Guest
Peter Kwasniewski is a full-time writer and public speaker whose work is seen at websites and in periodicals such as New Liturgical Movement, OnePeterFive, Rorate Caeli, Catholic Family News, and Latin Mass Magazine. Dr. Kwasniewski has published extensively in academic and popular venues on sacramental and liturgical theology, Catholic Social Teaching, issues in the contemporary Church, and the history and aesthetics of music; he is also is a composer whose sacred choral music has been performed around the world. The author or editor of many books, Kwasniewski’s writings have been translated into at least twenty languages.
Links
- Ultramontanism and Tradition (book)
- Bound by Truth (book)
- Tradition and Sanity (substack)
Transcript
Eric Sammons:
How can a Catholic be obedient when church leaders promote same-sex blessings, shut down authentically Catholic liturgies and continually undermine the faith? That’s what we’re going to talk about today on Crisis Point. Well, I’m Eric Sammons, your host, editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine. Before we get started, just want to encourage people hit that like button to subscribe to the channel, let other people know about it. We always appreciate that. Also, you can follow us on social media @CrisisMag and subscribe to our email newsletter at… just go to crisismagazine.com. Fill in your email address and we’ll send you our articles every day, right to your inbox. Okay, so we have a return guest today, one of my favorites, Dr. Peter Kwasniewski. I’m going to read his bio just because I like to, even though I think most people know who he is. It’s impressive enough.
I think I’m going to read it anyway. He’s a full-time writer and public speaker whose work is seen at websites in periodicals such as New Liturgical Movement, OnePeterFive, Crisis Magazine, RORATE CÆLI, Catholic Family News and Latin Mass Magazine. Dr. Kwasniewski has published extensively in academic and popular venues on sacramental and liturgical theology, Catholic social teaching issues in the contemporary church and the history and aesthetics of music. He’s also a composer whose sacred choral music has been performed around the world. He’s the author and editor of many books. They’ve been translated in more than 20 languages, and I like to say knowing how many books Dr. Kwasniewski has written is a moving target. You never know when he comes on the podcast if something has even published since I asked him a week or two ago. But two of his latest are Ultramontanism and Tradition, which he edited.
And I will say I’m one of the writers in here. It’s on the role of papal authority in the Catholic Faith, which we’re going to talk about today. Also, Bound By Truth, which he wrote, didn’t just edit. Authority, Obedience, Tradition and the Common Good. And really in a sense, the two of them, I think they work together. They work together, and we’re going to talk about all these issues. We’re also going to apply them in this conversation to some of the issues going on today, because I think that’s what really matters. So anyway, with that long introduction, welcome to the program, Peter.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Thank you so much, Eric. It’s always good to talk to you.
Eric Sammons:
Oh yeah. And you’re producing great work. Also, I didn’t even mention, I’ll put a link to it, but tell us the Substack address to go to see your writings.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Right. Well, it is traditionsanity.substack.com. The Substack itself is called Tradition and Sanity. I’ve been publishing since last April. April 2023. It’s going extremely well. I’ve published a hundred and something articles there. I’ve got almost 5,000 subscribers. It’s definitely become a major platform for me.
Eric Sammons:
Yes. When you first announced it, I am just going to be honest, I was like, oh shoot, does this mean he’s never going to write for OnePeterFive or for Crisis anymore? And I admit Tim Flanders and I were both like, “Oh no, this would be the worst.” But fortunately you still do right at other places as well. But we very much support your Substack. We’re not competition that just… we were like, oh, no. I mean, you’re definitely one of our favorites. But yeah, encourage you… I mean, you write so much. It’s like you can’t be held down by just one website. You have to be in many places.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yes, I did feel as the years went on, I felt as if it would be good to have one platform where I could share my thoughts and develop them over a long period of time with a certain audience that really wanted to read what I had to say. So I mean, anybody out there who enjoys my work should definitely check out the Substack. They can subscribe for free or they can take out a paid subscription, whatever they’d like to do.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, absolutely. I encourage people to do that. I mean, what’s it going to hurt to check it out for free at first, and then when you realize how much you love it, then you can be a paid subscriber as well. So we’re talking about today, I mean a topic that you talk about a lot, and I think it’s the most important one, frankly, as a Catholic today, and that’s this whole area of our role as Catholics. We’re talking particularly lay Catholics, but we’ll talk about priests and bishops as well. And how do we obey, how do we be good submissive Catholics that we’ve always been taught to be when the people in authority are not being obedient and submissive to who they’re supposed to be obedient and submissive to? And so how’s that work? And so I want to start it off with, I think something that is underlying all of our discussions as Catholics, and that is this whole idea of challenging the pope. I think if you have a good Catholic sense, a good Catholic ethos, that should automatically give you… there’s a theological term, the heebie-jeebies,
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yeah. Exactly.
Eric Sammons:
Which should make you recoil. And so what is that proper way of… I mean, because you and I are well-known publicly for challenging the pope. What right do we have to do that and what are the challenges to that? But also what are the potential pitfalls going too far? And what are the fears of not going far enough, I guess, for lack of better-
Peter Kwasniewski:
Exactly. Yeah, no, it’s a fabulous question. It is the question, as you said of the moment. I don’t think it’s always going to be the question of the moment. I think that there have been periods in church history where authority and obedience have worked generally fairly well together, and there will be periods, I’m confident, unless the world comes to an end which is in God’s hands. I think there will be periods again where that relationship is not as vexed and as frustrating as it is right now. But the reality is this: obedience is not a black and white subject. It’s not a switch that’s either on or off so that you’re obedient, unthinkingly blindly to whatever authority dictates or you’re a rebel, right? I mean, that’s the way that some people almost present this situation. But as I talk about, especially in Bound by Truth, every authority beneath God, God alone is supremely good.
He alone is always true, always right, always to be obeyed no matter what. But every authority under God, every created authority is inherently fallible. And the church is clear about the conditions under which an authority… well the pope, particularly the circumstances under which he is infallible. But it’s clear from even Vatican I that most of what the pope says and does is not going to fall into that narrow category of universal teaching on faith and morals that is binding on everybody under pain of sin. And so any created human authority is measured by God’s authority. That means by the eternal law, by the natural law, by the divine law. And basically, we should have a disposition of humility, docility, receptivity towards authority. That should be our default position until and unless there is a flagrant violation of what the authority is supposed to be doing.
Now, is it possible for us to recognize when authority is flagrantly going out of bounds? Well, the answer of the entire Catholic tradition is yes, we can recognize when that’s happening. We can recognize it when it’s happening on the part of civil authorities, presidents, prime ministers, kings, whoever they are. But also when priests, bishops and popes are also going outside of the remit, outside of the boundaries of what they’re supposed to be doing, when they actually turn against the good of the faithful in a particular case. And this has happened throughout church history. It’s not something that happens every day, thanks be to God. I mean, our Lord has set up structures of authority that, as I said before, generally function well, but they function well when there are virtuous men in those offices. When you have vicious men in offices of authority, then they can abuse their authority and they have done so in history.
So part of the purpose of my research and the 26 authors who are present in this anthology, Ultramontanism and Tradition, is to carefully go through the annals of Catholic history and say, “Look, here are some situations where papal authority was overweening, where it overreached, where it violated the rights of other bodies within the church or other individuals within the church, and where people respectfully stood up against it and said no.” Grosseteste is a great example. Bishop Robert Grosseteste, who, when the pope tried to impose his nephew, to give his nephew a canonry at Lincoln Cathedral, basically nepotism, Robert Grosseteste wrote back and said, “I refuse to allow this. I will not allow this. I don’t care who you are. Basically, I refuse to allow this.” And he said, “I refuse to allow it because of my respect for your office. I will not let you abuse your office in this way.”
Eric Sammons:
Okay, now here’s a pushback I want to have. There’s a bit of a difference between a one-time thing and an ongoing thing. So for example, St. John Henry Newman, when he was alive, he didn’t really think the pope should have temporal authority. He leaned against it and thought that… in his time, he thought that didn’t help the church for him to have temporal authority. But of course, Pope Pius IX at the time, and then Leo XIII very much thought that the pope should have this temporal authority.
So in this case, we see John Henry Newman, a saint who’s resisting the pope on this. But it’s not like… that’s a one-time thing. It’s one issue. It’s obviously prudential, things like that. But what we’re saying, and I think both you and I have basically said this, is we’re advocating a resistance to what popes are saying going back for decades, that Pope Paul VI, even John Paul II, whom I know both of us admired in many ways, but also we have serious criticisms of, CC meeting, things like that. And of course, even Pope Benedict a little bit, but especially of course, Pope Francis. And isn’t there something to be said for the Catholic idea like, okay, yeah, you can disagree here, you can disagree there. But now we’re talking about disagreeing with the fundamental program of the Vatican for five to six decades. And that seems to be a lot deeper, a lot more disobedient to use that term than just saying on these one-off situations.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Right. I’m glad that you put the objection that way, but I think the objection very much overstates the situation because first of all, what you see when you study in detail the last six decades is a great deal of contradictory policy, a great deal of hemming and hawing of going to the left and to the right of Pope saying, “Do this,” but then doing the opposite themselves or appointing people who do the opposite. So it’s not as if it’s so easy to see what is the overall plan or program that we’re supposed to be following in this period. Obviously with something like the Novus Ordo, yes, they all support it, but they support it in different ways and for different reasons and with different angles. John Paul II and Benedict XVI were trying to take it in a more traditional direction.
Francis, obviously by his own example and by what he tolerates, sees it being taken in a very different direction and anti-traditional direction. So I think that it’s very disorienting to be a Catholic right now because it’s not at all clear how we’re supposed to hold all these things together. Take Vatican II. Sacrosanctum Concilium says clearly many things that nobody is following. Is Pope Francis disobedient to Vatican II? He thinks he’s the paragon of obedience to Vatican II, but he isn’t. I mean, Serafino Lanzetta, Fr. Lanzetta, wrote this book called Super Hanc Petram, which is also something I would recommend. It’s a really excellent treatment of the papacy, specifically of whether Francis himself is living up to the task of the successor of St. Peter, and in particular, whether he is obedient to the Second Vatican Council.
And Fr. Lanzetta proves in case after case after case that Pope Francis contradicts the Second Vatican council. You see what I mean? It is not as if the popes have this monolithic, perfectly consistent plan that they’re saying, “You should do this.” And all of us are saying, “No, we refuse to do it. We rebel.” It’s more like, no, we actually want to be obedient to all of the things that Catholics are supposed to be obedient to in a time when our church leaders themselves are very inconsistently obedient to what they should be obedient to.
Eric Sammons:
Isn’t there a danger? I like playing devil’s advocate here. Isn’t there a danger though that we get this mentality? The tag that’s placed on people like us is recognize and resist, and I think it’s go so far, it’s not the greatest, but it’s not terrible either. Isn’t there a danger though, that basically resist becomes our meaning of our Catholic faith, basically like, okay, let’s just… if Pope Francis says it, that means I’m against it, or whatever the case may be. How do we protect ourselves from that danger of just always being… because I’ve actually seen this where I’ll say something nice about something Pope Francis does, and it’s like immediately I get people like, “Oh no, he’s wrong.” They just want to be like, “No, he’s wrong about everything.” How do we keep ourselves from that danger?
Peter Kwasniewski:
Well, okay, so here’s the other thing that should be said is that we need to make distinctions between various popes. All the popes from Second Vatican Council onwards are very different from each other. And Pope Francis is singularly bad. This program is not the place for us to sort hash out all the ways, but I mean, it’s hundreds of ways in which Pope Francis has contradicted the faith, has undermined the pastoral life of Catholics. Fiducia Supplicans is just the latest in a long line of scandals. And so Francis is an unprecedented example of a tyrannical Pope. I agree with Henry Seer who calls him the dictator Pope. He is. I think you wrote an article or maybe somebody on Crisis wrote an article about should we give Francis the benefit of the doubt? And basically you said, well, we all tried to give him… or most of us, I certainly did, tried to give him the benefit of the doubt for as long as we possibly could hold out. For me, that was a couple of years.
It was about a couple of years where I was able to square every circle, and then finally it was just like, okay, forget it. This is not working. We can see where he’s coming from, what his agenda is. And that’s only been vindicated over the past 11 years. Those of us who early on said something is very fishy here, and not the fisherman’s fishy. This is a bad fishy, a smelly kind of fishy. Well, we were vindicated. We have been vindicated by that. So I think with Francis, there is more of a reason to be at this point, basically skeptical and suspicious of almost everything he does and says, particularly as his pontificate winds down, he seems to become more and more radical.
And so, I would put it this way, there’s this famous saying that Leo XIII quotes, I think it’s in Satis Cognitum. He says something like, “You have to beware the drop of poison in the glass of water.” That’s not exactly how he puts it, but I can’t remember the exact phrasing right now. But if Francis says something true, okay, fine. I mean, a broken clock is right twice a day. I mean, of course he’s going to say certain things that are true. He’s not simply a machine of error. But there are so many problems in Francis’s teaching that I would never, for example, cite him as an authority. There are many, many other authorities that are far better than Francis to quote on any given topic, whether it’s pro-life or abortion or marriage or whatever the case might be. I’m not going to quote some nice thing that Francis says about marriage when he wrote Amoris laetitia. Sorry, I’m not going to do that. But as for the… yeah, go ahead.
Eric Sammons:
I was going to say, so I think… I don’t really want to go down this completely here, but I feel like it has to be addressed. Then why do you recognize him as Pope? Because that’s obviously a lot of people we know and respect and friends and people have said, “Well, because of this total picture that you’ve basically just described, then why do we continue the façade that people would claim for us of recognizing him as actually the pope?” If he’s the pope, but we are basically saying everything he does, we can’t give him the benefit of doubt, should we even accept him really as the pope?
Peter Kwasniewski:
I mean, I think that… so this book, by the way, is really helpful on this subject because it has some essays at the beginning like what may be done about a heretical Pope by a Dominican friar on the question of a heretical pope by Bishop Schneider, on papal resignation and papal heresy and so forth. In other words, these writers go through the very difficult question, which has been talked about for centuries in the church. It’s not some new question, can you have a pope who’s a heretic, either a material heretic? Can he ever think heretically and believe error, or a formal heretic? Can we have that situation? And if we do have that situation, what can be done about it? Does the pope automatically lose his office? That’s a very common position that people have. He’s lost his office, and we can judge that.
We lay people can see that he’s a heretic and therefore he’s not the pope. But I think that what this book presents consistently for many authors, the position that no individual Catholic is authorized to make a final decision about whether a pope is a heretic or not. In church history, the rare cases where papal heresy or collusion or complicity with heresy has arisen, it’s been adjudicated by a subsequent pope or by a council. The pope is not judged by anyone on earth, but his actions and his words can be evaluated and certainly by those who are his peers, either other popes or bishops in council. They can be after he’s dead. Certainly they can be evaluated and sifted through. And this is what I hope and pray for. But if you have a hierarchical church where somebody is clearly recognized as holding a certain office and there’s a universal consent that he holds that office, it doesn’t matter what your worries or anxieties about him are, you still have to acknowledge that he, in a sort of raw material sense, he holds that office.
He’s sitting in the chair. He’s the one who’s in the office that says Pope. Knock on the door, he’s the one who’s in there. In that very basic bare material sense, he’s the pope. He might, as it could turn out in the future, people look back and they say, yes, he was acting as the pope, but much of what he taught is not to be accepted. And I think we can already tentatively reach that conclusion for ourselves at least as an operational principle. But it would be absurd to think that any individual Catholic could decide who is holding an office or who is not holding an office. I think that’s not going to work.
Eric Sammons:
I’m not sure if I’ve said this publicly, but I’ve told numerous people this is that in the future, one day, I think that a future council, a future Pope will probably declare the acts of Francis Papacy null and void. I mean just like; all of it, just throw it out into the trash bin. I don’t think they’ll ever say though he wasn’t the pope. I think first of all, I just think that because you’d open up such a can of worms if you did that. Because then all of a sudden you’ve just made the precedent that a future Pope can just say a past Pope was never the pope. And so every single Pope’s authority comes into question at that point. They say, oh, well, future Pope is going to say this guy’s not Pope. So I think that it might be a selective null and void on his acts, but the point is that it would basically be like, let’s just move on from this and go to a different direction.
Peter Kwasniewski:
I agree. That would be the best scenario. But the other thing I want point out here is this, Pope Francis certainly has taught an enormous amount in the sense that he issues documents and he gives speeches and what have you, but he has never even come close to invoking his solemn authority as the successor of Peter to bind and loose, to define in a matter of faith and morals. So I’m not a minimalist about the papacy in the sense that I would say… and people have accused me of this, that I would say the only thing you have to obey is when a pope has a de fide infallible statement. No, that’s an absurdity. There is such thing as the ordinary papal magisterium, and you are supposed to normally… in normal circumstances, you should obediently accept that you should have religious descent of mind to that teaching.
But it’s also true, and Ed Faser is particularly good on this question, and he’s in this anthology ultramontanism tradition on this point. He’s very good at pointing out the opposite of infallible is fallible. So actually the ordinary papal magisterium can be an error. We shouldn’t assume it to be sort of habitually an error, and I don’t think there’s any case in church history where you can say, oh, this Pope was habitually an error, but Francis is pretty darn close to that situation. That is, there are many, many, many erroneous things in the ordinary teaching of Pope Francis that have to be resisted. This is not a typical situation. This is not like our default position. This is like a fire brigade emergency is what we’re dealing with right now. That’s why I do think it’s unprecedented in so many ways. We don’t have cases in church history where we can look back and say, oh, what we’re dealing with under Francis is what they dealt with in this century or that century.
No, we’ve never had a situation as bad as this before. By the way, I don’t think that makes Francis absolutely the worst Pope. I just think he’s one of the worst popes. The other quick point I want to make is this: you talked about having an attitude of resistance for decades. I think a better parallel is the Renaissance papacy, which Timothy Flanders has called the second pornocracy. And I think it’s a good way of putting it. The first pornocracy was in the Saculum Obscurum in the 10th century. The second was in the Renaissance leading up to the Counter Reformation, or prior to the Counter Reformation. And then finally the third pornocracy, which is what we’re dealing with today. In this lead up to the Renaissance, basically the late medieval or early Renaissance church was extremely corrupt at all different levels, and that’s why we had various proto-Protestant revolts finally culminating in 1517 Martin Luther, and all hell broke loose after that point.
That was not something that came out of nowhere. That was a response to the deep corruption in the Catholic Church. It was a bad response, and the Catholic Church made the right response in the counter reformation by reaffirming her doctrine and her discipline and by pursuing sanctity. But there were decades of bad popes. Worldly popes. And any serious Catholic at that time lamented that situation and said, “This is a very bad thing for the Catholic Church. These men are unworthy of their office. We acknowledge them to be pope. We pray for their conversion, but we do not admire them, and we keep a certain distance from them from the way they’re living.” And Savonarola, I think is a great example of this. As you know, many Dominicans consider him to be a saint. He strongly resisted Alexander VI.
Eric Sammons:
Now. So as we’re recording this, Pope Francis is actually in the hospital again. His health is not good. He’s old, and so there’s a real good chance that he won’t make it through 2024 just because that’s the natural way of things. Well, I guess, I’ll ask just you personally. When the next pope comes, and let’s just say they pick a cardinal who is… and it’s not Cardinal Burke, but it’s not necessarily Cardinal Fernandez either. It’s just-
Peter Kwasniewski:
Pope Tuche I.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, right, exactly. But it’s somebody kind in the middle, maybe ideologically more liberal towards Francis like that. How do you think should be the proper attitude of Catholics when this new pope starts? Because we said that there’s been, each pope before has been different. We gave benefited out to Francis for years, and then finally we realized it’s just not working. What should be a Catholic’s attitude for the next pope, assuming he’s not somebody who’s already known to be a hero of the faith. Cardinal Sarah or something like that. But is just somebody unknown or kind known to be a little bit maybe a Francis type person?
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yeah. Well, I mean, again, obviously we should give him the benefit of the doubt. We really should. That’s what we owe to any human being who takes office for the first time. It’s true, you could look at their record and say, oh, he’s done this and he’s done that, and he’s met with communists and he shook the hand of a Freemason and whatever. You can look at all that in the past, but every time somebody takes up a new office, there’s a new grace of office, a new charism of office that they receive. God gives them the opportunity to live this office well, and virtuously. I think we have to have a supernatural perspective. I agree with Roberto de Matteo about this, that when a man is elected Pope, God is offering him huge graces. And there have been examples in church history to go back again to… we have to study church history, but there have been cases where rather lukewarm and secular cardinals have been elected Pope and they’ve suddenly revved up to the office and they’ve started acting as reformers.
How did that happen? Where did that come from? That’s grace. Grace is transformative. Grace is powerful. We’ve all seen that in our own lives when God has pushed us from one level to the next through some conversion, experience or grace of conversion. So I think we owe the benefit of the doubt to anyone who takes up a new office. That’s the simple point. Let’s say it’s somebody like I really believe, and I think that George Weigel believes this, and Edward Penton and other people who have done very deep analysis of the College of Cardinals, that the next Pope is not going to be a Francis clone. He’s not going to be a Francis II. I hope he doesn’t take the name Francis II, but maybe he could as a sort of curveball, surprise everybody that I’m not like the first Francis.
There have been precedents for that too in church history where the same papal name has been a radically different person, but I think that it’s much more likely to be someone like Cardinal Zuppi. I’m not saying he in particular is the most papabulae, but he’s an example of he’s a politician, he’s a diplomat. He hangs out with communists, but he also celebrates solemn pontifical traditional vespers in Rome. He has no ax to grind against the traditionalists. He seems to have the attitude of a true liberal. Whatever floats your boat, let 1,000 flowers bloom. I think that’s much more likely to be the person that the Cardinals will want to elect next time. And that person could then be an ally for us. Even if we disagree with his liberalism, he could be the pope who might give us a Summorum Pontificum 2.0. So I think we shouldn’t burn our bridges from the start.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, I think that’s wise counsel, because I lean towards the same thinking, and I’m not an expert on the whole college… I don’t follow the whole who’s capable, all that stuff. But at the same time, it just seems to me there’s such a widespread, we’ll say, frustration among bishops with Francis, how he goes about doing things. Not necessarily with what he believes. I think a lot of bishops and cardinals might agree with them, but how he goes about it. He causes so many problems for bishops. The best example of course is tradition is Traditionis Custodes, where he just caused problems for bishops is all that does.
Because now all of a sudden, these people who were basically quiet, off the side, gave their tithes and kept to themselves, all of a sudden now that the local bishop has to battle with them? I could see the next Pope, they want to pick somebody like… might be ideologically close to Francis, but personality-wise and management style is just like, okay, we’re going to let things simmer down a little bit because it’s just a nightmare practically speaking for the bishops and the cardinals.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yes, that’s right. We also have to recognize that the traditionalist movement, which began really in 1966 with the founding of Uno Voce, it began then because as you know, after Sacrosanctum Concilium was approved by most of the bishops of Vatican II in 1963, right away, Paul VI set in motion the liturgical reform. With having in view something like the Novus Ordo, he and Bugnini were very much set on that, even though that’s not what the Council of Fathers had just voted on. And they started making changes pretty quickly, 1964, 1965, 1966. And so the Catholics who loved the Latin Gregorian Mass were already in a panic and already scandalized by what was happening in the mid-1960s. So that’s really where the traditionalist movement began even before years before the Novus Ordo came out. When the Novus Ordo came out in 1969, they were even more alarmed and even more scandalized because that was a much more radical step than already what had been done.
And so the point I wanted to make is Paul VI himself, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, they all increasingly opened up access to the traditional rights of the church. But there was never a lot of support on their part. It was more like a toleration, or an opening up of a space, and the bishops themselves were the ones who had to do the heavy lifting. And some were generous and some were stingy. And so the point is, whoever the pope is going to be in the future, traditionalists will still have a lot of grassroots on the ground-work to do, to build up traditional communities, build up chapels, buy the vestments, get the priests trained, educate, educate, educate.
We have to keep doing that. It would take an absolute huge divine intervention and miracle to end up with a traditional pope at this point in time. We might get one 20 or 30 years from now, maybe even sooner if God is more merciful to us than we deserve. But I mean, to get a really traditionally-minded Pope is going to take somebody who’s young right now reaching the age of 75, but having these more traditional ideas. We meet with young clergy. All the young clergy are conservative or traditional, but they’re very far away from being bishops or popes. So we have a lot of work to do regardless of who the pope is.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. Let’s just talk about the situation with the Latin mass, with Traditionis Custodes, and what we’ve seen… of course that came out was that 2019? It feels like it’s forever. I think that’s what year it came out. Wasn’t it like five years ago, or was it… I feel like it was before COVID, right? Yeah, it was 2021.
Peter Kwasniewski:
2021, exactly.
Eric Sammons:
Sorry. Okay. Yeah, 2021. It was after COVID. Yeah, I remember that now. Okay. Anyway, what we see is we’ve seen waves of bishops responding to it. There’s the first wave of the ones who were ideologically completely against traditional Latin mass cracked down. But a lot of them just let it go, and then we see another wave where someone would start cracking down on ad orientem Novus Ordo weirdly, and things like that.
We’re seeing, I feel like another wave this year, and it really seems to be stepping up. Publicly, we know of, like for example, in Austin, Texas, the cathedral mass is being shut down. I actually have an article in Crisis coming out this week from a woman who attends that mass. And then now we just heard that the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Nichols is not allowing the traditional Latin mass, the tritium masses this Easter for the first time. This is the first time, it won’t be since the 90s, I think. And so we’re seeing this, and also, I’ve heard that just from… I can’t say where or anything like that, but some other dioceses are getting ready to also clamp down. And they explicitly, the word is it’s because the Vatican is putting very hard pressure on them. You’ve got to do this.
I hear different things, and I know the knee-jerk thing is to get angry with the bishops who go along with this, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t on some level, but I’ve heard also that some bishops, what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to work out something to keep the Vatican relatively pacified, while still keeping at least a traditional Latin mass here or there. And their thinking is that… I mean, this is bishops who are close to the age of retirement or have already reached it, and their thinking is they can help influence who the next bishop after them will be, and there’s all these different things. So I just want to get your thoughts on the lay of the land right now when it comes to the implementation, Traditionis Custodes, how bishops are reacting and what’s going on with that.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yes. Well, I think you’re right. First of all, there is a new wave coming along, and the Vatican, they’re not very savvy when it comes to media relations in general, but I think they have picked up well enough by now that every time they issue some document from the top-down that says, everybody has to do this, it creates a firestorm of protest. They’re not using that strategy anymore after Cardinal Roach issued his rescript whenever that was, a year ago or something. I think what they’ve figured out is we just need to send the papal nuncio or somebody who represents the Vatican to various bishops, sit down in person and say, “Look, there’s no arguing about this. You are going to do this, this, this, and this.” Remember Bishop Strickland. Or just something like that. I mean, that’s really all they have to do. I’m sorry to say it, but the big crisis in the hierarchy of the church right now is spineless bishops.
They don’t stand up for the truth. They don’t stand up for the rights of the faithful. They don’t stand up for anything, it seems, whether it’s secular pressure or pressure coming from the Vatican. And I think part of the problem is that they have internalized for such a long time this… it’s a ultramontanism, but it’s more like a bureaucratic corporate mentality, where we all have to just follow company policy. In a way, that’s what seminarians are… It’s drilled into them from the first day they enter seminary is we are company men. We all act together. We think together. We speak together, we follow our orders. It’s like a military model, but with automatons, with no room for discernment or discretion or exceptions or whatever. Since the bishops are sort of the most polished versions of those people who have the bureaucratic corporate mentality, it seems they’re almost not capable morally of saying, “Thank you, Nuncio, for letting me know that. I’ll take that to prayer and I’ll pray about that some more, and we’ll come up with the right decision for my people, for my flock, thanks for visiting me.”
They’re not really able to stand up, and especially they don’t seem to be able to coordinate among themselves. I’m convinced that if let’s say 20 bishops, and I think that there could be that many in the United States, 20 bishops got together who were all very much in favor of keeping the Latin mass alive and well in their dioceses. If they all got together and had a common policy and said, “This is what we’re going to do, we’re all going to stick together,” maybe even publicly come out in that way, is the Vatican going to sack all 20 of them? What’s going to happen? There is strength in numbers, and it seems like that just isn’t in their thinking.
I’ve also said that about diocesan priests. There are certain dioceses where you have maybe 10 or 15 priests who celebrate the Latin mass, and it’s being taken away from all of them. Why don’t they all get together and stand up together and say, “No, we’re not going to accept this. All of us are retiring, we’re all leaving the diocese if you take the Latin mass away from us.” Anyway, in Bound by Truth, I argue in defense of this move.
Eric Sammons:
But I think you would acknowledge it is a difficult one, because nobody wants to be the first one because the first one’s the one who gets shot down. Gets the Strickland treatment. And nobody wants that to be the case. I mean, obviously they have to be faithful no matter the price.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yeah. That’s why they have to act together. That’s my point, is that then there isn’t the first one who’s shot down. Now, I suppose if 20 bishops got together, then the pope would say, “Find out who’s the bishop behind all of this, and let’s sack him.” I’m not saying that it would be somehow like a bulletproof vest, but come on. At the end of the day, the Catholics who are attending the traditional Latin mass are some of the most faithful, dedicated, hardworking, generous Catholics, pious Catholics, big families, vocations. How in the world can any sane person justify… how can any believer in Christ justify targeting these people and taking away from them not just any old liturgy, like a charismatic guitar mass or whatever, but taking away from them the immemorial liturgy of the Roman church, the one that most of our saints prayed and were sanctified in.
This is such an absurdity, it the height of absurdity, and I think that people who are willing to swallow that absurdity, that is who are willing to say, oh, sure. It doesn’t matter what this rite is, how venerable, how immemorial, how holy saint saturated. It doesn’t matter. What the pope says goes. They are nominal, they’re legal. They have no sense of the truth, of goodness, of beauty in itself. It’s all just about what the great leader dictates. Well, I’m sorry, that sounds like North Korea. Or China. This doesn’t sound like the Catholic Church. It doesn’t sound like any human or humane society.
Eric Sammons:
And it does come back to what you said, spinelessness, because I think most bishops… I’m not talking about the ideologues, the Cupiches or the Gregorys, but most bishops, they know that the people who attend the traditional mass are exactly as you described them. They’re just soul of the earth Catholics who are just doing their jobs, they’re maintaining the faith, they’re having big families, they’re producing vocations, all the things that Vatican II wanted everybody to do. They’re actually doing it in real life. And I think they know that, but ultimately, there’s not enough of them, in the sense that for a bishop, there’s not enough political capital he’s willing to spend for that small group. And so ultimately, it’s like when I have to balance between, okay, the corrupt people at the Vatican are telling me this to do to this small group.
It’s human nature. It’s what we do. You make a scapegoat. It’s like, okay, I will do what they say to the small group. I know they’re fine, but ultimately they’re not that powerful. They can’t change whether or not I’m going to be the bishop or not, and they give money, but still, they’re probably not that much money that they give. Because let’s be honest, a lot of traditionalists don’t give to the diocese. Which is spinelessness. I’m not defending, I’m just explaining the thought process.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yeah, no, and I would add here that it’s really only the bishops who have a deep appreciation from personal experience, of the traditional right, and of the communities, the traditional communities. When they have that intimate personal experience, they recognize the value of it. They recognize that it’s a precious jewel, that it’s a powerhouse for renewal in the church. They recognize that. They see the young people who are drawn to it. You’ve probably noticed lately, there’s this rash of articles about Gen Z and how they’re being drawn to tradition in this way or that way, and often in weird forms we know that. But often enough, they’re drawn towards Catholic traditions, specifically traditional Catholicism. It’s a powerful tool for evangelization. I think there are some bishops who are clued into that, but the other thing you have to wonder is, I mean, really, I agree with you that a lot of bishops, they might be having this thinking where they’re not really trying to shut down the Latin mass as such.
They feel pressured by Rome. They feel like they’re between a rock and a hard place. They’re just trying to placate or whatever. Fine, that might be true of them. But surely there must be bishops who are intelligent enough to recognize that the reason, the current regime in Rome, and people like Cupich, McElroy and whatever, the reason they want to shut down the Latin mass communities is because they know that those communities are not in favor of the new religion, of the new church, of Pope Francis, of the globalist, liberal, progressive new world order type church that Francis is very much behind, and so they know that these are the pockets of either explicit resistance, somebody like me, or implicit resistance, just by the fact of people going to this old liturgy and hearing Orthodox preaching and having large families, these people are seen as enemies of the development of doctrine, of the God of surprises that these people apparently believe in.
I don’t really know what they believe in ultimately, but it seems like at least superficially, that they believe in some new version of Christianity, and so they have to get rid of the old version of Christianity. So that’s very much what is driving all of this. It’s not about fidelity to Vatican II, it’s not about adhering to the Novus Ordo, it’s about stamping out the traditional Catholic way of life and way of belief. That’s what it’s about.
Eric Sammons:
And honestly, I think everybody knows that too. They might not say it outright like you just did, but they know that’s it, because the whole fidelity of Vatican II thing is such a joke anymore, because I would argue very strongly that your typical Latin mass community is a better fulfillment of the desires of the council fathers than anything else you’re going to see today.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Of course.
Eric Sammons:
I mean just it’s closer to Sacrosanctum Concilium, but it’s also closer to everything else they talk about in a lot of ways. It’s the type of parish they actually foresaw and wanted.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Exactly, and if fidelity to Vatican II, or infidelity to Vatican II is a reason for shutting churches down, then pretty much every church in the Nova Ordo world should be shut down with the exception of a few unicorn places here and there.
Eric Sammons:
Exactly. Now, let’s shift a little bit to lay people in this situation in that, okay, your Latin mass gets shut down. I talked about this a little on a podcast I did about how they throw you the bone of the reverent Novus Ordo, but of course that’s not the same thing, but for a lay Catholic family, I will say I have a lot of empathy for Catholics in that situation, in that it’s not an easy thing. First of all, there’s not always an easy solution. There might not be any Latin mass within a couple of hours once yours is shut down. But also the choices between a society of St. Pius X, maybe a society of a continent’s independent chapel, maybe there is a reverent Novus Ordo, the unicorn that we just mentioned nearby, or maybe there’s a Novus Ordo… maybe the parish that they’re in that loses the Latin mass replaces it with the Novus Ordo with the same priest and everything. You have a certain attachment to the parish and the priest and stuff like that. What advice do you give to a lay Catholic family in this difficult situation?
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yeah, I mean, as you said, it’s a difficult question because people have different… I mean, we know this from long experience. People have different toleration levels or tolerance levels. I mean, I myself provided music for decades at the Novus Ordo. That’s where I got to be intimately familiar with it, and was able to contrast and compare it with the traditional rights, which I was also providing music for. So I was living in this strange, almost bipolar world where in the morning I was singing at the Missae Cantata, and in the evening I was singing for the Novus Ordo. And so, I really had this very intimate… this time of close comparison. And so that’s where that fueled a lot of my writing. And actually 25 years ago, I could tolerate a lot more. I didn’t know as much as I know now, I didn’t notice as much for some reason.
I think when you become steeped in the traditional rights of the church, you understand the fittingness and the beauty and also the doctrinal and moral issues that are at stake in the way we worship. All of that stuff becomes more and more apparent to you over time and becomes more and more difficult to go back to the Novus Ordo, even when it’s celebrated rather well, because there are things about it that just start to grate you, because you can see, oh, they changed that. Why did they change that? Oh, it doesn’t seem to be for a good reason. And there’s almost never a good reason for the changes that were made. It’s always something like lay involvement or women involvement or conformity to the modern styles of music, or whatever it might be. There’s always some dubious reason behind these changes, and you start to pick up on that, especially if you study the matter and you don’t just use your senses.
So it’s really difficult to say what people should do, but honestly at this point, I say to people, look, Pope Francis made it clear they want to stamp out the Latin mass completely. They really do. They said that we shouldn’t be surprised at what they’re doing. They said, “We’re going to phase this out.” And when they gave two-year extensions to this place or that place, we know what that means. It means after two years, very likely the answer is that’s it. Goodbye. Provide a Novus Ordo for these people and educate them, or reeducate them. So I say to people, look, this is a battle over the very identity of Catholicism. It’s a battle over the meaning of Catholicism, our connection to truth, which you can find millions of saints, or millions, thousands of passages in the writings of the saints where they talk about the normative value of tradition.
We do what we do because we inherited it from our fathers. They did it. It’s good for them, it’s good for us. We don’t introduce novelties and so forth. So I think this is not just about my preference, it’s my preference to worship this way or that way. It’s about a whole way of believing and living as Catholics, and that’s under attack by the progressives and the modernists. That is very much under attack. If you recognize that to be the case, and I think very many people do recognize that to be the case, then you need to seek out a traditional right of the church. Eastern or Western. You should not settle for the Novus Ordo for all of the reasons that we could go into in any number of conversations. You shouldn’t settle for that because what you’re doing, if you accept the withdrawal of the traditional right and the substitution of the new right, you’re basically just throwing in the towel and you’re just saying, “Okay, I give up on this. I’m not going to fight this anymore.”
No, go and find a traditional mass. If that means The Society, then go to The Society. If that means a Byzantine Rite at least as a temporary home away from home, then go to the Byzantine Rite? If it means thinking about relocating, granted, that’s risky because Latin masses can get shot down anywhere, but there are dioceses that have more Latin masses or that have the fraternity of St. Peter or the Institute of Christ the King, which for now seem to be safe and much more stable. A fraternity parish has Latin mass right now, 365 days a year. So I think that there are hard decisions people have to make. I’m not going to try to make the decisions for them, but I think that what we must never do is simply surrender altogether, the fundamental principle of the traditionalist movement, which is that we Catholics have a right to their inheritance and that we have a duty to receive and to cherish and to pass on that inheritance.
Eric Sammons:
Now, when we’re talking about all this resistance and obedience and all this, are you encouraged about the massive Episcopal resistance to Fiducia Supplicans that basically… I mean, all of Africa and bishops around… we’re not talking about lay people, but bishops around the world have basically just said, “We’re not going to implement this.”
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yes. No, it’s very, very heartening. Contrary to Michael Lofton, who thinks it’s the devil’s work for anybody to refuse or resist Fiducia Supplicans, I think it’s a clear example of the census fidelium that even Pope Francis talks about, although he doesn’t seem to understand what he means by that, or he has a notion that’s not Catholic. But the census fidelium is the sense that the baptized and well-catechized Catholic has, of what is in accord with the will of God? What is in accord with sacred scripture and with sacred tradition and what is not? And with questions of liturgical tradition, they’re complicated. There’s a lot of subtleties there. You have to learn a lot to understand, even to get up to speed with the liturgy wars, as you can see it on social media, most people are absolutely clueless about these things. They don’t even know what they’re talking about.
They say, “Oh, Pius V invented mass after the Council of Trent.” They say the most absurd things. Tim Staples said the other day on Catholic Answers that, “Pius V after the Council of Trent, he created a Roman rite and imposed it on everybody, and that’s what Pope Francis is doing for us now.” I mean, the colossal historical ignorance involved in that is just… it’s unbelievable. But what I’m saying is with liturgical tradition, there’s a lot to learn and there are subtleties, and therefore you can understand why not everybody erupted into resistance against Traditionis Custodes. But with Fiducia Supplicans, we’re dealing with sodomy. We’re dealing with the basic commandments of God that are as clear. If you want to talk about black and white, this is a black and white issue. There’s no gray area in this whatsoever. And because it was dealing with basic morals, sixth and ninth commandment, bread and butter, nothing simpler than this in the world.
I mean, the only thing simpler would be if the pope had said God doesn’t exist, or Christ didn’t rise from the dead. So, because there’s this very clear attack on the natural moral law, and the revealed divine law, that’s why there was this explosion. The African bishops, “No way,” even the Belgian bishops, “No way. We’re not going to do this.” And so I think it’s a sign of… and the church’s immune system is weak. I say right now the church has an autoimmune deficiency. I mean, that’s very much the case. The church seems to be attacking itself in many ways. But in this case, the immune system worked right. Those white blood cells, they rallied. And thanks be to God for that.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, it was funny to watch it in real time because the day it came out, I think it was a week before Christmas, all the usual suspects, and I include myself in this, had their usual reactions. I wrote something very quickly that was saying what was wrong with it. And other people like us were people… the Michael Loftons and those people were saying, “Oh no, it’s great.” Very quickly. And you saw Bishop Schneider and his… and I can’t remember the name of his bishop, he’s the auxiliary under, they came out with something the first day saying, “No, we’re not going to do this.” And so it’s like, okay, you expect that. And there was here and there a few… and then it just seemed funny because first, there’s a statement from an African bishop saying in very diplomatic language, like, “Okay, we’re not really going to go along with this.”
But they try to make it as… and then each successive one seems to be more like… and then finally they’re just like, “No, we’re not doing this. We’re just rejecting this.” And you’ve seen more and more bishops do that. And I think you’re right that we would’ve wished they had done this for Traditionis Custodes. But it does make sense because there’s been so long of brainwashing. To this day, I bet you there is a sizable number of bishops who actually think the only difference between the Novus Ordo and the traditional Latin mass is that one is in Latin and one is not. I bet you there are a sizable number of bishops who think that. I know there’s tons of laypeople who still think that. I encounter it all the time, but I bet you there are bishops who think that. And of course if you think that it does make no sense to keep doing the traditional Latin mass.
I mean, just oh, they’re the exact same thing. Just one in a different language. So I think though you’re right though with this, when you see Father James Martin jump out there and bless a married couple, two men in a very public way, that gets in the New York Times the next day, and it’s obviously all pre-planned, I think that people know, okay, this is a step too far. And I don’t think Fernandez and Francis realized that they crossed a line because they’ve always pushed it and keep pushing it, pushing it, and I think they didn’t realize they jumped this time. And so I do think that was very encouraging. And I feel like Francis, as he gets near the end of his life, he’s doing more and more radical stuff, which I think in God’s way, is a good thing in the sense that it opens eyes for people to say, “Okay, we’re not going to go along with this.”
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yeah, I agree with you. It’s been pointed out for a long time that… So Christianity in recent centuries has tended towards moralism. That’s a defect. It’s tended away from dogma, from a concern about right doctrine and orthodoxy or right worship, because orthodoxy means both of those things, towards morality. The morality is always important, but it’s always in the bigger scheme of things, Christian morals has been seen as flowing from the doctrine and from the liturgy and supporting those things. For example, the reason you want to be a moral person is to be able to participate worthily in mass and receive holy communion. That’s the way we should be thinking about it. Not Christianity is about making me a better person and oh yeah, I guess I have to go to mass too. So we have a very backwards way of thinking about it. But still, as a result, people still respond to moral issues to the pro-life issue.
So when Pope Francis appointed, what I forget, Masu Kofta or whatever woman’s name was, this radically pro-abortion feminist to a Pontifical council for five years, that created, rightly so, a scandal. Father Rupnik has created a huge scandal because he sexually abused nuns for many, many years. And many of them. And so these sorts of issues, they touch a nerve with everybody, with the common man. They touch a nerve. I just think that it’s good in the providential scheme of things for people to see, yes, the pope and his curia can be gravely in error, at least to the extent of being gravely negligent, and in ambiguity and lack of clarity in moral teaching so that they can better appreciate the arguments of say, Bound by Truth, or Ultramontanism and Tradition about deviations in doctrine and in liturgy. They appreciate the deviations in morals. Now they need to appreciate that there can be deviations in the other two areas, right? Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi. These three things can never be separated from each other and they always have deep connections between them.
Eric Sammons:
So I want to finish this conversation up by putting it in the… I want you to put it in a historical context for Catholics. I think this is one of the things that first of, I think helps Catholics a lot when they understand they just aren’t in the moment. And also, I think it’s something that we often don’t have a knowledge of, and so we miss it. And so, particularly, I feel like the context of today’s age in the Catholic Church is we’re very much products of both Vatican I and Vatican II. I mean, those are our councils. I know people always think about Vatican II, but I think Vatican I, I think Tim Flanders does a very good job of reminding us of that over at OnePeterFive. But I feel like those two councils, there are the most influential things in the church. And so how would you say the historical moment we’re in, put it in perspective in light of those two councils, how Catholics should go about their daily lives, while keeping the historical sense of where we are in the church?
Peter Kwasniewski:
Yeah, it’s a very complicated question. There’s 200-
Eric Sammons:
And answer in 30 seconds. No, I’m just kidding.
Peter Kwasniewski:
200 pages worth of that in the book, Ultramontanism and Tradition. But yeah, so you can think of it this way. Vatican I was going to talk about a lot of different topics. They had a full outline of topics. And as the political situation degenerated in Rome in 1870, and it was looking increasingly as if there was going to be an invasion of Rome, and that the council would be endangered, there was a move to basically thrust ahead of all the other agenda points, the discussion of papal infallibility, which was being pushed very hard by the group of people historically known as the Ultramontanes, or the Ultramontanists. Cardinal Manning of England was the leader of that group. And they wanted a very strong statement of the pope’s infallibility. And some of them, especially the laypeople like VO, they wanted it to be that the pope is always infallible, or at least he should be treated as such.
That was definitely not what was passed. A fairly moderate statement of papal infallibility was passed. But the problem is the council ended rapidly after that, and the rest of the agenda was never covered. So it was a very imbalanced ecclesiology. It was like all about the pope and practically nothing about anything else in terms of ecclesiology. And so the teaching, the letter of Vatican I is actually very clear. And both of these books really drill into what does it say and what does it not say? And what are the dubia, as Timothy Flanders puts it of Vatican I? What are the questions that remain open-ended questions on which Catholics can have differences of opinion?
That’s very important to see that there are these open-ended questions. But there was a spirit of Vatican I, just like there was a spirit of Vatican II, and the spirit was one of sort of irresistible, uncontrolled centralization that was already going on in the 19th century, and of concentration of all authority and power in the hands of the pope, to the extent that he became seen as in a sense like the font from which everything in Catholic life flows. And you’ve talked about this in some great articles. In fact, some of your articles are in this anthology. So as if the pope is now sort of the Delphi Oracle for all teaching, he’s the standard meter bar for all morality.
I mean, it’s really this exaltation of the pope in a way that is bizarre in terms of what he’s actually supposed to be and to do. I mean, Newman says, if you look at history, the pope was the final court of appeals. He was the remora or the barrier to novelty. Basically, he was there in Rome doing his own thing, praying the liturgy most of the time, nobody hardly heard of him. And then there was some controversy. Jansenism. And then the pope would come in, slam hammer down all these errors and say, “Okay, you can’t hold these things.” And then he’d go back to his quiet life of prayer. And that’s basically the way that church functioned for century after century after century. Spirit of Vatican I made the pope the rock star. It made him the central figure of Catholicism. Pictures everywhere of the pope.
And so I think that the unintended consequence of the doctrine of Vatican I was to make everybody constantly look to the pope as the only reference point for what it is to be Catholic or even what Catholicism is. Not to tradition, even if it’s millennia old, not to the liturgy, not to the church fathers, not to St. Thomas Aquinas, but just to the pope. And if the pope tells you to look at something else, then you can go and look at that, but only if the pope tells you to. So it is this very weird inflation, hyperpapalism is what I call it that isn’t… it’s not in Vatican I, but it flowed from it by the way people interpreted it and the way they applied it and the assumptions they had and the mythology they built up around the pope.
And this is very similar to what happened at Vatican II. Vatican II, unlike Vatican I does actually have problems in it. There are real problems in the formulations of some Vatican II documents. Dignitatis humanae certainly. Unitatis redintegratio on ecumenism, which doesn’t clearly talk about the conversion of Protestants back to the Catholic faith or the Orthodox for that matter. And certainly Nostra aetate about Christians and Muslims adoring the same God. And there are all these problems that Bishop Schneider has pointed out, that should actually be corrected or clarified or even condemned in the future. So there were problems in the texts of Vatican II, but clearly also here there was a spirit of Vatican II that went way beyond anything in the council and in fact contradicted it rather flagrantly. “Oh, so Vatican II says we should have mass versus populum in English with popular tunes.” No, it said nothing about versus populum. It assumed ad orientem would remain.
It said Latin should remain the primary language, and it said that Gregorian chant is the principle music. So the spirit of Vatican II is radically different from Vatican II itself. That much, Benedict XVI is right about. So there’s a very interesting parallel between the way these two councils played out. And the last point I want to make is Vatican II and its aftermath is really people talk about collegiality and society of St. Pius X is always having a fit about collegiality. The fact of the matter is, Stuart Chessman talks about this in the anthology. Vatican II was the supreme triumph of ultramontanism. Why? Because it was driven through by John XXIII. Nobody really thought that a council was necessary. I mean, he was the only one who thought a council was necessary. Pius XII thought about it and then thought better of it. Okay? We know that historically.
John XXIII drove through this council. He was the one who allowed all of the schemas that had been written before the council, which were actually very strong, good, solid documents to be thrown out. That was another Ultramontanist movement moment. And then when Paul VI came in, he drove the council in a certain direction, and especially after the council Paul VI, he took the liturgical reform. He just went off into the horizon, into the distance with his own and Bugnini’s and others radical plans, that clearly he must have known were not what the council fathers had talked about. I’ve read what the council fathers said about the liturgy. They were not talking about the Novus Ordo. And so really, Vatican II, it talks a lot about the rights of bishops and so on, but we have not seen a real recovery of the rights and duties of bishops since the time of Vatican II. We are still living in an Ultramontane church. And that is actually the source of a lot of our difficulties right now.
Eric Sammons:
Well, that was a great answer because I knew my question was like you could spend hours and weeks and months on it, but that was a good synopsis. I think that really did make sense to me and the moment we’re in. And I think it’s funny because something you said made me realize a parallel. There’s a certain parallel between the Novus Ordo, how it came to be after Vatican II and Fiducia Supplicans after the Synod. Because the Synod did not want it. I mean, they were like, “No, we’re not…” And then all of a sudden, pope was like, “No, we’re just going to do it.” And the same thing, the Novus Ordo came to be, and it wasn’t what the Vatican II asked for. It’s not the liturgical… because there was liturgical reform in the air and there wasn’t a discussion, but it wasn’t what was asked for by the council. Clearly-
Peter Kwasniewski:
Well there’s an even closer parallel, as I’m sure you know. There was a synod of bishops in 1967 who was given a preview of what was called then the Missae Normativa, which we now call the Novus Ordo. And the preview of the mass did not receive the two thirds majority vote of approval that it would have required. Actually, it got a bunch of no’s and it got a bunch of… I mean, I think it’s scandalous that it received as much approval as it did, but even those who approved it often didn’t, so in the technical term juxta modum, which means “with reservations”. And then they spelled out what the reservations were. Well, guess what, even though the Missae Normativa did not please the majority of the Synod of 1967, it was hardly changed at all after that. There are people who say, “Oh, it was changed in this way, in that way.”
No, not substantially. It was still the project that Bugnini had in mind. And so, it’s actually very interesting that the same kind of… there’s a lot of hypocrisy in the church. People talk about collegiality, the pope talks about Synodality all the time, but he runs the church like a mafioso. I mean, everybody knows that. Everybody in Rome knows that. He’s the one in charge, he’s the boss. He says what happens, all the rest of is window dressing. Synodality was an attempt to set up an elaborate window dressing for what a small click of people in Rome wanted to push forward. And when they saw that they weren’t going to get it from the Synod, they just said, “Ah, to hell with it, we’re just going to go with this anyway.” Well, Raymond de Souza, Fr. De Souza wrote that fantastic piece of the Catholic thing about how synodality is dead and buried. And he basically says, “Do you think anybody’s going to believe any more that synodality is any more than hot air when it was massively contradicted on such a hot button item?” Anyway, very interesting.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, it is. I think we’re going to wrap it up there, but I appreciate this conversation. I think it’s great. I want to make sure people know, of course, about the two books right now. Ultramontanism and Tradition: The role of Papal Authority in the Catholic Faith. This is edited by Dr. Kwasniewski. A lot of different great writers in there. He also threw me in as a bone, I think. And then we have written by Dr. Kwasniewski, Bound by Truth: Authority, Obedience, Tradition and the Common Good. And I will be sure to put links on the show notes of where to get them. And I’m going to ask Peter actually afterwards to make sure I get the right links so we get them in the right place. We try here not to get people to buy it from the bookseller that will not be named. But I get that people go there. So I encourage people to buy both these books. I think they’re great. So thank you very much, Peter, for being on the program.
Peter Kwasniewski:
Thank you, Eric. It’s a delight.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, everybody, until next time. God love you.