News has broken over the past few days about an alleged intention of the Vatican (the Pope) to ban the “extraordinary form” of the liturgy once and for all. I have been listening to various podcasts on Youtube from devout traditionalists and information claiming to be a little more serious on Rorate Caeli. The story goes that Pope Francis, with his archons in the Vatican department that deals with the liturgy, intend to bring out a document on 16th July to bring a formal end to the old Roman liturgy. Obviously, it would be a massive act of intolerance, institutional hypocrisy and iconoclasm.

We do well to read with an open and sceptical mind the following interview between a traditionalist Italian blog and the lay expert Andrea Grillo: An astonishing interview of the main lay ideologue behind Traditionis Custodes and the desire to ban the Traditional Mass. With my somewhat bitter experience with Roman Catholic traditionalists between 1981 and 1997, I would be tempted to cheer him on and “get my revenge”. Such an attitude would not be Christian, and more than some of the exaggerations of the traditionalists. I find something of a parallel between Grillo and Robespierre in his intolerance and fanaticism. Such men die on their own guillotine!

I have sometimes found sympathy with Pope Francis, with these ideologues and with other globalist liberals and their cultural Marxist ideologies. However, I see through the gaslighting and the cigarette-and-the-fist approach in manipulating other human beings. The biggest argument of this ecclesiastical Robespierre is blind fidelity to the institution. At the same time, traditionalists have not really been able to extricate themselves from this cognitive dissonance. We find ourselves at the same Achilles heel I confronted in the 1990’s as I concluded “from Anglicanism whence I came, to Anglicanism I return”. Even Anglicanism is far from perfect with the same paradigm consisting of a Protestant institution with a desire to re-find a “magical-idealist” Catholicism. The English way has softened and become more tolerant, and founding parallel churches is less taboo, but I see the analogy. Many people of our time struggle with the tension between the Christian ideal and the merciless political institution the “official” Church has become. Either one finds a way to live as a Christian as an outsider (read Simone Weil’s works) or one sheds belief in God and anything other than brute matter.

Before you abandon this posting in despair, I give you this link to Michael Martin’s Report from the Between. He and I have converged from our different experiences of life onto Christian Romanticism. Roman Catholic priest and theologian Fr. Dwight Longenecker published an essay in which he discusses Michael Martin’s poetry collection, Mythologies of the Wild of God. From having been a hard-core “one true church” apologist, Fr Longenecker says:

His poems are rooted in his life in the countryside, and in our increasingly artificial life, they resonate with a reality that is refreshing. These are poems with blood on their hands—they reek of the guts and glory of farmland—the worms of woodland, wild beasts, meadows, livestock, hunts, and hard labor. Envision Robert Frost filtered through Cormac McCarthy.

Within the earthy musk of these poems there simmer sexuality, sensuality, and spirituality. Martin is deeply, physically, spiritually Catholic, and his poems wrestle with his masculinity, humanity, and reality. They surge with a surprising, stunning insights and enlighten with new perspectives. They meld poetry and prayer together just as they should—modern, intimate, powerful, and personal. I will come back to Michael Martin’s poems because they remind me of a gutsy and gritty reality that I have lost in this gasping, gurning, gargoyle world.

He has understood something that our Grillo-Robespierre in Rome will never understand, at least from what we read.

I have little to say about the present-day political situation in the UK and Europe. It seems the tide is turning from a kind of liberalism that has shown its intolerance and hypocrisy, to nationalist populism in its various forms. The demonstrations on both sides are shrill and noisy, not something with which I can relate. At an intellectual level, I see the need for change and for a forward view of history, as happened in 1789. However, France got Robespierre and the guillotine. It sufficed to disagree with the Jacobin ideology to be sent to La Veuve. At the end of the Terror, the change had to come, even if people rarely understood the deepest issues. Grillo might despise the Pilgrimage of Chartres, but I see it in parallel with the present populist uprising. He fails to see the new page of history beyond his liberal certitudes.

I have many memories from my time at Fribourg University. My tutor was Fr Jakob Baumgartner  (1926-1996) who represented the ideal of liturgical reform in its most radical Swiss-German form. He also showed me the tolerance of a university scholar as he dealt with my desire to write about the Tridentine Reform of 1570, Missa Tridentina. He merely expected my tolerance. This relationship taught me many things in life. I admired his scholarship and knowledge of his subject. He was a passionate and fatherly man, and I wish I could find the same qualities in Andrea Grillo. He would not answer the interview in the way he did without such qualities.

Grillo makes a caricature of traditionalists. His first argument is numbers. What for him is the winning group? The one that is the most collectivist and that tolerates no difference?

Little more than a sect that experiences infidelity as salvation, and is often linked to moral and political positions, and very concerning customs.

I have found sectarian tendencies in the traditionalist movement, but also in his camp. We can only deal with fanaticism and ideology through tolerance and kindness, not through pogroms and killing (physically or spiritually). Repression, force and fear will only make the perceived problem worse.

The Church is not a “club of notaries or lawyers” who cultivate their aesthetic passions or plan to instrumentalize the Church as “the most famous museum”.

Who said it is? You’re not going to blow the whole thing up with an atomic bomb because a minority might be young or old fogeys. What are you going to do? Send them to Auschwitz? Line them up in front of a machine gun or stuff them into a gas chamber? If you are a Christian, Grillo would see that Christ did not scheme with the Sanhedrin to have the Pharisees repressed. The living word and the spirit were what was needed, then as now. There are indeed many problems with the traditionalist world, including nineteenth-century stuffiness and another form of identity politics. You don’t deal with that with a machine gun, but through teaching, writing books, the nobility of spirit.

… forms of fundamentalism

I wonder if he would say the same about American evangelical mega-churches or Islamist terrorists. There is the old joke about the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist – you can negotiate with a terrorist. Ha,ha. There is some truth there. Grillo has a point that some aspects of traditionalism might have roots in post-modern identity ideologies. The point merits study and research.

First, the “dearth of seminarians” and “young people fleeing” is not just a negative fact: is the sign of a necessary travail for the entire Church. The “easy” solutions (i.e., let us fill traditionalist seminaries with militarized young men modelled on 17th or 18th century priests) are only blunders, whose costs are primarily borne by those involved. They don’t generate a life of faith but often great resentment and personal hardening.

This resonates with me, and my own fragile spiritual and mental health was not strong enough in this world. Perhaps I should have been a boat builder! Seminaries and regimented monasteries are very much a product of the Counter Reformation. I belong to a small Church body that ensures that candidates for the priesthood follow a course of theology, typically through a university faculty – like the old Church of England, and then spend a time mentored by an experienced priest in parish ministry. There are no easy solutions, but clericalism has been a justified target of Pope Francis. Unfortunately, he fights clericalism with clericalism – the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of politics.

Grillo expects complete conformity and collectivism in the name of fidelity to the Pope and Magisterium. At the same time, the Pope is making concessions to establishment Anglicanism and Protestantism. We have a clear situation of double standards.

Responding to the idea of “failed” liturgical reforms, Grillo traces the history of people finding problems with the liturgy in their time.

You say, “the liturgical reform has failed” and you reason in terms of numbers. You think like this: if something in history is before something else, then what is before is the cause of what comes after. It is not difficult, thus, to believe that the responsibility for the evils of the 70s-80s-90s, up to 2024, lies with the Second Vatican Council, and particularly the liturgical reform. This way of reasoning, however, is not historically well-founded. The crisis in the Church began in great part before the emergence of liturgical thinking: Guéranger and Rosmini speak of a “liturgical crisis” as early as 1830-40.

The argument is not wrong, but is weak. However, Grillo is not going to convince me that the liturgical movement beginning with Guéranger and promoted in French and German monasticism is the same in terms of ideology and culture as the Bugnini reform of the 1960’s.

I come to some form of provisional conclusion based on my own experience and observations about the modern world to which I have alluded. The biggest error of all institutional Churches, including Anglicanism, is the principle Cujus regio, ejus religio. The king we are talking about is not the dwarfed Charles III of England – but the real powers like the banks and multinational business and finance. It is the god of Mammon, raw money and power to which human beings will lust in their competitivity and primeval struggle. Perhaps this is the Ubermensch of Nietzsche, if his idea was not something more noble. This is the issue of politics, not the common good of persons and society – but money and power for the winner. The endgame is techo-feudalism and The Machine. This is the Archon King, and its religion will be that of the established Church.

Perhaps the tide is turning, but national populism will only go so far. The true King is Christ, not as a political ruler (or whose name is used as a justification for a particular political ideology) but as nobility of spirit. Maybe right-wing politics will help to clear the way and challenge the Machine, but it will only succumb to the same corruption unless it is based on the love, tolerance and kindness, spiritual mind, of the Gospel.

Grillo would have his place in the House of Commons, sitting there on his green leather bench with his legs crossed and a smirk on his face.

“I always voted at my party’s call.
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.”
I thought so little they rewarded me.
By making me the ruler of the Queens Navee”.

Sartre expressed it in his little book as La Nausée. I sense our age as one that makes us sick of being human. Mélenchon and Macron in their little manœuvres make me feel as nauseous as Starmer and Sunak the other side of the Channel. Common sense has been crushed under the weight of technocracy and greed. Our Continent is ripe for revolution, which I why I quoted Wordsworth as it happened in France in 1789: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive! I reserve my enthusiasm lest the ghost of Robespierre should blind us all and summon us to the triangular blade and the basket. Our only way out is Christianity, but one that is neither of the caricatures of Grillo or the traditionalists as a mass movement.

The temptation is to be done with institutional, and therefore sacramental, Christianity. Perhaps the Quakers have a problem with historical relevance. Atheistic materialism, the basis of The Machine, will not satisfy our Sehnsucht any more. This blog is the main part of my ministry as a priest of a small Church, too small to become corrupt with the Archons of this world. I have a feeling that things are going to change. However, Oscar Wilde gave us this salutary warning:

There is something so unique about Christ. Of course just as there are false dawns before the dawn itself, and winter days so full of sudden sunlight that they will cheat the wise crocus into squandering its gold before its time, and make some foolish bird call to its mate to build on barren boughs, so there were Christians before Christ. For that we should be grateful. The unfortunate thing is that there have been none since. I make one exception, St. Francis of Assisi. But then God had given him at his birth the soul of a poet, as he himself when quite young had in mystical marriage taken poverty as his bride: and with the soul of a poet and the body of a beggar he found the way to perfection not difficult. He understood Christ, and so he became like him. We do not require the Liber Conformitatum to teach us that the life of St. Francis was the true Imitatio Christi, a poem compared to which the book of that name is merely prose.

He wrote these words in prison, a system designed to kill him spiritually. I say to the traditionalists that Benedict XVI, though I esteemed him as a scholar and one who sought to reconcile Scholasticism with German Idealism, was such a false dawn. What I went through with the TAC and the Ordinariates in c. 2010 reiterated my bitter experience with the traditionalists. The traditionalists, and traditionalist Anglicans too, are a false dawn. We can only wait in our poverty of spirit to receive the new and true dawn with Christ’s blessing. Living as a solitary here in the French countryside, I will probably be long forgotten before the Spirit of God, the Word, is breathed onto our parched and barren world. I am of no importance. If we can arrive at such a degree of humility, then there is hope.

Rewilding is a theme that is not easy to understand or conceive. I already mentioned Michael Martin, and have had a recorded talk with him. He is a layman, a country dweller, a farmer, an intellectual, a family man. He writes so beautifully in his blog. I am a priest, shortly to resume writing my book Christus, the person and not only the ideal of Christianity or Christendom. I will be in a sailing rally next week, but the month of July is coming, when I intend to be at home. That will be my time of reading, writing, prayer – and doing practical work. Things have to begin on the ground, in our own hearts – the place where we can do something. Rewilding can take different forms, surviving on one’s own away from institutional bureaucracies, or maybe small Churches on condition that the bishops and priests have learned a lesson of humility and remember the real purpose of any Church (or communion in which the Universal Church is present). The word will resonate in our minds without our having any fixed idea. As Novalis thought, magical idealism comes with hovering (schweben) as reality and truth remain beyond our grasp. As we yearn and wait for the Blue Flower, our indeterminacy or restlessness keep us in that state of instability whose dialectical opposition bring us to new ways of thinking and feeling.

The world changed tragically and optimistically at the close of the eighteenth century. We now face an analogy of the same revolution and revival of the Romantic and Idealist spirit. I go forward with hope and faith…

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One day after I wrote this, this inspired and passionate article was written by the Benedictine monk Dom Alcuin Reid. EXCLUSIVE: Dom Alcuin Reid’s Response to Prof. Grillo’s Interview