Today Regina Pacis Academy, the Catholic classical preK through 8 school in Norwalk, Connecticut celebrated the Feast of Corpus Christi with a Solemn Mass, Procession and triple Benediction at the church of St. Mary.

This past Sunday, Fr. Richard Cipolla celebrated his 40th anniversary as a priest at St. Mary’s in Norwalk with a Solemn Mass, attended by a large congregation.

Here is the schedule of TLMs for June 2024 (and 5/31) at the Shrine Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament.

• FRI 5/31 – Queenship of Mary – Oratory of St. Philip Neri
• SAT 6/1 – 9am – First Saturday – Oratory of St. Philip Neri
• FRI 6/7 – Sacred Heart – Fr. Skoblow
• THU 6/13 – Eucharistic Heart – Fr. Zannetti
• SAT 6/29 – SS Peter & Paul – Fr. Perricone

Shrine Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament,50 W. Somerset Street, Raritan, NJ. More info: BlessedSacramentShrine.com

This Thursday, May 30, is the Feast of Corpus Christi. The following churches will offer Traditional Masses.

Thursday, May 30

St. Mary Church, Norwalk, CT, 12:10 pm, Solemn Mass and Eucharistic procession. Mass for 4 Voices by William Byrd

Sacred Heart Oratory, Georgetown, CT, 6 pm, Solemn Mass with procession and Benediction

St. Patrick Oratory, Waterbury, CT, 6 pm with procession of the Most Blessed Sacrament around the church building.

Sts. Cyril and Methodius, Bridgeport, CT, 6 pm, Solemn Mass and procession.

Holy Innocents Church, New York, NY, 6 pm, Missa Cantata followed by outdoor procession and triple Benediction

Most Holy Redeemer, New York, NY, 6 pm followed by Eucharistic procession to St. Brigid’s Church with Benediction.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel, New York, NY, 7 pm Solemn Mass; 8 pm Outdoor procession; 8:30 pm Benediction.

St Josaphat, Bayside, Queens, 7pm Missa Cantata followed by procession

St. Paul the Apostle, Yonkers, 12 noon

St. Andrew Church, Ellenville, NY, 7pm Missa Cantata

Our Lady of Sorrows, Jersey City, 7 pm

Our Lady of Fatima, Pequannock, NJ, 7 am, 9 am, 7 pm

St. Athony of Padua Oratory, West Orange, NJ, 9 am, Low Mass, 7 pm High Mass and procession

St. John the Baptist, Allentown, NJ, 7:00p.m. Mass followed by Eucharistic procession. 

The archdiocese has published the decree of merger of St. John the Evangelist- Our Lady of Peace and Holy Family parishes. Holy Family will be the surviving parish:

This is the second time the parish has been terminated. 1) The first was in 1969, when the archdiocese demolished the original parish church of 1880 and in its place started construction of the New York Catholic Center – a small skyscraper housing the legion of Archdiocesan bureaucrats and a Catholic high school.  We are fortunate to have a witness to these events who was also an active participant in this process. Monsignor George A. Kelly was Secretary for Education in the New York archdiocese and later the first pastor of the new St. John the Evangelist located within the Catholic Center. Monsignor Kelly is probably still best known for his 1979 book The Battle for the American Catholic Church, a seminal text for Conservative Catholicism.

Kelly’s The Parish: as seen from the Church of Saint John the Evangelist, New York City 1840-1973 (St. John’s University, NY 1973) is a work full of curious and valuable facts on the immediate post-conciliar era. The author, in the final two chapters dealing with the demolition of the old St. John the Evangelist and the building of the Catholic Center refers to himself in the third person. Much of what Kelly writes in justification of the archdiocesan actions is startlingly familiar: 

Indeed, radical uprooting of old structures is sometimes required in the name of life. Many large churches, providing diminishing service, stand long after people have moved. And frittering away limited church resources on ancient forms when substantial new needs existed in other places, is not good sense, if only because of the unreasonable amount of priest power and money power locked into ecclesiastical enterprises no longer productive. (p. 123)

But ideological and theological rationales also justified the decision:

Moreover,  liturgical changes have made 19th century churches less than useful to 21st century needs. … When Father Flood was building the 1880 church, some judged 1,200 seats too few. Today cathedral-like churches are hindrances to the eucharistic community and 200 people scattered throughout a nave built to sit six times that number give the church the appearance of a museum, not a dynamic house of worship. (p.123)

I was thus intrigued to find explicitly stated in Kelly’s book many of the things I had surmised from the location, décor and architecture of the new St. John the Evangelist. Of course, whether these arguments were meant seriously or were merely excuses to justify an essentially financial transaction I will leave to the reader to decide. Kelly himself describes a real estate transaction involving Cathedral High School proceeding in parallel with the closure and demolition of old St. John’s. Here too ideological arguments were adduced to locate this school in an affluent area. 

Of course, on Monsignor Kelly’s own evidence, St. John’s was, up to the Second Vatican Council and even afterwards,  not a moribund parish at all. Attendance had leveled off over the decades, but strangely the parish income steadily increased because of the continued development of nearby Sutton Place. There was still a functioning school. Indeed, by 2024 standards,  St. John’s in 1969 looked distinctly healthy! 

The parishioners did not at all agree with the decision to demolish their church. From reading Kelly’s book and from other sources,  opposition seems to have been fierce and the process traumatic. Kelly describes the laity of the parish as ignorant and emotional:

While the decision was supported by an array of substantial arguments in its favor, those directly affected, especially the parents of school children, were distressed and angry. (pp. 125-126)

In this book we thus have yet another witness to the contempt of the post-conciliar clergy for the laity (which continues to the present day).  And of course, this comes from the pen of a “conservative,” not a radical reformer! 

Archbishop Cooke, despite his ineffectual, Pope Paul VI-like persona, could, just like the Pope, take drastic action against those who were seen standing in the way of progress. The parish was duly closed, and the construction of the new building began. St. John’s parish virtually ceased to exist:

 (O)nly one third of (the) number (of  parishioners)remained after the demolition of the old church in 1969 to offer mass in a very unattractive chapel situated on the ground floor of a solid but hardly well-appointed rectory. Sunday attendance was down to 700 and there was little call for baptism, matrimony, penance, extreme unction, indeed for any substantial priestly service. All parish organizations were moribund and total parish income fell between 1969 and 1970 from $223,000 to approximately $106,000. (p.135)

Kelly then describes what he audaciously calls the “Fifth Spring of the Parish.”  St. John’s had to start all over again  “as if it were 1840.” Kelly writes that “1973 not only marks the end of four years of stress and unhappiness but hopefully the beginning of a new parochial dream.” (p. 135) Kelly’s confidence in the future, however, seems to have been tentative, even shaky, based more on ideology and wishful thinking than facts: 

“In spite of a sense of loss for the old, a new church might be more salvific for the future. … Not every parishioner would agree with this, and time may yet prove their judgment correct.” (p. 137)

“What may be expected of the new parish of Saint John’s will only be known after the more commodious and properly appointed facilities of the new church are completed and are available for use.” (p.145).

“There is no great rush to utilize the parish facilities as yet. Only time will tell whether St. John’s will survive as a neighborhood parish.” (p.142)

Did parish life survive after 1973 or, as Kelly feared, did the new church simply become a chapel for the school and the archdiocesan employees? I do not know enough about the post-1973 history to say.  Over the years, however,  an array of figurative art was added to soften the original, radical decorative scheme of Kelly’s time. In 2014, the (relatively)nearby parish of Our Lady of Peace was merged into St. John’s. Within two years the church building of Our Lady of Peace was sold. That does not bode well for the continued existence of the “worship space” of the former parish of St. John’s, once the last archdiocesan offices vacate the Catholic Center in 2025. 

St John’s is one of the earliest examples in New York of a parish restructuring/closure, directed from the top, and also of a new Novus Ordo worship environment. Monsignor Kelly wrote thst only time would tell how successful the newborn parish would be. Now, in 2024, we do know the answer: the new St. John’s was an abysmal failure ending in its dissolution.

On the parish church of St. John the Evangeliset see our post. On the looming fate of the archdiocesan headquarters see HERE.

1. Ignoring various early moves between the founding of the parish in 1840 and 1880. St Patrick’s cathedral is built on the original site of St John’s!

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend services several times at the Church of Saint-Eugène, Paris. This is a diocesan parish. Here the Traditional Mass is celebrated and a splendid musical culture is cultivated led by several noteworthy musicians. The Traditional Sunday Mass (the main Mass of the day) was thronged by an overflowing congregation of all ages – a rarity in France! The music, although in a style somewhat unfamilar to me, was of course most impressive. The Novus Ordo is also celebrated but in a manner extremely traditional. Even the parish bulletin grappled fearlessly with major issues of the day.

It was here that the late Nicholas Krasno – a long-standing member of this Society – sang in the schola. Indeed, it was the opportunity, after Summorum Pontificum, to attend and sing in such a church that inspired him to join the Roman Catholic Church. For it was after Summorum Pontificum that a Catholic could, at least in some places, regularly experience the fullness of the traditional liturgy in ceremony and music.

And perhaps for Nicholas Krasno there were additional factors that explained his attachment to this church. For does not Saint-Eugène in several respects resemble Krasno’s former beloved Anglican parish of Saint Mary the Virgin in New York City? Both are 19th century recreations of the style of the high French Gothic. Both used innovative construction methods, the earlier Saint-Eugène was built around an iron framework, while Saint Mary the Virgin was the first steel-framed church.

(St. Mary the Virgin) is in fact the earliest ecclesiastical use of constructional steel – a technique that had been first tried for office buildings in Chicago only 4 years previous. 1)

Both churches feature beautiful windows and decoration. In both the musical culture was fostered:

The musical program of St. Mary’s expressed an unabashed preference for works of the great musicians of the Roman Church: favorite composers included Beethoven,Haydn and Weber, and most of the French romantic school – Gounod, Franck. Faure and Guilmant. 2)

And both were despised by modernist taste – only to experience a reassessment in more recent years.

1. Krasno, Nicholas, A Guide to the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, New York City at 17( 2nd edition revised, New York, 1999). The architects, Napoleon and Pierre Le Brun, were Roman Catholic. For Saint-Eugène-Sainte-Cécile, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Eugène-Sainte-Cécile#History.

2. Krasno, op. cit. at 63- 65. Of course, in the Roman Catholic Church these works later fell victim (in the US) to the strictures of Pius X.

“Virtus Signaling,” The Lamp, April 5, 2024.

In 2020, I was dissatisfied by the initial offerings of the new Catholic magazine The Lamp. Too many contributors seemed focused on evading, instead of facing, the reality of the Catholic Church today. By 2022, however, a subset of that magazine’s writers – including its editor – had shaken off their initial noncommittal airs and started dealing frankly with major issues of the Church (especially Traditionis Custodes). Now, in the April issue of The Lamp, the magazine’s editor, Matthew Walther, in a devastating essay takes aim at one of the most offensive features of the contemporary Church in the US: mandatory Virtus “training” for all those involved in church functions. For those who don’t know it, Virtus is a program supposedly designed to prevent sexual abuse – it is the exact equivalent of corporate training videos on the evils of sexual harassment. Since I had given up my “office” in the Church (serving as an usher) years ago, I have lost touch with the Virtus and its mentality. Others in my family have not been so fortunate.

Walther skewers the mind-numbing blather of Virtus: “its all-encompassing banality is impossible to describe.” By working through preposterous scenarios, Virtus is supposed to enable trainees to recognize the signs of child abuse – and report them. The onus of eliminating child abuse is thus placed squarely on the laity. Yet Virtus dances around the main characteristic of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church – that overwhelmingly the clergy are the perpetrators of abuse.

Walther proceeds from a critique of the program to more profound reflections on the state of the Church. What are we to think when the Church, instead of “insisting on an older moral vocabulary – the language of iniquity, of enormity, of sacrilege in addition to rape” – on the one hand, and “the virtues of chastity, charity, prudence, (and) wisdom” on the other, with Virtus:

“substitutes compliance, bulletins, slides, training, risk aversion and mitigation, liability minimization (and) cost control?”

Is it not obvious that the Church sees child sexual abuse as primarily a problem of protecting its own financial resources? Is the Church then just “one more faceless business entity?”

Further, Virtus makes of the Church a “surveillance state” in which the laity are summoned to view each other – and the clergy too – as potential abusers. Informing is encouraged. Things like Virtus have contributed to this situation:

“(P)riests in the United States today are aloof, isolated in thier parishes or, increasingly, their parish “clusters’ or “collectives.”

Finally, Walther describes a pervasive “randomness and caprice” in the “secular security theater” world of Virtus:

“(S)uch inconsistency is essential to security theater. Far more effectively than any consistently defined regime, arbitrariness underlines the all-pervading quality of semi-occluded authorities while heightening the atmosphere of crisis.“

Walther’s observations resemble my own thoughts on the totalitarian ultramontanism of the Catholic Church under Pope Francis.

“Virtue Signaling” is essential reading!