Whatever happened to Catholic nuns? Whatever happened to Catholic schools? Whatever happened to the Catholic Mass? Why is Pope Francis giving us the 'thumbs-up' when the Catholic Church is crashing down all around us?

Michael Matt and Christopher Ferrara discuss. . .

I don’t have any answers for the questions I will pose below, but I think, with less than eight months to go before the next installment of the Synod to End the Family, now might be a good time to at least open the discussion: what do we do when the Cardinal Kasper’s New Paradigm is officially in place?

Simply put, can a Catholic in good conscience continue to attend a parish where the priest has agreed to go along with the New Paradigm? And if not, what then?

Ultimately, I believe we are in a situation in the Church so dire that only the long view of history is going to be able to determine what is really happening. But this is not to say that we who are living in it are unable to discern what our duty is here and now. I propose, therefore, only to start the discussion by asking some obvious but painful questions, and to perhaps illumine it with a few easily verifiable facts.

Dear fellow friends of The Remnant,

Greetings once again from Fr. Jonathan Romanoski, FSSP, in Guadalajara, México. I would like to give you an update on our apostolate down here in the land of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Empress of the Americas.

We moved two years ago from the Church of St. Peter where we had been for four years, to an historic church in the center of town dedicated to the oldest Marian title in all of Christendom - Our Lady of the Pillar. The oldest church indeed as it was begun by Our Lady herself during her lifetime around the year AD 40 when she visited the apostle St. James who was sent to evangelize the land of what is now Spain.

Arriving at Zaragoza, St. James had made but few converts and was tempted by sadness to despair when Our Lady appeared to him, descending from the clouds upon a pillar, which she left planted there, asking him to build a shrine in her honor, which she promised would remain till the end of time and which would be the source of grace for the conversion of that land which was to become a great nation.

In Nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.

Welcome to the Traditional Latin Rite Mass by which the Roman Catholic Church had worshipped Almighty God for centuries prior to Vatican Council II.

It is an ancient maxim of the Church that how we worship is how we believe. In Latin, that is called lex orandi, lex credendi …The law of prayer is the law of faith: the Church believes as she prays...” That is why, for centuries, the Church resisted changing one iota of the Sacred Liturgy for fear that it would change our Catholic beliefs. In the wake of Vatican II, radical changes to the Mass have taken place, which resulted in a New Order of Mass (the “Novus Ordo”). We will now review just a few of these changes, that will be noticeable to you, and see how they may have impacted our Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Faith; which was preserved intact for centuries by the Traditional Latin Mass.

 At 6:00 PM Rome time this evening (March 7, 2015), Pope Francis celebrated a special Mass of commemoration of the first vernacular Mass of Pope Paul VI.

The celebration took place at the Church of All Saints, Via Appia Nuova--the very same church where, fifty years ago today, Pope Paul VI offered a prototype of the New Mass in the vernacular. His homily aptly began with, “Today we inaugurate the new form of liturgy in all the parishes and churches of the world.”

It was March 7, 1965, a date which will live in infamy.  There is a commemorative plaque on the wall at the Church of All Saints, which reads:

“At this place His Holiness Paul VI, as the liturgical reform decreed by the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council was beginning, was pleased to celebrate in this church the first Mass in Italian, amid the excited exultation of an entire people.”

But one reason the plaque now rests so high above the table/altar is because it was vandalized several times by members of the “entire people”, many of whom were infuriated by Bugnini’s attempted destruction of the Roman Rite over which Pope Paul VI dutifully presided. It was necessary, finally, to put the plaque out of the reach of faithful who couldn’t resist the urge to spit at it as they passed by, some even attempting to physically deface it. 

Everybody’s favorite whipping boy these days, the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), is evidently not in schism after all—at least according to a recent EWTN report featuring a Vatican bishop (Mons. Juan Ignacio Arrieta, of the Pont. Council for Legislative Texts) admitting what The Remnant has maintained for two decades—that the SSPX is not in schism. “We can say that the problem with the SSPX is only a problem of trust,” said Arrieta, “because they are people who pray, people who believe the same things we believe in…they have their heart in Rome. I can assure you of that since I know them well.”

EWTN reported this? Yes, and kudos to them for having the courage to say what needs to be said about a difficult and most complex question.

Scripture relates about Satan the following: “Now the serpent (Satan) was the most cunning of all the animals that the Lord had made…But the Serpent said to the woman: “You certainly will not die! No, God knows well that the moment you eat of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is evil. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she gave some to her husband…Then the eyes of both were opened and they realized they were naked.”

We have here the Head of Satan, with its fangs of hatred of God and man, stripping Adam and Eve and the whole human race of the wedding garment of Sanctifying Grace and leaving us all in the nakedness of sin, in the death of the soul, in the nothingness of damnation as enemies of God.

During what I have called the Benedictine Respite, the traditionalist movement achieved a long overdue measure of justice from the Roman Pontiff. Benedict XVI liberated the Latin Mass from its forty-year-long false imprisonment, lifted the always dubious “excommunications” of the four bishops of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), and ordered critical corrections to defects in the vernacular translations of the Novus Ordo Missae that traditionalists had long protested—first and foremost what Msgr. Klaus Gamber (with the future Pope’s approval) rightly called the “truly scandalous” alteration of Our Lord’s words during the first Mass from “for many” to “for all.”

It was Pope Benedict himself who noted with dismay the furious resentment he had provoked within the Church merely by doing justice to the SSPX. As he wrote in his letter to the world’s bishops explaining why he had lifted the excommunications:

“But I have weighed you, says God, and I have not found you wanting.
O people who invented the cathedral, I have not found you wanting in the faith.
O people who invented the crusade, I have not found you wanting in charity.
As for hope, it might be better not to mention that, because they have taken all of it.”   ~Charles Péguy, God and France, (1912)


Would the brilliant French poet, Charles Pierre Péguy, still compose these imaginings uttered by God about France? How would the poetry of the devout Péguy capture the Catholic faith in post-modern France? Surely, Péguy would notice the empty cathedrals, the greying congregation, and the apathy of baptized, but lapsed Catholics and the grim reality of Catholicism supplanted by secularism.

Will the terrorist massacres of Charlie Hebdo bring France back to its knees?

Pope Francis’ homily for the latest consistory of cardinals meeting in Rome this week is being called a re-statement of his programme for his pontificate. Fr. Thomas Rosica, his English language spokesman, wrote on Twitter: “More than anything I’ve heard from (the pope) today’s homily is his mission statement.”

Let us assume for a moment that the pope knows the implications of what he is saying, and that the people closest to him are telling the truth when they say, repeatedly, that the things that are happening are happening at his behest, and examine what this “mission statement” has to say to the Church.

Francis is clearly signaling, again, his intentions for the Synod and the future envisioned at it by the Kasper faction. The question of Communion for the divorced and remarried is never named, but the terms describing the issue are unmistakable. And they are wholly on the side of the Kasperites, adhering without an iota of divergence from the basic presumption in Kasper’s proposal: that the law of God must be overturned or ignored for the sake of extending the mercy of God. A contradiction that is totally incompatible with all of Catholic theology, with logic and natural reason.