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Traditional Catholicism’s Enemies Routinely Fail These Three Common Sense Checks - Stone - 06-10-2025
Traditional Catholicism’s Enemies Routinely Fail These Three Common Sense Checks
Robert Morrison [Emphasis mine] | June 9, 2025
All of this is like a Monty Python skit except that it is only humorous to the enemies of God and His Catholic Church. God has permitted the crisis in the Church to reach this point to which those who persecute Traditional Catholics are unmistakably wrong.
Although we pray that the tide will turn with Pope Leo XIV, one of the most astoundingly bizarre realities in the world today is that Traditional Catholics are persecuted by the putative leaders of the Catholic Church. The crime committed by Traditional Catholics is that we seek to adhere to what the Catholic Church has taught for two-thousand years. Although relatively few clerics actively carry out the persecution against these “backward” Catholics, millions of Catholics watch the spectacle with tacit approval. As we can see from the three examples below, the failure to decry the preposterous injustice committed against Traditional Catholics suggests a thorough lack of common sense, or worse, among so many who consider themselves exemplary Catholics.
Unity in Diversity. Those persecuting Traditional Catholics often cite the need for unity as the justification for seeking to silence those who adhere to what the Church has always taught. This would be far more persuasive were it not for the obvious fact that these persecutors do all they can to foster diversity of belief and practice among those whom they do not persecute. To get a sense of this phenomenon, we can look at three passages from the Final Document of the Synod on Synodality’s October 2024 session:
- “Deepening the link between liturgy and synodality will help all Christian communities, in the diversity of their cultures and traditions, to adopt celebratory styles that make visible the face of a synodal Church.”
- “The whole Church has always been comprised of a plurality of peoples and languages, of vocations, charisms and ministries at the service of the common good, as well as of local Churches. In turn, these local Churches have always possessed their own rites and disciplines as well as their own distinctive theological and spiritual heritage. The unity of this diversity is realised by Christ, the cornerstone, and the Holy Spirit, the source of all harmony. This unity in diversity is precisely what is meant by the catholicity of the Church.”
- “The appreciation of contexts, cultures and diversities, and of the relationships between them, is key to growing as a missionary synodal Church and to journeying, prompted by the Holy Spirit, towards the visible unity of Christians.”
The Mass. The most common and effective punishment for many Traditional Catholics is to impair their ability to attend the Traditional Latin Mass. This, again, is generally justified in terms of promoting unity: allowing Catholics to attend the Traditional Latin Mass, they say, compromises the liturgical unity. This is self-evidently preposterous because the Novus Ordo Mass is itself a radical sign of disunity, with the manner of celebration differing from parish to parish within even the same cities, without even considering the fact that it is in different languages around the world.
Conversely, Traditional Catholics witness the ultimate sign of liturgical unity when they attend the Traditional Latin Mass in foreign countries — other than the sermon, it is substantially identical to the Mass they would attend in their home parish. Not only that, Traditional Catholics are unified with their ancestors in their worship according to the Traditional Latin Mass. And so it is almost impossible to imagine that serious people could actually believe that banning the Traditional Latin Mass promotes any sort of unity.
The Bishop of Charlotte, North Carolina, Michael Martin, added another dimension of absurdity recently when he condemned Traditional Catholics because they cannot really “participate” if they attend the Traditional Latin Mass:
“Latin is used from place to place for various and different motivations. However, the faithful's full, conscious, and active participation is hindered wherever Latin is employed. Most of our faithful do not understand and will never comprehend the Latin language, especially those on the periphery. It is fallacious to think that if we employ Latin more frequently, the faithful will get used to it and finally understand it. Our ancestors ‘heard' the Mass in Latin every Sunday but never understood it.”
The translation: these poor fools who think they can best worship God by attending the Traditional Latin Mass need to be deprived of the primary means by which they participate in the life of the Church because some of their ancestors may not have understood the Mass. When these opponents of the Traditional Latin Mass make such statements it is difficult to imagine that they are not being malicious. How, in other words, can we imagine that they are actually so confused?
Religious Liberty. As we know, one of the most touted innovations of Vatican II, was to overturn what the pre-Vatican II popes taught about religious liberty. To see this, we can simply consider the following contradictory statements:
- “From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an ‘insanity’ . . . that ‘liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way.’” (Blessed Pope Pius IX’s, Quanta Cura)
- “This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.” (Dignitatis Humanae, Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom)
All of this is like a Monty Python skit except that it is only humorous to the enemies of God and His Catholic Church. God has permitted the crisis in the Church to reach this point to which those who persecute Traditional Catholics are unmistakably wrong. We can pray for these enemies of the unadulterated Faith, but it is foolish to imagine that God calls us to compromise the religion He gave us to placate those who have completely abandoned reason. Never before has it been more clear that God asks us to endure any persecution from Rome rather than sacrifice one iota of the Faith.
Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!