This Friday, March 19, is the Feast of St. Joseph. The following churches have scheduled Traditional Masses:

St. Mary Church, Norwalk, CT, low Mass, 8 am, Solemn Mass 7 pm.

Basilica of St. John the Evangelist, Stamford, CT, 7:30 pm

St. Pius X Church, Fairfield, CT, Solemn Mass, 7 pm.

Sacred Heart Church, Georgetown, CT, 12 noon.

St. Joseph Church, Danbury, CT, March 18, 6 pm: Solemn First Vespers; March 19, 6 pm Solemn Mass (See poster below for more details)

Sts. Cyril and Methodius Oratory, Bridgeport, CT, low Mass 7:45 am, Missa Cantata, 6:45 pm

St. Patrick Parish and Oratory, Waterbury, CT, low Mass 8 am, Missa Cantata 6 pm.

St. Augustine Church, 30 Caputo Road, North Branford, CT, Missa Cantata, 6 pm. Father Robert L. Turner, celebrant.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel, New York, NY, 7:00 A.M. – Low Mass; 7:45 A.M. – Low Mass; 7:00 P.M. – Missa Cantata 1962 and Blessing of St. Joseph’s table

Church of the Holy Innocents, New York, NY, 6 pm.

St. Claire of Assisi Church, 1918 Paulding Ave, Bronx, NY, Missa Cantata, 6 pm.

St. Josaphat Church, Bayside, Queens, NY, Missa Cantata, 7:30 pm.

St. Paul the Apostle Church, Yonkers, NY, 12 noon.

St. Barnabas Church, Bellmore, NY, (Long Island), Missa Cantata, 7 pm. The celebrant is Father Jeff Yildirmaz, the pastor of St. Barnabas. A new Latin Mass location on Long Island!

Notre Dame Church in New Hyde Park, NY (Long Island), Solemn Mass, 7:30 pm

Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Newark, NJ, Missa Cantata, 7 pm.

Corpus Christi Church, South River, NJ, Missa Cantata, 7 pm

Our own Bridgeport diocese in the great state of Connecticut took this step in 2018. Now, the diocese of Essen in Germany has appointed Sandra Schnell as its first woman parish director. She was interviewed in Katholisch.de, the internet presence of the Catholic Church in Germany.

Q: At your side is a “moderating priest.” What is your relationship to each other? Who has the say, when push comes to shove?

S. Schnell: “He is deliberately called the moderating priest not the pastor. (1) My mission is, very clearly, to lead the parish and the priest is to support me in doing so. He takes over the things that are tied to the status of the priesthood, such as administrating some of the sacraments. … But the moderating priest (also) presides over the Kirchenvorstand, in which I also have a seat. Moreover, he is rector of the parish church. (2)  In this we have joint responsibility. The priest assigned to me, Johannes Broxtermann, at 70 years of age is already a senior and is set on being present primarily in a supporting role.” 

(1) The word “moderating” (moderierend) that is used refers to a presenter or a moderator of a TV show or debate. (SC)

(2) I believe these last two functions of the “moderating priest” reference a parish administrative board exercising a financial management role and perhaps also the need to fulfill a requirement under civil or canon law. (SC)

SOURCE: Erste Essener Pfarrei-Leiterin: Meine Ernennung ist Hoffnungszeichen

See also, from the diocese of Essen: Sandra Schnell leitet künftig die Altenaer Pfarrei St. Matthäus

For the “views” of one Vatican office on the subject, see the Instruction:

“The pastoral conversion of the Parish community in the service of the evangelising mission of the Church” (07/20/2020)

.

Arcadi Nebolsine died last year on August 21 at the Westhampton Care Center  (Long Island) after a long illness. He was 87. For an obituary see HERE.

What can I say about Arcadi Rostislavovich Nebolsine? He was my dear friend for so many years. I first met him in the company of his own great friend, Thomas Molnar, in the early eighties. I visited him regularly every year after that – and even more frequently after I had moved back to the New York area in 2002.  I saw him the last time in 2020 in a nursing home out on Long Island shortly before he died.

His impressive, formidable appearance was certainly out of the ordinary. And Arcadi spoke with an accent all his own – a mélange of American, British and vaguely European. He may have been a character, yet he was no eccentric or pseudo-intellectual. Rather, he projected the image of a cultured European gentleman.  Indeed he could be quite the bon vivant when the occasion presented itself.  His own parties after Easter and Christmas (according to the Julian calendar, that is) always drew a crowd of guests from the Russian exile community and many others who know Arcadi well.  For Arcadi had an amazing army of friends who shared his passions for art and culture. And he would attend the gala Petrouschka ball of the Russian nobility society. 

The basis of his culture was a profound knowledge of Russian literature and philosophy. But no aspect of European culture and music was foreign to Arcadi. In particular, Arcadi was a great admirer and collector of the works of 20^th century English Catholic and Christian authors: G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis and T.S. Elliot. Next
to his Russian literary studies, it was, so to speak,  a second fundamental point of reference for him. Indeed, Arcadi very much regretted not having had the opportunity to get to know C.S. Lewis better when he studied at Oxford in the 1950’s. At the time, he had been put off from exploring the Christian alternative – insofar as it had any visibility – by the social climbing antics of the Catholic chaplain and the eccentricity of the local clerical leader of the Orthodox….

Over the years, Arcadi and I would often meet and dine together for an evening of wonderful conversation. Since Arcadi always had some difficulty in getting around, our excursions were restricted to places in the vicinity of his apartment on East 86th Street. One such spot was the Heidelberg restaurant – along with Schaller & Weber, the last remnant of German and Central European Yorkville. Arcadi would inevitably order a couple of Martinis – with plenty  of olives – and an immense Schweinshaxe. Then he would unfailingly request a side of preiselbeeren  – only to he told they only had available cranberries ( the same answer the waiter had given him for over twenty years.)

In our conversations we would inevitably go over his latest cause. For Arcadi was always campaigning for something. Let me give you a brief hint of the range of his interests.

He was a great champion of the preservation of traditional art, cities and landscapes  He was always highly critical of modem invasive restorations – such as the renovation of the Sistine chapel – which substituted aggressive, bright colors for the subdued palette of the past. For his spiritual homeland, Russia, he helped organize a society for the preservation of Russian art and monuments. In particular, the fate of St. Petersburg was of grave concern to  him.

For it was the baroque and neoclassical styles that were dearest to Arcadi’s heart. Now that may seem surprising – but, as Arcadi liked to point out, non-Russians generally know nothing about the classical element in Russian culture: the poetry of Pushkin or the neoclassical architecture of the St. Petersburg of 1800. Who outside of Russia knows, for example,  that the Kazan cathedral of that period in that city was conceived as variation on St. Peter’s in Rome? And it was Arcadi who revealed to me that Nikolai Gogol  – the most passionate protagonist of the pro-Russian, pro-Orthodox  tendency in Russian culture,  had also written the most sympathetic account of the city of Rome and of the Catholic culture that still survived there in the 1840’s. 

In his struggles for the preservation of culture he developed and applied the concept of an ecology of the beautiful – uniting in the landscape nature and the works of man ( architecture). St. Petersburg, situated in a flat landscape by the waters of the Neva river under a limitless Northern sky, was for him a cultural ideal. Again, contrary to the notions of outsiders, he saw the old imperial capital with its “Western” domes and spires as a Christian city reaching up to heaven. He worked with local activists to prevent its desecration by modern high rises.

Similarly, Arcadi’s enthusiasm for the Austrian baroque was boundless. In the United States, he was drawn to the beaux-arts tradition that had flourished before 1914. Arcadi had less use for certain other periods and styles – such as those of the Victorian Age or the imitation “Slavic” architecture or Nazarene style icons of the same period in Russia. For more recent innovations, he had no understanding at all.

A second country dear to him was Portugal, where he often spent part of the year. He often spoke of the wonderful Portuguese landscapes, architecture  and people, and of his friend the pretender to the  Portuguese throne. He knew Fatima and its message well and also wrote an essay about the Azores and its “enchanted” landscapes, villages and small towns.  (The Azores, 1996 (untranslated)).

On a subject that should be of interest to the readers of this blog, Arcadi had a keen understanding of the liturgy and could always make a quick comparison of the Latin  (Traditional Catholic, that is) and the Orthodox rites. I first heard from him criticism of the 1955 changes to the Easter Triduum in the Latin church. He had had years ago contacts in Europe with circles of supporters of Archbishop Lefebvre. Regarding the whole question of revising the liturgy,  the Russian Orthodox Church had gone through a stage after the Revolution  in which  liturgical experimentation was encouraged by the authorities (the so-called Living Church). It was quickly dropped even in Soviet times, and Arcadi regretted that in Russia any otherwise harmless adjustments to the liturgy were no longer possible given the association of such changes with Communism. 

There were amusing differences between us illustrating the contrast between the Orthodox and Catholic perspectives. I had commented to Arcadi that I had read that if the Patriarch of Moscow would ever propose Vatican II – style changes, he would be deposed. Not at all, said Arcadi – in Orthodoxy nobody would listen to him in the first place .

His knowledge of all things Catholic was great, but the Second Vatican Council and John Paul II were insuperable barriers to any further interest he may have had. Although Arcadi was of the opinion that very little separated (Traditional)Catholics and the Orthodox. A few minor things like the papacy and divorce, to give a couple of examples…

Towards the end of his life he was working hard on trying to find a doctrinal formula that could serve to unite West and East. As in his efforts for the preservation of monuments, the gigantic nature of such a task never deterred Arcadi.

His own written output was small but select. Aside from his remarkable dissertation on poshlost, Arcadi left us a series of essays published in Russia and, as far as I am aware, untranslated: On Silver (1995) On Gold(1995),Le Soleil Inconnu (1996-97) and On the Colors (1996). He summarized his thoughts in The Metaphysics of the Beautiful: an Introduction to the Ecology of Culture (2003, also untranslated) It is an audacious synthesis of theology, philosophy, liturgy, literary criticism, environmentalism, travelogue and art history- focusing naturally on Russia but including much else besides.

Arcadi only enjoyed limited professional success to the United
States as a teacher. After Communism started to disintegrate, however, he found congenial friends and allies and a warm reception in Russia itself. There, people more easily appreciate Arcadi’s attempt to find a great synthesis or summary of what otherwise seem unrelated movements and disciplines.

As for poshlost, that was his arch enemy. Drawing on the writings of
Gogol and Dostoevsky,  Arcadi characterizes with this term those who are
simultaneously cowardly, depraved, lukewarm and banal. In other words, very much in the mood of today and characteristic of 21st century man. Arcadi’s other foes were big business, technology and globalism.

It is tragic that in such a culture as that of today,  true gentlemen like Arcadi R. Nebolsine, Thomas Molnar and Helmut Rückriegel  have departed  without leaving, it seems, any heirs or successors – at least in the US.  But we know, just from a survey of recent publications of a rising generation,  that this perception is false.  Arcadi Nebolsine will always find disciples – inspired by his vision of culture and humanity. And I look forward to the day when, following Arcadi’s last wishes,  East and West Christendom will fully unite once more. May his memory be eternal!

A Solemn Traditional Mass for the Feast of Saint Joseph will be celebrated at the Church of St. Pius X in Fairfield, CT on Friday, March 19 at 7 pm.

You’ll be glad to know Martin Mosebach has been hard at work. He has written a new novel and his published statements continue to generate controversy and even hysteria in a Catholic Germany slouching towards apocalypse along the Synodal Path. Let’s look at Mosebach’s recent reflections on “Catholic literature,”  taken from a lengthy interview in the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin.  Invigorating and certainly controversial, these remarks are, by the way, entirely consistent with his previous writings on the subject.

Interviewer: You are a Catholic, and in your essays battle against the modernization of the rites of the Church. You like to formulate slogans like: “We believe with our knees or we don’t believe at all.” Did you ever have an experience of spiritual enlightenment in your life?

Mosebach: No, my religious roots were never that deep, although they always existed. The connection with the Catholic religion began to grow only after I was thirty.

Interviewer: Your novels take place in religiously indifferent milieus. To struggle with faith, to experience a conversion, to suffer martyrdom, to be shattered by guilt, to receive absolution from a mortal sin: why doesn’t any of this appear in your works?

Mosebach: I’m not a friend of what is called “Catholic literature.” Propagating religion in the form of a novel seems to me to be a dangerous undertaking. Allow me a perhaps mildly scandalous comparison.  Just as in pornography an image of sexuality is created,  projected by the lustful imagination and omitting anything that could disturb it, likewise “Catholic Literature” is in great danger of adjusting the world to Catholic doctrine. My nightmare image of such literature is the death of Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited: the old sinner who nevertheless crosses himself as he breathes his last. I find something like this absolutely tasteless.

Interviewer: Why do you consider humor “a sign of the Catholic world view”?

Mosebach: A sense for the comic presupposes a pessimistic image of man and history. Because an optimist aims at the perfection of the good, he can be neither absurd nor cynical nor playful. His expectations, projected into the future, are more important to him than the understanding of present reality, which can captivate despite its frailty. The foundation of the Catholic world view is the conviction of the irreformable imperfection of the fallen world of original sin, in which every kind of grand and lofty endeavor at some point fails miserably. T.S. Eliot called the Catholic religion the “philosophy of disillusion” – not to expect from the world that which the world cannot give. Thus, comedy is the really Catholic form of literature.

Interviewer: Why then is the clergy united in its lack of interest in fiction?

Mosebach: Literature has tasks different from those of theology. It lives from contradictions, imagination, invention, and suggestions. Theology must keep all this at a distance – which it regrettably doesn’t always do.

“I like attacks better than boredom…Moreover, there is no right to be read.” Interview with Sven Michaelsen, Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin p. 8-15 (March 5, 2021). Translation – SC.

What can we say about evangelization today? What should the Church do in a time of apostasy and decline?  And what is the relation of the Traditionalist movement to all this? Two noted apologists of the establishment  – defenders of the Faith – recently wrote on the interaction of Evangelization, Traditionalism and Christendom. 

In From Christendom Times to Apostolic Times,  George Weigel tells us in First Things that:

Look around you and recognize that ours are apostolic times, not Christendom times. Christendom, as Fulton Sheen said in 1974, is over.

“Christendom” connotes a situation in which society’s cultural codes and the manner of life they endorse help transmit “the faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3). Places like that existed within living memory; I grew up in the last, fleeting moments of one, in the urban Catholic culture of 1950s Baltimore. That form of “Christendom” is now long gone. Throughout the Western world today, the cultural air we breathe neither transmits the faith nor is neutral about the faith; the cultural air is hostile to the faith. And when that hostility captures the commanding heights of politics, it aggressively seeks to marginalize the faith.

In Christendom times, a “missionary” is someone who leaves a cultural comfort zone and goes to proclaim the Gospel where it’s not been heard before. In apostolic times, Redemptoris Missio (John Paul II’s encyclical on the missions -SC)teaches, every Catholic is a missionary who has been given the mandate to “go, make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). In apostolic times, “mission territory” is not an exotic travel destination; it’s everywhere. Mission territory is the kitchen table, the neighborhood, and the workplace; the mission extends into our lives as consumers and citizens.

Now I fully agree with Mr. Weigel that ours is a culture hostile to the faith – that Christendom is no more. After all, apologists both Catholic and friendly to Catholicism have been making that point since at least – well,  Novalis’ Christendom or Europe (1801). I should mention, however,  that his characterization of today’s culture does conflict sharply not only with the rapturous embrace of modernity by the Second Vatican Council as well as recent popes and bishops but also with the de facto “neutral” assessment of the Opus Dei movement. Does not Redemptoris Missio, Weigel’s “blueprint” for mission, also, here and there, still reflect this optimism?

It’s also undeniable that every Catholic needs to be a missionary today and his mission territory is all around him. But after making this most valid observation, Mr. Weigel then draws a contrast between such an “apostolic age” and the “comfort zone” of Christendom. Our author has indeed often critiqued in the past the alleged inadequacy of Christendom and its pre-Conciliar pockets and successors. The source of such views is of course the ferment leading up to the last Council with its attacks on the “Catholic Ghetto,” and the ”Constantinian Church.” 

Internal and external mission, however, was always integral to Christendom. Now by this term I mean a society where the religion of the Gospel is made the defining constitutional element of state and society. In such a society,  the Catholic, Orthodox religion gradually informs all aspects of life: the social structure, the arts, the economy, the laws, the cuisine, the technology,  the dress of the people – nothing was exempt from Christian influence. It resulted in a transformation that took generations, even centuries. A new Christendom cannot be recreated or restored by our efforts in our own days – after all, it took over 700 years to form the first one. And the task is never complete – total conformity of the World to the gospel is never achieved – not even in the 13^th century Europe, not even in the baroque age of Italy and Germany. Christendom is inherently never static and is always in need of renewal. Catholic culture, however marvelous, of itself is insufficient: Prague is one of the most perfectly Catholic cities in the world yet it is now inhabited by a people largely atheistic. 

A brief review of history bears this out. It was, after all,  from Christendom, both East and West, that the territories and peoples outside the Roman empire were converted –  starting with Ireland in the West, then Anglo-Saxon England, then Germany, the Slavic and Hungarian peoples and, by 1050, Scandinavia as far as Greenland.  During and after the crisis of the Protestant Reformation,  new missionaries  – Jesuits and others –  converted many in Asia and in the new world – concluding with the California missions of the second half of the 18^th century. And after the intervening chaos of the French revolution, after which Christendom was, so to speak, on life support,  we encounter the great missionary revival of the 19^thcentury. 

The external activity was matched by internal evangelization. The Benedictine monks of the 7^th century were eventually succeeded by Cluny and the Cistercians – all three representing not withdrawal from the world but the launching of mighty spiritual movements within it. In the 13th century, the friars of the new mendicant orders evangelized the rapidly growing cities  – and advanced as far as China. Later, the Jesuits acted not just as apostles to the heathen – an even greater focus of their efforts was education and internal mission in Europe. These missionary endeavors left a stamp on many landscapes of Europe that lasted even until the Second Vatican Council. Even in 19th century New York City – increasingly remote from Christendom – we read of the many missions preached by the Paulists and the Redemptorists in the city’s parishes. Finally, the catalogue of the saints and blesseds of Christendom shows that internal evangelization was not just the province of monks or priests but was shared by the laity: kings and servant girls, high court officials and peasants.

The contrast to the evangelization required of us today is not Christendom, but various abuses that developed after it fell. There was, for example, the ultramontane emphasis on a centralizing clerical culture. And then came the “Conciliar Church”: the average US parish that is its product is hardly evangelical. That John Paul II had to devote paragraphs of Redemptoris Missio to defending the very concept of mission only demonstrates its perilous state by 1990.  And what are we to make of the repeated utterences of the current bishop of Rome against “proselytizing”?

Actually, in recent years it has been the growing Traditionalist movement that has displayed the greatest initiative in evangelizing those both inside and outside the Church. It has done this primarily by involving Catholics in the liturgy in one way or another. In doing so,  it has revived and employed cultural achievements inherited from Christendom: the music, the vestments, the philosophy and the art (insofar as that is possible today ). None of these are ends in themselves but are means to revive the faith of Catholics and lead others to it. The effect is to activate those organizing these liturgies – and then to attract others won over by what they have seen or heard.

As an example, we have these testimonies from the diocese of Brooklyn in the Brooklyn Tablet:

“Our congregation is made up of many professionals, young people. A great number of young families come with their children. I would say that almost every year we’ve had one or two children wanting to make their communions in the old rite. Also, we have at least maybe two or three baptisms during the year. I’m surprised to see, almost every Sunday, we have new faces here. You know, and those new faces are young people,” Cardillo explained.

……

Bongiorni, 28, has been serving on the altar for ten years. He’s part of a close group of about two dozen young Catholics who met at the Traditional Latin Masses and started the Latin Mass program at St. Finbar Church, Bath Beach, along with Father Michael Gelfant, then the pastor, last year.

What is the reaction of the professional evangelizers of the establishment to this? For that, we turn to auxiliary bishop Robert Barron – a would-be modern-day Fulton Sheen. Now Bishop Barron has little use for Traditionalists. Last year he hosted a closed door meeting with “Catholic media professionals”  – one wonders who they were – on,  among other things, the dangers of “Radical Traditionalism.” Just recently Bishop Barron wrote in his blog on The Evangelical Path of Word on Fire:

(Speaking of the late Cardinal George)  Thoroughly imbued with the missionary spirit of Vatican II, the Cardinal knew that a hyper-valorization of any particular period of Church history, be it the American Catholicism of the 1950s or the European Catholicism of the thirteenth century, would seriously undermine the Church’s present capacity to engage the culture in which it finds itself.

In recent years, a fiercely traditionalist movement has emerged within American Catholicism,… In their anger and frustration, some of it justified, these arch-traditionalist Catholics have become nostalgic for the Church of the pre-conciliar period and antipathetic toward the Second Vatican Council itself, Pope John XXIII, Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul II, and particularly our present Holy Father.

I have argued that the extreme traditionalist Catholicism of the present day is self-consuming, for it attacks the very foundations of Catholicism itself. If both of these characterizations are true, then these two critical movements are essentially moribund. I have tried to situate Word on Fire on the path of an evangelical Catholicism, the Catholicism of the saintly popes associated with Vatican II, a living Catholicism.

So the real problem for evangelization is a “fiercely” “extreme” “radically” Traditionalist  movement? Obviously this movement, that Bishop Barron calls “essentially moribund,” is in fact gathering steam, otherwise he would not be writing a diatribe against it.

But how is one to respond to a document like this? To point out the fallacy of a “missionary spirit of Vatican II“?  – by the establishment’s own statistics, mission, both internal and external, is in a crisis.  That to talk about “the Church’s present capacity to engage the culture in which it finds itself” verges on the ludicrous, given the total alienation of Christianity from the present lords of the media and academia? That the frequent references to the alleged “anger” and “frustration”  of the “spitting-mad” Traditionalists is obviously a copy of the rhetoric of the last few years directed against supporters of Donald Trump? 

Of course, these same Traditionalists are described as “nostalgic” for things that, given the age of the great majority,  they never could have experienced (including the 13th century!). Examining the list of authorities to whom Bishop Barron pledges allegiance, one would never guess that among them exist drastic, unacknowledged differences (e.g. Cardinal George – or Bishop Barron’s’ own ordinary Archbishop Gomez –  and Pope Francis). These same greats are all post-Conciliar, demonstrating that Bishop Barron has now adopted the progressive  “hermeneutic of rupture” (using Benedict XVI’s terminology) as his own.

Strangest of all from the perspective of evangelization is for Bishop Barron to imply that  “the authority of the pope and … the legitimacy of an ecumenical council” are “the very foundations of Catholicism itself”  – the most ultramontane, institutional formulation imaginable. This kind of rhetoric is only geared to a closed, internal audience. I can’t see positions like this serving as the basis for evangelizing anyone.

It is disheartening  that this post of Bishop Barron – like the recent alleged summary by the French bishops of the responses to the Summorum Pontificum questionnaire  – could have been written, but for the references to the internet,  40 years ago. And Bishop Barron is not just speaking for himself. For Traditionalists, the only path is to carry on as before, trusting that divine providence will continue to foster their increasingly thriving communiites. In so doing they are truly accomplishing a great contemporary work of evangelization.