Replies

Let's take your points one by one.

1. You say it is a lie to claim the Mass is harmful to souls. Yet statistics show two-thirds of all Catholics no longer believe in the Real Presence--a dogma formerly confirmed by the Old Mass, but suppressed by the New. How is this not harmful for souls? You insist there is no connection--but the weight of the evidence is against you. Catholics today show no difference in doctrine or morality from their Protestant counterparts. Even worse, they abort and use contraception and otherwise behave just as their secular counterparts. Statistics show, in other words, that they are Catholic in name only. You would claim there is no connection between this and the new liturgy--but the claim is implausible. These profiles began to emerge just after the institution of the New Mass. To claim there is no connection would be a stretch--just as is the claim there is no connection between the passionate support of the Novus Ordo by bad bishops and the Novus Ordo itself. It all ties together: we believe as we pray--and Catholics today believe what they choose to believe--and bad bishops do likewise.

2. You claim Satan wants to divide us--and indeed he does. But it is not I who follow his lead, but the modernists who have broken free from two thousand years of tradition. Traditionalists believe nothing new, practice nothing new, invent nothing whatever. It is the modernist revolution which has been "in your face", not traditionalism which simply wishes to be left alone and given an opportunity to worship as conscience demands. Every wacko liturgical innovation imaginable is given wide approval by the bishops--gay Masses, polka Masses, teen Masses, liturgical dances, you name it. The Traditional Mass alone is viewed with great alarm--why? Is it not because it affirms the old faith and a Catholicism which flourished up and until the nineteen-sixties? And does not this prove that it is the revolutionists who divide us from our heritage and seek to impose a new faith--and not traditionalists who affirm what had always been affirmed until recently? How can the refusal to follow such radically new doctrines and practices be explosive and divisive? It is the innovators who are divisive, not those who follow tradition. They will deny us the right to kneel for Communion, for instance--clearly intending to restrain the inclination to adore the Eucharist--and then claim that it is we who would kneel who are divisive, are troublemakers, are disobedient--when it is they who are playing an elaborate game of bait-and-switch, substituting a Protestant faith for a Catholic one.

3. You claim I want the Pope to be ignored and calumnied. That is itself a lie. I criticize the Pope for his inaction, for introducing novelties such as Assisi I and II, for his harsh put-downs of traditionalists while he tolerates all sorts of abuses from the left--but I have never calumniated this pope, I have never stretched the truth about him, I have never claimed he is in heresy, I have never denied his supremacy in the Church. If he causes scandal at outdoor papal Masses which have become occasions of unthinkable liturgical abuses, how is it calumny to point this out? If he kisses the Koran and apologizes to Islam--how is this not scandalous to those who remember the aggressions of Islam against Christendom? How is it not shocking to see a Buddha displayed on top of a tabernacle during one of his pan-religious rallies? How is it not profoundly upsetting to see this Pope affirming the very modernism preconciliar popes condemned? My major criticism has always been that this Pope has not used his awesome powers to defend tradition as he is obliged to do as pontiff, as preconciliar popes had always done, and he has not disciplined the enemies of traditional Catholicism as he has likewise been obliged to do, but has actually done the opposite--even elevating to the cardinalate a man who has openly doubted the historicity of the Resurrection as well as Christ's divinity. I didn't make up this shocking fact--it is on record and is stunning in its mind-boggling audacity. Why is it wrong to question why a pope is REWARDING apostasy? How is it "calumny" to question these things? They are shocking and out of keeping with the whole of Catholic tradition.

4. A lie is intended to deceive. It is non-conformity of the mind to reality. For instance, it is a lie to say the Novus Ordo is a traditional Mass that is a "reform" of the old Mass when all the weight of the evidence is that it is a new concoction which never evolved from the previous rite but was fabricated by a committee of doubtful orthodoxy. But it is not a lie to speak unpleasant truths. Of course the New Mass is not traditional and is therefore a danger. Paul VI himself called it a "liturgical innovation" (which, as a novelty, the First Vatican Council warned would not have the protection of the Holy Spirit). And Cardinal Ratzinger openly ascribed to it the modern crisis in the Church: "I am convinced that the ecclesial crisis in which we find ourselves today depends in great part on the collapse of the liturgy." (La Mia Vita, quoted by Michael Davies in the Latin Mass, Fall 1997.) One of the greatest of all liturgists, Klaus Gamber, openly expressed shock regarding its harmful effects. So have a host of churchmen and liturgists in very high places. Moreover it was precisely this form of the Mass that had been condemned by Trent. So I make no apology for what I say.