On Monday renowned Italian film composer Ennio Morricone passed into eternal life con il conforto della fede (with the comfort of faith), one day before the 13th anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum.

Morricone produced some beautifully haunting, exquisite melodies in films like The Mission and Cinema Paradiso. But he was popularly known for bizarre but irresistible Western themes like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, assembled from an improbable mix of howls, ocarinas, and whistles. He also composed a small body of sacred works. But frankly, his most noted one, the Missa Papae Francisci, is not suited for liturgical use and seems more appropriate for a trippy György-Ligeti-style journey through a stargate, à la 2001:A Space Odyssey (which, coincidentally, Stanley Kubrick had wanted him to score).

Notwithstanding Morricone’s unusual experimental style and (musical) modernism, he had a true sense of beauty and a genuine love for the music of the classical Roman liturgy.

In a 2010 interview with Edward Pentin, the composer expressed a great deal of respect for Pope Benedict XVI, “a very high-minded Pope who has a great culture and also great strength,” and offered some frank thoughts about the state of music in the Church:

He has a great wish to correct [liturgical] errors that have existed and continue to exist, and he tried to fix them just a few days after being elected. Today, the Church has made a big mistake, turning the clock back 500 years with guitars and popular songs. I don’t like it at all. Gregorian chant is a vital and important tradition of the Church, and to waste this by having guys mix religious words with profane Western songs is hugely grave, hugely grave. The same thing happened before the Council of Trent, when singers sang profane songs with sacred melodies and sacred words. He [the Pope] is doing well to correct it. He should correct it with much more firmness. Some churches have taken heed [of his corrections], but others haven’t.

Morricone was neither a traditionalist nor a critic of the entire postconciliar enterprise. He just knew music. It was his life. And when he saw a reckless liturgical revolution threaten to overturn his beloved art, he suddenly lost any room for toleration:

But I don’t agree with, and feel very strongly about, mixing profane, secular music with religious words in Church, or mixing religious music with a profane and secular text. After the Second Vatican Council, I was asked to be a consultor to the vicariate for two pieces of sung Church music, and I refused. The Church and Christians have Gregorian chant, and they said we had to now have this other music, so I refused. All the musicians in Rome also refused to work with it.

In a subsequent 2016 interview, Morricone described being “very unhappy” when the Church began to detach itself from Gregorian chant, which, he insisted

“was essential in Western music. Year zero — if it had not begun from there, polyphony, counterpoint, harmony, the first forms of “sacred” music  would probably not have been developed … Gregorian chant is linked to the history of our European culture and constitutes its important musical roots.”

Indeed, out of all the arts, music is somewhat odd in that its history begins in the West not with the classical period of Greece and Rome but with the early medievals and the Church. This is mostly because very little ancient music has been preserved. And what little does remain hasn’t been reverently kept at the forefront of Western culture in the way that, say, the Odyssey or the Aeneid has–or the chants of the Missale Romanum.

So as we remember this week how the 2007 promulgation of Summorum Pontificum gloriously vindicated that most ancient Roman Mass and the vast body of Gregorian chant proper to it that underpins all of Western music, we would do well to spare a few moments in prayer for a talented Roman composer who defended their preservation.

Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei.

Did you know that our monthly newsletter Meménto is now available in an easily accessible online edition? You’ll find the same great articles and news about Fraternity apostolates in a readable flipbook format.

And we’ve also made our monthly prayer card for priests available online, so you can access it instantly via desktop or mobile. No need to worry about misplacing a card–it’s right on your phone, wherever you go. And you can even download a printable pdf of the card–print out as many copies as you like, place them in your missals and prayer books, or give them away at your parish.

Bookmark the new pages, or you can also access these publications through our navigation menu under Media and News.

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by Rachel Shrader

Happy Independence Day! Our country’s 244th birthday gives us an opportunity to pause and reflect on the many blessings that God has bestowed upon us as Americans. It seems fitting that this day has come upon us in the midst of the national turmoil surrounding the vandalization of monuments and the demonization of many figures from our history. For us as Catholics, it has been particularly grievous to see some of our own saints targeted.

I for one love the American story, and that sentiment does not spring only from patriotism, nor from a naïve notion that our story is anywhere near perfect. I love it because it’s a great story. All day long I could listen to the tale of how a bunch of underdog, rag-tag rebels ousted an empire and started an experiment based on the idea that all men are created equal, that they have a dignity as children of God that no one can take from them. It’s too far-fetched. You couldn’t write this stuff. How on earth did those Americans do it? How did they win, how did they reconstruct after a brutal civil war? What about Gettysburg? How did those Normandy landings happen? Let’s hear the story again. And again and again and again.

So, on this anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, I contend that our country boasts a great company of men and women – many of them Catholic – who accomplished extraordinary things to build up these United States of America. As an antidote to the misinformation and anger currently reigning in the public square, I invite you to join me in a toast to some of my favorite Catholic characters from the American story and to the beautiful country they helped create.

St. Junípero Serra

Born on the island of Mallorca, Spain, in 1713, St. Junípero was educated by the Franciscans, joined the order at the age of 16 and was later ordained a priest. Intellectually gifted, he achieved a high level of education and worked as a professor and academic for many years. But his heart yearned for missionary work, and at the age of 35, he left his successful life behind and set sail for Mexico, landing at Vera Cruz and walking 250 miles on foot with a companion to Mexico City. During the journey St. Junípero sustained an injury to his leg that would plague him the rest of his life.

After 18 years as a missionary in central Mexico and the Baja peninsula, he set off for modern-day California, where he founded missions that would become some of California’s most famous cities, such as San Diego and San Francisco. He fought for the just treatment of the Native Americans at the missions, traveling all the way back to Mexico City in 1773 to defend their rights before the Viceroy.  

Leg injury and all, the indefatigable “Apostle of California” walked thousands of miles during his life to spread the Faith and care for the faithful of the missions, and he died at Mission San Carlos Borromeo in 1784.

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini

St. Frances is the first United States citizen to be canonized. She hailed from a small town near Milan, Italy and spent the first part of her life in her home country, founding the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus with seven other sisters in 1880. She dreamed of undertaking missionary work in China, but Pope Leo XIII recommended that, instead of going east to China, she head west – to the United States. She and her sisters arrived in New York City to work among the Italian immigrants there, and they founded schools, a hospital, orphanages and organized catechism and education classes.

The work of the sisters spread far beyond the borders of New York. St. Frances founded 67 institutions in New York City, Chicago, elsewhere in the United States and in Latin America and Europe.

St. Kateri Tekakwitha

St. Kateri’s mother was a Catholic Algonquin and her father a chief of the Mohawk. When she was a child, her village suffered a smallpox epidemic, which took the lives of her parents and little brother, scarred her face and impaired her eyesight. In her village she heard the preaching of the “Blackrobes” – the Jesuit missionaries who worked in New York and Canada, the most famous of whom, St. Isaac Jogues and his companions, had been martyred soon before her birth. She was baptized and eventually traveled 200 miles on foot to Sault Saint-Louis, a Christian Indian village near Montréal, to remove herself from the persecution she faced in her own village. She took a vow of virginity and lived her life in prayer and penance, going to her reward in 1680 at the age of 24. At her death, witnesses say that the scars on her face disappeared and her face became like that of a healthy young woman. She is called the “Lily of the Mohawk” and was canonized in 2012, the first Native American to become a saint.

Servant of God Chaplain Emil Kapaun

Born in the Czech farming community of Pilsen, Kansas, in 1916, Fr. Kapaun was ordained for the Diocese of Wichita in 1940, joining the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps in 1944 and serving in the Burma-India theater of World War II. After earning his Master’s degree and doing pastoral work in Kansas, he returned to military service in 1948 by his own request. As a chaplain in the Korean War he was fearless in his duties, celebrating Mass on the battlefield, administering the sacraments, retrieving the wounded and burying the dead. He received the Bronze Star for bravery in action on August 2nd, 1950, after rescuing a wounded man despite intense enemy fire.

But the actions that would earn him the Medal of Honor, our country’s highest military award for valor, occurred during and after the Battle of Unsan on November 1st-2nd, 1950. After his group was attacked, Chaplain Kapaun intrepidly ran about the battlefield, administering last rites and dragging the wounded to safety. Offered the chance to escape, he and a medic chose to stay with the wounded, and eventually he and his comrades were captured and marched to Prison Camp No. 5, 60-100 miles away.

In the midst of the horrendous conditions at the camp, Chaplain Kapaun tirelessly dedicated himself to the spiritual and physical care of the suffering soldiers. Though public prayers were forbidden, he snuck around to the various huts after dark to pray with the men and, defying orders, led them in an Easter service in 1951.

He fell ill not long after, and his captors transferred him to the camp “hospital” – in reality, a place where they left people to die. His men insisted on carrying him there themselves, and he forgave and blessed his captors as he went. He died alone in the hospital a few days later, only 35 years old. When the camp was liberated two and a half years later, his men made sure the story of their heroic chaplain was known.

I wish I had space here to bring you more tales of those who helped shape our country and provided her with some of her finest examples of courage, self-sacrifice and love for others. A few that I recommend researching if you don’t know about them: Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet, St. Katharine Drexel, St. John Neumann…the list goes on. Like the men of Prison Camp No. 5, let us go forth and share the stories of our saints, that their heroism may inspire us to continue the great work they began. Tell these great tales to all the world, and when you’re done, I’ll want to hear them again. And again and again and again. +

Rachel Shrader was the editor and primary writer of the Missive from its inception in June 2017 until May 2020. She now contributes as a freelance writer, covering military topics, the international work of the FSSP, and FSSP parish life.

When the British North America Act united the Canadian provinces into a constitutionally governed Dominion, first publicly celebrated on July 1st, 1867, the holiday of Dominion Day was born.

Only 18 years earlier in 1849, a feast for the Precious Blood that had been celebrated in Southern Europe was officially granted a universal observance in the Catholic Church.

These two celebrations originally had no connection. Pius IX set the observance of the Precious Blood for the first Sunday in July, and it was not until the early 20th century under Pius X that it was fixed to a specific date.

That date was July 1st.

There is perhaps an act of Providence in how the secular celebration of Canadian confederation and the liturgical feast of Our Lord’s sacred Blood came to coincide. The red vestments of the altar are now yearly re-echoed in the red of the modern maple leaf and the older Canadian Red Ensign still seen at war memorials.

We needn’t strain to find a connection between the nourishing blood of Christ and the maple. And isn’t Christ’s blood, fulfilling as it does the mission of the Passover Lamb, something of a naval ensign of its own? It is the fulfillment of the Passover standard protecting God’s children against the destroying angel, now flying atop the Church–the Ark of Salvation and the Barque of St. Peter.

We can also draw connections between the two festivals in Canada’s particular contributions to the Liturgy of the Mass, through which the Precious Blood is brought to our altars every day.

Perhaps the greatest such contribution is the Feast of the Holy Family. Like the Feast of the Precious Blood, it was made universal only relatively recently: in this case 1921. But its origins go all the way back to 17th century Canada and St. Francois de Laval, the first bishop of Quebec and the Father of the Canadian Church. In the diocese of Quebec, a special sequence or prose was written for the feast, called Sacrae Familiae. This sequence is the first known Canadian musical composition, and despite the extension of the feast worldwide, Sacrae Familiae still remains liturgically unique to Canada.

Today the country honors the Fathers of Confederation. For Catholics it is also worth considering too how Canada’s spiritual founders laid the groundwork for the Dominion of the Church: Bishop Laval; St. Kateri Tekakwitha; the founding Mothers Ss. Marguerite Bourgeoys, Marguerite d’Youville, and Marie de l’Incarnation; and the eight Canadian martyrs–including the great saint St. Jean de Brebeuf, who is credited with the Huron Christmas carol “Iesos Ahatonnia”, another of the nation’s gifts to Catholic culture.

On this July 1st, as we join with the Church worldwide in giving due honor to the Precious Blood, we also wish our Canadian confreres and families a most festive and joyous national holiday. Our Lord has bestowed great blessings upon the magnificent land of Canada. And we pray fervently that He continue to safeguard and guide its citizens through the purifying power of His Sacred Blood and through the intercession of the Canadian saints.

Et dominabitur a mari usque ad mare, et a flumine usque ad terminos terrae.

(He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.)

Blessed patronal feast of Ss. Peter and Paul to all our Fraternity family!

Today is the day for our 2020 Ss. Peter & Paul appeal. We truly thank each and every one of you who contributed a total of $25,924 so far, and we pray that God may richly reward your charity with His abundant graces. 

For those who may be considering a donation, we still could use your support!

How many new FSSP priests would you like to see? One? Two? Even more?

We interviewed Rev. Fr. David McWhirter, just ordained last month and just days away from starting his first priestly assignment, about what inspired him to seek the sacred priesthood, and how the contributions of supporters like you allowed him to achieve it.

You can listen to the full interview here.

Your donations help us prepare the next Fr. McWhirter for our Fraternity apostolates across North America.

As we rejoice with the antiphon at Second Vespers on this glorious feast tonight,

This is the day whereon Simon Peter went up upon the gibbet of the cross. Alleluia! This day did he, that holdeth the keys of the kingdom, depart hence with joy to be with Christ. 

we think of how we are now joyfully reuniting with Christ after the cross of our lockdowns — thanks to the priests who bring Him to us every day in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. 

And it is a joy we never want to lose again.

We at the Fraternity once again extend our gratitude for all the spiritual and material assistance you have generously given to date, and we humbly ask for your continued support and prayers as we shine the unconquerable light of Christ into the ever-deepening darkness of the world.

Join St. Joan of Arc, our FSSP apostolate in Post Falls, Idaho, in offering a 54-day Rosary, beginning on July 19th, 2020 and ending on September 10, 2020, centered on August 15th, the Feast of the Assumption .

We invite all members and supporters of FSSP apostolates in the USA to participate as we specially petition and give thanks to the Blessed Virgin during this time of apparent pandemic, riots, political and social unrest, and the scandals and loss of faith within the Church.

To participate, just download and print out the 54 Day Instruction and the 54 Day – Assumption files, then pray the rosary and special prayers as indicated each day starting on July 19th.

And please distribute this announcement far and wide so that as many people as possible can support this effort of prayer for the Church and the nation.

Hail, Queen of the Most Holy Rosary, my Mother Mary, hail! At thy feet I humbly kneel to offer thee a Crown of Roses, snow white buds to remind thee of thy joys, each bud recalling to thee a holy mystery, each ten bound together with my petition for a particular grace. O Holy Queen, dispenser of God’s graces, and Mother of all who invoke thee, thou canst not look upon my gift and fail to see its binding. As thou receivest my gift, so wilt thou receive my petition; from thy bounty thou wilt give me the favor I so earnestly and trustingly seek. I despair of nothing that I ask of thee. Show thyself my Mother!

Catholic history knows them as the iconoclasts–the image-breakers. And at various points of history they have reared up in riotous defiance of the Church and have smashed and broken their way through the sacred arts.

In 726 the Byzantine Emperor Leo the Isaurian published an edict declaring sacred images to be idols and ordered them destroyed, sending swarms of enforcing soldiers across the Empire and causing riots among the people. Orthodoxy was restored after a while, but again in 814 a new wave of iconoclasm broke out.

Then the mania died down again and there was relative peace, until a new bout of iconoclastic fury broke out after the Reformation in many parts of Europe. In the Beeldenstorm or “statue storm” that gripped the Low Countries in 1566, a merchant in Antwerp saw “all the churches, chapels and houses of religion utterly defaced, and no kind of thing left whole within them, but broken and utterly destroyed, being done after such order and by so few folks that it is to be marvelled at.” At Ypres witnesses testified that the iconoclasts were not single-minded religious fanatics but were largely drunken looters who were robbing and stealing from private homes as well.

Since then, it seems, this madness has not tended to fade away completely but has been recurring with some frequency through the centuries — in the French Revolution of 1789, in the rise of the American Know-Nothings in the 1850s, and again in the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

While the earlier iconoclasts claimed some divine support for what they were doing — however misguided — the most modern iconoclasts, having expelled God from the picture entirely, had their contempt for the created order descend even further into an erasure of  history itself.

A Russian critic once observed that “Bolsheviks topple czar monuments, Stalin erases old Bolsheviks, Khrushchev tears down Stalin, Brezhnev tears down Khrushchev….No difference. This is classic old Moscow technique: either worship or destroy.”

And George Orwell observed in his 1984:

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

Much of the same ideological underpinnings are now at work in cities and suburban areas around the world — a sort of Bolshevik Beeldenstorm aimed not only against the icons of the Church but all of history itself.

This, we know, shall pass as every similar episode of madness eventually has–and orthodoxy will triumph again.

But not necessarily without pain, without lasting damage, and without a profound miscarriage of justice by elected officials. In the case of Ypres, the magistrates of the town who helplessly watched the madness unfold were later forced to defend their inaction before the Habsburg government. During the American Know-Nothing riots of the mid-1850s, Bishop Martin John Spalding of Louisville, KY wrote in a letter to Bishop Kenrick:

“We have just passed through a reign of terror surpassed only by the Philadelphia riots. Nearly one hundred poor Irish have been butchered or burned and some twenty houses have been consumed in the flames. The City authorities, all Knownothings, looked calmly on and they are now endeavouring to lay the blame on the Catholics.”

In some cases, when the authorities failed them Irish and other Catholics banded together together to defend churches against the Know-Nothings. When a fire was started in the church of St. Peter and Paul in Brooklyn, the building was only saved by the police and the local militia driving off the mob.

And lest we be too despondent about the horrors of the news, lest we see the devil have his due and we give up hope, it is worth recalling what Bishop John Lancaster Spalding of Peoria said about the Know-Nothing era some twenty years later:

“It was not the American people who were seeking to make war on the Church, but merely a party of religious fanatics and unprincipled demagogues who as little represented the American people as did the mobs whom they incited to bloodshed and incendiarism. Their whole conduct was un-American and opposed to all the principles and traditions of our free institutions”.

So closely do the events of these historic periods mesh with our own, so perfectly do today’s rioters play out this hackneyed role trod by so many violent mobs before them, that we would be forgiven for wondering if those behind today’s lawlessness are truly as “progressive” as they claim.

On June 1st, five men from Our Lady of Guadalupe seminary were ordained to the sacred priesthood.

The Missive caught up with one of the new ordinandi, Rev. Fr. David McWhirter, as he returned to northeastern Pennsylvania to spend time with his family, offer Solemn High Mass at St. Michael’s Church in Scranton, and give first blessings to the parishioners.

As part of our Ss. Peter and Paul Appeal on June 29th, we will be debuting an interview with Fr. McWhirter where he discusses his journey through the seminary to the sacred priesthood–and how your support helped make that happen.

The Roman liturgy has now entered into the “green” time after Pentecost, and we along with it turn our focus to the flourishing and advancement of Holy Mother Church.

So join us on the patronal feast of the great Apostles Ss. Peter and Paul for a celebration of the continued growth of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter and the new priests who will be taking up their work at various apostolates across North America.

Tu es sacerdos in aeternum, secundum ordinem Melchisedech.

Around the year 1200, it pleased Our Lord to grant singular favors to a certain Belgian nun named Lutgardis.

She had already displayed various mystical gifts to her companions at the convent, and now she was also granted the ability to heal minor ailments by a mere touch. This wonderful news began to spread through the land, and before long people came from far and wide to be healed by Lutgardis.

But those looking for physical healing soon proved a spiritually distracting presence at the convent–not just for Lutgardis, but for all her fellow nuns as well.

As she was accustomed to be very frank in her prayers, perhaps rather shockingly so, she complained,  “Why did You go and give me such a grace, Lord? Now I hardly have any time to be alone with You! Take it away, please.” Then, with the kind of boldness that only the most intense lovers of God can seem to get away with, she asked for a new and better grace to replace it.

Our Lord asked her what she wanted in its stead.

As devout as she was, Lutgardis had not, it seems, been blessed with any facility for learning Latin. So although she had been praying the Divine Office with fervor, she was largely ignorant of what she was saying. So she asked the Lord for a fuller understanding of Latin.

Within a few days, she had it.

The psalms and antiphons of the Divine Office, the readings at Matins all suddenly came alive to her. With this new infused knowledge, she gained a deep understanding of these liturgical texts.

It was exactly what she asked for.

But not, it seems, what she really wanted. Because as amazing and ostensibly ordered toward increased piety as this second favor was, in the end it proved only an intellectual gift. Despite the increased understanding, Lutgardis found her devotion to God had not really increased, as she had hoped.

So after a short time, she asked the Lord to take His second mystical favor back. And again, He asked her what she wanted to replace it.

Wiser now from her first two experiences, this time she asked the Lord for something much simpler and more direct: His Heart. When He replied that He wanted her heart as well, her answer was as follows:

“Take it, dear Lord. But take it in such a way that the love of Your Heart may be so mingled and united with my own heart that I may possess my heart in Thee, and that it may always remain there secure in Your protection.”

Our Lord granted this bold request, and so St. Lutgardis of Aywières became one of the first saints on record to experience Mystical Union with the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She is regarded as one of the earliest progenitors of the devotion that would become widespread throughout the world four centuries later with St. Margaret Mary Alacoque.

Today, as we celebrate this feast, let us remember that it is not in amazing miracles or in intellectual understanding that our faith ultimately rests. We need not fret that we lack showy mystical gifts or profound liturgical or Scriptural insights. Although these can certainly bring us closer to our Blessed Savior, they can also be hindrances if we allow them to be. As gifts of God they are good in themselves, but they are not essential.

What is essential, as St. Lutgardis discovered, is to love–to mystically unite our own little hearts and wills to the burning furnace of Charity, the House of God, and the Gate of Heaven: the most Sacred Heart of Jesus.

On June 1st, the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter held priestly and diaconal ordinations in Lincoln, Nebraska, at the Cathedral of the Risen Christ.

The Celebrant was His Excellency Most Rev. Andrew Cozzens, auxiliary bishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Five men were ordained to the sacred priesthood: Reverends Daniel Alloy, Eric Krager, Joseph Loftus, David McWhirter, and Javier Ruiz Velasco Aguilar. Additionally, six men were ordained to the diaconate: Deacons John Audino, Joseph Dalimata, James Eichman, Nicholas Eichman, Joel Pinto Rodriguez, and Thu Truong. Although existing restrictions this year meant that only limited numbers were able to attend, the ceremony was streamed live to the entire world via LiveMass.net.

Special thanks to Charles Barbeau for providing the photographs.