The Liturgy from Hell

By George A. Kendall

(“The liturgy from Hell,” Chronicles Magazine, 38-40 (February 2024))

George A. Kendall settles accounts with the Novus Ordo regime in a blazing article – and suggests a path going forward. It’s a forceful response to the increasingly rabid attacks on traditionalists in Catholic media in Europe and the United States. 1)

The Chronicles editor comments:

George Kendall tells us that for much of his life he has been a conservative Novus Ordo Catholic but says traditionalist arguments have recently convinced him.  He writes: “I am deeply indebted to Peter Kwasniewski…..for helping me to clarify my thinking on the Church’s need to restore her ancient liturgy.”

I would add that George Kendall wrote regularly for The Wanderer. For those of us familiar with that publication in the past (I don’t think I have read it since the mid 1990’s) Kendall’s change of position is almost unimaginable. For The Wanderer, one of the original “Conservative Catholic” publications, used to define itself by opposition to Catholic traditionalism and uncritical exaltation of the papacy.  Not that it did them any good, in my experience, in their relationship with most of the clergy!

Let me give you some excerpts from Kendall’s article.

53 years ago, in 1969, a terrible act of vandalism was committed against the Catholic Church, an assault, not only on the Catholic faithful but on the very heart of the Church, the Eucharist, hence an attack on Christ himself. That crime consisted in the scrapping, on orders from the pope, of the Traditional Latin Mass, not only getting rid of the Latin language but butchering many of the texts of the liturgy, carving it up into a liturgy different in kind from the traditional one. 

…..

Then, in July 2021, Pope Francis issued his infamous document on the liturgy, titled Traditionis Custodes (“Guardians of Tradition”), which was, in fact, a wholesale attack on tradition. The new document takes away the hope of correcting Pope Paul’s mistake ( the Novus Ordo- SC),  seeking to suppress the old Mass by regulating it to death, contradicting Summorum Pontificum which stated that no one in the Church had the authority to do such a thing.

….

Kendall squarely addresses the question of authority:

Does anyone have the authority to do what Pope Francis has tried to do in Traditionis Custodes?…..  I find it hard to imagine that the Holy Spirit guided the development and continuation of the Latin Mass for so many centuries, then suddenly decided to make a U-turn, guiding the Church to adopt a wholly different and incompatible liturgy. The Traditional Latin Mass has the authority of the Holy Spirit behind it. The Novus Ordo does not. Just as clearly, neither the Novus Ordo itself nor Traditionis Custodes has legitimate authority behind it, and we are not obliged in conscience to obey either.

…..

The strategy of the Catholic faithful should be to forget about Vatican politics and to work at the local level (the diocese and the parish) to establish as many Latin mass communities as possible. Ideally they should exist under the authority of the local Bishop, where that is possible. Where it is not, we’ll have to go underground, operating in secrecy,  perhaps celebrating the mass at one another’s homes, using canceled priests. ….

Kendall recognizes that this goes against authority but:

When the Pope or Bishop tells us we must comply with Traditionis Custodes, which is an attack on Christ and on his Church, we can and must disobey.

…

Kendall sees two advantages to this course of action:

First, as the number of Latin mass communities grows throughout the world, the number of Latin Mass Catholics in the world will increase. 

Second, the number of Novus Ordo Catholics will continue to decline, as it has for the last 50 year. Novus Ordo Catholics have a problem reproducing themselves because they typically have small families, while traditional Catholics who still adhere to the prohibition against birth control affirmed in Paul VI’s  encyclical Humanae Vitae have bigger families. This is also because the children of Novus Ordo Catholics tend to abandon the faith.  I am constantly meeting young people who tell me they were brought up Novus Ordo Catholic but “don’t go anymore.” 

……

Kendall’s article is eloquent witness to the unheard-of stress on the Church created by the Francis papacy.

ADDENDUM: In another article in the same issue of Chronicles, Anthony Esolen has this to say:

But even if all the traditionalists were kindly and reserved, and even after they have amassed all the historical evidence for their liturgical claims and argued cogently about both the beauty and the spiritual effectiveness of the Tridentine rite – and I speak here as someone who does not attend that rite – it would not matter. They are opposed not because the rite in question is ugly but because it is beautiful, and the opponents sense it. They are opposed not because they are all hypocrites when they kneel but because most of them are not hypocrites; they are opposed not because they pretend to believe but because they believe too ardently. They’re the last people a priest whose faith has shriveled up wants to be near.

Esolen, Anthony, “Culture War, whether we like it or not,” at 17 (Chronicles Magazine, February 2024)

1. We will address some of these attacks in subsequent posts.