A Conversation With an Anglo-Catholic Friend

This conversation ensued after I posted the final chapter of Michale Davies' Liturgical Shipwreck. I've added a clarification at the end. To preserve my friend's anonymity, I've labelled his remarks with 'I' for Interlocutor and my responses 'JW'.

I: I’ll never understand why you’re willing to attend it (the NO Mass-JW). If I were RC I’d be “TLM or nothing.”

(Of course, I’ve always lived in major metropolitan areas, though Charlotte NC had nothing other than SSPX when I lived there.)

JW: Because I'm a Catholic, that's why. The First Precept of the Church is 'to attend Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation. It's not 'to attend Mass if a TLM or Divine Liturgy is available'. As far as I'm concerned 'home aloners' as we term them are in a constant state of mortal sin.

I: but I don’t believe the Novus Ordo is a mass. It’s just stupid fake garbage.

JW: And there we disagree. So, you would not attend a Novus Ordo said in Latin with Gregorian chant because 'it's just stupid fake garbage'? A Mass is a valid Mass if it has the proper minister (a Priest), proper matter (bread and wine), and proper form (the Words of Institution), all of which are present in the Novus Ordo.

I: I want the Novus Ordo to die. Being willing to attend it is not helping it die.

Not all of my traditionalist friends are confident that all Novus Ordo masses are necessarily valid. Better to stay away. 

But I suppose the difficulties of maintaining this position as a Roman Catholic is one reason I’m not one. The cognitive dissonance is too great, so in that sense I suppose you have a point.

JW: I never said that ALL NO Masses are valid. And, whilst I am certain that the Masses here in the Diocese of Lincoln are valid if there were a TLM or an Eastern Catholic Divine Liturgy available, I would never darken the door of an NO Church again, but there's not. But I'm still curious. would you not attend a Novus Ordo said in Latin with Gregorian chant because 'it's just stupid fake garbage'?

I: Jovan Weismiller well, the fact is I have, at St. Agnes in St. Paul MN, in 2010 and 2017. Of course not being RC I didn’t receive communion. Westminster Cathedral and the Brompton Oratory in London can be decent. But I don’t live in either of those cities.
I don’t know, honestly. But such masses are even rarer than the TLM so it’s mostly a moot point. I certainly would NOT be willing to attend a more typical NO with the kind of garbage “music” my mom used to have to practice. Her RC jobs since 1998 are my main personal reason for hating the NO so much. I couldn’t stand hearing her practice it. That “music” fills me with so much revulsion and disgust that it would never be possible for me to be in a proper disposition to receive the Eucharist under those conditions.

If that makes me an arrogant stubborn selfish aesthete, so be it. Aesthetics are, after all, why I created this group despite not believing that the RCC is the One True Church or that there is any such thing.

When I say “the NO is stupid fake garbage” I suppose I mean the whole culture and apparatus of modern NO “Catholicism,” for which I have nothing but contempt. Even if a given typical vernacular NO is valid the “externals” are an insult to God and I wouldn’t want to participate in insulting God. And even the sight of the face of Jorge Bergoglio enrages me. I hate him.

JW: Hatred is a mortal sin. I don't hate Francis, but I do pray for his conversion to Catholicism every day.

I: How can a non-Catholic be pope?

JW: That's well above my pay grade (and the pay grade of all the armchair theologians who sit in judgement of the Pope). He's not the first heretic to be Pope. Honorius, Liberius, and John XXII, all of whom are considered to have been valid Popes despite their heresy, come to mind. What I do know, is that St Robert Bellarmine, Doctor of the Church, wrote that if a man is universally accepted as Pope, which, despite the tiny fringe of sedevacantists and Beneplenists, Francis has been so accepted, he is undoubtedly the valid Pope. I'm a whole lot less worried about such questions than I am about getting to heaven. I don't think that one of the questions I'll be asked at the Judgement Seat is 'Did you believe that Francis was Pope?'

And that ended the conversation.

To clarify a point. I'd like to qualify my statement that all 'home aloners' sin. If the only NO Mass available is obviously invalid, and, yes, they do, unfortunately, exist, it can not be a sin to not attend it. In fact, even a valid Mass celebrated in a slipshod, abusive manner, may be a danger to one's faith, in which case it would be a sin to attend it.