Jack Seney on Fr Reese and the TLM

Mr Seney has some very cogent thoughts on Fr Reese's call to ban young people from the TLM.

By Jack Seney

So a single Jesuit priest loses his mind more than most of them already have, and begins spouting his singular opinion about how young people should be kept away from the Traditional Latin Mass. Predictably, hordes of TLM adherents react as though the Pope himself had just said this, and work themselves into a sputtering, rabid fury even to the point of saying that they "feel like leaving the Church."

Such trads are of course misled by some of the popular self-anointed spokesmen of the trad movement, who blare sensationalist headlines about this on their latest You Tube communiques to guarantee yet another round of hundreds of thousands of hits. And around and around we go in still one more misdirected fit of emotionalism that distracts from the very real daily work to be done for the TLM.

The priest in question is just that - a single (liberal) priest stating his own (stupid) opinion. And that's it. No one is going to bar young people from the Latin Mass. No one would dare to bar young people from the Latin Mass as the Latin Mass is a reliable source of guaranteed and much-needed support for the Church.

Might there be wild verbal aggressions and select insults of the Latin Mass from the office of a pope who has shown signs of confusion concerning it? Of course. Will these amount to some dramatic "banning" of or draconian assaults on the Latin Mass everywhere? Only in the minds of TLM adherents who would rather be on a Shakespearean stage signifying nothing than doing the daily drudge work for the TLM that the Lord actually requires.

Saint Pope Pius V established the Latin Mass as part of the Catholic Church forever, to the point that it survived the horrors that came out of Vatican II and was then solidified in its place in the Church once again by Pope Benedict XVI. Any attempt to lessen it now would be of questionable validity even if it came from the likes of Pope Francis, who is anyway not so "out of it" that he is going to try to weaken a solid Church support of immeasurable strength.

Naysayers like the Jesuit in question can be responded to simply and succinctly, with TLM adherents then getting right back to our daily work, charity and prayer. Getting bent out of shape about naysayers to the extent of yet another You Tube explosion of outrage is nothing more than a distraction taking our energies away from far more necessary good deeds.