When Accompaniment Becomes Abandonment

 

I attended a Mass as part of a 40 Hours Devotion tonight, followed by a procession, benediction, and formal dinner. As my wife was caring for our younger two recovering from illness, I was there with only my older two children. 

It so happened that we were seated at a table with just two other people: an older woman and her seven-year-old grandson. The woman introduced herself as Mrs. Rogers. 

About halfway through the conversation, she shared that her husband had divorced her (as far as the state is concerned) years ago and she was living a life of prayer to get him to Heaven. When he initiated an annulment process, the diocesan tribunal gave it to him, arguing that the mere fact of him seeking a divorce meant the marriage was never valid. Mrs. Rogers was told “You need to move on with your life” and “Don’t you want to be happy?”

On the recommendation of her spiritual advisor, she quoted Bishop Fulton Sheen to the canon lawyer, to the effect that she made a commitment and would remain committed to getting him to Heaven whether or not he stayed true to his vows. The canon lawyer told her: “You need help.”

She had no advocate except Cardinal Burke, who forwarded her case to the Apostolic Signatura, informed her of her right to appeal, and alluded to her on EWTN when he reminded viewers of the women and children damaged by a no-fault-divorce culture. Rome upheld her appeal, so her marriage remains. 

The conversation turned to her niece, V, who recently left a Benedictine convent. She was cloistered for five years but finally could not accept the constant pressure to be vaccinated for covid (she went to an appointment out of obedience, and the needle broke) and the attacks she endured for not voting for Biden. She is starting over in the world, out of her cloistered convent and wearing street clothes for the first time in five years. 

There are certainly strands of pharisaism among traditionalists. That is to say, people who use their knowledge of tradition and Catholic teaching to gain power over others, emotionally, financially, or otherwise. 

But from what I’ve seen, most people just want the support of their spiritual leaders to live lives of fidelity to the Church as handed down in the Church’s theological and moral teaching as well as sacred liturgy. 

Instead, they are treated with contempt, while their abusers are shown compassion and given everything they ask for. When the abused dare to speak up, they are told that they are fed the false dichotomy of accompaniment (that is to say, enablement of sinful lifestyles) vs rigidity and told to embrace accompaniment. 

Gentleness toward sinners does not require annihilating Church moral teaching. Saint John Chrysostom, who was himself exiled for upholding the truth, captured this beautifully in his Homily 29 on Matthew’s Gospel:

Wherefore groan, bewail, for the calamity indeed deserves tears. And the wounded man- again, nothing can so heal him as gentleness: gentleness, I say, which is mightier than any force.

Who is accompanying those widowed by divorce, who are told that their marriage never existed, their vows were invalid, their vocation is a lie? Or the children on places like Anonymous Us, scarred by the lack of a mother and/or father, or often horrified that their life began in a lab and was bought and paid for? 

Meanwhile, what is done to save the souls of the abusers? 

“If any one does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his own family, he has disowned the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” 1 Timothy 5:8

Still, we can have hope (and holy fear) in God’s promises given in Scripture. 

Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Every one loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the fatherless, and the widow's cause does not come to them. Therefore the Lord says, the LORD of hosts, the Mighty One of Israel: "Ah, I will vent my wrath on my enemies, and avenge myself on my foes. I will turn my hand against you and will smelt away your dross as with lye and remove all your alloy. And I will restore your judges as at the first, and your counselors as at the beginning. Afterward you shall be called the city of righteousness, the faithful city." Isaiah 1:23-26

A Night at the Council

 

If there is one major misstep in my growth in tradition, it has been an over-reliance on books and blogs and not enough talking to real people, especially older people who lived through the 60s and 70s. 

Two nights ago, I had the privilege of getting the closest I will get to a night at the Second Vatican Council. Through an interesting series of circumstances, I wound up driving a gentleman who was in Rome for the entire Second Vatican Council to and from an Anglican Ordinariate Evensong an hour away. 

Naturally, conversation turned to those years. For once, I was able to shut my mouth to focus on asking questions and listening. 

The gentleman said “If you’re not liberal when you’re young, you have no heart. If you’re not conservative when you’re old, you have no brains.” People were excited to put new ideas into practice, and only once years had passed and revealed the consequences did some pause to reconsider. 

Back in the early 60s in Church circles, it was common to hear of people whose teaching and books had been suppressed for unclear reasons. There was a general sense that the hierarchy was trigger happy. Education for priests was tied to watered-down Thomism from the 19th and 18th centuries. These formulas were typically prioritized over knowledge of the fathers and the Scriptures in their original languages. 

So when the bishops, many of whom were Scripture scholars and had studied the patristics, convened at the beginning of the Council, they found fault with the original schema on source of Divine Revelation, a hot topic leading up the Council. Though the votes did not reach the threshold legally required to reject the document, John XXIII was not the type to railroad his agenda through heavy opposition and agreed to set aside the schema and permit work on an altogether new document. 

This was a watershed moment. For those who felt (not unfairly) that the Church was stagnating under politically motivated condemnations that stifled growth in knowledge of Scripture and the fathers, this was a real moment of hope that the era of unthinking, even toxic, obedience to authority might be ending. 

It was not immediately clear how far this pushback toward the old order would go. The radical theologians like fathers Hans Kung and Edward Schillebeecx were not publicly flouting orthodox teaching until after the Council.

In retrospect, there were three councils. There was the actual Council, which published the official documents. There was the theologians’ council, where the actual Council was used as a pretext to push their much more radical ideas into the open. And there was the media council, where secular media used the Council to push their own messages to generate revenue and coerce Catholics into aligning with their political and social views. 

In particular, Xavier Rynne of the New Yorker framed the narrative of the Council that has become the norm: compassionate, world-wise bishops bringing a backwards, dictatorial Church into the maturity and complexity of the modern world. 

Most telling is his article after Humanae Vitae, in which Rynne paints the encyclical as the first step in repudiating the Council and going back to the way of thinking before John XXIII. The article names the aftermath a more serious crisis in the Church than the Reformation. It quotes numerous bishops, theologians, and academics who reject the encyclical as non-Scriptural and a basic failure in moral law theory. It celebrates Vatican II’s statement on the absolute freedom of conscience and applies it to Catholics dissenting from the encyclical. It then paints Pope Paul VI as the hostage of Cardinals Ottaviani, Cicognani, and others who “opposed the Council from the beginning.” 

Whether because of Rynne or the numerous Church figures he quotes, this is exactly the way the Council has been received by most Catholics. The Council means the Church is allowing Catholics to reject its most foundational teachings because everyone has unlimited freedom of conscience to do as they please. Any pushback against this mentality is attacked as the failed mentality of the old Church that wants to go back to modernist “witch hunts.” 

The gentleman said that Humane Vitae was the moment when the masks came off. Creating more space for scholars to dig into the Scriptures and patristics without monitoring by Rome was one thing. Sheltering and promoting theologians who flatly contradicted Church teaching was quite another. Though the American bishops were generally supportive, plenty gave cover to theologians who openly rejected it and encouraged other faithful to do the same. 

When I asked about the liturgy, the gentleman confirmed two of my pet theories. The first being that the liturgical changes were not demanded by the faithful and were perceived as being forced on them from above. People didn’t know what was going on, especially because the changes happened so quickly. Secondly, once the Church had made massive changes to its liturgy, most faithful assumed it was only a matter of time before the Church changed everything else. Massive changes and “you do you” approaches to the main interaction most faithful have with the Church (Sunday Mass) made it inevitable that most assumed the same attitude would soon apply to moral and doctrinal teaching. 

The gentleman related how a group of laity fired up by the Council demanded their own parish from the bishop under threat of leaving the Church. They got one, and when he tried to introduce some polyphony to their Masses he was pushed out quickly. That parish is now about to close after being repulsive to all but the most liberal fringe since it opened in the 70s. 

Despite having directed a schola for several years in Rome in the late 50s and early 60s, he had no outlet for his experience in sacred music for decades. 

He has attended the local Anglican Ordinariate parish because it is “a bastion of orthodoxy” and has a culture of sacred music very difficult to find elsewhere. It also embodies the actual Council document on the liturgy in that it retains liturgical tradition (ad orientem, traditional prayers, chant and polyphony) while using the vernacular and having more visible lay participation. It is also an example of the Church’s ability to attract and assimilate former protestants. 

While this gentleman said there has been some disappointment in the relatively small number of Anglican churches that have entered the Catholic Church under Coetibus Anglicanorum, many sterling individuals have swum the Tiber, including a former chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II. It may also be a refuge if the hierarchy becomes more tyrannical about the Latin Mass. 

It was a truly illuminating conversation on a subject dear to my heart, and I hope to have may more with him and others. In these trying times, it is helpful and hopeful to hear from those who came before.

Aging as Accumulated Damage

 

In my kids’ favorite book series, a young heroine seeking help from a legendary warrior is warned that the warrior may be stuck in the form of a beast. When the heroine asks: “She’s lived a long time, is there any chance she has mastered her condition by now” she is told: “You are new to life. For most of us, a long life simply provides more time to accumulate damage.” 

This is why I have always loved children’s books and am comfortable reading them as an adult. Dumbledore from Harry Potter remarks that people have a knack of wanting precisely the things that are worst for them. Narnia’s tragic exposure of Susan’s faults and those of the dwarves in The Last Battle strike a chord. Tom Sawyer provides witty truths about our weakness to reverse psychology. Little Women teaches us about the pitfalls of “the good life.” 

And this phrase about age as accumulated damage is one of the more stunning truths I’ve found. When my wife’s grandmother was dying, my mother-in-law commonly chalked it all up to her being in her 90s. That didn’t compute with me, because I have known several relatives in their mid-90s who were far more lucid, caring, and stable on their feet. 

While there are some aspects of aging that can’t be avoided, many of the more dreadful aspects are direct result of repeated choices we make and harm we do to ourselves. 

Dr. Kelly Starrett in the first pages of Becoming a Supple Leopard shows how the postures most of us adopt (shearing our bones because we’re lazy when we bend over and refuse to use muscles to help support our back when sitting and standing) cause massive damage and pain over time. A related plan to prevent and reverse this damage can be found here. 

There are many other examples, beyond the obvious ones like smoking and egregious diets.

If I’m starting to feel a bit stiffer in my 30s with increasing hearing, eye, and skin issues, it’s not that I’ve hit a magical number that generates more pain. I’ve damaged my spine through years of bad posture, weakened my body through lack of stretching and exercise, harmed my digestive system through eating too quickly and eating too much sugar, gotten too many sunburns, spent too much time with earbuds pumping sound into my ears, and stared at electronic screens for too long. 

The same could be said of the spiritual life. It’s not that old people are inherently out of touch and crotchety. But many of them walk in that direction for quite some years, and our society’s idolization of retirement and plethora of financial benefits for reaching a magical age encourage isolation and entitlement. 

“Age” is an excuse we use to dodge responsibility for the poor physical and mental choices we and others have made through the years. Look closer at most conditions and you’re bound to find self-inflicted damage sooner or later. If you’re young, stop digging the hole. 

Liturgy Review: Exaltation of the Holy Cross

 

I have been fascinated with this feast ever since venerating a relic of the True Cross at Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in Washington, DC nearly 10 years ago. New Liturgical Movement has a wonderful article on the feast’s history.

Why celebrate the holy cross in September, five months after Good Friday? Few know the story. Firstly, the feast commemorates the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre when it was first built after Saint Helena traveled to the Holy Land. Secondly, the feast commemorates the conclusion of the “First Crusade” when the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius pulled together an army from his disintegrating empire and recovered the True Cross from the invading Persians in 629. It is hard to imagine the pure joy that must have exuded from the church on the day the True Cross was restored. 

Let’s see what the Roman Church has handed down to us today. 

Like all traditional feasts, it opens with I Vespers the evening prior (9/13). The Monastic and Roman psalms are the Sunday psalms, beginning triumphantly with 109(110): The Lord said to my lord: sit at my right hand, until I make thy enemies thy footstool.” Notably one of the antiphons in the Monastic Office asks Christ “who didst save Peter in the sea” to save us. A useful prayer for today, perhaps. The next antiphon tells enemies to flee for the lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, hath conquered. 

The chapter is the beginning of the beautiful Christological hymn of Philippians 2: “Christ Jesus, who though He was by nature God, did not consider being equal to God a thing to be clung to, but emptied Himself, taking the nature of a slave.” The hymn is Vexilla Regis, also sung on Good Friday (for an excellent recording, see CC Watershed). 

Matins, after the usual opening of Psalm 94(95) kicks off with the Pange Lingua (sung on Maundy Thursday), followed by Psalms 1-3, then includes the opening of Numbers 21, nearly a mirror image of the reign of Heraclius. First, the Israelites are attacked, with several kidnapped. They pray to the Lord, fight back against their enemies, and destroy their cities. Then comes the familiar story of the Israelites reviling God in the desert, being punished with the serpents, and being healed by gazing upon the bronze serpent (which would’ve been in the shape of a cross). 

Matins continues with psalms 4,10 (In the Lord I put my trust, how can you say to me: flee into the mountain like a sparrow?), and 20. 

Now Matins recounts the story of Heraclius, whose peace offers being denied, boldly attacked Persian territory (led by an icon of Christ), touching off a revolt that unseated the Persian emperor and compelled the Persians to return both Byzantine territory and the True Cross. Matins also recounts how the gate of Jerusalem shut when Heraclius approached, personally carrying the cross, until he dismounted his horse and removed his royal raiment in imitation of the simple poverty of Christ. 

The Office concludes with homilies on the cross from Pope Leo I, a Te Deum, and the Collect:

Grant, we beseech thee, that even as we have understood the mystery thereof upon earth, so we may worthily enjoy in heaven the fruits of the redemption which was paid thereon.

Lauds also includes psalms of the Sunday, beginning with 92(93): The Lord reigns, He has clothed Himself in majesty. The passage from Philippians is read again. The hymn is Crux Fidelis. 

At Mass, vestments are red: recalling the triumph of the martyrs and the birth of the Church rather than the black vestments of mourning worn on Good Friday. The Mass opens with an Introit from Galatians 6: But it behoves us to glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The epistle is the passage following the Philippians passage from the Office: “Christ became obedient for us unto death: even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath exalted Him…”

The Gospel is the passage of John 12, where Christ says: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to Myself.”

The Offertory prays that the Lord protect us from our enemies by the sign of the Cross, “that we may be able to do Thee worthy service, and that our sacrifice may be well pleasing in Thy sight.”

At this point I have attended several liturgies for this feast: the new, Pauline Mass, Byzantine liturgy, and choral evensong in the Anglican Ordinariate tradition. Though the Byzantine rite’s prostrations and venerations of the cross were moving, I haven’t found anything to compare with the strength of the Roman Rite’s psalms, Scripture passages, and hymns for this feast. 

Predictably the new Mass includes a reading from Numbers 21 but removes the first three verses about the Israelites’ combat against the Canaanites. The Gospel is John 3, where Christ tells Nicodemus that the Son must be lifted up as the serpent was in the desert. But this passage loses Christ’s line: “Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the Prince of the world be cast out”, contained on the traditional Gospel from John 12. 

It seems perfectly fitting that the Church gives us a reminder, halfway through the year after Triduum, of the triumph of the cross, with some Triduum hymns and Scripture passages. Not just that, but the Ember Days of Fall also lead us into fasting the following week. 

This feast is fundamentally subversive. The cross was the supreme instrument of Roman domination: carefully engineered torture to be inflicted on enemies of the state, notably Sparticus and his revolting slave army. Yet Christians, under heavy torture themselves, turned this “nuclear option” into a sign of defiance. Pray that we may have the courage and grace to do the same. 

Tobacco Smoking and the Breakdown of Libertarianism

 

There is an obnoxious pro smoking stance among conservatives and libertarians. It is a perfect illustration of the fatal flaws of libertarianism. Pro smoking positions, and libertarianism broadly, miss two truths that are obvious if one can take off the ideological blinders. 

1: Free consent isn’t always present when you think it is, and it’s often impossible to verify

2: There is no such thing as a choice that affects just one individual

At the age of three, I all but watched my grandmother, with whom I lived, die of strangulation by a lung cancer tumor. She was 53 and had been a compulsive smoker since her teenage years. 

My mother tells stories about how her mother could not even reduce her cigarette smoking to one per hour during pregnancy but would cut each cigarette into four pieces and smoke one every 15 minutes. That does not sound like the freely consenting decision of a responsible adult.

What almost certainly killed her was her foolish decision to invite other smokers to smoke in her office when her office building went smoke free in the late 80s, and her inhalation of the concentrated second hand smoke. Again, it is not the smoker’s habit per se but the smoke that gets breathed in by others near the smoker that causes the real problems. 

This matches the diagnosis given to my father-in-law. He was diagnosed with lung cancer when my wife was a senior in High School. He was 60. The doctors told him it wasn’t the smoke from his own cigarettes but the unfiltered second hand smoke inhaled when smoking indoors (especially with others) that led to the cancer. 

While my high school graduation was marked by an empowering sense of freedom and a round of parties, my wife’s was marked by fear, guilt over her father postponing his tumor operation until after her graduation, the sight of her father in a wheelchair for months, and the horror of a follow-on stroke that left his right arm paralyzed for the rest of his life. 

He died at age 71 of pneumonia, almost certainly made fatal because part of a lung was removed in the cancer surgery 11 years before. His death was the day before my fifth wedding anniversary. My wife was 29. Our eldest child was 4, our second child was 2. 

While statism and fascism create tyrants from the top down, libertarianism creates tyrants from the ground up. A cynical mind such as my own concludes that my grandmother and father-in-law demanded that their families march to the beat of their smoking habit for decades, tolerating no dissent when innocent children dared to push back. This included the waste of money, personal health hazards to the rest of the family of breathing the second hand smoke, the unpleasant smell that lingered on children in school and spouses in offices, and of course the horror of losing a parent in one’s 20s and having to provide intense medical care (to say nothing of the expense) that was all avoidable.

Even if one is a staunch libertarian, smoking cannot be a right because no one has a right to impose those things on others who do not consent to them. But even if my relatives were hermetically sealed and the physical inhalation of the smoke affected only themselves, the libertarian argument still fails. Their deaths alone harmed dozens of lives for decades. 

Moreover, how do we know the behavior was consensual? Smoking is addictive by design, and many who wish to quit struggle to do so for years. It is impossible to declare smoking acceptable on the basis that it’s a consenting decision by an adult, because often it’s not. 

So what to do? Naturally, a blanket ban on tobacco smoking would not work. Nevertheless, communities (to wit: families, churches, neighborhoods) should apply creative social pressure to adults with an addictive tobacco habit, particularly those with a family. And yes, there is a role for government in preventing the sale and manufacture of knowingly addictive, fatal products whether through banning certain ingredients or holding those who sell them personally liable for their costs to society. 

This is true, not just of smoking, but of all human activity. 

Consent is often hard to assess, whether one is talking about sexual activity or even economic activity. Did you really make a freely consenting decision to take on that 22% interest credit card debt, considering your recent job loss, family of upbringing, the psychological hacks vendors used to get you to spend money, and the surrounding peer pressure of consumerism? 

Even if you did, consent doesn’t morph a usurious contract from bad to good. 

And so it goes for the unbounded consequences of economic acts. Buying something is not just a transaction between two private individuals. It sends a market signal and supports production of a certain type of product, reinforces a certain type of business model, provides funding to a certain type of company with certain values. It also takes family resources that could have gone elsewhere. That doesn’t mean it is automatically subject to centralized regulation by a remote bureaucrat. But it does mean that it can’t automatically be judged as good. 

Sin is not a right or the private affair of an individual but an addiction to be cured through the sacraments, prayer, and acts of mortification. All of those cures have a social element as well as a personal element because people exist in real communities and are not isolated entities wandering about in space. 

If we’re going to make genuine progress as a society, conservatives need to stop turning their brains off when it comes to outwardly consensual actions and start actively assessing the quality of those actions and how organic communities can push their people to improve them over time. 

To which end, I suggest a quick read of Elizabeth Anscombe’s brilliant Modern Moral Philosophy. 

Socialism is Petty

 

On my last work trip, in San Diego a month before the Great Shutdown, I asked a coworker from the UK if she’d bring her daughter on any of her trips. She responded that she couldn’t bring her anywhere except during the summer. She explained that in the UK, parents are fined 60 pounds if they take their child out of school for a single day. She told a story of how, for her father’s funeral, she requested to take her daughter out of school. The request was granted, but she was warned that if her daughter were taken out of school again, the fines would start. 

A friend is on a work rotation to Montreal. His wife is unable to check books out of the library because they homeschool and are barred access to check out books because the children are not enrolled in school. My friend is paying Canadian taxes his entire rotation. He and his wife also need to fill out onerous reports for the government about the children’s schooling, despite not being citizens and only being there for four months. 

Another friend’s father is from Spain, and most of his four siblings have lived in Spain for multiple years. They have all moved to the US because the economy in Spain makes it difficult to find and keep a stable job and because the covid restrictions were so harsh that one sibling with anxiety couldn’t stand the isolation. 

Austrian YouTuber Bernhard Kast lamented on his Military History Visualized channel that Vienna needs to roll back the regulations if they expect more dynamic startup companies in the country.                                                                                                                                                                                                             

As soon as the harshest travel restrictions in Canada ended in 2021, multiple rich Canadian relatives of mine beelined it for the Caribbean. I find it hard to imagine vaccine penetration was high in any of those countries. Yet that was ok, meanwhile the same Canadian government was harassing truck drivers, is still harassing my friend over proof of vaccination for his children, and is making it difficult for an unvaccinated Canadian acquaintance to reenter the country. 

Despite all the bluster about how socialist countries treat the poor better, I encountered more desperate homeless people in downtown Toronto than I saw in some poorer American urban neighborhoods. 

The Canadian prime minister is a pretty face and the son of a former Prime Minister. Germany has barely been able to put together a working government the last two major elections. They are also having to rethink their postwar identity as they realize they’re defenseless in the face of Russian aggression and dependent on Russian energy. The UK Prime Minister was ousted for engaging in raucous parties while forcing the rest of the country to abide by harsh lockdowns. France’s prime minister is the first in 34 years to be denied a parliamentary majority. 

At work, I took on a project to research environmental, social, and governance (ESG) regulations for real estate in Europe. Despite touting their environmental leadership, no European countries except Denmark have met their carbon emission reduction targets. And the ESG regulations are a joke. Every building is required to get a certificate, and most real estate professionals know the certificates are useless. They don’t actually measure the real energy performance of a building, and they’re not comparable between countries. The other regulations require a ton of bureaucratic calculations and reporting, and even still, investment analyst Morningstar says that 25% of investment funds are mislabeled as sustainable despite wasting all of this time and money on data analysis and reporting. A global customer of ours related that no one really knows how to comply with these regulations, so they just ask their attorney, who gets information on “what everyone else is doing” and they just assume that will get past the regulator. 

These are mostly personal, isolated examples. But they are real examples. And they add up to a world of harsh restrictions and mountains of difficult rules that waste peoples’ lives. Far from solving real problems, they often hamstring the economy, ruining economic opportunities, especially for young people. No wonder most socialist countries have such low birth rates. 

I wonder how long this false utopia of low birth rates, high debt-to-gdp ratios, and making the US do all their military spending can last. I get the sense that the postwar order is not long for this world, and maybe that’s a good thing. The postwar era may have given many of us freedom from war and a deluge of material wealth, but in many ways it seems like a false peace. 

Review: Mass of Ages Part II

 

After months of hearing about it from others, I finally got around to watching Mass of Ages Part II with my wife. 

Overall, it was a well done introduction to the changes that led to the new Mass, after Vatican II. The film did a good job of interspersing facts, humor, personal stories, average folks, and professionals. The scenery was great, and the juxtaposition of the new and old Masses (and Council documents) in both video and written form was a masterstroke. 

The Good

It is important for us traditionalists to remember that liturgy and history are boring to most people. The film did a great job of making the facts come to life. I’m willing to accept the cartoonish antics at the beginning (though the Titanic reference was overdone) because they at least made a dry, polarizing topic engaging. I will forever refer to the Gloria my former parish sings every Sunday as the My Little Pony Gloria. The animation of the edits to the Missal was brilliant. 

The overall angle of severing the New Mass from Vatican II was a great choice. “But Vatican II changed the Mass” is the most common argument made against the traditional Mass (old Mass), and the doc patiently, throughly defenestrates that argument. 

The inclusion of feedback from the bishops (Council fathers) during the 1967 “test drive” of the new Mass, particularly Cardinal Heenan of England, was eye opening. The doc had a nice, light approach of quoting Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC: Vatican II’s document on the liturgy) vs what actually happened to the liturgy. Video comparisons of the beginning of Mass and consecration in the old and new were fair and well done. 

The film did a balanced job of highlighting the abuses of Bugnini in pushing his agenda while gently reminding the audience that ultimate responsibility remained with Pope Paul VI. Using and citing Yves Chiron’s biography of Bugnini was wise.

I appreciated the blend of bishops, priests, and credentialed liturgical experts like Dr. Kwasniewski alongside ordinary, non-credentialed people. I especially appreciated the balanced, non polemical perspective of Dom Alcuin Reid. 

While his inclusion was an interesting choice, I thought Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire had one of the most salient points. The new Mass, by lowering the reverence given to the Blessed Sacrament, creates cognitive dissonance. The same goes for severing the altar and the tabernacle. It is difficult to believe in Christ’s true presence in the Eucharist when troops of pantsuited extraordinary ministers hand it out like a free sample at the grocery store. And so many respond by discarding their belief in the True Presence.

This is not an exaggeration. During a high school trip to Annapolis, we somehow attended a Mass at the naval chapel during which bewildered non-Catholics joined the Communion line, took a host from the minister, and said “Thank you.” It is hard to imagine this happening at an old Mass. 

The film also did well to legitimize itself by including three bishops, a monsignor, a former curial secretary, and experts on liturgy and music. Though it would’ve been nice to hear from a nun. 

Missed Opportunities

The doc’s biggest missed opportunity is a lack of clarity around its audience. Is the audience the average old Mass attendee or someone with no exposure to the old Mass? Because if the latter, then I can think of a few ways the film could’ve handled the material differently. 

The film devoted much energy to breaking the equivalence between Vatican II and the new Mass. But a massive missed opportunity was breaking the link between the Pope who called Vatican II and the new Mass. Pope John XXIII fired Bugnini and published Veterum Sapientia, an apostolic constitution demanding the priests be trained in Latin and that Latin remain the language of the liturgy. Highlighting this would’ve made very clear that the Pope who called the Council did not want, still less demand, the new Mass. Coupled with the quotes from SC and the Council fathers, this may be a tight enough case to really move people. It moved me. 

It is tough to blame the film for this, but it does not dare to broach the meddling with the liturgy before the Council. Dr. Kwasniewski explains that Bugnini’s first major position was leading the drafting of SC. The good doctor must be heavily filtering himself here because he knows better than almost anyone that Bugnini was also a member (though not a leader) of the liturgical commissions in the 50s that threw out traditional Holy Week, reduced commemorations of the saints on Sundays, removed the confiteor before Communion, and threw out most Octaves (Corpus Christi, Assumption, Sacred Heart, Apostles). 

Also unmentioned is the fact that Paul VI worked closely with Pius XII daily for 20 years and saw himself as fulfilling the liturgical reforms begun by Pius XII. I give them a pass on this one: it is hard enough being a trad, it is almost unthinkable to criticize Pius XII. Yet the film undermines this restraint when Joseph Shaw says that the reverent atmosphere of the old Mass cannot be recreated in the new Mass because the new Mass is a product of a man-centered view of the liturgy. This is true, but it’s too much for someone attending the new Mass who you’re trying to convince to give the old Mass a try. 

I get that the film is called “Mass of Ages” but it is weird that it doesn’t even mention how the reforms also changed the calendar (removed Septuagesima, the Octave of Pentecost, rejiggered most saints’ feast days) and the Divine Office. This is all the more strange given that Dr. Kwasniewski, a participant in the film, authored an article quoting Louis Bouyer, also mentioned in the film, saying how awful the reform of the calendar was. Why not fully expose how recklessly everything was changed all at once? 

Unforced errors

Traditional Catholics must repress the urge to mention freemasonry in front of normal people. Regardless of how reasonable the case is, it’s an automatic turnoff for many. The few minutes covering Bugnini’s alleged masonry and related investigations in the Vatican add little to the story but tinge the creators with enough conspiracy theory juju that it undermines the reliability of their other, legitimate claims. If this couldn’t be avoided, make the freemasonry discussion a separate supplemental video. At least this part was short.

Related, if this audience is on-the-fence-about-tradition faithful Catholics, it’s best to avoid featuring controversial personalities. First, avoid quoting Archbishop Lefebvre during the vignette on the bishops’ feedback on the reforms in 1967. Why raise the specter of the SSPX and excommunicated traditionalists when you don’t have to? And I don’t really know why, but Taylor Marshall is another controversial figure and his remarks didn’t add enough to the film to offset the adverse reflex some faithful Catholics have toward him. 

I understand asking for donations at the beginning. But again, if the audience is faithful catholics with no experience of the old Mass, this is a distraction that gives the tentative viewer, who is only watching because a friend sent it to them, a good 90 seconds to stop watching. 

It is very, very difficult to cover the liturgical reforms of the 60s without turning Bugnini into a bogeyman. On the whole, I think the film does a balanced job, focusing on real quotes from relevant documents and legitimate witnesses to the events. Still, it was not necessary to create dark, cartoon Bugnini. There are enough pictures of him that they could’ve just overlayed his quotes over actual photos of him. 

Again, almost impossible to blame the creators here, but Sacrosanctum Concilium is redacted to fit a traditional agenda. Reading the whole document, while it’s mostly restrained around the Mass, it’s a wrecking ball in many ways. It called for a reform of the liturgical books as soon as possible, emphasized full and active participation “above all else”, talked of removing useless repetitions, demanded a new cycle of Mass readings, abolished the hour of Prime in the Divine Office, called for a reform of the rites of all seven sacraments, and even talked about fixing a calendar date for Easter (!). 

Saint Thomas Aquinas sets the standard by beginning his articles with the strongest arguments against his positions. Admitting the passages in the document that directly call for reforming the traditional liturgy, and gently showing how not every pastoral recommendation by a Council needs to be implemented under penalty of Hell, would strengthen the audience’s trust in the other claims made by the film. 

My professional experience has taught me that there are always some nerds, and naysayers, who do the research and will loudly call you out if you window dress or stretch the truth. I’m afraid the film left itself open to legitimate criticism here. 

Closing

Mass of Ages Part II is well produced, well researched, and very accessible. Recommended watching (and distributing) for those who want a way to explain their love of the old Mass, and the problems of the new Mass, to their friends and family.