There will be Vespers in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite on Sunday, December 12th,at 3 PM,
Gaudete Sunday, at the Church of the Holy Innocents in Manhattan.

St. John the Evangelist Basilica in Stamford will once again offer a 9:30 Traditional Mass every Tuesday morning, starting this coming Tuesday. The Mass was temorarily moved to St. Gabriel Church in Stamford while restoration work was taking place at St. John’s. Help encourage the scheduling of daily Traditional Masses–please make an effort to attend this Mass if you are able.

For the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, this Wednesday, December 8:

 St. Mary Church, in  Norwalk, CT, will celebrate a Solemn High Mass, 5:30 PM. 

Solemn High Mass at Holy Innocents on West 37th Street,  Manhattan at 6:15 PM.

St. Stanislaus, New Haven, CT at 5:30 PM.

St. Peter’s Church, 160 Main Street, Hartford, CT at 9 AM.

St. Ladislaus Church, West Hemsptead, NY, 9 AM.

 If you know of other churches that will be offering the Traditional Mass on December 8, please let us know and we will post it.  We also need to start gathering information about Traditional Masses on Christmas.

St. Mary Church, Norwalk, CT will have  its annual service of Advent Lessons & Carols Friday, 10 December 2010, 7:00 p.m.  The choirs of St. Mary’s Church, under the direction of David Hughes, will perform, including The St. Mary’s Choir, El Coro Hispano de Santa Maria, The St. Mary’s Students’ Scholas and The Anchor Academy Schola Cantorum.
On the program are traditional carols from England, Spain & Germany; motets of Victoria, Vaughan Williams & Willcocks; organ music of Walther, Widor & Messiaen (whose birthday it is!); and  Gregorian chants of Advent.
Seven readings from Sacred Scripture and the writings of the saints on the Advent of Our Lord will be interspersed with carols, chants, hymns & organ music of the season, concluding with Benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament.
A festive reception will follow.
For further information:
203-866-5546 x115

In addition, Immaculate Conception Church in Sleepy Hollow, NY will have Advent Lessons and Carols on Saturday, December 11 at 6 p.m. There will be a special performance by Our Lady Queen of All Heart Choir.   Refreshments will follow.

St. Gabriel Church in Stamford will have Lesson and Carols at 4 pm on Sunday, December 12.

St. John the Evangelist, 348 East 55^th Street

On First Avenue between East 55^th and 56^th Streets stands an unremarkable medium-rise office building – perhaps a bit out of place in a mainly residential area. The surroundings may appear nondescript to the uninitiated, but, a block or so to the east, is Sutton Place – a very upscale address indeed. This dark-gray building is the “Terence Cardinal Cooke Building” – “ten-eleven,” the headquarters of the Archdiocese of New York.  And if we look more closely,  the side of this building fronting on East 55^th Street features stone facing more elaborate than that on the ground floor of the rest of the structure. It features a relief of a droopy St. John,  in a style like that of the early stained glass of the cathedral of Augsburg, and some bizarre nonrepresentational patterns of lines like the strange etched panels inserted in deep space probes to convey to aliens information about humanity. ( I suspect that these on the Catholic Center rather are  intended to illustrate the vision of  the New Jerusalem.)  Further along on East 55^th Street is an awning,  under which a set of institutional glass doors lead to the parish church of St. John the Evangelist.

The Second Vatican Council, its antecedents and its aftermath offer numerous intriguing parallels with developments in the secular world. Like “civil society,” the Church has experienced a “managerial revolution” (James Burnham) in which faceless bureaucrats and their allied “experts” have liberated themselves both from the control of their nominal superiors and any accountability to those they administer. Witness the role of the USCCB or of the “Catholic” universities over the years. It is no accident, then, that the most impressive Catholic project of the entire post–Conciliar era in Manhattan should be not a church, school or hospital but a new office building to house the managers of the Archdiocese. At “ten –eleven” the church bureaucrats demonstrated their power (at least to the Catholic population) –  abandoning the Renaissance splendor of the Villard houses, demolishing a traditional Catholic parish church and creating one more expressionless product of modernity.

Now this structure is not just an office building – it is also a church. The property on which 1011 was built was the old  parish of St. John the Evangelist, an impressive neo-gothic edifice built in 1886. The recent exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York on “Catholics” featured a wooden model of this church lovingly assembled by a parishioner. (The exhibit did not mention that the church had been demolished).

 But the parish of St. John the Evangelist was reincorporated within the new skyscraper and reopened in 1973. The first pastor of the new church was Msgr. George Kelly – yes, the author of the “Battle for the American Catholic Church,” a founding text of “conservative Catholicism.” Monsignor, who found all problems to be reducible to a question of obedience, obviously was not troubled by inflicting things like the new St. John the Evangelist on the Catholic population – as long as proper authority had ordered it.

(5 years ago an oil painting of Archbishop Hughes used to adorn the vestibule to the Church -the identifying plaque had been ripped away.)

In a sense, St. John the Evangelist is the logical end result of the Conciliar philosophy, in which the  Church accepts a role as one group among many attempting to make herself heard in the “public square” of the secular city. Until funding petered out, a handful of new churches continued to be built or rebuilt through the early 1970’s, architecturally of incredible ineptitude: the Church of the Epiphany, the Church of the Nativity, the NYU Catholic Center. But however misguided, these buildings still stood apart as churches. St. John’s, however, disappears entirely and is absorbed into the diocesan office building. The Catholic Church in this neighborhood is no longer represented by a neo-Gothic “house of God” but by an anonymous, secular structure, indistinguishable from dozens of others built in the same era.  But a  comparison with the leading secular competition of that time – like the late unlamented World Trade Center – reveals the discrepancy in power and resources between the Archdiocese and the forces of civil society with which it was so eagerly trying to make arrangements. The recent Opus Dei Center on East 34^th street has continued and even reinforced the trend to anonymity; the model this time being not an office, but an apartment building. But keep in mind that St. John the Evangelist, in contrast to the sanctuaries of that building, is not a private chapel but is intended to be a parish church for its neighborhood.

Inside, this church resembles nothing so much as a lobby of some expensive apartment building – or perhaps a restaurant. Indeed, St. John’s IS a lobby – one can walk from East 55 th Street through the church to the main entrance to the office tower. The space is a low ceilinged rectangular box, painted in stark white and black. An altar is in the center, sorrounded by pews on three sides. In the four corners of the rectangle are an organ, the tabernacle, the baptismal font and a dark “Saints’ room” (originally a “Lady Chapel”), respectively.  At mass, the congregation on the left side of this church sits with its back to the tabernacle. The altar, the tabernacle and the font are emphasized by tubes and rectangular forms hanging down from the ceiling.

The original decoration, largely intact, is more timid than the architecture. There are washed out wall hangings and “modernistic” Stations of the Cross. But the crown of the original decorative scheme (fortunately recently replaced) was a wooden relief behind the altar showing a stick –figure Christ with outstretched arms and a scooped-out, faceless head.

In 1973, St John represented the extreme limit – at least in New York – of the Conciliar “hermeneutic of rupture.” Yet, as the years went on, forces of resistance gathered among both the laity and the clergy. The statue of Mary, presumably part of the original art work and a fine work in the German style, was a point of departure. A traditional statue of the Virgin is also a feature of many modern German churches – it seems difficult to conceive of Our Lady in the grotesque forms of modernity. Gradually she was joined by a whole series of statues and devotions multiplied in this confined space: St Francis, Divine Mercy Sunday etc. A succession of pastors added traditional windows and icons (more on this below). Finally, two years ago, a more through restoration added various works of figurative art. Most notably it replaced the awful faceless relief of Christ with a traditional crucifix. Even though much of this artwork is of indifferent quality, the tendency is clear: a restoration of Christian culture in this most un-Catholic of environments has taken place.

A new statue of St. John.

The new crucifix is superimposed on the old modernistic relief.

Consider this development: the original (I assume)furnishings included this tabernacle – modeled vaguely on the old church of St. John which had been razed.

Around 2000, new windows in a non-modern style were introduced. They include this illustration of the old church.

Perhaps at that time these fine icons were also acquired. They originally flanked the former image of “Christ” behind the altar.

Here again, St. John holds a picture of the old St. John’s!

What could more clearly illustrate the bankruptcy of the modernism of St. John’s than the fact that in each case when that church – or the Church -needed to be illustrated, the artist had to turn back to the image of  the original edifice! Now, all the new sculptures and icons in the world cannot cure the fundamental defects of the architecture of the (modern) St. John’s. But it gives cause for comfort that, like the vegetation returning after a volcanic eruption, a Catholic sensibility has crept back and has remeined alive through the decades in the very heart of modernity.

St. Elizabeth of Hungary, 211  East 83rd Street

The block of East 83rd Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, transports the visitor to an earlier age of the Manhattan neighborhood known as Yorkville.   The streetscape consists of  townhouses, low-rise apartments and old storefronts – hardly anything dating later than the 1950’s.  The Church of St Elizabeth of Hungary fits very well into such a modest environment. Like several other splendid New York churches (Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral; St. James), St. Elizabeth’s does not stand alone but is the focal point of an intact ensemble or streetscape that somehow has survived the chaos of the city’s development. This area, now as expensive and culturally uniform as anywhere else in Manhattan, was once defined by a middle- and working class Central European  population: Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, Slovaks.  Nothing remains of this heritage execpt a handful of  restaurants, travel agencies and food stores – and the former inhabitants’ churches.

St. Elizabeth started as a Slovak parish but the present building was not its original home – it was erected as the Second Emmanuel Lutheran Church in 1892. (1)  The parish of St. Elizabeth acquired the  structure in 1917 and extensively renovated it as a Catholic church. (Several other fine Catholic churches originally were built for Protestant congregations: Immaculate Conception, St. Thomas More). The Slovak presence remained until the early 1980’s – I met the last pastor of Slovak nationality. In those days old timers still could recall stories of the past: like how St. Elizabeth’s came in handy for one Irish family for a requiem mass that could not be held in their own nearby parish, St. Ignatius, because of a dispute with the Jesuits. That was an age when the Catholic was defined by his parish.

Since then, all memory of the Slovak past has been lost – a member of the parish who showed me around a few years ago wondered aloud whatever could be the language on the windows and the stations of the cross….Polish, perhaps?  The parish, however, has survived and also has served as the New York center for ministry to the deaf. According to the parish website,  Cardinal O’Connor came here often to celebrate mass; he too seems to have succumbed to the charm of this church. For although there are many grander edifices,  I doubt anyone would dispute that St.  Elizabeth is one of the 4 or 5 or so most beautiful Catholic churches in New York City.

The exterior is handsome – it is unmistakably a “House of God”, larger and more elaborate than its neighbors yet complementing, not overwhelming them, thanks to its modest scale and the warm colors of its brick facade.  It features a tower deliberately patterned on Bohemian prototypes – a memory of the “old country” in the New World. Inside, the visitor must walk up a flight of steps to get to the church on the second floor.  The interior  is a squarish space, hardly more than a chapel. The sanctuary is differentiated from the rest of the interior mainly by an intact communion rail. Indeed,  this church is miraculously well preserved. Perhaps there were more statues 30 years ago – I seem to recall Mother Seton –  and the altar has been severed from the reredos for the “OF” liturgy; otherwise, all remains as it was. With its stone walls, elaborately vaulted ceiling and lifsize plaster statues, St. Elizabeth’s recreates the atmosphere of a European Gothic church with baroque decorative accretions.

But one must come during the weekday to experience what uniquely defines St. Elizabeth’s. After the liturgies, when the lights are dimmed and the congregation disperses, the church takes on a dark, mysterious character. Absolute silence reigns, except for the crackling now and then of flames in the many (real) votive lamps. At such times a mystic atmosphere of contemplation arises otherwise only encountered in certain ancient churches and chapels in Europe. There is nothing like it elsewhere in New York except, maybe, for St. Vincent Ferrer. The contrast with the cacophony, commotion and brilliant lighting of St. Patrick’s could not be greater. Truly St. Elizabeth’s is a house of prayer! The visiting New Yorker emerges, dazzled by the daylight and suddenly stunned by the raucous sounds of the city – a din he has perhaps not noticed for years. For  St. Elizabeth’s, the quintessential New York parish, has given him an opportunity to once more make contact with his God.

The sanctuary of St. Elizabeth is fine but perhaps is the only mildly disappointing part of this church; it looks like a creation of the early “liturgical movement” around 1940.

Another view of the church at Christmas.

The images are magnificent.

Very few older New York parishes lack a Lourdes Grotto; in this confined space the candles are electric.

One of the original donors- in Slovak.

The stained glass is among the finest of any Catholic church in New York City

(1) David W. Dunlop, From Abyssinian to Zion: A Guide to Manhattan’s Houses of Worship at 201 (Columbia University Press, New York , 2004). The parish was founded in 1891 and its original church still stands downtown (it is now Orthodox).

These pictures are from one of the early weekly EF Masses celebrated
at St. George’s parish. The celebrant is Fr. Rafael Capó, SchP. ( I believe this is the mass of the
San Juan Archdiocese, at Parroquia San Jorge. Can one our correspondents provide details of the new weekly mass?)

Courtesy of Fr. Greg Markey.

St. Mary’s, Norwalk, will be celebrating a Solemn High Mass on Thanksgiving day at 9:30 A.M., the feast of St. Catherine of Alexandria.

A few words need to be said on the topic rocking the Catholic media world: the Pope’s comments on condoms in the new Seewald book. We need not analyze here the meaning of the Pope’s statements; thousands of others have by now.  Let me make just a few general remarks. First, the issuance of this interview is obviously part of a coordinated Vatican initiative to defuse the conflict with the Western media which came to a head this year. Another component of this effort is the new Vatican initiative on child abuse. Second, the interview contains other remarks, even more extraordinary than those on AIDS, that have been obscured by the condom flap, such as:

I modified [the ancient Good Friday petition to express that] Christ is the Savior of the Jews…but in such a way that one did not pray directly for the conversion of the Jews in a missionary sense…

Third, the impact of all this on “conservative Catholics “ has been understandably traumatic.  Only a few dispute the correctness of the remarks.  Others (like Archbishop Chaput or Andrea Tornielli) have been more forceful in denouncing the by now legendary incompetence of the Vatican communications functions (e.g., incorrect translations; timing the publishing of  excerpts from the book  to conflict with the ceremony of the creation of cardinals, a total lack of preparation for the resulting firestorm).

We hope later to review here the Seewald book (in the original language) at which time we will be able to say something more specific about those issues that relate to the text itself. I would like, however, to focus on the some other points which I do not believe have received sufficient attention. These are more fundamental issues that should be a concern for every Traditionalist.

We follow the analysis of the late Prof. Thomas Molnar in viewing  Vatican II and its aftermath as, in essence, a process of  the subjection of the Church to the modernity and its rulers. Earlier ages had seen similar if less extreme examples: the “Babylonian Captivity” of the Avignon papacy under the French monarchy: the establishment of Henry VIIl as head of the Church in England; the triumph over the papacy by the Bourbon monarchs, the German prince bishops and Emperor Joseph II around 1780.  But the lords of modernity are not an aristocracy or a monarch but “civil society”: the press, the corporations, the law firms, the universities, the pressure groups etc. Molnar viewed, for example, the participation of Pope John Paul II in an earlier book of interviews with an Italian journalist as the epitome of Church conformity to the expectations of civil society.

It is amazing that none of the commentators find inappropriate that Pope Benedict not only gives an interview to a journalist but uses it as the vehicle for  potentially revolutionary theological and moral comments.  Moreover, nobody, other than one or two perceptive commentators,  stops to consider that such remarks technically are only the Pope’s private opinions; the overwhelming majority (including the Vatican and L’Osservatore  Romano) treat them as immediately establishing new law. Moreover, judging by the excerpts published so far, it is the press, speaking through the interviewer Seewald, who sets the agenda and frames the discussion. A clearer example of the abject submission of the Conciliar Church to “civil society” could not be imagined.

Furthermore, if the Vatican thought that the Seewald book  would be a step in reestablishing peace with the powers of “civil society,”  early indications are that they are sorely mistaken. With one bastion having fallen, the forces of modernity simply turn to the next objective. And our concern is that  this next step may be a renewed direct attack upon Traditionalism and its supporters. An article that appeared in the leading German newspaper may give a hint of what is to come.

The German journalist Christian Geyr , who had offered some eminently sensible commentaries on Church affairs during the reign of John Paul II, has lately turned into  a relentless critic of Pope Benedict and the Church. In his article “Eine goldig verzierte Moral” (A gilded Morality) in the FAZ of 11/22/2010, he launches a savage attack upon Traditionalist Catholics in the form of a review of a book by one  David Berger.  Mr. Berger, a “theologian” (in German usage,  often nothing more than a student or school teacher of the subject), had profiled himself in recent years as a  “conservative Catholic”  and a rabid foe of Traditionalists – somewhat like Mark Shea in the US. His reign as a hero of the “neo-Catholics” came to an abrupt end with his “outing” in a homosexual scandal but of course his celebrity status  with the German secular media followed the opposite trajectory.

Berger and Geyr find that the Traditional liturgy “has a special attraction for queers” which to them is  a paradox, because such liturgical movements are represented by “groups which, more than all others in Catholicism, condemn homosexuality.” Berger is no fan of Martin Mosebach. “A Traditionalism, elegantly perfumed by aesthetes like Martin Mosebach,  has in the meantime  become socially acceptable” – so Mr. Berger.  Berger further alleges that “to this very day the flourishing professional market in vestments for the Traditional liturgy has been largely in homosexual hands. Every clerical vestment that the 18th and 19th centuries produced – from rose to violet and always ornamented with gold thread – can in the meantime be bought from gay merchants in the internet.” But the  “homosexual sublimation” that is the “root and source of the Traditional Catholic cult”  also explains the “homophobia” in such circles. Geyr finds that after the Seewald book, this culture of “discretion and repression” can no longer be maintained. The loosening of the restrictions on condoms is only the first step in liberating sexuality from a “Catholic fantasy world.”

In the present atmosphere these remarks give cause for concern. Already, the current spirit of appeasement in the Vatican and the utter unpredictability of Team Ratzinger have caused some commentators sympathetic to Tradition to view the recently revived rumors of the  long awaited issuance of implementing regulations for Summorum Pontifcum with anxiety, not with joyful anticipation. We shall see –  perhaps before the end of this year. But I would not be at all surprised in the meantime to see a renewed attempt on the part of the media and some national hierarchies to choke off the developing Traditionalist movement.

The  German website Kathnews reports HERE that the long awaited “clarifications” to the motu proprio  Summorum Pontificum “probably” will be issued before Christmas.