Fr. Z's Blog

The distinguished German author Martin Mosebach, whose amazing books I do not tire of recommending, has a piece at First Things about the Motu Proprio Traditionis custodes (TC).

Mosebach begins from the premise that “papal authority is unraveling as never before” and the Church has “advanced to an ungovernable stage”.

This seems hardly to be disputed, given what Rome did to the Catholics in China, the “gay” mafia running things, bankrupt dioceses, “synodal” (walking together) paths that lead to the cliff’s edge, openly homosexualist Jesuits are applauded by the hierarchy even as hundreds of faithful priests are being cancelled by chanceries for speaking up, and bishops willingly give Communion to people like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.

The cherry on top is a war on the Traditional Roman Rite whose participants are young and committed and rapidly growing in numbers at a time when a demographic sinkhole is opening up beneath the rest of the Church.

But, who am I to judge?

Mosebach: “The vehemence of the motu proprio’s language suggests that this directive has come too late.”

He makes a point which I have underscored here since the extruding of TC.  There is no comparison between the 1980’s, when to obtain the TLM people had to go cap in hand and tug their forelock and Catholic news media were limited to gawdawful diocesan newspapers and the increasingly dissident Fishwrap (aka National Schismatic Reporter), Today, people have massive, rapid access to information. They can network quickly. Bishops have nearly completely squandered their moral capital, and many younger Catholic have been able to experience the TLM in a peaceful, stable way.

And they want it.

And the bishops are going to… what?  Say, “You can’t have it!”?

No….  Not that.  It’ll more along the lines of “If you want your Latin Mass, you can keep your Latin Mass.”

Pace one of the greatest public liars in modern history.

Mosebach:

Perhaps the Mass is not what most concerns the pope. Francis appears to sympathize with the “hermeneutic of rupture”—that theological school that asserts that with the Second Vatican Council the Church broke with her tradition. If that is true, then indeed every celebration of the traditional liturgy must be prevented. For as long as the old Latin Mass is celebrated in any garage, the memory of the previous two thousand years will not have been extinguished.

This memory, however, cannot be rooted out by the blunt exercise of papal legal positivism. It will return again and again, and will be the criterion by which the Church of the future will have to measure itself.

Not too long ago Peter Kwasniewski and I spent the better part of a morning together at breakfast and discussion after my early Mass.

At the time, a couple months before TC was extruded, I raised my concern that a new argument was developing on the papalotrous, sycophantic left.  I was catching a patchwork of theological, ecclesiological attacks on the Traditional Roman Rite (far more extensive than just the Mass).  The ecclesiological line ran something like this:

Vatican II must be the lens through which ALL OF TRADITION is to be read.  Vatican II, that is the Spirit of Vatican II, and not necessarily the texts, provides the way to reinterpret the entirety of Tradition, back to Apostolic times, and then provides the normative framework for how to apply Tradition to our needs in an ongoing way. Therefore, the TLM must be repressed because it is contrary to the ecclesiology of the Spirit of Vatican II.

Pay attention.

This is the Rahnerian “hermeneutic of rupture” school hopped up on too much sugar and cartoons.  Anyone can see through this B as in B, S as in S.   What this line of thought does is allow the total jettisoning of the Church’s teachings, rooted in the Regula Fidei and natural law, about faith and morals.   It creates an ever shifting set of lenses.   I am reminded of Card. Kasper’s puerile attempt to argue away the Lord’s prohibition of adultery by saying that, in Christ’s time, what Christ said about adultery was right, but each subsequent age has to reevaluate what Christ said in light of its own circumstances.  So, contradicting what Christ said then is not to say that Christ was wrong, but rather that we have to reinterpret the inner meaning of his historically conditioned words.

That’s what we are up against… again.  Perpetually.

Papal legal positivism fueled by Rahnerian modernism, in theology slowly replacing philosophy with politics, as Thomas Heinrich Stark pointed out in his hard, but dead-on-target explanation in 2018.

It’s the “lived experience” approach that twisted two Synods (walking together) on the Family.

Mosebach concludes:

Perhaps the Mass is not what most concerns the pope. Francis appears to sympathize with the “hermeneutic of rupture”—that theological school that asserts that with the Second Vatican Council the Church broke with her tradition. If that is true, then indeed every celebration of the traditional liturgy must be prevented. For as long as the old Latin Mass is celebrated in any garage, the memory of the previous two thousand years will not have been extinguished.

This memory, however, cannot be rooted out by the blunt exercise of papal legal positivism. It will return again and again, and will be the criterion by which the Church of the future will have to measure itself.

Regarding his point about “memory”.  That’s important for Mosebach.  I recall a passage in The Heresy of Formlessness: The Roman Liturgy and Its Enemy, where describes the resentment a rock probably feels if it is shifted from its perennial, traditional, place.  It might require centuries for the rock to settle down.

THAT’s how important our sacred liturgical worship is!   Even the details are important, not “superfluous” as my friend Fr. Jackson put it.

Change the entire rite of Mass and suddenly impose it?   It hasn’t really worked, has it.  Look around.

Seek to repress the rite of Mass in use, mainly, since before the time of Gregory the Great?  Suppress the rite that did work in favor of the one that didn’t?

Not likely.