St. Nicholas and St. Thomas Aquinas: Keeping Christmas

The Christian must never think he will someday be mature enough to be able to move on from a child's Christmas. No intellectual achievement, no humanitarian activity, no synthesis of faith can ever replace the treasure of wonder as one contemplates the Son of God made Man, the Divine Person taking on mortal flesh. 

The world -- and our families -- and the smallest child -- and the greatest theologian -- would be made bereft of the fulfillment of their deepest longings if ever we Christians were to abandon our simple observance of this time of preparing for and celebrating the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ!

Nothing can replace it; nothing can fulfill the longing and excitement of the preparations of Advent and the joy of a childlike Noël, lovingly prepared by Church, priest, mother, father, and grandparents, passed down through the generations. Many a convert has been made, secretly, in the love of Christmas carols and the dear crèche with its Infant and Mother, star, angels, shepherds, ox, and ass.

Today at 1Peter5, Peter Kwasniewski makes a brilliant connection between the great saint of charity, St. Nicholas, and the great saint of wisdom, St. Thomas Aquinas. Thinking in a worldly way, one might suppose the latter had found the key to transcendence in his own mind and been able to achieve a higher level of faith. Instead, we see that contemplation found him at the feet of Santa Claus (the identity of the great bishop, as Pope Benedict tells us, forged in the depths of history). 

It seems that St. Thomas, aided by St. Nicholas, saw the Christmas path and could no longer stop to write about it anymore; famously he compared his work to straw, which sounds sad but was a great joy for him. He found, like a child, the Christ whom Isaiah foresaw: "A Word completing and shortening in righteousness, because a shortened word will God make in the whole earth." 

All of Christendom has built up a wealth of customs, music, and art, all fittingly radiating the glory of this otherwise hidden event; let us dedicate ourselves to preserving this wealth and to protecting it from those who are arrogantly, erroneously beyond or above such things, who slothfully wish a change, or who fatally succumb to the world and its weary ways. 

Let us be as little children, the Angelic Doctor, and St. Nicholas, accepting what is so greatly given. Let us piously do our humble best to make straight the paths and keep Christmas.

The phony pedantry and empty metaphysical thrill of Teilhard de Chardin

The resurgence of the ideological, political, and emotional aura or atmosphere of the 70s, that incalculably influential decade (bursting forth as it did on the petard of one year, 1968, though of course having been sparking for much longer) means that we today must take care not to forget the figures and events of that time -- not if we want to escape its clutches. (And those of us who lived through that time would dearly love some respite!)

In the realm of theology, if we are going to identify some of the causes of our current plight, one priest, Teilhard de Chardin, exerts an influence far beyond his name-recognition today, yet his errors remain with us in myriad ways.

His ideas were formless from the start. He never had a theory or position that could be stated with much confidence. It's the very penumbra of drama, of poetic, vague spiritualism, braced up by the settled-science-y cachet of evolutionary theory that characterized his attraction and of which, today, his magnetism consists. For the confused and those who wish to confuse, his theology is perfect.

In one message to my husband and me, Fr. Paul Mankowski put it this way: 

Teilhard has always struck me as bogus the way Matthew Fox is bogus: his language is designed to make clear things cloudy rather than the reverse, and always promises some kind of metaphysical thrill he never delivers on.  He has his admirers, but nobody has been able to build anything on T's work, the way bright grad students go on to advance the arguments of the thinkers they study.  You either get intoxicated by the guy or you don't.

The Jesuits and the corruption of their charism exert a disproportionate influence on the Catholic Church today. Obviously, the Pope is a Jesuit. His closest friends and influencers are Jesuits. And Pope Francis clearly admires Teilhard, a Jesuit. 

So, as I say, even if trying to grasp the man's thought is hopeless, the way, as we used to joke, nailing Jello to the wall is hopeless, we do need to know what it is and what its current cognates are. His ideas lend themselves to endless iterations (without necessarily any acknowledgment of their source -- who needs to footnote a feeling?).

I recommend reading the four Substack posts on the topic by Peter Kwasniewski as a primer in the era and its confusions. In the first part, he remarks about the long passage quoted by Pope Francis recently, "A bit wild and wooly, but one might be able to read it all in an orthodox way." 

An aside: How often one has sat in the pew listening to some grandiose verbiage from the pulpit, words spinning around, creating a tangled ball of something that, overall, gives us a squirmy sense; yet as we attempt to resist spending yet another Sunday riled up about the state of things, we find ourselves saying, "Wellll, I suppose one could interpret it in a not-wholly-erroneous way..."

But why? Why do we have to do this? Why are things not clear, spiritually healthy, ringing with the familiar clear bell-like tones of the past? Why are we perpetually in a state of having to quell our uneasiness (at best) or standing athwart destruction (at worst, and who are we to take on this task)? 

Back to Teilhard. Peter Kwasniewski goes on to say, after the "wild and wooly" bit:

Yet Teilhard de Chardin, the Piltdown paleontologist and “Omega Point” mystagogue, is not exactly an uncomplicated and uncontroversial figure. Phil Lawler describes him as "a French author whose odd mixture of eugenics and evolutionary theory drew several cautions from the Vatican during the pontificates of Pius XII and John XXIII. More recently his work has drawn interest from exponents of New Age spirituality."

In the third of Kwasniewski's posts, he looks at the assessment of recent authors, including Fr. Mankowski, who writes:

Tall, dapper, handsome and aristocratic—I’ll have to take Kirsch’s word for it here—Teilhard de Chardin was essentially a fraud. At bottom, he was a Ramada Inn lounge singer posing as a metaphysician.

I cringe to admit I have weighty opinion against me. Both Joseph Ratzinger and Flannery O’Connor were deeply impressed by Teilhard. I can only explain this admiration by the surmise that neither admirer had any formal education in science, and both were thus innocently susceptible to Teilhard’s pseudo-scientific pedantries...

Had Teilhard stuck to his cotton-candy metaphysics, he probably would have been ignored by his principal antagonists both inside and outside the Church. It was his claim to be a serious paleontologist and unflinching respecter of scientific fact that put his theology in the crosshairs.

 

I must chime in here on the general assumption that Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, admired and was even influenced by Teilhard de Chardin. Maybe. 

Keep in mind that one way Teilhard retains his hold among the theological elites is by evoking that slipperiest of "settled theories," evolution. Most academics are loathe to challenge it, lest they be branded anti-intellectual, so tight is the fist that strangles true scientific inquiry -- or, I should say, so absolute is the dictatorship on this matter. Question evolution (as a unified theory of the world, that is; spotted moths aside) and be shunned forever, is how it goes.

I don't know why Flannery O'Connor couldn't sniff out Teilhard. Normally she had exquisite common sense. And it's true that on occasion, Ratzinger took Teilhard's ideas seriously, perhaps because he had that gentleman-scholar's way of graciously giving the benefit of the doubt, combined with the universally observed caution to avoid foreign, and in this matter, dangerous, academic ground. From what I've read, though, it seems more a case of the smarter person allowing someone's insights, however odd, to spark his own more profound thoughts, rather than delving into them on their own merit. 

Certainly, portraying someone's position should not be mistaken for agreeing with it, necessarily. Teilhard was influential enough to merit at least that, at least at the time. 

I'm not suggesting that some of Ratzinger's assessments weren't positive -- it seems as if they were. However, in our polarized age, we don't have what his attention could also be: patience. Ratzinger's overall demeanor was that of a gentle academic willing to hear everyone out (to the detriment, ultimately, of his disciplinary role as pontiff). My impression is that sometimes he was employing a Thomistic approach; he seems often simply to be holding Teilhard's position out at arm's length to get a good look at it for description's sake. To give him credit, how many of us are willing to do that -- to characterize our opponent fairly, even at the risk of being thought of as giving assent?

The point I want to make is that when Ratzinger was on his ground, he dismissed the man pretty decisively. In The Spirit of the Liturgy, one of his later, more mature works, Ratzinger spends a paragraph summarizing Teilhard's conception of the universe, which he saw as an evolutionary process in which the cosmos undergoes a "series of unions" towards "a growing synthesis, leading to the 'Noosphere', in which spirit and its understanding embrace the whole and are bended into a kind of living organism... In his view [emphasis added], the Eucharist... anticipates its goal and at the same time urges it on." 

In the immediately following paragraph, Ratzinger offers a quite different, even opposing, view, and it is the one he commits to and expands upon for the rest of the chapter and, indeed, book. "The older tradition starts from a different conceptual model. Its image is not of an upward flying arrow, but of a kind of cross-shaped movement... " 

The ensuing treatment simply leaves behind Teilhard's idea -- his main idea -- and never picks it up again. It does seem to be the case that in his writings, Ratzinger never directly refutes Teilhard. But if we look at what he does say about his own thought, we understand that he seems to regard Teilhard as requiring mention, if only to juxtapose him against his, Ratzinger's, own solid grasp of "the tradition." 

In the same way, Teilhard requires mention today; he is that influential. If he didn't himself create the loopy, gnostic, pseudo-scientific claptrap passing for theology we endure today, he is a handy emblem of it. Sometimes it's helpful to put a face on bad ideas so they are recognizable. 

NB: Happy to know, thanks to Peter Kwasniewski, that along with Fr. Mankowski, my bestie C. S. Lewis also had no time for Teilhard: 

Ironically, the Anglican C. S. Lewis showed a much more “Catholic” sensibility than current Church leadership when, in 1960, he wrote to a Jesuit friend: “How right your Society was to shut up de Chardin!”

 

 

Images matter -- don't be afraid to offer beauty!

Somewhere along the way, in a disastrous development, Catholics let go of the idea that images matter. Contemporary theology is exclusively rationalistic; contemporary opinion is that thinking gets you closer to God; what you see has no effect. Nothing could be less true. 

Beauty matters and images convey meaning, for good or ill.

The rainbow has a meaning. It's a sign of God's covenant with the descendants of Noah, which of course, we are. That covenant, the bow in the sky, is fulfilled in Christ. You can read all about it in this piece by Peter Kwasniewski. He says,

Noah’s Ark is a Scriptural image of the vessel of God’s salvation. Being in the Ark is being in Christ, in His Body, the Church. The raging flood of sin and vice drowns and destroys those who are caught up in it, but those who pass through the waters of baptism—of the death and resurrection of Christ—have their sins washed away and receive the grace of divine sonship. As the human race was preserved for temporal life in Noah and his family, so is it saved for eternal life in the Church.

Since the 17th century, June as been the month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I wrote about the devotion with David Clayton in our book, The Little Oratory: This path to love, rooted in the Gospel, was given to us by God as a remedy for the errors of Jansenism, errors of rejection of the human nature of Our Lord, errors of rationalistic legalism and separation from God, under which we still suffer today. I quoted Fr. John Hardon SJ on the topic:  

As formerly Divine Goodness wished to exhibit to the human race, as it came from the Ark of Noe, a sign of the renewed covenant between them . . . so in our own troubled times, while that heresy held sway which is known as Jansenism, the most insidious of all heresies, enemy of the love of God and of filial affection for Him — for this heresy preached that God was not so much to be loved by us as a Father as to be feared as an unrelenting Judge — the most kind Jesus manifested to the nations His Sacred Heart.

His article is well worth reading in full: The Sacred Heart and the Eucharist.

Peter Kwasniewski continues:

He is the Lord of creation and the King of the saints, the unity from which all diversity flows, and to which all must return in order to be natural, right, good, and blessed. This too is what the month of June, traditionally dedicated to the Sacred Heart—since the year 1673, I have seen it said—is meant to remind us of: He loved us first, and by His love, by what He did for us and gives to us, we learn whom to love and how to love. Apart from him there is only demonic unnaturalness, perversity, malice, and misery. [Read the whole thing!]

We still need this devotion, perhaps now more than ever, and we still need the beautiful images that draw us to His Heart and thus to His love. Above all, Jesus loves us and came to redeem us from sin and death. Don't be afraid to embrace His Sacred Heart and show it to the world. This (and other beautiful renditions) is the image we need now:

The way we love those who have fallen into sin is not by means of any political capitulation to ideology in the name of "dialogue" (and don't be taken in by the rhetoric: the LGBT movement is ideology, utterly political, a movement of power, not love). It is by loving our neighbor and, "like one beggar telling another where to find bread,"* offering him Jesus. 

*N.T. Wright

Dom Alcuin Reid stands athwart Traditionis Custodes and its defenders

Three respected academics, John Cavadini, Mary Healy, and Thomas Weinandy, have written a five-part series in the Notre Dame Church Life Journal on the Novus Ordo, the Mass of Paul VI -- the Mass that the vast majority of Roman Catholics throughout the world attend. (The articles are linked here -- the last link gathers them together in one.)

This series is frustrating to read, because it assumes what it sets out to demonstrate, that the Novus Ordo is superior to the (in their view, following Pope Francis in Traditionis Custodis) superannuated Traditional Latin Mass; a premise that the authors seem not to understand is self destructing, as it undermines the ability of the Church to guarantee true worship, if it must discard as inadequate the form in which it was celebrated for Roman Catholics in a span comprising the greater part of its history. 

I commend to your attention this excellent response from Dom Alcuin Reid, published in OnePeterFive today: The One Thread By Which the Council Hangs: a Response to Cavadini, Healy, and Weinandy.

“Don’t touch that! If you do, everything will collapse!” The warning is clear enough. Any sensible person would rapidly desist, lest their one seemingly minor act bring everything crashing down, undoing the work of many days, weeks, years or even decades.

I am not sure whether these were the exact words used by a number of bishops at the beginning of the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI, but, whatever words they chose, these bishops forcefully conveyed to him their opinion that he could not under any circumstances permit a wider use of the older liturgical rites without perilously detracting from the authority of the Second Vatican Council. “Don’t do it,” they insisted, “or the Council will seem to have been reversed and will lose its authority.”

Of course, Benedict XVI did “do it” with his motu proprio Summorum Pontificum (7 July 2007)—having first spent a cheerful morning or two telephoning many of the bishops who had previously shouted at him, in order personally to ‘explain’ that they had little or nothing to worry about. The world did not come to an end. The Church did not implode, and the Second Vatican Council’s true authority was not undermined.

Dom Reid has the confidence of one well versed in his subject, who is not academically or in any other professional way beholden to the regime built up around what he calls "the super-dogma" of Vatican II. He is exactly right, that those in the extraordinarily entrenched status quo live in fear of challenges to their received notions about liturgy -- that this "old, thin, and worn" thread will be pulled and everything will tumble down.

His freedom from human respect (a breath of fresh air, for these academics have throttled us with their iron grip on how we may think about the post-conciliar time) allows him to respond to the arguments (some of which, as you will see, is aimed at him) with what is readily observable to those not invested in the opposing narrative -- what even the National Catholic Reporter, that bastion of unorthodoxy, has on many occasions noted as "the hemorrhaging of Catholic youth" out of our Church. And, what supporters of innovation do not like, the popularity amongst the young of Tradition:

Calvadini, Healy, and Weinandy are honest in seeing that this poses quite a problem when there is at least one generation of Catholics, young and growing in number, for whom the reformed liturgical rites are practically unknown. They have discovered or even have grown up with the usus antiquior—the older liturgical rites—and they are now raising their own children accordingly, having been assured by popes and prelates across the world—even by the likes of the then Archbishop Roche[1]—that this was perfectly acceptable and did not in any way damage the communion of the Church; indeed, that it enriched it as an expression of that legitimate plurality that is part of the One Church of Christ.  

Today, he goes on, 

"... as repeated statistical studies from various countries demonstrate, the reformed liturgy has simply not delivered the ecclesial renewal promised. Promised? Yes: the assumption that guided (“motivated”? “sold”?) the introduction of the new rites was that if the liturgy were simplified, modernised, made more contemporary, then people would participate in it more fruitfully and a new springtime in the life of the Church would be ushered in. Alas, the opposite has proved to be true."

I highly recommend reading the whole thing. It is long, but bracing. His words are a tonic for the wilting spirit, especially as the attacks on Tradition show no signs of abating.

The death of Benedict means finally confronting ultramontanism

The passing of Pope Benedict XVI was, of course, not unforeseen; in fact, everyone, himself included, expected him to die during the first year after his resignation. Instead he lived for 10 more. But his death is a cause for sorrow, as it leaves us bereft and with a strange feeling of fatherlessness. I don't know how to characterize his life myself. I appreciate the memorials I have read so far. 

My husband Phil Lawler offers an obituary: 

Unfortunately, governing was not Pope Benedict’s strong suit. His greatest weakness as a manager was his tendency to assume the goodwill of others: to take it for granted that the prelates who surrounded him were honestly dedicated to their tasks, willingly carrying out his policies. He had denounced the “filth” that corrupted the priesthood, but he did not see—or did not know how to uproot—the corruption within the Roman Curia. Financial scandals rocked the Vatican, leaked memos embarrassed the papacy, subordinates resisted his policies. Eventually, Pope Benedict concluded that he lacked the strength, the stamina, and perhaps the decisiveness necessary to right the barque of Peter. So he resigned, in what I see as the one grievous error of his pontificate. His frustration was understandable, but when the shepherd leaves, the wolves begin to circle.

Michael Brendan Dougherty writes with spirit in defense of the great man (archived here if you are not a subscriber):

I predict confidently that he will be one of the only figures of his era to be remembered, celebrated, studied, and beloved in the future.  

In the near term, Benedict will be misremembered as a tough-minded reactionary, the “Panzer Cardinal,” when in fact he was a pioneering liberal, frequent innovator, and gentle-souled cleric. He will be mislabeled as a man whose reputation was fatally compromised by the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, when he was perhaps the sole figure of his era at the top of the church that took on the treacherous responsibility of reform — centralizing the handling of clerical abuse cases in his office and drastically speeding up the process of defrocking criminal priests (a project that has been thrown into reverse by his successor). 

Dom Alcuin Reid writes, "it is for us to thank him by learning daily from his humble and habitual recourse to love—even when our hearts are broken by others whom we thought we could trust."

Father Uwe Michael Lang writes of Benedict's liturgical legacy: 

His reticence as a lawgiver—for instance, there was no new editio typica of any liturgical book during his pontificate—could be interpreted as a lost opportunity. On the other hand, the fragility of legislative decisions was demonstrated when his immediate successor, Pope Francis, cancelled the provisions of Summorum Pontificum.

Against the odds, Pope Benedict did open perspectives for a renewal in continuity with the liturgical tradition, and these impulses have been taken up especially by younger generations in the Church throughout the world. This “new liturgical movement” Joseph Ratzinger desired has the potential to mend the torn threads of Catholic ritual. The best testimony to his liturgical legacy will be to continue his work with patience, perseverance, joy, and gratitude for his luminous theological mind and his long-suffering service to the people of God.

Bishop Schneider offers a concise and consoling summation: 

Pope Benedict XVI made shine brightly his episcopal motto “Collaboratores veritatis”, i.e. collaborators of the truth. With this motto he wants to say to each faithful Catholic, to each priest, to each bishop, to each cardinal and to Pope Francis as well: what really counts is the unshakable fidelity to the Catholic Truth, to the constant and venerable liturgical tradition of the Church and the primacy of God and eternity.

Jacob Phillips speaks of The Benedict XVI Generation:

Benedict XVI was always attentive and responsive to the needs of the present day. His own motu proprio [Summorum Pontificum] on this issue states that “young persons … have discovered this liturgical form [of the Traditional Latin Mass], felt its attraction and found in it a form of encounter with the Mystery of the Most Holy Eucharist, particularly suited to them”. 

His contemporary moment presented a need for a more widespread celebration of this ancient liturgy. This was no attempt to get people running back to the past, but a response to the needs of the present. The modus operandi was to undo the rupture and discontinuity at work in the fact that, for many, the Church seemed to be alienated from its own past by restricting the ancient form of the Mass. He writes, “in the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture. What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.” 

Like children of divorce, the death of one of whose parents puts an end to fantasies of reconciliation, we Catholics are left with a strange sense of a closure that does not heal.

We are in the position of having something like a step-father Pope, a Pope who we have ample reason to think doesn't love us and is an enemy of his spouse, the Church. The child's dream that Benedict would speak up or offer an explanation for his abdication that would satisfy, as opposed to the one he gave, which seems so thin, is now buried with him. 

So perhaps we have the opportunity to confront the specter of ultramontanism, or hyperpapalism, now that we are left alone, so to speak, with Pope Francis. I have been wanting to write about a two-volume book set from Peter Kwasniewski for a while, called The Road from Hyperpapalism to Catholicism (affiliate link), and the death of Benedict seems an appropriate time to do so.

The centralization of authority in the person of the pope is a paradoxical issue. On the one hand, in a universe where human authority is fatally tainted by the Fall, we need Christ's promise that the Rock upon which He places His church is indestructible. Without authority, the claim to govern (and there always will be claims, no matter how purportedly individualistic the religion might be -- even Quakers have elders!) always becomes a matter decided by personality and power. Only a religion the Master of which died on a cross to prove His love can offer the model of "servant of servants" in authority, and that authority must be traceable to and explicitly established by Him. 

On the other hand, as Kwasniewski argues persuasively in the two volumes of The Road from Hyperpapalism to Catholicism, we now labor in a delusional matrix of papolatry, where every casual utterance of the Pope is taken to be on a par with or even higher than Scripture. We suffer the whiplash of trying to solve his contradictions, a kind of squaring of the circle that some have not quite accepted is impossible. 

Kwasniewski writes of John Henry Newman's prescient concern at the time of Vatican I, which codified the doctrine of infallibility, "that a party of 'ultramontanes' was busy pushing a theologically unsound, philosophically unreasonable, historically untenable, and ecclesiastically damaging version of papal inerrancy that threatened to confuse the pope's office with divine revelation itself, rather than seeing him more modestly as the guardian of Tradition and the arbiter of controversy." Newman didn't deny that the pope has the power to define matters infallibly; he questioned whether it was prudent to make a dogma of that power.

Hyperpapalism has odd manifestations on the ground. I have heard mothers of large families offer as a reason for having so many children, "the Pope tells us to." (I am not making this up.) Now, apart from the rather sad observation that the last pope to praise large families was Pius XII, who died in 1939, this is a strange thing to say. The pope can only encourage large families (if they be granted by God, for not every couple is thus blessed) as a result of generosity and an expression of the love of husband and wife, besides being the purpose of marriage, which is procreation (in response to the command given by God in Scripture, "Be fruitful and multiply"). He cannot order couples to have more children; certainly their begetting would seem to be less likely if his image is invoked as a prelude to the necessary act!

At minimum, it's simply normal for husband and wife to have children! What is not normal is to create of this natural consequence and virtuous response -- the joy, really, of a man and a woman making a family -- a sort of legalistic duty imposed by a remote figure of authority. The truth is that the pope exists to protect something quite outside of his whims or even personal thoughts however deep -- he exists to, in this case, safeguard God's original plan to redeem and restore the world to Himself through the intermediary of the man and woman, as they live out the gift of marriage and co-creation by bringing children into the world. The pope's role is to keep them safe, not to burden them with a task that doesn't originate with him. 

The pope, far from being a capricious monarch invested with unlimited powers, going around (as is now the case) scolding people for not recycling or having too many children, like rabbits, is a steward. I don't know about other cultures, but in the English-speaking world, the idea of an unjust or unworthy steward or false king is an enduring theme that captures our imaginations. From Robin Hood to Denethor in the Lord of the Rings, and in many of our fairy tales, we muse on and explore the tragedy of the steward who is corrupt or who yields to something other than the will of the (absent) king, often due to a forked-tongued advisor. 

One strange, perhaps forgotten episode early in the pontificate of Francis occurred shortly after the four cardinals (Burke, Müller, Brandmüller, and Caffarra) submitted their "Dubia," their (pointed) questions regarding his apostolic letter Amoris Laetitia. On Twitter, his close friend Fr. Antonio Spadaro, nicknamed "Francis' mouthpiece," posted a couple of tweets with pictures of Gandalf and the caption, "to bandy crooked words with a witless worm." Some, including me, thought at first that his account had been hacked. Others (including Ross Douthat) thought Spadaro was calling the Dubia cardinals worms. It seems, most tellingly of all for my false steward/Denethor comparison, that he was joking about critics' view of himself  -- which of course makes Pope Francis the hapless Denethor, who has led his people astray by forgetting the existence of the true King. Denethor's particular error is using the Palantír to probe matters beyond his ken, unwittingly turning his will over to Sauron. If it was a joke, it was one that had more than a dash of truth to it, as all humor does.

In general, we can say that in our legends, the steward easily falls prey to delusions of grandeur. Kwasniewski says that, beginning around the time of Pius X and due to modern popes' abuses of power, "Catholics came to view the pope as a god on earth, a divine oracle who could never be wrong" -- a view adopted in large part with the encouragement of the pontiffs themselves. "[In Pope Francis] the ruptures of his predecessors, which in them had coexisted uneasily with more traditional Catholic pieties, have found an unresisting and unmixed welcome." All exacerbated by our instantaneous, all-pervading media.

The first volume of The Road from Hyperpapalism explores the history of the papacy and its limits. The second focuses on the challenges of this particular papacy. There are dozens of essays and they are all of interest. I will point out one almost at random to recommend, from Volume 1, Chapter 13: Are the "Inopportunists" of the First Vatican Council Being Vindicated? Inopportunists were those who, like Newman, wondered if that council was on the right track. 

In this chapter, we ponder what I wonder how many are aware of, that encyclicals are a recent development in the magisterium? They came into fashion in the 18th century, before which time popes tended to single out doctrines and promoters of doctrines, by name, to be condemned. As Kwasniewski points out, this practice safeguarded the teaching office not only of the pontiff but of the local bishop, who was assumed, unlike today, to be able to handle "proclaiming the orthodox faith or taking on heretics without the pope leading the way."

Anecdotally, I notice that a tentative "is there an encyclical about that?" is a common response to a self-evident statement about the moral law. What have we wrought? Interestingly, older catechisms (that predate the Vatican II era) simply offer brief teaching on the 10 Commandments and urge the faithful to have a clean conscience. The assumption is that the Christian has the grace to act morally if he knows Scripture and the moral precepts, being united to Christ in the sacraments. I recall a discussion of a scandal in a seminary; the response, from a theologian, was to remark that the seminarians need a course on the theology of the body. My first thought was that they need to be made to memorize the 10 Commandments and lined up for Confession! Somehow we have off-loaded our inner, supernatural life onto a papal platform, making it accessible only by a quasi-academic pathway. Some go so far as to exclude all but theologians from any conversation about all these matters, so arcane have we made what was once plain.

The overall theme of The Road from Hyperpapalism is that we are undergoing a purgation for this error that is not as new as we think it is, and has only grown with the "pop star" view of the papacy, in many ways cemented in the long reign of John Paul II. The cult of personality was, we are discovering now, a high price to pay for the excellence of his thought and the depth of his piety. 

We have to free ourselves from a slavish dependency on the papacy, while affirming it as a necessary safeguard of authority. The problem goes to an excessively legalistic, rather than organic, interpretation of what the papacy is. Instead of seeing the pope as an almost god-like entity, separate in essence from the brethren (meaning all the baptized) he is meant to strengthen, we need to recover a more relational view of things, akin to a family in which the father's authority derives from his submission to a hierarchy he has not invented and which is not identical to his personal attributes; his role as protector and provider. 

Just as a father who arbitrarily and capriciously wields power against the supernatural interests of those entrusted to him quickly loses their respect, the supreme pontiff must remain aware of and devoted to the principle held in the Church and expressed by St. Vincent of Lérins: "Yet teach still the same truths which you have learned, so that though you speak after a new fashion, what you speak may not be new." This precept is backed by Scripture, which warns us, "But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!" (Galatians chapter 1)

All that is valid, and well expressed in the two volumes of The Road from Hyperpapalism. But stepping back from the edifying details, we must recover the central gift of God in the New Covenant to us as followers of Christ: that we, all the baptized, are called to have the life of Christ within and thus to be able to act divinely, with divine goodness, as opposed to being mere keepers of the law, doomed in our flesh to fall short (as St. Paul warns in Romans chapter 7). 

Ultimately, this is the false promise of ultramontanism and hyperpapalism: while in practice it hides God's Law, which after all is written on our hearts as we learn from Scripture, from the faithful, by keeping their minds focused on papal decrees and even random remarks, it nevertheless represents a form of religion that will always fail. It is a false religion that keeps its adherents tied to rules and pronouncements "from on high" -- but not high enough. It distracts from the Gospel and from Tradition, offering instead novelties and ever-changing expressions of power to be submitted to.

Christ came, as Benedict of dear memory so admirably explicates in his Jesus of Nazareth, to reveal Himself as the Law incarnate, Goodness itself. The whole argument of that book, hidden to a certain extent in his gentle, explorative style (he speaks not in sound bites but in long paragraphs), is that it's this claim of Christ's that is so radical and such a stumbling block to the Jews, who rightly see their covenanted mission to be witnesses to that Law, but are blinded to the revelation that it has been made into a living stone, Himself. 

Christians are called to live in the freedom of being children of God, of being united, sacramentally, by means of Christ's blood, to divinity itself. “God became man that man might become God" -- no less an authority than Athanasius proclaims this shocking truth! We moderns are content to imitate His example; the ancients knew our destiny is to be incorporated in Him.

In his Introduction to Christianity, Joseph Ratzinger (later to become Benedict XVI) says:

"The essence of Christianity is not an idea, not a system of thought, not a plan of action. The essence of Christianity is a person: Jesus Christ himself. To become truly real means to come to know Jesus Christ and to learn from him what it means to be human." 

The Church must recover her mission to make us "become truly real." We are not exempt in some new, human dispensation from this mission, nor can we escape from it by waiting for the pope's latest proclamation. In God's challenging providence, this recovery will not be mild. We are, again, in the midst of a vast purgation, the likes of which we cannot see whole, but the parts of which we continually batter ourselves against with tears of frustration and anguish. The death of Pope Benedict is the closing of a door.

May we quickly find the right path to the truth; may God have mercy on that admirable, beloved, heart-breaking Holy Father. 

The vexed dilemma of concelebration at the Chrism Mass

The dilemma: 

On the one hand, the irenic wish to demonstrate docility towards the bishop, always a good default position.

On the other, the danger of sacrificing principle for the hope that one's mission can continue undisturbed.

Peter Kwasniewski examines the issue of the indult institutes and traditional clergy taking part in the Chrism Mass by means of actual concelebration; his arguments are worth reading and include many resources to back up his position. 

It's helpful to survey the various liturgical and canonical experts he calls upon, because most Catholics consider this matter of concelebration trivial and accept it as a norm, without examination, when it is by no means supported from tradition. After all, the faith itself is based upon and upheld by tradition! 

Somehow I sense that this statement will be met with interior resistance from many readers, but it is simply true. Yesterday's Feast of the Apostles Philip and James had, in the Office of Readings (Novus Ordo, so... ), a passage from the Book of Acts, which includes this verse: 

Every family has to be traced back to its origins. That is why we can say that all these great churches constitute that one original Church of the apostles; for it is from them that they all come. They are all primitive, all apostolic, because they are all one. They bear witness to this unity by the peace in which they all live, the brotherhood which is their name, the fellowship to which they are pledged. The principle on which these associations are based is common tradition by which they share the same sacramental bond. (Acts 5) [My emphasis]

(And I have argued that besides all the important reasons adverted to in Kwasniewski's article and elsewhere, concelebration has yet another detrimental effect of making reception of Holy Communion in the hand a difficult practice to dislodge.)

My observation of other institutes is that it doesn't end well to do things contrary to the consciences of its founders and members -- things that are not necessarily outright immoral, but that do, bit by bit, represent compromises on essential matters of liturgy, doctrine, and practice. There is more than one way to wear down one's apostolate and vocation.

Clergy could attend the Chrism Mass in choro, and there are other ways, as explained at length in the article, to demonstrate unity. "If what is desired of the traditional clergy is that they should freely and publicly express their communion with the local bishop and the presbyterate, it is manifest that concelebration is not the only way to express it." 

Catholics who love tradition (again, all Catholics in theory) should be alert to slippery slopes, which have been our downfall on so many occasions. How many times will our good will be mangled? We should stand on rights against abusive authorities:

Chartier [the author Kwasniewski is responding to] calls into question the fittingness of applying Canon 902 to the Chrism Mass, yet any sidestepping of Canon 902 raises a deeper problem. The requirement of an annual concelebration can be seen as a way in which to insist that modern Church customs and pontifical preferences surpass and relativize tradition and canon law, which has been the pattern throughout Francis’s pontificate and indeed throughout all postconciliar pontificates, back to Paul VI’s surrender to northern European pressure regarding communion in the hand, or John Paul II’s surrender on the question of female altar servers. Being pressured into concelebrating, even for the “best” of reasons, is the first step on a slippery slope of giving up other rights and traditions.

And we need to resist legalistic rationalizations in matters of love and duty, in matters of faith. Our Savior spent His precious time on earth warning against it, yet nowadays it's almost our only mode -- something that should pierce us with remorse. Kwasniewski:

In short: however valid the new sacramental rites are, their legitimacy and licitness should not be assumed a priori. If there were even a slight doubt in the mind of a priest in this regard, he should not concelebrate the new Mass, for there would be a kind of dissimulation or dishonesty at work, and his conscience would rightly reproach him for it. [My emphasis]

Ultimately, the main purpose of any traditional entity, personal or institutional, would be diminished and even vitiated if important matters are yielded. And let's not forget the detrimental effect on the bishop, who will be a better apostle when challenged by those with purified intentions. 

Bishops are surrounded by yes-men. They have come to imagine that their slightest whims must be obeyed, and yet I would say there are virtually none upon whom it dawns that they could rightly require obedience on matters of faith and morals -- subjects actually under their purview. They want total conformity to norms on using sanitizer but have no strong opinions on approaching Holy Communion having promoted abortion. 

"Worthy of note is Fr. Murray’s reminder that even if a bishop had evidence and reason to correct a priest about his opinions, there would still be no basis for requiring concelebration at the Chrism Mass. It is not legally translatable into a requirement." You know what is legally translatable into a requirement? Public reparation for public sin. Not seeing too much of that these days, more's the pity.

It would do the bishops good to be stood up to for the sake of a right principle. What's the worst that can happen? Expulsion? It will happen anyway if such a matter, characterized by its proponents as not that important, represents the sort of pretext he would use. Better to be hung as a sheep than as a goat!  

Liturgically abusive Masses should be avoided!

Peter Kwasniewski addresses the strange and abuse-enabling trope I've confronted often, that we should attend and even seek out liturgically troublesome Masses on the theory that in doing so, we participate in the sufferings of Our Lord. 

Best pull quote: "let’s not make spiritual sadomasochism into a virtue"! 

Well meaning people often lapse into the fallacy Peter Kwasniewski addresses here. (Another example, that I have heard argued without irony: The evils of socialism resulted in a flourishing of faith and fervor, therefore we should seek a socialist form of government.)

Fundamentally, the fallacy is to forget that grace builds on nature and does not replace it. Our duty is to order everything to the heavenly good. And it is a duty, repeated often in Scripture, denied by those who have fallen into gnosticism. This error is enabled and amplified by the theology behind the Mass of Paul VI, that somehow the Mass is a sort of Last-Supper-ish play. Thinking that bad liturgy can somehow be good for us ends in holding something along the lines of "we must deny Christ to follow Christ." Make no mistake, this is a position found in the writings of Fr. James Martin SJ and other darlings of the current leadership, alas, of our Church.

The Mass is mystical worship, we do participate in the actual sacrifice of Calvary as it is re-presented, in an unbloody manner, at the altar; and thus we do try to unite ourselves with the sufferings of Our Lord. But mysticism does not have anything to do with making bad actions into virtues that require our assent. And make no mistake -- intentional participation in such things is assent.

Is it Protestant to oppose Pope Francis's edicts?

This is the question that looms for the devoted Catholic of a certain age, the sort (like me) who dutifully and even gratefully held the line in the Novus Ordo with Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, even while some of their actions caused dismay. 

We trusted, we followed, we spoke up; but we also thought that if we bided our time we would be rewarded with a "mutually enriched" and "reformed" Reform. 

It is with the utmost trepidation that during this pontificate (not starting this summer but going back pretty far) some of us launched ourselves out into the seas of resistance. I myself wrote an essay (found in this book - affiliate link) explaining how adherence to the 10 Commandments takes precedence over submission to the false teaching of Amoris Laetitia.

Peter Kwasniewski writes in his article Are Traditionalists Guilty of “Private Judgment” Over the Popes? to answer the charge that it's just Lutheranism to resist the latest assault. Taken together with his previous post, his explanations and sources for his conclusions should hearten the man in the pew with a new resolve to be faithful to his conscience. Above all, we must cleave to the principle of non-contradiction, the ground of all reasoning, which is the first of all the precepts to which we must assent and never abandon. 

Some excerpts:

I find it frankly astonishing that anyone would confuse the traditionalist position with Luther’s. Luther quickly moved from opposing papal vices to opposing the papacy as such, then a bunch of ecumenical councils, then many Fathers and Doctors of the Church. He called reason a whore, and heaped contempt on the scholastics, especially St. Thomas Aquinas (rather different from a trained Thomist who follows the master’s principles, makes frequent use of his reasoning, and looks to his life as exemplary)...

Remember, the ones who are praising Luther and toying with his ideas are the progressives led by Francis. The campaign against the historic worship of the Latin-rite Church is nominalist and voluntarist to the core. For Bugnini and Montini, and now for Bergoglio and Roche, the Roman Rite is whatever we say it is, regardless of reality...

If Pope Francis is right, then all of his predecessors are wrong—and so, for that matter, are the Old and New Testaments, as interpreted by the Fathers and Doctors. But if all that is right, then Pope Francis is, quite simply, wrong. Now, which is easier to believe possible? Which of the alternatives is less destructive to the Catholic Faith?...

 

Bringing priests into balance

Clericalism, the disorder of clergy who arrogate authority to their own persons, is rampant -- we are really suffering from it. This age, the post-conciliar one, was supposed to usher in a new ascendence of the People of God, the laity; instead, we have priests thinking they are owed abject obedience for the merest prudential considerations (where in the past they would not have thought to venture) and laypeople unable to assert their God-given ability to judge circumstances. 

I concur with Peter Kwasniewski's analysis of the root of the problem of clericalism, which centers on The Priest Praying for Himself at Mass. 

What might have been “self-evident truths” once upon a time are no longer evident to many clergy, to their superiors, and to their flocks. One of these truths is staggeringly obvious, yet its implications seem to be not only ignored, but suppressed: the priest, too, has a soul to sanctify and save.

He demonstrates what has been lost in today's worship: the prayers at the Mass that the priest says for himself, for his sanctification, for his worthiness. Certainly, clericalism would be much mitigated if the priest could be reminded, daily, that he ought to be humble, that God is ready to humble him, and that humility is a condition much to be sought after.

Nearly all of these prayers [from the Traditional Latin Mass, reproduced in the article] were simply struck from Paul VI’s Order of Mass, which is denuded and exiguous by comparison, and which, practically speaking, is almost totally extroverted and procedural in nature. It barely addresses the subjective disposition of the one offering or his need for preparation. It hardly touches on his unworthiness and need for purification and mercy. It includes remarkably few signs by which an observer unfamiliar with the Catholic Faith could detect that something wondrous, astonishing, and awesome is taking place, before which angels veil their faces and men beat their breasts.

What were the reformers thinking? For them, the prayers of the priest for himself must have looked like exaggerated medieval piety and devotionalism, too introspective and clericocentric; the liturgy is “for the people,” after all. But this is manifestly a false view both of what liturgy is and of what these specific prayers are meant to accomplish.

With the Novus Ordo, priests do not, as a matter of ritual, pray these prayers (such prayers as "Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause from the nation that is not holy; deliver me from the unjust and deceitful man…. Send forth Thy light and Thy truth: they have conducted me and brought me unto Thy holy hill, and into Thy tabernacles…. To Thee, O God, my God, I will give praise upon the harp: why art thou sad, O my soul, and why dost thou disquiet me?... deliver me by this Thy most Sacred Body and Blood from all my iniquities, and from every evil; make me always cleave to Thy commandments, and never suffer me to be separated from Thee... Let not the partaking of Thy Body, O Lord Jesus Christ, which I, all unworthy, presume to receive, turn to my judgement and condemnation; but through Thy loving kindness may it be to me a safeguard and remedy for soul and body... " -- and more!). 

Because they are deprived of this ritual of penitential prayer in the midst of the transcendent task they undertake in celebrating the mysteries, I wonder if the effect is to deprive them of the conviction that they must pray, full stop. Personal, intimate prayer is in short supply these days, I think. Seldom are we in the pew reminded that prayer will save our souls. As St. Alphonsus Liguori said, "The man who prays is saved; the man who does not pray is lost." 

I read that great spiritual classic, The Soul of the Apostolate as a new convert; it transformed my spiritual life. In re-reading it many years later, I was surprised that I hadn't quite understood that it's meant for priests (but I still recommend it to you!). Jean-Baptiste Chautard is not shy about warning priests of the danger to their souls if they do not have an interior life, fed by the Masses they are saying and of course by the indispensable time of meditation -- prayer -- where one is present to God on a daily basis. This prayer is what he calls the soul of the apostolate. His message is that no one can hope to bring Christ to others if he has exhausted the interior well of his own soul by neglecting prayer, and the need for prayer begins with a sense of unworthiness.

I watched the first installment of the Mass of the Ages film. The most compelling part was hearing from the priests that saying the Traditional Latin Mass changed now they experienced their priesthood, bringing them into closer personal contact with God by means of the prayers of the Mass. The film does a service by presenting priests who can express the difference between the two forms/rites, the one nourishing a proper humility, the other, sad to say, building up a sense of entitlement. I would love to hear more from them.

The very first time a little chink of light came into my (reform of the reform-oriented) liturgical consciousness was when a dear priest friend related to me his experience of almost losing his vocation; he was rescued by learning and saying the Traditional Latin Mass. That testimony was quite unexpected. Before our conversation, I only thought of my perspective from the pew (even though I admit, I always found something in the priest's demeanor, even when he was trying to be reverent, that gave me pause, and I did at least subconsciously relate it to the way the Mass is celebrated). 

I thought, "Well, that makes sense to me. The prayers of the old Mass do seem deeper for the priest; but it's better for the people to know what's going on and not be so distant." Only gradually did I realize that if the priest's soul isn't being fed in his very vocation, the people will be left hungry, no matter how physically close to the altar they come or how much they understand about their participation. 

To circle back to Peter's article, the old Mass demonstrably invests the priest with a greater sense of the importance of his actions; simultaneously, it divests him of any thought that he is in a position to offer worship because of his personal importance. 

Clericalism is identifying the priest with Christ (or with authority in general) in an inappropriate way. It is the error that posits the priesthood is an identity; it views the faithful as assuming a role: the role of audience, of "participators," of would-be priests if only given jobs to do in the sanctuary. This attitude that the priesthood conveys status (rather than servitude) on the man spills over into life, where priests seem to expect honor for who they are, rather than what they do. Only the traditional rites, of which there are many, emphasize this distinction between man and action -- even more than the Latin rite, the Eastern ones give more of a role to the deacon and place the priest behind the iconostasis where he can hardly be seen. Only the Novus Ordo creates a situation where this distinction can be performatively denied. 

The priesthood is an indelible mark on the man, but the priest acts in persona Christi when he accomplishes what the Church asks of him. He takes on a role. This is the significance of the prayers highlighted in the article, as well as of other matters, such as the vestments that cover him. These things not only radiate a beauty of their own, they cover the man in order to remind him of his, in a sense, imposture; they nearly obliterate him, so that he can perform the rites as they must be performed, that is to say, by the High Priest, Christ Himself. It's also why he speaks in the name of Christ and not in his own name when he absolves sin in the sacrament of Confession.

The Novus Ordo strips those reminders away and creates an identity (and I am using this word separately from the indelible mark) between the man and the person doing the opus Dei of the rites. It allows the priest to impose his personality, using that word with precision, rather than Christ's PERSON-ality. The modern priest is taught that he doesn't need heavy vestments, he doesn't need a prayer of unworthiness. By being a priest he is encouraged to see himself as, well, worthy. 

James Hitchcock wrote about this paradox:

The celebrant of the Mass is now often called the “presider”, in order to minimize his hierarchical role and the idea that he represents Christ in some special way. But ironically, this has led to a new and exaggerated clericalism. In the traditional liturgy the identity of the celebrant was largely irrelevant. But, as Max Weber pointed out, in times of confusion and destruction, authority shifts to the personality of the “charismatic leader”, who appears to understand the movement of history and offers the guidance that established structures no longer provide. As many commentators have noted, a possibly unintended effect of the celebrant’s facing the people at Mass is to emphasize his personality and his “style” of celebration. [My note, after many years have gone by: I'm not sure now that this effect was unintended]

The laity on the other hand are... the laity. We appear at Mass in our own personae. We don't have any particular things we must do outwardly (as a matter of ritual, though perhaps as a matter of good behavior) because we don't have to demonstrate that we are taking on any role. There are lay people who appropriate clericalism! They assume authority because they are lectors or EMHCs or Help Father Out With Everything. They are a nuisance!

Even more, although men and women both are receptive in relation to God, women are more receptive than men by nature. So women are better at being laity than men, and men are better at showing that they are taking on a role. Thus, it's not offensive for a layman to serve a Mass, although he is not ordained, but a woman in the sanctuary can't help looking out of her natural place and somehow betraying her identity. Our Lady is the highest creature, you know. The honor of our race.  Her femininity suits her rank, and no man could usurp it. 

We need the old prayers, because it's not good for us and it's not good for him that the priest believes the deception that he is pretty good, all things considered. We start to think the same about ourselves. And that is how we are in this wretched state.

As Peter Kwasniewski says in his article:

May more and more priests discover this truth and embrace it wholeheartedly, for their benefit, as well as for the benefit of the faithful, living and dead. A holy and zealous priest, plunged into the mysteries of Christ, united with the Savior’s own prayer before the throne of grace, will always benefit the people of God far more than the people-centered or outward-oriented priest that the postconciliar era sought and still seeks to produce.

Why Remain Catholic?

I have at least one draft of a post open here to amplify and react to something written by Peter Kwasniewski, but I have to pause in order to make sure everyone I can reach reads his magnificent response to an anonymous seminarian's heartfelt question, Is There Any Reason I Should Remain Catholic?

The original lament is not specific to one pursuing the priesthood, by any means. As someone who listened to and read everything my husband, Phil Lawler, said and wrote about the liturgical and doctrinal crisis in the Church, as well as the abuse scandal (beginning in the early 90s as a real journalistic inquiry, after more than a decade of nameless suspicions); as someone who has read hundreds and possibly thousands of emails from Fr. Paul Mankowski and Phil to our group of friends, piling on examples and evidence of these dire (and connected) scandals, and contributed a few stories myself to the mix -- the sick and gut-wrenching trail of tears, most of which never even made it into the annals; as someone who strove to rescue a boy from the clutches of a priest fawned over by many, I too have had my share of anguish over my faith. 

Call me naive, but I can remember a night in the early 2000s when I realized with a deep shock that our own bishops simply do not believe in Jesus Christ. They are, as a priest friend memorably preached, "functional atheists." I remember feeling the fool -- utterly betrayed, as if I had been left holding the bag of tricks we call Christianity.

The response Peter gives is the true and good one. I can't pull out quotes because you have to read the whole thing, in order, from start to finish. Let's heed what he says and stick together -- let's remain friends of Jesus Christ, of the saints, of truth, goodness and beauty, of tradition, and of each other!

Someone dear to me said, upon receiving yet another blow from the hierarchy, "We just have to get closer to the cross of Christ -- there is nothing left." Jesus Christ came to save us and He founded this Church. The Church is His Body and as such, will undergo everything that He underwent, including every step of His passion and crucifixion. To be with Him now and hereafter in His glory, we must be willing to suffer what He suffered. He loved us and will love us to the end.