The Holy
Catholic Faith
Where is it And Who is Keeping it?

Has the Post-Conciliar
Church
Lost Custody of the Faith?
All
indications are that is has ...
The “Dark
Ages” — that disdainful term for the period in history following
the collapse of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D. until the 15th
century (a period correctly described as the Middle Ages) is
understood by the secular world to have lasted roughly 1000 years,
beginning in Florence, Italy.
Within the
post-Conciliar Catholic Church, however, it appears that the term
extends well beyond the 15th century; indeed, some 500 years
beyond it! According to contemporary Catholic thought articulated within
the past five papacies, the “Dark Ages” really ended in 1965 at the
conclusion of the Second Vatican Council. All the doctrines and
teachings prior to that Council were only imperfectly, deficiently,
and insufficiently articulated or defectively understood.
The 1000 Years of
Darkness
Only
the Second Vatican Council finally attained to enlightenment
in the divine economy, and after 1,965 years of suspension, it alone
has provided the final, sufficient, and correct understanding
of God and Church, man and nature. Prior to that, according to post-Conciliar
thought, Catholics had essentially lived in darkness, specifically the
darkness of the “pre-Conciliar Dark Ages.” It may be said that where
the Rational Enlightenment “saved the world from religion,” Vatican
II saved the Church from Catholicism.
This argument
— that God concealed the “real” truth from us for either 1500
years on the one hand (concerning Protestants) or for 2000 years on
other (concerning Vatican II) does not, of course, speak well of God’s
munificence, truth, or goodness — and that it is the very argument
to be brought against Protestants by Catholics, is good to keep in mind.
Why would a good, loving, and truthful God conceal the real nature
of the Church, the Sacraments, and true worship from us for so long?
Pay No Attention
to What You See!
We are told so
many times that what we see is no indication of what is real.
It is true in
two venues: the political landscape, which is really of
not much interest to us here except as a paradigm of our being told
that what we perceive to be oppressive, unjust, and despotic, is really
a benevolent government open to all its constituents. We are simply
not socially-enlightened enough (“woke” enough) to see it, you understand.
The other venue,
of course, is the ecclesiastical landscape, specifically
the Vatican, and more specifically the papacies of the Vatican II pontiffs
and the various Dicasteries under them. Within this crumbling landscape
we are told that all the dismantling, removal, renovation, and ultimately
the detritus following Vatican II has resulted in a more beautiful,
vibrant, healthy, and faithful Church, with pews filled at Sunday Masses;
a Church brimming with baptisms, confirmations, marriages, vocations,
ordinations … a chrysalis bursting in a renewal of all things
holy and good! We are simply too “rigid,” too “backward,” not “progressive-enough”
to see it. Because we do not “walk in Accompaniment with the Spirit,”
we are blind … you understand.
From Bergoglio’s
dismissive perspective, “looking back (indietrismo) is useless,”
1
and given Francis’s insolent
treatment of those who worship as our forefathers did for 200 centuries,
they are equally useless as well. They are impediments to his progressive
agenda; to use his words, they are “imbavagliando,” “gagging” the Church.2
His aggressively
Modernist agenda set in motion by Vatican II, apparently, is too far
advanced for the possibility of retrenching. It is “useless” to even
entertain the possibility of rapprochement with the Mass of the
Ages and the 2000-year spirituality inseparable from it; a Mass within
which we immediately find sanctity, solemnity, sacrality, holiness,
heavenliness, beauty, spirituality, form, sobriety, chant, mystery,
the choir of angels; in short, all that is egregiously absent
within the bland, mundane, and very worldly Novus Ordo
“Mass of Paul VI.”
What, Exactly, are We
to Understand by “Keeping — and Having Kept — the Catholic
Faith”?
The notions of
Keeping, and having kept, the Catholic Faith can only be
understood as retaining (keeping), and having preserved (kept), the
one true holy Catholic and Apostolic Faith that has been
kept and practiced for the 2000 years prior to Vatican
II — even when the practice of that venerable Faith has been unjustly
deprived through ecclesiastical duress. That unchanging and unchangeable
Faith is kept in the unwavering allegiance to it despite persecution
and even deprivation. It can be physically removed from us, but
it cannot be taken away from us.
Indeed, why do
we keep anything at all? We only keep what we want and value;
what is good and beautiful. Understanding this, we must ask,
is there anything more beautiful this side of Heaven than the Most Holy
Sacrifice of the Mass? … than the Faith bequeathed to us by our fathers,
by the Saints, by the Martyrs — the Faith that has generated the greatest
and most brilliant constellation of saints and martyrs in the history
of the Church?
It cannot
be the case that Faith of the Church for the 2000 years preceding
December 8, 1965 (when the Second Vatican Council was formally concluded)
is no longer the Faith of the Church now — for if the Faith
is different then the Church, which is the embodiment of that Faith,
is different, and if the Church is different, the Church is no more.
This cannot be. Christ promised that this cannot be.
But it can
be said that the teaching of the Church is now vastly
different from the teaching of the Church for the 200 centuries prior
to John XXIII and his five successors, and most especially in what are
presented to us as the “Conciliar” documents of Vatican II, documents
that vastly, even essentially, diverge from centuries
of incontestably authoritative Catholic teaching.
So much so, in
fact, that in its latest iteration under the papacy of Francis, we have
begun to ask in earnest, perhaps for the first time in our lives, “has
the post-Conciliar Catholic Church, or perhaps more accurately, the
“Post-Catholic-Conciliar-Church” — an increasingly different
Church that first emerged from Vatican II and has continued to
diverge from it through every successive papacy until that rupture with
the past has culminated in a Church, together with its hierarchy, largely
lost custody of the Catholic Faith?
Loathsome
Since beginning this article some days ago, some alarming news has begun
to emerge from credible sources that has necessarily changed the tenor
of this discussion, one which, much to our consternation, now
concerns not simply the nature of the custody of the Faith vis-à-vis
the papacy of Francis and the disaffected ecclesiastical apparatus in
the Vatican under him, but concerning nothing less than the integrity*
of the Catholic Faith itself. It has come to our attention that under
the direction of Pope Francis, English Cardinal Arthur Roche, prefect
of the Congregation for Divine Worship, together with other powerful
figures within the Roman Curia are preparing to completely abolish
— for all time — and with no possibility of reclaiming
— what they perceive as the threat posed by the celebration of the Holy
Sacrifice of the Mass in Latin — in other words, The Latin Mass, TLM,
as it has been celebrated for 2000 years which must yield
to the Novus Ordo (New Order) “Mass of Paul VI”
exclusively — a Mass now barely half a century (54 years)
in the making … and still in the making. In order to accomplish
this with absolute, clinical exactitude, Francis & Friends have determined
to stamp out the Latin Mass as something loathsome.
Such fear of something holy! As though the Mass of 2000
years can be shackled and plunged into a dungeon of unfathomable depth,
hidden from sight, concealed as a destructive secret, and made irrecoverable
to memory! How can we begin to imagine such malice in the Church toward
those within the Church; how are we to begin to grasp the Church
promulgating such an evil law and with an iron fist as hateful
as the crushing fist of any petty dictator?
Too
Catholic (for Ecumenism)
The Latin Mass, however, must go: apart from the many contrived and
ultimately superficial reasons for abolishing the Latin Mass, the principal
reason is this: it is an impediment to Ecumenism, the
very corner-stone of Vatican II. This is the real reason
behind the vitriolic, almost pathological animosity exhibited toward
the Latin Mass by the liberal, Modernist Church of Vatican II and its
principal proponent, Jorge Bergoglio: The Latin Mass is not amenable
to non-Catholics; it is … too Catholic, it bears within itself
the history, the memory, the devotion, the filial love of two hundred
centuries of generations of Catholics who cleaved to the Faith through
persecution and hardship and for many, to the point of the shedding
of their blood.
Dwindling participation on the Novus Ordo (Vernacular) Mass,
and an alarming increase in participation in the (Latin) Mass, especially
among young Catholics, appears to be the principal motivation behind
this draconian measure. The belief that Traditional Catholics will become
Vernacular “Paul VI Mass” Catholics by heavy-handed decree; that they
will be forced into this free-form Mass by Procrustean measures, is
nearly delusional. It will not happen. I do not know what will
happen, but I am confident that this fiction will not occur. Schism
may occur. Were this the case, it would appear from several informed
sources that Francis himself would be the formal cause of schism, and
hence the Schismatic. This is not a shocking possibility.
Of course, we
must ponder the question on everyone's mind: the fearful question that
wrenches our gut: where do Traditional Catholics go from here
— should the hammer fall on the Faithful?
Who is To Answer This?
Shall Canon Lawyers
decide this … who are part of the very ecclesiastical apparatus that
is prejudicial against the continued celebration of the Latin Mass?
Even were Canon Lawyers able to answer this (they are not), it
is not theirs to decide, for:
Ecclesiastical law derives its formal authority from the supreme
legislator understood as the reigning Roman Pontiff who,
in his person, “possesses the totality of legislative, executive,
and judicial power.”
In other words,
since there is no superior above the pope,
3 Francis
is exempt from, and not subject to, Canon Law
… and will do as he has ever done: whatever
he wills — which, as a matter of record, has not
always, or even often, been just, or even good.
Francis alone,
then — temporally speaking — will determine where Traditional Catholics
go from here, and given his outspoken animosity toward the Latin Mass
that preceded Vatican II for 2000 years, and his even greater contempt
for Traditional Catholics, it appears that he is prepared to offer us
two options only:
-
Go to the Novus Ordo (New
Order) “Mass of Paul VI”
-
The second option is intended to
be optimally coercive:
No Mass at all. Essentially, “Attend the Novus
Ordo Mass or leave the Church.”
What crime,
we must ask, have these Catholics committed in continuing to
worship in Latin (until Francis repealed Summorum Pontificum,
three years ago in Traditionis Custodes, 2021) as their Catholic
Religion has always worshipped up to a mere 70 years ago? Is this
the crime that will cause them to be expelled from the
Church?
Who is prepared
to call the Tridentine Mass — the worship of God
in Latin — a crime?
This Missal,
This Mass (the Tridentine Mass), promulgated in Quo Primum
(Pope Pius V, 1570):
“Grant[s]
to all priests of the Latin Rite the right to celebrate the Roman Mass
[0f 1570] in perpetuity.”4
Whether or not,
under the iron fist and the unbending will of Francis, matters come
to such a destructive, divisive, and unimaginably ignominious conclusion
remains to be seen. Perhaps it is rumor after all. By all accounts,
we will know by mid-July.
Why the Vatican has said nothing to quash these rumors is a matter of
ominous speculation.
Geoffrey
K. Mondello
Editor
Saturday, June 22, 2024
Feast of St. Paulinus, Bishop and Confessor
Printable
PDF Version
Comments? Write us:
editor@boston-catholic-journal.com
_________________________
*
integrity: the quality
or state of being complete, sound, unimpaired or undivided, uncompromised
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/integrity;
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/integrity
1
https://thedialog.org/vatican-news/pope-francis-reminds-u-s-catholics-being-backward-looking-is-useless/
2
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2022/06/14/pope-francis-traditionalist-gag-243151
3
“The First See is judged by no one” (#1404, The Code
of Canon Law of the Catholic Church, 1983).
4
“We require then that all men, everywhere, shall embrace and observe
the teachings of the sacred and holy Roman Church, mother and mistress
of other churches; and that at no time in the future should Mass be
sung or recited otherwise than according to the manner of the
missal which we have published, in any of the churches of
the provinces of Christendom, of Patriarchal, Cathedral, Collegiate
or parochial status, secular and regular belonging to any kind of order,
monasteries, both of men and women, also the military orders, and churches
without cure of souls or chapels, in which conventual Mass is customarily
celebrated or ought to be celebrated according to the rite of the Roman
Church, either aloud with a choir, or in a low voice.”
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/pius05/p5quopri.htm