My Journey to TLM Maximalism (Guest: Peter Kwasniewski)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. [00:00:09] Speaker B: Thank you very much for coming on the program. I really appreciate it. [00:00:13] Speaker A: Thank you, Eric. It's great to be back. I don't know what time this is. Fifth, sixth time. [00:00:17] Speaker B: I think you are the leader, by the way. I think this, this puts you ahead, if you weren't already has ahead as my, you know, top guest, having you the most time. So you're all. And every single time you're on, I will say the podcast numbers do very well. We keep bringing them back, and that's obviously not the only reason we do it. But it does. It does mean that what you're saying, I think, is resonating with a lot of people. And honestly, like, I think people who know you and kind of follow you, you have a focus on what you talk about, and that is Traditional Latin Mass, the importance of the liturgy. I mean, you'll sometimes on Facebook talk about some other stuff and, you know, make your substack. But really, it's mostly about the importance of the liturgy, the centrality of it, and specifically the traditional at Mass. And that's what I want to talk about today. You have, you always have a new book out every time you're here, because you always have a new book out. I mean, every month it seems like. But this one, this is like, I know some of your books are your. You edit projects. Some of them are some reprints of stuff, but this is one of your. Your big ones. I guess we could call it Close the Workshop. I'll put it here on the screen. Why? The Old Mass isn't broken and the New Mass can't be fixed, which, I mean, you're getting provocative just with the subtitle. [00:01:31] Speaker A: It's true. [00:01:32] Speaker B: I mean, a lot of people might agree that the Old Mass isn't broken. I mean, I know some modernists wouldn't, but. And the New Mass can't be fixed. Now, that's where we're gonna get, you know, some fighting words for a lot of people. So. But I know this is like a third book of, like, a series in a sense. I mean, not technically, but isn't it, like you have three books that kind of all you kind of see as a whole? Is that right? [00:01:55] Speaker A: That's right, yeah. In the preface to this new book, Close the Workshop, I say that there's an informal trilogy. I didn't plan it out as a trilogy, but what happened is when the 50th anniversary of Paul VI's apostolic constitution was coming up, that's April 3, 1969. So in 2019, when that big anniversary was coming up. I had thought, I'm going to write a book. My definitive book on. Here's what I think about the Novus Ordo, its potentiality for, you know, and why we actually need to go back to the traditional. Right. And so I began to write that book. And when I had a really large manuscript that said a lot of things I wanted to say, that was not. That was not the whole of what I wanted to say. So I published that as the book the Once and Future Roman write. And it has its own integrity. I mean, it can be read by itself. It doesn't really need any other book to go along with it. But then there were all of the questions of papal authority, and isn't. Doesn't the Pope have authority over the liturgy, and can't he abolish liturgical forms and can't he revise them at will? And all these sorts of questions wrapped up with authority, obedience, the common good, et cetera. And that became a second book called Bound by Truth, which really drills into those aspects of the problem that we're dealing with. And then this final book, Close the Workshop, is really, you know, it completes that arc. Again, it can be read entirely by itself, but it completes the arc because it's basically saying, look, all the reasons that you have heard for why the Old Mass was. Was corrupted or was defective or imperfect or whatever, and therefore needed this overhaul are not true, and I'll tell you why. And on the flip side, now that we have this new liturgy that almost everybody agrees is defective, you can't actually fix it. And I'll tell you the reasons why you can't actually fix it. So it completes the arc in that sense. Right? [00:03:57] Speaker B: One of the things I noticed about this book, like, your writing style, I always enjoy, I think it's just. It's scholarly yet, like, readable. And it, like, it's somewhat. It's very logical, kind of just hits the points. And I feel like it's never emotional or anything, definitely, and I like that. But one of the things you. You rarely do. You. You rarely are very personal. But I feel like this book is a little bit more for you. You know, you kind of open up a little bit about your own journey as. As they like to say these days, you know, your journey from being a Novus Ordo Catholic to a Traditional Latin Mass Catholic. And I'm going to make the same disclaimer you made in your book for this podcast. I do know that some people find some offense with the term Novus Ordo. They Think it's like a term of derision, but it really is simply an accurate term used by Paul VI himself. And so neither of us are using as a term of derision. We're simply just right. It's got to be. We have to distinguish between that and nutritional mass and Novus order seems to be the best. But that being said. [00:05:01] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [00:05:02] Speaker B: So you and I are about almost the exact same age. And so of course I grew up Protestant, so I didn't grow up in the 70s and 80s were Gen Xers, you know, in 70s and 80s of Catholic world. But you did. So what was that like as far as. Like, did you go to one of the. Did your parish kind of get all loopied? Were your parents, like, were they more traditionalist? Were, you know, how was that kind of in the Kwas Neski family growing up? [00:05:27] Speaker A: Yeah, well, so I have to just begin by saying, you know, I am very grateful to the Lord for always keeping me in the church, always keeping me in a way. He, he. I was always on the path of the Gospel to the extent that I understood it. I mean, I misunderstood it pretty badly at certain points, and I'll be really honest about that. And I. And I had to learn a lot more and grow a lot more. But, you know, I grew up in a Catholic, in a family where, you know, where my parents always went to Sunday mass and holy day masses. You know, we always prayed grace before meals. You know, there were rosaries around the house. We didn't actually pray the rosary as a family, but it's something that I grew up seeing. I went to Catholic schools. They were better or worse depending upon the teachers and the, and the, and the years. But the, the point is that my parents really wanted to pass on the Catholic faith and, and I think that they succeeded with, with me. And that's, that's by the grace of God. I unfortunately have some siblings who are not practicing anymore, but. But I kept practicing. Now, the thing is that the parish we went to when I was growing up, it was in suburban New Jersey. Of course, I'm not going to say the name of the parish, but it was your typical post Vatican ii, moderately liberal parish, you know, not super liberal because the rich people around that area would never have tolerated that. It had to be sort of respectable in a bourgeois way. But it was very. It was liberal in the sense that, you know, the pastor in the 1970s ripped out all the beautiful old marble furnishings, the high altar, you know, the, the. The communion rail, the kneelers, everything. He ripped out everything, statues. And he carpeted the whole thing in purple carpet and put this huge, like, church in the round. You know, he arranged it as a church in the round with chairs, padded chairs that had no kneelers. So I grew up never kneeling in church. I didn't. I mean, I didn't know any better than this. And then he had this giant stone altar, you know, on the top of the steps in the center of the church that honestly looked like a pagan sacrificial altar. It was like, large enough to. To put several bodies across. Like the Aztecs could have used it, you know, and then it had this Star Trek circular lamp hanging from iron chains over it. So it was like an. Also like a surgery operating table. I mean, it was. It was nuts. And the only redeeming quality to this church is that it was a neo Gothic structure from the 19th century. So very beautiful bones of the church. And he couldn't, I mean, he couldn't do anything about that. So it still had stained glass windows and a gothic shell, but all this modern, you know, the modern interior. So that was very weird. And, and I, as. I also like to say, you know, it was a church covered with carpet and eucharistic ministers. So every liturgy, lay people were doing everything, you know, all the readings, all the music, all the distributing communion. I mean, pretty much everything except consecration and the homily, you know. And so it was very, very post Vatican II in the worst sense. That was the experience of the liturgy I had all during my childhood and into, into high school. [00:08:41] Speaker B: Yeah, my, My, My wife tells similar stories because, you know, she's the same age as you as well, and she grew up Catholic and, you know, maintained her faith, all that, and her parents wanted her to be Catholic and all that, but it was the same thing where it was West Virginia and it was a parish that, you know, just kind of after, After Vatican ii, they. I don't think they went as ugly as, as yours did, but it definitely just kind of accepted all that stuff. And, you know, I think it was a beautiful church at one time. They, they changed it a lot and just eucharistic ministers all. I think there was a sister there for a while and then she kind of went loopy and, you know, the whole, the whole deal. [00:09:17] Speaker A: Well, and I'll just. [00:09:18] Speaker B: Was too common, unfortunately. [00:09:19] Speaker A: Yeah. And, you know, I have, I have to say, just to be fair, that this same parish about 10 years ago, I want to say, did a complete renovation in which they restored a lot of the old things. Now, unfortunately, it isn't as beautiful as it was, and that's often the case with these restorations. But they have now some kind of. I mean, they have a cranmer table. Sorry to use that term, but I'm just going to use that term. They have still the table altar, but they have behind it a kind of marble raridos for. In a decorative way. It looks beautiful. And they put a communion rail back in. I mean, it was amazing how much they put back in, you know, 10 years ago. And that's happened in a lot of places as. As, you know. You know, just when you pay attention to church news. But getting back to my high school phase, you know, I had been sold this bill of goods, which I think countless Catholics were sold that to. To participate actively in the Mass. The most perfect form of participating actively was to volunteer and sign up for ministries. Because if the assumption is that you're actively participating by speaking and acting out and doing things, well, then of course, if you're a lector, you're participating even more. And if you're a Eucharistic minister, you're participating even more. And so I became, in sequence, an altar boy, which was fine, but then I. But although I had to serve with girls, which was not exactly pleasant for a boy, and then I had to. Then I signed up to be a lector, and then I finally signed up to be an extraordinary minister of Holy Communion. And I just. I just thought I was doing the right thing. It was like, I want to get more and more active. And that's what I. That's what I did. So I did all of those things. I fully admit it, but I didn't know any better. You know, I had no catechesis, no education. I didn't know anything really about the liturgy. And really, when that. What started to change? There were two things that began to change. The first is that in high school, towards the end of high school, I had a kind of intellectual awakening. It was thanks to a philosophy course that I had, but also just in general, my mind was expanding. I had a lot of good teachers in high school, and they were giving me really good material to read, and it was just firing me up. But in particular, this. This philosophy teacher, he said, you know, I see that you have a real interest in your Catholic faith. I think you should read Ludwig Ott's Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma. Now. I. So, I mean, I didn't know what. [00:11:47] Speaker B: Dropping some truth bombs. [00:11:50] Speaker A: And so I. I got this thing by Ludwig Ott, and I actually read I mean, I pretty much read through it, which is incredibly key. [00:11:56] Speaker B: Do you have that white tan copy? [00:11:57] Speaker A: Yeah, the white tan copy. Exactly. [00:12:00] Speaker B: I get that Catholic. [00:12:02] Speaker A: And so I read and I find it fascinating. I mean, a lot of that book is really. I mean, it introduces you to Church Fathers if you haven't read them before. It's got argumentation, scholastic argumentations. It's got the philosophical aspect, you know, it's got all these scripture, these proof quotes from Scripture, you know that. And so it's very interesting for, you know, for somebody who doesn't mind. I'm the kind of kid who would sometimes read the encyclopedia, so I mean, I guess it didn't bother me too much. But when I got to the section on the sacraments and I was, you know, reading about the Eucharist, it was just mind blowing. I was reading about transubstantiation, I was reading about adoration, and, and I, I was discovering all kinds of things that I had never heard before. And it was beginning to cause dissonance. Like, if we believe these things, why are we doing the things that we're doing? How. How is this all supposed to fit together? And also, some of the things that he talked about in the book, which was written, I think, in the 1950s, even about the liturgy, didn't match anything that I had, that I had ever experienced. So I thought, is this book inaccurate at this part? Why didn't anybody call him out, you know, and say, you need to make. You need to talk about Eucharistic ministers or something, you know. And so it began to plant in my mind a doubt about what's going on. But I didn't yet know enough to be able to analyze it further. But then the other thing that happened is, I mean, you can interrupt me at any point. I don't know if you want me to just tell. Keep telling my story. [00:13:29] Speaker B: I did want to just keep on going through it because I think it's interesting because one thing I wanted, I do want to mention that I thought of while you're talking is people need to realize, because I think we forget this. You were the, you are the exception. What I mean by that is most of the. And my wife is the exception. Most of the people who went through what you went through do not practice the Catholic faith anymore. [00:13:56] Speaker A: Yes. [00:13:56] Speaker B: And that's just a harsh reality because sometimes we talk about, in debates of the church of, like, some people like to somebody like this, we remember people voted with their feet more than anything. And so when it's like, you can't say like, oh, Catholics accepted these changes as okay, because they didn't. They just simply said, we're out of here. And a lot of priests and nuns did as well. But like, I think that's important to note is like, praise God that you and like my wife and, and some others did. It's not like everybody laughed, but of your peers, I'd be willing to bet, what would you say? 70, 80, maybe 90%? [00:14:34] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:14:35] Speaker B: Either are gone completely or they barely practice or they don't really practice the faith at this point. I think that's something we should realize. This is this. My point of this is like this is real life. This is how people connect with the church is through their parish more than anything else. They're not reading, especially in the 70s, 80s. There's no online for them to read about, you know, things like that. Most of them aren't finding out about Ludwig Ott, that's for darn sure. And so like, you know, but. And they can't do a search on the Internet or go to Catholic Answers or wherever like that. So I think that's something we should recognize is that it had a huge impact what, what you were going through. [00:15:13] Speaker A: Exactly. And I know, I know plenty of people from my generation or older who are not practicing the faith anymore who were either turned off by what they thought was sort of. What's the word that people like to use? Not awkward, but cringy. Like a lot of cringy things about the Catholic church in the 70s and 80s really turned off a lot of people. We also have to bear in mind, Eric, just to kind of follow up on your point that we also have to measure Catholic adherence by how do the people live who still go to church. So if people are still going to an overs order parish, but let's say they're, you know, they're divorced and remarried, or they're using contraception or whatever it might be. I'm not saying that they don't have any faith. They could have faith, but they're not living the Catholic faith. And so you have to ask not just who's going to church, but what do they believe? Are they fully Catholic? Right. Are they actively, you know, Catholics, or are they sort of only half Catholic? So that's something that should be taken into account. The other. [00:16:20] Speaker B: I was gonna say, so out of high school then you never lost your faith? Praise God. But then how did you decide? Okay, I don't, I don't even know. I think I know where you went to undergrad when you went off to college. Was it Catholic school? Did you want to study Catholic stuff? Or is it more just like you're still kind of just doing your thing at this point? [00:16:37] Speaker A: Yeah, well, actually, there's one other important piece from high school that I need to say. One was, you know, reading Ludwig art and. And books like that. But the other was, you know, discovering the charismatic movement. Right. And that's something I need to put in here as well, because, you know, I think. I feel like I'm. I feel like I'm the weird guy who's, like, been involved in every aspect of modern Catholicism, you know, because, you know, when I was a junior in high school, a good friend of mine, you know, he saw that I was. I wasn't doing all that well. I think I was kind of on a trajectory that would have led me out of the church unless he had intervened and he said, look, Peter, there's this really great youth group that I'm a part of. The people are super fun. They're so nice. I think you just love them. Why don't you just come with me? And I was game for it. I just said, sure, I'll come with you. And I really did hit it off well with this youth group. It was in a town 15 minutes away from my town. I mean, everything in northern New Jersey is really close. So I went to this youth group, you know, incredibly nice leaders. This couple that taught Pre Cana and NFP and whatever. They were the leaders of the group. You know, it was pretty. It was a pretty big group. There were probably about 50 young adults there every week for the meeting. You know, they were very passionate about their faith. They sang a lot of campy sort of folk songs with the guitars. You know, it was the typical charismatic experience. Sometimes they were speaking in tongues. I'm not going to even get into that. That's a whole separate conversation. But, you know, the point is that they were loving people. These were normal, healthy, loving people. And there was a very conservative moral atmosphere to this charismatic group, which, you know, that's the way charismatics tend to be. And I think that the enthusiasm and the love and the commitment to prayer, even if it was mostly vocal prayer and, like, praying over people and so on, but there was real faith there, a real faith in God, in the supernatural, you know. And the priest that was kind of the chaplain to the group, he was also very dedicated, you know, in a way, he was a priestly priest, if I can put it that way. And so I think that whole experience basically revivified my faith and made it more personal, made it more real. [00:18:48] Speaker B: I mean, it was charismatic Catholics that brought me into the Catholic Church and they helped my wife too, when she kind of was a little bit on teetering a bit. Charismatic Catholics, same charismatic Catholics that helped me become Catholic, helped her kind of re. Return to the faith. And I tell people who are younger, who didn't like, you know, they didn't live during the 80s and 90s or they're very young. I'm like, you, you kind of know the energy within the Catholic Church today in America is with the traditionalist. I mean, there's just no question about that. I'm not saying there aren't other groups that do certain things, but that's where you see the energy. That's basically what was like in the 80s and 90s of the Charismatics. They were, I'm not saying there weren't trads around stuff like that, but like, honestly, the energy where you, what group was kind of pushing the, the ball forward, so to speak, in the church in a positive way. That was the charismatics in the 80s and 90s. I mean, there's no question. And like you said, they were typically very conservative morally. They were typically orthodox by the standards that we could, you know, it's definitely in comparison to your typical parish priest or, or, or person. You know, they were, they were typically orthodox and they, and they really did, you know, energize a lot of people's faith. And so I like you, I'm very thankful for that, that impact and that influence. But, but that's how I kind of tell people in the 80s and 90s, we're looking at where is, where is kind of the energy in the Catholic Church in America. It was with the Charismatics. [00:20:13] Speaker A: No, I fully agree with that. So I had, I had that intellectual piece, I had the charismatic piece in a way. I wouldn't say, you know, one has to be careful about rewriting history because when you look back, you have so much more experience. But it seems to me that I couldn't have said that I had really landed on my two feet in some, like, I really knew who I was as a Catholic. But I had this revitalizing going on and it was because of the philosophy teacher I had in high school that I decided to go eventually to Thomas Aquinas College because I wanted to read great books. I wanted to have a classical liberal education. I mean, that's what I wanted. And so I did. I went to TAC after a one year hiatus at Georgetown University. Which again, we don't need to go into right now. But it was the wrong choice. I went to Georgetown, I regretted it. And then I just started over at Thomas Aquinas in 1990. And at Thomas Aquinas College, a couple of really, really life changing things happened to me. The first thing was I discovered the unicorn. I met the unicorn. Okay, so for, for, for all the listeners and viewers out there, what I mean by this is, is what's called the unicorn Novus Ordo. In other words, it's the Novus Ordo in Latin with Gregorian chant, with communion on the tongue, kneeling, with only male altar servers, you know, with beautiful vestments, orthodox preaching, like the whole nine yards. Right. Thomas Aquinas College has always had that from the beginning. The one thing they haven't ever had, and I cannot understand this, and it, it. Well, I've heard rumors that might explain it and I'm not going to mention them because I don't know if they're true. But they've never done ad orientem. So that's the one thing that, where TAC has completely missed the boat. [00:21:59] Speaker B: Right, I noticed you left that out. Yeah. Okay. [00:22:02] Speaker A: So, yeah, so they really just don't do it. It's always versus populum, unless it's the traditional Mass, which they do have on both of their campuses seven days a week. So I'll give them a lot of credit for that. They didn't. That wasn't the case when I was there. I'll tell you what was, what was there when I was there in a moment. But anyway, the point is that they did the Novus Ordo in the most traditional way possible. Very, very reverent, devout, you know, as I said, the sacred music was wonderful. And this to me was a total revelation. I mean, I had never seen anything like this before. Ever, ever, ever. Not in that purple carpeted church. Not in my high school, which was a Benedictine high school. But the liturgy was pretty awful there, just to nowhere. Right. The charismatic group was lots of good feelings, but it was always guitar songs and, you know, ceramic vessels and things like that. It was just kind of low, low church, you know what I mean? And so at tac, I really had this sense of, wow, this is awesome. It's so beautiful. It's so reverent. The, this is the way we should act towards the Eucharist. This is the way we should act if we really believe that our God is here. Right? And at the time, you know how it is when you're, when you're, when you're a Catholic, you can go through, like, multiple conversions in life, right? I mean, we're also. We're always supposed to go through multiple conversions spiritually. But I mean, even in terms of, like, your orientation with regard to the church changes when you discover something new. It's like there's. It's like, I don't want to. I mean, sometimes people talk about the Matrix and, like, the red pill and all this kind of stuff, and fine, you could go that way, but it's a little bit. I mean, to use a less loaded sci fi, you know, metaphor, it's. It's like when you're in a big sprawling mansion and you. And you only know one part of it, or, you know, you visit your friend and he's there and you think, oh, we've seen everything. He's like, oh, no, there's this whole other wing, right? And then you go, and it's like, well, that's even more amazing than the wing that you were already in, right? And you just keep finding more and more and more. So that's how it was, you know, to find the Latin Novus Ordo with all the smells and bells. For me, I thought, you know, I've arrived. This is it, you know. But little did I know that that was, as I would put it, a kind of remote echo, like a distant echo of the tradition. You know, everything that was good about the TAC Novus Ordo was good because it emulated the tradition. Right. And all the things that were wrong with it, which I came to see subsequently, were wrong because it had departed from the tradition. Right, right. [00:24:24] Speaker B: Early 90s. Right, your early 90s. And was there any traditional Latin Mass at TAC at the time? [00:24:30] Speaker A: That's what I'm getting to next. So there were two major things that happened at tac. The one was the meeting, the Unicorn Novus Ordo. And of course, it's called Unicorn because it's so rare. I mean, we know that. We have to be honest about that. It's like maybe one place in any given big city might have something like that. Maybe. But that's. It's that rare. Right? But the other thing that I encountered at TAC was the traditional Latin Mass. And this was something that I didn't know about. I didn't know it existed. I went to TAC not knowing it existed and. Well, no, actually I knew that there was something, but I had no tangible experience of it. So it was like an empty concept. Like, oh, people did things differently, but I didn't know what that meant. Or how that looked. [00:25:16] Speaker B: And just to put this in historical perspective, this would have been soon after the SSPX had kind of had their break with Lefebvre and the consecration of bishops, probably right around the time he, he passed away. And so the, the Latin Mass, traditional Mass was allowed by John Paul II at this point and The Fraternity of St. Peter had started up, but it was, and I was just becoming Catholic at this point, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it was extremely rare in America, wasn't it, to have a traditional Mass. [00:25:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it was, it was quite rare. It, you know, you were likely to find it, if you found it at all in the late 80s, it would, it might be in a, in a hotel ballroom, you know. You know, like some people talked about this, the, the Saint Holiday Inn and places like that. You know, this is that, that's kind of how it be or the SSPX or some independent chapel, some kind of dicey situation like that. In, in, in certain big cities there were indulge parishes, but again, you have to kind of be in the know. And you know, if you, if you read like Stuart Chessman's book Faith of Our Fathers, he talks about how in those early days, you know, Catholics had to sign forms like they had to sign waivers saying, I accept the Second Vatican Council, I accept the Novus Ordo. And I mean, things like that, just crazy things going on back then, so. But TAC had a once a month Latin Mass at like 2pm or something like that. You know, one of those convenient times. And it was, it was because in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles under Cardinal Roger Mahoney, his generous implementation of the indult from John Paul II was to pick one church, to pick four churches throughout the Diocese of Los Angeles and put the Mass at each one on one Sunday of the month, like a kind of a round robin thing. And these churches were hours apart from each other. So if you were a Catholic and you wanted to go to the Latin Mass every Sunday, you had to be driving for hours to get to these four places. You know, that's how it worked. That that was the, the indel implementation and one of the places was the TAC chapel. So again, it was just something as simple as friends of mine at TAC saying, hey, have you ever been to the Latin Mass? You should come and have a look. You know, these were probably like, you know, closet trads, you know, from, from the bad days or something. You know, they, they were, they saw that I was interested and I was in the choir and I was in the scola and so forth. And so I went and, you know, of course, I had the same reaction that nearly everybody has, which is, what in the world is going on? He's. The priest has his back to me. He's whispering. It's quiet most of the time. I have no idea what's going on. But, you know, I don't hate it. I mean, it's interesting. It's new. It's different. Right. I can say that much. But, you know, because I'm the kind of person, obviously, who wants to understand. I mean, I'm a philosopher, so I really want to understand why things are the way they are. This, for me, was. Was a provocation. It was like, wait a minute, what is this liturgy that I just saw? Why is it so different? Why is the priest. Why does he have his back to me, towards me? You know, I didn't know at that time that the note, the Novus Ordo could be done ad orientum at all, you know. And most people, I think, still to this day associate ad orientum with the Latin Mass and versus Populum with the Novus Ordo. But, you know, why is. He got his back face to me. Why is it so silent? Why is the rest of it in Latin? Well, the Latin wasn't really such a big question, but the silence was, you know. And so I really wanted to get to the bottom of this, so I began reading, I began studying. I found Michael Davies. You know, I talked to other people. They handed me copies of the Latin Mass magazine. You know, it was a kind of. You know, back in that. In those days, it was almost like. Samizdat. Is that the word? It's like the. In the east, in Eastern Europe, under communism, you know, people sort of mimeographed copies of. Of forbidden books and, like, passed them around. You know, this is kind of how it was even. Even then. And so then I began going to this. And the clincher was one of the chaplains at TAC at that time. He was a priest who, many of us loved him very deeply. He was an excellent spiritual director. He was. I didn't realize this until later, but he was passionate about the Latin Mass, but he kept it quiet. He kind of kept it under a lid because officially, as chaplain, he wasn't supposed to be doing that, but he would do it secretly. He would do it periodically, you know, not the one Sunday a month that Mahoney allotted, but other days of the week, you know, just a feral Low Mass. And he would do it in a little private chapel that exists on the TAC California campus, the President's chapel. He must have done it, I assume, with the President's permission. I never found out about that, but you know, otherwise why would he be there saying Mass in this private chapel? But it was very much like, I want to say, it felt like Catholics in Elizabethan England, because the word, the whisper would go around to a select group of people. Hey, Father is going to do a low mass tonight at 7pm in the Hacienda Chapel. You know, let pass it on, right? So it was very much like that. And I started going to those Masses. And that's. Something happened with those intimate low Masses where instead of being in a large chapel, I was in a tiny, tiny church that could hold 15 people or a tiny chapel, 15 people maximum, really close to the priest. This really intense atmosphere of silence and prayer. And you know, by that time I had also figured out how to kind of follow along in a missal. And so the combination of that intense prayerfulness and then the prayers of the Mass themselves, you know, the richness of those prayers, both the changing and the unchanging prayers, I think that that really, really worked on my mind and my heart and made me realize that, yeah, this is basically like a three dimensional version of the two dimensional liturgy that I knew before. You know, this is, this has everything in it now that the Novus Ordo kind of gestures at or, or, or abbreviates, you know, this is like the on, it's like the unabridged version of the book, you know, and anyway, you know, it's, it's. [00:31:41] Speaker B: I love that three dimensional aspect of a two. You experienced two dimensionally because one of the biggest frustration I think, you know, that you hear, we commonly hear among traditionalists, I share it. And you might not because you're, you're smarter than the rest of us, but the struggle to explain to somebody who has never been a Catholic, we're talking about a good Catholic, practicing Catholic, always gone. No, sort of the whole life. The struggle to explain to them what's so appealing about traditional at Mass, especially even if they've gone to one or two or if they've never gone. It just is not easy to put into words. It's very difficult because you have to experience it. You have to experience multiple times. And I like to say it's just, it's simply so deep that we simply don't that first experience it. It's like we all, like you said, I had it too first time I Went. I was just like. I was more like curiosity. My, My wife and kids were out of town. I was like, I'll drive down to downtown D.C. and go, go to Latin mass, Mary Mother of God. And it seems like, you know, I've never, never heard that for. And it was just completely confusing. Kind of like dull, like whatever. Yeah, I couldn't even. I didn't realize they'd started. I mean, all that stuff, we all, we've all done that and it's like. But then. And that's what a lot of people still leave it at. And, but there's just something about it and I like that three dimensional because I just. The reason I like that. Have you read the book Flatland? [00:33:10] Speaker A: Remind me, who's the author? [00:33:13] Speaker B: Flatland is. Oh my gosh, I'm blank on the name. It was written in the late 1800s and it's a short little book and I'm blanking on the author. Somebody will remember at some point. But the, the point is I just read it, so I should remember the author, but whatever. And the, the, the premise of the book is this person, this square, this person lives in a two dimensional world. He's a square and he's explaining what two dimensional world is like. And so like women are, are lines and then there's triangles. And the more, the more sides you have, the, the higher up you are in the rank. It's somewhat of a, A, a satire Victorian society. But, but he lives in two dimensional world. But he, he is able to go to the three dimensional world. He actually at one point goes to a one dimensional world, but then he goes to a three dimensional world and the person is trying to convince him that the three dimensional person is trying to. Who's a sphere is trying to convince him. Like he doesn't see it at first. He's like. Because from his perspective everything still looks two dimensional because he's two dimensional. And the way he looks at it, finally the sphere convinces him, shows it and all of a sudden now it's like, oh my gosh, it's like this whole world gets open up. But then he goes back to the two dimensional world and he can't get anybody to believe him or. [00:34:32] Speaker A: Right, right. [00:34:33] Speaker B: Their whole world is two dimensional. This idea of height, like, basically they're just like, everything is like width and length and height to them. They're like. Oh, you mean like up. Like. No, when he says up, they, they think he means like north, like that way, you know. But he's like, No, I mean like, imagine A stack to get up there. Like, what are you talking about? [00:34:50] Speaker A: Yes, yes, yes, yes. [00:34:52] Speaker B: I'm like, that's kind of what I feel like when I'm talking about Latin Mass to some people. It's like, I just, it's hard to explain what height is. [00:35:00] Speaker A: Right, That's. No, exactly. And I mean, really, that's. That's a kind of Victorian clever retelling of Plato's. [00:35:07] Speaker B: The author's last name is Abbott. I just remembered that. [00:35:10] Speaker A: It's like a retelling of Plato's cave. Right. You know, when the philosopher escapes from the cave and he sees the sun for the first time and he realizes that there's a real world out there and everybody in the cave has just been looking at shadows and thinking that they're the real thing. I mean, really. I mean, I wrote something about this recently on my sub stack called Emerging from the Liturgical Cave, which is just to say that, that the experience of somebody who grows up only with a Novus Ordo or who's only ever seen that they're seeing a shadow of the Roman Rite. I mean, I'm not saying that it's, of course, I'm not saying it's not valid, but as a liturgy, as a liturgical act, as a composition of texts and rituals and rubrics and chants, that's what I'm talking about when I say liturgy. Right. I'm talking about the Eucharist or transunciation. I'm talking about the whole liturgy. The Novus Order is a shadow. It's a two dimensional black and white sketch of what the traditional Roman Rite is in full color, three dimensions. You know, and, and with all the richness of 20 centuries of development, you know, this is what, this is the difference, the different difference between a product of a banal on the spot, spot fabrication of the 1960s, as Ratzinger put it, and the, you know, a bi. Millennial heritage with Jewish roots. You know, it's incredible. The difference and height and depth are very much the kind of metaphors that people will use because you have a. There's a depth of, of intense spirituality in the, the way the Latin Mass is, is constructed and celebrated. And there's a height to its theology and also like a gritty realism there that it's almost like, when you get used to that the Novus Ordo is insipid by comparison. Like, it's, it's really not. It doesn't have flavor in comparison. Right. You know, and I just, I just give. [00:36:58] Speaker B: This is also why people get. People who attend no sort. And, you know, we both have lots of friends who attend it, and, and we're not questioning their faith or anything like that, but it's why they don't get why we just simply can't jump in the Reverend Novus Ordo bandwagon. Like, hey, we got the, we got the, the chance. We got the, the music. We got the, we got the, you know, even some Latin. We might even be at Orientum, might have some altar rail, stuff like that. And I'm like, that's great. I'm. I'm. I'm like, I'm happy that you do that. And I think that's a great thing because it's going in the right direction. But, like, your whole outlook, it's. It is like going from the three dimensions to the two. It's like, it's like if somebody does a two dimensions very, very well, you're happy they're doing it very, very well. But ultimately. And it's not something we're saying also, this is something I get all the time. I never understand. This is like some type of arrogance from us. It's not like we created the traditional Latin Mass. I had nothing to do with it. I'm just like, there as a, you know, as a participant. [00:37:59] Speaker A: No, it' I mean, another, another comparison you could use, you know, and, and again, I realize, I understand that there's the potential for people to be offended, but they shouldn't be offended if what is. If what we're saying is true. They should not be offended. They should be offended that Paul VI did what he did. Bishops have taken this away from us. That's the kind of thing that should cause offense. But the comparison I was about to make is, you know, it's also like the difference between a great novel and like a graphic novel, like a cartoon book version of a great novel. So you can find, like, Homer's Iliad, you know, in a cartoon version. And you can find Homer's Iliad in the way that Homer wrote it. Well, there's a massive difference between these things, right? And, you know, obviously, the liturgy is something much more important than Homer. But the point is that this is a great classic, right? It has depth and height and breadth. It has, it has poetry, it has, you know, gorgeous metaphors that has, you know, incredible language. All this stuff is found in an epic or in a play by Shakespeare or whatever. And when you take, like, the dumbed down child's version of it, fine, they might get the plot. You might be able to convey the plot, maybe that's fine for a little kid if you're trying to familiarize him with like Shakespeare stories. I mean, there are children's books that do that. Right. Just so they, you know, on the, on the assumption that kids can. It's good to get them familiar with certain things before they meet the grown up version. But you know, as Father Z says, you know, children should have children's food and adults should have adult food. Right. And what the traditional rights of the church east and west is not just about the Latin Mass, it's about any traditional right, east or West. These are the robust food of grown up Christians. And this is not. And what was produced in the 1960s was custom designed for what scholars in the 1960s thought modern man needed. He needed something streamlined, abbreviated, lots of text, heavy on the, heavy on the text, light on symbols and signs and silence. It, you know, it had to be rationally accessible, you know, almost instantly understood. I mean, all this kind of stuff is what you see, they say it, I'm not making this up, you know, I quote them in my book and you know, it has to reflect our modern views of, of, you know, what industrial capitalist, liberal life is like. No, that's what you're going to get. There is just a tiny, narrow slice of human history and not even human history at its best moment. You know, that's pretty obvious, right? [00:40:27] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. [00:40:28] Speaker A: So it's that I think, I think. [00:40:30] Speaker B: That, yeah, first of all, I just want to tell the audience nobody's knocking at Peter's door. He has some housework going on right now. So if you hear some knocks in the background, he's not ignoring like his kids or something who are asking for food or anything like that. So, but, but okay. The one thing I think is very interesting about this is you're telling the story about really embracing and loving Latin Mass in the early 90s. However, it's not light. And now you, now you have a book coming out where you're basically saying literally why the old Mass isn't broken, new Mass can't be fixed. But that was not, that's not what you thought when you first started going to it. So it's not like you went from you, you didn't get. I mean, I think, I think honestly most Catholics would consider you a radical and that's fine. But like the, you weren't radicalized then. You went a long, long time of basically attending the, the traditional Latin Mass and Novus Ordo and the Eastern liturgies. And so tell a little about, about how Your, your mind, which I think your mind now would be like, how did I even do that? But how did your mind kind of bring all that together? Because I think there are still people today. I mean, a lot of people might do that still. So how did your mind kind of work all that out? [00:41:52] Speaker A: Yeah, well, so here's, that's. Thank you. I'm really glad that you pushed the conversation to that level because, you know, it was a gradual awakening for me. You know, obviously I'm talking about the enthusiasm I felt spiritually when I first encountered the Latin Mass and as I got to know it at the end of my time in college. But it wasn't as if I had really studied extensively about the history of the liturgical reform. I hadn't read any Rotzinger. I hadn't compared the missiles to each other. I certainly hadn't compared the lectionaries. I mean, there was so much work yet to be done before I could come to the position that I have now that that is, you know, that is developed in this book and explained. You know, I try to explain things very clearly in a way to help people to get the benefits of my 30 plus years of thinking and reading about all this stuff. Right. So that, because not everybody is going to have that opportunity or that incentive or that, that, that, that ability or whatever to put all this stuff together. So that's why you write books, and this is why I'm writing books. But, but yeah, what happened is I left college. I went to graduate school in Washington, D.C. and in D.C. i was at Catholic University of America. Sometimes it was possible for me to get to Old St. Mary's where the Latin Mass used to be for many, many years. And I hope it will be again someday after this season passes. [00:43:19] Speaker B: Like I said, that's the first Mass. [00:43:21] Speaker A: But sometimes it was possible for me to get to Chinatown, to go to mass at Old St. Mary's but sometimes it wasn't. And I was stuck on campus. And I would go to the Latin chanted Novus Ordo in the crypt church of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, which they had every Sunday. I think it was at noon, if I'm not, if I'm remembering correctly. And you know, that was again, the unicorn. You know, it could, Nothing could have been. Nothing was wrong with it from a, from a nova sort of perspective from. But it's the, it was the best. It was the best that the nova sort of could be. And at the time, it was sort of like, well, okay, this, you know, this is in Latin. It's got chant. It's, you know, the priest is preaching. Well, you know what, why should I object to that or why should I boycott that? Right? So that, that was a sort of pragmatic situation. But then I went, I was hired to for my first teaching job and that was in Austria at the International Theological Institute in Gaming, Austria, where Steubenville also has a campus. You know, anybody who knows about the Steubenville Austrian program, that's where I was for seven and a half years. That institution, the ITI was very Byzantine in flavor. I mean, we had a Roman Rite chaplain. He was great. He celebrated the old Mass as well as the new Mass, but we, we always had Byzantine priests as well. And it was there that I started breathing with both lungs. You know, I began going regularly multiple times a week to the chanted Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom or Saint Basil or the liturgy of the pre sanctified gifts, depending upon the time of year. And you know, that was again, that was like a mind bending experience because if anybody, I mean, I always tell Catholics, like, if you've never been to an Easter liturgy, you need to go and visit one someday. Absolutely. Because. And I'm talking about the, I'm talking about the ones in union with Rome. You know, I'm not saying go to the Eastern Orthodox, I'm saying go to the Eastern Catholics, you know, Melkites, Marionites, Ukrainians, Ruthenians, you know, Cyro Malabar. I mean, however exotic I am, I. [00:45:24] Speaker B: Am a big proponent of going. In fact, that's what led me to the traditional Mass was I first went to the Eastern rites and you know, Eastern Catholic. There's a Melkite, you probably know the Melkite church there in McLean, Virginia. Holy transfiguration. I went there, you know, number of times every year when we lived in D.C. and oh my gosh, that's just one of the most beautiful liturgies in the world. I mean, you go, if you live in the, anywhere near D.C. area, go to Holy Transfiguration sometime in Plain, Virginia. I highly recommend it. [00:45:54] Speaker A: Yeah. So that experience of really getting into the, you know, I mentioned this book earlier once in future Roman. Right. That experience of, of attending regularly the, the Divine Liturgy. And I learned how to canter it because I'm a musical person. So I loved learning the psalm tones. It's all different. [00:46:08] Speaker B: Oh, that's awesome. I didn't know that. [00:46:10] Speaker A: But that's what led eventually after, after many years of reflection to this chapter, which is called Byzantine, Tridentine, Montinian, referring to Paul vi, Two brothers and a stranger. So what, what that, that immersion in the Eastern liturgy really helped me to see what are the fundamentals of all traditional liturgies and how does the Novus order depart from them. Right. And so I talked about. I'll just mention these really quickly. The principle of tradition, the principle of mystery, the principle of elevated mode, the principle of ritual integrity, the principle of density, the principle of preparation, the principle of truthfulness, the principle of hierarchy, the principle of parallelism, and the principle of separation. So what I. These are the things that I absorbed by this kind of comparison between the Tridentine and the Byzantine. And that gave me a new angle from which to understand the kind of deep structural defects of the Novus Ordo. You know, not just, oh, father's wearing a polyester drape, or the guitars are playing again, or, you know, just these kind of superficial things that everybody cringes about, but kind of like built into it, what's baked into it, what's in the DNA of the Novus Ordo, as opposed to the cosmetic level. So that. That experience with the Eastern liturgy was very profound, very formative for me, as it was for you. [00:47:35] Speaker B: You want to hear a real quick light bulb moment? It's. It's going to. Sound. Might sound stupid and it is, but it was a light bulb moment for me. So I had been to the Eastern Liturgies for years, loved them, but I never been to a Latin Mass. I went to that one Latin Mass at St. Mary's in D.C. and then I went in 2009, I remember it was for the Feast of Candlemas, and took my daughter. And they had a solemn Latin Mass at a parish somewhere in D.C. area. I can't remember where it was in Maryland, and it had tons of, like, seminarians there and stuff. Like, it was, it was, it was the whole works. And something struck me when, you know what I noticed? It was when the, the server kissed the. I can't remember if it was the hat, the Beretta, or if it was the. If it was something he. When he kissed the priest, you know, kissed it, a light bulb went off in my head because that's the. I was like, wait a minute, I've seen that before. Oh, I saw that at the, at the, at the Eastern Divine Liturgy. And like, I know that's like a tiny little. That's in a way a superficial thing, but that then just got my mind racing because all of a sudden I was like, wait a minute, that's I never have seen that ever in the Novus Ordo I've attended my whole Catholic life. But I said, so why is. Why is that one more like that? And then all of a sudden, I know. Then you start noticing other things, like, oh, wait a minute, they're facing away from us as well. Just like these. There's all these things you start to notice. And like, so your two brothers and a stranger did kind of start. I mean, like you. I take some time on these things before I. They all. But that was like a light bulb moment for me was the kissing of the hand. I mean, which is kind of silly. But that. That started me on the path. [00:49:14] Speaker A: Yeah, but I mean, that kind of experience could happen with many examples. For example, so, for instance, you know, if you go to a Byzantine liturgy and you see everybody sort of going up to receive communion and they crouch and open their mouths and the priest puts the communion into their mouth on a golden spoon, right? Only the pries, no lay people involved, right? That could get you thinking, you know, about communion in the mouth versus communion in the hand or when the priest goes behind the iconostasis. In the east, in many, at least many Eastern rites, there's an iconostasis, some kind of. Of literally a wall of icons. And. And in the, in the. Really, like the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches, it is a wall. You cannot see through it. Right. It's not like a grid with icons or something, you know, but. And they go for the consecration for the most solemn part of the Mass, the anaphora, the eucharistic offering. They go behind that screen and they close the doors, and you can't see anything. You can hear them singing, but you can't see anything. Right? And then when you go to the Latin Mass, okay, you can see the altar and the sanctuary and the priest, but you can't hear them, right. There's a sonic iconostasis, not a visual iconostasis. Then you start thinking about how, well, the east and west, as different as they are, they've come up with similar kinds of solutions in a way, right? To conveying the mysteriousness of the Divine Presence and the awe that we should have, you know, in the face of it. And, you know, there's. You've heard this. Everybody's heard this story, but I heard it first from the chaplain at ITI in Gaming. But he said, he told me, he said, you know, there's an old lady who once came up to a priest and said, father, when, when you were praying at Mass, I couldn't Hear you. And the priest said, well, madam, I wasn't talking to you. And so. And what? You know, when Catholics say something like, I can't hear the priest at the Latin Mass, I can't hear what he's saying. It's not about you. He's not talking to you, right? And in fact, the. The awe that develops when you realize we're in the presence of God and we all have to bow down on our faces in worship before him, in adoration. Then later on, you can catch up with the texts, you can read your missal, you can learn everything, and if you go often enough, you'll become familiar with all of that. But what's precious, what's vital, is that initial sense of the mystery and the awesomeness of God, that this is something that you don't just talk about. You don't just chat about this, you don't just broadcast this on a microphone over the speakers, right? I think that the. The Novus Ordo, what people don't realize, who are kind of immersed in that world, is how antithetical it is to the religious spirit and how antithetical it is to rituality and how antithetical it is to divine worship, divine adoration, right? It. It horizontalizes everything, it verbalizes everything, it broadcasts everything, Everything is. Is leveled down. And that's exactly what you don't see in any of the traditional liturgies. You know, you see hierarchy, you see separation, you see, you know, mysteriousness. Things you can't grasp, things you cannot understand, that you'll never understand, right? So. And that's the thing, right? Like with the Novus Ordo, you can't understand the transubstantiation. There's still a mystery there. But the whole mode of the liturgy is as if you should understand everything. So it. It's. And that's why, like, it's so bizarre when people say, I want to see the priest at the altar consecrating, I don't want his back turned to me. I always think, what are you seeing? You can't see transubstantiation, you know, I mean, the most important things are invisible. This is true in human life in general. Love is invisible, friendship is invisible. You can see the signs of it. But, you know, the fact that I have a rational soul, that's invisible, but you can see the signs of it because I'm alive and I'm talking and I'm thinking or whatever, but all the most important things are invisible, you know, and it just strikes me as there are. There are Paradoxes in the Latin Mass that are so powerful, like this point of the separation of the priest from the people, right? The priest is very much on his own. He's doing almost all of the work. He's way up there. He's got his back to you. You know, he, in a sense, doesn't care about you. You know, you might as well not be there. Right. This is very healthy both for communicating what the Mass is about and for communicating the essential difference between the ordained priesthood and the. And the baptized priesthood and for putting us humbly in our place. Right? We're not there to be catered to. We're not there to be lectured at. We're not there to be educated. That's not what worship is about, Right? [00:54:01] Speaker B: And what's funny is, is that the, the Novus Ordo is very focused on, like, it's very didactic, like educating people. Like, let's say everything. Let's make sure we explain everything, tell everything, say everything. I was just, last week, I was at. I was at a math, a Novus Ordo Mass. And I'm not going to say too many details, but why I was there or anybody, thing like that, but just I was at one. And the priest was a very good priest. I could tell from his homily, like in the, in the sense he was Orthodox, all that, but he interrupted eucharistic prayer three times to say, to make some point. And every one of the three points were actually legitimate. They were true, they were orthodox. But I was just like, father, this is not. I'm not. I'm not a catechism class right now. [00:54:49] Speaker A: Yes, yes. [00:54:50] Speaker B: And it's like, why are you, why are you saying this? And, but the one thing I will say is not really to disagree with you, but when you say it's not that Latin Mass isn't, like, educational, but that's the thing is, it's extremely educational in a symbolic, kind of deeper way, in the sense of when you see these things, like you just said, for example, the separation of the priests from the people, that naturally occurs in the traditional Mass, that is educating the people and the priests that there is a separation there. And so, like, but it's not like the priest gets up there and say, by the way, there's a separation between you and me. [00:55:26] Speaker A: It educates without. It educates without meaning to educate. [00:55:32] Speaker B: That's not the primary purpose of it. [00:55:34] Speaker A: It's doing what it's doing, namely focusing completely on God in worship. And as a result, it teaches us many lessons. Right? But those Lessons are. It's not didactic. It's not hitting you over the head like a, like a lesson planned, you. [00:55:46] Speaker B: Know, let's have our PowerPoint up here break down exactly. [00:55:50] Speaker A: Say, Eric, because there are so many, so many topics always that come up in these conversations. You know, we could just talk for hours about this stuff, and it's wonderful, really. But I feel like I should just close off my answer to your question. You were saying, how did it happen that for so many, for a couple of decades, I was going to both the old Mass and the New Mass. How did that happen, given the things that I'm saying? Well, for one thing, I was only the lights were going off, like gradually, you know, so it took me a while to get to the point that I'm at now. But more concretely and more, I guess, more practically speaking, I mean, I was always teaching for a school where the Novus Ordo was the normal liturgy for the school. So when the faculty went with the students to the all college Mass or the all school Mass, it was the Novus Ordo. And I was also always the choir director, or at least I had some hand in the, in the music at the iti. I had a hand in the music at Wyoming Catholic College. I was the choir director and the scola director. So it was my job to provide music for the Novus Ordo. Right. And I don't want to reduce it to, it was merely a job. I mean, obviously, when I went to the Novus Ordo and the priest elevated the host, I said, you know, my Lord and my God, I mean, I wasn't just doing it as a job, right? But it was my job and I wasn't going to get out of it, you know, and so I had to keep doing that. And in all of these places, the conditions were always optimal. That is to say, my job was to provide Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony and good English hymns. Right. I was never told to, to do the My Little Pony Mass or anything like that. You know, I just, I didn't have to deal with that garbage. So I had, I. Did I talk about this. I don't know if I mentioned it in close the workshop. I know I mentioned it somewhere else, probably in my book on music, good music, sacred music and silence. But, you know, for me, the choir loft was always a place of refuge because even at the Novus Ordo, I could go up into the choir loft and lose myself in the Gregorian chant, lose myself in the, in the, in the beautiful music. The choir was Singing. And in a way, I would say the music kind of saved the day, right? The music was the best part, at least from. From a. If you're talking about the human elements of the liturgy, that was the best part. I was pretty far from the sanctuary, you know, I could kind of check out in. In the musical world, you know, and. And so that. That helped me, to be honest. I did reach a point where I really didn't want to go to the Novus Ordo, where all these. These. These jarring differences between the old and the new, you know, were grievous to me. Like, they. Intellectually, they. They wounded me. They. They made me feel like something was wrong, you know, like, I think there is something wrong with. With what was done to the liturgy in the 60s and 70s. And. And so I had to kind of hold on to that music. That traditional sacred music was my lifeline. But, you know, I. As I say, I reached a point where I just. I couldn't really do that anymore. And it was, you know, it was divine providence that orchestrated an opportunity for me to break out of that, to become a freelance writer and publisher to do what I've been doing now for the past seven years. And now I don't need to have anything to do with the Novus Ordo. So that's the reason this is where. [00:59:04] Speaker B: I want to really. This is the part, you know, you've already established yourself as a crazy rad trad, so, you know, we're. We're good with that. Nobody can take that away from you. I want to get to this crux of matter because we both know a lot of people who, like, watch this podcast, they attend the Novus Ordo regularly. Maybe it's their only one. They attend or they. They do a lot or even somewhat. But you're going a step further. You're going the step that usually really offends a lot of Catholics, upsets a lot of Catholics, and that's basically. You just don't go to the Novus Ordo anymore. And you're basically saying in your book, nobody should in the sense that we should just get rid of it, chuck it, and go and just have the traditional Latin Mass. And this is something that I kind of feel like we need to be. We need the conversation, as they like to say in modern times, to be willing to. To bring up these topics, because I don't think we get forward if we just kind of like, oh, we. We got tiptoe through these controversial issues. So I want you to really. You've already kind of given a lot of the reasons leading up to this. But I want you just really from, you know, from what your argument from the book. People get the book to really know it, but why is it that you've just kind of gone full fledged, we just gotta chuck the Novus Ordo and we just got it? Because I don't usually, I don't. I'm not one who says that myself, and I'm pretty traditional and I'm like, you know, but you're like going all. You're going there. So give us your kind of, your take of why that is. [01:00:31] Speaker A: Sure, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, to be clear, I don't ever say in this book what I think is the best practical way to get out of this conundrum. That is, I don't say, here's what a future Pope should do and here's what his mod appropriate should look like. And on the first Sunday of Advent in 2030, you know, the Novus Order will stop being said and universally the Latin Mass will be put in its place. I mean, that's what Paul VI did. That was a horrible thing that he did because injured the souls of countless laity and clergy and religious, the way that he imposed the. The Novus Ordo. But so I don't make a practical suggestion about how that's going to happen. I do think, however, that if there were a truly laissez faire environment such as was developing under Sumorum Pontificum, that's why the progressives and the modernists and the liberals fear it so much and hated it and wanted to overturn it. But if you allowed Catholics to, as it were, go where the Spirit draws them, I think that the Latin Mass would just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger all the time. And it would happen also indirectly in that, you know, Father Z used this expression, the knock, the. The knock on effect. So as clergy, as younger clergy, became familiar with the traditional Roman Rite, it began to impact how they celebrated the Novus Ordo. Well, what that would do if you let it grow and you didn't try to artificially stop it, the way Pope Francis has tried to do is that it would. These young priests would get to a point where their Novus Ordo was so much like a Latin Mass that they'd say, what the heck? Why don't we just go, just do the full thing? I mean, like, you know, embrace the entire, you know, enchilada. Right? I mean, here, here we, we are, we're 9, you know, we're 75% of the way. Let's go 100 of the way. So I think that, in fact, that's what would hap have happened. And I believe, honestly, that a future Pope. I don't know if it's going to be the next Pope or the one after him, but I think a future Pope is going to abolish the Traditiones custodes framework. He's going to go back to something like Sumorum Pontificum, maybe even better. I really do believe that that's going to happen, because the generation that is so fiercely opposed to the recovery of the traditions of the Church is dying. They are a dying generation, and they don't have many replacements behind them, either biologically or ideologically. Okay, sorry, that was not the direct answer to your question. [01:02:53] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:02:53] Speaker A: But the direct answer is this. If you do a deep dive into the history of Sacrosanctum Concilium, which is what my first chapter is about, what you discover is that there were already liturgical revolutionaries, radicals of the liturgical movement, who were writing that document, steering it through the committee, getting it accepted at the Council. And all along, they knew they were going to do much, much more than what they told the Council Fathers. So there's a fundamental dishonesty about Sacrosanctum Concilium and about the reform that was done in its name, but often against its provisions. That was all planned, thoroughly planned. And Annabelle Bunini, I'm sorry, he is the villain in this case. I mean, that is. That is documented now by many, many historians. We have the. The primary sources. This is not a conspiracy theory. Okay? And as a friend of mine likes to say, if you had to create a villain, could you have come up with a better name than Annabelle Bonini? I mean, you can't. It's like a Mafioso name. But anyway, leave that aside. So there's something really fundamentally dishonest about the way that that was driven through and implemented. But the main rationale for the Church for the liturgical reform was that the old right was defective, that it had many problems. It was wrong in this way and that way and the other way. It had been corrupted in the Middle Ages by superstition. It had been corrupted in the Baroque period by courtly and kingly ceremonial. You know, it had been overlaid with. With generations of allegorical interpretations that didn't make any sense. It was not. It was remote from how the early Christians worshiped. I mean, you could. I give. I give a whole list of these arguments in my book of all the reasons why they Said it has to be revised, reformed, you know, they used these terms, but really more like scrapped and then replaced. And so half of this book is, is my going through in detail the things that, that people said had to be changed. This is, this was corrupt and had to be changed. And explaining why it's not corrupt, why it's a good idea, why it's a beautiful practice, why it's beneficial to us, especially today, and why we should keep it. So in other words, I, I, first I get rid of the case for reforming the old right. Okay, if you get rid of that case, then what you're left with is, oh, so there was nothing wrong with it to begin with. There's no need to change it. That's why people love it today. That's why traditional Catholics love it, because it's already perfect at doing what it's supposed to do, you know, so that's one half. Then the other half of the case is to say, let's go over now to the right of Paul vi, the Novus Ordo world. If you have, if you have damaged the rubrics as much as you have by, by stripping them down, if you have created a new lectionary that has all kinds of gaps in it, if you have created a new missile that has only 13% of the prayer content of the old missile left unchanged, if you have a smorgasbord of Eucharistic prayers, only one of which is traditional to the Roman rite, if you have, you know, I mean, I could go on and on. If you have all these problems that are engineered into the right itself, how, tell me how you're going to reform that. How are you going to make that better? The only way you could make that better is by such a radical overhaul that you might, that you'd be creating another new right. And then why not just go back to the old Latin right? You know, we have this, this right that was developed over, you know, over 1700 years of, of prayer in the Church. But then there's the even more subtle level that, okay, let's say you're content with the Novus Ordo with its, with its components, and all you think is necessary is that you have orthodox devout priests. You know, what does Father Z say? They're, they're doing the red and saying the black right. They're following the rubrics exactly. They're saying the text. They're not ad libbing, they're not performing, they're not doing any of this stuff. Wouldn't that be at least A temporary solution or a good enough solution. And I say no because. Because there's a spiritual danger in the Novus Ordo. The priest in the Novus Ordo is much more in charge of how the liturgy is going to be. In fact, he's, he is in charge of how the liturgy is going to be. He can choose options all along the way. Option A, option B, option C, he can say this in these or similar words. He can give a little mini homily here or here or here. All of that is in the rubrics of the Novus Ordo. He can use this music or that music. He can do chant or he can do My Little Pony Mass, whatever. I mean, it's all there, it's all open ended. It's like a bunch of modules that you can configure as you wish. And what that means is that the celebration of the Mass of the Novus Ordo is the personal accomplishment of the priest celebrant. It's the Mass that he wants, it's the Mass he chooses, it's his project. And therefore the reverent and devout Novus Ordo priest is as much the architect of that as is the liberal looney tunes clown mass dancing leotards priest. Okay? They're in charge of what, what comes about. And therefore the priest in that situation, he gets the reputation of, oh, Father so. And so he does such a reverent Novus Ordo, right? It, you know, and then this parish, this particular parish in the diocese. Oh, that's the parish where the Novus Ordo is done. Well, right. Do you see what I'm getting at here? It's very, it's very twisted because it's not just with the old mast. It's, you must do these 600 rubrics. You have to do it. It's ironclad. It's like a military operation. There's no room for creativity, no room for options, no room for the priest personality. It is what it is and that's what it is. Right? And with the Novus Ordo, it's a personal accomplishment. So I think the Reverend Novus Ordo is in some ways just as harmful, maybe even more harmful than an out of control Novus Ordo. [01:08:52] Speaker B: It would be interesting if somebody did a study. I don't know how you could do this, but you look at the history of unicorn masses over the past 30 or 40 years. How many of them stayed after the priests left, after the pastor left? Like, did they, did that parish continue? I mean, some place? I Imagine would like the dice. The bishop would be like, okay, we send our guy who does the Reverend Novus Order that parish when he comes along, because that's our Reverend Nova sort of, he wouldn't call it that. But you know, the conservative Novus Ordo parish, we send our priests, our conservative priests there. But it is interesting because it is very dependent upon the. And you hear the stories of these unicorn Masses. How did they start up? They start off because a priest who, you know, great intentions, orthodox, might be a very holy man. You know, I'm not questioning any of that said, okay. And sometimes it's also a matter of I think they're like, okay, what's the best I can do? In reality, I'm not allowed to do a traditional Latin Mass, so I'm going to do the best I can and it becomes the unicorn Mass. So I think though, like, so, so yeah, I think it's good that you started out by saying you're not giving practical suggestions of how it actually would happen. I tend, in fact, I was just talking to my recently a priest about this recently, the laissez faire kind of attitude. I think if it's allowed to happen, I think this is why certain people don't want it to happen, is it will lead to like, I think within 10, maybe 20 years in America at least, you have more Latin Mass going Catholics than Novus Ordo. If it was a true 100%, every priest, every parish with no restrictions whatsoever can offer the Latin Mass. Now, some of that is bad news in the sense that I think a lot of that would because simply the, the decreasing numbers at the Novus Ordo is so extreme these days. But then there'd be that flood into the Latin Mass parish as well. So. [01:10:49] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. And I think, you know, the point that you raised before is also something that I lean into quite a bit. So I'm really glad that you brought it up in this conversation. Namely that because the Novus Ordo leaves so much to the discretion of the priest and also so much to be determined by the parish council or the liturgy committee or the choir director or the bishop liturgy office. I mean, there are so many variables, right, and so many ways to configure it for good or for ill, that, you know, in a sense there are no 2Novus Ordo masses exactly alike, right? It's so varied, the landscape is so various that even the unicorn over here looks different from the unicorn over here because all the moving pieces are going to be configured In a different way. This, I think, is, it's both, it's both unstable in terms of the priest spiritual life and the, and the faithful spiritual life because they can't just go to any Catholic Church. That's the thing. You and I both know this. Wherever we are in the world, we can go to the traditional Latin Mass and get the same thing. You know, sure, it's going to be pronounced, the Latin will be a little bit different pronounced, whether it's a Polish priest or an African priest or an American priest, whatever, but essentially it's the same thing. And it always, and even in terms of like the rubrics and the whole, the whole way the liturgy goes is scripted, right? It's scripted. And therefore, you know, I've traveled all over the world and I have this blissful experience of just being able to enter into this timeless, eternal act of worship wherever I am. It's always the same with the Novus Order. You could go to two parishes in the same town and get something radically different, right? Or even two Masses on the same Sunday in the same parish can be radically different, right? This is the recipe for spiritual instability, spiritual indigestion, confusion, theological confusion. I mean, there are so many problems with this. And then, as you said, the priest, the devout conservative young priest, is yanked by the bishop. He's sent to some other boondocks place because maybe he's preaching against contraception or who knows what. And then they stick in some old liberal and he just wrecks in a matter of a couple of weeks everything that priest has been. And I know this so many times, I've heard people complain about this so many times. So I'm just saying the whole. The Novus Ordo is a mess. It's a gigantic cataclysmic mess. And the sooner we come to grips with that, the sooner we say it unvarnished. Just the. This is the truth. There is no way to fix this thing. It's like an out of control experiment that has to be shut down. You shut it down, you say, thank God we did that experiment. It didn't turn out the way that it was expected by the people who designed the experiment. Perhaps, who knows, maybe some of them did expect it to turn out this way. And we're just going to go back to the tried and true what absolutely works, what missionized the entire globe. That's what we're going to, we're going to stick with. [01:13:43] Speaker B: Now, I want to talk about something. Probably the last thing we'll talk about. We'll see uh, that is, I think in some cases, this talk, this discussion we're having, it depresses some Catholics because they don't have access to the traditional Latin Mass. And so they have to go to. They go to the local parish, they find the best one, and it just. But they know they've had enough experience. They know. It's like, I know you're not giving practical advice in the book and things like that. It's more a matter of just like, this is what we should be. What we should be thinking, but what does somebody like that do? I mean, what can they do? [01:14:21] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah. I mean, I do, actually. Well, I do in a couple of. [01:14:26] Speaker B: Priests at one point, like, what they can do. But, like, what about this? The lay person who has no control. [01:14:32] Speaker A: I think that in a couple of places, I might go into that to some extent. But basically, I think that there are a few points that we need to look at. The first is that any Catholic anywhere can integrate more of the traditional liturgy into his own devotional life. The main way that that can happen is through the Divine office, through the Breviary. You know, if you get. I mean, I'll just. I'm a Benedictine Oblate, so I pray the. The monastic breviary. It's a very. I don't have a copy right to hand, but it's a very convenient little book. It's called the monastic diurnal. It's just one. One little volume. It's got all of the daytime hours. That is everything but matins, everything but the night office. That. That has it. That's a huge office. So it takes a lot more space. So you can get all the day offices in one little book. And, you know, when I get up in the morning, I pray prime, the office of prime. It's a beautiful office. Beautiful psalms. It's very rich. It's the traditional liturgy, right. We have to remind ourselves that the traditional liturgy is not just the Mass. Mass, it's also the divine office. It's also the other sacraments. So that's one bit of advice that I always give to people. Stay close to traditional devotions. The. The breviary, if you can, the rosary, the Angelus, you know, you can start doing some of those in Latin. You can teach them to your children. You can chant the. The Marian antiphons, you know, Regina Cheli, Avi Regina, Chaylor Regina, etc. You know, there are resources for all of these things that make it very easy to do that. So you're. You try to bring tradition into your home. And into your heart when you can't find it in your neighborhood. That's, that's the first bit of advice that I would give. [01:16:13] Speaker B: And I just want to, real quick, just add on to that Divine Office that was, that has a deep impact on your spirituality. Because I pray the liturgy hours, you know, whatever they call it, the Novus Ordo version, whatever, for about 10 years. And then I switched over to the Divine Office and I just pray one or two officers a day, usually LODs. And, and sometimes I'll, I might do, you know, the, the sext or something like that, you know, a daytime one. And it really is amazing the difference. I mean, it's, it, until you do it, you don't really, because I, the colics, obviously, and just the way it's all structured. I mean, just. Here's just one example. For Lent, like every single day, the colic mentions abstinence or fasting almost, almost in. During Lent. And it does not in the, the new Liturgy of the Hours. I mean, we'll mention sometimes it might allude to it, but it really is more just, just, you know, help us God type of thing. But this is like, you know, take our fast, our, you know, encourage, you know, help us in our abstinence to be giving up a sin too. And so, you know, it's like a real, like hitting you over the head with a two by four, like, get with it, boy. [01:17:23] Speaker A: Yeah. No, in fact, I mean, this has been, this was demonstrated by Lauren Pristis in her famous book on the collects of the Roman Missiles, that, that fasting was removed from, from all but one or two prayers in the Novus Ordo missal. And it's there almost every day in the, in, in the old, the traditional Lent. And you know, what's interesting about that is it's, it's a perfect illustration of the problem. The liturgical reformers in the 1950s already were saying, you know, the kind of people who are excited about changing the liturgy. They were saying, look, nobody's fasting anymore. What are we supposed to do? And they had two choices. They could have said, let's reaffirm fasting. Let's teach about it. Let's have a papal encyclical about it. Let's have bishops really promote this. Let's have practical instruction, you know, given. Like, here's a pamphlet to give out to every single Catholic in the world. Here's how you fast, you know, whatever they, you know, or we can just get rid of all the prayers that mention fasting because, well, modern man doesn't fast anymore. Well, that's what they did. They just got rid. It's like we just erased this whole part, this, this unanimous ancient part of the Christian tradition which the east still practices right to our shame. We just deleted it because it didn't fit with modern Western concepts anymore. I'm sorry, but that's completely ridiculous. I mean, that is, that is, that is beneath contempt. Right? I. I mean, I can. Look, I'm. I'm friends with a lot of Eastern Orthodox people and also a lot of Byzantine Catholics. And they have a hard time not making fun of us when they see things like that. They're like, are you guys, Are you for real? I mean, and, and then the Orthodox can just say, well, that you guys are obviously not the true church, because the true, true church would never stop fasting the way that the apostles and all their successors did. Okay, sorry, that's a digression. So the next bit of advice I would give to Catholics in that situation is try to go sometimes to a traditional liturgy. You know, if you can't go all the time, I know people will go once a month or they'll, or they'll make a retreat or they'll go on a vacation where they can, you know, go to daily mass somewhere, you know, at the institute or the Fraternity of St. Peter or whatever. You know, it's, it's actually a really. It's so important for our spiritual life that we should take those kind of steps, you know, for our own, for our own benefit and for the benefit of our families. The third thing I say is of course harder, but I do encourage people to think about moving, think seriously about moving. And it is hard for two reasons. One is that people have their families in a certain area that they don't want to be far from. They have their jobs, maybe they can't get out of the job. Maybe they own a company. I mean, there are all these sorts of situations that really glue people to a certain spot. But there are also people who are not glued to a certain spot spot in that way or who could detach themselves from it without too much difficulty and maybe go somewhere else in the same state or to the next state or something like that, so that they're not too far away from, from their friends and family. You know, it's difficult one, for that one reason, but also it's difficult because in the post traditiones custodes world, you have to be very careful where you move to. And I think it's at this time again, you know, I Could be wrong in six months. I hope not. But at this time it seems like a safe bet to go where the Institute of Christ the King or the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter is located because those places are very well supported by the bishops. You know, those or those orders are strong, they're numerous. They've got, you know, they've got their tentacles, so to speak, in the best possible way, you know, in a lot of places. And so if you're going to a place like that, you're getting a dedicated traditional Roman rite parish, 24 7, you know, full service Latin parish. It's not just the Mass on Sundays, it's the Mass every day of the week. It's traditional confession, you know, marriage, funerals, baptisms, you know, all that stuff. Confirmations usually, even, even to this day. So that's what, that's where I, I think you know, that I know families who have pulled up tent stakes and tent pegs and they've moved to go to be by a fraternity or an istu parish and they, they typically say it was the best thing we ever did. Like it's completely transformed our lives as Catholics also because you just meet a ton of like minded families, lots and lots of families like your own. Whereas you might be kind of a sore thumb or like you kind of stick out where you're at. Maybe you're the only one wearing a veil, you know, in your Novus Ordo parish if you're a lady. But you go to the institute parish and suddenly it's an ocean of women wearing veils. So I, I think that anyway these are, these are some bits of advice that people can, can take. [01:21:58] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's great and I think it's, I, I just, I know people get discouraged sometimes and, and I do think I'm actually optimistic. I don't know about you, but I'm optimistic about the future of the church. And I say that with full knowledge of everything going on. Full knowledge that there is some people who are very much at odds with the traditional at Mass, with, with frankly Catholicism, you know, in some high ranks in the Church. I just feel like though it, it, I mean this is, I, I always hesitate to me it's this analogy, but it's a little bit crass. But I do think like the free market of, of of liturgy so to speak does, will lead to a. You just can't hold it down. It's like you can do everything you can. I mean, because the truth is if the traditional at Mass could have been completely abolished it would have been in the 70s. I mean, that's just a reality. That's, that is probably historically that was the, the, the, the, the, the most precarious time, not now, but back then. And because at that point everybody, almost everybody except for a few souls, believed it was actually abolished. [01:23:05] Speaker A: Yes, that's right. [01:23:06] Speaker B: Like, you know, that, that's, that's a, I mean, that's, that's just huge. So the fact that it wasn't, didn't fall away. I think, you know, that that's, I think that tells us something. I think something. [01:23:18] Speaker A: And, and similarly, back in the, in the early 70s, really, throughout the 60s, there was still a lot of ultramontanist capital that the Church could draw upon. What I mean by that is most Catholics had this instinct that we have to obey the Pope. We have to do what the Pope is saying. And I think, I mean, if you have a good Pope who's in line with tradition, then that's a healthy instinct. But since that time, we've had enough rocky experiences, especially in the past 12 years, to be able to see that, no, actually we, we need to be obedient in an intelligent way. And if, if your, if your commander tells you to do something suicidal, you don't do it or you find a different way to fulfill the commandment that, you know, that is, is not suicidal, you know. And so it seems to me that now there's just more of a sense of, oh, tradition is an immense good. In fact, not just immense good, but, you know, an indispensable good. We cannot live without this. And so even if high ranking prelates are going to attack it, that's not going to dissuade us. That's not going to deter us from defending it. We can see that we know better than they do about all kinds of other issues in the secular world and also in the Catholic social teaching and marriage and family and whatever. So if they're wrong about so many of those things, why couldn't they be wrong about this other thing too? Right? So in a way, it's sad. It's a sign of the breakdown of authority and the breakdown of structure. But that's just the modern West. The modern west is a mess, right? And so the Church is reflecting that messiness. The Catholic response to it is not to contribute to the mess, but to try to reintroduce order and structure and virtue. Right? And to do that intelligently, not like an automaton. Right? So this is, this is what we're, I mean, it puts it Puts a lot more responsibility on lay Catholics than ever before. You know, Vatican II wanted the age of the laity, right? They wanted us to embrace. You know, they. I mean, and. And here we are, you know, many people like us. We're taking our faith very seriously, and we're trying to nourish ourselves and our families on what works and what's proven and tried and true. And, you know, and then we have prelates fighting against us. It's a bizarre situation. We just have to accept the bizarreness of it and not get discouraged by that. [01:25:36] Speaker B: You know, I would encourage people to get this book, close the workshop. I would also say if. If you are somebody who is very much a reform of. The reform person, really believe that that's. That's the path forward is just to reform the nose or. First of all, God bless you for listening to us for an hour and a half and not turning it off. I admire you, first of all, but I would especially encourage you to get the book because it's. I think it's. Like I said, it's a conversation needs to be had. I think we need to be very open and blunt about our positions. And I think Peter does a great job here of just kind of laying out why the old Mass isn't broken and the new Mass can't be fixed, as the subtitle says. So I obviously put a link to the. The. The book in the show notes so people can easily access it. But where else can people find the stuff that you're. That you're doing, Peter? [01:26:28] Speaker A: The main place nowadays is my substack, Tradition and Sanity. So please head on. Head over and check that out. I'm. I'm happy to say it's the. It's the number 22 substack in the world for religion, for. [01:26:41] Speaker B: For. [01:26:41] Speaker A: In the category of faith and spirituality. It's. It's only. The only ca. There are only a couple of Catholic substacks ahead of it, including the pillar. So I've. We've got a little ways to go before. Before the. [01:26:53] Speaker B: Okay, tell me, what are the Catholic ones ahead of you besides the pillar? [01:26:56] Speaker A: Oh, gosh, I think. [01:26:58] Speaker B: Who's the competition here? [01:26:59] Speaker A: Emily Stimson. Is that. [01:27:01] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah, Emily. I know her. Yeah, yeah. [01:27:03] Speaker A: And there might be one or two others, but there aren't that many. Most of them are like apocalyptic Protestant ravings, like prophetic, you know, prophecy stuff. And there's a bunch of Zionism things. And. And there's like a bunch of religion for bad people. Like. Like religion for lazy people. You know, this kind of. There's there. So it's like this miscellaneous category. So anyway, we're on. We're on the charts here. [01:27:26] Speaker B: You have not had that sub for that long. Just like a couple years. Is that right? [01:27:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm coming up on the second anniversary. [01:27:32] Speaker B: Okay, very good. Okay. Definitely link to that. So. And check that out as well. And you're also on Facebook and on. And on X and. And places like that. And. [01:27:39] Speaker A: And all the places I said I would never go. [01:27:43] Speaker B: I always. I just want to say I really. I appreciate how much you share crisis articles, and I, I love it when you share them too. And you're even like, you know, I don't really agree with this part, but I like, you know, and like, I think that's great. I. I do. I do appreciate you doing that. So. But thanks also for coming on the program, Peter. I really. It's great. As always, there's a reason why you're my number one guest as far as how often you. You get on here. So I. And. And again, this is. This is great. [01:28:08] Speaker A: Much appreciated. Thanks, Eric. [01:28:10] Speaker B: Okay, everybody, until next time. God love.