Essays in Idleness

The remarkable thing, about the pope’s new Motu Proprio, strangely entitled Traditionis Custodes, is its degree of ignorance. Its entire argument is based on the fantasy that the liturgical changes of the 1960s were somehow made necessary by the commands of Vatican II, and that trying to resist them is the cause of divisions throughout the whole Church. This is obviously false, indeed laughable. The documents of Vatican II called for no such thing.

A great deal of brutality and cruelty towards faithful Catholics is hardly concealed within this. It is more than a falsehood. It glares through the “synodality,” “accompaniment,” “listening,” “dialogue,” “outreach to the margins,” which are methodically overlooked in the text, and the clericalism, rigidity, and force that replaces them.

Most explicitly, the very carefully expressed ruling of a former pope (still alive and in local residence), is contradicted, and the man insulted. This is among the unprecedented acts which mark this as an untypical action of the papacy, and a warning to Christians to ignore it. It is ultra vires.

The Catholic Liturgy had heretofore developed “organically.” It was not the plaything of clerics, as it became under Paul VI and Bugnini — by which new features of vulgarity and vileness were brought into it.

Of the Catholic Church generally, it could be said, that it is not a bureaucratic entity. Wise and necessary decisions (such as Summorum Pontificum) are favoured by the ages; foolish and arbitrary decisions are forgotten in the course of time. Popes may count for very much power, or for none. Saints count most of all. (A pope becomes interesting and important only when he is a Saint.)

We have passed through three generations. The first, the “baby boomers,” was the one the Novus Ordo was marketed to, and who responded by leaving the Church in their bulk. The “gen-X” generated few priests and the older ones began dying out. But in “generation alpha,” thanks to the rekindling of the traditional, Latin Mass, the seminaries and many churches were beginning to fill again, and life was returning.

Old men like Bergoglio — the aging “liberation theologians,” Marxists, relics, sex perverts and others — may try to resist. We should not damn, but mock them. For against them is the genius of the Catholic religion.