Guest
Fr. Gabriel Mosher entered the Dominicans in 2007 and was ordained in 2015. He spent his first seven years as a priest at Holy Rosary parish in Portland, OR. He is now pastor of St. Catherine of Sienna in Salt Lake City, as well as pastor of the local Newman Center.
Links
- “America’s New Catholic Priests: Young, Confident and Conservative” (article)
- “‘A step back in time’: America’s Catholic Church sees an immense shift toward the old ways” (article)
Transcript
Eric Sammons:
Recent news stories have highlighted that young Catholics, both clergy and laity, are increasingly conservative. We’re going to look at the reasons behind that growing trend today. Hello, I’m Eric Sammons, your host, Editor-in-Chief of Crisis Magazine. Before I get started, I just want to encourage people to hit that like button, to subscribe to channel, let other people know about it. Follow us on social media @CrisisMag at all the different social media channels and subscribe to our email newsletter. Just go to crisismagazine.com, fill in your email address, and we will send an email to you once a day with our articles. I feel like I’m a broken record saying that, but I figure there are new people every single time.
We have a great guest today, it’s Father Gabriel Mosher. He is a Dominican. He entered the Dominicans in 2007, he was ordained in 2015. He spent his first seven years as a priest at Holy Rosary Parish in Portland Oregon. He is now pastor of St. Catherine of Siena in Salt Lake City, as well as the pastor of the local Newman Center. Welcome to the program, father.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Well, thank you so much for having me, Eric. I appreciate it.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, so you were recommended to me because this topic, I think, is very interesting. That we’ve seen the New York Times had an article not long ago about more conservative priests, the priests being ordained in America were more conservative. Associated Press had an article about the parishes becoming more conservative. So you’d be a great person dealing with young people a lot and being relatively young yourself, I mean, I can say that with my gray beard here. You have a gray beard, but you’re actually-
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Yeah. I’ve got a nice one here. But I’m only 45, so yeah.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, there you go. So I think it’d be great. But why don’t you tell us a little bit first about your background. I read a little bit of it. It’s kind of fascinating how you returned to the Catholic faith and then decided to become a priest.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Yeah, so basically I was raised in a Catholic family. Family is very culturally Catholic, but also not necessarily in a bad way culturally Catholic. I would definitely describe my great-grandparents as very saintly people, at least on my mother’s side. And my grandparents also, very, very devout people. And so there’s a lot of that there. There’s a lot of the typical turmoils of my parents’ generation and then my own being sort of at the end of Gen X, beginning of the Millennials, trying to recover, rediscover the faith in many ways. In some ways I think of it as our rebellion against the rebellious generations. And just discovering that the faith actually matters more than just a label or an identity. I’d always considered myself Catholic, even though we didn’t really go to mass, we didn’t participate in the life of the parish. I wasn’t able to participate in the sacramental life of the church until I was an adult. I was baptized. I received my first confession when I was a kid, but not first communion or confirmation. That was when I was 20, 21.
And so I think that’s a very typical story in many ways. I discovered the need for faith out of tragedy. I was a student at Texas A&M University under the Marine Corps Scholarship, and there was a big tragedy there on the campus and that affected my life tremendously. It caused serious reflections on what’s actually important in life, and that sort of brought me back to the consideration of the faith. And in that consideration, I left A&M, I dropped my scholarship. I was having troubles after that. My schooling wasn’t going very well. I was a mess, to be honest.
And so I went home and in the process of going back home to New Mexico, living with my grandparents, because I was living with them at the time, rediscovering the faith in the midst of all that, getting squared away with the sacraments. And at the same time, I was asked by the young priest in my parish and then later on the archbishop there, Archbishop Sheehan, if I would become a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Santa Fe and I just said, “Yeah, sure. Why not?” And then I did that for a couple years and then left, worked for the Knights of Columbus, did a couple other things, and then eventually entered the order in 2007, and this is definitely where I needed to be.
Eric Sammons:
There’s got to be a certain irony. When you said my schooling wasn’t going so well, now you’re a Dominican.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Yeah, yeah.
Eric Sammons:
It’s kind of Dominicans’ thing is to do school well, right?
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Yeah, no, exactly. A Dominican that isn’t studying is a Dominican who isn’t praying. Yeah, I mean, my education wasn’t doing well, and part of it was a lack of discipline, but also I was going through a severe sort of life change and depression and all sorts of crazy things going on. I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. And the way I would describe it now, having a deeper insight into the faith of how grace works, how God works through us, is I would say that there’s, on one part, there was a little bit of a natural problem because schooling and stuff always came pretty easy to me so I didn’t develop the habits that I needed to be successful in college at first. That wasn’t until later until I got to the seminary that I started learning how to do things the right way. And also the other part of it is that the fruits of the Holy Spirit weren’t manifest. It was just clearly not manifest in that milieu as I look at it retrospectively, and that’s not where I was supposed to be.
Eric Sammons:
Now, you were in a seminary about 15 years ago, right? Yes, right?
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Sammons:
And so what was the seminary like then in the sense of what we’re talking about today as far as being conservative and things like that? Was it… Because I’ve heard stories from back… Like I have friends my age who were in the seminaries in the early ’90s, and they left because it was just really bad. And I know every seminary is a little different, but just very liberal, very, frankly, pro-homosexual, and they left. So what was it like about 15 years ago when you were there?
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Well, I’d say that, a little correction, I’ve been to three different institutions of formation. So my first experience was in the early 2000s. That was both at Holy Apostles and Mount Angel. And then when I entered the order in 2007, that was with our formation program, which is different than a normal seminary. I could say that, well, when I was at Holy Apostles, I entered in 2001, that was a wonderful place. I had a really good experience there. There were, later on I discovered, some problems in the place, some problems with some of the formators, some problems with some of the students, but while I was there, I didn’t experience any of that or really even see that. It wasn’t very clear to me. Maybe I was just a naive 21-year-old, but I didn’t see that.
And the philosophy and theology that I got there was excellent, and the liturgy. We were at the very beginning, I’d say, of the beginning of the restoration of some good, solid, Catholic tradition. I know that we were the first sort of group of people to rediscover the chanting of the Ordinary of the Mass, for instance. We had the St. John Cantius. They weren’t called canons of St. John Cantius at those times. They were the Society of St. John Cantius, so they were there, the Fathers of Mercy were there, our diocese there, the CFRs were going there. A lot of different groups were there at the time, and that experience was extremely positive.
And we were heavily influenced by things like the Adoremus Bulletin, and that was around the same time as the New Liturgical Movement blog was going strong in those early days when Shawn started that up. A lot of different things like that. Sacred music, sacred architecture. We had Steven Schloeder came and gave a rector’s conference on sacred architecture because his book had recently been published by Ignatius Press. And it was a really good sort of beginning, our foundation for what was to come.
And I think that’s because our rector experienced that transition period after the council where one year, as he described it, he was getting calluses on his knees from praying and the next year when he went back to the seminary, they forbade him from praying the rosary or doing the holy hours or anything like that. So his experience of that, Father Mosey’s experience of that, really formed our experience at Holy Apostles, really good.
When I went to Mount Angel, it wasn’t the same. There was some good things there, some really good priests there, a couple of really, really good ones. But I also experienced some of those negative drawbacks that you discussed while I was there. That’s why I left. But then when I entered with the Order in 2007, I would say we were very strong. Very strong, very faithful desire to be in the heart of the church. We’re still in the midst, and we still are really in the midst of our renewal and internal reform of our life as Dominicans, but we were really far ahead of the bell curve by the time that I got there and as I was going through formation.
Eric Sammons:
So Dominicans, do they have their own seminary here in America that you go to?
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
So each province is responsible for the formation of its own friars. So we don’t have seminaries so much as we have houses of formation, because every Dominican is already a Dominican. We’re not growing into anything. We’re not seeds in a seedbed, so to speak. So the Eastern Province has the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., the Central Province has their house of formation in St. Louis, and we have our house of formation in Oakland and our school in Berkeley, and that’s the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology. And the Southern Province joins the Central Province for their initial formation.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, okay.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Yeah, it’s a completely separate ratio than what the secular clergy get.
Eric Sammons:
Right. It is an interesting thing because I don’t think younger people realize the sea change between the ’80s and even the ’90s into the 2000s.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Huge.
Eric Sammons:
Because in the ’90s, we did have this uptick of, like from JPII, I mean mostly that inspiration where, I converted in that time, a lot of people were converting. A lot of excitement, good apostles, like the Catholic answers were really starting to take hold, but the seminaries still were pretty bad. I mean, a lot of them, and then-
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Even when I was there in the early 2000s, I mean, there were stories of other places that were just horrific. I’ve heard all sorts of war stories from different priests and friends, yeah.
Eric Sammons:
And I’m not saying seminaries are perfect now, but I think the difference, though, between now and then is radically different. And so what do you think were the keys that led to seminaries becoming… Okay, just for everybody in the audience to know, when we use the term conservative, we’re not talking politically here, we’re just simply saying more in tune with the tradition of the church. And I know there’s different ways we can use those labels, but that’s all I’m talking about here. Why do you think that happened and what led to the seminaries becoming more conservative and I think the men entering being more conservative, I think, when they got there as well?
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
I actually think there’s two things, and it’s very, very clear to me. It’s two things or two persons. John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Those are the principle influences worldwide that formed people of our age group and younger in the faith. And then also, if you think about it, as someone, I’m about ready to turn 45 this year, I have friends that their children are already out of college, right? So they’re Zoomers and even sort of late Millennials in some cases, and so their parents were influenced by John Paul II and Pope Benedict. And now them as becoming like parents in the next generation already after that, they’re influenced by these same things. And so there’s this cascading sort of effect. And I think those were the two primary influences.
And in some ways, Ben XVI more than John Paul II. John Paul II was a rock star. He was larger than life, but Benedict XVI was always by his side. He was there since 1978, well, ’79 really, as the head of the CDF and then himself Pope and being part of that theological formation of the faithful from that point forward. And I don’t think that’s something that can be discounted or even spoken about without… It’s superlative, his influence is a superlative influence on the last two or three generations of Catholics. Especially English-speaking Catholics. I can’t, I’m not sure about everyone else, but definitely English-speaking Catholics. Those are the two ones.
I would say in the United States, there’s another influence that’s a subtle influence that people might not be aware of, but it permeates everything and that’s the Integrated Humanities Program from Kansas. So John Senior, I think, and his godchildren and whatnot have had a profound influence, particularly on the American church.
Eric Sammons:
Wow, that’s interesting. And isn’t that where Bishop Conley, I believe, went through that? I think, was he a convert through that? I can’t remember now, but I know I-
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Yes.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, that’s what I thought. And I actually, when he was a priest, he was the chaplain of the pro-life group I was in.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Oh, nice.
Eric Sammons:
Many, many years ago. He probably doesn’t remember me at all, but yeah, I’ve kept up with his career over the years.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
He’s a great guy.
Eric Sammons:
Yes, very much so. Would you say then today, from what you know about people you speak to and things like that, would you say most seminarians now, is what the New York Times saying, is it true? Because you always have to ask that whenever the New York Times says something, is it actually true? But would you say that what you’ve seen from priests coming, young priests over the past few years that they are, it’s continuing this trend of being more conservative, more traditional?
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
I think by and large, when a young man enters the seminary or enters religious life, same with a sister, enter religious life, their desire is to be faithful. I don’t think anyone enters with a desire to not be faithful. Now, what their conception of fidelity is might be relative, but there is this yearning, this desire to be faithful. And the formation is what tends to shift that and move that one way or another. And I do think that because of these generational movements that you see in the family, because again of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, among others, Cardinal Sarah is part of that. There’s a whole bunch of people that you can list that have had a profound effect on formation, on the Catholic faithful.
These different groups are, they don’t just influence your average Catholic person on the street. They do influence the professors, what they’re teaching. I mean, when I was in the seminary and then also when I was in initial formation as a Dominican, we were using Ratzinger’s Spirit of the Liturgy everywhere. We were using Carbone. We weren’t using sort of that older stuff that was very contingent in time. We weren’t using Rahner or Schillebeeckx or de Lubac or Hans Urs Von Balthasar. It was back to Aquinas, it was back to sacred scripture, it was a lot of more stable theological works, and that also led to a lot more stable and traditional liturgical practices.
I also think that when there was the period of time when we were going through the revision or the implementation of the new English translation of the Roman Missal, the Third Typical Edition, there was a lot of parish programs and diocesan programs that focused on reading the documents of the Second Vatican Council, particularly Sacrosanctum Concilium, and in actually reading the documents of the Council, people would often realize that what they had been experiencing wasn’t exactly what the documents had articulated.
I remember a conversation with someone who was at first sort of up in arms in the translation change because it was new, it was different, it was conservative, it was all these sorts of things. And then finally the person realized that it was just a more faithful English translation to the Latin. And this person said, “Oh, well that makes perfect sense.” It was like this immediate shift, this movement from ideology in how everything was articulated to just a clear shift once the person was confronted with truth, rationality, all these sorts of things. I don’t know, there’s so much, there’s so many little pieces, but I think a lot of it has to do with this transition that happened under John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
Eric Sammons:
So it still seems to be going on. And do you think, I mean, the elephant in the room is the next Pope that you didn’t mention. And he’s been Pope now for, Francis has been Pope now for 11 years. Yes, 11 years. And yet we’re still seeing seminaries that are, in America, at least, I mean, we’re not speaking about other places, we don’t have experience to that, but that are more conservative and things like that. Do you think, I mean, this is all a guess, but do you think that’s going to continue or is there going to be a more progressive attitude among seminaries kind of entering in or seminarians coming in because of the influence of Pope Francis?
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
No, actually, I think by and large for people, the experience of Pope Francis in formation is very different than the experience that people have of Pope Francis sort of out and about. Because again, it’s going back to the documents, it’s going back to an objective approach to the deposit of faith and objective approach to the hermeneutic of continuity. These sorts of things form the way in which all this stuff is received. So even when something might have been able to be put more precisely or with a little bit more… That could have been articulated more clearly in certain documents, when you read them very deliberately within that sort of Roman tradition of harmonizing, whereas Pope Benedict called it the hermeneutic of continuity, you just can’t read these things out of harmony with the larger deposit of faith. And there’s many ways to do that. It’s not reading them dishonestly, it’s just reading them charitably.
And when you do that, it forms the way in which you think about these documents. Whether it’s Fiducia Supplicans or whether it’s, whatever, it doesn’t matter. All of these things, we can dispute about a lot of the details in the documents, but when they’re looked at within the context of the larger history of the church’s theological tradition and that mining of the deposit of faith, anything that is found outside of that deposit is not part of that deposit. So I don’t see that being a difficulty right now. I don’t see that right now as a difficulty in formation. In fact, I have not seen that as a difficulty.
Eric Sammons:
So I guess what you’re saying is the focus in formation is really… There was an era there, I guess in the ’70s, ’80s where the focus of formation was very much the contemporary, whoever the latest theologians are and things like that. And now what you’re saying is the formation is much more based upon the ancient tradition, so whether it might be Augustine or Aquinas or Trent or whatever, and so everything that comes new is like, okay, we’re going to read it through the lens of the tradition, the deposit, rather than the other way around of kind of re-reading old things, Aquinas, through the lens of Schillebeeckx or something like that.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Right, exactly. And I think Pope Benedict put it well. At one point he used this image. He said, “The church is always looking forward with one eye looking back.” And so there’s always this dual movement because we’re moving forward in history, but we’re always bringing the democracy of the dead with us. There’s no way to negate that. And anyone that would is already outside of the heart of the church, because the church is always perennial. The deposit of faith is something that Christ gave us, it’s not something that can just be set aside. And it’s that radical fidelity to the person of Christ, that encounter with him that is the manifestation of a person’s faith, even though the faith is imparted in baptism, but that igniting of it in the encounter with the person. Once that happens, I think it’s really hard to sort of step away from that.
And institutionally, it becomes even harder. Institutions are like battleships, right? It takes a while for them to move in the right direction, so it’s taken a couple decades. People make fun of, now, it’s almost a meme, John Paul II’s new springtime, but I think there is kind of a new springtime but it’s just, again, it’s a battleship. The institution takes a long time to turn, and then once it turns, it’s going to take a lot for it to turn away. I see a lot of stability. I see a lot of good.
Now, some of the teenagers that were in my youth group, when I was in the early 2000s, they’re priests now, they’re running formation programs, they’re vocation directors. And actually I know one who’s running a propaedutic year at a seminary. And these are solid guys with really… They carry different baggage. They’re not coming from an embattled position because we had already won those battles, so to speak. And so they’re sort of working in a different, I don’t know, a different existential space when it comes to looking at this formation. There’s much more calm, much more peace, much more stability to the work of formation, to what’s happening in seminaries and in religious orders. There’s still outliers. There’s still places that need work, and not everyone is in the same place with respect to that renewal, but it’s a real thing. I’ve seen it everywhere.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. This is interesting, because this leads into my next question which I’m actually going to ask a little differently based on what you just said, because I remember in the ’90s when I first became Catholic, things weren’t that great. And people would say, “Well, look at the young people, the young men becoming priests. They’re more conservative, so in 20 or 30 years, they’re going to be the bishops, they’re going to run the church, and everything’s going to be so much better because of that.” And of course we all know, it’s not like everything is hunky-dory today. And so I admit there’s a certain amount, part of me, this is probably a cynicism of getting older which I need to fight, I realize, but the idea of like-
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
All of us.
Eric Sammons:
Yes, right? When I hear like, “Oh, well the young people, they’re more conservative.” I admit, one of my first thoughts is “I’ve heard that for 30 years.” And it sounds like you’re saying there really has been an improvement over those 30 years, it’s just not always visible in the news stories or things like that. Is that kind of what you’re saying, would you argue?
Because it looks to me, okay, I’m just going to lay it out here what it looks to me. It looks to me like a lot of those guys who were so much great on fire in the ’90s who became priests, they ended up becoming just kind of bureaucrats who just kind of go along and they’re not really have that same juice for orthodoxy that they used to, now it’s more a matter of just managing things. And maybe I’m being too harsh, maybe that’s not accurate. What would be your perception of that phenomenon of what’s been happening since the ’90s as far as young priests that are on fire and orthodox when they come in and how they end up?
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
So I think there’s three different points that I would hit. First one is, it’s very easy to become institutionalized. Institutional drag is a real thing. And when you realize that there’s all these things that have to be done in order to maintain the institution of the church, that can really sort of weigh you down. You can get stuck in your office and never see people. You may be a great bureaucrat, you might be able to raise money and do all those things and maintain black books and whatnot instead of red ink and all these sorts of things and that makes you appear to be a good candidate for advancement through the institution, but whether you have any evangelical zeal left over after that, that’s a whole different question. But I’ve seen institutionalization happen and it happens by inches. People don’t even recognize it and sometimes that institutionalization doesn’t even happen until someone becomes, say, a bishop. They have that evangelical zeal, but then they become a bishop, and then they’re kind of stuck in their chancery office having meetings all day long instead of going out and engaging in the ministry of the word like the apostles intended. So how to solve that I think to some degree is one of those million dollar questions, so I’ll leave that at that.
The other thing about the… I just read an article from the Wall Street Journal the other day that showed this Gen Z and sort of the change in political demographics, and I’ll use this as an analogy for what’s happening in the church because I think it’s similar, is that Gen Z, for instance, is split and is split on lines of sex. So men are moving more conservative politically, women are moving more liberal politically, by and large.
Eric Sammons:
I saw that, yes. I saw that.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
And it’s a significant gap in their ideologies. And what was interesting in that article, and I don’t think it was a mistake, is that the young man that was being sort of looked at, he was obviously Catholic because he had a Marian shirt on and all these things on his tractor. But there is this sort of movement towards a type of, a rejection of some of these aspects of modernity that are in conflict with what the church teaches, what Christ teaches. And there’s a segment of people that are embracing what the church teaches and see the value of that, and then there’s the people that are rejecting it.
And I think the group of people that are accepting it, that you say more within the context of the language of the church, are becoming more conservative or living in the heart of the church is a growing group of people, but it’s a smaller group of people when compared to the larger society. Because I think right now is, and this is the third point, is that there is no advantage to, there is no social advantage to being Catholic, and there is certainly no social advantage to being faithful, and so it’s a self-selecting group. We see this even at Newman Center or at a parish. Particularly my last parish was very much a boutique parish. It’s one of parishes where people go to, it’s a destination parish, so it’s very self-selecting in the people who attend that parish.
And we’re seeing that more and more. The older generations had a sense of duty. You went to church because you went to church. You were taught to do that and you follow those rules, that’s how it worked. But I think starting with the later Gen X and definitely with Millennials and Gen Z, there are no rules like that. There’s no interior disposition like, “I go to mass because I have to,” or “My grandmother’s going to be angry at me with me if I don’t go to church,” like who cares? It’s a self-selecting group. And so as this group continues to be self-selecting, you’ll have, as Benedict said, a smaller, more faithful church. I think that’s just the direction that everything is moving.
And people find that very troubling for multiple reasons. I find it troubling because that says, rather, what does that say about our work of evangelization? Of our ability to actually convince the secular world that Christ’s message is not only true but effective? And that it’s something that attracts the human spirit, attracts the human soul away from the world, the flesh and the devil. And I think that’s where the challenge is, the real rub. So when a larger demographic starts showing up again in the churches, well, I don’t know what it’s going to look like, but right now it’s that self-selecting minority.
Eric Sammons:
So in your experience running Newman group and things like that and just working with young people, so you would say then that it’s definitely true that the young people who are active in their faith are far more conservative than the general population? Is that a pretty safe statement to make?
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Oh yeah, very much so. Yeah.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. And that’s mostly then who are attracted to going to this or people who are really, I don’t know a better way to put it, but just really into their faith, I guess is the best way to put it. Because I know when I was in college in the early ’90s, and I was not Catholic, but I knew a lot of Catholics at this point, we didn’t have a Newman Center, but it was like the local parish’s college outreach, whatever, had… It was a large college in the area and it had hundreds of people in it, but most of them, it was people who just… This was all Gen X people who were in college at the time. Most of them, they just lived like everybody else as far as drinking, partying, stuff like that, mostly. And then they would go to mass on Sunday and they would go to some of the events, but it was a very large group.
I remember there a small group of people, Catholics who were very serious and that’s what I got attached to as a Protestant because pro-life work, and they really didn’t want anything to do with the bigger group because they were like, “They’re not really faithful. They’re not really trying.” So would you say basically now what’s happened is we’ve just eliminated that big group of most of them are just not going, and now it’s just left to the small, like you said, self-selected group?
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Well, that’s some of the things that the data is telling us, even post-COVID, right? Is that there’s so many people that just didn’t go back to church because in the post-COVID thing and in some ways, that’s moved that ball forward to some degree. All the demographics, all the data that we see tends to say that, that it’s just a self-selection. It has very little to do with anything other than that, is people who are coming to mass, people are participating in the sacramental life of the church, and people who are participating in the social and ministerial life of the church, they mean it. And it’s beautiful.
I mean, I thanked my congregation the weekend before last because my parish, nobody leaves after communion. That’s always been the joke. That’s always been sort of the thing. How many Catholics are running out to the parking lot to get out of there after they do the communion? But it’s so rare, so rare, and it’s always a visitor or someone that we never see on a regular basis who leaves prior to the end of mass. The priest is always the first person out. And that in itself is kind of an impressive thing if you think about it based off of the culture of how people would go to mass, I mean, at least my whole life.
Eric Sammons:
It wasn’t as if you were saying every week, don’t leave after communion.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
No. People just stay. They’re happy to stay and they want to build a community of faith, they care, and I think that’s precisely what Pope Benedict was talking about. And it’s from that core that something more can be built. And so I have great hope and great faith that from that core will be built something more a restoration of some sort. Again, sort of using that John Senior language of the restoration of Christianity, I think that’s a real possibility.
And I don’t buy into the idea of a dead notion of Christendom. No, I think it’s our job to build, just like Pope Paul VI said in Evangelii Nuntiandi is that our job is to evangelize the culture itself. We are to make the culture Christian. And so if we work towards that, that is the reestablishment of some sort of Christendom. And whether it looks like the former Christendom, probably not, but it will look like something and it will be beautiful. We just have to do it and we have to put our back into it.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, it’s interesting what you, well, what Pope Paul VI said about making the culture Christian, because what you see is, especially among the few remaining progressive Catholics that are left, this idea of they don’t say it like this, but basically we need to be more like the culture and that will attract people. Because we all know we have dwindling numbers. I mean, the numbers are going down on a whole. I mean, that’s obvious to everybody. And I see a certain desperation among some Catholics that like, okay, well if we don’t accept women priests or homosexuality, all that stuff, then more people are going to leave.
And here’s one thing I think conservatives don’t always acknowledge. That actually is true on a very surface level, in the sense that you will get people, but the fact is, it’s not like, we know from the Anglicans and everybody else, that’s not a long-term way to grow your church. Because people are leaving now because we’re not liberal enough or whatever they want. And I know people like that, and I’m sure you do, too.
But then what you would say, then, is the shrinkage of the church, obviously it’s a bad thing objectively. Just, we want every soul in the church. What you’re saying, it can be a good thing long-term. And so is that because you’re saying that because the people left will really be now faithful and that will attract the masses? Are we in danger of becoming like the Amish? Is that a danger that we could just end up like the Amish that, let’s be honest, the Amish, they’re awesome in a lot of ways, but they don’t impact the culture at all. And so is that a danger that we have in the kind of direction, the trajectory we’re going?
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
I think it is a danger. The danger is… So I guess controversially I’ll say is I think the danger is what was spoken about as the Benedict option. I don’t think that’s the correct approach. We have to engage the culture. But you engage the culture from a place of stability and fidelity. And so to some degree, there needs to be that same instinct that St. Benedict had of retreat from the world in order to establish that fidelity. But then you also have to have the instinct of St. Dominic, which is yeah, but from that monastic disposition, from that disposition of contemplation and study and fidelity, you engage. That preaching is the fruit of contemplation and preaching happens in both word and deed, and it is incumbent upon us to engage the culture. That doesn’t mean that we have to be like the culture, but we have to be in those cultural spaces.
This is why I get very frustrated all the time when people think that clergy or whatnot should not have any involvement in politics or shouldn’t have any involvement in various social things or in the arts or all this other stuff. No, no, no. Religious and priests should be in all of those places. One of the things I actually think was a huge mistake of John Paul II was forbidding clergy to run for office. I mean, it used to be one of the greatest performers of the church and of our order was Lacordaire. And Lacordaire always served in public office wherever he was assigned as a Dominican, even in the General Assembly in France.
And he was able to affect people in those spaces as a result of his presence. I mean, St. Thomas Aquinas used to spend time with the French court. I mean, one of the most decadent institutions in human history and there’s St. Thomas Aquinas there sort of writing his stuff in the corner in the midst of all of that. We can’t exempt ourselves from any of the spheres of human life, but we can’t be the world. We can’t be like the world. We have to bring that otherness to the culture and call it to conversion. But you can’t call it to conversion if you’re not there.
Eric Sammons:
Right. And I think we have to recognize that it could happen where we go through a phase like the early church did, where that means persecution and martyrdom and things like that, but that’s really just, that’s up to the Lord.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Of course.
Eric Sammons:
I want to bring up the role of the liturgy in how the church is becoming, in America at least, becoming more conservative in practice, because that’s usually the touchstone. I mean, lex orandi, lex credendi, we know how instrumental it is.
In fact, the article in the AP was a lot about how a parish had become more conservative liturgically, and that drove out, this is up in Madison, Wisconsin, I believe, and a lot of the Boomers and others didn’t like it that all of a sudden the things they had been doing, their tradition, was now thrown out.
Of course, we know the history a little bit, but in the ’90s, the traditional at mass was unheard of to the average Catholic. Then of course it starts growing in the early 2000s. Pope Benedict opens it up basically to the world. It starts to grow, becomes very influential. Then of course, we all know, traditionis custodes, Francis is clamping down, which seems to be making it grow more in popularity in a lot of ways. But how has the liturgy, has it followed the people becoming more conservative or is it the driver of them becoming more conservative, or is it a little bit of both?
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
So my previous parish, we had a Dominican Rite of the Mass on a daily basis.
Eric Sammons:
Oh, that’s awesome.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Oh, it was fantastic. So every day is a low mass, and then on Sundays is a sung mass or a solemn mass. And before that, when I was in formation, I used to spend a lot of time with the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest in Oakland. And then before that, when I was in the seminary, I spent a lot of time with the site of St. John Cantius. And these movements personally had a profound effect on me because I didn’t know anything. When I went to the seminary, I was completely ignorant about stuff. So many people that go to the seminary, they’ve been reading things and studying stuff before they even take one foot into the seminary. They were just like, “Hey, you should go.” I’m like, “Okay.” And so I went and I learned in the seminary about things.
And I fell in love with the older rites because the symbolism and the ceremonies are very clear, at least to me. The symbolism speaks volumes in a way that I think the ordinary form in its usual parish context doesn’t as well. I think that I do want to read the liturgical reformers positively, I think they were trying to. Because I do believe that there are some problems. I don’t think the church has fully ever accommodated the change in human life that the Industrial Revolution affected. A way that I describe this is that I don’t have a proper blessing for electric lights. Why is there not a proper blessing for electric lights? There’s candles and lard and bacon and there’s crosses for fields. So everything is still sort of very agrarian. There are some things, like there’s a blessing for a dynamo, there’s a blessing for a telegraph and for a seismograph, but there’s not many things. Even the blessing for a vehicle, for a car is really just the blessing for a currus, just a chariot and just appropriated for a car.
So there is a real sort of discontinuity to some degree between the devotional and liturgical structures and cycles and the modern way of living. Even the way the divine office is cut up and prayed or where a mass is situated during the day is discontinuous with the tradition because electric lights. You can say mass any time, right? And also the fasting cycle is broken, which is a more historical thing, as well.
So I think the more people learn, actually, I think the more there’s accessibility to the knowledge of liturgy, not that you attend liturgy. So Americans, at least, by and large for the last 100, 150 years have been habituated to be consumers of religious experiences. So people go to mass because it satisfies me or because it entertains me or whatever. This is why rock band mass is a thing and all this other sort of stuff. Because it’s something familiar, it makes me feel good. But that’s not what mass is for. Mass is about worshiping God and then receiving those graces as a result of the work of worshiping God. And the more that understanding becomes prevalent among the faithful, the more there are study groups on the documents of the council, the more there are study groups on things like the Spirit of the Liturgy from Ratzinger or other such works, the more that liturgical world is brought into the common sphere.
I think Scott Hahn did a great job with this with his book The Lamb’s Supper. It’s one of the most accessible pieces of fundamental early discovery of liturgical ideas. The more that is the case, the more people realize that there’s something broken in their day-to-day liturgical practice, that what they experience. And I’m not talking just simply about the difference between the older rites and the modern rites, the revised reformed rites, but that in the reformed rites after the council, that the way in which most people experience those rites is not consistent with what the council wanted or even with what was implemented by the Concilium. I don’t think the Concilium people would’ve ever expected some of the things that have been experienced over the years.
But also I think, so what happens is that when you see that, you can react against that and when you go to the older rites, because they’re far more mature, because they’ve developed and they’ve had a longer history and patrimony and the signs are much more clearly articulated because of that period of time that they were in dominant use, it’s very comforting, I think. So I don’t think it’s just a matter of taste. I think that the signs actually do communicate something more to people.
And as Aquinas says that the devotio or solemnitas, solemnitas of actions, it affects devotio in the person and the more that a devotio is influenced in the person or excited in the person, the more grace they’re able to receive. So there is a reality to this. It’s not just aesthetics, it’s not just taste. There is a direct line between solemnity, devotion and the grace received. Not the grace offered. The grace offered is the same, but the grace received, the subjective disposition, is directly related to the solemnity of the act. And so the less solemn something is, the less a person is disposed to receive grace, the more solemn something is. And I do think that by and large-
Eric Sammons:
I just want to interrupt, but that is so-
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Sorry. This is a bit…
Eric Sammons:
No, I just wanted to interrupt because that is such an important point what you just said, that’s why I wanted to stop for a second. Because I don’t want to go over that one quickly because you hear often the argument like, “Well, it’s valid and that’s all that matters.”
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
It’s not all that matters.
Eric Sammons:
It’s like Jesus is there, so that’s all that matters. But what you just said is the key point. Because I had a priest, I remember, a parish who was training the altar boys and my son was one of them, and I was at this, it was for Fathers’ Day and the boys there and he made that point about more graces are able to be received at, for example, a solemn high mass and a low mass.
And you use that example to not make it a no sort of versus TLM, but just to say because there’s greater solemnity, it’s kind of what you were saying, and that’s the reason why the church developed these ceremonies over a thousand years and more because of the fact they recognize, okay, our people are going to be more open to the receive the graces. Like you said, the grace offered isn’t different, it’s just the grace received can be different. There’s the objective and subjective. So I apologize for interrupting, but I just was like, that’s one, I got to make sure everybody heard that part of what you were just saying.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Yeah, no, I apologize. I can get on a soapbox about that, because it’s particularly frustrating to me.
Eric Sammons:
Right, right. It is. And so I think another thing I wanted to mention was what you said about, you kind of briefly mentioned Scott Hahn’s The Lamb’s Supper. I personally think that had a huge impact on the church in America liturgically, because the book itself, for those who don’t know it, came out in the late ’90s, I think, has sold I think millions, I’m not 100% sure of the number, but it’s hundreds of thousands I know and I think even millions of copies. I think it’s his most popular book, and that’s saying something because all his books are popular, but it’s not like a book about the old rite, it doesn’t even mention that. It’s assuming the Novus Ordo. But what it did was, and I know it did for me too, a light turned on in a lot of people’s Catholics’ mind that, “Oh my gosh, the liturgy is super important.”
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
It literally is the source and summit of the Christian faith, right?
Eric Sammons:
Right, but it’s almost like we just treat it like, “Well, this is what we do, but really it’s not that big a deal.” And I think people don’t realize how many Catholics thought like that. And then this book comes out, and I will say then what happened, I’m not saying this was Scott’s intention, but I think what happened was a lot of people then went back to their parish and they’re like, “For how important this is, we seem to be taking it not very seriously.”
And I think that then, and just a number of years later, it was Summorum Pontificum, of course. And so I really think that might’ve been a seedbed to make… And even in those sort of parishes to start being like, you started to see a growth of, and I don’t think these problems are solved, but definitely you’d get more reverent liturgies more often. I think part of it was his book just all of a sudden clicking on the light that, you know, let’s actually take this seriously instead of acting like it’s a price and service, and we don’t really care that much about how we do it.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
No, I totally agree. It sort of opened up a veil that people… And I think it’s because it did that for him, right? There’s that moment where he talks about in… I think he talks about it in the introduction there but he also talks about it in A Father Who Keeps His Promises. He talks about it in multiple places where the first time he kind of goes to a mass where he’s at the moment of the Agnus Dei and he goes, “This is either the most profound blasphemy I’ve ever experienced in my life, or this is real.” There’s something about his own intellectual habits and his knowledge base that allowed for a clarity for him to see that moment. It’s like there’s a grace given there at that moment for him, and we’ve all benefited as a result of that.
Eric Sammons:
What do you see as, and this is the question that you can ask and I know you’re just going to, who knows what’s going to happen, but what do you think the future is, though, for the liturgy in the Roman Rite, because Benedict obviously wanted to see a certain mutual enrichment and things like that. And I think people at that point, I know I was one of these people at that point, thought, okay, eventually what we’ll probably get is a hybrid of some sort that will be traditional at mass in a lot of its essence but then will have some reforms that were inspired by Vatican II and that era and things like that. But then, now with traditionis custodes, I feel like it’s gotten to the point where it’s like, no, there’s no connection between the two, almost. I mean, Francis himself doesn’t call them forms of the same Roman Rite. He treats them like there’s two foreign rites each, almost like the Eastern Rite and the Roman Rite.
And so what do you think, though, I mean, just your crystal ball, how do you think this eventually gets resolved? Because obviously their current situation is not a tenable one long term.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Well, I mean, my hot take on that in my mind is that if you want to worship in English, you should be a member of the Ordinariate. If you want to worship in Latin, celebrate in the Roman Rite, but that’s my super-hot take.
Eric Sammons:
Ordinariate, yeah, I’m with you on that.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Yeah. But I honestly don’t… I can tell you what my own personal practice is as a priest is to be very diligent about reading the rubrics precisely of the liturgies so that the places where a more traditional Ars Celebrandi is available, that that is implemented. And it’s not so much ideology, somewhat is on my part a little bit, but it’s also because there is a sense that when the Concilium was put together, one of their theories, or the way I was taught, is one of the theories was by paring back things and allowing for openness of interpretation that it would allow for a new, modern thing to develop that is consistent with the tradition but wasn’t attached to necessarily the French Renaissance court.
And as a Dominican, I can respect that, because our own liturgy is very different than the Tridentine Mass. It’s signs and symbols, it’s movements, it’s actions. The way reverences work, everything is very different than the Roman Rite. And so you can tell that it was founded within a period of time of the medieval city-state and it sort of exemplifies that form of statecraft where the Tridentine Mass sort of exemplifies the statecraft of the Renaissance court, just like the Byzantine is the Byzantine court.
And I think the ordinary forms is sort of emblematic of them, the modern city-state in many ways, the forms of reverence and simplicities that exist here. But the liturgy allows for a lot of interpretation. Liturgical norms are not negative precepts, they’re positive precepts. So there’s a lot of variability for interpretation. And so the interpretation that I use is, again, that hermeneutic of continuity. How can I be as continuous with a tradition as possible without breaking the rules myself? And so where things can be bent, where things can’t be. And I think you’re going to see that more and more. I think there’s a lot of priests that are interested in that actively, I know many priests that are. And there’s books being published about celebrating the ordinary form of the Roman Rite with that sort of disposition, that disposition of a traditional Ars Celebrandi.
Where things go from here with respect to what things can be restored, I think, actually, I joke about the Ordinariate, but I think they’re a good example of what ought to happen. For instance, they restored the offertory prayers. That’s something that needs to be done. The old offertory prayers are very important to the Roman Rite, and I think that they were removed erroneously. I quibble about the reading cycle. There’s a lot of different things here and there that I think could be adjusted and fixed and done either by just understanding the rubrics and just doing them because you’re exercising different options, but there’s some things that only Rome can do. And I think that there has to be sort of that honest reflection in Rome about sort of like, well, maybe the concilium wasn’t a hundred percent correct about removing this, or by imposing that, and who knows how that’s going to work.
Eric Sammons:
And it’s interesting because new priests, newly ordained priests since traditionis custodes need explicit permission to celebrate the TLM and my understanding is, they don’t really receive that in general. But I know a lot of them, I mean, I say a lot, I know of that they’re learning the TLM just to say privately. Because they’re still allowed to say it privately, they can’t be stopped from that. And so I think that that alone is a good thing because it gives them, first of all, hopefully it helps their spiritual life, their priestly life, but also then it’s going to impact how they then celebrate the Novus Ordo in their parishes and whatnot, which is a good thing.
But yeah, obviously we don’t know what’s going to happen. But I think it is interesting. I think, though, ultimately, Ratzinger, I think it was Father Ratzinger turned out to be a prophet in his… Because that was in the early 1970s, I think it was ’71 he made that prediction that the church will get smaller, but basically stronger in a lot of ways and then have to go out from there. So we’ll see.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Well, we can pray.
Eric Sammons:
I think I’m going to finish there. Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. I mean, yeah, we always pray.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
We got to pray, man, it’s intense.
Eric Sammons:
It’s also, we have to realize these things aren’t linear, they’re just super bumpy and they’re going to go down and up and things like that, so we just keep praying and doing our best.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Well, and honestly trusting that God is in control in the end, but we have to participate in that and truly not just sit on the sidelines, but be active participants in the life of the church. And by doing that, then true conversion not just of ourselves, but of other people, but also the institution, is affected by engaging, not disengaging.
Eric Sammons:
Right, right. Absolutely. Okay, Father, I think I’m going to wrap it up here. Where can people find… I mean, you have an X account, right?
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
I do, I do.
Eric Sammons:
Yes. I will link to it even though you may not even want me to, but I’m going to link to it in the show notes.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Perfectly happy to.
Eric Sammons:
So people can follow you there and get your thoughts on things. So I appreciate you being here though, Father.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Yeah, absolutely. And that same handle, that lukei4655 is me everywhere online.
Eric Sammons:
Okay.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
I try and secure that everywhere.
Eric Sammons:
That way they know it’s really you when they see that.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. Yeah, there’s consistency across the interwebs.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, right. Exactly. Okay. Thank you, Father.
Fr. Gabriel Mosher:
All right. God bless you.
Eric Sammons:
Until next time, everybody. God love you.