The Pope, and quite frankly, large swaths of the Church, have finally had enough of the schismatic attitudes generated by the Latin Mass. The disciples of the TLM have spent the last few decades channeling their inner schismatics, imitating the madness of Marcel Lefebvre, and they got the response that justice required.
To be completely clear, I was a member of an FSSP TLM parish for five years, attending every Sunday. When I began there, I had high hopes that I would encounter a group of Catholics who were better-educated, better-formed, just better at being Catholic, than the great mass of Catholics at the Novus Ordo Mass. It is easy to find my blog posts from that period extolling the virtues of the Latin Mass and its community.
But, over the course of those five years, I slowly realized there was a level of hatred and anger within the community that could only be described as demonic. When priests spout denigrations of an ecumenical council, the Pope and the post-conciliar Church in pseudo-anonymous podcasts or, worse, from the ambo during Mass, there are serious problems with the movement that forms such priests. When the people attending to those podcasts or assisting at those Masses cheer the priests on, there is schism.
I have personally watched my brother-in-law, a good man and a good priest, driven to theological insanity by the TLM. I have seen him drag several members of his family, including his own mother, into the madness. It was and is a train-wreck, it turned him and his family into a theological train-wreck.
Marcel Lefebvre was a schismatic and a heretic, the movement he founded shared his spirituality of schism, heresy, madness. The FSSP attempt to reform the TLM movement failed. Lay members of TLM communities, whether FSSP or SSPX, continue to revere Lefebvre as a visionary instead of condemning him as the nutcase that he unquestionably was. With shocking conformity, TLM members continued to ape Martin Luther's insistence that the Church would soon reverse itself and see the "wisdom" of the schism he fomented.
Blessed Pope Pius IX famously proclaimed, "I am Tradition!" Pope Francis occupies the chair that is tradition. Denigrating Pope Francis, as so many TLM communities take delight in doing, logically and ineluctably leads to sedevacantism, which is itself simply an assertion that the gates of Hell prevailed against Christ. Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict both gave the TLM communities decades to correct themselves, decades to demonstrate their love of Christ and His Church by showing fraternal charity towards the council and the post-conciliar Church. But the TLM'rs let both of these Popes down.
Instead, it squandered every opportunity, choosing to pour out venom on anyone who did not share their particular theological idiosyncracies. No group within the Church can lay claim to the entire spirituality of the Church. Franciscans cannot engage in combat with Dominicans about whose spirituality is "better". That's not a Catholic attitude. Lefebvre's attachment to the TLM drove him to schism and heresy. The people who followed him demonstrated they could not escape that error. They insisted that their way alone was superior, that the whole Church must reform to their understanding of Catholicism or be dragged down to the depths of hell. They set themselves up as Pope and denigrated the Pope for not following their vision.
But it is the Pope who leads and directs, not Lefebvre, not the TLM community. It is the Pope who is Tradition. The Pope leads the Church and forms her. If the Pope says a spiritual practice is not conducive to spiritual growth, then we surrender that practice to his ruling. Popes have suppressed liturgical traditions before. Most famously, Pope Pius V suppressed numerous liturgical traditions immediately following Trent. Now, following Vatican II, the Pope has suppressed an additional liturgy. It is his right to do so, not ours, nor have we any right to murmur against the decision.
"Traditionalists" like to insist that monarchy is the best form of government. Well, TLM'rs, you live in a monarchy. The king has decreed. Suck it up, buttercup, and walk the talk. Quit imitating the followers of Korah and Luther. You have been given another opportunity to embrace the Catholic Faith, to follow Tradition, to thank the Pope for his wisdom. Take advantage of it.
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The Upside-Down Church
by GEORGE NEUMAYR
Pope Francis has often compared the Catholic Church to a “field hospital.” It is an odd analogy in his case, given his penchant for quackery and malpractice. The healthiest patients at his field hospital have their limbs hacked off while the sickest ones receive increased dosages of a medicine that doesn’t work. The pope’s conception of health in the body of Christ is the opposite of his predecessors. They saw the absence of orthodoxy as a cancer in the Church, whereas Pope Francis sees the persistent presence of orthodoxy as the poison.
According to this twisted view, the crisis in the Church derives not from the modernist heresy but from the unwillingness of Catholics to succumb to it. Laboring under this view, he has devoted much of his pontificate to undoing the post–Vatican II conservative retrenchment of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. In complaining about the Church’s reluctance to embrace “modern culture,” he has implicitly criticized those predecessors. Where they viewed the liberal “spirit” of Vatican II with concern, he welcomed it.
At the beginning of his pontificate, he lamented that the progressive promise of Vatican II hadn’t been fulfilled — “very little was done in that direction” — but that he had the “ambition to want to do something.”
The pope’s recent order curtailing the traditional Latin Mass is central to that ambition. He can’t rest until all Catholics have submitted to his modernism. In the past, popes instituted oaths against modern errors. This pope is eager to impose an oath in favor of them. In urging the bishops to marginalize the traditional Latin Mass, the pope reveals the depth of his contempt for Catholic tradition and his desire to cement in place a modernist redefinition of Catholicism.
Pope Benedict XVI used to talk about the theologians at Vatican II who wanted to start a new religion from scratch. He called them anarchic utopians. He said that “after the Second Vatican Council some were convinced that all would be made new, that another Church was being made, that the pre-conciliar Church was finished and we would have another, totally ‘other’ [Church].” That largely sums up the program of his successor. His decree against the traditional Latin Mass is designed to finish off the pre-conciliar Church. It severs any connection between the post–Vatican II Church and the pre–Vatican II Church, thereby allowing the modernists to monopolize the direction of the Church.
In order to take Catholicism out of Catholicism and turn it into an unspiritual and political quasi-religion, the modernists can’t abide any competition from the orthodox. Because the traditional Latin Mass movement was growing, particularly among young people and young priests, the pope had to kill it. The onerous provisions in the decree will first ghettoize the old Mass, then snuff it out. The Church, already suffering from a vocations crisis, will lose even more vocations, as the decree in effect tells tradition-minded young men that the price of entry into the priesthood now is total submission to the pope’s modernism.
For a religion predicated on tradition, the suppression of tradition makes no sense unless the goal is to change that religion fundamentally. By “unity,” the pope means universal acceptance of that project. He is demanding that all Catholics view uncritically changes that have obviously weakened the faith. If they don’t, they are “divisive.”
The pope, of course, embodies the very division that he claims to deplore. He is dividing Catholics at the deepest possible level — from Catholic tradition itself. A “unity” rooted in heterodoxy is a sham. As the modernist Church stumbles from scandal to scandal, he dares to hold it up as the model of Catholicism to which all must aspire. His latest act of ecclesiastical tyranny is nothing more than an attempt to extract from the most faithful Catholics a pledge of allegiance to that crumbling Church.
Oh, my heavens. You think Liberius and Honorious explicitly taught error? Wow. Ok... yeah... RCIA clearly didn't take, nor did your self-study courses. Have fun as a schismatic, I guess... amazing...
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