UPDATE 12 Oct:
I saw at InfoVaticana that:
A comparison of the documents shows that the norm on orientation reproduces almost word for word the one promulgated by Most Rev. Lawrence T. Persico for the Diocese of Erie (Pennsylvania) on January 14, 2022, with a single notable addition: priests with several parishes or “churches of limited use” may not distribute the celebrations among them in order to increase their number.
So, he’s also unoriginal. Which leads me to wonder if this isn’t a “canary in the coal shaft” move. One might wonder who put him up to this, to test just how far the priests of the diocese, and through them the people, can be pushed. We learned a lot from COVID about bishops, didn’t we.
I was also a little curious about the bishop’s background. Most Rev. Jeffrey Walsh in 1987 attained a bachelor’s degree in health and human resources. He got the coveted MDiv from seminary. He has a master’s degree in social work.
Originally posted 11 Oct:
This is what I get when I procrastinate…
Peter K beat me to it.
He’s right on all three counts. That decree from the Bishop of Gaylord is a complete joke founded on… let it be said… a lie. There can be some discussion of the early practice of different ancient churches regarding orientation of worship (… not much discussion, mind you…) but using GIRM 299 like that… that’s brazen. I’ve written about 299 many times. (Esp. HERE) Why the strong word “lie”? Because even the Congregation for Divine Worship explained that the English translation used by the USCCB (then endlessly parroted by bishops in their attempts to stomp out ad orientem worship) was wrong. The Congregation even had to explain the Latin because, apparently, the brain trust of the USCCB at the time didn’t get it right. They were either too ignorant to get it right, or they purposely got it wrong. However, once Rome explained it, clearly, to continue to use the bad translation is, effectively, to lie.
A fine example of a decree that can have no legal force, because it is premised on several factual errors.
1. The practice of “versus populum” was not “restored,” because the original and authentic tradition was “ad orientem”; it’s not like that was a deviation that had to be corrected.
2. As numerous authors have explained, the Latin of no. 299 of the GIRM does NOT mean that Mass must be celebrated toward the people whenever possible. It means the altar should be freestanding so that it can be incensed all around, and so that Mass *may* be celebrated versus populum. Just do a search for GIRM 299 at Fr. Z’s site and you’ll get the nitty-gritty.
3. Most importantly, a bishop’s local law cannot trump universal law, and the universal law clearly allows (indeed, presupposes) Mass ad orientem. For the same reason, a local bishop cannot mandate communion in the hand, when communion on the tongue is still permitted, indeed is the universal norm.
— Peter Kwasniewski (@DrKwasniewski) October 11, 2026
GIRM 299:
Altare maius exstruatur a pariete seiunctum, ut facile circumiri et in eo celebratio versus populum peragi possit, quod expedit ubicumque possibile sit.
ACCURATE LITERAL VERSION
The main altar should be built separated from the wall, which is useful wherever it is possible, so that it can be easily walked around and a celebration toward the people can be carried out.
USCCB’s BAD TRANSLATION
In every church there should ordinarily be a fixed, dedicated altar, which should be freestanding to allow the ministers to walk around it easily and Mass to be celebrated facing the people, which is desirable whenever possible….
SSPX, necessity. More documented proof.
While for years those who wished to reform the Church have played a long game, hoping that with enough ambiguity and lack of clarification that eventually tradition and the teachings of Jesus and the Church will become so watered down and forgotten that anything can be accomplished, they know they have essentially failed.
It is no secret our young priests and many faithful are simply waiting for this generation to die. Holding on to tradition trying to preserve the ember so the next generation can fan it back into flame. We all know they are dying. They know they are dying and have lost.
So I believe what we are seeing, and will sadly see for the next few years are the death throes of the “spirit” of Vatican II, and a dying animal is a dangerous one. These bishops and cardinals who for a short while longer have the power and control will do everything they can to start documenting into (false)law all of their ideas and dreams of what they envisioned Vatican II would become. They will no longer hide or pretend. Their true colors will show and they will gladly desecrate the Church with their heterodox ideals.
@Dan I strongly hesitate to see the “necessity” of the SSPX in this situation. All this proves is that our bishops are very often malinformed on liturgical matters and blindly guided by their ideological leanings. Error won’t fix error.
That being said, it truly baffles me how uneducated the vast majority of American bishops are on a slew of matters of Church law. First the guy claiming that masses not explicitly approved by the bishop “do not fulfill the Sunday obligation” (which would mean, quite unpastorally might I add, that even if a priest were to privately celebrate mass for his family on vacation, they wouldn’t have fulfilled their obligation and thus be under the pain of mortal sin), and now this. Not to mention the ongoing nonsense in Charlotte.
Thankfully, this isn’t unheard of. When a revolution has failed and its established ideology is crumbling, those within said ideology’s only option is to flail about wildly and try to impose their will and authority upon everybody below them in a final ditch effort to keep the flame from dying out. This is just one of many signs that we’re coming upon the light at the end of the tunnel. We know who wins in the end!
It mind boggling how some of the shepherds wis to rid the Church of the few remaining sheep.
Bishops content to manage the decline are bad enough, but to have a bishop intent on prying one more finger off of the cliff’s edge…
His Gaylordship’s* pen does not rest, he has also forbidden priests from requiring only male altar servers and also mandated Ordinary Extra Ministers of Communion if the congregation exceeds 100 unless there happen to be extra clerics around. His other decrees are a smorgasbord of “good” items – against certain abuses – which will likely never be enforced… but I’ll betcha that the gaystapo* will be vigilant in enforcing versus populism, girl altar boys, and OEMs!
*These are merely plays on the geographic name of the see in question and are not meant to cast aspersions regarding the proclivities of any cleric or official of that diocese!
The problem is – whether the decrees are legal or not, whether they’re logical or not, whether they have an ounce of sanity to them or not . . . they will be enforced with extreme prejudice. And what I learned in my own diocese is that there’s a cabal of odiferous toadies only to eager to spy on behalf of the bishop and rat out any priest that doesn’t toe the line to the infinitesimal micrometer.
The only hope in opposing the decrees would be if the priests worked TOGETHER to oppose them en masse, as brothers in arms in the defense of the Church, but, alas, again my own diocese taught me that I vastly overestimated the trust the diocesan priests had with themselves, and even I was surprised by some of the more well known and significant champions of Tradition and Orthodoxy who quickly folded tents and took up their office as the bishop’s Torquemada.
A priest, standing alone, will get smashed to bits. And if he wants to appeal to Rome that will take much time and much money with little hope for a positive outcome. (more likely it will get cast into the same abyss of nothingness that Dubia and inconvenient Cardinals get put in) In the meanwhile, he will, at least, get kicked out of his home, have his medical care and salary removed, and have no sacramental public life.
And people wonder why the SSPX continues to grow. Go figure.
Ultimately, the legality or validity of such decrees doesn’t seem to factor in all that much. We saw this with TC. We saw this with COVID. We will continue seeing this for the foreseeable future, I’m afraid. The other side of the coin of “You MUST Obey, no matter what” is “They can order you to DO whatever THEY want, and they don’t have to have a reason that makes sense.” I wish more folks who worship at the altar of “Obedience Uber Alles” understood how much damage they are doing to the Church.
Dan: Spot on. However, I would suggest that their goal is not to “reform” the Church, but rather to “deform” it. This situation also affirms the extent to which we are at the mercy of misguided bishops.
Any recommendation on how the laity can resist this kind of oppression, Fr. Z? I also live in a diocese (Davenport, IA) where ad orientem has supposedly been outlawed by the bishop (based on 299 of course) and my pastor has chosen obedience to the bishop’s demands over exercising his right to celebrate Mass according to the actual laws.
Any recommendation on how the laity can resist this kind of oppression? I also live in a diocese (Davenport, IA) where ad orientem has supposedly been outlawed by the bishop (based on 299 of course) and my pastor has chosen obedience to the bishop’s demands over exercising his right to celebrate Mass according to the actual laws. It seems that it is up to our priests to push back but I would like to be of help.
The bishop of Gaylord should know priests often report that communion distributed at the altar rail on the tongue to kneeling communicants goes much faster than single line distribution of communion in the hand, and would eliminate the need for Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion when there are hundreds of people communicating and only one ordained minister available. Just sayin’.
If I were the dark one, I’d get my psychophants not the Church in positions of power and destroy from within. And have plenty of free agents. I’m talking about you Jesuit Jesse James Martin
As I was becoming increasingly distraught about the what was going on in the Episcopal Church, one day in the 1990’s I was watching EWTN’s coverage of a meeting of the USA’s college or council of Bishops. They were discussing where tabernacles holding the Blessed Sacrament should be placed in Churches. It was the most idiotic discussion I could imagine, it was painful to watch and listen to, so I stopped watching. My wife, by this time, had been giving me tapes of Scott Hahn discussing why the sacred scriptures pointed to the Catholic Church. (This was how he made his living before finishing his doctorate.) His arguments were good, and still are, a brilliant man, but I could not see how anyone with half a brain, and Scott Hahn has several brains compared to mine, could put up with being in an organization run by Bishops who claim authority from Christ, but who act embarrassed because they are supposed to believe that He is still alive and well in the tabernacles of its churches and that praying in front of these tabernacles is fruitful. (My best guess is that the decline in Eucharistic devotion, i.e., Holy Hours, after Vatican II, had had as much of a negative effect on the Church as had the changes in the liturgy. It seems that if the liturgy is changed to make it possible to believe the Mass is not a sacrifice, it in turn discourages less Eucharistic devotion, which in turn implies fewer believe the Mass is a sacrifice, etc.)
Because of this I joined a schismatic group which a few years after SP reconciled with the diocese. Of course, IMHO, the Vatican did not completely keep its part of the bargain, so I cannot blame the SSPX for not trusting the Vatican.
There is a writer on substack who claims (from sources he knows within the FSSPX) that one reason that the SSPX did not want the Vatican to provide them with a Bishop or have the right to choose a Bishop for them was because they are worried that a Bishop chosen by the Vatican would be a homosexual himself. This writer has argued that allowing married priests would reduce the attractiveness of the priesthood to homosexuals and would help reform the Church in the right direction. I don’t know, because there is a video on youtube about the decline and fall of the Episcopal Church. Its title is “All Are Not Welcome: The Downfall of the Episcopal Church and How to Reform Her”. It appears that the decline and fall of the Episcopal Church has been the result of efforts by both feminists and homosexual clergy to reform it by watering down its teaching on sexual morality and by persecuting parish priests who do not support their agenda. (Sound familiar?) Having married priests has not helped, in fact there are many married priests who have a same-sex partner. The video is only an hour, and is about three Episcopalian priests who tried to reform her from within, finding complete intolerance from those seemingly promoting tolerance. After putting up with years of abuse, two are now preachers in protestant churches, while one’s entire diocese left the Episcopal Church and joined (or founded) an Anglican organization.
Did anyone note that the chancellor of the diocese is a woman? Shockingly, that’s true of about 30% of US dioceses.
Comments above:
Any recommendation on how the laity can resist this kind of oppression?
A priest, standing alone, will get smashed to bits.
The only hope in opposing the decrees would be if the priests worked TOGETHER to oppose them en masse, as brothers in arms in the defense of the Church, but, alas, again my own diocese taught me that I vastly overestimated the trust the diocesan priests had with themselves
And there you have it: even if a priest, or 3 or 4 of them, decided “that’s enough, we’re going to get organized and resist this en masse” to make it too costly for the bishop to simply cancel ALL of the priests involved, in the process of reaching out to other priests to “get organized”, they will inevitably run into one of the priests who is fine with the bishop’s new oppression, or who isn’t fine with it but who thinks “this is not a hill to die on” and then says to himself “if the bishops cancels these guys, and if he finds out they reached out to me but I did NOT rat them out to the bishop, then I will get cancelled along with them.” He will feel enormous pressure to inform the bishop.
You mention lack of trust among the priests: this is both natural and by design. Natural, because this lack of trust is the natural outflow of decades of bishops and diocese chanceries repudiating traditional teaching and liturgical norms, ignoring sound requirements from Rome, lying about pedo priests, and then lying about the cover-up, (i.e. hanging out to dry the reputation of ALL priests by association with the then 5% who are homosexual or otherwise deviant). And by the USCCB then adopting norms for hanging a priest out to dry if they are accused of abuse, while at the same time protecting criminal cronies. (Would anyone like to put real money against the thesis that “there were at least 6 bishops who knew all about McCarrick and never said anything to Rome or the authorities, and at least 2 who were cohorts in his crimes”? I didn’t think so.) The natural outflow of bishops doubling down on failed theory, failed rhetoric, failed “reform”, pretending for decades that “more of what ails us” is going to cure the problem. It is BY DESIGN in at least a few dioceses, with bishops who learned the lesson that was exemplified by Francis: divide and conquer. By being capricious, alternating hot and cold, advancing and then demoting at whim, temporarily giving power to one faction just to take it away later, and never reacting to requests and complaints with no predictable pattern, you make the priests unable to trust anyone else the diocese, even at the lowly priest level.
Prayer and God’s action to restore His church is what will fix this. Good priests should (at rare times, but when necessary) resist even it gets them cancelled, but there’s no harm in them preparing for themselves an underground exit strategy too.
The decree about altar servers seems to require priests to allow girl altar servers. As I see it, this is in contradiction to your article here. https://wdtprs.com/2011/08/what-romes-cdw-says-about-altar-boys-girl-altar-boys-and-lay-service-at-the-altar-in-general/
Does this kind of blatant disregard for or disobedience to Rome count as schism?
@DavisCountyIowaCatholic
Schism only counts if you’re a part of the SSPX. And I’m not even joking. This is now how it literally works.
@Davis,
No, of course not. All disobedience is bad, but some disobedience is not equal to others.
What’s so cruel is that these bishops were broadly left alone to enact their own liturgical will in their own parishes when they were priests. They can’t give the same courtesy to their own priests.
When the revolutionaries of yesteryear become leadership, suddenly obedience and law are of paramount importance.
I am more concerned with the fact that the Chancellor of the Diocese of Gaylord is a laic than the fact that she’s female…
The Archlady – a convert and mother of six – would make one heck of a good chancellor or chief-of-staff or XO – better than half of the guys I know… but she doesn’t fit the mold. She’d no sooner wish to be an altar boy or an Ordinary Extra Minister at Mass than she would to join the Patriots practice squad! Qualification for the role per se has nothing to do with chromosomes, it has everything to do with the charism of the priesthood, for which a chromosomal incongruity IS a disqualifier! Not that I think the chancellorette had anything to do with the decision-making process, she’s just (sadly for her) window dressing. The whole thing is a travesty.
Yet another reason to only go to Michigan while on vacation
On a more positive note, those open cardboard containers for produce that grocery stores use, are also called gaylords. I don’t know why, but they are.
Probably an old company name
Apropos of nothing, when I hear “Gaylord” I always think of Gaylord Perry, Hall of Fame pitcher who pretty much admitted that the latter portion of his career was sustained by his ability to throw a “spitball” and also to avoid detection by the umpires of whatever illegal substance he was applying to the ball on any given day! Or, Gaylord Bros. of Syracuse who made library supplies including the mechanical “charging” (book checkout) machines used in many libraries (my 1st job when I was in HS!) And of course Gaylord Container Company – which makes those produce boxes – was founded in St. Louis in the 1920 by a Robert Gaylord.