Bordering on the prophetic John Morris reviews The Once and Future Roman Rite by Peter Kwasniewski

This is a fighting book. In its proposals it is, I think, ultimately correct, but it makes one wonder: how angry is Peter Kwasniewski? He is angry about the state of the Church, angry about covid hysteria (p158), and above all angry about injustice. At times he borders on the prophetic: ‘those who follow the modern path will get their paltry rewards in this life and their eternal punishment in the next if they do not repent’ (p103), or moves from a description of what the Church ought to be to the observation that it is perhaps much smaller than it looks— although if sanctity is required for membership we are in trouble. The architects of the liturgical rupture are guilty, at any rate materially, of sinning against the Holy Spirit. (p55ff)

These are strong words, and the world Kwasniewski paints is bleak: he takes comfort in his own mortality, which at least sets ‘a limit to the evils each of us must endure’ (p324). But precisely because this is an angry book (I do not mean an intemperate book) the question arises: for whom is it written? The tone is popular, rather than scholarly; at times we sacrifice accuracy: Kwasniewski is well aware that theological development in the early Church did not really occur by adding clauses to creeds, for instance. But this is not a book out to make converts either. References to ‘trads’ and even ‘non-sede trads’ (p334) pick up as the book goes on, and the outsider will struggle to place many of the allusions.

The usual targets are shot down: the revolutionary spirit after the Council is called (somewhat inaccurately) Nietzschean, and even poor confused (and rightfully forgotten) Teilhard gets a mention, plausibly as a Modernist (p215) and less plausibly as a candidate for impending canonisation (p323).

Nor will it be easy reading among traditionalists. The Novus Ordo is a mule, ‘the infertile hybrid’ of the Faith and Modernity. We should, Kwasniewski clearly thinks stop going to it, stop celebrating it, refuse to settle even for the already tainted books of ’62, and take matters into our own hands: ‘we have the books; we have the know-how; we have the clergy and laity.’ (p354) This is fighting talk, as is the claim that promulgating the modern rite (which Kwasniewski is clear is objectively not the Roman rite) was beyond the pope’s power ( ultra vires: 171), or the call for ‘ashes and sackcloth, widespread book-burnings, and Latin Mass training sessions’ (p184) in response to the contemporary collapse of faith. The trouble is that these last two arguments are familiar in traditionalist circles, and have been defended carefully in less colourful language (including by Kwasniewski). But his proposal of a widespread adoption of what I agree is a far superior liturgy (even to that of ’62), whilst simply rejecting the authority of anyone who tries to forbid it, needs a far more careful argument than we get here, and a far more liturgical-anthropological argument than (naturally) we get in his recent True Obedience

His position is uncomfortably close (as he notes: p337) to de-facto Orthodoxy. The relationship between liturgy, Tradition and authority which he proposes is not merely opposed to the fait accompli defences of the reform: it is in direct conflict with the universal understanding of papal liturgical authority before the council—on which, inter alia, a great deal of traditionalism is built. Kwasniewski is quite right to attack that extrincisism: the idea that liturgy is ultimately arbitrary symbolism sanctioned by authority, sometimes illustrating an otherwise unrelated doctrine. He calls this, not entirely accurately, ‘neo-scholastic reductionism;’ it is the theory (as he notes: 335) of Mediator Dei as much as of Missale Romanum, and it is nonsense, but one does not demolish centuries of shoddy thinking in a few paragraphs.

In the end—ungrateful as this sounds—we must demand yet another book. In the meantime, The Once and Future Roman Rite remains in equal measure provocative and unashamedly Catholic.

The Once and Future Roman Rite by Peter Kwasniewski is published by Tan Books. Available from the LMS shop at £27.99.