From the Our Old House Facebook Page (2/18/2023):

“We recently closed on this 1890 Catholic Church that we plan to renovate into our dream home! We plan to go all out with the gothic style and want to incorporate a medieval theme as well. It’s about 4000sqft and we are going to keep it an open space. It’s going to be a lot of work but we cannot wait to restore this beautiful church!!”

We read in the Forum Catholique that Alessandro Gnocchi has joined the Russian Orthodox Church. Actually, he seems to have taken this step in 2019, but more recently, breaking what appears to have been a long silence, he has published a book on the subject (which I hope to read soon). Readers may recall that Gnocchi and Mario Palmaro (1968-2014), working as a team, were among the earliest and most perceptive critics of Pope Francis. For that unforgivable crime, the authors’ positions with Catholic media were terminated – this is the way the Roman Catholic Church dialogues with those perceived as adversaries of the governing establishment. Need I add that the early critiques of Gnocchi and Palmaro have been all too terribly vindicated? Now Gnocchi has joined the Orthodox Church. It is a step that in recent years other prominent Catholics, most notably Rod Dreher, have felt compelled to take.

Professor Roberto de Mattei has written on this tragic situation, accusing Gnocchi of “apostasy.” Now although we all esteem Prof. de Mattei, this judgment seems to me far too strong – after all, the Orthodox Church, in Catholic understanding, is only schismatic. If we understand “apostasy” to mean repudiation of the Catholic or even of the Christian faith, we must seek it elsewhere. For the most notorious apostates of our day are the controlling powers of the Roman Catholic Church: the German Catholic Church, the Jesuit order, etc. The primary blame for Gnocchi’s decision lies with them. Let us alway keep in mind the substance of what is going on, not the legal formalities so dear to conservatives.

Prof. Luc Perrin has written a perceptive coomentary on this affair, rightly focusing on the primary role of the institutional Roman Catholic Church as the obsequious servant of the New World Order. The natural consequence of its misdeeds is a movement towards the Orthodox Church, less infected by modern deviations. For all its faults, the Orthodox Church, in contrast to the West, as a church has preserved the Christian liturgy. It has also preserved the contemplative life and mysticism. Now, of course, within the Western Church traditionalists have preserved the liturgy, just as contemplative monasteries survive and even flourish. But the Roman Catholic Church as an institution, works either to supress or at least marginalize these manifestations of spiritual life. We should always remember all this before critiquing the choices of men like Alessandro Gnocchi.

Sandro Magister reports on the ever-growing problem of using Catholic churches – once the clergy and faithful are gone:

Closed Churches. Two Criteria for Their Best Reuse

Here are excepts with my commentary.

More than attacks, thousands of churches in Europe suffer from abandonment. With ever fewer Catholics at Mass, they find themselves empty. And so they are being closed. In Germany, in Holland, in Belgium, the figures are dizzying. But in Italy as well there is a growing number of churches in disuse. 

(In Italy), at least, the churches are not state but ecclesiastical property, and therefore enjoy spontaneous and lasting protection on the part of their respective diocesan and parish communities. (Is this intending to be humorous? In the US, where the Church, in various forms, owns its own properties, such protection has been nonexistent. Indeed, it is largely because of state ownership (where such regimes prevail) and state-imposed restrictions that the Catholic architectural heritage has been preserved.)

But when these communities dwindle and disappear, for their respective churches it is the end. They are at serious risk of going under and ending up on the market, perhaps turned into supermarkets or dance halls, or in any case into something contrary to the purposes for which they arose.

(Again, speaking for the US experience, the churches are at risk even if the “communities” still exist. For one thing, all properties are de facto exposed to the financial problems of the entire diocese and its insatiable need for funds.)

A conference at the Vatican issued recommendations in 2016 for the disposal of such churches:

(The conference) produced “guidelines” advising against “commercial reuse for speculative aims,” and instead encouraged “reuse for aims of solidarity,” with “cultural or social” purposes: museums, conference halls, bookshops, libraries, archives, art studios, Caritas centers, clinics, soup kitchens, and more. Still leaving the option of “transformation into private homes” in the case of “more modest buildings with no architectural value.”

In the same vein, Giuliano Zanchi, a priest from Bergamo, professor of theology and a “great expert on art and themes on the border between aesthetics and the sacred” has now made his suggestions.

 (T)here are two criteria that Zanchi suggests be followed in the reuse of churches that have ceased to be such but want to “relaunch themselves in civil life with the function of cultural crossroads and spiritual threshold.”

The first criterion, he writes, is that which “harnesses the artistic dignity normally connected to historical sacred buildings…..”

There is in fact today a “social sect of art, which has its shrines, its liturgies, its priests, its myths, its sacraments, its pilgrimages, and its holy days of obligation,” which in turn, together with music, cinema, literature, “delimit a rather hospitable space of a common and shared ‘pensiveness’.”

The historic precincts of many religious buildings no longer functioning as places of the liturgy have all the qualities to be able to accommodate these social needs so deeply rooted,  and to bid to act as a true crossroads of a ‘cultural fraternity’ in which to enliven, in debate, in encounter, in plurality, in hospitality, a common sense of the human.”

(So, henceforth Catholic Churches will function as museums and cult locations for the “social sect of art.”)

The second criteron, according to Zanchi:

consists in “that typical need of the contemporary city” to have liminal areas, thresholds, “capable of steering toward the profound and the transcendent, which in the absence of anything else are identified in theaters, museums, libraries, and other places of non-utilitarian ulteriority.”

 “In our cities, which remain mercilessly horizontal even when they build skyscrapers that defy the heavens, there is a need for spaces that can be traversed as ‘spiritual thresholds’ and embody a vertical impulse even when they remain hidden on the ground floors of urban life.”

We cannot say that any of this typically European, Roman Catholic gibberish makes sense or imposes any real restrictions on anyone regarding the future use of former churches. What is clear, however, is the Church’s acceptance of the elimination of Christianity from modern society, as vividly symbolized by the closing of Catholic churches. The decline of Catholic practice is silently assumed to be an unalterable fact of life. In place of Christianity, secular functions are acknowledged that provide psychological benefits to the man of today (the “sect of art,” a “common sense of the human,” a “shared pensiveness” and “spiritual thresholds” that embody a “vertical impulse.”) Moreover, this psychological and emotional assistance is apparently viewed as an adequate substitute for the Christian cult previously practiced in these buildings. And are we not forced to conclude that the Catholic Church already sees its own primary role as providing such benefits (the “field hospital” of Pope Francis)? Did not the great Christian writer Novalis in 1800 denounce “pious” contemporaries for whom the Christian religion was “dope.” (emotional and psycholgical comfort). Such a “religion” is doomed to extinction. By actually endorsing such principles, the Catholic Church acquiesces in its own marginalization – and eventual elimination – from the world of modernity.

(Above) The Interior of the Church of Notre Dame (2008)

We have now received more detailed information about what is going on near Columbia University.

Columbia University, one of the premiere institutions among the Ivies, now has a proper Catholic center. 

The Thomas Merton Institute for Catholic Life had a “soft opening” at the upper Manhattan campus this week, as the center continues to finish construction. 

Named for who is most likely Columbia University’s best-known Catholic convert, the Merton Institute is being constructed at the Church of Notre Dame. 

Columbia Catholic Ministry is planning a grand opening of the Merton Institute for later this semester, when the space is better furnished, said CCM co-president Joel Kattady.

Merton Institute President Brian McAuliffe, a Columbia alumnus, estimates it will take $10 million to finish the Institute, which still requires further construction and furnishing. McAuliffe anticipates that successful alumni fundraising will meet this need.

“So much about the living of the Catholic faith goes beyond worship,” said Fr. Roger Landry, the chaplain to the Merton Institute and Columbia’s Catholic religious life adviser. Fr. Landry arrived at Columbia last year after serving at the Holy See Mission to the United Nations.

Source: Columbia University gets its own Catholic Center (2/16/2023)

And the website of Corpus Christi parish(“Masks requested, please“) – until now silent on all these developments swirling about it – has posted this:

It’s official: Corpus Christi and Notre Dame have merged into one parish.  We are called, quite simply, the Parish of Corpus Christi and Notre Dame.  We are one territorial parish, whose boundaries extend from 110th Street to 125th Street, and from Morningside Drive to the Hudson River.  We remain two church sites, Corpus Christi on 121st Street and Notre Dame on 114th Street.  According to Cardinal Dolan’s decree, Corpus Christi is the parish church, housing the rectory, office, and all parish records (including those of Notre Dame and St. Vincent de Paul).  Notre Dame will continue to serve the community as it has been, as the center of French-language Catholicism in New York City as well as a center for Columbia Catholic Ministry (under the aegis of the Thomas Merton Institute for Catholic Life, who are in the process of transforming the Notre Dame rectory for this purpose).

In the coming weeks, Archdiocesan officials will help us to form a new civil corporation.  This will mean appointing trustees and setting up a new finance council and parish council.  We are a diverse parish and I intend to have qualified representation from across the community in these councils.

CORPUS CHRISTI AND NOTRE DAME CATHOLIC PARISH NEW YORK CITY

So many questions are still unanswered. It takes $10 million to renovate a rectory? Who will own the renovated rectory? Is Fr. Landry now at least de facto the Catholic chaplain of Columbia University? Is Notre Dame church once again the center of the Columbia chaplaincy? Is anything going to be done to the magnificent church itself? Will the Thomas Merton Institute be transparent on the details of Thomas Merton’s life in the 1960’s? We will have to see!

Connecticut

St. Mary Church, Norwalk, 8 am and 7 pm.

Sts. Cyril and Methodius Oratory, Bridgeport, 7:45 am, 6 pm

St. Stanislaus Church, New Haven, 5:30 pm

St. Patrick Oratory, Waterbury, 8 am and 6 pm

New York

Our Lady of Mount Carmel Shrine, 7 AM Low Mass, 745 AM Low Mass, 7 PM Missa Cantata

Holy Innocents Church, 8 AM Low Mass, 6 PM Missa Cantata

Saint Josaphat’s Church, Bayside, NY, 7 pm Missa Cantata

St. Paul the Apostle, Yonkers, 12 noon.

Immaculate Conception, Sleepy Hollow, 7 pm

New Jersey

Our Lady of Sorrows, Jersey City, 5 pm

Our of Lady of Victories, Harrington Park NJ, Low Mass, 6:15 pm.

Crepusculo: Lettere dalla Crisi della Chiesa (Twilight: Letters from the Crisis of the Church)

By Aurelio Porfiri and Aldo Maria Valli

Chorabooks, Hong Kong, 2022

Aurelio Porfiri and Aldo Maria Valli have now given us three short books that together represent a profound series of reflections on the state of the Church today. I have already reviewed the first in the sequence, Uprooted: Dialogues on the Liquid Church(Sradicati, 2019)) – which also has been translated into English. I am looking forward to receiving the second, Decadence (Decadenza, 2020). Finally, in 2022 appeared Twilight (Crepuscolo). The title captures the state of the Catholic Church of today. The authors ask if this twilight is the growing darkness before nightfall or that before a new dawn? For the American reader, however, the title of course has  added significance in relation to the Roman Catholic Church of today: the Twilight Zone!

Like its sisters, Twilight takes the time-honored literary form of an exchange of letters. The personalities of the two authors are complementary. Aldo Maria Valli, a journalist, Vaticanist, media and TV commentator, is poetic and forceful, even visionary. I can confirm, having heard Valli speak in Rome last October at a conference during the Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage, that he is an extraordinary speaker. Aurelio Porfiri,  a musician and composer by profession,  has a more discursive and restrained style, featuring generous quotations from favored authors of conservative Catholicism, like Henri de Lubac  – but also from Romano Amerio. That is not to say, however, that Porfiri does not make his own pointed observations. What is common to both authors is that,  after having served the Church and secular media establishments for years in high positions, they have become determined critics of the present Vatican regime. Aldo Maria Valli, moreover, has turned decisively to Catholic traditionalism.

The writers’ assessment of the present situation of the Church is honest and bleak. The institutional Church has identified herself totally with the world. The Church speaks and acts exactly like the secular powers. “Nothing good for the soul can come from ‘shepherds’ who talk like the United Nations, are champions of political correctness and who embrace all the theories of the New World Order.”

Even though the Church cannot end, Valli states the Church as he had known it up to now is finished. The Church that may arise again will have nothing to do with hierarchy, the episcopal conferences and the dicasteries of the Roman curia. ”That ship has been wrecked and sunk.” As for the papacy, under Bergoglio, “the papal authority, already undermined, has received the death blow.” But Bergoglio is only the last link in a chain. Decisive for this realization of Valli’s was Amoris Laetitia and, even more so,  Traditionis Custodes. 

Valli describes his spiritual situation: 

The word that comes to mind is extraneousness. Look, I feel ever more estranged from the hierarchical church, from the shepherds – these shepherds! From their preaching, from their rites. Extraneous to all the so-called pastoral initiatives that live from empty slogans. Extraneous to the ceremonies which put at their center not God but man. Extraneous to sloppy and distorted liturgies. Extraneous to the conformism of the guardians of mercy….  

In such a dilemma, what can a Catholic do?  Here the authors draw on Ernst Jünger and his archetype of the Waldgänger (literally, “one who goes into the forest”). The Waldgänger is a combination of rebel, outlaw, and anarchist. Such a man asserts the truth in a dishonest world. The price of his personal integrity is exclusion from that world and immersion in the figurative forest.  Valli emphasizes that the Waldgänger is not fleeing, but making a manly choice of resistance,  “when by now it is clear that the institution has taken the path of betrayal and apostasy.” 

Valli does not at all see himself leaving the Church. “(Going to the forest)does not mean in my case abandoning the Church, but rather is a cultural attitude, by which everything coming from the summit of today’s Church, dominated by a humanitarianism which is confounded with that of the Masons, is decisively denounced, rejected, and refuted.“ Do we not see here some similarities with Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option and – even more so – his Live not by Lies? And does not the latter title in turn remind us of Solzhenitsyn and his colossal solitary struggle? We should also remember that Ernst Jünger became a Catholic a year or so before his death (at age 102)….

Aurelio Porfiri ends Twilight by quoting Joseph Ratzinger: a small rest (of Catholics) will remain, perhaps like those Japanese of the past, who lived their faith far from the (institutional ) Church but without separating from her.  So, Porfiri concludes, while we cannot say that a paradigm shift has happened in the Church it is taking place in ourselves, in those of us “who  take seriously the promises of the Man from Nazareth and sit here in the twilight, dispelling the darkness with confused actions while waiting for the dawn.”