That the Catholic Church today is in what may be analogously termed (following legal theorist Carl Schmitt) a ‘state of emergency’ is indicated by the fact that one of her most prominent orthodox liturgical scholars is not a bishop, priest, or religious, but is in fact a layman: the American author and musical composer, Peter Kwasniewski. Dr. Kwasniewski follows in a line of eloquent lay scholars venturing into these traditionally clerical waters since the Second Vatican Council, including the English schoolteacher Michael Davies and the German novelist and playwright Martin Mosebach. Leaving aside what it says about the state of the Catholic clergy today that such an apologia for the Roman Church’s liturgical inheritance is not being spearheaded by an ordained minister who actually celebrates that liturgy, the sheer volume of literature that Kwasniewski is able to produce is impressive.
With well over ten books published in the last five years alone we might begin by understanding where The Once and Future Roman Rite (2022, TAN Books) sits within Kwasniewski’s swelling oeuvre. This book follows Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis (2015), Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness (2017), and Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright (2020) in focusing on liturgy. Whereas these earlier works treated the essentials of Christian liturgy, the aesthetics of worship, how rites shape the form of Catholic life and mission, and made a robust argument for the superiority of the Old Rite over the Modern, as well as the central place of the Traditional Latin Mass within any Catholic revival, The Once and Future Roman Rite is still more forthright in arguing that, contrary to the beliefs of Pope Francis, the Apostolic Roman Rite—and not the ‘Montinian’ Rite—is the only Roman Rite. Kwasniewski’s past works dwelt upon various aspects of the Apostolic Roman Rite, but this book focuses on the wellspring of Tradition itself from which the liturgy is nourished.
The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass—for the Latin Church within the Apostolic Roman Liturgy—is the supreme instance of what the philosopher Eric Voegelin might have called metaxy (the ‘between’) within Christianity. Both transcendent and immanent, finite and infinite, it is where heaven touches earth, eternity touches time, where the God-Man is made really and substantially present, and where, through partaking in Divine worship and the Holy Sacrament, the faithful are sanctified and even divinised. In his book, Kwasniewski expounds both how this metaxy unfolds in the elements of the Roman liturgy and why the revival of the Catholic Church is dependent on the recovery of the Roman Rite “in its Tridentine plenitude.”
For Kwasniewski, emphasis on the principle of organicity is fundamental. Here the non-Catholic conservative may draw analogous insights. The author grounds his work with an examination of what constitutes tradition and how we can recognise its organic development in history. In a manner comparable to Edmund Burke’s central theme, and one that clearly draws from St. John Henry Newman’s ecclesiological historiography, Kwasniewski explores both how identity and essence are preserved amidst change and, by contrast, what revolution consists in and how it can be differentiated from legitimate development and reform. The interaction between the Church and the temporal sphere is central here; Kwasniewski’s historical discussions within the book indicate how it was the secularising culture of Europe that influenced the liturgical reformers, and that their work in turn secularised the Church.
For the aforementioned Professor Voegelin, any formation of concepts—or ‘ideation’—severed from the Great Chain of Being that is creation, is necessarily directed towards both the unreal and the parasitical. In Kwasniewski’s mind, the permeation of nominalism, voluntarism, Protestantism, Pistoian rationalism (from the condemned Synod of Pistoia, 1786), antiquarianism, hyperpapalism, and modernism in the committee responsible for the Montinian Rite means that it expresses traces of an ideation, a rupture, away from the Great Chain of Being, and thus a move by the Church into the conceptual territory of ideology. He writes:
She [the Church] needs a heart transplant—but instead of getting a different heart, she needs to get rid of the artificial mechanical heart installed by her ill-informed doctors and take back the heart of flesh that her tradition grew within her.
“Our glorious inheritance”
This book originated in a series of lectures given in 2019 around the 50th anniversary of the 1969 promulgation of the Novus Ordo Missae of Paul VI. However, the book is subtitled “returning to the Traditional Latin Liturgy after seventy years of exile.” Kwasniewski goes further than many traditionalist writers, tracing the immediate roots of the radical liturgical reforms of the 1960s to the 1948 Pian Commission for Liturgical Reform, the resultant new Easter Vigil in 1951, and the changes to Holy Week in 1955. Here we may mark a certain maturation of the traditional Catholic critique of the Second Vatican Council and its subsequent reforms. Michael Davies called the Missal of 1962 (the missal most frequently used among traditionalists) a “rock of stability,” and Archbishop Lefebvre decided to offer the Mass according to this Missal when he founded his traditional seminary in Écône in Switzerland in 1970; but Kwasniewski ambitiously views it as “an island on which one cannot camp out permanently.”
More attention to the pre-Vatican II “interim projects” of the 1950s is adding depth and nuance to the traditionalist movement, which in the crisis environment of the post-conciliar period (necessarily some might say) delineated a position more directly opposed to the conciliar reforms alone. In some ways, the traditionalist movement at that time offered a continuation of ‘1950s Catholicism,’ and almost by default deprioritised any deeper analysis of the crisis. Thanks to the criticisms of ‘hyperpaplism’ by Kwasniewski and others, this awareness of liturgical novelties in the 1950s is leading many traditional Catholics to realise that the Church’s problems today do not all originate in the Second Vatican Council. Certain pathologies associated with modernity were at work in the decades and even centuries before the 21st ecumenical council, which in turn became the moment of their eruption. Such growing awareness is a further sign that, as Kwasniewski points out, “all of the serious scholarship is on the traditionalist side.”
Kwasniewski’s writing is simultaneously scholarly and readable; of all his books, it is in this one that he is most forceful. The Once and Future Roman Rite is a panegyric, an historical study, and a call to action. The author writes that, “We are privileged to be living at a moment when it is possible for the laity and the lower clergy to be taking the steps needed to recover our glorious inheritance.” He goes on to urge: “What we need most of all is priest after priest after priest who will refuse, under any circumstances whatsoever—including threats, banishments, or penalties—to give up the Latin Mass.”
Kwasniewski’s deep love and familiarity with the Traditional Rite is obvious, but he understands that there are many Catholics who are just now discovering the riches of the Roman liturgical tradition. He also shows a deft familiarity with some of the colloquialisms widely used within online discourse while charts, diagrams, and schemas provide helpful conceptual summaries at different intervals.
Since the publication of The Once and Future Roman Rite, Pope Francis, Cardinal Arthur Roche, and the other soixante-huitard opponents of the Old Rite Mass have resorted to what many traditionalists say is the illegally-wielded, centralised, institutional tools of the ultramontane modern age to suppress the Traditional Latin Mass and the growing interest in it. However, we are not in the modern age with its systems and institutions; we are in the postmodern age, which is about information and narratives. Within this paradigm they have already decisively lost. The times they are a-changin’. In fact—as Kwasniewski seems to hint—one may speculate that Traditionis Custodes was a long-term victory for the Apostolic Roman Rite because it continues to draw the discourse’s centre of gravity in the Church towards the Old Rite and Tradition, further stimulating interest, attraction, and growth. Before Traditionis Custodes most Catholics weren’t even aware there was ‘another Mass.’ As the saying goes, there is no such thing as bad publicity.
Many bishops across the world can, and have, suppressed Masses in the Old Rite. What often seems to follow is that tweets, blogs, and podcasts castigating them are viewed by far more people than ever attended the targeted, suppressed Mass in the first place! One may ask, how much engagement and how many views do traditionalists like Taylor Marshall’s podcasts receive compared to official curial “Synodal Journey” videos? Social media is a critical domain of the battlefield and one side can barely log in and show up. The lack of energy, the geriatric decrepitude, the general ‘un-coolness’ of liberal Catholicism (whereas a baffling kind of perverse ‘glamour’ had been its great strength during the revolutionary 1960s and ’70s) is palpable. Word continues to spread and people tend to find ways to attend the Apostolic Roman Rite through these information networks. Kwasniewski is therefore right to view Traditionis Custodes as a desperate “kamikaze strike” and an indicator of the neo-modernist’s slow defeat rather than a decisive counter-attack from a position of strength.
The British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury had a famous conservative dictum: “Delay is life.” Something similar may be said regarding the once and future Roman Rite. The degree to which Pope Francis and the enemies of the Apostolic Roman Rite must be resisted might be quite limited, for perhaps they need only be outlasted.
