Böcker i Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition-serien

Between September and November 2022, Church Life Journal published a series of articles on liturgical reform, coauthored by Drs. John Cavadini, Mary Healy, and Thomas Weinandy. With its rosy view of the Liturgical Movement, its caricature of the Catholic faithful prior to Vatican II, its forensically questionable affirmation of Sacrosanctum Concilium's paternity of the Novus Ordo (not to mention its solemn chrismation of both by the Holy Spirit), and its severe rejection of the "Tridentine movement," the series sparked ample criticism of the authors' perplexingly inadequate scholarship, grandiose generalizations, and pastoral callousness.Because the innovationist and anti-traditionalist arguments of Cavadini, Healy, and Weinandy are perpetually recycled in seminaries and degree programs around the world-the "commonplaces" of countless bulletins, homilies, blogs, and workshops-the appearance of the series offers a providential opportunity to present Catholic counterarguments. This handy book makes a persuasive case in favor of immemorial tradition against yesterday's novelties at a time when a growing number of priests and faithful are longing for the sacred and the authentic.After an initial careful summary of the Cavadini, Healy, and Weinandy series, Illusions of Reform gathers the critiques of nine authors: in Part 1, Dr. Janet Smith's own five-part series; in Part 2, Dr. Peter Kwasniewski's rejoinders on several major issues; in Part 3, further responses by Alexander Battista, representing the point of view of Eastern Catholics; Fr. Samuel Keyes, a priest of the Anglican Ordinariate; Roland Millare, an expert on Joseph Ratzinger; Fr. Peter Miller and Dom Alcuin Reid, liturgically knowledgeable Benedictine monks; and Dr. Joseph Shaw, president of the International Una Voce Foundation. An epilogue by Gregory DiPippo and a select bibliography round out the volume.

On July 16, 2021, Pope Francis published Traditionis Custodes, an apostolic letter that aimed at a drastic reduction of the use of the traditional Roman liturgy. In a letter to the bishops published on the same day, the pope explained at length the reasons for his decision. The harsh measures, in tandem with the violent and accusatory tone of the accompanying letter, have aroused consternation among the faithful who are attached to the usus antiquior. The Responsa ad Dubia issued in December of 2021 by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, so far from clarifying matters, only intensified the growing dismay and debate.The inaccuracies, difficulties of interpretation, and problems of concrete application of Traditionis Custodes have meanwhile raised many questions among canonists, pastors, and institutes whose proper law binds them to the liturgical forms of the Latin tradition. The present tract, written by canon lawyer Fr. Réginald-Marie Rivoire, F.S.V.F., undertakes a careful canonical reading of these documents, chiefly from the point of view of their juridical rationality. It is well known that rationality is one of the essential characteristics of a legal norm, such that strictly speaking, an irrational norm is not a norm and does not bind.The tract first considers the legal status of the documents; then, the affirmation at the heart of this whole legal apparatus and its raison d'être, namely, that the liturgical books promulgated by Paul VI and John Paul II are the sole expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite; and finally, the way in which numerous fundamental principles and precepts of canon law are undermined by the new norms.***The revised edition includes a 10-page addendum on (among other things) the implications of the "Rescript" released by Cardinal Roche on February 20, 2023.

The seventeenth-century Baroque synthesis of the divine-human relationship emphasized the primacy of the Christian God in the lives of all men as the basis for legitimate humanism. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century tore apart the components, emphasizing matter over spirit and pushing God far away as a remote cosmic architect. In the first half of the nineteenth century, spirit prevailed once again over matter in Romanticism. This effervescent movement, opposed by a renewed scientific materialism, ended up fragmenting into utopianism, sentimentalism, psychologism, existentialism, and pessimism. The history of Romanticism is the story of an explosive creative force that always consumes itself.Such is the thesis of this ambitious historical and philosophical study, in which the author shows how thought and art forms from the end of the Napoleonic wars have left their mark on every aspect of the Western civilization we inhabit today. Its pages are a tour de force of cultural history as seen in a procession of influential figures-among them Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Comte, Delacroix, Darwin, Hugo, Zola, Monet, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Dali, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Malraux, Gide, Bergson, Maritain, Marcel, Bernanos, Sartre, Ortega y Gasset, Dostoevsky, Ruskin, Wilde, Weber, Freud, Barth, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, and Niebuhr.Modernity's accelerating dissolution becomes, in Fr. Steckler's telling, a negative apologetic for the truth of the Catholic Faith, which takes the whole of reality into its gaze and harmonizes the contradictories of matter and spirit, nature and divinity, feeling and reason, faith and science. Man is doomed to a cycle of experimentation, frustration, and skepticism so long as he runs away from the revelation and grace of God, which bring newness rather than novelty, freedom rather than frenzy.

As St Augustine told his flock in Hippo Regis, the books of Scripture are letters that have come to us from the City toward which we are on pilgrimage. Yet for many decades, the teaching and study of Scripture in academic settings within the Catholic Church has served more to undermine faith than to nourish it. This disastrous situation has arisen through a forgetfulness or rejection of the principles that should guide exegesis. In particular, many renowned scholars whose works have dominated the Catholic landscape sought to erect exegesis into an autonomous discipline, separated from both the teachings of the Church and from speculative theology. To shield themselves from such a secularized exegesis, and in response to the wider assault on orthodoxy within the Church, some Catholics have taken refuge with the magisterium, yet in a way that can obscure the fact that popes and bishops themselves must remain subject to the word of God. In this brief but profound primer, Fr Thomas Crean OP sets forth principles fundamental to all exegesis-in particular, the plenary inspiration and inerrancy of the sacred books-and responds to modern attempts to limit these two properties of Holy Writ. He discusses disputed questions about the nature of inspiration, literary genres, the plurality of senses, and the sufficiency of Scripture, and explains the enduring importance of the Septuagint and the Vulgate. Letters from that City will be of use especially to seminarians and other students of theology.

Three days before His Passion, Our Lord warned the High Priests: "the Kingdom of God is taken from you and given to a nation that will bear the fruit thereof." What is this nation? Who are the people of the Messiah? What is the Kingdom inherited by the saints of the Most High, and why does the Messiah rule the nations "with an iron sceptre"? The Church Fathers, East and West, are clear in their answer: the people of the Messiah are the Romans. Although in its pagan form it is Babylon and the Beast, the Roman Empire is translated by the power of the Cross from the temporal to the spiritual order and becomes what the Apostle calls "the restrainer": the power that holds back the coming of the Antichrist. The removal of this restrainer signals the commencement of the final persecution of the Church and the end of all mortal things.Guided by the teachings of the Fathers, St Thomas Aquinas, and St John Henry Newman, The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man explores the essentially Roman character, the Romanitas, of Christ's One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, and demonstrates how a true understanding of this fifth Note of the Church can guide us in the most vital and perilous of all discernments.

What does it mean to say that the Apostle Peter-and each of his successors-is kepha, the rock on which Christ has built His Church? Could this rock ever be allowed to crumble, without the Church herself crumbling? Can a successor of Peter fail in his office, or even in his faith, without negating the Church's indefectibility? What are the nature-and limits-of the pope's infallibility and primacy? Has the role of the supreme pontiff sometimes been exaggerated or distorted?Today questions like these are asked with greater urgency than ever, owing to the pontificate of Pope Francis. In Super Hanc Petram, Fr Lanzetta answers them with balance, realism, and confidence in Divine Providence. Lanzetta investigates Pope Francis's sources, leitmotifs, methods, and goals, examining the return of nominalism and pragmatism, the elevation of pastoral care over doctrine, the proclamation of a mercy that severs charity from truth, the substitution of "a people on the move" for "the mystical body" and of a panreligious humanistic fraternity for the salvific Christian mission, the inversion of hierarchy by synodality, the selective use of Vatican II as an impetus for "paradigm shifts," an evolutionary vision of doctrinal development driven by sociological-cultural theories, and the supplanting of eschatology by ecology.Pastors, theologians, laity, converts, non-Catholics interested in the Church and her relationship with modernity-all will find Fr Lanzetta's study valuable for the light it sheds on the age-old office of the papacy and on the tempestuous reign of its most recent incumbent.

Thomistic theology is rarely associated with liturgical prayer, even by many of St. Thomas's own disciples. Such a dissociation reveals more about the priorities of later Thomism, however, than it does about St. Thomas Aquinas, who himself devoted considerable energy to the contemplation of the sacred liturgy. In Thomistic Mystagogy: St. Thomas Aquinas's Commentaries on the Mass, Urban Hannon considers the saint's teaching on the meaning and purpose of the various rites that surround the holy Eucharist. Drawing on four essential texts-two from St. Thomas's earliest major work, two from his latest; two on the words of the liturgy, two on its actions-this little book pieces together a properly Thomistic commentary on the Mass. "Because in this sacrament the whole mystery of our salvation is embraced," St. Thomas says, "thus it is carried out with greater solemnity." This is a study of that "greater solemnity," and of how St. Thomas believes it relates to "the whole mystery of our salvation."