Sampson the Holy Unmercenary Healer, and Prayers for a Dear Friend of Mine

I read the entry from The Prologue of Ohrid every day. I turned it to an entry today and found that the entry was on Sampson, the Holy Unmercenary Healer. He would be able to heal the most incurable diseases of his time. When it was said of the Holy Emperor Justinian's physicians that he was suffering from an incurable illness, the Holy Unmercenary Healer Sampson came to him. His medicines and prayers were even more powerful than the conventional medicines of the day. If anybody could heal the Emperor, it would have to be him. Sampson did heal the Emperor Justinian. When the consensus of the physicians was that the Emperor was finished and would be beaten by this illness, Sampson healed the Emperor. The power of God acts against the better wisdom of man sometimes.

I saw on the news the other day of this building that had collapsed. The story was so disturbing that I couldn't bear to handle it. The destruction, the debris, the lives lost. All of this while these unfortunate people were sound asleep. But it made me think of a dear friend of mine. I used to not like her at all. But I realized she had showed compassion to me and turned my resentment of her into a friendship. I have given her candles to light which she has always responded to me with thankfulness. I have lit candles for her and she has responded to me with thankfulness. I remember giving a candle to her before the Divine Liturgy one day. I noticed that it had remained lit throughout and finally burned out at the very end of the Divine Liturgy when it had been lit during Orthros. This building collapse made me think of her because she had talked about very recently how her ceiling in her new home had collapsed. Fortunately, neither her nor her roommate were hurt. But seeing the news about the building that had collapsed made me think fondly of her.

I learned just last night that she had suffered a stroke late Thursday evening. I don't think of her as particularly the greatest of health for her body seems frailer than a spider web. But you wouldn't think of her as one to suffer from such an illness. We are all prone to suffer a stroke at any age and for various reasons. I'm not going to speculate the reasons here either. It was early Friday morning I saw the news of this building collapse. I'm certain people have been talking about this unfortunate situation on social media which I have been avoiding lately. But now I know why I was called to think more fondly of her. As the Apostle says, "I thank my God every time I think of you". When we think of someone, we return thanks to God and we pray for them. When we think fondly of someone, we return thanks to God for the fond memory of that person. I pray regularly for her and didn't even know why I was thinking of her so much until last night.

I talked with her brother-in-law and he said they expect a good update. She is only 32 but has done so much in the parish. At any age, we can suffer a stroke. At any age, the Lord could call us from this Earth. We shouldn't think about what tomorrow holds for we may not get a tomorrow. We should think about what today holds and how we ought to prepare ourselves for the great combat we must face after life on this Earth so that we are ready with a defense before the awesome seat of judgment. We should always be busily thinking about the day of our own judgment for it is appointed for us all to die once and then face the judgment. Preparation for death should be the only thing that is on our minds from day-to-day and what state we wish to find ourselves in upon death. It is a reminder that death can come for us all at any moment. Though she is expected a full recovery, I have known people who have suffered strokes. Sometimes their memory is fuzzy. Sometimes half their bodies shut down. Sometimes they speak with a slur afterwards. No one I know has ever "fully recovered" from a stroke though they may look as if they never suffered a stroke to others who have never met them before.

I remember what a beautiful voice she had prior to her stroke. I wonder if she will still have the same beautiful voice. Perhaps. Perhaps not. My grandmother, who suffered a stroke six years ago, was telling me today how her own singing voice is not what it once was before her stroke. My mom says she detects a slur in her voice from time to time. This may be a most devastating loss for the parish as this lady was deeply involved in the parish life. One can only wonder what a full recovery looks like. But I request prayers for this lovely friend of mine.

So it is that today is the Feast Day of the aforementioned Holy Unmercenary Healer Sampson. Sampson who cured the Emperor when it was said that his ailments were incurable. Sampson who defied the wisdom of men upon healing so many diseases and illnesses suffered by men. Sampson who trusted in the power of God over the wisdom of men. Holy Unmercenary Healer Sampson, pray for my friend that she may truly fully recover from this ailment. If not physically, fill her with the most perfect spiritual graces that she may be filled with the highest beauty of modesty and Godliness.

Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness - A Feast of All Saints

What do you think of when you experience the liturgy? Do you consider yourself as an individual Catholic in a body of Catholics? Do you consider that this is a liturgy that was attended by this particular saint? Do you consider that the saints celebrated in a very similar fashion? Or do you not consider yourself tied to their past tradition at all? I always tell people to look to the saints for guidance. Let those who dwell in Heaven be your guides. Of course, this is difficult considering the modern canonization process has benefited liberal Popes who have abandoned Church tradition, so I'll be more specific. Look to the past before the Church tradition was vehemently changed. Before Vatican II, look to those saints. Before the 20th century, look to those saints. Before the first millennium, look to those saints. As Eastern Catholics, the Synod of St. Petersburg in 1917 countered much of the damage caused by the Synod of Zamość in 1720. Vatican II did to the West what the Synod of Zamość did to the East. It ridded the Catholic World of most of the cult of saints, it changed dates and times, and it altered and corrupted the Divine Liturgy of All Ages. When this happened to the Eastern Catholics in 1720, it was spiritually damaging to them. While some Latin adoptions proved beneficial, there must be a place and time for all of them. Our Rite is not the Western Rite, after all. Likewise, the West must value the purity of its own traditions.

Bp. Athanasius Schneider mentioned in Christus Vincit how John XXIII threw out St. Philomena from the Roman Martyrology. St. Philomena was a martyr whose tomb was discovered in the 19th century. When her tomb was discovered, a cultus immediately was formed around her name. St. Philomena was soon canonized upon the discovery of her tomb. But this matters not for the Novus Ordo Mass. In many ways, the Novus Ordo has decided that it can determine who is and who is not a saint and then enforce it upon the whole Church. Not only this but the Novus Ordo has decided for itself when it can celebrate Feast Days. Certain saints have seen their Feast Days combined with other saints. While some saints do have combined Feast Days with other saints, these are often due to the eminent standing of the saints and because they also have their own unique Feast Day. Peter Kwasniewski contends that this is a way in which the Novus Ordo has sought to dampen the emphasis that the saints have.

One stand-out thing about the Novus Ordo is how it frequently moves and altars the Feast Days of the saints during Lent. One prominent example is with the Feast Day of the Annunciation. There is an inherent symbolism in the Feast Day of the Annunciation being on March 25. This is the Feast Day that celebrates Our Lord's beginning and Our Lady's humble acceptance to be the vessel through whom Our Lord is to be born. December 25 is Our Lord's Nativity. Nine months is a perfect gestation period for a human being. But if this Feast Day is moved outside of Lent when it falls on Good Friday, Palm Sunday, or Easter, as the West has been doing so since Vatican II, then you would logically have to change the date of Christmas for how can Our Lord, being perfect human and perfect God, have a less-than-perfect gestation?

The remembrance of the saints calls us to two things. It calls us to the historic tradition which we celebrate when we attend Church and it calls us to remember their penitence and to join them in penance. To move the saints out of Lenten services as the Novus Ordo does is to undermine what Lent is about. In fact, Lent is a preparation season for Pascha. It prepares us to join into the communion of the saints. How can we be preparing to join in communion with the saints if we aren't remembering them during our Lenten services? Further, we see their asceticism and their penance on display for us in their lives and we are called to emulation of them. The Novus Ordo has given us a broken tradition by booting them out. Rather, the Novus Ordo has broken tradition by booting the saints out, from Thomas Aquinas to Our Lady!

Finally, the Church as a whole is a communion of the saints! We are in full communion with the saints of the past as much as we are in full communion with the saints of today. Part of that communion is to recall what liturgy those saints attended. It was not the Novus Ordo. If anything, we shouldn't focus on building up a "New Mass" but rather re-establishing old rites. The West was diverse in its rites much like the East. The saints attended all sorts of rites such as Coptic rites, Byzantine rites, Mozarabic rites, Gallican rites, and Celtic rites. If we say the Tridentine must change, then we open the door to allowing other rites to change. To say the Tridentine rite is to be done away with, altered, or changed, is heresy. When this is the liturgy that so many Western saints attended, Thomas Aquinas, Anselm, Rita of Cascia, Thomas à Kempis, etc., to do away with it is to declare oneself out of communion with those saints and out of communion with the courts of God. Part of the Tradition we inherit from the saints is their Liturgy. This is why it is important for Easterners to reflect on the lives of Eastern saints and why Westerners have to reflect on the lives of Western saints. Together, we reflect on the lives of all saints. We are a Church of all saints and the Divine Liturgy is the Feast of All Saints. All the time, every day.

Josiah, King of Israel

Josiah succeeded the kings Manasseh and Amon. Manasseh, like Josiah, was young when he was king, in fact 12 years of age. Manasseh did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. Amon, like Manasseh, was also given over to demons, and he too did evil in the sight of the Lord. He worshipped the idols that his father Manasseh served and abandoned the Lord. Though he was 22 when he took over the Kingdom of Israel. The people conspired against him and assassinated him. His son Josiah would be placed on the throne of Israel at age 8. It is important to note that Josiah was the king of Judah. Israel had split into two kingdoms by this point, the northern kingdom was given over to idolatries much more grievously than Judah so the northern kingdom would be delivered to the Babylonians much sooner than the Kingdom of Judah. Unlike his father and grandfather, he did what was right in the sight of the Lord. Josiah's mother was Jedidah and he would reign for a total of 31 years in Israel. It was under Josiah's reign that Israel was called forth from the worship of false idols once again.

Josiah's servant Hilkiah found the Book of Law which had been lost to the Israelite monarchy for quite some time. It was doing a routine counting of money in the Temple in which this high priest found it. The high priest, showing it to the holy king, began to read from it. When Josiah had heard every word from it, he tore his clothes for he had begun to realize the grievous errors of his predecessors on the throne of Israel and how they had abandoned the God of Heaven and Earth by assenting to the worship of pagan deities. He sent the high priest Hilkiah, Ahikam, Achbor, Shaphan the secretary, and his own servant Asaiah to inquire from the prophetess Huldah of what awaits the nation of Israel for he realized how great the offense of Israel's was in the sight of the Lord.

Huldah warned the men of the coming destruction of Israel. How the words of the prophets from the book which the King of Judah read shall be fulfilled. But because the King of Judah showed great repentance upon hearing the words of the prophets, rent his clothes, and mourned over the kingdom, he would be spared of the coming destruction to the Kingdom of Judah. He would be allowed to die in peace and to be buried with his ancestors. He would not have to see the destruction coming to the Kingdom of Judah which his successors would have to see for their idolatries. Upon hearing these things, Josiah was led to greater penance. He began a sweeping series of reforms to the Kingdom of Judah.

He commanded the high priest Hilkiah to bring out of the temple the idols of Baal and Asherah and had those idols burned. He also defiled the altars to the pagan deities, the demons, who were worshiped by his ancestors, tearing down the high places dedicated to these demons from Geba to Beersheba, defiling the altar to Topheth so that no daughter would pass through the flames in a sacrificial act to the demon Molech and he tore down the houses for the male prostitutes of this fertility goddess Asherah. He tore down the two altars built up by his grandfather Manasseh and continued throughout the land. Wherever there was an altar dedicated to one of these demons, he tore it down and defiled it. Wherever there was an altar constructed to Baal, he took it down and defiled it. Only the Lord of Heaven's Armies was to be worshiped by Israel. The readings from the books of the Law had reformed his heart and he proceeded courageously against the will of the people to call Judah back to the worship of the one true God and away from the demons they had found themselves dedicated to.

Moreover, he commanded the Passover be observed once again. Judah was so sold out to these pagan deities that they had neglected to observe the most important Jewish feast of all. The Passover was instituted under the Holy Prophet Moses and was to be observed as remembrance of the plagues wrought out upon the Egyptians while the Israelites were held in captivity under these wicked heathens. They were to keep it in remembrance of what the Lord had done for them in delivering them from their bondage. This important holy feast had been neglected. It was during the Passover that Our Lord even instituted the New Covenant becoming the Pascha (Passover) for the New Israel (the Church). There is no greater Jewish feast than the Passover and Josiah would restore its celebration. There was no king like Josiah. But still, the Lord's wrath was enkindled against Judah for the idolatries that Manasseh had sold Judah out to. The Lord was still desirous to remove Judah from the earth. Yet Josiah was not to see this in his lifetime for Josiah was killed in battle at Megiddo by the Pharaoh Neco. Josiah's successors, Jehoahaz and Jehoiakam did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.

When the country is moving in the wrong direction spiritually, there may be no way to turn it around save through a national repentance of the kingdom. This is what Judah needed. Though we may have solace for a temporary period of time, it is inevitable that a country committed to its worship of idols will continue on this deadly track. This is exactly what we observe in the reign of Josiah. We see a period of solace from the deadly worship of idols but immediately after he falls, the country is led astray yet again. Broad is the road leading to destruction and many will find it. Narrow is the path to eternal life and few will find that. Always take the straight and narrow path. St. Josiah, pray for us!

St. Etheldreda, Foundress of the Ely Monastery

St. Etheldreda was one of the pious daughters of St. Anna who raised several pious daughters, many of whom became nuns including Ethelburga, Sexburga, Withburga. Etheldreda, who is also known as Audrey, had the desire to form a monastery and was able to always live in virginity but was forced into marriage to the ealdorman Tombert, prince of the Girvii in 652. It was through Tombert though that she would acquire the settlement in East Anglia of Ely. The marriage lasted three short years before Tombert's reposal. Either from indifference or respect to her desire for virginity, Tombert allowed her to remain a virgin. Upon his death, Etheldreda was committed to settling as a nun but political tensions would once again force her into an unwanted marriage.

In order to secure an alliance for the House of Uffings with the Kingdom of Northumbria against the aggression of the Mercians, Etheldreda was married to Egfrid, the son of St. Enfleda. She was 30 by now and he was estimated to be about half her age. As a younger child, she had a great influence over him and he looked to her as a learned woman, permitting her to keep monastic practices in his courts as he learned from her religious instruction. Etheldreda was deeply inspired by the monks and nuns and made donations to the monasteries, one of those was St. Cuthbert, of whom she was a contemporary.

After winning many battles against the Mercians though, and aging, the satisfaction that the young king Egfrid had once gained from her religious instruction was to no avail. He began to be inspired by pride, sought an heir, and desired after her flesh. Etheldreda was still desirous to preserve her virginity so she ran from him. He consulted with his brother Wilfrid to convince her that her duty to her husband was her duty to God. But Wilfrid, rather than surrendering Etheldreda to something that she had never desired in her life, convinced Etheldreda instead to abandon her throne and become a nun. Etheldreda took the advice of Wilfrid. She was then tonsured a nun by the same St. Wilfrid, a year later, she was given permission to return to her estate at Ely. There, using the estate of her late husband, Tombert, she built and founded the Ely Monastery, becoming its first Abbess. She ruled the monastery for seven years and served as an example of piety to her nuns. She governed this monastery until she reposed in 679.

In 679, she developed an illness of the tonsils, a condition known as "quinsy" and she attributed this illness as a punishment from God for her former love of fine clothes and jewels. She would never recover from this illness and would repose soon afterward, on June 23. As the Venerable Bede records in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the remains would be dug up 15 years after her death as ordered by her sister and her successor as Abbess, St. Sexburga. The remains would be found in an incorrupt state. As recorded by Bede,

The body of the holy virgin and spouse of Christ, when her grave was opened, being brought into sight, was found as free from corruption as if she had died and been buried on that very day; as the aforesaid Bishop Wilfrid, and many others that know it, can testify. But the physician, Cynefrid, who was present at her death, and when she was taken up out of the grave, was wont of more certain knowledge to relate, that in her sickness she had a very great swelling under her jaw. “And I was ordered,” said he, “to lay open that swelling, to let out the noxious matter in it, which I did, and she seemed to be somewhat more easy for two days, so that many thought she might recover from her distemper; but the third day the former pains returning, she was soon snatched out of the world, and exchanged all pain and death for everlasting life and health. And when so many years after her bones were to be taken out of the grave, a pavilion being spread over it, all the congregation of brothers were on the one side and of sisters on the other, standing about it singing, and the abbess, with a few, being gone to take up and wash the bones, on a sudden we heard the abbess within loudly cry out, ‘Glory be to the name of the Lord.’ Not long after they called me in, opening the door of the pavilion, where I found the body of the holy virgin taken out of the grave and laid on a bed, as if it had been asleep; then taking off the veil from the face, they also showed the incision which I had made, healed up; so that, to my great astonishment, instead of the open gaping wound with which she had been buried, there then appeared only an extraordinarily slender scar. (Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bk. IV, ch. XIX)

St. Ethledreda is one of the most popular saints in English history. Incorrupt remains, faithfulness to her virginity and her dedication to God even in the midst of an abusive relationship with her second husband, and her founding of the Ely Monastery. Tragically, the Danes would destroy the monastery she founded in one of their campaigns against the Anglos in the ninth century but it would be fully restored in the year 970, along with her own tomb and that of the other Abesses. More reading on St. Etheldreda can be found in the following:

Agnes B.C. Dunbar, Dictionary of Saintly Women

Joan Carroll Cruz, The Incorruptibles

Protopresbyter John Thornton, Pious Kings and Right-Believing Queens: An Encyclopedia of the Royal and Imperial Saints of the Orthodox Church

St. Etheldreda, pray for us!

Biden is excommunicated

I haven't discussed politricks on this blog in a while but the deliberations by the U.S.C.C.B. over whether to commune Biden, the Vatican's response to bishops who have lashed out against the traitorous heretic, and the media's phoniness about this intra-Catholic skirmish has my skin boiling. First off, if you're an orthodox Catholic, don't think for a moment that any member of the U.S.C.C.B. is "on your side". They aren't. José Gómez assaults the truths of the Catholic faith just as much as Biden does. Gómez's vision is clearly to turn the Church into a functional political party. While the Church is a political party as it is the Kingdom of God, what I mean is that these bishops want to turn the Church into an earthly political party. They don't intend to elevate the Church at all. In fact, they are politicizing the Eucharist. These people want to make a show of Biden to bolster their own political power so it looks like they're on the "right side" of orthodoxy within the Catholic Church. The fact of the matter, an "excommunication" decision on their part is nothing more than a justification for their complicity with the lockdown orders, their siding with the rejection of the Church's traditional upholding of the death penalty, their support of the destruction of the Catholic liturgy, and their support of the democratic ideology. These bishops favor moving the Church to an earthly political power. They couldn't care any less about the Heavenly Kingdom of the Church.

Secondly, the media has portrayed this as an intra-Catholic struggle between "right-wing" Catholics and "liberal" Catholics. There are no such monickers to describe Catholics. This is entirely a struggle over the essence of the Catholic faith here. The Catholic moral doctrine is at stake. Do we put a hammer down against sin or not? Do we condemn sin in the flesh or not? Are we about building up and converting sinners into saints or not? Are we about transforming people from ravenous wolves into the most peaceful and humble of sheep or not? This is what is at stake. There shouldn't be any politics involved in the life of the Catholic any more than what is required to catch fish for the Lord and reap in the harvest. The media wants to pretend that this is a political struggle for the Church which is why they've applied political terms and placed it in the Church. This is not a political struggle for power in the Church. It shouldn't be. This is a struggle for the essence of Truth. It is a spiritual struggle. Do the orthodox prevail within the Church or are we to be cast out with our Holy Father John Chrysostom along with St. Olympias and suffer martyrdom with Tigrius and Eutropius? This is a spiritual struggle over sin for the faithful. We may be bludgeoned by heretical bishops but the struggle will not last forever. St. John Chrysostom reminds us that the battle is over sin (Letters to Olympias), not over clerical power. Will we be given over to Satan by our ecclesiastical hierarchy or will we be preserved as the Kingdom of Heaven by our hierarchy?

Third, it does not matter what the vote result is for Truth is not a democracy but a person. Our clergy are corrupt parasites much the same way that heretical politicians like Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, Nancy Pelosi, Tim Kaine, Andrew Cuomo, Paul Ryan, Gina Raimondo, and Joe Biden are. Parasites consume a host in order to live. These politicians, like our bishops, have no power if they are given no host. The reality is, their host has become the Catholic Church and the holy sacraments. These politicians have no allegiance to the Catholic faith as is displayed by their sin and their hatred to their brethren. He who loves not his brother loves not God, as the Apostle John the Evangelist has spoken. How can you love your brother if you willfully engage in the persecution of your brother? You cannot. Biden has willfully engaged in the persecution of a group of Catholic nuns when he served as Vice President with Obama. He loves not his brother as was shown with his engagement in the persecution with those who served the Church faithfully. If Biden claims he is a Catholic, then those nuns were his brethren and he engaged in persecution against them. He hates his fellow Catholic. He hates his fellow brethren. He loves not his brother. He loves not God. This is not an open question. Biden is a persecutor from within. Any love of God he claims to have is a sham. He hates his brothers so he also hates God.

Fourth, this is not a dispute. Catholic ecclesiology is clear on the subject. Manifest heretics, according to St. Cyprian, are not members of the Church. An excommunication is merely only a pastoral declaration that someone is not a member of the Church in the hopes that it serves to call them back to repentance. Pastoral care, unlike what the phony Cardinal Wilton Gregory, who himself does not hold any formal authority as a Cardinal, is about bringing people to repentance. The Catholic faithful do not commune with heretics nor are subjected to heretics. A manifest heretic is an open heretic who has been denounced previously for his apostasy and his open contradictions to the tradition of the faith. No one in Washington, D.C. has any subjection to the authority of Wilton Gregory just as Nestorius lost his episcopal authority from the moment he began preaching his heresies about the Holy Theotokos. Biden has been denounced publicly as a heretic multiple times. He has no real or authentic communion with Holy Mother Church. He is excommunicated. No declaration is needed. The fact that we have bishops who think that we can still commune a heretic shows that the Church is in as bad, if not worse, a situation since the Arian crisis. The bishops need to get their act together and recall what the Church teaches about manifest heretics like Biden and Gregory. We have communion with neither of them. As St. Jerome once asked the Pope, "must we be separated from the Arians by mere walls?"

Fifth, Biden is not just a heretic for his stance on abortion. The bishops want to make this solely about abortion because they would like not to admit their dreadful stances on other social issues and the entirety of the social doctrine of the faith for it would expose them. The bishops are only intent on being secular humanists and supporters of the establishment political position as much as they can. This is why they are only concerned with abortion. But Biden is in open denial of Catholic teaching on numerous issues. He upholds democratic ideology which the Church condemns. Until he acknowledges that his authority comes from God, it is inevitable that Biden's reign will be taken away and he will be made to dine on grass like a cow, just as Nebuchadnezzar was made to dine on grass like a beast of the earth. Biden's authority will be degraded if he continues to claim falsely that his authority comes from the people. That is the democratic ideology that he adheres to. That is condemned by the Church. It made Pontius Pilate a pawn of the Synagogue of Satan as he put Our Lord to death. Biden has acted as an official at a gay "marriage", defiling the sanctity of marriage. That act alone excommunicates him automatically. Any one suggesting he is still a "Catholic" either has not read canon law or is not aware of this for anyone who even attends a gay "marriage" is automatically excommunicated and Biden officiated one. Biden also has enacted openly racist policies favoring "coloured" people over others. It does not matter what the skin color is, racism is racism. Biden has assisted at a Novus Ordo "Mass" which indicates he may not be genuinely fulfilling his Sunday obligations. Need I mention Quod Primum which automatically excommunicates those who attend or create "new Masses" other than the ones instituted by Holy Mother Church which are 200 years old or older at the time of the writing? And the document was written in the 16th century? Biden has persecuted his brethren for standing against contraceptives. Thus, Biden has defiled the Church's teaching on abortificients and contraceptives and has shown that he does not love his brother, therefore, he does not love God. The bishops want to make this about abortion so they can claim this is about preserving human dignity. They are only concerned with a materialistic humanist agenda. If they excommunicated Biden for all the reasons he is already excommunicated for, they would have to excommunicate themselves as well. The bishops' real goal here is humanism.

Sixth, the Eucharist has routinely been "politicized". If anyone in the hierarchy is sensitive about denying a politician the Eucharist over the concern that the Eucharist is "politicized", they really ought to show their flocks the money flowing into their pockets first and then read their history books second. The Church has been no stranger to calling Catholic politicians and statesmen back to the herd. We excommunicated Frederick II. We excommunicated the Simoniac Henry IV. We excommunicated the murderer Henry II. We threatened the excommunication of Henry III of England. We excommunicated the adulterer Henry VIII. We interdicted the Netherlands, Germany, and England. Oh yes, we've "politicized" the Eucharist. The Catholic Church has always used these as a means of calling people back to the herd so that they may receive the Eucharist again, not to their deaths but to eternal life. This is what the Eucharist is about. In reality, the bishops refusing to declare a heretic to be excommunicated have politicized the Eucharist for they see in the Eucharist political gain for themselves. They see in the Eucharist a source of political power much like the Arians who booted St. Athanasius out of their Church have done. They see denying people the Eucharist as a threat, not to pastoral care of the flock, but to their image and social standing among the humanist liberals. And the U.S.C.C.B. isn't really better as they are only concerned with one heresy held by Biden. These are not your friends, nor are they God's friends, even if they do rightfully conclude that Biden is to be denied Holy Communion. But that's beside the point. There is no declaration needed for a manifest heretic. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. is already excommunicated and any bishop who says otherwise is a wolf in sheep clothing at this point.

Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness - The Usus Antiquior Enables Active Participation

When we talk about the active participation of the laity in Mass, are we talking about the institution of extraordinary ministers of the sacraments or are we talking about the way we pray during Mass? Are we praying as a collective group of Catholics, in a mass act of public worship, or are we talking about having equal rights to serve the sacraments? It seems with the Novus Ordo, we have become all about "equal rights". But when has the Church ever supported "equal rights"? I have seen the Church become progressively more and more democratic and progressively more and more about equality to the extent that it has become less of a Church and more of a political party that bears the name "Catholic Church". I have seen deacons, priests, and bishops become sell-outs to the spirit of liberal democracy and abandon any other political system that has been favorable to the Church throughout the centuries. What I see when I look at the politicization of our Church is not a "de-politicized" Eucharist but a rather heavily politicized Eucharist that equates democratic values in human society with official Church doctrine. This is the "active participation" that has become of the Novus Ordo. It is lousy and inept and spiritually damaging to the Church. It's not that the Church needs reform. I did not enter the Church to reform it, after all. I entered into the Church to be a churchmen. What I will say is that this spirit of democratic ideology has no place in the Church, it is not the Church. To state, as I did in my last entry, that our clergy need to seek to abolish the Novus Ordo, is not my pinning up of the 95 Theses as the heretic Martin Luther did. It is my observation that the Novus Ordo has become an obstacle in the prayer life of the Church. Frankly, if we're going to make all of Pope Francis the Heretic's encyclicals dogmatic, even as they change Church teaching, we need to embrace the fact that Quod Primum is also explicit dogma and remember that any one among us who even sets foot in a Novus Ordo parish is frankly not even a Catholic, they've been automatically excommunicated.

What we need is consistency and the Neo-Catholics have become inconsistent vermin that occupy the Church like rats do a hotel. What we do to rats is exterminate them. Like rats, there is no other group that needs more systematic extermination from the Church than Neo-Catholics. They are probably worse than the more obvious heretics like Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, Tim Kaine, Nancy Pelosi, or Joe Biden. These are the kind of heretics that still insist they possess a formal communion with the more obvious heretics by the mere fact that "authority" hasn't properly pronounced them excommunicated nor declared them excommunicated so we must "obediently submit" to authority even though authority is scandalizing us by allowing us to believe we are in a "true communion" with false Catholics. Neo-Catholics, as I have said before, seem more intent on conserving the problems that the liberals have created in the name of authority which they see as rooted in piety but is rooted in a fervent rejection of tradition and a fervent repudiation of Catholic theology throughout the centuries. Neo-Catholics have gone along with this democratic spirit and have greatly done aid in conserving the democratic spirit that has crept into the Novus Ordo liturgy.

Kwasniewski addresses the issue of active participation. What is meant by the issue of active participation as he understands it, is not the implementation of more lay ministers of the sacraments but the participation of prayer. We see in the traditional rites, there is a greater call for the spirit to engage in prayer as the body is taken through the motions of prayer. In the East, we practice bows, we cross ourselves, we stand, we raise our arms. Any one who has been to a more ancient traditional liturgy also knows that in the West, they kneel, they stand, they cross themselves, they go through these motions because the body is inherently connected to the spirit. Unlike the Platonic philosophy where the soul is a slave to the body in a dualistic combat between soul and body, the body is an earthen vessel for the soul and its service is to assist the soul in attaining to heavenly things. Hence, the body is put through these ascetical disciplines.

Further, the laity become engaged in a communal form of worship that exceeds the spirit of individualism in the Novus Ordo. In the Novus Ordo, the laity have the option of receiving Eucharist on the tongue or in the hand. In the traditional rites, that is not an option. The Novus Ordo stresses option and choice as has been talked about. This entails not active participation but individual participation. The traditional rites stress the communal form of worship that when we see one brother kneeling, that is because either he is not as familiar with the rite, or we're all supposed to kneel in reverence at that moment with him. In the Byzantine rite, we all fall face to the ground during our Presanctified Liturgy. This is how we participate in the Liturgy. Active participation is not about having more laity serve the sacraments nor about having more laity go their own way in the liturgy. The Divine Liturgy is not a democracy. The Catholic Church has no place in either its liturgy or in its theology for the democratic ideology that the Novus Ordo heretics are attempting to fuse into its worship and tradition. That we even consider this a discussion when Church teaching has been unambiguous and instead defend a Pope who has been anything but unambiguous at best is an appalling circumstance that the Church has been placed in.

I suppose critics of Kwasniewski could state here that "active participation" does not entail the communal worship and I would contend with them stating that the worship in the liturgy is public, therefore the active participation must be a public service to the Church, ergo, not about individuality. The public worship of the Church calls us to abandon our individuality and enter into communion with God. That is active participation. We cannot come into communion with God if we are looking at our own selves and only concerned with our own wishes in the participation. Participation in holy worship is about deification. We are not divine in our own right but made divine by God. If we are going to allow him to accomplish this act of deification, we need to abandon ourselves and embrace a more active participation in public worship. The Novus Ordo centers the worship on man and away from God.

Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness - Laying Our Foundation on Solid Rock

One problem that has come as a result of the liturgical malformation is how we have all ended up becoming "experts" of the liturgy rather than  simply accepting the simplistic nature of the liturgy as a gift from Heaven (Noble Beauty, 169-170). This is caused by the bouncing back and forth from different Masses. As has already been noted, the Novus Ordo does not fix itself into a set rubric. So when one looks at a liturgy, they are more attuned to the abuses in a particular Novus Ordo liturgy. They have less of an appreciation for the beauty of Mass. The focus becomes more about how the Mass has been celebrated and it opposes the concept of the Mass as a gift from Heaven. It's not that Kwasniewski sees thinking liturgically as a bad thing but rather the focus away from the liturgical and heavenly beauty of the Mass is what is the bad thing and that has led us into this liturgical competitiveness among both Westerners and Easterners.

One thing I've noticed in my own journey in the Eastern rites is that there is a mode of liturgical elitism that crops up among the more supposedly "pious" Eastern rite Catholics. They look at their liturgy not as equal to that of the Traditional Latin Rite but as superior to the Latin rites all together. But that's not the duty of the Eastern rites. The duty of the Eastern rites is to call the Latins to a traditional and liturgical frame of reference, not to annihilate the West and coerce it to adopt Eastern rite practices as universal. I have noted far more differences and discrepancies between the Eastern rites and the Novus Ordo that even Eastern rite proponents would like to admit. We have become fixated more on the exterior modes of celebration ourselves. We've been no better than the West on this issue.

Kwasniewski's chapter here also takes a swipe at the emphasis on socializing at church. Socializing is a core part of many Novus Ordo churches. Is it not essential that we develop and grow with other Catholic families though? It certainly is but socializing is not the reason one attends Mass. We work out our own salvation through fear and trembling after all. How are we doing this if we are constantly fixated on socializing? And a coffee hour can be a very good thing and can even be used as a window to offer opportunities to inquire but even when I was an Anglican, the priest would remind us that we do not attend church for the coffee hour afterward or for the people but to make ourselves ready for God, to receive the holy Eucharist in the Mass. If focus is placed solely on socializing, then we begin to lose focus on the Eucharistic mysteries. Lately, my socializing after Vespers and the Divine Liturgy has been reduced to praying with my godfather and saying "I love you" to my godmother. Those three words I found she needed to hear too during Lent when I saw her face light up with relief.

Kwasniewski writes of the liturgical tradition, "it is God's gift to us, it comes before us and goes beyond us, we did not generate and we cannot, of ourselves, guarantee it." (182) Is that not our Eastern attitude toward our Divine Liturgy? Is that not how we are meant to think about our liturgical tradition? Something that is handed down to us as a gift that is not our own? Yes, that is our Eastern attitude. When we talk about Easternizing the West, we are contributing to the great damage to liturgical theology in the West, the same damage when the West talks about Latinizing us. And let's put it simply, if the West is going to "Latinize" us (and they shouldn't), then shouldn't we be concerned about the damage they have done to their own liturgy. If they can suicide their own tradition, they can murder our traditions. Alice von Hildebrand has this to say about the Latin Mass:

"The devil hates the ancient Mass. He hates it because it is the most perfect reformulation of all the teachings of the Church. It was my husband who gave me this insight about the Mass. The problem that ushered in the present crisis was not the traditional Mass. The problem was that priests who offered it had already lost the sense of the supernatural and the transcendent. They rushed through the prayers, they mumbled and didn't enunciate them. That is a sign that they had brought to the Mass their growing secularism. The ancient Mass does not abide irreverence and that is why so many priests were just as happy to see it go." (183-184)

The Novus Ordo has invited in an era of liturgical elitism on all sides unhealthy for the Church. This is not the fault of the ancient liturgies as this spirit is not nearly as grand as it may have been in the first millennium and especially not the second millennium. This spirit of liturgical elitism has been ushered in by the Novus Ordo's arrogant assault on the tradition of the Church which is an assault on the Church itself. Our clergy need to address this and they need to seek the total abolishment of the Novus Ordo before it spreads its errors throughout the rest of the Church.

Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness - Formed in the Spirit and Power of the Liturgy

Here, Kwasniewski challenges the terminology of extraordinary being applied to the Tridentine Mass (Noble Beauty, 145). When one considers the Church's existence prior to Vatican II and the corrupted Mass (if you can call them that) formats of Paul VI, the terminology used to refer to the ancient and Old Mass as "extraordinary" is baffling at best, misleading at minimum, and an outright deception at worse. The Catholic Church has had its roots in both East and West, this is true, but the Catholic Church, since the Middle Ages, has primarily been Western. Thus, Western liturgical expressions have been the norm as they existed in the Celtic and English rites, the Ambrosian rite, the Mozarabic rite, and in the Tridentine rite, the Mass of Gregory the Great. Incidentally, in the Byzantine rite, our presanctified liturgy is attributed to Gregory Dialogous, the one who in the West, is called St. Gregory the Great. He is particularly called this as he is known for his dialogues, but that is an aside point. The fact that Catholics need to deal with is that the Tridentine Mass attributed to him is by no means an "extraordinary" Mass as there is no "extraordinary" time in the Church's liturgical year in opposition to a manufactured "ordinary" time. Indeed, the Tridentine Mass, especially after Quod Primum, was the dominant Mass of the Western Church and the Catholic Church, being Western held that as the dominant Mass. It was supposed to be that what would remain extraordinary were the more ancient rites and liturgical traditions.

One principle confusion that has emerged as this dupe about the Tridentine Mass being "extraordinary" are the growing numbers of extraordinary ministers of the holy Eucharist. First, no lay person should ever touch the Eucharist. This is for sanctified hands to touch only. And the Byzantine rite would never do this, so another difference for those counting. Second, if these are deemed "extraordinary" then what the Novus Ordo proponents are really doing is being deceitful in how they apply the term "extraordinary". They apply it one way to the Tridentine Mass as an act to belittle it and another way to these ministers of the holy Eucharist in order to enhance their occupation. The Novus Ordo proponents, have, in a way, politicized not only the Eucharist but also the term "extraordinary"! And as Kwasniewski points out, the growing number of these ministers was supposed to be few, not many, according to even the precepts of the Second Vatican Council, but here again, the Novus Ordo doesn't show itself as concerned with preserving any liturgical tradition or even the tradition of the Church. Neo-Catholics generally preserve the Novus Ordo because Neo-Catholics have always preserved the changes that the liberals have made to Church teaching. They'll insist that they won't accept fundamental changes, yet the goalposts of what constitutes a fundamental change for them don't seem to stop moving. Maybe it's time we hit them back hard and rebuke them for moving those goalposts?

Although Benedict XVI was by no means perfect, and I certainly don't concur with some of his private judgments, one thing Benedict XVI has to be commended for is his clamp-down on the liturgical malforms and his criticisms of seminaries to meet the requirements of Latin instruction prescribed by canon law (152). If Benedict XVI was not critiquing the Novus Ordo for its lack of liturgical formation, it's difficult to imagine what he was critiquing. It astonishes me how in the West there seems to be almost a universal lack of liturgical formation in both the Novus Ordo and the Tridentine Mass. In my own rite, we use the liturgy in order to open discussions about the nature of God and the sacraments. The liturgy becomes a holy mystagogy in this way. Something that would secure the Tridentine Mass is the tradition of mystagogy as the liturgy ought to become central in the life of the Christian. Kwasniewski touches on this theme numerous times in his work here. In fact, reading Kwasniewski's work, I was inspired by how liturgically-centered his theology is and if one changes a few words in select passages, Kwasniewski himself could almost be mistaken as an Eastern liturgist. He certainly is influenced by a Byzantine Catholic as he mentions the Byzantine Catholic theologian Michael Martin in his introduction.

And finally, the buzz-saw that the Novus Ordo proponents of Vatican II run into. The laity are entitled, by Vatican II, to the full spiritual benefits of the Church in its liturgy and sacraments (165). If there isn't a reason to make the Tridentine Mass ordinary again, I don't know what there is. But especially looking at this past year, we have seen Novus Ordo "bishops" who have rejected the plain Catholic teaching in its dogmatic theology and legal code. We have seen "bishops" effectively apostatizing. Some have refused to marry parishioners. Some have refused to give the sacraments. Some have even refused communion to Catholics who wish to respect Our Lord by receiving it on the tongue calling such humble Catholics arrogant and lacking humility for their very own humility. It is a disgusting position for the Catholic faithful to be in. We are entitled to the full benefit of the Church's service in both its liturgy and the sacraments. If our bishops say that we cannot attend Liturgy but we want to attend Liturgy, our bishops cannot tell us "no" or that it's for "health reasons" as they have done while still remaining themselves Catholics. If we request it reasonably, they cannot tell us "no" and shew us out the door. They would cease being Catholics themselves as they have a duty to defend the Catholic faith. There should have never been a Church shutdown. If the Catholic faithful want to attend the Tridentine Mass, then the bishops have a duty to make this widespread and available. If the faithful want to attend the Tridentine Mass more than once a week, the bishops must make it available more than once a week.

Thus, the battle for liturgical formation in the Church may not be easy but it is a battle that can be won. As more Catholics see the spiritual dryness of the Novus Ordo, the Tridentine Mass has to allow itself to become a holy mystagogy. It is the holy mystagogy that draws Westerners to the East, it will be the holy mystagogy that draws the Novus Ordo proponents to the Tridentine Mass. This mystagogy has been lacking in the West and it simply is inapplicable in the Novus Ordo. The Novus Ordo doesn't place a center spotlight on the liturgy. If anything, the Novus Ordo places a center spotlight on choice and the radical deformation of the liturgy. In order for liturgical restoration to be seen, we need the introduction of mystagogy to the West. That is how there will be true liturgical formation. Things such as the vernacular are exterior visuals. Really, the vernacular is the only similarity I have been finding in reading about the Novus Ordo and the liturgical destruction of the West with the Byzantine rite and yet my church's previous archbishop praised the accomplishments of the West in reclaiming a more "Eastern" tradition on this basis. I am failing to see where this "Eastern" influence in the Novus Ordo is though and I can only think that Easterners are failing to see the destruction that our sister Church in the West has been succumbing to from this "liturgy". An introduction of mystagogy to the Tridentine Mass would lead the West to a more Eastern understanding of the liturgy. Such with the emissaries of St. Vladimir of Kyiv. There was a difference between how the German Christians worshiped and the Greek Christians worshiped. The latter was more involved with the liturgy, even though at this time, there would have been barely any difference between the two liturgies.

Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness - Different Visions, Contrary Paths

In this chapter, Peter Kwasniewski looks at the liturgical emphasis made by the Jesuits and the Benedictines. It developed in the early twentieth century that the Benedictines placed a heavy emphasis on the centrality of the liturgy in the spiritual growth and theology of the Church's life. The Jesuits, on the other hand, placed more of an emphasis on the intellectual growth with the liturgy being merely just a tool useful for spiritual growth. In the last section, I talked about this unfortunate side effect of scholasticism. The Benedictines insisted on the primacy of the liturgy in the life of the Church while the Jesuits insisted on a re-envisioning of the liturgy to a mode of private devotion. These two came into fusion at the Vatican II Council "as if new Jesuit wine had been poured into old Benedictine wineskins" (Noble Beauty, 118). It is in this chapter that Kwasniewski also seems to depart from any mask of sympathy he may hold toward Vatican II.

The Benedictines certainly hold a more fundamentally correct view, however, like the Jesuits, they also abandoned the liturgy of the ancient rite. They favored the concept of the private character of the Novus Ordo. Some people may think in reading this that I attack the Novus Ordo too much but when fully considered, there is a very limited sense in which the Novus Ordo can accurately be deemed a Catholic Mass. Certainly, if emphasis is placed on reverence and these formats are not made optional, it may be able to be deemed a Catholic Mass and a vernacular translation of the Old Mass, but if these are left optional, the Novus Ordo fails to merit anything of Catholic value. The centrality of the liturgy in Catholic life though is not optional. Lex credendi lex orandi! is the old dogma and the old dogma will remain. Liturgy is not distinct from our theology and prayer is not distinct from our belief. This disconnect between the two brought upon by the Jesuit strain of theology in the Church's life was a blunder. How could the two have been so blatantly disconnected and the liturgy allowed to become objectified like this?

There is a desire among proponents of the Novus Ordo to retrace back to "antiquity" and claim the tradition in antiquity once again. But this leads them to a selective mode of antiquarianism. They want their cake and eat it too. Kwasniewski notes how the great liturgical theologian, Dom Prosper Guéranger saw in these heretical and schismatic movements always a burning desire to retrace their own claims to antiquity. (124) Of course, there was no validity in it and what was always neglected was the organic nature of certain developments and growths. St. Vincent of Lérins comments much on how doctrine appropriately develops. But what we often see instead of a love for antiquity is a rejection and a repudiation of orthodoxy that leads to a selection of what we want to believe about antiquity and what we do not want to believe about antiquity. How many Novus Ordo proponents view the mandate for women to wear headcoverings as effective? How many Novus Ordo proponents would wash their hands before receiving the Eucharist? How many Novus Ordo proponents would actually go back to practicing baptisms by full immersion with the catechumen in the nude? The fact of the matter is not many of them.

Was Protestantism not started by a man who desired to bring Catholicism all the way back to the Scriptural era? Yes! We see that antiquarianism does not actually have roots in Catholicism but rather has its roots in the spirit of Martin Luther. The arch-heretic desired to find what the original Christians taught and found himself inside his Bible. Not coming to the conclusions even of the Bible, Martin Luther sought that Christians root themselves in the authority of Scripture alone. This of course led to a problem soon as more Protestant denominations began to spring up which Luther himself never intended but it was too late for Luther. The damage to the Western Christian tradition was already done, there was no way to end it. Eventually, Luther's doctrine found proponents in the Anabaptists who took it to the most literal level of all of the Protestant Christians at the time. They believed that all men could accurately understand the Scriptures and could effectively be their own authoritative pastors. But it was the antiquarian approach of Luther's that still retains dominance among Protestantism and liberal Christianity today. Even the ones claiming the most progressive standing are backwards and behind.

And here, Kwasniewski notes that the liturgy does undergo organic development in terms of its pruning. Like a tree when it grows in your yard needs its branches clipped on a regular basis. The garden needs to be weeded. The liturgy is growing like a tree. The Church has planted the seed of its faith in the liturgy and the necessary actions are to ascertain it grows properly by pruning the plant, making certain weeds are not growing, keeping the plant centered. If this does not occur, the plant will not grow properly. The garden will not flourish well. Overgrowth will occur. This pruning of the plant is not to show that there is an artificiality in the plant or even an artificial growth in the liturgy, but rather it shows that the liturgy is guided by the Church throughout the years, it undergoes no mutations turning it into a new plant like the Novus Ordo, and it shows that the Church has a spiritual garden in its liturgy. The liturgy is the life of the Church, it is the spiritual garden of the Church, and it is the prayer of the Church. The Church is all about the liturgy, and its theology is in the liturgy. Many proponents of the Novus Ordo deny this and they subsequently anathematize the Church in the process.

Kwasniewski states, "we retain the Roman liturgical tradition out of humility and not out of pride" (133) which could not be better well put. Too often, the Traditionalist Catholics are accused of acting in a spirit of pride by the false Novus Ordo Catholics. That they ought to accept the new liturgical changes, the private devotion in the "Mass" and the mutations done to tradition or they are not acting in obedience. But the Church is more than just obedience to a particular Pope at a given time. If we were to play that game, we could pit Popes against each other. The Church, instead, is the whole of the liturgical tradition and the liturgical garden that it has been planted in. No one can be acting in a spirit of pride by giving up their own selves in the liturgy as the Traditionalists who attend the ancient liturgies of the East and West do. Who can be acting in a spirit of pride are the ones who attend the liturgies because it's their preference, it's their way to connect with God, it's their private devotion. And these people are typically found in the Novus Ordo, not with the Tridentines.

Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness - Urgent Care for Sick Church

When one looks backward at the Old Liturgical Movement, unless they knew better, one would be tempted to categorize the proponents as traditionalists in the modern sense that term is used. Their desire was to get people to know about the liturgy. They wanted people to understand what was going in the liturgy. Of course, this ultimately led to a complete undivinization of the liturgy. Kwasniewski talks about how the saints knew that asceticism was to be practiced in the mystical life (Noble Beauty, 93). Here is a glaring problem with the Novus Ordo. When one looks at the Novus Ordo, many of the fasts are taken out. There is no pre-Lenten season of Septuagesima, no daily Lenten fasting (Byzantines practice daily Lenten fasting, another commonality we have with the Tridentine Rite, and another difference with the Novus Ordo), and no abstinence on Fridays. Many of these rules were already being adjusted prior but they certainly paved way for what was to come in the Liturgical malform.

Kwasniewski states, "[t]he real crisis of Catholicism at the time of Council was not located in its mysteries, rituals, or symbols, which are enduring and life-giving, but in lack of devotion to them on part of many of the clergy, which begot a lack of desire to lead the faithful into a better understanding of them (97). As mentioned, we see the deteriorating devotion prior to the Council so many Neo-Catholics have attempted to remove blame from Vatican II by referencing those. But we can see that Vatican II did nothing to fix the lack of devotion which is what a Council is supposed to do. So let's cool our jets and stop slabbing off onto people the idea that Vatican II made massive achievements and was by any means a holy Council. If it was a holy Council, it would have reversed the direction the Church was careening on. It did not. Councils are instituted to correct error. Vatican II adopted error. It cannot be held that the faithful are bound to the full tenants of Vatican II since the faithful can never be bound to error.

This lack of devotion is obvious enough in the adjustments to the fasting regulations. Before, it was mandatory to fast up to six hours prior to receiving the Eucharist. This was adjusted under Pius XII to one hour. Even a more traditionalist Pope like the Ven. Pius XII certainly committed error on this legal issue. A Pope can commit error on laws not pertaining to the faith and since dioceses are allowed to be stricter, one cannot insist that the faithful were ever necessarily bound to following this new obligation which was actually a diminishment of the prior obligation. But here we already see a culling of the asceticism that goes along with the mystical life. We cannot have a mystical life by indulging ourselves in food. A mystical life is impeded by the lack of asceticism in our lives and it is helped and aided along by asceticism. When there are no ascetics, the mystical life is devoid of meaning. Hence why the New Age can get us no where. And yet we see New Age concepts being brought in on a constant basis into the life and theology of the Church. We see this with the teaching on human dignity, religious liberty, and the liberty of conscience. These things had no existence prior to the Second Vatican Council.

Clearly, this is not all the fault of the Council but the Council had the responsibility to culling the lack of devotion. The Council had the responsibility of engendering new devotion to the Catholic faith. These things, the Council did not do. As a result, we see the "Mass" being turned into a clown show by stooges. Heretics have strutted themselves into the Church and claimed seats of power which do not properly belong to them (if you are ever turned away from the Holy Eucharist by "Fr." James Martin, remember that you were graciously excommunicated from heresy by divine fiat). How has this happened if Vatican II is truly a holy Council? We may be tempted to say the implementation of the Council was "misunderstood" but that would insist that the implementation of the Council's clear-cut theology was laid out firmly against this madness. It is not. It seems to be the clear-cut meaning is in favor of this madness. Unlike with the Council of Nicaea which denounced in unequivocal terms the heresy of Arianism, we don't see that from Vatican II. We instead have people in the Church who now think that the only thing about Church theology and liturgy that matters is Vatican II.

Kwasniewski concludes, "The Liturgical Movement prior to the Council lamented the fact that Catholics, generally speaking, did not possess an intimate knowledge of their liturgy or cherish a particularly intense desire to live 'under the sign' of liturgical seasons and feasts." (108) This is a primary difference between the East and West. The West did not have a means of fully explaining the liturgy to people. It should have nevertheless made the effort. But the rise of scholasticism made the focus of the West on the paper theology of the Church rather than the essence of the liturgy. While Quod Primum made this effort, we see this mentality in the West still today. Because the liturgy was never fully explained to people, people began to think of the liturgy as something that could be changed, even ignoring the dogmatically binding statements of Quod Primum which binds all Catholics to the affirmation of the Tridentine Mass as the ordinary Mass for Catholics (yes, my rite is an extraordinary exception, but as it was older than 200 years at the time Quod Primum was written is stil an acceptable practice for Catholics), and thinking that liturgical expressions are only optional outward expressions of the interior faith. The faith, under this assault from this type of scholasticism, has been reduced to creedal affirmations.

Unlike in the East which has been greatly supplemented by the works of St. John Chrysostom, St. Germanos of Constantinople, and St. Nicholas Cabasilas, the West has not made the focus or core of their theology the liturgy. In the East, when asked a theological question, we turn straight to the liturgy and make a clear statement of what the faith is. The West does not have that. The West has been under the chains of the scholastic influence for quite some time. This in no way is meant to denounce the scholastic philosophy as a theological system but rather to propose a correction to the scholastic philosophy in that it should not find itself disconnected from the liturgical expression. If the scholastic method found itself reconnected to liturgical expression, there would be no doubt a firm a denunciation of all heresies and a full affirmation of orthodox Catholicism throughout the world. Until then, there is need to stop the further malforms that are being brought into the Church by the liberals through their Neo-Catholic dupes.

Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness - Spirit of the Liturgy in Our Lady

It is to the Ever-Virgin that the Archangel Gabriel announces the coming of Our Lord first and she returns praises to God with the Church's glorious hymn known as the Magnificat. It is not just the Ever-Virgin that is able to return this prayer but the Church who returns this prayer for the Church is the very expression of Our Lady the Theotokos. It is in the liturgy that we come to realize our full expression of the Blessed Ever-Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. In the liturgy, we too, are pregnant with God in anticipation of His Second Coming, His coming into us through the Eucharist. We are standing with Him at the foot of the Cross. Many people want to make of the Church a more masculine place of worship nowadays but the Church, in its essence is feminine. Very feminine. It is the expressed image of Our Lady. And like Our Lady, "Holy Mother Church never has the intention of 'knowing a man', that is treating the liturgy as a 'choice' made by partners in family planning" (Noble Beauty, 56). We have no intention of knowing this "liturgy of choice" that the Novus Ordo has effectively become throughout the entirety of Western worship. We fully submit to being in the likeness of the Ever-Virgin who carries Our Lord in her womb willingly and allows the will of God to be done according to His Own, not to hers. We are turned toward God in the liturgy, not towards each other. The focus is on God and when the focus is on God, we are honoring Our Lady in the truest sense. Muhammadans may have a devotion to Our Lady but they fail to render her honor as they refuse to acknowledge her Son as Our Lord.

Like the Blessed Virgin, we join into the suffering of divine things. "The Blessed Virgin exemplifies this suffering of divine things. She lets them happen to her, she accepts, she receives, embraces, and this is why she becomes pregnant with God." (57) It is not just in her womb where she carries Our Lord but afterward, she joins Him in His ministry at the wedding of Cana where she presents intercession on behalf of those who were without wine, she joins Him at the Cross where a sword likewise pierces her soul, and she subjects herself to death even though without sin, she was not subject to it, so that she can enter into His Resurrection. The Church's life is Marian because the Church's prayer is Marian. We offer ourselves according to the Will of God, not according to our heart's content, for often our fallen hearts know more what is wrong than what is right. It is when we conform to the image of Our Lady that we soon find the Novus Ordo in direct contradiction to this. The Novus Ordo, as discussed in the last section, entertains a voluntary characteristic. It is true that Our Lady voluntarily submitted herself to God but in doing so, she said, "be it done according to thy Word." She did not allow her will to take over when she surrendered it to Our Lord. The Novus Ordo is in a situation where it has refused to surrender its will over to Our Lord's. It turns its will toward itself. Many times, looking at a priest face-to-face in a liturgy is distracting and brings more attention to the priest and the parishioners than it does toward God.

Kwasniewski notes, "It is the very inflexibility of traditional liturgical forms that gives them their indomitable power to shape us, to change us, to be our fixed reference point, to be the rock on which the anchor of our restless hearts can catch hold." (61) How are we being shaped if we are free to shape what is meant to shape us? Prayer is not about changing others or the Will of God. It is about changing our wills to the Will of God. It is about entering into the life of God. This is the way the Ever-Virgin lived. She always had the Eucharist in her mouth. She was always turned toward God. She was always facing God. One of things I admire about Crazy Church Lady, my godmother, is that she is always turned Eastward, toward God. She looks toward Christ. Jesus alone is her King, Jesus alone is her Lord. She desires her children to have the same attitude. When her little one expressed she loved Jesus more than her mommy and daddy, my godmother expressed that this is exactly what we desire for this little one. The Ever-Virgin is constantly interceding for us in the presence of God and the Liturgy is offered for those who are in desperate need of the intercession of Our Lady. We pray in the East that God remember all men and women. One can be certain that the Ever-Virgin prays for all men and women too. Like my godmother, Our Lady is always turned Eastward.

"[The Virgin Mary] was ad orientem through and through. In our interior attitude towards liturgy, in our actual practice of worship, and in the ordering of our lives, we should imitate and internalize this theocentrict and Christocentric orientation of the Blessed Virgin Mary." (67)

In all of our ecclesiastical life, we are to imitate Our Lady. Our Lady is the New Jerusalem. Our Lady is the City of God. Our Lady is the Bride of Christ. All of those things, the Church is too. The Church is the New Jerusalem. The Church is the City of God. The Church is the Bride of Christ. Our Lady possessed the Eucharist always in her mouth and so too, the Church possesses the Eucharist always in its tabernacles. The Church is facing Eastward, at the foot of the cross, suffering along with Christ, pregnant with God Himself and all of His riches.

"Our Blessed Lady shows us the best way, the true way, the holy way. It begins with 'Be it done to me according to Thy Word,' culminates in her adoring and co-redemptive silence at the foot of the Cross, lingers lovingly in her life of Eucharistic communion, and finds completion in her glorious assumption where she─the very personification of the heavenly Jerusalem and its ineffable liturgy─is taken up by the hand of her Son and led into His eternal wedding feast." (87)

Let it be done to me, according to thy will. 

Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness - Why Reverence is Not Enough

Peter Kwasniewski's next chapter tackles the question of reverence. Many efforts have been made to push the Novus Ordo into a reverential direction. These efforts are certainly commendable and could do a service in ensuring the survivability of the Novus Ordo, but only if such reforms are not made optional. The core problem here with the Novus Ordo then is not whether it can be reverent but that the Novus Ordo possesses the option to not be reverent. Therein lies the fallacy with the Novus Ordo as it exists today. Bp. Athanasius Schneider himself has proposed different ways to reform the Novus Ordo, all of them are very important for Catholics to consider. These reforms he proposes are the reestablishment of ad orientem priests in the liturgy, the reception of the Eucharist kneeling and on the tongue, not the hand, the reintroduction of the offeratory prayers that indicate the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist, the return of the calendar of the Old Rite, and the reintroduction of Latin into the liturgy. (Christus Vincit, 246-256) But wait, doesn't this eventually turn the Novus Ordo into a vernacularized version of the Traditional Latin Mass? Why yes, and that's exactly the point!

"I do not think it is realistic to abolish the Novus Ordo. You cannot accomplish this on such a large scale. We have to restore the constant traditional form of the Mass step by step, in a substantially organic manner. We cannot make another rupture but need to do it organically. Only those things that are absolutely necessary should be imposed in all Catholic churches of the Roman rite by pontifical authority: celebration ad Deum and Communion kneeling and on the tongue." (249)

I would further argue that the addition of the offeratories should be made mandatory as the Eucharist is not just a common meal but a sacrificial offering of the Lord's body. And any one insisting that the Novus Ordo's commitment to receiving the Eucharist standing is an example of its "Eastern" quality is sadly mistaken. In the East, standing is an act of reverence. In the West, kneeling is an act of reverence. In the East, we do not receive the Eucharist on the hand, we receive the Eucharist on the tongue just like the Traditional Latin Mass and not like in the Novus Ordo in which it can only be done by request assuming you currently still have a bishop in good standing with the Catholic faith.

Peter Kwasniewski talks about tradition as guiding us in our lives. Tradition is our culture and tradition is what we inherit. The Latin tradere means "to hand over". Tradition binds us into a culture that we fight to preserve. "Tradition comes to us from above, from God who providentially designed us as social animals who inherit our language, our culture, and our religion; it comes to us from our ancestors...the ones who have gone before." (Noble Beauty, 38) In contrast to tradition are the errors of modernity. Modernity seeks to topple tradition. Modernity is rooted in pride. It is a pride that says, "I know better than my ancestors who came before me!" It is a pride that turns one into a know-it-all and they become consumed with thinking that they have found the answers or that those who came before them fudged it all up. This pride is rooted deeply in the spirit of modern day democracies and it is rooted more deeply in the form of Protestantism. To speak of the adherents of the Old Liturgy as "Protestant" in mentality is not only a slanderous accusation to make but also an egregious fallacy of what Protestantism entails. Protestantism is a rejection of the authority of tradition. Protestantism didn't reject the authority of the Pope, it rejected the authority of tradition which the Pope's authority was rooted in. Protestantism didn't reject the authority of the bishops, it rejected the authority of the Church which the bishops carried their authority in. This golden calf of modern day liberalism, the Enlightenment philosophy, is deeply seeded in American culture and flourishes deeply in American Catholicism. Sometimes I wonder if we as Catholics have forgotten that we are the Church and have embraced the American culture over ecclesiastical culture. Kwasniewski further makes his argument against the Novus Ordo,

"the reformed liturgy, moreover, like modern liberalism itself, exalts choice, spontaneity, and diversity, whereas the historic liturgies of Christianity, both Eastern and Western, present the worshiper with a fully articulated act of worship to which we gratefully yield ourselves, taking on its features as an icon panel receives layer after layer of prescribed color until the beautiful image stands forth." (39)

Here, Kwasniewski has tied the spirit of the liturgical malform in with the spirit of modernist liberalism. It is the spirit of this change that the Neo-Catholic insists is genuinely Catholic, but the emphasis on choice presents him with error. Kwasniewski cites Martin Mosebach, "the very fact that it is possible [to celebrate it reverently] is the weightiest argument against the new liturgy" (45). Mosebach further draws a comparison between this attitude toward the liturgy with an attitude regarding treating a monarch as needing to be competent since it is the monarch's birth from which he draws his legitimacy. Tradition is handed down to us. Tradition is what is in contrast to modernity. Modernism embraces the emphasis of choice. It embraces spontaneity and diversity. Within Christianity, there is room for some diversity, but the limits are drawn with the terms of how and how can not a liturgy be conducted. Christianity is a broad, universal religion, uniting all ethnicities, but it is in the historic tradition of the liturgy that we are united. There are many ancient liturgies that, as Catholics, we celebrate, but they are rooted in the same essence. This rooting is in the Holy Sacrifice of the Eucharist. This is why we can look at the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and see how strikingly familiar the Liturgy of St. Basil is when we celebrate it. This is why when after looking at that, we can venture into the West and see the melodies of the Gregorian chant yet know that the liturgical pattern is the same. There might be different ways of expressing reverence through kneeling or through standing but the core essence is what unites us together. The Eastward direction of the priest, the liturgy of the catechumens and the liturgy of the faithful, the chanting, the Gospel readings, the offeratories, all of this is the same in both East and West. Only tradition frees us from the errors of Protestantism. Dead authoritarianism leads us to an even duller form of Protestantism than the one we anathematized at the Council of Trent.

Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness - The New Evangelization Needs the New Mass

Peter Kwasniewski is brilliant in this book at using the logic of the Vatican II reforms against those who have polluted the Church to demonstrate why the Traditional Latin Mass actually fulfills the reforms the Neo-Catholics have been trying to "discover" in the Novus Ordo far better than the Novus Ordo ever can or did. One of the things that has occurred since 1965 is that attendance of the Catholic faithful to Mass every Sunday has been in constant and drastic decline (Noble Beauty, 3). This was also around the time the changes to the Mass started to be implemented. Is this a sheer coincidence or is this an indicator that prayerful attendance to Mass is inherently connected to the type of worship that is occurring in Mass? One of the things the more "conservative" Neo-Catholic defenders of the Novus Ordo try to spit on is the concept of the lex credendi lex orandi. This, translated to English, means "law of belief, law of prayer". Fr. Casey has shown his consistent dismissal of this rule of law in the life of the Catholic as he relegates the changes of Mass and rites is not actually a matter of faith. Though there may be some argument when regarding fasting observances and what age to administer the sacrament of confirmation, when you are talking about fundamental changes to the Divine Liturgy, yes, the Divine Liturgy is a matter of faith. To dismiss this idea is to repudiate Catholicism. As we have shown from the introduction post in the comments made by the Byzantine Liturgist Nicholas Cabasilas.

Kwasniewski builds his defense of the Traditional Latin Mass's reimplementation being the root cause of what is drawing people back to the faith by citing numerous stories of people who have been attending the Novus Ordo, who now attend the Traditional Latin Mass, and can see the vast difference in reverence. Though these arguments are largely matters of personal experience, they touch on the fact that the Novus Ordo has created a dry religious environment for the Catholic faithful. There is a reason why people I know flock to the Traditional Latin Mass even after attending a Byzantine Liturgy in the morning. There is a reason why people would rather observe the beauty of the Traditional Latin Mass. Simply put, there comes a point in which the only real difference between Protestantism and Catholicism, if the Novus Ordo is the dominant Mass, is relegated to nothing more than paper. I remember walking around my old home in Arizona seeing a lot of these Novus Ordo parishes and they looked almost like megachurches. It felt weird thinking of them as Catholic parishes. One of my friends has commented about his own conversion, going into a Novus Ordo parish at first and wondering, "what's the difference" between this and Protestantism?

Religion is not a paper format but a relationship. Religion is a binding of oneself to God according to St. Augustine. Kwasniewski answers a common objection to the Traditional Mass, namely that it is irrelevant, we cannot see it, we cannot understand it. Kwasniewski's theology is based in simplicity but not in simplisticness. The Liturgy is like a window that shows us God. But like a window, if it is too transparent, it becomes invisible. The makers of the Novus Ordo demanded of us a transparent transparency where the window is so clean and clear that we run into it like a bird. There must be a level of opaqueness to come against (13-15), otherwise, we would not be able to come up face-to-face with God. In many ways, this shows the tensions of man with himself. The Novus Ordo becomes a form of self-worship when we look at the Mass in such a way that we try to grasp a reality tangible that we can understand. There is a lack of mystery in such a form of worship. It is formlessness.

"If, because of the way things are being done, one can see that the Mass is a sacrificial action in which our Lord and God is present for our adoration, that is a good simplicity─something that even the tiniest child can perceive and the oldest person still relish as the awe-inspiring wonder it is. If, on the other hand, one thinks Mass is a Bible study with a communion service, one might have been exposed to a bad simplification of it. Similarly, if you become immersed and a bit dizzy in the richness of the Mass as it invades all your senses and thoughts, that is a good complexity; no analysis could ever do it justice. But if there is a lot of disjointed and distracting stuff going on at Mass and you can hardly pray and cannot wait to get out, that is a bad complexity." (24-25)

How does this all relate to evangelism? Kwasniewski summarizes his position perfectly.

"The humanism, rationalism, archaeologism, utilitarianism, modernism, and other -isms on the basis of which the reformers worked in the sixties and seventies have yielded a liturgy inadequate to its own theological essence, unequal to its ascetical-mystical vocation, and estranged from its cultural inheritance." (27)

It is interesting to point out that the Latin word cultus from which our word "culture" derives from means worship. The modernistic mentality that took up the malformers was one of destruction of worship, an attack on prayer, and an assault on culture. The Traditional format of the Mass was the Catholic culture for ages. I think this is why we see the Byzantine Catholics starting to flourish as they adhere fast to their culture and recover their Eastern mentality. We have a worship that attracts Latins who have been left with a half-dead liturgy, if one could call it that. We need not sacrifice the West, but in adhering to our own culture, Greek Catholics have an important role to play in the recovery of the Church. We show the West that it is gravely important to cling to our cultural traditions. The West has been blessed with numerous ancient rites from English to Spanish to French to Celtic. This has led to the formulation of the its expression in the Traditional Latin Mass. The West needs to call its attention to its ancient traditions and abandon modernism in every way Greek Catholics must. Too many Greek Catholics think that the West is supposed to move Eastward in all of its formatting and by this, we fail to realize that the West is actually abandoning tradition altogether. The Church is universal. We are made of both East and West. We cannot allow the suicide of the West and pretend nothing is going on since they now have a "vernacular" liturgy. The West has done overtly heretical things to its liturgy. Or did we also abandon our tradition?

Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness - Introduction

Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness is a timely work of Peter Kwasniewski's that deserves attention in recent times, especially with the vicious attack on tradition by our ecclesiastical hierarchy. Martin Mosebach begins the book with an introduction commenting on the issues at play in the current discussion of the liturgical "reform" (or rather malform) that has been brought about by the effects of Vatican II and how they have deteriorated the Western Catholic mode of thought and appreciation for beauty. I am a Byzantine Catholic. Why am I so interested in the deterioration of Western Rite Catholicism? I am interested in the deterioration of Western Rite Catholicism primarily because as a Catholic, if the West can suicide its own tradition as it has done in the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st century, what stops the Western hierarchy from doing this to the East? Indeed, even my own bishop has decided to take cues from the Western bishops when it comes to how to deal with the coronavirus pandemic specifically. We do not want to be governed according to Western precepts if the West has decided to suicide its own tradition!

This collapse in appreciation for the beauty of the Church's liturgy has become among the downsides of the reforms of Paul VI. Vatican II brought about numerous reforms (or malforms) to the Church which were already in the making but hadn't touched the core essence of the liturgy quite yet. It was in this context that the liberals would first strike at the principal concept uniting Christians together. The core of our prayer life in the liturgy was assaulted. No longer was there a sacrificial offering. Churches became bland and devoid of life. The liturgy became a mode of communion between individuals rather than a sacrificial communal meal tying Christians together. Thus, Martin Mosebach comments in the introduction, "The Church, unrestrainedly pushing ahead with her revolution, continued to lose both attractiveness and retentive capacity." (xiv) I would dispute that the Church was the one that went ahead with this revolution though. I would state it was the members of the Church that tried to cut the Church into pieces and instead became persecutors of the Church instead!

One of the common themes of the Novus Ordo is that the priest frequently faces the people. This reduces the liturgy to a virtual interaction between priest, whereas a liturgy is meant to bring the congregation's proper focus on Christ. "Klaus Gamber...had given the scholarly proof that in no period of the Church's history had the liturgical sacrifice been made facing the people instead of facing East, together with the people, to the returning Lord." (xviii) This Eastward direction was intended to emphasize that Christ is coming in the East. He will return from the East. The Holy Prophet Malachi refers to Christ as the Sun of Righteousness. The Sun rises in the East. There is an inherently Eastward emphasis in Messianic theology in the Jewish literature which as a consequence, extends into the Christian literature. To create a "liturgy" in which priest and people face each other is to turn the liturgy from a sacrificial offering to God to a communication among believers. Such an act deteriorates the liturgy.

One of the things that is cut out in the Novus Ordo typically tends to be the order of consecration. The Traditional Latin Mass, much like the Byzantine Liturgy, is divided into the Mass of the Catechumens and the Mass of the Faithful. The Mass of the Catechumens is where the Gospel is read, shortly afterward, the catechumens are dismissed for the catechumens, remaining uncleansed by their lack of baptism, are unfit to observe the sacrifice of the Mass which occurs during the Mass of the faithful. Nicholas Cabasilas, commenting on the order of consecration during the Byzantine Liturgy, makes this argument in defense of the Byzantine order of consecration. In his day, there were Latins attempting to minimalize the consecration of the Eucharist, claiming that after the words, "take and eat", the Eucharist was fully consecrated already (A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, 29). There was a certain strain of Latins already abusing the faith of both East and West, minimalizing these prayers. "Who does not know that is the death of Christ alone which has brought remission of sins to the world? But we also know that even after his death faith, penitence, confession, and the prayer of the priest are necessary, and a man cannot receive remission of sins unless he has been through these processes. ... To follow the innovations of these men would inevitably mean the total destruction of Christianity." (29)

Cabasilas's harsh words to these Latins may offend some Latin Catholics, but it is important to note he only references a strain of thought developing in certain Latins. A strain of thought that Kwasniewski will take issues with. Martin Mosebach, in his foreward to Kwasniewski's book makes note of the consecrations in various different rites (Noble Beauty, xxi-xxii). Cabasilas, though commenting on the Byzantine Liturgy, has already shown the commonality between the Byzantine and Latin Liturgies (A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, 30), something that I have seen many apologists for the Novus Ordo try to claim for the Novus Ordo. Their argument is only in the position that the Novus Ordo is in the vernacular. The vernacular will be brought up later though Mosebach has a grim statement to make about the universal return to Latin. It may be that the vernacular is here to stay. I can see arguments for both the vernacular and a universal language so I won't comment further until I get to that section in this series, but the proponents of the Novus Ordo who try to compare the Byzantine Liturgy to the Novus Ordo never address the ad orientem position of the clergy nor do they address the lack of consecrations in the Novus Ordo. Indeed, that the consecrations are only deemed "optional" in the Novus Ordo ends up separating those Catholic defenders of it from the main body of the whole of Tradition already. They ignore the warnings given by Cabasilas and they have distorted the Divine Liturgy by insisting that consecrations are not necessary. Both are an attack on the essence of the Catholic faith. With these statements, Martin Mosebach calls us back to our Catholic tradition in the Divine Liturgy and in the Mass of our ancestors.