“Where do We Go From Here?”

When Pope Francis Eradicates the Latin Mass
 

In his rage against anyone and anything that stands in the way of his ecumenical vision of a Church bleached of its Catholicism, it is widely reported that Francis soon plans to crush, once and for all time, what he sees as the principal obstacle to this agenda: the Latin Mass. It is, as he sees it, the last vestige, not simply for the Catholic Church to become sufficiently de-Catholicized (much in the way that the Novus Ordo “Mass of Paul VI” has been) but totally expunged.

The Latin Mass alone cannot easily be aligned with, nor be embraced by other “ecclesial communities” that long ago, during the Protestant Revolt, left the Church, finding her teachings and worship abhorrent and hateful.

Francis, then, has decided, to stamp it out! Every extant remnant that could in some way, however remote, recall the life of the Church as it existed before Vatican II is to be remorselessly expurgated from living memory.

I had written about this some time ago in another article (https://www.boston-catholic-journal.com/loss-of-language-and-other-paradigms-in-catholic-church.htm) outlining the ecumenical need for the extinction of any memory of the Catholic Church prior to Vatican II, much in the way that North Korea implemented the “Three Generations Solution” to eradicate any memory of what life was like in North Korea prior to the Communist Kim dynasty extending from Kim Il Sung in 1948 to present day Kim Jong Un. By programmatically throttling the transmission of culture from one generation to the next, it succeeded — within three generations — in isolating the last generation from any memory of the first. Only the State remained.

In a similar manner, Pope Francis is equally determined that only Vatican II will remain, and nothing before it — and this most especially pertains to the Novus Ordo “Mass of Paul VI.”

For this to happen, the Latin Mass must go. It is the most monumental, emblematic, and visible institution that is the sine qua non of anything identifiable as uniquely Catholic. And for this reason it is seen by Francis as the most dangerous.

After 2000 years it just will not go away by itself! It has survived 200 centuries of persecution, oppression, infiltration, corruption, scandal, intrigue, pagan armies, heretics, apostates, dictators, unworthy pontiffs, depraved cardinals, craven bishops; every imaginable adversary — and never folded.

There is a reason for this. And this time will be no different.

Even if Francis closes all the doors to all the Churches that celebrate the Latin Mass, he does not (because he cannot) abolish, let alone stop, the Mass of the Ages celebrated in Latin as it has been celebrated without interruption for nearly 2000 years. The Apostolic Constitution Quo Primum of 1570 binds us forever to the Mass as it was celebrated prior to 1962.  As the Church survived previous disasters, it will survive Francis.
 

The Master, the Steward, and the Keys

For a time, the Master gave the Steward keep of the House, and even keys to the doors, but what is written on the hearts of men is etched more deeply and universally than the instructions that came with the keys — instructions that the Steward, in the Master’s absence, tossed away, seizing the House and imagining it his own. There is a parable to this effect, yes?

I will come to the point: Francis cannot take your being Catholic away from you. He can seize all the properties belonging to the “Post-Catholic-Conciliar-Church” of Vatican II: the buildings, the chattel, the real estate, the bank accounts; in a word, everything tangible that is the “property” of the Church. St. Athanasius spoke poignantly of this in a deeply moving letter to his flock during the Arian heresy (included below). Your Traditional Catholic parish may be taken from you, yes.

But your Traditional Catholic Faith, together with the Latin language through which it has ever been liturgically expressed, and that treasury of countless prayers, devotions, litanies, chants, hymns, classical requiems, masses and motets in Latin — these beautiful and sacred gifts that God Himself has nurtured within you and which have become part of the fabric of western culture itself — can never be taken from you by any decree, papal or otherwise — simply because they may be offensive to other “ecclesial communities” outside the Catholic Church; communities in many ways deeply antagonistic to the Church and what she authentically teaches.

How would this be possible? Can the sacred love in your heart that is inescapably bound up with your being a traditional Catholic, be subject to law, interdiction, suspension? Can it be abolished as ecumenically “incorrect”? Are you no longer a “Catholic” in the eyes of the Post-Catholic-Conciliar-Church if the word “Traditional” is prefixed to it, or is in some way predicated of it?

We opened this article with a question: “Where do We Go From Here?” that is to say, when Pope Francis totally prohibits the Latin Mass in parishes throughout the world.

This — unquestionably — is the foremost question in the mind of virtually every traditional Catholic throughout the world. “Where do I go now?”
 

Questions that we must not blench from asking:

Will we be able to attend the Novus Ordo Mass at our local parish where it appears to be understood as:

• Entertainment

• A Social

• A Musical (“The employment of the piano is forbidden in Church, as is also that of noisy or frivolous instruments such as drums, cymbals, bells, and the like.” ¹

• A Comedy (remember: at the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass you are really and truly present at the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on Calvary. Would you really laugh ... and applaud?)

• A Talent Show

• A Liturgical Laboratory and a linguistic exercise in evading masculine nouns and pronouns, especially as they pertain to God.

• A simple Banquet or Meal much as at Protestant gatherings, devoid of the absolutely essential Sacrificial nature of the Mass

• A Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion platform, an ecological platform, an environmental platform, a platform for promoting homosexuality, feminism, transgenderism, social and racial activism, or for promoting what is, for the moment, a secular agenda that has absolutely no place in divine worship. That impedimenta is left on the sidewalk outside the Church. It is not of God. It is of the World (see Saint John 15.19 and 1 St. John 2.15).

Does your local Novus Ordo parish have  a “congenial atmosphere” sterilized of the sacred but correctly “sensitive to” the social and political toxins permeating the secular world outside it; where music “ministers” provide tinkling pianos before Mass much as we may hear in a nightclub, together with “folk” music that no one outside the Catholic Church has sung since 1970; where the priest routinely leaves the Sanctuary to “engage his audience” by homilizing in the aisle (often in a Q&A format); where there is applause after Mass — and even during Mass if something is particularly cute; where there are more women by far around the altar than men, and you feel privileged if you receive Holy Communion from the consecrated hands of a priest rather than from your neighbor’s wife who is one of the many “Eucharistic Ministers,” and where the Lectors are exclusively women — and now even the acolytes (Francis’s initiative). If you can overcome the sense of the growing feminization of so many, many, roles around the Altar, in front of it, beside it, and sometimes behind it ... then perhaps your segue into the Novus Ordo Mass of Paul VI will be painless. But I doubt it.

On the other hand, if you find yourself confronted with the prospect of damaging, diminishing, or undermining your Faith by participating in Novus Ordo Masses that you find manifestly unworthy of God, corrosive to your faith, and which present a danger to your immortal soul, it would appear wise to worship somewhere that your father’s father — and his father’s father — would recognize as the Catholic Mass of his forbears ... as it was celebrated in the Catacombs during that persecution of Catholics by other tyrants.

As you see, I have no answer. You will answer this question. I increasingly find myself moving across a divide that I did not make, and do not relish.

That responsibility lies with Francis alone.

I know my Shepherd ... and it is not Francis.

______________________

 ¹ Pope St. Pius X 1903, Encyclical Tra le Sollecitudini: Instruction on Sacred Music

Letter of  St. Athanasius of Alexandria to the Faithful:

“May God console you! ...What saddens you ...is the fact that others have occupied the churches by violence, while during this time you are on the outside. It is a fact that they have the premises-but you have the apostolic Faith. They can occupy our churches, but they are outside the true Faith. You remain outside the places of worship, but the Faith dwells within you. Let us consider: what is more important, the place or the Faith? The true Faith, obviously. Who has lost and who has won in this struggle-the one who keeps the premises or the one who keeps the Faith?

True, the premises are good when the apostolic Faith is preached there; they are holy if everything takes place there in a holy way ...You are the ones who are happy: you who remain within the church by your faith, who hold firmly to the foundations of the Faith which has come down to you from apostolic Tradition. And if an execrable jealousy has tried to shake it on a number of occasions, it has not succeeded. They are the ones who have broken away from it in the present crisis.

No one, ever, will prevail against your faith, beloved brothers. And we believe that God will give us our churches back some day.

Thus, the more violently they try to occupy the places of worship, the more they separate themselves from the Church. They claim that they represent the Church; but in reality, they are the ones who are expelling themselves from it and going astray.

Even if Catholics faithful to Tradition are reduced to a handful, they are the ones who are the true Church of Jesus Christ.

We remain because, as St. Peter once said to Our Blessed Lord at a particularly challenging moment: ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.’ (St. Jn. 6:69)”