On September 15, 2022, Francis spoke to the bishops, priests, deacons, religious, seminarians and pastoral workers at the Cathedral in Kazakhstan. Everything he said can be summarized in these three sentences of his:
- “Faith is not a lovely exhibition of artefacts from a distant past or a museum, but an ever-present event, an encounter with Christ that takes place in the here and now of our lives. So we cannot pass it on by simply repeating the same old things, but by communicating the newness of the Gospel. In this way, faith remains alive and has a future. As I like to say, faith is transmitted through the ‘mother tongue’.”
Let’s get into this. The opening bits are all good:
- “Faith is not a lovely exhibition of artefacts from a distant past or a museum, but an ever-present event, an encounter with Christ that takes place in the here and now of our lives. So we cannot pass it on by simply repeating the same old things…”
Right. That would be the heresy of Pelagianism to think that we could, on our own, just repeat articles of the faith, or, say, rubrics in the liturgy. I think we’re all good with that. Otherwise, we could simply loop recordings, say, of the Council of Trent, and think that because of that we have saved ourselves. That would be stupid.
But then he continues and now we know what he really means, which is that Francis does want us to think like Pelagian heretics:
- “…we cannot pass it [the faith] on by simply repeating the same old things, but by communicating the newness of the Gospel. In this way, faith remains alive and has a future. As I like to say, faith is transmitted through the ‘mother tongue’.”
Wow. A number of things here. He’s speaking in such fashion that we are falsely led to believe that the Faith, Sacred Tradition, is communicated necessarily and merely in new world-view contextualizing by human evangelization, indeed, through the “mother tongue”, a jab at the Traditional Latin Mass.
But while this seems to be the case — that we are to hand on the faith, and we are indeed to do all we can humanly speaking to evangelize others — this supposed “handing on” of the faith is instead only done as a favor to the evangelizers, so that they can grow in the charity necessary for any evangelization. The true “handing on” of the faith, the living content of the Traditiones , the ‘things’, if you will, of Sacred Tradition, the articles of faith (as Trent has it), all comes to us by way of the Holy Ghost. Trent has it that what the Apostles do in evangelizing, what we do, is wrought only quasi per manus, almost as if by hand. But the Holy Ghost is the One who actually “hands on” the living faith for us, the Truth, which comes to us with sanctifying grace, and therefore with hope, with Charity. God is love, always in the same way, for all, for each individual, “univocally” as the great Cardinal Siri put it in his most necessary book Gethsemane. This is the indwelling of the Most Holy Trinity.
This is more than any “mother tongue” or any insult to the Traditional Latin Mass can bring about. Cynically attacking the Most Holy Sacrifice of Jesus is not how we’re to go about receiving the faith from the Holy Ghost.
It seems that every chance, it seems every day, multiple times a day, is taken by Francis and his minion Cardinal Roche to demean Sacred Tradition so as to have it dumbed down to have it merely signify that which we do in whatever culture in whatever religion with what savior we imagine or not.
You have heard that it was said that by May 2023, there will be a total ban of the Traditional Latin Mass. It’s already been said that the TLM is no expression whatsoever of the Roman Rite (Traditionis custodes) and has no place whatsoever in the life of any parish (Cardinal Roche).
ARISE! LET US BE GOING! 