By Father Kevin M Cusick
We’re pretty battered. Which was the point. Three years after Traditionis Custodes those of us who have opted to worship, or provide for those who worship, according to the faith of our Fathers labor along still.
We are feeling pretty beat up. The point was to relegate us to the status of second class citizens in our own Church. If this means loving and honoring God according to our conscience it is the most wonderful life imaginable.
Those who once attended Mass at my small parish and who haven’t decamped for canonically irregular independent chapels have been intentionally made to suffer inconvenience, opprobrium, absurdity and other consequences that should never result from an intervention on the part of a “father in faith”. These men are sent by God to make the Faith easier to live, whenever possible, and not the opposite.
But that is the already well documented result of Pope Francis’ 2021 letter forbidding the offering of the traditional Latin Mass in parish churches.
The people of my parish, 90% of whom once enjoyed two Sunday traditional Masses, both before noon - a real luxury, have been displaced. They must drive ten minutes north to a small chapel over the Calvert County line in the neighboring county of Prince George’s.
A very few who once attended both the new and antique Masses have switched full time to our Sunday morning novus ordo.
The rationale for TC, we were told, was that the TLM must not be part of regular parish life. Mission churches and chapels, however, offer Sunday Mass just as parish churches do. Those arriving before or after the traditional Mass at that location, however, will see it as a regular part of what passes for their “parish” life. The arbitrary nature of the restrictions does not end there.
Recently a commentator writing under the alias “DC Rosary Rally” published commentary on Rorate Caeli asserting that if Catholics cannot get the TLM within the parishes of their local diocese then they’ll “leave the Church”. What exactly the writer meant by that it is difficult to say. But if he meant that these Catholics will voluntarily sunder their relationship with the Body of Christ he couldn’t be more wrong.
One of the criteria for mortal sin is full consent of the will. Catholics who’ve had the Mass they believe in conscience will best aid their salvation ripped from them by men sent as their “shepherds” are not the wrongdoers here.
Those Catholics who choose to worship according to the 1962 Missal do so precisely because they wish to avoid at all costs injuring their relationship with the Church in any way. They want full Communion with all that “Catholic” has ever meant in its truest, highest and best sense.
Is it not, rather, those Catholics who expose themselves and their children to years of liturgical and doctrinal abuse, sacrilege and other results of changing the liturgy to suit personal preferences and fads that are jeopardizing their Faith? And is it not the right of any Catholic to opt for the alternative that will protect them and their families from these dangers?
Salvation of souls is the highest law of the Church. And one’s conscience is, as Cardinal Newman averred, “the aboriginal vicar of Christ”.
Such scandals to Faith are an eventuality that traditional Catholics will never risk because of the strictly prescribed nature of the rite. No wiggle room for “Father knows best”, as in the alternative with its instruction to say what’s offered in the book “in these or similar words”.
Is it the fault of the traditional Latin Mass that an overwhelming majority of Catholics were recently discovered to no longer believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist? I think not. Most Catholics since the 1960s have never attended and may not even know the traditional Mass exists.
No: the good people who choose to attend the TLM do so precisely for the reason that they wish to remain very much in communion with the faith of the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church.
There is a well publicized survey comparing the faith and practice of traditional Catholics over against those who choose not to attend the more ancient form of worship. The TLM Catholics score higher than others in all areas of adherence to
faith and moral teaching; they are also more financially generous. No: traditional Catholics are driven by loyalty to the Faith which comes only through the Church.
Every Mass offered by a validly ordained priest who intends to do what the Church does, whether in a building designated as a church or chapel, in a cellar or cave, behind a hedgerow or on a rock crowning a sandy desert mesa avails us of the grace necessary for our salvation. All of these modes of worship unite sincere believers to Christ the sole Savior.
I have celebrated Mass in the desert and at sea, on ship and shore, in classrooms and on vehicles, in training and war zones,
even atop a simple table. We used what we had to glorify God. That is what Catholics always must do until the end of the world.
The recusants of England under Henry and Elizabeth inspire us with their example, some martyred simply for harboring priests so that they would never be without the holy Mass and the Blessed Sacrament which it makes possible, the Divinely instituted and most powerful guarantee of union with Christ.
We who are labeled as “traditionalists” because we seek only to worship as our parents did, are the marginalized about whom the Pope speaks so much. We are surely included in that “todos, todos, todos” which he says so often must be welcomed.
There is a new document, allegedly, that will evacuate the papacy of all doctrine. It is proposed that the successors of Peter will be ecumenical figureheads for a “Church” that will accept anyone without requiring they modify their doctrine. We who are known as traditional Catholics surely must be welcomed also to such a body. Surely it is not required of us that we change our beliefs in order to be a part of this new Church which, so it is said, Pope Francis envisions?
If we are not, would such a new reality be truly “ecumenical”?
Now, a document does not have the power to create a new kind of papacy which is doctrinally vacuous. This we know. The papacy is the creation of Christ the Lord, and the men who occupy the office are His vicars on Earth. Not of and for themselves.
That is what we believe who have thus far called ourselves Catholic. That is what Catholics have always believed. But if we conceive of a new “Church” where only those who believe as Catholics always have are no longer welcome, then we truly crossing a new “rubicon” indeed.
Those who soldier on, doing as Catholics have always done and believing as Catholics have always believed, will still have hope no matter how lacking in affirmation on the part of those who brandish power. Not so much those others whose only creed has become “keeping up with the times”.
Thank you for reading.
Praised be Jesus Christ our King, now and forever
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