In my experience, many traditionalists[1] perceive the “New Mass” as empty and bland compared to the richness of the Tridentine liturgy. From their perspective, the new liturgy needs artificial distractions, from ad-libbing to clowns, to maintain people’s interest. The inherent...
Is Latin a “Sacred Language”? The “Iconostasis of the West”? A unifying, universal language? Or are we being fed a bunch of “Just So” stories? What attitudes might these “Just So” stories be inculcating? The Use of Latin While Latin...
On October 13, Pope Francis gave his approval for the beatification of Pope John Paul I, who is best known for having one of the shortest pontificates in history: just 33 days. We have to look back to 1605 to...
How does one tell the story of the Second Vatican Council? It is a question that has fascinated many people over the past fifty years, challenged them as well, because for one thing, more than one story is involved. Why...
Six weeks ago Pope Francis issued an Apostolic Letter called “Traditionis Custodes” (“Guardians of the Tradition”). When I heard the news and read the letter, my first thought was, “thank God.” In this essay, I want to explain why, and suggest...
Reuters recently reported that some Israeli rabbis had written the Vatican to express their “distress” about one line from Pope Francis’s recent addresses on Galatians: “The Law, however, does not give life.” According to Reuters, the rabbis worry that this...
In light of the debate over Traditiones Custodes, I’ve been doing some research into the history of the Church’s liturgical reform. A lot of historical claims have been made on social media about the state of the liturgy prior to...
An area of contention and debate surrounding the state of the Roman liturgy today is sacred music. Many today will point out that Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on Sacred Liturgy, states, “The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as...
A big mistake that some Catholics make is to think of the liturgy as clergy-centered. Honestly, it’s difficult to blame them—priests really do play a great role in liturgical celebrations. For example, without a priest, it is impossible to have...
Today the Holy Father, Pope Francis, stunned the Catholic media sphere by abrogating Pope Benedict XVI’s controversial 2007 Motu proprio Summorum Pontificum (SP). Francis wrote in his own Motu proprio Traditionis Custodes: I take the firm decision to abrogate all...
Obviously there’s a lot more to say, but I think the key to Pope Francis’s decision to abrogate “Summorum Pontificum,” Benedict’s document that liberalized the use of the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite, in the motu proprio “Traditionis Custodes”...
The Second Vatican Council—specifically in its Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, Apostolicam Actuositatem and in the Apostolic Constitution Lumen Gentium—affirmed that the laity are co-responsible for the mission of the Church. One narrative of the post-conciliar years has...
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