By Monica Showalter
The pope yells about them. Joe Biden’s FBI spies on them.
But in a rather astonishing development, efforts to suppress the traditional Latin Mass among the Catholics is booming, which kind of tells us what’s really going on.
Even the mainstream media is noticing.
According to a page one story in the Miami Herald:
Traditional Latin Mass, also called the extraordinary form of the Roman rite, or the Tridentine Mass, has been celebrated in the Archdiocese of Miami for the past 40 years, beginning under former Archbishop Edward McCarthy. In recent years, Miami’s community has steadily grown, relocating to five different chapels in the past 10 years to acccommodate the growth.
…and…
Miami’s Latin Mass community has more than doubled in the past five years — up from an average of 112 congregants in 2017 to 320 in 2023 — according to records taken by Frank Andollo, who’s been going to the services for 10 years. People drive from as far north as Palm Beach County and as far south as the Florida Keys to make it to Latin Mass at Belen on Sundays.
Well, ahem. Now we know what the hullabaloo is all about.
The numbers cited don’t sound like much but imagine if it were a stock — that would be a very high rate of growth showing no signs of slowing down.
Maybe there’s some sort of revolution going on. The scary thing for the suppressors is that reports show that it’s young people taking the lead. The Herald’s photos show all young people.
This is what’s rolling in from the younger Catholics at the pope’s ongoing Synod, too, which is a gathering intended to bring in the laity to Church decisions:
Bet they didn’t have that on their bingo cards.
What’s more, it’s come despite Joe Biden’s FBI’s spying on traditional Catholics as “terrorists” from at least three field offices, and perhaps even more astonishingly, despite efforts within the Church to suppress the Mass, by in this case, keeping the saying of the Mass out of mainstream churches and stuffing it into little chapels, as well as by failing to publish any information about where it is or when to come. If you’re a Catholic who wants to go to one of these Masses, you have to get such information by word of mouth. They do things like that to keep numbers low.
Pope Francis, who’s given political aid to abortion enthusiasts Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, revealed a special little cold spot in his heart for traditional Catholics in the U.S. this week:
Pope Francis accused some leaders of the US Catholic Church of “backwardness,” saying they have abandoned Christian doctrines in favor of political ideologies.
“Doing this, you lose the true tradition and you turn to ideologies to have support. In other words, ideologies replace faith,” the pope said during a private meeting with a Jesuit order in Lisbon earlier in August.
The transcripts from that meeting were just made public Monday, revealing the 86-year-old pope’s unfiltered opinion about a rift growing between some US religious leaders and the Vatican over his initiatives to modernize the Catholic Church.
Francis’ comments came after a Jesuit described encountering a number of Catholics and bishops who were critical of his papacy and the Vatican during a recent year-long stay in the US.
In response, the pope called the US church “backward,” and said it had “a very strong, organized, reactionary attitude” which he warned could lead to a climate of closure that would be the antithesis of Christian values.
Ideologies? This, from the guy who entertained Marxist “thinker” Naomi Klein and globaloney standard-bearer Jeff Sachs in the Vatican as papal “advisors”?
Speaking of ideologies…
As far as antithesis of Christian values, well, let’s just say that I’ve been to traditional Latin Masses — and among the attendees were the very people he’s courting now as his vanguard: gays.
It’s not just gays, it’s young single people, young families. And don’t forget that Dorothy Day, who’s up for sainthood and is being held up as a model of progressivism as the founder of the “Catholic Worker” movmeent in the 1930s, was a bigtime fan of Latin Mass, too.
Despite the twists and turns that various Catholic Worker communities have taken, it founders were far more orthodox than they are given credit for. Servant of God Dorothy Day preferred the Traditional Mass herself, and got into a fight with one of the Berrigan brothers when he offered Mass at the Catholic Worker house using a Styrofoam cup.
Is this starting to sound a little .. universal?
But rather pathetically for the suppressors, the flock just keeps growing.They’re producing priests. The report above cites just Miami but it’s actually happening all over the states, as well as in Europe, in places like France and Ireland.
The Herald opted to do real journalism in this piece by asking the Catholics why they were attracted to this older rite. They said they were looking for something “authentic” for one, echoing a young Hollywood A-list movie star, Shia LaBoeuf, who embraced Latin Masses with this observation:
“The Latin Mass affects me deeply,” he said. “Because it doesn’t feel like they’re trying to sell me a car.”
It calms them. There’s no Nike nor Apple nor anything in them that succors the wokester commercial world they are surrounded by. No mass media, no high tech, no buy buy buy, just an ancient rite embraced by young people.
They also don’t like the bizarre stuff they’re seeing coming out of the Vatican, such as Pachamama parading, or those butt-ugly modern-art Vatican Nativity displays.
Yet another thing that was bringing them in, according to the Herald, was the close sense of community, which they don’t get with generic churches.
That has an authentic ring, too. I have no idea where to find a Latin Mass where I am in San Diego, but there is a close equivalent in the traditional Byzantine-rite Mass which is easy to find in the city — and they have that exactly described sense of warmth and welcoming community.
Another reason, seen on Twitter, certainly describes why this form of worship is growing:
Call it the ‘barf’ factor, which compares pretty unfavorably to this:
No wonder the leftist establishment is trying to shut it all down. You can see why Joe Biden and his politicized law enforcers can’t take it. The strange thing is the opacity of the Vatican for something that is actually drawing in new members. They seem to be intent on killing off their seed corn in the name of some shut-the-conservatives-out progressive and globalist ideal — gays, the environment and other irrelevances — which is very establishment-y.
At least we know what’s going on now. The Latin Mass is popular and growing and those most threatened by it can’t ignore it. The suppression of Latin Mass and the bid to call its adherents ‘terrorists’ seemed like a minor thing to me when I first heard the news of the FBI’s illegal spying, but obviously, it’s not. The bad guys are roused first at the news of any threat to their monolithic power, and they’re biting down.