Discovering the Latin Mass Brings Lots of Questions

Dr Kwasniewski reprints a recent correspondence with a layman who, after experiencing the Traditional Latin Mass, had many questions.

From One Peter Five

By Peter Kwasniewski, PhD

Author’s note: the following was a real correspondence that took place in recent years via email. Personal identifying details have been removed.

Dear Dr. Kwasniewski,

My family and I are attending the Latin Mass more and more often these days, and finding it exerts, to our surprise, a strong pull. I say to our surprise, because for such a long time we were die-hard devotees of the reverent Novus Ordo that has long been available to us and where all our friends are. But the confidence that once came easily is now wavering.

I’m writing to you to ask about a possible doctrinal basis for what I’m experiencing in the TLM in contrast to the new rite. I’ve been attending the TLM nearly every morning for the past week. It feels throughout the Mass as though a steady and continual stream of grace or assimilation to Christ is pouring forth. I don’t experience this in the Novus Ordo, which for a long time has felt dry and almost burdensome to me, though I attended the Novus Ordo daily and had always sought out the most reverent expressions thereof. After the TLM, I feel as though I’m in a heightened state of contemplation which remains until I get up to leave. Again, this rarely happened with the Novus Ordo, and when it did, it didn’t occur in the same expansive and effortless way. Every few years, God seems to surprise me in a manner that renovates my entire outlook. This feels like such an occasion. I’m full of wonder and in search of a doctrinal basis for what I’m experiencing.

Might it have to do with the TLM being a more objective rite, a fuller expression of Christ’s form, as you discuss in Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright? I’m much intrigued by your discussions of the TLM”s objectivity as it pertains to Christ’s form communicated in and through the Mass. I would love recommendations for written analysis of how the heightened objectivity of the TLM might relate to Aquinas’ understanding of form and our conformity to Christ that occurs through grace and the sacraments.

I should say that I’m not at this point following the specific prayers of the TLM in a missal, though I know generally the order of what is occurring.

                                                                                    With gratitude,
                                                                                    Amator Veritatis

Dear Amator Veritatis,

Your experience is exactly that of myself and so many others: the grace of contemplation is given more easily in this rite. I think there are a lot of reasons. The “sonic iconostasis“ is one of them. The role of the Latin sacral language cannot be overstated. More subtly, the “sacerdotalism” of the old rite – its concentration in and on the person of the priest offering Mass – is not only superlatively beneficial to the priest, but paradoxically augmentative for the laity’s experience, as I explain in this lecture. In a more obvious way, the spaciousness and silence of the rite allow “time to absorb the mysteries,” as I put it in a series of short articles at NLM (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

The position of the priest ad orientem is incalculably helpful in orienting the Mass to God, and therefore the souls of all who participate in it. Here are two places (1, 2) where I’ve talked about the manifold “messages” that either stance transmits—and the messages are transmitted independently of our subjective intentions.

Finally, since you mentioned objectivity, I have two pieces (1, 2) where I contrast the approach of the Benedictines with the approach of the Jesuits, and suggest that we can understand a lot about our situation through this contrast.

I don’t want to overwhelm you with any more links! Hopefully these will encourage your further thinking and prayer.

                                                                                    Yours in Christ,
                                                                                    Dr. Kwasniewski

Dear Dr. Kwasniewski,

Thanks for all those links, which I read with appreciation.

I was thinking on the way home from Mass this morning that thanks to immersing myself in the TLM for the last several weeks (by attending it almost daily and reflecting on it afterwards), I now have a new grasp of Aquinas’ sensibility—the understated dignity, expansiveness, and grandeur of his writings. I had long thought I needed to attend and appreciate the Mass that is closest to the one he himself would have celebrated. Thanks be to God I finally did. What I didn’t realize was how much more wonderful—wonder-full—it would be! As I said God seems to surprise me every few years with something that drastically but joyfully revises my perspective. Perhaps this is his way of keeping me humble.

Above all, I continue to be awestruck by the overwhelming sense of God’s presence in the TLM. I’m still reeling from the contrast but in a good way. I finally understand all of the references to the Mass as a cosmic reality. I finally understand why preconciliar authors attained to such profundity and to such reverence for the Mass. I keep waiting for all of this to wear off as novelty recedes, but it isn’t. Deep down though I don’t expect it to. The experience is too profound to be delusional.

Most of our friends are “reform of the reform” people, as we ourselves were up until recently. We’ve not yet disclosed to them our attraction to the TLM and are discerning how to go about this, even as we try to retain enough memory of our former mentality as to be able to communicate the new perspective more intelligibly.

                                                                                    With gratitude,
                                                                                    Amator Veritatis

Dear Amator Veritatis,

I quite agree—Aquinas (and the medievals in general) make much more sense when one lives in the realm of prayer they inhabited.

One thing I have realized over the past three decades is that Catholic tradition had developed organically for millennia to a point where everything “clicked,” where it all made sense: the doctrine, the discipline, the liturgy, everything mutually reinforced and reflected everything else. That’s what we’d expect, isn’t it, from an institution led by the Holy Spirit, and with so much time for refinement? I’m convinced, too, that a major reason why the revolutionaries could gain control in the mid-20th century is that most Catholics were taking too much for granted and running on the fumes of a great tradition, and so were unprepared for the challenge of modernity or its distillation, modernism.

It’s rather difficult to break through to “reform of the reform” [ROTR] types, because they are (a) already in possession of a lot of truth and so can’t imagine they are missing something major, (b) they have a sort of subtle defensiveness, because they know—at some level—that the liturgy was massively changed and that the changes have been destabilizing, but they figure if the pope wants the new thing, it must be good; (c) they feel judged if someone says “I used to think the way you do (or go to the church you still go to), but I’ve found something richer and deeper…”

I think the Mass of Ages films, especially episode 2, can be very powerful aids in this process, if people are willing to watch them. I am particularly eager to hear your thoughts on it, as I consider it one of the best exposés ever produced on a difficult subject—difficult in both senses: challenging to present accurately, and a bitter pill to swallow… unless and until one sees it as a “red pill” that frees us from comfortable, harmful illusions.

                                                                                    Yours in Christ,
                                                                                    Dr. Kwasniewski

Dear Dr. Kwasniewski,

I must first apologize for stating the obvious in my prior email about Aquinas being analytical. I’ve had so many new insights in the wake of this “conversion” to the TLM that I’ve not yet sorted them all out. I think the point I was groping towards was this: Aquinas was an analytical type and yet never called for, or never would have been drawn to, a rationalistic Mass along the lines of the Novus Ordo. He was too immersed in the lofty mysteries of theology to think that a liturgy should be “clear and distinct” and instantly accessible to an “audience”; he of all men would have appreciated the silences, the language of symbols, the melismatic chants, the objective rituality.

By the way, “ROTR” is a very funny acronym. It looks like “rotor” and suggests the robotic quality of the rationalistic rite along with the forced conglomerations of argument that often imbue the ROTR outlook. Humor is a welcome tonic in these days of cultural insanity. (It’s funny, too, that Pope Francis speaks of an “automaticism” in the TLM without apparently recognizing the rationalistic seedbed of the Novus Ordo.) I agree with and find helpful your analysis of why ROTR types might have a hard time breaking through to a deeper appreciation of the TLM. It seems that some of the ROTR folks who do break through have started to wear out with the Novus Ordo—it’s as if they just can’t pretend anymore that this actually is the “source and summit” of our religion. If it is, the religion seems kind of pathetic. This was happening to me, as I’ve already related, though I didn’t understand exactly what was happening or why until I broke through with the TLM.

It seems to me that ROTR rationalism leads to an overreliance on moral teachings as fuel for prayer and holiness. The Novus Ordo, even its most reverent forms, lacks the fullness of what the Mass ought to be, so ROTR people turn to moral theology in a quest to recover the coherence lacking in the Novus Ordo. But this is problematic on a number of levels and has bad side effects. Of course, one ought to affirm and adhere to orthodox moral teachings, but they shouldn’t be used as substitutes for the integrity that ought to subsist in the Mass. The liturgical and cultural life should sustain and inspire the moral life. Morals are only interesting, let alone livable, when there’s something else behind and beneath them.

I’m still trying to get my mind around the fact that there’s a valid rite which mediates grace (and isn’t devoid of Christ’s Eucharistic presence and sacrifice, as was the Protestant liturgy in which I grew up) and yet does not mediate the grace of contemplation as effectively as the TLM. I’m also trying to understand why God allowed us to remain in the Novus Ordo for decades. Ultimately, I’m grateful for the ease and depth of prayer in the TLM, and I’m grateful we’re being led in this direction. But I’m working to fathom the implications of it. Perhaps God uses all the efforts one made to attend reverent Novus Ordo Masses through the years—the habit or exertion entailed in that, in swimming against the current to pray as well as one can amid the rationalism and other deficiencies of the Novus Ordo—to fuel one’s prayer in the TLM. As one eventually wears out with the Novus Ordo, God then uses whatever depth of prayer one attained through it, despite that rite’s objective deficiencies, within the new TLM context, as analogously God might do when an ardently practicing Protestant converts to Catholicism. At the same time, using the holiness reached through the grace mediated in the deficient Novus Ordo would be an instance of God, through the grace of the Cross, bringing forth good in spite of privation. The privation itself finds no justification except in so far as it can be the occasion of a greater good by the grace of the Cross.

I’m not owed a perfect understanding, and God may want me not to understand it fully, for the sake of humility. With a seismic shift like this, I feel obliged to understand the implications as best as I can. It is always painful to realize how much better off one would have been had one seen the light sooner, but the endurance of this pain gives one something else to offer up in union with Christ’s sacrifice and draw closer to Him thereby.

                                                                                    With gratitude,
                                                                                    Amator Veritatis

Dear Amator Veritatis,

You have suffered the neglect of anyone who writes a long and intelligent letter, precisely because it deserves a real response and not a quickly dashed off “reply”!

I get what you’re saying about Aquinas. I went through the same process of discovery. It had seemed to me for a long time that Aquinas was a proto-rationalist; indeed, that is the main reproach leveled against him by the Eastern Orthodox. But then I spent more time on his poetry, on his sermons, and on his actual life (as narrated to us by those who knew him), and I began to realize that his style of writing and arguing is an aesthetic (rhetorical) choice, much as the choice of oil or watercolor or charcoal is for an artist. He wanted to present the logoi as clearly as possible, to minimize the danger of equivocation, fallacy, and recourse to the imagination or the emotions. Yet what we see is only the tip of the iceberg of Thomas’s spiritual depths, as we catch a glimpse of them in his biography and non-academic writings.

Your comment about an overreliance on moral theology to fill the gap of a religion without much else to it is very perceptive. I think this is part of the reason people got so excited by John Paul II: in his moral theology, in his theological anthropology, he was offering something of real intellectual substance, which looked wonderful next to the postconciliar pablum. But it was always rather rarefied and highbrow. The liturgy is high theology translated into symbol, gesture, chant, and art, and everyone can relate to it, indeed relatively easily, although without ever exhausting the meaning.

That we have a valid rite that does not mediate the grace of contemplation is part of the “mystery of iniquity” of our times. Every age of the Church has its own version of this mystery, and ours is the bungled liturgical reform, which ended up undermining everything it claimed to be achieving. It seems to me that the Church’s indefectibility requires that there always be a rite that mediates sanctifying grace, i.e., the grace apart from which we cannot be saved; but it would not require that a rite mediate other graces, gifts, fruits, perfections, attainments.

You wonder about why the Lord left you for so long in a postage-stamp yard, so to speak, when just outside there was a vast and beautiful forest to wander in! Your conclusion is the same as the one I came to: through this inadequate diet, God was teaching me how to hunger and thirst for Him, and when I finally got to the pure source (liturgically speaking), I was more than ready for it—I was panting for it. It frightens me to think of souls that do not find this oasis, this garden… I think some of them muddle along well enough, but others lose interest or drift away. There is a deeply tragic aspect to the past sixty years: the Council that was called to make the faith come alive among modern men has nearly suffocated it. And although churchmen apologize nowadays for everything under the sun, including plenty they should not apologize for, they never apologize for having caused or tolerated or ignored this tragedy.

When you speak of God using even a privation as an occasion of good, you state a profound truth. Just as we would not defend Scott Hahn’s Protestantism (nor would he) and yet we thank God for what it prepared him to become as a Catholic and how it has fitted him to be a great ambassador for the Bible among Catholics, so too we can thank God for what He has given us on the way to the fullness of liturgical Tradition, because, no doubt, we—I mean, you and I—would likely not have been able to reach this final point without passing through the earlier stages. Other people will have other paths, like those blessed offspring nowadays who grow up exclusively with the TLM, or the people one meets who convert directly from Protestantism to traditional Catholicism; but without a doubt, speaking for myself, I would never have been able to be a “TLM apologist” without having first had a long and intimate familiarity with the Novus Ordo—indeed, with several kinds of Novus Ordos (since it is more like a genus than a species).

Thus, when you write “it is always painful to realize how much better off one would have been had one seen the light sooner,” are you not simply stating salvation history in a nutshell? The story of Israel is the story of humanity is the story of each man: we could always have been “better off” from this or that point of view, and yet God manages to bring good out of evil and greater goods out of lesser goods. This is precisely what enables us to recognize His hand, His largesse, when it intervenes, which in turn magnifies our gratitude and our humility. It’s enough to make one dizzy with His ingenuity and infatuated with His affection. He truly is a “God of surprises”—just not in the way that our poor misguided pope thinks!

                                                                                    Yours in Christ,
                                                                                    Dr. Kwasniewski

Dear Dr. Kwasniewski,

I finally have time to reply to your generous response. I enjoyed Mass of the Ages, Episode 2. It is very well done—surely one of the best if not the best video treatment of this subject to date. While respectful of the ecclesial authorities involved and any aspirational intentions, the video is unabashedly truthful as to the reality and the damage done. The restraint and respect shown by the commentators make the critique all the more poignant and powerful. I thought Alcuin Reid summed up the reformers and reform superbly when he said they were “culturally naive.” 

This is the sixties in a nutshell. There seems to have been this sense that humanity could wipe the slate clean and recalibrate everything according to simplistic premises. It does indeed remind one very much of the Protestant Reformation. “We’re tired of complexity. Let’s get rid of this gobbledygook and start over!” And just as mainline Protestant denominations swelled like red giants headed for collapse, Catholic revolutionaries decided to adopt their failing schema! It’s very sad. The mainliners were able to put up a pretty good front still in the sixties, especially in the U.S., so I can see how a group of shallow-minded Catholics might be deceived into thinking they needed to imitate the model or else face extinction. This is also the pattern of today’s Catholic progressivists with whom I became well acquainted during my years in college. They were eager to embrace already collapsed ideologies “or else we’ll be made fun of and won’t fit in socially or survive!” 

It reminds me also of the lesser but still egregious cultural naivete of Cavadini, Healy, and Weinandy in their Church Life Journal series. Why don’t these writers on liturgy spend a month or maybe several months attending the Mass that they think needed reforming, if only to be better informed about the nature of the reform? How can one assess the progress made by a new technology without understanding how the old technology worked? It only makes logical sense. But that’s where the “we all need to be united in worship and trust the popes” argument comes in. That does make a degree of sense according to the principle lex orandi, lex credendi—but not if the TLM is vastly better and the reform a deracination of the original. In this case, one needs to see that we should all be united in worship through a return to the TLM and then assess the liturgical reform by its superior light.

What is especially salutary about your writing, I find, is that you have confidence that the traditional rite will one day be the central and standard rite. This is critical. Just as progressivists falsely imagine a story of inevitable progress, one can also succumb nowadays to a vision of accelerating and inexorable decline, especially in times as degraded as these. We must rather put our confidence in Christ and His sacraments and then let the historical drama unfurl. As Christ said to Peter, what concern is it to you if John lives and you die? These are lesser matters. The one thing needful is to keep our eyes on the Lord perceived through the sacramental forms in which he chooses to appear to us.

I had a good meeting with Fr. N. a couple of weeks ago. He emphasized that God is outside of time and can therefore in an instant restore to us the graces we might have been given had we been attending the TLM our whole lives instead of spending decades in the Novus Ordo or worse. This gets back to the salvation history theme you summarized. God brings forth good from every evil. We need not and should not justify the evil or try to make it fit into a logical progression towards the good. Rather, we call it what it is and fight against it, while also asking God to bring forth good from it by the power of the Cross. Each of us can recognize the good that God has brought forth from evils that have marked our lives and the broader course of history, but we don’t think the evils were good in themselves. The latter approach tries to defang evil by naturalizing it, whereas the former puts faith in the grace and power of the Cross.

I agree too that obsessive recourse to the life and theology of John Paul II is another instance of people seeking substitutional forms of coherence which ought to have been available in the liturgy properly celebrated. This overreliance on two orthodox popes and their theological works makes conservatives like Weigel vulnerable to errors and to intra-Church leftist critique. At the same time Weigel looks similar to progressivists in the sense that there’s an appearance of trying to create from whole cloth—via John Paul II and Benedict—a new Catholic culture from the ruins of the reform, infamously attributing the ruins to poor “implementation” of the reform rather than acknowledging the depth of problems in the reform.

In 2006, Joseph Bottum published an essay in First Things that confronted the destruction of Catholic culture in the US. I remember reading and meditating on this essay at the time it was published, when I was fresh from years of chaos in a theology department and had experienced a number of Catholic parishes in different states, and was beginning to realize how inadequate our own RCIA formation had been. I remember being struck by the essay and wondering, “How did this happen?” I recall hypothesizing at the time something like: “These are huge cultural movements; the immigrant communities that kept this cultural element of the Church going likely dispersed when they started making money, gaining wider acceptance, and moving to the suburbs; these changes were bound to happen because of Weigel’s thesis about institutional maintenance, because the Church can’t be based on cultural identities forged defensively; and at least we still have the Real Presence, the re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice, and a core of sound doctrine, which is what matters anyway even if some rebel against it…” But now I see that changing the Mass was at the causal epicenter of these other negative changes, to say nothing of wider cultural changes it detonated in America, Europe, and elsewhere.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow but made less so when one experiences the beauty and richness of the TLM and feels a flood of graces pouring forth from it as I have in recent months. One realizes at once, fully and wrenchingly, the tragedy of the liturgical reform and the needless cultural destruction that followed upon it—but one sees this, mercifully, in the refreshing, calm, relieving, and peaceful light of Christ’s presence in the TLM. Yes, one shouldn’t have a closed Catholicism that expels anyone who isn’t part of one’s cultural group (à la Weigel’s and the progressivist’s portrayal of the Church’s tendencies or problems pre-Vatican II), but neither should one have a Catholicism that is non-cultural, ahistorical, formed-purely-along-doctrinal-lines (however sane and sound the doctrine), and harmfully-stripped-down-sacramentally (however valid Christ’s work therein). This is, as Alcuin Reid put it, culturally naive. And this isn’t the Catholicism of St. Thomas Aquinas, however pure and clear was his understanding of doctrine. It’s the Protestant error all over again.

                                                                                    Gratefully yours,
                                                                                    Amator Veritatis

Dear Amator Veritatis,

I’m glad you enjoyed Mass of the Ages Episode 2, and I certainly agree with your analysis of the 1960s “counterculture,” which, ironically, was really an intensification of the evils already present in Western liberalism.

As for poor Cavadini, Healy, and Weinandy, they are so convinced of the superiority of “everything Vatican II” that they cannot imagine a world in which an older way of worshiping turns out to have been right all along. It’s a form of the modernist prejudice that all things new are better. And for such people, even entertaining the scenario of attending a TLM for a while to check it out would feel like disobedience and pride. In this way they deprive themselves of such a great good. It’s interesting how fallen human beings don’t realize when a principle they would normally agree with applies back to them: for surely CHW would say “Of course one cannot write well about a subject with which one is not well acquainted,” but then they go and do it in spades.

As for having confidence that the superior rite will win out again, I’ll admit that I’m hoping for a miracle on the scale of Noah’s flood or Pentecost, since right now the “new paradigm” seems to be baked in, hard-wired, fused like metal, injected into the bone marrow. But we do know that huge systems can collapse with astonishing speed: the history of empires shows this, with the rise and fall of rulers and their armies. Indeed, the triumph of Christianity itself could never have been humanly predicted, and yet it happened, in the teeth of persecution of all kinds. 

It sounds like Fr. N. was very helpful in his way of discussing how God brings good out of evils. A seminarian once tried to persuade me that it would be more humble to accept liturgical defects or ugliness or even abuses in a self-denying spirit like that of St John of the Cross, who sought out sufferings rather than consolations, than to pursue the restoration of tradition when the hierarchy, who are our fathers in Christ, do not support it, or positively forbid it. My response to him develops an account of how patience and toleration differ essentially from acceptance or approval.

I loved what you had to say about Weigel and the weakness of the neocon position. They do not see that “it’s the Mass that matters,” or, as Lefebvre once memorably said: “The Mass is the Church and the Church is the Mass.” Obviously that is a hyperbolic expression; he is not asserting a simple equivalency. What he perceives is that the Mass mystically sums up and presents the Church to us, it is the clearing house, the axis or nexus, the core, the primary symbol, the point of departure and point of arrival. Because it is what it is, change to it necessarily cascades into change everywhere.

I’ve often wondered if God permitted this terrible calamity of the 1960s/70s to reanimate and reenergize the Catholic love for the Mass and the Holy Eucharist. Not immediately, but rather in the way the Jews became more devout due to the Babylonian captivity, and paved the way for the coming of Christ and the first disciples. It seems an extraordinarily dangerous “gamble” on His part, but it wouldn’t be the first time God has acted with breathtaking boldness. For example, where the TLM has revived in our time, it is celebrated with great beauty and care, with fervent participation, moreso (it seems) than was the case in some places before the Council. God seems to be forming for Himself a remnant. Not that we should too quickly assume we are that righteous remnant, but rather, we should humbly give thanks that we, for no merits of our own, were chosen to carry on the tradition of the Faith at a time when it is being literally bartered away by our bishops, who shutter their churches as dioceses fail.

                                                                                    Cordially in Christ,
                                                                                    Dr. Kwasniewski

Dear Dr. Kwasniewski,

It is good to acknowledge the full reality of the calamity and the ensuing decline in order to develop a proper strategy of response. “Managed decline” is a good term for it. Bishops today often act as though it’s inevitable, as though secularism has a more compelling and merciful narrative to which the Church must adapt, damaging its own integrity. I know this defeatism and its lamentable results all too well. Secularism and its false mercy merely enable people to damage themselves through disordered actions. Thanks be to God that we have the Mass and Blessed Sacrament, the foundation of all order, as you said. No wonder Satan wants them suppressed. You wrote somewhere that faithful adherents of the Latin Mass will be the ones still standing when all else is reduced to rubble. The glory will be God’s, for He is, even now, bringing about a renaissance through those who are being hunted down and villainized from all sides, by both ecclesial and secular authorities. It is an astonishing story that will inspire future generations.

Our Lord seems to have been laying the groundwork in our family for quite some time. Providentially, my children and I had read together Ronald Knox’s The Mass in Slow Motion a couple of years ago. My instinct then was that to understand the present Mass as fully as possible, one ought to understand how it used to be. Also, I wanted them to have a concrete sense of the Mass that the great saints had celebrated down through the ages, the Mass that had undergirded most of the history of the Church, because we were studying the the saints and the history of the Church and of Europe, and I thought we would be leaving something out if we neglected the Mass that was in place for most of the saints and this history. 

Perhaps I imagined the relationship between TLM and Novus Ordo as being similar to the relation between an original classic work and an abridged version. I remember saying something like “to fully understand and appreciate the Mass we celebrate, we must make an effort understand how the original one was structured.” It seemed like common sense to me. In our home studies we’ve always emphasized the superiority of original works of literature to abridged ones, so at some level I must have been aware that an abridged version of the Mass was bound to be inferior! But I felt at the time that it might be somehow subversive to pay too much attention to the original, especially when the Novus Ordo, with Christ’s sacrifice re-presented and his real Presence therein, was still so far superior to the Protestant liturgies I grew up with. I didn’t know what to make of this feeling. And the typical arguments and narratives about “how necessary and good the reform was” kept a hold on my thinking.

As I have gotten to know the TLM better and better, one thing for which I’m very thankful is that the TLM makes a person less dependent on or desperate for charismatic priests and homilists—which is what one obsesses over in the Novus Ordo realm, where you practically have to develop a rolodex of the priests who say Mass “well” and/or preach the Gospel faithfully. Of course, one always hopes for excellence in any priest, but I feel relieved that the Mass is less about the individual priest in the TLM. In our experience it is pretty much the same from priest to priest. This is the way it ought to be.

                                                                                    Gratefully,
                                                                                    Amator Veritatis

Dear Amator Veritatis,

So true that the priest in the TLM makes less of a difference—and that is a such a relief for him and for everyone!

Your story is quite interesting to me. It’s like Francis Thompson talking about “the Hound of Heaven”: Our Lord was pursuing you and trying to reveal more to you, and happily, you were docile!

I love your comparison to unabridged vs. abridged. It’s true that one can keep the “essence” of a story while dropping out lots of details or digressions, but then one loses so much richness, atmosphere, the world the author subcreated. Martin Mosebach puts it this way: who would ever say that any element in a painting by Raphael was superfluous, even if there are bits and pieces that could be omitted without destroying the subject? Even the empty spaces, the weeds on the ground, the wisp of cloud in the sky, has a role to play, like the face, hands, and body of the main saints depicted. That is the way any great work of art is, and the traditional Mass is abundantly that way. You see this especially in a well-executed Pontifical Mass.

You mention once feeling subversive just to be thinking about the old Mass. But the most challenging moment for any Catholic, I personally believe, is when they come to the realization that evil operators have been working behind the scenes and even at the highest hierarchical levels to modify the “faith once delivered to the saints” into a modernist or quasi-modernist, quasi-protestant “catholicism lite” for modern man. They are the true subversives. This is challenging because the depth of iniquity, the cynicism, the deception, and the consequences for the loss of souls are staggering. It is, has been, the biggest shock of my life, and I feel like it’s taken me decades to process it and come to a place of interior peace, where I can see the evil for what it is, put my trust in God, and adhere to the truth no matter how unpopular it may be.

                                                                                    Yours in Christ,
                                                                                    Dr. Kwasniewski

Dear Dr. Kwasniewski,

You describe well the challenging moment in which one has the negative realization about corruption in the Church. I’ve had three such lightbulb moments, first, when I realized that Protestantism was a deviation and Catholicism vastly superior; second, when I realized post-conversion in graduate school that the Catholic Church was deeply divided and had people in it who were trying to modify or eliminate essential doctrines; and most recently, in my awakening to the superiority of the TLM and the catastrophic impact of the liturgical reform. This latter has been a startling surprise because I had thought lightbulb #2 was the final such realization I needed to have. Little had I known all of these years that #2 had in large part been caused by #3.

Has anyone to your knowledge written a book or article on ways the TLM harmonizes with principles of good design? I’ve ordered Dr. Shaw’s new book on the petitioning by artists and intellectuals on behalf of the TLM. I’m looking forward to reading it—it’s telling that artists and intellectuals, even non-Catholics, perceived what Novus Ordo architects did not.

I have noticed the use of design principles in your and others’ writing, which is partly what gave rise to this question. It would be interesting to look at the TLM through the lens of recent theorists on what constitutes good design and/or “branding.” I was watching an interview today with Paul Rand, who designed iconic logos for IBM, UPS, ABC, and others. He related the following story. About 20 years after he designed the ABC logo in the 1960s, he heard, in the 80s, that some ABC executives had the impulse to update Rand’s logo for the times. They devoted many dollars and much angst to exploring the possibility. Finally, they decided to conduct a survey, from the results of which they concluded that the original logo had accumulated such massive recognition and associative value, due to decades of use, that it would be far too costly to dispense with it. Would that Paul VI and his reformers had been as wise and humble as the ABC executives!

                                                                                    Gratefully,
                                                                                    Amator Veritatis

Dear Amator Veritatis,

That book, The Latin Mass and the Intellectuals, is fantastic! You will love it. I ranked it one of my favorite books of 2023.

I don’t know of an ex professo treatment under that heading, although innumerable commentators talk about symmetry, order, parallelisms, symbology, the “architecture” of the Mass, etc. The comparison between Classic Coke and New Coke is so obvious that it’s given rise to a plethora of articles, posts, and memes. A fine article by Eric Sammons can be found here—almost a classic itself in internet terms, as it’s nine years old.

You could be describing my own journey, except that #1 for me was from mainstream lukewarm Catholicism to the charismatic movement; then #2 from there to “conservative” Catholicism; then #3 to tradition. Just as Our Lord healed a blind man on one occasion in steps, it seems that most of us need to be led from station to station—as if, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, we cannot bear too much reality, and have to be expanded and toughened up for it.

I wish you and your entire family many blessings as you put your roots down in the traditional Faith—a mighty tree whose roots plunge into the depths of the ages and whose massy trunk supports far-flung branches heavy with fruit, proffering shade to weary pilgrims. Thanks be to God that, in spite of our unworthiness, we have been led to a home on earth that reflects the beauty and echoes the song of the heavenly Jerusalem. Gloria in excelsis Deo!

                                                                                    Yours in Christ,
                                                                                    Dr. Kwasniewski