A Supreme Moment of Decision, Courtesy of “Divine Worship”, by Peter Kwasniewski, PhD

On the day Traditionis Custodes was released, I compared it to the detonation of the first atomic bomb in New Mexico on the same date in 1945. With the release on December 18 of the Responsa Ad Dubia—essentially an instruction on the implementation of the motu proprio—a similar comparison suggests itself. There were two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. The motu proprio and its letter was the Little Boy, and this instruction is the Fat Man.

Or, to use another comparison, TC was like chopping off branches and threatening to spray the tree with harmful chemicals, but the Responsa is like trying to dig up the tree from the roots so that it will never grow again.

(By the way, it’s nice, isn’t it, to think that when dubia are submitted to the pope by four cardinals about upholding the Ten Commandments, they receive no response; but when a set of dubia on how to limit liturgical tradition are submitted to a Roman congregation, they receive a rapid and stark response. In some ways, that should tell us all we need to know.) …