Monthly Archives: January 2026

. . . the writer can testify to the Chicago experience!

The Great War over, the liturgical movement kept moving. Special gatherings, liturgical weeks and days, became common, as in the French cities Rouen and Lourdes.

A Congress of Sacred Music in 1919 was attended by cardinals and bishops and bishop-level abbots. Interest was building in high places.

Gregorian chant, approved vigorously by Pius X 20 years earlier, was being taught to children — a half million in New York City, to cite a major effort. People were being encouraged to receive communion at mass — another Pius X footprint — and were in some cases reading Scripture at mass.

Pius XI told of “lively satisfaction” at these developments.

In Holland, the country best organized in these matters, clergy-staffed liturgical commissions were established in every diocese.

The lights of the movement were beginning to shine.

Dom Odo Casel’s calling liturgy a “mystery” rite made him the source of “perhaps the most fruitful theological idea” of the 20th century in the view of then Cardinal Ratzinger.

The prolific Pius Parsch (1884-1954) and the Italian-born Romano Guardini (1885-1968), who was raised in Germany, would be mainstream contributers and theological shapers of the reform in decades to come.

Bonneterre was happy to recall these giants of scholarship but was at the same time critical. In 1920, he noted that their writings “remained moderate, but that did not last long.” In fact, “It was in Germany that the movement experienced its first and perhaps most serious deviations.”

The flourishing was under way, however, including in Italy, Spain, and the United States. In New York in June, 1920, at an International Congress of Gregorian Chant, mass was sung in chant by 4,000 children from 47 Catholic schools where a half million students were learning the chant.

In the Chicago archdiocese in the early ’40s, grade schools were still learning it. They also were taught how to pray at the “dialogue” mass, condemned in our time as “the worm of decay” that “began to devour traditional rites from the inside.”

The year 1909 . . . was the year in which Dom Lambert Beauduin presented his ideas for more “active” lay participation in the liturgy at the National Congress of Catholic Action in Malines on the invitation of Cardinal Désiré Joseph Mercier.

So. All was not working to tradionalists’ satisfaction. Back to main theme:

I was in such a school — and sang too in the men and boys choir, where the music was the church-approved, magnificent polyphony of the Renaissance, and the choir director scorned chant!

Meanwhile, Fr. Lasance produced his Sunday missal, Dom Lefebvre his Catholic Liturgy, translated from the Italian.

In 1921, the St. John’s Abbey, Minnesota, Benedictine Virgil Michel published My Sacrifice and Yours; and Dominican sisters in Grand Rapids, Michigan, published brochures for classroom use in teaching liturgy, titled With Mother Church.

Only later, in the ’50s, would the “American Movement” fall under what Bonneterre considered the very bad influence of “the French and German movements.”

Indeed, even at this early date, the pastoral-vs.-God-centered liturgies conflict was in the mix, Bonneterre explained.

The pastoral approach emphasized the “apostolic” character of liturgy as emphasized by the Belgian, Dom Beauduin, who “tended” to overemphasize it, he wrote.

This conflict was to become increasingly pervasive as the movement faced “the great temptation . . . to make liturgy above all a means of apostolate; to bend [it] to the needs of the apostolate.”

Of which more later.

Here was the danger, said Bonneterre in the 1980s: the movement could not “withstand this temptation” to subordinate worship to pastoral technique, and “this magnificent work [of reform] broke down, bringing with it nearly the entire fabric of the Church.”

Big stakes, to say the least.

But zest for ecumenism remains a key part of the problem . . .

First of all, there are such married priests, as we many if not most know already. Not Roman Catholics but Eastern Rite, long-ago created in all-systems-go efforts at unification with once-schismatic Orthodox worshipers.

I stood chatting with one some time back a few blocks from where our two sons were living, upstairs from the art gallery they were running on California Ave., where the Ukrainian Catholic church was for which the priest was pastor.

As a one-time religion reporter and before that a Jesuit, I thought we might take a look inside. We did, but no more than a look. It was Easter Day, the pastor had been there since six o’clock, and he was closing shop. Had to join the wife and kids at home.

Yes. The man was a couple decades or so older than my sons. He had found his way in life that included two sacraments, Matrimony and Holy Orders. And I bless him to this day.

He and I and my son Pete had a pleasant half-hour chat and returned to the flat, joining his mother and others.

Another married-priest syndrome were the Anglicans who in the last several decades pulled a John Henry Newman on the Church of England and joined up with Roman Catholicism and now function as pastors throughout the U.S. and U.K.

These took Romanism on at the behest of our last pontiff but two, Benedict XIV, who in the year of Our Lord 2009 said come one, come all to Anglicans in search of old-time religion which they used to have in Merry England but had no more.

Alas, something went wrong with that invitation. It’s been withdrawn. By a pope named Francis, now gone for his reward, and not reinstated by his successor named Leo. No sir, no sirree.

One one single news day in the world of what this writer could find on his google, there a dozen links to the story about widespread former Anglicans become full-fletched Romans, lots of them, and one, 7-31-25, about Francis withdrawing same.

The Vatican has made a decisive move by ending a special provision that allowed Anglican priests to convert to Catholicism while retaining some of their traditions. This pathway, established under Pope Benedict XVI in 2009, was designed to welcome disillusioned Anglican clergy, particularly those opposed to the ordination of women and LGBTQ+ rights. [emphasis added]

Lot there, to be sure. The top man of Anglicans not happy with this doctrinal exposing as cause of hundreds of his people packing up for greener pastures in Rome. Come on, he says, you open your doors and we watch our people hustling through.

In hundreds, wives and families and all, as reported 11-21-25 as regards the United Kingdom, home of the worldwide English-speaking priests and bishops (!):

A new report reveals that significant numbers of Anglican clergy have converted to Catholicism in the United Kingdom since 1992.

The report, “Convert Clergy in the Catholic Church in Britain,” released 11-20-25, shows that approximately 700 clergy and religious of the Church of England, Church in Wales, and Scottish Episcopal Church have been received into the Catholic Church since 1992. The number includes 16 former Anglican bishops.

This equates to approximately a third of all Catholic priests ordained in England and Wales during this period.

And then there is the US and Canada situation.

1-1-12,

Benedict XVI announced creation of an ordinariate – similar to a diocese, but national in scope – for Anglican groups and clergy across the United States who wish to become Catholic. The ordinariate will be based in Houston.

Yes indeed, the Spirit moved Benedict to make it international. Anglicans shocked and disturbed by their religion and wanting out were given it.

The pope also named Father Jeffrey Steenson, a Catholic priest serving in Houston since 2009, to lead the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter.

Married and the father of three children, Father Steenson was an Episcopal bishop before becoming Catholic in 2007.

He was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Santa Fe in 2009, the same year he came to Houston to teach patristics (the study of the Church fathers) at St. Mary’s Seminary.

Two years later, Benedict opened the gates.

Pope Benedict XVI promulgated the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, permitting erection of personal ordinariates equivalent to dioceses, on November 4, 2009.

By 2017, there were 43 ordinariate parishes and missions in the in U.S. and Canada, headed by priests named by the equivalent of monsignor but not bishops, who had to be unmarried.

So 43 married priests and parishes, what do you know about that? Adding to the Eastern Catholic pastors like him who took time for a half-hour chat in mid-afternoon on Easter Sunday but had to get back to his wife and kids.

It can be done. Holy Mother Church is pastored almost but not entirely by celibates including the same-sex-attractive who currently number as high as eight out of every ten, some of whom live up to their state of life but others who don’t.

For these same-sex attracted one might (I did) go to what’s said prolifically by a priest of long experience who makes this proposal: Mix up your (presumed) 80% of them with ministerial colleagues who have wife and kids and you have, shall we say, a calming effect on the church of today.

— more to come on this, to say the least, unusual proposal —