In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Naturally, in. the current controversy over Traditionis Custodes , it's important to understand our fellow Catholics on the other side of the issue. Yesterday's post by Fr Hunwicke , while it seems simple on the surface, carries two subtexts that lead to a deeper understanding of his, and traditionalists', mindset. It begins, I have always had a soft spot for S Anne, not least because she is the Patron of my wife's college at Oxford (we sent two of our children there) . . . In his thumbnail, he says he himself has been Senior Research Fellow at Pusey House in Oxford. But just so we're all on the same page, for those of us in the US at least, you need to substitute Yale, or possibly Princeton, for Oxford. Yalies in particular never let you forget they've been to Yale; two recent examples are Glenn Reynolds, whose actual intellectual mentors are Ayn Rand and Hugh Hefner, and Michael Medved, who lost his radio show when his NeverTrumpism became too boring e...

Yesterday's post at Fr Hunwicke's blog is another that invites further analysis. It begins: Dear Father Thank you for your email about whether you are bound in conscience to adhere to Traditionis Custodes. The answer is No; certainly Not; and No. My first reaction is that he's making a big deal in public about how priests apparently seek him out for advice on issues of conscience. In this, he's echoing Fr Z, who even now apostrophizes colleagues on his blog to the effect of "Fathers: Remain steadfast" blah blah blah. Fr Z's issue is that, by trying to pull a fast one on the local bishop, he lost his faculties and is unlikely to get new ones anywhere else. Why would any priest take Fr Z's advice on anything? If Fr Z had behaved with ordinary prudence, he likely would have been able to continue celebrating Latin masses in the Diocese of Madison, given the bishops' wide discretion under Traditionis Custodes. Now, he can't say it anyw...

When I was a lot younger, I had a friend who was an aspiring comic (he wound up working for American Greetings writing gag lines, so he had talent). I used to go to his routines on amateur night at the comedy clubs to support him, so I wound up learning a little about the business. One thing a comic has to do is put his best material up front and time it so the audience gets into the habit of laughing. Then he puts the not-so-funny stuff into the mix, and even if the joke is just "it rained last Tuesday", the audience still laughs. Fr Hunwicke, as far as I can tell, is thought in some quarters to be funny. His problem is he ran out of good material years ago, but he keeps posting the C-minus stuff, day in, day out. Let's look at a random recent post, the one he had up yesterday, Der Fuehrerbefehl . A Fuehrerbefehl is an order from the Fuehrer, viz, Hitler. I assume he's drawing some sort of parallel between that and a motu proprio . ROTFL, huh? But then he starts o...

Heavy-duty Catholic George Weigel thje other day described Traditionis Custodes as “theologically incoherent, pastorally divisive, unnecessary” and “cruel.” Msgr Charles Pope issued a cri de coeur, which seems subsqently to have been edited to "cry from the heart" : I must say that I am grieved and stunned by this document and the letter to the bishops that accompanied it. I think not so much of my own potential loss but of the many Catholics I have served who love the extraordinary form. For so long and in so many places they have often been treated harshly and have been marginalized for their love for the form of the liturgy that most of the saints knew. The Remnant editorialized : Francis is also obsessed with crushing the tiny remnant of believers left in a world of universal apostasy because he is a globalist tool. He has locked down Summorum Pontificum because like a crucifix to a vampire, the old Catholic liturgy threatens the diabolical New World Order t...

Most of the reaction to Traditionis Custodes I've seen in Catholic media has been negative, almost always tied to deep, and I would say knee-jerk, suspicion of Pope Francis. I don't think anyone can dispute that this is the case. This leads me to a basic question: how would I address any concerns I had about Francis in the confessional? Option 1: "Bless me, Father, I have sinned. I have attended a novus ordo mass, eleven times. I have received the sacrament standing, in the hand, eleven times. I was tempted to agree with Pope Francis in his statements on faith and morals, more times than I can count. I changed my mind on the death penalty after reflection based on remarks by our priests and his revision of the Catechism. I am sorry for these and all my sins." Option 2: "Bless me, Father, I have sinned. I have unconsciously adopted the idea that Catholics who don't attend the Latin mass aren't good Catholics. I have spread the opinion that the pope ...

Does Dr Fauci seem a little tired, even distracted, in the photo above? I'm beginning to think so. He's now been fighting the public gain-of-function question for six months, when he'd spent almost all of 2020 trying to keep it from coming out at all. And notwithstanding his efforts, the word is out that An increasing number of senior administration officials engaged in a probe of the virus are now backing the theory that the virus could have emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to a CNN report. However, Dr Fauci is still on the side of the natural origin theory . No wonder, the obvious question, which nobody is quite putting in the terms it ought to be asked, is that a so-far unknown amount of money, almost certainly in the hundreds of millions, from the US government, incuding Defense, State, and the NIH, went to the Wuhan lab to fund gain-of-function research. The claim was that this was to prevent future epidemics. Instead, a lab leak fro...

As I predicted Sunday mornimg, there was no mention of Traditionis Custodes in that day's masses at our novus ordo parish, nor would there be any reason to mention it. Our pastor has sent no e-mails to reassure us of anything. We have a reverent OF celebration that includes professional vocalists with a small orchestra and a full organ. It's mostly all back from the lockdowns. Nobody is threatening it, and it appears that the archdiocese smiles on our rectory. A visitor sent me the image above, which is a social media message an ordinariate priest sent to his little group, as yet still a considerable distance from being a parish. Unlike our successful parish, clearly unthreatend by Traditionis Custodes , Francis's letter is clearly the one thing that's on their minds, notwithstanding they aren't a Latin mass parish and are no more threatened than ours. In fact, the priest goes on to say the Holy Father is "deeply, distressingly un pastoral". Just him, ...