Traditionis Custodes: The New Atom Bomb

Seventy-six years ago, on July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated in a lonely desert 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico. Today, on July 16, 2021, Pope Francis has dropped an atom bomb on the Catholic Church that will harm not just those who “adhere to the Latin liturgical tradition” but everyone who values continuity and coherence, reverence and beauty, our heritage and our future. The document is dripping with condescension and heartlessness, designed like a Swiss Army knife to equip bishops with as many ways of inconveniencing or hounding tradition-loving Catholics as possible. As I opened up Traditionis Custodes this morning, my eyebrows rose at the improbable title (Traditionis Perditores, “Destroyers of Tradition,” would have been far more accurate), and then my incredulity rose with each paragraph. By the time I had finished the accompanying letter, I was deep into the ideological fantasy-world inhabited by Pope Francis and other enemies of the traditional liturgy …