The war opened with Traditionis
Custodes is about so much more than the TLM. Francis is attempting to
eliminate a whole way of being Catholic—even for people who never go to the
TLM. By this, I mean a commitment to perennial truth, unchanging doctrine,
moral absolutes, reverence for tradition, all of which attitudes are embodied
in the immemorial Roman Rite, and which are, not surprisingly, under attack
from the same people who stand against the traditional liturgy. Put in this
way: without Summorum Pontificum, there can be no Veritatis Splendor,
Fides et Ratio, or Ecclesia de Eucharistia. The English liturgist
Clifford Howell was wont to say that the use of vernacular in the liturgy was pointing
toward a new world order that couldn’t otherwise be expressed coterminously
with Latin; in other words, the new liturgy is a social movement based on a
rejection of the traditional Catholic worldview. The Old Mass is too “off-message”
now to be allowed to continue; that is where the “prison-guards of treachery”
believe. (Peter A. Kwasniewski, Turned Around: Replying to Common Objections
Against the Traditional Latin Mass [Gastonia, N.C.: TAN Books, 2025], 180
n. 301)
