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Pope Francis’ Assault on the Latin Mass: Here is his Big Bertha.

As the dust settles following publication of the laughably entitled Traditionis Custodes (“Guardians of Tradition”), we find that numerous bishops are well disposed to allowing Latin Mass communities to continue as before, despite Pope Bergoglio’s obvious (and truly laughable)  intention to eventually abolish the traditional Latin Mass altogether. As Francis puts it in his explanatory letter to the worldwide episcopate, his aim is to ensure that the bishops are guided by the “need to return in due time to the Roman Rite promulgated by Saints Paul VI and John Paul II…” 

That is, if this Pope has his way, every Catholic will end up in the pews of the Novus Ordo, which have been emptying steadily over the past fifty years of “liturgical renewal” — a process of abandonment of divine worship that has only been accelerated by the same Pope’s outrageous demand that Catholics follow the draconian dictates of public authorities that have closed the churches while keeping the abortion mills open. Many of the few remaining faithful of the Novus Ordo, barred from their churches by government dictate, will never return.

Happy to say, most American bishops have already indicated that the Latin Mass revival will continue in their dioceses, Traditionis Custodes [TC] notwithstanding. Bishop Paprocki of Springfield Illinois has even gone so far as to dispense from TC’s purported ban on Latin Masses in parish churches, citing Canon 87 and declaring that two established parish Masses will continue as before. Under Canon 87, the bishop has the authority to “dispense the faithful from universal and particular disciplinary laws issued for his territory or his subjects by the supreme authority of the Church.”

Sad to say, however, Pope Bergoglio has planned for the possibility that TC will become a dead letter in most dioceses. In Article 7 of TC, he wheels out a Big Bertha that, at least according to plan, will ensure the piecemeal and eventually total demolition of Latin Mass communities of any kind in the Catholic world. Here it is: 

“The Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments and the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, for matters of their particular competence, exercise the authority of the Holy See with respect to the observance of these provisions.”

The Congregation for Divine Worship (CDW) is headed by Cardinal Arthur Roche, a notorious enemy of the Latin liturgical tradition. The Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (CSAL) is headed by Archbishop José Rodríguez Carballo, formerly the Secretary of the CSAL. Under the CSAL’s former head, João Cardinal Braz de Aviz (now a member of the Congregation for Bishops), Rodríguez, as Vaticanist Marco Tosati recalls, was busily engaged in the relentless destruction of “good traditional communities,” including  the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate (FFI), the Family of the Incarnate Word, and the Heralds of the Gospel.

The CDW and the CSAL together now have the power, by issuing decrees directly from the Vatican, to wreak havoc on the still-existing traditional Latin Mass communities, including the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter, the Institute of Christ the King, and the Canons Regular of Saint John Cantius. Vatican dictates could well be issued commanding use of the new Lectionary (a jumbled assortment of horribly translated readings that destroys the traditional liturgical calendar), lay readers, Communion in the hand, altar tables instead of high altars, or any other command that would hasten the day when, as Francis hopes, every Catholic who still attends church will have been herded into the liturgical disaster area of the Novus Ordo. Worse, the CSAL can now conduct “visitations” of traditional seminaries in order to ensure the elimination of their traditional formation of priests, as was done during the process of dismembering the FFI and their sister organization of nuns, the Franciscan Sisters of the Renewal.

So, while many bishops may look for ways to circumvent the tyrannical overreach of TC, what will they do, and what will the remaining traditional Catholic communities do, if confronted with direct Vatican commands to dismantle this or that element of their traditional Catholic life and worship?

Pope Bergoglio’s Big Bertha is locked and loaded. We can only watch, hope and pray that the Latin Mass will be delivered from his clutches before he is able to inflict irreparable damage on the communities that still strive to preserve “the most beautiful thing this side of Heaven.”

Note: The term “Big Bertha” originated during World War I. It was the nickname of an unusually large and powerful siege howitzer used by the Imperial German Empire.

Pope Francis has bent and twisted the Gospel so often to suit the rhetorical needs of the moment that a group of diocesan priests (who must remain anonymous) has compiled an entire compendium of the words of Francis versus the Church’s traditional understanding, which is found here. To recall just two of the more memorable examples:

According to Francis, when standing at the foot of Cross, Mary “surely… wanted to say to the Angel [of the Annunciation]: ‘Liar! I was deceived.’ She, too, had no answers.” In other words, Mary lacked faith and was not sinless. Why else would She accuse God and His messenger of having ‘deceived her.’

And, according to Francis, when Our Lord was found by Mary and Joseph in the Temple, amazing the elders with His wisdom, “For this little ‘escapade’, Jesus probably had to beg forgiveness of his parents. The Gospel doesn’t say this, but I believe that we can presume it.” In other words, Christ sinned. Why else would He need to “beg forgiveness” for His “escapade”? That in fact He chided His parents for not recognizing that He had to be about His Father’s business seems to have escaped Francis’s exegetical method. 

The latest example of Gospel-twisting, found here, is that, according to Francis, when the woman poured precious ointment on Our Lord’s feet (in a prefigurement of His burial) as recounted in Chapter 14 of Mark, “It was also for the sake of the poor, the lonely, the marginalized and the victims of discrimination, that the Son of God accepted the woman’s gesture.”

But this is nonsense. Our Lord — in immortal words known to the whole world, believers and unbelievers alike — declared “The poor you will always have with you” as a rebuke to the Pharisees in attendance, as well as the traitor Judas, who were murmuring, in the mode of modern demagogues, that the ointment should have been sold and the proceeds given to the poor. Moreover, the woman who broke the alabaster box and poured its precious contents onto the feet of Our Lord was “A woman in that town who lived a sinful life,” but who “learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume.” (Lk. 7:37)

As Our Lord Himself recognized, the gesture of that sinful woman, who had just poured the equivalent of a year’s worth of wages (300 denarii) over His feet, had nothing whatsoever to do with the poor, the marginalized or — please! — “the victims of discrimination.” The woman was making atonement for her sins and giving glory precisely to the Anointed One Who would sacrifice Himself to make atonement possible for her and for all humanity.

Who was this woman? The tradition in the Latin Church, which comprises the vast majority of the faithful, has held from time immemorial that she was Mary Magdalene, who in turn was Mary of Bethany, all three being one and the same person, who appears in the Gospels as a follower of Our Lord — the first witness of the Resurrection whom Our Lord instructed to the tell the others that He had risen. As no less than Pope Saint Gregory the Great declared in 591: “She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark.” And that sinful woman was a repentant prostitute, as the tradition acknowledged by Pope Saint Gregory had always acknowledged.

That Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany are one and the same is all but certain, while the identity of this Mary with the sinful woman we encounter in Luke is at least probable, as we read here. Pope Gregory the Great certainly thought so! Predictably enough, however, during the so-called Reformation, Protestants adamantly rejected the identity of the three, especially as it concerns the sinful woman, because, as the Catholic Encyclopedia observes, “It almost seems as if this reluctance to identify the ‘sinner’ with the sister of Martha was due to a failure to grasp the full significance of the forgiveness of sin.”

Also predictable, given the outcome of Vatican II, was Paul VI’s decision, noted with approval by that prominent outlet of post-conciliar correctness, Aleteia, to “remove[] from the liturgical calendar the appellative ‘penitent,’ which had traditionally been applied to Mary Magdalene, and since then, the readings of the liturgy of the day ceased to be those referring to the penitent sinner and began to be the Gospel passages that properly refer to her.”

Why this change after 1,400 years? As Aleteia observes, the tradition of Mary Magdalen, the repentant prostitute who became a saint, “was opposed decades ago by Catholic theologians and by recent popes.” Well, if a tradition of fourteen centuries’ standing, affirmed by Pope Gregory the Great, the builder of Christendom, was opposed “decades ago” by some theologians and “recent Popes,” then of course it must be tossed overboard, along with everything else that was jettisoned for the sake of “ecumenism” and “the great renewal,” whose results have been the de facto decommissioning of the Catholic Church. For who would make bold to question the new discoveries of that era of enlightenment known as the Seventies? 

Today the Church is led by a Pope whose thinking is stranded in the Seventies, and who now declares that Our Lord was defending the “victims of discrimination” when a sinful woman, in a supreme act of repentance and humility, anointed His feet as He rebuked those who, not recognizing His divinity, were murmuring about the poor at that key moment in salvation history. One wonders if Francis, had he been present, would have been among the murmurers.

Nothing is more tedious or wasteful of time and intellectual effort than the debate over the supposedly invalid election of Francis. There was a conclave in 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio emerged as the Pope-elect, he accepted the office and was installed therein. Everything else is vain speculation—awaiting, perhaps someday, a revelation that would be confirmed by a successor Pope or Council, failing which the whole debate is academic.

But with Francis we have something never before seen in the annals of the papacy: a Pope who does not seem very much interested in being the Roman Pontiff, Vicar of Christ and Defender of Faith and Morals. Rather, Francis is evidently intent on using the power of the Petrine office to advance secular and political causes: everything from universal brotherhood, to curbing “climate change” (the pseudoscientific superstition that man can control the weather by reducing carbon emissions) to world government. No wonder the Grand Lodge of Spain (members suitably attired in their ridiculous COVID-19 obedience masks in addition to the usual Masonic garb) has hailed Francis’ call for “Universal Fraternity”—the primary dogma of the Freemasonic pseudo-religion.

All of this is perfectly obvious.  But one must note a seemingly small but actually enormous detail of this pontificate that has just emerged: On Holy Thursday, the date on which the faithful commemorate the Last Supper, the founding of the priesthood and the institution of the Holy Eucharist, Francis skipped the traditional Holy Thursday Mass, which is the first part of the Easter Triduum. He left that to the Dean of the College of Cardinals while he celebrated Mass in the private chapel of Cardinal Angelo Becciu, whom Francis had ousted from his position as Substitute Secretary of State on account of (rather murky) allegations of financial impropriety. While Francis did preside over the Chrism Mass in the morning,  as the AP reports, “[t]he Vatican never explained why Francis was skipping the official service.” Apparently, he felt he had better things to do than conduct all that Pope business of leading the Universal Church in her traditional Easter observance. Much better to commiserate with the very Cardinal he had ousted from his post.

The AP speculates that Francis was a no-show on Holy Thursday because, due to COVID-19—the imaginary plague that floats in the air and threatens everyone, not just the vulnerable elderly—he could not conduct his novel replacement for the Holy Thursday Mass. Francis decided early in his papacy that instead of doing what the Church does on Holy Thursday, he will visit  some prison or refugee center and indulge in a “a foot-washing ritual to symbolize Jesus’ willingness to serve others”—a showy display of “humility” that has nothing to do with Our Lord’s gesture, which exemplified the priesthood as a salvific office of service to the faithful in imitation of Our Lord. Which is to say that Francis has never been interested in Holy Thursday Mass as the commemoration of the Last Supper, the founding of the priesthood and the institution of the Holy Eucharist.

Ponder the fact carefully: We have a Pope who skipped Holy Thursday Mass to celebrate a private Mass in a Roman apartment with a Cardinal he had sacked. The evidence is overwhelming that with Francis we have a Pope who does not wish to be Pope but rather to employ the power and prestige of the office for his own ends: “It’s very entertaining to be Pope,” said Francis to his friend Cardinal Poli, as reported by National Geographic in an article entitled, appropriately enough, “Shunning Orthodoxy: How Pope Francis Is Remaking the Vatican.” Shunning the papacy as well, even as he wields the power of the office for ends that have nothing to do with the defense of faith and morals but rather tend to the prejudice of both. There has never been a papacy quite like this. But then there has never been a crisis like this in two millennia of Church history—as Our Lady no doubt foresaw in that Secret [the Third Secret of Fatima] whose integral contents have yet to be revealed.