Pints With Aquinas - The Latin Mass Is Not Going Away... and Here’s Why (Dr. Peter Kwasniewski) | Ep. 543

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

In this interview, Matt talks with Dr. Peter Kwasniewski—author, lecturer, scholar and composer—about his (Dr. Kwasniewski's) first experience with the Traditional Latin Mass, and how it deeply impacted him and changed his understanding of what the Mass is all about. The conversation also touches on the beauty (and importance of) sacred music, the impacts of Vatican II upon the Church, and much, much more. 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 https://mattfradd.locals.com/support 💵 Show Sponsors: 👉 College of St. Joseph the Worker: https://www.collegeofstjoseph.com/mattfradd 👉 Truthly – The Catholic faith at your fingertips: https://www.truthly.ai/ 👉 Hallow – The #1 Catholic prayer app: https://hallow.com/mattfradd  💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: https://facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattfradd ? Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas 🎵 TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas 👕 PWA Merch – Wear the Faith! Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com

My wife and I started going to a beautiful Byzantine church because we were surrounded by several very, very unimpressive novice auto churches. And I'm adopting an Eastern tradition that's not the tradition of my forefathers, but I felt like I had no other choice. And now I see this. And I'm like, why did they take this from us? Exactly. The church historian is faced with the enormity of telling a story about the 20th century church that no. saying would be able to believe. I want to talk about what happened after the second Vatican Council you just said how overnight essentially these things changed. I see

myself as a faithful critic, as a son who wants to say, you know, dad, it's really, it's really problematic down here. We need help. Gidey, welcome to Pines with Aquinas. Today I speak to Dr. Peter Kwasnevsky, we spoke for almost four hours, and it was an absolutely riproarer of a show. It really felt like 20 minutes. It was, yeah, very engaging and you're going to love it. And I think if you listen to 20 minutes, you'll probably think this is amazing. It just kept getting better. Dr. Kwasniewski has done a lot of study in this area. We talk about the liturgy, the development of the liturgy, what happened after the Second Vatican Council, the state of the traditional Latin Mass today.

Regardless of your opinion on this topic, I hope you will have an open mind and an open heart to listen to what he has to say, because as I say, Dr. Kosniewski has been writing and studying this topic for a long time, and I know it'll be beneficial no matter where you fall. I want to call out, or sorry, bring your attention to this book, the once and future Roman right,

returning to the traditional Latin liturgy after 70 years of exile. I have been a frequenter of Dr. Kostnevsky's substack over the last several months. And he's an excellent writer. He's also got a great book called Turned Around, which responds to common objections to the traditional Latin Mass. I'll put links below. Please support him, get his stuff. And A, before you go, if you want to, I don't want to tell you what to do.

I don't want to be pushy. But I'd like to invite you to subscribe to the channel. We'd really appreciate it. Click subscribe. Click the bell button. Thanks for being here. Dr. Peter Kwasnevsky, thank you very much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me, Matt.

And I got your last name correct? Perfect. I am really pumped to talk to you. I first heard about you, I don't know, I think it was two years ago. You'll forgive me for saying this, I hope. I had heard things about you. People say things about you online. I don't know if you know this.

Indeed. But I went online and there was this YouTube video. And I think part of me was watching it to kind of dismiss you. Like, not that I knew anything about you, but I just thought, well, who's this fellow? But unfortunately, everything you said made a tremendous amount of sense. And I was like, oh, bummer. And I reached out to our friend, Dr. Scott Hahn, and I said, should I reach out to Dr. Peter to have him on the show?

And he went, absolutely, you should. And then you and I got in touch several months ago while I was in Europe, and we've been back and forth. And I've very much enjoyed your substack and your YouTube videos. And so it's a real honor to have you here in person. Thank you so much. But since I don't really, this is the first time we've met. I don't know a great deal about you, and maybe many of our listeners don't either.

Who are you? Well, let's begin at the beginning. No, I grew up in northern New Jersey. I was born in Chicago, but grew up in New Jersey. I was in a Catholic family. We went to Mass on Sundays. We went to a church in New Jersey. I won't mention the name of it.

It's not necessary. That in retrospect, I can say, was a very progressive church, at least at the time. it's become a bit more conservative since then and so I didn't really know my left hand from my right hand growing up as a Catholic I had the same crummy catechesis that most Catholics had in the 70s and 80s I remember my first communion training

where they were very insistent on on telling us to receive in the hand very very insistent on that of course I didn't have any frame of reference so I didn't know what the big deal was and you know later on as I responded to the message that I was receiving from my parish, that to be active to participate meant to volunteer to do things,

I volunteered to be a lector. Well, first I was an altar boy. Then I volunteered to be a lector. Then I volunteered to be an extraordinary minister of Holy Communion. So, yes, I did it all. I admit it, mea culpa. How old, like, when did you take hold of your faith, or did you never let it slip?

Well, you know, it never, it never slipped. I can't think of a time when I didn't believe. But to use John Henry Newman's distinction, I think a lot of that was not not real assent. I think for me, the real assent, the existential commitment, when I really took possession of my faith and said, I am a Catholic, I believe in Jesus Christ, I believe in his church. That happened in high school, towards the end of high school. Interestingly enough, because of a charismatic prayer group. So one of the things that people don't realize about me is that I've been everywhere, I've done everything. And so I'm not, I wasn't born in some kind of protected traditionalist enclave.

I was in a very mainstream progressive parish. And in, you know, in high school, I think my faith was not very deep. I think it was rather superficial. But a friend of mine who, I think, had a much, much stronger faith at the time. He invited me to come to this youth group with him at a parish in a neighboring town. And, you know, my experience in high school was,

you know, I didn't fit in with the jocks. I fit in with more of the academic types, the artistic types. I was in the choir. You know, I was in all different language clubs, you know, that sort of thing. But I felt somewhat on the outskirts, on the margins.

because the school had, was very clickish, you know. And I think this friend of mine, he saw that I needed something and he invited me to this group. I'm so grateful to him, eternally grateful to him. Because I went to this group, not knowing what to expect, more as a favor to him than anything else. And I met there the most wonderful people, really, really loving, sincere, pious people,

my age, and as well as some older people who were helping to run the group. And it revitalized my faith. It had a profound impact on me. You know, we had every week, we had a prayer meeting, and there were sometimes as many as 60 or 70 young adults there, high school students. Sometimes a few college students would pop in.

We'd have a talk, either from some parents or from some of the other students. We would pray out loud together over each other. We'd sing songs. I mean, and then I, you know, from there I went to, I went to the Stubanville Big Ten meetings a couple of times. So I wasn't, I wouldn't say that I was ever, you know, a charismatic to the extent that I thought, you know, for the rest of my life, I'm going to be doing this. But it was, for about two years, it was rejuvenating and it made my faith come alive. How did you a parents feel about that?

Just because charismatic prayer groups can sometimes instill a sort of enthusiasm in people that parents. don't necessarily appreciate it definitely had that effect on me to some extent i remember it's funny isn't it you know parents they they want their children at least many catholic parents want their children to be faithful catholics but then when the children start taking their faith very seriously and they start to go to a lot of prayer meetings and they they they start to read the bible and they're talking to their parents about doctrine and the parents can can freak out a bit you know what's going on you know and and maybe this is too much and you're you're becoming cultish or something like that definitely happened with me yeah it happens a lot of people um so i think

my parents were perplexed they were perplexed that i was that i was going very regularly to this prayer group that wasn't at my parish um i was less and less active in my parish more and more involved in the prayer group um but you know i think they they saw that it was wholesome and they saw that there wasn't really a particular reason to be concerned about it. So they let it go. There was a bigger conflict in high school when this took place after I was introduced to the charismatic prayer group. So in my senior year of high school, the next seismic shift happened in my life.

And this was discovering philosophy. So up until this point, I'd been studying literature. and history and all the usual high school subjects. German I took at my high school. I was in the drama club. I was in the choir. But I had never studied philosophy. I had never studied theology.

I'm not even sure if I could have told you what they were. But we had electives in senior year. And one of the electives was a political philosophy course. Taught by, as it turns out, a Catholic convert who had been given a great book's education, Chicago style, was very passionate about his stuff. an excellent teacher, one of the best teachers I've ever had. And he, you know, in one semester with a group of about 18 boys, it was an all boys Catholic

school, with about 18 boys, he took us from being your typical American relativists, at least on an intellectual level, you know, that all, you know, all points of view are equal and you can't say that one is, you know, that you have the truth and so, you know, so he took us typical American relativism, you know, and materialism and hedonism and all the sorts of isms that trap people. And, you know, through reading Plato's dialogues, Aristotle, some of the ethics, you know, some Aquinas is five proofs for the essence of God, Augustine, some of the city of God. Just reading these kinds of works was transformative for me. I was, I and my fellow students we were we were intellectually changed so much so I mean just to give you a

sign of that four out of those 18 boys in the class ended up majoring in philosophy in college and getting doctoral and doing doctoral work in philosophy because of that one class that's how huge an impact it had now for me the the shattering force of that course was realizing first of all, there is truth, that you can know the truth, that the truth is, you know, that the truth is, how shall I put this? I think up until then, I had been living mostly on the basis of emotions and opinions. And this course was the first time that my intellect was fully engaged and where I tasted the taste of true wisdom. And it was intoxicated.

for me. I left that semester saying, I want to devote my life to reading these kinds of books. It wasn't even, I want to be a philosopher. It was I want to read Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, at Alia. And so I asked my teacher one day, where can I go to college to study books like this? My parents wanted me to go to Georgetown University. My brother had gone there. I'd already been accepted. They just wanted me to do a more conventional line. in life, I suppose you could say. So I asked him, where can I go? And he said, well, there aren't that many places.

There's actually almost nowhere you can go if you want to go to a Catholic college. But this is, we're talking about the late 80s. Right. But there is this little college in California called Thomas Aquinas College. And you know, you should look into it because this is exactly the kind of stuff

they do all the time. I thought to myself, wow. a school that does what we did in this semester class, but all four years in every subject, you know, where, you know, sign me up. How can I, how can I get to this place? So I looked at, it wasn't really the website back that I remember. I mailed, I requested information.

They mailed it to me. I was reading the catalog and just my eyes were popping out. I couldn't believe what I was reading. You know, here, here was a college where I could go and read nothing but great books. Well, it's true. They read a few things that are not. technically great books, but almost all of it is what we would call great books. So I was very excited, and I'll never forget telling my parents, you know, mom and dad, I found this college.

This is really where I want to go. And then, and then they, so what's it called? Thomas O'Connor's college? Never heard of it. Where is it? California. You want to go to California? I was in New Jersey, you know, opposite coast. That was the first strike against it. And how, how big is this college? Oh, it's like 170. I think it was something like 170 back then. 170. That's insane. Your high school is bigger than that. So my parents were very antagonistic about me going to TAC. And it actually blew up. I mean, I don't need to go into all the details, but it was a really messy situation. So much so that for the sake of keeping peace and the family, I made a deal with them. I said, I'll go to Georgetown because you want me to. I'll go to

Georgetown for a year and I'll see how it is and I'll see how I like it. And if I really can't stand it and I'd like to start over again at TAC, then that's what I'm going to do. Well, they hesitantly agreed to that, just assuming that I would forget all about TAC and just stick with Georgetown, especially because you have to start over at TAC so you'd be losing a year. So anyway, so I went to Georgetown University. That was a bizarre experience. It was a totally non-Catholic Catholic school. I mean, I don't think I need to tell you about Georgetown University in D.C. You know, we got... What were some instances of the Catholic? You know, the first week I was there as a freshman, we had freshman orientation, and part of the

freshman orientation was the mandatory sex ed demonstration about how to use condoms. And I mean, it was just, it was just that kind of atmosphere, not just secular, but I think Catholic schools, when they go rotten, are the worst. Crupsio optimi pessima, the corruption of the best is the worst, right? There, they just, they just go into, so there was constant, constant drunkenness in the dorm. I was in a co-ed dorm. People were sleeping with each other all the time. It was, it was a really, it was a nightmare from a social point of view.

And remember, I'd been through the charismatic prayer group. I was taking my faith seriously. I didn't want to be in an environment like that. But then on the academic side, it was also bizarre because I was in something called the liberal arts seminar, which was supposed to be a special great book seminar. that's, you know, for freshmen. And instead of starting with ancient thinkers, which is the logical place to start

in any great books curriculum, we started with 19th century poets and revolutionary philosophers. So here are freshmen who've never studied philosophy. I had studied a little bit of philosophy, as I said, but these, my peers had studied nothing at all. And they were being given Kant and Hegel and Feuerbach and Nietzsche.

It's almost like the professors were trying to, break down their Christian faith or their Catholic faith. I mean, that's the only thing I can think of. And, I mean, I did have a better experience at Georgetown literature. We were reading the romantics like Wordsworth and Blake, and that was really enjoyable. And then that's where it was in the literature part of the liberal arts seminar that I met John Henry Newman for the first time.

I forget what it was by Newman that we read, but for whatever reason, it was a moment for me of core ad core loquitur. Newman spoke to my heart, and I started grabbing hold of any Newman I could find. And that's actually how, partly how I consoled myself in that year at Georgetown, which was otherwise rather miserable, was just reading as much Newman as I could get hold of. I read the Apologia of Provita Sua. I read, started reading the parochial in plain sermons, didn't finish them until later. You know, I began to read the idea of a university, also didn't finish that until later.

But the point was that Newman was very much in the mix. And I think actually reading Newman filled me with more longing than ever to go to Thomas Aquinas College. So I just remember sitting down with my parents. It was, I think, the spring semester of my one and only year at Georgetown at a restaurant in Georgetown called 1789 of all ironies, telling them, this university is not for me. And I'm going to start over at TSC. And they didn't take it very well, but I did. I went there on my own nickel because my dad said, well, I'm not going to support you to go to TAC.

We think it's a bad idea. But there's a happy ending to that story. And I just want to wrap it up with that. To say about a year into my time at TAC, I started talking to my parents again because there had been a rupture. And I said to them, you know, I really want you to come out and visit this place. I know you think we're crazy out here,

but I really want you to come and visit because I think you'll have a very positive experience. So begrudgingly, they agreed to come out and visit. They did come, and they loved their visit. They loved the people they met. It was completely different from what they had imagined. I think they had imagined some kind of Waco, Texas, you know, well, I mean, like, what was in Waco, Texas?

It was the branch Davidians or whatever, you know, just some kind of weird. sect you know that that's what they had imagined um but they loved it they loved the place and they ended up becoming donors to thomas squionis college so they had a they had a 180 on that topic um but okay so you asked me who am i i fell in love with philosophy when i left tacc i went to catholic university of america and i did my master's and doctorate in philosophy the reason i went into philosophy is that i wanted to study the works of primarily st thomas aquinas and back in the mid-90s, in most universities, Catholic or otherwise,

the only way you could study Aquinas was by studying philosophy. The theology departments, the religious studies departments were not reading Aquinas. He was Passet, he was a medieval sexist. I mean, whatever kind of reductionistic account you wanna give of Aquinas, he was definitely out of fashion back then. It's not like it is today where everybody's talking about Aquinas,

you know, and you can go online and find, you know, the Thomistic Institute and just, you know, know, serried ranks of Dominican Thomists everywhere, just conquering the intellectual, Catholic intellectual world. It wasn't like that in the 90s, I can assure you. So I went into philosophy to be a Thomist, to be trained in Thomism. At Catholic University of America, the School of Philosophy run by Jude Dardy, may he rest in peace, that was a program where probably three quarters of the course offerings were to mystic. And I mean, teacher. who were using the Summa Theology A as the course text

and lecturing about that and from that. So I had a wonderful, wonderful training at CUA. I'm so grateful for that. And so really, the direction of my life for a while was very much in Thomistic philosophy, tomistic theology. Then I was hired by a place called the International Theological Institute

in Goming, Austria. You visited Gaming, didn't you? Yeah, I just came back. I was there for two months. Yes. The ITI had moved. It's in Vienna. now near Vienna, but...

That's right, that's right. It's a gorgeous place, isn't it? Yeah, very. Yeah, so I went to Gomming when ITI was there to be a philosophy professor. I was hired by a man named Mikhail Walshstein, who teaches at Steubenville now, but he was the founding president of ITI.

I loved my time there. My wife and I, we had just gotten married in a traditional Latin Mass wedding, and then we moved to Austria, and I started my first job. And that's where our children were born. over there. So I was in Gombing for seven and a half years.

The funny thing is I showed up and they said, okay, we need you to teach philosophy, so you'll do this metaphysics course and you'll do this logic course. But by the way, we're kind of short-staffed and we need people to cover various theology courses as well. You're a Thomist, you can do it. So then I began teaching to mystic theology courses.

These were very much like what I described, you know, taking a treatise from the Summa like the treatise on charity or the treatise on law and grace and just reading it through with the students and discussing it. It was kind of a discussion, great books program. That's the way the ITI has run, like TAC. So I ended up teaching as much theology there as I did philosophy.

And that was with the consent of Cardinal Shunborn, who was the grand chancellor of the ITI for all those years. I had a mandatum from him to do that. So, yeah, so then after that, I left ITI in Austria to join the founding team of Wyoming Catholic College. I was one of the ones who helped establish that place in 2006. It opened in the summer of 2007, and I was there for 12 years. Again, teaching philosophy, theology, music, and then art history as well. I better stop here because I could just go on for two log.

That's beautiful. When you were at Georgetown, was your faith sustained through your reading only, or did you also have other Catholic friends that you continued to pray with? I met some good Catholic folks at Georgetown. I don't want to paint the picture that it was just a wasteland. There was a definite countercultural minority there. There was a very active pro-life club on campus that I was involved in. The Knights of Columbus were active. They had a college campus chapter. there were students who went to daily mass. I did go to daily mass there. It was obviously the Novus Ordo in Dalgrin Chapel.

It was peculiar because the Jesuits who offered mass there usually came into church wearing a suit and tie. And then they'd come out wearing a chasible, which was, I'd never see that before. I found it absolutely bizarre. But of course, that's the way the Jesuits often are, unfortunately. So, yeah, I did, my faith life continued. but I think it was primarily at that point.

It was very bookish, very intellectual. I think if I hadn't grown up Catholic, I would have been one of those, I might have been, by God's grace, one of those people who read his way into the church, you meet people like that. They read voluminously and they have this massive intellectual construct

of the truth of Catholicism. And then there's often a kind of bitter shock when they actually encounter on the ground something that doesn't look at all like what they studied intellectual. So I think that maybe I was spared that because I'd had such an eclectic and experience with Catholicism up until that point. How did you first hear about the Latin Mass? Yeah, so the Latin Mass wasn't a part of my life until I got to Thomas Squinus College.

In fact, I had barely heard of it. I heard of it once in high school, the same philosophy teacher that I've been. talking about who changed the course of my life. He also mentioned in passing that Catholics used to celebrate mass in Latin. And it just stuck in my head like, oh, that's interesting. I, you know, I never heard that before, you know, that Catholics used to do mass in Latin. But then I got to TAC and I met for the first time the dreaded phenomenon of the traditionalists. You know, the student who, so like the female student who always wore the Mantea, you know, and, you know, the... Had you heard about these people prior?

No, I didn't really know that there was such a thing. I had never seen a Mantea until I got to TAC. And so, yeah, I met some students there who told me, you know, and I think they had scoped me out pretty well. Like, okay, this guy, he's serious, he seems devout. we should tell them about the secret Latin Mass that we have going on here. So one day some students said to me, you know, Peter, sometimes the chaplain celebrates a Latin Mass on the side, you know. And, you know, do you want us to let us, do you want us to let you know about it when it happens?

I said, sure. I mean, I'm curious. You know, I'm game for anything. I'm open to learning, new things, you know. So, it turned out that one of the two chaplains at the time, you know, the chaplains officially at TAC did the Nova Sordo in Latin, but one of them was deeply devoted to the traditional mass. And again, we're talking about the early 90s. So this is Cardinal Mahoney's period. He was...

Yeah, for those who aren't familiar with him. Yeah, Cardinal Mahoney is like Cardinal Supich today. I mean, he was just, I think that's all you need to say, really. So he was against the Latin Mass. He was against many things good, true, and beautiful. But he, you know, when John Paul 2's indult came out, Cardinal Mahoney's response was, okay, we'll have a Latin Mass in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles somewhere on Sunday. Now, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles is gigantic.

So he picked four different locations in the whole Archdiocese, four different places, and said on the first Sunday it's here, on the second Sunday, it's here on the third Sunday. So if somebody actually wanted to go every Sunday, they had to do like a tour of the, you know, of Southern California. Well, TAC was on that roster. But funnily enough, the Sunday, the Sunday TLM at TAC didn't really make an impact on me because I was so involved in the college choir for all four years. I was even the assistant director of that for a period as time went on. And I was so involved in the college choir that I always went and sang at the main Nova Sort of high mass on Sundays where we had. the choir sang polyphony and chant, and that was it. So I just didn't even really experience that Sunday TLM that happened once a month. But the chaplain would say private masses, I don't know how often. I wish I had kept a diary because then I could look something like this up. I want to say it was a couple of times a month.

He would do a private low mass in the Hacienda Chapel, which is attached to the president's house at TAC. So I have to think, you know, looking back, that the president knew about this, and approved of it. Otherwise, it's not like people would just sneak into the president's chapel and do this. So he must have known about it and at least tolerated it, if not approved of it.

But it was what I like to call, it was our clandestine mass because it was always a whisper, tonight at seven o'clock, you know, Father's gonna do the mass in the Hacienda Chapel, you know? And so the word would spread and a group of us, maybe 25, 30.

I love that this is how kids at TAC rebel. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Secret party where it will be whiskey and dough. Well, there was that too. Okay. I could assure you there was some drinking that took place against the rules. But anyway, kids are going to rebel in one form or another. And I would hope that they would, I would hope that they could rebel in a healthy way rather than an unhealthy way.

So I actually remember going to this mass. Yes, this is the first time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was the first time I had ever experienced. Was it a low mass? It was always a low mass.

Well, no, no, no. was mostly low mass there. Later on, we did some sung masses. I'll get to that in a sec. I just remember going a few times and being really taken with it, mystified by it, provoked by it, because from the beginning, I did not know what was going on, like most people who attend the Latin Mass for the first time or for the first few times. I didn't know what was going on. I couldn't hear the priest, but it was so solemn and it was so focused and it was so otherworldly that it actually had like a pretty tremendous effect on me. I would say it, the difference was this. And we'll get into this, of course. But I think that until that

point, every experience of the liturgy I had had was that the liturgy was something that was being done for the people. And this is not to talk about abuses or any kind of nonsense, but just that I had, for so, I had never seen Mass Adorientum, you know, even at TAC, the Latin Nova Sorda was done versus Populam, which is, I think, a big mistake, but they've never, they've never bent from that policy, probably for political reasons. I want to say a big thanks to the College of St. Joseph, the Worker, based in Stubanville, Ohio. You'll recognize many of their faculty and fellows from the show, people like Dr. Andrew Jones, Dr. Jacob Imam, Dr. Mark Barnes, Dr. Alex Plato. Listen to this. Their program combines the rigor of an elite bachelor's degree with the practicality of training in the skilled trades,

and their tuition model is structured so that students graduate without crippling debt. if you're a bright young man thinking about what college to go to apply to a place where you not only learn the good but gain the power to do it apply to the college of st joseph the worker if you're a parent look into this college for your children and if you're not in either category just consider supporting the mission go to college of st joseph dot com slash matt frad to learn more that's college of st joseph dot com slash matt frad to learn more there will be a link below thanks So anytime I'd ever seen the mass, it was the priest facing the people, and he was kind of talking to them, and he was looking at them, and we were making responses. And so it was this communal group activity. And so the idea that we were there to focus on Almighty God and to direct our adoration, our worship towards him,

was not something that I think had ever impacted me about mass. Right. It's like you show up and realize in your bones, oh, this isn't about me. Exactly, exactly. It was the realization, of I'm there's a prayer that's going on here that I have tiptoed up to I'm almost on the outside looking in there's this tremendous mystery taking place and I'm almost in the shadows like on the

edge of it you know almost like touching the garment from the edge of the garment but it's not directed towards me it's not for me in any kind of obvious way I mean of course ultimately it is for my sanctification that's why God gave it to us but Primarily and fundamentally, it's something we're doing to him and for him. Something we're doing towards him is what I want to say. And that, I think, is why it sanctifies us. So I think that what these first low masses taught me, I wasn't trying to follow in a missile.

I don't think I could have because nobody had ever showed me how to follow in a missile. I think what I just learned is a different kind of prayer, a different form of prayer, a contemplative form of prayer. something that is more interior, something that's more receptive, a kind of prayer of waiting and of being taken up into something greater than one can understand. This was my first experience of these low masses. So, of course, the effect of these experiences

was, as it is on any curious person, The effect of it is to make you start asking questions, like, what is this? What, you know, where did this come from? Is this legitimate? You know, is this really the way the church worshipped for so many centuries? I mean, I had all these sorts of questions. And there were students at TAC who could, whom I could talk to and who knew some answers to these things. So they would say, oh, yeah, this is the way everybody was doing things before the 1960s.

And, you know, yeah, it was a huge change. I mean, this was all brand new to me. I was completely, I was like drinking from the fire hose, you know. And so then, you know, then the, the bit of advice came to me that comes to many people, you know, oh, you have to read Michael Davies. Back then, Michael Davies was the author, the one who talked about these things. So I started reading some Michael Davies and it was then, you know, the scales began to fall from my eyes. I began to learn about the history of the liturgy, about all the things that had been lost, changed,

why they were changed you know and I mean I have to admit it was that was the beginning of for me many decades of struggling you know that just that simple experience of seeing such a radically different way of worshipping

set up for me a whole nest of problems that I had to work through and that I basically ended up working through for 20 or 30 years you know so wow yeah i shared this in my recent interview with michael knolls which i think i sent to

you but just to share it again i mean my wife and i started going to a beautiful bison teen church because we were surrounded by a you know several very very unimpressive novice auto churches and i had chosen to spend an eight-day silent retreat at a byzantine monastery where was it Wisconsin and the town itself was settled by German Catholics and on the last day or the second to last day of my retreat since it was a small town one of the monks invited to take me to the local museum

and so he had the key and we let ourselves in and that's when I started seeing all of this cool Catholic stuff see I don't even know the names of it because that's how deprived we've been but the canopy for the Eucharistic processions, the beautiful vestments, the rosary beads, that were serious-looking rosary beads. Everything was serious and beautiful. And I felt angry.

And I felt angry because I thought, here I am, I'm adopting an Eastern tradition that's not the tradition of my forefathers, but I felt like I had no other choice. And now I see this, and I'm like, why did they take this from us? Exactly. What about this was so offensive

that they had to strip it away? So it was a similar, kind of an anger. Yes, I think a lot of people have that experience of I've been robbed. I mean, I can't tell you, I've had countless people share their stories with me of discovery and feel very much as if, you know, and I don't say this to cause offense to anyone,

one. As I'm going to explain, you know, in our conversation, I was working in and with the Nova Sort of for a long, long time. But I think many of us experience it as like the difference between tiptoeing in the shallow pool, in the kiddies pool at the, you know, on one side of the pool or doing a dive into the into the deep end. You know, there's a, there's such a difference in depth between the old form of worship and the new form of worship. And, and you, as a, As you experience the two of them side by side, this actually just becomes more and more apparent all the time. I should mention, because you asked me about,

was it the low mass I was going to, the other big discovery that happened for me in college, liturgically speaking, was learning Gregorian chant. I'm a musician. I've been singing for all my life. I was in the children's choir at my parish. I was in the young adults contemporary band as well. Believe me. It was crazy. Yeah, I know. I've heard that. And so, you know, I've been singing all my life, but I had never encountered Gregorian chant until I went to Thomas Gronis College. Again, this was another one of those hidden treasures, right? It's kind of crazy to think about it, right? The only form of music that dominated the Western world for centuries, the form of music that was at the root of every other form of music, the music that was sung in every single Catholic church across the world from one end of

of the earth to the other, all of that disappeared almost overnight in the 60s and 70s. It's unbelievable. There are things that happened that are hard to believe. Because as my friend Henry Sear, church historian, he says, the church historian is faced with the enormity of telling a story about the 20th century church that nobody sane would be able to believe, right?

That, you know, when you read a historian, you want to be able to believe them. And if they say something that sounds ridiculous, then you stop reading them. Well, a history of the 20th century church is like that, you know. But anyway, at TAC, we had a great scola. It was run by students. And I showed up on campus, and I was recruited into it right away. They figured out I could sing and was like, okay, you got to get into the scola.

And, of course, I had already heard about Gregorian chant as this kind of mythical beast. And so I thought, this is going to be fun. I want to get into this chant scola. I'd listened to, in high school, I had found some recordings of chant. So I knew what it sounded like, but I hadn't heard, I hadn't never heard anywhere in church. Gregorian chant is the sort of music that you don't have to try to enjoy. Yeah, exactly. There are certain kind of maybe a classical music that you have to really try to enjoy,

especially if you're not used to that type of music. But I find that even, like my daughter said to me the other day, play Gregorian chant, and I gave her my headphones, and she was sitting in a chair, and she says, it's the most beautiful music in the world day. And I think she is, right. Yes, I do. I mean, after decades of singing it, I would agree. I think that it has a sublime and transcendent beauty to it that no other music can touch. And that's because it was crafted by, it emerged from the souls of God-loving and God-fearing individuals, monks, mostly, and anonymous monks. They wrote it for the love of God. They wrote it to praise God. And it was handed down from generation to generation as this amazing treasure. But so it finally got handed down to me at TAC in the Scola. We sang it for the

Novos Ordo. We were not singing for the traditional Latin Mass at that time. And I fell in love with it. I loved the boliphany. I loved the chant. I thought this is the most marvelous music in the world. Why isn't every single Catholic church singing this music? It was just an obvious question. I think anybody who hears sacred music done decently, I mean, it has to be done decently. It can be done badly. But if it's done decently, any normal Catholic's response would be this is religious music. This music fits the mass. I mean, I suppose there are Catholics who are so badly habituated to the the Haugen Haas type music that they would actually be offended by it or something. But I think the normal reaction of a person who hasn't been propagandized against it would

just be to say, this is beautiful music that's fitting to the church. You know, it sounds churchy, right? It's got a churchyness. What's interesting is even when you watch Hollywood movies throughout the 80s and 90s, the sort of Catholicism Hollywood wants to present is that type of Catholicism. It is the beauty and the Grigorian chant and the incense as if to say, I don't know what does that say about. Of course.

I mean, no one was playing that lift you up on eagle's wings or whatever. Yeah, of course. I mean, you know, it's funny because even in Hollywood, when the albino assassin monk emerges, you know, from the dark corner, it's something like Diaz Ere playing, right? It's not, you know, let us build the city of God or something like that.

You know, it's, of course, Hollywood understands what works, what doesn't work. But yeah, so the discovery of Gagorian chant was a watershed moment for me. Initially, it wasn't really something that I connected with the traditional Latin Mass, because that's not how I encountered it. I just encountered it as a musical form

that was being used at the Nova was Ordo. But by the end of my time at Thomas Aquinas College, some friends of some friends and I were singing Gregorian chant at the Latin Mass when we could, when we could arrange it, when things worked out. Well, that's when I got to be familiar with the missacantata, the sung mass. Okay. And, you know, there's so much to talk about, but let me just try to make this point. For me, the discovery of the Latin Mass was like, it was like multiple layers of revelation. Because the first thing I encountered, and the only thing I knew for a while was the low mass. So it's, you know, 35 minutes of silence or 40 minutes of silence.

It could be a little faster than that. But at least in the chapel where I went, it was about 40 minutes. You know, it's just this oasis of silence. It's almost like Eucharistic adoration, right? This way that you could describe it to somebody who doesn't know what it's like. so very quiet, you know, very contemplative. But then I discovered the Miscata, where everything is being sung, you know, the antiphons are being sung, and the orations, the prayers are being sung,

and the readings are sung, you know, and it's, you know, and usually there's incense that's brought in. This is like a whole new level of glory and beauty that the mass has. And it's, you know, for me it was like discovering the mass yet again, right, on a higher level you know now now now this is the sung mass wow and for a few years that's all i you know that was the highest form of mass that i knew and then one day i went to a solemn high mass right with the deacon and the subdeacon and you know armies of acolytes and and it was even more splendid and i you know it was like it was like another veil of heaven being lifted you know now now i can see the whole hierarchical act

of worship that you have with the priest, the deacon, and the subdeacon, which is very ancient, that, you know, that way of worshiping. Yeah, I'm just now realizing I don't think I've ever been to a high mass then. I think a lot of people just assume that if they're singing, it must be the high mass. Yeah, well, there's also a terminological issue here because in the British world, they often say sung mass for what we call in America high mass, and then they'll say high mass for what we call solemn high mass. So it's a little bit of terminological confusion. But I'm just saying that when I discovered the solemn high mass with the deacon and the subdeacon,

that was yet another revelation of the glory of our liturgical tradition. And then a few years after that, I went to a pontifical, a solemn pontifical mass for the first time. Okay, at that point, it was just like the Book of Revelation, you know. And how does that differ? I don't think I've ever been to one. Well, that's when a bishop is the celebrant. Okay.

And in a pontifical mass, you have the bishop with an assistant priest, a deacon, a subdeacon, many more men. ministers, doing all kinds of elaborate ceremonial. It's the form of the mass that is the most regal, the most complicated, the most symbol-laden and rich. It's what you would see for priestly ordinations, or for the consecration of a virgin, or for at least oftentimes the giving of confirmation,

there might be a pontifical mass with confirmation in it, that sort of thing. So then, you know, years later, when I was studying the liturgy, I discovered, oh, wait a minute. So actually, the way it worked historically, it was the other way around than the way I experienced these things. Historically speaking, if you go to the early church, the bishop was everything. He was the center of the church. All of the early masses were the bishop's mass, surrounded by his presbyters, his, I won't say

court, because that's perhaps an anachronistic way of speaking, but you could say court, his Senate, as it were. But as the church spread, as the church grew, then the bishop couldn't be the only one to celebrate the Eucharist anymore. So then the presbyters, the priests, began celebrating the Eucharist in many different places on behalf of, with the blessing of, in communion with the bishop. And so the original form of mass was pontifical mass, though not necessarily as elaborate as it became in the Middle Ages. And then a derivation of that, a kind of a step down, a simplification was the solemn mass, priest, deacon, subdeacon, which could be done away from the bishop.

And then a step down from that, another simplification was the low mass, which was really intended as a private devotional exercise, usually for monks. And then what we call the sung mass or the misocontata is basically a sung low mass. And so it's just interesting that in the history of the liturgy, um just like in the history of languages too what's what comes first is it's not like darwinian evolution it's not the simple and then the complex the complex comes first and then you have various simplifications of it that happen later on for usually for convenience or for devotional reasons um so i mean i would really encourage i know it's not easy nowadays some people can't get to a latin of mass at all i feel i feel

really badly for them and i hope that that changes under leo the 14th um but if you can get you can get to a solemn mass, I really encourage people to do that because it's the fullness of the Roman right. You see things there that you'll, that will make a lot, I mean, that help to explain things that happen at the other forms of the mass. And similarly, if you can get to a pontifical mass, let's say, priestly ordinations for the fraternity of St. Peter, which happened every year in Lincoln, Nebraska, it's worth it, you know, it's really worth it to see these things. I want to talk about what happened after the Second Vatican Council. You just said how overnight, essentially, these things changed.

And I want to enter into that by sharing this quotation with you. I was in Croatia recently, and I was reminded of Medjugoria, and I was then reminded of a book I had read many years ago by Wayne Weibel. I don't know if it was called The Message or something like that, but it was he purported to have in allocutions of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The point, that's not the point. Here's the point. He goes to his first Catholic Mass, and he's a Lutheran.

And he says this, quote, I was nervous in the beginning, but then surprised to find out how similar it was to our own Lutheran service. Indeed, with the exception of a few words, the liturgy was almost the same. What? What is that? Yes, yes.

And now, so did we take our beautiful liturgy and make it Protestant? Or did the Protestants see our novice order want to adapt to it? What happened? This is a fantastic question. And the answer, I'll do the best I can to put this answer in a succinct way. So what he says is good news, I'm horrified by. No, I'm horrified by too. Yes. I think, let me just take a stab at it from this angle. If you look at the liturgical movement, and it's really important to think about the liturgical movement. What is the liturgical movement? It began in the 19th century with Dom Prosper Geronté, at least he's sort of the honorary grandfather of the liturgical movement. He's the one who

reestablished Benedictine monasticism in France after the French Revolution. He's the one who revived Gregorian chant. He's a very, very important figure. But he's known especially for two works. One is called the Liturgical Year, which is a long series of commentaries on every day of the Catholic liturgical year. And it was read by families everywhere in France. The family of St. Therese of Lysieu read that at night aloud for the whole family. They read Garanget's liturgical year. That's how she received her education in these things. But Garanget also wrote a book called Liturgical Institutions from 1841 to 1850 is when he wrote this book. Very important work. It was just recently translated for the first time into English and published by Oscee Press.

So if people are interested in that, they can check that out. But why is the liturgical institutions important? It's in this work, Geronje basically says that what Catholics need is they need to rediscover the treasure of the liturgy as they've inherited it. They need to learn about it. They need to enter into it more deeply. They should learn to follow it better. and they need to be careful about deviations from the true spirit of the Roman liturgy.

And part of the deviation that he was concerned about is what he called the, or I should say, maybe the overall deviation he was worried about is what he dubbed the anti-liturgical heresy. And he spends many pages on this. Basically, the anti-liturgical heresy is something that pops up a day. different points in church history. But anytime people become impatient with the ceremonies or rights of the church and they want to simplify them radically, anytime they want to put them into the vernacular and not in a sacred, dedicated special language, anytime they want to make it more focused on the people and on the act of participation of the people understood as people saying

and doing things. And these are the sorts of things that he picks up on in his history of the liturgy as he says they are anti-liturgical because they undermine the essence of the Catholic liturgy. And he says the worst sort of rash of this anti-liturgical heresy was what took place during the Protestant Reformation or Protestant Revolt. During that period, that was the first time that you had people like Luther, Calvin Zwingli, saying the worship should be in the vernacular language only, in the common language of the people. That was the, if not the very first time, certainly the most influential moment when the vernacular sort of erupted onto the scene was because of the Protestant revolt. Also, Luther wanted to turn the priest or the minister

towards the people. He wanted to have the mass not as a sacrifice, which he called an abomination, but as a meal, as a fellowship meal, right? With, you know, music in German and so forth. So I think that for sure a lot of the aspects that the liturgical reformers of the 20th century in the mid-20th century arrived at were basically the same as what the Protestant reformers arrived at in the 16th century. And this is what Garanjay called the anti-liturgical heresy. And what's so ironic about that is Garanjay is considered the grandfather of the liturgical movement, and it was his grand children, so to speak, the liturgists of the 50s and 60s, who were promoting a line that was diametrically opposed to the line that he promoted.

So I think that's important to get out onto the table. To be more focused, what happened? Well, Joseph Ratzinger wrote this very powerful essay called The Theology of the Liturgy, which you can find in his collected works in volume 11, published by Ignatius Press, in which he says, and he's writing after the Second Vatican Council, he says, tragically, in the middle of the 20th century, many Catholic theologians arrived at the conclusion that Trent had been wrong and Luther had been right all along, that the mass shouldn't be considered a sacrifice, that this is a pagan notion, that this is not something, that this is

foreign to a properly Christian understanding of the Eucharist. The Eucharist is a fellowship meal of love. That's what it's about. And Luther emphasized this, so did the other Protestant reformers, and they were right. And the Council of Trent and basically everybody else in the Catholic Church was wrong. And Rotsinger goes on to reject this, of course, and he says, this is not true. In his usual way, Rotsinger very nicely brings in St. Augustine, book 10 of the city of the city of God. And he says, it is a sacrifice, but it's a sacrifice of charity. And so, in fact, charity, love is at the center, is at the heart of the mass, but it's still a true and proper sacrifice because our Lord Jesus Christ is offering himself to the father in his body, blood,

soul, and divinity. So it is a sacrifice, but it's a unique, all-sufficient sacrifice of love. And, you know, no longer a bloody killing of an animal victim, you know, as it would be for pagans or in the old covenant. So anyway, I bring up the Rotsinger essay to say, he agrees that there is a problem with a Protestant or a Protestant or Lutheran or even Calvinist mentality that infected the minds of some liturgists. This is connected with the view of the original Protestants and of the liturgical reformers that the worship of the early church, you know, the early centuries of the church was, in their minds, it was a fellowship meal. It was in the vernacular, the priest was facing the congregation, et cetera. So the Protestants re-envisioned or reimagined

early Christian worship in that way, and that's why they changed it to be that way. And then in the 20th century, almost as if they were playing catch-up after 500 years, many liturgical reformers said, you know what, they were right after all. We need to imitate the early Christians in these respects. So are you saying then that if these changes to the liturgy after the Second Vatican Council had never occurred, the Lutheran liturgy that was see today, I know there's variations of it, would essentially be the same. In other words, we were inspired by the Protestants, not the other way around? Well, it's complicated because I don't, you know, there's a one thing I'm going to say just because it's very important is

there are traditionalists out there who make really outlandish claims without having done the research. So they'll say something like, the Novus order was written by Protestants. You know, you'll see this claim. It pops up on the internet. Well, okay. Yes, there were six Protestants whom Paul the sixth invited to be observers of the liturgical reform process. They did have input. Eve Sharon, the French historian, talks about this. They were not simply observers in this sense of like just sitting there saying nothing.

They were actually involved, but they had no vote, and there were only six of them. And in fact, they didn't write anything. They just had whatever influence they had in their conversations. So, I mean, I think you could feel a little bit scandalized about that, but I don't think it's the same as saying Protestants wrote the Noah's Ordo. Really, what's happening is more what I tried to describe before, that there were Catholic liturgists who came to think of this, this reaching back to the supposedly most ancient early form of liturgy in the same way as Protestants had thought about it.

So a kind of parallel movement to Protestantism, but also one that was intended to appeal to Protestants for ecumenical reasons. And we have proof of this, right? Yes. Oh, yeah. And this is no conspiracy theory. Yes. We have evidence. Eve Chiron is excellent about this. By the way, he's the best historian.

He has a biography of Bunini. Annabali Bunini, the architect of the reform. He has a biography of Paul the 6th. He has a big book on the history of traditionalism. He's a fantastic historian. He's award-winning, very accurate, very objective, totally scientific. He's not a partisan. He's not an axe grinder.

but he has all the documentary evidence that Paul the 6th was very strongly animated by the ecumenical intention of reaching out to the Protestants and of removing any barrier in the liturgical life of the church that could prevent a Protestant from converting and going to the mass and making that his worship service this is a problem this is a big problem because there are many aspects of Catholic tradition that don't make sense to Protestants and that a Protestant has to wrestle with and fight his way through

and finally renounce his errors about. So it's not, it's very sad, but it seems to me that the trajectory that Paul the 6th followed was one that tended towards a lowest common denominator. That is it tended towards Catholics doing things that up until then only Protestants had been doing. So, in a way, removing barriers, but also in the process, removing precious elements of Catholic

tradition that were themselves very educational, very pedagogical, very, they had a message. They had a message that transmitted the Catholic faith, and that was removed. And I think because the liturgy is the greatest catechizer, that is one of the reasons why the Catholic Church on earth right now is in such a pathetic condition, because the liturgy, which is the greatest catechizer, is failing them. Yeah. Well, give us some more info about this Bunini character because I think the Second Vatican Council is quite murky for people.

Even if they've read some of the documents, they certainly don't see it talking about the sorts of revolutions that took place to the liturgy after the council. So, I mean, I've seen quotes from Bunini who say things like every single stumbling block within the mass ought to be removed, something like that. Which I thought was quite shocking because up until that point, and maybe I'm wrong, is that not the case? Well, so here again is a place where we have to be careful. There is a famous statement that Bunini made about removing

stumbling blocks, but he made that in an article in La Servitori Romano talking specifically about Holy Week ceremonies. Okay, that's different. And he's, you know, he's not making a universal claim that this is his plan is to remove everything from the Catholic liturgy that might, but having said that

it was a focused comment, nevertheless, the mentality there was operative, I think, in a large sphere, you know, let me give one example. I'll just, you know, I'll just give a very controversial example. Communion in the hand, okay? Communion in the hand was something that was practiced, it seems, in different places in the early church. We don't know how many places because we have fragmentary records. It's very important to just recognize that everything from the early centuries of the church is fragmentary. So, we,

know what they were doing in this place or in this place at a particular time or what. But we can't say everybody did thus and such throughout the third century because there was a fair amount of diversity going on back there. That's the point that Paul Bradshaw makes a really good scholar of the early Christian liturgies. I want to tell you about Hello, which is the number one downloaded prayer app in the world. It's outstanding. hallo.com slash Matt Frad. Sign up over there right now and you will get the first three months for free. That's like a lot of time. You can decide whether it's useful to you or not, whether it's helpful. If you don't like it, you can always quit. Hello.com slash Matt Frad. I use it. My family uses it. It's fantastic. There are over 10,000

audio guided prayers, meditations and music, including My Lofi. Hello has been downloaded over 15 million times in 150 different countries. It helps you pray, helps you meditate, helps you sleep better. It helps you build a daily routine and a habit of prayer. There's honestly so much excellent stuff on this app that it's difficult to get through it all. Just go check it out. Hello.com slash Matt Frad. The link is in the description below. It even has an entire section for kids. So if you're a parent, you could play little Bible stories to them at night. It'll help them pray. Fantastic. Hello.com slash Matt Frad. So there is evidence that at least in Jerusalem, under St. Cyril of Jerusalem, that communion was given in the hand. However,

interestingly enough, a few centuries later, by the 9th century, nobody was giving communion in the hand anymore in either the West or the East. And this is even more striking because in the East, there was a council, I forget which council it was, but it was, there was a council that actually said people should be giving communion in the hand because the hands are sanctified. They're part of the baptized Christian. They're sanctified. But then a few centuries after that council, nobody in the East was doing it either, even though they had a council specifically telling them, that it was okay to do that and even fitting to do that. So what happened?

Well, it's very simple. People have better ideas, people learn from experience. You know, it wasn't, I mean, you also talked about in your book turning around, which I would highly recommend, that a sort of cloth was placed upon the communicant's hand sometimes, and then they would bend their head down to receive it. Exactly.

Yeah, okay. This much we know for sure that even when community was received in the hand, It was always received in the right hand, because for symbolic reasons, the left hand, you would not receive something in the left hand. So you use the right hand as basically a patent, and then some of the consecrated bread was placed in the hand, and then the person would bow down in adoration and lick it from his hand. Like basically just eat it directly from his hand. He wouldn't feed it to himself. This idea of feeding oneself

is something that only the clergy did traditionally because they're acting in persona Christi, the one who instituted the sacrament. The rest of us are mere recipients of the sacrament and therefore the way that we receive it has to show that we're not feeding ourselves. We're not the agents, we're not the agents, we're the ones, the recipients.

And so even the way that communion was given in the hand in the early church was very different from the way it is now where people receive in their left hand and then they feed themselves with their right hand while they're standing and often walking. This is something that the early church would never have been able to recognize. But the point I was going to make is that by the 9th century universally,

and by the way, what that means universally in the 9th century is that many people independently of each other had to have come to the conclusion that there were too many problems with giving communion in the hand. problems of loss of particles, problems of irreverence, problems of people carrying at home with them. Actually, some people did carry it home with them initially, and then the clergy said, we don't want you to do that anymore, you know, to give it to the sick or something. And so the church adopted a better practice, which was to feed people directly into the mouth.

In the east, everybody kept standing at liturgy because they've always stood during the liturgy. That's the resurrection posture. But in the West, kneeling entered in as a sign of, a sign of humility. And it's for us Westerners, it's a very natural sign of humility and of veneration, right? This is why men kneel when they're proposing marriage, right? It's not something, it's not a transaction, right?

It's something to do humbly on bended knee and with a great sense of veneration. And even more, a fortiori, for God Almighty, for Jesus Christ and the Blessed Sacrament. So by the time you get to the second millennium, everybody is doing communion in the mouth. only given by the priests. And then what happens when John Calvin comes along?

Well, the Calvinists, in order to shatter the belief of people in the real presence of Christ and to insist that that communion is simply a memorial, a kind of token by which we remember what Jesus did for us 1,500 years ago or 2,000 years ago, that he insisted that people be given the bread in their hands, right, as a sign that this is simply bred that is a symbol of something else, right? For Catholics, it is a symbol, but it's more than a symbol, right? As Flannery O'Connor said,

if it's just a symbol to hell with it, right? So Calvin brought in hand communion to undermine the Catholic faith in the real presence. When the, in the 1960s, when communion in the hand was brought in again, it came in primarily through northern Europeans who had a Calvinistic Eucharistic theology. And I'm not going to say,

I'm not going to accuse them of deliberately trying to break faith in the real presence. But what I can say is they had a distorted or diluted faith in the real presence. They wanted to emphasize more the people as the body of Christ, which even led in some places to when somebody, you know, there was this one crazy church where they told people when the priest or Eucharistic minister said the body of Christ, instead of replying amen, they were supposed to reply. we are. You know, so that is, the shift went to the whole congregation as the body of Christ. Okay, that's true. We are the body of Christ. We're the mystical body of Christ. But Jesus Christ is present in his body, blood, soul, and divinity in a unique way. He is substantially present. And that deserves all of the signs of reference and adoration and humility we can give it. And so this changed to a Calvinistic form of communion in the hand. It was not a recovery of ancient.

Christian practice, not at all, right? And when you see something like that, then you realize, okay, that's the extent of the damage that can come through modernistic or progressivist or Protestant-influenced Catholic theologians. That's what was happening in the middle of the 20th century. What do you say to somebody who says, okay, fair enough, maybe this kind of revival, if you want to call it that, of communion in the hand, was inspired by Protestants. But nevertheless, you admitted it yourself. This was something they did in the early church that was good enough for them. If this is good enough the earliest Christians, I know you're saying that it gets better, but I don't know, this seems to be a perfectly appropriate way or else they wouldn't

have done it. Therefore, that's why we're going to do it. Yeah, I mean, the reason that I reject that line of argument is simple. I mean, first of all, there is a development in the liturgy that takes place over time. Just like we talk about development of doctrine, you know, that, you know, the church over time comes to understand more and more deeply what she professes. The faith doesn't change, but the expressions of it grow and expand, you know, Christ didn't start by handing the Summa Theologia to the Apostles. It took 13 centuries to get to the Summa Theologia. And yet we see that as a genuine accomplishment and as something as a kind of progress, right, not a Darwinian evolution, but as a progress where people are delving more and more deeply into the same thing.

That is exactly what happens in the liturgy. When as century after century passes, the rituals are more developed. The symbolism is more pronounced. The beauty is enhanced of the music and the architecture. The signs of reverence and veneration are multiplied. This is exactly what we would expect as people linger longer and longer with the majesty and the mystery of the Holy Eucharist, right, and of really anything to do with the worship of God, is that we want to give God our best. We want to give him the most we can. Deo, optimo, maximo, to God the greatest and the best, right? And so it's absurd to think that suddenly at some point in history we're just going to slam on the brakes and turn the car around and drive it as fast as we can eight or

10 centuries back and pick up an earlier practice that made sense back then. Why would that automatically make sense now? In fact, I'll go farther and say with Martin Mosebach, fantastic, by the way, fantastic author on these questions. Martin Mosebock says, it's very different if all you ever did was received communion in the hand in Jerusalem in the fourth century or fifth century, as opposed to living at a time when for over a thousand years, Catholics had only ever received on the tongue kneeling. Because in the latter situation, when you suddenly reverse that and say, oh, guess what? You can stand now and receive in your hand. It sends the message, you know what? It wasn't such a big deal after all. All these signs of humility and

adoration and so on. You don't need to do that. You've grown up now. And this is the deepest evil in all of this, is that, and I have documentation on all of these things. I'm not making up anything. There were, there were liturgists in the 1960s and 70s who were daring to say things like, in the Middle Ages, everybody had this fearful, craven view of God, that he was a, that he was a, you know, a master and a judge, a severe judge, and that he was, you know, and that we were just sort of, you know, shivering, huddling peasants beneath his thunderous gaze, you know, like Jupiter and the ancient Greeks or something. And, you know, they groveled before God. But we modern people, we are mature Christians. We can stand on our own two feet. We know that Jesus is our

brother and he loves us. And so the way that we approach communion, you know, should be one of chummy fellowship. And, you know, it's a caricature. It's a complete caricature, first of all, of medieval piety, which gave us, you know, St. Bonaventure and St. Bernard of Clairvaux and later St. Robert Bellarmine and, I mean, really, yeah, I don't even know what to say to such a caricature of the Middle Ages and really, well, not just the Middle Ages, but piety all the way down to the middle of the 20th century. But it's also a caricature of our relationship with Christ. Yes, he is our brother, but he is also our Lord and our master. And it's very clear in the Gospels that, that no one is allowed to be chummy with him.

That's not fitting. The closest thing you get to that kind of intimacy is when St. John leans his head against the breast of Jesus at the Last Supper. There's a special relationship there between John and Jesus, but John has given everything to the Lord. He's the virginal disciple. He's the disciple who stands at the cross until the end.

He's the one to whom Jesus entrusts his mother. I mean, John, if anybody has a right to rest on the breast Jesus, it's John, right? But if you look at the rest of the Gospels, what do people do when they come up to the Lord? They fall on their knees. They beg him, master, help me. Heal my son, heal my servant. You know, Peter says, Lord, depart from me for I'm a sinful man. I mean, people recognize Christ. Yeah, I'm not worthy to untie the thong of your sandal. If I can only touch the hem of his garment, we see it everywhere. It's all over the place. And so the attitude that the contemptuous liturgists

attributed to those benighted medieval peasants is actually just the attitude of a healthy, normal Christian in any era, right? And we're the ones who have a problem with our arrogance and with our lack of receptivity. And I really want to emphasize that point. It's about everything in my defense of tradition is about receptivity.

Right? The word tradition itself, paradoxes, it means what is handed down. It's the act of handing something down. So tradition is literally the body of wisdom, the body of ethics, the body of practices, of customs, that you are handed by your predecessors, your forefathers. And the humble man is the one who says, thank you for giving me this immense. inheritance that I didn't earn. I couldn't have earned it. I'm not worthy of it. But if I use it well, it will sanctify me and I can hand it on to my descendants as well. That's the attitude of receptivity. We see that in the traditional posture for receiving communion, which is like a, it's like a baby bird, you know, tilting its head back and letting the mother bird feed it because the bird can't feed itself. It needs, you know, we are children before God. You know, he has to feed us. The father has to feed his children. That is receptivity. But more broadly, just having the attitude of 1,000 or 2,000 years of Catholic tradition knows more than I know, knows more than we

know. Our clever ideas in 1955 should not be allowed to supplant or overthrow 500 or 1,000 or 1,500 years of what Catholics have done, including all of our greatest saints. You know, this to me, this attitude of receptivity, it's fundamentally a Marian attitude. It's the attitude of Our Lady. You know, be it done unto me according to thy word. That is, if I had to put traditionalism in a nutshell, it would be that. Be it done unto me according to thy word. Not according to my word, my good ideas, my bright ideas, my funky scholarship, whatever it might be.

but according to what God in his providence has given the church over all these centuries. In your book Turned Around, you made the great point that we all know that what we do with our body matters. And you said, a man doesn't propose marriage to his beloved the way a man stands at line in the post office ready to buy stamps. And when I read that, I really did think, okay, suppose you went into a Latin mass and you saw how people received. and then you went to a typical nervous order. You would think, and suppose you thought the church has mandated that this is now how you are to receive, you would think that this is the sort of change

you would implement if you no longer believed that the mass was the mass. That's not me accusing the church of saying that. It's just phenomenologically, I don't know how else to make sense of it. Exactly. Yeah, no, it's amazing. Actually, when you start to look at the layer upon layer upon layer of changes, right? The old mass is hierarchical. It's sacerdotalist. Only the clergy and those

who stand in for the clergy can serve in the sanctuary. You don't have this permeable barrier with lay people going in and out and men and women interchangeably and so on. You know, it's solemn. It's theocentric because everybody is facing odd orientum together towards the east. you know, it's in a sacred language that's a kind of veil over the sacred mysteries to remind us that we're in God's presence and not anymore in the secular world. I mean, there's just layer upon layer upon layer of difference. And what I do in my book turned around, and thank you for reading that and for mentioning it, what I do in that book is I try to show that every one of these aspects in which the liturgical tradition is so radically different from the Nova

Ordo, as usually celebrated, is there for a good reason, for many, many good reasons. It's not, it's not, like the liturgist said in the 1950s, the result of centuries of ignorance and corruption. That was the big theory. That was another fashionable theory, you know, that in the Middle Ages, they forgot the principles of liturgy, and they had all kinds of deviations and secretions and superstitions. And they, you know, and it became just a clerical, um, not puppet show, but, you know, a clerical show

and, you know, the people weren't doing anything. They were just back there praying their beads and maybe once in a while they received communion. And, but, you know, they were not involved. They were detached, you know, dumb spectators. And, you know, it's full of corruptions. And what we're going to do with our modern scientific, rational approach is we're going to have a committee

of 300 people and we're going to go through and we're going to make, we're going to build a new and better liturgy for modern man. That was the whole project. Right? To me, it's been a disaster. It is a disaster because, first of all, who are we to, how dare we dismantle so many things all at once that, you know, that in, I mean, it goes so far back into the history of the church. And that's really, I didn't say this before, but I want to say it now, lest it be forgotten, lest it be omitted, that in fact, this claim that the novice order was going to, to be more like the early Christian worship is just false. It's a false claim. It's more like it in some incidental respects.

But first of all, we now know, actually we already knew in the 1950s because Yosef Jungman and Louis Bouillet and other scholars were already arguing this. But Christian Eucharistic worship has always been odd orient him. Always, always, always. That's a constant thread through East and West. from the beginning to the present. And I'm sure that my viewers know what I'm talking about, but Adorienta means when the priest and the people

are all facing together towards the east, towards the altar, that's the way it looks inside a church, towards the sanctuary and the altar. You know, and often a crucifix tabernacle, that was sort of the Baroque configuration, to have everything centered so that everybody's focused on Christ. You know, that was there from the beginning because Christ in scripture is called the Orient.

you know, he said he was going to come again from the East in glory to judge the living and the dead. And, you know, the early Christians, they looked East as a symbol of the Christ who was to come again in glory. That was their hope. That was their longing. So everybody faced East for worship. You said it even predates vestments in the early church. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And everything else. So you gave a multiple thing. So I was surprised at just how. Oh, yeah. It's one of the most basic, you know, substrates of Catholic. worship. So to have, to have the priest turned towards the people is fundamentally wrong. It's, it's a historical, it's anti-historical, it's anti-traditional, and most importantly of all, it sends the

wrong theological message. Right. So if you want to try to make an argument for it, don't at least be honest. Don't say we're trying to go back to the early church. If you were going back to the early church, you would turn, the priest would turn around. Exactly. Perfectly true. But then there's more, too. In the early church, we had ember days and we had regation days. Those are very, very ancient. St. Gregory the great and St. Leo the great preach about these things. Well, the ember days happened four times a year. They're four weeks during the year, one in each season, when the church celebrates special liturgies on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, Ember Wednesday, Ember Friday, Ember Saturday, as days of penance, days to pray in petition and Thanksgiving for the fruits of

the earth, for vocations. I mean, there are various intentions that have been attached over the centuries to the Ember Days. Ordinations were often done during Ember Weeks as well. Basically, the ember weeks were really important pivot moments in the Roman calendar. And they are so ancient that we have church fathers preaching about these Ember Days, right? Well, what happened to the ember days. They just vanished into smoke, into thin air. I think I heard about them two years ago. The only place you're ever going to find ember days, which as I say is part of the ancient heritage of the church, is in the traditional Latin Mass, because they don't exist in the novice ordo. Rogation days, the same kind of thing. It's a similar concept. The major

rogation takes place around the feast of the ascension. That was when in traditional Catholic cultures, there was the beating of the bounds, where a priest would go around in procession with the people and bless the property, bless a farm outside. You know, it was another one of these moments of integration of, you know, the farm life, the daily life, kind of spilling out of the church into the ordinary lives of people. And there was a lot of that in the old church, I want to say, especially before modern times. You know, but if you look at the Middle Ages, what you have is just one example after the next of the church, finding every possible way to sanctify and bless every aspect of human life to make it an

offering to God. And so we have so many of those things in the ancient rights. And a lot of those things were written off as superstitious, you know, as irrelevant to modern people. You know, we don't have farms anymore, et cetera, et cetera. You know, and my attitude is it's very narrow-minded. It's very myopic to, for a committee of liturgists in the 50s or 60s to get together and say, this is the way people are right now, therefore we should make permanent decisions that are going to affect the rest of the history of the church from here on out. Instead of saying, you know, the liturgy has remained largely unchanged for many centuries. And what that means is every century people are going to find things in it that they need. It's like this giant warehouse of stuff that accumulates.

It's true. There's a certain kind of eclectic randomness to it. But it's a huge warehouse, I would say a treasury of many things. And in this century, people are attracted to this bit. And in another century, they're attracted or they find useful, this other aspect. And the attitude was sort of, let's just keep carrying this whole inheritance with us because who knows what we're going to need, right? It's like it would be like carrying, it'd be like having a caravan with literally

everything you might ever want, even things that you don't know that you might need. And, you know, and so what's happening now? Irony of irony is now there's a back to the land movement, Catholic land movement. People want to have regation days again. They want to have the bounds beaten. They want to have the priests come out and bless their property. Well, they're going to do that with the old right, because that's the only right there is for doing that kind of stuff, you know?

So things change in history quite rapidly. And actually, I think the main problem with Vatican II and a lot of liturgical reform is It's like a fly stuck in the amber of the 1960s, you know? And, you know, Pope Francis talked about backwardism, right? He accused traditions of being backwardists. But to my mind, and I'm sure you've talked about this before, the worst backwardists are the ones who are stuck in the 1970s. We are so far beyond the 1970s right now for better and for worse, you know.

I mean, unfortunately, often for worse, but the kind of burning concerns of liturgists circa 1965 are just not ours, right? You've given two examples there because you said people will often say, we're going back to what the early church did. And you said, Ad Oriental, Amber Days, et cetera. Other things do? Yeah. Oh, yeah, fasting.

Okay. So, remember that? Nobody likes to fast. You know, my doctor told me last year, he said, you know, Peter, you're a bit overweight and you've got high blood pressure. And, you know, I think you just need to go on intermittent fasting. It's great that you can pay a man to insult you like that, isn't it? I know, I know.

And so, you know, I thought, okay, well, Well, I, you know, nobody likes fasting, but I'm going to do this. You know, I'm just, and so I started eating, I started doing like six hours of eating and then, what is it, 18 hours of not eating, you know, every day, most days, nearly every day. And I have to say it's hard, it's really hard, and it's good. It's hard, good, right? It's a good hard, as some people say. because it forces you to deal with the pain and the suffering, the hunger, the things that affluent Western people typically don't have to worry about.

You know, we're so pampered. We're so, we have everything in abundance in the United States, most of us, many of us, too. You know, and so it's good to deprive yourself of these things in order to remember. And then you can offer it up, right? You can offer it up to God for some special intention. You know, for example, for Leo the 14th, I can't even imagine how hard a job. he has. He needs us to be praying and fasting for him, you know. And so, but in the early church, fasting was just a normal part of the way of life, multiple days a week, just like it is

in what the Byzantine church is doing today comes from the early church. Okay. The Western church began to lose that in bits and pieces over the centuries, but still all the way up until the 1960s, at least on paper, you could get dispensations. On paper, there was still the true Lent and fast for us. That means 40 days of fasting, fasting every day of Lent except for Sundays, one meal a day. That was the fast. Up until the late 60s, that was the norm for Catholics, right? What happened to that? That is a direct connection to the apostolic church. We gave that up to. Why? Paul is 6th. It doesn't suit modern circumstances anymore. Well, I'm sorry, but there's only so many times you can say it doesn't suit modern circumstances anymore before you just, you've given up the

game, right? You might as well just say, we give up. We're not going to do this, this Christian thing anymore, you know. So that would be another example, the fasting, the abstinence that was there in the early church. Well, I mean, I can give a lot of examples. Another one would be the ancient lectionary that we have. You know, the lectionary of the Tridentine Mass, of Tridentine Missile is from the first millennium. It is a patristic document. What? I had no idea. What I mean by a patristic document is it's a document from the patristic period that reflects the the practice of the church at a time when you still had you know great saints like maximus the confessor living this this one-year calendar where does it date back to what's the earliest evidence that we have of it well so the the

calendar itself oh is that the calendar itself has always been the electionary we've only we've always only had a one-year calendar yeah which is why the one-year lectionary makes sense because the calendar and the lectionary, again, universally, every single right, Eastern and Western, had, and most of them still have a one-year calendar with a one-year lectionary. Yeah. That calendar has been under slow development unceasingly from the beginning until the present. You know, there have always been saints added or removed or, you know, octaves are added for this feast or that feast or then removed, you know.

So the calendar is like slow-moving. lava. It's, you know, it's never 100% fixed in place. But what we can say about the one-year calendar is that it was increasingly fixed over time. And that by the time you get to the Tridentine missile of 1570, you know, what is recognizably the Roman right calendar is there in place. And unfortunately, that was very much shattered by one of the committees of the liturgical reform in the 60s, a group that Louis Bouillet called a trio of maniac. That was his expression. I want to come back to that because that's a big discussion.

But yeah, but the lectionary, the lecture, the, as far as I recall, the earliest lecture we have that you could call the same as what's found in the Tridentine missile is from the 7th century. And the thing is that by the time, I mean, everybody who studies the early church period knows that by the time you have something that's written down in a fairly complete form, that wasn't just invented by somebody. People didn't work that way. That means that is the final solidification of something that had been developing already for several centuries.

And we know that because, as I said before, we have homilies by Gregory the Great and Leo the Great on some of the same readings that are done today in the Trinantine Mass. So basically, what I'm going to say to everybody who's watching this is if you want ancient Christian worship, go to the traditional Latin Mass. That's where you're going to find it. in its integrity, in its substance, it's, yeah, you'll find things that are post-ancient, but you're going to find all those ancient things there as well, right? Because it's just, as I said before, we carried the church in her receptive Marian attitude

just carried from century to century everything that she already had and added on to it. What do you say to the objection, though, that, look, St. Justin Marta wrote an account of how the liturgy was celebrated, and that sounds far more similar to the Novus Order than the Latin Mass. So, okay, maybe there were some elements that you find in the Latin Mass that you found in antiquity, but surely not all of them.

I mean, people presumably were hearing the mass in their own language, etc. Yeah. So I'll take up the language thing first, and then I'll get to Justin in a second. It's true. The first worship was done in Coyne Greek, which was. the common, sort of the lingua franca, if I can use that expression, of the ancient world, the language in which Paul often preached, you know, the language in which, as, you know, Luke wrote, John wrote. But what we have to recognize is that a process of development

begins with Christian worship, where just by a natural conservative, And this, I think, is something, again, I want to emphasize this. You can see this in every religion. So this is what I would call an anthropological constant. Truthly is a groundbreaking Catholic AI app built to help you know, live, and defend the Catholic faith with clarity and confidence. Whether you're navigating a tough conversation, deepening your understanding, or looking for daily spiritual guidance, Truthly is your companion on the journey. It's like if chat GPT went through OCI, got baptized, and made it its mission to,

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That anytime there is an organized religion, it's not perpetually in a state of upheaval and change. it tends to solidify and to, it, what's the word I want? Well, I'll just use the word solidify. As time goes on, the texts that people are using are written down. And then those are venerated as canonical. And then people start writing commentaries on the canonical texts. And similarly, when there are, you know, it seems like in the early church that when the Eucharist was celebrated, there was a certain amount of extemporaneous praying.

But when you had a very holy bishop who was praying a certain way, he would pray in formulas. Everybody prays in formulas. I mean, you have to remember, the early Christians were formed by the Old Testament and by the Psalms. And even today, when you hear Protestants preaching spontaneously

or praying spontaneously, they use formulas. And in fact, the best extemporaneous prayers are the ones coming from people who are steeped in the Psalms, deep to the scriptures, because they're not just spitting off, you know, superficial nonsense banality. Their language is richly informed by a prayer tradition. You see what I'm saying? Yes.

So in the early church prayer is always going to be formulaic, but it becomes more and more so over time. Because let's just say, let's say you belong to the church of Rome and you had Pope Clement as the Pope. Okay, Pope St. Clement. And he's praying in a certain way. And, you know, this is the the way he is accustomed to pray and the way other people are accustomed to praying with him. And, of course, the more stable, the prayer, the easier it is for everybody to follow and to participate, right? And so then he dies and the next pope comes along and says, you know what? The way Clement prayed, I'm going to pray that way too, because he was holy, he was a saint, and everybody loved him and I'm just going to keep going in that direction.

And so this is how scholars think that over a period of really only a few centuries, just a few centuries, You have extemporaneous, although formulaic prayer, hardening or solidifying into written formulas that then are put into manuscript form and become the first missiles, right, or the first sacramentaries. And this is just a, this is a normal process. As I say, it's a process that makes sense, if you think about it, that we're not always trying to reinvent the wheel. I mean, frankly, I mean, Thomas Howard, one of my favorite authors, he says, when people try to be creative, it usually fails, right? When people want to be original, it's usually embarrassing, right? So don't try to be original. That's not what, and the church's liturgy has just respected this. I mean, even in the, well, okay, I'm not going to go there right now. But I was going to say, even in the Nova Sordo, although there is, unfortunately, there are these flex points for options and extemporaneous speeches and stuff, that there still is a, preset pattern with preset language, right? So it's not as if the church is ever going to say,

oh, let's go back to that molten lava period where things were in a process of forming, right? I see. But then to get back to the language question, why was it that the liturgy of the Church of Rome and of other Western, let's say other Italian cities, and even for that matter, cities in Gaul, why is it that they switched in approximately the fourth century from Greek to Latin? well the false answer you're going to hear typically is well because latin was the vernacular language and so in order to respond to that change therefore they had to put the liturgy in latin because it's all about the vernacular language well i'm sorry but that's false it's false for a few reasons the the first reason is if you look at the latin of the liturgy and a great example would be

the roman canon which is the most ancient core that goes all the way back to those early centuries the the the uh the the certainly the fourth and fifth centuries by the time of gregory the great it's already complete you know completed um uh the roman canon is written in very lofty latin it's formal it's rhetorical it's poetic it's it's ceremonial it's legalistic it has it's a very dense and rich text it's not the vernacular we actually have graffiti from ancient rome father reggie Foster love to talk about that. And it's not the language of the Roman canon or any of the collects of the mass or any of the or even of the Vulgate for that matter. So, you know, you have your street language and then you have your high formal Latin. And that's the latinity

of the Latin mass. It's a high form of that Latin language. And I'm not saying high in the sense of classical. It's not necessarily Ciceronian, but it's more like literary. literary Latin than it is like spoken street Latin. And so the reason... And what century is this being implemented? We're talking about the fourth century. Wow. Although I think Ova Michael Long

in his really important monograph that just came out about the history of the Roman right, I think he says it could go even to the century prior to that, but I'd have to go and look that up again. But I'm safe saying the fourth century. There's no question because Pope Damasus was definitely involved. he was a very important factor. And here's the nub of the matter.

The reason Latin wasn't used earlier in the history of Rome is not because of what the people were speaking in the marketplace. It was because Latin was not yet Christianized. Latin was a pagan language that was used hitherto only for pagan religious ceremonies.

There wasn't a Christian Latin yet. A language has to be used for a while by Christians until they develop a theological vocabulary and a devotional vocabulary that is suitable to perform a liturgy in. And so to take an example, Tertullian, right? It's true he ended up as a monotonist, so unfortunately we can't call him a church father, but he was an extremely influential theologian. Tertullian was an absolute genius because he was able, for the first time, to talk high theology

in Latin. had been doing it in Greek prior to that time. So Latin had to be forged into a tool that was suitable for an addition of Christian worship or for a ceremony of Christian worship. And that's exactly what happened. It was essentially not because of the common people, but because the aristocracy of Rome, Latin speaking, the highly educated people, the literary people, they needed a Latin liturgy. So the liturgy was, if anything, aimed at the aristocrats, not at the common people. it's fascinating but when you get into these things i guess what i would say is it's more complicated than it looks it's not just this simple story of we put it into the vernacular it's not that it's

it's complicated right and so then what happens well uh the liturgy is in latin and in the western church you know the history of the western church is is also very complicated because you have all the barbarian tribes um coming down from northern europe invading the mediterranean Indian. And, you know, they're speaking their barbarian languages. They're not very cultivated. But when they're Christianized, they are Christianized by saints who were educated, who were cultivated, who could speak Latin, sometimes Greek. And they kept the liturgy in one of these high languages. They didn't try to put it into the barbaric languages, right? And because there were so many different tribes and so many different cultures melting together to form what

eventually would be medieval Europe, the liturgy always remained in Latin, just almost pro forma. Like, it had to. There was no other way forward. And nobody ever questioned that. No vandal or goth ever said, how dare you pray in Latin? No, it was just like, well, if that's what the clergy do, I mean, the clergy are the specialists. They're the experts. They're the men of God. They are divinely consecrated for this work. And I think fundamentally, pre-modern people, have a sense of ritual or rituality where it's like it has to be done just so just right when you're when you're when you are face to face with god you don't lapse into vulgar banter that's not what you do you use precise language you fall in your face you repeat the formulas

of your forefathers you offer the same sacrifice in the same words this is how you approach the divine. And I think, I mean, I think, honestly, that a lot of Catholics in modern times have lost this sense of what Rudolf Otto called the Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans, the, the overpowering and fearful and fascinating mystery of God, right? That, you know, as C.S. Louis put it, Aslan is not a tame lion, right? We're not on the same playing field as God. So if we're going to approach him in a formal, in a formal and public act of homage, then we are going to put on special vestments. We're going to bow our heads.

We're going to beat our breasts. We're going to adopt a sacred language and sacred formulas hallowed by our forefathers. This is what ritual looks like. This is integral to ritual, right? And I think that that sense of rituality has been lost, with the extemporaneousness and the, you know, the good morning everybody and, you know, this kind of stuff. It's lost. It destroys ritual. You know, and if people, if people are listening to me and saying, gosh, you know, he's, he sounds like he's just, you know, like Joseph Campbell or

Murcia Eliada or, you know, what does this have to do? Or Carl Jung, what does this have to do with Catholicism? What I'm saying is all there in Joseph Rotsinger, Spirit of the Liturgy. I mean, nothing that I'm saying is not in Joseph Rotsinger. So I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I mean, granted, he and I would, he wouldn't agree with me about everything, but I'm on very safe ground when I say that, you know, ritual is characterized by stability, by integrity, by unspontaneity. That's the exact term that Ratzing uses. Unbeliebikikikait in German. Unspontaneity. In other words, when you go to a liturgy, you should know exactly what it's going to be. There should be no curveball, no extemporaneous fluff or best. banter, no 15 mini homilies, you know, no special announcements about the soccer game, you know, before the final blessing. I mean, it should be a ritual act, scripted from top to bottom, rubricly controlled, fenced in. You know, it's like Moses going before the burning bush. He takes

off his sandals and he falls before the burning bush. This should be our attitude before the Mysterium Tremendom at Fashinans. Beautifully put. All right, let's zoom out a little bit. You said that the revolutions that took place after the Second Vatican Council have been a disaster. And what's interesting is I think that most serious Catholics, even those who might be offended by what you're saying,

because they might mistakenly think that you're impuging their going to the Novus Auto for daily mass and you can address that if you want. But what I find interesting is I think most serious Catholics would hold that opinion about a whole variety of things. In other words, what happened to seminary formation after the council was a disaster? That doesn't sound terribly controversial.

What happened to sacred music was a disaster? We all look back, I think, of the tape cassettes we would play and cringe over them. What happened to the religious orders, throwing out their habits and priests saying, hey, call me Jeff, was a disaster. What happened to biblical studies was a disaster? What happened to church architecture was a disaster.

But when it comes to the liturgy, I think here people pause and they don't want to go with you all the way. And I think, well, fair enough, because I could imagine somebody saying, well, look, who the hell are you to say that you know better than the church? So fair enough, maybe there were some mistakes made in these other areas that are being rectified, but isn't a liturgy that is given the rubber stamp of approval by the church,

essentially God's positive will. So here's the, you've brought up so many fantastic questions there. So the first thing I want to say, and we can get into this later, so I don't get too distracted by it, but I am somebody who attended the Novus Ordo almost daily

for 20 years of my life. More than 20 years of my, no, I mean, I'm not, so including my childhood, basically I'm, I'm 54 right now and I haven't attended. the novice ordo for um seven years but prior to that time i was attending it all all the time i

i i'm not i'm not a a cradle trad i had to discover it i had to read about it had to fight my way through all kinds of intellectual difficulties um i held different positions than i do now i used to be i used to be i used to have the attitude of of you know let's just everybody do both rights as well as they can be done. And I did that myself. I was a choir director at multiple institutions, responsible for providing music for the Nova Sordo. And I did. I provided Gregorian chant, polyphony. I was, I had the privilege of providing that wonderful music from our tradition. Excuse me. And, you know, I did it with respect, with, with care, with love. But I will say, as I learned more, as I saw more, I became intimately familiar with the novice ordo i know every line of the new missile i've read the general instruction

of the roman missile 10 times i had to you have to read this because you get into fights with bishops and priests about oh you can't do this or you should do this or whatever and you have to say no actually the law is this the rule is that so i know it backwards and forwards and and in general i would say one of the great disadvantages in the traditionalist novice ordo discourse is that most trads are very familiar with the novice ordo. I mean, granted, some have grown up without it, but most of us have grown up with the novice ordo. Many of us discover the TLM later in life, as I did.

And for us, it's a head over heels, falling in love, transformative life experience. We start going to it. It opens up a new world for us. It reinvigorates our Catholic life. And after that point, we become sort of radicalized by that experience, right? I think that that's understandable.

And the problem is that if you're on the novice ordo side of the fence and you've never been to the Latin Mass, or you've only been once or twice, like, oh, yeah, I went to a low mass once. And it was boring, and I was lost. I couldn't follow it. And I thank God, I never have, I don't have to go to that again. Well, I'm sorry, but that's just not going to cut it.

If you really want to have a high-level discussion, or you really want to understand, why did the church for 1,000 years or 1,500 years or more do this or that or the other thing? And why did she suddenly stop doing it? Then you have to get into the weeds. You have to dive in. You have to do a deep dive into the traditional right.

I'm not saying that I wish everybody would do that. I don't think everybody is going to do that. Some people just don't have no interest in it. Some people can't even get to a traditional mass. I know I've been in touch with people for whom the closest mass would be eight hours away. You know, they live in the sticks of Australia or something like that and they can't get to. Okay, I understand all of that. I'm just saying that it's a really uneven discussion because I know.

the novice ordo like the back of my hand and most people out there don't know the traditional roman liturgy you know that way in that level of depth i wonder if an analogy is sort of like when i became a christian at the age of 17 and came home i was to use a word that perhaps isn't accurate obsessed with jesus i was in love with jesus and i annoyed everybody with my enthusiasm and i began to read a great deal about christ and maybe christian apologetics and arguments for the resurrection and why the church teaches this or that. And when I would encounter people who may have been goodwilled but hadn't done any of that sort of study, they might try to hand wave Jesus away or something. And I think, okay. And the same thing happens. I mean, look, all of us have multiple conversions

in life. You know, I mean, it's not going to be the same for every person, but some people go from atheism or agnosticism to Christianity, some kind of generic Christianity. Maybe they read mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis or what have you. And they become deeply enthralled just by that level of Christianity. And those people would, could look at Catholics and say, you Catholics are so weird. You've added all kinds of extra stuff. You have Marian devotion and you have the saints and you have relics and you have masses and you have purgatory. And where is all this junk coming from? It's not biblical. You know, you know all these arguments, right? But it's so analogous, right? But it's exactly analogous because, in fact, the traditional Latin liturgy, and I say

liturgy, because it's not just the mass, it's all the sacramental rights, they were all changed, it's the breviary, it's the pontifical ceremonies, it's the blessings, everything, everything, everything was changed by Paul the 6th, and often radically so. When you look at that, at the traditional Roman liturgy, it is like the, it's the deluxe Catholic playground. It's the, everything that we have is there to the max, right? The cult of the saints and the relics and of Our Lady, the, you know, belief in the merits of the saints and their intercession and miracles and apparitions and, I mean, approved apparitions, you know, the doctrine of grace, everything depends on God's grace, the doctrine of sin, of hell, you know, I mean, it's all there in the traditional liturgy in, in spades, you know, it's very richly present. It's the traditional liturgy is super Catholic, you know.

It's like saturated Catholicism, right? And in the Novus Ordo, those things are either absent or they're muted or they're generic or they're kind of superficial. And again, I mean, this can be demonstrated. You know, references to hell in the President of Sorda were almost completely exized, abolished. Just a real quick interjection. Am I right in thinking that you said that, when they took the traditional Latin mass and it was turned into the novice order,

however that happened, 13% of the prayers remained? Yes, exactly. That's a perfect example. Thank you for bringing that up. Just to be very concrete about this. In the mass, you have what are called the orations. The orations refer to the three pivotal prayers of the mass.

There's the collict or the opening prayer as it used to be called in the earlier translation. So the collect, the secret, as it's called in the old right, or the prayer over the offerings in the Novos Ordo, and the post-communion or the prayer after communion. Those are the three orations. Well, these texts are some of the richest

in the entire missile tradition. You know, they go back into the early centuries of the church and have been building up ever since, accumulating ever since. And these orations are where you get some of the richest theology of the liturgy. well they were they were massively rewritten during the liturgical reform of the 1960s to such an extent that only 13% of the orations of the old missile were taken over intact into the new missile that's not a very high percentage well so then somebody asks well what about the other 87% what happened

to those well of that 87% some percentage were taken from the old missile but then rewritten and modified to take out things that were deemed offensive to modern people or to smooth the phrase or put in a social justice emphasis or whatever it might be. Another portion of them were just rewritten from scratch. Another portion of them were, you know, taken from other ancient sources and just sort of, you know, okay, well, we found this interesting prayer, you know, from 1500 years ago and we just stuck it in there. So it's a mishmash, but the point is only 13% of the orations survived intact. That is not an example. That is not faithful. to what the Second Vatican Council said.

The Second Vatican Council in Sacrosanctum Conchulium said very clearly, no change shall be made unless it is absolutely and certainly required for the good of the church and every change that is made should seem to come as if organically from what was there before.

This is almost a verbatim quotation from Sacrosan Conchilium. It's, as Father Joseph Fesio has said, it is one of the key principles of that document. It's a principle of conservatism, i.e., this is not going to be a radical overhaul that changes everything.

And it's on that basis that the fathers of the Second Vatican Council voted for Sacrosanctum Conchialium. On the basis of being reassured, this is not a revolution. This is a revision. It's a revision. Yes, we're going to make certain changes.

I have a problem with some of the changes proposed in Sacrosanctum Concilium. But it also reaffirmed things like Latin will remain the language of the liturgy. The bishops needed to hear that. They wanted that to be. Gregorian Champ will be given quite of place. normative music, pride of place, prince of ben loquim, which means chief place, the chief place in liturgies will be given to Gregorian chant for the music. You know, pipe organs should continue to be used. I mean, there's just so many examples of the of this, of this, of this, of this, where you can see clearly that what happened in the liturgical reform was not faithful to what Vatican to, what the fathers of Vatican to agreed. And I've, I've written about this extensively. I mean, I know my stuff. You know, on new liturgical movement, I have

three articles, you can easily Google them, about the council fathers on the Latin language. And it was by far, it was an overwhelming majority of council fathers who wanted to keep Latin as the primary language of the Roman right, even if there was some room made for the vernacular. They said, yes, some room can be made for the vernacular, especially in the changing parts of mass. So they had in mind something like doing the readings in the vernacular so they could be more easily understood. I have issues with that, but, you know, but the point is that the council fathers were sold

a false bill of goods. And that is, that's just, you can't escape that. So you asked, you brought up earlier a whole bunch of examples of where things fell off a cliff. Yeah. And that all of us would acknowledge that. Exactly. Well, the liturgy is of a peace with all of those things. And that's what I just, I urge people, be coherent in your way of thinking.

If you see that the church made prudential mistakes in all kinds of areas, why would the liturgy be this magical domain in which no prudential mistakes were made or some mistakes were made, but they were only abuses. They didn't have to do with the actual process of reform or the books that were approved. They only had to do with abuses. Well, here's the bad news. The bad news for people who make that argument is that the problems we're dealing with are intrinsic to the Novos Ordo.

They don't, I mean, there are problems of abuses where people are clearly just wrecking it by their own bad ideas on their own initiative against the rules, against the law. Yes, that happens. That happens all over the place. Even today, it hasn't gone away. And I reject that and I deplore that.

But I'm saying that many of the problems we're dealing with are built into the Nova Sorto. They're not cosmetic problems, but genetic problems. Yeah. What do I mean by that? Well, Joseph Ronsinger famously said that having options and room for extemporaneous interjections in the Noah sort of was a mistake

because it disrupts and breaks apart the rituality of the act of worship. It makes it difficult for people to participate when the priest is kind of like a clerical overlord who's in charge. He's the driver. He's driving you in the mass where he wants to go. Instead of the mass being the driver

that everybody is, is sitting in, including the priest, right? When we, the priest, here's the key difference. The old right is sacerdotal in the sense that it's focused on, centered on the work of the priest at the altar. It's very sacerdotalist. But the novice order is clericalist. And the difference is that a clericalist liturgy

is one in which the priest is the driver. He has to make decisions. He chooses penitential right, A, B, or C. Do I say the confitia, or do I not say it? Do I pick Eucharistic prayer one, two, three, or four? Are we in a rush today? Okay, I'll use number two. When I get to the Roman canon, do I read the list of saints?

Well, they're in brackets. I can skip them. I better skip them. You know, it's full of that kind of stuff, right? And that's, and Rotsinger says, this is an intrinsic problem. And he says, he says, that should just be abolished. That should be taken out of the new missile. You know, he still thinks the new missile can be salvaged.

And so he thinks that he was of the opinion that there could be a reform of the reform. and you've heard this expression. Yeah. You know, if only we fixed this, this, this, and this. The problem I have with that, Matt, honestly, is, you know, when are we going to quit the tinkeritis, right? The 1960s and 70s were a period of sort of an epidemic of tinkeritis. I've coined that expression to mean just everybody having their own good ideas and they want to tinker with this and that. And the other thing, well, I'm sorry, but, you know, God so loved the world that he did not send a committee, right?

And a committee-made liturgy is going to be like a committee-made animal. You know, it's like the elephant trunk and the giraffe neck. And, I mean, it's going to be what every person or every subcommittee wants and they're just going to try to glue it together like a Mr. Potato Head or something at the end.

And it's not going to please anybody. I really think, in a certain fundamental way, the Nova Sort of pleases nobody. And what I mean by that is everybody wants to do something different with it. The liberals, they want to make it more liberal and more progressive. The conservatives want to make it more and more traditional. They want to do it Adorientem, in Latin, with Gregorian chant, with nice vestments.

Bishops often try to stop them from doing that. But nobody is really content with the novice ordo as it is. Whereas what I've been so struck by in traditional communities is that we are very happy with the traditional liturgy. It works. It does what it's supposed to do. I mean, it's what the label says. It just does, it does its work. And how could we be surprised?

It's something that has been refined by over 1,600 years of use. You know, it's the ultimate, it's the greatest work of art, of piety, and of theology in Western civilization, the Trinity Mass is. So I think the pushback you might receive and do receive, have received from people is,

the liturgy is the most sacred thing we can do. And it feels like you're attacking it. and it feels like you're not being obedient to the Holy Father. You just said that if a committee put something together, it's in shambles. Well, what if it's a people approved liturgy? I mean, surely there have been different liturgies, people will say, throughout the history of the church. And if the Pope approves them, who are you to object?

Of course. So I think then that gets us to another level of this whole question, which is what exactly did the Pope approve? what I mean by that question is is as follows Paul the 6th approved a Latin edition of the Novosorto Misei

and then this was in 1969 1970 it came out in 69 at the very end of 69 but many of the books were not available until 1970 and then it was sent around to all of the Episcopal conferences

which had to make translations into the vernacular languages well these translations ended up being awful. And almost anybody who's ever looked into this knows how bad the translations were, especially in English. The English translation was horrifically bad. I mean, to such an extent

that a whole sentence of Latin would be replaced with one word. They were just ignoring stuff. He took bread into his holy and venerable hands was he took the bread. That's how it was translated in the original English missile that was used for 40 years, right?

And there are just countless examples like this. So did Paul the Sixth approve all these vernacular versions? Kind of sort of. I mean, somebody at the Vatican approved them, unfortunately. You know, but that was a whole mess, the whole kind of babel of vernacular translations that took place, which suddenly meant that Catholics who prior to then could attend Mass anywhere in the world and be at home

were now suddenly thrown to the whims of whatever language happened to be in the air, whatever vernacular register people chose. I mean, you know how, you know what that's like traveling, right? But then what about this? If a missile has a bunch of options in it, and some of those options or some of those moments for spontaneity put the liturgy now in the hands of the driver, the priest,

is the pope approving that? I mean, whatever this priest is doing with the freedom that the missile gives him? So it's a little bit complicated. And then what about this, right? Vatican II says Latin and chant. should have pride of place. But what did, and it says nothing about Ata Orientem.

Nothing at all, which means that nobody questioned that the mass should continue to be said facing eastwards. But then what is Paul the sixth to do in 1965, March of 1965? He celebrates Mass for the first time in Italian facing the people. So he set an example, this was even before the Nova Sorto, of doing the Trintheon Mass in a way contrary to what just a couple of years before the council fathers had agreed to. So is Paul the sixth being faithful to the council? He's being unfaithful to the council?

Does a pope, should a pope, at least for reasons of honor and nobility, should he go along with what over 2,000 prelates vote for? Or should he just be his own man and go his own direction, right? But then in 1969, he gives two addresses in November of 1969, in which he bids a pained farewell to Latin and chant. We must give up the language of the angels. We must give up this most beautiful music. Why?

Because the vernacular is apostolic. Because we're now making an outreach to modern man and he can't relate to Paul the 6th. He can't relate to Latin and chant anymore. So everybody out there who's saying, all we need to do is just do the Nova Sort of as it was intended to be done. What are they talking about? I mean, is it, is it, is it, it's their idea.

then to do it in Latin and chant, not Paul the sixth idea. You see what I'm saying? Whose idea? Their idea. Okay, sorry, let me try to explain what I'm saying. If a novice ordo priest comes along and says, we're going to do the mass right. We're going to do it, odd orient him, in Latin, with chant. All you have to do is say Paul the sixth did it exactly the opposite way. Do you know better than Paul the sixth? He was the pope. He was the one who implemented this missile. He showed and said how he wanted it to be celebrated. It's not your way. It's his way. So I guess what I'm saying is the more you look into it, the more chaotic it appears. But was that a one-off with Paul the 6th?

Was he always facing the people speaking in Italian? And if he wasn't, couldn't they just respond by saying, well, that was a single choice? The Pope chose to engage in? He didn't always do that because at St. Peter's Basilica, the popes have always done the mass partly in Latin. That has survived even down to the present, amazingly enough. But what he said was this is the way that the parish liturgy should be. right the papal basilica liturgy is different right they've always been different they've always been uh intended for a more international gathering and they're more formal and it's the pope's mass

and all this sort of thing but but what he was doing was setting an example for parish liturgy yeah and then again um you know the the general instruction for the roman missile it says every time there's a point in the mass where music can can arise um it mentions Gregorian chant first, but then it mentions, but other kinds of music can also be used. And so then what about when a bishop says, well, I don't want you to use chant. I want you to use other types of music. What is a priest supposed to do in that situation? Who is he obeying and why? Is he obeying the liturgical law? Is he obeying the bishop? Is he obeying the pope? I mean, it's very chaotic. It's very chaotic. I think that the source of the liturgical woes in

the Catholic Church, go back to the uncontrollable variability of the new right. It can be done in Latin or the vernacular. It can be done with popular styles of music or with Gregorian chant. It can be done ad orientem or versus populum. It can be done with, you know, involving women as Eucharistic ministers or only with men dressed in casks and surpluses. I mean, will the real novice ordo please stand up, right? I don't think the novice order is one right. It's a multiple. of rights. It's a kind of multi-right. It's like it has a kind of identity crisis. What is it? It's, well, I think part of this identity crisis is that some of the liturgical reformers, they wanted it to be adaptable to different situations. That for them was a virtue. So they thought,

well, the African missionary is going to go to this tribe somewhere and they can't deal with a European style liturgy. They need to have dancing and bongo drums. And therefore, he gets to adapt the Nova Sorda to that situation. But, you know, what if this other college chaplain is, you know, he's chaplain to a classical college where everybody is speaking Latin? Well, then he could do it in, you know what I mean? So it's the adaptability and variability and mutability of it was intended as a strength. I think what the decades have shown is that it's a weakness because it dissolves, the sense of a rite. It dissolves the sense of this is what the mass is and how it's done. It dissolves the sense of the priest as a servant to the rubrics and the and the liturgical texts and music.

I think it just, it spreads clericalism and activism of various kinds. Wow. Have there ever been liturgies in the history of the church that have been embraced only to be repealed? Yes. Thank you for asking that question. Because I think, I think that that it's valuable to point out that popes have made mistakes before in the area of the liturgy. I'll just give three examples. And Paul the third in 1530 something approved a breviary called the Quignogne's Breviary. And this was actually a really radical move. He did not, he did not enforce it on everybody. He simply permitted it. But this was a breviary designed by a Spanish cardinal who actually just started from scratch and revamped the entire breviary and made a new

division of the Psalms, completely new division, to minimize the repetition of the Psalms. None of the Psalms were repeated. In the traditional order of the Roman Salter, which formed the backbone of the breviary or divine office for every century down to the beginning of the 20th century, there were many Psalms that were repeated multiple times during the week. So, for example, at Lod's morning prayer, every day, Psalms 148 to 150 were said every day. And that's on top of, at least in theory, saying all 150 Psalms every week. So somehow you had to get in the 150 Psalms, but a bunch of them were repeated as well. So there was a lot of Psalms to pray, a huge amount of Psalms. And Quignonias came along. You know, it was the Renaissance. It was the humanist period. It was a period of a lot of

experimentation and new ideas, you know, on all different levels. And so he came along and said, what if I took the 150 Psalms and just divided them rationally over seven days with no repetition? And then Paul the third said, sounds good. I approve it. And it took off like wildfire. It went through dozens of additions. Thousands of clergy and religious were praying it.

It was very, but it was very controversial. The Sorbonne in Paris, if I recall correctly, condemned it and said this is against tradition. Nobody has ever prayed the altar this way. There were people all over the place like St. Francis Borgia. if I'm not mistaken of the Jesuits, he said, absolutely no way. We're not going to use this. So there was a lot of controversy about this.

Well, lo and behold, in 1568, so what's that about 33, I think about 33 years later, Pope Pius V, the great Pope of the Tridentine Mass, in 1568, he condemned the Quignonia's breviary. He took away the permission. He said, this is not to be used anymore, period. And only the Roman breviary, which he had redacted and published a new,

is to be used, hence, forth. So that's one interesting example. That would suggest, for instance, that if a future Pope came along and said, you know, Paul the 6th, he was undoubtedly well-intentioned by implementing the liturgy of the hours, which divides the Psalms over four weeks instead of one week, as was traditionally done. And even though he was undoubtedly well-intentioned in removing 122 verses from the Psalms, nevertheless, we have decided to go back to the one-week Psalter with the complete 150 Psalms in all of their verses. A Pope could do that and it wouldn't be saying, you know, Paul the 6th is burning in hell or, you know, something like that, or that it's a sin

to use the Liturgy of the Hours. I'm not arguing that. It's not a sin to pray the Psalms however you want to pray them, but I would argue that it's not the traditional Roman way of praying the Psalms in the divine office and that there's something wrong with the Liturgy of the Hours on a liturgical plane. So that's one example. Another example, very interesting, also connected with the divine office, is Urban the Eighth's revision of the hymn texts. So if any of you have prayed the, you know, lads or Vespers or really any of the hours of the divine office, you'll know that in each one of them there's a hymn, which can be anywhere from three verses to seven or eight verses, I mean, depending upon the feast day or the, or the feria of the week. And these hymns are

beautiful, they're beautiful ancient Christian Latin poetry. They go back to the first millennium. Some of them go back to St. Ambrose of Milan. Well, Urban the Eighth was a classical, trained humanists. And the classly trained humanists had, they sneered at medieval Latin. They, they thought it was uncouth, barbaric. It didn't have the polish that they were used to finding in authors like Cicero. And so Urban the 8th commissioned a team of humanist scholars to revise the hymns. And he ended up making, if I remember correctly, he made about a thousand changes in this very ancient Christian body of hymnography, and then he imposed it on the church. Well, interestingly enough, even at that time, the Benedictans, Sistercians, Dominicans,

Carthusians, and probably some other religious communities, they said, we are having nothing to do with this. We have, we've been praying our own breviaries since time immemorial, and we are not going to adopt these classicized hymns. So they never did. But the the Roman clergy had to, all of the parochial clergy and so forth. Well, lo and behold, so there was a lot of complaints about this. People criticized it, but it stuck. It stuck. And to this day, a priest of the fraternity St. Peter or the Institute of Christ the King, he's praying in a breviary that has Urban the Eighth's classicized Latin hymns, even though they might not wish that they were doing that. But funnily enough, it was Paul

the 6th who understood that what Urban the 8th had done was very inorganic, very, very you know, oddly cerebral, oddly particular, in a way, to him. And so in the liturgy of the hours, when any of those ancient hymn texts are used, they restored them to their original versions. So, I mean, to me, that's a kind of sweet irony that sometimes a hymn printed in Latin in the liturgya aurarum is more authentic than the version in the breviarium romanum

of Urban the 8th. But anyway, that's another example where a pope made what is generally agreed to be a mistake and a subsequent pope fixed it. Okay. Though Paul the 6th

fixed it and broke a lot of other things in the process. And then a third example is, oh, this is great. It also has to do with the Divine Office. Pius X. 12th, who is an interesting figure in many, many ways,

very traditional in some respects, very modern in other. respects. But Pius the 12th thought, you know what, the sultan that we've been praying from St. Jerome, that's how ancient it is, St. Jerome. So we're talking, what is that fourth century? I mean, that's going back really a long ways. And Jerome made three translations of the Psalms. He wasn't content with any of them because the Psalms are very difficult Hebrew poetry. He did it three times. He wasn't satisfied with any of them. But one of his Psalter's caught on. It became the normative

Psalter used for prayer in the Western church. And that remained unchanged. We're talking about everybody who was ever praying the Psalms anywhere in the Western world was using one of Jerome's translations of the Psalms. And then Pius XVI decided, you know what? It's time to re-translate the Psalms in Latin based on the Hebrew original according to modern biblical scholarship. So he entrusted this two team of Jesuits, headed by Augustine Cardinal Bayer.

And they produced in a few years, this was happening, I think, during World War II, they produced a new translation of the Psalms. It has some overlap with Jerome's, but it reads noticeably differently. I mean, if you're familiar with the Jerome Salter, and then you try to read the pies to the 12th one, it's like hitting speed bumps every other verse. Whoa, where did that come from? And so he published it. And he, it's interesting. that Pius the 12th published it in such a way that all new breviaries were to have the new Salter. As far as I know, he didn't forbid people from using the old one, but if you got a new breviary, it was going to have the new version. People hated it. And it was, this is quite interesting

because we're talking about the 1940s, so kind of the heyday of ultramontanism, you know, where you don't dare to speak a word against the pope. There were reviews in learned journals complaining about this. There was one reviewer who said, he said, I think he said something like Aaljeat latinitatum, pietatatim minuit. I don't know if I've got that exactly right. But it increases latinity, but it diminishes piety.

That was his sort of nutshell take on the pious to 12th Salter. Well, what happened just a few years later when John the 23rd was elected Pope, he said goodbye to it. He quietly cut the ropes on that and put back Jerome's salter into the breviary that he promulgated in 1960.

So the 62 breviary has the Jerome Salter, not the Pais, the 12th Salter. So, you know, somebody, and by the way, there's people say about the Baya Salta, they say, Bea culpa, Bea Maxima Culpa. So, you know, somebody listening might say, well, those are kind of obscure examples. But my point is there are three examples

where popes using their full pontifical authority implemented a liturgical text which a subsequent pontiff prudentially disagreed with and shunt it off to the side and replaced with something more traditional. Well, I mean, that's all you need really

to respond to the idea that popes could never make a prudential decision or never commit a prudential error in a practical domain, in a disciplinary domain, like which liturgical texts should we use. Yeah. Now, granted, The critique that traditionalists offer of the novice ordo, you know, the mass, the liturgy of the hours, the other sacramental rights, it's on a massive scale. It's vastly bigger than any of those examples that I just gave. And we would say, I would say, it's unprecedented. The rupture that occurred in the 60s was unprecedented. We have never, ever in the history of the church, seen something like what happened then in terms of such a tremendous departure from,

so many customs, prayers, ceremonies, music, you know, there's no area in which there was not a significant rupture. And that, to me, is, that's cataclysmic. That's apocalyptic. That's massive. That's not something that you can just sort of sweep under the rug and say, you know, well, I guess it's our job to pay, pray, and obey, and we shouldn't think about these things. No, we should think about these things, especially because the church is in a state of crisis. And Rotsinger, I want to quote Rotsinger again. I love Rotsinger, if you can't tell. He said, the crisis in the church is to a large extent caused by the crisis in the liturgy.

That's what he said. And I agree with him. So we must talk about these things. And canon law says, educated laypeople can respectfully express their opinions on matters of governance like this. We're not dissenting from any doctrine at all. We're talking about reforms in the prudential arena. that we are arguing are mistaken, harmful, and need to be rescinded, need to be walked back. What do you say to the objection that popes throughout history have made some decisions

about how the liturgy ought to be celebrated, such as at the Council of Trent, which you can speak of? And so that this is just another such decision. I know to your, that was an interesting point you made earlier about what is the Novos order. We have, you know, we have to figure out what we're talking about. But so therefore the Pope has the authority to do this. And so, you might not like it, but you need to get over it. Sure. I mean, there is a view out there that I respect. It's a theological opinion.

Well, actually, I don't respect it. I would say that I tolerate it. But it's a view that can be taken and has been taken, that the Pope has nearly unlimited authority and power over the liturgy. And that the only thing that he cannot change is what some people call. in a scholastic vein, the form and matter of the sacraments. So very narrowly speaking, the formula that is required for confecting or effecting a sacrament, along with the proper matter of the sacrament, be it bread or wine or water or oil,

that apart from the material objects and the formulas, hallowed by tradition, the Pope can change absolutely anything else he wants. But there is also an opinion that you can find precedent for throughout church history that the pope, that his job is to be a guardian of tradition, that his job is to be a recipient and a transmitter and a defender of tradition, and that the more he deviates from that, the more he acts ultra-vierrez, that is beyond his powers outside of the responsibilities of his office,

in fact, in a betrayal of his office, right? in a way similar to, you know, if you had a nobleman who owned a castle and a great, you know, wealth of land and art and other cultural artifacts and so on, and he just squandered it or burned it, we would say he's a bad, he's a bad steward of the goods that were entrusted in, the patrimonial goods that were entrusted to him. And he has robbed his children of what was their right to receive. You know, that's how we can think about, that's how we can think about this situation by analogy. And the reason we can think that way is that all authority, whether it's papal or otherwise, has a certain common structure. All authority is for the sake of the bonum cumune, the common good

of a society over which the authority is placed. Authority doesn't exist for its own sake, just to sort of bark out commands and make people do stuff. Authority is put in place precisely to, to govern and guard the common good of a society. So anytime an authority uses his power against the common good of a society, that is an abuse of his power, not a proper use of it. Let me give you an example. So a president has his, you know, according to his office, he is supposed to promote the common good of the people.

if he implemented laws or policies that were severely prejudicial to any part of the people that he's governing we would say he's a bad president and depending upon the nature of those laws we might even say that they're not laws at all because they're so contrary to justice that they cease to be laws

and this is a to mystic principle right St. Thomas says that a law without justice is no law at all right a law that does violence to the common good is not a law So in the liturgical sphere, I mean, I can just make one very easy case here. That is to say, right now, as a matter of fact, there are hundreds of vibrant and healthy

communities of traditional Catholics around the world for whom worshiping in the traditional rights is a deeply integral and nourishing part of their lives as Catholics. It is why these communities are flourishing. It is why people go to them. It is why there are vocations, religious vocations, why there are so many families starting these communities. If you ask those people, why are you going here? It's not like, oh, it's close to my house. It usually isn't. It's usually an hour away or a half an hour away or in the worst part of town or something like that. They're going there because they've fallen in

love with the traditional liturgy of the church. That traditional liturgy cannot ever be seen as not a part of the common good of the church. It's certainly a common good for all of these communities that share it, right? For a pope, therefore, to act directly against that, as Francis did in tradition's custodos, is contrary to the nature of his office and it's outside of his power, ultra-viraes. That would be the argument I'd make in short. But don't you get into a dangerous place where you have to discern whether or not what the Pope is deciding is for the common good or not? Well, I think that we, let's put it this way. If you have an authority who's doing his job, then typically you don't have to worry about this. So if you have a father of a family

who is, you know, not perfect, not a saint, but is generally active. virtuously the right way, you know, the family rules he's instituted are reasonable, even if they're irksome sometimes. You know, the children and the wife are typically not going to feel the need to examine with a magnifying glass every single rule, every single thing that's said, you know, as if there's like a line item veto, right? And so in general, when an authority is doing its job, the subjects of that authority just roll along with whatever is coming out, you know. And so, you know, if a pope says in 1925, as a pope did, pious the 11th, you know, there's a missing gem in the crown of the liturgical calendar. It's the feast of the kingship

of our Lord Jesus Christ. So I'm going to put that gem in there. And now everybody on the last Sunday of October, which is what it was, and still is in the traditional calendar, everybody on the last Sunday of October is going to celebrate this proper mass in honor of the kingship of Christ. Did anybody complain about that? Nobody complained about that. Why would you complain about that? Why not just rejoice and say, this is fantastic?

I love the opportunity to venerate the kingship of Christ, you know, and it's a beautiful mass. You know, or the Pope says, you know, I have added, you know, I've canonized St. Robert Bellarmine and I've declared him a doctor of the church and his feast day is May 13th. That's also what Pius and the 11th did,

all those things. So who's going to complain about that? You know, nobody's going to complain about that. But if you have a massive and cataclysmic series of changes that deeply disrupt the life of faith on every level. And we have to admit that that's what we're talking about. And anybody who doesn't believe me just needs to take some time to read accounts of what Catholics were thinking and saying in the 60s and 70s. Just read the crushing letters between Evelyn Waugh and Cardinal Heenan. And this is even before the Novus Ordo.

This is when all the crazy stuff was happening with the Trinantine Mass in the 1960s. these these cries of pain from from faithful Catholics who for whom the world was being gutted inside out by one raft of changes after another at this point it's not looking anymore like oh here's a little gem that we're adding to here's a little here's a saint we're putting on the calendar it's looking like we're throwing out hundreds of years of worship and and making you do everything in a totally different way from one week to the next gregorian chant to guitars father standing in in unity with the people facing eastwards, father standing over against you,

making eye contact with you. These are, if we just think about the magnitude of what we're doing, then we can say, you know, you don't need to have a PhD in political philosophy to recognize this is looking like an assault on the common good of the church.

Now, I realize some people are not going to agree with me, but it's a legitimate position to take and it's not only my position. There are many, many, I would say this is something that all the classic traditionalist authors said in one form or another. is that this avalanche of changes is harmful. It's harmful to the stability of the church.

It's harmful to the faith of the people, to their piety. It's harmful to their family culture. It's harmful to religious life. All of those things you were mentioning earlier, the decline in all of those areas is not unconnected with the crisis in the liturgy, right? So, yes, I do very much blame Paul the 6th for driving all of these things through.

The reforms, you cannot possibly change as much as he did in the space of a few years and not expect catastrophic consequences from it. You can't possibly do that. Let me know if you need more water too. What does it do to one spiritual life to live in that state, right? Because I think an object, a kind of complaint you'll find sometimes by people who tend the Novice Auto Church mass, novice, normies like me, I suppose. And I don't think it's unfounded, eh?

Is that there seems like there's this perpetual cynicism against whatever the church today is saying, a sort of resistance against any initiative that's being led by some apostolate. So it's like we can't celebrate anything. So, hey, Bible in a year, how great is that? That's the number one podcast. Modernism. Let me finish, because I've gone a bit of a bender here. You know, or Fostina.

I've heard people say, well, that devotion's satanic. Or John Paul II's theology of the body. Now, it's one thing to have legitimate criticisms about it, but it's another thing, again, to call it satanic. And I just think it can't be healthy to live in this perpetual state of elbows up against the mother who's supposed to be teaching you. Now, maybe there's good reasons that you have to be on guard, given what you've just laid out. But I think Novus Auto-Catholics, I don't mean to use that in a disparaging way or any way, but just those who attend the Novus Auto Mass, for better or worse, don't live in that position. They live in a sort of openness to the church, and maybe that gets abused. But I think there's a sort of state of, like, peace that Novis Auto-Catholics have that

sometimes we don't encounter, and I understand that that can be a character and a straw man of the average Latin mass going Catholic. But sometimes online, you'll see people who are very angry continually and you think, okay, I look at other Latin mass Catholics, like Therese of Lizier, she didn't have to keep going on about this. Whenever I encounter a Latin mass Catholic, who I love and learn from, it feels like we're always talking about liturgy wars and the abuses of the popes and the councils. And it's like, well, where's this talk of the interior life and our relationship with Christ? Okay. No, no, no, thank you for that. That rant is good. Gosh, there's so much that could be said.

First of all, do you understand what I'm saying? I totally understand what you're saying. See, so here, you know, online discourse is just often really toxic. It doesn't really matter what position you're looking at. And that would be demonstrated below this video. I mean, you know, honestly, Matt, I think it's very unfair for trads to be singled out as guilty of the kind of behavior you're talking about, that the sweeping judgments, the, you know, the massive condemnations when you'll see it from other perspectives within the church as well.

You know, I've seen, I've seen Eastern Christians and Catholics, you know, launch tirades against the West. I've seen Novus Ordo Catholics launch their tirades against the traditional, not just the traditional movement, but against traditional piety and liturgy and things that that the saints would, that they all approved, you know, in a way that goes beyond. we don't like your attitude to we think the church was wrong for a thousand years. I mean, that's what I'm saying. So there are, you can find there's no lack of offensive and ill-informed and exaggerated comments in online commentary.

I agree, but in this discussion, you're trying to win us over to your side. Oh, of course. And we want to be win one over to your side, which is precisely why I have to point out the flaws in some online discords among trials. One example, the other day I heard on a YouTube video, some well-meaning fella said something horrible called the Nova sort of the bogus order. Yeah. And you think, okay, look, well, how is a priest who's just given his life to the church or a person who just does their best? How are they supposed to react to that? That's just insulting. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, look, I'm not, first of all,

I think, I think that people could use a lot more charity and a lot more good taste in how they talk to each other about things. I would never say bogus order. Um, you know, I, uh, it just Just like, I mean, maybe over a cigar and scotch, I might say the proddies, but I'm not going to say to a Protestant, the proddies, or something like that. You know what I mean? Especially you're trying to win them over. Yeah, exactly.

You know, it seems to me that there are ways of speaking that are just understood to be contemptuous, that we should avoid at all costs. And certainly in my written work, I always try to avoid those things. And I think also in my speech. here's where I'm going to say some things now that will annoy the rad trads. I mean, I am a rad trad, liturgically speaking, but, you know, I think that most of what they say

about the theology of the body is nonsense, is bunk. I have studied the theology of the body carefully with Mikhail Volgstein. I've read the whole giant book that he re-translated because the original translations were so poor from the Vatican media outfit. I, the theology of the body is a profound work of theology. It actually has a very low magisterial status. It's just a bunch of Wednesday audiences. So it's not really something that you can, you can't lean on it too much as magisterium.

But in terms of finding rich, psychological, anthropological, spiritual reflections in there, I mean, I think it's golden. Do we have to agree with every single opinion that the Pope says there? No, nobody has ever said that that's the case. We could have respectful disagreements with the theology of the body. My impression is, and I wrote a chapter about this in my book, treasuring the goods of marriage and a throwaway society about the theology of the body. My impression is that people are often reacting to popularizers of it, and not even to the best of those popularizers, but kind of to the sound bites.

And they see something that bothers them, and then that in their mind becomes John Baltu's Theology of the Body. Similarly with Sister Faustina, right? You know, she says some odd things in her diary, but then again, I've read a lot of mystics. They all say odd things. Mystics are odd people, and they're trying to express experiences

for which human language is inadequate. And so you have to make a big allowance when you're reading, you know, Anne Catherine Emric or Venerable Mary of Agrida or Hildegard of Bingon or, you know, I mean, whoever the mystic is, when they're trying to put into words what they've seen, they're struggling to do that well,

and they're going to say odd things. They're going to say things that don't agree with other mystics. You know, there's, there are tensions in the mystics who've seen the life of Christ. So I guess what I would say there is, you know, if the devotion to the divine mercy isn't something that suits you, the church hasn't obliged us to take it up. You know, the church has recommended the rosary 10,000 times more

than the divine mercy devotion. everybody should be doing the rosary in my opinion you know that's what our lady of fatima asked for and but don't pick on the people who love the divine mercy devotion you know it's it's anyway so i mean i i i don't want to go too far off on that but basically the more general point of this sort of cynicism or skepticism against the current right so i think i think that first of all with with a lot of catholics they're actually ill-informed they don't really know what the debates are so if they have a peaceful attitude, I think that could be something of a false piece that is not really understanding the stakes, the high stakes. And I'll give you an example that is non-liturgical, death penalty, okay?

Pope Francis is wrong about the death penalty. I'm absolutely convinced of that. I agree with Ed Faser, who, I don't know if, I didn't watch the whole interview with Ed Faser. I don't know if that question came up. We did discuss it. But Ed Faser is absolutely right. The doctrine of the church has always been, and it's also the doctrine of Scripture, really everybody. Everybody has always taught that the death penalty is licit, is legitimate. That doesn't mean people have been enthusiastic about it. It doesn't mean that we have to apply it, you know, as often as possible. It's even compatible with saying we think that prudentially now we shouldn't apply it, but the idea that in itself, it's legitimate is just part of Catholic teaching. And Francis said it was per se contrary

to the gospel and to human dignity. I'm sorry, but that's false. So, a lot of Catholics out there, they don't know what's at stake in a question like that. And if they are prone to a kind of reflexive ultramontanism, which is still there, the pope must always be right. We must always follow the pope in everything. I'm sorry, but that can lead in a bad direction. If it's possible that the pope is wrong, and no theologian has ever questioned that, outside of ex-cathra, pronouncements of dogmatic and moral matters. I'm not going to go into all that. But basically, outside of the very strictly delimited Vatican I, Poster Eterrano's situation,

popes can make mistakes. They have made mistakes in the prudential order, in the political order, in the disciplinary order. Even in the doctrinal order in a non-infallible way, it's possible. So, you know, it's, I think that there's a desire to at least, on the part of those of us who are not foaming at the mouth, we just want Catholics to be intelligent in their faith, to learn their faith, to know their faith,

and to understand that there may be times of tension with the Pope. And that this is not the end of the world. This is not the crashing down of the whole house of Catholic theology, the way that some state of a contest is presented as like, if a Pope is wrong, then Catholicism has been falsified. This is kind of nonsense. No, that's not true. That's over-inflating the office of the Pope.

that's making the be-all and end-all of Catholicism. That's making the ultimate litmus test of divine revelation. That's not what he is. And that's not what, that's no authentic account of the papacy is going to go in that direction. So I guess, you know, just to say, yes, I do think there's a danger.

I think when people fall in love with the traditional mass and when they start to discover all kinds of aspects of traditional Catholic life, when they see their first traditional Roman baptism, when they see, or even more, when they see a priestly ordination in the old Roman right, it's a hard thing to process because you're looking at something that is like, it's like visiting the land of Camelot.

It's like, suddenly you're seeing something that you can't even believe is real. It's so beautiful. It's so magnificent. So majestic, so powerful, so thick and rich and full of religion. and you're thinking, how could a Pope take this away? It causes an existential crisis, I think, in many people. It causes cognitive difficulties. And, you know, that's just a fact.

It does. And people have to wrestle with these. And what I always counsel, I always counsel, you need to keep up an intense prayer life. You need to keep praying your rosary. You need to keep frequenting the sacraments. You should, yes, as traditional as you want to be, don't take yourself out of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church, you know, it is the only haven of salvation

in this messed up fallen world we live in. You know, and I think some people have a triumphalistic picture of the church. Ironically enough, most of the recent popes have encouraged people not to have a triumphalistic picture of the church. But, you know, Tolkien once used this phrase in a letter talking about marriage. He said, a Catholic spouses

are like partners in shipwreck. This is the expression he used. And, you know, I think about the church as not some kind of glowing golden galleon that's just riding on the waves effortlessly and all the darts and arrows are just flying off of it and like, you know, it's just, it's all perfect. But I think of it as like as a storm-tossed ship,

you know, the mast is broken and people are bailing out and they're swash-buckling going on. And I mean, it's a messy thing, right? But if you fall into that ocean, you're dead. You're going to drown. The sharks will eat you, right? So it doesn't, to me, it doesn't even matter

how much turmoil or difficulty there is in the Catholic Church. I love the Catholic Church. I love the Mass. I love our Lord. This is where we find him. and them, right? I'm never going to go anywhere else. So, yeah, I mean, I see myself as a faithful critic, as a son who wants to say, you know,

dad, it's really, it's really problematic down here. We need help, right? You know, the, or, you know, your predecessors created a lot of trouble for us, and we need these things to be addressed and we need these things to be fixed. And that's done out of love for the father. That's done out of love for the ship. It's done out of love for the faith. Let me offer a couple of questions from priest's friends of mine

who really love you and love reading you. And if they could ask you a question, would ask you, there's a couple here. Because I think they're very practical questions. This priest says, coming from the perspective of a priest who loves the traditional mass and desires the good for his people and at the same time acknowledging that a lot of damage was done,

in the reform following Vatican two, what good comes from holding the position that it is impossible to offer the Novus Auto in continuation with tradition? The difficulty is that it seems to imply that the priest who offers his parish, Novus Auto Mass, in obedience to his bishop and does so in a traditional way, is somehow further doing harm to the spiritual lives of his people. Would it not be better to lead them to desire the riches of the traditional liturgy in this way? It's an outstanding question. It's one that's on the mind of many priests, especially in the post-Tradizinos custodas world. So I'll admit, I have conflicted thoughts about this. On the one hand, I recognize to use a phrase.

that Father Zulzdorf likes to use, a rising tide lifts all boats. So I recognize that if people can hear Gregorian chant at the Nova Sorto, it's better for them than hearing Marty Howgan. If they can see a priest praying Adorientem, I mean, in my book turned around, I say, you know, that's the first chapter.

I say, this is such a fundamental question that it's hard to see Versus Populam as a form of Christian worship. And you're just going to have to read that chapter if you want to see why I make that. outrageous claim. So, of course, it's better to see the priest facing east. You know, the liturgist Klaus Gomber said that was the single worst change was

turning the priest around to face the people. So, of course, that would be a tremendous improvement. You know, and I could give many other examples where it's true that people are going to encounter the tradition in this way, in the context of the Novosorto. But then the other side of me says, yes, but. This is ultimately a kind of piecemeal solution. It's a pragmatic, almost do-it-yourself solution. It's a stopgap measure.

It's what we do until we can recover a fully coherent tradition. And in that sense, maybe if you see it as a transition, as a missing link, so to speak, as a bridge, perhaps is a better way of putting it, then I would say it's not for me, but I understand why people wish to do that and how it could be beneficial in this or that respect. But again, you know, my fundamental critique

of the Nova Sordo is that all of these decisions are the priest's decisions. It's his liturgy. He's the one making it. He's not just a tool anymore of Jesus Christ, the high priest. He is, it's father bonuses, you know, up traditional novice ordo, you know, done with the grumbling of the bishop, probably.

But you know this. That's more than the grumbling. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I do that. Just imagine that you've got a priest. He likes to read your substack. He's fully bought in. But he knows, forget celebrating the Latin Mass.

Even if he were to turn at orient him, he wouldn't just be slapped on the wrist. He'd be sent out. But this shows the depth of the crisis when we have bishops who are so opposed to what I'm going to call the common mind of the church, the common mind of the church, as we've seen it in all of her centuries of liturgical worship. I'm sorry, but a bishop doesn't have the authority to set himself up against the common mind of the church. And certainly, he doesn't, I mean, bishops right now are doing the most ridiculous illegal things. For example, bishops try to outlaw adorient him. Sorry, they can't do it. It's a legitimate option in the Nova Sordo. I don't like the fact that

it's just an option, but it is a legitimate option. They try to outlaw sometimes Gregorian Chan. Sorry, it's the first thing listed in the general instruction and in sacros. I mean, they say you can't give communion to people kneeling at an altar rail. Where are they going to find that? There's no document that says that. All that the USCB says is, you know, the norm is standing in the United States. Yeah, we're grateful in this diocese to have a good bishop. When I said to him, when I said to him, thank you for allowing us to have the Latin Mass here.

He said, why would I ban what the church permits? But I know in North Carolina or another place. So, look, I mean, I don't really have a good response in the sense that I, I think that the new liturgy is harmful in many subtle ways. It's harmful to the priest in terms of putting so much stress and pressure on him to traditionalize it in the teeth of the Karens and Susan's in the parish, in the teeth of his bishop, you know,

in the teeth of other clergy, you know, it puts pressure. And then in terms of how is it harmful to the people, it's harmful mainly by omission. That is to say, you know, people often confront me with the question, like, how can you say that the Novosurdo is defective? Well, things can be defective in different ways. I mean, something can be defective

by having error in it. I've never said that about the Nova Sordo. It doesn't have error in it. It doesn't have heresy in it. But something can be defective by lacking what it should have, by omissions of all kinds, by not having the prayers at the foot of the altar

in adequate preparatory period, by not having an adequate offeratory, by not having readings that are well chosen for the purpose for which readings exist in mass, you know, and, and on and on, you know. And so, um, a person can be harmed by eating a diet that's not sufficiently nutritious. And I'm talking about the liturgical diet. I'm talking about the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the same everywhere. You know, thanks be to God. But the liturgy isn't just a communion delivery system. You know, the, the liturgy has its own proper nature and purpose. If it was just meant as a kind of, you know, sacramental pez dispenser, you know, then you could just have a five-minute quick, you know, consecration, distribution, and you're out of there, you know, kind of like the drive-through masses and stuff that were happening during COVID. So, I mean, liturgy has its own purpose, and it's got to fulfill those purposes, and I don't think the novice order is fulfilling them, even when it's souped up. So even if we grant your point that the bishop doesn't have the right to tell a priest not to celebrate

at Orientum, still he's in a situation where I can imagine a priest saying, look, it's really easy for you with your substack and your books and no bishop who's going to be censuring you. If I do the sorts of things that I want to do, I'll get sent away and some other priest who's probably not as good is these people who I'm in charge of caring for. So maybe another swing at that? I mean, I know you don't have all the answers here and it's not an ideal situation.

Yeah, no, I mean, it shows how desperate. spread things are, because what you're effectively saying is the best priest, the priest who most cares for the spiritual good of his flock is the one who is most in danger, both in danger from internal contradictions, in danger from Episcopal intervention and interference. I mean, it's, so, okay, so I'm just going to lay my cards on the table. you know, I have, I can't tell you how many young men have written to me over the years, over the past 10 years in which I've been writing predominantly about the liturgy. Asking, you know, asking me where, how can I become a priest in today's church?

I love the traditional mass. I want to celebrate the traditional mass. Where do I go? What do I do? You know, and in almost every case, I never tell people, this is what you should do. I always say, here's what I think, or here are some options or whatever. But what I explained very clearly is if you go into the diocesan priesthood, there's a very serious danger that the Latin Mass will be taken away from you or that you'll be forbidden to do it. And that the only way you'll be able to do it is to sneak it in on your day off or something like that.

And by the way, I've argued online extensively that no bishop can tell a priest not to do it privately. So they can certainly do it in their room on their day off. And that is very nourishing for priests who are in this difficult situation. But I've just said to the look, if you're a diocesan priest, you are like a pawn on a chestboard. You know, the bishop can move you where he wants. He can put you in a terrible parish where you're never going to be able to do anything traditional or where doing that would be like getting stoned, you know, or inviting a stoning. And, you know, he can do that.

If you want to be a traditional priest, if you want to be formed with a rigorously traditional seminary formation in philosophy and theology, you want to learn the liturgy backwards and forwards. You want to celebrate the mass of the ages. pray the breviary of the saints. You want to pray, you know, do baptisms with exorcisms and all that good stuff. You have to enter the fraternity of St. Peter. You have to enter the Institute of Christ the King.

You have to go to the Institute of the Good Shepherd. You need to go to Clear Creek Monastery or Nortia in Italy or et cetera, et cetera. I mean, you can, you know, there's a lot, there's a fair number of these communities now. You know, and that's... And I bet they are bulging at the seams, are they? They are. All these places are doing well.

I mean, wherever the traditional liturgy exists, you know, it's exploding. It's like a beacon, it's a magnet. It's weird to me that the church, it feels like the church hates itself and is trying to shoot itself in the foot. This is what I've talked about. I've called this the ecclesial autoimmune condition.

Because I think that in some weird sort of way, you know, we're talking about the church on earth. The church on earth, as St. Augustine says, is a mix. It's a mix of the wheat and the tears, the saints and the sinners. And as Cardinal Jornais says, in fact, all of us have a line that passes through our souls that divides the part of us, which is, which belongs to Christ for the part of us, which belongs to

the world. But, um, um, but the church on earth, not the heavenly bride of Christ in all her eternal glory, the church on earth right now seems to be suffering an autoimmune condition, where, where, where the body is attacking itself, you know, where instead of looking at a community saying, this community is bursting at the seams, whatever they're doing must be working, let's have more of that. It's like, oh my goodness, this church is bursting out the seams. Abolish all of it, close it down. Yes. Drive them into a basement or an attic.

You know, I mean, it's crazy. It's insane. It's actually insane. Is it these people still drunk on the revolutions? Exactly. It's, they drank the Kool-Aid. All of the people in charge right now, not all of them. But most of the people at the senior level are, are the boomer level.

Yeah, the boomers, yes. Might as well just say it. You know, all of them are nine. 1970s nostalgics. They're all backwardists, right? As I said before, they're all stuck in that dream of a new Pentecost, a new springtime. And the thing is that it's, it's so, they're so habituated to it. They've been so colonized by that way of thinking, or even contaminated, one might say by that way of thinking, that they, their attitude is basically, damn it, we're going to keep going full steam ahead in the same direction, no matter how many churches closed.

no matter how many monasteries shut down, no matter how many, you know, priests retire, we're just going to keep going in the same direction because that is the new springtime. That is the new penthouse. That's what it feels like. Well, sorry, bud, it's not working that way. It's not working that way.

And anybody who can't see that has a serious plank in their eye. You know, my wife and I have made several moves throughout our marriage. And, you know, we all would like to think that things happen for a reason and we're doing God's perfect will and we had this sign, which is why we moved here or there.

But I think if we're honest, most of us would look back in our life and go, that was a really bad mistake and I shouldn't have made that gigantic move. But that takes humility and it's kind of embarrassing. I think part of it is that as well. That if we look back and say, that was a mistake, what does that mean?

I think in general, in general, the clergy, the higher up you go in the clergy, this is definitely true of bishops and popes, the more, the more difficult it is for them to say they're sorry, to say they've made a mistake, to say we need to go back to the tried and true, what worked before. You know, and you, you see this in all kinds of examples. For example, I mean, just this one that's on almost everybody's mind is what happened just, was it, four years ago, five years ago with COVID?

I didn't remember what year it was, 2020. Yeah. How many bishops have apologized for the way they mishandled that? A few of them have, but there are over 5,000 bishops, right? How many of them apologized about promoting the vaccine mandates and the forced vaccinations of employees? Have they apologized about that? I mean, no, it's crickets, you know?

I think as of today, I mean, as of today, no, the bishops haven't even, you know, they haven't even addressed the Charlie Kirk assassination, you know. Still, as a USCB? Yeah, still. Because I'm pretty sure they addressed the George Floyd thing immediately. Exactly. That's right.

That's right. So it's very selective, right? It's whatever fits in with their progressive narrative. The safe narrative. Yeah, the safe narrative, the one that is friendly to the world. Because even if individual bishops aren't of that opinion, there's a safe way to go, and then there's a way to go and you'll get smacked by the culture. Yeah, it's really astonishing.

I mean, if the elements, of a serious Catholic renewal are right in front of us. I know. I mean, you even go to a place like Franciscan University of Steubenville, which I think is a fine school. Everyone's kneeling. All the women are veiling. Nobody wants guitars, even though it's like the, and I mean no offense to these dear people who are holier than I am and are leading these knights of praise, but it feels like it's on life support.

You go to these knights of praise, I think they call it, a festival of praise. And it's just, it's just, maybe it was huge, huge in the 80s, but now all the young people kneeling, veiling before the Eucharist. And so I think to myself, if you were following like the spirit, surely you'd be like, well, let's put up altar rails. This is where the spirit seems to be leading, but we seem to be wanting to send people back. You know, this is a point that could have come up earlier, but didn't. Because we were talking about what were the motivations of the liturgical reformers? And I talked about their antiquarianism, the false antiquarianism, condemned by Pius the 11th in Mediator

today. And I talked about the influence of the Protestants, you know, and the anti-liturgical heresy diagnosed by Geronje. But another very important factor that we have to take into account is enlightenment rationalism. That is the idea that the reduction of human beings to their intellects and the reduction of culture to basically intelligible bite-sized chunks of immediately comprehensible content. And so the idea a rationalist would say, and in fact they did say this, this was the Jansenists were doing this, they tended to be very rationalistic in this sense, that the liturgy, everything should be said out loud, nothing should be whispered, everything should be said in the people's language, not in Latin, everything should be done so that it could be

seen easily, nothing should be veiled, nothing should be hidden, right? You know, and in all of these ways, a kind of rationalism seeped in to Western modernity. I mean, it seeped in everywhere and, of course, it seeped into the church. Not surprising, because the church is part of the world and is influenced by the culture. And so, this rationalism

is very instrumental in liturgical reform. Everything has to be simplified, abbreviated, vernacularized, made to be said out loud. Two things can't be happening at the same time. It has to be sequential. You know, I mean, it's it you can see that that doesn't fit the religious anthropology of the human race at any other time

you know any time before the era of rationalism and then now in the postmodern period where i would say the strange the mysterious yeah the unusual the hidden the veiled all of that has resonance again why why why does it have resonance again i think I think because already the spell of rationalistic modernity was breaking, even as Vatican 2 was meeting, it was breaking. And yet the tragedy of that council, and this is an idea that I got from Father Richard Chipola, so I want to credit him. But the tragedy of Vatican 2 is that it was a council responding to a modernity, to a version

of modernity that was already on the way out. So Vatican 2 is like, it's like, um, It's like a very delayed response after many centuries to a kind of enlightenment vision that was already seriously under fire and already falling apart. And basically post-modernity was being born already in the 60s. And so by the time the ink dried on the Vatican II documents, they already were irrelevant in a certain sense. They were speaking to a different period.

They dated more quickly than any council's documents. have ever dated, right? And we can see this because, you know, even the most, even the most, you know, buttoned up conservatives will say it's painful to read Gaudi Mitzphez now. You know, it's just so full of this sort of post-war optimism and, you know, we're building a new world of brotherhood

and, you know, blah, blah, blah, all this kind of stuff. And you kind of look around at the world today and you just say, wow, they kind of missed the boat on that. Like, there was just, there was chaos about to come and not just chaos, but also people hungry for a deep spiritual traditions. Why did, I mean, the Vatican has talked about this in some very good documents,

why all of a sudden, in the period after Vatican II, were so many people looking into far eastern religions, you know, burning incense and doing yoga and trying to learn transcendental meditation and, you know, saying, you know, oh, you know, I mean, why were they doing all this stuff? It's because they were trying to escape rationalism. They were trying to escape materialistic,

scientific, hedonistic, rationalistic, yeah, they were trying to break into a mystical domain, right? Of course, they were doing it in all kinds of bad ways, all kinds of harmful ways, you know, even self-destructive ways. But the church was and is perfectly poised to respond to that hunger

for the deep mystery of God, right? The kind of thing that brings you to your knees, the kind of thing that makes you weep, the kind of thing where you don't, Don't ask, do I get it? Do I understand it? But can I submit to it? Can I surrender to it?

You know, this is what, I think this is what so many people find at the traditional Latin Mass is something that is pre-modern and post-modern, right? So something that is so old that it's timeless. Something that is so different that it wakes us up, it kind of shakes us up. something that is so stable that it comforts us. I don't know, it's just amazing the power of an age-old ritual like that. You must have tremendous hope because I mean, you've been writing on these topics for years now

and it feels like things have really sped up as far as the interest young people have in tradition, right? Especially among young men today in America. There's a vibe shift, everybody's talking about the vibe shift. I remember talking to a priest once and he said how out of touch Pope Benedict the 16th was when he was reigning because of all this Latin he wanted. And I thought, oh, that's so sad because you don't see that you're the one out of touch. Exactly.

I mean, I know. The 80-year-old Benedict is with us. Yeah. I know of seminarians all over the world, again, in contact with me, diocesan seminaries, seminarians who are studying Latin as much as they can, oftentimes privately because they're not getting adequate instruction, you know, in the seminary, you know, they eat this up. They love it, they love it. And doesn't it make sense that postmodern young people,

you know, they grew up in a world that's de-rassinated. They have no roots. They have, they hardly have a history. They've been thrown to the lions of the internet. You know, I mean, there's, in almost every way, modern people, especially as you go younger and younger, are like free-floating atoms with no anchor, with no connection. And it turns out it's not fun.

It's horrible. It was fun when we first severed ourselves off back in the 70s. Yes. That's what I think of when I watched, I don't watch it anymore, but that old show Seinfeld. It was like this narcissistic generation living on the fumes of Christianity. They all had intact families while they were fornicating. I'm sure it was great then, I don't mean that, but you see the point. But now look at the wreckage.

Exactly. Exactly. No, we're living in a sort of post-nuclear situation, societally speaking. Which gaslights us because the electricity works and the water still. and the water still runs. Right, right. Yeah. And so we're living in that situation and young people are sick and tired of it.

I mean, you've seen all of these articles that I have. They've come out in the New York Times and Washington Post and National Geographic, big, big outlets, talking about how young people are turning to tradition, how they're looking for meaning, they're looking for roots, they're looking for a connection that goes beyond yesterday, you know. You would think if you were a bishop just trying to bring in more money. Let's be cynical about it and say that's your sole goal. And let your traditionalist priests do what they want, bring it in, fill the coffers. Yes.

I don't understand why they don't even do it for that reason. So, Matt, you know, there are, there are bishops who are like that. I mean, I, you know, I don't want to, I really, really don't want to give the impression that I think that all the bishops are bad. I know some very, very good bishops. Yes, of course. I'm friends with them. You know, I've consulted with bishops. I mean, I could someday, maybe I will write a memoir about all the relationships good and bad I've had with bishops because it's been quite colorful.

Maybe on your way out. But the fact is, I know some very good bishops who have exactly that attitude. It's either a pragmatic attitude of whatever works, works. And our goal as shepherds is to bring souls to Christ. Obviously, the traditional liturgy can do this because it did it for so many centuries, and it's obviously doing it today. And so why not let it flourish? I know bishops have that attitude.

I also know that the idea of, you know, these parishes are flourishing. They're bringing in money is a consideration for some bishops. They understand that, you know, money, that money is a kind of rough and dirty measure of success. 100%. The other, but, you know, I think the other kind of bishop that we're dealing with is the ideologue, you know, that's the one I described earlier, as the one who will drive the bus off the cliff rather than turning around. Can we name him? Can we name Supitch and North York, or the North Carolina bishop?

I don't mean to be. Soapich, Martin, Bishop Martin, Bishop Martin Luther, as some people call him. What's he doing? What is he doing? Yeah. He didn't go after just the Latin Mass. He went after the novice order. Like, there can be no trace of reverence, essentially.

No trace of tradition. Give us a few examples for those who are new to this. I mean, there's high candlesticks you can't kneel to receive. Right, right. What else? Yeah, no Adorientem, no veils on women who are exercising ministries. Priests can't use vesting prayers in the sacriety. I mean, basically, absolutely anything that is not stipulated by the novice ordo he wanted to forbid.

And even some things that are stipulated in the novice ordo, he wanted to forbid. So what you're dealing with in a case like his is the Kool-Aid drinking ideologue. You know, the true believer in the New Pentecost, new springtime, who thinks that really if basically we just have to novice hard. like we have to we have to break things down more we have to get further away from the middle ages further away from the brook period further away from any kind of of of recidivism isn't that the expression that's used for people who sort of fall back into their old sins you know so so pre priests and leit who are falling back into pre vatican two sins you know we have to get rid of all of that that's the attitude of somebody of that sort and it's it's painfully out of touch it's extremely pasturally

sensitive and cruel. I mean, the Diocese of Charlotte, I have so many friends there. It's writhing. It's like... Did he walk it back? It seems like he did without doing it, but I don't know. I mean, he, so he had this memo that was leaked by somebody internal to the Diocese because the presbyterate can't stand him at all. I mean, he's the most disruptive thing that's ever happened to that Diocese. But his memo, you know, enforcing all these changes on the Nova Sorta was leaked. So he didn't do that. But, Apparently, he's still pushing these things behind the scenes. So he's not going to give up.

He's not going to give up. And, you know, so circling around to your earlier question about what a priest's supposed to do. I mean, in Charlotte, this is a very concrete question because there is a generation of priests there. Charlotte's seminary was full. It was packed because it was a traditional diocese, just the way any other traditional diocese is. They're always packed with candidates for the priesthood. And, you know, they were studying Latin. speaking Latin. I mean, they were doing everything beautifully. And so now you have a whole generation

of priests in Charlotte who are very traditionally formed. When they do the Nova Sordo, it's very traditional in its smells and bells. Let me put it that way. They also celebrate the traditional Latin Mass by preference, right? This was a diocese where before the new bishop cracked down, there were many flourishing parishes with the Latin Mass. Parishes that had been transformed for the better by the Latin Mass, right? Well, for the better if you have our perspective. I mean, obviously, somebody like Bishop Martin would say, it was a horrible thing that happened.

You know, but these men are in crisis now because now there's a huge struggle in their conscience between how they were formed. Remember, they were formed by Benedict the 16th, who said what was sacred and great in the past remained sacred and great today and cannot be forbidden or declared harmful. That's a dogmatic statement.

So they were formed by Benedict the 16th. They were formed by their former, their previous bishop. They were formed by reading Rothinger and other liturgical scholars. And now they have a bishop who is diametrically and vehemently opposed to all of that. That's people who say things like, oh, they should just be obedient to their bishop. They don't understand how this works, right? If you form your conscience and your mind and your heart in a particular way, profound way that goes down to every last bone in your body, you would have to be a superficial

idiot to change like that, to do a 180 and suddenly disagree with everything that you've been formed in. Yes. It's like, how can I put this? People who were formed by John Paul II and Benedict the 16th, who really let themselves be formed by Veritati splendor, by Ecclesia de Eucharistia, by Fides et Rastio, by Evangelium Vite, I mean, the list goes on and on, by Sumorum Pontificum. Those people were the ones who struggled under Francis. Why? Because Francis was not in agreement with John Paul II and Benedict

the 16th on many of those fundamental questions. And so to say, well, a new pope has come, you should reinvent yourself. It starts to sound like some kind of transgenderism. It's like, I let myself be deeply formed by the popes, my holy fathers. And I let myself be formed by all of these legitimate authors and so forth, and now I'm being told to think and do the opposite, I cannot do that. What kind of coward and traitor and superficial idiot? Do you think I am, right? Do you see what I'm getting out? A hundred percent. It just seems like the people who have this, this almost dog whistle idea of obedience don't understand what they're asking people to do to themselves. And it's not, I'm sorry, but it's not like a virtuous, you know, I'm going to give up my will because,

you know, Philippians, too, you know, I'm not, no, it's, what you're talking about is intellectual suicide. You're talking about intellectual contradiction. You're asking people essentially to become walking robots that are just the sounding board for the latest program, whatever that is. Yeah. I mean, that is so far from Christian maturity, that's not even basic sanity, you know. Right. Wow. Wow. Yeah. So in terms of what, what can priests do? I mean, I don't know. I don't have, there are no easy answers to this. But I know some priests who, I mean, they do a lot of different things.

Some of them are clever. They keep their head down. They try to keep doing traditional things because they know it's right. And they know that what they've been told to do or not to do is wrong. They might get in trouble. They're prepared for that. There are others who go into early retirement and keep celebrating private masses that people, you know, show up to because the door is conveniently left open.

You know, there are priests who change dioceses and try to find greener fields somewhere else. There are some priests I know who have joined the fraternity or the institute is not easy to do. It's actually very difficult to do. Your bishop has to give you permission. Yeah, there has to be approval and, you know, and everybody has to be happy with everybody doing it. And, you know, there are some who go into religious communities, which is technically to take a step up. And so that is easier to do, like if you become a Benedictine monk. But, you know, there are possible, I mean, there are some who have joined the SSPX.

You know, I mean, I'm just going to be frank with you. In terms of what happens out there, there are probably a dozen different things that priests are going to do who are trapped in this situation. I'm not going to say, one is the right, you know, this is right, that's wrong. I mean, but I'm not going to withhold my view that tradition is not optional. It's not an add-on. it's not window dressing it's not something we like to do because it makes us feel good that's not what it is it's our lifeline to the past it's our connection with the saints it is

our superfood we're not going to give it up like that let me ask you if pope leo calls you and he calls you to that'd be lovely calls you to the vatican and he asks you what do we do about this Latin Mass thing. I'll put you in charge of it, the liturgy throughout the world, which of course you're not asking for, but he's asked you and you want to be obedient to him. And so you say, all right, what do you tell him?

Because I once had an FSSP priest sit with me and he said that even though he wants the whole church to be celebrating the Latin Mass, he wouldn't want the new mass to be taken away from people the way the Latin Mass was taken away from their generation because of what it would do to the faith. So I guess it's easy to cavalierly say just next day. It's all that in mass.

And maybe that is what you would say. But, I mean, practically, prudently, what would you tell him to do? Yes. That's a monumental counterfactual. But I've thought about this a lot, not because I ever expect to be asked to do anything about it,

but just because I think it's an interesting question and because I think in the future, a pope will need. to come up with some kind of modus vivendi. Tradizinos custodas is absolutely unworkable. Any sensible person can recognize that. It's created a situation of civil war inside the church. And no amount of robotic parroting of the word obedience

is going to change that civil war. It just is what it is because it's there for serious reasons, not for frivolous ones. So what would I say? I agree with the fraternity priest. I think what was done to Catholics in the 1960s was exceedingly cruel. That is to change overnight the way that they worshipped, which is to say to change the most important act of the Catholic life

in which most Catholics found their identity over against Protestants or people of the world, secular people. You know, the mass was so, you know, central. I think that it would be cruel to just, remove the Novos Ordo overnight, I think that all that's necessary, really, is a kind of souped up version of Simoran Pontificum, where what you would do is you would remove all restrictions on the traditional, right? You would say any priest can celebrate it. You would, you would make it clear that it's desirable to have this in as many parishes as possible

as one of the masses. Parishes often have five masses or three or five masses. One of them could be a Latin mass. Let it attract people organically, naturally. People will go either because they find it more devotionally suitable or because they're curious or because it's even just a convenient time. They'll discover it.

It'll become peacefully integrated into parishes and dioceses again. And I think, I mean, I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say, if you had a policy like that, a true laissez-faire policy, then I think that within 20 years, almost all of the masses would be the traditional Latin mass. Do you know what? That's what I said.

Yeah. I put out a tweet about seven years ago, and I said, if no one, this is before the modiproprio by Francis, that if no one tinkers with the Latin Mass, I think it'll be the predominant way people worship. And maybe I'm just in an isolation sort of, maybe I'm wrong about that, but that was what I kind of thought.

I got a lot of blowback from that from really good theologians and biblical scholars who wrote to me personally, you know who I'm talking about, and just thought that was really problematic. And I thought, well, if it's problematic or not, I think this is what would happen. Yes. Yeah, I do think that's what would happen because the fault of most scholars, and I mean, I'm fully willing to admit, you know, scholars have many occupational faults. and one of them is that they tend to overly intellectualize things and they don't, they lose the ability to see things

with a common man's perspective. And I think what's helped me not to fall into that mistake is just hearing constantly from so many ordinary Jains and Joes across the world. People just write to me and share their first Latin mass experiences. You know, this is what it was like. I just, Dr. Kay, I just wanted to let you know this is what it was like when I went the first time.

And I get to see things over and over again through fresh eyes. And what I see is that, you know, you've got, let's say, some formidable biblical scholar who is just droolingly enthusiastic about the new lecture. He's like, oh, three years of Sunday cycle and two years of weekday readings. And isn't this so cool? It's intricate and we can do all these commentaries and blah, blah, blah. And then you've got the ordinary Catholic who's like,

I don't remember what the readings were, you know, what were they yesterday? What were they today? I don't remember. And so then they go to the, old mass and they start using a missile as you know they eventually will almost certainly start using a missile or at least a leaflet a handout and they start reading these readings from the old mass and first of all they begin to discover passages they've never seen before because the old missile has things that the new the old lecture has things the new lecturer doesn't have you know including

some very tough passages um and they and they see them and they see themselves being morally challenged because the readings are deliberately morally challenging they're not just like some historical account taken from the Old Testament because you're supposed to know it, which is what a Bible study is for. But they're actually directed towards Eucharistic communion and being worthy for that. And so then they start getting the sort of tough love message from the readings. Like this is really, I've never, I haven't, I hardly seen this before. And then if they go often enough, they start realizing, oh, I've heard that reading before. I'm seeing it again. And again. And then after a few years, like, I know that reading. Like, I've got it inside of memorized that,

you know, like, you know, if the salt loses its savor, it's fit for nothing but to be thrown out, you know. Or blessed is the man who suffers temptation but conquers, you know, who could have transgressed but didn't transgress, who could have taken money but didn't take money, you know, or I've espoused you to Christ as a chaste virgin. You know, there are these passages that come up over and over again, you know, the five foolish virgins and the five wise virgins.

And, you know, the old lectionary is forming people in a very profound way through repetition, through deliberate, pedagogically deliberate repetition. And so then you take what I'm going to call Joe or Jane's experience, which is they are being steeped in portions of scripture that are ideally suited for forming the Catholic interior life, the spiritual life. While, meanwhile, the scholars are geeking out about some huge lectionary that isn't having that effect. It can't have that effect, right?

it is not going to. So this is where I think, I think that it's really important for people to kind of get out of their ivory towers and get to brass tacks. I really liked your chapter on the three-year lecture versus the one year because that is what a lot of people say.

This is the one good thing they'll say, even if they're very sympathetic with many of the things you say and that's the three-year lectionary. But I love your point. Your point is, well, what is the mass? Because if the mass is a Bible study, you didn't say this,

but I would say this, then I'd agree with you. In fact, we should add more scripture. Because we actually don't cover the entire Bible in three years. What if we cover the entire Bible? Maybe let's, hang on, let's cover the entire Bible in a year. That would be better, right? That'd be better. And clearly that wouldn't be better because what is the mass

and what are people's attention spans? Yes. Yeah, no, I mean, once you appreciate the pivotal distinction is to see the mass as a sacrifice versus seeing the mass as a meal, a fellowship. Obviously, the sacrifice is a sacrificial meal. It's a sacrificial banquet. O Socrum, convivium, says St. Thomas.

But it's primarily a sacrifice from, of which we may partake of the victim, right? So once you have that focus where you realize that the mass is not an attempt at a historical reenactment of the Last Supper, which is how the Protestants think of it, but it is the making present anew of the bloody sacrifice of Christ on the cross on good. Friday in an unbloody manner. And so it's really mass is bringing us not to Holy Thursday, but to Good Friday and to the cross, to the foot of the cross. And once that is your theocentric and Christocentric orientation, then your question about the liturgy of the word, or as we call it, the mass of the catechumans, then your question about that is, how, what is the function of this with regard to preparing you to participate in the sacrifice? Both To offer it interiorly, which is, I would argue, the primary form of active participation is to offer interiorly your mind, your heart, your body, every faculty, every power that you have, all that you are, to offer it in union with Christ on the cross to the glory of the Father.

That's the primary form of active participation. That is what the Latin Mass facilitates so well. But also then the participation, the Eucharistic or sacramental participation. So that's why if you look at the Sunday readings in the old mass, the one-year cycle, they're very concerned with moral worthiness because, of course, that's a presupposition for sacramental communion. They're very much concerned with how to live out charity in day-to-day life for the same reason.

They're very much concerned with impressing upon people the divinity of Christ and his miracles. There's a really strong emphasis on that. Why? Because we're about to receive Christ. We're about to worship Christ. We need to be put in a disposition to adore him as God and then to receive him on our knees, you know, as our Savior, as the one who can heal us, right?

And so actually the old lectionary is a work of genius. It's a work of genius. I think you could say that the new lectionary is as well. Yeah, but for a different purpose. I just said that because when I counterbalance what I said earlier, I wasn't trying to disparage the new lectionary to say there wasn't that genius in the way that the old and the new testament fit together. It has its own ingenuity to it because it was,

put together by respectable biblical scholars. And it was put together by precisely the sort of people who studied scripture and who think everybody else wants to study scripture and who were not making a distinction between the liturgical function of the readings and just scripture study in general. What they really were trying to create is something like a Father Mike Schmidt's experience

within the liturgy. And frankly, that's never gonna happen. It's never, ever, ever going to happen. I don't care how good the preaching is that there's too much scripture and it's spread out too diffusely across the three-year Sunday cycle and the two-year weekday cycle for it ever to cohere. I think, frankly, I mean, it's to me, it's not surprising that the huge injection of biblical fervor in the Catholic Church in recent decades has been

from Protestant converts, right? Like the Scott Hans of the world and all of the others who kind of orbit in that circle, right? And, you know, what are these? These are Protestants who fell in love with the Bible before they had a sacramental liturgical face. And then when they found the Catholic church, they were like kids in a candy shop. Because it was like, now we have not just scripture, but all the realities that scripture is talking about are right here in front of us.

And you know, the amazing thing is, you know, someone like Scott Hahn, what he found in the novice order was already so much better than what he had found in Protestantism that it contented him for a while because it was like, oh, this is the cool Catholic stuff. Then when he discovered the traditional Latinas, he was like, oh, that was the law.

light version. This is the full-on, like full-calorie, full-fat version, right? Yes. And that's exactly the way it comes across to us. But I bring up these Protestant converts because they invented something like the Great Adventure, Jeff Kavens, which is terrific. I did it. I've done it. And where if you want to learn the Bible, do something like that. It's intentional. It's focused. It's well-constructed. And very importantly, it doesn't omit difficult passages as the new lectionary does. Right. the new lectionary is a carefully edited and curated presentation of scripture where things that are offensive like people getting killed by prophets or you know people talking about hell or or how or most notoriously you know that you have to to discern carefully the body and blood of christ

and examine your conscience lest you eat and drink damnation from from first letter to the corinthians you know chapter 11 these things are taken out of the new lectionary so it's it's as i said it as i put it once, it's not just more scripture, it's different scripture. It's scripture that has been edited to be safe for modern Western people. And this to me is, I'm just going to say it flat out. I think that there is an element there of sacrilege, some kind of sacrilege, where what you're saying is, the word of God needs to be edited for modern people, either because some of these passages are questioned by modernistic biblical scholars, which is definitely the case that they do question certain things, you know, or because somehow what God has revealed to us in the midst of these

passages that we think people should know is harmful for them, that it's going to give them the wrong ideas. Well, I'm sorry, but if that's your attitude towards the revealed word of God, that doesn't seem pious to me. That it doesn't seem as if you're actually giving people, strong meat and drink, right? I mean, if your purpose is to give them, you know, a feast, a banquet of the Word of God, which is the way that some of these documents speak, we'll give them the whole banquet, you know?

I mean, banquets are not just sweet desserts. You know, they include sharp and bitter and spicy things too, right? I mean, this is what a banquet should be. And in the traditional lectionary, when you look at it, it's this wonderful selection of every kind of, of thing you can find in the Bible, including the tough language. It's there, right? And so people are going to have to confront that. They're going to get hit with it, you know? And if somebody says, well, it wouldn't make a difference because they're hearing it in Latin, they wouldn't

understand it. Well, no, that's not true for two reasons. First, you know, many, many people use missiles or handouts that have the readings printed in them. And secondly, in most traditional masses I've been to, the priest reads the readings in the vernacular from the pulpit before he gives a homily. So, yes, they are going to, they're going to see. and hear these readings, you know. I agree with you that many people have the experience that you had. They step into a Latin mass and they're just, they're bowled over by it. That's not always true.

There are good people who go there and go, I get the people who are into this. I don't get anything out of this. So what do you say to them? Sure. Well, you know, I like to say to everybody, really, a ritual that took a thousand years to develop is going to take you more than an hour to enter into. Something that is a ritual that is bringing you into contact with the eternal, incomprehensible God

is going to baffle you and stymie you. It's going to be a steep climb. That's the way it should be. That's good for you. And what you need to do is, is as when a person enters a dark room from a very bright day, and he can't see anything, even though there's lots of furniture and stuff in the room, and he has to just pause and let his eyes adjust to the new light level.

I say the same thing about the liturgy. You need to acquire the mind of the traditional liturgy. You need to let it form you and not expect to be spoon-fed. See, this is part of that rationalism I was talking about before, where it's we want the liturgy to be on our terms. we want to be the ones who dictate how it should educate us. Instead of having the humility to say, you know what, maybe I don't know what I need.

Maybe the tradition knows better than I do, how to form me. And so instead of me forming or reforming the liturgy, I should let the religi form me, right? I should be the one who is clay in the hands of the potter, right? And I think this is often, this often proves to be true. So one situation that I've encountered a lot in my life is the situation, it can be often quite painful and awkward for a time, but where one spouse falls in love with the traditional mass and the other one doesn't, and maybe even the other one can't stand it, right?

And so, and it goes in both directions. It's not always, I mean, it's true that men tend to be very attracted to the traditional lot mass, and I think that's because of its masculinity, its regimentation, yeah, Exactly. It's got kind of military formality to it, and everybody is symmetrical, and it's all very, you know, choreographed. And it's not emotional. It's not sentimental. It doesn't, it doesn't, it leaves them anonymous. It leaves them alone. You know, the best thing, the best thing about the Latin Mass is that it seems like it doesn't care whether you're there or not. You know, it's like, it's like, I'm here to worship God. And yes, he's happy to see me, but nobody is looking at me. Nobody's expecting me to give an amen, you know, or something. It's, it's, it's, just, it's so pure. It's so pure and so unself centered. It's, it's, it's centrifical. It's sentrifical. It's taking us out of ourselves, right? It's ecstatic. That's what, that's what's going on there. So we can forget about ourselves more easily. And I think men especially appreciate that. They don't want to be pampered. They don't want to be held by the hand, you know, like,

let's all hold hands and this kind of gay stuff, you know. And so, yeah, so men are definitely attracted to it, but I have definitely known situations where the wife falls in love with the Latin Mass, something about the silence of it or the solemnity or the music or the way that the children tend to behave better because they do because they can pick up, they can pick up on the sacredness of what's going on very easily, sometimes even more easily than adults, I would say. And, you know, so the wife is locked in, but the husband is like, oh, I don't know about this. This is all kind of, you know, it's too quiet. It's too long.

And, you know, so you get all sorts of things. But in those kind of mixed marriage situations, if I could put it that way, you know, I would just counsel the spouse who isn't into the Latin Mass. You know, give it a chance for a while. Like, go for a while, like three months. Just go every Sunday for three months. You know, you might be gritting your teeth. You might be tempted to look at your watch.

You know, you might be thinking, I'm not getting much out of this. But give it a chance to speak to you. give it give your eyes a chance to adjust to that light you know um let its rhythms calm you and slow you let its ceremonial beauty put order and peace into your soul it does these it works in a very subtle way it seems to me it doesn't hit you over the head it's not you know it's like it's like who's that actor Shaya Leboeuf? Yeah, who said, I don't feel like they're trying to sell me a car. Like, it's, the Latin Mass is just kind of, it's so objective as ritual. It's just going on up there in the sanctuary that you really do have to, I think, fundamentally, well, you have to let your

idea of what worship is be, to a certain extent, deconstructed and reconstructed. Because for us, worship has so much has so much come to be seen as a group activity where we're all involved hearing things through loudspeakers and always something is being said and we're always acting physically and you know people are going up and and it's just kind of a like a jamboree kind of a thing or even even if it's not to that extent it's so extroverted and so congregationally focused, even in the best situations, that it's really hard for us to get a sense of an act of prayer that is so selfless and so other-directed and so much like an arrow that's flying up, you know, rather than a circle that is, that we're a part of, you know. And I just,

I just, these are just metaphors, of course, but. what's the difference between sort of organic development and rupture, right? And my fear is that because of this reaction to the revolution after the Second Vatican Council, that even if you got what you wanted, there would be this hypervigilism around the traditional Latin mass and the lectionary that there could never be any kind of organic development. Two examples I'm thinking of in history would be, one, the implementation of the pipe organ that you brought up in what the 10th century

brought over by Charlemagne, I think, from Byzantium and then gradually introduced, and there was a lot of reaction to that, negative reaction. This is the most complicated piece of technology in existence and we're now inserting it into the liturgy. There was obviously a reaction to that. So how is that not just this? Why is this something we now praise?

Also church pews. I know they predate the Protestant Reformation, but they were popularized by the Protestant Reformation because the Protestant liturgy or the Protestant service is sermon-centered. Yes. But traditionally, we don't have pews. So why not object to those things?

Sure. Well, you know, it's, I guess what I would say about that is we are in a very peculiar situation as people living at the beginning of the 21st century for multiple reasons. The first reason is that we are, now the heirs of five centuries, more than five centuries of papal centralization and liturgical legislation. So this is an incredible, this is kind of a mind-blowing thing for people

to realize, but I really stress it because it's so important. For 1,500 years, that is three quarters of the history of the church, Christians, Catholics everywhere in East and West, were celebrating liturgical rights that were never promulgated by a pope, that had never gone across a pope's desk, that were simply there because of tradition, only because they'd been handed down in this local church by the bishops for century after century after century,

often using the same books, books that had been written centuries earlier were still being used later on, right? So prior to 1570, which is when the Trinantine Missal, as we think of it, was promulgated by Piper. the 5th. Prior to that time, nobody thought that the liturgy came from the hands of the Pope.

Nobody thought of that. They would have said, our liturgy comes from St. Ludolf or from St. Rudolf or whoever the saint was, the oldest one that they could remember or that they knew anything about. Chrysson, exactly. Chrysusususon, Basil, Gregory the Great. Actually, even the Roman right goes back before Gregory the Great. Some people call it the Gregorian Right. And so we have this very weird situation where once, again, understandably, as a response to the chaos of the Protestant revolt in the 16th century, understandably, you had a desire to formalize, centralized, let's have a concerted, coherent, well-planned response to the relatively chaotic liturgical situation around Europe. And again, even Pius V was conservative in the sense that he said,

if anybody has a liturgy older than 200 years, you don't have to adopt the Roman right. He did not impose it on everybody. There's a lot of false information. Oh, that's good things to say on that. Yeah, I think a lot people do think that. No, no, absolutely not. No, basically what he said is

if you're already using the Roman liturgy, then you have to use my new book. My new edition, it's not a new book. It's a new edition of an old book. And if you have a liturgy in your own church or religious community that's older than 200 years, then you may keep using that. But if you want to adopt the Roman right, you may do so with a unanimous vote

of the bishop in the chapter. Now, this is also very telling of his conservatism. Because, you know, again, Catholics nowadays, they don't even know what it means to talk about a bishop and his chapter of canons, because that has mostly disappeared in the 20th century, especially after Vatican too. But what you're talking about is take it like a given city in Europe, you know, the city would have a bishop. Keep going. The city would have a bishop surrounded by, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 cannons who were attached to the cathedral, who basically presided over the liturgical celebrations at that cathedral day and night. They sang the office together they celebrated solemn liturgy they were in charge of processions i mean it was these cathedrals

were just buzzing hives of liturgy in the middle ages you know it must have been incredible in the in the height of this period and so what what pious the fifth is saying is every one of those canons with the bishop unanimously has to request adopting the roman right over their local right if it's going to replace it right okay so this is not a pope who's like you have to all of you have to use my right this is ridiculous this is like urban legend Okay. But anyway, but ever since 1570, that did introduce a new era in the church where now everybody can say, well, I don't know. Can we make any changes? Because if we make any changes, then that's different from the Pope's missile, which we adopted. And maybe we need to ask Rome for permission. And then Rome maybe was hesitant to give permission. Or then Rome says, oh, we like that idea. And then implements it for everybody. And so once you have this very top-down, centralized form of liturgical governance, organic development on the ground becomes much more difficult.

Why? Well, for obvious reasons, you know, if you have a country diocese, let's see you've got a country diocese where, you know, I'm just making this up. This is not a historical example, but let's say there's a country diocese where they started using bidding prayers. So what we would call intercessory prayers, you know. So after the homily, you know, the priest or the deacon

or somebody stands up, you know, in the pulpit. and praise for different categories of people, as we do in the prayer of the faithful. This was part of many medieval liturgies. Well, chances are nobody asked for permission to do that. They just started doing it. Or maybe one church started it, and then the next church over said,

that's a great idea, we're going to do that too. And then pretty soon everybody was doing it, and nobody gave permission. It just happened, right? That's what we mean about organic development. Not that it happened like, literally like an earthquake or an avalanche. It wasn't organic in that sense. it's organic more of the sense of it sprouts up here and there by decisions of individuals

and it spreads in a natural way not by a top down imposition right that's what we're talking about and without asking for permission that kind of thing is going to be just incredibly difficult after 1570 i see but that's not it um the next weird thing is that we're living in an age of instant communication so now if the pope gives an interview on an airplane pretty soon everybody knows everything he said and everybody's talking about it. And so there isn't even this kind of the root. What we have to realize is that part of the room

for organic development is when you have thousands of churches spread out over a large landmass that are not in communication with each other, right? And this favors a couple of things. It favors a strong conservatism because you can't get fresh input all the time from far away. You're just going to keep doing what you've done locally. And in fact, some people,

especially before the invention of machinery, a lot of people stayed in their town for their whole lives. Maybe they went once or twice to a big city for some special occasion, but everybody was basically localized, right? Now that everything is globalized, there's not really a place anymore, and there's no way that a custom could slowly grow, right?

It's just weird. Our whole way of communicating now, sort of instantly things are either promoted or demoted or pounced on or piled on or, you know what I mean? It's like, 100%. That really makes sense. Everything is vexed.

Yes. Everything is fraught immediately, right? Yes. So what to do? And then there was a third thing I was going to bring up as well. Oh, and then the third problem with organic development at this moment is we've just been through a shell shock, you know, a monumental shell shock with the 1960s and 70s and the fallout from that, which continues and will continue.

and which was exacerbated by Tradizinos Custodas, you know, kind of almost like inducting a whole new generation into the pain that people felt in the 60s and 70s. And so when you have a situation where so much tinkeritis has been in the air and so much damage has been done, it's totally understandable that people would just batten the hatches and say, we're not changing anything.

Don't you dare change anything? You know, it's like sort of 1962 or bust, you know, or whatever it might be. I understand that. I sympathize with that. I think that it's actually a way for us to show deep respect to the feelings of our fellow Catholics to not talk about more reform at this time.

We don't need more reform, more change, more committees, more good ideas, good ideas. Oh, my goodness, yes. And by the way, I just want to mention this. John Henry Newman, so amazing. John Henry Newman, when he was an Anglican, early on in his career. So I want to say in the 1830s, he wrote this, he got wind that the Anglicans, Anglican bishops, probably, were talking about revising all of their liturgical books.

So he got wind of this scheme, and he wrote this very eloquent document against making changes in the liturgy. And even though he's talking about the book of common prayer, all of the arguments are exactly applicable to the Catholic, the Roman Catholic situation. So he says, among other things, he says, if you start changing, you'll never stop changing. And moreover, if this change pleases one person, it will displease another person. And so then they'll be tempted to make a compromise that satisfies neither one of them. And he gives all these arguments about if something ain't broke, don't fix it. right now i realize again i realize the liturgists and there are some very prominent ones out there

they really believe that the trinantine mass was broken they really really believe that it was terribly broken and needed to be fixed i having attended the novice ordo for all my life until seven years ago and having attended the traditional latin mass now for some 30 years i i know them both intimately. And in my opinion, this is the subtitle of my last book. My last book was called Close the Workshop, Why the Old Mass Isn't Broken and the New Mass Can't Be Fixed. That is my sincere, considered, long, brood opinion. And so if people want to know why I think that the arguments against the old right fail and why I think that the idea of we can do a reform of the reform, why that fails, then they can look at my most recent book.

Yeah, you've been very generous with your time. Before this podcast becomes the length of an audio book, maybe let's just, in addition to that book, tell us about your new book as we wrap up here. You said this was the one, if all your other books were burnt and only one would remain, that would be the one. What is it? Yes. Do you know something, by the way, about somebody who wants to burn my books?

Just kidding. Well, I wouldn't be surprised. This is the once in future Roman right, returning to the traditional Latin liturgy after 70 years of exile. This is what I consider my most important book. It's tan did a very beautiful job. Yeah, they did. Very beautiful.

They did a really nice job. And so, for instance, I attempt in here to define what are the essential traits of the Roman right. And then on the basis of that, I argue that the Noah is sort of isn't the Roman right, but a different right. I call it the modern right of Paul the 6th. I'm not the first one to argue that, but I think I argue it most extensively, more extensively than anyone else. I also talk here, something that we didn't even get into. I have a whole chapter here about all of the parallels between the Byzantine right and the Tridentine right

and how both of them, how the Nova Sorto is deeply different from both of them. I talk in here about organic development. So there's lots of good stuff in here. I mean, I could talk to you for three more hours, but my wife probably wants me home. And then if you have a publishing house. Yes, I run a publishing house called Os Yusti Press.

And this book is our most recent release. I'm really proud of it, very excited about it. It's called the Cristero Counter Revolution and the Battle for the Soul of Mexico by Father Javier Oliver Ravasi. This is a translation of a book that's already a classic in Spanish. And it's the most thorough

and most exciting and most harrowing account of the Cristeros War that exists in English now. It's absolutely phenomenal. And so this is something I recommend to anybody who's interested in that subject. So just to mention, Osce de Press, is it does have some

liturgical titles, but it also publishes all kinds of things like this book. Is there a website? Yeah, it's just, it's just os-yusty.com, I believe, is what it is. I'll do my very best to put these in the show notes if I don't. Someone remind me and I'll do it. Certainly. And then finally, you have an excellent substack. You're a very good writer.

And a lot of people have said that, and it's true. Is that the main place people can connect with you? Yes, tradition and sanity is my substack. and that is that's in fact where I'm doing most of my writing nowadays well I didn't realize you could do this you know because I have a substack that I rarely put anything up on but when you press play you get an AI voice I wasn't aware that you the author could read their own articles so when they go to your substack if they want to listen to it they can listen to you read it very often exactly yeah I read my articles the articles are read twice a week Monday and Thursday and and occasionally

I try to write about a lot of different things even though the liturgy is a big topic. And so just last Thursday was the 90th birthday of the great Estonian composer Arvo Perth, whom I love. He's my favorite living composer. And thanks be to God, he's still alive at 90. And so I wrote a whole, a big article about Perth's discovery of Gregorian chant as the turning point, the catalyst for his creative development as a composer. And he talks about that extensively. So I brought in all of those quotations. And then in the voiceover, I actually shared excerpts from his music. So if you listen to the voiceover, you get a whole sort of introduction to Arvopert. Well, fantastic. I have no idea who that is, but I look forward

to learning. If you haven't, he should listen to it. He's so wonderful. Thanks for being on the show. You're welcome. Thanks so much for having me.