Data and the Traditional Latin Mass

 Some of the preliminary results suggest the TLM community, while drawn to a different aesthetic than the typical parish experience, holds onto the beliefs of the Catholic faith more consistently than the wider population of Catholics,

September 3, 2024 Stephen Bullivant, Cranney CranneyPrint

A sacramentary is seen on the altar during a traditional Tridentine Mass July 18, 2021, at St. Josaphat Church in the Queens borough of New York City. (CNS photo/Gregory A. Shemitz)

Recently rumors have been flying that Pope Francis is preparing to impose stringent restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass. Of course, unfounded rumors out of the Vatican are not new, and some journalists have not been able to identify anybody who has actually seen the document in question.

Still, even if it ends up being in the class of “Pope Francis is dying” rumors that we have heard for years, such a document would be in character for a pontificate that has emphasized placing hedges around the more conservative, traditional elements of the Church. While his predecessor’s position towards the Latin Mass community can be broadly characterized as one of accommodation, Pope Francis has taken a more confrontational approach.

But why? What is the problem with allowing what is by all measures a small fraction of Catholics to participate in a licit Mass that they find beautiful, reverent, and holy? The very real fact is that Traditional Latin Mass participation has been associated with factions inside the Church who do not accept Vatican II and may even be quasi-schismatic, and multiple popes have taken a variety of approaches in how to deal with groups such as the SSPX.

It is not our place to tell the Holy Father what to do; we are social scientists, not bishops, and one of us is not even Catholic; however, the extent to which the TLM community is a schismatic hotbed of negative attitudes towards Vatican II is ultimately an empirical one that is scientifically investigable, and on this point there has been a clear lack of objective, systematically collected data.

The Prefect for the Dicastery for Divine Worship, Cardinal Arthur Roche, has made it clear that he thinks the TLM has a different liturgical theology than the Novus Ordo. There is also the argument that the TLM is an implied, if not explicit, rejection of Vatican II. It seems the Holy Father himself holds this view. Conclusions based on impressions are suspect if they are not supported by more objective evidence.

In announcing Traditiones Custodes (the 2021 round of Latin Mass restrictions), the Pope invoked a survey that he had disseminated among bishops on the question of the Latin Mass. However, in addition to the fact that the survey was of bishops and not Traditional Latin Mass-goers themselves, the wordings used, the exact responses, the representativeness—any one of many things that would be required for a professional survey statistician to objectively gauge the validity of the survey—were completely unknown. Therefore it is difficult to know how seriously to take the results of the survey when only the vaguest details are known.

We, a professor of sociology and theology (and a TLM attender) and a demography/sociology dual-PhD data scientist, have been striving to remedy the lack of transparent, systematically collected, objective data on the TLM community in preparation for a book we are writing: collating all previously published information on the demographics and attitudes of the TLM community (it is not a lot), as well as conducting our own surveys and supplementing our quantitative data with approximately 20 in-depth, semi-structured interviews of TLM Catholics across the country. While our study is on the United States TLM community in particular, given the American Church’s reputation as a hotbed of conservativism, we believe our findings have broad implications.

So what did we find? While we are still processing our data, some relevant themes have already emerged. There is obviously a lot to talk about with TLM Mass-goers, which we will discuss in greater detail in the book, but in broad strokes, this is some of what we learned about Traditional Latin Mass Catholics in the United States:

• There is some truth to the conventional wisdom that they tend to be politically conservative. Of the 446 respondents in our survey who attend the Traditional Latin Mass at least once per year, 77% of them lean Republican.
• They are very, very pro-life. 85% of the TLM Catholics in our sample believe that abortion should be illegal in all cases, whereas 13% believe it should be illegal in most cases, while only 1.6% believe it should be legal in most cases, and less than 1% believe that it should be legal in all cases.
• They are orthodox. In our survey only 2% of TLM Catholics believe that the bread and wine of communion are symbols, as opposed to the Real Presence, of the body and blood of Christ. In a similarly worded Pew survey of general Catholics, 69% considered the Eucharist a symbol.
• They generally accept the Second Vatican Council. When we asked “I accept the teachings of Vatican II”
• 4% Strongly disagreed
• 7% Disagreed
• 10% Somewhat disagreed
• 15% Neither agreed nor disagreed
• 15% Somewhat agreed
• 27% Agreed
• 22% Strongly agreed
• Read the rest: https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/09/03/data-and-the-traditional-latin-mass/

Made, not begotten: Why we said “No!” to in vitro fertilization

We should not expect much courage from politicians, but Christians are called to bear witness to the truth, regardless of what opinion polls show. And the truth is that IVF is wrong.

August 29, 2024 Nathanael BlakePrint

(Image: Ricardo Moura/Unsplash.com)

When my wife and I said “No” to in vitro fertilization, we assumed that we were rejecting our last hope of bearing children. Our years of infertility were unexplained and unresolved, despite the best efforts of the Catholic Ob/Gyn practice we had been going to. They had been thorough, and the physician who offered us a second opinion had nothing to add—except pushing us to try IVF.

We did not.

Despite this apparently being the final nail in the coffin of our hopes of conceiving children together, it was not a difficult decision; we had long ago concluded that the suffering of being barren was not a justification for sin.

Believing that IVF is wrong is a minority view, as demonstrated by the response to a recent Alabama Supreme Court decision. The court sided with a couple whose embryos had negligently been destroyed, ruling that human embryos, whether in the lab, or in the womb, are persons under state law. This decision did not ban IVF, but having to treat human embryos as, well, human, would crimp the style of the loosely regulated IVF industry. Democrats quickly pounced, denouncing embryonic personhood as a mortal threat to IVF, and Republicans, led by Donald Trump, folded as fast as they could, loudly proclaiming their love for IVF and disclaiming efforts to regulate it. Alabama Republicans quickly passed a law protecting IVF clinics from lawsuits brought in response to negligence or misconduct.

We should not expect much courage from politicians, but Christians are called to bear witness to the truth, regardless of what opinion polls show. And the truth is that IVF is wrong. As practiced, IVF is a moral catastrophe in which the fertility industry manufactures and destroys human embryos on a vast scale—tens or even hundreds of thousands every year in the US alone. This is done because creating more embryos offers more chances for a successful pregnancy. However, this also ensures a lot of discarded human lives, especially because the industry is aggressively eugenic, from providing sex-selection to culling embryos suspected of being inferior in some way. Additionally, IVF is integral to the evils of surrogacy, in which the well-to-do order children and gestate them by renting the wombs of poor and working-class women—the same people who endlessly invoke the specter of The Handmaid’s Tale cheer when homosexual men lease the wombs of poor women in Eastern Europe.

Read the rest:  https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/08/29/made-not-begotten-why-we-said-no-to-in-vitro-fertilization/

89-year-old among 7 pro-lifers facing 10-year sentences after Biden-Harris prosecution

CV NEWS FEED // A federal jury in Michigan on Tuesday convicted seven pro-life advocates on charges of “conspiracy against rights” as well as for violating the controversial Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.

The group of defendants includes Eva Edl, 89, who survived a Communist death camp as a child in Yugoslavia before fleeing to the United States.

Edl, Joel Curry, Chester Gallagher, Heather Idoni, Justin Phillips, Cal Zastrow, and Eva Zastrow each “face over 10 years in prison and hundreds of thousands in fines upon sentencing,” The Daily Wire reported.

The Daily Wire also noted that the Biden-Harris administration “has been using the conspiracy against rights charge, originally designed for the Klu Klux Klan, to go after pro-life activists.”

The charges stem from a peaceful protest that all seven defendants took part in outside an abortion facility in the Detroit suburbs.  

“Edl and Idoni were convicted on an additional charge for a pro-life protest” at another Michigan abortion facility, per The Daily Wire.

Edl, a Christian, said during the trial: “We need suffering in our lives in order to be purified and not feel sorry about ourselves.”

https://catholicvote.org/89-year-old-among-7-pro-lifers-facing-10-year-sentences-after-biden-harris-prosecution/

BREAKING: Pope says both Trump and Harris are “against life”

Nota bene: Insisting on legal immigration, as Trump does, is not a moral evil. Lack of hospitality toward immigrants of any degree is not comparable to the abominable crime and sin of procured abortion. KMC

Pool photo by Guglielmo Mangiapan

Pope Says Both Trump and Harris Are ‘Against Life’

Pope Francis said American Catholic voters had to choose the “lesser of two evils,” citing Donald Trump’s cruelty toward immigrants and Kamala Harris’s support of abortion rights.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/world/europe/pope-us-election-abortion-immigration.html

Presidential debate fact-check

 

Big Brother has it in for everyone – but especially ‘extremist’ Catholics

  Gavin Ashenden

August 29, 2024 at 10:45 am

Traditional Catholics founds themselves targeted by the FBI last year. In August 2023, the Heraldreported that “leaks revealed that the FBI focused in particular on Catholics who were interested in the Traditional Latin Mass as the group within the Church allegedly the most likely to be sympathetic to violent extremist activities.”

What begins in America often swiftly finds its way to the UK.

Yvette Cooper, the recently appointed UK Home Secretary, has just commissioned a swift review of what have been described as “extremist ideologies” as part of a new government anti-extremism strategy. 

We live in a world of new politically charged euphemisms, and, as so often happens, “extremist” has come to mean views that an authoritarian left-wing government disapproves of. Cooper has vowed to crack down hard on people whom she considers to be pushing “harmful or hateful beliefs”.

The problem of course, and the accompanying potential threat, lie in the definitions of what constitutes harm and hate. In the Left’s new lexicon, anything that counters the authoritarian dogma of progressivism is harmful and hateful.

The writer and commentator Brendan O’Neill sounded the alarm recently on behalf of Catholics when he wrotein the Spectator:

“Indeed I can envision entire belief systems being reimagined as harmful. Some already have been so. Traditional Catholics, for example. They think marriage should only be between a man and a woman, that sex is determined by God not scalpel-wielding gender surgeons, and that only followers of Christ to go to heaven. That’s homophobic transphobic and Islamophobic right? In other words harmful. Shut them down.”

One of the consequences of secular opprobrium is that it places a lot of pressure on us as Catholics to dilute Catholicism in order to be thought better of by others. 

But this is a form of ideological Danegeld, that tax levied in Anglo-Saxon England to raise money to pay or see off Danish invaders. The more one gives away in order to placate one’s enemies, the more they demand.

Read the rest: https://catholicherald.co.uk/big-brother-has-it-in-for-everyone-but-especially-extremist-catholics/

Amsterdam bishop says young Catholics are going back to ‘roots of the faith,’ want traditional liturgy

Young Catholics who embrace tradition ‘are appearing out of nowhere’ in the Netherlands and ‘going in the opposite direction’ of the older, liberal generation, Dutch Bishop Johannes Hendriks said. ‘The Holy Spirit is at work.’

 Unsplash/Gloria.tv

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Andreas Wailzer

Comments  

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Wed Aug 28, 2024 - 2:34 pm EDT 

(LifeSiteNews) — Dutch Bishop Johannes Hendriks said that young Catholics are going back to the roots of the faith, including more traditional liturgies.

In an interview with the German newspaper Die Tagespost, the bishop of Haarlem-Amsterdam described the dynamic of Catholics in the Netherlands. While many of the older generation are still demanding heterodox “reforms” along the lines of the German “Synodal Way,” young Catholics are returning to tradition.

“The younger ones are going in the opposite direction again: to the roots of our faith,” he said. “It is the older ones who are coming up with the themes of the Pastoral Council of that time.”

Hendriks referred to the so-called Dutch “Pastoral Council” that took place from 1966 to 1970 and is comparable to the heretical Synodal Way in Germany. The heterodox project is considered to have been a driving factor in the country’s de-Christianization.

When asked about what young Catholics who wish to return to the roots of the faith are interested in, the bishop replied, “The charisms, vocations, and interests among young people are as diverse as in the Church as a whole: there are young people who are committed to bringing other young people together and sharing their faith and friendship with them, and there are those who are committed to helping the poor, for example, with Sant’Egidio.”

“There are those who are interested in the liturgy, often in a classical form, or who are particularly interested in deepening and forming their faith,” he stated.

“I recently had a conversation with a grandmother from our parish who said that she didn’t really like it if Holy Mass was sometimes celebrated in a more traditional way during the week, but her grandson thought it was wonderful!” the bishop recalled.

“So on the one hand, she grumbled a bit about it,” he continued. “On the other hand, I felt that the grandmother actually liked the fact that the Mass was so important for her grandson. The Holy Spirit is at work.”

Read the rest: https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/amsterdam-bishop-says-young-catholics-are-going-back-to-roots-of-the-faith-want-traditional-liturgy/