A Leaven In The World . . .

A generous brother priest volunteered to cover my Sunday Masses once this month. Freeing up the weekend enabled me to connect weekdays of two adjoining weeks resulting in a more generous period for a drive to Florida where my father and extended family now reside in the Space Coast area.

Two brothers are retired there and nieces are marrying and transitioning there. One of these, with her husband and two baby boys, lives blocks from the Atlantic Coast. As well, my father had long nursed plans to transition to Florida if my mother should predecease him, as his two remaining siblings and their families reside in the Orlando and Palm Beach areas. She did. And he did.

Last November was a year that my mother departed from us. May she rest in peace.

After an overnight stop at my Virginia hermitage, the balance of the 12-hour drive took until after midnight. My father has a simple apartment in an independent living complex which can accommodate a guest without too much discomfort. A kitchen enabled my morning Italian-style mocha espresso and daily hot herbal tea. I took many meals with him in the restaurant-style dining room, along with too-frequent desserts! Diet and exercise often are delayed for post-vacation letdowns. Conversation with the residents often took interesting turns, garbed as I was in cassock.

Close as the complex is to a neighboring Catholic Church, only a couple of blocks away and reachable by sidewalk, the residents board a bus for a quick trip to reach Sunday Mass weekly. One resident goes to the church and retrieves the hosts and then returns to lead a Communion service weekly.

I daily rose early to drive 20 miles south to offer a private daily Traditional Mass. A deacon of the parish generously supported me as server. This at the same parish which hosts a Sunday Traditional High Mass, which means the prayers and Scriptures are chanted by the priest with the support of the responding schola and choir. Tradition requires lay participation. Not an innovation with Vatican II. Surprised?

Thank God for generous Catholic pastors with common sense who realize the Traditional Mass, which hasn’t disappeared after hundreds of years of oppression, won’t disappear this time, either. And for Catholic bishops who realize the crime and sin of deplatforming faithful Catholic souls by expelling them from our churches because of the way they choose to pray is a sin which will be judged by Almighty God.

Traditional Catholics can be recognized by one characteristic in particular: they believe in all the teachings of the Church. Period. Full stop. Because the Church teaches them.

Happily, for pastors in these days of rising costs and emptying Catholic pews on Sunday, Traditional Catholics also believe in generously supporting the physical and material needs of the Body of Christ, His Church. Often, in fact, it is the Traditional Catholics who financially carry the parish. Sometimes this means giving four times as much weekly as the Novus Ordo Catholics do. For some parishes, shutting down the TLM and expelling the souls who are devoted to it means shuttering the parish.

Of course, we all witnessed the lack of seriousness of the Francis project with the capricious jettisoning of the militant anti-TLM rhetoric now that a conclave comes more fully into view in the wake of Francis’ most recent serious illness and extended hospital stay. Now that a new pope less ideological and more friendly to Catholic Tradition may ascend the Petrine throne, the cardinal entrusted with dismantling the Tradition has changed his tone. Mirabile dictu.

And what a turnabout. Here is his interchange with the Catholic Herald here about the devotion that young people have to the Traditional Latin Mass.

“Of course, it is good that people want to be part of the Church, and there is no reason why they cannot. There is nothing wrong with attending the Mass celebrated with the 1962 missal. That has been accepted since the time of Pope St. John Paul II, Pope Benedict, and now Pope Francis.”

It is not only good, it is necessary that young people take part. Without them the Church has no future. They are not going to give up the Mass no matter how many times Rome attempts to twist reality by claiming it is not the norm, as with Arthur Cardinal Roche here:

“What Pope Francis said in Traditionis Custodes is that it is not the norm. For very good reasons, the Church, through conciliar legislation, decided to move away from what had become an overly elaborate form of celebrating the Mass.”

Who is Cardinal Roche to decide when Catholic worship is too “elaborate”? Tradition decides.

“One of the things that has been very interesting to me is observing this situation worldwide. The numbers devoted to the Traditional Latin Mass are, in reality, quite small, but some of the groups are quite clamorous. They are more noticeable because they make their voices heard.”

They love the faith. They show up. And they defend the whole of Tradition: faith and morals together with liturgy. All of a piece.

“What interests me is why people get hot under the collar about others celebrating the Tridentine Mass. I think this has been a mistake. Bishop Wheeler, of the Diocese of Leeds, insisted that a Holy Mass be celebrated in Latin according to the Novus Ordo at least once every Sunday in every deanery. That showed considerable wisdom.

“From my perspective, the celebration of the Eucharist, in whichever missal you are using, should be very noble and marked by noble simplicity.

“I often hear people say, ‘Cardinal Roche is against the Latin Mass.’ Well, if they only knew that most days I celebrate Mass in Latin because it is the common language for all of us here. It is the Novus Ordo Mass in Latin. I was trained as an altar boy until the age of 20, serving the Tridentine Form.”

It’s not about Latin, first of all. It’s about capriciously and impulsively jettisoning the worship of the Church which traces its roots back to Christ as an Apostolic Tradition. It’s about prayer. Omitting and changing it. And this in favor of a liturgical collage thrown together by Masonic prelates, among others, with an alien agenda of pleasing Protestants more than Almighty God.

And, speaking of “hot under the collar,” Cardinal Roche has been the most conspicuous enemy of the Traditional Mass in recent memory. He was so “hot” that he was reportedly thrown out of the pope’s office for miscalculating the pontiff’s own temperature on the matter.

The Catholic agenda at Vatican II was suborned by an ecumania with the absurd idea that Christ, and His teachings, which include our worship, must be changed because some heretics do not like them. This reality must be faced once and for all if we are to finally resolve the internal war and identity crisis in the Church which has raged since at least 1968 and shows no signs of resolution.

Despite the anti-Catholic revolutionaries and jockeying cardinals in Rome and elsewhere, despite the mercurial posturing of prelates worldwide, the faith remains. I saw this in Florida with the beautiful, faithful, humble families, numbering in the hundreds at Sunday Mass and afterward together for an hours-long coffee and donuts social.

I was also blessed to be with Catholics at Mar-a-Lago and one hundred other priests for the “Prayer for America” event during my Florida stay. I met Gen. Michael T. Flynn and his wife, pro-life hero Jean Marshall, and longtime fellow Wanderer writer Chris Manion, who debuted his new book, Charity for Sale, at the fête. Photos are available on my blog, apriestlife.blogspot.com, for the date March 20. Also for the Mass in Micco dated March 16.

The faith in Florida, and in many other places, is strong despite persecution from above as well as from without. People in tribulation are sometimes known to comment jokingly, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” That is certainly true of our holy Tradition, which can only become stronger, a priceless diamond of spiritual worth, as we fight to keep it unto salvation, “come rack, come rope”!

Praised be Jesus Christ, our King, now and forever!