Close the Workshop

The Mass of Paul VI is so deeply flawed that it cannot be repaired from within, whether by copious helpings of smells and bells, by arbitrary attempts at traditionalizing, or by an official “reform of the reform”; and the Roman Mass inherited from the Age of Faith did not (and does not) need to be “reformed” along antiquarian or pastoral-utilitarian lines, as it fulfills the highest act of religion in a fitting manner perfected over many centuries of prayerful practice. The liturgical revolution, driven by ideology, culminated in balkanization, banality, and boredom; its fabrications must be retired from use, and the traditional rite must be restored to its rightful place of honor in the Church of the Latin rite.

Such are the bold claims defended in Close the Workshop: Why the Old Mass Isn’t Broken and the New Mass Can’t Be Fixed, in which Peter Kwasniewski refutes the reformers’ own case for reforming the old rite and illustrates the subtle dangers to which clergy and laity are exposed by attempts at “doing the new rite reverently.” Simultaneously he reminds traditionalists that they should aspire to the noblest possible celebration of the Mass, always faithfully observing the rubrics and resisting bad habits that interfere with the rite’s full splendor and efficacy: unseemly haste, minimalism, ineptitude, and the itch for pastoral experimentation.

If the Catholic Church in the West is ever to recover her internal soundness and external cultural influence, her shepherds and her flocks must let the ill-advised Council of the 1960s and the Bauhaus liturgy cobbled together in its name lapse into obsolescence, so that the perennially fresh theology of the Council of Trent and the immortally beautiful liturgy of the Roman Church may once again flourish unfettered.

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