The Danger of Equating the Church with the Mass

He probably didn’t need to do it. At first glance, he doesn’t look the part. He has a warm smile, a rosy complexion, and eyes that have a happy, joyful glint. He seems to embody the expression “good man.” In his official portrait he’s wearing the traditional black episcopal regalia and the venerable San Damiano pectoral cross. Had he used Pope Francis’s “pastoral cross,” showing not the Crucified Christ but Christ the Shepherd, you could perhaps say, “Well, we all saw it coming.” But he didn’t, so you couldn’t.

Nevertheless, that smiling, seemingly harmless and reasonably moderate new bishop, the Most Excellent Michael T. Martin, O.F.M. Conv., pulled the plug on the Traditional Latin Mass in the Diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina.

Juridically, Bishop Martin was more than justified. In his official statement, he said he was doing nothing more than implementing, as obedience to Rome required, the norms of Traditionis Custodes, Pope Francis’s controversial motu proprio that put an end to the liberties of Summorum Pontificum, Pope Benedict XVI’s motu proprio that allowed parish priests to celebrate the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) without episcopal approval. This meant sending all TLMs in his diocese to a chapel in Mooresville, some 30 miles from downtown Charlotte. Though His Excellency said “the name of the chapel is yet to be determined,” it has a name. It’s the Freedom Christian Center, formerly a Protestant gathering place.

Could the bishop have been any clearer? The TLM is not welcome in his diocese. What followed was fierce uproar. There was no shortage of commentators giving their views on the subject, and the absolute majority was negative. The traditionalist community is, after all, as vocal as it gets on the Internet.

Disagreement and animosity are one thing, especially in a diocese where traditionalism has a deep foothold. But the controversy has revealed — yet again — the strange beliefs among traditionalists that Catholicism is the TLM, meaning that an assault against the Mass is an assault against the Church herself, and that access to the TLM is a God-given right. In fact, popular author Peter Kwasniewski wrote a book titled Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright (2020). Kwasniewski is the dean of what might be called “TLMism,” the branch of traditionalism that’s centered on the primacy of the TLM, and his book is not about religious vs. civil life, or the natural law vs. the secular state, all traditional Catholic issues. It’s about the Mass.

In Kwasniewski’s view, Catholics have a birthright to the Church’s traditions, and these coalesce in the old liturgy, which, he says in his book The Once and Future Roman Rite (2022), “took centuries to reach perfection.” Drawing on St. Vincent de Lérins, Kwasniewski argues that the Church goes through a growth (profectus) from infancy to maturity, like a biological entity. However, unlike in biology, there’s no decay and death in the Church’s case because she is the Church of Christ, who conquered death. “Her liturgy likewise,” Kwasniewski says, “develops under the guidance of Divine Providence, under the breath of the Holy Spirit, the Lord and the giver of life, making present anew the mysteries of the glorified Christ who has conquered death and lives forever. As a consequence, this liturgy, in its broad lines and beloved details, grows from strength to strength, from glory to glory, until it reaches a stature that may be considered its mature form, like that of a thirty-three-year-old man” (emphasis in original).

In other words, after reaching the fullness of age, the liturgy will cease to change. Then, at the end of time, the liturgy will be absorbed into the heavenly liturgy.

A peculiar understanding of the axiom lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of what is prayed is the law of what is believed) buttresses this view, which squares the Church with the TLM, in which liturgical development and ecclesiastical development are one and the same thing. The law the Church prays today, however, is almost universally prayed at the New Mass, the post-Vatican II Mass of Paul VI, which is, per Kwasniewski, corrupt (see below). Thus, he would say, the majority of today’s Catholics believe in a corrupt Church. Since the “official” Church chose to give up on the TLM for a corrupted liturgy, she is now “beside” herself.

This explains, in brief, the mistrust the better part of TLMists feel toward Rome and its representatives. Non-traditional priests are the enemy, bishops are the enemy, most cardinals are the enemy, and even (and especially) the pope is the enemy. No need for him to be the current pope; Pius XII is an enemy to some, owing to his bulldozing of the octaves and changing the Holy Week liturgy in the 1950s. TLMists call this “recognizing but resisting” the visible hierarchy. They feel they have no other choice but to congregate around the TLM as the exceptional source of public life in the Church.

In short, TLMists exist in relative separation from the Church as institution and magistery, viewing her as corrupted and generally untrustworthy. If applying the word corrupt to the Church — the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church — raises eyebrows, let it be known that that’s how Kwasniewski describes the New Mass, the Church’s ordinary form of worship, in Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness (2017). He calls it “a corruption from which the Church needs to be restored.”

Why would someone choose going down the TLMist path? Consider whom Kwasniewski and other TLM thought-leaders are generally addressing: young people. The Catholic Herald Institute recently called traditionalism “the new ‘cool’ for young Americans.” On their smartphones they see triumphal edits of the Crusades, of dapper priests in ornate chasubles burning incense in Gothic churches, of Pius XII in the sedia gestatoria. They go, Yeah, this is it! Then it’s Sunday, time to go to Mass. At the nearest parish they see a blank, unadorned altar “table,” altar girls wearing Chuck Taylors, and a disengaged priest in a shabby polyester chasuble, all while a guitarist and keyboardist churn out uninspiring tunes by Marty Haugen and the like. Where did the beauty go? they wonder. The knee-jerk reaction: Vatican II did away with all that. You’ll have to look elsewhere.

Who can blame them? It takes a special kind of Catholic to like Vatican II and the New Mass. I don’t like them. If it were up to me, the TLM would be normative, and Vatican II would get a second look. (More on that later.) But the fact is that we live in a Vatican II world. The council was meant to force a break from what constituted Catholicism up until the 1950s. From the famous rallying cries of aggiornamento and the “new springtime of the Church” to Paul VI himself saying Vatican II was more important than the Council of Nicaea, the deduction that whoever was in charge was trying to reset the Church isn’t outlandish. Within a few years, after the New Mass was made normative, we were subject to liturgies stripped of reverence and sobriety, during some of which the Eucharist became barely an afterthought. Allies and partisans generally accuse traditionalists of exaggerating the prevalence of “clown Masses” (irreverent liturgies that make the church a theater) as examples of how disastrous the changes were. But a quick reading of documents from the era, such as The Experimental Liturgy Book by Robert F. Hoey, S.J. (1969), suggests that these weren’t just “abuses” or the “excesses” of misguided priests but a new liturgical vision.

Even today, especially in parishes in older demographic zones, you might find just about any kind of liturgical abuse, especially if the celebrant has white hair. What came out of the Vatican over the past 12 years hasn’t helped. We’ve gone from the elegant posture and magnificent ceremonial of Pius XII, which commanded attention and left no doubt that we were witnessing a thrice-great leader — the father of the princes and kings, the ruler of the world, and the vicar of Christ on earth — to, well, Pope Francis, and all his name suggests.

What option do Catholics who pine for a splendorous expression of the faith have but to run from the visible hierarchy and hide away in personal parishes or among marginalized groups — either those in communion with Rome, like the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest and the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, or not, like the Society of St. Pius X? At least they say the Mass as it should be said; they are reverent to the mighty tradition of the Church; they don’t require a hermeneutic of continuity.

As I said above, it takes a special kind of Catholic to wholeheartedly embrace Vatican II. Even many of the most charitable postconciliar priests are ill at ease with all that’s happened since the early 1970s. The princely late Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., who graced the pages of this magazine, once said, “Much of the English translation of the Novus Ordo has been rather vapid, and the Latin not as elegant as that of the Tridentine Mass.” Why settle for less? Better to forget what the pope is saying, ignore what comes from Rome, and everything will be all right.

Though the feeling is understandable, it is dangerous. The wound Vatican II opened made a certain (influential, though small) group of Catholics suspicious of the very thing that separates the Church from every other form of Christianity: the Petrine ministry. But what is a Church, regardless of how conservative and traditional it might be, that “resists” the pope? The answer is obvious. It is dangerously close to Protestantism. How can you be in communion with Rome while at variance with Rome? Herein lies the paradox of certain tenets of traditionalism, especially TLMism.

What’s interesting is that while traditionalists seek to escape the influence of Rome and do things their own way (is there anything more American than rebelliousness against central — monarchical! — authority?), they fall right back into the logic of Vatican II. A few years ago, at the otherwise informative New Liturgical Movement blogsite, David Clayton wrote a two-part post on Eastern Catholic Churches that avoided the disastrous effects of Vatican II. Why were they spared? Thanks to “a difference in governance,” he says. “In the East, the authority to change the liturgy is much more dispersed according to the principle of subsidiarity — maximized local freedom — while in the West, authority is far more centralized, with the focus of that authority in Rome” (emphasis added).

I wonder if Clayton would have been surprised if he’d received a note from Pope Francis saying, “I agree!” His suggestion of decentralizing the Church and granting authority at a more local level is textbook synodality. As Rafael Luciani puts it in Synodality: A New Way of Proceeding in the Church (2022), Vatican II “can be characterized by an ecclesiological shift that involves the beginning of a transition from a Western, monocultural Church, centered on Rome and the primacy, to a global and intercultural Church, thus opening the way to recognizing the authority of the local churches.” Had Rome suggested to TLMists that synodality is their way to Tridentine supremacy, would they accept it?

The point is, both TLMists and modern-day Vaticanists are in tenuous positions. Their proposals for a decentralized ecclesiology are in stark variance to the Church’s traditional teaching regarding unity. As Pope St. Pius X put it in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907):

They [the modernists] insist that both outwardly and inwardly it [ecclesiastical government] must be brought into harmony with the modern conscience, which now wholly tends toward democracy; a share in ecclesiastical government should therefore be given to the lower ranks of the clergy, and even to the laity, and authority, which is too much concentrated, should be decentralized. (no. 38)

This passage describes synodality with stunning prescience — and condemns the very suggestion Clayton makes so he can have his TLM in peace. What he and the “modernists” seem to forget (and let’s note that traditionalism is a symptom of modernity) is that there’s no cherry-picking in Catholicism. Pope Benedict XV drove the point home in Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum (1914): “Such is the nature of Catholicism that it does not admit of more or less, but must be held as a whole or as a whole rejected” (no. 24). You can’t run from the primacy of the Holy See in traditional liturgy any more than you can run from tradition by way of “perennial reforms,” per Paul VI’s parlance.

The risk of running from the magisterial tradition of the Church is that you soon find yourself in bed with your adversary. Synodality, which seems so very modern, is a throwback to a very medieval ecclesiological understanding, one that grants privileges to local churches (i.e., parishes and national churches) and their way of “being church.” (Trent razed that kind of ecclesiology because it made caesaropapism so very tempting.) In the case of TLMists, an idiosyncratic view of lex orandi, lex credendi led them all the way to synodality. The lex orandi axiom doesn’t apply ipso facto to the liturgy the way they think it does. It is a special application of magisterial infallibility on disciplinary matters; for instance, in the formulae for prayers. The pope can’t approve formulae that contain errors. It has nothing to do with incense and Latin chants.

Anyway, who’s happy? Not I. Those who accept that the Church wasn’t born in 1965 are between a rock and a hard place — or between Peter and the Apostolic Palace. As with many traditionally leaning Catholics, I find the spectacle that is the Church since the 1960s not easy on the eyes. Like many, I’d like to have the TLM readily available. I’d also like to hear Masses with tropes and see churches with jubés — things Trent did away with. I’d like to hear rogation day Masses with dragons in the procession, as was common in medieval Siena. I’d like to return to medieval Catholicism, which was more complex, more mystical, and, frankly, weirder.

Sadly, that’s impossible. Equally impossible is to pretend that Vatican II never happened. The day might come when the council passes from being an “ongoing theological event,” as one scholar called it, to “just another council,” when a pope or a group of ecclesiastic experts decides to revisit it. We are likely two or three papacies away from that, and many of us won’t live to see that day. In the meantime, TLMists and modern Vaticanists will have to learn that there’s no optionality in the Church. Vatican II happened, but before Vatican II there was tradition, which endures.

The central battle in the ongoing Liturgy Wars is not over what the Mass should be, but what Catholicism is. We engage that struggle within the Church, not against her. If we are to have reverential, sublime, and beautiful Masses, this is something we must work for from within. It shows poor judgment to surrender the whole Church for a form of the Mass, since Catholicism is a civilizational matrix. The Church is the mother of Christendom, the union of Catholics, each in their own variant, moving together. She encompasses all modes of life, from economy to culture, from politics to family relations. Lose the Church and you lose everything, because the Church lords over the liturgy and so much more.

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