The Traditionalists Destroy Themselves With Their Lies

Catholic Traditionalists live in a world of lies, and they hang on to these lies with all their strength.  These lies constitute the foundation on which they have built their spiritual lives.  That foundation, which has been cracked and falling apart for years, is finally giving out.  Like the horrible tragedy of the collapsed building in Surfside, Florida, the world of the Traditionalists is crumbling beneath their feet, and soon they will be surrounded only by a pile of rubble.

Roberto de Mattei, an outspoken critic who has unrelentingly condemned Pope Francis, has written an Op Ed for Rorate Caeli entitled, "Francis Has Unleashed a War: It Will End With the Full Triumph of Tradition." I choose this article because it contains some of the more blatant lies on which the Trads rely for their existence. It is so packed with lies and misrepresentations that I hardly know where to begin. So I will begin at the beginning.

de Mattei starts out his "Op  Ed" with the most loaded lie possible:

The intent of Pope Francis’s motu proprio Traditionis Custodes, of July 16, 2021, is to repress any expression of fidelity to the traditional liturgy, but the result will be to spark a war that will inevitably end with the triumph of the Tradition of the Church.

This is classic Catholic Traditionalist, skewing the facts to make themselves into the innocent victims of the big bad Church.  

First, it is important to note that Traditionis custodes is not about the TLM at all.  This Motu Proprio has been given in response to the divisive effects of the Trads upon the Church, as will be shown.  The reason Summorum Pontificum has been abrogated is because the Trads have used SP as a weapon to bludgeon the rest of the Church.  Francis is taking away their weapon in order to protect the rest of the flock.

From Pope Francis' letter to the bishops:

Regrettably, the pastoral objective of my Predecessors, who had intended “to do everything possible to ensure that all those who truly possessed the desire for unity would find it possible to remain in this unity or to rediscover it anew”, has often been seriously disregarded. An opportunity offered by St. John Paul II and, with even greater magnanimity, by Benedict XVI, intended to recover the unity of an ecclesial body with diverse liturgical sensibilities, was exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church, block her path, and expose her to the peril of division.

As will be shown later, de Mattei includes part of this quote in his article but omits the most damaging accusation. 

Like all other Trads, de Mattei makes no mention of the constant attacks and condemnation of the Magesterium by Traditional Catholics, including repeated calls for the condemnation of Pope Francis himself as a heretic. 

Secondly, if this war "inevitably ends with the triumph of the Tradition of the Church", then the Catholic Church has ceased to exist.

de Mattei goes back in history to St. Paul VI (whom he addresses neither as "Pope" nor "Saint", not an accidental omission) and the introduction of the revision of the Roman Missal, as St. Paul VI referred to it.  Once again, de Mattei completely misrepresents the facts and skews it to paint St. Paul VI as an evil pope trying to undermine the Church:

When, on April 3, 1969, Paul VI promulgated the Novus Ordo Missae (NOM), his basic idea was that within a few years the traditional Mass would be only a memory. The encounter of the Church with the modern world, which Paul VI was aiming for in the name of an “integral humanism,” envisaged the disappearance of all the heirlooms of the “Constantinian” Church. And the ancient Roman Rite, which Saint Pius V [notice that de Mattei does use the title of "Saint" with Pius V] had restored in 1570, after the Protestant liturgical devastation, seemed destined to disappear.

If St. Paul VI had wanted the traditional Mass to be "only a memory", he would have done so in MISSALE ROMANUM by abrogating it at that time. He did not do that.  In fact, he praised the Mass of St. Pius V:

The Roman Missal, promulgated in 1570 by Our predecessor, St. Pius V, by decree of the Council of Trent, has been received by all as one of the numerous and admirable fruits which the holy Council has spread throughout the entire Church of Christ. 

St. Paul VI states that the renewal of the Mass did not begin with him but with his predecessor, Pope Pius XII, a fact de Mattei conveniently omits:

The beginning of this renewal was the work of Our predecessor, this same Pius XII, in the restoration of the Paschal Vigil and of the Holy Week Rite, which formed the first stage of updating the Roman Missal for the present-day mentality.

Next, de Mattei gives us the same old tired lie about the vibrancy and growth of the Latin Mass as opposed to the dying "Novus Ordo" Mass:

Never has a prediction shown itself more mistaken. Today the seminaries are devoid of vocations and the parishes are emptying, sometimes abandoned by priests who announce their marriage and return to civic life. On the contrary, the places where the traditional liturgy is celebrated and the faith and morals of all time are preached are crowded with the faithful and are incubators of vocations. 

Here is the truth from none other than onepeterfive.com, hardly a bastion of liberal Catholicism.  This is from a 2019 article entitled, "Reality Check: No, the Latin Mass Is Not Taking Over":

I’ve noticed that those who have spent their whole religious lives within traditional Catholic communities, or who have been outside the mainstream N.O. Church for a long time, tend to get a skewed sense of how big the movement is. The Latin Mass is growing, for sure, but let’s examine the numbers to gain some perspective. CARA’s [Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate] data show that there are 36,580 priests in the United States, of which 25,254 are diocesan priests, the vast majority of whom, probably greater than 95%, are saying only the N.O. Mass.

By comparison, the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter, the Institute of Christ the King, the Institute of the Good Shepherd, and the Society of Saint Pius X, the largest of the traditionalist priestly organizations, have a combined total of approximately 1,035 priests worldwide. That’s 25,254 Diocesan priests in the United States alone versus 1,035 TLM priests worldwide.

In the same LiturgyGuy.com survey that examined the attitudes of TLM-attending Catholics and compared them with the attitudes of N.O. attendees, the authors note that “[TLM] Catholics attend at least 489 Sunday Masses nationwide” and “on any given Sunday, an estimated 100,000 Catholics” in the U.S. attend the Latin Mass.

This is undoubtedly leaps and bounds ahead of where Latin Mass attendance was 10 and 20 years ago. It’s an improvement, for sure. But compare the 489 Latin Mass parishes to the 17,000 total. While the 489 are not all contained within the 17,000 number (the SSPX parishes are not, for example), if they were, they would make up less than 0.003% of the total.

An estimated 100,000 faithful attend the Latin Mass every week, traditionalists have much larger families than pro-contraceptive N.O. families (at least that’s what the data suggest), and the youth do seem to have a much higher preference for tradition than previous generations, but 100,000 is not a large population when you consider that 556,418 Confirmations took place in the previous year.

The Trads twist themselves up in knots trying to promulgate the lie that they are the salvation of the Church, and that if they should be sidelined, the Church will die.  

Their foundation is getting really shaky.

Finally, de Mattei actually gets within striking distance of telling the truth about something, but even manages to skew that.  de Mattei correctly states that the Motu Proprio is a response to the survey sent to bishops last year.  However, de Mattei does not tell us the reason for the survey, an interesting and important omission:

Faced with this movement of cultural and spiritual rebirth [I have just shown that this is a lie], Pope Francis reacted by instructing the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to send the bishops a questionnaire on the application of Benedict XVI's motu proprio. The survey was sociological, but the conclusions that Francis drew from it are ideological. [What in the world does that mean?  de Mattei gives no explanation or examples, just throws it out there as an accusation]

There is no need for a survey to see how the churches attended by the faithful attached to the liturgical tradition are always full and the ordinary parishes are increasingly depopulated. [This is a total non sequitur. The attendance at the TLM was not the point of the survey.  Pope Francis wanted to know what effect the Trads are having on the rest of the Church.]

But in the letter to the bishops accompanying the motu proprio of July 16, Pope Francis affirms: “The responses reveal a situation that preoccupies and saddens me, and persuades me of the need to intervene. Regrettably, the pastoral objective of my Predecessors, who had intended ‘to do everything possible to ensure that all those who truly possessed the desire for unity would find it possible to remain in this unity or to rediscover it anew,’ has often been seriously disregarded.” 

Note that de Mattei omits the sentence which I included above: ""An opportunity offered by St. John Paul II and, with even greater magnanimity, by Benedict XVI, intended to recover the unity of an ecclesial body with diverse liturgical sensibilities, was exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church, block her path, and expose her to the peril of division."

de Mattei then continues the quote after that deliberate omission:

“I am saddened,” Francis adds, “that the instrumental use of the Missale Romanum of 1962 is often characterized by a rejection not only of the liturgical reform, but of Vatican Council II itself, claiming, with unfounded and unsustainable assertions, that it betrayed the Tradition and the ‘true Church’.”

de Mattei also omits the next section in which Pope Francis quotes from Dei Verbum:  The path of the Church must be seen within the dynamic of Tradition “which originates from the Apostles and progresses in the Church with the assistance of the Holy Spirit”. A recent stage of this dynamic was constituted by Vatican Council II where the Catholic episcopate came together to listen and to discern the path for the Church indicated by the Holy Spirit. To doubt the Council is to doubt the intentions of those very Fathers who exercised their collegial power in a solemn manner cum Petro et sub Petro in an ecumenical council, and, in the final analysis, to doubt the Holy Spirit himself who guides the Church.

St. John Paul II includes this same teaching about Living Tradition in his Apostolic letter, Ecclesia Dei, in which he also quotes the same passage from Dei Verbum:

The root of this schismatic act [unlawful ordination by Lefebvre of four bishops] can be discerned in an incomplete and contradictory notion of Tradition. Incomplete, because it does not take sufficiently into account the living character of Tradition, which, as the Second Vatican Council clearly taught, "comes from the apostles and progresses in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit. There is a growth in insight into the realities and words that are being passed on. This comes about in various ways. It comes through the contemplation and study of believers who ponder these things in their hearts. It comes from the intimate sense of spiritual realities which they experience. And it comes from the preaching of those who have received, along with their right of succession in the episcopate, the sure charism of truth.

But especially contradictory is a notion of Tradition which opposes the universal Magisterium of the Church possessed by the Bishop of Rome and the Body of Bishops. It is impossible to remain faithful to the Tradition while breaking the ecclesial bond with him to whom, in the person of the Apostle Peter, Christ himself entrusted the ministry of unity in his Church."

de Mattei and the Traditionalists completely reject the teaching of the "living character of Tradition" in the Church.  They believe the Catholic Church can never grow in her understanding and beliefs, that the Church must stay fixed in time and, most importantly, in a time of the Traditionalists' own choosing.  

As a result of their unwillingness to admit Tradition means following and growing with the Holy Spirt, the Traditionalists find themselves in constant conflict with the Magesterium of the Church.  And as St. John Paul II states, this is actually contrary to Tradition. This is the root of their lies and the seed of their own destruction. 

de Mattei ends his quotation from Pope Francis's Motu Proprio with the following:

Therefore “I take the firm decision to abrogate all the norms, instructions, permissions and customs that precede the present Motu proprio.”

Instead of addressing this accusation of rejection of Church teaching and causing division in the Church, de Mattei does a "whataboutism":

Pope Francis did not see fit to intervene in the face of the laceration of unity produced by the German bishops, who often fell into heresy in the name of Vatican Council II, but he seems convinced that the only threats to the unity of the Church come from those who have raised doubts over Vatican II, as doubts have been raised over Amoris Laetitia, without ever receiving an answer.

Try standing up in court and defending yourself by saying, "yea, well, look at that guy over there and what he did. I had a right to break an unjust law, so you can't hang anything on me."  

de Mattei then makes a statement which, if believed, completely abrogates the authority given to Peter in Matthew 16:19 "I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” :

On the level of law, the revocation of the individual priest’s free exercise of celebrating according to the liturgical books from before the reform of Paul VI is clearly an illegitimate act. In fact, Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum reiterated that the traditional rite has never been abrogated and that every priest has the full right to celebrate it anywhere in the world. Traditionis custodes interprets that right as a privilege, which, as such, is withdrawn by the Supreme Legislator. 

This modus procedendi, however, is completely arbitrary, because the lawfulness of the traditional Mass does not arise from a privilege, but from the recognition of a subjective right of the individual faithful, whether lay, clerical, or religious. In fact, Benedict XVI never “granted” anything, but only recognized the right to use the 1962 Missal, “never abrogated,” and to enjoy it spiritually.

de Mattei further writes: 

No pope has the right to abrogate or change a rite that dates back to the Apostolic Tradition and has been formed over the centuries

This statement confirms St. John Paul II's lament about those who hold an "incomplete and contradictory notion of Tradition." 

Only those teachings and dogmas which constitute the deposit of the faith cannot be abrogated.  By saying that the TLM cannot be abrogated, de Mattei is saying it is part of the Deposit of the Faith.  That is a blatant lie.  It is a lie to say the TLM dates back to Apostolic Tradition.  Its earliest beginnings, if you want to be really picky, go back to Gregory the Great, who was pope in the late 6th and early 7th Centuries, NOT Apostolic times.  

Plus, the TLM is not a rite.  It is a form of the Roman Rite Mass.  The Roman Rite is basically three forms down through history:  the Pre-Tridentine Mass, Tridentine Mass and Mass of Paul VI.  

Yes, the Church must always have the Sacrifice of the Mass, but the form of the Mass is completely arbitrary and is decided by the Magesterium.  de Mattei is maintaining that the Mass itself dictates the law and the Pope must abide by it.  Not only is this an absolutely ridiculous statement, but it reduces the Papacy  to nothing more than an impotent figurehead.  It would mean Peter no longer has the Keys to the Kingdom, and we no longer have a Church.  

How can I say that?  If the Pope does not have authority over the Mass, then he has authority over nothing.  Of course, that is exactly what the Trads want.  They will not be happy unless and until they can take away all authority from the Pope.  It doesn't matter that the Church will also be destroyed.  As long as they have their Mass, they are happy.  This is, without mincing any words, demonic.  

Further on in his article, in order to bolster his position that the Mass has more authority than the Pope, de Mattei makes this blatantly false statement:

Benedict XVI, with Summorum Pontificum, publicly acknowledged the existence of an immutable lex orandi of the Church that no pope can ever abrogate.

In the Motu Proprio, directly contradicting de Mattei's statement, Benedict absolutely did grant, i.e. give permission, to celebrate the TLM.  Since he gave that permission, that would mean he and any other Pope would have the right to withdraw that permission:

It is therefore permitted to celebrate the Sacrifice of the Mass following the typical edition of the Roman Missal, which was promulgated by Blessed John XXIII in 1962 and never abrogated, as an extraordinary form of the Church’s Liturgy.

In Article 3:

If communities of Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, whether of pontifical or diocesan right, wish to celebrate the conventual or community Mass in their own oratories according to the 1962 edition of the Roman Missal, they are permitted to do so.

In the accompanying letter to the bishops, Benedict wrote:

As for the use of the 1962 Missal as a Forma extraordinaria of the liturgy of the Mass, I would like to draw attention to the fact that this Missal was never juridically abrogated and, consequently, in principle, was always permitted.  At the time of the introduction of the new Missal, it did not seem necessary to issue specific norms for the possible use of the earlier Missal.

Nowhere in either of these two statements does Pope Benedict say the Mass can never be abrogated.  He stated that it had not been abrogated up to that time.  de Mattei's statement was not even close to the truth.  In fact, de Mattei's statement is a diabolical lie.

The Traditionalists' foundation has completely crumbled around them.  It is gone.  

And that is why Pope Francis had no choice to but take the actions he took.  The Traditionalists are an imminent danger to the unity of the Church.  They spread lies, hate, division and rebellion against authority.  Pope Francis would be completely derelict in his duties as Pope if he did not take these actions.

I literally thank God for Pope Francis's courage to stand up to the Traditionalists, knowing he was facing a raging mob who are capable of anything.  I pray for him daily, that unlike his predecessor, Francis will have the courage to stand up to the wolves, as he has done so far.

And I also know that Roberto de Mattei is wrong.  The Traditionalist movement will not triumph.  That movement will go the way of all other heresies in the Church, into the dustbin.  I do pray for the souls of all Traditionalists, that they will see how they have separated themselves from the Church and repent.