“Heresy Thrives on a Combination of Amnesia, Anarchy and Novelty.” Video!

Fr Zed recommends this talk by Dr Kwasniewski “Why Latin is the right language for Roman Catholic worship.”

From Fr Z's Blog

I was given a manuscript of a new book by Bp. Schneider to look over. It is about heresies. Just as he put out a book about the truths of the Faith that are to be believe, now he has a book about errors to be avoided.   More about this book later.

That leads me to something that really perked my ears.

I have an action item for you.

I just finished watching a video of a talk given in Cleveland by Peter Kwasniewski about “Why Latin is the right language for Roman Catholic worship.”

The radical progressives who waged war against Latin in the mid 20th century knew very well what they were doing. They wanted to blow up the bridge that connected Catholics with their heritage their tradition their collective memory. The vaunted modernization of the Church could be carried out only if the past were forgotten, sealed inaccessibly behind a wall of incomprehensibility. The loss of Latin has therefore had ramifications far beyond the sanctuaries of our churches even if that is where we most notice its presence or absence. Heresy thrives on a combination of amnesia, anarchy and novelty. The liturgical crisis is only one part of the larger crisis of Catholic identity which has more to do with language than most people realize.

Peter knocks dinger after dinger out of the park in this talk. He says many of the things I’ve been saying over the years in a concise speech, deftly reasoned, fluidly connected.

He spins out in his own words the phrases that I use often, such as “We are our rites”, “Liturgy is doctrine”.

I invite you to listen to the talk.

Before I leave you to it, also take note of how he obliterates the absurdly ignorant proposition that people who attend the Vetus Ordo can have all the smell and bells and vestments and chant and Latin in the Novus Ordo.

Firstly, that’s just dumb. The content of the prayers of the rites are different. However, Peter has another approach which was quite good in explaining how that doesn’t work. He starts with the premise that the Novus Ordo was created for maximum comprehensibility. You should be able to see, hear, and grasp everything without effort. There are microphones, the priest faces the people, the vernacular is used, only one thing happens at a time. Of course this has nothing to do with “worship” in the history of humanity and the transcendent. When people say, you can have the Novus Ordo in Latin,

“they’re completely missing the point. The Novus Ordo in Latin falls between two stools to use a saying of Joseph Shaw’s. It has neither the instant accessibility for which it was designed nor the grandeur, solemnity, symbolic richness and ceremonial depth of the Tridentine rite which augments our awareness of mystery and our receptivity to truth that cannot be put into simple linguistic packages. So the Latin Novus Ordo fails. It fails from both angles.”

The Q&A is also good, and extensive.  My experience in giving talks – back when people still wanted me to give talks!  LOL! – people often enjoy the Q&A as much as if not more than the talk.