Vinicius continues his series on the errors being promulgated by Catholic ‘traditionalists‘, this time honing in on those commentators who extol Vatican II and the heresy of Gallicanism while condemning Trent and the Vatican Council I.
To read previous posts in this series, click on the links below:
- Part I: Peter Kwasniewski, High Church modernism and Occultism.
- Part II: High Church Modernism: deconstructing the Traditional Church
- Part III: The high church modernist Synodal Way to “complete” Vatican II
- Part IV: High Church Modernism and the loss of Faith
- Part V: Kwasniewski’s Tombergian Church
Kwasniewski’s uncatholic ritualism
Peter Kwasniewski has expressed many commonsense insights on post Vatican II liturgies, few of which have not been expressed by previous authors over the last half century. His “originality” lies in the agenda he has added to the long-standing traditionalist opposition to these changes. We are unable to remain silent in the face of his many heterodox “additions” that go far beyond preserving the pre-Vatican II liturgy and faith.
He declares,
“I’ve gotten a lot of grief over the years for emphasizing the primacy of liturgy… over other aspects of Catholic life, including the modern age’s seeming obsession with doctrinal rectitude and precision, as if the solution to our ills were to be found in a library of neo-scholastic manuals”. 1
But orthodox faith is not a “modern obsession”, as Kwasniewski claims. The Church, from the earliest times, has fought tooth and nail for every precept of the faith. The great Arian crisis turned on the meaning of one letter.
Kwasniewski’s opposition of doctrine to cultic worship is ritualism at its worst. It smacks of Richard Hooker’s Anglican combination of conformity in worship with vagueness on doctrine. Shortly, we’ll see
where his concept leads.
Kwasniewski defines liturgy in primarily psychological terms.2 In order of importance, he asserts that a “religious rite” must come from “innumerable nameless ancestors” (but the Mass, in its history and publicly recorded institution, contradicts this “folk tradition” view). Only lastly should a “religious rite” be “directed towards the Divinity”.
For Kwasniewski, the most important thing about the Catholic “old rite” is its ritualism: “I enjoy reading ancient Far Eastern classics… Confucius has a fairly well-developed notion of rites – what they are and how they should be conducted”. But this does not help Catholic tradition; the Novus Ordo can be performed in a very ritualistic way (as in Saint Peter’s Basilica or Solesmes) without fixing its main problem, a faulty expression of doctrinal orthodoxy.
The Church has always known the importance of ritual; even civil societies and false religions do. But to argue as if the worst thing about a clown rite or a rock ritual honouring Baal was its form and not its object, is not the Catholic way of looking at liturgy. The question
of orthodoxy in our rite is the very first consideration; just as the lex credendi preceded the lex orandi in time as Pius XII stressed (thereby annoying Peter Kwasniewski).
Saint Peter believed in the divinity of Christ before he kneeled before him (how many people today imbibe the faith is another matter). Kwasniewski argues that if people attend good rituals over time, they will “get the rest” right. But this is a ritualist iteration of the Synodal Way’s “kerygma” that prioritises personal relationship and “communion” over doctrine.
For the Catholic Church, doctrinal rectitude is not a “modern obsession”. It is the only way almost everyone knows what to believe and love in religion. People may love their parents without needing words, but almost nobody has this kind of direct experience of God. They need doctrine. Indeed, the liturgy teaches.
But if false doctrines are not opposed with the “precision” of “scholastic manuals”, one ends up with the “Orthodox” Churches, whose members attend traditional liturgies for centuries yet are increasingly heterodox in their beliefs.
The Greek Orthodox Bishop Zizioulas (whose views are proclaimed as the “solution’ to the crisis in the Church by Tim Flanders is a case in point; he was entirely modernist, yet a practitioner of traditional Catholic liturgy. Peter Kwasniewski’s mix of Tombergian occultism with traditional liturgy would also be an empty shell like Anglicanism.
The origins and destination of high church modernist ritualism
Kwasniewski’s ritualism has received praise from Thomas Plant, an occultist Anglican clergyman who enthusiastically praises the Tombergian escapade Kwasniewski published. (Mysticism, Magic and Monasteries by Sebastian Morello).
Like Kwasniewski, Plant begins by confusing the Church with civil society and asserting that the insistence on doctrinal orthodoxy is “modern”. He asserts that dogmatic religious belief therefore “undermines national unity”. As with the high church synodal way, the priority is the “communion” of the assembled liturgy on its “journey”. Plant asserts that the Old Testament did not deny “belief” in other “gods”, whose “reality” it “accepted”, but only some practices of their worship.
Kwasniewski’s colleague, Robert Kleim (below) has a similar view. Plant says the insistence on doctrine is modern “mind control”, but how does this compare to Our Lord’s injunction: “He that believeth and is baptised…”?3 Plant defines “orthopraxy”/ritualism as the main game; “Orthodoxy” (the faith) is only a communal profession of belief that is secondary, and not insisted upon in “traditional” religions, and is possibly an obstacle to ritualist “orthopraxy”.
For Plant, what people believe is far less important than what they do in ritual. He claims that this ritualism was central to paganism (true), Israel (false), and to the “early Church” (false). He asserts that the Church was corrupted by professions of faith and creeds into valuing orthodoxy more than ritual; the Church’s “obsession” with orthodox belief led to “Islam” and Protestantism”.
Peter Kwasniewski is already practicing Plant’s submission of orthodoxy to “orthopraxy” by attending and defending Catholic ritual while believing Tombergian occultism; orthodox Catholic ritual splashes away like water off a duck’s back here and “scholastic manuals” are urgently needed.
Peter Kwasniewski refers his readers to a post by Robert Kleim.4 Kleim falsely claims5 that the Bible’s teaching, “All the Gods of the gentiles are demons”, is only an artistic turn of phrase and “could mean ‘all the gods of the nations are inferior deities’ or ‘all the gods of the nations are spiritual beings of indeterminate moral status’”.
He says the word demon is “ambiguous” and speculates that the pagan gods were not imaginary, just not as good as the God of Israel. The Tombergian work published by Kwasniewski has no doubts and proclaims paganism’s demons were “emanations” of God that Catholics “need” to “know”.6 Hopefully such authors and their readership do not “know” these “indeterminate” spirits or communicate with them.
Paganism’s religious object was the world itself, from which emanated divinities and invisible beings; contrary to Christianity, paganism’s invisible entities could not exist without the material world. Robert Kleim argues the Greeks didn’t have a word for religion, and speculates how wonderful it would be if Catholics didn’t either. But paganism’s worship of the world, making it the origin of “divinity”, is the most evil thing about it.
Christianity broke that pagan view of the world forever. But neo-pagans ensconced in Churches give an animist, pagan meaning to buzz words like “incarnationism” and “sacramentalism” (one of their icons, Roger Scruton, repeated these terms constantly while denying and ridiculing all the most basic Christian beliefs). Clearly, “orthodoxy” is not high among their concerns, or they might have remembered Pius XII’s instruction:
“the Church of God… is despised and hated maliciously by those who shut their eyes to the light of Christian wisdom and miserably return to the teachings, customs and practices of ancient paganism”.7
Unfortunately, this warning has fallen upon deaf ears: Peter Kwasniewski praises an interview by Charles Coulombe,8 who asserts, “Paganism at its best is natural religion”.9
The same idea is presented by an internet group that Kwasniewski helps run, rather badly named “Eternal Christendom” (below). It explains the Parthenon on its logo as “include[ing] all those peoples and nations that witness to the existence of one God… without the assistance of divine revelation”. But pagan peoples have never adored God. Aristotle and Plato were individuals whose notions were a metaphysical idea of God mixed with errors about divinity; they ridiculed paganism’s gods and mythologies but practiced no cult towards God.
Instead, Kwasniewski’s colleague, Sebastian Morello, praises (the virulently anti- Christian) Iamblichus and his “liturgies” to pagan gods. There is no record of any historical society ever having practiced “natural religion”. Could Coulombe or Kwasniewski specify one
such society?
Peter Kwasniewski’s “new” Tombergian “anti-church”
“Eternal Christendom”, the internet club which Kwasniewski helps run, claims submission to the doctrinal arbitrage of a priest of the Saint Peter Fraternity who it refuses to name. Unfortunately, the group teaches the Anglican idea that Church and civil society are one society with different functions, rather than the Catholic teaching of two distinct, allied societies. But its view of the Church is alarmingly erroneous, for it closely resembles the Lutheran caricature of the “Whore of Babylon” as a permanent feature of the Catholic Church (a view related to Kwasniewski’s Tombergian ecclesiology). The view endorsed by Kwasniewski here invents “the Anti-Church” as part of a “New Theory of Apocalyptic History”.10
The article claims “Christendom – and pre-eminently the papacy” is the “katechon” that stops the antichrist. Christendom, however, was civilisation of many civil societies in spiritual, not political, submission to another society, the Church. The Pope as supreme political ruler is a Lutheran caricature, but this article insists on it:
“the Spiritual and the temporal – while distinct – can never again be separated [after the Resurrection]”.
But Pope Gelasius said exactly the opposite – that Old Testament examples of identity of religious and civil society (like Melchizedek) are finished with the New Testament. Only the Church, the Body of Christ, is capable of restraining the evil spoken of in these biblical texts. What is worse about this article is its claim that the papacy is the “katechon”, that will “disappear”. This denies the divine constitution of the Church and our Faith, which holds that the See of Peter will remain for all time to guide the faith.
Appallingly, the article claims that Saint Peter and the Apostles who hid during the Crucifixion were the beginning of “the Anti-Church”, basing itself on the Catechism of the Catholic Church. But the CCC only speaks of the suffering of Christ as a type of the sufferings that the Church will endure throughout history. Kwasniewski’s group invents a permanent “Anti-Church” existing within the Church as not merely worldly or bad people, but a “third team” working for evil. Obviously, this is not an ecclesiology that has ever been taught by the Church and is the result of “itching ears” instead.
A Tombergian “Third Testament”?
But no matter; relying on the “continuing” revelation of some spirit or other, a new truth has been discovered after two thousand years, one found in no Father of the Church, no scriptural passage or Church teaching, and no approved private revelation:
“… we discovered that there is another camp [apart from the world, the flesh etc] – one that does not exist on its own, and is in fact merely an extension of Antichrist. But it clothes itself as if it belongs to Christ. It is, in short, the Body of the Devil which hides itself ‘inside’ the visible Body of Christ. This ‘third’ camp, what we simply call the ‘Anti-Church’, we discovered is found… throughout history… shroud[ing] itself within the Church [and intending] the destruction of the Church”.
This is indeed the Tombergian animal issuing from the Church discussed in the last post on this subject.
The only religious authority cited is Saint Augustine’s The City of God. Now Saint Augustine made it clear that the City of God and the earthly City are spiritual realms that do not correspond to the visible boundaries of the two societies, the Church and civil societies.
There are godly and ungodly people in both the Church and civil societies. With regards to the Church, Catholic teaching has developed the notion of living and dead members based on the life of grace in each individual. There are also the invisible members of the Church through baptism of desire. Members of the Church can lose grace; they can be worldly, but nowhere in Saint Augustine or the Catholic faith is there anything about a satanic ecclesiastical entity or “team” in its own right.
Where is this Anti-Church throughout history? Was it Pope St Gregory the Great purging and reforming and standardising the Roman liturgy in the sixth century? Was it Pope St Pius V doing the same thing in the sixteenth? Was it Pius X and the frequent communion “revolution”, or Trent and the Jesuits “corrupting mysticism” denounced by Tim Flanders? (below). Is the “hexed Church” of the last millennium preached by Sebastian Morello and Peter Kwasniewski the “team” that, “as part the antichrist”, “intends the destruction of the Church”?
Catholic theologians indeed considered heretics like Arius and Luther as prefigurations of the antichrist because they led people out of the Church and persecuted it, as Our Lord was persecuted. The worst of these crises sorted out those who could not remain in the Church after a couple of generations based on actions like blatant heresy and rejection of the Church. But defining a deliberate “antichrist team” as a permanent part of the Church is the stuff of Salem witch-hunts. The worst thing about this madness is how it inclines Tombergians to regard fellow Catholics. Instead, as Saint Augustine taught, there are only two “teams”, and it is not for us to judge hearts.
May Pope Pius XII have the last word on this subject of the Body of Christ, the Church:
“Nor must one imagine that the Body of the Church, just because it bears the name of Christ, is made up during the days of its earthly pilgrimage only of members conspicuous for their holiness, or that it consists only of those whom God has predestined to eternal happiness. It is owing to the Savior’s infinite mercy that place is allowed in His Mystical Body here below for those whom, of old, He did not exclude from the banquet. For not every sin, however grave it may be, is such as of its own nature to sever a man from the Body of the Church, as does schism or heresy or apostasy. Men may lose charity and divine grace through sin, thus becoming incapable of supernatural merit, and yet not be deprived of all life if they hold fast to faith and Christian hope, and if, illumined from above, they are spurred on by the interior promptings of the Holy Spirit to salutary fear and are moved to prayer and penance for their sins”.11
The Tombergian “Team” moving out of the Church?
However, once the artisans of designer Churches start acting, they do not tend to stop. The concept of Revelation is thrown up in the air by Timothy Flanders:
“The inspiration of Scripture is not primarily about whether or not it contains error… The inspiration of the Scripture is primarily concerned with God’s own self-revelation to the individual human heart”.12
He mistakenly claims Saint Bonaventure “never used to the term ‘revelation’ in regards to the Scripture per se (the way that the pre-Vatican II manuals did”.) But for the Catholic Church, the Scriptures are public, not private Revelation. What can easily be inferred from Flanders’ interpretation is “continuing revelation”, the famous “Third Testament” preached by modernists in several Churches.
Flanders’ Continuing Revelation does not fail him. He presents a model of “the Church in history” which he teaches to the children of unsuspecting Catholics:13
But where is the Church in this model? Where is the priest? Where is the Mass? Where are the Apostles who received “revelation” [but perhaps “revelation” continues…]? Where is the Pope and the successors of the Apostles? Does the “King” run the Church, like Henry VIII? Are the “Elders” priests? Are the laity the “elders”?
We are informed that “[God’s] actions through His saints come from His divine grace which flows from the Christian cultus – the Holy Mass”. Does God have no action except through “his saints”? Is this an echo of Iamblichus’ idea (promoted by Morello) that the “spiritual beings”, pagan gods, were the channels for divine action. Is this why ambiguous terms like “elder” and “cult” are used instead of priest and Mass; is this a concept that can “include” the ministers of Jupiter, and shamans etc?
Let’s leave Flanders’ “Programme for Young Adults”. It looks too much like the synodal Communion on its path out of the Church.
High Church modernism’s bête noire: Trent and the Papacy
Peter Kwasniewski’s “traditionalism” takes as its model the Gallican heresy of seventeenth-eighteenth-century France. Its liturgical abuses are “the treasures, ever ancient and ever new, of the Latin liturgical tradition… the broad ocean of the Latin rite as it was celebrated in
better days”. 14
These so-called Gallican liturgical practices predate the post-Vatican II changes but that does not make them traditional or Roman: they restored the Renaissance abuses Pope Saint Pius V had ruled out, and invented practices merely to spite the partial Tridentine reform of the French Church. Gallicanism was influenced by Enlightenment rationalism and included features like refusal to genuflect in front of the tabernacle.
Gallicanism’s innovations were a ritualist prefiguration of post-Vatican II changes because they were meant to reflect and bond the civil society of its place and time, just as Vatican II’s aimed to. They were an example of ritualism put before orthodoxy.
The Roman rite throughout history has always returned to its liturgical sobriety and pristine expression of doctrine. It will not return to the liturgical morass of eighteenth century Enlightenment France.
Kwasniewski blames Trent and Pope Saint Pius V for codifying the Roman liturgy. But this liturgical reorganisation was nothing compared to that of Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century. What is common to the reforms of Gregory the Great and Pius V was concern for purity, doctrinal clarity and sobriety in the rite, which are exactly the things lacking in the innovations of both Gallicanism and Vatican II’s aftermath.
Gallicanism resisted the Tridentine reforms for as long as it could, and mixed in Jansenist and even Protestant sensibilities. Many of Gallicanism’s innovations were unedifying and scandalous. Kwasniewski defines them as “the classic Roman rite”, a model of “liturgical diversity” for the future. He demands that the papacy be “like St Joseph… ‘the Silent Man’: not a single word of his is recorded in Scripture… He hid himself in the shadows”.
In other words, local churches should make up the Roman rite as they do now, but include lots of candles, incense, and altar girls with albs, mitres etc., as detailed in some these “Gallican” practices. But Kwasniewski says “immersing” oneself in this early modern state of liturgical chaos and abuse is “is a call to recover the patrimony… [of] the Latin rite”.
Kwasniewski’s and Flanders’ crusade against Trent and Quo Primum. Is this what they mean by the “Anti-Church”?
Kwasniewski says Gallicanism’s practices were “authentic liturgical development”, an “example sorely needed” now. The deep crisis of Gallicanism and Jansenism, which almost destroyed the Church in France, is interpreted as “National pride and fidelity to Catholic tradition… assert[ing] the legitimacy of local diocesan usages, the so-called neo-Gallican rites, in defiance of homogenizing tendencies that would reduce sacred worship to mere uniformity”. But Gallicanism (defined by Kwasniewski’s magisterium as “correct in a broad way”, but whose heresies were condemned by Vatican I ) was defying Trent and its codification of the Roman rite in Quo Primum, the very thing traditional Catholics are supposedly united around defending!
He has helpers in this struggle for upside-down tradition. After demonising the First Vatican Council (whose spirit, Peter Kwasniewski claims, is worse than that of Vatican II, and needs to be “exorcised”), Flanders now claims the great threat today is the “spirit of Trent”, whose “false spirit” is “still alive among Trads today who think we should be so militant and vicious against heretics”. “Trads” “misunderstand Vatican II”; they are modern representatives of the “false spirit of Trent”. 15
Flanders claims, repeating very stale Protestant propaganda, that in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, “we can see the false spirit of Trent”. But the reforms of Trent were kept out of France until well into the next century; the massacre was an example of Renaissance Europe, instead.
It was part of a long period of political strife within France, and was
precipitated by the fears of the Catholic city of Paris faced with a Protestant army camped outside and the threat of a Protestant coup d’etat against Charles IX. French Catholics feared that their country was next in line after a series of violent Protestant takeovers in other countries. Many Churches in France had already been burned and profaned.
But Trent’s Counterreformation worked by persuasion and the practise of piety; the Thirty Years War was started by Protestants alarmed at the Tridentine recovery of the Church in society as soon as the Protestant nobility lost positions of power (as in Bohemia).
To accuse traditionalists today who oppose error uncompromisingly (as this article does by criticising high church modernism) of having the same spirit as Bartholomew’s Day mobs is the kind of red herring we hear from modernists. Mr. Flanders may sleep soundly in his bed; no Catholic mobs approach. But he ought to relearn Catholic doctrine and history before being involved in the religious education of children or adults. Any competent pre-Vatican II history of the Church debunks the “history” taught in his video.
A modernist opposition of Mysticism to Doctrine
Flanders claims that Vatican II “restored” the “lost” tradition of mysticism. He claims that mysticism is more important than the Mass in the lives of Catholics.
This is false. The Mass is the most important religious action of the Church and its members. And for most Catholics, it is ascetical prayer life that has always sustained them. This prayer life has been degraded in the Church since the Vatican II with disastrous results.
Flanders invents a childishly fictitious “Tridentine” history where Carmelites foreshadowing Vatican II’s “restored mysticism” fight Jesuits bent on activism and mind control. But saints like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross were canonised by the Tridentine Church, and were in the forefront of Trent’s counterreformation. Teresa of Avila did the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius and her spirituality was influenced by them. She was supported and defended by her Jesuit confessors. Saint John of the Cross was part of the same counterreformation and was educated by Jesuits.
Far from restoring mysticism, the spirit of Vatican II has done a better job than all the Revolutions combined in gutting the monasteries and convents of contemplative orders. In line with his demonisation of Trent, Flanders repeats the false assertion that the Jesuits taught that lay people are not called to the stages of interior spiritual life.
This is simply untrue. But no matter, he insists that “interior life” was “corrupted” after the Council of Trent, and repeats the modernist slur that faith of Catholics after Trent was merely “exterior”. Bizarrely, Flanders praises a Novus Ordo collect which he admits had removed the references to sin because its authors wished to promote a “Lutheran” liturgy, claiming it is focused on the interior life instead – which makes it “better” than the old collect!
Flanders extends this argument to the Novus Ordo in general. But the obstacle to grace in the Novus Ordo is not just the mundane way it is realised in 90% of parishes, but its text’s defective doctrinal expression of the Mass. For Flanders, traditionalist concerns about this make an “idol” out of the Mass, and their concerns are far outweighed by the lovely arrangement of the NO’s lectionary! He says Vatican II “restored” the mystical tradition that Trent “corrupted”. But the first thing everyone notices about the Novus Ordo is the difficulty of prayer and the general loss of sensibility to the sacredness of what is happening.
For Flanders, the preoccupations of traditionalists over false ecumenism, religious liberty, the Mass, and the aberrations of the post-conciliar period, are all “secondary”. He claims that if Catholics are not engaged in attaining “all the levels of mysticism”, then their defence of the faith is the “insane trick of the devil” of “making an idol out of truth”.
Flanders accuses “Tridentine Trads” of falling for this trick because their spiritual life “neglects” mysticism. How he can know this with such certitude and speak with authority as one who has got this “one mystical thing” right is the only mystery around here though.
Traditional Catholics prefer instead to be less judgemental of their fellows and concentrate on what they really can speak about: there is no love, no Church, no communion, without the true faith. The revealed religion can never be an idol, even to its most unworthy defender.
Does Flanders truly believe that the Crusaders were idolators because they were not Trappists? All things considered, it is high time for someone else to run One Peter Five, yet again.
By Vinicius. Vinicius is a Melbourne-based historian-researcher focussing on early modernity as the Christian Western alternative to ideological, Enlightenment modernity.
ENDNOTES
- Peter Kwasniewski, Facebook, 1/7/26 ↩︎
- Peter Kwasniewski, Tradition and Sanity 28/10/25 ↩︎
- Thomas Plant, Why Japan Coheres (and England Doesn’t) ↩︎
- Peter Kwasniewski, 25/8/26, Facebook ↩︎
- Peter Kleim, Were the Greek gods Real? ↩︎
- Sebastian Morello, Mysticism, Magic and Monasteries, 2024, p. 22 ↩︎
- Pius XII. Mystici corporis, 1943, 3 ↩︎
- Peter Kwasniewski, Facebook, 20/8/26 ↩︎
- Charles Coulombe, Christian Monarchy & The Supernatural ↩︎
- Joshua Charles, A New Theory of Apocalyptic History ↩︎
- Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, 23 ↩︎
- Tim Flanders, Let’s Admit the Divine Riches in the Novus Ordo Missae. The article claims that the new lectionary makes the NO “more militantly Marian” than the traditional Mass. Unfortunately, the lectionary does not remedy the doctrinal shortcomings of the new rite, which Bishop de Castro Mayer describes. ↩︎
- Tim Flanders, Faith of Our Fathers: Spiritual Formation Program for Young Adults. ↩︎
- Peter Kwasniewski, The Broad Ocean of the Latin Rite: What True Liturgical Diversity Looks Like ↩︎
- Tim Flanders, Vatican II Restores the Most Important Tradition ↩︎
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