Charles-Gaffiot, Jacques, “In the Earthly City of Emmanuel: the Liturgy of Heaven Dwells among Mankind” in Salomon, Xavier F., Charles-Gaffiot, Jacques, and Constensoux, Benoit, To the Holy Sepulcher:Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum (The Frick Collection, New York and D.Giles Limited 2025)

Is it not remarkable? A catalog for the exhibition of liturgical treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum in Jerusalem is published by a secular institution, the Frick Collection. Yet it contains in an essay of some 17 pages, one of the most succinct and theologically rich explanations of the Roman Catholic Mass I have ever encountered. Perhaps this clarity and honesty are attributable to the secular nature of the hosting institution, which needs to explain to visitors what the exhibits were used for and what their meaning was to their donors and creators. Assuming that the average visitor knows nothing about such matters – a good assumption –  the Frick museum has to provide a basic introduction to the subject. And it has little incentive to advance modernist and secularist agendas. 

The author, Jacques Charles-Gaffiot,  bases his analysis almost entirely on the Traditional Latin Mass. Indeed, he emphasizes the continuity of the Tradition embodied by this Mass from early Christianity to the splendid liturgical celebrations at the court of Louis XIV (contemporaneous with the creation of many of the exhibits that can be seen in this show) to the clandestine liturgies of Fr. Maximilian Kolbe at Auschwitz. The author’s analysis of the Mass as primarily a sacrificial act is eminently Catholic. The same is true of his equation of the Mass with the heavenly liturgy. Throughout his essay Charles-Gaffiot develops the symbolic meaning of the Mass and of the sacred objects used therein and on display in this exhibition. As he writes:

The pieces of gold and silver assembled in the exhibition this book accompanies find the understanding and legitimization of their existence in liturgy, particularly in Catholic liturgy. The decorators and goldsmiths who designed these pieces and gave them shape adhered to canons that were profoundly and widely understood in their day, allowing and facilitating their use during specific religious ceremonies, which were also painstakingly established. (p. 97)

Charles-Gaffiot describes in great detail the parallels between the Mass and Jewish rituals. For the Church had always seen Christian worship as the fulfillment and completion of the worship of God set out the Old Testament. Then, especially regarding liturgical dress, there came influences from pagan Rome (or example wearing of the stole or the adoption of the basilica by the earliest churches.) 

This passage is a good example of the author’s approach:

Since the seventh century, a crucifix has been placed on top of the altar indicating that with each celebration of mass the place becomes the new Calvary, where Christ sacrifices himself. Moreover, the lighting on or around the altar conveys a particular symbolism. During Mass, at least one candle must be lit on each side of the altar:  the one to the left of the crucifix represents the holy figures of the Old Law; the one to the right those of the New. They also symbolize the two cherubim placed on the Ark of the Covenant (the seat) as well as the two seraphim that Isaiah heard singing three times to honor the Thrice Holy God. During solemn Masses, the six candles on the altar are lit; a seventh is added behind the crucifix on the occasion of a pontifical Mass. These lights recall not only the seven-branched candlestick but also the seven golden lampstands placed before the throne of God as described in the Apocalypse.(pp.100-01)

This essay alone is well worth the substantial ($89) price of the catalogue! The exhibition only lasts untl January 5, 2026. I have written a review: The Legacy of Christendom.

Dr. John Rao delivered this presentation at the reception following the Solemn Requiem Mass for Msgr. Barreiro on Saturday, November 15 at St. Mary’s parish, Norwalk CT. We are grateful for his remarks!

A Priest According to the Order of Melchisedech

By Dr. John Rao

         “If you are an idiot before you are ordained”, a priest whom I knew, now deceased, regularly told the seminarians that he taught; “you will be one afterwards as well”. 

         Some years ago, I went to the wake of a well known priest of what seemed to be an ingrained, ornery, pre-ordination temperament from the Archdiocese of New York. The late Fr. Benedict Groeschel opened the gathering—attended by an enormous number of clergy and laity—by stating quite authoritatively: “You all know that this man was a priest; and if all priests were like he was the Church would now be in wonderful shape”. 

         Indeed, we all did know what he meant, and it was accurate also because his naturalorneriness continued in his hundred percent priestly existence after ordination, but then with respect to anything that stood in the way of his happily, fully, and immediately doing what to him was not only his clerical duty but greatest joy. I remember the cleric in question shaking his head sadly when dealing with obstructions caused by a fellow member of the First Estate that he did not believe to be pastorally fruitful. “I learned long ago not to interfere in another man’s priesthood”, he regretted in my presence. And the crowd at the wake was there out of loving gratitude for his own brilliant priesthood, served by an earthly orneriness that had been transformed in Christ. 

         Meditating on both idiotic and ornery natural characteristics gives me my starting point for remembering our dear friend Monsignor Ignacio Barreiro-Carámbula, who, in his pre-ordination existence, possessed neither the one nor the other. He was, on the contrast, a man whose personal natural background offered him many gifts which—taken up and transformed through the grace of his priestly vocation—-gave to his priesthood a sophisticated shape in general, and an understanding of the problems of what the title of an old radio program of Dr. William Marra called “The Drama of Truth” in particular. Nature, Supernature, and Drama of Truth: it is these three themes that I want to use in order to recount what I know of the life of the extraordinary person whom parishoners here also came to know in his last years. 

         Everyone is aware that Monsignor was born in Montevideo in Uruguay, but not all of you may know that his “natural” background was a noble one. His family passed on a title from the Spanish Government, which his brother holds, but what I really mean by noble is what this signifies in the fullest sense of the word. A noble individual signifies a “known” quantity; a man conscious of who his ancestors were, what they accomplished, and the responsibility that he now has, in consequence, to live up to the deeds and the reputation that they have handed down to him. A truly Catholic noble family makes certain that its offspring take seriously their duties to protect the religious, political, and social order that honored their forbears, and that they have the education and personal military-like discipline allowing them to grasp and carry out those obligations fully and properly. 

         This sense of duty, excellent education, and disciplined soldierly spirit were all passed onto our friend and guided him on the purely natural plane. What I want to mention about that now, however, concerns solely his response to his vocation. Monsignor told his friends that he always felt a pull to the priesthood. Nevertheless, a definite family preference, reaffirmed, personally, by his own sense of horror over the revolutionary direction down which Uruguay was headed and confirmed by his relief over the military’s halt to it led him to see a need for a secular fulfillment of his duty to the common good. He cooperated with this earthly vocation at first by openly supporting the military’s traditional policies among his comrades at his university, and then, after earning a degree in Civil Law, joining the nation’s Foreign Service. He would come to be fluent in English, French, and Italian, alongside his native Spanish, in the course of this part of his vocational life and beyond.

         It was at the very end of Monsignor’s service as a member of the Uruguayan delegation to the United Nations from 1978-1983 that I met him, at the Sino-American Amity Fund on Riverside Drive in New York City. This historic organization,  guided at the time by Fr. Paul Chan, S.J.—-another “priest according to the Order of Melchisedech”—-accompanied its defense of Chinese Catholicism by giving shelter to a priest or two fighting for the Catholic Magisterium in those early and particularly dreadful postconciliar decades, as well as by providing meeting rooms for a number of academic and devotional societies engaged in the same conflict. 

         Our encounter was at a gathering of the then flourishing conservative-minded New York Catholic Forum. It was here that I also came to know many other full-fledged New York Traditionalists, including Stuart Chessman and the future Fr. Richard Munkelt. The latter, who had not yet even dreamed of entering seminary, became Monsignor Barreiro’s closest friend. All three of us got to know more about one another at dinners at Fr. Munkelt’s apartment on the Upper East Side, during which the now former diplomat’s ability to converse on any topic from ancient Roman coins to current day members of both branches of the Spanish Aristocracy, to the quality and quantity of whiskey that it was appropriate for Catholic gentlemen to consume all shined forth. 

         It was Fr. Munkelt who reminded me that alongside the continued attraction of an already once perceived higher calling and the disappearance of the family obstacle to following it that I recollected, Monsignor himself saw a third reason for finally heading down the clerical route. New revolutionary waves were rocking the military regime that had nurtured the more traditional values that his ancestors valued, and the idea of continuing diplomatic service to a regime that dpromote left wing goals was loathsome to him. Disciplined, intelligent, militant service to the greater common good—that of the work of Redemption—was the future to which he was being inevitably called. 

         The fact that this involved his entry, in 1983, into the New York Archdiocesan Seminary in Dunwoodie was not a surprise. Our retiring diplomat had come to love our quirkly city. Moreover, its training ground for priests had gradually improved—certainly compared to many, many others wedded to an ever-evolving Catholicism in the United States and in South America—during the tenure of Terence Cardinal Cooke (1968-1983). Monsignor took the plunge, fought through whatever remained painful in his seminary years with a noble’s soldierly fortitude, and was ordained a priest by JohnCardinal O’Connor on November 14th 1987 in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. 

         While working in a parish on the Upper West Side, Monsignor continued his association with the whole of the orthodox Catholic world in New York City. These included the already mentioned conservative Catholic Forum. More important for his own future was his association with the downright Tradiionalist focused Roman Forum, which was founded in 1968 by Drs. Dietrich and Alice von Hildebrand, Dr. William Marra, and the Rev. Dr. Vincent Micelli, S.J., and whose Director I myself became in 1991. Most significant of all was to be his concern for the Pro-Life Apostolate, whose cause the newly ordained priest supported with time and zealous passion.

         But at this point we must move forward to the second part of my argument: supernatural grace’s enhancement and transformation of one’s natural character and strengths. In Monsignor Barreiro’s case, this meant his becoming a still more rounded and refined lover of all things beautiful. What stands out most in my memory about him in this regard from the intellectual standpoint is a discussion that I had with him when I was engaged in a study of Werner Jaeger’s massive, three-volume work on Greek education, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture and also his Greek Paideia and Early Christianity. The first of these works showed how the crucial classical contribution to Western Civilization is built upon the passion for learning what “the Beautiful” really fully means, how men can gain possession of it, and why it also forces us to understand what is “Good” and “True” to reach that goao. The second teaches how many of the Church Fathers grasped the fact that Christianity offered the final piece of the puzzle; that is was only by becoming part of the Mystical Body of Christ that men could build an honestly beautiful civilization, where everything natural fit together in the proper hierarchy of value, aiding them, as much as was possible in a world of sin, to eternal possession of the True, Good, and Beautiful, through the Beatific Vision.

         Monsignor had always been attached to the Traditional Liturgy, but, now, engaged in the practical realities of parish work in a world that was falling farther and farther away from any connection with all three of these essential pillars of a true civilization, he understood more than ever, why its return to the center of the life of the Church was absolutely necessary. Good theologian that he was, he knew that the Novus Ordo was valid. Still, as von Hildebrand said in 1970 when committing the Roman Forum to the restoration to primacy of the entirety of the Traditional Liturgy, he recognized that it was hopeless as a tool for creating that beautiful kind of earthly community that could aid us in every natural way to cultivate a desire for the  possession of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth for all eterniy.         Any well meaning attempt merely to “dress it up” simply drew attention to all of its other inadequacies, with its insistence on shaping worship on the perceived emerge“needs” of the all too corrupt environment around just being its central flaw. The Traditional Liturgy, with its fixed focus on the Creator God who knew best what nature was intended to be, allowed us properly to scoop up all of the literary, musical, artistic, and generally sacred longings of our fallen earthly souls to be guided, harmoniously, from above and not from below, and then to use created nature to help draw all of us still further upward. 

         Because of Monsignor’s love for his parishoners in New York, he tried his best with the tool he had available to him as a diocesan priest. But very quickly, after the establishment of the Ecclesia Dei communities in 1988 and afterwards, with the promise of at least a partial freeing up of the Traditional Rite, he courageously explained his position to Cardinal O’Connor. He joined the newly created Fraternity of St. Peter and left for an introduction into the life of this community in their recently opened seminary in Wigratzbad in Germany. I visited him there soon after his arrival and realized that his “charism” was not that of the monastic existence in which he was for the moment immersed in Wigratzbad. He never had anything of the monk about him, and needed to cultivate his mind to pass on the desire to raise all of nature to the greater glory of God in some pastoral capacity. 

         Luckily, he soon gained permission to move to Rome for further studies. In 1991 he entered the University of the Holy Cross in Rome, obtaining his license in 1993 and his doctorate in Theology in 1997 with a dissertation on The Experience of God and of the Faith in God according to St. Thomas Aquinas. While doing his studies, he was able to say a public mass at the Church of San Luca e Martina at the Forum in Rome and undertake some pastoral work. He lived at the Church of Santa Maria della Scala until after his doctorate, joined there in 1992 by the future Fr. Munkelt, who had by this time begun his own studies for the priesthood and the doctorate. 

         The Roman Forum began its Italy program in Gardone Riviera in 1993. Our first chaplain could not help us the following year, and the obvious candidate to replace him was Monsignor Barreiro. He served the Forum in this capacity from 1994 until illness prevented him from doing so, at which point, he was succeeded by his close friend, now a priest, Fr. Munkelt. After his departure from the Fraternity—about which a bit more later—he was named the first Director of the Human Life International Rome Office in September of 1998, and obtained his title of Monsignor, as a chaplain of His Holiness, from Pope John Paul II in 2004. Monsignor offered the Mass of the Ages in a number of places throughout Rome in those years. He enjoyed serving as chaplain also for a group of equally militant minded young Romans engaged in political action for the goal of building the Social Kingship of Christ. Monsignor took part in every pro-Traditionalist event he could, travelling not just in Italy and other parts of Europe but also the United States as well.

         Monsignor lived just a fifteen minute walk away from the Human Life International office, both residence and place of work being very close to the Vatican. The apartment and the office became wonderful gathering places for all sorts of people interested in the Pro-Life and the Traditionalist Movement. His home, filled with fine books and art works, was a place where one could meet literally anyone from archaeologists to visiting patristic scholars and have fine conversation on topics, once again, ranging on anything from the Dead Sea Scrolls  to St. John of God and the glories of the Carlist Wars in Spain. All this was accompanied by good food—I know, because I cooked much of it—-and good wines that more well-heeled fellow travelers brought with them. 

         Among the visitors to office and/or home was Roger McCaffrey, who was working very closely in those years with Una Voce leaders like the great Michael Davies, and who is here with us today. So were Monsignor’s friends from the Roman Forum, alongside dozens of sympathetic cardinals, bishops, priests, academics, and students from all continents. A special favorite of mine was Fr. Gabriel Diaz-Patri, an Argentinian through whom one could meet the few people in Rome whom Monsignor himself did not yet know. 

         One of the outstanding groups of Traditionalist Catholics whom I encountered through this cosmopolitan “salon” were those who took part in the Hispanic Traditionalist network centered round Dr. Miguel Ayuso from the Pontifical Academy Comillas in Madrid. His influence, and that of the organizations he runs, extends not just through Mexico and Latin America at large, but also to the non-Spanish speaking European world as well, including such fine men as Professor Danilo Castellanofrom the University of Udine in Italy, and Bernard Dumont, the editor of the journal Catholica, in France. Monsignor’s militant young disciples from Rome were also often present, especially his devoted Secretary, Serinella Verucchio, who flew with her husband to New York for just a few days to visit him before his death in 2017.

         That brings me to the third part of this talk: Monsignor’s truly Catholic illustration of understanding the reality and complexities of  “The Drama of Truth”. Dr. David White once gave a lecture for the Roman Forum in Gardone Riviera on this subject, in which he explained the Greek discovery of the fact that the fullness of drama required two things: tragedy and comedy. Tragedy was needed to identify man’s sense of broader, higher, and more important actions than quotidien reality, and the inherent problems connected with carryint them out; comedy, to expose the human foibles that often cause each of us to stymie our own actions. After all, it is the very man who entertains and works for something grand—-amidst a sea of inherent troubles—-who slips on a banana peel that he himself has carelessly tossed on the ground before him.

         Age was one reason that Monsignor readily accepted the problems of the general drama of life when becoming a priest, just as it was for me, marrying at forty, the same age that he was at his ordination. At forty, you are pretty much surprised if anything goes right at all. In any case, his acceptance of reality came with a wonderful comic sense. When telling us that his family had a noble title, he added that it came from involvement in the slave trade, about which at least his generation of Barreiro-Carámbulas were not terribly proud. He described in comic detail the unsanitary way in which the morning bread would by thrown by a less than savory truck driver onto the pavement outside his home in Montivedeo, to be picked up sometimes by the gardener, with heaven knows what on his fingertips,  only to be brought out by the family maid in white gloves using prongs to put it on their plates. Familiar as he was in the United States with the Andy Griffith Show and Barney Fife, he told us that he, too, had his tiny Foreign Service pistol with its one bullet to protect himself in the case of left wing assault. He also was amused to be reminded later in life of the pride he took while a layman in his awareness that “women find me attractive”.

         Obviously, his comic sense did not disappear upon entering the priesthood. He was never cruel when discussing the world around him, just amusing. I loved his recounting of the antics of some of the friars at Santa Maria della Scala and the acrobatics of eating a three course meal in fifteen minutes, as well as one of their more fascist-minded member’s recitation of poems in praise of the Carabinieri’s efforts to keep the Left in place. One of my favorite memories was his sitting me down one day over Campari Soda and peanuts and telling me of what he would do if he were informed that he had a terminal illness with only a few months left to live. He said that he would set up an Apostolate to Assassinate Heretical Bishops. They would be kidnapped and given ample time to repent, before being justly dispatched for the irreparable damage they had already done. 

         When agreeing to become the Roman Forum chaplain, he made me promise to take him on a trip beforehand to see the churches of Ravenna—but also, for historical reasons, the tomb of Mussolini as well. I had to promise that he would not have to eat polenta as well, because he absolutely detested it. His recounting of his visit to the local pastor in Gardone in the second year of his chaplaincy to ask permission for our use of the parish church for the Traditional Mass (we had been saying it in the hotel) was also a gem. Those were the days of what were called “celebrats”, issued with rarity to prove that a priest had permission to engage in such subversive activity. “I will explain to him that my Bishop gave me the authority is in Brazil and there will be no further questions as to why I am here and not there”, he explained. He came back doubled over in laughter, when it transpired that the Pator knew Portuguese fluently, had spent years in Brazil, and knew everything imaginable about the diocese in question imaginable. “The Drama of Truth”, another New Yorker might add”; “ya know what I’m sayin’?”

         Monsignor had many many friends who could joke about some of his more comical personal characteristics. He had a look that he would throw someone when he was miserable and wanted him to know it—as he did to me in Wigratzbad, hiding behind a pillar so no one else could see that he was utterly incapable of singing a note of Sext and Compline. He had a most amusing mumble of unpredictible length which proceeded many of his pronouncements. Almost invariably, when he fully and enthusiastically agreed with something you had just said, he would mumble and then shout “No, no!” , so that you presumed he had rejected it entirely. He would make very pronounced gestures when speaking or preaching so that one had to make sure there was nothing breakable around him to hit and smash with his arms. There was some sort of condition that he had that required him to compose himself deliberately when turning from one direction to another and taking off—which he could then do at great speed. His sense of propriety, combined together with this deliberation-followed-by-speed, created some of our most memorable memories. Once in the Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere, shocked by the scanty dress of some young ladies whose affect on the friends accompanying him he feared,  he made one of his studied moves, put his head down, took off like a panzer division in Northern France in 1940—- and ran head on into an equally young lady wondering what the priestly visit was all about.

         Unfortunately, Monsignor did have enemies: some, because they were totally opposed to what they knew he believed, which was at least an honest reason; some, because “if you are an idiot before you become a priest, you will be one afterwards as well”. And some could even use the characteristics that endeared him to his friends to mock him. For this and for many other reasons, I never believed he received the due respect for all his dedication, his soldierly discipline, his energy, and his intellect. 

         Monsignor was fully aware of this reality as being part of the Drama of Truth. On the other hand, the reality in this case was shaping the general tragedy of the Church in our times, for which he suffered deeply. I remember the sorrow Monsignor felt when telling us in his office of yet another horrible appointment of someone whom he knew would add another nail to the coffin of the already badly wounded postconciliar Church. 

         Generally, Monsignor was prudent in dealing with the tragedy of the ailing world around him, as was well displayed in his ability to keep as quiet as possible regarding his Traditionalism while in Seminary, so as not to jeopardize the greater good of his Ordination. He was as wise as a serpent when, in 1995, on the 450th anniversary of the opening of the first sitting of the Council of Trent, he decided that the Gardone Summer Symposium had to take a trip to this nearby city with him then having the joy of saying a Mass on the altar used by the Council Fathers in the Cathedral. This was not a propitious time to attempt carrying out such a coup, so I wondered how we would pull it off. “By not saying anything to anyone about what we intend to do”, was the answer. It worked, and with a moving pastoral result, as we shall soon see. 

         On another occasion, his acceptance of the need to find inventive ways of dealing with tragic reality was, once again, downright comical. They reflected Napoleon’s answer to a question regarding how he defined his theory of strategical action. “One engages battle”, he said, “and then sees what happens”. We decided to repeat our Cathedral Coup the year after the Trent success on a visit to Pavia, one of whose purposes—Monsignor’s first—being the celebration of a Traditional Mass on the tomb of St. Augustine in the Church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro. An apparently untransformed but ornery sacristan “welcomed” us. He shook his head vigorously “no” when Monsignor announced his attention. “No one says Mass on that high altar”, he said, pulling us toward the parish picnic table.  Monsignor apparently thought that it was panzer time in Northern France again. “But I only say the Traditional Latin Mass, and the ceremonies don’t allow it to be said on your regular altar”. “Well then”, the ornery sacristan unexpectedly responded, suddenly transformed; “I guess you really have to use the Augustine altar”. Grace had triumphed over nature. 

         “First time in my life I have been favored for being an obscurantist”, Monsignor triumphantly whispered to me. We visited the famous Certosa monastery in Pavia immediately afterwards. Michael Davies was with us and asked the monk giving us our tour whether they celebrated the Traditional Latin Mass there. “No”, he answered, taken somewhat unback. “Well they are doing it on St. Augustine’s altar in town”, he responded. “Better jump on the bandwagon before it is too late!” 

         Probably the only misplayed panzer move involved the timing and carrying out of Monsignor’s break with the Fraternity, which took place in Rome and was rather tense. Thankfully, no one on either side wanted to cause any problem that might hurt the common cause. And, here too, Monsignor showed another one of his fine characteristics: that of courageously approaching those with whom he had had a problem so as not to let the difficulty go on forever. One Sunday, after Mass in Rome, I saw him charging, head down, out the door to what to me was an unknown location. When he told me the name of the person he was going to see I almost choked. “You cannot actually be going there, are you?” I cried out. He mumbled for a bit. “No, no, no”, he then answered, meaning “yes, yes, yes”. “Never uselessly multiply enemies”, he taught me, marching off to reconcile himself, a priest with a layman, and that afternoon with one of his most vocal foes. 

         But, then again, everything he did was pastoral in one way or another, and he did what he did well because he liked people, he welcomed them, he listened to them, he was honestly happy with good things that happened to them and was super solicitous in helping them to ensure future good events. He was ready with help for whomsoever needed it. He would take off in the middle of the night, like a soldier in a trench in the First World War, for whatever destination duty demanded, be it a hospital for the sake of the sick, or a private home to hear the confession of someone who believed felt himself to be in sin: even in the middle of the night. Knowing that my father-in-law was near death a good number of years ago, he begged my wife to tell him the moment that he passed way. That moment turned out to be 3:00 A.M. Rome time, and Monsignor got out of bed, vested, and said Holy Mass for him “on the double”. What else could a disciplined, soldierly aristocrat do for a friend?

         Perhaps the most moving “historical” pastoral action that Monsignor was ultimately responsible for from start to finish concerned that 1995 Mass in Trent. During its celebration on the  “Council Altar”, all of us participating heard sobs from the back of the pews. They came from a very elegantly dressed elderly woman carrying shopping bags with her. When the Mass was over, Monsignor and a few others, myself included, went to ask her what the problem was. “I am from Trent”, she said, “and had just finished making my purchases at the weekly market here in the center. I got on the bus to go home and a voice told me to come to the Cathedral where ‘I would find what I had been looking for for so long’. And the  voice was right! I thought this Mass did not exist any longer!!’”. Monsignor assured her of what her eyes had seen and her ears had heard. He told her where it was that what she desperately wanted—-and needed, because it was beautiful and aimed the mind, soul, and body upwards towards possession of eternal beauty in a world tempting us to deny its existence—-could be found the following Sunday.

         We were all shocked when we heard of Monsignor’s illness, but I remember that his room in the rather lovely facility at which he first was treated in Rome had swiftly become yet another Traditionalist Command Center. And this happened at an extremely useful time; that of a conclave, but the one which, alas, ended with the election of Pope Francis and yet another dreadful act in the Drama of Truth.

         That Drama had worsened by the time of Monsignor’s death. Still, I often wonder what he would think about the situation now, when, only eight years later, it is even worse; when the entire goal of our civilization to understand and to take possession of the beautiful has been attacked as far as it possibly can be; when Reason, along with Faith, have both been retired as tools to reach that goal; when an arrogant and stupid Nihilistic Criminal Ugliness has been enthroned as the height and goal of all existence. 

         Of course Monsignor would recognize the tragedy of it and the horror of the complicity of the clergy with the the Reign of Nihilistic Criminal Ugliness. But I don’t think that he would feel as though there were much chance of being quiet about this disaster any longer, in the hope of some greater good emerging through such prudence. Instead, I think that in solid Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere fashion, he would mumble for a half a minute, say “no, no, no”, turn delibrately, and then, with a “yes, yes, yes” fervor take off across Northern France for a frontal assault on the diabolical enemy. After all, if you are a lion before you are ordained as a priest,  you will be a lion afterwards as well.

Please pray for this good and faithful friend, good and faithful priest, good and faithful soldier of Christ the King.

Jesse Russell at Catholic World Report has provided a review of Yves Chiron’s Between Rome and Rebellion: A History of Catholic Traditionalism with Special Attention to France ( Angelico Press, Brooklyn, 2024 (John Pepino, translator)):

Russell, Jesse, “French historian delves into the tumultuous history of traditionalism,” Catholic World Report ( 8/20/2025)

Now in reviewing a book it is always a great temptation to substitute the reviewer’s ideas for those of the book being reviewed. But rarely have I seen such an example so extreme as Russell’s review.  I think it’s fair to say a reader of his review would hardly have any idea of the tone and contents of Chiron’s book. Indeed, in most respects it is the exact opposite of Russell’s description. 1)

Let’s start with this review’s title: a “tumultuous history” – compared to what? Has Russell considered, for example,  the vicissitudes of the career of Fr. Fessio, the founder of the organization that publishes Catholic World Report? And the issues within traditionalism pale in comparison with the conflicts that have bedeviled the establishment Church since 1962. This, however, was an issue I also had with Chiron’s history, in that it dealt with traditionalism in isolation. The reader would have little idea of the chaos afflicting the “institutional church” through most of the period covered by Chiron’s history.  Events in traditionalism were often a reaction to developments in the broader Church.

Next, Russell adds significant new material of his own. Notably,  there is an account of the history of “conservatives” and “traditionalists” in the United States which is entirely absent from Chiron’s book which deals with America only tangentially. And what Russell does say about this history is debatable –  to put it mildly. First, he describes the Catholic Church in the United States in 1993 as caught between two pillars or forces.  First, was the Catholic laity who “pursued the faith of their immigrant ancestors, attending mass, joining the Knights of Columbus, wearing Saint Anthony medals and sending their kids to parochial schools.”  Is this an accurate depiction of the life of the Catholic laity in 1993?  I don’t think anyone with memories of that period would agree. Please also note the thinly disguised contempt for the laity that one so often encounters in Catholic establishment (or would-be establishment) publications. 

The second major force in the American Catholicism of that era Russell calls “old liberal” Catholicism. Russell seems to be only mildly critical of the so-called old liberals. Nowhere does he indicate that there’s a fundamental institutional and sociological difference between them and the first mentioned group.  The “old liberals” were dominant in the institutional church, the Catholic media, the schools, the religious orders etc. of the Church. So, it was not at all a contest between equal forces.

Russell then describes the conservative Catholics and their institutions with some accuracy and correctly notes that as of 1993 they were still a minority. According to Russell, John Paul II’s visit to the United States in 1993 propelled the conservative Catholics to a dominant position within American Catholicism. That is exceedingly dubious, because between 1993 and the death of John Paul II conservative Catholics suffered travails and major reversals. They still remained on the fringes of the Church establishment, even though some of their works, like those of George Weigel,  were starting to receive favorable commentary in Rome. Their liturgical ideas (like reform of the reform) had been summarily rejected in the United States( e.g., the controversy over the proper posture for receiving communion). John Paul II was in no way following a consistent policy of appointing “Wojtylian” bishops to consolidate conservative positions. Ominously, the ever-increasing pressure of sexual abuse scandals during this entire period was undermining the conservatives’ defense of the hierarchy and the Vatican. And contrary to what Russell writes, by the 1990’s the traditionalist movement, if still small and facing its own difficulties, was no longer so “marginal.” It had become a real competitor for the conservatives – a thing they had believed to be impossible. The conservatives’ anxieties at that time prompted increased polemics against traditionalists – hardly a symptom of a triumphant movement.

Remarkably, Russell does concede that the alleged dominance of conservative Catholicism has now ended.  He admits that today traditionalism is the greater force in the American Catholic Church. How did this come about? Russell attributes the current situation primarily to the development of an “internet conspiracy culture.”  Really? Wasn’t there a papal document called Summorum Pontificum in the meantime ? Weren’t the Ecclesia Dei communities expanding their presence? And then if we turn our attention to the Church as a whole, wasn’t there the pontificate of Pope Francis? That pope specifically rejected the liturgical, political and economic positions of the conservative Catholics and unleashed a tidal wave of abuse – in all senses of the term – which motivated more and more Catholics to turn to traditionalism instead of conservative Catholicism. I should add that some of the earliest and most prominent internet personalities were not traditionalist at all but conservative Catholic: Mark Shea, Amy Welborn …

To the extent Russell deals with Chiron’s book it is only to take isolated passages out of context to support the positions Russell himself is advocating. His review is a long diatribe against traditionalists, who are painted in the darkest of colors.  Russell concedes repeatedly that Chiron’s book is sympathetic to traditionalism. However, he then claims it debunks “myths” of the traditionalists and contains “shocking” revelations about them and their leaders. They subsist on conspiracy theories and exhibit “pathological” behavior. Russell seeks to fit Chiron into a conservative Catholic framework of analysis, in which obedience to a presumably impeccable authority is the supreme, even exclusive virtue. Those who do not obey have only themseves to blame for whatever actions Church authorities take against them. Chiron does seem to favor irenic policies and recoils from the hard decisions men like Archbishop Lefebvre felt they had to take. But in no way does he advocate blind obedience to authority and throughout the book criticizes the actions of Church authorities in France and elsewhere.

To cite one example of his method, Russell singles out a supposed vision of Archbishop Lefebvre regarding founding a seminary, subsequently confirmed in a visit to French visionary Marthe Robin, as demonstrating the alleged reliance of traditionalists on private revelations disfavored by the Church. This topic is only the matter of a few sentences on one page in Chiron’s book, but Russell develops it into a major indictment. But does he know who Marthe Robin was? She’s much more strongly associated with the French clerical establishment and especially various officially recognized charismatic groups rather than with traditionalism. In recent years many of these groups have been rocked by major scandals. Of course, Russell insinuates that sexual abuse scandals are significant within traditionalism. There have indeed been such scandals,  that is clear, but they are as nothing compared to the (ongoing) situation in the “establishment” Catholic Church. 

Russell seems to end his review of Chiron’s book by discussing events in the mid 1970s.   I wonder if he stopped reading at that point. I would have expected, for example, that someone with his biases would have something to say about the concluding chapter of Chiron’s book dealing with Pope Francis.

Russell’s review of Chiron’s history says very little about that book but much about one subset of conservative Catholic culture in the United States. Conservative Catholicism is a movement currently lacking a head (at least until we find out more about the positions of Pope Leo). Once again, their liturgical ideas have been directly attacked  – this time by the bishops of Detroit and Charlotte, both acolytes of the late Pope Francis. And they seem to be up in the air regarding their attitude to Trump. It is a major dilemma for a movement posing as an omniscient “party of the establishment.” 

As we have chronicled it in the past, the response to this situation by many conservative Catholics has either been to fall silent entirely or to resume advocating their favorite issues but avoid commenting on the role of the papacy. But for a minority, the reaction to this period of uncertainty has been to renew savage attacks on traditionalists. 2) And these conservative Catholics, such as Russell, show a remarkably understanding attitude to the progressives. That’s very strange, because, after all, it was the conflict with the Catholic progressive “forces” (Russell’s word) which gave birth to conservative Catholicism in the first place. Is this all just a tactical move to curry favor with the hierarchy? Perhaps – although in the light of the experience of recent decades it is a fond hope. And I doubt the rediscovered belligerent demeanor towards traditionalists will stir up support for the conservative Catholic cause among the steadily diminishing ranks of the laity. For it doesn’t suffice to repeat, as Jesse Russell does, conservative Catholic and establisment Catholic platitudes like:

 (Catholics should) seek to be, first and foremost, simply Catholic and a follower of Jesus Christ.

For the point is that there is no longer a “simply Catholic” position but antagonistic theological and political forces which exist within the Church. This struggle involves not theoretical debates at some remote level but fundamental issues which confront the life of the believer: the basics of the faith, the nature of the liturgy, divorce, marriage, contraception, abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia. It is becuse of these issues that the traditionalist movement exists – and why it will not go away.

1. In 2022, I wrote a review  – favorable but not uncritical –  of the French original, which has the less grandiose but more accurate title Histoire des Traditionalistes:  Chessman, Stuart, “Histoire des Traditionalistes,” The Society of St. Hugh of Cluny ( 5/27/2022). I believe John Pepino did not translate one significant section of this book.
2. See Chessman, Stuart, “Apologetics Director,” The Society of St. Hugh of Cluny (8/18/2025)

In a recent visit to the cathedrals of England we encountered the traces of the prior occupant: the Catholic Church. Here and there the memory – and sometimes the tombs – of the medieval saints are preserved. For the devotion to the saints was and still is characteristic of the Catholic Church in England. Many of the great cathedrals owe their architectural splendor to the medieval pilgrims who thronged to the graves of the saints revered there.

Of course, the most famous saint was Thomas Becket. His shrine in Canterbury Cathedral was the main pilgrimage destination of England – as immortalized by Geoffrey Chaucer.

(Above and below) The place in Canterbury Cathedral where St. Thomas Becket’s magnificent shrine once stood. The Church of England seems to have no difficulty in commemorating “St. Thomas of Canterbury” – whose cult in England was extirpated by that denomination’s founder.

(Above and below) Where St. Thomas was martyred.

Saints often had been outstanding bishops of their diocese and leaders both in Church and state. (Above) The (former) tomb of St. Osmund in Salisbury Cathedral: pilgrims could see or touch the relics of the saint through the openings. The famous reliquary was destroyed in the Reformation. (Below) The tomb of St. William, the patron saint of York. (York Cathedral)

Durham Cathedral still contains the tombs of two early English (Anglo-Saxon) saints. (Above) Saint Cuthbert (ca. 634 – 687) (Below) The tomb of Venerable Bede (672/3 – 735) in the “Galilee” chapel. They both were instrumental in the founding and consolidation of the Catholic Church in England. The relics of both had been translated (moved) to Durham early in the Middle Ages.

Such was the faith of Catholics in medieval England. But what of the age of the Reformation and beyond?

Canterbury Cathedral still houses the grave of another more recent Catholic archbishop. Cardinal Reginald Pole, the last Roman Catholic archbishop of Canterbury, was one of the most outstanding prelates of Europe and even was considered for the papacy. He was archbishop under Queen Mary I and supported her in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to restore Catholicism as the official faith of England. The extent to which he was involved in her campaign against heretics is disputed. But scholars like Eamon Duffy think that despite this “failure” of a Catholic restoration, Mary and Pole planted the seeds fof the recusant resistance of the next 270 years. Tragically, Pole died in 1558 while under bitter attack by the possibly crazy Pope Paul IV.

(Above) The tomb of Cardinal Pole in Canterbury Cathedral.

(Above) The tomb of the repudiated Queen Catherine of Aragon in Peterborough Cathedral (up to the time of Henry VIII, an abbey). She was buried here in 1536. Her tomb was subsequently destroyed by the Puritans – the existing decorative slab is a contribution of the late 19th century. We should reflect on her life and its lessons for the Church of Amoris Laetitia. A second tragic Catholic queen, Mary Queen of Scots, was once also buried in Peterborough. But her son, King James I, eventually had her body moved to Westminster Abbey after he ascended the English throne in 1603.

(Above) A list of the martyrs of York displayed in the York Oratory (Roman Catholic!)

The English Catholic Church especially reveres the martyrs of the Reformation period onward. Their relics, of course, are not found in Anglican cathedrals! One of the chief of these was Margeret Clitherow of York. She was put to death in a particularly gruesome manner in 1586 (she was pressed or crushed to death). A relic of her survives in the Bar Convent ( a clandestine convent and school established in the 17th century by the Mary Ward sisters)

(Above ) A chapel of St. Margeret Clitherow in the picturesque “Shambles” of York. This was thought to have been her house – but a subsequent renumbering of the houses on the street had been ignored. Her real house still exists, across the street from the chapel. Note the arrangement of the altar….. (Below) The relic of St. Margertet Clitherow – her hand – in the chapel of the Bar Convent.

Finally, not a tomb, but, like the Bar Convent, an ancient reminder of the penal times. The former chapel of the Bavarian embassy – now known as the Church of Our Lady of the Assumptionn and St. Gregory – dates to the period when London Catholics could only worship in chapels of embassies of Catholic countries. The Bavarian chapel, after having been destroyed by the mobs of the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780, was rebuilt around 1790. It is thus one of the oldest Catholic churches built after the Reformation in England. It was, however, extensively redecorated in the 19th century. After a number of recent vicissitudes, it has been entrusted to the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. As in the case of the chapel of St. Margeret Clitherow, please note the arrangement of the altar.

These mementos of the English martyrs and the sufferings of the penal times are especially relevent to traditionalists. For we are still officially persecuted – this time by the establishment of our own church. Reflection on the history of the Catholic Church in England helps put our situation in perspective. Consider the surrender of almost the entire English hierarchy under Henry VIII – except for one bishop, St. John Fisher of Rochester. The persecution of Catholics that began then lasted, with a few reprieves, almost 300 years! And if physical violence had (mostly) died down after the 17th century, at all times in these years English Catholics were denounced, segregated, and excluded from most aspects of public life. Yet they persevered and in the 19th century a Catholic renaissance did indeed take place. One of the main spiritual leaders of that recovery, St. John Henry Newman, is about to be made a doctor of the Church. But this renewal was only possible by virtue of previous generations of Catholics who had kept the faith through seeemingly hopeless times. And also by the sacrifice of so many who paid the ultimate price for that faith.

A large fire destroyed a historic church that was beloved by the community – St. John the Baptist Church in Maria Stein(!). It was one of a number of Catholic churches in that region of Ohio which were built by German immigrants.

Steeple collapses after fire rips through historic Catholic church (WHIO -TV 7, 5/29/2025; with many photos)

Is this not as potent a symbol of the Catholic Church today as was the 2019 fire in Notre Dame cathedral in Paris? Particularly when the Catholic clerical, liturgical establishment is mustering its forces in and outside the United States for a decisive battle with both Traditionalism and “reform of the reform.”

Coincidentally Charles Coulombe has just published in Crisis an acccount of the crack-up of traditional American culture taking as its starting point the burning of historic Nottoway plantation in Louisiana.

Coulombe, Charles, “The Burning of Nottoway and the New Pope: American Identity and the Future of Catholicism,” Crisis Magazine (5/30/2025)

For the destruction of this magnificent 1859 mansion was greeted with indifference by most people, with equivocation by local poltical and cultural leaders and even with satisfaction by others. For to them this house was a symbol of an evil American past.

Mr. Coulombe thinks the end of our inherited Protestant American society and culture may open the door to a new Catholic revival. But how is a Church also at war with its own culture, history and beliefs going to accomplish this? For the Church of the Council is not an alternative, but the mirror image of Western, secular society – which it tries so hard to emulate. That is the ultimate origin of the liturgical war recently launched by the hierarchy in the Charlotte diocese. The burning of St. John the Baptist church in Ohio is a most telling sign – an “ideogram” (Ezra Pound!) – of Catholic disarray.

St Joan of Arc. A past victim of episcopal malfeasance(Bishop Pierre Cauchon of Beauvais ). Later, the decision of Cauchon’s court was overturned and much later Joan was canonized.

What have we learned about Pope Leo so far  – at this very early stage of his papacy? What have his initial actions  – or his inaction – revealed about the potential direction of his pontificate? Let us remember that many of the steps being taken at this moment were agreed and decided before the election of Leo. Their disclosure at this time is nevertheless significant.

As to his appointments, on May 25 we read:

The Holy Father has appointed His Eminence Cardinal Robert Sarah, prefect emeritus of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, as his special envoy to preside over the liturgical celebrations to be held on 25 and 26 July 2025 at the Shrine of Sainte-Anne-d’Auray, diocese of Vannes, France….1) 

A ceremonial position, yes – but a mark of a certain favor. Much more important, however, was this announcement on May 22:

Pope Leo XIV has appointed Sister Tiziana Merletti, former Superior General of the Franciscan Sisters of the Poor, as Secretary of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. 2) 

There she joins Sister Simona Brambilla in the leadership of the dicastery. I think that at the very minimum this appointment is a vote for the status quo. Let us remember that the “status quo” in this dicastery means that conservative or traditionalist orders (from the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate to the FSSP)are subject to visitations or even takeovers while the progressive and mainstream religious orders and institutes continue on their disastrous downward course in numbers and activities without the slightest interference from Rome. In that regard, I note that, as of 2023, Sister Merletti’s order (which she led 2004-2013) has a total of 106 members. I cannot find information on prior years. 3) The (at least nominal) prefect of the Dicastery, Sr. Simona Brambilla, led her order,  the Missionary Sisters of the Consolata, between 2011 and 2023.  In 2008 they numbered 762 in 128 centers, in 2022, they had 532 members in 73 centers. 4)

As to Traditionalism, we must start our review with the “interregnum” – with the critical illness of Pope Francis. Since then, we have received news of new traditionalist apostolates and initiatives. At least one prelate has made a public statement in favor of at least toning down Traditionis Custodes. The Pentecost pilgrimage to Chartres  has achieved yet another record in participation – subscription is now closed except for children. 

However, all these favorable signs have been offset by other official, specific measures of the Catholic hierarchy and the Vatican:

The drastic restrictions imposed on the celebration of the TLM in the Detroit Archdiocese( announced 4/16/2025);

The expulsion of the institute of Christ the King from Oakland(effective 4/20/2025);

The procedural roadblocks imposed on the Chartres pilgrimage ( issued 5/6/2025, only weeks before the pilgrimage is scheduled to begin);

The expulsion of the FSSP from Valence in France(announced 5/15/2025);

The restrictions on (almost the abolition of) the TLM in the Charlotte diocese( announced 5/23/2025; effective 7/8/2025).

Now Cardinal Roche explicitly participated in drafting the measures against the Chartres pilgrimage; I would be very surprised if other actions listed above (particularly those in Detroit and Charlotte)did not involve at least the relevant nuncio and perhaps the Vatican as well. 

The form of these decrees is as important as the substance. The message is conveyed in curt, authoritarian, bureaucratic language. The texts,  when they do refer to the traditionalists, seems to me to be outright sarcastic or contemptuous. The nebulous, verbose, emotional passages often found in official Catholic documents are not to be found here. Likewise, there is no “dialogue,”  ”accompaniment,” “tenderness,” or “mercy.” These allegedly sacrosanct principles fall by the wayside when dealing when someone perceived as an actual enemy. 

The earlier actions seem to me like opportunistic moves on the part of the establishment to take advantage of the last days of the rule of Francis or to create a fait accompli in advance of whatever new regime might come. The later actions, after the election of Leo – particularly that in Charlotte – seem more like a demonstration of strength, even a challenge, to the new pope. For I think those in the Vatican and locally involved in such decisions expect that the pope will take no action against them. 

For even assuming Pope Leo disagrees in part or totally with the anti-traditionalist campaign of Francis (which is not at all clear!) these actions put him in a difficult spot. For if it is his intent to disengage from the Bergoglian course,  I would assume he would want to do so only gradually. Now, however, he will have to overrule bishops or one of his own officials in the earliest days of his papacy. This would bring down on his head the wrath of the dominant progressive forces in the Church and the secular media which stand behind them. But by doing nothing on these matters he will be giving the progressives carte blanche to do whatever they want. Their agenda, let us remember, is by no means limited to exterminating traditionalism. There is the unfinished grand project of the synodal path in Germany and elsewhere (married priests, women priests and elimination of the remaining restraints of Catholic sexual morality). A less obvious conflict between progressives (and the Vatican) and Opus Dei continues in Spain and elsewhere. Bishops in the United States and Italy call for the abolition of kneeling when receiving communion – repudiating a decades-old compromise.

So, for the time being at least, the Church’s war of annihilation against traditionalism – and really against the totality of its own heritage – continues. Whether this conflict can be sustained long-term is another matter. Will the acolytes of Francis be able to persevere in the war against the traditionalists, absent the fanatic will of their late master? Financial and personnel realities will likely soon catch up with the Vatican and the local churches. I can’t exclude the possibility that even more unsavory details of Francis and his entourage will emerge, putting the establishment under pressure.  Whatever may happen, it is regrettably unlikely that peace will return to the Catholic Church anytime soon. 

1. Resignations and Appointments, 24.05.2025, Press.Vatican.va.
2. Vatican News, 5/22/2025’
3. “Franciscan Sisters of the Poor,” Catholic-Hierarchy.org.
4. “Suore Missionarie della Consolata,” Catholic Hierachy.org; “Suore Missionarie della Consolata, it.wikipedia.org.

We have a new pope in Leo XIV. What can traditionalists expect from his papacy? The first impressions have been favorable. The new pope’s choice of name, his vestments, his demeanor, and several early addresses have found favor among traditionalists. These matters of form all indicate a break with the culture of his predecessor.

On the other hand, Pope Leo is reliably described as a candidate of the circle of Pope Francis, promoted by them when, for one reason or another, the “Bergoglian” papal candidates with the greatest media support could not advance. It was then that Prevost’s name moved to the front of the list. Indeed, Leo seems to be in several respects a compromise candidate. We see this reflected in the fact that representatives of contradictory factions in Catholicism are vying to claim him as their own. Moreover,  there still remains a dearth of information on what his real views are. 

Some conservatives and traditionalists remain disappointed because a pope explicitly friendly to traditionalism and orthodoxy was not elected. However, is it surprising that the new pope would emerge from the “Bergoglian” camp, given that the vast majority of the Cardinals were appointed by Francis?  And after Francis had de facto eliminated the college of cardinals as some kind of cohesive, deliberative body? As we shall see, however,  the prior history of a new pope, as well as the expectations of those who achieved his election, are by no means determinative of what his actual papacy will be like.  

Let me set forth some historical parallels to illustrate these points. Now I recognize it is a perilous thing to draw on historical precedents to understand the present. In this very year there appeared in the pages of Commonweal magazine a fatuous comparison, intended to be insulting, of the Catholic traditionalist movement to the Jansenists of the 17th century. (I myself thought traditionalists should be flattered by this comparison, especially since under Francis there was talk of canonizing Blaise Pascal.) Yet, if used cautiously in a general, non-pedantic way,  the past does offer real insights into the current age and, if we recognize this culture to be problematic, examples of how to get out of it.

I would analogize the “Conciliar” era, commencing in 1958, to three other great periods of crisis, decadence and collapse which enveloped the papacy and much of the rest of the Church as well: 

First,  the Pornocracy or Saeculum Obscurum, which lasted roughly from 880 to 1040. 

Second,  the Renaissance papacy between 1470 and 1534. 

Third, the late 18th century crisis between 1758 and 1800, culminating in the French Revolution.

Characteristic of each of these periods of decline is an almost exclusive focus of the papacy on a limited range of secular political issues. The popes withdraw from the great religious concerns of the Church that had previously governed their actions. The growing lack of awareness of spiritual issues goes hand in hand with the institutionalization of an all-engulfing fantasy world into which the leadership of the Church retreats.

In such ages we see the gradual acceptance as normal of what once had been considered unimaginable, perverted or even criminal. For example, in 882 the first pope was assassinated – in the following hundred years it became a fairly regular event.  After 1470, the popes and higher clergy routinely promoted and extravagantly enriched their nephews – and soon their sons and daughters as well – at the expense of the Church. In 1773 the Jesuit order was disowned and suppressed by its principal patron and beneficiary, the pope himself. In our own day, we have seen a never-ending series of financial scandals at the Vatican, a sexual abuse crisis continuing to rock the Church,  the trial, deposition, and laicization of Cardinals,  and papal promotion of change in what had been considered immutable rules of Catholic morality.

This indifference to scandal is not confined to the papacy.  The Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, discussing the disreputable conduct of Pope John XII (955-964) – who was at most 20 years old – is said to have philosophically remarked “he’s only a young pope.”  Leo X (1513-1522), under whom the Protestant Reformation got underway, was lauded by the humanist writers – the equivalent of today’s media.  If we look at our own day, the official Catholic Church – the Vatican, the mainstream religious orders, the hierarchy, the educational and media apparatus, and a great part of the laity – does not acknowledge that there’s anything amiss in the Church – at least nothing attributable to the Pope, the clergy or Vatican II.  

Now, in each of these cases, the papacy was completely immersed in the decadence and indeed led the way downward. And at no time did change for the better happen because a newly elected pope suddenly came to his senses, recognized the perilous situation and then systematically confronted the issues. Rather, the beginnings of recovery first required either outside political intervention (impossible today) or total disasters for the Church like the French Revolution. For it’s exceedingly difficult for the papacy to work its way out of bad situations all by its own,  because all the likely candidates for the papacy are themselves participants in the crisis. 

What can happen, however, is popes or bishops have a surprising change of heart, and members of the establishment begin a gradual and tentative transformation of a corrupt culture. A famous example is the election in 1534 of Alessandro Farnese as Pope Paul III. Pope Paul’s predecessor, Clement VII, when faced with the Protestant Reformation, the separation of England from the Catholic Church,  Turkish advances and local political disasters, such as the sack of Rome,  had no response other than to continue the Renaissance papacy’s focus on secular political maneuvering. His successor, Alessandro Farnese, embodied the best and worst features of the college of cardinals of that period:  an extravagant patron of the arts,  the proprietor of the most splendid palace in Rome, a skilled political leader – and the father of a number of children. Moreover, his rise to such prominence was in large part attributable to the status of his sister Giulia as mistress of Pope Alexander VI. He would seem to have been an unlikely candidate for a reformer. Indeed, Pope Paul III continued some of the worst abuses of the past (extreme nepotism, a focus on secular politics).  Yet this man, definitely not a saint,  also launched the Catholic Reformation – patronizing new orders, promoting spiritually minded clerics and calling the Council of Trent. By the death of Paul III in 1549, the Catholic Reformation was well underway. In the next decades setbacks and regressions occurred, but by 1564 changes for the better had become irreversible. Going forward, the Church, now under the leadership of the reformed papacy,  was able to hold fast against her enemies and create the baroque Catholic culture that flourished all over Europe. 

Of course, by that date, one third of Europe had been permanently lost to the faith.

I am in not at all suggesting that Leo XIV resembles in character Paul III!  However, the Farnese pope’s story does illustrate that the prior conduct and utterances of a cardinal are not necessarily an indicator of what he does as pope. And that, amid an age of decadence, often the most that one can hope for from a conclave is a pope who perceives at least in part the need for change and begins to initiate it – even if the reversal of culture is not total or complete. 

The indications Leo XIV has given us so far have been favorable. It is far too early to adopt an air of optimism, but let’s not be caught up in deterministic scenarios of disaster either.   We will learn about Leo XIV not so much by what he says but from the issues he addresses (or does not address), from the men he promotes (or leaves in place). We already have a welcome sign in the reduction of the responsibilities of archbishop Paglia. And it is likely that the Bergoglian and progressive forces will try to force the pope’s hand early on. Consider the insulting and restrictive actions just taken by Cardinal Roche and the French bishops against the Chartres pilgrimage ( measures decided before the election of Leo).  It is only from how Leo handles such sensitive matters that we will be able to gauge better the true meaning of his papacy. 

After reflection and having reviewed what I had written during the twelve years of the reign of the late Pope Francis I’d like to add my own modest comments to the subject.  The literature on the Pope which has appeared since his death is already immense. Some is perceptive, others fantastic nonsense. Some articles are critical others hagiographic – in some cases literally, as there are already calls for the canonization of Francis. Perusing the contributions  of the Francis enthusiasts, however, I note that they generally praise Francis not so much for what he did but for what he said and for the political positions he took which were aligned with those of Western secular society.

The Roots of the “Worldview “of Pope Francis

In my view the first key to Francis was his training in the official Church bureaucracy:  starting  in the Jesuit order and later as a member of the hierarchy. The second factor was his commitment to Vatican II. As to the latter, the result of the 1960s revolution in the Church had been to institutionalize a regime that on the one hand repudiated the Catholic past to a greater or lesser degree and on the other, welcomed the secular influence of the “modern world.” This dramatic reorientation, however, preserved the existing bureaucratic structure of the Church, and indeed depended on it for its implementation.

These two aspects of the Catholic Church coincided in the Jesuit order –  the spiritual home of Bergoglio. The Jesuits were among the most aggressive in implementing “the Council” while giving it a specifically secular cast. I can recall witnessing in the early 1970s  a clash between a leading Jesuit liturgist and some of his colleagues on the faculty of Georgetown University regarding the renovation of the university chapel. (There were no traditionalists active at that time!) The demeanor of the Jesuit was arrogant,  confrontational and openly contemptuous of the views of his opponents. I often recalled this experience when reading of the not dissimilar demeanor of Pope Francis. And in this very year another Jesuit liturgist speaking at another of the order’s universities demanded the summary and final abolition of the Traditional Mass. In both these cases Jesuits reduce an issue to a black-and-white, purely ideological confrontation with an “enemy,” without regard to other consequences. For the Georgetown chapel, once renovated, had to be restored again at considerable expense, and for those who frequent the Traditional Mass, as the website of the German bishops puts it, they may “fall by the wayside.” 

Of course, there was one radical difference between the behavior of Jesuits in the early 1970s and that today.  In the earlier era the Jesuits were openly contemptuous of Pope Paul VI. They acted on behalf of the Council and its “spirit,” regardless of Pope Paul’s “views.” (In any case, by that time they knew that Pope Paul would hardly ever act against them.). Under Francis, they can invoke blind obedience to the authority of the pope and the Council.

The innovation of Francis  – the leading example of his “cunning” – is the systematic deployment of the language, images and acts of papal absolutism in the service of the revolutionary cause. (In a sense this had already happened under Paul VI, however,  that pontiff was able to better disguise the nature of his authoritarian acts.) Francis understood that since 1968 the forces opposing or at least trying to slow down the course of reform had relied on papal authority as their ultimate bastion – exemplified by the regime of John Paul II. Moreover, given the bureaucratic nature of the Church it would be impossible for most priests and bishops to publicly oppose papal authority.  

Francis further understood the strength that the papal cult retained despite all the disorders of the post-Conciliar years.  For the Pope was now widely perceived as a “visionary” expected to stamp the Church with his spiritual ideals. The pope thus assumed  the status of a founder of a Catholic religious movement. This explains Bergoglio’s choice of the name “Francis.”

The post Vatican II era, however, had revealed that media support could serve as an effective shield against papal authority. Pope Francis would make sure that would not be an issue for him. For another key aspect of the Bergoglio papacy was the aggressive courting of the secular news media. This also required establishing the best of relations with the Catholic progressive forces and institutions that are allied with these media. Francis understood the great fear the higher clergy had of the media. He also understood that most Catholics got their information about the Church from the secular media. His successful media policy meant that from the beginning to the end of his papacy the words and acts of Francis were shrouded in a bodyguard of lies. For the public image of Francis often had nothing to do with the reality. 

I do not think that the substance of the policies of Francis is confusing or contradictory at all. I think we should take him at his word –  that he wanted to complete and make permanent the changes made to the Church in the 1960s. Whereas in the 1960s the enemy in the mind of the Catholic reformers was the Church as it had existed under Pius XII, for Pope Francis and his allies the target was the Church of Benedict XVI and John Paul II. The limited measures these two popes had had taken to redress the balance within the Church would now be systematically attacked and overthrown. With that accomplished, the progressive agenda would be rolled out once again. For the demands of the progressives had fossilized in the 1960’s and 70’s.

Traditionalism

The new Pope’s animosity to Catholic traditionalism was absolutely clear from the earliest days of his papacy. Consider the actions taken in 2013 against the Friars of the Immaculate and the constant disparaging language employed by Francis in reference to traditionalists. Yet, up to 2021 the traditionalist movement seems to have expanded its reach despite the overt hostility of Francis. Perhaps this was attributable to the demoralization of the Catholic conservatives – the closest alternative on the “right.” The conservatives saw their confident predictions in ecclesiastical politics proved worthless, their secular policies and alliances rejected and, above all, were disowned by their chief support –  the papacy. 

In 2021,  Francis decided to put an end to this situation by promulgating Traditionis Custodes (“TC”)after a typically opaque, manipulative and convoluted introductory buildup. The Catholic traditionalist movement was to be wiped out entirely regardless of the consequences to the clergy and laity involved in it. It was just one more example of the Roman Catholic Church repudiating an alleged achievement of Vatican II  – in this case, religious liberty.

However, it became clear early on that there were limits on the war of annihilation against traditionalism. Most notably, the Ecclesia Dei communities, instead being subjected to further restrictions in the implementation of TC, were for the time being spared. In many places traditionalist masses continued despite the provisions of TC. Monasteries and convents still adhered to the traditional  liturgy. And, in the background, the FSSPX continued on its course.

What developed was an arbitrary, unsystematic and lawless persecution. Under Francis the anti-traditionalist campaign became an essential element of the culture of the Catholic Church.  Traditionalist orders and priests still remained subject to summary expulsion from churches and dioceses. Catholic traditionalist masses continued to be terminated without explanation  – a process that continued in places such as Detroit up to the week before Francis  died. And the process of investigating the Ecclesia Dei communities had been restarted. 

But despite all the coercive actions and invective directed against it, the traditionalist movement did not collapse.  Masses are still celebrated widely;  the Ecclesia Dei communities continued to exist and continued to ordain priests. A seemingly endless stream of traditionalist literature was published. An ever-greater number of lay organizers and publicists stepped into the shoes of the clergy. In 2012 I had asked myself if the current generation of traditionalists had any idea of the long and tortuous struggle that had been necessary to achieve what was then in place. Now I can say that today’s young traditionalists have themselves lived and suffered through a similar and, in some respects, even more severe struggle, and have survived.

The Church Today

What is true of the war of Pope Francis against traditionalism also applies to his other initiatives. Wide sections of the Church have not accepted his institutionalization of divorce, recognition of  LGBT practice or unlimited ecumenism. The result is a continuation and intensification of the chaos that has prevailed in the Roman Catholic Church since the 1960s. It is no longer a question of a divergence between an establishment and “dissenters” –  if that ever was in fact the case – but of differences at the highest levels of church authority on the most fundamental issues. 

It is a conflict that largely takes place outside of the public’s view. The progressives and Pope Francis’s allies are loud and aggressive in propagating their views, their opponents have to be more discreet. Francis first tolerated a German synodal path and then spread it to the rest of the Church – all under the supervision of reliably progressive bishops and bureaucrats. Despite endless talk only the agenda of the progressives is on the table. 

But despite it all, Francis sensed there were limits beyond which he could not (immediately) go. This explains, for example, his drawn-out struggle to establish married priests and female clergy,  a measure that seemed on the brink of realization in 2019. I think Francis understood that to immediately impose the full agenda of his progressive allies would likely lead to a disintegration of the Church into an Anglican-style family of ecclesiastical entities. While forces such as the German church might have welcomed that prospect, Pope Francis and his more direct allies wanted to preserve the institution as well as implementing progressive demands.

What are the practical aspects of this regime? From the very beginning of his papacy Pope Francis unleashed an unending barrage of high-handed administrative actions. All of them tended towards the consolidation of power in his own hands. It became very clear that no prior customs, laws, traditions or principles bound Francis. Indeed, he repeatedly reversed his own recent decisions and those of his subordinates. Ultimately, the only authority in the Catholic Church became the will of Francis, as expressed at the current moment. There was a virtual dissolution of law within the Catholic Church.  Institutions such as the college of  Cardinals were virtually abolished. A cleric’s status within the Church was determined not by any external rank  but by the degree of friendship with Francis. And that friendship could be fleeting….

Within the clerical ranks and the church bureaucracy a pervasive climate of fear took hold. We have read about the animosity engendered in institutions like the curia or the diocese of Rome which had ongoing direct contact with Francis. But fear became a worldwide phenomenon as Francis used his nuncios and diplomats as informers and enforcers. We all know of the most spectacular instances of the removal of bishops without any procedure or “due process.” But the same fear was experienced at a much less exalted level. Clerics asked  not to be photographed or that their names be removed from online records of events  – like traditional Masses –   in which they had taken part years ago. Titles of conferences were rewritten to obscure their relationship with, for example, traditionalism or the personal enemies of Francis.

While these internal struggles proceed,  the institutional decline of the Roman Catholic Church continues and accelerates. Especially in the Western, more economically advanced societies, ordinations continue to decline, religious communities disappear, parishes are merged out of existence, schools are shut and the practice and knowledge of the Catholic faith among the laity reaches catastrophically low levels. None of these things seems to trouble the representatives of the institutional Roman Catholic Church. For an institutional fantasy world dominates all levels of the Church – except for some commentators who can be safely disregarded.  

The question of what happens next is more uncertain than usual. It’s always a safe bet to predict that the next Pope will be in some way a continuation of his predecessor  – one sees that in some of the current media lists of papabile. I would only say that in the past such “official” predictions have been egregiously wrong –  such as in 1978, 2005 and 2013!  And let us remember the increasing fracturing of the Roman Catholic Church into antagonistic worlds with differing religious practices and theologies. The division of the Church into “friends of Francis” and “enemies” will not end with his death. 

The central institutions of the Church likewise have been changed and weakened. A system of governance that has been reduced to a conveyor belt for the pope’s actions and ideas, once deprived of its head, cannot operate autonomously. Do many of the Cardinals really know each other? It will be difficult if not impossible to identify a man that could hold the clerical institution together under such circumstances.

In Conclusion

As traditionalists we can only stay the course.  Traditionalism  has survived nearly four years of official persecution by the Catholic Church. We are still standing. On the other hand, the vision of Francis has failed to materialize both in the Church and in the secular world. What will come next we do not know.  What we do know is that those who have survived such trials, developing their spiritual and intellectual life, should not fear to face the future.

I have been meaning for a long time (two years to be precise!) to provide an updated report on where we think the Church stands and what the Society of St. Hugh of Cluny intends to do in the upcoming year. That task kept being deferred. But I think I now owe you are an accounting of where we are today. I am especially thinking of our loyal supporters and contributors.

By now traditionalist Catholics have suffered over 3 1/2 years of persecution. They have been segregated from the rest of Catholics, regulated and restricted. Their Masses are arbitrarily suppressed. They are routinely denounced by various spokesman of the official Church – including of course Pope Francis himself, who not only calls them enemies of the Holy Spirit but also mentally ill. In individual dioceses, orders and parishes the Church establishment continues its attack – sometimes coordinated by the papal nuncios. Throughout this campaign of annihilation, the hierarchy, the Catholic religious orders and the Catholic educational institutions have absolutely refused any “dialogue” with traditionalists. Often the Church does not deign even to publish the actions it takes against the traditionalists. It is entirely an exercise in brute force. The war against Traditionalism has become a core initiative of the papacy of Pope Francis.

If we consider only the clergy,  the persecution to a significant extent has been effective. Priests have abandoned the celebration of the traditional mass; traditional parishes or masses of long standing have been abolished or displaced without resistance. Yet many traditional masses continue to be celebrated openly. And many others have “gone underground” or at least do not call attention to themselves. These traditionalist activities have attracted favorable media attention – even, here and there,  (by mistake?) in the diocesan press.

Now of course we were aware of the reports last year concerning a more definitive prohibition of the traditional mass being prepared by Pope Francis. We did not engage in that discussion, above all because we have no special knowledge  of the facts in Rome. Based on prior disclosures, we believe that ideas or drafts for such a prohibition have existed and have been circulated at the Vatican for months and even years now.  Whether such a measure will be adopted will depend on the sudden and arbitrary decision of the Pope. He has decided up till now not to proceed further down the path of persecution, but that is no guarantee he will not reverse himself tomorrow. Given how the Church is governed, there is little point in speculating on this subject.

Furthermore, I think such speculations highlight one of the worst aspects of the Roman Catholic Church today: the exclusive focus on the Pope and his entourage. On blogs and online media, we read more about opaque personnel moves in the Vatican, the opinions of Francis’s favorites and the day-to-day utterances of Pope Francis than we do about the faith, canon law or the principles of morality. I see no reason to contribute to such abuses. 

The Twilight of the Conciliar Church.

We find ourselves in a late stage of the regime of the Catholic Church that was established starting with the Second Vatican Council in 1962. We’ve already discussed in the past the most fundamental principles  of this system. First, ultramontanism: the concentration of all governance and spiritual authority in the papacy, combined with an understanding of the rest of the Church as a ministerial bureaucracy under Vatican control. Second, Vatican II:  not any specific text of the Council, but the general principle of openness to the world (that is, the political, social and cultural regime dominating the western world by the 1960s). This was associated with a revolutionary rejection of the Catholic liturgy, morality and culture as they existed prior to1962.

Under Pope Francis these two cornerstones of the post-Conciliar Catholic culture have fused and have been pushed to a new extreme. At least within the Church bureaucracy, the only rule of law, morality and liturgy is the arbitrary will of Francis as expressed at any one time. The Pope contradicts not only the decisions of his predecessors but even his own rulings of the immediate past. The Pope removes or protects prelates or clerics without any explanation or accountability. He and his Vatican directly manage the affairs of individual priests and parishes. 

As to the Council, the decisions and utterances of Francis, the synodal path of Germany and the “Synod on Synodality” embracing the whole Church have reaffirmed the Church’s commitment to an ongoing, open-ended series of changes in doctrine, liturgy and morality. The substance of the Church’s message at least at the highest levels has been reduced to a copy of the secular agenda of the quasi-totalitarian culture of the liberal West. (At least as it existed prior to Trump’s election!) 

But the roots of the present situation predate Francis. In 1962 a new culture of conflict was introduced into the Catholic Church.  In the movement for updating (aggiornamento),  a party was established in the Church that demanded immediate and complete accommodation to the world of today and its morality. It was opposed to a second tendency or faction which wanted to restrict the Conciliar innovations to certain discrete areas while leaving basic Christian moral rules and the basics of Catholic theology intact.  ( A third group, that dissented from the decisions of the Council,  was excluded from the conversation.) 

Thus, with the Council, a struggle broke out within the governing and teaching institutions of the Church itself. Progressives were pitted against those who wanted to “conserve” earlier rules and structures of authority (or at least go slow on innovations).  By its very nature, no resolution of this conflict was possible. For given the hostility of the modern world to the Catholic faith – an animosity that only continued  to grow – achieving the progressive ideal could only mean the liquidation of the Catholic Church.  A substantial part of the establishment was unwilling to do exactly that. The result of this conflict, drawn out decade after decade, has been chaos and lawlessness within the Church

Pope Francis has embraced this conflict and has aggressively confronted, in word and deed, the entire spectrum of enemies of Catholic progressivism – Conservative, traditionalist and middle-of-the-road. They range from individuals posting on social media, alternative Catholic news sites, individual bishops and even cardinals. And, after Fiducia Supplicans, even an entire continent joined. We cannot say that the Pope has succeeded in eliminating them. 

For the reach of the Pope’s authority and the progressive cause to which it is wed today have definite limits. First, the very nature of the regime of Francis entails a high degree of confusion and incompetence. No effective leadership structures have been established, rather, doctrinal concessions to progressive demands have been made and individual adversaries have been targeted,  demoted or destroyed. But the chaos which Francis seeks to create functions as a barrier to any consolidation of his regime. 

Second, Francis depends on the goodwill of the secular media and of the Catholic progressives. It is they that create a favorable or at least neutral public image for Francis throughout the world. It is they that make sure the glaring faults of his regime are buried or at least minimized. For these services a price must be paid: continued progress on the accommodation of the Church with the secular world of today. Given this dependence on external and internal allies, the regime of Francis is only a limited totalitarianism.

Third, the Church is dependent on the laity to provide both funding and congregations. In today’s society,  the Catholic Church is unable to compel anyone by penal sanctions to either participate in or contribute to the Church. Even in Germany lay participation is ultimately voluntary. Here too the Francis regime feeds on itself – under any empirically quantifiable measure the Catholic Church is in drastic decline: the level of religious participation and understanding of Catholic doctrine among the laity, the number of priests and religious, the number of parishes etc. And this is especially so in the “advanced” nations of the West which have long served as the model for the Conciliar Church. These trends have already required drastic reductions of parishes, schools and religious foundations in places like Germany, the United States and the Netherlands. Even the merging of dioceses has commenced.  More losses will inevitably follow.

Regardless of what is officially claimed,  the rites of the Conciliar Church, as they are celebrated in the vast majority of locations, have been ineffective in retaining people in the Church, let alone finding new members. The mind-numbing banality and uniformity of the Novus Ordo and its music are in no way an attraction but a deterrent.

How is the Church establishment addressing these crises?

Pope Benedict’s response was increased tolerance of the Traditional Mass and encouragement of traditional elements in the Novus Ordo. Both initiatives have been expressly rejected by Francis. More recently the Church has deployed, often outside of the liturgy,  selected practices and forms of a prior era. Relics of saints brought from Europe are being paraded around dioceses in the United States. A new jubilee year in Rome with the appropriate indulgences has been proclaimed. And, of course, there is the “eucharistic revival” – the attempt to revitalize eucharistic piety or just the awareness of what the Eucharist represents. Tabernacles are being returned to the center of churches. Monstrances are prominently displayed as a new kind of Catholic “icon.” Eucharistic processions –  in the United States until very recently exclusively the province of conservative and traditionalist Catholics – are now conducted with great fanfare. And, last year,  a grand (and expensive) eucharistic conference was held in Indianapolis.

A second official response to religious collapse is to foster the charismatic movement. So, last year’s eucharistic conference was also accompanied by charismatic services and performances. Charismatic meetings and encounters are held regularly.

But how effective will be these initiatives? The establishment may be fostering eucharistic processions and rites – but at the same time Cardinal Cupich,  who is held out to be great friend of the Pope, continues to call into question all these practices. Thus, the underlying conflicts within the Church, such as those on the nature of the Eucharist, remain unresolved –  the “new conservatism” is more a matter of appearance.

As for the charismatic renewal, its presence remains limited. Its close connection with evangelical Protestantism is problematic in a country, like the United States, where in many places the evangelicals a strong force (and competitor).  For example,  I would see the development of charismatic ministries as  prompting the departure of as many Hispanic Catholics as it wins or retains. The charismatics’ encouragement of unrestrained emotionalism is hardly propitious, in the context of the numerous occasions of Catholic faith leaders abusing their spiritual authority over gullible followers. 

Thus, the culture of the Conciliar Church will continue. Conflict, lawlessness and pervasive dishonesty are its hallmarks.  It is any wonder that we increasingly read of apocalyptic expectations?  That the question of whether and to what extent Francis is pope no longer is reserved to an eccentric fringe but is ever more widely discussed.  That more and more appeals to divine intervention are being made?

 Misunderstandings and Weaknesses of the Traditionalists.

Obviously, these times have been traumatic for traditionalists. Based on a total misinterpretation of what had happened within the Church after Vatican II, most of them previously viewed themselves as defenders of the papacy –  at least as it was defined in 1870. To have such an exalted notion of the Pope and then to be denounced and persecuted by him “with magisterial authority” is obviously a severe blow.  Many bishops and priests who had been favorable to the traditionalist movement, quickly became indifferent or even turned into persecutors after Traditionis Custodes.

Traditionalists had very much underestimated the continuing commitment to Vatican II and its implementing decrees among the clergy, the religious and their lay acolytes. 1962-65 indeed had unleashed an authentically  revolutionary movement. Admittedly, that elan largely had dissipated by the time of Francis. Many of the first wave of participants had died or left the Church. Yet in the institutional Church the dream remained of a grand opening to a superior modern world, and concurrently,  of the need for a violent rejection of traditional Catholic culture in all its aspects. This was no mere intellectual exercise – adhering vocally to “the Council” offered career opportunities in Catholic education, media and administration. 

During the era of Summorum Pontificum I can testify to numerous encounters with the clergy and Catholic religious who showed a continuing violent hostility to the traditional mass and the culture associated with it. This hostility was also shared by that minority of the laity that had associated themselves with these priests and religious. For, given the dearth of vocations to the religious life and to the priesthood,  many of the Catholic institutions – parishes, schools, colleges and dioceses – are in fact run today by lay bureaucrats who have been nurtured in the attitudes of the makers of the 1960’s revolution.

To expect that this culture would change because of Pope Benedict’s motu proprio was extremely naive. The implementation of Summorum Pontificum was very uneven:  in some parishes and dioceses near miraculous results were achieved. In others there was no real change from the situation after 1988 in which the Traditional Mass was permitted as a matter of episcopal grace under severe restrictions. 

The Traditionalists’ dilemma also reflected a continued misunderstanding of the constitution of the Church –  in particular its de facto organizational form as a modern bureaucracy, imposing rules from the top and demanding obedience.  Traditionalists underestimated the continuing effectiveness of papal power within such a bureaucracy. They had been misled by the ineffectual attempts of Popes Paul VI, John Paul, and Benedict to restrain the progressive Catholics. They didn’t consider that those progressive forces occupied key positions of power in the Catholic Church and had important relationships with the secular forces, above all the media. They also didn’t fully appreciate that the three popes above mentioned agreed in varying degrees with aspects of the progressive ideology. 

Traditionalists, on the other hand, had no such allies. They have virtually no representation in the mainstream Catholic religious orders and educational institutions.  The secular political world and its media often view them as reactionary political adversaries.  So, when Pope Francis launched his persecution, there was limited public resistance. Regardless of what his liturgical, moral, and theological convictions might be, it is very difficult for a Catholic priest or bishop to publicly stand up to the policies of Francis.

The Traditionalist Movement Continues

Yet, the traditionalists have carried on. The Ecclesia Dei congregations are still functioning and still training and ordaining seminarians. The traditionalist masses continue, sometimes, as in a dimly remembered past,  on a clandestine or unannounced basis. Alternative forms of Catholic liturgy such as vesper services have been proliferating. And should we fail to mention the courageous support given to the traditionalist cause by individual bishops and cardinals throughout the world? This support is not just in words but by direct participation in traditional liturgies. 

Among the laity,  the current generation of traditionalists has come to its convictions as a product of personal spiritual development,  through the conscious participation in the traditional liturgy. Their faith is the product of conscious choice not conformity to some outside culture.

In finding and developing their faith they enjoy a whole range of supports that did not exist in the 60’s and 70’s. A host of Catholic sites, blogs and podcasts provide contemporaneous coverage of news in the Church. These sources also provide access to orthodox Catholic spirituality. It is true that, especially for the more narrowly defined traditionalist world,  many of the best sources are still not to be found in English but in the French, Italian, German and Spanish languages.  To become an informed traditionalist, it’s a great advantage to be a polyglot too!

Accompanying this this is a veritable avalanche of new books  – now available in English – on Traditionalism and related movements. They include detailed analyses of the Mass, music and rites of the Church. Noted scholars have given personal  witness of their commitment to Catholic Tradition. Even the history of Catholic traditionalism has by now acquired its own literature. Most of these works have appeared since 2020. The contrast with the meager intellectual support the establishment has been able to drum up in favor of Traditionis Custodes is remarkable.

A whole spectrum of special events now exists in which the traditionalist can participate: pilgrimages, retreats and conferences of every kind. Recall how the overflowing 2024 pilgrimage to Chartres made such a strong impression on the secular world and stunned the Church. Instead of rejoicing in the success, the immediate reaction of the ecclesiastical authorities was to discuss banning the pilgrimage from the cathedrals in Paris and Chartres! But that is a restriction the pilgrimage has lived with before. In the United States, similar if smaller pilgrimages are scheduled this year for Auriesville, New York and Clear Creek, Oklahoma.

Thus, the era of Traditionis Custodes, if a time of sorrow and tragedy for so many,  is at the same time an era of growing understanding of the cause for which traditionalists fight.  Resources unknown to their forbears are available to them. These aids, in addition to the goad of persecution,  permit a far clearer understanding of what it means to be a traditionalist. The position of traditionalists today is thus very different from that which prevailed between 1965 and 1978 – the previous highwater mark of the ecclesiastical assault on the traditions of the Church.  

What is Catholic Traditionalism?

Traditionalism is not primarily an esthetic movement. For decades traditionalists celebrated the mass of their forefathers without the aid of beautiful music, splendid vestments or churches. Traditionalists have developed important and growing links with “right-wing” political movements – yet political engagement has played a subordinate role in traditionalist life.  In this regard, the contrast is remarkable with the “Conservative Catholics” of the United States and even more so with the relentlessly secular political orientation of the progressive Catholics (and Pope Francis). Similarly, traditionalism by now has no connection with nostalgia – if it ever had any! Traditionalism is not attached to any one period or era of the past – neither the age of Pius XII nor the Middle Ages –  in contrast to the exclusive focus of the Conciliar Church on the modern world of Western Europe and the United States.

Rather, traditionalism is a movement for the recovery of the Catholic faith lived through the ages and concretely experienced in liturgy, in morality and in theology. It is a vision that sees the faith as encompassing and transforming all aspects of human life –  yet it does not proceed from politics or “Catholic social doctrine” nor does it primarily rely on the techniques of publicity, agitation or argumentation. Rather,  it grows through offering the experience of the dignified and complete celebration of the Traditional Mass and other liturgical functions. This is not an individual quest, but takes place in congregations, orders, parishes and communities. In the so-called ”secular age,” traditionalism retains a holy hope for the recovery of the Church and of the sacred. Traditionalists understand that now they can only be a minority movement, but their ambition is to transform the entire Church.

The Role of the Society of Saint Hugh of Cluny

What is the role of this Society in the present day? Let me first summarize our activities in 2023 and 2024. As you can see, the Society sponsors a blog which seems to be widely read. We have sponsored a whole series of solemn masses, usually in connection with a classical Catholic school in Connecticut. We have acquired and made available additional vestments for the dignified celebration of the Traditional Mass at local parishes. We have helped to sponsor in New York and Princeton solemn vespers with outstanding music and magnificent ceremonial. We have sponsored very well received lectures  by John Lamont and Marie Meaney. The Society has joined the CISP (the “International Coetus Summorum Pontificum”), and since 2021 the Society has been represented each year at the Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage in Rome (not at the expense of the Society!)

We thank all those who contribute to support these efforts. Much more could be done and perhaps we should more actively seek out donors. The main constraint on the Society’s mission, however, have always been not the lack of funding but the lack of personnel. In 2023, for example, we tried to organize a large-scale conference in Connecticut. In the world of Traditionis Custodes, finding a venue is challenging. And bringing off our usual format of combining lectures with the celebration of a traditional liturgy is even more so. Several key speakers could not in the end attend. With all these complexities, by the time a suitable venue was found it was too late to proceed with the conference. I suspect with more (human) resources devoted to the project some kind of resolution could have been achieved.

Going forward, we envisage continuing the path set forth above. The Society will sponsor more conferences and liturgies. Our primary area of activity will remain in and around the greater New York area. We of course welcome suggestions from  readers as to projects and events the Society should support. With this in mind, we look forward to continuing our successful activity in the course of 2025.

By Marie Cabaud Meaney

(Marie Meaney has summarized for us the presentation she gave on November 9, 2024 for the St. Hugh of Cluny Society. SC)

Biographical Introduction

Simone Weil is not someone one might expect to hear about at a society centering on the liturgy. For this French philosopher was not a Catholic; she came from an agnostic, Jewish French family. Only in the aftermath of several mystical experiences did she come close to the Catholic Church (though she had already felt attracted to the liturgy earlier on). But she had
always had a great sense for beauty and its significance; and after encountering Christ, the supernatural became the focus of her thought. Hence, I believe she can teach us something about these matters.

In hindsight, she thought that she had always been Catholic de facto, if not de iure. For she shared the Catholic worldview, always sought the truth and the good, lived charity to a heroic degree, chose poverty, and embraced chastity. As she would come to see later on, she had loved God implicitly and obeyed His commands without knowing Him – thus proving Christ’s prediction that at the Last Judgment some who did not know Him will be surprised to sit at His right hand for having served Him.

For a long time, she had embraced agnosticism, believing that the human mind could not reach God. That God would descend to man came as a complete surprise to her in November 1938. It was when she was reciting George Herbert’s poem “Love” that “Christ came down and took her,” as she writes in her famous autobiographical 4th letter to Father Perrin (to be found in Waiting for God).

Though astonishing, this mystical encounter had been prepared in various ways. There were three “contacts” with Catholicism that truly mattered. During the academic year of 1934-5, she had taken time off from teaching to be employed among factory-assembly line workers to understand from the inside their working conditions. Attracted to Communism, she hadn’t kept
her concern for the oppressed on a purely theoretical plane but wanted to gain insights based on experience in order to find workable solutions (she would later criticize Communism scathingly). Given her bad health and natural clumsiness, the work on the assembly line was particularly
grueling for her. She came out of this experience, broken in body and soul. As she writes: “There I received forever the mark of a slave, like the branding of the red-hot iron the Romans put on the foreheads of their most despised slaves.” To recover, she went with her parents on a holiday
to Portugal in September 1935 where she witnessed a religious procession in a poor fishing-village, perhaps on the feast-day of Our Lady of Sorrows. The people were singing hymns of such “heart-rending sadness” that “there the conviction was suddenly borne in upon me that Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others,” as she explains. This was not a Nietzschean position about the weak resenting the strong and trying to control them through a restrictive morality, but rather the realization that Christianity recognizes suffering by showing affliction’s true face as Christ’s Passion.

In the Spring of 1937, she travelled to Italy, where, in Assisi, “alone in the little twelfth-century Romanesque chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli, an incomparable marvel of beauty where Saint Francis often used to pray, something stronger than [her]self compelled [her] for the first time in [her] life to go down on [her] knees.” Though her kneeling-down was not yet prayer, it was a definite step in that direction, i.e. the implicit acknowledgement of someone infinitely holy and good calling for this posture of reverence.

A year later, in 1938, she spent Holy Week at the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes, which is famous for its wonderful liturgy and Gregorian chant. Non-believers were known to go there for the beauty of the liturgy. She writes: “I was suffering from splitting headaches; each sound hurt me like a blow; by an extreme effort of concentration, I was able to rise above this
wretched flesh, to leave it to suffer by itself, heaped up in a corner, and to find a pure and perfect joy in the unimaginable beauty of the chanting and the words. This experience enabled me by analogy to get a better understanding of the possibility of loving divine love in the midst of
affliction. It goes without saying that in the course of these services the thought of the Passion of Christ entered into my being once and for all.” That Christ’s Passion left its mark on her came through the liturgy and implies already a kind of union with Christ through the Cross.

There too, she was introduced to the Metaphysical Poets, and in particular to George Herbert’s poem “Love III” depicting a dialogue between the soul and God, ending on a Eucharistic note. She would recite it during her violent headaches, thinking it was merely a beautiful poem without realizing that it “had the virtue of a prayer.” As she succinctly states: “It
was during one of these recitations that… Christ himself came down and took possession of me.”

After this, everything changed and nothing changed. Everything changed in that she now knew that God existed; hence, the supernatural was going to become the main focus of her philosophy. Nothing changed in that she’d already led a highly moral life – so there was no moral turnaround. Nothing changed in that it didn’t lead her to engage in any steps towards the Catholic Church, nor did she start to pray. A mystic who doesn’t pray is a surprising combination, nay even seems like a contradiction in terms. But she was fearful of auto-suggestion and therefore resisted giving her intellectual assent to her experience for the sake of the truth, knowing that “if one turns away from him [Christ] in order to go towards the truth, it will not be long before one falls into his arms.”

But this changed, when she decided with Gustave Thibon in September 1941 to learn the “Our Father” by heart in Greek. Thibon was a thinker and gentleman farmer whom she met during her exile in the South of France, where she had fled from the Nazis with her parents to the unoccupied zone. Remembering her promise a few weeks later, she did so, reciting the prayer
from then on with the utmost attention at least once a day. Each time, she would have another mystical experience, where her spirit was transported beyond time and space, where she experienced a silence “which is more real than a sound,” and where “Christ is sometimes present in person.” And after having met the Dominican priest Joseph Marie Perrin in June 1941, who raised the question of baptism with her, she went to mass every Sunday, and often daily. Weil also frequently spent hours in Eucharistic Adoration.

The question of baptism haunted her for the rest of her short life. She left France with her parents for the US in May 1942, though she would have preferred to stay in France, to continue helping in the Resistance and suffering with the oppressed and persecuted. She applied for and
obtained a position in the Free French Government of General de Gaulle in London. She arrived in the UK at the end of 1942, but died on August 24th, 1943 from tuberculosis, overwork, exhaustion, and malnutrition. 1)

I will now turn to Weil’s reflections on beauty that are significant in and of themselves, but also in terms of their importance in the liturgy, even if she didn’t reflect much on the latter.

Beauty

Every time we experience authentic beauty, “there is a real presence of God,” Weil writes in her notebooks, for “it is like a kind of incarnation of God in the world of which beauty is the mark.” “Beauty is therefore nothing else but God who comes to seek man,” as she states in “God in Plato.” More precisely, the beauty of the world is that of God Himself, rendered graspable to the senses, while all other beauties are reflections.

When you ask people to define beauty, they have a very hard time doing so and will often say that it’s in the eye of the beholder and therefore purely subjective. Or they will state that the experience of beauty is due to a chemical reaction, such as hormones set in motion. But even
without a reductionist approach, one can find it difficult to capture it in words. It is not surprising therefore that “when one reflects on the beautiful, one is stopped as by a wall.” Weil therefore sternly states in her notebooks that “Everything that has been written on this is miserably and obviously insufficient, for this study needs to start with God,” for the simple reason that beauty is God. By taking Him out of the equation, one ends up doing injustice to it.

Beauty is “a reflection of the supernatural in the natural,” which doesn’t mean it exists disassociated from us (Prechristian Intuitions). For it occurs as a relationship between our senses and this world. It is meant to be enjoyed by human beings and even by all rational beings in the universe to whose sensory perception it is geared, is Weil’s claim. But beauty is real and of its own kind (sui generis). It cannot be explained by anything else but itself and is its own criterion.

Beauty as Sacrament

Yet beauty has an incomparable role to play. Weil even compares it to a sacrament, since it unites God and human beings. Without beauty, therefore, human beings would be lost. Those who have never experienced beauty “could perhaps reach God by no other means.”

Though there are a number of openings to the supernatural, “the beauty of the world is almost the only way through which one can let God penetrate” people’s lives in the West, as she writes in “Implicit Forms of the Love of God.” Yet, “the white race has almost lost its sensitivity towards the beauty of the world.” If it was bad in Weil’s day, one wonders what she would say
today.

But this sense of beauty, “even if mutilated, deformed, and sullied, remains indestructibly in the heart of man as a powerful motive.” If rendered “authentic and pure, it would transport in one fell swoop secular life at the feet of God” and make a “complete incarnation of faith” possible.

However, this isn’t easy, for it means abstaining from using beauty for one’s own gratification. Therefore, “only those can be saved,” she states in her notebooks, “that something compels to stop when they would like to approach that which they love, those in whom the sense of beauty has put contemplation.” This detachment is motivated by beauty itself, by the
realization that beauty is fragile, at least in this world, and can be destroyed and debauched. It implies a renunciation of one’s selfishness or a “decreation,” as Weil calls it, that comes down to a painful death to self.

Beauty and the Liturgy as Metaxu

Beauty is one of the metaxu, the bridges or “holes” in the fabric of our artificially secularized world, that lead to the supernatural. The supernatural is obviously not the demonic, but is “that other reality,” namely the absolute good which turns out to be the triune God, Love
itself.

It has its own laws that can be drawn up and are just as certain, if not more, than scientific laws. If someone directs all his attention and love towards the absolute good, then he will eventually perceive it; it will “descend upon him” and shine “through him upon all that surrounds him.” However, this will not happen primarily through perception or reason (though these can confirm it) but through the heart, of which Pascal already said that it “has its reasons which reason does not know.”

Another manner to get to “touch the supernatural,” another metaxu, is through the liturgy. In a time where people have lost their roots, the liturgy is key to give them back these roots, as Weil states in “Le christianisme et la vie des champs.” In “Human Personality,” she compares the human person to a tree that has roots both in the sky (the supernatural) and in the earth (their culture, traditions, and history) that have so often been lost through industrialization and secularization. The supernatural is often accessed through those cultural roots: through customs, art, literature, architecture. But when these have disappeared, been disfigured, or remain
inaccessible, then the supernatural in the form of the liturgy becomes even more essential in helping people grow these roots again (though Weil mainly thinks of farmers in “Le christianisme,” it is applicable to all).

Conclusion

The cult of ugliness seems to reign everywhere. Unfortunately, beauty has often even been removed from our churches and our liturgy. But the beauty in the liturgy is essential, as Weil is implicitly saying, in drawing people back from the secularized and uglified universe they live in, giving them roots to grow and the capacity to understand what life is truly about – not a comfort-zone that tends to our desires and need for distraction, but a heroic choice between good and evil, for God or against Him.

 © Marie Cabaud Meaney

1. All quotes in this section were from Weil’s fourth letter to Perrin that is to be found in Waiting for God.

For more elements regarding Simone Weil’s thoughts on the supernatural, see my analysis in: https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/spaziofilosofico/article/view/9964

For Weil’s thoughts on beauty, see my chapter in the forthcoming volume: Amazon.com: The Bloomsbury Handbook of Simone Weil (Bloomsbury Handbooks): 9781350341623: McCullough, Lissa (Editor)