The Excommunication of the Faithful

 

I have prayed and worshipped as my father and my grandfather did — as I did as a child ... and today I am excommunicated for doing so.

What madness is this?

How can the form of worship, the language of prayer ... be the cause of my excommunication? These solemn and beautiful rites, this sacred Mass of 2000 years dwarfs in majesty the mere 63 years of endless and abusive liturgical experimentation.

The eternity of God is present upon these altars. A luminous gathering of angels surrounds it.

For a while we are transported to Heavenly realms thrown open to us by the Perfect Sacrifice that occurs on that altar. 

We witness God.

And we are brought to our knees ...

It was this Church that baptized, sanctified, and buried the greatest Saints, and that converted the greatest sinners ... through holiness, through solemnity ... not silliness.

But banality, after all, is much easier and less work; it demands little of us and, in fact, few of us are prepared to give more.

The great Company of Martyrs are a curious lot to us: we cannot fathom their faith — and now as I reflect on it, it is likely because we cannot fathom their love.  For Christ.

We love God too little ... and the world too much.

The Church of our fathers understood this and called us away ... but that once urgent voice has grown ever more docile and has become a mere whisper for that last 63 years.

And now those who hold fast to Faith of our Fathers — who pray and worship as the myriad martyrs did, who shed their blood for that Faith, are to be understood as separated from the Church by participating in what was sacred and holy for the 2000 years prior to that most unfortunate Council of a few decades ago that is still searching for what it cannot find?

I think not.

And for the record, our excommunication is for not conforming to changes never mandated in the the Vatican II documents themselves — changes, in fact, that are contradictory to the actual documents concerning the use of Latin, chant, the organ (not the piano!), solemnity — oh, and, yes, absolutely no reference to worshipping versus populum (facing the people, rather than God ... Who, not incidentally, is really present in the Tabernacle behind the altar). All that was fabricated through a contrived “spirit of Vatican II”— and not the documents themselves, was really the “spirit of” the 1960s era of unrestrained inhibition: freedom from every expression of limitation, restraint, and most especially abnegation. God no longer governed us: we governed how God governed us ... which is nothing more contemptible than the apotheosis of the self. See where it has brought us ...

Much more will follow this brief update.      
 

Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal     
July 2, 2026      
Feast of St. Thomas