Below is a letter I received from a mother of a large family. She and her husband gave me permission to publish it. I am keeping them anonymous, as well as their bishop and diocese.
The TLM community in my diocese is suffering greatly. We are still mourning the loss of our Latin Mass; that school of holiness, valor, beauty, and love. It was our identity; the light of our families and the means of constant conversion in which we were all deeply happy and experienced such sweet holiness. Totally erased in the blink of an eye. It has been viciously torn away from us with absolutely no concern about what that would do to the faith and hearts of the people of this diocese. Tossed into the diocesan garbage bin are entire communities wracked with sorrow, and that sorrow hasn’t diminished with time. After all the media frenzy has died down, we are still crying.
Our Latin Mass was stolen from us on a Thursday. We who would die for our King are now forced to watch as the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is dismantled piece by piece before our very eyes until all that’s left is an inferior, empty, heartbreaking disappointment, unworthy of Him. In its place, protestant-flavored liturgical norms are being fired at us like a gatling gun. Is this not the hostile transformation of our Catholic culture by our own bishop?
It is holiness in our worship that we crave so that we may better honor and adore Him whom we love, and it is holiness in worship that is being forbidden(!) by the man who is charged with guarding the sacred liturgy and defending our Catholic liberty. We are accustomed to having a normal, peaceful diocese with a loving bishop. This bizarre situation is completely unfamiliar and it’s beyond distressing to be under constant attack by our “father”. What’s so confusing is how callous the words and behavior of our current bishop are, and how careless he is with the souls entrusted to him.
We are enduring the year of “firsts” after the death of our Latin Mass. Compared to the traditional calendar, the ordinary form calendar is utterly depressing. Should anything regarding the sacred liturgy be referred to as “ordinary”? Why do they put our high feasts days behind bars when we are asking to celebrate them at the appropriate time?
For example, every year we are accustomed to having an Extraordinary Form Missa Cantata to honor and glorify God on the great feast of Ascension. But the new calendar in our diocese doesn’t allow this solemnity to be celebrated that day; it’s transferred to the following Sunday. Therefore, we get nothing on Ascension Thursday. The end.
Someone please explain to me how this is somehow a better way. We want to honor and adore Our Blessed Lord on His high feast of Ascension Thursday per the tradition of Holy Mother Church. Let us! How can we change the culture and convert the world if we don’t set the example of placing Him first over everything else, even on a weekday? It gave us great joy to do this. I cannot describe the sorrow this loss is causing. We’re still crying.
We are now officially forbidden (!) from using our altar rails in worship of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity at Holy Communion and spurned by our bishop for wanting to do so. I watched in tears as a young girl on crutches struggled to kneel on the hard floor to receive Holy Communion, right next to a cushioned altar rail. How does this make any sense without concluding that it is abuse for the sake of hatred?
We are judged and shamed by some for making others feel as if we are holier than them when we kneel to receive our King, but our kneeling has nothing to do with them. It doesn’t even have anything to do with us. This is about Our Lord, Jesus Christ and freely giving Him the honor which is due to Him without impediment or difficulty. “Down in adoration falling, Lo, the Sacred Host, we hail!”
This is our faith. We are Catholic. We kneel, we veil, we chant in Latin, and we adore Christ in the Most Holy Sacrament of the altar. Does Bishop X even believe? He has made the altar rail a war zone because of, unity?? I see nothing but division, chaos, and pain. I will kneel on tacks and hot coals until I bleed if necessary and offer it all up for his conversion if I must. If he wants me to stop wearing my veil, he’s going to have to rip it off my head himself. Does he want me to give up my scapular too? How about my rosary? May Almighty God free his Church from the anti-Catholic tyrannical rule of modernist bishops.
Next in line for the guillotine in Bishop X’s reckless path of spiritual destruction could very well be the sacred music, one of the most integral ways to pass down the Catholic faith. A precious relic, “greater than that of any other art”. Sacred music belongs to us all. It is our history, our culture, and our identity. This is our children’s priceless inheritance, meant to be painstakingly preserved in its proper form, and carefully handed down to the next generation intact.
I will never chant in the vernacular. It disgusts me. I am Catholic and I chant in the official, sacred language of our Church: Latin, just as those before me have always done for centuries. Bishop X has been heard to say that he hates Latin. Satan also hates Latin. One can only be left to surmise that only a tragically malformed ideologue with an intense hatred for sacred tradition would be so determined to crush this holy, beautiful, and ancient form of prayer within the Mass. Gregorian chant has become a part of our souls now. We are not prepared to give it up as an integral element of our worship in noble service of the sacred liturgy.
The recent experience of having to watch large screens rolled out and placed directly in front of the altar, blocking the tabernacle during Holy Mass to play the video of the bishop speaking to us all about his, uhh, below average vision for the diocese was staggering and left many people more reassured in their suspicions that he has Narcissistic Personality Disorder. We worship the Holy Trinity, not Bishop X.
A prayerful woman and dear friend once told me after being puzzled by our bishop’s hateful actions that she realized why he punishes us so relentlessly, “He is jealous of Jesus”. An astute observation. Any bishop who demands that his flock cease their reverent, licit practices of devotion to our God and King in the sacred liturgy has proven himself unworthy of the office, and therefore should step down or be reprimanded and removed by Rome before he is able to do any more damage to the faith and the hearts of those entrusted to his care.
We have all seen with our own eyes that he disregards our Eucharistic Lord at the consecration and seems to hold Him in disdain. I would absolutely question his belief in the True Presence. His appalling ignorance of the sacred liturgy is painfully evident for all to see. Chief liturgist and chief exorcist? Factual but laughable. His episcopacy is a sad embarrassment to our esteemed diocese and the Church at large. Respect and trust have been obliterated by him. His abusive behavior is that of a level 10 narcissist and we are in desperate need of an apostolic visitation.
And Rome? Crickets. Whomever is responsible for choosing this man to be in authority over innocent souls should be punished by God for the suffering he has caused. That may sound harsh to some who haven’t witnessed the abuse and anguish we are continuously experiencing here.
With every fiber of my being, I reject this foreign, protestant replacement religion currently being rammed down my throat in my Church. It is not Catholic. I reject the syncretistic false “unity” of the globalist, sodomite, freemasonic and even satanic enemies of Christ who present themselves in Roman collars as if they were holy men of God. Our current reality is that those with authority in the Church are the destroyers of the Church and we need to say it often until it’s commonly understood.
The organic resurgence of authentic Catholicism through the action of the Holy Spirit in the Church has them enraged and terrified and they are in an enormous hurry to crush it before they die. They hate Jesus Christ and they hate us. Now is the time to hold fast to the traditions handed down to us, more tightly than ever. May God have mercy on us and deliver His holy Church from the power of wicked men.
Why do some priests allow us to be severely spiritually abused in the name of “obedience”? We were not consulted beforehand as to how we felt about them “taking it on the chin” over the removal of our Latin Mass. They, thankfully, can receive nourishment from the ability to say their own private Latin Mass. But the lay faithful do not have this access and we’re starving. We were not asked how we felt about their unnecessary compliance with the rail ordinance. I think many of them truly must not understand how this feels for us. It is way, way more than just “a little sad.”
Forgive me, but should they not be more concerned about the damage and scandal caused to the faith of the little ones, than about appeasing a petty tyrant out of fear? The long-term cost of capitulation is too great. Too great. “Christ would not have his spouse be a slave. There is nothing in this world that God loves more than the liberty of His Church.” St. Anselm of Canterbury. May St. Anselm intercede for us that God grant His priests the ability to freely minster to their flocks.
There are a good many faithful priests who have courageously and quietly continued ministering to their people to the best of their ability despite the threats. They need support in numbers from their brother priests. But when will the priests who feel squeamish about all this finally stand up and say, “Enough”? When will they cry out from the pulpits that this is all actually evil? We are under siege. To be a priest is to be willing to follow Christ to crucifixion, correct?
But they are not willing to risk it all to protect us and while they continue to cede ground, souls will be lost. Souls. Will. Be. Lost. How far will they compromise their integrity before they finally draw a line in the sand? To the priest who is responsible for leaking information to the press and thereby allowing transparency and awareness so that we can know exactly where to direct our prayers: HERO.
“When the shepherd becomes a wolf, the first duty of the flock is to defend itself. The true children of Holy Church, at such times, are those who walk by the light of their Baptism, not the cowardly souls who, under the specious pretext of submission to the powers that be, delay their opposition to the enemy in the hope of receiving instructions which are neither necessary nor desirable.”—Dom Prosper Gueranger, The Liturgical Year.
Are we there yet??
I’ve attended Latin Mass for over forty years. Forty years. I’m told that our current experience is a repeat of history and we are experiencing what those in the 60’s went through. They did not have a happy ending, so what do we have to hope for? For those of us who have a great love for tradition, after the glory days of Summorum Pontificum, we’ve been thoroughly defeated and have lost what was the beating heart of our families: our Mass.
Many souls are regularly weeping bitter tears and the temptation to wish that we had never become so attached to the beauty of the Latin Mass in the first place is weighing on us. That loss combined with having such an abusive father is becoming unbearable. We love the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass so very much and are wholly driven to ensure that it is filled with splendor and beauty. I do not love the deflated, mediocre, protestantized Mass. I love the Catholic Mass.
If Bishop X completes the destruction of the liturgy in our diocesan home which he is wrecking, where will we take our children for Catholic worship? How will we pass the faith on to them without our Catholic culture at the Mass. Really. How? Good catechesis and home life cannot fully make up for bad liturgy. It is the effeminate, handholding, emotional music-saturated, woman-dominant, hideous architecture, entertainment-themed, “communal gathering-for-a-meal”, liturgical formula which drives men out of the Church. I’ve witnessed it for decades.
With the violent removal of our Latin Mass, we are being denied the chance to give right worship to God to the best of our ability, which is the most important thing we can do on this Earth. I’m sorry, but the Novus Ordo is empty and banal, and I can clearly see now that it belittles Our Lord Jesus. It is insufficient for the King. It can never replace what we had. Never.
So, what now? How long will our children have to wait for its return? Until they’re grown and have missed their formation in good liturgy, after it’s too late? I know too many who have lost their faith in the uninspiring Novus Ordo Mass and the Catholic school systems (rather, they never received it), and precious few who have found their way back through the Latin Mass. They suffered from the lack of it and they are justifiably angry about having been denied it all their lives.
We live every Sunday in outrage, and our hope is at breaking point. We were torn from a fruitful path of purpose, worthy mission, and most importantly, restoration in the TLM and now are witnessing the systematic dismantling of what’s left of the sacred liturgy. No way out. No way forward. Rome does not appear to be coming to the rescue and the dubia will probably be ignored because the upper echelons of the hierarchy are mostly corrupt and seemingly all on the same side. There will be no legal repercussions for them because, for now, they hold all the levers of power. I pray that I am wrong.
We sorely need an inspired strategy from Heaven and a unified prayer campaign to our Blessed Mother, our Advocate, with the intention that God grant us a saintly bishop for our battered and bewildered diocese. In the words of Dietrich von Hildebrand, may we “storm Heaven with the prayer that the spirit of St. Pius X might once again fill the hierarchy.”
Until that happens, I remain stunned that anyone on this earth had the power to take our Mass away through the channels of authority inside the Church. May Heaven help us in this nightmare we’re living. Until then, we will try by God’s grace to endure this persecution under our cruel bishop and trust God’s reasons for allowing this bitter trial while we pray for the hastening of the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
But we go on living in sorrow in the desert of our liturgical wasteland as we watch our children begin to languish without the Latin Mass. Like the saints before us, in this bizarre situation, may God grant us the grace to always be authentically CATHOLIC, most especially, in our liturgy and worship.
Forcing myself to end with a smidgeon of hope, I’ll quote our friend Father John: “This is our season for patience; for waiting. Waiting for God to show us clear paths forward in the light of unexpected setbacks but not defeats. But it is a season that God has permitted.” And holding on for dear life to the words of the kind priest who wrote the anonymous letter of consolation to our diocese in the midst of our strife, “Pray for him, bear your exile and the sufferings therein with patience, offer these sufferings as a sacrifice, and trust that your return is near. Through your stripes, you can help mend these liturgical wounds. Return follows exile; renewal follows persecution; restoration follows destruction.”
Let it be so very soon, O Lord, for our precious children.
(Note from Fr. David: If you know to whom I can give credit for the beautiful featured image at the top of this article, simply email me at the address found on my donate page. I only saw it floating around Twitter without a name to the original photographer, but I am happy to give you photo credit.)