Author Martin Mosebach, who is not a fan of interrupting sacrosanct actions, suggests in The Heresy of Formlessness that the priest’s sermon metaphorically rends the liturgical garment in two. Mass begins with what is sacred, gets abruptly disconnected by human …
Adelphopoiesis: The Myth of the “Gay” Byzantine Marriage Rite
The Church is in the midst of a battle between warring ideologies in the secular and ecclesiastical courts. One combatant is a certain confederation of groups that push for the normalization of homosexuality in the Church and the redefining of …
What Bugnini Was Thinking When He Destroyed the Catholic Mass
In G.K. Chesterton’s story “The Queer Feet,” Father Brown says: A crime is like any other work of art. Don’t look surprised; crimes are by no means the only works of art that come from an infernal workshop. But every …
When in Florida: The Priest Who Refused My Wedding
The top-down annihilation of a developed orthodoxy into a mad-glad tambourine session seems to have been successful for a few decades. As I grow older in the Catholic Church, I’ve gradually become aware of the various effects of this post-conciliar …
On Discerning Vocations: How to Think about “States of Life”
A university student once sent to me the following heartfelt letter. He expresses well the thoughts and feelings of many young Catholic men and women his age, who are open to a vocation from the Lord, but struggle with how …
Ad Orientem: Turning Things Around in the Church
In my 21 years in Japan, I have attended three funerals. The first, for my wife’s godmother, was a Catholic one, while the other two were not. As my wife is Japanese and is the only Catholic in her family …
Veil, Vernacular, and Culture: Death and All of Its Friends
You will often hear from people who lived through the “great” post-Vatican II reform of the Mass that, despite the loss of reverence and sharp drop in attendance, it was good to have the Mass in the vernacular. Surely, understanding …
How the Best Attacks against the Traditional Latin Mass Fail
My article “Twelve Reasons Not to Prefer the Novus Ordo” was greeted with a barrage of snide remarks, flustered dismissals, relativistic claims about “tastes,” and soberly framed objections. As a philosopher and theologian, I care little for empty rhetoric, but …
Go to the Grotto of Sanity
When the day comes where you bury your head in your hands and say, “This cannot be right,” start your search for the nearest Latin Mass. I am talking here about Mass in the “extraordinary form,” the Tridentine Mass, the …
Twelve Reasons Not to Prefer the Novus Ordo: A Reply to Fr. Longenecker
Fr. Longenecker has written some fine books and articles. Years ago, I enjoyed and benefited from his book on St. Benedict and St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and his recent book on the historical veracity of the Magi is interesting. It …
