Chartres

Beware of NOChurch cardinals, especially when they come saying the Tridentine Mass - Sunday 10th to Saturday 16th of June

In a week which contained a lot of major news from the secular world, it might seem odd that my highlights are to do with an event that didn't even take this week - the Chartres pilgrimage. My primary concern is for the Church, for only the Church can save the world, and with that in mind I shall go on to address some of the events on the Chartes pilgrimage.

It is rather significant that the Chartres pilgrimage has become so famous. I had not even heard of it until som 4 years ago or so, but I shall have to agree with Michael Matt that it is one of the most significant events taking place in the Church today, although in his case he plainly states that it is the most significant, with which I do not quite agree. Along with its increasing profile, the mass has attracted higher profiles of celebrants. Last year it was Cardinal Raymond Burke, who is probably the closest thing we have right now to a champion of the faith. When Cardinal Burke celebrated though, it was without a position in the Curia, having been unceremoniously kicked out of his position as the head of the Apostolic Signatura (the Church's highest court) so that Bergoglio could railroad his full-throttled assault on marriage through easy annulments and sacreligious Communion.

This year's celebrant, therefore, would have to count as the most high-profile yet. In Cardinal Sarah, we had the head of the Congregation of Divine Worship, the man in charge of not only the Mass but the administration of all sacraments. Yes, there are bureaucratically speaking other higher-profiled cardinals - the secreatary of state comes to mind - and even with regards to Catholicity the prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith ranks higher. However, in his capacity as head of worship, he ranks second only to the pope, so one is entitled to say that they don't come much higher than Cardinal Sarah. Also in terms of standing up for the faith, Cardinal Sarah is one of only 2 cardinals under the age of 80 - the other being Cardinal Burke - who have consistently stood up against efforts to water down the faith, or to outright corrupt the faith (however tepidly).

It was therefore with great sadness that I read a piece written by Peter Kwasniewski titled Traditional Clergy: Please Stop Making “Pastoral Adaptations”. It quickly became clear that the piece was about the final High Mass at the Chartres pilgrimage, of which Cardinal Sarah had been the main celebrant. Among the 'pastoral adaptations' on show was reading both the Epistle and the Gospel in French, instead of Latin, and not bothering with having the proper orientations when reading Sacred Scripture, instead turning towards the people, and not even bothering to chant but rather speaking it out instead. These were grave liturgical abuses. It is unclear who was in charge of these abuses - the master of ceremony, the local bishop, or the cardinal are all potential agents. What cannot be denied, however, was that in perhaps the most prominent Tridentine Mass in the world today, we were being confronted with a very well-orchestrated Novusordoisation, and that ought to trouble us all.

If there is anything that the Novus Ordo has taught us, it is that slippery slopes are real, and once embarked upon one will quickly find oneself close to the bottom. It is therefore inexcusable that at the most prominent Tridentine Mass the celebrants would embark upon the same slippery slope which led us to where we are in NOChurch today, i.e., little if any reverence at Mass, with priests who treat the Mass as if it is their plaything, and laity who froth in anger at hearing that there are authentic Catholic alternatives. Another point that Dr. Kwasniewski made which is worth repeating is that Latin is the language of the Church, and the Chartres pilgrimage is the most international pilgrimage that we have today. It therefore makes little sense to have the readings in French when many of the attendees will be non-French. They could, if they so wished, read out in Latin according to the rubrics and then afterwards read in French (which is allowed by Ecclesia Dei, it turns out, although even that is a slippery slope) but that's not what they did. In other words, I am quite certain that whoever made the decision did it knowing full well that it was against the liturgical laws and against the spirit of the Tridentine Mass, yet did it anyway, perhaps to force the point that the Tridentine Mass has to get along with the Novus Ordo mass.

This being NOChurch times, of course, not everyone was upset. As I have previously mentioned, Catholics as a whole have lost the ability to get angry at anything directed against the faith. In "WHEREIN ROBERT CARDINAL SARAH GETS IT RIGHT AND FATHER Z DOESN'T " (I've no idea why he insists on capital letters for his headlines), a response to Fr. John Zuhlsdorf's Why we Say The Black and Do The Red, which was in turn a commentary on what Dr. Kwasniewski had wrriten , Fr. Allan McDonald chimed in that Cardinal Sarah was right to make adaptations in order to get people to feel at home, once again showing that the Novus Ordo has poisoned the minds of even many of those who say the Tridentine Mass occasionally. We don't adapt the Mass to ourselves; rather we adapt ourselves to the Mass, and the arguments he was making were well-adressed in Dr. Kwasniewski's original piece, which it seems blew completely over his head.

The best commentary on Fr. McDonald's piece came from Henry , who wrote:

A single instance of vernacular abuse, as at Chartres, is not a big deal. No doubt God will survive the desacralization of a couple of moments in this one Mass, and the

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Novus Ordo is to Catholicism what the West is to Christendom - Sunday 27th of May to Saturday 2nd of June

This was a very eventful week; in fact, far too eventful for me to do it any justice, especially having fallen so far behind my weekly reviews that I am forced to be brief. I shall therefore only pick out 2-3 stories which I found to be of paramount importance, and anything beyond that will get a simple passing mention.

For honourable mentions alone, I must begin with Cardinal Sarah who in his homily at Chartres told us that "The West Has Nothing to Offer but Emptiness", at least as headlined by Gloria.tv. I must admit to not yet having read the whole transcript but these are sobering words, for several reasons.

The most important reason is that his words are the bitter truth. When Cardinal Sarah said that “the Western society, chosing to organize itself without God, has fallen into lies and selfishness”, he was only saying what any open-eyed Catholic can tell from reading the news, or looking around, or reading various statistics. He then went on to state that Western society “has embraced the craziest ideologies and has become the target of an ethical terroism more destructive than the terror of the Islamists.” That is a point I have made too many times to recall, and often ended up in heated conversations about it.

The fact of the matter is that the suicidal policies of the West - and I don't simply mean the governments alone here - are what has brought the Western world to the edge of destruction. It's not Islamists who got the West to kill off a vast number of their children. It is not Islamists who got the West to squander the investments of their forefathers and get itself into a debt it is unlikely to ever climb out of peacefully. It is not Islamists who turned men against women, women against men, women against children, people against their very nature. It is not Islamists who destroyed the great heritage of Christianity in Europe, and even the Americas. All these things have been done by Westerners. Granted, they have been driven by the rulers of Western states, but with every missed Mass, with every modern interpretation of ancient wisdom, with every vote cast for a morally dubious candidate, with every bomb dropped unjustly, the West has turned itself into the enemy of the very Christendom which built it, and I feel, has brought itself beyond the point of salvation.

Virtually all of the most dangerous ideas of the 20th century all originated from the West , be it all-out homosexualism, transgenderism, feminism, communism, nazism, freemasonry, warmongering, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, the killing of the unborn, the killing of infants (although China gets a dishounourable mention here), the killing of the elderly and I am sure the list could go on and on.

It has become common among many so-called Alt-Right or generally 'conservative'-leaning people to proclaim the West is best without specifying what is good in the first place. If an alien landed on Earth today and used Christian metrics to measure a society's standing, I can assure all that the West would not indeed be best. If another alien was to use metcis of sustainability - and I don't even mean eco-stuff, but simple demographics - the West would not be best. If yet another alien was to use metrics of economic sustainability, even there the West would not be best. If yet another alien was to use more natural law metrics, such as quality of family life, value of human life, number of friends, or what not, the West would trail even here. The warmongering NATO would also drag the West down on any metrics measuring peaceability.

In fact, the only area in which the West is clearly best is that which has to do with self-indulgence, but it is precisely due to winning this particular 'award' that the West trails on so many other fronts.

Christendom was the best culture. The West is the monster that chewed up Christendom and is trying to dump what remains of it in the deepest sewer it can find. The sooner we realise that, the better.  We must never conflate 'the West' with Christendom for the former is a morally decrepit empty shell of a society with very bad future prospects, whereas the latter is what built up virtually all the good that we enjoy today. Europe without Christianity is likely to be no different than the Soviet Union - a cold, sterile, ugly, violent, hateful place.

The sooner we work to restore Christendom, the sooner Europe can in any honest sense attempt to reclaim moral or even existential superiority.

It has escaped nobody's attention that the Irish voted to remove legal protections for the unborn. This means that before long the sodomitical prime minister of theirs will be able to introduce legislation to kill all the unborn, if he so desires. No doubt he will play it safe by introducing an age limit on those who can be killed, but we can expect this to be the top of the slippery slope. I am not going to waste much time on this, except to state that this is yet another win for the Novus Ordo. Everything the Novus Ordo touches, it kills, and Ireland is the best example of that.

As the author of the piece May 25th was the burial, not the death, of “Catholic Ireland” notes and as I have mentioned many times before, the Catholic Church runs most of the schools in Ireland. According to the piece, 93% of primary schools are run by the Catholic Church. This means that virtually each and every one of those people who voted to kill the unborn will have been touched by NOChurch in no meaningless way.

Ireland is not the Novus Ordo done badly, but the Novus Ordo done well, almost to perfection. This is what the Novus Ordo does: It kills the faith, then poisons society, then destroys the...

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