Conciliarism: The False Faith of the Spiritually Dead

The late and entirely unlamented demon named Jorge Mario Bergoglio may have died one hundred forty-three days ago but his unremitting warfare against Catholic Faith, Worship, Morals, and Tradition lives on within the conciliar sect, and there are none so committed to perpetuate the late Argentine Apostate’s warfare against his traditionalists straw men than his own hand-picked choice to continue the lavender legacy of the theologically and morally corrupt Joseph Bernardin, Blase Cupich.

Cupich’s most recent screed against traditionalism, which he distinguished from “tradition,” came in his column in the September 3, 2025, edition of the Chicago Catholic. I will interject at various points before providing some additional commentary to this gratuitous attack upon the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church:

The late Jaroslav Pelikan, a historian of Christianity, made an important distinction that is helpful to remember: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”

Interjection Number One:

Who is Jaroslav Pelikan?

Well, he was born in the United States of American to Lutheran Slovakian parents and became noted for his alleged works on Christian history during his time teaching at the notoriously anti-Catholic Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, which used to be the heart of old-fashioned White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. Pelikan later converted to Orthodox Church of America after meeting with none other than Karol Jozef Wojtyla/John Paul II in 1988. You cannot make this stuff up.

Jarsolav Pelikan’s false effort to create a dichotomy between Catholic Tradition and traditionalist Catholics stands in contrast to the pronouncement of the Third Council of Constantinople, which met under the infallible guidance of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, the Constitution of the Holy Faith issued by the [First] Vatican Council, and the words of Pope Saint Pius X:

These firings, therefore, with all diligence and care having been formulated by us, we define that it be permitted to no one to bring forward, or to write, or to compose, or to think, or to teach a different faith. Whosoever shall presume to compose a different faith, or to propose, or teach, or hand to those wishing to be converted to the knowledge of the truth, from the Gentiles or Jews, or from any heresy, any different Creed; or to introduce a new voice or invention of speech to subvert these things which now have been determined by us, all these, if they be Bishops or clerics let them be deposed, the Bishops from the Episcopate, the clerics from the clergy; but if they be monks or laymen: let them be anathematized. (Sixth Ecumenical: Constantinople III).

For the doctrine of the faith which God has revealed is put forward not as some philosophical discovery capable of being perfected by human intelligence, but as a divine deposit committed to the spouse of Christ to be faithfully protected and infallibly promulgated.

Hence, too, that meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by holy mother church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding.

God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever be in opposition to truth.

The appearance of this kind of specious contradiction is chiefly due to the fact that either: the dogmas of faith are not understood and explained in accordance with the mind of the church, or unsound views are mistaken for the conclusions of reason.

Therefore we define that every assertion contrary to the truth of enlightened faith is totally false. . . .

3. If anyone says that it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by the church which is different from that which the church has understood and understands: let him be anathema.

And so in the performance of our supreme pastoral office, we beseech for the love of Jesus Christ and we command, by the authority of him who is also our God and saviour, all faithful Christians, especially those in authority or who have the duty of teaching, that they contribute their zeal and labour to the warding off and elimination of these errors from the church and to the spreading of the light of the pure faith.

But since it is not enough to avoid the contamination of heresy unless those errors are carefully shunned which approach it in greater or less degree, we warn all of their duty to observe the constitutions and decrees in which such wrong opinions, though not expressly mentioned in this document, have been banned and forbidden by this holy see. (Pope Pius IX, Vatican Council, Session III, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, Chapter 4, On Faith and Reason, April 24, 1870. SESSION 3 : 24 April 1870.)

They [the Modernists] exercise all their ingenuity in an effort to weaken the force and falsify the character of tradition, so as to rob it of all its weight and authority. But for Catholics nothing will remove the authority of the second Council of Nicea, where it condemns those "who dare, after the impious fashion of heretics, to deride the ecclesiastical traditions, to invent novelties of some kind...or endeavor by malice or craft to overthrow any one of the legitimate traditions of the Catholic Church"; nor that of the declaration of the fourth Council of Constantinople: "We therefore profess to preserve and guard the rules bequeathed to the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, by the Holy and most illustrious Apostles, by the orthodox Councils, both general and local, and by everyone of those divine interpreters, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church." Wherefore the Roman Pontiffs, Pius IV and Pius IX, ordered the insertion in the profession of faith of the following declaration: "I most firmly admit and embrace the apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions and other observances and constitutions of the Church.'' (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

Fourthly, I sincerely hold that the doctrine of faith was handed down to us from the apostles through the orthodox Fathers in exactly the same meaning and always in the same purport. Therefore, I entirely reject the heretical' misrepresentation that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously. . . . The purpose of this is, then, not that dogma may be tailored according to what seems better and more suited to the culture of each age; rather, that the absolute and immutable truth preached by the apostles from the beginning may never be believed to be different, may never be understood in a

So much for Jaroslav Pelikan.

The next part of Blase Cupich’s screed repeated the old, disproven Modernist canards about John Henry Cardinal Newman and Saint Vincent Lerins being forerunners of the “Second” Vatican Council’s supposed development of doctrine:

That quote [Pelikan’s] came to mind as I reflected on the recent decision of Pope Leo to declare Cardinal John Henry Newman a doctor of the church. A key factor in his decision to join the Catholic Church was his understanding of the development of doctrine. He observed that while Protestants readily accepted some doctrines that developed over time, such as the Trinity and the divinity and humanity of Christ, they were inconsistent in rejecting the analogous developmental history of other Catholic doctrines, such as purgatory and those related to Our Lady.

Interjection Number Two:

Mr. Mario Derksen dispatched this Modernist canard in a post last month on Novus Ordo Watch,

Was Cardinal John Henry Newman a Modernist?

Cupich then went on to repeat Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s and Robert Francis Prevost/Leo XIV’s abject misrepresentation of the teaching of Saint Vincent Lerins concerning the development of doctrine:

This understanding of the development of doctrine has a rich history in the life of the church. St. Vincent of Lérins, a fifth century monk, compared the maturation of the human form to the development of doctrine. He observed that “the tiny members of unweaned children and the grown members of young men are still the same members. Men have the same number of limbs as children. Whatever develops at a later age was already present in seminal form; there is nothing new in old age that was not already latent in childhood.” Likewise, “the doctrine of the Christian religion should properly follow these laws of development, that is, by becoming firmer over the years, more ample in the course of time, more exalted as it advances in age.”

At the same time, St. Vincent wrote, “If the human form were to turn into some shape that did not belong to its own nature, or even if something were added to the sum of its members or subtracted from it, the whole body would necessarily perish or become grotesque or at least be enfeebled. In the same way, the doctrine of the Christian religion should properly follow these laws of development, that is, by becoming firmer over the years, more ample in the course of time, more exalted as it advances in age.”

Newman’s writing on the development of doctrine greatly influenced the bishops as they addressed it in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation. In paragraph 8 they wrote: “There is a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down. This happens through the contemplation and study made by believers, who treasure these things in their hearts (see Luke 2:19, 51) through a penetrating understanding of the spiritual realities which they experience, and through the preaching of those who have received through Episcopal Succession the sure gift of truth.”

Interjection Number Four:

Those who defect from the immutable teaching of the Catholic Faith do not have Apostolic Succession derived from sacramentally invalid and liturgical barren rites devised in a synthetic manner by Modernists. The Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus liturgical abomination is the liturgical expression of a false religion, something that Monsignor Klaus Gamber, not a traditionalist himself, noted in The Reform of the Roman Liturgy:

Not only is the Novus Ordo Missae of 1969 a change of the liturgical rite, but that change also involved a rearrangement of the liturgical year, including changes in the assignment of feast days for the saints. To add or drop one or the other of these feast days, as had been done before, certainly does not constitute a change of the rite, per se. But the countless innovations introduced as part of liturgical reform have left hardly any of the traditional liturgical forms intact . . .

At this critical juncture, the traditional Roman rite, more than one thousand years old and until now the heart of the Church, was destroyed. A closer examination reveals that the Roman rite was not perfect, and that some elements of value had atrophied over the centuries. Yet, through all the periods of the unrest that again and again shook the Church to her foundations, the Roman rite always remained the rock, the secure home of faith and piety. . . .

Was all this really done because of a pastoral concern about the souls of the faithful, or did it not rather represent a radical breach with the traditional rite, to prevent the further use of traditional liturgical texts and thus to make the celebration of the "Tridentime Mass" impossible--because it no loner reflected the new spirit moving through the Church?

Indeed, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the prohibition of the traditional rite was announced at the same time as the introduction of the new liturgical texts; and that a dispensation to continue celebrating the Mass according to the traditional rite was granted only to older priests.

Obviously, the reformers wanted a completely new liturgy, a liturgy that differed from the traditional one in spirit as well as in form; and in no way a liturgy that represented what the Council Fathers had envisioned, i.e., a liturgy that would meet the pastoral needs of the faithful.

Liturgy and faith are interdependent. That is why a new rite was created, a rite that in many ways reflects the bias of the new (modernist) theology. The traditional liturgy simply could not be allowed to exist in its established form because it was permeated with the truths of the traditional faith and the ancient forms of piety. For this reason alone, much was abolished and new rites, prayers and hymns were introduced, as were the new readings from Scripture, which conveniently left out those passages that did not square with the teachings of modern theology--for example, references to a God who judges and punishes.

At the same time, the priests and the faithful are told that the new liturgy created after the Second Vatican Council is identical in essence with the liturgy that has been in use in the Catholic Church up to this point, and that the only changes introduced involved reviving some earlier liturgical forms and removing a few duplications, but above all getting rid of elements of no particular interest.

Most priests accepted these assurances about the continuity of liturgical forms of worship and accepted the new rite with the same unquestioning obedience with which they had accepted the minor ritual changes introduced by Rome from time to time in the past, changes beginning with the reform of the Divine Office and of the liturgical chant introduced by Pope St. Pius X.

Following this strategy, the groups pushing for reform were able to take advantage of and at the same time abuse the sense of obedience among the older priests, and the common good will of the majority of the faithful, while, in many cases, they themselves refused to obey. . . .

The real destruction of the traditional Mass, of the traditional Roman rite with a history of more than one thousand years, is the wholesale destruction of the faith on which it was based, a faith that had been the source of our piety and of our courage to bear witness to Christ and His Church, the inspiration of countless Catholics over many centuries. Will someone, some day, be able to say the same thing about the new Mass? (Monsignor Klaus Gamber, The Reform of the Roman Liturgy, p. 39, p. 99, pp. 100-102.)

Monsignor Klaus Gamber was not an ideologue. He was a honest liturgical scholar who saw the harm represented by the Novus Ordo and saw it as his duty to point out the simple fact that it was based upon a rejection of the Catholic Faith, which is why the like of the late Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his stooge, Blase Cupich, have been hellbent on stopping the movement of young people to what they believe to be the Immemorial Mass of Tradition as he cannot abide yet another generation of young Catholics within his conciliar structures having what they think is an “attachment to the past” rather than an acceptance of the “reformed liturgy” as responsive to the “promptings of the “holy spirit,” who blows with the wind and accommodates Faith, Worship, and Morals to the alleged “needs” of times.

I will have a bit more about Cupich’s attack on the Immemorial Mass of Tradition a bit later in this commentary.

Now, let me correct, for the umpteenth gazillion time, the conciliar misrepresentation of the teaching of Saint Vincent Lerins about the development of doctrine by quoting the Saint directly:

[56.] In like manner, it behooves Christian doctrine to follow the same laws of progress, so as to be consolidated by years, enlarged by time, refined by age, and yet, withal, to continue uncorrupt and unadulterate, complete and perfect in all the measurement of its parts, and, so to speak, in all its proper members and senses, admitting no change, no waste of its distinctive property, no variation in its limits.

[57.] For example: Our forefathers in the old time sowed wheat in the Church's field. It would be most unmeet and iniquitous if we, their descendants, instead of the genuine truth of grain, should reap the counterfeit error of tares. This rather should be the result—there should be no discrepancy between the first and the last. From doctrine which was sown as wheat, we should reap, in the increase, doctrine of the same kind— wheat also; so that when in process of time any of the original seed is developed, and now flourishes under cultivation, no change may ensue in the character of the plant. There may supervene shape, form, variation in outward appearance, but the nature of each kind must remain the same. God forbid that those rose-beds of Catholic interpretation should be converted into thorns and thistles. God forbid that in that spiritual paradise from plants of cinnamon and balsam, darnel and wolfsbane should of a sudden shoot forth.

Therefore, whatever has been sown by the fidelity of the Fathers in this husbandry of God's Church, the same ought to be cultivated and taken care of by the industry of their children, the same ought to flourish and ripen, the same ought to advance and go forward to perfection. For it is right that those ancient doctrines of heavenly philosophy should, as time goes on, be cared for, smoothed, polished; but not that they should be changed, not that they should be maimed, not that they should be mutilated. They may receive proof, illustration, definiteness; but they must retain withal their completeness, their integrity, their characteristic properties.

[58.] For if once this license of impious fraud be admitted, I dread to say in how great danger religion will be of being utterly destroyed and annihilated. For if any one part of Catholic truth be given up, another, and another, and another will thenceforward be given up as a matter of course, and the several individual portions having been rejected, what will follow in the end but the rejection of the whole? On the other hand, if what is new begins to be mingled with what is old, foreign with domestic, profane with sacred, the custom will of necessity creep on universally, till at last the Church will have nothing left untampered with, nothing unadulterated, nothing sound, nothing pure; but where formerly there was a sanctuary of chaste and undefiled truth, thenceforward there will be a brothel of impious and base errors. May God's mercy avert this wickedness from the minds of his servants; be it rather the frenzy of the ungodly. (Commonitorium, by Saint Vincent of Lerins.)

Far from proving what Blase Cupich desires, the full passage that follows text he cited, as found in the Novus Ordo breviary, contradicts him entirely and condemns everything that he, Bergoglio/Francis contended in his interview was true and necessary.

Saint Vincent of Lerins also stated in the Commonitorium that we must avoid all profane novelties of words, drawing upon the very words of Saint Paul the Apostle to Saint Timothy, which were, after all, written under the divine inspiration of God the Holy Ghost:

[60.] But let us return to the apostle. "O Timothy," he says, "Guard the deposit, shunning profane novelties of words." "Shun them as you would a viper, as you would a scorpion, as you would a basilisk, lest they smite you not only with their touch, but even with their eyes and breath." What is "to shun"? Not even to eat 1 Corinthians 5:11 with a person of this sort. What is "shun"? "If anyone," says St. John, come to you and bring not this doctrine. What doctrine? What but the Catholic and universal doctrine, which has continued one and the same through the several successions of ages by the uncorrupt tradition of the truth and so will continue for ever— "Receive him not into your house, neither bid him Godspeed, for he that bids him Godspeed communicates with him in his evil deeds." 2 John 10

[61.] "Profane novelties of words." What words are these? Such as have nothing sacred, nothing religious, words utterly remote from the inmost sanctuary of the Church which is the temple of God. Profane novelties of words, that is, of doctrines, subjects, opinions, such as are contrary to antiquity and the faith of the olden time. Which if they be received, it follows necessarily that the faith of the blessed fathers is violated either in whole, or at all events in great part; it follows necessarily that all the faithful of all ages, all the saints, the chaste, the continent, the virgins, all the clergy, Deacons and Priests, so many thousands of Confessors, so vast an army of martyrs, such multitudes of cities and of peoples, so many islands, provinces, kings, tribes, kingdoms, nations, in a word, almost the whole earth, incorporated in Christ the Head, through the Catholic faith, have been ignorant for so long a tract of time, have been mistaken, have blasphemed, have not known what to believe, what to confess.

[62.] "Shun profane novelties of words," which to receive and follow was never the part of Catholics; of heretics always was. In truth, what heresy ever burst forth save under a definite name, at a definite place, at a definite time? Who ever originated a heresy that did not first dissever himself from the consentient agreement of the universality and antiquity of the Catholic Church? That this is so is demonstrated in the clearest way by examples. For who ever before that profane Pelagius attributed so much antecedent strength to Free-will, as to deny the necessity of God's grace to aid it towards good in every single act? Who ever before his monstrous disciple Cœlestius denied that the whole human race is involved in the guilt of Adam's sin? Who ever before sacrilegious Arius dared to rend asunder the unity of the Trinity? Who before impious Sabellius was so audacious as to confound the Trinity of the Unity? Who before cruellest Novatian represented God as cruel in that He had rather the wicked should die than that he should be converted and live? Who before Simon Magus, who was smitten by the apostle's rebuke, and from whom that ancient sink of every thing vile has flowed by a secret continuous succession even to Priscillian of our own time,— who, I say, before this Simon Magus, dared to say that God, the Creator, is the author of evil, that is, of our wickednesses, impieties, flagitiousnesses, inasmuch as he asserts that He created with His own hands a human nature of such a description, that of its own motion, and by the impulse of its necessity-constrained will, it can do nothing else, can will nothing else, but sin, seeing that tossed to and fro, and set on fire by the furies of all sorts of vices, it is hurried away by unquenchable lust into the utmost extremes of baseness?

[63.] There are innumerable instances of this kind, which for brevity's sake, pass over; by all of which, however, it is manifestly and clearly shown, that it is an established law, in the case of almost all heresies, that they evermore delight in profane novelties, scorn the decisions of antiquity, and, through oppositions of science falsely so called, make shipwreck of the faith. On the other hand, it is the sure characteristic of Catholics to keep that which has been committed to their trust by the holy Fathers, to condemn profane novelties, and, in the apostle's words, once and again repeated, to anathematize every one who preaches any other doctrine than that which has been received. (Commonitorium, by Saint Vincent of Lerins.)

This should sufficiently prove that Blase Cupich completely misrepresented the teaching of Saint Vincent of Lerins, which was only simply a reiteration of the consistent teaching of the Catholic Church, thus corrupting it for the purposes of seeking to justify the unjustifiable and to defend the indefensible, the false religion of conciliarism.

Finally, we turn now to Blase the Lavender Envirofascist Friend of Big Phama and Deep State Cupich’s tired, old cliches in defense of the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical travesty:

I am convinced that the bishops approached the reform of the liturgy as an exercise in taking responsibility for the correct development of church teaching as manifest in the way we worship. In many ways, the reform was a recovery of truths of the faith, which over time were obscured by a series of adaptations and influences that reflected the church’s expanding relationship with secular power and society.

Interjection Number Five:

In other words, every single pope was wrong offered a liturgy that obscured the truths of the faith.

Every single canonized bishop and priest who offered the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church obscure the truths of the Catholic Faith.

Every single canonized religious must have become holy in spite of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition.

Pope Saint Gregory the Great himself must have participated in obscuring the truths of the Catholic Faith when by rearranging the Communicantes and Hanc igitur in the Canon of the Mass that goes back to the Apostles themselves in all of its essential elements:

St. Gregory the Great became Pope in 590 and reigned until 604. His achievements during those fourteen years almost defy credibility. Prominent among the many important reforms that he undertook was that of the liturgy. His pontificate marks an epoch in the history of the Roman Mass, which, in every important respect he left in the state that we still have it. He collected the Sacramentary of Gelasius into one book, leaving out much but changing little. What we now refer to as The Gregorian Sacramentary cannot be ascribed to the Pope himself as, apart from other evidence, it contains a Mass for his feast, but it is certainly based upon his reform of the liturgy and includes some material composed by him.

The keynote of the reform of St. Gregory was fidelity to the traditions that had been handed down [the root meaning of the Latin word traditio is to hand over or hand down]. His reform consisted principally of the simplification and more orderly arrangement of the existing rite-----the reduction of the variable prayers at each Mass to three [Collect, Secret, and Postcommunion], and a reduction of the variations occurring at that time within the Canon, prefaces and additional forms for the Communicantes and Hanc Igitur. These variations can still be found on a very few occasions such as Christmas and Easter. His principal work was certainly the definitive arrangement of the Roman Canon. The Lectionary was also given a definitive form, but was still to undergo considerable change subsequently. The Order of Mass as found in the 1570 Missal of St. Pius [1566-1572], apart from minor additions and amplifications, corresponds very closely with the order established by St. Gregory. It is also to this great Pope that we owe, to a large extent, the codification of the incomparable chant that bears his name. (Michael Davies, A Short History of the Roman Mass.)

According to Blase Cupich, Father Adrian Fortescue must have been wrong when he praised the stability of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church as follows:

Essentially, the Missal of Pius V is the Gregorian Sacramentary; that again is formed from the Gelasian book, which depends upon the Leonine collection. We find prayers of our Canon in the treatise de Sacramentis and allusions to it in the [Fourth] Century. So the Mass goes back, without essential change, to the age when it first developed out of the oldest Liturgy of all. It is still redolent of that Liturgy, of the days when Caesar ruled the world, and thought he could stamp out the Faith of Christ, when our fathers met together before dawn and sang a hymn to Christ as God. The final result of our enquiry is that, in spite of some unresolved problems, in spite of later changes there is not in Christendom another rite so venerable as ours. (Michael Davies, ed., The Wisdom of Adrian Fortescue)

There was no “earlier liturgy” that resembled the Novus Ordo service, which was the synthetic, manufactured product that even Joseph Alois Ratzinger once termed a “banal, on the spot” creation that grew organically out of nothing and did not represent a return to some “mythical” past. Cupich’s claim that the supposedly “reformed liturgy” recaptured the “past” is nothing other than the sort of Jansenist antiquarianism condemned by Pope Pius VI in Auctorem Fidei, August 28, 1794, as was noted by Pope Pius XII in Mediator Dei, November 20, 1947:

The same reasoning holds in the case of some persons who are bent on the restoration of all the ancient rites and ceremonies indiscriminately. The liturgy of the early ages is most certainly worthy of all veneration. But ancient usage must not be esteemed more suitable and proper, either in its own right or in its significance for later times and new situations, on the simple ground that it carries the savor and aroma of antiquity. The more recent liturgical rites likewise deserve reverence and respect. They, too, owe their inspiration to the Holy Spirit, who assists the Church in every age even to the consummation of the world. [52] They are equally the resources used by the majestic Spouse of Jesus Christ to promote and procure the sanctity of man.

Assuredly it is a wise and most laudable thing to return in spirit and affection to the sources of the sacred liturgy. For research in this field of study, by tracing it back to its origins, contributes valuable assistance towards a more thorough and careful investigation of the significance of feast-days, and of the meaning of the texts and sacred ceremonies employed on their occasion. But it is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device. Thus, to cite some instances, one would be straying from the straight path were he to wish the altar restored to its primitive table form; were he to want black excluded as a color for the liturgical vestments; were he to forbid the use of sacred images and statues in Churches; were he to order the crucifix so designed that the divine Redeemer's body shows no trace of His cruel sufferings; and lastly were he to disdain and reject polyphonic music or singing in parts, even where it conforms to regulations issued by the Holy See.

Clearly no sincere Catholic can refuse to accept the formulation of Christian doctrine more recently elaborated and proclaimed as dogmas by the Church, under the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit with abundant fruit for souls, because it pleases him to hark back to the old formulas. No more can any Catholic in his right senses repudiate existing legislation of the Church to revert to prescriptions based on the earliest sources of canon law. Just as obviously unwise and mistaken is the zeal of one who in matters liturgical would go back to the rites and usage of antiquity, discarding the new patterns introduced by disposition of divine Providence to meet the changes of circumstances and situation.

This way of acting bids fair to revive the exaggerated and senseless antiquarianism to which the illegal Council of Pistoia gave rise. It likewise attempts to reinstate a series of errors which were responsible for the calling of that meeting as well as for those resulting from it, with grievous harm to souls, and which the Church, the ever watchful guardian of the "deposit of faith" committed to her charge by her divine Founder, had every right and reason to condemn.[53] For perverse designs and ventures of this sort tend to paralyze and weaken that process of sanctification by which the sacred liturgy directs the sons of adoption to their Heavenly Father of their souls' salvation. (Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei, November 20, 1947.)

It must be remembered, therefore, that the appeal to "antiquity" by the Catholic leaders of the "Liturgical Movement" throughout the Twentieth Century sought to make the antiquarian claims of the Protestant Revolutionaries "respectable" in the eyes of the hierarchy and thus serve as the foundation for what was claimed to be a "much needed" reform of the Sacred Liturgy, and the conciliar revolutionaries care not for the sanctification and salvation of souls but for the what they claim is a “communal” and not a “clerical” liturgy.

Here are Blase Cupich’s own words in the final part of his column:

Particularly prominent during the Carolingian (seventh to ninth centuries) and baroque (17th to 18th centuries) periods, many adaptations were inserted in the liturgy that incorporated elements from imperial and royal courts, transforming the liturgy’s aesthetics and meaning. The liturgy then became more of a spectacle rather than the active participation of all the baptized in the saving action of Christ crucified.

One could easily read the bishops’ Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, “Sacrosanctum Concilium,” as a correction of these Carolingian and baroque liturgical adaptations through a restoration of the liturgy’s original emphasis on active participation by the laity and a noble simplicity. These reforms were a direct response to the centuries of development that erroneously had transformed the Mass from a communal event into a more clerical, complex and dramatic spectacle.

What is at stake in accepting the liturgical reforms of the council, then, is our very understanding of what it means to be a church of tradition. On his flight back from Canada in 2022, Pope Francis observed that: “A church that does not develop its thinking in an ecclesial sense is a church that is going backward. This is today’s problem, and of many who call themselves traditional. No, no, they are not traditional, they are people looking to the past, going backward.”

In a word, the true understanding of Catholic tradition provides the church with the capacity to witness to the Gospel in new contexts. True reform is the church’s way of going deeper into the tradition in order to move forward.

Indeed, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” (Tradition vs. traditionalism - Cardinal Blase J. Cupich.)

The Roman Rite of the Catholic Church has not been reformed many times.

Pope Saint Pius V enshrined the Mass of the Roman Curia for universal use in Quo Primum in 1570 to standardize the offering of Holy Mass as there were various regional and/or local variations. He specifically forbade the use of rites that less than two hundred years old to place those rites beyond the “innovations” of the likes of John Hus and Martin Luther that inspired some Catholics to adapt in various ways for their own purposes without any authorization to do so. However, the Missale Romanum of Pope Saint Pius V was such a fitting expression of the universal experience of the Latin Rite of the preceding one thousand years that even the bishops in most of the places that could prove local usage prior to 1370 chose to use it.

While it is true that Pope Saint Pius X and Pope Pius XII made their own changes, none of these resembled the creation of a synthetic liturgy, noting as was done in the 2021 edition G.I.R.M. Warfare: The Conciliar Church's Unremitting Warfare Against Catholic Faith and Worship that the changes authorized by Pope Pius XII were a matter of great contention at the time but nevertheless contained nothing heretical and nothing that detracted from the expression of the Holy Faith in the proper collects of Holy Mass (see the anti-sedevacantist Dr. Carol Byrne’s discussion found of these changes at: 1951-1955: The Vatican Started the Liturgical Reform. One can follow the rest of her series from thereon. See also Pre-“Second Vatican Council” Liturgical Changes: Road to the Conciliar liturgy and Liturgical Revolution.)

As a true revolutionary, Blase Cupich must contend that the “past” was “bad” and that, after over 1500 a liturgy was created that dispensed with the past’s “errors” that stifled the liturgical rites and killed the spirit of Catholics in the process.

Alas, the conciliar mania for “full, conscious, and active” participation in the liturgy implies that Catholics who assisted at the Immemorial Mass of Tradition were unconscious and inert, a contention that Pope Pius XII, mindful of the claims being made by liturgical revolutionaries in his own day, refuted in Mediator Dei, November 20, 1947:

Permit me a chance to explain by quoting directly from Mediator Dei:

24. But the chief element of divine worship must be interior. For we must always live in Christ and give ourselves to Him completely, so that in Him, with Him and through Him the heavenly Father may be duly glorified. The sacred liturgy requires, however, that both of these elements be intimately linked with each another. This recommendation the liturgy itself is careful to repeat, as often as it prescribes an exterior act of worship. Thus we are urged, when there is question of fasting, for example, “to give interior effect to our outward observance.”[28] Otherwise religion clearly amounts to mere formalism, without meaning and without content. You recall, Venerable Brethren, how the divine Master expels from the sacred temple, as unworthily to worship there, people who pretend to honor God with nothing but neat and wellturned phrases, like actors in a theater, and think themselves perfectly capable of working out their eternal salvation without plucking their inveterate vices from their hearts.[29] It is, therefore, the keen desire of the Church that all of the faithful kneel at the feet of the Redeemer to tell Him how much they venerate and love Him. She wants them present in crowds — like the children whose joyous cries accompanied His entry into Jerusalem — to sing their hymns and chant their song of praise and thanksgiving to Him who is King of Kings and Source of every blessing. She would have them move their lips in prayer, sometimes in petition, sometimes in joy and gratitude, and in this way experience His merciful aid and power like the apostles at the lakeside of Tiberias, or abandon themselves totally, like Peter on Mount Tabor, to mystic union with the eternal God in contemplation.

25. It is an error, consequently, and a mistake to think of the sacred liturgy as merely the outward or visible part of divine worship or as an ornamental ceremonial. No less erroneous is the notion that it consists solely in a list of laws and prescriptions according to which the ecclesiastical hierarchy orders the sacred rites to be performed.

26. It should be clear to all, then, that God cannot be honored worthily unless the mind and heart turn to Him in quest of the perfect life, and that the worship rendered to God by the Church in union with her divine Head is the most efficacious means of achieving sanctity. (Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei, November 20, 1947.)

Pope Pius XII did commend the efforts of those who produced missals to make the texts of the Mass easily accessible to the faithful, and he also noted that the faithful could join in the singing at High Masses. However, he also wrote that the absence of these accidentals do not detract in any way from the efficacy of a Mass offered validity by a true priest:

105. Therefore, they are to be praised who, with the idea of getting the Christian people to take part more easily and more fruitfully in the Mass, strive to make them familiar with the “Roman Missal,” so that the faithful, united with the priest, may pray together in the very words and sentiments of the Church. They also are to be commended who strive to make the liturgy even in an external way a sacred act in which all who are present may share. This can be done in more than one way, when, for instance, the whole congregation, in accordance with the rules of the liturgy, either answer the priest in an orderly and fitting manner, or sing hymns suitable to the different parts of the Mass, or do both, or finally in high Masses when they answer the prayers of the minister of Jesus Christ and also sing the liturgical chant.

100. These methods of participation in the Mass are to be approved and recommended when they are in complete agreement with the precepts of the Church and the rubrics of the liturgy. Their chief aim is to foster and promote the people’s piety and intimate union with Christ and His visible minister and to arouse those internal sentiments and dispositions which should make our hearts become like to that of the High Priest of the New Testament. However, though they show also in an outward manner that the very nature of the sacrifice, as offered by the Mediator between God and men,[102] must be regarded as the act of the whole Mystical Body of Christ, still they are by no means necessary to constitute it a public act or to give it a social character. And besides, a “dialogue” Mass of this kind cannot replace the high Mass, which, as a matter of fact, though it should be offered with only the sacred ministers present, possesses its own special dignity due to the impressive character of its ritual and the magnificence of its ceremonies. The splendor and grandeur of a high Mass, however, are very much increased if, as the Church desires, the people are present in great numbers and with devotion.

107. It is to be observed, also, that they have strayed from the path of truth and right reason who, led away by false opinions, make so much of these accidentals as to presume to assert that without them the Mass cannot fulfill its appointed end. (Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei, November 20. 1947.)

The conciliar revolutionaries have made the accidentals essential to the “fullness” of the liturgy.

The mania for activity, a total rejection of the true concept of active participation found in Pope Pius XII's Mediator Dei, has resulted in the replacement of true interior participation with mindless activity and verbosity, all of which detract from the nature of the Mass, turning what purports, albeit falsely, to be the Sacred Mysteries into an anthropocentric, communitarian exercise of mutual self-congratulations.

The participation of the lay faithful in the end of Petition found in the Mass requires them to be recollect before Mass, to spend time in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, to pray some of the wonderful prayers found in the various Latin-English hand missals, many of which have been reprinted in recent years. True participation in the Mass requires us to follow the Mass carefully, meditating upon the beauty of the prayers, some of which have been cited in this commentary. The Mass is ever ancient, ever new. Its fixed nature conveys the inestimable treasures contained in all its rites and prayers.

There is constant food for thought, no matter how many times we have celebrated a particular feast day or have heard a particular reading. And just as it is the case that honor and glory are added to God and grace is added to the world each time a priest celebrates Holy Mass, so is it also the case that our prayerful, interior participation in Mass (and the prayers we offer therein, as well as those we offer before and afterward) helps to build up the Mystical Body of Christ. Each ligament in the Mystical Body helps to support each other, as Saint Paul noted.

None of us in the laity knows the efficacy of our prayers here in this vale of tears. But we are called to be faithful to our prayers, both the formulaic prayers found in the Mass and in Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary and our own mental prayer, the development of which is an important part of passing through the stages of spiritual perfection. It is the Mass which provides us the perfect framework to become more perfect lovers of the Blessed Trinity who are ever eager to serve Him in all aspects of our daily lives. Indeed, our very lives are meant to be offerings of praise and petition to God. That is why we are to be prepared for Holy Mass. For it is in the Mass that we are reminded day in and day out to conform everything about our very being to the standard of the Sacrifice of the Cross, which is re-presented before our very eyes in the greatest miracle we can ever behold in this mortal life.

Blase Cupich believes not one word of this as he believes that the Catholic liturgy—as well as everything else about the Catholic Faith—must be an expression of the “times” in which men live, not an act of solemn reverence for the Most Holy Trinity as the Sacrifice of the Holy Cross is perpetuated in an unbloody manner.

There must never be any compromise on matters of truth. None. There is nothing to "discuss" or, to use a term that has been popularized by the conciliar revolutionaries, "dialogue" about as truth is irreformable. Truth exists. Truth does not depend upon human acceptance for its binding force or validity. Truth is. Period. No compromises.

Anyone who can still claim after reading these quotes that he is not certain about the papal vacancy that has existed since the death of Pope Pius XII on October 9, 1958, has fallen prey to the Kantianism’s supposition of the impossibility of knowing anything for certain, a supposition that had been advanced by Michel de Montaigne during the Renaissance.

Pope Saint Pius X noted the following in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910, when condemning the errors of The Sillon that are at the foundation of the false faith of the spiritually dead that is conciliarism:

However, let not these priests be misled, in the maze of current opinions, by the miracles of a false Democracy. Let them not borrow from the Rhetoric of the worst enemies of the Church and of the people, the high-flown phrases, full of promises; which are as high-sounding as unattainable. Let them be convinced that the social question and social science did not arise only yesterday; that the Church and the State, at all times and in happy concert, have raised up fruitful organizations to this end; that the Church, which has never betrayed the happiness of the people by consenting to dubious alliances, does not have to free herself from the past; that all that is needed is to take up again, with the help of the true workers for a social restoration, the organisms which the Revolution shattered, and to adapt them, in the same Christian spirit that inspired them, to the new environment arising from the material development of today’s society. Indeed, the true friends of the people are neither revolutionaries, nor innovators: they are traditionalists. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

The fact that the conciliar “popes” have been imposters and that the conciliar church is a false religious sect might have been difficult to accept for a long time—and I certainly took a long time to see it!, but Bergoglio has made it easy. Real easy. All one has to do is to embrace the truth and thus to endure the slings and arrows of other Catholics and to suffer loss of human respect and massive humiliation. Isn’t truth worth such wonderful offerings to make to the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Blessed Trinity, as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

May each Rosary we pray every day help to plant a few seeds for the restoration of a true pope on the Throne of Saint Peter and thus of the right ordering of the Church Militant here on earth as the precondition to the establishment of right order in a world gone mad because of the errors of Modernity and Modernism, which has robbed Catholics of Sanctifying Grace and have robbed the world of a superabundance of the Actual Graces people need to live as befits redeemed creatures in perfect submission to Holy Mother Church in all that pertains to the good of souls.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, pray for us.

Appendix

On the Feast of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino

Today, Wednesday, September 10, 2025, is the Feast of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, a member of the Order of Saint Augustine, who lived most of his life in the Thirteenth Century and died in the year 1305. The readings in Matins in today’s Divine Office describe how Saint Nicholas of Tolentino was so impressed with a sermon on contempt of the world given by an Augustinian monk that he joined the order himself immediately thereafter:

This Nicholas is called Nicholas of Tolentino, because he lived in that town for most part of his life. He was born at St. Angelo, a place near Fermo, in the March of Ancona, about the year 1245. His parents were godly people, and in their desire to have children, vowed and made a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Nicholas at Bari, where they were assured of their wish, and therefore gave the name of Nicholas to the son whom they received. From his childhood the lad gave many good signs, but especially as regarded abstinence. In his seventh year, in imitation of his blessed name-sake, he began to fast upon several days in the week, which custom he always kept, and was content with only bread and water.

After he reached man's estate, he enlisted himself in the army of the clergy, and was preferred to a Canonry. One day he chanced to hear a sermon upon contempt of the world delivered by a preacher of the Order of Hermits of St. Augustine, and was so moved by it that he forthwith entered that Order. As a Friar he was most strictly observant of that way of life. He subdued his body with rough clothing, stripes, and an iron chain. He never ate meat, and seldom any relish to his meals. And he was a burning and shining light of love, lowliness, long-suffering, and all other graces.

He persisted in constant and earnest prayer, notwithstanding many troubles from the assaults of Satan, who sometimes even flogged him. Every night for six months before his death he heard Angels singing with such sweetness, that it was a fore-taste of the happiness of heaven, and he would often repeat the words of the Apostle I have a desire to depart and to be with Christ Phil. i. 23. Lastly, he foretold to his brethren the day of his death, which was the 10th day of September 1306. After his death also he was famous for miracles, and when due investigation had been made thereof, Pope Eugene IV enrolled his name among those of the Saints. (Matins, Divine Office, Feast of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, September 10.)

I don’t know about you, but I know I fall far from the spirit of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, and I am very much aware of how much I have offended God by means of my sins and thus of the need to make even more reparation for them than I am doing. To advance in sanctity, however, we must do more than we are doing, and the example of austerity and mortification practiced by Saint Nicholas of Tolentino should inspire us to increase our voluntary sacrifices and to accept the penances of the present moment with peace, tranquility, joy and thanksgiving.

Mindful that this is the third day of the Octave of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., wrote the following prayer in honor of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino:

Good and faithful servant, thou hast entered into the joy of the Lord. He has broken thy bonds; and from heaven, where thou art now reigning, thou repeatest to us those worlds which determined the sanctity of thy life on earth: ‘Love not the world, nor the things that are in the world. For the world passeth away, and the concupiscence thereof.’ How much a man thus forgetful of earth can do for his fellow-men is evinced by the gift thou didst receive of solacing all the miseries around thee, and succouring the souls in purgatory. The successor of St. Peter was not deceived, when, in ranking thee among the saints, he counted on thy power in heaven to bring back society from its long continued state of disturbance to the paths of peace. May that word of thy beloved disciple which thou has just echoed to us, sink into our souls as a seed of salvation, and there yield the fruits that it produced in thee: detachment from all temporal things and a longing for eternal realities; that humble simplicity of the soul’s eye which makes life a peaceful journey towards God; and lastly, that purity, which made thee the friend of angels and the favourite of Mary. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Volume 14, Time after Pentecost, Book V, pp. 186-187.)

We must remain at peace as we pray as many Rosary’s each day as our state-in-life permits as we pray for a true pope to be restored on the Throne of Saint Peter so that he can consecrate Russia collegially with all the world’s true bishops to Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart in fulfillment of Our Lady’s Fatima Message and thus restore a period of peace before the final battle that will take place between Christ the King and Antichrist.

Pray the Rosary daily!

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!