Soon we will have priests reduced to the role of social workers and the message of faith reduced to a political vision. Everything will seem lost, but at the right time, only in the most dramatic phase of the crisis, the Church will be reborn. It will be smaller, poorer, almost catacumbal, but also holier. For it will no longer be the church of those who seek to please the world, but the church of believers in God and his Eternal Law. The revival will be the work of a small, seemingly insignificant, but indomitable, remnant, undergone a process of purification. Because that’s how God works A small flock withstands evil.
From Cardinal Ratzinger’s vital address in 1969.
Benedict’s prediction is bearing fruit, but there are many more setbacks to endure. Consider this sad news from the Society of St Hugh of Cluny:
31 Dec
2023
End of Traditional Mass at St. Stanislaus in New Haven
Posted by Stuart Chessman
We are reliably informed that two minutes before today’s Traditional Mass a decree of Archbishop Leonard Blair of Hartford was read suppressing the Latin Mass in New Haven as of January 14. There had been no previous communication with the congregation. They have been referred to St. Patrick’s, the church of the Institute of Christ the King, in Waterbury!
Your Tatler, when living in New York, knew some of these wonderful people; observant, pious Catholics whose only wrong was to embrace the Mass that Catholics have celebrated for 1500 years, with only minimal and organic changes, up to the 1960s. Then, in an audacious action forever to be deplored, a group of men arbitrarily decided this glorious work of faith–and art–should be “modernized.” Substantial parts of the order of worship were trashed and the remaining carcass translated into jejune vernacular, reading like a second-rate sixties pop song (the lyric of a Beatles song is much superior).
Benedict’s prediction will prevail. The rebirth he cites though may likely not occur until most or all of us are dead. It thus behooves Catholics who love the Mass to pray and keep it alive. Even, when necessary, playing whack-a-mole with Archbishop Blair and his colleagues’s desperate attempts to extinguish it once and for all. They will not succeed. Most of those clerics are old and older, but the Mass is older still, eternal, and will survive them and their destructive acts.
Domine salva nos.
The Taos Tatler. 