Your Excellency:

On April 4, 2006 the angelqueen.org website posted an “exclusive interview” with Your Excellency in which, among many other perplexing and even alarming statements, you set forth what you call the  “seven capital sins of the traditionalists.” You describe these “capital sins” as “temptations and dangers where [traditionalists] can fall in, and sometimes do fall.”  According to Your Excellency, the seven capital sins of the traditionalists are as follows:

1. Pride – feeling like we have some exclusive and personal knowledge of truth, cultic idea that we are the only Catholics, the Church’s savers (sic).

2. Systematic lack of charity. “See how they hate each other” That’s the contrary of what pagans said about the first Christians. The art of changing one’s friends into enemies. The spirit of division.

3. Rash judgment - Spirit of suspicion. Conspiracy theory.

4. Scandal mongering – Criticism as a system. Ministry of criticism.

5. Spirit of dispute – Systematic disobedience. Independence toward hierarchy and Church’s Magisterium.

6. Cultish group spirit – “no salvation outside of us”.

7. Pessimism – against Christian hope (In spe gaudentes). To some point, satisfaction with the abnormality of one’s situation – and with errors by the human part of the Church – like (sic) if this could justify one’s own position.

Roman Catholic traditionalists who know of Your Excellency’s leading role in resisting the Modernist onslaught in the Diocese of Campos, Brazil as a priest in the 1980s are surprised, to say the least, to see such a list of traditionalist “sins” coming from you.  For the “sins” you enumerate are precisely those the modernists in Campos attributed to yourself and your traditionalist brethren, including the late, great Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer, at the time you were fighting their imposition of the New Mass and questioning the theological novelties spawned by the Second Vatican Council.  That is, these “sins” are not sins at all, but rather unjust characterizations of the traditionalist movement by its Modernist critics.

One may be permitted to dispute the wisdom of Your Excellency publicly enumerating on the World Wide Web “the seven capital sins of the traditionalists”—many of whom, on account of Your Excellency’s courageous deeds in Campos, regard you as one of the leaders of a counter-revolutionary movement against the Modernist revolution in the Church.  Consider, Your Excellency, the analogy of a general who discusses the perceived weakness, defects and failings of his own soldiers in published communiqués being read by the opposing army. To say that such a general would be imprudent is putting it mildly.  His humiliated and demoralized troops could be forgiven for thinking such a general to be, in fact, a traitor to the cause.

We hope Your Excellency will appreciate that such an impression could only be confirmed by the fact that while you took the occasion of your exclusive interview to enumerate the seven capital sins of the traditionalists, you assigned no capital sins at all to ecclesiastical authorities at all levels who have presided over the destruction of the Church’s liturgy, the ruin of her discipline, the corruption of her doctrine and the disgrace of her very name since the Council.  Had Your Excellency taken the trouble to enumerate the capital sins of the hierarchs—which include, of course, the widespread practice or protection of sodomy—your “exclusive interview” would have concerned nothing else, and would have had to be presented in multiple parts.

But instead Your Excellency made only a vague reference to “progressive” priests who “are guilty of the lack of [sic] sacred and of the generalized desacralization in the Church,” as if the crisis in the Church had been caused by some parochial renegades rather than the disastrous acts and omissions of the Church’s very leaders, including the conciliar and post-conciliar Popes themselves.

Nevertheless, since Your Excellency has seen fit publicly to announce the seven capital sins of the traditionalists, permit us to offer these public comments on your accusation against the traditionalist movement.  We are moved to do so by our conviction that Your Excellency’s interview as a whole has not only unjustly maligned the movement of which you are a part, but has also cast into doubt (whether you intended it or not) the very reason for the movement’s existence.

A Look at “the Seven Capital Sins of the Traditionalists”

Only the first three “capital sins” Your Excellency enumerates—pride, lack of charity and rash judgment—are terminologically recognizable as sins, as opposed to the other four, which are exactly the kind of pseudo-psychological pejoratives employed by Modernists to describe any Catholic who objects to the ecclesial debacle the Modernists call a renewal.  How disheartening it is to see Your Excellency adopting these same pejoratives.

There can be no doubt that the “classic” sins of pride, lack of charity and rash judgment tempt traditionalists no less than others in the Church, but they are hardly the “capital sins” of traditionalists only. Your Excellency, what of the members of the hierarchy who are guilty of what you yourself call “lack of the sacred and of the generalized desacralization in the Church” (which, for some reason, you do not describe as a capital sin). Is there no sin of pride involved in the destruction of the sacred, not to mention the sins of sacrilege and blasphemy, which offend God directly? Is there no lack of charity on the part of those who have deprived virtually the entire Church of the spiritual patrimony that belongs by right to every Catholic? Have you not seen rash judgment on the part of the many “progressives” who calumniate traditionalists as “disobedient” and “schismatic” for no other reason than their just refusal to cooperate in the generalized desacralization of the Church? Indeed, Your Excellency, what judgment could be rasher, and more nonsensical, than the judgment that those who oppose the desacralization of the Church are not in communion with the Church?

Under the headings of the four other “capital sins” Your Excellency attributes to traditionalists, you list:

·  criticism as a system. Ministry of criticism.

·  systematic disobedience. Independence toward hierarchy and Church’s Magisterium.

·  “no salvation outside of us”.

·  satisfaction with the abnormality of one’s situation—and with errors by the human part of the Church.

Rifan Meets His Holiness Pope John Paul II

What of Your Own Deeds, Your Excellency?

Here we would respectfully suggest that Your Excellency consider who you are, and where you came from. You are the bishop of a group of traditionalist Catholics in the Diocese of Campos, who for more than 30 years refused to accept the New Mass or any of the other unprecedented innovations in the Church since Vatican II and who withdrew from the diocesan structure rather than be forced to change their practice of the perennial Faith.  You are a bishop only because of the fact of that resistance, which placed you in the position of being chosen to succeed the dying Bishop Rangel as leader of the Campos traditionalist community.

In his landmark work Mouth of The Lion, Dr. David Allen White recounts many of the details of Your Excellency’s involvement in traditionalist resistance to the post-conciliar revolution in Campos. There were none fiercer in their resistance than Padre Fernando Areas Rifan:

·  In 1986 you publicly resisted Bishop Navarro’s order to leave your parish at a time when you were the last parish priest in the Diocese of Campos still offering the traditional Latin Mass.

·  On July 25th of that year you sent the Bishop “thirteen letters, position papers, and papal encyclicals from the pontificates of Pius IX, Gregory XVI, Leo XIII, Popes St. Pius X, Pius XI and Pius XII,” asking the Bishop in your personal note how these teachings of the Church could be reconciled with the documents of Vatican II. 

·  In that same package to Bishop Navarro you included “a section of the Summa Theologicae… which deals with the question of obedience” — that is, justifying your refusal to obey the Bishop’s unjust directives to cease offering the traditional Mass and leave your parish.

·  Four of your own parishioners—Gerson Ribeiro Gomes, Geraldo Damiao de Azevedo, Amaro Fidelis da Cruz and Jonas Moura—barred the door of your church so that Bishop Navarro’s Vicar and his diocesan attorney could not enter to present you with the decree ordering your removal.

·  You waged a legal battle against Bishop Navarro when he dragged you into civil court to seize your parish, as he had done with the parish of every other priest who resisted his imposition of the New Mass against the will of the clergy and laity of Campos.

·  When you lost the civil suit, you moved your entire congregation to a chapel you built on land you had earlier purchased. Along with the other priests of Campos who had done the same in their own chapels, you persevered in providing your parishioners with the traditional Catholic Faith—in direct defiance of Bishop Navarro.

Your Excellency, surely you remember what you said about Bishop Navarro and his collaborators in your last sermon before vacating the church from which the Bishop had used the courts to evict you and your parishioners:

Today, we are not abandoning our struggle; we are being expelled by a judicial decision and we are transferring to a “parish-in-exile”…. Those responsible for the implantation of progressivism in this church will be the same ones who will profane this temple by a lack of respect, by the presence of indecent clothes, by the new Mass. They may introduce progressivism by force into this church, but later they will answer to God, in the hour of in judgment…. Our work will continue, with all your help, in the slums. This is a historic day, and we will not leave in defeat. One day we will all give account and we will know in heaven that we are the victors.

But having been appointed bishop after so many years of resistance to Modernism, Your Excellency now speaks of the capital sins of traditionalists. It is only right to ask Your Excellency the question his own accusation provokes: When you said and did the many courageous things recounted in Mouth of the Lion, did you commit any of these “capital sins” yourself? In particular:

Was it prideful of you to send Bishop Navarro theological documents and ask him to explain how the Church’s past teaching could be reconciled with current novelties?

When you joined with your fellow priests of Campos in criticizing the new Mass, the new ecumenism and the new religious liberty, were you guilty of what you now call “criticism as a system” or a “ministry of criticism”?

Did you commit rash judgment when you said in your last sermon in the parish that the Bishop and his collaborators would profane your church with the New Mass and all that goes with it, and that they would have to answer to God in the hour of judgment?

Were you guilty of “systematic disobedience” and “independence toward hierarchy and Church’s Magisterium” when you refused to vacate your parish, fought the bishop in civil court for possession of it, and then built an independent chapel to keep the traditional Faith alive in Campos?

When you established your independent chapel and continued to speak out against the “new orientation” of the Church, were you being “satisfied with an abnormal situation” and “errors by the human part of the Church”?

In setting up a chapel apart from the diocesan structure were you declaring “no salvation outside of us”?

Traditionalists all over the world who admired Fr. Rifan’s principled opposition to the “auto-demolition” of the Church believe that the answer to all of these questions is certainly no.  Indeed, given what Your Excellency knew then about the evils afflicting the Church in the aftermath of the Council, you might well have sinned had you failed to act as you did. For how could one not sin by refusing to resist what one knows to be “the generalized desacralization of the Church”?

An Ironic Accusation

Yet now Your Excellency accuses traditionalists of being “satisfied” with the “abnormality” of their situation and with “errors by the human part of the Church.” But how could the situation of traditionalists who have taken measures to escape the generalized desacralization of the Church—just as you did—be considered “abnormal”? Is it not, rather, the generally desacralized Church that represents an abnormal situation? Are not those who have participated in this desacralization, therefore, the ones who are satisfied with the abnormality of their situation? Are not these same people satisfied as well—eminently satisfied—with the very “errors by the human part of the Church” which have brought about the Church’s desacralization?

You say now that traditionalists have fallen into the sin of believing there is “no salvation outside of us.” Is this what your flock in Campos believes? Is it what traditionalists who attend indult Latin Mass chapels, or chapels of the Fraternity of Saint Peter believe? Has the Society of Saint Pius X ever said such a thing about itself?  Can Your Excellency quote a single reputable traditionalist or traditionalist publication for the proposition “no salvation outside of us”?  Who exactly is guilty of this “capital sin of the traditionalists” which you assign as a tendency of the traditionalist movement in general?

You speak now of “systematic disobedience” and “independence toward hierarchy and the Church’s Magisterium…” on the part of traditionalists other than yourself.  Disobedience to what, and to whom, Your Excellency?  As Your Excellency knows, and as the Vatican itself now seems prepared officially to announce to the world, the traditional Mass was never forbidden. “Ecumenism” and “dialogue” have never been imposed upon us as duties by any law of the Church.  In fact, not one of the novelties of the past forty years has ever been required of the faithful as an obligation of the Faith. Nor have most of us, unlike yourself, been placed in the position of having to resist a direct episcopal command to abandon the traditional Mass.

How is it, then, that Your Excellency now perceives capital sins in traditionalists whose actions are tame, even timid, in comparison with your own as a priest in Campos?

We hope you will pardon us for saying to Your Excellency what is no doubt on the minds of many after your interview: It appears that the man who speaks to us now, who gives “exclusive interviews” announcing the capital sins of traditionalists, is not the same man who defied the evil commands of a Modernist bishop bent on eradicating the traditional Catholic liturgy and the Faith that surrounds it.

"I think demonstrating that co-living is possible is a useful

 point both for progressives and for traditionalists."

...Bishop Rifan

 “Unity” and “Co-existence” with Modernism?

Now, instead, Your Excellency speaks of “co-living with the local diocese – unity in diversity,” and you say that the demonstration of this “co-living” is “a useful point both for progressives and for traditionalists.” But how can there be unity of any kind between the progressives, whom you admit are guilty of desacralizing the Church, and traditionalists, who are attempting to re-sacralize her? And even if some local bishops are now willing to tolerate the existence of strictly quarantined traditionalist communities within their dioceses, is it right to describe such an arrangement as “unity in diversity”? What happened to the opposition in principle between progressives and traditionalists—an opposition that not so long ago drove you and your parishioners into what you yourself called “a chapel-in exile”?

On this idea of traditionalists “co-living” with the progressives in a “unity of diversity,” Your Excellency made a most perplexing statement: “For progressives believe such is not possible, fearing unity of Church would be undermined if they open the door for traditionalists, and traditionalists fear they may lose their identity with this co-existence. No! Peace is possible with liturgical diversity, disciplinary diversity and of course fidelity to doctrine.”

Is Your Excellency really saying that the “progressives” are now a legitimate party in the Church—indeed the dominant party—with which traditionalists are obliged to seek “unity in diversity” and “peace”? Is this why you now attend scandalous “World Youth Days,” where the attire is far more immodest than the “indecent clothes” you would not allow in your parish in Campos, and join the Modernists in caricaturing traditional Roman Catholics as narrow-minded bigots?

Are you calling, then, for unity with Modernism as opposed to the legitimate end (which you pursued as a priest in Campos) of obtaining a foothold in a diocese with the aim of winning it over for Tradition? What, indeed, has happened to your entire opposition to Modernism? It appears to us that you now consider Modernism/progressivism as just one of many “identities” in the Church “co-existing” with traditional Roman Catholicism, and that the latter is no longer to be equated with the Faith simpliciter, which must be restored for everyone.

“The new Ordo Missae is not faithful to the theology of the Mass,

 as established definitively by the Council of Trent, and...

 consequently it constitutes a serious danger for the purity of the Faith.”
...Antonio de Castro Mayer
Bishop of Campos, Brazil, 1969
 

Absolving the New Mass of Blame for the Crisis

Alarming indeed is your Excellency’s repudiation of the document “62 Reasons Why One cannot, In Good Faith, Attend The Novus Ordo,” published by the priests of Campos—most of whom, your interviewer notes, “are now under your charge.” You dismiss this as a “document created many years ago” and “not official.”

But did you yourself not agree with it when it was published? Now, however, Your Excellency states: “Most of these (62) reasons are really artificial, saying, for instance, about the apostasy of priests, etc, with no necessary causal relationship with the Novus Ordo.”

Your Excellency, given your own history of militant opposition to the liturgical revolution, how can you now say in good conscience that there is no necessary causal relationship between the Novus Ordo and the immediate decline of the Church after its introduction, especially when that decline is the very thing you, your fellow Campos priests and Bishop de Castro Mayer predicted would happen?

Does Your Excellency no longer believe what Dr. White has written about the preservation of the Faith in Campos, while the rest of Brazil was undergoing an apostasy? Let me recall his words: “In Campos, where the Tridentine Mass had been preserved and the Faith remained in place without alteration… nothing of these upheavals occurred. The life of the people remained Catholic. Large numbers of people attended Mass, the number of priests kept growing… the convents in the diocese were full of nuns who worked and prayed and taught and lived and looked like nuns…. [Campos] made clear that the turbulent collapse of the preceding years was unnecessary and could be traced directly to changes in the Mass and encroachment of modernist ideas that had watered down the Faith.”

Does Your Excellency now reject what even the former Cardinal Ratzinger has declared about the connection between the new liturgy and the ecclesial crisis? As the Cardinal wrote: “I am convinced that the ecclesial crisis in which we find ourselves today depends in great part on the collapse of the liturgy.”1 What liturgy has collapsed, Your Excellency, if not the Novus Ordo?

Yet now it appears Your Excellency is content to hold that “the Novus Ordo Mass is a valid catholic Mass, of course,” as if there had been no collapse of the liturgy producing a great crisis in the Church. You adopt as your own the sentiments of some Roman functionary who told you “the problem is not the rite, the problem is the sermon.” Is that what you now believe, Your Excellency—that the crisis in the Church is just the result of bad sermons?

 “Occasional” Participation in a Modernist Ambience?

Even as you refer to the “modernist ambience” of the Novus Ordo that must “in some cases be avoided”—and since when have Catholics avoided Modernism only in some cases, Your Excellency?—you justify your own “occasional” participation in concelebrated Novus Ordo liturgies, along with several of your priests.

Here you reveal that you have participated in such liturgies along with Anglican “bishops,” who attend by “courtesy.” You, who once barred the door to Bishop Navarro’s men when they came to take away the traditional Latin Mass, are now willing to attend (but only “occasionally”) concelebrated Masses with bogus Anglican prelates who preach all manner of heresy and immorality, leading souls to hell!

Concerning this scandal, you have your spokesman defend you as follows:

Dom Fernando is a Catholic bishop, member of the Catholic episcopate, in communion with the Holy Father the Pope. Thus, like every Catholic bishop, even those of a different rite, he must demonstrate this full communion practically…. Now, to refuse continually and explicitly to participate in every and any Mass in the rite celebrated by the Pope and by all the bishops of the Church while judging this rite, in itself, incompatible with the Faith, or sinful, represents a formal refusal of communion with the Pope and with the Catholic episcopate.

Have we read your spokesman correctly, Your Excellency? Is it really now your position that a conscientious and complete abstention from the New Mass is a schismatic act?  It is now schismatic, in your view, always to avoid a “modernist ambience” in the liturgy? How is your spokesman’s claim anything but utter nonsense?

Aping the sedevacantists, your spokesman suggests that one cannot shun the New Mass without implying that the Church has failed by “universally” promulgating an invalid or illegitimate rite. How happy the sedevacantists must be to see you accept their specious argument! 

But your spokesman, lacking all precision, makes no distinction between “the New Mass” as promulgated by Paul VI in the Latin typical edition, and “the New Mass” in practice. In practice the New Mass is celebrated in badly translated local vernacular versions with innumerable options and tolerated abuses. These elements of the new liturgy do not at all implicate the infallible universal disciplinary authority of the Church, but only fallible prudential judgments and bad governance from which not even the Pope is immune, and to which no Catholic has any duty to pay respect.

Besides, your spokesman fails to mention that even the Latin typical edition of Paul VI was, as the pertinent Roman documents show, no more than an exception from the universal received and approved rite of Mass in the Church, which remains the Damasian-Gregorian Latin liturgy canonized in perpetuity by Pope Saint Pius V. As Paul VI himself told Fr. Jean Marie Charles-Roux “I never forbade celebration of the old Mass; I have only offered an alternative.”2 As Your Excellency himself once recognized, no Catholic has ever, in fact, been obliged to participate, even “occasionally,” in this alternative liturgy—an experiment whose failure is evident to anyone in possession of his senses.

With all due respect, Your Excellency, between you and your spokesman the Society of St. John Marie Vianney’s approach to the New Mass has become incoherent. In view of this confusion, one wonders what has happened to Your Excellency’s simple conviction, which led you to a “chapel-in-exile” in the slums of Campos, that despite its essential validity the new liturgy has eroded the Catholic Faith.

Have you forgotten, Your Excellency, the statement of your own parishioner, Damiao Geraldo de Azevedo, a Protestant convert who was one of the four parishioners who barred the door of your parish to Bishop Navarro’s representatives?  Here is what this man said in your defense, as Dr. White records: “Reflect on this: In Campos, curiously, Dom Navarro is persecuting the priests who celebrate the Mass which causes Protestants to convert to the Catholic Church, and with an iron fist implants the ‘Mass’ which causes Catholics to become Protestant. Surely we are at the end of time.”

Yet now it seems Your Excellency is afraid to say what even Monsignor Klaus Gamber said in his Reform of the Roman Liturgy: that the traditional rite of Mass “must become once more the norm of our faith and the symbol of Catholic unity throughout the world, a rock of stability in a period of upheaval and never-ending change.”  Do you still believe that the traditional rite of Mass must be restored as the norm of our faith for the good of the whole Church and the welfare of souls? If so, then by all means let the faithful hear Your Excellency say it without ambiguity once again! But if not, then one must ask: What has become of your apostolate?

It already appears to many that your apostolate has been reduced to the mere advocacy of a liturgical “preference” which Catholics can take or leave with no difference to the welfare of the Church (or their souls). That, it seems, is how Your Excellency is putting the matter these days. But consider, Your Excellency, the reasons you gave in your interview for why you “love, preserve and prefer” the traditional Mass:

·  for a question of better and more precise expression of our Faith in Eucharistic dogmas,

·  for safety, for protection against abuses…

·  for wealth and solemnity of rites,

·  for better precision and rigidity of rubrics…

·  for the sense of sacredness,

·  more wealth and precision of prayers’ formulas, in reverence,

·  for personal and ritual humility,

·  for elevation and nobility of ceremonies,

·  for respect, beauty, good taste, piety, sacred language, tradition…

By necessary implication, then, Your Excellency “prefers” the traditional Mass because the New Mass is lacking in: expression of our Faith and the Eucharistic dogma, safety and protection against abuses, solemnity, precision of rubrics, the sense of the sacred, reverence, personal and ritual humility, elevation and nobility, and respect for beauty, good taste, piety, sacred language and tradition!

The new liturgy Your Excellency indicts by negative implication has obviously, therefore, been a total disaster for the Church, despite its “essential validity.” No wonder it has collapsed! For as your own list of reasons for “preferring” the traditional Mass reveals, what is essentially valid in the New Mass is almost totally obscured by ruinous innovation.  Hence even Cardinal Ratzinger has posed this damning question: “[W]hen the community of faith, the worldwide unity of the Church and her history, and the mystery of the living Christ are no longer visible in the liturgy, where else, then, is the Church to become visible in her spiritual essence?”3

Where indeed, Your Excellency? And what has become of Your Excellency’s own concern about this catastrophe in the Church? Traditionalists everywhere are now wondering what happened to the militancy that led you to establish an independent chapel rather than allow the Church’s immemorial liturgical tradition, her great bulwark against heresy, to be replaced  by a Protestantizing novelty whose introduction only 36 years ago even Cardinal Ratzinger has called “a breach into the history of the liturgy whose consequences could only be tragic…”4

Yet, amazingly enough, Your Excellency now views “occasional” participation in this very tragedy as the sign of “perfect communion,” while you consent to the proposition that the Church’s ancient received and approved rite of Mass, perpetually sanctioned by a sainted Pope, is a mere liturgical preference in which not a single Catholic is obliged to participate, even “occasionally.” How has the militant traditional priest from Campos allowed himself to be maneuvered into accepting such an absurd reversal?

Cardinal Ricard of Bordeaux (in green) treated Bishop Rifan "like a brother"

The Reason for the Movement

In your interview you recount with satisfaction how you “visited Mgr Vingt-Trois in Paris, Cardinal Ricard in Bordeaux, I had lunch with Mgr Pansard in Chartres and I was received by the nuncio in Paris. They all treated me like a brother.”  While it may have pleased Your Excellency to be treated courteously by liberal prelates who have presided over the destruction of the Faith in France, where only 12% of Catholics still attend weekly Mass, can you fault anyone for thinking that in the warm glow of good feelings and acceptance as a bishop, you might be losing sight of the reason there is a traditionalist movement in the Church?

When you were a young priest in Campos, you spoke and acted as one engaged in a battle for the Faith itself, not merely the pursuit of a liturgical preference. Your motive—and we know this because you said so—was the salvation of souls and the good of the universal Church, which you knew was being threatened by a neo-Modernist revolutionary upheaval, extending far beyond the liturgy and provoking the greatest ecclesial crisis since the time of Arius. As Monsignor Gamber has written of our situation:

Great is the confusion!  Who can still see clearly in this darkness? Where in our Church are the leaders who can show us the right path? Where are the bishops courageous enough to cut out the cancerous growth of modernist theology that has implanted itself and is festering within the celebration of even the most sacred mysteries, before the cancer spreads and causes even greater damage?

What we need today is a new Athanasius, a new Basil, bishops like those who in the fourth century fought against Arianism when almost the whole of Christendom had succumbed to the heresy. We need saints today who can unite those whose faith has remained firm so that we might fight error and rouse the weak and vacillating from their apathy.5

Your Excellency, let the recovery of Tradition be reduced to the “preference” of a few Catholics called traditionalists, and there will be no end to the darkness and confusion Monsignor Gamber described. The cause in which you are involved, however, has always been a cause for restoration of the entire human element of the Church to liturgical, doctrinal and moral integrity.  As a young and militant Roman Catholic priest you understood this. But now it is fair to ask whether you understand it any longer.  Many Catholics are waiting to hear your answer.    

Respectfully yours in Christ,

Christopher A. Ferrara

Michael J. Matt

Footnotes

1Ratzinger, La Mia Vita, quoted by Michael Davies in The Latin Mass, Fall 1997.

2 “Restore the Old Mass,” Inside the Vatican, May 4, 2004.

3 Ratzinger, Joseph, Milestones: Memoirs: 1927-1977 (Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 1998), p. 149.

4Ibid, pp. 156, 148.

5 Gamber, Reform of the Roman Liturgy, p. 113.