving homage with dozens of full-color artworks to nourish the imagination.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

There Was No “Original Liturgical War”: A Response to Dmitri Solzhenitsyn

Communion of the Apostles

The following article was published at Crisis Magazine on October 7, 2026, and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the editor Eric Sammons.

In an article published at The Catholic Thing on September 18, 2026, Dmitri Solzhenitsyn endeavors to summarize for readers what he calls “The Original ‘Liturgy Wars’: Between East and West.” His basic argument is that wars over liturgy are nothing new—in fact, the first battlefield was between East and West, inasmuch as the Western church slowly drifted away from the original template still preserved to this day in the Eastern churches. The way he tells the story makes it almost sound plausible.

The argument he puts forth rests on an underlying double premise: first, there was a primitive common liturgical repository from which all the different traditions differently evolved; second, this repository was Greek or Byzantine.

However, no serious liturgical scholar holds either of these positions any more.

As to the first, Paul Bradshaw and others have demontrated that the opposite is true: at the beginning there seems to be considerable diversity, and over time there tends to be convergence and assimilation, as different rites either borrow from each other or replace one another. Ritual practice tends to assimilate itself to that of the great Sees (see Gregory DiPippo’s discussion of this trend in his lecture “Unity in Diversity”). In the West, that great See would, of course, be Rome; in the East, it would not be Byzantium initially, but Jerusalem and Antioch, with Constantinople acquiring dominance after the seventh century.

Solzhenitsyn gives the impression that we have a well-documented commonality between Old Rome and New Rome in liturgical matters, from which one of them (namely Old Rome) diverged; thus, he writes: “All of this established the Roman rite as distinct from the Byzantine,” as if they had begun aligned and then diverged. That is not the case; there is no evidence whatsoever for it. After all, if “by the end of the seventh century, East and West had diverging prayers, hymns, cadences, and even iconography,” what are we to make of the “diverging prayers” etc. within the East itself—since Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, and Byzantium all prayed differently? The notion that the Byzantine liturgy has a normative antiquity or a peculiar fidelity to apostolic origins is an assumption without foundation.

That brings me to the second premise. Solzhenitsyn gives the impression that “the East” means or is equivalent to Byzantine or Constantinopolitan. Not only does it not mean this, but in the earliest period of Christian liturgy Byzantium is very much less important than Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria, whose traditions are older and were more influential for a time. Armenia and Georgia had already adopted the liturgy of Jerusalem at the time when Byzantium/Constantinople/New Rome was first declared a patriarchate. Those older rites already wielded considerable prestige. And yet, we see—as could be expected—a great diversity and vitality of different traditions. The paucity of information and the diversity of traditions in the early centuries make it singularly difficult to pin down where something first occurred, or who influenced whom.

Solzhenitsyn claims: “During the later 300s the Greek liturgy was uniquely refined: garments like the sticharion (a kind of long tunic), hymnography like the short troparia, and sophisticated vessels were a much more prominent feature of Byzantine rites than of the simpler Latin rites.”

By “the Greek liturgy,” presumably he means “the Byzantine.” The problem with such sweeping claims is that we know little to nothing about the Byzantine liturgy of the fourth century. There is precious little documentation of it or citation from it available. There is, for example, no equivalent to St. Ambrose of Milan’s citation of the Roman Canon in the De Sacramentis, written around 387, which strongly points to the Roman Canon already being a familiar anaphora by that time.

The claim about the sticharion cannot be substantiated and is anachronistic. It is well known that clerical attire in the early centuries had not yet evolved into a distinct type of clothing set apart from secular clothing; rather, the clergy wore the best garments available when performing the rites, and due to the innate conservatism of the religious instinct, the sacristy wardrobe remained fixed in style while secular clothing changed out in the world. In any case, it was not long before Western vestments displayed the same stunning beauty as their contemporaneous Eastern counterparts.

Hymns such as the troparia had indeed already emerged as a literary genre by the late 300s, when Byzantium was still a suffragan of Herakleia, not a patriarchate. The Latin hymns of St. Ambrose, long admired for their mellifluous poetry and lofty theological conceptions, were written at just the same time, and soon entered the Western liturgy.

As for “sophisticated vessels,” it is rather difficult to understand what the phrase even means. As soon as we have records of liturgical vessels in the West, we see they are ornate and valuable, which is why the pagan Romans tried to steal them. For example, the Gesta apud Zenophilum/Acta purgationis Felicis, centered on the church at Cirta in North Africa and dated to 303, records an inventory of items taken in a raid, including 2 gold chalices, 6 silver chalices, 6 silver cruets, a small silver basin, 2 large chandeliers, 7 small bronze lamps and their holders, 11 bronze lamps with chains, 38 curtains, substantial quantities of clothing, a silver chest, and a lamp that had been concealed in the library.

The gravest error in Solzhenitsyn’s article is his reporting, with approval, the opinion of some Eastern sources that the Roman liturgy originally had a “descending” epiklesis—that is, an invocation of the Holy Spirit to bring about the conversion of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ—that had somehow dropped out of or been removed from the Roman rite. He cites (approvingly?) Orthodox patriarchs who in 1848 accused the Roman Church of “rejecting” from the Canon “the very ancient and Apostolic invocation of the Consecrating Spirit” and thus “miserably mutilating the Sacrifice in its most essential part.” (A less extreme exponent of the view that the Roman Rite once had this kind of epiklesis would be Adrian Fortescue, the inaccuracy of whose views has been discussed elsewhere.)

In reality, the Roman rite never had such an epiklesis because its unique anaphora predates the Macedonian controversy over the divinity of the Holy Spirit, which afflicted only the East and is the reason why the Byzantine rite inserted an epiklesis that the Roman rite never needed. The Roman theology of consecation is different, and, tellingly, older. If anything, it is the Byzantine epiklesis, as a later insertion, that requires explanation. (I will not enter here into the Roman rite’s “ascending” epiklesis, the Supplices te rogamus, which is not relevant to the point at hand, nor into the Veni, Sanctificator prayer of the Offertory, which alludes to the Holy Spirit but does not have the function of an epiklesis as we are now discussing it.)

Continuing his brief for Latin deviation from or corruption of a putatively pure and uniform “Greek” original, Solzhenitsyn claims that leavened bread was used by everyone from the beginning but the West drifted later on into the practice of unleavened bread, and, similarly, that the marriage of priests was normative but the West later enforced clerical celibacy. He seems unaware that a long history of scholarly debate exists on these questions.

On the topic of the type of bread used, our information is too scant to permit a determination of when unleavened bread began to be used in the West. The West may have used unleavened bread in imitation of what Christ did at the Passover; for all we know, both types may have been in use at the same time in different places. The fact that we know unleavened bread to be widespread by the Carolingian period does not mean it was invented in that period. On the topic of celibacy, Solzhenitsyn oversimplifies the historical record. For a different telling of the history, I recommend Alphonso Stickler’s The Case for Clerical Celibacy: Its Historical Development and Theological Foundations, Christian Cochini’s Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy, and the first chapter of Gary Selin’s Priestly Celibacy: Theological Foundations.

Sadly, it would appear that Solzhenitsyn has permitted himself to be formed and persuaded by classic tropes of Eastern Orthodox apologetics, which tend to grant a fictitious primacy to the Byzantine East, instead of taking seriously the far more complex and diversified picture that scholarship paints of the early Christian centuries. Moreover, Eastern writers in general neglect to pay attention to the historical evidence of slow organic development within their own liturgical (and theological) tradition. The “Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom,” whatever connections it had with the saint after whom it is named, took many centuries to develop to its present completed state; it did not descend fully formed from the heavenly Jerusalem.

I would not wish to be seen as solely negative. The article’s strongest point is its near-admission that the modern rite of Paul VI or Novus Ordo marks an unprecedented rupture from both the Roman tradition itself and from the entire world of historic apostolic rites, both Eastern and Western—a claim I defend at length in my book The Once and Future Roman Rite (2022), a portion of which is available in the article “The Byzantine Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and the Novus Ordo—Two Brothers and a Stranger.” The melancholy words of Cleenewerck would be difficult to dispute: “The liturgical metamorphosis of the Roman Catholic Church... widened the gulf” between East and West.

Dr. Kwasniewski’s Lectures in Netherlands, Belgium, and England, Oct. 24-31

I will be giving the following four lectures in Europe between Oct. 24 and Oct. 31, and hope to meet NLM readers at the events. Please come up and introduce yourself!

“The Thomistic Virtue of Religion: From Sacred Order to Mystical Union”
Saturday, October 24, 2026
Nijmegen, Netherlands

Filosofie & Geloof (Philosophy & Faith) Study Day, 9:30am to 7pm
Symposium on Ethics and the Human Relationship with God
Location: Pelgrimshuis Casa Nova
Pastoor Rabouplein 5
6564 BP Heilig Landstichting

(Please register here by October 18; Holy Mass in the Vetus Ordo will be offered at the start of the day)

“Living the Liturgy as the Font and Apex of Catholic Life”
Sunday, October 25 (Feast of Christ the King)
Brussels, Belgium

Location: Het Oude Klooster Maleizen (Servi Jesu et Mariae)
Terhulpensesteenweg 708
3090 Overijse
Time: 3pm

(Free and open to the public; will be followed by Q&A and booksigning)

“Why Christ Is King of Family and Society – and How We Embrace His Reign”
Tuesday, October 27
Brussels

Location: Het Oude Klooster Maleizen
Terhulpensesteenweg 708
3090 Overijse, BE
Time: 7:30pm*

(*N.B.: Free, but open to men only, as it is being sponsored by and for a men’s group; register by contacting W.jambon@gmail.com)

“The Heavenly Model of the Earthly City”
Saturday, October 31
London, UK

Symposium on Catholic Social Teaching:
The Church’s Remedy for Modernity
Location: Cabrini Community Campus,
Honor Oak, London, SE23 3LE
Time: 2pm to 6pm

Featuring a second lecture by Dr. Sebastian Morello, a panel discussion with Os Justi Press authors, and a public Q&A followed by multi-author booksigning.

Free and open to the public, but the organizers ask you to RSVP here.

A Cardinal’s Liturgical Ordo from 1681

Of the three books I examined in Milwaukee, in many ways this was the most fascinating: a liturgical ordo for the year 1681 (MDCLXXXI), owned by a cardinal, as the beautifully gold-stamped white leather cover indicates, and as a hand-written message on the inside cover confirms: the book belonged to “Cardinal Altieri (Paluzzo Degli Albertoni), cardinal in 1664, bishop of Porto... died 29 June 1698,” all of which matches this record.

The title page notes that this ordo contains special information on cardinalitial vesting.

A posthumous inscription indicating which cardinal owned this book (if you didn’t happen to know his coat of arms by heart).

Looking here at January: note the octave day of the Holy Innocents on the 4th; the Epiphany on the 6th; the Sunday within the Octave on the 12th; etc.

When we reach Ash Wednesday, we see the notice, “Weddings are closed”, i.e., no more weddings now that Lent has begun.

From April into May; one sees that May 1 is SS. Philip and James.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Photos of a Missale Romanum Printed in Antwerp, 1616

As mentioned last week, my visit to Milwaukee gave me the opportunity to view several rare books in a friend's collection. Today I will share some photos of a Missale Romanum printed in Antwerp in 1616; brief commentary will be offered in the captions. Although not in order, let's begin with the Canon page:

The viewer will see wormholes present throughout.

The title page

First Sunday of Advent

The Order of Mass, starting with Psalm 42

The words of consecration.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

A Missal for the Use of Braga, 1558

Recently when visiting Milwaukee, I met a friend for coffee, who after we sat down pulled out from a box three marvelous treasures: a 1558 missal for the Use of Braga ; a 1616 Missale Romanum printed in Antwerp; and a liturgical Ordo from 1681, owned by a cardinal. Not usually a shutterbug, I could not resist taking some photos of these lovely liturgical books to share with NLM readers (in three separate posts).

I will offer simple commentary here. Those who wish to read more about the Use of Braga should visit this dedicated website and search on NLM for “Braga.” Enjoy the show-and-tell! (As always, click the photos to enlarge them.)

The frontispiece

The liturgical calendar for January

The liturgical calendar for September

A diagram for calculating the liturgical cycle

Introit for the First Sunday of Advent

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Dr. Kwasniewski’s Midwest Lecture Tour, Sept. 30 - Oct. 4

I am pleased to announce here at NLM my upcoming Midwest Lecture Tour (taking Midwest in a rather broad sense). Click on the images to see the details.

September 30 • Burr Ridge, Illinois (Chicago area): “Why Divine Woship Needs the Power of Non-Verbal Language”

October 1 • Ambridge, Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh area): “Exploring the Common Riches of the Byzantine Rite and the Roman Rite”

October 2 • Catholic Identity Conference (Pittsburgh)*: “The Traditional Latin Mass: What Truly Unites All the Clans”

(To register for the CIC, visit this link.)

October 4 • Carmel, Indiana (Indianapolis area)*: “Not Peacenik and Bambi-Lover, but Mystic of the Mass and Defender of the Eucharist: Discovering the True St. Francis of Assisi” (N.B. This will be the 800th anniversary of the death of the great saint!)

(To register for this event, which includes dinner, go to this link.)

Each event will feature a talk followed by a Q&A and booksigning.

All details are found on the attached posters. Looking forward to meeting old friends and new.

(*CIC and Carmel events require registration; the other two are free & open to the public.)

Invalidating the Mass Is Not as Easy As Some Seem to Think

Photo by Fr. Lawrence Lew OP (source)

Not long ago, a priest wrote to me with some questions prompted by recent events:

Does Saint Thomas teach that the intention of the priest pertains only to the words of institution, as meaning that Jesus becomes substantially present, or does intending what the Church intends encompass more than just the moment of consecration?

Does the SSPX hold, or at least do some within the SSPX hold, that the Novus Ordo is unacceptable because they fear that priests are not intending what the Church intends, by, e.g., understanding the Eucharist to be merely a meal?

But clearly Saint Thomas asserts that lack of personal holiness, and even heretical views, do not prevent a priest, in the context of the liturgy, from intending what the Church intends during the rite of the Mass.

This question seems clear to me, yet there remains some fog surrounding whether the Novus Ordo so undermines what the Church intended for the Mass that I can call its validity into question.

Yet again, I intend what the Church intends: that the Mass is a sacrifice and not merely a meal, and that Jesus is made present on the altar as on Calvary in an unbloody manner. It seems challenging for me to say that I do not intend what the Church intends while celebrating the Novus Ordo through its liturgical prescriptions, such as the change in direction in which I stand (though I have come to understand that the new Mass is still meant to be celebrated facing away from the people).

I am cautious to ask: Is the issue with the Novus Ordo not so much one of validity and intention, but rather of liceity? Liceity seems to belong to following the GIRM, but could the instructions themselves present issues of liceity if the very instructions depart from the meaning of the Mass?

These are important questions, but they involve somewhat dangerous waters. They are also relevant in understanding the positions of the SSPX.

There are a lot of separate issues here to disentangle.

A notorious example of poor understanding is found in Fr. Anthony Cekada, who argued that the Novus Ordo simply “narrates” the institution of the Eucharist, and therefore does not intend the words as consecratory. This, of course, is pure foolishness. The words of institution effect what they signify whenever they are spoken by a priest who intends “to do what the Church does,” which is to confect the Eucharist – however the priest may personally understand that.

St Thomas is very insistent that a priest may have a personally incorrect idea of the sacrament, indeed he may be an atheist, but inasmuch as he is an “animated instrument” of Christ the High Priest, he need merely lend his hands and words to the act of the Church for the rite to be efficacious. This was already hammered out by St. Augustine against the Donatists, who argued that the holiness of the minister was essential; to which St. Augustine replied that it is Christ who accomplishes the sacrament, using the minister as a minister, that is, as an instrument.

For an intention to be invalidating, the instrument must will to not be an instrument, to not serve as the voice and hands of the Church. It is usually assumed that if he recites the words of the rite as printed and follows the usual gestures, he is lending himself to serve in such a way. His invisible thoughts and desires are not relevant in that regard. More relevant would be if he departs so far from the text that he is no longer doing what the Church prescribes, and thus indicating that he has no intention to lend himself as a minister of Christ to doing what Christ’s Church does. I don’t wish to cause readers needless pain, but here is an example shared on my YouTube channel of a priest whose liturgy is certainly invalid.

Since it is the common teaching of theologians that the words of institution are the immediately efficacious sign, the minimum required for validity is that these words be spoken correctly, over the correct matter, with the intention as described above. Obviously messing with the rest of the liturgy would be unfitting, illicit, scandalous, sacrilegious, etc., but it would not invalidate it. The same could be argued with regard to all the sacraments, each of which has its essential “formula” plus all the additional things done around it.There can be no question, judging from official documents released after the Council and the liturgical reform, that the Mass is still taught consistently to be a true and proper sacrifice, with the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist at its core. Thus, in spite of my very forceful critique of the Novus Ordo qua liturgy, I have never found any argument for its invalidity to be even remotely plausible.

As for illicitness, that’s a more involved question. Technically, anything that follows the rubrics issued by the competent authorities is licit (hence, you mention the GIRM that governs the Novus Ordo); but one may also ask larger questions about how far continuity with tradition can be ruptured without introducing a kind of illegality. This is a topic to which Fr. Claude Barthe has made some important contributions in his recently published book The Seven Sacraments, Past and Present: A Short Critical Study of the New Rituals.

In my lecture “The Four Qualities of Liturgy: Validity, Licitness, Fittingness, and Authenticity,” the transcript of which was published here in 2020, I define and distinguish between legality/licitness and legitimacy/authenticity, bringing clarity to a topic that is too often left opaque. I go further into the possibility of the new rite’s being illicit in two articles at my Substack: “The Reign of Novelty and the Sins of the Times: Why the Novus Ordo Is Solely Modern in Content (Part 4 – Conclusion)” and “Clarifications on the Reign of Novelty: A Letter Exchange with a Friendly Critic.”

In short: the arguments that sedevacantists are wont to make for the invalidity of any of the new sacramental rites are sunk by the classical Thomistic theology of the minimum required for validity, as well as by the consistent teaching of the Magisterium about what the sacraments are and what they effect, demonstrating that, however disastrous pastorally and spiritually the reforms have been, the underlying theology has not mutated past recognizable continuity.

I would only add that in my experiences traveling around the United States and beyond, all the young clergy I have met are reading books like Ludwig Ott and the Catechism of Trent. Their theology is traditionalist, even if the rites they use are not (yet) in full harmony with the tradition. In fact, recently I was looking at a brochure for a Newman Center at an American university, and I had to smile when I saw a large photo of a priest celebrating a Novus Ordo Mass. He was raising aloft a chalice – and observing canonical digits. Now there’s a man who hasn’t the slightest doubt that he is handling the Body of Christ.

Further reading:

• Why the Omission of Mysterium Fidei Does Not Invalidate the Consecration of the Wine
• The Displacement of the Mysterium Fidei and the Fabricated Memorial Acclamation

TLM Pilgrimages in France and the Holy Land with Dr. Kwasniewski

Over the years, I’ve noticed a happy development, and it seems to me to confirm the general trend pointed out by countless observers, namely, that where Catholicism still remains, it is becoming more traditional, or at least more tradition-friendly. Thus, it used to be the case that it was nearly impossible to find a group pilgrimage to the famous religious sites, be it Lourdes or Fatima, Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, or what have you, that also featured the daily celebration of the traditional Roman Rite. But today, if you look at companies like St. Charles Catholic Pilgrimages or Syversen Touring, you will quickly find several options with chaplains who will offer only the old rite.
Without prejudice to any of the other wonderful trips taking place, I wanted to alert NLM readers to a couple of unique opportunities coming up in 2027, because of their unusual combination of traditional liturgy, theology, and sacred music.

O Beauty Ever Ancient, Ever New: French Gothic Cathedrals with Sacred Music From September 29 to October 9, 2027, I will be co-leading a pilgrimage to sacred sites in France that offers a rare immersion in the Church’s tradition. We will contemplate the theological vision embodied in Gothic architecture (including the cathedrals of Paris, Chartres, Beauvais, Amiens, and Rouen), and venerate relics and holy sites (Mont St. Michel, St. Denis, Sainte Chapelle, Miraculous Medal chapel, the Carmel of Lisieux and Les Buissonnets, the site of St. Joan of Arc’s martyrdom). I will be offering commentary as the trip proceeds, in addition to casual conversations with each of the participants. Daily High Mass will be offered by our chaplain, Canon Jean-Baptiste Commins, ICKSP, with a choir singing Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony that I will direct for every Mass. The kind of music we’ll be singing:

Formed by the Church’s liturgy and the legacy of French Catholic culture, we will seek to draw closer to Christ in His mysteries. Ends with a Seine River cruise.

***N.B.: there’s a $300 per person Early Booking Discount for deposits received before 9/29/2026 and a $200 per person Check Discount for those paying the remaining balance by check after the initial deposit. For more information, visit the pilgrimage page.

The Holy Land: An 11-Day REGINA Insider’s Pilgrimage

Those who are looking for a traditional Catholic pilgrimage to the Holy Land, look no further. On this Regina/St. Charles trip, taking place November 29 to December 9, 2027, we will have daily Latin Mass with a wonderful priest, Fr. Pablo Santa Maria—and we will sing whenever we can, whether inside or outside of churches, utilizing special Masses and chants for the Holy Land. Our tour manager will be the incomparable John Paul Sonnen of Liturgical Arts Journal, one of the most widely-traveled and culturally knowledgeable Catholics you will ever meet in your life. Our local guide will be Amer Shehadeh, revered for his experience, lore, and connections. And I will be offering theological and liturgical commentary, as well as being available for conversations over meals or on walks. A rare opportunity and still a few spots open. For details, see this page.

Fr. Santa Maria and I on an earlier pilgrimage

Giving a short talk on the bus

Fr. Santa Maria offering Holy Mass

Eyewitness Accounts of Liturgical Life Before and After the Council

In his second memoir, Traddy Daddy: Memories and Thoughts of the Father of a Catholic Family, Joseph Bevan regales us again, as he did before in Two Families, with story after story of English life before, during, and after the Second Vatican Council. I think personal testimonies like these are worth their weight in gold, particularly as fewer and fewer people are left who can pass on the tales of what things were like back then.

Indeed, I have noticed a disconcerting tendency among younger generations nowadays to deny or downplay how good things were in the 1950s in many places, and how bad things really were in the 1960s and thereafter. The partial restorations of tradition under John Paul II and Benedict XVI have, to some extent, been projected backwards so as to create the illusion of a mild squall rather than a tempestuous storm. Memoirs are a partial but crucial way to overcome such biases. (See “Not ‘the Silly Season’ but ‘the Satanic Season’” for more on this point.)

There’s also a lot of rich detail in this book about the history of the Society of St. Pius X, obviously of considerable interest given this summer’s events.

(The remainder of this post is direct quotation from Bevan’s Traddy Daddy.)

Solemn Pontifical Mass in Westminster Cathedral, ca. 1950

1966: Westminster Cathedral Choir School

The priest mutters his way through the Latin prayers during early morning Mass as we boys kneel in adoration in the dusty half-light of the crypt under Westminster Cathedral. The celebrant stands at the altar with his back to us as he performs the work of a master craftsman, and he whispers the prayers. I look up during the elevation of the host and watch the fishes in the mosaic depicted on the arch above the altar, as I have done hundreds of times before. There is Our Lord walking on the water and there’s the ship containing the apostles who are scared by the storm. Fish abound in the picture, and I try to count them. Having had nothing to eat I often feel faint at the priest’s recitation of the Agnus Dei, during which he bends slightly and taps his chest three times. Why I do so at that particular time of the Mass I have no idea and today I pass out momentarily.

Sister Immaculata frogmarches me out of the crypt and sends me on a trot around the car park outside. I find that attending Mass on a completely empty stomach is a bit of a trial, but, as it is Sunday, we do get a decent breakfast afterwards. Nevertheless, I am struck by the dual simplicity and dignity of the ceremony, with the priest in sparkling gold vestments on Saints’ days. To my young brain, the whole ceremony is rich with deep meaning which is beyond my comprehension, and represents the magnificence of the supreme orderliness which is the Catholic Church. Everything is in its place and the whole organisation reminds me of an ancient clock which ticks away over the centuries and never loses a beat. During the hush of the consecration of the host, I hear the low mumbling and tinkling bells of other Masses which are going on in the various crypt chapels. There is also the distant rumble of traffic in Victoria Street….

Every Sunday we wear our smartest uniforms as we file into the cathedral for High Mass and take our places in the front two rows facing the grand altar. The interior of the church is constructed out of miniature red bricks, reminding me of Legos and, for a little boy of my size, it’s vast. I cannot see the roof as it soars up above my head shrouded in darkness. Above the high altar is a decorative baldacchino which, to me, is as big as a railway bridge, and hanging over the sanctuary a massive crucifix keeps sentinel over the proceedings. The organ is growling in the background as the church begins to fill up.

Some people kneel whilst reciting their rosaries and knots of people cluster around the votive candle stations as they light candles and kneel in prayer. No one is talking and all I can hear is the shuffling of many feet and the creaking of chairs as they quietly take their places with the organ playing in the background. Sister Immaculata fusses over us like a mother hen and ensures that we have our missals open at the correct page. My own Mass book contains a section at the end of the service called “post communion” and I have concluded that it is for when the priest posts off holy communion to people who have been unable to attend. (1-3)

My favourite service in the cathedral is Sunday Vespers. Again, we probationers occupy the front two rows and follow the service in our missals. The psalms at Vespers move me to tears sometimes; even as a boy of eight my sensitivity is acute, and I am transported by the sight of five priests in gold copes among the clouds of incense. During the incensing, while the altar is prepared for Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, the organist plays thunderously and it is this part of the ceremony that I look forward to most of all, for the organist is Nicholas Kynaston who, we are told, is internationally famous. (6)

Quite often Sister Immaculata takes us to the cathedral during the week to visit the Blessed Sacrament in a special chapel set aside for devotions. We follow the nun quietly through the echoing cathedral where we see people praying, strolling around, or lighting votive candles. The Blessed Sacrament chapel is off a side aisle to the left of the high altar and when we enter, we see many people kneeling down. Some are holding rosaries and whispering the prayers. The centre of devotional attention is the gold tabernacle on the altar, surrounded by lighted candles and flowers. I smell the sweet odour of the incense of past ceremonies, and the attendant hush is in striking contrast to the noisiness of the London traffic outside in Victoria Street. I have no difficulty in saying prayers as I am transported by the beauty of the chapel and the fervour of the people around me. My childlike approach to prayer, which has never left me, was formed during those wonderful visits to the cathedral.

One Wednesday afternoon we are milling around in the playground and Father Veal is walking around the perimeter of the lawn in the distance, buried in his breviary. All the priests I meet at the choir school, and there are lots of them, seem to have their daily lives dominated by this mysterious black prayer book which they always carry around with them. (7-8)

We have religious instruction lessons with Father Veal, and he first distributes to each of us a little red booklet called the Penny Catechism. Over the next few terms, he makes us learn the whole thing parrot fashion and we recite sections of it back to him together in a singsong chorus. There is a lot of discussion, which Father leads and encourages, and in doing so he displays his own deep love of the Catholic Faith, which is infectious. (10)
 

How things were before: Bevan's father as director of the Downside Abbey choir

Changes in the liturgy

Our parish church in Shepton Mallet is a converted hall and every Sunday it is full. There is a choir gallery which our family inhabits so as to sing the Mass, and Pa plays the organ for us. We sing Gregorian chant and a few simple motets.

I detect trouble ahead as something Pa calls “Vatican Two” is casting a shadow over everything religious. Attending Mass, after the experience of Westminster in term time, comes as a surprise but I am thoroughly entertained by the upheavals.

Father Ryan is now facing us, having put in place a table which he uses as an altar. He is given to interrupting the service every so often to emit what Pa calls “sermonettes.” Worst of all, we are forced to join in with the server in a rather wordy and tedious translation of the Latin Mass. Jokes abound with the cack-handed words, such as, “mindful of our Saviour’s bidding, and for the prairie tortoise” (prayer he taught us).

Pa and my elder brothers, especially, are often angry after Mass. This is a massive alteration in our religious observance as respect for the parish priest, who is agitating for change, diminishes. I hear them mutter in annoyance when the priest gives an extra-long sermon about the “presidential chair,” whatever that is. The whole of Mass is, for me at least, an orgy of experimentation and I look forward to each Sunday in anticipation of new outrages.

Rather than being a servant of the liturgy, Father Ryan is behaving like a compère at a village dance, not resisting the odd joke or two either. Yet I am struck by the “do this or else” attitude of the priest, meaning that by taking our part in the changes we are being loyal subjects of the Holy Father. Nobody dares to object publicly, but privately people are either angry or mystified. Ma is convinced that the Pope has been kidnapped and is trussed up in a cellar in the Vatican. “Don’t worry,” she says, “he’ll restore things to what they were after he escapes.” This is how many people cling to hope.

St Michael's, Shepton Mallet

Changing church buildings

At about this time we abandon the old chapel of St Nicholas and take possession of our new gleaming concrete and glass building which is St Michael’s Church. As we enter the new building for the first time, I am immediately aware of that smell common to new buildings, it is the slightly sweet odour of floor polish. The altar is a slab of white bare stone and, unlike its predecessor at our last chapel, has no coverings. Also gone are the statues and the stations of the cross. The servers at Mass have abandoned their black cassocks and white cottas in favour of what look, to me at least, like long dresses which are coloured dark green.

With the new church comes a new parish priest, called Father Gerald Carrol, who has a string of drinkdriving convictions, so we are told. I am under the impression that Father Carrol is a “conservative” (the Catholic Church nowadays is reduced to political name-calling) and is resisting pressure from some of the more enlightened members of his congregation to get rid of our family choir which sings for him every Sunday. I can only describe the goings-on at the altar during Mass as chaotic. Father Carrol is often not particularly sober and keeps on breaking out into Latin. The servers bustle around like headless chickens and constantly trip up over their green dresses which are far too long for some or far too short for others. The master of ceremonies pushes and shoves to restore some kind of order. As I am at a delicate age, I find all this tremendous fun, but I catch the sighs, the groans and sharp intakes of breath from those around me.

During Mass of Low Sunday, we look up to see Father Carrol’s little white dog entering the church through the open vestry door and, neglecting to genuflect, waddling past the front row of pews, and then settling down in the corner by the little organ. Mass continues normally but during the hymn at the offertory the dog starts to howl, so a parishioner picks it up and returns it to the vestry. (11-13)
 

Chaos in 1969

1969 finds the Church in a maelstrom of chaos, upheaval, and experimentation. All Hallows, an unknown prep school in the middle of nowhere, is not immune to these revolutionary forces and Alistair Mortimer, our Headmaster, willingly carries the banner of progress. The school chapel, for example, a beautiful cruciform and ancient room with a remarkable reredos, is the first place to receive unwelcome attention from the reforming Headmaster. The altar is torn from its mountings and dragged out, leaving a space behind it from which the priest can face the congregation. The delicately carved wooden reredos is sold off, and a yellow curtain replaces it. The stations of the cross are removed along with the many statues of Our Lady, Saint Joseph, and the saints. A public address system is installed which often either breaks down or emits loud crackles which are extremely offensive to the ear.

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Reader Appeal: Origins of the Terminology “Liturgy of the Catechumens” and “Liturgy of the Faithful”?

If one looks at an old Roman hand missal, one will find the Mass divided into two parts, “the Mass of the Catechumens” and “the Mass of the Faithful.” Like most people, I had supposed this was an ancient division. However, Lynne C. Boughton, in her fascinating article “An Imagined Past: Initiation, Liturgical Secrecy, and ‘Mass of the Catechumens’” (Antiphon 25.2 [2021]: 161–210), believes that this terminology was invented rather later.

Boughton quotes a Catholic Encyclopedia article of 1908 in which the author, Thomas Scannell, writes: “Catechumens when present at Mass were not dismissed with the inquirers, but were detained while a special prayer was recited over them. They then also withdrew before the Mass of the Faithful began.” She suggests that the language became popularized through Dom Fernand Cabrol in the 1920s, based on Cabrol’s interpretation of the disciplina arcani:

Hand-missals provided for congregations into the early part of the twentieth century corresponded to altar missals in not indicating a “Mass of the Catechumens / Mass of the Faithful” distinction. But in 1921, a hand-missal edited by the liturgical movement specialist Fernand Cabrol contained labels that divided the Ordo missae into a “Mass of the Catechumens” and a “Mass of the Faithful.” Cabrol’s introduction to the hand-missal explains that the labels indicate that catechumens were “only allowed to assist at this first part of the Mass and were obliged to withdraw after the Gospel.” Although some hand-missals that were produced as late as 1950 did not insert labels that implied a division in the Ordo missae, the presence of such became standard in these books for the laity—but not in books for altar use—in the decade preceding the Second Vatican Council.

The remainder of her article then questions the historical assumptions on which the division was made. But my question is: When and where did this division originate? What are its origins?

A 1941 publication

Picking up volume 10 of Dom Guéranger’s The Liturgical Year, the English version of which was first published in 1879, I see he writes on page 39:

The Priest and the people should now have their hearts ready: it is time to prepare the offering itself. And it is here that we come to the second part of the holy Mass; it is called the Oblation, and immediately follows that which was named the Mass of the Catechumens, on account of its being formerly the only part at which the candidates for Baptism had a right to be present.

Dom Guéranger speaks as if it’s a well-known fact, not something he’s daringly introducing. And this is over forty years earlier than Cabrol’s 1921 missal cited by Broughton.

So, my first question is: What is the earliest evidence any reader has come across for the Mass being divided explicitly into these two parts?

The plot thickens: I have noticed that Byzantine publications also divide the Divine Liturgy into “Liturgy of the Catechumens” and “Liturgy of the Faithful,” and I am trying to figure out how far back that goes. One hypothesis would be that it was picked up from Western writers and applied to the Eastern rite, but it could also work the other way around.

I asked a biritual priest for his opinion and he replied:

“In Greek liturgical books, one distinction is ancient: ‘Pre-anaphora.’ But the evidence I can see points to the formal division of Byzantine service books under those exact headings being a later, imposed editorial convention, not a Byzantine manuscript habit. In the Greek tradition, older witnesses seem to prefer categories like proanaphora rather than ‘Liturgy of the Catechumens.’ In the Slavonic printed tradition (not my area of expertise) but discussed by Taft et al., explicit headings such as ‘Литургия оглашенных’ (Liturgy of the Catechumens) are attested at least by the 1617 Sluzhebnik, and continue in later editions (the interesting question here is whether or not Cabrol had access to French/Slavic versions of these books—from Russian emigres in post-Revolutionary France?). The formal division of Byzantine liturgical texts into “Liturgy of the Catechumens” and “Liturgy of the Faithful” appears to be modern editorial imposition. That is to say: the rite historically had a ritual seam at the anaphora, but the titles themselves may be largely a modern scholarly fiction when projected backward.”

Now, if a book in Russian in 1617 has “Liturgy of the Catechumens,” then could Guéranger have gotten this term from the Slavic tradition and imposed it on the Roman Rite? Perhaps “Liturgy/Mass of the Faithful” was a later imposition, something invented for the sake of parallelism and a clear division?

As a provisional hypothesis, one might say that the source of calling the first part of the liturgy “catechumenal” is due to the litany of the catechumens terminating before they are thrown out of “the doors” by the subdeacons at Hagia Sophia, and thus, the second part becomes, by default, the liturgy “of the faithful.” St. Augustine complains at one point that there are too many catechumens to bless individually so he will bless them all at once, which indicates the origin of the oratio super populum. The litany of the catechumens ended in a common dismissal prior to the anaphora, as likely attested in North Africa, Rome, and Constantinople.

In any case, I would very much welcome input from readers on these questions.

The Incarnation, the Passion, and the Eucharist as Keys to Rightly Interpreting the Song of Songs

If you’ve ever read the Song of Songs (also called the Canticle of Canticles) in the Old Testament, you probably had more than a few questions about it! What is this very sensuous book about a lover and a beloved doing in the canon of Scripture? Are the modern biblical exegetes right when they say it’s just a loose collection of ancient Near Eastern erotic poetry that accidentally found its way into the Hebrew scriptures? Were the Jewish rabbis closer to the truth when they said it depicts the tender and tempestuous relationship between YHWH and Israel?

In his new book Wounded I Sing: The Song of Songs and the Incarnation of the Son of God, Dr. Timothy Kelly, a professor of theology at the International Theological Institute in Trumau, Austria, argues that Christians are uniquely positioned to unlock the mysteries of this book, which opens its secrets more and more as we read it in and through the Heart of Christ.

When the Word became flesh, the transcendent God of love reached down into our mortal, passible nature to join it as a man joins his betrothed, and upon the Cross He accomplished a bodily-spiritual nuptial covenant with the Church and every baptized soul that He renews, day after day, in fleshly-and-spiritual Eucharistic communion.

What the Hebrews longed for as yet-to-be-attained in the Messianic age, the Christian receives as now accomplished in the sacrifice and sacrament of the Lord's Passion—yet this, in turn, is the foretaste and pledge of something far greater: the eternal wedding feast of the Lamb. The dynamism of eros that characterizes the Song reveals both the fiery love of the Divine Lover and the yearning of His beloved to be inseparably one, but in a manner that is incarnate, ecstatic, total, irrevocable, blissful beyond what mind can conceive or imagine.

This is the essence of the Christian life and no book in the entire Bible conveys it better. No wonder the Fathers and Doctors wrote more commentaries on the Song of Songs than on any other book. No wonder it entices and baffles us: it speaks to our deepest desire, and yet does so with all the enigmas of salvation history and of our pilgrimage under the invisible hand of Providence.

And we can be thankful to Dr. Kelly for synthesizing all of this—drawing especially on St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Matthas Scheeben—into a readable guide that opens one magnificent vista after another. An exemplary work of Thomistic synthesis, with the clarity of Garrigou-Lagrange and the eloquence of Pieper.

Readers of NLM will be particularly interested in Kelly's extensive discussion of the Passion narratives (pp. 63-96), which play so pivotal a part in the ancient Roman Rite's celebration of Holy Week (with all four being read between Palm Sunday and Good Friday); how Christ's spousal office is necessarily priestly, sacrificial, and nutritive of His bride, the Church and the Christian soul; and how baptism and the Holy Eucharist, in particular, are nuptial sacraments with analogous aspects of unity and fecundity (pp. 97-149).

Without necessarily intending to be an apologetics work for the Catholic Faith, in fact Kelly's argument shows that both the Old Testament as a whole and the Passion of Christ make no salvific sense if there is not an immediate physical-spiritual communion possible with the Son of God, and in that sense proves that the Protestant account of personal salvation (through faith, by Scripture, by grace alone, etc.) is in tension with the entire trend of salvation history and of the life of Christ.

The early readers of this manuscript—including some of the greatest living Catholic biblical scholars—loved it.

Scott Hahn, editor of the Ignatius Bible’s commentary on the Song of Songs, wrote: “Rarely will you see a book that brings biblical, dogmatic, and mystical theology together so artfully and lucidly as this remarkable and readable synthesis does. Timothy Kelly refreshingly resets the entire question of the Song’s literal and spiritual meanings.”

John S. Bergsma, who co-authored A Catholic Introduction to the Bible with Brant Pitre, and wrote a book called The Bible and Marriage, had this to say: “An exquisite contemporary reading of the book, which I hope will contribute to returning the Song to its rightful and central place within Catholic biblical theology.”

Stephen K. Ray, author of commentaries on Genesis and the Gospel of John, summed it up as “an illuminating guide to a sublime and mysterious book.”

Fr. John Saward, author of some of the finest theological works of recent decades, declared: “Writing with a poet’s sensitivity to language, Dr. Kelly shows us how the Nuptial Mystery of Christ and His Church, of which the Song of Songs speaks with the authority of divine and prophetic inspiration, stands at the very centre of the Catholic faith.”

To find out more or “look inside,” visit the publisher’s site or any Amazon site.

Here’s a short video introduction, including a reading of part of the text:

Interesting Liturgical Sights on a Recent Trip to Europe (2): Venice

Concluding the gallery I began last week, today I have a small number of photos to share from Venice (and one that was taken elsewhere, as will be noted in due course).

In the Franciscan church Santa Maria Gloriosa “dei Frari - of the Friars”, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the altar in the Blessed Sacrament chapel had been fitted out with a new and rather handsome icon of St. Maximilian Kolbe.

In a side chapel, a Preparatio ad Missam next to a kneeler; rather oddly situated, I thought, and it made me wonder if it was the original location for it.

Also in the Frari: the chapel where Claudio Monteverdi is buried in a remarkably humble tomb compared to every other one in the same church.

It had been 27 years or so since my last visit to the Basilica of San Marco, and I had forgotten just how exquisite the mosaics are. Absolutely stunning! Here are depicted the six days of creation and the fall.

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