Fr Hunwicke And Standup Comedy

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 off,

Many of you will be too young to remember the infamous events of 1962. They led to famine and public disorder; to mobs of crazed people jostling in the streets as they struggled in the queues to register for their unemployment benefit and for hand-outs of public foodstuffs. Gaunt and famished, in country after country the hungry men, driven to despair, protested in the only way they knew. The barricades ... the street massacres ...

The cruel decree Veterum Sapientia had ordered the sacking of thousands of men, and some women, from Catholic seminaries throughout the world. Papa Roncalli, "Good Pope John XXIII" as he had ironically been called, in full consciousness of His authority, Decreed and Commanded eight important rules. Rule 5 ordered that the major sacred sciences should be taught in Latin, that the professors of these sciences in universities or seminaries be required to speak Latin and to make use of textbooks written in Latin.

So my reaction was. "huh? wha?" Fr Hunwicke's timing was way off, first a Hitler joke that wasn't funny and then a pedantic detour into the alternate universe that had nothing to do with the Hitler joke. By the next paragraph, we learn this has something to do with "Good Pope John XXIII" (clearly uttered with a sneer), who is being characterized as something between Hitler and an out-of-touch fuddy-duddy. The general idea might work for a speaker trying to warm up a Klan meeting, but the references are too obscure, and the tone is too preciously literary, so it won't even work for the Klan, though comparing a pope to Hitler isn't a good strategy for Catholics, either.

(In fact, I went to Veterum Sapientia and found most of it unexceptionable):

As is laid down in Canon Law (can. 1364) or commanded by Our Predecessors, before Church students begin their ecclesiastical studies proper they shall be given a sufficiently lengthy course of instruction in Latin by highly competent masters, following a method designed to teach them the language with the utmost accuracy.

Fr Hunwicke himself affects a level of erudition that would only look down on anyone not fully competent in Latin. It would seem that, leaving his immediate personal agenda aside, there's little for him to disagree with otherwise here.

In fact, it appears there's little discussion on the web covering this particular constitution and its history, but it actually seems like an interesting case and worthy of real investigation, not summary dismissal. But we're back to Fr Hunwicke's alternate universe:

In Argentina, no bishop was more rigorous than Bishop Bergoglio in enforcing the decrees of S John XXIII. If ever he heard of a seminary professor giving a single lecture in Spanish rather than Latin, he was instantly on the phone demanding that the man be sacked. He had the reputation of being the strictest bishop in Latin America in implementing Veterum Sapientia.

Of course, nothing like this actually took place, and Hunwicke's point is obscure. A rhetorical journey ino the alternate universe must be apt. The problem for the metaphorical structure here is that Hitler is likened to John XXIII is likened to Francis, but the result is that the three figures merge into a single raging apocalyptic fuddy-duddy, which doesn't work. Wouldn't it be even a little easier to say flat-out that the Bishops of Rome are the Antichrist? There's a problem here, because a certain no-Popery is lurking behind this whole metaphor. Once you accept one pope as Hitler, you open Pandora's box. The nicest thing you can say about Hunwicke's argument is that it's shallow and puerile.

But then he gets to his overall point:

Our privilege today, in 2021, is that we are being given a very similar opportunity for total and unthinking obedience, Jesuit style. Pope Francis possesses precisely and exactly the same authority as S John XXIII. When he decrees the extermination of the Old Mass, that decree comes to us with precisely and exactly the same force as the requirement of S John XXIII that all Priestly Formation in seminaries should be done entirely in Latin ... er ... except that possibly a motu proprio may not have ...um ... quite the authority of an Apostolic Constitution ... er ... . I wouldn't know about that sort of thing; I'm only a 'convert'.

For starters, he makes two inaccurate assertions, or suggestionis, or whatever they are. He claims Francis "decrees the extermination of the Old Mass", which he clearly didn't; nobody says that. Nor (since I went back and read Veterum Sapientia) did John XXIII decree that "all Priestly Formation in seminaries should be done entirely in Latin", he wanted only the theology courses in Latin.

But here's the problem. Fr Hunwicke clearly doesn't like John XXIII; after all, he called the Second Council. He clearly doesn't like Francis, he's a tool of the globalists or something. But he likes Benedict XVI, because he issued Summorum Pontificum and Anglicanorum coetibus. So his point is that we should follow one set of apostolic constitutions/motu proprios but not another, apparently based entirely on whether he likes the pope involved.

This is meaningless. But more important for the point here, it isn't even funny. It's a lot of unfunny stuff inserted in the routine, when he hasn't got the audience into the habit or either laughing or nodding assent.

BOOO! GET BETTER MATERIAL!

The Big Boo-Hoo

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 to which Francis has signed on.

This level of over-the-top indignation from priests and Catholic laity hasn't been seen, frankly, since the Viet Nam war. Meanwhile, the US bishops and the UK Latin Mass society have said the result of Traditionis will likely end up as a series of relatively minor adjustments. From the latter:

Pope Francis’ new decree restricting the traditional Latin Mass can be interpreted in such a way that it is “perfectly reasonable” for bishops to allow existing arrangements for celebration of the older form of the Roman rite to continue in their dioceses, and for lay faithful to continue attending such Masses.

. . . The principal feature of Francis’ apostolic letter is to reassign to bishops the power to restrict celebration of the older Mass, giving an ordinary “the exclusive competence to authorize the use of the 1962 Roman Missal in his diocese.”

But in its guidance, the Latin Mass Society notes that in insisting on the role of the bishop as the “moderator of the liturgy” in his diocese, the decree “is not making any innovation or investing bishops with special authority” but merely reiterating “the existing legal situation.”

So why are even normally responsible Catholic spokesmen getting so weepy about Traditiones? Especially since, as in our novus ordo parish, Francis's move went unnoticed. The big issue, if any, was that we had to wear masks again last Sunday, and frankly, I think that was far more important. For our parish, what happened with Latin mass was about as relevant as whether the new street cleaning schedule affected parking in Hackensack.

I've had a hard time finding good numbers on how many Latin mass Catholics there are. The closest I've come is this piece from several years ago:

[C]ompare the 489 Latin Mass parishes to the 17,000 total. While the 489 are not all contained within the 17,000 number (the SSPX parishes are not, for example), if they were, they would make up less than 0.003% of the total. An estimated 100,000 faithful attend the Latin Mass every week, traditionalists have much larger families than pro-contraceptive N.O. families (at least that’s what the data suggest), and the youth do seem to have a much higher preference for tradition than previous generations, but 100,000 is not a large population when you consider that 556,418 Confirmations took place in the previous year.

The reasoning is vague, and it makes unjustified assumptions. It refers, for instance, to "pro-contraceptive N.O. families". This seems to imply that novus ordo Catholics, or at least those in families, are all pro-contraceptive. But our novus ordo parish makes it plain that it will not marry a couple in the Church unless they complete a course in natural family planning. This is the sort of knee-jerk assumption, from a group that's far from a majority even among faithful Catholics, that I find offensive.

The question I have is why the leaders of the boo-hoo contingent completely ignore the passage in the letter accompanying Traditionis:

A final reason for my decision is this: ever more plain in the words and attitudes of many is the close connection between the choice of celebrations according to the liturgical books prior to Vatican Council II and the rejection of the Church and her institutions in the name of what is called the “true Church.”

What's disturbing is that the more fervent Latin mass apologists, like a couple of those above, simply make Francis's point for him by calling hjim a "globalist tool" and doubling down on the attitude he criticizes. But another problem is that Catholics who ought to be more responsible are twisting their tissues and dabbing their eyes on cue. My guess is that the journalists who contacted them somehow goaded them into making statements that I think are extreme. It would be more disturbing if people like Weigel and Msgr Pope made them on their own initiative.

My guess is that if I went to any of our priests, outlined my concerns, and asked what I should do, among their recommendations (which would include to pray about it and listen), would be to continue to speak out and act where appropriate. This I will likely do.

I'm told, for instance, that I had a great deal of influence in the old blog on the North Anmerican ordinariate's policy on certain priests. Maybe I should take on Fr Hunwicke. Frankly, I think his ordination was a grave error. The North American ordinariate had the good sense to correct some such errors and modify its stance toward other such priests. I find that if I put my mind to it, I can make a difference now and then. I do think something needs to be done in some of these areas.

More Thoughts On The Reaction To Traditionis Custodes

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 is a heretic. I have spread the opinion that the Second Council was not valid. I am sorry for these and all my sins."

It occurs to me that almost any priest (excluding some real jerks I know in the ordinariate) would be tempted to laugh me out of the confessional for Option 1, but would actually try a patient explanation, given the time available, of what the Catholic Church is about, but again considering the time available, maybe even suggest either counseling or a return to confirmation class. He would almost certainly find it problematic that such a person would be thinking perfectly good things are sins, while quite possibly neglecting a more thorough examination of conscience over things like pride that he thinks are not.

The second option, it seems to me, would reflect a more authentic examination of conscience over matters like pride, gossip, and scandal. I would imagine that just about any priest, again excluding those jerks in the ordinariates, would be happier to hear Option 2 than Option 1.

Actually, considering what I've been seeing in social media -- heck, not just in social media, in respectable Catholic blogs and web sites -- I'm feeling more and more offended by the aspersions that traditionalists now even more vehemently cast on me and the great majority of other Catholics who attend and are well fed by novus ordo parishes and masses. It's not much different from the elites who now routinely insult me by claiming I'm a racist. It's poisoning the atmosphere.

In fact, I probably need to bring my own reactions to this up the next time I go to confession.

Let's look at the dynamic here. The Vatican II constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium, which at Bp Barron's recommendation I just read, decreed "a general restoration of the liturgy" so that

For this purpose the rites are to be simplified, due care being taken to preserve their substance; elements which, with the passage of time, came to be duplicated, or were added with but little advantage, are now to be discarded; other elements which have suffered injury through accidents of history are now to be restored to the vigor which they had in the days of the holy Fathers, as may seem useful or necessary.

This document, the product of an ecumenical council, is as authoritative as you can find in the Catholic Church. If you have problems with it, you have problems with being a Catholic. So to get around it, those who object criticize what emerged as the novus ordo liturgy. Just today, someone sent me material about Annibale Bugnini, the head of the commission that produced the new mass and a longtime bete noire among traditionalists.

The point seems to be that Bugnini was politically adept and even something of a schemer, and not all the bishops liked him -- even Paul VI got tired of him. I don't understand. In Acts, we learn that St Paul didn't get along with St Mark at all and didn't want to travel with him. How does this undermine the New Testament? This sort of thing happens among human beings. As someone who's had to get even small-scale stuff done at work, I've learned you have to have political skills, even to revise a technical manual. How much more do you need to revise the mass? The Church nevertheless comes out of it.

Wikipedia quotes Michael Sean Winters:

Aficionados of the old rite like to talk about how that rite uniquely conveys the sense that each Mass is a part of the one eternal sacrifice of Christ […] If the Eucharist is, as Vatican II taught, the source and summit of the Catholic faith, then we know that when the celebration of the Eucharist fails to serve the unity of the church, something is wrong, and it isn't ever the fault of him whose sacrifice we commemorate.

I've got to say that the traditionalists' tone in this discussion, often doubling down on the position that Vatican II was not authorized to change the liturgy, or that Francis is a heretic, is driving me away from that group and only confirms the impression I'd developed that Anglicanorum coetibus was an intiative as flawed as Summorum Pontificum. I'm with Francis on this one. And I'm a conservative guy.

The Problem With COVID Now Is The Lies

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 from this research seems to have caused the kind of worldwide epidemic it was supposed to prevent. So what if the Chinese are stonewalling? We have almost all the answers we need from Drs Fauci, Collins, Daszak, Baric, and I'm sure many more right here in the US. It's looking more and more as if the US public health establishment was complicit via its "experts" in causing the epidemic. Isn't this the sort of thing that would normally call for a national commission, like the Kennedy, Watergate, Church, and 9/11 investigations? So far, not a peep.

Meanwhike, the same public health establishment can't understand why not everyone wants to take the vaccine. They blame anti-vaxxers, but people are smarter than that. In this case, they maybe aren't geniuses, but they're still smart enough to grasp that there's just something hinky about the whole received COVID narrative, and whether they're right to refuse the vaccine, they're certainly right to question what figures like Fauci are telling them, because Fauci is clearly telling lies. This isn't helping the country, and if the public health establishment wants credibility for more vaccinations, it's time to drop Fauci.

(At this point, they'd answer that if they drop Fauci, then everyone will know they were lying, and even fewer will take the jab. But that's just another problem they've created. Crisis management consultants are long overdue.) A good sign of how the problem has aged is that Fauci, tired and on the defensive, is definitely losing his cool. Rand Paul confronted him again yesterday:

Paul detailed the evidence that he claims proves that experimentation on gain of function research was happening at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and quotes the doctor who did this work on both her work and on the amount of funding she received from the NIH.

"Knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11 where you claim that the NIH never funded gain of function research in Wuhan." Paul asked Fauci.

"Senator Paul," Fauci began, "I have never lied before the Congress and I do not retract that statement. This paper that you are referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain of function."

Paul interrupted, "You take an animal virus, and you increase its transmissibility to humans, you're saying that's not gain of function?" He asked incredulously.

"That is correct," Fauci defended, "and Senator Paul you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly, and I want to say that officially: You do not know what you are talking about."

P:aul told Sean Hannity last night,

I will be sending a letter to the DOJ asking for a criminal referral because he has lied to Congress. We have scientists that will line up by the dozens to say that the research he was funding was gain-of-function.

This is nothing but an empty gesture, of course, since a request for a referral will get nowhere in the Biden Justice Department. But it's worth asking this kind of question about the public narrative, because there's a fairy-tale quality to the whole thing. Now LA County is responding to the rise in cases among the unvaccinated by requiring everyone to mask up again -- when a year of evidence based on hundreds of millions of subjects shows that masks have no effect.

To what extent is the general atmosphere of lies intended to obscure a big truth? As Rand Paul told Hannity,

Once everybody puts this together, he realizes where the blame is going to attach. He has at least tangential responsibility. If this came from the lab that he was funding, my goodness, can you imagine the moral culpability the man has?

Not just Fauci, of course. There's an institutional rot that needs to be addressed much more widely than just in the NIH.

More Fallout From Traditionis Custodes And The Pope's Letter

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 unpastoral". Just him, of course. Not speaking as a priest at all. But, er, Father, why did you use the official group mailing list to express your opinion? You're a priest 24/7. Were the Chicago priests who got busted for hanky-pank in a Miami rental car near a school acting only in their personal capacity, not as priests? Appears Cdl Cupich didn't think so. This is one reason I would not go within a mile of the ordinariate for any pastoral function, its standards for ordination are distressingly low, and we see it over and over, as we see it here.

Beyond that, I went back to the letter and re-read it carefully. Catholic commentators that I took seriously in good faith when I started as a Catholic, like Msgr Charles Pope, have called its tone "harsh", but I just don't see this. Where does Francis call anyone names? Where does he scold anyone? Where does he use abrasive or profane language? Where does he not give full explanations, fully footnoted, for his action, referring to scripture and Church authorities, in particular the Vatican II constitutions? I keep coming back to the sense I get that in fact, the traditionalists Francis identifies don't really acknowledge Vatican II, and for Francis to cite its constitutions is perhaps the big thing that's too harsh.

The problem the ordinariate priest acknowledges is, of course, that Traditionis Custodes does in fact pose "some implicit threat to our existence as ordinariate Catholics". Astonishingly, in the next sentence, he directly accuses the pope of scandal. Just him, of course. Not speaking as a priest, just some guy wearing clericals with access to the group's official mailing list. If this priest felt the need to say anything, since as he acknowledges, his group isn't affected, wouldn't just a two-sentence note suffice saying the group isn't affected, and we'll learn more about how the move affects those who are in coming weeks?

That's certainly what the US bishops are saying. Their position generally appears to be things will continue as they have while we work on this. We'll see it through. Calm down.

So the question I have is why people who aren't affected are in such a panic. The ordinariate priest, wno isn't affected, is nevertheless saying "he's talking about us in the most unpastoral way!" The people Francis is talking about are described fairly precisely:

A final reason for my decision is this: ever more plain in the words and attitudes of many is the close connection between the choice of celebrations according to the liturgical books prior to Vatican Council II and the rejection of the Church and her institutions in the name of what is called the “true Church.” One is dealing here with comportment that contradicts communion and nurtures the divisive tendency — “I belong to Paul; I belong instead to Apollo; I belong to Cephas; I belong to Christ” — against which the Apostle Paul so vigorously reacted.

In other words, he's referring to people who use the former liturgy as a totem, and we can see fairly clearly that ordinariate groups share similar totems with the Latin mass faction, such as women and girls wearing chapel veils, insisting on communion kneeling and on the tongue, and indeed, using the innovation of intinction to enforce the latter. I don't see how those totems imply anything other than "we have it right; everyone else has it wrong"; in other words, they're using them as a force for disunity.

I've certainly seen this over and over covering the North American ordinariate for nearly ten years in my former blog. In fact, without being specifically referred to or called out in any way in the pope's letter, I'm seeing an ordinariate priest recognizing that Francis, describing only a general set of attitudes, seems to be referring to him and his flock. As the saying goes, if the shoe fits, wear it.

I would guess that the ordinaries recognize this as well. If they want to stay out of the crosshairs -- because it would seem at least some of their priests understand that they qualify -- they should be acting forcefully to discourage these tendencies before higher authority moves in to do it. The problem, though, is that by doing this, they would take away what for many of their flock feel makes them special. But isn't that the point of Francis's letter?

LA County Issues Indoor Mask Order

On July 15, LA County imposed an indoor mask requirement, which took effect at midnight Saturday. Media reports like this one have been incoherent, describing on one hand the usual "sharp increase" in cases, while saying as well they're "a far cry from the winter peak that saw an average of more than 40,000 per day". Nevertheless, CNN reported that every patient now in the hospital for COVID is unvaccinated.

An issue that so far nobody has raised is that, with compliance in LA County near 100% on masking and social distance in late 2020, it had no effect, even with partial new lockdowns, on controlling the pandemic, with case rates declining only after the introduction of vaccines. If the problem is actually the unvaccinated, any type of masking, or the reimposition of any other former controls, will have no better effect than they did last year. But reimposition of former controls is exactly what the county has in mind:

[Health Officer Dr Muntu] Davis said L.A. County’s order doesn’t have an end date, and will stay in place “until we begin to see improvements in our community transmission of COVID-19."

. . . Davis said physical distancing requirements and other public health measures could also be reinstituted.

"Anything is on the table if things continue to get worse," Davis said.

The problem remains that the pandemic is essentially limited to the unvaccinated, but the entire population is being inconvenienced by ineffective controls, more of which are now pretty much guaranteed to be reimposed. County Supervisor Hilda Solis said on the Sunday talks,

[A] reimposed mask mandate in indoor public spaces is “not punishment,” but “prevention.”

. . . At the same time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not changed its policies to require those who are vaccinated to wear masks in public settings indoors, and the Los Angeles decision has been met with some controversy.

As shown above, Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva posted an announcement that he will not enforce the order. (Villanueva is an elected official and able to issue policy statements in opposition to other county departments.) In addition, Ric Grenell, a former Trump operative, has filed for a temporary injunction against the order. So far, I haven't been able to find any update on the status of this case. It's being handled by Harmeet Dhillon, a San Francisco public-interest attorney who has been involved in other COVID related legal action.

The Health Officer Order impermissibly restricts the liberty of fully vaccinated individuals without rational basis or legal authority. Since March 2020, County residents have had their liberty restricted in unprecedented ways. Businesses, schools, and houses of worship have been shuttered or had to follow other onerous restrictions in an effort to stop the spread of COVID19. Those restrictions have loosened as the result of rising vaccination levels, but now the County seeks to again restrict the rights of vaccinated County residents, yet this time based on a minuscule risk of COVID-19 contraction or transmission.

The overall conundrum is that the county, early this year, went out of its way to reach the most vulnerable populations, focusing especially on poor and minority communities. Vaccine doses and vaccination sites were allocated in ways that were specifically intended to reach those groups, with vaccines given free of charge. Those who didn't get the vaccines, despite these exhaustive efforts, are now the ones suffering from those choices.

There needs to be a better solution. As things stand, LA County is trying to reimpose draconian controls like Australia, while its overall statistics will undoubtedly be no better than places like Texas and Florida with no controls. This will likely have to be resolved in the political arena. Recent moves by Sheriff Villanueva may indicate he intends to have a political future as well.

What About Anglicanorum Coetibus?

Yesterday I said that, although Anglicanorum coetibus so far doesn't seem to have been affected by Traditionis Custodes, maybe it should be. Although it was originally intended to appeal to disgruntled high-church Anglicans, very few of these came in (I think this reflected a profound misunderstanding of Anglicanism). Instead, such appeal as it's had has been largely among the same traditionalist faction of cradle Catholics that Pope Francis intends to bring to heel with Traditionis Custodes.

I observed this movement for almost ten years in the old blog. Even before Anglicanorum coetibus, the most successful Anglican Use Pastoral Provision parish, Our Lady of the Atonement, wound up appealing largely to traditionialist Catholics as well, but its separatist posture resulted in financial as well as sexual abuses.

Media commentators over the weekend across the board haven't mentioned the essentially separatist nature of both Latin mass and Divine Worship parish culture. That the intent of Traditiones Custodes is to take the Extraordinary Form out of the parish environment -- allowing its celebration only outside parishes and forbidding new parishes centered on the Latin Roman Canon -- suggests to me that Francis in fact understands where the problem lies.

I think it's significant that, although Latin Mass apologists say it attracts younger and more generous Catholic families, Traditiones Custodes will have absolutely nil effect on our highly successful novus ordo parish, which fully met its fundraising goal for a building program despite being closed or with restricted worship during the pandemic. In fact, it also conducted a separate drive to renovate the adoration chapel, using the lockdown as an opportunity to do it -- this was fully funded as well. I doubt if Latin mass will be mentioned at all in today's masses.

Visitors have suggested to me that so far, it doesn't look like Traditionis Custodes will have any effect on the ordinariates, at least one of which, in Australia, is on life support without its help. A visitor who follows ordinariate Facebook groups says,

The consensus seems to be that Divine Worship is safe for now, having been established pursuant to an apostolic constitution rather than the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. And of course its similarity to the OF—-its lectionary, choices of Offertory prayers and Canons of the Mass—-are in other contexts subjects of frequent complaint. It is certainly not “the EF in English“ that many would prefer. Christian Campbell, the SSPX attendee, points this out regularly. But those who are saying “Nothing to see here” are failing to look at the larger picture, it seems to me, which is the Pope’s agenda in suppressing Summorum Pontificum. If he is looking to root out hotbeds of “traditionalist” resistance then the ordinariates should be next in line. I’m sure there are ways around Anglicanorum Coetibus.

Nevertheless, the visitor points out,

As we recall, Msgr Steenson closed the door on Extraordinary Form celebrations in North American ordinariate communities. This led to some negative comments in the blogosphere, although as far as I know only Fr Catania, then still at Mt Calvary, Baltimore was offering the EF. Luke Reese of course offered DW, OF, and EF as PV at Holy Rosary, Indianapolis when it hosted the St Joseph of Arimathea ordinariate community, but that seemed to be okay.

Bp Lopes seems to have lifted that prohibition, and the EF is offered at some North Anerican communities on one or two weekdays. Several communities are hosted by churches that are also TLM parishes, suggesting a certain sympathetic mindset. We recall that Msgr Reid had great difficulty finding a host parish in Victoria, BC after the ordinariate group was asked to leave Our Lady of Fatima. They were finally taken in by the local TLM parish despite having to be wedged in an afternoon time slot.

Now Bp Lopes will have to “go on the record” with the Vatican if he wishes the existing EF masses to continue —- with possible repercussions for his future career — they will have to be offered by ordinariate Pastors/PAs, and it looks as if the concept of a “TLM parish” is being rethought, which may mean that communities have to look for new locations. There have already been several instances of new diocesan pastors being appointed and suddenly the ordinariate group’s finding itself no longer welcome.

An intriguing issue is that, as in fact was done at Our Lady of the Atonement, there doesn't seem to be any prohibition on celebrating the Ordinary Form mass in Latin. The issue is focused on the Roman Canon in Latin, not Latin per se, which again suggests to me that Francis is fully aware of the particular form of EF's totemic status among dissident Catholics. But I think Traditionis Custodes prevents ordinariate parishes just as much as diocesan from celebrating the EF mass in the parish.

Again, as far as I'm aware, there's no single manifesto from traditionalists on why they insist on a pre-Conciliar Roman Canon, but it appears to be at the center of their so far inchoate doctrine. In recent days, several of Fr Hunwicke's posts have hovered around this point. Most recently, he says Francis doesn't have the authority to abrogate Summorum Pontificum, while Hunwicke presumably has the authority to rule on this. Well, he has his following.

But if the ordinaries want to stay out of the crosshairs, not just from Francis but from their brother bishops, they should really shut Hunwicke down.