Persons vs. Human Beings, by Randall Smith
August 9, 2022The Papal Push to Keep Latin Alive, by Jerry D. Salyer
August 9, 2022
By Peter Kwasniewski, One Peter Five, August 8, 2022
The meltdown of the Church in the West since the Second Vatican Council doubtless has many and complex causes, but I am convinced that the foremost cause of it is the fact that churchmen[1] have betrayed much of Catholic Tradition and legislation, and have merited divine punishment as a result—let us call it a period of disciplinary suffering as an invitation to repentance and conversion.
Bishops, priests, and even popes have turned their backs on the preconciliar liturgy and Magisterium as well as on many points in the actual teaching of the Second Vatican Council. Such actions, and the “structures of sin” they put in place, serve as massive impediments to any renewal in the Church. This impediment will not go away of its own accord but only through a conscientious repudiation of discontinuity and a courageous effort to rebuild the desolate city.
For example, the Second Vatican Council, in harmony with the Magisterium before it, says that the language of the liturgy is and shall remain Latin, albeit with some use of the vernacular, and that Gregorian chant deserves to have chief place as the music proper to the Roman Rite. One could add, as a different kind of example, the abandonment of worship ad orientem, which Saint Basil the Great, among other Church Fathers, identifies as part of apostolic tradition—a view that, far from being patristic hyperbole, finds support in the best scholarship, such as that of Fr. Michael Lang and Fr. Stefan Heid.
