One TLM Attendee’s Response to a Hate-Filled Jesuit

Penitent: Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been a week since my last column—excuse me, confession. In that time I have been forced to read a Jesuit’s public “confession” in which he announces, with all the gravitas of a man discovering fire, that he hates the old Latin Mass. Not disagrees with. Not finds less to his taste. Hates. Sort of like a toddler hates broccoli, except the toddler has the decency not to write a column about it.

Priest: Hatred is still a sin.

Penitent: Oh, don’t worry, Father. I don’t hate him. I regard him the way one regards a man standing in the ruins of a burned-down house, gasoline can in hand, explaining to the fire department that the real danger is the neighbor who owns an antique fireplace.

The spectacle is almost magnificent.

Yes, Father. Apparently the Latin Mass is a zombie. They buried it. They poured concrete over it. They issued permissions for visiting the grave. They restricted access to the cemetery. They appointed diocesan committees to make sure nobody brought flowers.

And the damned thing keeps getting back up.

Worse, the zombie is attracting twenty-five-year-olds.

Meanwhile, the supposedly vibrant living alternative is sitting in a parish hall under fluorescent lighting while six retirees rehearse “Gather Us In” for the 10:30 Mass.

If this is a zombie movie, somebody has badly misidentified the corpse.

Priest: He says he doesn’t hate the people—only the ideologues.

Penitent: Of course he does. That’s the classic PhD progressive two-step: “I love you, I just hate everything you love, the way you love it, and the conclusions you draw from loving it. Now sit still while I explain why your preferences are the fruit of insufficient catechesis.”

He grew up with the old Mass, loved it, then accepted the changes because “obedience was the most important virtue in the old church.” How delicious. The same man who spent decades celebrating every progressive innovation as the “movement of the Spirit” suddenly rediscovers the glories of blind obedience—but only when the obedience runs leftward. When traditionalists actually practice the obedience the pre-conciliar Church demanded, he calls them ideologues. When he salutes and does whatever the current committee decides, he calls it virtue. The consistency is breathtaking—if one is careful never to look at it.

Priest: He cites Jungmann.

Penitent: Ah yes. The sacred name-drop—a favored tool of the over-credentialed. “I read Jungmann in seminary, therefore the post-conciliar rupture was simply organic development, therefore the rest of you must read Jungmann or remain liturgical infants.” One almost expects him to award himself a gold star and a juice box. The problem is that he uses Jungmann’s Missarum Sollemnia [Mass of the Roman Rite]—with all its mountainous scholarship—as some sort of blank check for liturgical vandalism. Yet, that work, is a history of gradual, organic growth: a slow enrichment of the Roman Canon over centuries, the careful addition of prayers and gestures that better expressed the same revealed sacrifice, the organic deepening of an already ancient rite. THAT is development. What the Consilium delivered was not development. It was demolition and rebuild.

The more accurate history was documented by Michael Davies with relentless clarity in his three-volume work Pope John’s Council, Cranmer’s Godly Order, and The Liturgical Revolution. He showed that the post-conciliar changes followed a pattern far closer to the Protestant Reformers’ deliberate rupture than to any organic Catholic development. Gradual growth perfects the expression of the same faith. What happened after 1969 was a controlled demolition justified by a selective reading of the past. Many of us have read Jungmann and Davies cover to cover—and, apparently, have a stubborn refusal to pretend that an agenda driven committee rewrite somehow equals the slow work of centuries.

Priest: He is jealous of the traditionalists’ organization.

Penitent: Naturally. The great progressive lament: “Why do the people with the actual living communities, full seminaries, and young families keep getting attention while those of us who want yet more experimental Eucharistic prayers and a return to the 1998 translation are ignored?” It can be summarized metaphorically as a toddler screaming “LOOK AT ME!” It never seems to occur to him that the reason the TLM crowd is “well organized” is that they still believe something definite enough to actually organize around. Meanwhile his preferred liturgy has spent half a century producing the most thoroughly disorganized collapse of belief, practice, and vocations in modern Catholic history—and his solution is the same: more of what caused the problem, plus better catechesis [read: reeducation] for the stubborn Athanasian Contra Mundum holdouts who notice.

Priest: He wants further reforms.

Penitent: Of course he does. The Novus Ordo is never finished. It is a perpetual worksite. First we needed the vernacular. Then we needed the versus populum. Then we needed new Eucharistic prayers. Then communion in the hand. And now, we need the 1998 ICEL translation that Ratzinger had the temerity to reject.

And let us speak plainly about that 1998 text he pines for. It was not a translation in any serious sense. It was a paraphrase driven by the ideology of the moment: dynamic equivalence on steroids, inclusive language that deliberately obscured all masculine references present in the Latin (and in Scripture), flattened sacral diction into the cadence of a committee memo, and repeatedly substituted contemporary pastoral preferences for the actual words of the rite. Precision sacrificed for supposed accessibility; doctrine was softened wherever it might hurt tummies; the elevated, hieratic character of liturgical speech was treated as an obstacle rather than a feature. The English-speaking bishops approved it because many of them had already internalized the same assumptions while adjusting their Rainbow Chasubles. Cardinal Ratzinger rejected it—rightly—because it failed the most basic test of a liturgical translation: fidelity. He insisted that the vernacular must carry the full theological weight and sacral tone of the Latin original, not rewrite it according to the linguistic fashions of the 1990s. That insistence later found formal expression in Liturgiam Authenticam. The complaint that “a native German speaker was able to tell English speakers how to pray” is simply the progressive version of wounded pride: when the translation subordinates accuracy and reverence to ideology, the man charged with safeguarding the Church’s prayer is supposed to smile and wave it through. Ratzinger refused. That is not cultural imperialism. It was his job.

And through it all runs the serene assumption that the traffic of understanding only ever moves in one direction: toward him. Anyone who ends up preferring the older form must simply not have studied as hard as him. The possibility that two people can read the same sources, examine the same history, and reach opposite conclusions is apparently too emotionally threatening to entertain. Better to simply diagnose the other side as knuckle-dragging, unsophisticated children who will, at some point, eventually grow up and thank him for his credentialed brilliance.

Priest: Did you grow up with the old Mass yourself?

Penitent: Exactly the opposite. I was born in the 1970s. I never once attended the old Mass as a child. I have zero nostalgia because I have nothing to be nostalgic for. I was raised entirely on his preferred huggy Novus Ordo—with the spectacle of guitars, tambourines, “On Eagle’s Wings,” “Gather us In,” “Table of Plenty” and the entire 1970s folk-Mass soundtrack on endless loop. I was smothered in Felt Banners and so-called community. Lace mantillas were a thing of the past and there was no family memory of Latin. My formation should have made me the last person on earth to end up at the usus antiquior.

Priest: Then what happened?

Penitent: What happened, Father, is that I spent my entire childhood and adolescence watching the “obedience” the Jesuit now pretends to revere turn the average suburban parish into a circus of progressive self-expression. The same people who lecture traditionalists about submission cheerfully introduced liturgical dance, felt banners, and—yes—actual clown Masses, complete with greasepaint and honking noses at the elevation. Reverence was treated as the enemy. Genuflection became optional, then embarrassing. Silence was abolished in favor of constant chatter and applause. Respect for the Lord evaporated so thoroughly that the average Catholic now treats the Real Presence with less care than the after-Mass Bulletin. That was the practical fruit of the “obedience” he celebrates: not deeper fidelity, but a systematic rejection of anything that might suggest God is actually there and deserves to be approached with fear and trembling. In short, the felt banner fueled boomer bishops tried to turn the Mass into a variety “show” and produced a “show” that jumped the shark in 1974 but now insist it is the only show any “educated Catholic” should watch.

And into that wasteland came my real catechesis—beginning in the 1990s and my first attendance at Mater Misericordiae in Phoenix. That is the fact I most want him to choke on. I did not drift toward the old Mass on a cloud of sentiment. I studied my way there: the Fathers, the actual conciliar documents rather than progressive summaries of them, the documented history of the reform itself. The more I learned, the more the usus antiquior revealed itself as the fuller, denser expression of the faith I already held—and the more the clown-Mass, felt-banner version looked like a deliberate repudiation of everything the Church had once guarded. And let me be precise, because the precision is the entire point: none of that study led me to reject Vatican II. I accept the Council fully [despite its lack of dogmatic pronouncements]. My case for the old Mass lives entirely inside that acceptance, not outside it. What I reject is the progressive hijacking that treated “obedience” as a one-way street: mandatory for anyone who wanted to keep Latin and incense, optional for anyone who wanted to turn the sanctuary into a stage.

Priest: And you claim no nostalgia clouds the judgment?

Penitent: Not one shred, because there is nothing to be nostalgic for. Which is precisely why I demand he look past his lazy nostalgia smear and confront what “letting in some fresh air”—Pope John’s own phrase—actually produced once the progressive enforcers finished interpreting it. In this country alone, priestly ordinations have collapsed by roughly two-thirds since the mid-1960s. Religious orders that once staffed hospitals and schools by the thousands now count entire provinces in a handful of elderly sisters. Weekly Mass attendance among American Catholics has cratered from something like three in four in 1965 to well under a quarter today. That is not a statistical footnote. That is a catastrophe, and it unfolded on the watch of his treasured reform—and under the direct pastoral care of the very people who thought clown Masses and liturgical dance were the height of Spirit-led renewal.

Priest: Correlation is not causation.

Penitent: Granted. I will not pretend the new Missal single-handedly caused secularization, the contraceptive revolution, and every other cultural broadside that struck the Church in the same decade. But I am entitled—indeed obligated—to notice that the reformers promised the vernacular and the changes would fill the pews, make the faith more accessible, reverse decline. Instead we received the opposite of every promise on virtually every measurable metric. At some point the project must answer for its results, not merely its intentions and its arrogant self-congratulation.

Priest: You expect me to believe the architects themselves were alarmed?

Penitent: Paul VI himself was alarmed, Father—the very pope who promulgated the new Missal. By 1972 he stood in a homily marking the anniversary of his own coronation and declared that from some crack, not from the Council but from somewhere, the smoke of Satan had entered the temple of God. His own words. The man who signed the reform into law was, within a few years of its rollout, publicly describing the Church in terms of doubt, uncertainty, and crisis rather than the renewal that had been advertised. If the authorizer of the change was already sounding the alarm, it is not arrogance for the rest of us to keep asking the hard questions half a century later. It is sanity.

Priest: And the faith itself, beyond mere numbers?

Penitent: That is the wound that bleeds worst. Pew Research found only a third of American Catholics still believe the Church’s actual teaching that the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ. Most of the rest treat it as mere symbol. One third. That is not a catechesis gap to be fixed with another pamphlet. That is the near-total evaporation of the sense of the sacred at the very heart of the Mass. It is no coincidence that this collapse occurred alongside a liturgy that, in the vast majority of parishes, systematically stripped away the silence, the gestures, the orientation, and the atmosphere of approaching something terrible and holy—the very things that once communicated the Real Presence without a single explanatory sentence—while progressive innovators were busy perfecting the clown Mass and the liturgical dance routine.

Priest: And in your circles?

Penitent: Meanwhile the traditionalist orders are overflowing. The Fraternity of St. Peter has had to turn away vocations for lack of seminary beds. The Institute of Christ the King, the Benedictines of Norcia before the earthquake, the Carmels that retained the old observance—all of them young, full, expanding—while diocesan seminaries that went all-in on the reform have been forced to merge and close. Mock our absolute numbers all you like. Small and growing against a backdrop of institutional collapse should provoke curiosity, not contempt.

Priest: I see the destination.

Penitent: It is Benedict XVI. He saw the pattern before most were willing to admit it. Summorum Pontificum in 2007 was not a nostalgia project. He stated plainly that what earlier generations held as sacred remains sacred and great for us too, and that the two forms of the one Roman Rite could enrich each other mutually, in both directions. He demanded no rejection of the Council. He demanded that the Church stop treating her own immediate past as a radioactive embarrassment to be quarantined.

Priest: And yet Rome reversed much of that.

Penitent: Traditionis Custodes. That is where the real fury lives—far hotter than Professor Liturgical Innovation’s prose. The stated pretext for throttling the old Mass was that it had become a vehicle for rejecting the Council and sowing division. The actual data on the ground showed the opposite: young, orthodox, expanding communities that in the overwhelming majority of cases were not rejecting Vatican II at all, but simply living a form of the faith the reform never succeeded in making attractive to their generation. Crushing that does not look like a pastoral response to a genuine pastoral problem. It looks like institutional insecurity—an inability to sit with the fact that the old rite was quietly converting hearts and filling seminaries in a way fifty years of “fresh air,” clown Masses, “Marty Haugen” and felt banners had failed to do. The honest response would have been curiosity and consideration. What we receive is suppression and confessed “hatred” from Professor Creative Liturgy.

Priest: That is a grave charge against the hierarchy.

Penitent: It is, and I make it with sorrow, not triumph. Benedict’s entire project was reconciliation, mutual enrichment, no rupture. Traditionis Custodes treated that project as an error to be corrected rather than a wisdom to be developed. If the partisans of the Novus Ordo could ever move past the reflex that our “attachment” to the old Mass is either ignorance or nostalgia, they might finally ask why it is working where so much else is not—instead of simply bolting the door and congratulating themselves on the lock.

Priest: I believe I understand the state of your soul.

Penitent: Pride, Father. Pride in having read the same sources he name-drops. Pride in noticing the body count. And a certain uncharitable amusement at watching a man publicly confess hatred for a liturgy that still produces faith, while defending one that increasingly produces neither faith nor attendance—and then assigning himself the role of the only adult in the room while he polishes his PhD and other credentials.

Priest: For your penance, read Sacrosanctum Concilium carefully. And try not to enjoy the irony too much when you remember who actually ignored it.

Penitent (sotto voce): Tell the Jesuit that if he ever wants a real confession, he might start with the part where the “fresh air” turned out to be a draft strong enough to empty the churches—and where “obedience” somehow always meant accepting the clown Mass while punishing anyone who preferred the silence.