From the Editor's Desk...

by Michael J. Matt

The ‘New Rosary’ and Pope John Paul the Great

One October 15, 2002, we published The Problem with the ‘New Rosary’: The Fourth Commandment and Other Reformist Woes by Robert Emmett Henry. For the benefit of the many "new recruits" to Tradition here in 2018, we’re reproducing it on Page 13, as it helps to place Pope Francis into the proper Modernist context of the Revolution of Vatican II.

We must keep in mind that during his reign, Pope John Paul went from the "great white hope" of conservatives early on, to the most outspoken champion of the Revolution of all time.

And his many gifts to the Church—i.e., altar girls, Theology of the Body, the saint-making factory, Assisi-styled interfaith lallapaloosas, a New Rosary, etc.—did precious little to assuage the fears of traditional Catholics who felt that the situation in the Church—under Pope John Paul the GREAT! —couldn’t get much more apocalyptic.

Granted, in hindsight John Paul seems like something of a watchdog of orthodoxy; but this is only in comparison to Francis the Uber-Modernist. To employ a pretty clumsy analogy from the cultural revolution of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll—Francis might be Miley Cyrus or Marilyn Manson, while Pope John Paul is the Beatles. They’re all part of the same revolution but the Beatles were well-dressed, articulate, talented and smart enough to overcome Christian society’s residual social and moral sensibilities. Most decent people with a pulse can see a problem with Cyrus

~ See Editor's Desk/ Page 2

Editor's Desk, Continued...

and Manson; but just try criticizing the 'greatest' Marxist minstrels of all time, the Fab Four, the gods of early rock ‘n’ roll, and see how popular you are at the next cocktail party.

And yet this is what the traditionalists felt more or less dutybound to do where all the post-conciliar popes were concerned. This is why the traditionalists were vilified, called ugly names like ‘schismatic’ and dismissed as ‘trouble makers’...because, to them, the Emperor looked pretty darn naked and they told him so!

Pope John Paul did have two distinct advantages over Francis, however: Charisma, on the one hand, and a retention of some semblance of the Catholic Faith on the other. John Paul was also cool. He’s the Michael Jordan of popes. He was charming, cosmopolitan, multilingual, confident, and conveyed the easy impression that he—along with Maggie Thatcher, Sylvester Stallone and Ronald Reagan— could make the world a better place. The world was understandably seduced by the great pope who, by the way, actually pioneered the Papal Apology To The World Tour For All Things Catholic.

But the hard reality is this: without Wojtyla there would never have been a Bergoglio. And while to his everlasting credit Pope John Paul certainly held the Catholic line on abortion, it’s also true that when it came to phony ecumenism, liturgical mayhem and dogmas such as extra ecclesiam nulla salus, he was much closer to Francis than St. Pius X. And let’s not forget who "excommunicated" Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.

And one quick point about his New Rosary: It was not the new mysteries themselves that created the furor, but rather their introduction. So, let’s not get hung up on defending the "Proclamation of the Kingdom" or whatever they are.

That’s not the point.

The problem with the New Rosary was that it was more of the same Modernist tinkering and changing and updating of EVERYTHING in the years after the Council—even down to and including, finally, Our Lady’s own Rosary itself.

This is what left traditional Catholics less than disposed to take advantage of John Paul’s suggestion (as laid out in his Rosarium Virginis Mariae) to meditate on the optional Luminous Mysteries if one were so disposed. In fact, I myself have never once made use of the Luminous option, and I never shall.

Does this sound harsh? Arrogant, perhaps? But you must remember what they’d already done to the Church by the time the so-called New Rosary was trotted out: They’d wrecked the Mass, smashed the statues, bulldozed the sanctuaries, knocked out the high altars, made the liturgical calendar unrecognizable, green-lighted meat on Fridays, edited the Bible, kicked over the communion rails, gutted the breviary, turned sacred music over to John Denver, swapped organs for guitars, and now—guess what?—they wanted to "reform" the Rosary! No, thanks!

Besides, Archbishop Bugnini, the grand architect of the Novus Ordo, had already suggested changing the rosary back during the pontificate of Paul VI. At the time, Pope Paul VI responded through his Vatican Secretary of State: "[T]he faithful would conclude that ‘the Pope has changed the Rosary,’ and the psychological effect would be disastrous…. Any change in it cannot but lessen the confidence of the simple and the poor."

That might be one of the few things Paul VI got right. (And it would have been even more disastrous had Catholics still been praying the Rosary at all by 2002, which, of course, most were not).

In any case, a few years later when another pope was old and feeble, the same malignant forces of Modernism finally got their way and rammed a New Rosary down the Church’s throat, making it so there was really nothing left in the Church not branded with their great, big M for Modernism.

So, the article on Page 13 fits rather nicely into the Remnant’s larger effort to "get back to basics", and to connect the dots from Francis to the Revolution of Vatican II, for which he is the perfect, if unwitting, poster boy. Because, again, Francis isn’t the fundamental problem so much as its inevitable consequence.

We’ve got to stop behaving as if what’s going on in Rome today is something new, because it’s not! We have to be honest about what led up to the Francis crisis, especially now in anticipation of the Neo-Catholic Caravan that is making its way to Tradition, the Novus Ordo having become largely uninhabitable, riddled with predators, dominated by dictators, and certainly no place for children.

If you’re new to Tradition, the article on Page 13 may be challenging. But I encourage you to open your mind to the reality that Francis really is nothing more than the last straw.

At best, he’s the cleanup batter, the bases having been loaded long before this befuddled old Modernist ever slouched into the batter’s box.

MJM