A “unique” expression of the Roman Rite. But remember… it’s the Traditional Latin Mass that’s the big threat.

The “unique” expression of the Roman Rite.

No no.  Before you object, it’s the TLM and tradition-minded Catholics that are the big problem. They need to be suppressed.

ACTION ITEM! Be a “Custos Traditionis”! Join an association of prayer for the reversal of “Traditionis custodes”.

HERE

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
This entry was posted in Traditionis custodes, You must be joking! and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

22 Comments

  1. donato2 says:

    The occassional extreme liturgical abuse is emblamatic but not even the worst of part of the post-Vatican II liturgical state of the Church. The worst part of it is the way the new Mass is commonly celebrated in many ordinary suburban parishes. It is a spiritually stultifying mess: guitar-strumming, chit-chatting priest-entertainers, piano playing, clapping, rock bands, joking, etc., etc. One thing that Pope Francis and whoever was behind Traditionis Custodes do not understand is that once a person has been exposed to and shaped by the TLM there is for that person no going back. It is impossible.

  2. rhig090v says:

    No doubt the TLM is better than the NO. No doubt either that the NO opens the door to innovate more easily, particularly in instances where it encourages it.

    But, I wonder to what extent the fact that 99% of Masses being NO contribute to these abuses: I wonder if the 1962 Missal were still in force today, with or without V2, if we would see abuses too.

    The TLM is celebrated beautifully and faithfully today in every place I’ve seen it celebrated, but that has to be because the priests celebrating it have to go through a great deal of effort to seek it out, which correlates to faithfulness, which correlates to wanting to celebrate Mass well.

    Would these abusing priests of the NO likewise abuse the TLM had the NO never been invented? Maybe they would have never become priests. Or maybe they still would have, but maybe their consciences would have been more properly formed such that they couldn’t commit these abuses. Some fat to chew on

  3. Dave P. says:

    Is there something in the water in Germany that makes their priests act this way? Because I’ve never come across this level of liturgical abuse here in the USA in recent times…

  4. Son of Saint Alphonsus says:

    Dave P., note that this priest did not, strictly speaking, engage in liturgical abuse. His disrobing did not take place within the context of liturgy. It did, however, take place in a church being used for making a commercial. Presumably in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. What we have here is sacrilege. (He did at another time commit a grave liturgical abuse and sacrilege as is indicated in the article.)

    Regarding the tattoo, I know tattooed (and pierced) priests. Some are very holy, devout, solid priests who got “inked” in their pre-vocation years. Some were previously and even still are part of the “biker culture” where they are actively involved in priestly ministry to very traditional Catholics, offering the TLM. Some got their “body art” after ordination so they could be hip and cool—relevant, so to speak—were and are heavily involved in youth ministry. They are good, devout priests but misinformed and lacking in good judgment or the queen of virtues, prudence. And some should never have become priests and are living sinful lives.

    I do not judge them for their tattoos. Tattoos have been worn(?) by Christians since Apostolic times. I do judge the holiness of their acts, the way they celebrate Mass, and the words they preach. Most of them will have a much higher place in Heaven than I. I pray for all of them to be faithful to Truth and their priesthood.

    To my knowledge none of them would ever display themselves in such a shameless and sinful way….at least I hope not.

  5. rhig090v says: But, I wonder to what extent the fact that 99% of Masses being NO contribute to these abuses: I wonder if the 1962 Missal were still in force today, with or without V2, if we would see abuses too.

    Have you ever heard that this kind of stuff proliferated during the 1,500+ years of the traditional Mass?

    In all probability, the traditional Mass stood in the way of garbage like this, which is why it, and the theology and doctrine that go with it, had to go.

  6. rhig090v says:

    Anita Moore,

    I don’t disagree with you. The extremely arrogant modernity, the NO, and these abuses all coincided with each other. My musing is about whether one gave birth to the next, which is a strong possibility, or if they merely all coincided at the same time for a perfect storm, or maybe somewhere in the middle. They say that correlation isn’t always indicative of causation, we have the correlation, but I find it an interesting exercise to build a case for it being causation as well

  7. APX says:

    Is there something in the water in Germany that makes their priests act this way?

    From the looks of things, estrogen. Dude’s got man boobs (and a farmer’s tan). I don’t want to see that. My eyes!!

  8. Anita and rhig090v,

    Yes, there were periods where the traditional Mass was badly celebrated. By way of example, Vincent de Paul (d 1660) was zealous in conducting retreats for clergy at a time when there was great laxity, abuse, and ignorance among them. He was also a pioneer in clerical training and was instrumental in establishing seminaries. So, I’d say a qualified “No”, the TLM does not inherently prevent such abuse. Ignorance and bad training will make for a poor practitioner of anything.

    Now having said that, the TLM today takes lots of training and hard work. So in today’s environment the TLM IS a sign of good training and attention to detail. Priests who celebrate the TLM really have to want to. So ipso facto, those priests who celebrate the TLM invariably do not fall into the carelessness and silliness that is often present in the NO. I have been to NO Masses said by priests who also say the TLM and they are head and shoulders over the usual fare of non-TLM saying priests.

    As to rhig090v’s musings, I think it is a good deal of both. Post SVC catechesis has been a disaster. Likewise, many of the post-SVC seminaries have been filled with crazies. So combine poor catechesis and bad training, much like St. Vincent’s time, and you have a recipe for liturgical disasters. I doubt the TLM would have been spared had it been the de facto missal in the post-SVC era. Now certainly the NO is very flexible in the rubrics compared to the TLM. This aggravates an already bad situation making it even worse.

  9. daughteroflight says:

    I second ArsA. One of Luther’s significant motivating factors for the 95 Theses were the liturgical abuses he witnessed while in Rome for official business. If even a quarter of what he said occurred was true, Rome circa 1500 was just as bad if not worse than a 1970’s American NO church. Significant portions of the Council of Trent were devoted to addressing these liturgical abuses, though many of them took decades to die out. It is foolish to think that man is incapable of forgetting his God within the context of the TLM – though it is, perhaps, a bit slower to occur. Even looking at the early liturgical movement of the 20th century, many of the concerns they raised were incredibly just – the TLM in that era had generally devolved into a rote ceremony which was little understood by priest or congregation outside of it’s meritorious value, which was frequently in attitude calculated rather like points at a football game. The reaction in the mid-1950’s onward to the problem was obviously opportunistic and evil in many respects, but the initial observation that something was wrong with the Church’s liturgical practice was absolutely correct.

  10. daughteroflight says:

    I second ArsA. One of Luther’s significant motivating factors for the 95 Theses were the liturgical abuses he witnessed while in Rome for official business. If even a quarter of what he said occurred was true, Rome circa 1500 was just as bad if not worse than a 1970’s American NO church. Significant portions of the Council of Trent were devoted to addressing these liturgical abuses, though many of them took decades to die out. It is foolish to think that man is incapable of forgetting his God within the context of the TLM – though it is, perhaps, a bit slower to occur. Even looking at the early liturgical movement of the 20th century, many of the concerns they raised were incredibly just – the TLM in that era had generally devolved into a rote ceremony which was little understood by priest or congregation outside of it’s meritorious value, which was frequently in attitude calculated rather like points at a football game. The reaction in the mid-1950’s onward to the problem was obviously opportunistic and evil in many respects, but the initial observation that something was wrong with the Church’s liturgical practice was absolutely correct.

  11. daughteroflight says:

    Alcuin Reid has lovely research on the Liturgical Movement, if anyone cares to read more – very thorough.

  12. Pingback: MONDAY EDITION – Big Pulpit

  13. Ellen says:

    There’s nothing sinful about tattoos, some pilgrims to the Holy Land get a Jerusalem Cross tattoo in shops where they have been doing it for centuries. I don’t like tattoos at all but they aren’t sinful. However, what this priest is doing is scandalous and inappropriate. I often go to a Novus Ordo Mass that is celebrated ad orientem and I do like it. The priest isn’t have to “perform” and the Mass is the main focus, not the priest.

  14. Lurker 59 says:

    To keep one’s pride in check, it is important to keep in mind that it was clerics who were well trained in TLM and who had said it for decades that gave the world VII, the NO, the liturgical experimentation of the 70’s, the liturgical abuses that extend to this day, the shoddy sacramental theology, and the horrendous “music” that plagues the hymnals of 99% of NO parishes.

    So no, TLM isn’t a guarantee, hedge, or bulwark against liturgical abuse. Only abiding in the Spirit which animates the Liturgy of the Son directed to the Father does. That is true, and the only, form of liturgical participation because it comes from God not from man.

    Is the NO more prone to liturgical abuse than TLM? The NO seems to come hand in hand with poor spiritual formation of clerics, but which causes which? Or is the issue deeper?

  15. Kathleen10 says:

    These are the same men who have destroyed the lives of so many boys and young men. Displaying one’s body, tanned, fit and muscular or flabby and adorned with ink, is all part of the club activities. There’s an underlying narcissism and self-absorption at work. You don’t matter. He does. This is not a good look for a priest or even a layperson. It takes an incredible amount of self-centeredness to do such a thing. No excuse.
    Fr. Z. This would be a great weekly post. Post it under “Current Events in Our Church”, so we can learn and profit from it. I’m a TLM-attendee. Enlighten me. I feel I’m too rigid.

  16. jflare29 says:

    Lurker and others, methinks you well demonstrate the opposing point. Men well-trained in the TLM DID give us the e abuses of the NO; abuses inflicted on the Mass–and the faith in general–DID give Luther incentive to rebel. I could agree with some of those critiques to an extent. …And yet….
    Notice that Luther rebelled against authority mostly on basis of abuses, not because of well-followed rubrics. If we can’t and don’t know precise motives for the Novus Ordo, we CAN say that many objected to the TLM’s “rigidity” well before Vatican II.
    I would not say that Vatican II or the Novus Ordo developers erred, exactly. I WOULD say that the Council Fathers seem to me …very optimistic. I think they saw society’s reaction to WW II and assumed men would have ample warning against his own arrogance. I think they badly underestimated man’s short-term memory.
    Such act as this migh’ve provoked a “friendly chat” with his bishop in 1950. Today, we’ve seen too often how we barely recognize the crude for being crude.
    We’ve learned to ignore too much of the not quite baldly disgusting.
    Methinks the properly-followed TLM and the cultural norms that follow DO provide insurance against this idiocy.

  17. daughteroflight says:

    Jflare, I don’t think we’d disagree that the TLM is better posed, when faithfully presented, to foster true religion, but every ‘insurance policy’ has a loophole on this side of the Vale of Tears. We were responding to Anita Moore’s rhetorical question/implied assertion that the terrible things we have seen done in the last century within the liturgy have never occurred within the context of the TLM – this is patently false. Again, underestimating man’s capacity for evil is naive at best, and even when he is hemmed ’round by the best of checks and balances, he can produce terrible works of sacrilege. The greatest tragedy, in my mind, about the NO is that those checks were unceremoniously removed and were replaced with obvious encouragement to irreligiousity. However, the catalyst for that decision was the TLM’s practical state of entropy within the Church at the time.

  18. Semper Gumby says:

    Kathleen10: “There’s an underlying narcissism and self-absorption at work. You don’t matter. He does. This is not a good look for a priest or even a layperson.”

    Good point. Tattoos often involve showboating.

    In the comments, tattoo decommissioning:

    https://wdtprs.com/2020/08/ask-father-tattoos-and-st-jane-de-chantal/

    Regarding the “TLM-trained who gave us VII, Novus Ordo and liturgical abuses” there is a distinction to be made between those who infiltrated the church for generations and received TLM training to further their own nefarious agendas, and faithful priests who received TLM training for the glory of God. Physically participating in training is one thing, motivation and mindset another.

  19. Benedict Joseph says:

    This demonstrates that it is a bottomless pit to which we have been drawn. The “gentleman” is clearly emotionally unbalanced, cognitively compromised with serious “border issues.” It does not bode well.

  20. Semper Gumby says:

    “The “unique” expression of the Roman Rite.”

    I don’t think that word means what the Vatican thinks it means.

    On October 17 Bishop Alberto Rojas of San Bernardino was the “main celebrant” of the “Synod on Synodality Opening Mass” at Queen of Angels Church in Riverside. Among other curiosities, some observers associated a man in a jaguar costume and headdress with the Aztec jaguar god Tezcatlipoca (“smoking mirror” or divination), the god of conflict or war, change or fortune, and sorcery.

    His other names: youalli ehecatl (night wind), titlacuahan (he whose slaves we are), ilhuicahua tlalticpaque (possessor of the sky and earth), yaotl (the enemy). Some myths indicate Tezcatlipoca is associated with drums.

    A few notes:

    – A photo from October 17:

    https://www.twitter.com/ProtecttheFaith/status/1450768975735009291

    – An Aztec drum and dance group in California:

    “Tezkatlipoka’s mission is to share and promote indigenous Meso American culture through Aztec dance and drumming.”

    “…tapping into our own ancient indigenous wisdom and medicine to heal body, mind and spirit.”

    http://www.tezkatlipoka.com/tezkatlipoka-aztec-dance-home

    – Page 17, Codex Borgia, Vatican Library

    https://pixels.com/featured/codex-borgia-aztec-gods-tezcatlipoca-smoking-mirror-on-vellum-serge-averbukh.html

    (Note the unusual feet. Codex Borgia, page 1, appears to show Tezcatlipoca carrying the 20 day signs.)

    – A “Gnostic gem,” Archaeological Museum of Bologna

    “Abraxas was a magic word that we often find on gems, papyrii and gnostic texts. Adding together the letters of the word (? alpha = 1; ? beta = 2; ? rho = 100, ecc,) the sum is 365, which is the number of days in a year.”

    http://www.museibologna.it/archeologicoen/percorsi/66288/id/74727/oggetto/74746/

    (Note the feet. “Abraxas” does not necessarily appear on both sides of every “gem.”)

    – Codex Borgia, Vatican Library, is one of the “Borgia Group” of codices. Others are located in Oxford, Bologna and Paris.

    – In 1805 German scholar Alexander von Humboldt observed the Codex Borgia among the possessions of Cardinal Stefano Borgia (d. 1804).

    – During the 1490s the Borgia family heraldic bull was equated by the painter Pinturicchio in the Sala dei Santi in the Vatican with the Apis bull (see ancient Egypt, Mithras and Freemasonry).

    – The secretary to Pope Alexander VI (r. 1492-1503) Giovanni Nanni or Annius of Viterbo (apparently lifting sections from Boccaccio’s 14th century “De Mulieribus Claris”- biographies of historical and mythological women) included Isis in a historical chronology of humanity with the goal of diminishing Greek influence and increasing ancient Egyptian influence on Italian culture.

  21. Semper Gumby says:

    – In 1463 Marsilio Ficino at the request of Cosimo de Medici translated the Corpus Hermeticum from Greek to Latin (from a codex of fourteen tractates brought to Florence from Macedonia by Brother Leonardo of Pistoia in 1460). Ficino believed the Corpus (c. 100 BC-200AD) pre-dated Plato. Ficino translated in 1497 “On the Egyptian Mysteries” (theurgy) by Iamblichus (Syrian, 4th c.).

    – Ficino directed the Platonic Academy of Florence, founded in 1459 at the Villa di Careggi under the patronage of Medici. Ficino’s attempted synthesis of Christianity, Platonism and Hermeticism influenced the other members, one of whom was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Mirandola agreed with Ficino that the ancient Greeks and Moses received their wisdom from the ancient Egyptians, but Mirandola emphasized “Christian Kabbalah” and “Chaldean wisdom.”

    – “prisca theologia”

    – Bishop Gentile de Becchi was a member of the Academy.

  22. Semper Gumby says:

    – Hermes Trismegistus is the “wise teacher” of Hermeticism, and the “author” of the Corpus Hermeticum (see Ficino above). Hermes Trismegistus (“thrice-great Hermes) is a syncretism of the ancient Egyptian god Thoth and the ancient Greek god Hermes.

    – In the Sala dei Santi (see above) Pinturicchio depicted Hermes Trismegistus alongside Moses and Isis (for Isis see Annius of Viterbo above). Pinturicchio also depicted Hermes on the mosaic floor of the Siena Cathedral.

    – In the Koran the prophet “Idris” is associated by Islamic scholars with the biblical Enoch, but also (for example, the 14th century scholar Ibn Kathir) with Hermes Trismegistus. Ibn Kathir and other Islamic scholars wrote that the Prophet Muhammad was a descendant of Idris, meaning specifically Hermes Trismegistus. Idris in Islamic lore is involved with the “Black Stone” which was “sent from heaven” at “the time of Adam and Eve.” Today, the Black Stone is a small rock set into the side of the Ka’ba in Mecca in a silver metal frame.

    – The various activities in late-15th century Italy involving the translation of ancient Hermetic texts, the Medici Florentine Academy, art depicting Hermes Trismegistus, and Ficino are known as the “Hermetic Renaissance.” Today, Hermetic writings are popular in certain occult circles and Hermetic themes occasionally appear in movies, short films and novels. That said, the Hermetic Renaissance appears to have been more successful propagating syncretism and prisca theologia.

Comments are closed.