A volume of essays on three connected questions: the distinction between extreme radical Catholic reactionaries and mainstream “traditionalists”, the New (Pauline, Novus Ordo) Mass and its real liturgical abuses, and genuine, orthodox — not silly liberal — ecumenism.
Dave Armstrong’s position from the outset: people ought to be freely allowed to worship as they please, at whatever form of Mass they prefer, with the sanction of the Church. He has held that view since becoming Catholic in 1991 — long before Summorum Pontificum. He worships at a downtown Detroit parish that offers both the Novus Ordo Latin Mass (his own preference, received at the altar rail, on the tongue) and the Tridentine Mass. He loves them both. That is not what this book critiques. What it critiques is the fringe insistence that the New Mass is “inauthentic” Catholic worship, that Vatican II broke the Church, and that orthodox ecumenism is a betrayal.
The book treats the reactionary tendency as a recurring problem in Church history — comparable in pattern to the Donatists, Montanists, Jansenists, and the Old Catholics who left after Vatican I — and offers an orthodox Catholic answer to the errors, not a polemic against persons. As with Dave’s first book on the topic, no names are named: the goal is to win the reader, not the argument.
Inside this book
- Definitions: radical reactionary, mainstream traditionalist, and the “neo-Catholic” caricature
- Vatican II, the New Mass, and the question of whether they harm or help conversions to the Faith
- Pope St. John Paul II on hell, universalism, and marital submission — answering reactionary charges
- An apologia for Catholic ecumenism and its harmony with apologetics
- Salvation “outside” the Church, the Allah-Yahweh question, and the Koran-kissing controversy
