It’s hard to deny the inherent attractiveness of the Church’s liturgical and artistic legacy, especially in an historical moment thirsting for beauty. The trend of young people drawn to the Tridentine Latin Mass and other elements of traditional Catholic art and spirituality has become more prominent on the internet and in news outlets. Take the recent New York Times and Vox pieces featuring those drawn to the decadent and campy elements of Catholicism, which to them is an alternative to what they perceive to be the drab aesthetics and the inauthentic “sincerity” that pervades much of mainstream culture. Others are drawn to the TLM and traditional Catholicism for less aesthetic reasons, and rather are seeking to escape from (or react to) the lax morals of the culture.
Pope Francis warns in his recent motu proprio on the TLM that placing excessive emphasis on the external gestures of the Faith, rather than treating them as entry points into the what’s most essential–having a transformative encounter with Christ–is a problematic distraction and worse, a form of idolatry. Are these young “trads” just following the latest trend, or “flavor of the month”? Are they merely seeking to use Catholicism as a means to signal their counter-cultural status? A closer look at the various manifestations of this trend reveal that as much as the trad trend can quickly become a path to idolatry, it could also be a stepping stone to reaching profound insights into Christ’s relevance to today’s world.
Among the celebrities drawn to the aesthetic side of traditional Catholic art and liturgy cited in Rebecca Jennings’ Vox piece is Kourtney Kardashian, whose wedding ceremony included a baroque altarpiece decked in red roses and a statue with the Virgin and child. Kardashian wore a revealing mini-dress partially covered by a cathedral length lace veil featuring an image of Mary on it. The wedding was not a Catholic ceremony and was celebrated by a justice of the peace outside a medieval castle in Italy.
Britney Spears hinted in August of 2021 that she had become Catholic and was attending Mass, and posted prayers like the Hail Mary on her Instagram page. Spears posted later in August of 2022 that she was disappointed that she wouldn’t be able to get married at St. Monica’s parish in Santa Monica, California. “During the 2 years of Covid, I also wanted to go there … I was told no due to the pandemic.” She then indicated that she told her wedding planner (who also planned Madonna’s wedding) that she wanted to get married there, but was turned down: “they said I had to be catholic and go through TEST!!! Isn’t church supposed to be open to all???” The post, which included an image of the sun shining down through the window in St. Peter’s Basilica onto the tomb of St. Peter, might cause some to question how much she was interested in the sacrament of marriage versus using the church as a backdrop for her wedding.
Other celebrities have taken to Instagram to post about their interest in Catholicism. Lady Gaga posted a picture of herself praying the rosary in 2017, and another with her parish priest, quoting Pope Francis on the importance of the Eucharist in the caption. More recently, Kanye West posted pictures of himself and Candace Owens at a Paris fashion show wearing a shirt with the phrase “WHITE LIVES MATTER” on the back and a collage of images of Pope Saint John Paul II on the front.
Among those who are more blatant about their ironic attraction to Catholicism’s counter-cultural aesthetics are meme pages like Instagram’s @ineedgodineverymomentofmylife and @memes.of.heresy. Catholicism’s aesthetic imagination has also been the subject of a variety of museum exhibits including the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination exhibit, which turned out to be the Museum’s most successful show in history, attracting nearly 1.7 million visitors. The exhibit featured a series of dresses and jewelry made by high end fashion designers and inspired by Catholic art and liturgical vestments. The exhibit also served as the theme of the 45th annual Met Gala in 2018, where an exclusive list of elite invitees wore original outfits inspired by the pieces in the exhibit. The Brooklyn Museum hosted the Andy Warhol: Revelations exhibit until June of this year, which featured Warhol’s pieces inspired by his (complicated) Catholic faith, as well as his personal devotional items and photos of his visit to the Vatican in 1980 and shaking hands with John Paul II.
While some are drawn to traditional Catholicism’s elaborate pageantry, others are drawn to its demanding moral doctrines and rituals that orient the individual toward ideals that transcend the self. Shia LaBeouf is perhaps the most visible of a slew of traditionalists lauding the rigor and rich symbolism implicated in the TLM.
A Capuchin friar posted an Instagram photo of LaBeouf with himself and his confreres in December 2021 while on pilgrimage visiting several Franciscan holy sites in Italy. The pilgrimage was made in preparation for his role as Padre Pio in an upcoming biopic, which left him feeling “completely immersed in something way bigger than myself…It is super attractive to see people giving themselves to something so divine and it is heartwarming to know that there is a brotherhood like this that exists.”
The interest was set ablaze when LaBeouf appeared on a Word on Fire interview in late August with Bishop Robert Barron, discussing his experience preparing for the role and his newfound esteem for the TLM. As he attended and studied the TLM, he found himself drawn to the way that it puts more onus on the priest to “activate” the people, in a way that echoes a classical Aristotelian understanding of the actor’s role in “activating” the audience in a theater. He goes on to assert that “the Mass has changed because there was a yearning to activate the public in an artificial way … but it feels like this bureaucratic activation, like rules were set … where it’s almost as though the Church is trying to, from the office, activate the audience, without putting the agency on the priest.”
He remarks having found a striking difference between guitar masses at his local parish where it felt like they were trying to “sell me on an idea,” and TLM parishes where “it feels like they’re not selling me a car.” The Novus Ordo Mass is too “direct” and appeals to the intellect, he insists, while the subtlety and mystique of the TLM appeals to one’s senses and emotions. Similarly, he’s found that too often at NO Masses he hears homilies that try to feel relatable, giving him the feeling that at that point of the Mass the priest has “let the air out.”
He remembers that his first exposure to Jesus was that of a “soft, fragile, all-loving, all-listening” figure with “no ferocity,” which felt foreign to his own experience of masculinity. He goes on to lament the “feminization” of Western culture and to laud the hypermasculine spirituality of figures like Padre Pio. The more he spent time with the Capuchin community, he found a model of “redemptive” masculinity that encouraged him to let go of his attachments and enabled him to experience healing from his wounds and self-seeking tendencies. The friars helped him understand that “freedom without structure doesn’t feel good,” to which Bishop Barron responds with a Bob Dylan lyric: “freedom just around the corner for you. But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?”
His sentiments reflect those of many other young men who are starving for “a roadmap,” as he said, to make sense of their mascuine “genius” in a culture that insists on neutralizing gender difference and fostering widespread homogeneity. His remarks are reminiscent of other proponents of heroic masculine virtue like Joe Rogan, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson (who has expressed interest in converting to Catholicism), and Milo Yiannopoulos (who was raised Catholic and has published a book about his qualms with the “feminization of the Church” and his esteem for the TLM).
Some have criticized LaBeouf’s “aggressive” masculinity, though a more charitable reading of the interview may recognize that his remarks are not much unlike those of other young men during their “starry eyed convert phase,” which with time and experience will temper out and develop nuance. It may take some time for the “truth” that has begun to structure LaBeouf’s freedom to mature from a set of abstract principles to be adhered to an encounter with the loving presence of God in the flesh.
It’s easy to accuse the various proliferations of young traditionalists of only engaging with Catholicism on a superficial and self-indulgent level. But people like Dasha Nekrasova demonstrate that what for some may begin as ironic performance art can become a sincere journey toward He who is at the origin of the Catholic imagination. In a 2020 Interview magazine interview, the 31-year-old Belarusian-born co-host of the controversial Red Scare podcast (who at the time viewed herself as a believing but not practicing Catholic, as she attended Mass but abstained from the Eucharist) said, “what’s so great about faith is that it doesn’t have to be grounded in rational thought. We are seeing a lot of people return to religion because everything feels so senseless and pointless, so why not be a Catholic? Catholicism is nice because it involves a whole body of work outside of the Bible — it’s a very aesthetic, literary religion.”
Nekrasova and co-host Anna Khachiyan (a Russian-born secular Jew of Armenian descent who claims to “believe in God and say a prayer everyday”), have been grouped with other “dirtbag leftists” who are known for their penchant for politically incorrect, sardonic cultural commentary. Though Nekrasova was raised Roman Catholic, her family lapsed after immigrating to the US when she was three years old, citing being disillusioned with the uninspiring “boomer capitalist Catholicism” she encountered in the parishes near her home in Las Vegas, and with the way the priests addressed congregations in a way that was “affected” and felt like they were “pandering” to them, in a way echoing the sentiments of LeBoeuf.
Since the podcast’s debut in 2018, “the girls” have interviewed several Catholic guests ranging all over the ideological spectrum, including democratic socialist Elizabeth Bruenig, far-right political strategist Steve Bannon, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, and the traditionalist “leftcath” known as Mecha. As time has gone on, Nekrasova’s Catholicism has become increasingly prominent (and decreasingly ironic or, as she would put it, “LARP-y”) on the show. Her allusions to her faith range from mentioning the lives of mystical saints to her concerns about the Masonic influence on Vatican II and her (dissatisfying) experiences at several schismatic SSPX masses.
Many have expressed their doubts about the sincerity of her faith. She mentioned a “radtrad” who called her out for not being a “real Catholic” due to several sexually provocative selfies she posted in the past on Instagram, while others belittle her musings about her obsession with buying “religious ephemera.” But after working closely with a spiritual director, doing sacramental preparation for chrismation and enduring a spiritually demanding Lenten sacrifice (alcohol and Taco Bell), she was officially confirmed in the Byzantine rite of the Church on June 5th of this year. Since then, she has continued to open up more about her personal growth in faith in Christ and how it is shaping her lifestyle. Since her reversion, I’ve met several Red Scare fans who have expressed interest in beginning to attend Mass, some of whom seem to be interested in doing so for the irony of it, while others seemed more earnest in their interest, and have mentioned formally converting to Catholicism.
Similarly, as Tara Isabella Burton displayed in her May 2020 New York Times feature on “weird Catholic Twitter,” many young people who feel disillusioned by mainstream Democratic or Republican moral, political, and cultural paradigms are drawn to the way that the countercultural aspects of both traditional Catholic liturgy and Catholic Social Teaching transcend the American neoliberal left/right “duopoly.” The people featured in Burton’s article demonstrate what it looks like to do the work of moving beyond abstractions and into the depths of what is attractive about traditional liturgy, art, and piety. Their trajectory is an example of a mature integration of worship, personal morality, and furthering the Common Good through social activism.
Echoing the remarks of people like Nekrasova and LaBoeuf, cultural critic Camille Paglia, who was raised by Italian Catholic immigrants, lamented in a 1994 interview with Fr. James Martin SJ feeling alienated from the American brand of Catholicism she grew up with in the 1950s. “I began seeing a pattern in American Catholic churches: As they were being refurbished and restored, there was what I now regard as a snobbish purgation of the ethnic origins of the parishioners in these churches.” She attributes the flattening of American Catholicism with an effort to align itself with a suburban WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) sensibility in order to gain more credibility in the eyes of the cultural hegemony of the 1950s.
In our culture, under the influence of Protestantism, there has been this homogenization, this constant bleaching out of everything ethnic in America. As that happens we get more and more removed from the life of the body. Even though the body is tortured in Catholic iconography, it’s still there, it’s present. But in Protestantism, in Presbyterian, Episcopalian styles, which is very chi-chi … it’s a very bland, country-club style. That’s what I see as the number one problem in America. It absorbs everything. The minute you get any ethnic group into the middle class they begin to lose any ethnicity. You have this incredible domination by the WASP style. It completely cuts you off at the neck. It makes you very bland, very soft-spoken. All the bloody, barbaric reality of life in the body is gone…It’s been homogenized and turned into ‘The Donna Reed Show’! If you go into any suburban Catholic church … the priest acts towards the parishioners as though we’re all friends … It’s part of the therapeutic culture of America, which again …the kind of debased therapy that goes on today is just making you feel better about yourself. ‘I’m O.K., You’re O.K.’
Speaking specifically about church architecture, she cites the removal of elaborate, upward pointing altar pieces and altar rails, describing the experience of going to Mass as feeling like “a Chamber of Commerce/guild hall … totally sanitized. What”, she asks, “does that do artistically and architecturally to the church? It is incoherent. … Now we have this abomination in America of these shells of the old churches with these barbecue-pit interiors! These airline-terminal interiors. What does this do to young Catholics? I think it just removes any visual culture.”
It’s no wonder that people who feel outcasted for their unconventional personalities and sensibilities–from queer people, to those who don’t relate to the Anglo-American cultural sensibility, to people on the Spectrum–are drawn to the TLM (as I documented in a previous article). This trend is not without historical precedent. Other figures throughout history who felt like black sheeps for their temperaments or ways of perceiving reality–from turn of the century decadents like Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, and JK Huysmans, to others like Andy Warhol, Stephen Patrick Morrissey, and Princess Margaret and her confidant Fr. Derek “Dazzle” Jennings (whose conversion was featured in season four of The Crown)–were drawn to traditional Catholic liturgy, art, and piety for similar reasons. Huysmans, often criticized for his “neuroticism” and “peculiar” sexuality, expressed concerns similar to Paglia’s about how the Church in France was selling “its mystical soul to bourgeois liberalism and commerce” during his lifetime.
The ironic and reactionary attitudes associated with this trend is an understandable response to what can be perceived as the spread of a bourgeois suburban cultural sensibility in the American Catholic Church. This sensibility has a tendency for breeding what philosopher Charles Taylor would call “buffered selves,” who are able to avoid being impacted by spiritual forces, in contrast to “porous selves” who are impacted by the spiritual charges—both holy and demonic—of forces outside of themselves. In this “disenchanted” state, we determine the meaning of things on our own, rather than allowing our lives to be affected by forces beyond our control and dealing with the unpredictability of such an existence. Expressions of religiosity that overemphasize the agency of the individual and his or her will, as opposed to the agency of God and other spiritual forces, are largely indistinguishable from the rest of secular culture.
It’s not hard to find the correlation between the interest in aesthetic Catholicism and the rising trend of “TikTok witches” and other brands of occultism that emphasize the immanence of spiritual forces in everyday life. “Even satanism,” writes Ellis Hanson, “belies a paradoxical piety, since it is a mystical indulgence in evil and abjection that would be sheer nonsense apart from the moral authority of the Church,” citing the entryway of figures like Huysmans and Baudelaire into Catholicism “through the backdoor” via occultism. “It is just at the moment when positivism is at its height,” wrote Huysmans, “that mysticism rises again and the madness of occult begins.”
Skepticism toward the various outcroppings of the trad trend are surely understandable. Much of the rhetoric–from the ironically decadent to the heroically masculine strains–gives whiffs of neopagan reductions of Catholicism, with their overemphasis on secondary elements of the Church’s tradition at the cost of downplaying the significance of the transformative power of an encounter with Christ. But perhaps these reductions are also seeds–fragments of the fullness of the Truth–which require fostering and guidance in order to mature into the flower of a sincere faith in Christ and the Church.
It would be imprudent–especially for clerics, theologians, and religious educators–to dismiss the phenomenon as a passing trend. Rather, the trend ought to be seized as an opportunity to deepen our understanding of how Christ and the Church’s tradition can speak to today’s culture in ways that we may not have noticed before. Further, it’s an opportunity to look more closely at the errors made in preaching and pastoral ministry over the last few years. As a matter of both prudence and charity, the Church ought to heed the call to help foster the growth of these seeds that so many young people are receiving, lest they die out or be distorted among the thorns of neopagan reductionism.
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This is a silly piece.
Taking a look at how interest in traditionalist forms of Catholicism is showing up in various (and often surprising) ways is … silly? How so?
Santayana saw through the attempt to make the Catholic religion the Unitarian religion, sterile and without passion. In spite of his lack of faith, his corruption by Harvard’s Philosophy Department, and having a secular father,he saw the future of a once vibrant Church being vacated by horrible Architecture, weak Bishops, collapsing morals, effeminate, liturgies. Perhaps the future is a combination of various paths to Traditionalism.
All I can leave you with, subject to moderation, is I don’t want to meet you in Purgatory.
If I were to construct a marketing slogan for the Catholic Church, it would be this: “CONSIDER THE CATHOLIC CHURCH; YOU’LL BE PUTTING YOUR LIFE ON THE LINE.”
Only when the Catholic Church is perceived as asking you to sacrifice your life for something that is good, true and beautiful, will anyone be genuinely attracted to it. Who wants to join a Church that demands little, expects no sacrifice on your part, and permits just about any whim you can come up with? Not me, for certain and probably not anyone else. The post-Vatican Church of ease, comfort, narcissistic worship of personal “feelings”, hedonism, self-congratulations, ephemeral emotional states and “doing your own thing” has wrought us nothing. It has nothing to do with the NO or TLM; it has everything to do with living for something you’d be willing to die for. That’s core to the Gospel message of Jesus Christ
I concur.
I don’t know if silly is the word I’d use, although I’m leaning that way. I find this article way too long and in serious need of editorial tightening. In addition, I’ve read all this before. So my overall feeling on coming to the end of it is frustration and annoyance with myself for persevering to the finish line.
Patience is a divine gift.
Are young Trads then looking for better preaching of the gospel and moral law? I have to say I have not heard a priest preach on purity, chastity, virginity, for decades. Are they craving beauty and chants like a lullaby and precious vestments, white gloves, golden altars and many candles to have a little peak of heaven? Unfortunately, the real faith lived by Jesus Christ was sacrifice and self-giving, and “the Son of man had no pillow to lay his head on”. Prince Florian of Bavaria ordained a priest in 1986 was offered a place in the beautiful Cathedral but in order to give away his privileges, he decided to become a poor Franciscan missionary in Africa. I wonder what the Lord Jesus Christ would find more beautiful? The Catholic Church is the real thing! We are to follow Christ Jesus and it has to start with self, with us. Instead of all the complaints and condemnation in the Church, go and become a saint!
Perhaps the beauty inspired him to become a priest?
I have heard a lot of different things from different traditionalists on what they find at the TLM. Some are looking for beautiful liturgy. Others are looking for cultural practices, so that their faith can be part of their lives in many different ways, without reinventing the wheel. Others want a church that feels Catholic, rather than Protestant. Some are looking for fellow Catholics who, while imperfect as themselves, at least take the Faith and our Rites seriously, reject heresy and cafeteria Catholicism, and can support each other in the counter-cultural lifestyle of Catholicism. Some want a homily with meat, that doesn’t employ ambiguity or silence to avoid causing any discomfort. Some have gotten told to leave Novus Ordo parishes for teaching the Faith unambiguously. Others are sick and tired of liturgical abuses and just want a priest who says the black and does the red. For some it’s all of the above. For most of these, a Low Mass does a better job than a Novus Ordo, despite the simplicity, silence, and lack of chant and incense.
These things are helps to holiness. We are saved as individuals, but we aren’t saved individually, nor do we have a religion of pure spirit, like the gnostics. We are body and soul, and what we do with the body, see with the body, and hear with the body, can strengthen or weaken the soul, lead to sin or to God. So why not position yourself around things that lead to God? This is the point of the parable of the dishonest steward.
St. Francis of Assisi applied his poverty to himself, not to the Mass. His deaconal alb had more lace than I have ever seen on a TLM priest. A TLM group (I think in Arlington) was relegated to a gym a few months ago due to TC, I suppose because the church they had been using was too privileged, and they needed to lack a pillow to lay their heads on. So they made the gym beautiful.
You got it.
Terence says: This is silly piece
Agreed, everyone can see the article was written purely on the author’s emotion, that is why it feels silly overall – written by someone with many reservations towards the sober life that TLM faithful try to accomplish.
The most obvious example is how he compares the faithful of the TLM against the ones of the modernist church using modernist metrics – take for example how he mentions Francis’ words as rule but forgets the pre-conciliar teachings; or how the uses celebrities instead of everyday family people; or how he doesn’t mention relevant numbers showing the incredible impact the TLM has on the faith overall; or how he labels the FSSPX as schismatic even though they have relatively good standing with Francis himself.
I could write an article exactly the opposite of this one filled with positive emotions instead of negative ones like the author here does, but the internet is full of them. I’m just sorry the author is so immersed in his reservations that he won’t consider writing it himself, it could be “an opportunity to deepen [his] understanding of how Christ and the Church’s tradition can speak to [him] in ways that [he] may not have noticed before.
Adubato has done a broad survey, or inventory, of aesthetic interest in Catholic religion. In the things he identifies in that, he is generally accurate, I think; and fairly links many disparate items in a cogent succession.
He recognizes the superficiality in the aesthetics being reviewed.
On the other hand he allows that encounter and experience of the elements of our religion can be stepping stones to profound insight -not to be rendered out-of-hand, as “empty”.
To that work he could have injected some insightful critique, egs., whether profound insight and social conscience are themselves insufficient and what matters is grace.
In that sense the celebrities being cited got too much of the limelight, benefit of doubt and emphasis. If they followed Adubato too closely here it could perhaps mislead them.
His renderings of Hanson, Huysmans and Baudelaire, are wrong. Their past lives are not proof of anything but their past lives:
1. re Hanson – the evil of Satanism is just evil and not nonsense, whereas the attachment of the idea of “the moral authority of the Church” is a circumlocution to prove “nonsense”
2. re Huysmans – there is no necessary connection of mysticism to occult and howsoever you trip into occult it is because of temptation and sin, but moreover, aesthetics is not mysticism
3. re Baudelaire – this man’s creative triggers and intellectual frames of reference were -understatement alert,- debauchery, shill, shock, sensationalism and theatric subversion, just look at his pitiful face.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire
This is an extremely condescending and pseudo-intellectual analysis of what is, at its heart, simply a desire to pray in the midst of a Church given over to noisy sloganeering and cheap virtue signaling. I have attended the Traditional Latin Mass all over Europe and America, and the real a story is everywhere the same: mostly young families in search of an authentic prayer life and a deep longing for tradition and beauty in a rootless and ugly society. That is all.
They’ve obviously found it at St. Patrick’s in New Orleans:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GGU7XC0JUM&t=513s
And note the youth of the priest/celebrant.
Yep. Thanks to the use of birth control/sterilization by 80%+ of Catholic couples, young Tridentine families could become a majority in a generation or two by simply continuing to obey Catholic moral teachings.
Exactly Amanda. Thank you. But they’ll also have to find ways to retain their children in the Faith & the TLM community. In our present culture that’s the tricker part.
A couple generations ago virtually every Catholic family had numerous children. As a child I remember a Catholic neighbor family with 15 children.
Birthrates are critical but so is retention.
The Pope “has full, SUPREME, and universal power over the WHOLE Church, a power which he can always exercise UNHINDERED.” Cathechism # 882.
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The College of Cardinals, all younger than 80, elects Popes and requires at least 66% votes. Francis will have it on 1/14/23 when Cardinal Bagnasco is 80. He need not appoint more before then, given his 16 new ones, who shall replace 80 year olds through Cardinal Sandri on 11/18/43. Expect Francis to appoint 15 new Cardinals after that date, only 14 months away, who would replace 15 Cardinals through Cardinal Cardozo, who turns 80 on 10/10/44. On that day in 2 years, Francis College Cardinals will be 77%. If Francis retires when he turns 90 on 12/17/26, then he will appoint 83% of the College. Every new Cardinal is another nail in the coffin of your “Articles of Resistence.”
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Francis also shall continue to appoint Bishops, who shall appoint Francis Heads of Seminaries, who shall appoint Francis faculty, who shall teach seminarians to become Francis priests.
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Benedict is 95. Francis shall be 95 on 12/17/31 if he is Pope. It is possible. Current College members, who are not “Francis Cardinals,” shall be only 6 then. Seven Cardinals were born before 1960; new Cardinal Marengo is only 47. They shall elect 2 successor “Francis Popes”, and more shall follow: the same with Francis Cardinals and Francis Bishops, who shall appoint Francis Heads of Seminaries, who shall appoint Francis faculty, who shall teach seminarians to become Francis priests.
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Francis has changed US Bishops by appointing 131/273 who are younger than 75, which is when he can retire them. That is 5 fewer than 50%. The 5 turn 75 by 11/19/22. Others turn 75 in the next 5 years from large dioceses (Detroit, Los Angeles, Newark, Miami, Atlanta, Houston, Orange County), and 2 are the President and V.P. of USCCB. Soon, Francis Bishops shall control USCCB (retired Bishops cannot vote) and its agenda. These
Francis Bishops shall appoint Francis Heads of Seminaries, who shall appoint Francis faculty, who shall teach seminarians to become Francis priests.
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To those who have resentment toward Francis, remember the saying: “you don’t have the numbers, and the House always wins.” They shall have fewer numbers and more resentment with each new day. There is nothing they can do about it, given Catechism # 882.
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Remember Benedict is the cause of Cardinal Bergoglio being Pope Francis because Benedict would be Pope had he not retired, making Francis his Papal legacy. Remember it was the Cardinals appointed by Benedict and John Paul 2 who elected Bergoglio Pope Francis. THEIR Cardinals created Francis. Look to them and to Benedict.
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Benedict also is the cause of Francis not being able to retire before Benedict dies because having 3 living Popes is an ontological impossibility for the Church. Benedict alive creates another Francis Bishop to appoint another Francis Seminary Head to appoint another Francis Seminary faculty to create another Francis priest.
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To those who have resentment of Francis, they can thank Benedict for their resentment. I thank God for retiring Benedict. May Benedict live a long life. The Papal irony of more resentment of Francis caused by Ratzinger is a Papal gift that shall keep on giving.
Reader advisory, Anna N Amoz keeps posting the same notice on different articles in the comment boxes at CWR.
In another place in CWR I already established flaws in this Anna N Amoz repeat essay. Summarizing, an identified purpose is absent.
In addition to that, Anna N Amoz is making and has arranged conceptually, wrong ideas of the Catechism para. 882.
This wrong idea conditions the whole statement that follows and so all the material is corrupted from it.
Anna N Amoz also implicates the Holy Spirit in being caught by the interpretation, which is against true faith.
Errors that come from Pope Francis are errors, not occasion for irony and resentment for thanking Pope Benedict.
If the Holy Spirit wants Pope Francis to resign there is nothing on ontology that could stop that from happening.
Thanks for noting this. I had recently posted a similar advisory when I saw this exact wording several different times on different articles.
Childish stupidity, arrogance, and Catholic anti-Catholic bigotry remains childish stupidity, arrogance, and Catholic anti-Catholic bigotry even when it comes from the top, sad irony or not.
“It is just at the moment when positivism is at its height, that mysticism rises again and the madness of occult begins” (JK Huysmans). Debatable, although any collective behavior lacks empirical verification, the phenomenon is feasible. Precisely because of the perception however convincing. That premise finds support in Man’s spiritual nature, the repression or acknowledgment of good and evil. Knowledge that is inherent in human nature.
It relates to Carl Olson’s article ‘Reclaiming the light of dogma in the face of supposed deeper understanding’. How are we who hold to the revealed Word rather than Card Hollerich’s proposal that stable homosexual relations must be reconsidered able to say we are right Hollerich is wrong? It’s our conviction. Certitude arrived at when a truth, a principle is apprehended. When both subject and predicate are apprehended in one act of knowing. Self evident to the intellect designed by God to make that apprehension [faith enhances that apprehension].
Adubato correctly acknowledges the supremacy in the collective mind of science. Affecting a majority, in the face of demolished credibility in the spiritual, in one direction or another, in general toward evil or good. Man is a spiritual, moral or immoral animal. Why we have a resurgence in witchcraft, the occult, and by testimony of our Catholic exorcists obsession with evil and increase in diabolic possession. Likewise, the attraction to Catholic traditionalism from those on the fringes of faith.
Halloween followed by All Saints marks that dichotomy of human moral behavior, the former often for fun and now seeming moreso for evil. Whereas we who possess faith are virtually unanimous in our adoration of God and veneration of the saints. Except for the few. Not the few who are weak in faith, rather those from the Dark side, who enter the sacred premises with ulterior motive.
Our own sanctification is found in enduring evil with courage, going so far as to have compassion on the depraved among us.
Apprehension of the evil of same sex relations, and the good of a male female relationship are self evident in accord with the natural law within, the imprint on the soul of God’s order of nature. We arrive at these truths by right reason, the intellect apprehends them. Faith enhances that apprehension although it doesn’t determine the apprehension.
Whereas it is by faith, the work of grace that we believe Christ is the Son of God. The infinite good that is God is revealed to us in Christ’s Passion Crucifixion Resurrection. That knowledge [of an infinite good] then is not attained by reason, rather it is revealed in Christ. Reason has the task of making this apprehension comprehensible for human understanding. That revelation, given and evident to all in the knowledge itself, if given assent or refused determines our salvation. Assent is initiated by prevenient grace that precedes that assent [prevenient grace according to Aquinas may be rejected].
Man has an insatiable quest for knowledge and to express his ideas. This can be of great value to mankind, yet in essence, the nub of inventiveness is a gift from God. We are seldom willing to acknowledge the source of inspiration that comes to us.
In matters of devotion to God, the ways and means of man are a cornucopia of nonsense and self deception. Perhaps an example might be Papa’s bountiful basket of the irreverent, as some might categorize it!
2 Timothy 3:16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,
Romans 15:4 For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.
Hebrews 4:12 For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
2 Peter 1:19-21 And we have something more sure, the prophetic word, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
Let us honour God, taking guidance and comfort in His eternal word.
Brian Young your description of the interior life reveals a deficit of penance on your part, by the nubs and by the baskets too.
Dear Elias:
Of course you understand me far better than myself! Disregard what I say and instead ask yourself, does the Holy Scripture that is given have impact on you?
The Joy of forgiveness. When I confess my sins, He is faithful and just to forgive me of my sins and cleans me from all unrighteousness. We serve an awesome God, do we not?
Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Amen
In the precious name of Jesus,
Brian
You mustn’t take God’s Name in vain.
With the exception of Traditional Thomism I never much cared for Traditionalism.
But I love orthodoxy and the correct exposition of Catholic Doctrine. I can get that from a Trad Priest, a Charistmatic Priest, a EWTN Priest, or an Eastern Priest. I can get that from a TLM or a properly celebrated NO Mass or an Eastern Rite Mass.
I prefer proper unity in proper diversity.
If Trad is yer thing well as long as yer loyal and orthodox I have no problem with it.
The problem is finding a “properly celebrated NO Mass.” It can indeed be celebrated in Latin and make use of the Latin aesthetic and cultural heritage, but in my experience that is even rarer than Mass according to the EF. Interestingly, the vehement hostility toward any use of Latin by many of the clergy is indistinguishable between the two rites. Many of them will also refuse to use the Roman Canon in English – once again in ENGLISH – because it’s “too pre-VII.” I’m not sure where that places me on the yardstick by which we measure “traditionalism,” but I can tell you that it’s quite mystifying and frustrating.
The Vatican says the SSPX is not schismatic. Is the writer’s authority above the Vatican authority?
You got the correct message.