Letter #14, 2025, Wednesday, January 29: Motu Proprio: Why the Latin Mass? Why Now? Part 4

    I want to again introduce this serial presentation of a lecture I gave almost 18 years ago, in the summer of 2007.

    On August 17, 2007, I gave a talk at a church in California, St. Cecilia Church in Tustin, near Los Angeles, on the decision of Pope Benedict XVI to issue on July 7, 2007, his motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, granting wider use of the old liturgy throughout the world.

    The motu proprio had been published just 5 weeks before.

    So, at that time, in August 2007, it was entirely in keeping with the wishes of Rome, and of the Pope, to receive and to accept and to praise and to embrace that document.

    Pope Benedict had encouraged me to try to explain his intent in the pages of my magazine, Inside the Vatican, and in any talks I gave.

    So I felt “authorized” to try to give my interpretation of what he had done, and why, when I gave my first and only talk on the subject, in August 2007.

    I spoke without notes, and went on for about an hour. (It was recorded by Terry Barber of St. Joseph Radio — thank you, Terry!)

    Even as I gave the talk, I felt it was reasonably effective, but later people told me it was the best talk that I had ever given.

    I did speak from my heart, and from my memories as a child, and from my studies as a historian, and from my many conversations with Pope Benedict, in the 1980s and 1990s, when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger.

    I tried to be clear, and fair, and reasonable, and faithful, to what I had lived and learned during those decades about the Catholic Mass.

    Later, people came up to me and told me that my talk had moved them and instructed them, and they thanked me.

    I put the talk onto a CD which was entitled Motu Proprio: Why the Latin Mass? Why Now? (To order a copy, please quick here)

    Now, almost 18 years have passed by, and the attitude of Rome, and perhaps also of the Catholic faithful in general, has changed over these nearly two decades. Indeed, in Rome, the current pontiff seems intent on restricting the celebration of the old Mass, for reasons he has set forth in two documents and in several interviews. (see this link from seven months ago).

    During December, one month ago, an old friend and reader of the magazine told me that my talk had influenced him deeply, and that he had taken to listening to the talk on his car CD player (I realize that many cars no longer have CD players!) while driving on long trips. “It is a great talk,” he told me. “I may have listened to it 12 times or more by now. I always find something new in it. Why don’t you share it again, make it available again?”

    So I decided to publish that talk here, and to make the CD available again. I will also soon be posting a downloadable audio file.

    I note again that, when this talk was given, in 2007, it was given in an attempt to explain and defend the reasoning of Pope Benedict, who had acted just 5 weeks before.

    The talk was therefore intended to offer my full support to the reigning pontiff, and to explain why he had taken the decision that he took.

     —RM

    P.S. Order the Motu Proprio: Why the Latin Mass? Why Now? CD here

    P.P.S. Subscribe to Inside the Vatican magazine here. (Each subscription is quite helpful to us!)  

    Motu Proprio: Why the Latin Mass? Why Now?

    Part 4

    (Continued from previous letter)

    In the 20th century, several things occurred. We had the First World War, which was so devastating that you almost would see it as apocalyptic. There were 250,000 boys who, in a couple of weeks, in the summer of 1915 and again in the summer of 1916, were shot to death in France. They were kids who had studied at Oxford and Tübingen and the Sorbonne.

    They were the flowers of Europe and they came up out of the trenches, their officers said, “Attack!” And they were mowed down by machine guns. 250,000. We’ve lost in Iraq a little over 3,000 soldiers in four years time. They lost 250,000 in a couple of days. Europe was, in a sense, committing suicide.

    Out of that experience came a collapse in Europe. And a search for new models of culture and civilization because it seemed that everything didn’t work. So they went to the fascists in Italy in 1922. Mussolini came to power. They moved after the Roaring Twenties and after the collapse of the German economy and then the confusion of the Weimar Republic, they went to Nazism in Germany with Hitler in 1933.

    The First World War was the end of all the Christian monarchies of Europe, which used to rule Europe. It was the end of the Catholic monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was Emperor Karl, who’s just been beatified. It was the end of the Protestant monarchy of the Hohenzollerns. The Kaiser, Wilhelm, was a Protestant.

    It was the end of the Orthodox monarchy of the Russians. The Romanovs, Nicholas and Alexandra. And, in a certain way, it was the end of the Anglican monarchy in England, although it remains in place with Prince Charles and Lady Diana. In a sense, the businessmen and the military men in the Parliament really did seize power in England after the First World War.

    Europe, in a sense, is de-Christianized from the top down, from the First World War on, although obviously this was already occurring prior to that time, from the French Revolution. The French Revolution, I think they guillotined 6,000 nuns and priests. So the de-Christianization and the creation of a post-Christian civilization is occurring in the West for the last 200 years.

    It’s nothing new.

    It creates in Russia one of the strangest and most horrible phenomena in human political history.

    A regime which says it’s going to create paradise and perfect justice on earth, and creates the atheistic communist regime of the Soviet Union, and puts 20 million people to death in the gulags.

    Many of them Christian believers.

    In the middle of the century, we fought the Second World War, which is the second half, in some ways, of the First World War. Because the unresolved tensions of the Versailles Treaty led directly to the Second World War. Following the Second World War, we begin to have a world that’s a little bit more recognizable to us today.

    We create immediately, from 1945, the torch in some sense is passed to the United States of America, as the world leader, with another torch being still held off by another great power, which was the USSR, the Soviet Union. So we had the bipolar world. And we create the structure for one world government in 1945, the United Nations.

    In 1948, Israel is created. For the first time in 2,000 years, the Jews can return legally to Israel. This is new in history.

    In the 1950s, the Europeans, who are now completely devastated by the two wars in which millions of Europeans have been killed, start to withdraw from the rest of the world. They withdraw from Africa, and all the African countries become, one by one, free and independent countries, as you recall, the decolonization.

    It was in the midst of this that the Catholic Church said, we too are facing a new reality. Four hundred years have gone by since Trent, and a hundred years have gone by since Vatican I. The world has had two great wars. We’ve had enormous changes in communications, in travel, in technology. We need to have an updating Council.

    So they called the Second Vatican Council.

    [Part 5 to follow]

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