Traditional Latin Mass is like an Easter egg hunt that lasts a lifetime
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
184.6406
Summary
Dr. Peter Kwasniewski has a new book, "Turned Around: Replying to the Most Common Objections Against the Traditional Latin Mass," from Tan Books, responding to the objections to the traditional Latin Mass.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Even in the Middle Ages, when people were illiterate, they were educated in all kinds of ways.
00:00:04.740
If you go into a medieval church, it is the Bible in stone and glass.
00:00:17.340
Hello, my friends. It gives me great pleasure to introduce you to someone who I esteem very much.
00:00:23.200
His name is Dr. Peter Kwasniewski. Many of you will know him already because of his defense of the traditional Latin mass.
00:00:31.480
He's been doing that for a long, long time, and he's got a new book out.
00:00:35.720
The book is called Turned Around, Replying to the Most Common Objections Against the Traditional Latin Mass.
00:00:42.240
It's from Tan Books, and you can get it at Tan Books.
00:00:45.200
If you're outside of the United States, you can also pick it up on Amazon.
00:00:48.200
But this is going to be a good one because Peter is a man of great intellect, but he's also one who has the humility to speak to the common people.
00:00:59.740
He actually takes the great learning that he's achieved by hard study and can bring out the truth in simple ways for just us common folks.
00:01:08.920
And so I asked him before the show if I could ask him the hard, hard questions, the ones that probably a lot of people think about, but they don't ask.
00:01:18.520
Like about, oh, those traditional priests, those Latin mass guys, aren't they the ones who are, isn't the abuse crisis much more common among them?
00:01:35.480
I mean, come on, all those questions and many more will be answered right now.
00:01:41.020
Stay tuned to this episode of the John Henry Weston Show.
00:01:44.080
For U.S. residents, creating will has never been easier.
00:01:47.360
Thanks to My Legacy Will, an online platform free of charge, you can now create your own will and choose to include LifeSite News in it.
00:01:56.300
Specify where your funeral will take place, the number of masses to be offered for your soul, and how your estate will be distributed.
00:02:03.360
We would be deeply grateful if you remembered LifeSite News in your will.
00:02:12.400
Thank you for your support, and may God bless you.
00:02:20.260
Let's begin, as we always do, with the sign of the cross.
00:02:22.600
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
00:02:32.580
This is one that I think a lot of people have been waiting for.
00:02:36.020
It's one that will hopefully give to people what they need, because there are a lot of questions.
00:02:43.300
And we're going to start right in, because I've got a bunch of them for you.
00:02:45.900
I went and talked to a bunch of people who have things that they find problem with in Latin mass.
00:02:53.720
And I thought, oh, there's no better person to speak to than Dr. Peter Gozneski.
00:02:58.720
I feel like I'm in the batter's box, you know, ready to pitch these fastballs.
00:03:09.880
Why Latin when nobody understands it, for the most part?
00:03:14.060
I'm going to give a nutshell answer to that question.
00:03:16.460
The nutshell answer is that every Christian church, every apostolic rite in Christianity,
00:03:23.560
East and West, has developed over the course of centuries what you could call a sacred language.
00:03:28.780
That is, language used at a lofty, transcendent level that is actually difficult for people to understand.
00:03:37.840
Of course, there are people who have no difficulty with these languages.
00:03:40.360
But generally speaking, when we approach God, when we approach, we come into the presence of God,
00:03:45.540
we don't simply use the language of the marketplace or the language of the kitchen.
00:03:50.140
We use this special level or register or type of language that's called sacred.
00:03:56.800
And you see that with the Greek Orthodox Church.
00:03:59.400
You know, 2,000 years ago, everybody was speaking Koine Greek.
00:04:02.960
But the Greek Orthodox Church today still uses ancient Koine Greek when modern Greek is a quite different language.
00:04:09.200
Similarly, the Russian Orthodox, they use Church Slavonic, which can, you know, is similar to other Slavic languages.
00:04:18.340
It's not, it's like, it would be like for us, you know, maybe like Chaucer's English or something, right?
00:04:24.780
Even the English with the Book of Common Prayer, a lot of people think, oh, Cranmer, you know, used the English of the day.
00:04:32.380
He used a very special register that very few people, nobody spoke the way the Book of Common Prayer speaks.
00:04:40.020
And now, 400 years later, it's even more the case that that has a special sound to it.
00:04:45.140
In the Western Church, right, Latin came in early on, not because it was the common language, that's the big myth,
00:04:52.780
but because it was the language of the educated, the scholars, the aristocrats, the poets, and also of the priests, the ancient pagan priests.
00:05:02.000
So it had this kind of numinous and divine resonance to it.
00:05:06.080
And when you look at the Latin liturgy, it's written in, not in everyday Latin, we know what that looked like, because we have records of it, but in this special register.
00:05:14.980
So I think there's a phenomenon you can see, not just in Christianity, but in all religions, in Islam, in Hinduism, in Buddhism, and Judaism, of course, to use a special language when we approach God in worship.
00:05:27.380
That makes sense in terms of anthropology, in terms of psychology, because it puts us in a certain frame of mind.
00:05:33.720
When we're approaching God, we're approaching the infinite and the eternal one.
00:05:37.160
We're not just, you know, approaching a chum and we're going to have a beer together, right?
00:05:41.660
So I think it's very helpful for us when we go into that domain.
00:05:45.060
You know, when you go into a church and you hear the priest say,
00:05:48.260
in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, Amen, intro ebo ad altari dei,
00:05:52.700
suddenly it's like, oh, we've just dived into the deep end of the pool.
00:05:58.660
Now we're in a different domain than we were outside the church.
00:06:02.240
You know, profane, the word profane means beyond the threshold of the temple.
00:06:06.260
So what's outside the temple, we enter the temple, now we're in a sacred domain.
00:06:10.140
But of course, people can follow the meaning of these prayers.
00:06:14.120
You know, that's why we have hand missiles or handouts or the red booklet that you see all over the place.
00:06:19.560
It's not difficult to know if you want to know what's being prayed.
00:06:23.180
It's not like the church is saying, you're forbidden to know what's being prayed.
00:06:26.520
But when the priest approaches God, he is using this appropriate sacred language.
00:06:34.240
And that is helpful for all of us, too, to enter into the spirit of worship and adoration.
00:06:44.080
But I think there's a lot of people who would love to hear it.
00:06:49.000
And at least in the Novus Ordo celebrations have grown accustomed to hearing the prayers that the priest is praying
00:06:56.420
and kind of making them their own and praying along with them.
00:07:01.940
And besides which, during a lot of the time when the Latin Mass was out there for everybody and it was the only Mass, most people didn't read.
00:07:12.600
So what do you answer to those who want to hear it and pray along with it but just can't?
00:07:17.540
I mean, it's a complicated question because the way that the liturgical tradition in the West and in the East developed is that they used a multitude of languages,
00:07:27.360
not just the spoken language, but they used the language of architecture, iconography, stained glass windows, statues, music.
00:07:35.260
There are so many different languages, and even some of these are nonverbal languages like gestures, bows, prostrations, signs of the cross.
00:07:45.200
The vestments are themselves a kind of language.
00:07:47.740
You know, certainly the music has words, but it also moves us simply because of the music.
00:07:52.640
And so the church communicated with all of these verbal and nonverbal languages,
00:07:57.360
and all of them together are meant to form us over time, really over a whole lifetime, in understanding what we're doing.
00:08:05.260
So it's not, I think part of the problem here is that there's been an assumption for some decades that the only way to understand,
00:08:13.020
or the best way to understand, is to have something delivered to you on a plate, so to speak, in your common language,
00:08:18.880
that's instantly comprehensible and digestible by you.
00:08:22.360
And when you look at the Christian tradition, actually, I think that the reason that was avoided
00:08:26.860
was that it would give you too superficial a notion of what you're doing and the one you're dealing with.
00:08:35.040
I really want to come back to this, this deep sense of mystery that you find in whether you go to a Latin Mass or a Byzantine liturgy,
00:08:43.640
and they're quite different in character, but they're very powerful at evoking this sense of entering into the mystery, right?
00:08:51.420
And when we simplify and vernacularize and turn the priest towards the people,
00:08:57.100
it becomes kind of a didactic preaching exercise, almost like a meeting where we're just going to talk about God.
00:09:04.920
We can talk about God all the time, everywhere else.
00:09:08.940
What about humbling ourselves in his almighty, awesome presence?
00:09:15.420
You know, we need that more than ever, I would say.
00:09:20.980
A lot of the time the priest is praying silently.
00:09:22.900
You can't even hear what he's saying, whether it's in Latin or some other language.
00:09:25.600
It doesn't even matter because you can't hear it.
00:09:27.780
But that silence is a reminder to us that I could make this brief comparison.
00:09:32.240
In the Eastern churches, they have what's called an iconostasis.
00:09:35.100
So a big screen of icons that separates the sanctuary from the congregation in the nave.
00:09:41.400
And when the priest enters behind that iconostasis, you can't see him at all.
00:09:48.940
Well, in the West, we can see the priest at the altar.
00:10:00.460
which act as a kind of veil that separates us in a way from the mystery,
00:10:06.420
but also entices us and draws us into the mystery, right?
00:10:15.100
Because let's say for your typical person, they're not going to understand the Latin.
00:10:21.600
They're also, unless they're good at it, flipping the pages and finding out where we are,
00:10:26.380
they're not necessarily going to do that either.
00:10:28.120
And it's kind of distracting to have this go on and look back and so on.
00:10:31.580
So for that kind of person, which is a lot of people, what is their disposition at Mass?
00:10:43.780
Even on a regular daily low Mass or whatever they call it, it's going to be 45 minutes.
00:10:51.460
Well, you know, one bit of practical advice that I always give to people is,
00:10:56.780
you know, if you're going to a low Mass and with a priest who's very conversant with it,
00:11:02.300
let's say a fraternity of St. Peter priest, it might be 35 minutes.
00:11:09.540
But I say to people, treat it like a holy hour.
00:11:12.160
Treat it as if you're going to a holy hour and you're going to adore the Blessed Sacrament.
00:11:20.220
You can enter more deeply into the spirit of the liturgy and into the texts.
00:11:25.220
But at least initially, relinquish the desire to be involved actively, vocally.
00:11:34.200
And let the mysterious beauty of this liturgy, it is very beautiful just to watch the motions of the priest
00:11:55.780
It's not primarily about educating us and telling us what we're supposed to know,
00:12:00.160
catechizing us or empowering us for mission or all these sorts of things that people say.
00:12:04.540
It's about raising our minds and hearts to God.
00:12:07.200
If it accomplishes that, then it's accomplished the primary work of the sacred liturgy.
00:12:11.240
But I would say, I'd push back just a little bit and say, it's actually not that difficult to become familiar with what's going on at the Latin Mass.
00:12:20.160
It, unlike the Novus Ordo, which has a gazillion options, the priest can do it this way or that way.
00:12:28.540
He can have modern music or ancient sacred music.
00:12:31.220
I mean, he can use one of four or eight or twelve Eucharistic prayers.
00:12:35.420
No, in the Latin Mass, it's always the same thing.
00:12:38.160
You know exactly what you're going to get from beginning to end.
00:12:44.700
And all of that is in your little red booklet or in your missal.
00:12:48.820
So over time, you recognize, okay, the priest is always going to do this.
00:12:58.680
It's like a sacred dance, you know, and you, and when you, you know, if you become familiar
00:13:03.500
with Tchaikovsky's, you know, Nutcracker, then you know what to expect.
00:13:07.640
You're not surprised every time by something different.
00:13:10.100
So I think the same kind of thing happens with the Latin Mass.
00:13:13.340
You, you know, over time, you do become familiar with the Gloria and the Credo and the Sanctus.
00:13:19.320
So I don't think it's as difficult to get into it.
00:13:22.420
People just need to relax, I would say, a bit and just let themselves go with the flow
00:13:29.220
I know that sounds very modern, you know, go with the flow, but that's, that's, that's
00:13:34.560
So one of the things particularly of concern to some people is the readings.
00:13:38.460
People say, wait a minute, why are we doing the readings in Latin?
00:13:43.080
Because there's lots of people who said for a long time, oh, I never heard the, the Bible
00:13:51.360
So, you know, we have among Catholics, this sort of famous thing about biblical illiteracy.
00:14:02.380
So there's, I think we have to immediately separate a modern mythology from the actual
00:14:10.600
So, you know, there's these, there are these things called black legends, you know, that
00:14:13.860
Protestants, historians, especially for many centuries, they promoted certain lies in order
00:14:21.240
And one of the lies was that Catholics were utterly biblically illiterate.
00:14:26.640
The reason it's not true is, is harks back to something I said earlier, namely that even
00:14:31.380
in the middle ages, when people were illiterate, they were educated in all kinds of ways.
00:14:35.880
If you go into a medieval church, it is the Bible in stone and glass all over the place.
00:14:41.340
And they were catechized by that without having to be constantly lectured at.
00:14:46.220
And we have evidence, you know, like Eamon Duffy, the English historian, he's a bit of
00:14:50.480
a liberal himself, but he's an excellent historian.
00:14:52.620
And when he talks about medieval Catholicism, he says it was saturated with the Bible.
00:14:58.980
They also had these mystery plays that went on year after year after year, retelling in
00:15:03.560
the common language outside of the church as a kind of entertainment, you know, all the
00:15:12.420
So there was a huge amount of biblical literacy.
00:15:14.400
I think there's a lot of evidence that biblical literacy now, even after 55 years of a vernacular,
00:15:26.460
If you talk to your average Catholic about different characters in the Old Testament or
00:15:29.980
even different characters in the New Testament, they hardly even know what you're talking about.
00:15:33.420
So I think it, you know, having a lectionary in the vernacular is not the silver bullet.
00:15:38.900
But I think what's more important is preaching.
00:15:42.840
If there's good preaching, good catechesis, which should happen outside of Mass, good sacred
00:15:47.880
art, you know, and encourage people to do Lectio Divina, right?
00:15:52.860
This is the Christian tradition developed all these different ways to educate people about
00:15:58.340
And the Mass wasn't meant to be the only vehicle by which that happened, right?
00:16:04.680
The other answer is, you know, the old lectionary, it's a one-year annual cycle, which is what
00:16:09.520
you find in every single apostolic Christian rite until 55 years ago.
00:16:18.440
And that one-year cycle, the idea wasn't to read as much of the Bible as possible, but
00:16:23.620
it was to read the passages that are most helpful to prepare people for worshiping the
00:16:31.220
So they were chosen, the New Testament passages were chosen to promote sound morality, which
00:16:38.220
is what is a precondition to receiving communion, and then to increase your admiration for Christ
00:16:44.120
So if you look at that one-year cycle, they're very beautifully selected passages that have
00:16:50.180
And I don't think they're remote from the people because, A, you know, anytime you go
00:16:55.240
to a Latin Mass, practically anytime, certainly on Sundays, there's a handout with those readings.
00:17:02.420
But also, the priest, usually from the pulpit before his homily, reads the readings in English
00:17:11.220
So, you know, at our parish, the priest before his homily, he just reads the epistle and the
00:17:17.500
So I actually benefit from that twice because I'm reading my missal, and I see the reading
00:17:24.420
And I get something from that because, I mean, I do know some Latin, but I do get something
00:17:29.460
from the first pass, and then I hear it again from the pulpit.
00:17:35.860
In that sense, I don't really see that this is a big issue.
00:17:39.800
That's actually a really good answer because the idea of getting it twice is really neat.
00:17:44.060
But one of the critics I heard was like, but why Latin in the first place?
00:17:55.460
So I think, again, part of the error that's crept in in our times is, and I think it's
00:18:02.840
fundamentally a Protestant view, that the reading of scripture at the liturgy is didactic.
00:18:08.320
Its primary function, actually, its exclusive function, according to some people, is to educate
00:18:14.240
So essentially, for the liturgy of the word, the view seems to be that the congregation
00:18:18.880
is like a classroom, and the priest becomes a preacher-teacher, and he reads to them, and
00:18:24.380
they get educated, and he explains it in the homily.
00:18:28.560
Historically, that's not the way that this part of the liturgy was thought of.
00:18:33.140
It was thought of as, yes, having an instructive aspect, for sure.
00:18:38.600
If you hear the word of God, it's going to have an instructive aspect.
00:18:44.200
Because there are moments in scripture, actually quite a few moments, when some prophet or mediator
00:18:50.860
will go before God and remind him of his own words and say, this is what you told us.
00:19:01.680
And in fact, when the readings are chanted at the Latin Mass, the epistle is chanted facing
00:19:07.940
eastwards, which is a posture of worship, and the gospel is chanted northwards, which
00:19:14.240
is to symbolize the north in scripture symbolizes the pagan, unconverted world.
00:19:18.980
So it's a sign that the gospel is being preached to the unconverted world, but also including
00:19:23.360
implicitly us to the extent that we're not yet converted.
00:19:25.980
But in both cases, the reading isn't directed towards us.
00:19:29.980
And what that does is it subtly reminds us that the word of God is greater than this community.
00:19:36.160
It's also when we lift it up to God, it's a homage that we pay to God.
00:19:40.300
We actually are thanking and praising him for his revelation in our midst.
00:19:46.120
And we're also being reminded that it has an evangelical and missionary aspect as well.
00:19:51.680
So I think, I mean, there's a lot more that can be said about this.
00:19:53.920
It's actually a pretty intricate subject, but I just, just to put it very pithily, reading
00:20:01.120
It's latrudic, having to do with worship, and it's didactic, having to do with instruction.
00:20:07.540
And if you look at how historical liturgies work, they bring both of those aspects out.
00:20:13.640
I think the Latin Mass brings out the latrudic, the worship side, really strongly.
00:20:19.220
But again, I like to say to people, we need that now more than ever, because we are anthropocentric.
00:20:30.580
I think it's good for us to push, to bend the stick in the opposite direction, right?
00:20:34.960
And be reminded that this word that we're reading isn't like any other word.
00:20:44.740
And isn't the hymns something that the people are doing now?
00:20:48.300
The Mass is actually going on while we're singing the hymns.
00:20:53.160
You know, I think we'd have to make the question a little more precise.
00:20:56.160
So the Latin Mass doesn't really have hymns in the same way.
00:21:00.800
I mean, the whole question of sacred music, that could be a whole separate conversation.
00:21:05.300
Um, but, but, you know, there was something called in the, you know, in earlier in the
00:21:10.740
20th century, this idea, this, this phrase was coined the for him sandwich, you know,
00:21:15.820
I think it's a funny expression, but the for him sandwich, the entrance him, the offertory
00:21:21.380
him, the communion him and the closing or recessional him.
00:21:24.900
That's the for him sandwich that came in, that came in before the second Vatican council
00:21:29.620
that was being done at low masses where the priest was doing his prayers in Latin,
00:21:34.180
but the people were permitted by the, by the Vatican to sing in the vernacular at these
00:21:40.700
That was because the liturgical movement was already kind of cranking its gears and saying,
00:21:52.760
And so that's how the for him sandwich came in.
00:21:55.560
But historically speaking, you know, hymns, the only real hymns in the Latin Mass are the
00:22:03.760
And these, these can be sung by the people if they're sung in chant, you know, the church
00:22:08.360
also has heavily promoted, even at Vatican too, that everyone should sing these chants
00:22:14.400
And in fact, you know, you find that, you know, my parish, the Fraternity of St. Peter
00:22:18.680
Parish, and I know this is common, that everybody at the High Mass does sing the Kyrie, the Gloria,
00:22:24.620
the Sanctus, the Agnus Dei, the Responses, et cum Spiritu Tuo.
00:22:32.260
They can actually participate actively in that way.
00:22:35.400
My main point here would be to say, you know, the Latin repertoire that we have, the chants,
00:22:42.840
the polyphony, this is an exquisite and exceptional, exceptionally beautiful, exceptionally meaningful
00:22:53.060
And it's good for people to be immersed in that and to pick it up slowly, you know, again,
00:22:57.780
to resist the city of instant, immediate comprehension as the ideal.
00:23:02.860
I mean, in my life, I've been going to the Latin Mass for years and years.
00:23:09.380
It's, it's like a perpetual Easter egg hunt, you know, where, where you, you're always finding
00:23:13.560
new little treasures around that you didn't know existed before.
00:23:16.360
How wonderful is it to enter into something that's so vast and so great that you're going
00:23:21.900
to be discovering it all your life, you know, and always seeing new aspects of it.
00:23:31.300
So there's a number of other controversial topics with the Latin Mass.
00:23:40.160
So one of the things you'll notice right away at an extraordinary form of the Mass or the
00:23:50.960
There's no women doing extraordinary minister of Holy Communion duties.
00:23:55.760
By the way, there's no lay men either, but that has been sort of very heavily focused upon
00:24:02.860
In fact, Pope Francis just made that a sort of, um, not quite sine qua non, but he made
00:24:09.040
the, uh, women, um, acolytes, uh, so that, you know, this is sort of an established part
00:24:18.600
And yet in the traditional Latin Mass, that's completely absent.
00:24:23.740
Well, I mean, I, I think, you know, look, I'm just going to be really blunt here and say
00:24:26.660
to people, you know, for nearly 2000 years, that was not the Christian tradition.
00:24:34.100
I always bring up the East because I think it's important to breathe with both lungs
00:24:39.440
Uh, and because everybody admits that the ancient, that the Eastern churches are deeply rooted
00:24:44.400
in antiquity and that they have preserved their traditions very, very well.
00:24:48.580
Now I will, I will say some of the Eastern churches here and there, you can see liberalism
00:24:55.840
So they're having some of the same difficulties that they just, everything happens slower in
00:25:00.240
So there, there are a few decades behind us, but they're going to be facing, and they are
00:25:04.740
But my point is for almost 2000 years, the understanding of all ministry in the sanctuary
00:25:11.140
of the church is that it's all a participation in and a reflection of the high priesthood of
00:25:21.840
Well, there's in every Christian church, and this goes right back to all the way to the
00:25:27.760
There's always a separation between the nave and the sanctuary.
00:25:31.200
The nave of the church, which is the larger part where all of the people sit or stand or
00:25:41.540
And we're all in the bark of Peter, we're all in the ship, and we're all traveling together
00:25:45.880
But when you cross that, that boundary, which is usually marked by something like a communion
00:25:50.940
rail or an altar rail, you pass into the whole, the sanctuary, the holy of holies, and this
00:25:58.780
And through, and as we read in the letter to the Hebrews, who passes through the holy
00:26:04.180
of holies to enter into eternal glory and to prepare a place for us?
00:26:11.520
It's because he's the priest and mediator that he can enter into the holy of holies and
00:26:17.020
So that's why all of the ministers in the sanctuary are all Jesus Christ in a certain
00:26:23.520
So the priest is obviously the most, the icon of Christ, the high priest, most of all.
00:26:29.180
But the deacon is the icon of Christ, the servant, you know, and the subdeacon is an
00:26:36.960
The acolytes are Christ exercising, you know, small ministries like the washing of the feet,
00:26:42.980
right, or the washing of the hands, as in the case of mass.
00:26:47.020
And so really, it's the way Bishop Schneider puts it.
00:26:51.860
He says that all of the ministries in the church, bishop, priest, deacon, subdeacon,
00:26:59.620
acolyte, exorcist, porter, lector, these are all of the traditional orders.
00:27:05.160
They're like a fanning out of the priesthood of Christ that shows all the dimensions of it.
00:27:11.040
All the dimensions of Christ's priestly service are reflected.
00:27:15.740
And this is like, because we poor mortal creatures, we can't understand very much simultaneously.
00:27:23.620
So we need to see symbolically all of the potentialities and powers of Christ's priesthood
00:27:29.880
Like, just like white light passing through a prism turns into a whole spectrum of colors,
00:27:35.920
They're a spectrum of colors that come from the prism of Christ's priesthood.
00:27:40.480
Now, if you take all of this seriously, and again, this is common theology for the whole
00:27:45.960
of Catholic and Orthodox history, then you're going to say, well, do we take seriously the
00:27:51.580
principle of the incarnate realism of Christ's priesthood?
00:27:57.820
He's not a hermaphrodite or an androgyne, you know, a male, female, or transcending male,
00:28:07.300
No, he's just a man, fully man, fully human, but fully male as well.
00:28:12.300
And that's, that has, I mean, again, this could be a whole separate topic, but scripture
00:28:16.460
has a clear anthropology about men and women and how they relate to each other.
00:28:21.600
And this relationship that God created at the very beginning in Adam and Eve, he created
00:28:26.120
that, Leo the 13th says, in order to foreshadow and to teach us about the relationship of
00:28:35.880
And that's, that comes straight from St. Paul, Ephesians chapter five.
00:28:38.720
So Genesis and Ephesians and many other texts, Revelation as well, are showing us that we,
00:28:45.220
when we see Jesus Christ, we're seeing the bridegroom, right?
00:28:50.680
We're not, there's no kind of homosexual, transsexual confusion in the Catholic church.
00:28:54.720
Unfortunately, and this would be my, this would be my last comment.
00:28:58.720
Unfortunately, feminism, I think feminism was part of the revolt of the Western world
00:29:05.500
against the cosmic order that God instituted in making the two sexes as complementary and
00:29:13.540
equal, but not interchangeable and not identical, right?
00:29:18.000
And feminism is a big revolt against the order of creation and having women serving ministries
00:29:23.940
in the sanctuary that reflect Christ, the bridegroom.
00:29:26.540
This is part of the feminist confusion in the church, and it's a massive confusion and
00:29:34.720
Pope Pius XI said, men must look for the peace of Christ in the kingdom of Christ.
00:29:41.600
And he urged that the faithful give public honor to Christ the King so that individuals
00:29:46.020
and states would submit once more to the rule of their savior.
00:29:49.820
And that is why LifeSite News is raising up the image of Christ the King across the United
00:29:59.260
Please pledge your support today for these billboards at lifefunder.com slash Christ is
00:30:05.880
That answer answers a few of my other questions, because one was about women or girls serving
00:30:13.140
at the altar, which that answers because they tour in the sanctuary.
00:30:15.920
The other one was about women lectors, which is almost, I'll say almost, but almost a sine
00:30:25.100
I know that's, but it's almost, because it's in over 90%, I would say over 98% of all Nova
00:30:34.660
And in fact, it's even at the most of the unicorn masses, which is those masses that
00:30:41.240
are as orthodox as possible, even there, they have women readers.
00:30:47.180
They won't have extraordinary ministers of Holy communion.
00:30:49.460
They won't have altar girls, but women readers will always be there.
00:30:52.100
I think that not only is feminism involved, but also, and more, more innocently, you might
00:30:58.980
say, also involved is a false notion of active participation, right?
00:31:02.960
And this, this, this notion of active participation really needs to be properly understood.
00:31:08.620
The false way of understanding it is to think that the only way lay people can be dignified
00:31:14.660
is if they're busy doing some task that's related to the liturgy, especially in the sanctuary.
00:31:20.520
So as if to say that, to, that to be more active as a lay person is to be more like a
00:31:26.920
cleric, to be more like a minister in the sanctuary.
00:31:29.900
And the more active you are, the more involved you're going to get in the execution of the
00:31:35.760
So, so basically like a bad Catholic is one who, who stands outside and smokes a cigarette.
00:31:41.400
A decent Catholic is one who sits in the pews and a good Catholic is one who sings the
00:31:46.840
hymns from the pews, but the best Catholic is the one who volunteers to be a lector,
00:31:51.540
a Eucharistic minister, you know, or whatever, an altar server.
00:31:55.400
Well, I'm sorry, but that's a completely false notion.
00:31:57.860
That is what John Paul II called a clericalization of the laity, right?
00:32:01.940
Where it's as if for a layman to have dignity, he has to imitate a priest and become a little
00:32:09.760
And the most dignified thing, priests, that is, we're priests in a general Christian sense,
00:32:14.700
We're incorporated into the priesthood of Christ.
00:32:16.640
We're not ministerial priests unless we're ordained in holy orders.
00:32:19.880
But all of us, the most dignified thing we can do is to offer the sacrifice of praise,
00:32:24.740
the spiritual sacrifice of our bodies and souls at mass.
00:32:27.560
That's where we get our dignity from as Christians, not from doing stuff, you know, in the sanctuary
00:32:33.900
So I think there's been a real, a tragic loss of what is most important in the Christian life,
00:32:39.620
Finally, lay people are supposed to be active primarily outside the church.
00:32:45.480
When they leave the church, they're supposed to be active in culture, in politics, in business.
00:32:54.320
That's where their active participation most of all counts.
00:32:58.460
In the liturgy, the ministers are entrusted by the church with the conduct of the liturgy,
00:33:03.280
and they are the ones who should be active in the liturgy primarily.
00:33:06.420
You know, the ministers and the choir, I would say, as well, these people who have special
00:33:12.280
The rest of us should be like Our Lady, actively receptive, right?
00:33:17.280
We are there to receive, not necessarily to be busy, right?
00:33:25.080
That's one distinction, I think, that where, because you included women in that, the women
00:33:30.580
aren't in the sanctuary, which distinguishes their ability in Latin mass of women to sing
00:33:37.400
in the choir, whereas they're not in any of those other roles, which are all inside the
00:33:43.360
And that's why women are allowed to sing in the choir?
00:33:45.880
So if there's a church, you know, this is a bit of inside ball, but if you have a church
00:33:51.120
set up, and there are many churches like this, where you have the sanctuary with the high
00:33:56.040
altar, but then also an area called the choir, which is where in a monastery, the monks would
00:34:03.400
sit and chant antiphonally back and forth, and then the nave.
00:34:07.700
If you have a setup like that, the women shouldn't be in that area that's called the choir area
00:34:13.020
of the church, which is, and that's because it would, it would send this kind of conflicting
00:34:21.460
With a, with a monastery of women religious, it's going to be set up in a different way.
00:34:25.460
But, but in, in most Catholic churches, what developed over the past few centuries is a choir
00:34:31.540
loft in the back of the church, accessible by a staircase, where the men and women, lay
00:34:37.780
people generally would sing, would sing in the choir.
00:34:40.360
And there was, there's, there's no difficulty with that because they're very, they're very
00:34:45.580
They're in the nave and even better, they're not visible.
00:34:48.900
So you don't have to look at the performers and be distracted by them.
00:34:52.060
You can just hear their, hopefully angelic voices, you know, soaring out over the, over
00:35:07.480
For more content like this, check the link in the description.
00:35:11.760
You can also connect with us on social media to stay up to date with the latest news on life,