The Mass and Americanism

by Thomas A. Droleskey

[Author's note: This was written in my days as an indulterer. However, I thought it useful to re-publish this article now as a companion piece to Father Lawrence C. Smith's "Sharpening the Horns of the Dilemma." The Mass of all ages does indeed need a Catholic culture in which to flourish, which is why the Church's accommodation in her human elements to the Modern State is so destructive of the good of souls and thus of right ordering of nations.]

A young man came up to me following a talk I gave in Houston on August 18, 1999, complaining about my thesis that there is a direct connection between reverence in the Mass and social order. I had indicated in the talk, as I have in a series of articles in this publication, that one of the fruits of the Traditional Latin Mass was order within the Church, and hence order within society. The young man disagreed, noting that Americanism flourished while the Traditional Latin Mass was celebrated in the United States; he also took issue with the assertion that social order had prevailed in the Middle Ages. Permit me to use this space in Christ or Chaos to elaborate more fully on the theme I have been developing in the past few months on this most important of issues, upon which I believe hinges the totality of ecclesiastical and social order.

Most of the elements of the Traditional Latin Mass were taught by Our Lord to the Apostles before He ascended to the Father's right hand in glory. While there was some organic developments in the first centuries of the Church--and some regional differences in its offering in a few places, the Mass of the ages goes back in all of its essential parts to the Apostles. Sure, it is not a panacea. It has been offered during times of confusion and decadence within the Church and the world. Granted. But its fruits helped to produce the world of Christendom, the world where culture was informed by the true faith, a world where people had a sense of sin, a world where people lived and worked for the honor and glory of the Triune God. Even the most hardened sinner was forced to consider First and Last Things in such a world. The culture of Christendom was so infused with the faith that all things in social life were referred to the standard of the Holy Cross, providing the world with a compass to direct it when the Devil helped to foment heresies and licentiousness at various points during the Middle Ages.

During the Middle Ages, you see, more people than not realized that they had to cooperate with the graces won for them on Calvary which were made available to them in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. They understood that social order depended directly upon the state of individual souls. And the state of individual souls hinged upon how worthily people received Holy Communion, and with what degree of fervor they permitted the fruits of the Mass to permeate their lives (how they dressed and spoke, the diligence with which they worked to fulfill the obligations imposed by their freely chosen state-in-life, the hours they spent in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament). The Traditional Latin Mass is no guarantor of ecclesiastical and social order; however, it is the essential precondition of such order.

The Devil understands this only too well, which is why he sought to foment the Protestant Revolt in the Sixteenth Century. He knew that the Christian world would be rent asunder if people divorced themselves from fealty to the Successor of Saint Peter, and if they attacked and “reformed” the Mass. The Devil hates the Mass. He hates the Eucharist. He hates the sacramental forgiveness of mortal sins in the hospital of Divine Mercy, the confessional. Indeed, he hates human beings because they are made in the image and likeness of the One he hates, the Blessed Trinity. He knew full well that an attack upon the true Church would result in false liturgies which would lull the Christian world to sleep, making them easy prey for the political ideologies he was about to loose upon the world as the replacement for Catholicism. It is not possible for individuals or their societies to pursue authentic justice founded in the splendor of Truth Incarnate if they do not have a belief in—and cooperate with—the graces which are contained in and flow from the Sacrifice of the Mass.

All secular political ideologies, including the very ethos of secularism itself, arose as a result of the Protestant Revolt. That is, a society which does not recognize the primacy of the See of Peter in matters of faith and morals degenerates eventually into radical individualism, the belief that each individual is his own interpreter of First and Last Things. Such a rejection of Divinely-instituted authority led to warfare among various “reformed” sects. And said warfare led to religious indifferentism as the basis of a false sense of “peace.” Since it was supposedly “impossible” for anyone to say that his was the true religion, it became necessary for warring Protestant sects to agree to disagree with each other. From thence sprang the belief, popularized with such ferocity in the United States (and by the ecumenist spirit within the Church), that it does not make any difference what religion one believes in as long as one is a “good” person.

All of this led inexorably to secularism. A society that professes no religion succumbs ultimately to the allure of the world, the flesh, and the Devil, believing that there is some secular, non-denominational way to resolve the problems of the world and to pursue some semblance of civil justice. And essential to both the Protestant Revolt and the schemes of the naturalists, secularists, and Freemasons was a hatred for the Traditional Latin Mass. A destruction of belief in and reverence for the Holy Mass was an essential part of Protestantism and secularism. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to state that the secular and indifferentist world in which we live sprang directly from a hatred for the Traditional Mass as an exercise in “deep, dark superstition,” as none other than John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail after attending a Catholic Mass in Philadelphia.

Americanism and the Mass

Americanism, the exaltation of the secular, indifferentist state created by a Constitution which makes no reference to God or the authority of His true Church, arose as the direct result of the Protestant Revolt and the Age of the Enlightenment’s torch bearers, the Freemasons. It was accepted “dogma,” so to speak, by the time of the American founding that the confessional state was unrealistic in a land where people professed so many different faiths, or no faith at all. This poison would infiltrate the very life of the Church in this country, vitiating many of the fruits meant to flow into the world from the Mass.

Yes, ours is a Masonic nation, as Masonry desires to foment belief in religious indifferentism as the basis of creating a secular culture in which there is no room for Our Lord and His Church. And it was, as I point out in Christ in the Voting Booth, a desire to accommodate Catholics to the spirit of religious indifferentism and pluralist democracy that led then Bishop John Carroll to flirt with the idea of Mass in the vernacular, a Mass that would not “threaten” Protestants as being mysterious and remote. Although Carroll later recanted his early flirtation with a vernacular Mass, he remained until his death a believer in the American Constitution, not recognizing that the document he so venerated had planted the seeds for the destruction of the faith he was attempting to plant in the former English colonies along the Atlantic seaboard.

That is, the Mass needs a Catholic culture in which to flourish. Although some have argued that it is hard to establish such a culture when people are tarring and feathering you, the early Catholics in the Roman Empire were unafraid of the power of the State. They were willing to lay down their lives to bear witness to the truths of the true faith. Sure, many of them hid in the catacombs in order to preserve their lives during times of overt persecution. But they were unafraid to declare that the decadence of Rome was incompatible with the Divine positive law and the natural law. The seeds they planted with the shedding of their blood made it possible for Christendom to arise, a Christendom which would flourish because of the glorious Mass in which the one sacrifice of the Son to the Father in Spirit and in Truth was offered in an unbloody manner at the hands of an alter Christus, a priest.

The fact that Americanism flourished in the United States at the time the Traditional Latin Mass was being celebrated in no way denigrates the importance of that Mass to social order. Quite the contrary. Americanism flourished in the life of many Catholics because not a few bishops, especially those of Irish descent, encouraged it, leading their flocks into the fallacious belief that it was neither wise nor desirable to seek the conversion of this nation to the Social Reign Christ the King and Mary our Queen. Catholics were led to believe that they could have the best of both worlds: they could hold their own religious beliefs while at the same time pursuing the American materialist dream of a “good life” founded in Calvinist individualism.

Americanism undermined the culture necessary for the flourishing of the Traditional Latin Mass. One generation of American Catholics after another gradually permitted themselves to become informed by the culture of indifferentism and secularism rather than serve as instruments of evangelizing the true faith. Isn’t it the case today, ladies and gentlemen, that the lion’s share of Catholics in this nation view the Church through the eyes of the world rather than viewing the world through the eyes of the true faith? This is the result of an anti-Catholic culture created and maintained by many bishops and priests, both for reasons of social acceptance and political expediency. It was more important to be “accepted” and to be considered “successful” than it was to fulfill the obligations Pope Pius XI had outlined for all Catholics in Quas Primas in 1925 (obligations which had been written about at length by Pope Leo XIII during his pontificate, 1878-1903).

That having been noted, however, the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass did maintain a certain sense of order within the Church and the world. Catholics did make sure to wear their Sunday best when attending Mass. Those in states of mortal sin (or those who had not fulfilled the Eucharistic fast) did not approach to receive Holy Communion. People were silent in Church. They got to Church early to prepare themselves interiorly for Mass, and they stayed afterward to make a proper Thanksgiving for having received the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. They made visits to the Blessed Sacrament during the day and were devoted to the Blessed Mother and the cult of the saints. This resulted in a civility and decency, the likes of which have been swept away within the Church and the world by the effects of the Novus Ordo.

The Novus Ordo was made to order for Americanism, as well for all other political ideologies. Its de-emphasis on the vertical and sacrificial, its profanation of the language of worship, its banalizing of sacred music, its rewriting of prayers which date back over 1500 years gave Catholics a sense that they did not have to be “counter-cultural” witnesses to the Sign of Contradiction, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour. Yes, it was all right to accommodate one’s self to the spirit of the world. It was all right to avoid the confessional. It was all right to dress “down” for Mass and to speak audibly and frequently in Church. Indeed, it was all right to miss Mass entirely for no good reason. After all, you can pray in your room, right?

The Traditional Latin Mass is not, as I noted earlier, a panacea for ecclesiastical and social ills. People must cooperate with the fruits which flow therefrom. Consider this, however: almost every priest who celebrates the Traditional Latin Mass (either after a lapse of years—or who have never celebrated it all) finds it very difficult to return to the Novus Ordo. Those of us who attend the Traditional Latin Mass as frequently as we can, including every Sunday, find attending the Novus Ordo—and dealing with all of its attendant distractions—to be painful. For it is the Traditional Latin Mass which fosters reverence and respect for First and Last Things, the necessary precondition for seeing the Divine impress in ourselves and in others—and the necessary precondition for fighting valiantly for the establishment of the social reign of Our Lord and Our Lady.

Michael Davies told the Wanderer Forum in New Jersey in January of 1999 that the Traditional Latin Mass failed to produce a Catholic culture in the United States because the social kingship of Our Lord was not preached. He is entirely correct. The Mass is meant to bear fruit in society. But it cannot bear that fruit if bishops and priests are not willing to die as martyrs in defense of the absolute right of Christ the King to have primacy of place in a nation’s social and political life. Bishops and priests were so willing during the Middle Ages. It was the unwillingness of bishops and priests to do so in the United States that helped Americanism become more important in the lives of Catholics than the faith itself.

A new Christendom cannot be founded on the banality of the Novus Ordo. It does not call Catholics to be counter-cultural, to be martyrs in defense of the holy faith. A new Christendom can be founded only in the Mass of our fathers, and only if the injunction of Pope Pius XI in Quas Primas is embraced and carried out with zeal:

“But if the faithful were generally to understand that it behooves them ever to fight courageously under the banner of Christ their King, then, fired with apostolic zeal, they would strive to win over to their Lord those hearts that are bitter and estranged from Him, and would valiantly defend His rights.”

The scourge of Americanism—and all political ideologies—can only be driven away if the Traditional Latin Mass is restored within the Latin Rite of the Church, and if the Social Kingship of Our Lord—and the Queenship of Our Lady—is proclaimed with apostolic courage. Consecrated to the Immaculate Heart Mary, may we do all we call to bring about the day when all people everywhere, including the United States, will exclaim “Viva Cristo Rey!” with every beat of their hearts. That won’t mean the end of social conflict or sin. But it will mean that people will understand that social conflict is caused by the sins of individual men, and that the only way to build and renew the just society is to refer all things to the standard of the Holy Cross, upon which our salvation was wrought and the Sign of which is made constantly in the Traditional Latin Mass.