What is tradition and why is it so important for Catholics? Why is it not enough to have the "essence" of the Mass (a valid Eucharist)? What can we learn about the Mass by looking at Shakespeare's plays, or the use of clothing, or the art of painting? All this and more, in Dr. K's lecture given in Grand Rapids, MI, on March 3, 2022.

Against Memoricide: The Importance of Preserving Liturgical Tradition

The Q&A after my talk on "Against Memoricide: The Importance of Preserving Liturgical Tradition," given in Grand Rapids, MI, on March 3, 2022.

Grand Rapids: Question & Answers on March 3, 2022

Br. Andre-Marie and Dr. Peter Kwasniewski discuss all kinds of issues related to the papacy in the Catholic Church, prompted by the release of the author's two-volume set "The Road from Hyperpapalism to Catholicism."

CRUSADE Channel Radio 

From Hyperpapalism to Catholicism. Guest: Dr. Peter Kwasniewski

In this lecture, I make a pitch for “slow liturgy.” I explain why our basic mental framework should not be capturable in the question “What do I get out of attending the 60-minute Sunday Mass?,” but rather, “What will I get out of an entire lifetime of faithfully immersing myself in the mysteries of the Mass?” If liturgical reformers and church leaders make it their basic assumption that liturgy is to be assessed on the basis of what one can immediately understand in that 60-minute Sunday Mass, they are setting up the people of God for a catastrophic failure. They should be asking, rather, how a liturgy ought to be if it is going to have the wherewithal to sustain and reward an entire lifetime’s participation, so that it will be experienced less as a repetitious and burdensome duty and more as an ever-deeper entry into something both familiar and strange.

Why It Is Better Not to Understand Everything Immediately—Q&A period

Why It Is Better Not to Understand Everything Immediately: The Wisdom of Traditional Liturgy

In his Apostolic Constitution Missale Romanum (April 3, 1969), Pope Paul VI specified that the Novus Ordo Missae would go into effect on the First Sunday of Advent that year — November 30, exactly fifty years ago. In my recent Minneapolis lecture, written with an eye to this important anniversary, I argue that the Novus Ordo Missae constitutes a rupture with fundamental elements of all liturgies of apostolic derivation (eight such elements are identified in the talk), and that, as a consequence, it violates the Church’s solemn obligation to receive, cherish, guard, and pass on the fruits of liturgical development. Since this development is, in fact, a major way in which the Holy Spirit leads the Church “into the fullness of truth” over the ages, as Christ promised, so great a "sin against the Holy Spirit" cannot fail to have enormous negative consequences, as indeed the past five decades have verified. Nor is it possible to bridge the abyss between old and new by applying cosmetics or the drapery of elegant clothing, because the problem is on the order of a genetic mutation, or damage to internal organs. The profound and permanent solution is to maintain continuity with the living liturgical tradition found in the usus antiquior. (Please note: In this lecture I refer to a chart, which may be found online as a JPEG at the website Rorate Caeli [https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2019/11/on-fiftieth-anniversary-of-novus-ordo.html], along with the full text of this lecture, including its footnotes.)

Beyond Smells and Bells: Why We Need the Objective Content of the Usus Antiquior

This OnePeterFive podcast (Episode 41) features Steve Skojec and Dr. Peter Kwasniewski in a wide-ranging conversation about the Liturgical Reform of the 1960s. Who was involved? What were their theories, motivations, and methods? Why did they think they needed to change so much? What has the fallout been?

(The picture here is of the famous Fr. Josef Jungmann, who popularized both the corruption theory and the pastoral-modernization theory, discussed in the podcast.)

What Happened in the Liturgical Reform? And Why Does It Matter?

A passage from my book “Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness,” read by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf.

“Death by Verbosity”: How the Novus Ordo Drowns Us in Words

This brisk Q&A period followed a lecture on the Roman Canon (which is available elsewhere on this SoundCloud page) given in Oxford on Friday, October 26, 2018. The questions go into such topics as the rationalism of the liturgical reform; the equation of participation with intellectual comprehension; the flaws of Paul VI's character that precipitated the liturgical crisis; why Vatican II was doomed because of a lack of clarity in its convocation and the patchwork viewpoints represented in its documents, making it a wax nose that can be twisted this way or that; why Pope Francis is the first real "Vatican II pope"; whether we should suddenly reimpose the TLM or let it come back slowly; why it was a mistake for John XXIII to introduce a new saint into the Roman Canon; why doing the Novus Ordo in a super-traditional manner is likely to cause more difficulty and division than re-introducing the TLM; and more!

Problems and Prospects for Recovering Traditional Catholicism

This lecture, given at Maternal Heart of Mary in Sydney on April 6, 2019, lays out the historical, scriptural, dogmatic, and anthropological case for worshiping eastwards or “ad orientem,” as well as the case against “versus populum” as a profound aberration and solvent of the liturgical spirit.

“From the East to the West”: A Defense of Ad Orientem Worship

This lecture is a full-on defense of the primacy of tradition as ultimate norm. The consistent practice of the Catholic Church over the centuries has been to carry along with her whatever is already part of her life — and the more so, the more universally it permeates the body of the faithful. The longer the tradition, the more certain it is to be true, fitting, and beneficial; new practices are to be admitted only when they refine, crystallize, amplify, or otherwise enhance traditions already in place. Catholics therefore have an obligation to value the whole of their tradition at every level, because all of its elements constitute the beautiful and subtle tapestry of the Faith. It is not only misleading but dangerous to make too sharp a distinction between what is “essential” or “primary,” and what is “accidental” or “secondary.” The entire liturgical reform of the 20th century rested on exaggerating and eventually discarding this distinction.

[This lecture, with minor changes, has been given under a number of titles: (1) Tradition Reviled and Recovered: A Study of False Assumptions about Substance and Accident; (2) Tradition as Ultimate Norm: Clearing up Confusion about Essentials and Incidentals; (3) It’s Not Just a Matter of the Heart: Why What We Do and How We Do It Matters So Much in the Liturgy. The version recorded here was given under the title “Dew, Tears, and Torrents: The Living Waters of Tradition,” in May 2019 at the Sacred Liturgy Conference in Spokane, Washington.]

“Gregorian chant” is one of the richest and most subtle art forms in Western music—indeed, in the music of any culture. It is also, for many reasons, the type of music most perfectly suited to the sacred liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church, as her official documents repeatedly teach. In this lecture, I first offer a sketch of the history of chant as the “musical clothing” of the Roman rite, then delve in some detail into the eight characteristics of chant that cumulatively separate it from all other music forms: (1) primacy of the word; (2) free rhythm; (3) modality; (4) unison singing; (5) unaccompanied vocalization; (6) anonymity; (7) emotional moderation; (8) unambiguous sacrality.

This presentation was recorded at the 2019 Sacred Liturgy Conference in Spokane, Washington. Although I had a slide show along with it, the text is quite comprehensible without the slides.

Gregorian Chant: Exemplary Music for the Catholic Liturgy

In this short podcast, Fr. Zuhlsdorf reads my LifeSite article on the difference between Pius X's portrayal of "active participation" (of the laity in the liturgy) and Vatican II's portrayal of it. Pius X makes participation relative to the objective splendor of the liturgy; Vatican II makes participation the be-all and end-all value that trumps all others. We discover that so much of what has gone wrong in liturgical reform stems from this deviation. Along the way, Fr. Z adds his usual insightful commentary.

How Vatican II Inverted Pius X's Teaching on Active Participation

Honking geese, Byzantine chariot racing, and a rousing discussion of the deep and essential connection between the liturgy and the common good — in this episode of the Josias podcast, your hosts Pater Edmund Waldstein and Joel Feil are joined by Jonathan Culbreath and Peter Kwasniewski. Along the way, they discuss the liturgy as focal point for the common good in the church and in secular society, public versus private devotion, and compare Charles de Koninck’s defense of the common good against personalists and totalitarians with Erik Peterson and Romano Guardini’s defense of the liturgy against certain members of the liturgical reform movement.

Liturgy and the Common Good: A Discussion

The intrepid Br. Andre-Marie of the Reconquest show interviews Dr. Kwasniewski on the occasion of his new book, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass (Angelico Press, 2020). Some topics covered:

• The Mass is not a reenactment of the Last Supper, which is a Protestant view of Christian worship; it is first and foremost and essentially a sacrifice, which is also a sacred banquet
• The Latin tradition developed a “sonic iconostasis” in three elements: the continued use of Latin; the singing of Gregorian Chant; the prominence of silence
• “Actual participation” vs. “activist participation”
• Why it's good that the TLM is “steep, craggy, and sublime”; how it reminds us of our creaturely dependency and humbles us so that we may be lifted up to God by grace
• How children benefit from the TLM in what it shows and what it does not show
• The formative power of our traditional rites and the importance of avoiding “little doses of poison” from the modern rites

CRUSADE Channel Radio

The Genius and Timeliness of the TLM: An Interview

This lecture was delivered at Prince of Peace Catholic Community in Houston, TX, on November 23, 2019. In it, I explain what is meant by "participation" in the Mass and then explain how the "Extraordinary Form" of the Roman Rite (the traditional Latin Mass) actually fosters a fuller and more perfect participation than its modern replacement. 

The liturgical reform put the laity's participation above everything else, but ironically, by not letting the focus remain on the primacy of the action of Christ the High Priest and the higher human faculties, it ended up producing a liturgy that works against, rather than in favor of, the transformation of the believer in(to) Christ. The Tridentine Mass, in contrast, has a multitude of ways of drawing us in and plunging us deeply into the mystery.

This lecture became, in a rewritten form, chapter 3 of my book "Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass." The book is available from Amazon and its affiliates: https://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-Our-Roman-Catholic-Birthright/dp/1621385353

"Active Participation": What It Means and Why the Latin Mass Better Supports It

Dr. Thomas Curran of My Catholic Faith Ministries and Sound Insight (https://mycatholicfaith.org/) interviews Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, prompted by his book "Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass." Dr. Curran wants to understand: "Why is this Mass so effective at communicating and supporting the Catholic Faith? Why do we need it in the Church today, right now, and everywhere?" Join us for an invigorating and wide-ranging conversation.

“Why the Latin Mass Is the Answer to the Church’s Crisis of Faith”

I gave this lecture on Wednesday, September 23, 2020, at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio. The purpose of my talk is not to critique the charismatic movement but to show how the things valued by members of that movement are found plentifully and profoundly in the traditional liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church, especially the Tridentine Mass. It is an invitation to reconnect with the fullness of our heritage. Will be appreciated also by those who have no connection to the charismatic movement.

Why Charismatic Catholics Should Love the Traditional Latin Mass

If we want to overcome the impoverished state of liturgical discourse, which results from focusing on only two categories (validity and licitness) and arrive at a fuller, more accurate picture, we must also consider fittingness and authenticity/legitimacy, which are two other irreducibly distinct perfections of liturgy. 

A lecture given at Queen of Peace Parish in Patton, Pennsylvania, on September 21, 2020.

Video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esmjGfT24Ew

The full text, including a chart, may be found here:
https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-four-qualities-of-liturgy-validity.html

or here:
http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2020/11/the-four-qualities-of-liturgy-validity.html

On the Four Qualities of the Liturgy: Validity, Licitness, Fittingness, and Authenticity

T. S. Flanders discusses with Peter Kwasniewski the need for, and the meaning of, a "Crusade of Eucharistic Reparation" as described in the doctor's newest book: "The Holy Bread of Eternal Life: Restoring Eucharistic Reverence in an Age of Impiety" from Sophia Institute Press (https://www.sophiainstitute.com/HolyBread). In their hour-long conversation much ground is covered, theological, liturgical, devotional. At the conclusion, Dr. Kwasniewski reads Bishop Schneider's "Prayer of the Crusade of Reparation to the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus."

Crusade of Eucharistic Reparation: Timothy Flanders Interviews Dr. Kwasniewski

In a 15-minute fast-moving segment of the show "Having Read That," Brian Vakulskas interviews Dr. Kwasniewski about points that arose from reading his new book "The Holy Bread of Eternal Life" (Sophia Institute Press). It's amazing how much material can be covered in this racquetball format!

First aired on KSCJ Radio (1360AM/94.9FM Sioux City, Iowa).

Essential Eucharistic Points in 15 Minutes

Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J., invited me once more to be a guest on his radio program The Catholic Current, broadcast on The Station of the Cross. Our conversation ranged over many controversial topics in the Church today.

Heaven's Greatest Gift

Br. Andre Marie invited me once again to be a guest on his Reconquest program (this is episode 258). This time we talk about questions prompted by my new book with Sophia Institute Press.

Restoring Eucharistic Reverence in an Age of Impiety

Dr. Peter Kwasniewski is a Catholic theologian and philosopher, composer of sacred music, writer, blogger, editor, publisher, and public speaker.

Peter Kwasniewski

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