Guest
Peter Kwasniewski earned a B.A. in liberal arts at Thomas Aquinas College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from The Catholic University of America. Since 2018, Dr. K has been a full-time writer and speaker, contributing to blogs, magazines, and newspapers. He has published over twenty books and his work has been translated into at least twenty languages.
Links
- Turned Around: Replying to Common Objections Against the Traditional Latin Mass (Book)
- Dr. Kwasniewski website
- Dr. Kwasniewski substack
Transcript
Eric Sammons:
The Traditional Latin Mass continues to be controversial within the Catholic Church with many Catholics objecting to various aspects of the TLM. Today we’re going to address some of those objections and try to help Catholics of all stripes understand why the Traditional Latin Mass is the way it is. Hello, I’m Eric Sammons, your host and editor chief of Crisis Magazine. Before we get started, I just want to encourage people to hit the like button, subscribe to the channel, let other people know about it. Also, you can follow us on social media, @CrisisMag and you can also subscribe to our newsletter. Just go to Crisismagazine.com and put in your email address and we’ll send you our articles each day, two a day typically. Okay, so our guest today is a return guest. I’m not going to give a long introduction, you all know who he is. He’s Peter Kwasniewski.
He’s written a lot of books, but what we’re really going to focus on today is his most recent book, which is Turned Around: Replying to Common Objections Against the Traditional Latin Mass. Now, before we get started, Peter, I just want to set the table here. We both know in the online world the Traditional Latin Mass, it causes a lot of friction, let’s just say that. And not even in the online world, but in the Catholic world. It’s caused a lot of controversy, especially in recent years. But I know I can speak for myself, but I’m probably speaking for you too, we both met a lot of Catholics who don’t attend a Traditional Latin Mass, and they’re just curious. But there are things about it, they’ve heard this, they’ve heard that, and they’re like, “That doesn’t make sense to me. That doesn’t seem to be the right way to do it.” Or, “That just doesn’t seem to be a way that really helps people draw closer to Christ.” And I think they’re sincere questions, they’re sincere objections.
So what we’re going to try to do today is do what your book did, and we’ll of course refer people to the book to really go in depth, is to start to answer some of those objections. So first I just want to thank you for writing this. It’s excellent. I’m babbling here at the beginning, but there’s so much good stuff here. I just wanted to note that Karl Keating, who’s very well known in the Catholic world, of course. He’s the founder of Catholic Answers, has done probably more than almost everybody, at least in the American Catholic world, to bring people to the Catholic Church. To let people know about his book Catholicism Fundamentalism, I read as a Protestant in the early 90s, and that’s a major reason I became Catholic, was reading his book in the early 1990s.
Of course, Scott Holland and all that. But he endorsed this book and I like what he said. If you don’t mind, I’m just going to read it. “The public argument in favor of the Traditional Latin Mass has been waiting for a book that handles common objections thoroughly, yet winsomely.” This is that book. And I think that’s exactly what we want to do here today is just talk about, okay, here’s the objections to the Traditional Latin Mass. Let’s go ahead and address them and explain why they’re done the way they’re done. So does that sound good to you, Peter?
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yeah, that sounds great. Absolutely.
Eric Sammons:
So I just want to jump right in then and just start going through some, we’re not going to go through everything the book goes through, but I think some of the big ones. I know for me, I always feel like the big two that you almost always hear is the priest has his back to the people and he’s speaking a language that people don’t understand. I feel like that is almost always in one sentence, they include both those as a description of what’s wrong with or maybe not even wrong, but alien with the Traditional Latin Mass. So I’d like to go ahead and address those two upfront, let’s start with the priest with his back to the people. Now, of course that language is loaded, but why don’t we go ahead and start with that one to begin with.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Sure, exactly. No, I think that’s very important. And in fact, it’s so important that I made it the first chapter. That’s the very first objection that I take up. Why is the priest not paying attention to us? Why is he not speaking to us? And I think, Klaus Gamber, who is an important liturgist that Cardinal Ratzinger frequently praised, Monsignor Klaus Gamber once said that he thought the single most devastating change in the liturgy was to turn the priest around towards the people. Why? Well, let’s just begin with the facts. What we call ad orientem, worship facing eastwards, literally the cosmic east is what we’re talking about because of symbolic reasons. Because Christ in scripture is called the Orient, the East, and he says he’s going to come again from the east to judge the living and the dead.
So that posture of worshipping ad orientem to the east is something that goes all the way back into antiquity. The earliest Christian records that we have indicate that this is how people worshipped. They weren’t turning towards Jerusalem or towards Mecca the way that later the Muslims did, they were turning towards the cosmic symbol of Christ who will come again in glory. So it originally has this eschatological significance. It has to do with our waiting in joyful hope for the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. So that is something that is a constant in church history, always this worship towards the east of everybody. The people and the priest, together. We have to remember it’s not the priest with his back to the people, it’s everyone standing in a common direction towards the Lord and praying to him. So the posture really symbolizes our fundamental theocentric orientation. In other words, that we are ordered to God. God is the center of the liturgy. He’s the target, he’s what the liturgy is for.
And this conception is, I would say, of fundamental importance. We’re not going to church for a Bible study, even though the Bible is the word of God and it’s infallible and we should be reading it every day, but we’re not going to church for a Bible study. We’re not going for a communal gathering. And in order to feel welcomed and to shake each other’s hands. The fellowship is great, it should be there too. But we’re going to church and we’re going to Mass, especially to worship, to adore the Lord, to offer the holy sacrifice of the Mass, the holy sacrifice of Christ on the cross, and to beseech the Lord for his graces and to thank him and praise him for his blessings.
So it’s all ordered to God, and the ad orientem and posture really dramatically brings that home. This isn’t about the community. It’s not what Ratzinger called the closed circle where the priest and the people are facing each other and so to speak, talking to each other. It’s everybody talking to or praying to, better, the Lord. So that’s a very brief explanation of why we worship this way, why the church has always worshiped this way. And I’ll just add as a post script that the reason that the priest was turned around, and this was happening a little bit in the early 20th century, but it happened in a big way in the 1960s, even before the new Mass came in 1969.
That turning of the priest around was based on an erroneous, we now know, erroneous interpretation of early Christian data, where it was thought that the Mass was originally celebrated as a meal in the form of a banquet with the presider at a table, and everybody around the table, and we were partaking together of the bread and wine. That was the model that people had. And they said, this is the way the early Christians worshiped. And in the Middle Ages, it turned into this very sacrificial otherworldly kind of thing, and now we need to get back to the roots. That was the argument. Well, there’s no scholar who holds anymore that this is the way the early Christians worshiped.
In fact, there’s this… I’ll just grab this book here, because this is the kind of work that underlies my own research. These are the heavy artillery guns, right? Stephen Hyde, Altar in Church. This book just came out a few years ago. It’s a definitive demonstration of all of the points that I’m making right now, which is that the early Christians, they thought they had altars that were also tables. They thought they were offering sacrifice, not just meals, and they stood ad orientem and they oriented their churches this way. So I think that misconception of the meal is really at the root of why the priest was turned towards the people, and we need to get away from that. The Eucharist is first a sacrifice and then a meal that we partake of. It’s a sacrificial meal, that’s how I would put it.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. And one thing, I feel like with this one, it’s very obvious. But I feel like this might be a theme among a lot of these objections or how things are done, I should say in the Traditional Latin Mass. There are deep theological reasons to do something a certain way, but what we find is that it also has sociological impact. So there’s almost sociological reasons. So for ad orientem, theologically, like you stated, it’s because we’re facing the cosmic beast, the Christ who is coming back one day from the east. So instead of representing to Jerusalem or Mecca or wherever we’re facing Christ, those are deep theological reasons.
But just the simple fact of the priest having his back to us. Facing the same direction, of course is the right way to put it, rather than facing us, that really does have a sociological impact. In fact, I’ve said this for years now, that if you told me I was allowed to change just one thing and one thing only, there’s nothing else you could change. This would be the one. I would say, “Just have the priest celebrate ad orientem.” No matter what the other objections are. That be the one I’d be like, “Do that.” Because I feel like sociologically, if nothing else, it has such an impact. Does that make sense what I’m saying?
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yes. Oh yeah, absolutely. So another way of putting that is, and you could say psychologically as well as sociologically, that when the priest is turned towards the people, and we know that there are good priests who are very reverent and who don’t become showmen. But it’s a temptation for a priest to feel like he has to engage with the people and he has to in a sense, entertain them, maybe tell jokes or stories. He has to preach multiple little homilies. He becomes in a sense, a performer. He’s on a stage, he’s on a platform, he’s facing an audience, and the whole dynamic is wrong. It’s not a prayerful, reverential worship-filled kind of dynamic. It’s more the dynamic of a show.
And some people, I think a little bit crudely, but they say it’s almost like a cooking demonstration. He kind of showing them something. And this immediately makes the experience more, again, I’m going to drop this loaded term, anthropocentric. That is more focused on man on the community and on the priest as an individual and his style of celebrating, than it puts the focus on God. And the moment the priest turns around, he becomes anonymous. You don’t see his face anymore. You might hear his voice, of course, he’s singing or speaking, but it’s suddenly not about him.
It becomes much easier to realize, “Oh, he’s just standing in the person of Christ and he’s offering this sacrifice on behalf of the whole people. He’s a mediator.” That’s very clear. When the people are in the nave of the church and when the priest is standing at the altar and then he’s offering the sacrifice usually towards a crucifix or towards some kind of work of art, a raritos, whatever it is in a traditionally appointed church. It becomes very clear that he is offering something on our behalf to God. And this is exactly the whole direction that the liturgy should have. A vertical direction, not a horizontal direction.
Eric Sammons:
Right. And I think another common theme we’ll see in a lot of these ways that the Traditional Latin Mass is different is that there is an alien aspect to this for modern culture. What I mean by that is we’re not used to being at anything where the presenter is not facing us. Think about it, you go to your business conferences, you go to your talks, you go to whatever the case may be, your concerts, they’re always facing you and they’re addressing you.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yes.
Eric Sammons:
So I think it is striking, and I think those of us who have attended Traditional Latin Mass for years need to always remember how striking it is for somebody who has never been in that situation. To walk into a traditional lit Mass for the first time and the priest seems to be ignoring him.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yes. Yes.
Eric Sammons:
And I think it’s something that it is difficult. I know people who they struggle with that at first because it just seems very difficult to grasp.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Right. I think it’s helpful to say to people, “Look, the Mass is not primarily a meal. It’s not primarily a social gathering. It’s primarily an act of worship of God.” And yes, God is with us, and if we’re in a state of grace, he dwells within us. So we’re not denying that God is among us, that Emmanuel is God with us. But the point is that we are a people on pilgrimage, so to speak, towards heaven. We’re not yet at our destiny, and that’s obvious in a thousand ways. Just physical sickness and all of the evils in the world and death itself. And we are clearly not where we want to be. We want to be fully happy. We want to be in a state where we’re happy without the possibility of falling into sin ever again. We want to be with our Lord forever and his mother and all the saints and angels. That’s heaven.
So in this life, we’re on pilgrimage to heaven. And the Mass is an earthly participation in the heavenly liturgy, and it’s also so to speak our way of getting there. Just like Christ is the goal, but he’s also the way to reach the goal. The Mass is already a foretaste of heaven, but it’s also us moving towards heaven and asking for the grace to keep doing that. So it’s much better to think of the priest as being like a general leading an army into battle, or even a bus driver, or an airplane pilot. They’re not going to turn around and face you. You don’t want the bus driver facing you, you want the bus driver facing the road and the highway. He’s going to keep going in that direction. So think of it as an airplane, as a bus, as an army of soldiers, as a group of pilgrims moving towards Jerusalem, the heavenly Jerusalem. However you want to think about it, it’s all of us moving in a common direction.
And I think if people experience it a few times, what will happen is this interesting switch will happen. Some people, it happens right away, some people it takes longer, but there’s something that clicks in the mind when you realize, “Oh, this isn’t about me primarily. This isn’t about us, the congregation. Rather, we are being ordered to something beyond ourselves and something higher than ourselves.” And then it becomes actually quite a consolation and even a relief that the Mass isn’t about you and it’s not being directed to you and nobody’s catering to you, and they’re not trying to put on music that they think is going to appeal to you or whatever. Actually most of the music doesn’t appeal to people.
So it’s suddenly this reversal happens, and this is why I call my book turned around because the whole theme of the book is trying to understand why the traditional liturgy turns things around. It turns us inside out and turns us around too. It really fundamentally changes our sense of why we’re going to church. And with that comes I think a new fascination and a new attraction to worship. To be honest, it’s hard to entertain people. It’s hard to compete with the entertainment industry. It’s hard to compete with sports and with TV and with movies and with whatever else modern culture throws at us.
So the church in her wisdom never really tried to compete with the entertainment industry. The church said, “We have something completely different to offer. We have something transcendent, something mysterious, something that will fulfill you at a level that maybe you weren’t even aware you needed to be fulfilled, or you needed to have addressed.” So when the church does something utterly different, otherworldly and counter-cultural, it ends up being what we need to become entranced with and enamored with divine worship. Instead of feeling it’s a duty that we have to go through and a ticket that we punch, so to speak.
Eric Sammons:
Right. It’s like the Mass, the less it’s like a Taylor Swift concert, the better.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yeah, for sure.
Eric Sammons:
So trying to be like the popular culture is the downfall, and the Mass is, specifically the Traditional Latin Mass is trying not to be. It never was trying to be whatever the popular culture was. There’s one last thing that, kind of on ad orientem, the priest facing the same direction, but also is common to all of these, and you already mentioned it. A lot of the changes that occurred after Vatican II with the new Mass and everything that now make the Traditional Latin Mass seem foreign, were based upon 20th century scholarship that said, “Okay, this is how it was done in the early church, and we want to go back to doing that.”
In fact, that’s a lot of the common objections we hear about things like ad orientem, or communion on the tongue, and things like that in Latin. Or, “Well, in the early church, scholarship now shows it was done like this, and so we want to do it like that again.” I think there’s two points to that I want you to address. One is how good is that scholarship? And two is if the scholarship, even if it’s accurate, how valid is that model of we’re going to skip back to the first 200 years and try to imitate them?
Peter Kwasniewski:
Exactly. No, that’s a fantastic question. The scholarship question is more easily dealt with, even in the 1950s when the theories were very popular about how the early Christians worshiped around a table, and this is what we need to go back to. Even then there were major scholars saying, “No, that’s not true.” Including Josef Jungmann, who was so destructive in other ways. And Louis Bouillet, who was also a part of the reform, but then later regretted it. Regretted certain aspects of it, many aspects of it. So Jungmann and Bouillet, who are these two major, major scholars of the 20th century, even they said, “No, no, no, no, we should not go versus populate, we should keep ad orientem.” So even the scholarly community was divided about a lot of these questions.
But the other aspect you asked about is even more interesting. False antiquarianism, that’s the view… Well, antiquarianism is the view that older is always better. And that if we could find out what the Christians were doing in the year 100, or the year 200, it would be better for us to go back and do exactly that than to do something that developed, let’s say in the Middle Ages. This view was condemned by Pope Pius XII in his encyclical, Mediator Dei from 1947. He called it a false and distorted antiquarianism, or exaggerated and distorted antiquarianism like that of the Synod of Pistoia. So what’s the problem? Well, there are multiple problems.
The first problem is our records about early Christian worship are extremely thin, and piecemeal, and eclectic, so we just don’t have a lot of information. We don’t have a detailed description of how anything was done actually. We have some vague descriptions, some allusions, some homilies. We have these things called the Ordines Romani, which are like cliff notes on the liturgy. There are definitely things that scholars can work with, but not a lot compared to what you get later on as history goes on and things are better documented. But even beyond the difficulty of figuring out what were they exactly doing, the church has always held to the view that there’s growth over time. There’s legitimate development under the influence of the Holy Spirit and under the governance of divine providence.
So the little acorn that’s planted by Christ grows into a great oak tree over many centuries/ and that’s the way it should be. That’s the way everybody always understood, “Oh, yeah. Well, when the church was persecuted, a persecuted minority, and they had to hide in their homes and celebrate Mass in their homes, of course that’s going to look different from after the Edict of Milan when suddenly they could build beautiful basilicas with mosaics and have grand altars and all the clergy there, and the singing. And all this sort of thing that they wanted to do all along, and now finally they can do it.” So this idea of the growth and progression of the liturgy over time is very much at the heart of Catholicism. And unfortunately, it was really only the Protestants in the 16th century who first said, “We need to leapfrog over all of the medieval…” What they regarded as corruption and superstition, “And get back to the original early Christian way of doing things.” Which of course, none of the Protestants could agree on what that looked like either.
So that’s why there’s really no unity. There’s very little unity in Protestant worship. And sadly because of that same false antiquarianism now in the Catholic Church, there’s a lot of diversity and there really isn’t much liturgical unity anymore, and that’s because everybody has a different idea about what the Mass is supposed to look like. That I think is fundamentally because we’ve lost our confidence that the church was guided by the Holy Spirit, it was guided by divine providence over all the centuries to produce what we call the Tridentine rite or the Tridentine Mass.
I would just mention one other tiny thing, which is that there’s an irony here as well. All the scholars who said, “We should go back to the early centuries.” They ended up selectively going back to the early centuries. So they took things that they liked. For example, they imagined versus populum, breaking bread over the table. But they dropped all the things that were ancient, but that they didn’t like. For example, lots of fasting and abstinence. Tons and tons of fasting and abstinence. So they took the medieval laxity about fasting and abstinence… Well, somewhat lax. But they didn’t take the ancient fasting and abstinence, so there’s also just a really deep inconsistency with the antiquarianists.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. I always like to say when somebody says… And we’ll talk about this one in a minute. But they say, “They did communion in the hand early the church, so we should do it too.” I’m like, “We also did three-year public penances where you sat in front of the church in sackcloth and ashes before you could receive communion. Do you want to go back to that too?” We’re just picking and choosing then at that point.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Exactly.
Eric Sammons:
Because what you’re saying, the development matters. Because the church did see, for example, the development of the sacrament confession. That’s a sacramental rite that developed greatly over the centuries in how it was practiced. And the fact is there wasn’t very much of a private confession where your penance has done privately. If you did something like adultery, or murder, or something like that, you had years of public penance that you had to do before you could go communion. So there’s a reason that these things happen the way they did.
The church in her wisdom says, “Okay, this is a better way we’re seeing over time. This is how we practice this, this is better.” So I do think it did remind me of Protestantism a lot when I hear the arguments of, “We want to go back to the other church.” Because that’s exactly what we always said as Protestants was, “Okay, we’re trying to be just like the New Testament Christians were.” And like you said, it’s picking and choosing often. And also it’s very little evidence. As we know, the New Testament itself is not a catechism. It’s not a liturgical guide. So you get hints and pieces of the liturgy, for example, in the New Testament. First of all, those hints and pieces look nothing like a modern Protestant service.
But even beyond that, that doesn’t tell us exactly how St. Paul, for example, would have celebrated Mass. We don’t know the exact details of it other than just some hints of it. And then you have to trust the church that she did know how St. Paul celebrated and later bishops handed on. And as they handed on, they developed it. It changed over time organically, which we’ll talk about as well. But I wanted to address those points under this, because they address a lot of the issues of the specifics that we’re going to talk about here in a minute, because the fundamentals why the church does things like she did and why they changed as well.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Right. And I should add, because I think it’s very important to note, that there’s a double dynamic that happens in church history. The first aspect of it is that there’s development and there’s development of doctrine in the way in which Vincent of Lerins or Newman understood it. Namely, that not a changing of doctrine, but simply a fuller and fuller grasp of the meaning of what we profess in the creed and the implications that it has. So not a change in what we think about Christ as God or about the Trinity, but a change in how we formulate it and a change in the errors that we can respond to that people fall into. Typically, the engine for doctrinal development is error. When various heretics arise and they deny this or that, then the church has an opportunity to really work hard to clarify what it is that the church professes. So that’s how development of doctrine works.
But development of liturgy works in a somewhat similar way. The sacramental mysteries were entrusted to the church from the very beginning by our Lord himself. That’s what the Council of Trent teaches. But the church initially just received these rights and practiced them, but hadn’t had a chance yet to fully reflect on what are the meaning of these rights and what are the most effective ways of showcasing them, or of embellishing and ornamenting them so as to impress upon the people the magnitude of what they’re doing. These sorts of considerations, which are natural considerations. As time goes on, and you have bishop, after bishop, after bishop, and once peace in the Roman Empire comes and the Christians are not a persecuted minority, as I mentioned before. Then there’s the opportunity to develop chant, a body of sacred music.
That’s not something that’s going to fall from heaven. God could have given it from heaven. He could have given the Summa Theologiae from heaven. He could have given the Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils from heaven, but he didn’t. He wanted human beings to have the dignity of being causes with him, of the unfolding of doctrine and the unfolding of liturgy. This is the way Aquinas sees it, that the reason God doesn’t do everything for us is because he doesn’t want to treat us like infants who can’t do anything. We can’t blow our nose, we can’t tie our shoes, we can’t do anything. He wants us to have the dignity of participating in the unfolding of doctrine and liturgy over time, and to use our own imagination, our ingenuity, our zeal, our piety for his glory. He loves that. He’s like a father who wants his children to be involved and not just to be passive blobs.
So I think that’s very important. But then the other aspect is as time goes on, doctrine is more and more polished, so to speak. The creeds become more and more definite, and then there’s a point where you don’t have to invent new creeds anymore. It’s like, “Well, we’ve said all of the fundamentals that we need to say. Yeah, we can still write big theology books, but we’re not going to change the creed anymore.” And similarly with the liturgy, it also has an arc of development whereby the rate of development slows down as time goes on, and it reaches a plateau where, as I would put it, it just is all that it needs to be. It doesn’t need to be any longer. It doesn’t need to be any grander. It has all the music for everything that needs to be sung.
So once the liturgy reaches fullness, then what we see in both east and west… And I always emphasize that point, this is a universal phenomenon. We see basically a stop to liturgical development in the high Middle Ages, in both east and west. And after that, only very incidental changes. Like a new feast day is added, or maybe a new preface for a certain day of the year. But the major changes are over, they’re done. So that kind of liturgical stability, it’s not something negative. It’s not like, “Oh, we suddenly lost our creativity.” No, this liturgy is as full and rich as it needs to be. It’s already effectively doing what a liturgy should do. So that’s why I think we see that the Tridentine rite was so stable for so many centuries.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. Also, I think one great example of this development of liturgical rites in practice is Eucharistic adoration. Because what we see is in the early church, they did not have Eucharistic adoration, as we understand it. With the monstrance and the host, and they’re basically adoring the Lord by looking at it and things of that nature. That just wasn’t the practice. But it’s not to say that they didn’t believe in the real presence. There’s plenty of evidence for that.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Of course.
Eric Sammons:
So we know that, but it took time for them to finally come to the conclusion it is right and just for us to actually have our Eucharistic Lord displayed in a way that we can adore him directly. And I think in fact, you will see in a lot of the 20th century people who were pushing for more radical changes in the liturgy go back to their church, they also denigrated Eucharistic adoration.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yes.
Eric Sammons:
And for the same reasons. Because like, “Well, the early church didn’t do it, and therefore we shouldn’t do it.” But that’s nonsense, of course. For everybody who attends Eucharistic adoration knows how much nonsense that is. But that’s a perfect example I think of it’s an extra liturgical rite type of thing. I know it’s not the Mass, but it really is an example of the church learning this. And also it fits into what you were saying of this really reached its height and recognition of this in the 11th, 12th century. Right during the Middle Ages, and then it did become somewhat fixed. Most of what we have for adoration right now is from Thomas Aquinas. It hasn’t changed since then.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Exactly. Exactly.
Eric Sammons:
And there’s no real reason to change it at this point. Because it took that time to recognize what is it we believe? How can we show what we believe and practice it? And then you had these great saints, like the St. Thomas Aquinas develop in the liturgical text, the church accepts it. And then it’s like, “Well, there’s no need to… Maybe fiddle with the edges here and there, but no need to fundamentally change it.”
Peter Kwasniewski:
Right. Well, that’s the whole point of this Catholic understanding of the unfolding of doctrine and devotion and liturgy over the ages is that the church is in fact being led more and more into the fullness of truth. This is what Christ promised. He said, “I’ll send you the Holy Spirit who will lead you into the fullness of truth.” So the idea that we’re getting now, and I know we can’t go into this right now because it would be a totally different conversation, but what we’re hearing in Rome with the Synod on Synodality and all these people is they want a kind of evolutionary model for doctrine. Where you get a bird from a fish, you get a man from an amoeba. And they want to be able to say, “Well, it used to be held that the death penalty was legitimate, but we know for X, Y, Z reasons that it’s never legitimate. It’s in fact always wrong.”
And they see that as some doctrinal development. Well, it’s not. That’s just a contradiction. You can’t get from point A to point B in this case. So similarly, when people say something like, “Well, if you’re right about the development of liturgy, why can’t you just say that that includes the Novus Ordo? That the Holy Spirit and divine providence has now led us in this direction.” Well, the reason is simple, because many of the aspects of the Novus Ordo that I’m touching on at least indirectly in this book because I’m talking about the traditional way of doing things which are contradictory. They’re the opposite. Between ad orientem and versus populum, those are contrary postures. It’s not like you can see them as six or one half a dozen. They’re not, they’re contrary symbols.
So my point here is that if there’s been a rupture, and if many of the ways that the church has always, or for a long time worshiped are being rejected, then that’s very troubling. Because it implies that for most of the history of the church, the church was worshiping in a way that was suboptimal or even wrong. And that is what the Protestants said, they said the church went off the deep end early on. Well, I don’t think we want to hold that. So I take very seriously the need to defend the way the church has always, or for the most part, worshiped. Can I give you one other example that’s related to adoration, and that is kneeling to receive communion and to receive on the tongue?
You brought this up earlier, but I think it’s another great example of legitimate development in the liturgy. It does seem from some records as if early on, at least in some places, Christians did receive communion in the hand. We know that as a matter of historical record. However, if you look at the authors who talk about communion in the hand, they talk about it as it has to be done in a very particular way. It has to be done with a supreme amount of reverence. They have very careful descriptions of what that looks like. It doesn’t look like what was reintroduced in the 1960s.
The hands are put in the other direction. The person bows down to receive the holy bread with his mouth. He basically licks his hand. He uses his hand like a paten, and also the bowing down is a sign of adoration. So the way that it’s described in ancient times is very different and would look very strange if it were reintroduced right now. What they said they were bringing back in the 1960s was actually a Calvinist way of receiving communion. And this has also been very well documented, I talk about it here in other places. So it wasn’t even the ancient way, but it was some much later heretical way of receiving communion. So what happened, it seems to me, is that as the church reflected on the magnitude of this immense divine gift of the Eucharist, and as she also had pastoral experience of accidents that can happen, of fragments being lost, of liquid being spilled, or whatever the problems might be.
In her wisdom, both pastoral wisdom and her theological wisdom, she eventually moved towards exclusively communicating people on the tongue and in a kneeling posture. Because of reverence, because of devotion, because of care for the blessed sacrament to prevent any fragments from being lost and so forth. So that’s a perfect example where it’s precisely the reverence that you find in those patristic authors like Saint Cyril of Jerusalem that leads you to something like communion, kneeling, and on the tongue. It’s a perfect continuity. And to have a sudden reversal in the 1960s, it sends the message that the church was wrong, was overly cautious, was overly devout, whatever the message might be. And those are not good messages.
Eric Sammons:
Right. Now, people might think we’ve gone a field from just going through the objections, but I feel like we’ve addressed a lot of the foundational reasons why things were they were and defenses why they were changed already. So I want to get back now to the other main objection you often hear, we talked about ad orientem, but being in the Latin tongue. Now this is one, I admit that… And people say, “You can’t understand what the priest is saying.” This is when I admit that I was attending Latin Mass for years at least before I even myself, was okay with it being in Latin. It’s one of those things where I’m a modern, this is who I am, I’m used to everything… I’m not very good with languages. It’s very difficult for me to pick up… Heck, it’s difficult for me to pick up the English language, much less foreign languages. So I think this is a very common objection. I understand this one probably better. So why is it that the Latin Mass is in Latin?
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yes. So there’s so much that can be said about this question, which is why I hope people are going to get this book and read it. But I’ll just touch on it, I’ll just hit a few major points. The first point is that we see in every major religion that some kind of sacred language is used, some kind of special register of language. It’s not always a very remote language. It could be something that has some connection with what you speak, but it’s not the everyday language of the marketplace or the household. There’s something special and elevated about it. So we see this, first of all, at the Last Supper. Because our Lord, when he went through the Passover rituals, was using the Hebrew language, which at the time was a sacred language. It was not a commonly spoken language, that was Aramaic.
So when Christ was talking with the apostles on a day-to-day basis, they were talking Aramaic. But when they did rituals, they did some of them at least in Hebrew. And when they prayed Psalms, some of the Psalms would’ve been prayed in Hebrew. So even our Lord was using, at the Last Supper, a dead language by that time. And that’s something that I think is really important to point out to people because they’re always like, “We should do what they did at the Last Supper.” Okay, well then have a sacred language that’s dead and that nobody speaks. Now of course, today people do speak Hebrew because the state of Israel revived it, but that’s a separate historical question. But in Eastern Christianity, actually, most eastern Christians for most of history have used a sacred language.
So the Greek Orthodox use Koine Greek, the New Testament Greek, which is not modern Greek. In fact, it’s different enough that somebody who speaks only modern Greek, it would be Latin for that person. That is Latin for us, something that’s not very intelligible, except for maybe a few words here and there. The Russian Orthodox, they use church Slavonic. Which of course in its origins was a Slavic language, but even if you study its origins, it was a custom-built language for the liturgy. And it very quickly deviated from the common language of the people such that again, a Russian going to a church of Slavonic liturgy, he will understand some of it, but a lot of it will seem foreign to him as well. And then you could just talk about how Islam uses Arabic, how Buddhism uses Pali, how Hinduism uses Sanskrit and so on. Why? There’s a universal constant here.
And that’s because when men enter into the presence of the divine, when they enter into the presence of God, when they’re trying to worship the ultimate source, and end of all being, however they understand that, it’s obviously understood different ways in different religions. They recognize that you have to approach this awesome mystery with humility, and you don’t speak in the same language that you speak in the street, or in the household, or in the marketplace. There’s a kind of awesome reverence, a numinous awareness. We’re entering into a divine and sacred domain, and we need to act accordingly. We need to dress and speak accordingly.
That will mean among other things, using special chant. So music that’s different from anything we would do in the world, not guitar music, folk music, but music that’s special to this sacred occasion. It means having silences because our language can never fully be adequate to God, we need silence to indicate that. And then to be speaking in some kind of elevated language. Now, that’s just like a broad picture. I think that the Latin language in the liturgy is the western church’s equivalent of an iconostasis in a Byzantine church. So this of course might be explaining the less known by the even less known, but if you go into an Eastern Orthodox Church or a Byzantine Catholic Church, you will see a screen of icons separating the nave of the church from the sanctuary. And if the church is built as it should be, this icon screen is really a wall. It’s truly a wall. You can’t see past it. You might be able to glimpse through this or that crack, but you really can’t see beyond it.
And this iconostasis is for the East, a symbolic partition that represents the division between the earth and heaven, this world and the next world. And when the priest enters through the doors to offer the holy sacrifice, it’s recollecting… In the letters to the Hebrews when it says that Christ went through the veil of the temple into the Holy of Holies and that is the temple not made by human hands, talking about heaven. So in the Eastern liturgies, that’s very clearly represented visually, but when they’re chanting behind the iconostasis, you can still hear them chanting, you just can’t see them. So there’s some kind of barrier, but it’s not a complete barrier.
Similarly, in the West, now we have something analogous to that. We don’t have the iconostasis, we never really did. Well, very early on in the West, there were physical partitions or barriers like that, but they fairly quickly fell away. And certainly after the Council of Trent, the only remnant that was left was the communion rail. So there’s a little bit of a divider between the sanctuary and the nave. But what the west used was what I call the sonic iconostasis. Latin itself is a veil that is suspended over the liturgy to remind us that we’re now entering into a heavenly domain, a domain that is no longer of this earth. And that’s also where the silence comes in. The silence is part of this sonic barrier.
So I think what I really like to do, Eric, is I like to double down on the foreignness and strangeness of the Latin Mass. And say, “Look, yes, the Latin is foreign to you. And it should be, because you’re not on earth anymore. Now you’re at the threshold of heaven, now you’re in God’s domain. This is God’s house, not your house. In your house, you speak your language. In God’s house, you speak his language.” Or a language that’s consecrated to him, let’s put it that way. So this is how I think we should think about it as it is good to have a certain kind of barrier to remind us of who we are and where we are and who we want to become and where we want to end up. That being said, I’ll just add a simple note, which… Well, no, why don’t you react to that first?
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. I was just going to say the point about it being foreign and alien to our mind, it very much is. And I’ve come to be like you and lean into it. Because one of the things I realized was a lot of the objections that people have, and I’ve had them myself, just to be clear, and in the past. To Traditional Latin Mass have to do with your initial impression of it, newcomers, people who are just learning about it. Because in today’s world, most Catholics who attend the Traditional Latin Mass for the first time do so as adults, after attending the new Mass for most of their life. So this is something that they start up maybe in their 20s, 30s, 40s, whatever. So that’s kind of the attitude. And as somebody like me who has always been concerned by evangelization, that’s been my focus. My thoughts for a long time where this is an anti-evangelization effort. It’s like you’re purposely trying to keep people out.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yes.
Eric Sammons:
But the point I think that I’ve come to realize is a couple. First of all, is that the Mass is not intended to be something that is a first time, you go, you know everything that’s going on, and that’s the way it should be. Because people who go to Mass, remember. They don’t go to Mass once and then they never go again. You go every single week, maybe even more often through your entire life. So in my life, for example, I started going to Latin Mass regularly in 2011, so 13 years ago. When I first started going, I was clueless. I’m looking through my missal completely, stuff like that.
Now I can go, I could go to a low Mass, for example, without a missal with me. Again, I’m terrible at languages. I don’t know Latin very well, even to this day. But I would know essentially what’s happening at every single moment of the Mass. I might not know the exact prayer. I couldn’t tell you exactly what the reading is, for example, of the day. But the point is that I understand on the level I need to understand what is going on because I’ve attended for 13 years now regularly.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Exactly. Yes.
Eric Sammons:
But that’s not because I’m educated or anything like that. It’s just simply that I’m going.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Right. Right. Exactly. No, you’ve just hit so many important points. The first and foremost point is this, the Mass is not about evangelization. It never has been, and it never will be. It’ll only fail if that’s what you try to turn it into. And that’s the problem is that modern liturgists and modern priests, and in general, they want the Mass to be the Swiss army knife that has every function, it does everything. It appeals to the teenagers, it appeals to the old people. It teaches Bible literacy. It brings us together once a week for fellowship. It worships God. It slices, it dices, it does everything. Well, no, it doesn’t actually do everything. It was never meant to do everything. It’s meant as the supreme act of adoration of God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. That is the essence of the Mass.
And then our holy communion in and through Christ with that sacrifice and with his body and blood, if we’re well-disposed, if we’re properly disposed to do that. So the Mass is not the machine that does everything, it does one thing really, really well. And we have to remember that in the ancient church, people went to the first part of Mass, which is called the Mass of Catechumens, if they weren’t baptized, and then they left. And they didn’t go to the Mass of the Faithful, which is the Eucharistic sacrifice. So far from being about evangelization, the Mass was only for those who were fully initiated. It’s the point of arrival, it’s not some kind of point of departure. So the reason why that’s significant is that if you, so to speak, have fully bought into the Catholic faith, you’re fully committed, now you need a liturgy that’s going to nourish you for the rest of your life.
You need a liturgy that is so profound, has so many layers, so much symbolism that you could never ever get to the bottom of it. And that’s what people like us find in the traditional liturgy. It wasn’t designed to be instantly accessible and to be fully comprehensible. No traditional liturgy is, they all are too vast. There’s too much going on. There’s sometimes multiple things going on at the same time. You couldn’t follow it all, even if you wanted to, even if you were fluent in Latin. And I think what this really shows is that it’s not about us, it’s about God, and we just insert ourselves into it as best we can. It’s like swimming in the deep end. You got to swim or you’re going to, or you’re going to drown. But you’re not going to hit the bottom, and it’s not like splashing in the kiddie pool. It’s serious stuff when you’re in the deep end. So I think that’s what we have to bear in mind.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. I think the fact is, if the Mass was created for a newcomer, what happens is that those who attend over time, it becomes just something that is like the kiddie pool to them. It becomes something just like it’s not enough because you’ve done it for somebody who knows nothing, so somebody who’s been going to Mass for 30 years, it becomes almost nothing to them. It’s not really as deep. But I remember 10 years ago I think it was, I wrote an article for OnePeterFive about the Mass is not about evangelization and it’s not about being relevant. And I remember that article really took off. I was a little surprised because I had just started writing for OnePeterFive, and I was just starting to talk publicly about the Traditional Latin Mass. Because working for a diocese director of evangelization, I was a little scared to be too much into that. But I remember though, that the thing is, the Mass is not for evangelization and you’re absolutely right about that. But here’s the beauty of it, it actually becomes more attractive as the result of directing it to God.
If you direct it towards man, it is not really deeply attractive. Because it’s just like entertainment, it’s the Taylor Swift concert. If it’s directed towards God and the worship of God, what happens is the open-minded person, the sincere person, they all of a sudden realize, “Wow, this is something that is unlike anything else on Earth.” And it becomes attractive. Like the old story, of course, about Vladimir sending his representatives Constantinople, “I didn’t know if I was on heaven or earth.” Well, it’s not like the Constantinople church was thinking, “Hey, we really got to make sure we’re relevant to these Russian ambassadors.” No, they’re like, “We’re doing our thing, and you either like it or you don’t like it.” And then they recognize the beauty of it. And I think that’s something that we need to realize is that the Mass, if it’s directed towards the worship of God, and it is this foreign and alien thing, it actually does become, in a sense, an effective means of evangelization. But not on purpose, that’s not the intention. That just becomes one of the effects of a Mass celebration.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Well, yeah, for sure. And in various books I’ve written about all the conversions that have been prompted by the Traditional Latin Mass, by the way that it hits some people with a kind of colossal force. And I think it’s because of how different it is and how saturated with mystery, and with luminosity, and with silence. But a really full silence, a saturated silence. It’s like encountering this Massive, invisible reality that you almost bounce away from. Like when you hit it, it’s like, “Whoa, I didn’t realize that was there before, but now there’s something here. And now it’s driving me crazy, because I have to come to grips with this.” So the great irony is that when you make the Mass more horizontal, more humanistic, more anthropocentric, more instantly understandable in your own language and so forth, you suck out of it the divine otherness. And you domesticate God. This is an expression that I’ve heard other people use. You make Aslan a tame lion, but he’s not and we know that. We know that he’s not a tame lion.
So this is why, Eric, everything we’re talking about right now, I devoted a whole chapter to this chapter eight. It’s called, Why It Is Better Not To Understand Everything Immediately. So the obscurity of the old Mass and the demandingness of it are good for us. They’re really good for us. They’re good for our humility. They’re good for our zeal. They say, “Come in deeper, come further up and further in.” Is the way that the old liturgy speaks to you. And here’s the little note I wanted to add, is that in a sense, everything that’s happening in the Mass is in a sense easily accessible to anybody who’s literate, which is like 99% of us at this point. Because there are Latin-English hand missals, there are Spanish-English hand missals. Pretty much every major language in the world has a bilingual missal at this point. And if you want, you can follow all the prayers the priest is praying. You can understand what the rubrics are. In that sense, it’s not a closed book. In that sense.
I like to see it this way. People should attend the old Mass and let it speak to them in its own terms. Watch the movements of the priest, the sacred dance that takes place. Watch and listen to the music and the ceremonial, and let the silence penetrate your soul. Just let it speak to you in its own symbolic language. You don’t need to follow word for word. But after a while or now and again, look at your missal and follow along with some of the prayers. Because they are beautiful and they are rich and they’re incredibly nourishing. And I think if you do both of these things, that is, you’re not a slave to your missal, but you’re also interested in following and understanding more. I think what happens is that over time, it’s like a train on two tracks. There’s the track of mystery and there’s the track of understanding.
And I think on both of these, you speed forward. And this was certainly my experience, I like to say my hand missal made me a traditionalist. Why? Because as I read the missal from day to day or week to week, if not every time, sometimes I had a crying baby to deal with. But as I read that missal, I became more and more impressed and dazzled with the depth of the prayers in that missal and all the things that are there that are missing from the Novus Ordo. That would be a whole separate show to talk about that. And then you realize, wow, so we do have a liturgical rite that is so profound, and so all-encompassing, and so cosmic, and so realistic about the human condition. So I do think that both the understanding and the surrender to that which we cannot understand are both really important.
Eric Sammons:
That’s a great point. I remember at my parish, this is my regular diocese in Novus Ordo Parish. This was probably 15, 20 years ago now. Our priests decided to celebrate the Traditional Latin Mass. This would’ve actually would’ve been 2008 because it was right after Summorum Pontificum. So he’s like, “We’re going to have a Traditional Latin Mass here. I think I’m going to celebrate once a month on Sunday at 2:00.” And I was like, “Okay.” We’re like, “Great.” So I had been once or twice, but I never really even followed the missal, I just kind of went. Almost as a spectator, so to speak. But I remember a bunch of my friends, we all were like, “Let’s go to this first one, see what it’s like.” And we all went through the missal and kind of followed along the missal. And I remember afterwards we had, I think we all went to out for dinner or something.
I can’t remember. We were all together though. All these guys, these dads, we were together and we were talking about it. And I remember we all said the same thing first, which was we were blown away by the prayers. We were just reading the prayers in the missal. We just were like, it was such… Because we were all Catholic. I was a convert, but I’d been Catholic for 15 years at this point. And everybody else, either the crater, been Catholic a long time. So we had a Catholic ethos, we weren’t Protestants looking at it. But it was like, “This is it.” This was like everything we believed all of a sudden was put into print and set before us, but we had never seen it like that before. And it was like you said, going deeper and deeper, going up and further in.
I’m actually explaining it way better than we did at the time because we didn’t know how to explain it. We were just like, there’s something here that we all immediately had this attraction to because of our Catholic background, but we had never seen it before. So I do think that’s a great advice that you give, that there’s one part of you that should just be there and understand you don’t understand everything. But then there’s another part of you that should follow along at times and say, “Okay, what is the priest saying here? What are these prayers?” Because the richness of them… And it makes sense that they’re rich, because they were developed over hundreds of years and they were proven to be ones that the church said, “This is what creates saints.” And they were used for over a thousand years and after that to create Saints.
So that’s a great point. I do think the prayers are just… And I don’t even think you mentioned it as one of the common objections, but I do think you mentioned a couple different ones. You mentioned it being kingly and courtly, and I think that also falls into this whole thing we’re talking about here, which is it is different. It is not the same. It will strike you as a newcomer as something very foreign to modern culture in multiple ways you can’t even understand. Like the priests doing all the genuflections and sometimes the altar server might kiss his hand. And all these things you’re just like, “It’s just so foreign.” But once you start to recognize where you are, you recognize, if there’s one word for it, that’s Catholic. That’s what it is.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yeah, it’s true. And the thing that you brought up about the kingly and courtly aspects of the old liturgy, I devote a whole chapter to that topic. Because I think it is something, maybe people won’t put those words to it, but what they see is such a choreographed event, such a rubrically precise event. It’s almost like a military drill. They’ll see that in the sanctuary. No looseness, no spontaneity, everything’s like a drill. Exactly so. And they’ll also see so many signs of deference, this person bowing to this person. As you mentioned, the kissing of the hand. And it really is so formal and solemn, and ceremonial, to use the adjective version of that word, that it throws a lot of people off initially. Because that’s not the way modern western society is.
We are casual, we dress down, we let it all hang out. Spontaneity is like the greatest quality, authenticity. This is how people think. This is how people have been practically brainwashed to think. And when you get to the liturgical domain in the traditional rite, it’s so, so different. But what I show in the chapter is all that the liturgy is doing there is reproducing on earth what we read about in heaven in the book of Revelation. And what we see throughout scripture, and really what we see in any traditional society that retains signs of formality, and deference, and decorum, and things like that.
And it’s precisely because we lack those things that we need them so much. We need them in the liturgy, especially to honor God, our king, the king of heaven and earth. But we also need them in our society and in our culture. So I see one of the crucial strengths of the Latin Mass is that it’s like the tip of the spear, to borrow a Father Z expression. From the traditional liturgy can flow forth into society and culture and especially into the family initially, some of these positive qualities that we have lost in the modern West. And I think that’s also something that people need to be aware of.
Eric Sammons:
I think a book that you reference in your book a few times, I would argue, is one of the key books that fertilized the field for the Traditional Latin Mass becoming very popular in America after Summorum Pontificum. And that is the Lamb Supper, by Scott Hahn. Which people who understand the history of that book might understand that it’s a little bit ironic, it’s a little bit surprising to say it. Because Scott wrote that in the 1990s. He was not in Traditional Latin Mass, it was not intended in any way… If you read it, it has nothing, does not talk about the Traditional Latin Mass. It’s not having to do with Traditional Latin Mass specifically, it’s just simply talking about how the book of Revelation is this heavenly liturgy that we enter into in the Mass.
But I think what that did was, I think it turned a lot of switches in Catholics heads that, “Wait a minute, these 70s and 80s liturgies we’ve had to endure that we instinctively knew something was a little bit off with them, but we didn’t really know what, now we’re starting to understand. Because we’re supposed to be… This is a heavenly liturgy.” And I think that, like I said, that fertilized a field for people then to start to see later the whole kingly and courtly. If you went to heaven, what would you expect the liturgy to be like? For a Latin Catholic at least, I think all Latin Catholics, they would imagine your highest medieval liturgy possible.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Eric Sammons:
It’s how you would picture heavenly liturgy. Almost all Catholics, no matter what they normally attend or whatever would think that. So I think that did that, it helped. And of course, like I said, Dr. Hahn was not attending the Traditional Latin Mass back then. He wasn’t talking about that. He had no real experience of it, but I do think it helped. So I thought that was interesting at the beginning of your book, I think that’s one of the first books you reference and you talk about that.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yes.
Eric Sammons:
And I think that there’s a reason for that. That book is done a lot of good, that wasn’t necessarily intended by the author. Not that he was against, it just wasn’t what he was thinking at the time.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yeah, precisely. I totally agree. It was a kind of evangelizing of the imagination, you might say.
Eric Sammons:
Right. Understanding what liturgy is more than we think of it as. Okay. One last thing I want to talk about. It’s not a common objection, but I feel like this is something that is an objection at least psychologically for a lot of people who don’t attend a Traditional Latin Mass. And that is the impact of the Traditional Latin Mass, of attending it, and how you look at Catholicism, how you practice Catholicism, basically how you practice the religion. Because what I see is there’s two things here. One is a lot of people who’ve never attended or rarely attended Traditional Latin Mass, they really look at us and they say, “Why do you people make such a big deal out of that? Why is it such a focus on your part?”
And then secondly, and I think this is the more controversial part, but I think we have to address it. It does seem at times that the religion we practice practically, those who attend Traditional Latin Mass is often at variance, different in a lot of ways from how religion is practiced by people who attend your typical Novus Ordo parish at your suburban parish. So I want to address that, what is it? Is it all this stuff we’ve been talking about? What is it that makes it where your whole view of how you practice Catholicism really does change? And why are we making it such a big deal then?
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yes. Well, the last chapter of my book is called The Mass is the Faith and the Faith is the Mass. And of course I say that’s an exaggeration, that’s a hyperbolic way of speaking. But the truth in it is that the Mass is the pinnacle. It is the source and summit, to use Vatican II’s language. The font and apex, I prefer that translation, of the Christian faith is this holy sacrifice of the Mass. It’s not meant to do everything, as I said before about the Swiss army knife, but it is the pinnacle. It is the place to which in a sense, our personal spiritual life and all the other sacraments are meant to lead us because it is the supreme act of worship that is given by our Lord himself, to his Heavenly father joining us to him. That’s what makes it the supreme act of the church. And it’s also act that unites…
It’s the most direct bridge to heaven. This is where we are most in contact with the church triumphant centered around the throne of the Lamb. This is where it happens. So it is the axis point of the Catholic faith. It’s the axis around which everything else revolves. All the spokes of the wheel go into this hub. So if that’s true, and the church itself says that that’s true, then as goes the Mass, so goes the faith. This is true. If the Mass is messed up, it’s not what it’s supposed to be. It’s become anthropocentric, it’s become horizontal. It’s become secularized or protestantized or whatever it might be. That’s going to have ripple effects on every aspect of the Catholic faith. On what we believe, the morals we practice, the culture we produce or don’t produce, etc.
If the Mass is the way it should be, it inspires all of these other things. John Senior says that the whole of medieval civilization, which everybody acknowledges was glorious, was inspired by the Mass. The building of the cathedrals, they were giant tabernacles for the Mass. All the sculpture and paintings and so on were for chapels. They were for alters. It was the backbone of medieval Christendom, the Mass was. So that’s how powerful this is. It’s really so powerful. And I think what happens when you start going to the traditional Mass… Even in a humble form, like a low Mass, not in a gothic cathedral, not a pontifical Mass, but just a humble low Mass in a plain suburban church. I think nevertheless, there is such a spirit of earnestness, of seriousness in this liturgy that it begins to make you want to take your faith more seriously.
It makes you want to start fasting, for example. Or maybe if you haven’t been doing Friday abstinence, you’re suddenly thinking, I got to do something on Fridays. I can’t just do some kind of lame Hail Mary and just say, “That’s my Friday penance. I need to do something more.” And then you start asking, “Well, what does the church really teach about X, Y and Z?” I think it awakens the mind and the heart of a Catholic and makes them start wanting to learn more and to be more as a Catholic. And that’s good. That’s obviously good.
But it will put on a collision course, unfortunately with the Synodal church, with a lot of what Pope Francis seems to be teaching. We don’t need to go down that rabbit hole, but I think it’s clear to everybody who’s listening to this that he’s a controversial figure and that there are many things going on right now in the church that are very difficult, if not impossible to reconcile with the way the church has always believed and always practiced. So I think it’s not surprising that if people have a huge injection of liturgical tradition into their lives, it is going to turn them around and maybe turn them upside down in a sense, in regard to a lot of other issues as well.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. And I think we have to be honest and just acknowledge that if you attend a Traditional Latin Mass… And no, it’s not because of the sermons. People think these traditional priests are preaching homilies that are like anti-modern church or whatever. If you attend, you know that’s not true. They’re talking about how to grow in holiness and things of that nature.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Exactly. I actually wish that they would sometimes address them-
Eric Sammons:
It’s funny, sometimes you are… Yeah, it’s like if you at least once or twice a year bring it up. But no, they don’t.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Right. Exactly. It’s like, “Okay, we’re going to hear a homily about the virtue of justice.” Or, “We’re going to hear about forgiving your neighbor or something.” It’s like, “Oh, man.”
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. Exactly. So for people who don’t attend, they might think that we’re being brainwashed by homilies or catechism, whatever, but that’s not the case. But what you find is if you attend the Traditional Latin Mass regularly for quite some time, you do find yourself in tension with the institutional narrative of the church today, of the modern church. And this is something that you have to reconcile because what I find is these two things happen. One is what you just said, is you just simply dive more into your faith. And for me, at least personally, I know I can say this for myself, I can’t speak for anybody else. But I know it has deepened my own practice of the faith radically, in so many ways attending Traditional Latin Mass. It’s not why I started going in the first place, but that’s just what happened.
And a great example is what you gave, was like all of a sudden you start taking fasting seriously because all the Collects during every single day of Lent are like hammering home our fasting and penance and all that. And when you pray that all the time, all of a sudden it starts to impact you. You’re like, “I better get with the program.” So that’s the good, and probably crude way to put that. But the bad, or at least the difficult, in my mind is it does put you in tension with what, let’s be honest, a lot of bishops, a lot of priests are saying. And so you have to work to reconcile that.
And I think what it does is you go back to Chesterton and… It was Chesterton, I think. Tradition being the democracy of dead. And you look at, yes, you might be in tension with some modern bishops and some modern priests. But what you’ve done is you’ve aligned with and you’ve accompanied a lot of the old bishops and priests, and saints, and theologians, the St. Treats of Avalos, and the St. John’s of the Cross, the St. Thomas Aquinas’, the St. Francis of Assisi. So it doesn’t take away all the tension. What it does, it makes you realize, “Okay, I’m at least in line with these great saint theologians.”
Peter Kwasniewski:
Well, yeah, in fact, what’s really embarrassing for some proponents of a modernized Catholicism… Which we’re seeing very much of in Rome, but also everywhere. What’s really embarrassing for them is that they themselves are in tension with their saintly predecessors. So we’re not the ones creating the tension, the tension is just there. It’s there for anybody who’s literate who wants to look into it. And a pragmatic argument that I think we should take seriously, Eric, is that the traditionalists, they might seem… Okay, they’re a noisy minority. That’s true. They’re a very opinionated minority. I think they’re opinionated because they have reason to be. They’re discovering things and they’re like, “Hey everybody, what about this? Why do we forget about this? We shouldn’t have forgotten about this.”
Eric Sammons:
And maybe sometimes we do it with a little too much enthusiasm and rudeness and things like that. We can all acknowledge that, but it is that you discover something and you want to tell everybody about it.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Right. So what I was going to say is even though we’re just a minority, as people always like to remind us, nevertheless, I think we’re a very influential minority. And the fact is, if you study… Let me just reference a book here. I want people to go out and by Turned Around, but once they finish that, then they might check out this book if they’re interested. This is a book that came out very recently, Between Rome and Rebellion, A history of Catholic Traditionalism by Yves Chiron. If you really want to deep dive into the traditionalist movement, it’s fascinating. A fascinating history. But I bring this up because the original traditionalists that is the ones from the late 60s onwards, they were not just focused on the Mass, they weren’t even just focused on liturgy and sacraments. They were just as concerned about the bad catechesis that was going on and about the bad Bible translations that were being put out as they were about the liturgy. And I think that’s remained true.
If you study, for example, American traditionalism, they’re frequently talking about bad catechisms. We all remember that. That’s a specialization of yours. And what happened? I think it was the traditionalists who were constantly, constantly banging this drum about how bad catechesis was that got people like Ratzinger to take seriously the need to do a new catechism, and that eventually led to the catechism of the Catholic Church. Yes, it’s flawed, but it’s very, very much better than any of the other stuff that was out there for a long. And it’s like the antithesis of the Dutch catechism. So I actually think that the traditionalists, they’ve been like the providential squeaky wheel that gets the grease eventually, and that keeps alive certain topics that should not be allowed to subside into silence.
So we complained about catechesis, that’s better now. We complained about liturgy. I think that was part of why John Paul II permitted issued this indult for the worldwide celebration. He knew there were abuses. He apologized for liturgical abuses. I think that Summorum Pontificum partly came out of Ratzinger’s many decades of experience with traditional Catholics. Who said, “We just love the way the church has always worshiped and we want to hold onto this.” And he said, “Yeah, that’s legitimate.” And then when he was Pope, he was in a position to do something about it.
So I guess I don’t really have a problem with some tension as long as it’s ordered to the common good of the church. I really care for the souls of my co-religionists. I don’t want anybody to go to hell. I want everybody to hold the Catholic faith in its fullness, and I want everybody to experience worship in its most sublime and its most Catholic. So I do what I do and I write what I write not to create division, but to introduce people to riches that they have lost and things that they actually will benefit from.
Eric Sammons:
And I think you’re right that the squeaky wheel has made an impact, because I went to the National Eucharistic Congress, Indianapolis. And the whole video, I have criticisms of it, all of that. That being said, there is no question that certain aspects of it would’ve never happened 30 years ago, never happened. 30 years in American church, you had an approved Traditional Latin Mass celebrated by one of the most high-ranking bishops in the country, Archbishop Corleone, very close by at a beautiful church. People complained it was kind of far away, but no, they wanted to make sure it was in a church that was fitting for the liturgy. They had one of their main nights at the stadium, they had a much more traditional Gregorian chant, music of that nature. Just the fact that they were promoting Eucharistic adoration, they had the procession. And the procession was done, in many ways, in a very traditional manner. All these things never would’ve happened 30 years ago. I remember the 1990s well, that’s when I became Catholic.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Oh, yeah.
Eric Sammons:
No chance.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Right.
Eric Sammons:
So the fact that these things have happened, I think it’s because a lot of those people that we like to criticize as being cranky and everything in the 80s and 90s, or whatever the case may be. Well, they were the only ones who were saying anything.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Exactly.
Eric Sammons:
And then all of a sudden, people like Ratzinger and others started to realize, and Corleone, and people, they start to realize, “Oh, this is something that we do. We can’t lose this. We have to continue to have this.”
Peter Kwasniewski:
Exactly. And I’m not saying this because I want anybody to pat us on the back, but the fact is conservative Catholics should be thanking the traditionalists for having preserved many things that had almost completely disappeared. And then later on, the conservatives were able to take them up too.
Eric Sammons:
Right.
Peter Kwasniewski:
This is why I wrote that article for Crisis a few years ago, right after Traditionis Custodes, when I said, “All parish liturgies will suffer if the Latin Mass goes away.” That is absolutely true. Because it is kind of the gold standard. That’s how I see it. It establishes the high bar for how worship should be. And it’s because there’s chant, and incense, and only male altar servers, and so on in the traditional Mass that many are inspired in the Novus Ordo world to imitate those things. Yes, they’re options in the new Mass, but they’re just options. And they were options that were despised.
Eric Sammons:
Right. Yeah.
Peter Kwasniewski:
So I think we just have to be honest about this and say, yeah, it’s sometimes okay to be the squeaky wheel. That’s all right.
Eric Sammons:
And some people, some traditionalists criticize… Maybe not as much anymore, but I remember Summorum Pontificum or at least Ratzinger and Benedict’s idea of this mutual enrichment. But I always felt like this was a brilliant move at the time for where the church was at the time of, if you let that Traditional Latin Mass just grow and infiltrate, to use maybe a more controversial word. But you let it just be the leaven there, all of a sudden it will start to impact the rest of all the Masses, which is basically what you’re saying.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yes. Yes.
Eric Sammons:
And I think that’s what happens.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yes.
Eric Sammons:
So one last thing I just wanted to ask you was what do you think is the future of the Traditional Latin Mass? What do you see in 10, 15, 20, 50 years as far as its impact on the church, how much it’s celebrating things? And I know you’re not a prophet, but I’m just curious where you see the trajectory.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Well, just hold on. Let me get my crystal ball over here. No, actually I have some hunches. The first hunch I have is based on the fact that the most vocal critics of the revival of the traditional liturgical rites are very elderly people. People who were formed in the Vatican II, Halcyon Vatican II days, the Summer of Love, 1968, all this kind of stuff. These people are so glued to that paradigm that they cannot imagine any other paradigm ever working for anybody. So they have pretty much a totalitarian attitude now, which is that you’re not allowed to be nourished by what nourished the saints in the past. Because ever since Vatican II happened, Vatican II has now told you how you must be nourished. And this is the only way that you can be nourished. And that’s the mentality. It’s a totalitarian or fascist mentality.
And that’s not exaggerating. Because this is the generation that is most cracking down. And yes, they have sympathizers in younger generations, but basically, as we’ve seen from statistics, as you get to younger and younger generations of Catholics, they have no interest in sustaining this kind of totalitarian imposition of post-Vatican II Catholicism. They just don’t. It’s either totally boring to them or they’re even opposed to it on theological grounds. So I see a dying out of that Vatican II generation. I see younger bishops and priests saying, “Look, the church is falling apart all around us. All we ever seem to be doing is closing churches everywhere. But the traditional parishes are flourishing, and they’re producing families and vocations, and they’re giving lots of money. You know what? God bless them. They’re doing something right. Let them keep going.” So I see a reversal of some of the closures and shutdowns that Cardinal Roach has been imposing because of Traditionis Custodes. I see a new era of slow but definite growth in the traditional Mass movement.
I think we need to get out of this pontificate. We need to get into another phase where there isn’t this ideological battle against tradition. That’s where we need to get to. As for whether the next Pope will be the Pope who can do that, who knows? But Francis cannot control the next conclave. And even if I don’t attribute the result of every conclave directly to the Holy Spirit, as Ratzinger said, we shouldn’t do. And as no Catholic has ever done until recently. Nevertheless, I do have confidence that the cardinals, including the many appointed by Pope Francis, could actually say to themselves, “We need more peace. We need more diplomacy. We need an entirely different style. The past 11, 12 years have been a crazy ride. Everybody is discontented, for one reason or another. Let’s try to get some peace and stability.” So maybe even a pope from the next conclave could bring back more of a Summorum Pontificum policy or at least ignore Traditionis Custodes. Those are some thoughts.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. I’m with you. I think you’re right. It was interesting because one of the bishops who was picked for the next conclave is a bishop, I think in his 50s in Iran. He’s a bishop in Iran and he’s in his 50s. I just can’t imagine he cares about the Western European obsession with pelvic issues, obsession with a lot of these ideological battles. The guy is a bishop in Iran. By the way, I know nothing about him. But I’m just guessing that his priorities are not going to be, “Let’s fight some ideological battles from the 1960s and 70s and keep fighting them over and over again.” My guess is there’s going to be a lot of cardinals who are of that mindset from Asia. Because that’s one thing Frances does do, is he picks people from all around the world, what he calls the peripheries. And I do think though often that those are people who are outside of a lot of the Western ideological baggage that occurred in the 60s and 70s in America, Western Europe, Australia, places like that.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yes.
Eric Sammons:
And we’ll see. I don’t know these people, I haven’t studied them or anything like that. So I think you’re right, my guess is it will move towards an era of just like, “Let’s just leave people alone, people who aren’t doing anything wrong alone.” Then perhaps over time it’ll be like, “Let’s start to encourage these things.” And then I kind of feel like that’s a likely trajectory. We’ll see what happens.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. This much is clear, the traditional liturgy is not going away. We were in a much worse place in the 1970s than we are now, even with all the stuff that’s happening. So we should keep a hopeful and positive disposition about all of this and just be faithful, as faithful as we can be.
Eric Sammons:
Agreed. Amen. Okay. Well, everybody we touched on… Actually I wanted to cover the lectionary, things like that. But buy the book, Turned Around, Replying to Common Objections Against Traditional Latin Mass. I think it’s the book. If you’re a Traditional Latin Mass going Catholic and you have a friend, a Catholic who doesn’t attend but is curious. He’s not antithetical, against it, but he has objections that you’ve heard before. I honestly think this is the one. This is the book you get. Maybe have him listen to this first and get them this book. Because it’s the one that I think talks in a very Catholic sense to just your typical conservative Catholic who is not, again, ideologically opposed to it and maybe has gone a few times himself, but doesn’t really get it, so to speak. I think this is the book to get. So it’s from TAN Publisher, I’ll make sure I pull a link where you can buy it directly from TAN. Do you have it on your website as well?
Peter Kwasniewski:
Actually, that’s a good question. I think I did put it up on my new website. But I’m in the process of doing a new website, so it’s still a bit under construction. However, it’s functional. But let me just mention this too. For those who prefer audiobooks, it has been recorded. In fact, I recorded it because I wanted to make sure that it was read just the way that it should be read with all the proper pronunciations and so forth. So it’s in audiobook, ebook, and hardcover.
Eric Sammons:
That’s awesome. Great. So just get the book. Also, just follow Peter. He’s on Facebook a lot, Twitter now, or X, I should say. I’ll put a link to his website. And he’s got a million books, read them all, but start off with this one, Turned Around. So thanks for being with us, Peter.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Thank you, Eric. It’s always a pleasure.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, until next time, everybody. God love you.