Please, Blessed Mother, intercede. Ask for graces from Our High Priest, Your Son, to open the hearts of bishops who are suppressing the faithful who desire traditional worship.
Today is the 108th Anniversary of the Final Apparition of Our Lady in Fatima, and the Miracle of the Sun, witnessed by thousands in Cova da Iria. pic.twitter.com/qotKdATPeS
— Catholic Sat (@CatholicSat) October 13, 2025
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since Sat., 25 Nov. 2006:
I may catch flak and I won’t win any friends for taking this stance, but I will tell you how I feel, on this Fátima Monday.
I love traditional worship, I truly do. I love the music and smells and bells and lace, ample vestments and 100 candles and ladies in veils and laymen in suit and tie. For the past 19 years I have attended some staunchly traditional (Ordinary Form) parishes which incorporated a lot of reverence and eschewed rainbow stoles and tambourines.
But yet, I grew up with the aforementioned stoles and tambourines, and my mother actually constructed felt banners down on the vast floor of our family home. So yeah, I know how they feel too.
The destruction of the Usus Antiquior and the suppression of stable groups and the wreckovation at altar rails, these are all tragedies and they sadden me very much. But unfortunately, I consider them necessary tragedy at this time.
We have seen, in the historical record, how liturgical reform, and especially calendrical reform can engender dissent, schism, and even wars. Ask the Russians how their calendars are working out these days. Ask the Tewahedo Orthodox about when they celebrate their feasts.
I am convinced that the schism-inducing features of the Usus Antiquior chiefly consist of its calendar, its feasts, and its Lectionary cycle. There is simply no way to adequately reconcile the old ways with the new Lectionary, newly-canonized saints, or the feasts that have been irreversibly moved.
Do you want to know a secret? I’ve been studying astronomy, and over the past 1,000-2,000 years, the stars have moved. The heavens have changed a bit. Mother Church honestly still cares about these movements, and she’s desperately, gently, quietly trying to keep herself and her cycles making sense, so that when we look to the skies for a sign, those signs are true and good and right.
A really cool feature of living the liturgy with 1.4 billion of my closest brethren is that, for all intents and purposes, we all hear the same Scripture readings and Psalms and texts, all simultaneously on any given day, all around the world, wherever we are, in whatever language. And, theologically, I can reliably ask the Holy Spirit to interpret for me, what has happened in the world, in my life, in our community, by meditating on those readings and how they apply to us in 2025.
If I did not regularly celebrate the Mass, and the L.O.T.H., or at least check into the readings, I would be ignorant and set adrift. I wouldn’t be able to make sense of the world without the Holy Spirit showing me. I would have a hopeless situation, unmoored to time or space. Unfortunately for those who cling to the Usus Antiquior, this will be the case more and more often that they cannot sync-up with the calendar and cycles being used by everyone else.
It’s not that we shouldn’t sing and chant in Latin. It isn’t that we need to stop kneeling, or pray the Last Gospel, or having real altar boys who are trained and know what they must do. The structure of the liturgy and its elements and those bits that are just lost in the Ordinary Form, they seem to me not to be the divisive parts.
But look back to the entire world’s acceptance of the Gregorian Calendar. The protestants were kind of pi**ed that Rome was telling them what day it was. But today, look! Even China, even Saudi Arabia and Kolkata, even Indonesia obeys our secular Gregorian Calendar, and businesses are synched up, and the secular world is all on the same page, when we say there is a meeting on March 31st at 3pm Pacific, that’s meaningful and real.
So sadly, everything else, every other action of suppression and “reform” and wreckovation, they will proceed from this principle of unity. We speak sometimes of “marching to the beat of a different drummer” or how important it is that we all unite in rhythm, melody, and harmony, but in 2025, the Jubilee Year of Hope, it is apparently Time to Pay the Piper.
>>schism-inducing features of the Usus Antiquior chiefly consist of its calendar, its feasts, and its Lectionary cycle.<<
That’s ridiculous.
>>over the past 1,000-2,000 years, the stars have moved. The heavens have changed a bit.<<
?!? So, what?
Calendrical matters matter (this date for this feast or not) at little, but not like the orations. Some calendrical matters matter more, such as Ember Days, Pre-Lent, Octaves, etc. But even there… orations.
>>Ask the Tewahedo Orthodox about when they celebrate their feasts.<<
No. We don’t care.
>>businesses are synched up, and the secular world is all on the same page<<
And there it is.
What the previous commentator doesn’t understand is that the Novus Ordo and the Vetus Ordo are different in their orations. He is caught up in oddities.
I don’t understand the first post. The Church can make adjustments to deal with new saints etc. without throwing the baby out with the bathwater as they did by establishing the Novus Ordo. In the past they got to the point that there were so many saints celebrated that you hardly ever saw Green on a Sunday after Pentecost so they adjusted the rank of sundays. New saints can be added easily enough. This is how things worked for nearly 2000 years until the modernists got control and decided that the New Man who was somehow unlike any Man that had gone before therefore needed a New Mass.
How can the antecedent rite of the Mass – or should I say the “principal” antecedent rite – there are lots of others – be “schism-inducing”? Now if there had been some event, some sort of “innovation” – maybe we could call it a “rupture” – which was upsetting to a portion of clergy and faithful and did in fact result in many of them “clinging” to an undeniably orthodox form of worship hallowed by nearly fifteen centuries of use – wouldn’t that thing be more properly described (at least figuratively) as “schism-inducing”?
The most charitable thing I can think of to say is: “you use that word, I don’t think it means what you think it means’”
@Elizium23 – You’re really grasping at straws to try and paint traditionalists in a bad light. Your argument on how things change, such as the stars movement over the centuries, is exactly how the traditional calendar has organically developed over the centuries. The constellations didn’t just all of the sudden decide to jump and rearrange themselves across the heavens, so your analogy here ends up working against your argument.
All of your argument is essentially just saying the same thing that was said with Vatican II and those that support what followed, that the Church must adapt to the changing times of the world. The Church of course, doesn’t do this, nor has ever done this. We in fact even ask during the Mass that the sacrifice being offered may be pleasing to God as Abel’s offering was, because we’re sacrificing to the same God of Abel, and of Adam and Eve, of Abraham, of Moses, etc.
The Church is not subject to the times. It is the times that are subject to the Church.
If Elizium23 is referring to the split in Russian Orthodoxy that resulted in the emergence of the Old Russians, it was caused by a forced liturgical change. Russian scholars noted a difference between their liturgy and that in Greece. Thinking they had made a mistake they instituted a change in the liturgy only to discover a hundred or so years later and thousands of people persecuted by the Russian government, later it was the Greeks who had revised their liturgy. Forced liturgical change everywhere and always results in trouble. It is not essential for everyone to use the same liturgy nor is it divisive. Several Protestant denominations have liturgies indistinguishable from the NO, and it has not resulted in greater unity between Catholics and Protestants other than a shared decline in attendance.
Look, I can’t argue or deny any of the foregoing. Especially not on a blog called “WDTPRS” and considering how it all started.
It is true that I have been concerned with oddities. Perhaps I do not understand the difference in orations.
But the sacred liturgy is the heartbeat of the Church. It’s where we take our orders in the Church Militant. It is the supreme work of the Holy Spirit, yes? The Council Fathers chose to chop out the old Lectionary and lay down a new cycle. (Two cycles, in fact: Sunday Masses Year A/B/C, and Daily Years I/II.)
The orations flow from the texts. The hymns are harmonized with the texts. They all dovetail together. So yes, orations gonna differ. Perhaps they are wrong and bad. Simplified? Bowdlerized? We cut all the Imprecatory Psalms too.
Perhaps that is where the heresies will flow from, in the ages to come. But heresies or no, I humbly submit that the schism is precipitated by matters calendrical.
The Holy Spirit has authority over space and time. The Church also has significant authority over the reckonings of time itself. And the Church exercises this authority. To tweak the Lectionary and General Roman Calendar is to tweak our very reckoning of time. A pacemaker for the Church Militant. I do not consider this to be “matter[ing] a little”.
But please, go ahead with your orations, Father. I sincerely apologize to be so wrong on such a glorious day of peace and justice.
Here’s another footnote: the genius of Christianity, the sine qua non which set us apart from all Pagans and Jews, and perdures unto the present day, is our human-centered worship and our person-centered calendar.
The Jews and pagans all observed calendars based on agrarian events and the natural world dictated their seasons, even liturgically. The Egyptians and Babylonian priests needed to fix days for sowing, reaping, harvesting, ploughing. So that’s how they reckoned days, months, seasons and years.
But when Jesus came, when Constantine legalized our existence, when we began celebrating persons and events in human history, that changed everything. Our Christian cycle of feasts is only agrarian by coincidence, because we celebrate Christmas, and Easter, and the days of the BVM, and our saints and angels mark solemnities and feasts.
Even though the Jews were humanistic and adored the Invisible, Living God, and they venerated their holy ancestors, they still did not slap them on the calendar and go on pilgrimage on Joshua Day or St. Joseph’s Eve. It was up to Christians to metamorphose into a person-centric faith. We Christians are not tied to a territory or landscape, but Jesus is in our hearts, we carry His light wherever, even the poorest peasants and serfs, can see themselves in the saints, and the Holy Trinity.
It is something so fundamental, so essential that we don’t realize it, as fish swimming in water don’t know they are wet. But that is the genius of our faith, and our calendar as well.
I’m becoming fairly convinced that besides the allegorical/mystical significance of the actions and postures in the Old Rite, that they were also very cleverly arranged so as to function as a “memory palace.” It’s a theory, so far.
Calendrically, the (old) reading cycle for the year could also theoretically be memorized using the old memory methods involving places and things, and possibly the zodiac circle. Agostino del Riccio, in his “Arte della Memoria Locale” just casually mentions that the florentine Dominicans were memorizing 200 articles of the Summa per day. One can only imagine what of Scripture they had committed to memory. The casual way in which it flows in the old authors suggests a great deal.
And I do think the Old Rite was a part of this grand ancient/medieval/renaissance memory work, and knowledge of it was lost in the modern era… and that we have tampered with something we really didn’t understand.
So, the Gospel has to change because the stars move. Not only are the orations changed in the NO, the theology is changed. The suppression of the Usus Antiquior cannot express the will of God because it is founded on a Lie, and we know who it’s father must be.
Gamaliel had it right! God’s will WILL Fbe done and Mary’s Immaculate Heart WILL TRIUMPH!
@ Elizium23:
“… we all hear the same Scripture readings and Psalms and texts, all simultaneously on any given day, all around the world, wherever we are …”
We already had all that and more before the reform was enacted.
With respect, can you not see that, in fact, the “schism-inducing feature” was the very act of change, of unnecessary “reform”, wrought in the 1960s?
About 20 years ago, I took my family to Christmas midnight Mass in the cathedral in Frankfurt (Novus Ordo). I was expecting German, which I would have been able to translate for them, but no: the Mass was in (I think) Croat and I hadn’t a clue. As a result, very little spiritual benefit was derived from the text and readings of the Mass, although, of course, we obviously benefitted from the actual offering.
Whence the curious, unargued suggestions that the New Lectionary cannot be as easily removed as it was installed (together with any rearrangements of Orations, Propria, etc.), and that any feasts “have been irreversibly moved”? If, as (under correction) I think Benedict XVI thought, the New Lectionary has any inherent merits, it can be read as profitably privately – as, for example, many of the laity read one or another version of a Breviary daily.
Sure guys, sure, sorry I have offended and labored so diligently to paint everyone, including me I guess, in a Bad Light.
But I will humbly submit, as a layman, as an unordained Person-in-Pew: the orations don’t hardly matter. Really, most prayers of the Mass are between Priest and God. Can be prayed sans amplification, can be prayed in a whisper, can be prayed in Croat or Klingon, can be prayed in an empty room!… and still be efficacious without any human understanding.
It is not the orations that affect the laity and edify us and guide our daily lives, it’s the readings. Orations are not, must I remind you, Sacred Scripture, but the Lectionary is, so surely it takes precedence? I am surprised, shocked even, at the proposal that the A/B/C and weekday I/II cycles could be easily abolished with another stroke of the pen. I would eat my hat in such a case.
Once again, fish don’t notice that they are wet, but in 50-100 years, the Old Roman Calendarists will struggle bitterly against the Novus Ordo Calendarists, (which includes liturgical protestants, Freemasons, and most governmental “astrologers”) and yet fewer of them will care what the prayers really do say.
Dear Elizium,
You say in your opening post:
“I love traditional worship, I truly do. I love the music and smells and bells and lace…” but if you think that those things are of central importance to lovers of the TLM and why there is such real pain and suffering at its suppression, then you do not understand what is happening here—in the Church, your Church and my Church. To pray in reverent stillness and quiet and recollection knowing what is transpiring at the hands and in the heart of Christ in the person of His pries
and that the Supreme Sacrifice of the Son is being offered to the Father in your presence and on your behalf—without the mis-directions, distractions and dilutions of the new rite—is a precious treasure for which we would sell all we have. That’s what this is about. You will say that all of this action is in the N.O. and you will be correct. The N.O. is a valid rite. Nevertheless, what is actually experienced is different, which is why the most efficacious force for true worship and the greatest magnet bringing people into the Church today is the Holy Spirit working with and through the traditional Latin Mass that has been “traditio”-ed to us from generation to generation for most of the life of the Church. I do not have the TLM available and I am blessed to be able to attend a wonderfully beautiful and reverent N.O. Mass with a beautiful altar, many candles alight, well-trained altar boys magnificently outfitted in cassocks and albs and white gloves, an excellent choir even singing some chant, an altar rail at which almost all communicants kneel and receive on the tongue. It is wonderful. But it is not the same. The Novus Ordo is a different rite. It cannot and will not ever be the same
@Elizium23
>The Council Fathers chose to chop out the old Lectionary and lay down a new cycle. (Two cycles, in fact: Sunday Masses Year A/B/C, and Daily Years I/II.)
No. They didn’t.
I’m not sure what you’re point is or what you hope to accomplish with your comments, but you appear to be woefully misinformed or uneducated on practically everything to do with the liturgical “reform” that created the Novus Ordo. Perhaps you could watch Episode II of the “Mass of the Ages” for a quick overview? Watching episode I and III would also be beneficial.
Elizium: the orations and the scripture readings are all offered to God. Neither “takes precedence” – they’re all part of the same offering. I’d recommend reading Prof. Kwasniewski (in particular) on the subject of how the Usus Antiquior works – perhaps you have.
Anyway, before you attempt to ingest your head-covering of choice, do please research how the ABC/Year1/Year 2 cycles, which are a mere 55 years old at this stage, are actually an egregious interruption of the almost 1500-year-old tradition of scripture in the Mass. A very well founded and perfectly worked-out tradition. There is much literature, including Prof. K., on the subject.
Elizium23,
To complement ususantiquior’s comment at 9:22 on 14 October, I would note that most of the chant in the Propria consists of Sacred Scripture prayed by the schola (and anyone else who joins in, vocally or mentally). Since you love the music, see if you can find a schola to join and pray along in that way, too – it is a joy, and as ususantiquor observes not a few reverent N.O. Masses include those Scriptural Propers, so it may not one so difficult to find one.
Ah, proofreading!
“it may not be so difficult to find one” – and with “one” I was thinking of a welcoming schola in a reverent N.O. Mass.