Open Letter to Pope Francis after Traditionis Custodes in 2021, and Annie Dillard's reaction to the new Mass
In light of the rumored ban of the Traditional Latin Mass . . .
The fundamental reasons against restricting the free celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass still apply.
The Traditional Latin Mass is a prodigious achievement of Western civilization, aside from its merits as a reverent and beautiful liturgy in which we remember Christ’s sacrifice, as He told us to do. Three popes have called for a reform of the deformations that have been introduced into the New Mass in many places, but we shouldn’t have to wait any more until the mess is cleaned up. The Traditional Latin Mass is already free from amateurish and appalling improvisations. Sixty years have passed since the experimentation began, and many more may pass before misinterpretations of Vatican II are purged until the Church that celebrates the Mass of 1969 stops being the electric Church —as Mother Angelica once said, “because every time you go, you get a shock.”
In light of the currently rumored ban of the Traditional Latin Mass being considered by the Vatican, I want to share this article I published after Pope Francis released his Motu Proprio Traditionis Custodes on July 16 three years ago at New Liturgical Movement and Latin Mass Magazine. [Motu proprio (Latin) means “on one's own initiative”, and the term is used for a document personally signed by a pope about a subject in which he has a special interest, which is less formal than an Apostolic Constitution.]
I sent my Open Letter to Pope Francis at his residence at the Domus Sanctae Martae guesthouse where he lives. I never got a reply.
Immediately after I read the motu proprio, whose official translation into English is "Guardians of the Tradition,” I looked up “custodes” using the William Whitaker’s Words program, and of the alternative meanings, “jailers” stood out as a better fit than “guardians.”
"Jailers of the Tradition" seems much more true both to the intent and result of the restrictions put in place by the motu proprio.
BONUS: Keep reading to the end to see Pulitzer Prize winning Annie Dillard’s brilliantly expressed reaction to absurdly irreverent amateurish liturgies that she witnessed in the year after her conversion to Catholicism. She left the Church soon after, apparently with the impression that the Church had not gotten worship right in 2,000 years, repelled by the absurdity of it all in the face of the stupendous reality of the miracle of God coming to us in the Eucharist. If she had been able to attend Traditional Latin Masses, I suspect she would still be a Catholic.
Open Letter to Pope Francis
His Holiness Pope Francis.
Saint Martha House
00120 Città del Vaticano, Vatican City
September 27, 2021
Dear Holy Father,
When I read your Motu Proprio Traditionis Custodes on July 16 and realized the effects it will have on the free celebration and future growth of the traditional Latin Mass, I cried. It seems like an excessively harsh measure uncharacteristic of an otherwise kindly seeming pope, after the comparative freedom we enjoyed after your predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI released Summorum Pontificum in 2007.
To explain my reaction, I think it would help for you to know some things about my background. I am a 76 year old Catholic lay woman, with a B.A. in art and English and an M.A. in writing. I was for many years a technical writer in the computer industry in Silicon Valley, and I now write full time as a passionate amateur about Catholic sacred music and divine liturgy, architecture, art, and literature.
I was a cradle Catholic who left the Church in 1963 in adolescent pride, a university freshman who thought that intelligent people don’t believe in God, and I returned in the late 1970s, a “sadder and wiser” divorced mother of two. In the meantime, from lots of hard experiences, I had realized that the Church is not a big meanie trying to steal our joys and that God’s commandments are for our protection.
At first I accepted the new Mass without any question. After all, I had come back because I had learned to believe in and trust the Church as the Body of Christ, so why would I not trust the changes made to the liturgy?
At the first parish where I went to Mass after I returned to the Church, I saw many examples of the kinds of jarring things I continued to see in the years since then. Long-haired hippies in blue-jeans played rousing spirituals and folk songs on guitars, banjoes and tambourines at the parish Masses —not that I was averse to hippies or to spirituals, but to the lack of reverence and to the way in which performance was emphasized over worship. I still hear the same types of distracting music that brings the rhythms of the world into the Mass even now when, for example, I’ve attended Masses at my diocesan cathedral, with its current large ensemble of cantors and musicians located to the right of the altar with a jazz piano, electric guitars, and drums.
During Mass at that first parish I attended in 1978, we stood in a half circle facing each other. After the novelty wore off, over time I realized that everyone was showing off, everyone was looking at everyone else, and the focus was no longer on the sacrifice that was taking place at the altar.
The priest was now at the center of attention and, since then, as I’ve seen again and again, many priests have trouble resisting the temptation of playing to the congregation, spouting their own opinions instead of the Church’s teachings, sometimes telling jokes, even off-color ones, from the pulpit. The constant rather-lame improvisations and the folksy or jazzy songs remind me of the old TV show The Ted Mack Amateur Hour.
I also grew more and more appalled at the experimentations that led to what Pope Benedict XVI and you have termed objectionable improvisations of liturgy. But not only that, deformations of doctrine and practice were and are rampant.
What is especially shocking is that over the ensuing years in various parts of the United States where I’ve lived almost every Catholic lay person, priest, religious sister or brother or Catholic university professor I talked with believed that not only had the Mass changed but morality had changed also. Statistics show that non-traditional Catholic couples are unashamedly casually engaging in the intimacy that belongs in marriage, living together outside of marriage, contracepting, aborting their babies, and divorcing at the same rate as the rest of the society.
I think it’s due perhaps to an unexpected after-effect of Vatican II. Many Catholics believed during the 1960s, when the council was going on, everything formerly taught and practiced by the Church for two millennia was up for grabs.
Some simple-mindedly seem to reason, for example, that if the Church taught before Vatican II that we would go to hell for eating meat on a Friday, and the Church removed that penalty that the Church could and was probably going to remove the penalty for all sorts of other things. As the song goes, a new Church was being sung into being, and in many respects it was nothing like the old Church.
Another false assumption came to light for me in the late 1990s when I went to a Franciscan retreat center. At Sunday Mass, the Franciscan priest who managed the center walked away from the pulpit into the middle aisle and acted out the Gospel of the day, in which Jesus says that God hates divorce. He then proceeded to claim in his homily that Jesus was really not against divorce.
After Mass, I asked the priest how he could have contradicted the words of Christ. By the way he answered me, I learned that he believes the Gospels were written by committees, each of which had its own agenda—which is a theory, as I learned later, I taught at most Catholic universities and seminaries. Many, like that priest, go on to infer logically from that premise that no passage of the Gospels needs to be taken literally, and so there’s no such thing any more as Gospel truth. And for those type of Catholics, it seems, the Church’s perennial teachings are no longer to be consulted. The priest told me that a moral theologian had written Jesus was not against divorce, and the opinion of a theologian trumped the Church’s teachings in that priest’s mind.
After I started studying at the bishop’s Institute for Leadership in Ministry in San José in 2002, I found there the speculations of theologians were taught as if they were settled doctrine, even thought in many cases, the theologians’ claims had been rejected by popes or by decisions from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
My own bishop taught the class on Penance. He told us that Jesus had not instituted the seven sacraments, and that that the Eucharist forgives mortal sins.
For the teachings at the ILM about Penance that contradict official Church teachings and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, see “Is Penance Relevant? What San Jose Diocese Teaches Lay Leaders about the Sacraments.”
Professors from nearby Catholic universities and priests from the Bay Area taught that morality had changed, that the Church was no longer a hierarchy but a circle, that the church’s teachings against contraception and homosexual acts did not have to be followed. (I still have my notes.)
No classes taught about personal holiness. No classes used the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which I heard referred to disparagingly as a “pre-Vatican II document,” even though it was published in 1992; CCC came out during the reign of Pope Saint John Paul II, who many apparently regard as objectionably conservative.
Back to the music. In 2006, I joined a choir that had managed to keep singing Gregorian chant and polyphony during ordinary form Masses, even after that kind of music had practically been banned since 1969. After I was re-exposed to the Gregorian chants of the Ordinary I had learned as a Catholic school girl in fourth grade, and I learned the many more chant Mass settings, I then learned about the wonderful chants for the Propers of the Mass that varied every day throughout the liturgical year,
I read Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Vatican II document on the liturgy, for myself. I learned that it actually says “Gregorian chant should be given pride of place,” and “the pipe organ is to be held in high esteem.” And that it didn’t say that chant should be replaced with folksy or jazzy tunes or that the organ should be replaced with guitars, drums, pianos, banjoes, or tambourines. SC does say that the vernacular could be “allowed,” not that Latin should be banished. So, what happened there?
I also learned that SC doesn’t say anything about Communion in the hand distributed from one pair of unconsecrated hands to another, about Extraordinary Eucharistic Ministers, about the priest celebrating facing the people, or about “girl altar boys.”
For these and several other reasons, I started to wonder what is behind the claim that the new Roman Missal expresses the mind of the Second Vatican Council. Maybe someone will explain that to me some day. But I digress.
Over time, I found myself unwilling to go to Mass at other churches where a “four-hymn sandwich” had replaced the chants. As a result of abandoning the Church’s sacred music, Catholics were singing at Mass instead of singing the words of the Mass.
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To learn more about what official Church documents teach about appropriate sacred music for Mass, see this articel.
And the hymns they were singing were seemingly chosen at random and had no relation to the feast of the day or the day’s place in the liturgical year. Besides, the words of the hymns were often doctrinally unsound. For example, one Christmas Eve midnight Mass, when I joined my parish church’s combined choirs, I was shocked when one of the members of the Spanish choir played his electric guitar and sang Imagine, John Lennon’s atheistic hymn against religion.
In 2007, after Pope Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum freed up the celebration of the traditional Latin Mass, the San José diocese erected an oratory as the diocesan center for the TLM. I joined their newly formed choir, and since then I have mostly attended Masses at the oratory.
I can’t help but grieve that you, my pope, my papa in the original meaning of the word, have made this decision to prevent the further growth of the traditional Latin Mass. Already many bishops around the world have used your motu proprio to justify the suppression of these Masses. These measure seems cruel and heavy handed.
Dear Papa Francis, I and the vast majority of us who love the traditional Latin Mass prefer it not because we are divisive, but because we love and are loyal to the Church.
We prefer the traditional Latin Mass because we prefer the reverence, the beauty, and the emphasis on the Holy Sacrifice of the altar that we find at the old Mass and have seldom found at the new. We know that the priests are not going to be doing comedy routines from the pulpit and they will not be contradicting the words of Our Saviour either.
Generalized accusations against traditional Catholics unfairly disparage the deep and authentic devotion that I and thousands, perhaps millions, of Catholic men, women, and children express when we worship God and remember the sacrifice of His Son Jesus Christ at the traditional Mass. Besides, how can we deny what Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Summorum Pontificum? “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.”
You call for more reverent Masses that are true to the rubrics of the current Roman Missal. Pope Saint Paul VI did too, as did Pope Benedict XVI. But sixty years have passed since the experimentation began, and many more may pass before misinterpretations of Vatican II are done away with and the Church that celebrates the Mass of 1969 stops being the electric Church —as Mother Angelica once said, “because every time you go, you get a shock.”
Please reconsider. Please don’t take the Mass of the Ages away from us. Don’t divide us. Let us live side by side together with those who find their comfort with the new Mass, all of us tolerant of our differences, in peace, and united in true obedience to God.
Te rogamus. Audi nos.
Sincerely and respectfully yours in Christ,
Roseanne T. Sullivan
I second the comment from a reader named Madzi I found below where the article was published at New Liturgical Movement:
"If I had the ear of the pope for 5 minutes, it would be to ask him, 'Pope Francis, you call for the accompaniment of homosexuals, immigrants, everyone and any one. But who will accompany those of us who only want to worship the Almighty in the traditional Roman Mass? Who will be OUR pastor? Are we not Catholic? Do we not love the Lord as much as any other Catholic? And as Sacrosanctum Concilium has NOT been followed or adhered to, can you still say that it is we traditional Catholics who are denying the Council? Are you not OUR pope as well?'"
Let Us Now Quote Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard is a few months older than I am. There the similarity mostly ends. Unlike me, she rocketed to fame in the 1970s In 1975, her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. She published several more notable works and taught writing at Wesleyan University in Connecticut for twenty-two years. In the 1980s, she converted to Catholicism, but sad to say, she left the Church not too much later. From what she wrote, it seems her experiences with the broken liturgy of the new Masses she attended seem to have led her to defection. Following are some of her quotes about the appalling liturgical and musical amateur hour celebrations of the Mass that followed Vatican II:
The following is an excerpt from my article: "Vatican II Changes To The Mass: Intentions Vs. Results According to Annie Dillard, Evelyn Waugh, Leila Miller, Some Little Girls, Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Saint Paul VI, and Me."
Pulitzer prize winning author Annie Dillard (author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) famously converted to Catholicism as an adult. In her essay “An Expedition to the Pole” in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk: 1983, she brilliantly uses comic exaggeration to depict the amateurish chaos she endured attending Masses in the early 1980s.
The essay begins: “There is a singing group in this Catholic church today, a singing group which calls itself ‘Wildflowers.’ . . . They straggle out in front of the altar and teach us a brand new hymn.
“It all seems a pity at first, for I have overcome a fiercely anti-Catholic upbringing to attend Mass simply and solely to escape Protestant guitars. Why am I here? Who gave these nice Catholics guitars? Why are they not mumbling in Latin and performing superstitious rituals? What is the Pope thinking of? . . .
“It is the second Sunday in Advent. For a year I have been attending Mass at this Catholic church. Every Sunday for a year I have run away from home and joined the circus as a dancing bear. We dancing bears have dressed ourselves in buttoned clothes; we mince around the rings on two feet. Today we were restless; we kept dropping onto our forepaws.
“No one, least of all the organist, could find the opening hymn. Then no one knew it. Then no one could sing anyway.
“There was no sermon, only announcements. . ..
“How often, how shockingly often, have I exhausted myself in church from the effort to keep from laughing out loud. I often laugh all the way home. . . .
“A high school stage play is more polished than this service we have been rehearsing since the year one. In two thousand years, we have not worked out the kinks. We positively glorify them. . . . Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens. . . . Who can believe it?". . .
“The Mass has been building to this point, to the solemn saying of those few hushed phrases known as the Sanctus. . . . Now, just as we are dissolved in our privacy and about to utter the words of the Sanctus, the lead singer of Wildflowers bursts onstage from the wings. . . . They [the band] array themselves in a clump downstage right. The priest is nowhere to be seen.
“Alas, alack, oh brother, we are going to have to sing the Sanctus. . . . I would rather, I think, undergo the famous dark night of the soul than encounter the dread hootenany—but these personal preferences are of no account, . . ..
“During communion, the priest handed me a wafer which proved to be stuck to five other wafers. I waited while he tore the clump into rags of wafer, resisting the impulse to help. Directly to my left, and all through communion, a woman was banging out the theme from the Sound of Music on a piano.
“Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?
“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. ”’
If Dillard could have been able to attend a traditional Latin Mass, she would have heard the stately Latin and not have been distracted by amateur show offs who act as if they believe they are under papal orders to improvise a new church into being.
She would have been able to let down her guard and worship God in a liturgy celebrated with reverence and awe and with full focus on the sacramental Divine mystery taking place with all due respect on the altar.
At a High Mass, Dillard could have heard Gregorian chant and polyphony instead of guitars and would never again have to endure hearing music from “The Sound of Music” banged out on a piano while she received Communion.
Annie Dillard should have been at the consecration at our traditional Latin Mass on First Friday last week. The reverence was almost palpable. The silence was total. Everyone there was completely focused on the sacrifice of the Mass, which is the most reverent possible form of actual participation—by immersion in the sacred mysteries. Those who were able were kneeling on small pads on the thinly carpeted concrete floor of our temporary location since COVID in a former thrift store in a shopping plaza slated for demolition, and some were almost prostrate with their heads bowed in worship while the Precious Body and Blood of Our Lord were consecrated.
I have been attending TLM ever since 2007, and at those Masses I worship God peacefully. I don’t have to fear any more the distractions from what Mother Angelica called the electric church because you get a shock each time you go.
The girl next to me isn't wearing hot pants and a sleeveless shirt, but she is modestly dressed. Everyone is modestly dressed. A guy with lanky hair and face piercings isn't giving out communion and calling me by name. We receive Communion only from consecrated hands and don't receive it in our unconsecrated hands, but kneeling—if possible—to show our recognition of the holiness of the sacrament and only on our tongues. No women (or men) are dancing "the gifts" up to the altar in flowing robes, or sweat shirts and jeans, or bright colored stretch pants, all of which I’ve seen. The priests aren't trying to be comedians. They aren't reading the gospel and then telling us that Jesus didn't really speak the words on which important doctrines are based. The choir is singing the words of the Mass according to its place in the liturgical year instead of singing whatever odd, usually unrelated, and perhaps even doctrinally bad hymns someone picks out for the day.
Annie Dillard is no longer a practicing Catholic. I am inclined to believe that if she had been able to attend traditional Latin Masses after she converted, her curriculum vitae at her website might not now read: Religion: None.
Thank you for this excellent effort!
From an email: 🤞🤞🤞
Diane Y