This is second part of a series on the errors of one of the most prominent voices in the traditionalist Catholic world: Peter Kwasniewski. For those who think these articles are too ‘negative’, please recall that we are to “have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.” – Ephesians 5:11. Part I of the series can be found here.


by Vinicius

For Peter Kwasniewski, traditional Catholic beliefs and practices are combined with and justified by Valentin Tomberg’s false mysticism (see Part One) and Gallican type views of the constitution of the Church. Both these tendencies rebelled and “lost” in the traditional Church (going back to its beginnings in some cases), but left an anti-tradition of heterodox “precedents” for High Church Modernism.

This version was therefore not received from the Church of the ages. Nor did it inform the first thirty years of traditionalist resistance to the spirit and letter of Vatican II (the first generation of traditional priests, like Father Basil Wrighton, below, would have been horrified by it). In today’s situation of crisis, only with the loss of first-hand knowledge of the traditional Church prior to the Council has it been possible to misrepresent it and market an embodiment of Tomberg and Gallican error as traditional Catholicism. Kwasniewski’s Gallican traditionalism has failed the first test of tradition: Tradidi quod et accepi.

Opposition to false notions associated with Vatican II (Modernist tendencies, Gallican ideas on the constitution of the Church, false mysticism, religious liberty and false ecumenism) began at the Council itself. It was founded on continuing the magisterium of the traditional pre-conciliar Church and involved hundreds of bishops. But Peter Kwasniewski’s opposition is founded on very different premises:   

“Exorcise” the traditional Church; “forget about” Vatican II.

“The first cause [of the crisis] is what I have called “the spirit of Vatican I”; “ultramontanism, we see in it a confluence of several factors: a growing tendency for the Church to imitate the absolutism of the modern State, together with the breakdown of intermediate, subsidiary legal structures and cultural centers of gravity that acted as ‘checks and balances,’… and, as I mentioned, a Jesuit notion of blind obedience to religious authority 1”. This blatantly inserts notions from civil society into the divine constitution of the Church that have never existed. There have never been “constitutional checks and balances” on the papacy. Archbishop Lefebvre demonstrated abundantly that recognition of this fact does not mean “blind obedience”, despite Kwasniewski’s lengthy discussions of this straw man. To abolish the divinely instituted government of the Church through Gallicanism would be just another great error like modernism. 

But for Kwasniewski, the spirit of the traditional Church is a greater problem than the post-Vatican II crisis:

“A more pressing question [than “what to do about Vatican II”] is: “What shall we do about Vatican I?…  we are more threatened today by the spirit of Vatican I, which it will take a mighty exorcism to drive away.”

Vatican I led to a dangerous “runaway” papacy, he says. On the other hand”

“What shall we do about Vatican II?’ – I suggest we leave it alone, leave it behind, leave it in peace, along with Lyons I, Lateran V, and other councils you’ve never heard of”. 2

part two
Vatican I. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It ought to be odd that one should single out the Council Lateran V for forgetting, when it did such commendable work in destroying the Gallican anti-Council of Pisa and beginning the long process of ending Gallicanism in France. As for Vatican II, its indispensability (below) to the High Church Modernism promoted by Kwasniewski is a good extra reason for not “leaving it in peace.”

Are we being harsh? Perhaps Kwasniewski only wants to challenge the popular papalism that was indeed encouraged by the succession of marvellous Popes preceding Vatican II (but only became a “runaway” problem with post-Vatican II Popes)?

Unfortunately, Kwasniewski’s challenge to the traditional Church goes much further back than Vatican I, and is exemplified in his publication and undiluted support for Sebastian Morello’s Mysticism, Magic and Monasteries (2024), whose central premise is that the entire Church has been under a “hex” for 600 years!   

The pre-conciliar Church is “fair game”.

How can Peter Kwasniewski know then what is traditional? How far back can he challenge the Church on this basis? His answer is that the entire non-extraordinary papal magisterium is “fair game”, going back to Saint Peter:

“The Holy Spirit protects them [the Popes] from irrevocably, committing the Church to error and disaster … Everything else, as far as I’m concerned, is fair game … if he’s not going to teach ex cathedra … then his opinion is his opinion. And if the opinion is one that on the face of it makes sense [is orthodox]… then of course you could go along with it. But there are times when Pius X says things that make it seem as if he is saying, ‘I am the only authority in the Church, and no one can question me for any reason whatsoever’ Well, that’s actually false”. 3

But is it not the case that Kwasniewski’s distortions and errors make him, not the Church, “fair game”? For,

“ … this is precisely the error of the neo-Modernists, who devalue the ordinary papal Magisterium and the “Roman tradition” which they find so inconvenient. They say, ‘The pope is infallible only in his Extraordinary Magisterium, so we can sweep away 2000 years of ordinary papal Magisterium’”. 4

The “hexing” of the Tridentine Church

This is one the more bizarre results of Kwasniewski’s open season on the pre-conciliar Church. He recently published and enthusiastically endorsed Sebastian Morello’s Mysticism, Magic and Monsteries, which proclaims that the Church has been under a “hex” for the last 600 years, blocking “grace”; the only solution is occultism and “magic”.

The Church was “Cartesian” even before Descartes, and “this bewitchment is supported by highly authoritative sources”, no less than Saint Ignatius and his Spiritual Exercises!:

“Since the Catholic Church adopted Cartesianism as its dominant worldview, Catholics have by necessity taken on the likeness of Protestants”. 5

Needless to say, the book is not able to provide proof for these assertions. Sadly it contributes to today’s loss of faith by questioning the traditional Church in this ridiculous fashion. The book only provides proof of its own uselessness with its recipe for recovery, the “pre-modern mind”:

“Part of adopting a premodern mind is first acknowledging that every people in history has accepted that our world is a world pregnant with magical forces ad the activity of spiritual beings [a fine summary of pagan animism]”. 6

Morello claims the pagan gods were “emanations” of God. We “need” to “know” them, he says. This pre-modern mind is simply the pre-Christian mind of paganism. Enough said. 

Trent and the magisterium of Popes named Pius have “failed”

Tim Flanders, whose site, One Peter Five, works in lock-step with Peter Kwasniewski, regularly attacks the traditional pre-conciliar Church. As with Kwasniewski and Morello, the “hex” that Our Lord’s Church has been presumably helpless to do anything about until the appearance of High Church Modernism, goes back many centuries:

“ … there is a deeper root issue which was the cause of Liberalism (in fact, it was a dubium of Trent to define the doctrine of the Two Swords – and so Trent failed in this sense”; “there is some ambiguity on this question [on religious liberty] before 1958 (and I believe there is – think about Bishop Chiaramonti’s [Pius VII] comments when the French Liberals invaded Italy, or Leo XIII’s ralliement)”; “there are legitimate criticisms that can be made against the Oath against Modernism, the Thomistic theses”. 7

Flanders attacks two hundred years of papal teaching in the name of his better understanding of “tradition”:

“There is enough ambiguity in the Pian Magisterium (from Auctorem Fidei, 1794, to the death of Pius XII, 1958) as well as in the Conciliar Magisterium (1958-present), to at least obviate any culpability of error from faithful Catholics [who accept liberal religious liberty]”. 

Where does this nonsense end?! Pius VII and Leo XIII never hinted at false religious liberty. Why does Kwasniewski’s colleague in the High Church Modernist project quibble about the Oath Against Modernism? Why does Flanders send traditionalists to read an attack on the Twenty-Four Thomistic Theses (the bane of Modernism) written by a “Byzantine Scotist” of all things?

Why pick on Auctorem Fidei, the encyclical that began the battle to finally decapitate Gallicanism, which concluded gloriously at Vatican I? This is what happens when open season is declared on the whole Church’s past by making it “fair game”.

What does Flanders understand by attacking Trent for not declaring the “dogma of “two Swords”? He is saddened that it did not adopt the High Church Modernist error of making civil society and the Church one society. Who on earth expected it to do that?

Now Christendom was a civilisation composed of a divinely founded society, the Church, and many civil societies. It was NOT one society with a temporal ruler and a spiritual ruler. When Pope Gelasius referred to “two swords”, he did not mean this. 8

But Gallicanism, and its Protestant equivalents (like the divine right theory of James I) confused the boundaries between civil society and the Church (which though distinct, should be allied), permitting civil governments to attempt to run the Church. This has always been rejected by the Church, and is explained clearly in St Thomas Aquinas’ De regimine principum.

Peter Kwasniewski favours the Gallican idea of confusing the two societies, however:

“The root source of clericalism is not at all what Francis et al. think it is, but rather the breakdown of the Christian civil order and the co-responsibility between lay leadership and clerical leadership”.

It is to be noticed how Kwasniewski, Flanders and Coulombe etc., continually lament the end of lay participation in Church councils. But this anachronism, like bishops who were temporal lords and led armies, is not part of the divine constitution of the Church. To merge civil and Church societies is not “the early Church”; it’s something that became a serious problem with Gallicanism and the Enlightenment. 

These attacks on the traditional Church are not isolated: “Only because of the Protestant revolt did we arrive at a situation where virtually the entire Latin Church celebrates the rite of the city of Rome. It is not traditional for the Bishop of Rome to attempt to make the entire world his own diocese and his own rite”. 9

Yet, as Flanders admits, Pope St Pius V states in Quo Primum that “it is most becoming that there be in the Church only one appropriate manner of reciting the Psalms and only one rite for the celebration of Mass”. Flanders also ignores that “the entire Latin Church” had (apart from few exceptions) adopted the Roman rite many centuries before Quo Primum.

This situation is traditional. Fr Davide Pagliarani (Superior General of the Society of St Pius X) recently rejected Cardinal Roche’s conclusion that this one liturgy should be the Novus Ordo, but commented on Roche’s statement,

“In the Church, ‘there ought to be only one rite’, in full syntony with the true meaning of Tradition. This is a just and coherent principle, since the Church, having one faith and one ecclesiology, can have only one liturgy capable of expressing them adequately”. 10

Rejection of the traditional Primacy of Peter

The liturgical polemics of High Church Modernism are founded firstly on a rejection of the traditional view of papal Primacy and only secondly on the doctrinal deficiencies of the Novus Ordo. Peter Kwasniewski enthusiastically quotes,

“’The Pope is not now, and never has been, the ‘Head of the Catholic Church’ [simply speaking]. There is only one ‘Head of the Catholic Church’ and that is our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ”. 11

The Council of Florence (Laetentur Caeli, 1439) says the opposite, “[The Pope] is the true vicar of Christ, the head of the whole church”; as does Vatican I: “[the Pope is] head of the Church militant”. 

The aversion to calling the Pope head of the Church is an uncatholic reflex formed amidst error, which believes that Christ’s headship and that of His Vicar are mutually exclusive things. The allergy first became a general malady at Vatican II:

“ … the draftsman of Lumen Gentium, the Louvain theologian Gérard Philips, generally reserved the phrase “head of the Church” for Christ while normally referring to the pope as “head of the college”. 12

On one hand, Peter Kwasniewski alleges exaggerated papalism was a consequence of Vatican I, but then (like Flanders) implies it has been  a characteristic since the time of Trent at least:

“Question: “Pius XII limits the role of everyone else in the Church to passive recipients of what the Apostolic See hands down to them: the bishops are to enforce it, and the laity are to accept it. Period.” [caricaturising Mediator Dei]

“If we took this to be truly the point of view of Pius XII, it would not make it right, it would make it simply the peak moment of ultramontanist concentration – clericalism on steroids. Nothing like that view was practiced for the first 1,500 years of Catholicism. It overlooks entirely the way in which episcopal subsidiarity operates”. 13

Kwasniewski again avoids the “hexed” last half-millennium as a reliable guide to what traditional Catholicism is.   

Elsewhere, Kwasniewski lets on a bit about what he means by “episcopal subsidiarity”:

“I think there was a healthier sense all around, prior to the 19th century, that the Church is a body with many organs… Rather, in pre-modern times especially, as I mentioned, kings and emperors, aristocrats, religious orders, particular religious communities, bishops… a 1,000 points of authority spread throughout the Church… sometimes, as in the United States government… they also were able to be checks and balances to one another..” 14

But this is to borrow concepts from Enlightenment civil society. And what have aristocrats and heads of political society to do with the divine constitution of the Church? Nothing, unless one is a Gallican. Obviously there could be resistance to Popes on the basis of universal principles, but there was no episcopal “subsidiarity” in the sense papal magisterium uses the term of civil society. Magisterium does not discuss “episcopal subsidiarity”.

Saint Thomas Aquinas provides theological argument for papal authority and infallibility that is, if anything, greater than that espoused by what Kwasniewski calls ultramontanism. Saint Robert Bellarmine famously argued for papal authority, infallibility and Church freedom from all interference by civil society long before Vatican I. But for Kwasniewski, opposition to papal authority is what defines “tradition”; he confuses strategies for conservation with the origin of what has to be conserved: “Tradition lives and community thrives at the small and local level, which is where we must build effective opposition to centralized authority”. 15

Justifying High Church Modernism on the authority of Vatican II

Denying the theological understanding prior to Vatican II that the ordinary jurisdiction of bishops is a participation in that of the Pope, Kwasniewski asserts: “That’s something that Vatican II and other sources reject16 (for the true history of how Yves Congar O.P. and other Modernists introduced these novelties against the fierce resistance of traditionalists at Vatican II, see Fr. Basil Wrighton’s examination17).

He asserts that ordinary jurisdiction is independent from the Pope’s by being derived directly from God:

“The bishops rule by a kind of divine right… once they’re in possession of that episcopal office, they rule and they teach and they sanctify with a right proper to them”.

He skirts the well-known distinction between sacramental jurisdiction (to confer sacraments, to preach) possessed by all bishops through their consecration, and ordinary, territorial jurisdiction. Pius XII made it clear in Mystici corporis and other encyclicals that ordinary episcopal jurisdiction is a participation in papal jurisdiction. 18

Vatican II attacked this:

“[Instead of] delegation by the bishop of Rome as the encyclical Mystici corporis had taught in 1943… [Conciliar theologian, Fr. Gerard] Philips wrote that Vatican II’s assertion that jurisdiction is intrinsically linked with episcopal consecration [Peter Kwasniewski’s dogma] was ‘the most important theological progress advanced by the council’”.  19

Belittling the Magisterium of the Popes of history; St Joseph and frequent Communion

Ex Cathedra papal infallibility is rare. Kwasniewski is left with a lot to pick and choose  from in the pre-conciliar world. He starts with Pius XII, who gets it wrong in “… Mediator Dei, in which Pius XII at one point inverts the traditional axiom lex orandi, lex credendi by saying that the lex credendi should determine the lex orandi”.

But Pius XII was right, of course; faith came before liturgy, even though they reinforce each other.

There seems to be a real problem, for Kwasniewski, with the prominence given to Saint Joseph by the traditional Church:

“Pius XI in his decree Quemadmodem Deus of Dec. 8, 1870, states: ‘In view of the sublime dignity which was conferred by God upon his faithful servant Joseph, the Church manifests her veneration for him by according him the highest acclamation and honor after Mary, the Virgin Mother of God.’ It would be hard to square this with the fact that in litanies and liturgical texts the Church has always named John the Baptist immediately after Our Lady, and Joseph only later on (if at all)… This has not changed, regardless of what Pius XI may have said”. 20

He seems to believe the “lack” of devotion to Saint Joseph in “the East” should be an important consideration for the Roman rite and attributes devotion to Saint Joseph to the needs of modern “psychology”.

But devotion to Saint Joseph has been growing for hundreds of years, being introduced into the liturgy in the fifteenth century. He was proclaimed special patron of the Americas in the sixteenth century. Fr. James Davis O.P.A. has written a treatise on Saint Joseph in Aquinian theology.21

Unsurprisingly, Kwasniewski wants Saint Joseph’s name out of the Roman Canon of the Mass at some future stage, in order to get us back to the primitive Church and align us with other rites, “with a view to purifying the Roman Rite”,22 even though there had been petitions to Rome for this inclusion in the Canon since the early nineteenth century.

Saint Joseph was proclaimed universal patron of the Church precisely to thwart the kind of attacks on its divine constitution represented by High Church Modernist ideas. Fr. Daniel Couture has written an interesting discussion of the history of devotion to Saint Joseph and his special role in modern times, strikingly illustrated by the vision of Saint Joseph at Fatima.23  

Concerning frequent Holy Communion, Peter Kwasniewski avoids giving it the unequivocal support that Catholics have shown since St. Pius X. In an article on the subject, he seems to approve it, but with many caveats, and great “sensibility” to the opposing opinion, venerable because of its older (“pre-hex”?) practice.

Incredibly, the authority he relies upon to give the most unequivocal support for frequent communion is Meister Eckhart, who was condemned for heresy by Pope John XXII, and is a “patron saint” of false mysticism.24

Kwasniewski’s support for this central practice of traditional Catholicism seems underwhelming: “we can benefit ourselves and make reparation for others by sometimes not going to Communion and by making an act of desire instead – a spiritual communion”. 25Was this foray into spiritual direction really necessary?

Reinventing Vatican I; High Church Modernism adopts the Gallican narrative

The traditional Catholic memory of its past is essential to its preservation. Distorting it is a precondition for reinventing “tradition”. Kwasniewski adopts as his own position the work of John O’Malley S.J., Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church. O’Malley authored numerous books on Church history from the point of view of Vatican II triumphalism. Why quote him? The reasons become apparent. 

Relying on O’Malley, Kwasniewski attributes the origin of the movement in favour of declaring papal infallibility to Joseph de Maistre.26 Now Joseph de Maistre earned respect as a brilliant polemicist who opposed French revolutionary ideas, but his entire worldview was steeped in masonic, Enlightenment ideas. He often gave religious terminology heterodox meanings, and this was the case with infallibility. His work, The Pope (1819), defended papal absolutism on the same Enlightenment grounds he used to defend absolutism in civil society, declaring (as did Thomas Hobbes), “ ‘for no imaginable reason is it permitted to resist authority’… I… am ready to subscribe to it for all time to come.” 27

De Maistre argued that the Popes, like all sovereigns of civil society, were “infallible”, because they were absolute. “The Church requires nothing more than other sovereignties… inasmuch as infallibility is… humanly supposed [in all societies]”.28 This made a mockery of infallibility as Catholics understand it. De Maistre rejected indirect (spiritual) authority over civil society. 29The Pope (Du pape) was full of heterodoxy, and Pius VII refused to allow de Maistre to dedicate it to him. 30The papal nuncio in St. Petersburg, where de Maistre lived, dismissed him as a man “full of learning, but also full of vanity and false ideas”.31

It’s necessary to provide some explanation of de Maistre because he is routinely brought up as the “origin of papal infallibility”, for all sorts of motives. Kwasniewski not only wrongly claims that the impetus for defining this dogma began with de Maistre (it began with Pius VI), he also makes him the inspiration for the traditional view of episcopal jurisdiction as a participation in that of the Pope’s:

“In the view of de Maistre-inspired enthusiasts, bishops do not receive their office from Christ, only Peter does – and Peter, in turn, grants the office to the Apostles on his own authority”.

This caricature ignores, again, the distinction between the episcopal power of jurisdiction and power of order, and reduces Pius XII to a “Maistre-inspired enthusiast”. Kwasniewski describes the Gallicans (many of whom still subscribed to the heretical Gallican Articles) opposing papal infallibility as

“ … the so-called Gallicans, who represented the old paradigm that, while one must hold the Bishop of Rome in the highest possible regard, he should not be viewed as a divine oracle… We might say that the Gallicans were correct in a broad way although wrong on several definite points”.

Well, he has no choice about these “points”: with Vatican I, the four Gallican Articles which epitomised the “broad Gallican way” must be understood by all Catholics to be heretical.

To state that Gallicanism was the “old”, “traditional” view of most European or French clergy is outrageous. These ideas were not traditional, or popular. They originated from the secularist ideologies favoured by absolutist monarchies of the Enlightenment.

Gallicanism (and Jansenism) weakened during the nineteenth century largely because absolutist monarchies had been destroyed in the revolutionary period. But the main reason for its demise was better education in the seminaries and the increase of Marian devotion, and that to the Sacred Heart. O’Malley almost sadly chronicles all this, blaming the opposition of the younger clergy (“poorly educated”) to their often Gallican bishops (“well-educated and serious”). 32

Kwasniewski’s history of the pre-conciliar Church relies heavily on O’Malley. But O’Malley’s work is superficial and includes all the usual slanders and slogans against the orthodox majority in the Catholic World of the nineteenth century and at Vatican I. O’Malley repeats the story according to which Pius IX is supposed to have upbraided Cardinal Filippo Maria Guidi during a private audience: “Pius broke out with the famous words, ‘I, I am tradition! I, I am the church’”. 33

No historian has ever been able to produce evidence that the Pope ever said those words. The only documentation that exists is in the diary of Archbishop Dupanloup, a well-known Gallican activist at the Council, who mentions a similar phrase that was bandied about. But Dupanloup does not claim anyone heard the Pope use it; nor does he claim that Cardinal Guidi told anyone this phrase. This is not even hearsay. 

On the other hand, Fr. Basil Wrighton’s excellent account of the history of “Collegialism” explains that the First Council of the Vatican was necessary to root out Gallicanism as much as to oppose liberalism.34 Pius IX (Inter multiplices, 1853) clearly singled out the continuing Gallican threat, which was also the basis of opposition to papal infallibility. O’Malley does more than play down that threat:

“ … [historians have] conclusively shown that the [heretical Gallican] articles reflected the genuine and traditional views of the French clergy (as well as the views of probably most clergy in Europe at the time)”, which is rubbish.35 

As O’Malley is so superficial and tendential, it is worth knowing whose scholarship he bases himself on:

“[Vatican II’s] promulgation of the doctrine of episcopal collegiality raised questions about the previous council’s doctrines of primacy and infallibility and gave impetus to further studies of Vatican I. Theologians began to review Gallican and liberal claims and assess them less negatively… Two works [by modern Jesuits], upon which I have heavily relied, are basic”.36

O’Malley’s view of the past does indeed rely heavily on Papal Primacy. From its Origins to the Present, by Klaus Schatz S.J. Schatz gives the game away early with this gem:

“Did the Eastern Church as a whole ever [in the first millennium] recognize more [to the See of Peter] than a ‘primacy of honour’?… If it is understood to mean ‘a primacy of jurisdiction’… the answer must certainly be negative”.37

Schatz claims that, only in the late second century did Rome begin to “attempt” to “assume responsibility for the entire Church”, and that these attempts were resisted and failed. 38He views papal supremacy as a recent human construct, thus defying the Catholic faith. A very shaky base for the ecclesiology Kwasniewski gives star treatment to.

This look at High Church Modernism seems to disproportionately focus on Peter Kwasniewski. This is because he is so involved in its invention. That relies on a foundation of false mysticism and occultism (Part One), and an attack on the orthodox, traditional past of the Church (Part Two). The next section describes the kind of Church High Church Modernism aims to create, and its justifications in past errors.

It is sad to have to conclude that, in spite of the encouragement some traditionalists have found in reading Kwasniewski’s writings, it is a case of one step forward, two steps back, into the old quagmires the traditional Church had cleaned up at Trent and Vatican I.   


by Vinicius. Vinicius is a Melbourne-based historian-researcher  focussing on early modernity as the Christian Western alternative to ideological, Enlightenment modernity.  

  1. Peter Kwasniewski, Lecture, Littleton, Colorado (Kwasniewski cites an article blaming “Jesuit spirit” for French decay in the eighteenth century, when it was the suppression of the Jesuits that destroyed intellectual opposition to revolutionary ideas).  ↩︎
  2. Peter Kwasniewski, The Second Vatican Council is now far spent ↩︎
  3. Peter Kwasniewski, Eric Sammons interview ↩︎
  4. Clear ideas on the pope’s infallible magisterium, SSPX: “That is why Pius IX, even before Vatican I (1870) felt obliged to warn German theologians that divine faith’s submission “must not be restricted only to those points which have been defined ” (Letter to Archbishop of Munich, Dec. 21, 1863). ↩︎
  5. Sebastian Morello, Mysticism, Magic and Monasteries, Os Justi 2024, pp. 34-36. ↩︎
  6. Morello, Mysticism, p. 22. ↩︎
  7. Tim Flanders, Does this Mean that Non-Trads are Heretics? ↩︎
  8. In his letter to the Byzantine Emperor, Anastasius, Pope Gelasius wrote that the world was governed by a religious power (the Church) and by political power. This did not infer that the “world” was one society, or that the Church and civil society were one society. ↩︎
  9. Tim Flanders, Bishops Against Bishops ↩︎
  10. Fr Davide Pagliarani, Interview ↩︎
  11. Peter Kwasniewski, https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=5256617964393007&id=100001345673649 ↩︎
  12. Thomas Guarino, Did Vatican II replace one-sided papalism with one-sided episcopalism?, First Things 12/8/25 ↩︎
  13. Peter Kwasniewski, Papal authority over liturgy 28/6/23 ↩︎
  14. Peter Kwasniewski, How to properly understand the role of the papacy, 19/8/22 ↩︎
  15. Peter Kwasniewski, The “spirit of Vatican I” as a post-revolutionary political problem, n.4., One Peter Five, 6/7/22 ↩︎
  16. Peter Kwasniewski, Eric Sammons interview, Should Bishops Ignore the Pope, 28/6/22, https://crisismagazine.com/podcast/should-bishops-ignore-the-vatican-guest-peter-kwasniewski ↩︎
  17. Fr. Basil Wrighton, The Angelus 1984, https://sspx.au/en/collegiality-error-vatican-ii-2-30457  Also explained are the Conciliarist and Gallican origins of these errors, https://sspx.au/en/collegiality-error-vatican-ii-30456  ↩︎
  18. Fr. Jean-Michel Gleize SSPX, https://sspx.org/en/news/owe-pius-xii-important-clarifications-nature-episcopate-28096  “This is the important clarification that Pius XII gives: ‘Yet in exercising this office [the bishops] are not altogether independent, but are subordinate to the lawful authority of the Roman Pontiff, although enjoying the ordinary power of jurisdiction which they receive directly from the same Supreme Pontiff.’ The wording of the Latin text is unambiguous: ‘immediate sibi ab eodem Pontifice impertita.’ Note the presence of the adverb ‘immediately,’ which means ‘in an unmediated way’ or ‘without an intermediary’” [This article is very valuable reading for its discussion of irregular episcopal consecrations]. ↩︎
  19. Thomas Guarino, Did Vatican II Replace One-Sided Papalism with One-Sided Episcopalism?, First Things, 12/8/25, https://firstthings.com/did-vatican-ii-replace-one-sided-papalism-with-one-sided-episcopalism/  ↩︎
  20. Peter Kwasniewski, Tradition and Sanity, 21/2/25 
    https://www.traditionsanity.com/p/has-devotion-to-st-joseph-supplanted/comments ↩︎
  21. Fr. James Davis O.P.A., Thomistic Josephology, Center of Research, St. Joseph’s Oratory, 1967. ↩︎
  22. Peter Kwasniewski, New Liturgical Movement 23/12/19 https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2019/12/on-insertion-of-st-josephs-name-into.html   ↩︎
  23. Fr. Daniel Couture, https://sspx.ca/sites/default/files/documents/dsl_2003_en_st_joseph.pdf   ↩︎
  24. Peter Kwasniewski, Tensions in the Catholic Tradition on Frequent Communion, New Liturgical Movement 5/9/22 https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2022/09/tensions-in-catholic-tradition-on.html ↩︎
  25. Peter Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright, Angelico Press, 2020, p. 285. ↩︎
  26. Peter Kwasniewski, The “Spirit of Vatican I” as a Post-Revolutionary Political Problem, One Peter Five 6/7/22 https://onepeterfive.com/spirit-vatican-one-post-revolutionary-political-problem/ ↩︎
  27. De Maistre, Joseph, The Pope Considered in his Relations with the Church, Dolman, London 1850, pp. 125-6. ↩︎
  28. De Maistre, The Pope, p. 108. ↩︎
  29. De Maistre, The Pope, p. 125. ↩︎
  30. “Pope Pius VII refused the dedication of Du Pape because of the theological errors contained in the work”, Jean-Yves Pranchère, “The Persistence of Maistrian Thought” in Richard Lebrun, Joseph de Maistre’s Life, Thought, and Influence, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal 2001, p. 290 ↩︎
  31. Bernard M.G. Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition: Aspects of Catholic Thought in 19th-Century France, Cambridge University Press 1973, p. 26, fn. 21 ↩︎
  32. O’Malley, Vatican I, pp. 56-58. ↩︎
  33. John O’Malley S.J., Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church, Harvard Univ., 2018, p. 212. ↩︎
  34. Fr. Basil Wrighton, Collegiality: error of Vatican II, The Angelus 1984:  https://sspx.au/en/collegiality-error-vatican-ii-30456  ↩︎
  35. O’Malley, Vatican I, p. 27. ↩︎
  36. John O’Malley S.J.Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts 2018, p. 20. ↩︎
  37. Klaus Schatz, Papal Primacy. From its Origins to the Present, The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, 1996, p. 60. ↩︎
  38. Schatz, Papal Primacy, p. 11. ↩︎

2 responses to “High Church Modernism part two: deconstructing the Traditional Church”

  1. Many thanks for this. Unfortunately, many “new Trads” don’t know their Faith and rate a person on popularity, not orthodoxy. My Latin Mass parish is steeped in this New Traditionalism. Not sure what to do.

    1. Well, knowledge is the key. If your priest isn’t willing to run Catechism classes, perhaps a few of you can get together and read Trent or watch a good video series to better learn your Faith. You could also familiarise yourself with the errors of Tomberg so that you can explain them to others. We have thought about making a concise version of these long articles sometime in the future, to help people grasp the errors quickly and easily.

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