Guy Noir again!!

[Advisory: See Da Rulz #9]

The underground correspondent we used to keep on retainer in an Atlantic seaboard city that knows how to keep its secrets, Guy Noir - Private Eye, just sent me an email, of all things, rather than a message delivered by carrier pigeon or by a courior in a tuxedo riding in a limo.

Some of you may remember our intrepid detective, who provided timely and sometimes scandalously-amusing reports, sent to us regularly -- yes, by carrier pigeon or by courier in a bow tie and tux. Well, it seems that our intrepid undercover correspondent has now taken on a job somewhere as a professor, which is likely as amusing as it may be scandalous if only his students only knew his previous employment as the mysterious Guy Noir. In any case, here's your chance to read some écriture noire at your own risk in yet another report from Guy Noir - Private Eye:

This week my public speaking students have to choose an informative speech topic. The parameters are the topic must be someone or something commemorated on a U.S. Postage Stamp, because, well, you have to be dead and significant to land yourself on a stamp, right? 

Wrong, apparently, since 2011. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/us/postal-service-will-begin-honoring-living-people-on-stamps.html

Because "Having really nice, relevant, interesting, fun stamps might make a difference in people’s decisions to mail a letter,” said Stephen Kearney, the Postal Service’s manager of stamp services. “This is such a sea change.”

One point one, he was wrong: letter-sending continues to drop, even with Michael Jordan (and Harry Potter, a Brit!) now on envelopes. On point two, he’s right: we continue to tread water in a cultural sea change that has elapsed in the last 61 years.

61? Yes, that is how old I am.  And when I was born, Vatican II was just convening. Even when I was 12, the old-school Catholic vibe prevailed to such an extent that my Catholic best friend was not allowed to follow me to a Methodist potluck (though his mother let me take communion with them once at Mass).

All of which makes me think of Vatican II on its anniversary:

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/pope-marks-60th-anniversary-vatican-council-91320061>

As the dust finally begins to settle, despite the current and last few popes’ determined propaganda campaigns to keep the Council’s relevance alive, some surprising counter-verdicts are in:

Blogger Amy Welborn muses, "It doesn’t seem to me to be unreasonable to label the Second Vatican Council as a failure.” How very different from the genial attempts in the 1980s by guys like Steubenville charismatic Alan Schrenk to claim it as part of glorious arc. 

Read all of Welborn’s thoughts:

https://amywelborn.wordpress.com/2022/10/06/expression-formulated/>

And her remembrance of the all-but-forgotten pop icon Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

https://amywelborn.wordpress.com/2022/10/12/jesus-livingston-seagull/>

Or hear the NYT’s Ross Douthat also flatly declaring. "The council was a failure.” His concluding note is a bit depressing, sort of like saying even when you regain civility with an ex-wife, damage done remains. That’s nice. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/12/opinion/catholic-church-second-vatican-council.html>

At National Review, MBD says this:

"Catholic theologians and bishops have been turned into sponges, soaked in metaphors that have no precise theological content but which retain an acid-wash quality, an iconoclasm aimed at a church and a theology of the past that is half understood, at best. So modernists such as Hans Kung could say that Vatican II promoted a “communio model of the church” over and against an “absolutist pyramidal model.

None of this was meant with any real conviction. It was an ad hoc theology developed for the sole purpose of legitimating dissent on moral issues touching sexuality. In Kung’s model, if the pew sitters could be shown to not be following this teaching, then the teaching itself should be jettisoned. But this has lately been junked for more papal primacy, because the current pope is seen as more progressive than some of the pew sitters.

The church has thus proceeded from slogan to slogan, as if theological reflection or — more ominously — the development of doctrine were mere rumination on the latest sets of buzzwords, usually coming from bishops or the pope. The people of God in transit, the listening church, the new evangelization, the field hospital. The synodal church. Catholics used to be known by their distinctive devotional life — prayers to the saints, rosaries, abstaining from meat on Fridays. Now, devoted Catholics spend their time reading papal encyclicals and mastering this pseudo-theological jargon."

Rod Dreher provides illustration of those thoughts by sharing a painfully crass but on-point video (at least the fictional priest avoids mentioning the ‘evidential power of beauty’).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUeShUhnZnk

Part of me wonders if we may ever again have a pope or council who flatly declares anything dogmatic to be true. There seems to be a lack of confidence in hard-edged doctrine as even a possibility if it attempts to narrow the confines of belief. We know something has to be true, but what that something is, well ... ‘Love and let live!’

In all of this, today’s American Church, much like the seven sisters of the Protestant mainlines, has become the uncertain guardian of a tradition that gathers dust in volumes no one reads, and is heard only in muffled explanations at parishes when people do bother to attend.

Everyone manifests strong symptoms reflecting Unitarianism and Quakerism, and endures settings animated by American Idol- and YoungLife-like liturgics.

Which is why Robert Barron’s recent interview with Shia LeBouf was like an episode of Quantum Leap.

Neocon Hubris & the Battle for Ukraine

By Pieter Vree | September 2022 NEW OXFORD NOTEBOOK

And here we thought they’d exited the world stage, heads lowered, hats in hand. The entire lot of them seemingly had faded into the sunset.

Not so. The neoconservatives are back.

Or, more accurately, they never left. They merely blended into the background, working as assiduously as ever toward their ultimate goal: U.S. military and economic hegemony in every corner of the world.

If you thought the neocons were effectively exiled from the halls of American political power when they failed to force a successor to George W. Bush into the White House, think again. (Who remembers Sarah Palin? In 2008 an official at the neocon American Enterprise Institute said of the vice-presidential hopeful, “She’s bright and she’s a blank page. She’s going places, and it’s worth going there with her.” Hey, stop snickering!)

Palin (and her running mate, John McCain) went nowhere and is a mere historical footnote. But the neocons? They regrouped, rebranded, and resumed their nefarious activities. You see, party affiliation doesn’t matter to them as much as power and influence. You’re a Republican? Fine. You’re a Democrat? Not a problem. To the neocons, the labels are interchangeable.

Opportunistic malleability is in their DNA. Neoconservatism, in the words of its founder, ex-Trotskyite Irving Kristol, “is not a ‘movement’…[but] a persuasion, one that manifests itself over time, but erratically, and one whose meaning we clearly glimpse only in retrospect.” Neoconservatism, which began in the Democratic Party in the 1960s, eventually became associated with the Republican Party in the 1980s (its roots are in the Trotskyism of the 1930s). But it isn’t tied to the GOP.

Scott McConnell, former editor of The American Conservative, described the neocons as “resilient and tactically flexible.” In 1991, when George H.W. Bush “tried to put America’s weight behind settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” McConnell wrote (Dec. 18, 2006), “many neoconservatives suddenly remembered their Democratic Party roots and bolted.” In the next election cycle, “a significant group of neocons signed on as advisers to Bill Clinton.”

From Bush Sr. to Clinton to Bush Jr. to Barack Obama, the neocons managed to exert influence over a succession of U.S. presidents.

Obama? Yes. During the height of the Arab Spring, Charles Krauthammer, a neoconservative syndicated columnist (who previously was a self-described Great Society Democrat), wrote that the Obama administration “is rushing to keep up with the new dispensation, repeating the fundamental tenet of the Bush Doctrine that Arabs are no exception to the universal thirst for dignity and freedom” (March 4, 2011).

Even William Kristol, son of Irving and founder of the (now-defunct) neocon rag The Weekly Standard, called Obama “a born-again neocon.”

Only Donald Trump interrupted the flow. Glenn Greenwald, former editor of The Intercept, wrote during Trump’s term that “one of the most under-discussed yet consequential changes in the American political landscape is the reunion between the Democratic Party and the country’s most extreme and discredited neocons.” The latter, Greenwald observed, “loathe” Trump, who has “accelerated this realignment,” though it “began long before the ascension of Trump and is driven by far more common beliefs than contempt for the current president” (July 17, 2017; emphasis in original).

Trump notwithstanding, neoconservatism truly is a bipartisan project. Democrats, Republicans — it doesn’t matter who’s in charge. The neocons will adapt.

And adapt they have — to the current presidency. “The Biden Administration,” writes Jeffrey Sachs in Tikkun (June 29, 2022), “is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

It is as it always was.

By any rational standard, the neocons’ track record “is one of unmitigated disaster,” Sachs writes. Yet that hasn’t prevented Biden from bending his ear to them.

Given the neocons’ penchant for warmongering to advance the American empire, it should come as no surprise that their fingerprints are all over the latest international crisis. “As a result” of the neocons’ abiding influence, Sachs writes, “Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle…. The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement.”

According to Sachs, the neoconservatives “championed” the expansion of NATO “even before that became official US policy under George W. Bush, Jr. in 2008. They viewed Ukraine’s NATO membership as key to US regional and global dominance.

In fact, two years earlier, Robert Kagan, cofounder of the neocon think tank Project for the New American Century, spelled out the case for Ukraine’s admission to NATO. “Might not the successful liberalization of Ukraine, urged and supported by the Western democracies,” he wrote in the Washington Post (April 30, 2006), “be but the prelude to the incorporation of that nation into NATO and the European Union — in short, the expansion of Western liberal hegemony?”

Kagan knew full well the implications of this strategy. If Russia continues to be one of the “sturdy pillars of autocracy over the coming decades,” then that nation will be an obstacle to “the West’s vision of humanity’s inexorable evolution toward democracy.” (Democracy is neocon code for the end to which any and all means are acceptable.)

Russia, Kagan said, can be expected to “resist the encroachments of liberalism in the interest of [its] own long-term survival.” He quotes Dmitri Trenin, a former member of Russia’s Foreign and Defense Policy Council, as saying, “The Kremlin is getting ready for the ‘battle for Ukraine’ in all seriousness.” Mind you, this was 16 years ago. (Kagan, true to form, was so incensed by Trump’s nomination in 2016 that he left the GOP and endorsed Hillary Clinton for president.)

Seven years before Kagan, paleoconservative pundit Patrick J. Buchanan sounded the warning bell about expanding NATO to include Ukraine. “By moving NATO onto Russia’s front porch,” he wrote in his book A Republic, Not an Empire (1999), “we have scheduled a twenty-first-century confrontation.”

That, however, was all part of the neocons’ master plan. Says Sachs:

The neocon outlook is based on an overriding false premise: that the US military, financial, technological, and economic superiority enables it to dictate terms in all regions of the world. It is a position of both remarkable hubris and remarkable disdain of evidence. Since the 1950s, the US has been stymied or defeated in nearly every regional conflict in which it has participated. Yet in the “battle for Ukraine,” the neocons were ready to provoke a military confrontation with Russia by expanding NATO over Russia’s vehement objections because they fervently believe that Russia will be defeated by US financial sanctions and NATO weaponry.

And here we are.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in February, did you ever stop to wonder why the overwhelming sentiment among American pundits and politicos, Democratic and Republican alike — not to mention the corporate media — is virulently pro-Ukraine and vehemently anti-Russia? Dissent from the parties’ line was difficult to come by. The whole thing was presented to the American public as a real-life version of Star Wars, with Ukraine’s plucky president Volodymyr Zelenskyy (a former actor, by the way) cast in the role of Luke Skywalker against Russian president Vladimir Putin’s Darth Vader.

Many Americans swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. As Wayne Allsworth, author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, put it, the invasion “prompted a firestorm of anti-Russian propaganda in Western mass media reminiscent of the disinformation campaign to which we were subjected prior to the 2003 Iraq war” (Chronicles, May 2022). History has a way of repeating itself, especially when different players are acting out the same old parts in the same old plot but on a different stage.

Did you ever stop to wonder why Pope Francis took so much flak for suggesting that the invasion was “perhaps somehow provoked” by NATO’s “barking at the gates of Russia”? The Holy Father was onto something. And he was wise to warn us to “move away from the usual Little Red Riding Hood pattern, in that Little Red Riding Hood [i.e., Ukraine] was good and the wolf [i.e., Russia] was the bad one. Something global is emerging and the elements are very much entwined.”

This is not to say that Russia was justified in invading a sovereign nation. Far from it. The very act of invasion violates Catholic just-war principles, and Ukraine is well within her rights to defend herself against the aggressor. But America has blood on her hands as well, and our continued involvement will only add accelerant to the fire.

Nobody wants all-out war — nobody, that is, except the neocons. And Biden, like Bush Jr. and Palin, might be enough of a “blank page” to do their bidding, at which point the neocon’s “remarkable hubris” could set the entire world aflame.

Observe: Ever the bumbler, Biden let slip this March that Putin “cannot remain in power.” Though Biden did backtrack, saying he wasn’t expressing support for a Russian regime change, the cat was out of the proverbial bag and the plot laid bare. Who knows what Biden really thinks? He himself might not know!

But one thing is clear: Biden is heavily invested in managing the outcome of the invasion. Already in fiscal year 2022, the United States has provided $950 million in “security assistance” to Ukraine — including aircraft, artillery, and ammunition — and over $5 billion total since the beginning of the Biden administration. And though the president insists he has “no intention of fighting Russia,” he has increased the number of U.S. troops in Europe to 100,000. How is Russia to take this allocation of U.S. money, materiel, and manpower if not as an act of aggression? What does the United States stand to gain by continuing to meddle in another far-flung regional conflict?

Pat Buchanan, who saw this coming over two decades ago, said it best. “In 230 years,” he wrote in his syndicated column (May 20, 2022), “the United States has never gone to war with Russia. Not with the Romanovs nor with the Stalinists, not with the Cold War Communists nor with the Putinists. U.S. vital interests dictate that we maintain that tradition.”

©2022 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved.

The foregoing article, "Neocon Hubris & the Battle for Ukraine," was originally published in the September, 2022 issue of the New Oxford Review and is reproduced here by kind permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706.

A Life’s Worth of Failure, an Abundance of Gratitude

By Karl Keating | The New Oxford Revies, July-August 2022

I came to hiking and backpacking late in life. I remember exactly when it was that I went on my first backpacking trip. It was in California’s Sierra Nevada, south of Mammoth Lakes. The first day I hiked to Duck Lake and camped there. The second day I hiked farther, to Purple Lake, and camped there. The third day I began to retrace my steps. Along the way, I met a ranger. We spoke for a few moments, and then she said, “I don’t know if I should tell you this. I don’t want to ruin the rest of your hike.”

“Well, now you’ve got me wondering,” I said. “So you may as well tell me.”

“New York’s Twin Towers have been destroyed.”

That first backpacking trip sticks in my memory for more than one reason, as do two preparatory day hikes I took in the months immediately prior.

In July 2001 I hiked up White Mountain. At 14,252 feet, it’s the third-tallest peak in California and, by general consensus, the easiest of the fourteeners to summit. But I didn’t find it easy. Once I passed 13,000 feet, my leg muscles turned to Jell-O. The farther I ascended, the more often I had to stop to catch my breath: every hundred paces, every fifty, every twenty. At length, I reached the summit, and, at length and thoroughly exhausted, I returned to the trailhead, where I said to myself, “This, by far, is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.”

I changed my mind a month later.

In August I did a day hike of Mt. Whitney. At 14,505 feet, it’s the tallest peak in the 48 contiguous states. The Mt. Whitney trail is half again as long as the White Mountain trail, and the elevation gain is twice as much.

I reached the summit later than I had hoped, but I reached it. On the way down, I passed Trail Crest, at 13,600 feet, and was about to enter the infamous 97 switchbacks. They take you, in a precipitous mile and a half, down 1,600 feet to Trail Camp, roughly the midpoint of the route.

At the top of the switchbacks, one of my toes began to bother me. I suspected a blister was in the works. I knew what I should do: sit down right there, take off my shoe and sock, examine the toe, and tape it up as necessary. “No,” I thought, “I’ll wait until I get to the relative comfort of Trail Camp.” It was a capital mistake.

How political correct language undermines the Gospel (and much more)

The world, according to Christianity and much of classical antiquity, is populated by things with stable natures, like fire and water, gold and silver, dogs and cats, and men and women. These things are what they are, and are not somethe else. The strength of this view lies in seeing the world as it is, rather than as some might wish it to be. But a war is being waged against this ancient view. Examples include: Nominalism (from the Latin 'nomen' for 'name'), which attacked this view, insisting that common names like 'dog' and 'cat' don't refer to anything real outside our minds but are only 'names' arbitrarily assigned to things. Darwinism attacked it, insisting that 'species' is a term arbitrarily assigned to a phase of an evolutionary continuum, and that nothing remains unchanging. Postmodern Deconstructionsism attacked it, insisting that it was part of a metanarrative that was no more than a social construct. Transgenderism attacks it, insisting that one's 'gender' is also a social construct arbirarily assigned at birth. As R. R. Reno recently noted in his First Things column:

Ze and Zir are easy to mock and ridicule. But the now-ubiquitous use of “them” as a singular pronoun shows how deeply all of us are now implicated in the rebellion against bodily reality. -- R. R. Reno, "Transgenderism: Escaping Limits," First Things (June 2022).

Students these days end up writing the most tortured grammatical contortions, like this:

If a human being is not an end in themselves, they can more easily be seen as a 'burden to society' if they cannot make a 'contribution.'

Or:

Everyone thinks they are a theologian, and begin misapplying theological arguments, or even argue themselves headlong over the edge, into sedevacantism.

Any foreigner trying to master the logic of English grammar would find such sentences, for all their 'political correctness,' grammatically unintelligible. I don't know of any European language being flogged into such torgured contortions as English over politically correct allergies. Almost all continue to use masculine pronouns inclusively. And Asian languages, so far as I know, have not succumbed to the contortions now fashionable in English.

Peter Kreeft noted the problems with language of this kind in a footnote in one of his philosophy books:

"Man" means "mankind," not "males." It is traditional inclusive language. "Humanity" does not go with "God" ("God and humanity") because "God " and "man" are concrete nouns, like "dog" and "cat," while "divinity" and "humanity" are abstract nouns, like "canininity" and "felinity" or "dogginess" and "cattiness." Whatever the political or psychological uses or misuses of these words, that is what they mean. We do not undo old injustices against women by doing new injustices against language." -- Peter Kreeft, Philosophy 101 By Socrates: An Introduction to Philosophy Via Plato's Apology (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2002), p. 9n1.

Kreeft notes the tendency towards abstraction in such language, a retreat from the concrete and the real. But I would go farther. I would retrieve Reno's point about our complicity in the rebellion against bodily reality when we use such language.

In the earlier form of the English Mass, when I was first received into the Catholic Church in 1993, when we came to the response: "Let us give Him thanks and praise," many individuals with an allergy to masculine inclusive pronouns for God would subsitutute: "Let us give God thanks and praise." It sounded innocent enough. But there is a Gnostic presumption at work here that one can get behind the language of Scripture and the Church to the supposed 'reality' of a God beyond gender. Woe betide the day God became Incarnate as a man! Such deconstructionists want to unmake the genetic design revealed in Scripture. One can imagine where such logic might lead. Imagine the resulting translatin of John 3:16 --

For God so loved God's world that God gave God's only Child that whoever believes in them/Zem/Xem shall not perish but have eternal life.

Again, as Reno says about 'Ze' and 'Zir,' it's easy to mock and ridicule such caricatures, but the challenge is real. Once we capitulate to using the language of the revolt against nature, we undermine the metaphysical foundations of the Gospel. If St. Paul's syllogism in 1 Corinthians 15 about Christ's resurrection means anything, it is that our own redemption rests on Christ's being the New Adam and having taken on the human nature of the Old Adam and redeemed it. If He rose from the dead, we may hope that we, too, who have been incorporated into His mystical Body, shall also be resurrected in the world to come.

But all of this depends on there being such a thing as "human nature" for Christ to take on and redeem as the New Adam. If there is no such thing and if Christ be not risen, then as Paul says, "we are of all men the most miserable."

What does resistance require? Is it enough that we resist using Ze, Zir, Zem, Zeir, Xe, Xir, Xem, Xeir? Is it enough that we use good grammar and refuse to mix singular nouns with plural pronouns like they, them, themselves, etc? Is it enough to avoid using God or Godself repeatedly instead of personal pronouns for God? All of that would help, of course. But my own view is that we have to return to the inclusive use of the masculine pronouns as suggested by Peter Kreeft above. As he notes elsewhere, a consolation to the contemporary feminist might be found in metaphor of the Church as the Bride of Christ, since, in relation to the Bridegroom, all men, along with women, are feminine in relation to the heavenly Bridegroom! I will not go into the metaphysical foundations for the inclusive use of masculine pronouns represented in Genesis, where Eve was created from a rib removed from the sleeping body of the Adam, or in biblical passages like 1 Corinthians 11:1-16, long unfamiliar with Catholics because excluded from the 'short form' of their Novus Ordo lectionary readings.

But in the transgender movement, one can more clearly see the animus at work, and that it isn't just about language. It is about unmaking the objective order of nature, or, if you prefer, the Creation Order. J. Budziszewski, in his book about natural law, What We Can't Not Know, references in this connection a very ancient Greek word: γοητεία (goēteía). The word is associated with occult demonology and witchcraft, and Budzieszewski links it to the sorts of impulses one finds in the revolt against being, not merely in radical examples like Aleister Crowley, but even in the currently more mainstreamed dispositions found in LGBTQ+ communities. The point would be that even in subtle and now widely-accepted ways, the revolt against nature has found a home in contemporary language and habits.

The resistence can also begin with language that used to be mainstream. The contemporary allergy against use of expressions like 'mankind' involves neither a recent discovery that women are also members of the human family nor an effort to clarify a puzzling expression. I don't know of any woman visiting a zoo who saw a sign on a door that said "DANGER! MAN EATING TIGER" and would assume the warning didn't apply to her because she wasn't a biological man. As Kreeft notes, words like "man" and "woman" are strong nouns, not anemic abstractions like "humanity." They deserve to be recalled into service. I will not reference the contraction H. L. Mencken made of "he-or-she-ior-it," but it's clear enough what he would have thought of our contemporary lingistic inclinations.

Let me conclude by 'correcting' the earlier sentences butchered by political correctness. Let the reader judge whether he would agree with me that the traditional inclusive forms are much more natural and lucid.

If a human being is not an end in themselves, they can more easily be seen as a 'burden to society' if they cannot make a 'contribution.'

Corrected: If a man is not an end-in-himself, he an more easily be seen as a 'burden to society.'

Again:

Everyone thinks they are a theologian, and begin misapplying theological arguments, or even argue themselves headlong over the edge, into sedevacantism.

Corrected: Everyone thinks he is a theolgian and begins misapplying theological arguments or even to argue himself headlong over the edge into sedevacantism.

And finally:

For God so loved God's world that God gave God's only Child that whoever believes in them/Zem/Xem shall not perish but have eternal life.

Corrected: For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Tridentine Community News -- San Francisco TLM Celebrant Training Report #6; Seminarians of the Franciscans of the Holy Spirit

"I will go in unto the Altar of God
To God, Who giveth joy to my youth"
Tridentine Community News by Alex Begin (May 22, 2022):

San Francisco TLM Celebrant Training Report #6



For the sixth time, Extraordinary Faith was invited to provide Traditional Mass celebrant training in the Archdiocese of San Francisco. We are delighted to report that with the approval of Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, soon-to-be-ordained Reverend Mr. Gerardo Vazquez will celebrate his second Holy Mass after ordination to the priesthood in the Extraordinary Form. It will be a Solemn High Mass on Sunday, June 12, 2022 at 1:30 PM, at historic St. Monica Church in San Francisco, and everyone is invited. The schola of the Benedict XVI Institute, a.k.a. the Archbishop’s Schola, will provide the music.

Deacon Gerardo took Extraordinary Faith’s training program on the Traditional Latin Mass on May 12 & 13. Pictured with Deacon Gerardo is Fr. Kevin Kennedy, Administrator of St. Monica Parish, who also pastors a nearby Byzantine Rite parish.

Seminarians of the Franciscans of the Holy Spirit



The Franciscans of the Holy Spirit have become familiar faces at Traditional Latin Masses around metro Detroit, in their home parish of St. Mary of Redford and at the Oakland County Latin Mass Association at the Orchard Lake Shrine Chapel, Old St. Mary’s, Our Lady of Good Counsel, and other sites. The FHS seminarians – whom you may recognize but whose names you may not know – are now featured with bios on their own web page: https://becomefire.faith/about/meet-seminarians. There you can meet Br. Paul Graupmann, Br. Elijah Delello, and Br. Lawrence Hogue.

The “oldest” of them, Deacon John of the Cross, returned this week to the FHS home base of Phoenix, Arizona, to be ordained to the sacred priesthood. He will be assigned to one of their apostolates in Phoenix, but we can expect to see him visit Detroit from time to time. And yes, rest assured that he intends to make the Traditional Mass a part of his priesthood, as the TLM is written into the FHS constitutions.

Tridentine Masses This Coming Week

• Wed. 05/25 7:00 PM: High Mass at Old St. Patrick, Ann Arbor (Rogation Day) – Outdoor procession precedes Mass
• Thu. 05/26 7:00 PM: High Mass at Our Lady of the Scapular, Wyandotte (Ascension Thursday)
• Thu. 05/26 7:00 PM: High Mass at St. Priscilla, Livonia (Ascension Thursday)
• Thu. 05/26 7:00 PM: High Mass at St. Thomas the Apostle, Ann Arbor (Ascension Thursday)
• Sun. 05/29 2:00 PM: High Mass at St. Alphonsus, Windsor (Sunday After the Ascension) – May Crowning and procession follows Mass

[Comments? Please e-mail tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org. Previous columns are available at http://www.detroitlatinmass.org. This edition of Tridentine Community News, with minor editions, is from the St. Albertus (Detroit), Academy of the Sacred Heart (Bloomfield Hills), and St. Alphonsus and Holy Name of Mary Churches (Windsor) bulletin inserts for May 22, 2022. Hat tip to Alex Begin, author of the column.]

Tridentine Community News - Fr. Perrone Celebrates Mass at OCLMA and Old St. Mary's; Romeo Knights Photo Album of Historic Detroit Churches; Detroit Catholic Podcast Interviews Wassim Sarweh; TLMs This Coming Week

May 1, 2022 - St. Joseph the Worker


"I will go in unto the Altar of God
To God, Who giveth joy to my youth"
Tridentine Community News by Alex Begin (May 1, 2022):

Fr. Eduard Perrone to Celebrate Masses at the Oakland County Latin Mass Association and Old St. Mary’s

A familiar face is returning to the altar in the Archdiocese of Detroit: Fr. Eduard Perrone celebrated the Sunday 9:00 AM High Mass for the Oakland County Latin Mass Association at the Orchard Lake Shrine Chapel on May 1 [and will do so again on May] 8, and 22. He will also celebrate the 10:00 AM High Mass at Old St. Mary’s on May 15. We hope you can join us and welcome Fr. Perrone back to the traditional liturgy.

Fun fact: Prior to becoming a priest, Fr. Perrone was the music director at Old St. Mary’s and even released a now highly collectible LP recording of the Novus Ordo Latin Mass choir there.

Romeo Knights Photo Album of Historic Detroit Churches





Brian O’Curran of the Romeo Knights of Columbus has posted a beautiful collection of photos of historic Detroit churches taken during a recent Prayer Pilgrimages bus tour. Rarely can one see such architectural splendor all in one place. [Photos of the naves of St. Hedwig and St. Florian above].

See the full album at: https://romeoknights.com/2022/01/16/prayer-pilgrimage-2022/

Detroit Catholic Podcast Interviews Wassim Sarweh

Those attending the March 20, 2022 Tridentine Mass at Old St. Mary’s may have noticed a sound crew recording the choir that day. The Detroit Catholic was there to capture some background music to be used in an interview of Oakland County Latin Mass Association/Orchard Lake, Old St. Mary’s, and Holy Family Saginaw Tridentine Mass music director Wassim Sarweh.



The podcast, entitled “Does the Music Matter?” and part of their Detroit Stories series, was posted on the Detroit Catholic web site this week: https://www.detroitcatholic.com/news/detroit-stories-episode-30-does-the-music-matter-podcast

Full disclosure: The podcast emphasizes the diversity of musical styles available at Archdiocese of Detroit Masses and therefore includes some decidedly untraditional music alongside our beloved Gregorian Chant.

Tridentine Masses This Coming Week Fri. 05/07 7:00 PM: Solemn High Mass at Old St. Mary’s (Feria of the Second Sunday After Easter) – Celebrant: Fr. Steve Mateja, Deacon: Fr. Michael Suhy, Subdeacon: Br. Lawrence Hogue, FHS. Reception after Mass.

[Comments? Please e-mail tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org. Previous columns are available at http://www.detroitlatinmass.org. This edition of Tridentine Community News, with minor editions, is from the St. Albertus (Detroit), Academy of the Sacred Heart (Bloomfield Hills), and St. Alphonsus and Holy Name of Mary Churches (Windsor) bulletin inserts for May 1, 2022. Hat tip to Alex Begin, author of the column.]

Tridentine Community News - Exorcisms in the Blessing of Epiphany Water; Plenary Indulgence for Prayers During Pandemic; Tridentine Masses This Coming Week

"I will go in unto the Altar of God
To God, Who giveth joy to my youth"
Tridentine Community News by Alex Begin (January 2, 2022):

January 2, 2022 – Holy Name of Jesus



A priest reader of this column who happens to be a diocesan exorcist pointed out that the prayers of exorcism in the Blessing of Epiphany Water are similarly worded to the prayers in the Rite of Exorcism. These prayers are more detailed than the prayers of exorcism of salt and water used in the blessing of regular Holy Water. The pure and exorcised Epiphany Water is customarily taken home and sprinkled in the rooms of the house as a protection against evil.

As a result this priest has decided to use Epiphany Water for other blessings he conducts during the year. For reference, one of those exorcism prayers from the Epiphany Water Blessing is provided below. Note that the Traditional Roman Ritual requires that it be prayed in Latin.

The full English translations of the Blessings of Epiphany Chalk and Water were published in our January 3 and January 10, 2010 columns and are available on the Tridentine Community News page of www.windsorlatinmass.org

Exorcism Against Satan and the Apostate Angels

We cast thee out, every unclean spirit, every devilish power, every assault of the infernal adversary, every legion, every diabolical group and sect, by the Name and power of our Lord Jesus + Christ, and command thee to fly far from the Church of God and from all who are made to the image of God and redeemed by the Precious Blood of the Divine Lamb +. Presume never again, thou cunning serpent, to deceive the human race, to persecute the Church of God, nor to strike the chosen of God and sift them as wheat +. For the Most High commands thee, + He to Whom thou didst hitherto in thy great pride presume thyself equal; He Who desireth that all men might be saved, and come to the knowledge of truth. God the Father + commandeth thee! God the Son + commandeth thee! God the Holy + Spirit commandeth thee! The majesty of Christ commands thee, the Eternal Word of God made flesh, + Who for the salvation of our race, lost through thy envy, humbled Himself and was made obedient even unto death; Who built His Church upon a solid rock, and proclaimed that the gates of hell should never prevail against her, and that He would remain with her all days, even to the end of the world! The Sacred Mystery of the Cross + commands thee, as well as the power of all Mysteries of Christian faith! + The most excellent Virgin Mary, Mother of God + commands thee, who in her lowliness crushed thy proud head from the first moment of her Immaculate Conception! The faith of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul and the other apostles + commands thee! The blood of the martyrs commands thee, as well as the pious intercession + of holy men and women!

Therefore, accursed dragon and every diabolical legion, we adjure thee by the living + God, by the true  God, by the holy + God, by the God Who so loved the world that He gave His Sole-Begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish, but shall have life everlasting – cease thy deception of men and thy giving them to drink of the poison of eternal damnation; desist from harming the Church and fettering her freedom! Get thee gone, Satan, founder and master of all falsity, enemy of mankind! Give place to Christ in Whom thou didst find none of thy works; give place to the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church which Christ Himself bought with His Blood! Be thou brought low under God’s mighty hand; tremble and flee as we call upon the holy and awesome name of Jesus, before Whom hell trembles, and to Whom the Virtues, Powers, and Dominations are subject; Whom the Cherubim and Seraphim praise with unfailing voices, saying: Holy, Holy, Holy, the Lord God of Hosts!

Plenary Indulgence for Prayers During Pandemic

With the ending of the Year of St. Joseph on December 8, 2021, many easy ways to gain a Plenary Indulgence every day have expired. However one can still take advantage of the several simple means to gain a Plenary Indulgence during the time of pandemic, some of which can be done in your own home.

Holy Mother Church granted a simple way to gain a Plenary Indulgence during this time of pandemic “to those faithful who offer a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, or Eucharistic adoration, or reading the Holy Scriptures for at least half an hour, or the recitation of the Holy Rosary, or the pious exercise of the Way of the Cross, or the recitation of the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, to implore from Almighty God the end of the epidemic, relief for those who are afflicted and eternal salvation for those whom the Lord has called to Himself.” The usual conditions of Confession within 20 days, reception of Holy Communion once per indulgence sought, prayers for the Holy Father’s intentions, and freedom from attachment to sin apply in those locales where churches have reopened since the indulgence opportunity was first published. For complete details, see: https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2020/03/20/200320c.html

Tridentine Masses This Coming Week

Thu. 01/06 7:00 PM: High Mass at OCLMA/Orchard Lake Shrine Chapel (Epiphany) – Celebrant: Fr. Clint McDonell. Blessing of Epiphany Water at 6:15 PM. Please bring bottles if you would like to take some home. A limited number of small bottles will also be available for those who do not bring their own.

Fri. 01/07 7:00 PM: High Mass at Old St. Mary’s (Feria of Epiphany) – Celebrant: Fr. Derik Peterman. Devotions to the Sacred Heart before Mass. Benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament at the end of Mass. A reception follows in the Parish Hall.

[Comments? Please e-mail tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org. Previous columns are available at http://www.detroitlatinmass.org. This edition of Tridentine Community News, with minor editions, is from the St. Albertus (Detroit), Academy of the Sacred Heart (Bloomfield Hills), and St. Alphonsus and Holy Name of Mary Churches (Windsor) bulletin inserts for January 2, 2022. Hat tip to Alex Begin, author of the column.]