WHILE nominally Catholic colleges annually host stagings of the Vagina Monologue, invite homosexual and pro-abortion speakers to campus, treat the Democratic Party as the American Vatican, encourage feminism (both the radical and mainstream versions) and pursue cultural Marxism with such impunity that at least one survey has shown the obvious reality that students are much less likely to be Catholic by the time they graduate from a supposedly Catholic institution than they were when they entered, a small Texas institution trying  to swim against the tide and adhere to the faith has come under attack from the Vatican II hierarchy. This is truly a remarkable instance of hostility to Catholicism within the superstructure of the American Church.

The bishop of Fort Worth, Texas, the Most Rev. Michael Olson has stepped in (his letter is posted at Rorate Caeli and has been confirmed by the college) not to clamp down on abuses such as those above but to ban the Latin Mass at Fisher More College, which considers the Mass at the center of its academic mission, as every Catholic college should. The college has been struggling to survive and this action seems intended if not to destroy it altogether to change its entire mission. The Latin Mass, also known as the Extraordinary Form, is, with little deviation, the liturgy that was practiced by the Church from the fourth century until it was abruptly and radically altered by Vatican II in the 1960s, redefining and Protestantizing the Eucharist with a Novus Ordo liturgy and introducing such inducements to impiety that few balk at altars stripped of the saints and stained glass or the sight of “Eucharistic Ministers” dispensing the Blessed Sacrament like poker chips at a casino. This is no small issue, no mere question of aesthetics or use of an antiquated language. It is the arena in which the fight against a rogue Church is being fought. Defenders of the Latin Mass are not upholding antiquarianism. They are defending the supernatural life and Western civilization. For many years after Vatican II, the  mass was banned altogether. John Paul II allowed it under very limited circumstances with his Indult of 1984 and Benedict XVI reinstated it, also under limited circumstances as an option for antiquarians, in 2007. Priests remain forbidden to promote the Latin Mass in Novus Ordo churches or argue for its superiority.

This is the second major crackdown on observance of the older form under “Pope” Francis. The first involved the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, a religious order that revolved around the sacred liturgy.

Bishop Olson perhaps intended to discipline Michael King, the president of Fisher More, for his lack of orthodoxy or for mismanagement, commenters at other blogs speculate. By the same logic, it would be okay for the director of a hospital to deny chemotherapy to cancer patients because he didn’t like their doctor. And that’s what the Mass is — spiritual chemotherapy. Regardless of possible management problems at the school, commentary on this issue at some Catholic blogs is excruciatingly mushy-minded. The painfully obvious is avoided as if it were a form of mental electrocution. And what is the painfully obvious? There is no reason to deny students at the school the Mass.

Bishop Michael Olson

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