My brother died in 2012, on Langkawi, the day after I had shown him how to burn incense at a Buddhist temple on the island of Penang. I was only fifteen at that time.

I had meant it as nothing more than a curiosity, something to show him on a holiday. For me it felt not that different than lighting a candle in a chapel. It became one of the last conversations we had.

While on Penang, we walked past the old clan houses the Chinese clans there had built generations earlier, most of them kept intact, still used, and maintained by descendants of the men who built them. Much better maintained than the rest at that time… Malaysia is a lot richer now than 14 years ago.

I remember thinking, with the strange clarity grief sometimes gives a boy that age, that I wanted something like that for my own family one day. It looked cool, and sounded cool to know who your ancestors are. I wanted to build a house that outlasts me, the who starts it… To this day I have not built it yet. But that is where the desire started.

What followed after my brother’s tragic death was a serious study of Zen Buddhism, somehow specifically the teaching of Dogen Zenji, who is Japanese. It made me feel like those Asians had something to stay ‘in touch’ with the family members they had lost. I wanted that too, since I just lost my own brother.

At age sixteen I was already considering becoming a monk. Researching Zen Buddhism led me to discover the Catholic missionary history of China and Japan, which oddly let me into Confucianism, because Japanese art, morals, and ritual sit on a Chinese foundation.

Most of my friends growing up were Chinese, which had already pointed me toward that part of the world before any of this began. Maybe you know Asian parents, and how reserved they are around us white folks, but even they were amazed about how much I know about their history.

Thank God Covid-19 happened, which finally put a Bible in my hands again (raised Protestant, yet unbaptised), and the book of Leviticus was the one that removed the doubts I still had about the Church. Which were not about idolatry, but for me, since my point of reference was Protestantism, ‘Christianity’ lacked certain rituals, traditions etc.

When reading Leviticus I noticed something I could not unnotice afterward… Buddhist practice, the chanting of sutras, the long sitting, the contemplation, resembles a Protestant service far more than it resembles anything Catholic: words recited, a mind turned inward, no fixed form handed down by command. See, I already tried to ‘supplement’ it with Shinto and animist influences, which… might I say... fired back to me in a very negative way.

The Book Leviticus is the opposite of Protestantism and Buddhism... God did not ask Israel to contemplate him. He prescribes, in exhausting detail, exactly what a priest should wear, what the altar holds, and what gesture happens in what order. It was liturgy, not a Protestant Sunday service. I noticed that I had been looking for that structure in the wrong tradition… my own culture and ancestors (Catholics) already had everything that I sought…

Yet, my indulgence in Sino-Japanese philosophy has helped me greatly to understand what tradition and transmission means, and what we lost along the way.

I do not propagate importing Chinese customs or their cultural imperialism. I hope you can recognise which parts were already yours, under a name nobody taught you, and recognise exactly where the resemblance has to stop.

China plays the long game… We no longer play any game at all!

A Chinese clan typically kept a written genealogy, called the zupu: recording births, marriages, and deaths across centuries, used to settle inheritance, arrange marriages, and decide who owed support to whom.

Many Chinese clans ran a charitable estate dedicated to the family line.

Fan Zhongyan founded one in Suzhou in 1050, to fund grains and education for his descendants, and estates like it were still recorded functioning in the twentieth century, nine hundred years after he died.

Penang’s clan houses are a visible, later version of the same structure, built by families who intended to still be a family in a 1000 years and built accordingly. This is still law, custom, and administration, resting on one assumption: no outside institution will secure your family’s future, so build something your household can run without help for 10 generations.

The West was built on an opposite assumption. Noble houses kept genealogies and endowed chantries, chapels where a priest was paid in perpetuity to say Mass for the family dead, but this depended on crown law and inherited wealth holding steady.

Unlike China, ordinary households never had access to any version of it, and when the state turned against the mechanism, the noble version collapsed with it.

China for all its faults and destruction of Mao Zedong still managed to keep family structures to survive without institutional support. The West built family structure to depend on it.

We had a similar system in many places in the west. In my ancestral village of Giethoorn, the eldest son inherited the farmhouse (Blijversrecht).

What Catholic missionaries decided could be kept

Matteo Ricci SJ faced it directly when the Jesuits entered China in the 16t century. He had to answer one question before he could baptise anyone: which parts of Chinese family life were compatible with the Gospel, and which were not?

He judged that civil rites are fully compatible: the written genealogy, the family hierarchy, the elder’s authority, the practice of remembering the dead by name. And only judged one thing incompatible: treating the ancestors as gods owed sacrifice, rather than as the dead owed memory and prayer.

The Franciscan missionaries supplied the part a court appointment could never reach.

Friars working in Shanxi province did the parish work that no scholar’s title covered: burying the dead, administering the sacraments, staying in the village after the important men had gone home.

Between the two orders sits a complete, working answer to a question most Catholic men have never had put to them directly. Not whether to honour your dead. But exactly how, and exactly where the line sits that I did not see at sixteen.

In my opinion China could have been a fully Catholic country, and have avoided all the terror of communism. Their societal structure was completely optimised for it.

Since that sadly did not happen, here is the lessons we can still take from this baptised version of Confucianist metaphysics…

Read more

A candidate entered with his own food, his own oil lamp, and a guard outside who did not know his name, only his number. He sat there for three days, and could not leave.

Men died in those cells, from exhaustion, from cold, from the strain of an exam that decided not just his life but his family’s rank for a generation. Some brought a coffin’s measurements folded into their sleeve, so their body would not disgrace the family by being sent home unprepared.

The China you were taught to fear are tanks in Tiananmen square, a labour camp, bishops under house arrest, a virus and a cover-up.

But you were not taught the offices that build the 5000-year old civilisation: the examination hall, the ancestral grave, the household ledger that has decided, for two thousand years, who owes whom and until when.

China still makes decisions as if an heir inherits the obligation along with the name. If you were raised to treat binding as the opposite of freedom, that looks cruel.

What Westerners were trained to miss

Most people learn the same four facts about China early and never update them: no soul, only the (communist) Party. There is no family, only the collective. A country that does not value life, proven by a death count, a lockdown, a one-child law enforced with force. None of this is false of course, but is missing the machinery underneath.

That machinery is that a household still counts as the basic unit of the state, in law and in feeling. Chinese are still obsessed with schooling. An exam decides a young person’s entire adolescence on a single number, because that number decides which university, which city, which spouse, which grandchildren get born at all.

An ancestor still has a seat at the family table once a year, when it is tended, swept, spoken to. A state behaves atheist on paper, but moves like a clan that cannot be allowed to split.

You can hate the Party for what it has done with these facts. You cannot understand what it does without them. When you leave them out, every Chinese decision reads as malice with no cause.

Subscribe now

So what are the four offices Chinese civilisation is build on?

Even though four is an unlucky number, since in Mandarin four: sì (四), and the word for death sǐ (死) sound almost identical, these are the 4 pillars of China:

1. Lineage: A son is still, in most Chinese families, the one who inherits the house, absorbs the parents’ savings, and becomes the one who buries whom. The one-child policy, in force from 1980 to 2015, did not remove this pressure. It concentrated it onto a single child, often a single son, who now carries what three or four siblings once shared.

2. Examination: The imperial examination cell became, in 1952, the gaokao, the national university entrance exam still sat each June by roughly twelve million students. One sitting of two days, and a score that can lift a household out of a province or sink a young life into a factory town. Families sell property to fund tutoring. Hotels near test centres go silent, construction is halted by local order, so the students inside can concentrate.

3. Ancestry: Ancestral halls were burned by the thousand during the Cultural Revolution, tablets smashed, lineage books destroyed as feudal filth. Yet the practice returned. Every April, at Qingming, families travel back to clean the graves, burn paper money, and speak to the dead as though they are still owed something. The dead did not vanish from the count. They were removed from it by force, and the force did not hold. An average Chinese can easily trace his family back thousands of years.

4. Fund: The clan once managed this, pooling land and money across generations so no branch of the family would starve or disappear. The Party took over the function without the form. It behaves like a house that intends not to die, which is why it treats a bishop’s appointment or a Tibetan reincarnation the same way a nervous eldest son treats a will he did not write.

   

The father outside the family

Much of Confucian China would feel familiar to a Catholic, yet the familiar pieces are arranged around a different centre, the family and the state rather than God, and so they end up meaning something quite different.

Zhengming means ‘getting the names right’. Confucius taught that a society starts to fall apart when people hold titles they do not truly live up to: a king who does not act like a king, a father who does not act like a father, a son who does not act like a son.

A title is supposed to match the job behind it. If it does not, the rot spreads downward from the top. That is why the Chinese government cares so much about who gets called a bishop.

When Beijing insists that it, and not the Vatican, decides who may use that title, it is following this old rule exactly. To the Chinese state, the wrong person in the wrong office is not a small paperwork problem. It is the danger Zhengming was invented to stop.

Sangang Wuchang means the Three Bonds and Five Constants. It is an ancient code of relationships, and the Communist Party’s own chain of command still works along its lines. About two thousand years ago, officials of the Han dynasty named three bonds as the ones holding everything up: father and son, ruler and subject, husband and wife.

In each pair, the junior person owes obedience and the senior person owes care, and neither side can simply walk away the way you might quit a club. Seen this way, a citizen who defies the government is not using his rights. He is like a son rebelling against his father. That explains why Chinese state media describes protesters as betraying the family bond, rather than as people who just disagree about a policy.

Some of the Five Constants line up closely with Catholic teaching:

Xiao means respecting your parents and praying for relatives who have died, is very close to the Fourth Commandment.

Ren means kindness, which is close to Christian charity, with one difference: it begins with your own family and spreads outward in rings, whereas Christian charity is meant to reach even a stranger straight away.

Yi is doing the right thing simply because it is right.

Xin means keeping your promises, and is much like the ordinary virtues the Church teaches.

Li means doing things in the proper way, and works rather like lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. It is not just going through the motions: it is how a community stays in step with each other, even among people who will never meet.

Ganying is the belief that Heaven reacts to how people behave. If a ruler governed badly, the signs appeared in the world itself as floods, famines or uprisings, showing that ‘Heaven’ (God) had stopped supporting him.

Tian, which means ‘Heaven’, is a higher order that the ruler must obey and cannot make up for himself, a bit like the Catholic idea of natural law. The crucial difference is that neither Tian nor Ganying is a person who judges you. Christianity has a Father who does, which the missionaries could easily explain using the Three Fundamental Bonds.

The West used to not be that different: a parish or hospital was funded to last for generations, we said Requiem Masses for someone who died decades ago… all of these exist to keep something good going long after one person’s life.

Chinese families aim for something similar. What differs is who is allowed in. The Church welcomes strangers and converts regardless of family background, from outside all three of those bonds. The traditional family clan does not.

Baptism is where the two systems collide. It gives a person a Father who stands outside every one of those family and state relationships.

In effect, it tells a son that someone his family never chose now has the first claim on his loyalty. That is why a society built on these ideas treats baptism as a threat, controls which priests are allowed to say Mass, and demands that bishops answer to Beijing before they answer to Rome.

The Chinese state recognises what the Church is doing precisely because it understands it so well, and that same understanding is what makes it suspicious.

Why is this system still running?

Mao’s campaigns tried to burn this system out. Red Guards smashed ancestral halls, denounced filial piety as feudal, and for a decade came closer than any government in Chinese history to erasing the whole apparatus.

It came back, because a state that governs 1.4 billion people still needs ranks, heirs and a single centre that does not negotiate its own succession. The gaokao returned in 1977. The clan house, the father-son bond, and the ancestral grave came back with it.

The Party runs as the clan that survives all its members: officially atheist, unofficially ancestral.

Why Rome ruined the expansion of Catholicism in China by itself

When the Jesuit Matteo Ricci landed in China in 1583 he did not begin with the Gospel. He began by learning the exam. He mastered classical Chinese calligraphy, learned Confucianism, and spent two decades proving to the literati that a foreigner could argue inside their own tradition rather than shout at it from outside.

He called the rites paid to ancestors and to Confucius civil customs, not a rival cult, and let converts keep the tablets, the incense, the bows at the family grave. To Ricci this was Zhengming done properly: a rite honouring a father is not the office of a rite owed to God, and pretending they were the same name would be exactly the confusion Confucius had warned against.

It worked. Xu Guangqi, one of the empire’s most senior officials, was baptised in 1603. By 1692 the Kangxi Emperor had issued an edict of toleration, and Jesuits sat inside the Forbidden City running the imperial calendar and mapping the empire’s borders. The literati door was open, and it had taken a century to open it. The same strategy Catholics earlier used to ‘infiltrate’ the Roman senate and emperors.

Franciscans and Dominicans arrived later, mostly through Manila, working parishes among ordinary people rather than court appointments. They looked at the same tablet and saw something else. They had not spent childhoods among mandarins learning to read a bow as etiquette. They saw incense burned before a wooden plaque and called it what it looked like: worship. Their complaint travelled to Rome, and Rome spent decades weighing it.

Clement XI ruled against the rites in 1704 and confirmed the ban in 1715. Benedict XIV closed the question for good in 1742, and required an oath from every missionary in China swearing to enforce it. Rome had made its decision the way Rome makes decisions: by asking whether an image on an altar belonged to God or to an idol, with no third category available for a rite the Chinese had never confused with either.

Kangxi did not receive the ruling as a matter of Catholic doctrine. He received it as a foreign priest in a city he had never seen telling his own subjects how to bury their fathers, a decision that belonged, by every office this essay has already named, to the household and to the state and to nobody else.

He wrote across the decree that the West had shown it understood nothing of China. Within two years of his death in 1722, the court began closing churches. The Dominicans and Franciscans who had argued for the ban discovered too late that the emperor’s fury did not sort missionaries by which side they had taken in Rome’s debate. Every mission closed. Not only the Jesuits’.

This is not a story about Chinese intolerance. It is Rome practising its own Zhengming, in a country that had already perfected the art of getting names right, and getting one wrong.

The distinction Ricci spent thirty years building, between an office owed to a father and an office owed to God, was a distinction Confucius himself would have recognised on sight. Yet… Rome overruled thousands of miles away, on a continent where ancestor and deity had never needed separate offices, because European altars had never had to hold the distinction Ricci was asking Rome to hold.

The door Ricci spent a lifetime opening did not close because China proved unreadable. It closed because Rome, for once, refused to read.

So next time you get mad of China electing its own bishops, this is the reason for that.

—Robbert

Coming Saturday: How to read China

• Jesuit frame. Ricci’s method: how to enter through the literati, learn the exam before you preach, treat ancestor rites as civil form until proven otherwise. It bought access to the Kangxi court, but it also risked turning missionaries into court technicians Rome no longer recognized.

• Franciscan frame (the correction:. Friars who worked parishes rather than courts refused Ricci’s civil/sacred split, seeing the same rites as idolatry. Dutch Franciscans in Shanxi, 1871–1954, are the case study: heroic in the collection letters sent home, slow and undersupplied on the ground, slow to hand parishes to Chinese priests.

• Dutch frame: The VOC was a company chasing a port, not a mission chasing the calendar, useful as a contrast to what the Jesuits were actually after. The real Dutch warrants are de Rougemont, the Shanxi friars, and Frans Schraven of Lottum, killed in 1937 defending his compound.

• Five usable tests: the generation test (can it be explained to a grandson), the rites test (funeral and magistrate before custom vs. cult), the literati door (form travels through cultivated men, or you are a sect), the handoff test (did the parish ever go to a Chinese priest), and the two funds (does home want a martyr poster while the field needs rice and native clergy).

Become a member →

The Blessed Sacrament left the Sint Urbanuskerk in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel on the 25 of January this. Bishop Hendriks had written a letter for that Mass. A man from the parish board had read the decree in the nave: ‘withdrawal from worship on the first of March’. On the Sunday itself the Paschal candle was extinguished. The sanctuary lamp was put out. The tabernacle emptied. And the altar stone with the relics left under drumbeat in a procession the mayor of Ouder-Amstel later described as ‘a closing of doors’.

What is left is a building with Cuypers brick, its Stations in tile, its Marian chapel, and its smell of cold wax.

I asked for vestments and other things I could repurpose, but never got a response besides: ‘we have to discuss.’

The Netherlands is a great country in terms of infrastucture and we seem to organise a lot good, except for heritage, inheritances etc.

A lot goes to waste through omission, receiving a quick buck and a ‘we don’t care’ attitude.

So, as we concluded: on the first of March the Diocese of Haarlem-Amsterdam withdrew the Urbanus from worship. From that hour this Cuypers church became, in the language of the chancery, a building like any other. The stone remained a ‘rijksmonument’ (National Monument), and the city began to speak of cultural heritage.

It is the sad reality of parishes in the Netherlands: a slow process of deconsecration: through laymen (and women) replacing the priest, dual use of the Church building (venue rental), and finally: the last Mohicans (seniors) being buried under the ground.

How Dutch parishes get deconstructed reminds me of how they tore the garment of Our Lord: everyone got an unequal share. Statues go to random parishes in Asia, Poland, etc., more often to antique dealers who sell them with 99% margins or they end up in a warehouse for decay.

The worst offender is Catharijneconvent: which is a secular Museum, receiving government funding, attached to the Cathedral of the Archdiocese of Utrecht.

It is criminal, yet even ‘conservative’ bishops like Eijk let this happen: a government funded museum stealing the Church’s artifacts under the assumption of stewardship.

Maybe you have uncountered any of this yourself. The closed Church you drive past on the way to the one remaining Sunday Mass. The Church your grandparents built that now holds offices, a restaurant, flats, or a bookshop.

The sense that the faith in your house is a private remainder, while the public form of the faith has been catalogued and sold. Buildings are only retained for their ‘cultural heritage’ listing. Your grandpa could spot a Church and just walk in there. You can do the same, but today you never know if it actually is a Church still.

The force that produces this condition is not decline as a weather. Decline is the weather. The force killing your parish is a procedure.

A parish board, facing heat and slate and a Sunday count that can fall as low as to fifteen souls. Often they invite local entrepreneurs or real estate developers in the parish board, and then ask the bishop for reduction to profane use.

The bishop (a weak figure 9.9 out of 10 times) consults, and issues a decree. A liquidation committee writes an inventory with four values for each object: religious, historical, artistic, economic.

Museum Catharijneconvent has registered hundreds of thousands of such objects. The sacred vessels go first to another church in the fusion parish. The rest go to a list.

And what finds no church and no museum meets a sentence in the handbook: discrete destruction, or a pawn shop.

We inherited a country where an old church building is treated as valuable for the public, while keeping the Church open for worship is treated as an expensive problem.

Your great-grandparents may have spent their whole lives saving money to build the church. But today, the diocese still has to pay for the roof, heating, repairs, and insurance. So when there is not enough money, the Church will be sold.

The municipality may be willing to help pay for a protected historic building, called a rijksmonument. But that does not necessarily mean it will help keep the building functioning as a Church. The government often wants something in return.

Then the diocese has to decide what should happen to the building. Sometimes it has rules about what the new owner may do. For example, a contract might say that the building cannot become a café, theatre, or supermarket, and breaking the rule could result in a large fine.

But there is another problem… Some people inside the parish board may prefer to turn churches into houses because housing is financially attractive (and they could live there themselves). The result can be that the building survives, but the purpose dies.

So we end up saving the shape of the church while losing the heartbeat of the church. Remember: Christ is in all the Tabernacles, His presence alone is worthy to keep.

A closed parish creates a strange situation. Someone who wants to keep a church as a living parish may be told that they are simply nostalgic. And do not try to contact the diocese if you are SSPX: they rather make it into a junky squat house then give it to actual faithful.

But a church was never just a building filled with objects.

It is a sacred place where people did the same important things week after week. The priest wore different colours because the Church year had different seasons. The bell was rung because it helped give the village its rhythm. Families sat in particular pews. The altar contained a relic because Mass was celebrated there.

None of these things were random.

The building, the objects, and the people formed one whole organism. The Church mattered because something happened there.

When people could no longer continue that life, the old Church could become a practical headache. Who will pay for the heating? Who will repair the roof? Who will buy insurance? Who will organise the volunteers? Eventually, people might start fighting about these questions… since many boomers are self-righteous and uncompromising (except when it is about money, they are addicted to it).

In the past, when a Church could no longer be used, important religious objects might be moved to another church or treated with religious respect. The building itself might simply cease to be used as a church.

Today, however, we often try to preserve the building at almost any cost by giving it a completely different purpose.

And that raises an uncomfortable question:

If we save the walls but remove everything that made the building a church, have we really saved the Church? What have we saved at all, besides a pile of bricks?

It is honest to admit that a building has lost its original purpose than to turn it into something completely unrelated. In that sense it is more respectful to demolish it, then to ridicule it with profane uses.

Our great-grandparents built these churches for God and for their communities. They did not build them so that, a hundred years later, a padel company could buy one, keep the historic façade, and celebrate itself for having “saved the heritage.”

This is what has been lost: people who lived with a rhytm, a faith, and accountability to their neighbours.

Below are the 6 steps to save what remains of your local parish before it is too late…

Read more

Part I: what the 2021 census really said
Part II: how Poland turned a pope into a brand
Part III: the 1980 speech that moved a dogma nobody noticed move
Part IV: the parishes that survived without any of it

Catholic Poland died on the census and in the ordinary parish.

In absolute numbers, it still looks like everything is fine. A census still says that 71 percent of Poles are Catholic. The pews, the communion rail, and the ordination lists tell a completely different story.

My first essay was about that disappearance. The second was about what filled the space afterwards: a John Paul II brand turned into pastry, street names, and eventually an online joke.

The third went underneath the whole thing, to the theology of the supposed Catholic renewal: a 1980 speech in Mainz, and the ground that moved when the Old Covenant was described as never revoked.

But one question remained…

Where did the people who still cared go?

Picture the parishioner who does not fit any of my last three essays.

He has not walked away. Has not stopped believing, stopped attending Mass, or stopped caring what the Church over 2000 years taught.

Quite the opposite actually…

He still wants the sacraments, still cares about the liturgy, and still believes that what the Church teaches matters.

He has simply stopped trusting the diocesn parish. Or the local bishop. Or the Paul VI Mass as Rome now permits it.

So on a given Sunday, instead of walking to the parish where he grew up, he gets into his car. And forty minutes later, he arrives at a chapel with no diocesan backing, no canonical certainty, and a priest whose relationship with Rome has been argued over since before he was born.

He has not stopped going to Mass.

He has gone somewhere else.

And for some Polish Catholics, that journey began during Covid.

Before the pandemic, weekly Mass attendance in Poland stood at 36.9%

In 2021 it fell to 28.3%. Since then it has remained around 29%, with the longer-term trend still downward.

The ordinary parish had suddenly become much less ‘ordinary’.

Like bishops elsewhere, the Polish bishops adhered to government restrictions. Access to the sacraments was limited. In many places communion in the hand became mandatory(!)

For the Polish Catholic who felt that something was wrong, this created a very simple question:

Where can I still go?

The Society of Saint Pius X already had an answer.

Its chapels had been celebrating Mass in Poland since the early 1990s. The pandemic did not create the network. It simply sent a particular kind of believer toward a door that was already open.

The chapels did not close. There were no capacity limits. And in some places, the number of Sunday Masses was increased.

For Catholics who felt abandoned by their own parish, the SSPX chapel was no longer merely a marginal curiosity.

It was an actual alternative.

In some places, attendance grew by 300% during Covid.

And that matters because the people walking through those doors were not necessarily people who had stopped being Catholic.

Most had become more determined to practise their faith precisely because the ordinary structures around them had become difficult to trust.

The network was already there… waiting for them!

By 2025, the Polish District listed 41 places of Mass inside Poland: four priories and thirty-seven chapels, with three missions under Fr. Karol Stehlin.1

2021, the year Rome shut a door

For years, a Catholic in Poland could attend the old Mass in his own diocesan church, like anywhere else in the world.

But then, in July 2021, that arrangement changed.

Pope Francis issued Traditionis Custodes,2 restricting the use of the Roman liturgy as it existed before the reforms of 1970 and withdrawing the permissions Benedict XVI had expanded fourteen years earlier in Summorum Pontificum.3

Bishops who had let the traditional liturgy run alongside the Missal of Paul VI were told to wind it back. In a lot of dioceses, that meant: to nothing.

Poland felt the logic of that document even where it was applied unevenly…

Because Poland’s religious landscape was never uniform: Tarnów still records Mass attendance above 60 percent, while Koszalin-Kołobrzeg sits below one in five.

That split, already documented in my first essay, is important here.

Strong pockets of traditional attachment existed inside a national Church suddenly under instruction to standardise its liturgical life to the Missal of Paul VI (once more).

A parishioner in one of those strong pockets, attending the old rite at his own diocesan church for years, was suddenly given two options: accept the New Mass, or find the old one somewhere else.

And as divided as the country is, Poland did not obey uniformly: Some bishops left existing celebrations in place, while a handful suppressed them harshly4. Separate from the SSPX, public directories of bishop-approved 1962 Masses still list more than a hundred sites in Poland. Surprisingly more, not fewer, than in 2021.

So where did the people go when their local Mass disappeared?

The SSPX chapels were already there. They did not need a decree to keep existing. They needed that disillusioned believer. Remember: every Summorum Pontificum / diocesan TLM (including FSSP, ICKSP, IBP) have TEMPORARY faculties, which can be taken away by a local bishop at any time.

Traditionis Custodes opened the eyes of many Poles for this Sword of Damocles when they saw their local Latin Mass discontinued.

There was another door.

And some people walked through it…

And the growth was enormous: SSPX in Białystok5 outgrew the chapel blessed on 8 December 2021 and consecrated a larger one, still under the title of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, on Palm Sunday 2026. The Tarnów chapel moved from a tent extension to a new chapel. This year Rzeszów blessed their new chapel on 15 August.

Two more reasons, and they are Poland’s own

The 2021 Latin Mass restriction explains some of the traffic. But does not paint the full picture. The SSPX chapels were already receiving people the ordinary parish could no longer hold.

Abuse was the first reason, and it cuts a strange path... For the Catholic who now drives to an SSPX chapel, the scandals from the first essay did not produce indifference. For them it produced a sharpened distrust of the specific Polish bishops who mishandled them, and an unchanged, sometimes hardened, commitment to the sacraments those same bishops are supposed to protect. He is the type of Catholic that does not trust the diocese. Yet still wants the Mass. The ‘Lefebvrist’ chapel was built to receive that person.

Theology is another... The believer who has read Redemptor Hominis, or the Mainz address, or simply absorbed a general unease that a lot has shifted across the last Pontificates, and finds the shifts rather troubling than reassuring, has few places inside the mainstream Church to take his discomfort.

His parish is not going to relitigate Vatican II with him. It probably has a shrine dedicated to the same ‘Saint’ John Paul II in the nave, including to ‘traditional’ ones:

Then thirdly: what sends some of these people out of the parish is older than a fight over one sentence in Mainz. It is an argument printed in Polish since 1997 in Zawsze Wierni: that the Council, and the language of a never-revoked Old Covenant, moved the ground under the necessity of Christ.

But the growth came not only from disappointed laymen. 13 diocesan priests have crossed as well. The most public case is Fr. Wojciech Gołaski, a Dominican of twenty-eight years’ priesthood, a liturgist who had said the Dominican rite for twelve years.

On 17 August 2021 he wrote an open letter to Pope Francis from Jamna6. Traditionis Custodes, he told the Pope, had informed him that ‘the road he had been walking no longer existed’. He placed himself at the disposal of the Society of Saint Pius X and asked them that his Dominican identity be left intact.

The letter went to the Master of the Order, the Polish provincial, the bishop of Tarnów, and Fr. Stehlin, the superior of SSPX in Poland. A priest telling Rome he was leaving the structure and keeping his rite, because he had no other option.

It became clear that this movement was no longer something hidden or anonymous in 2023, when an independent Polish documentary called Ukryty Skarb Kościoła7 (;The Hidden Treasure of the Church’) was released. The film was shared widely online. And it showed how many people started attending the Traditional Latin Mass and, in particular, how ordinary Polish families began going to the chapels of the Society during the pandemic.

The documentary showed that this community was no longer staying out of sight. And it even grew SSPX-chapels in other places in Europe due to local Polish immigrant populations.

The interesting fact is the kind of defection: small, deliberate, made almost entirely of people who cared enough to leave rather than fade.

A parishioner who stops attending Mass makes no statement. He is just gone and out of the game, yet a parishioner who drives forty minutes to a chapel with contested standing inside his own Church does make one.

And this shows up where it matters most: succession. Poland will ordain 196 priests this year, a number my own country (The Netherlands) could dream of. But it is its lowest total this century, with seven dioceses ordaining no one at all.

The small (though growing) SSPX network funds its own work through direct donations, a modest online shop, and the 1.5 percent of personal income tax that Polish taxpayers may assign to a public-benefit foundation.

The vehicle is Fundacja Sancti Iosephi (KRS 0000237527)8. Ironically the SSPX in the Netherlands is also called ‘The Saint Joseph Foundation’ (Stichting Sint Jozef).

The tax assignment alone brought in 296,000 złoty for 2022, 445,000 for 2023, and 525,000 for 2024 (~$140,000). The money goes, among other things, to the St Thomas Aquinas school in Józefów and a kindergarten in Warsaw.

But this tax deduction alone does not run the chapels. The chapels are paid by Sunday offerings and by donations routed through a second foundation, marked for religious worship, which donors may deduct from their income.

Separate public appeals for new churches and chapels have already taken in millions of złoty. More than 3.8 million złoty (~$1 million) toward a Church on the left bank of the Vistula in Warsaw alone.

People who choose the traditional version of their own faith turn out to be people who will pay for it, in a way the comfortable 71 percent never had to.

Conclusion

Thirty-nine sites do not replace the national Church. But do show who still pays.

The monuments in the second essay were a substitute for practice. These chapels are where the practice of the faith, not of the cult, continued: A retreat calendar set a year ahead. A school that has to raise its own wing. And in August 2026, a men’s bicycle pilgrimage from Gniezno to Gietrzwałd: 300 kilometres, three stages.9

To say the SSPX grew in Poland is an understatement. It rather became an undercurrent, which is still growing.

Poland is a country that printed 71 percent Catholic, then failed the attendance test, the communion test, and the ordination test.

Catholic Poland died on the form and in the parish.

What remains is a diocesan zombie church and a smaller, stricter, and harder to find network of Latin Mass chapels.

Poland is the country that forgot those Catholics.

-Robbert

If you liked this series, consider becoming a (paid) subscriber, or make a one time donation.

Subscribe now

Keeping them is rather inherited discipline, than recovered legalism.

I say that first because serious readers will otherwise smell a trap. Most of us tried to live against the current. Have already read the Church Fathers. And hopefully have already structured a life around the Mass that your neighbours treats as a weird hobby.

You do not need another obligation invented in my newsletter. I think you already know that these days still exists after the sanction died… if you do not, read this.

So… the sanction died. But the Ember Days did not. Pope Leo the Great preached the four seasons as thanksgiving for the earth and as the ordinary time of ordination.

The 1917 Code bound the fast. The 1966 Code unbound it. Maybe for the right reasons, because almost nobody observed them anyway… yet I guess you do not want a 1950s spirit back (it is less romantic than you think).

So… what remains is your own household in which you can keep practices like these when the institution lets them slip.

Today is Saturday, 19 September 2026.

And while I recently discovered the older calendar would observed the Ember Days the past week (maybe one of the few things Paul VI actually restored), for this year I keep the 1960 calendar.

On that count September Ember is next week: Wednesday 23rd, Friday 25th, and Saturday 26th. On the older count, after Holyrood, last Wednesday, Friday and today are the Ember Days. That split is why the comments exploded.

But let us not make it a purity test…

The point here is: the more you live with your missal and the liturgy, the more the seasons become clear to you. Besides all theological errors, this is what the 1969 Liturgy Reforms have taken away. There is no ‘Ordinary Time’ in the Catholic liturgy. Never has been.

Yet.. nobody at your workplace is hungry for harvest. Few volunteers at your parish office will print Ember Days on a sheet. And the gap is not ignorance alone. Even few Catholics live a life that carries the season.

They do not always do this on purpose, it is because modern life has gotten abstract. People wear t-shirts and jeans summer, autumn, winter and spring.

The Ember Days

Just to clarify, this is the difference of the dates that has gotten so much discussion lately. This is what it is about:

The Rubricarum instructum of John XXIII, 25 July 19602, changed how the first Sunday of the month is counted for the August–November Scripture cycle. The Ember week in September is tied to that third week. When 14 September sits early, the two systems part. And 2026 is one of those years…

Again, I was not aware of this before. That is why for this year I keep the 1960 week.

So the practical first step for you:

1. Pick one liturgical calendar for the year: I assume most of you attend a 1962 Mass, few maybe a 1954 Mass, and others maybe a 1969 Mass. A Catholic who keeps half of this week and half of next week keeps a private invention. If you ate as usual on Wednesday the 16th and you follow 1960, you have not missed Ember. Your week has not started.

   If you followed the older week and find these pages on Saturday the 19th, keep Friday and Saturday. Do not do a back-dated Wednesday!

   You can use this liturgical calendar daily!

Read more

Part I: what the 2021 census really said
Part II: how Poland turned a pope into a brand
Part III: the 1980 speech that moved a dogma nobody noticed move
Part IV: the parishes that survived without any of it

Pope John Paul II stood in a German synagogue in 1980 and told the Jews that they never needed his Church at all.

On 17 November 1980, in Mainz (Germany) Pope John Paul II stood before a Jewish community and described his visit as ‘a dialogue between two peoples’. The people of the New Covenant, he said, are meeting the people of the Old Covenant, a covenant, he was careful to specify, that God had never revoked.1 Catholics are the New Covenant, Jews the Old. A sentence that sounds like it comes right out of the gobbledygook dictionary of a diplomat that wants to ‘build bridges’ rather than ‘reopen old wounds.’

This diplomatic sentence read against nearly two thousand years of Catholic teaching on this exact subject. It was one of the most consequential sentences a Pope has spoken in the modern era, and almost no one in Poland, then or since, has been asked to reckon with what John Paul II actually claimed here.

To see why, it helps to know exactly what it was answering to.

How John Paul II ‘changed’ a doctrine defined three times in Church history

As a Catholic you might (or might not) know that the Church did not arrive at the necessity of Christ for salvation in a casual way. Over the centuries the same fact has been proven again and again… Until modernia overruled it.

Why? Maybe because modern people are scared of hell. They cannot imagine it anymore, they think going to Church is enough. Or being a ‘good person’ without faith is sufficient too. And do not think it are only agnostics saying this, even in Traditional Catholic circles nonsense like that Charlie Kirk is in heaven, or that Orthodox go to heaven is preached by some.

And while God can do as He pleases, no is allowed to spread such false optimism. The Church never left open the question for later popes to revisit it, or that circumstances can change. The Truth does not change with times.

The Council of Florence, under Pope Eugene IV, declared as an article of faith that the ceremonies, rites and sacrifices of the Mosaic law, no matter their earlier standing, had ceased with the coming of Christ. And that those who continued to observe these rites after that point cannot be considered part of the Christian faith.

This article was not but a passing remark in a sermon. This was (and still is) a solemn profession of faith, issued by an ecumenical council, in the exact register Catholic theology reserves for its most binding and permanent statements. While the broader doctrine it rests on: that the Church founded by Christ is necessary for salvation, had already been defined with comparable force at the same council. And later reaffirmed again and again by popes and doctors of the Church across the centuries that followed.

But it was Holy Scripture itself that gave the doctrine its foundation, before any council had ever touched it. It was Christ Himself that addressed the Jews directly, and warned that those who did not believe He was the one they awaited would die in his own sins.

St. Peter, at the very first Christian sermon on the day of Pentecost, also did not tell the devout Jews that gathered to hear him that their existing covenant remained sufficient. He told them plainly, to be baptised

St. Paul, when writing to the Hebrews, said plainly that the new covenant had made the old one obsolete. None of these examples was ambiguous to the theologians who spent centuries systematising it.

None of these writings left room for a later pope (together with many Israel-obsessed Protestants) to describe the Old Covenant as still standing, untouched, and alongside the new one. That would mean that Christ’s arrival had simply added a second valid path rather than fulfilled and superseded the first.

The doctrine of supersessionism is what Wojtyła’s sentence in Mainz set aside. He did not attack it directly, which would have provoked exactly the resistance a modern pope had every reason to avoid. But by speaking past it, very gently, and warmly, in a sentence that simply assumed the Old Covenant’s ongoing validity as though the question had already been settled in the other direction.

Many of the John Paul II idolisers now teach this doctrine like it has always been taught this way:

The non-Catholics who noticed exactly what had happened

My clearest evidence for that this was not just a rhetorical accident, but a real and legible shift, comes from the reaction of the Jewish people who had every reason to read it correctly, because it was being said for their own benefit.

For example Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League: he praised Wojtyła specifically for rejecting what he called ‘the destructive concept of supersessionism'.’

The Jerusalem Post ran a tribute when John Paul II dies asking who would follow ‘the best pope the Jews had ever had.’

The Boston Globe called his outreach to the Jewish people ‘remarkable’, and praised him for insisting the Old Covenant was never revoked.

These were not hostile critics looking for something to attack. They were sympathetic observers, on the receiving end of the gesture, confirming in their own words exactly what traditionalist critics inside the Church would go on to say had happened.

When the people the doctrine was changed to accommodate are the ones telling you it changed, the argument that nothing shifted becomes very hard to sustain.

But instead of slowly restoring this error, Rome did not walk the sentence back either.

No, they doubled down on it! In 1985, the Vatican issued Notes on how Judaism should be presented in Catholic preaching and teaching. The document pointed readers specifically to a passage instructing that Judaism shall be treated as a living present reality rather than a superseded one, quoting Wojtyła’s own Mainz sermon directly to make the point.

John Paul II later described the document as proof of the Holy See’s ‘continuing commitment to the relationship it established.’

He also said that it would help to free Catholic teaching from what he called ‘a negative and inaccurate presentation of Jews and Judaism.’

The Pope who said his Mainz sermon had been misread by the ADL, The Jerusalem Post and The Boston Globe had an opportunity, five years later, in an official Vatican document bearing his own commentary, to correct this own record. But instead he confirmed exactly what these journalists said five years prior.

The Anti-Defamation League praised John Paul II for exactly the theological move traditionalists have spent four decades calling heresy.

Subscribe now

His sentence in Mainz was not a one-off…

What is important to understand here is that none of this happened in isolation. So it is is worth tracing the sentence in his Mainz sermon back to where it all began.

The flawed theology that produced it was already visible in Wojtyła’s very first encyclical, more than a year before he ever set a foot in that synagogue.

Redemptor Hominis, published in March 1979, the encyclical got framed as an one about the Holy Redeemer.

In a close reading of its first six sections what one finds, according to the theologian Fr. Johannes Dörmann’s extended study of the text, is something closer to a theology of universal salvation rooted in the Incarnation itself. In the sole fact that the Son of God took on human nature, rather than in the specific redemptive act of the Crucifixion.2

And that difference is much more important than one would guess… and also the reason why the Catholic Church told as to not ‘proselytise’ and stop the missionary work. It explains Assissi in 1986 and the obsession post-Vatican II popes have with human dignity.

If Catholic theology begins with the Incarnation, meaning: Christ became human, it can argue that Christ is connected to every human being simply because all people share human nature (or human dignity) with him.

On this view alone, a person might receive the benefit of Christ’s Redemption without first having faith or being baptised, because such an argument does not depend on the person responding to the Crucifixion through faith.

Dörmann then makes an important observation about this: in Redemptor Hominis, there is strikingly little emphasis on faith and baptism as the normal ways in which a person receives redemption.3

For a papal document specifically about Christ’s saving work that silence speaks volumes. The fact that faith and baptism are not presented as necessary means of receiving redemption reveals all about the flawed theology in the document itself.

Then again, Redemptor Hominis was not an isolated example that John Paul II later overtuned. In a broader reading of his theological writings, the same pattern appears again and again throughout his pontificate: John Paul II repeatedly presented the Incarnation as the place where Christ is united with humanity and where God and human beings meet. 4

So, what John Paul II said in Mainz in 1980 about Judaism was not a sudden change in his theology. It was an application of the same flawed theological ideas already appearing earlier writings.

When Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, took an active role in the Second Vatican Council he helped with the drafting of Gaudium et Spes.

Paragraph 22 of that document became especially important because it says that the Son of God, through the Incarnation, somehow united himself with every human being.

This became an important starting point for Wojtyła’s and among him many other post-conciliar prelates’ and Popes’ thinking about the relationship between Christ and humanity.

The study of humanity was becoming closely connected with the study of God, because God had united Himself to humanity by becoming man.

Subscribe now

The Philosopher underneath the ‘Theologian’

It is worth explaining what kind of thinking lies behind Wojtyła’s anthropocentric theology, which is still widely taught in Poland and many other places. And yes: even ‘TLM’ seminaries like the one of the Fraternity of Saint Peter.

John Paul II is often described as a Thomist, but that description is too simplified.

His early studies at Rome’s Angelicum, especially under the Dominican theologian Garrigou-Lagrange, were genuinely Thomist formation. He continued to use Thomistic vocabulary throughout his life. E.g. ideas such as act and potency, nature and person appear again and again in his writings.

The deeper structure of his philosophy comes from non-Catholic sources. His habilitation thesis focused on the ethics of Max Scheler, a philosopher in the phenomenological tradition that developed from Husserl and, further back, Kant.

His major philosophical work that followed, Person and Act, also begins with human experience and consciousness. Rather than starting with a Thomistic metaphysics of being, he asks how a person experiences himself, makes choices, acts, and becomes aware of himself through those actions.

It represents a much bigger shift in where philosophy begins. Descartes famously began with the thinking subject: ‘I think.’

Kant likewise focused on the mind and the way the mind structures human experience. Hegel went further, treating consciousness, and human ideas and doctrines, as things that develop and change throughout history.

The argument, then, is that Wojtyła’s theology uses the language of Aquinas but is structured around a more modern focus on the human subject. That is why on a superficial level people consider them to be ‘conservative’ or ‘orthodox.’

But when you read his writing you will discover how he places great importance on human experience and consciousness rather than beginning with metaphysical realism: the idea that reality, including being itself, exists independently of how we experience it.

This then allows for doctrine to develop rather than treating every formulation as permanently settled in exactly the same form.

This is closely related to Cardinal Ratzinger’s own description of Gaudium et Spes as introducing a ‘new type of anthropocentric theology.’ In other words, Ratzinger was identifying the same basic movement from within the Council itself.

My central point is therefore: a theology that begins primarily with man’s experience of himself, rather than with God as He exists in Himself, is structurally different from classical Thomistic theology, even when it continues to use Thomistic words and concepts.

Call it Novusordoism, Vatican Twoism, John Paul II’ism or whatever you want, but it does not constitute Catholic doctrine.

Even sympathetic observers called it a revolution

It is always assumed that only ‘the Lefebvrists’ read John Paul II’s pontificate this way, and what everyone else experienced was continuity, yet dressed in a friendlier tone.

The record does not support that assumption.

Weeks before John Paul II beatified Popes Pius IX and John XXIII together, the progressive Catholic journal Commonweal observed, with something close to admiration, that both men (John Paul II and John XXIII) would have been condemned for their own ideas had they voiced them while Pius IX still held the office.

James Carroll, writing in Time and openly critical of the Catholic Church’s institutions, went even further. He challenged the common picture of John Paul II as simply a conservative pope trying to protect the Church’s old ways.

It took a Time magazine atheist to see what princes of the Church, buried in lace and reciting the old rite, still cannot bring himself to say out loud.

Carroll argued that John Paul II’s pontificate brought about two major changes. The first concerned the Church’s attitude toward war, and the second its relationship with the Jewish people. Carroll considered these changes among the most important developments in the modern history of Catholicism. He believed that these changes created the possibility for even more changes in the future, most of which John Paul II himself may never have intended.

Joe Sobran of the National Review however, approached the issue from a very different angle. He was more sympathetic to traditional Catholic teaching rather than hostile to it. He questioned whether John Paul II had really solved the problems that had emerged after the Second Vatican Council.

He pointed, for example, to declining Mass attendance and to what he described as ‘a homosexual subculture’ in some American seminaries. A problem that would later be connected with some of the Church’s most serious sex scandals, many of which were not dealt with effectively until it was too late.

My point here is: these writer were not all Lefebvrist conspiracy theorists trying to discredit a Pope they disliked already.

Both the liberalist and traditionalist reached the conclusion: something has changed in Catholic thought and practice during John Paul II’s pontificate.

The change was not simply a pope using different words or having a different style of communication. Something deeper had shifted in the Church’s understanding of the dogma’s of faith.

What the John Paul II monument was never going to tell you

This piece is what the cake and the statue in the previous essay could never carry. Both are part of a brand, but neither one can hold an argument about whether the covenant God made with Israel was fulfilled or simply left standing beside a second one, and neither one was ever built to try.

Yet it does shows you the flawed theology behind all the glitz and glamour of John Paul II. Catholicism is not a personality cult for the Pope. Never was and never will, yet John Paul II introduced exactly that.

Poland spent four decades building public shrines to a man whose actual theological project, on the specific question of who needs Christ for salvation, was contested at the time by his own sympathisers and celebrated at the time by people the traditional doctrine had explicitly excluded.

Both things happened in full public view. Neither one required the average Catholic to read a single page of Redemptor Hominis to keep venerating the man who wrote it.

The last essay in this series will be about the places where the reading of his flawed ideas never stopped. The chapels that kept the old calendar, a journal that made my argument decades before it was fashionable to make it. It includes a network the census was never built to count.

If the theology in this essay is right, it explains why those places exist at all. They are what is left when a country stops asking its saints to actually mean what they said.

Our civilisation was held together by the collection of these small and grand ideas. Vestments, processions, customs, recipes, crafts, feast days observed in one place and nowhere else. Most of them faded or stopped being taught.

Not everything will come back. Some things ended for pragmatic reason. But you cannot decide what to want to keep or let go if you have never even heard of it.

Soon autumn will start again, and historically Catholics fasted at the start of every season to reset….

Yet even most Traditional Catholics nowadays have never kept the Ember Days. The practice was already very lax during the Pacellian Pontificate, when fasting before Mass was changed from midnight to just 3 hours… But that is a story for another time…

So.. what are Ember Days?

Four times a year, at the turning of each season, the Catholic Church historically set aside 3 days for fasting, prayer, and gratitude.

The logic behind this being a Wednesday, Friday and Saturday are:

• Our Lord was betrayed on a Wednesday

• Our Lord was crucified on a Friday

• Our Lord was in His Tomb on Saturday

The autumn Ember Days fall in the week after the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, which is on September 14th. They have fallen after this Feast since at least the fifth century.

Before that, the Romans kept seasonal fasts around the same turning points. The Catholic Church did not invent the impulse, but consecrated it, and made it part of the liturgical year.

The Latin name is Quatuor Tempora: the four seasons of the year. And the days had a threefold purpose:

1. To thank God for the gifts of the season

2. To learn how to use them in moderation.

3. To remember the poor, who feel the turning of the year more than anyone.

These 3 pillars are often forgotten nowadays by Catholics… who spend all days consuming, buying stuff they do not need, engaging in conversations that waste time…

Most consumption today is conspicuous consumption as Veblen would call it. So that traditional priests are not more radical about these days is beyond me… It is an antidote to the sick, wicked times we live in.

For over fifteen hundred years the Ember Days were obeyed in every diocese of the Western Church without interruption.

But on 17 February 1966, Pope Paul VI’s decree Paenitemini excluded the Ember Days as days of fast and abstinence.

The 1969 calendar revision left their observance to each national bishops’ conference. Yet Novus Ordo does not even have liturgy for these days anymore… so how can one expect people to know them?

Most dioceses let them go without announcement. The American bishops declared that existing Days of Prayer already counted. The Dutch bishops said nothing, the practice just died out.

The Ember Days disappeared inside a bureaucratic reclassification that nobody noticed and seemingly nobody mourned.

For some magical reason The General Instruction of the Roman Missal still mandates their celebration in every diocese. State plainly in paragraph 46 that conferences of bishops ‘should arrange the time and plan for their celebration.’ Paragraph 394 of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal states that Ember Days ‘should be indicated’ in every national calendar. Should… Not ‘may’!

What was lost in our society was not a superficial devotional curiosity. Fasting, unlike what health influencers tell you, is spiritual, and not for vanity.

It was the only structure that connected our body to the rhythm of the year. The light in September is different from the light in June. The coldness of autumn is not the same cold as in February. Our body knows the season. And for fifteen centuries the Catholic Church gave you a form for responding to that knowledge.

Catholicism embodied the WHOLE life, so not just what one does on a Sunday morning weekly or occasionally.

Without this, the season passes. You notice the light is different, and you feel something shifting… Yet people completely lost the seasons.

People have stopped dressing for the season, eating for the season, or noticing the season at all.

I can name more of these examples of how people have become blind and numb for seasonal differences… like eating strawberries all year, buying flowers in winter etc.

If you are reading Heritage Standard, you probably do not want all that consumerism in your life… So… why not start implementing this practice next week?

You can still keep these days... You can do it for yourself, or with others, but do not make a thing of it. Fasting is spiritual, not a vanity object.

Fast on Wednesday. Fast on Friday. Fast on Saturday. Sit in silence for twenty minutes and thank God for what the summer gave you and what the coming winter will require.

No bishop or priest in your local parish will announce this anymore. But the season is still turning. Summer is sadly over… so do what your ancestors did. Our Faith and society as a whole are bigger than the 1900-1970 lunacy.

The winter Ember Days fall after the feast of Saint Lucy, December 13. More on that later.

Your year has a shape. It always did.

Now give that shape back.

-Robbert

Subscribe now

Part I: what the 2021 census really said
Part II: how Poland turned a pope into a brand
Part III: the 1980 speech that moved a dogma nobody noticed move
Part IV: the parishes that survived without any of it

Poland spent 40 years building John Paul II shrines large enough to be seen from every roundabout, and in the same time Poles stopped reading his books….

The first pilgrimage in 1979 of John Paul II contained the habit of a purpose-built stage: a crowd, a stall selling mugs and pens, a camera crew, but almost no mechanism for carrying home the sentences this Pope actually spoke. While a lot of modern seminarians and internet priests often quote making him look like a brilliant figure, while ignoring the heterodoxies, interfaith prayers and even intercommunion with Protestants and Eastern Orthodox.

Poland in the 1970s was a country starved of a figure it could be proud of on the world stage celebrated the way countries celebrate at the time of his ascend: Loudly, and with merchandise.

With John Paul II Poland found the hero it could be proud of, and turned him into a huge national symbol. Vendors sold t-shirts, mugs, pens, commemorative albums, small devotional objects meant to be carried home and kept on a shelf.

Over time Polish people became more interested in celebrating him than in listening carefully to what he was actually saying.

Every time he came back to Poland this pattern continued. Like during his visits in the 1980s and 1990s. Each visit was shaped like a show: he spoke on stage, large crowds, souvenir parlours, an paparazzi en TV crews recording every move.

The Poles got creative: new souvenirs were invented, and people bought them, eventhough they already had plenty. Every object he walked across was treated like a relic. And it is understandable that people need physical memories: a medal, rosary etc. to remember a Papal visit. But now, almost 40 years later people remember the brand John Paul II™ better than his actual message.

‘Conservatives’ like Cardinal Burke even makes him into a fierce defender of the Catholic faith. Yet somehow never mentions Assissi in 1986.

Writer Konstanty Pilawa described1 how Poland’s relationship with Karol Wojtyła (Pope John Paul II) changed over time he divides this relationship into three stages:

He calls the 1st stage ‘The Kremówka,’ in which he refers to the cream cake John Paul II often mentioned when he returned to Wadowice, the small Polish town he grew up in.

Over time, the cake became a symbol of Wojtyła himself and even of his entire time as Pope. It represented a cheerful, familiar, and distinctly Polish side of him. It was something people could easily enjoy and connect with. But, importantly, the cake had almost nothing to do with Wojtyła’s actual religious teachings or ideas.

Exactly his religious views is what political scientist Krzysztof Mazur was criticising in 2011 when he wrote that when capitalism replaced communism in Poland, ‘the Holy Ghost got replaced by a cream cake.’2

The point of his joke is that after communism ended, John Paul II’s deeper spiritual and religious significance was supposedly replaced by a much simpler, more commercial image of him: a beloved Polish celebrity associated with nostalgic memories, national pride, and souvenirs.

His essay was called ‘We Killed the Prophet.’ And by ‘killed,’ Mazur did not mean physically killed. He meant that Poles had, in a sense, destroyed the real prophet and his message by turning him into a harmless, popular cultural icon.

While I disagree with the fact that John Paul II is a prophet, researching him makes it clear of what mould he was cast.

From a pastry to a monument

But kremówka phase could not last forever. A joke about a cake will eventually lose its power, and was inappropiate when they ‘canonised’ Wojtyła in 2014. Wheather or not we accepts the significance of that canonisation process, it did mark a change in how he was presented publicly: he was increasingly treated not simply as a Polish celebrity, but as someone to be placed on a pedestal.

So Poland built monuments for him. Pilawa calls this second stage ‘monumentalisation.’ Meaning: the growing number of statues, plaques, street signs, and other public memorials dedicated to the Polish pope.

But the habit of naming things after John Paul II became so widespread that, in Pilawa’s estimate, it could feel as though every second parish hall, third roundabout, and fourth street in the country carried his name.

I do not care if those numbers are meant literally or simply express how overwhelming the density of these memorials felt to someone living among them, the broader trend is clear…

What is interesting is what was happening alongside this growing number of monuments, and what did not happing.

Poland was building a kind of national monument industry around Wojtyła’s image at during the same time that religious participation was declining. During the same period, Mass attendance fell from 37 percent to 28 percent, while the number of new priestly ordinations also began to decline, heading toward the 196 that the country is expected to manage in 2026.3

These developments are closely connected. Countries can continue to admire and revere a person even when fewer people are interested in his actual teachings and legacy. When that happens, reverence will only take a physical form: statues, plaques, street names, and monuments.

Pilawa’s explanation for why the monument phase became stronger instead of fading is interesting. The generation now in their late thirties and older, so people for whom John Paul II’s time as pope and his death were defining experiences largely see him as an unquestionable authority. To them, he is the one person who should still be able to unite the country, much as he once seemed to.

But since young people began to become noticeably less religious, the older generation turned to Wojtyła’s image again. He was used as a weapon against secularisation, hoping his authority could help bring young people back to the Church, and as a shield for Catholicism, protecting it from criticism and from the claim that the Catholic Church itself had become corrupt.

As Pilawa puts it, his legacy became less important than his monument. Almost nobody read his stuff, but he is often deployed for political ends.

But monuments do not require faith, regular church attendance, or a change in how someone lives. A monument asks for recognition: a glance, a photograph, or simply recognising a name on a street sign while driving past. It is a display of what a nation stands for… or at least pretends to stand for.

Poland therefore filled its public spaces with symbols of acknowledgement and respect while its Churches are becoming emptier. For a while, these 2 things can co-exist without people noticing the tension between them.

And Poland spent roughly a decade doing exactly this: preserving and displaying the image of John Paul II while religious participation rapidly declined.

The emptying of Wojtyła’s legacy

It would be too easy to treat this as a story about one particular person and Poland’s unusual fascination with him. The same pattern appears elsewhere in Polish public Catholicism. The problem was never really about John Paul II alone.

Writer Marcin Kędzierski describes what he calls the collapse of Poland’s ‘Catholic imaginarium’,4 which is a shared set of images, ideas and assumptions through which Catholicism once shaped the public life of Poles.

When he looks at conflicts over LGBT rights and organisations such as Ordo Iuris, Kędzierski argues that Polish Catholic identity increasingly survives through symbols, public gestures and a sense of grievance, rather than a shared theological/catechetical foundation underneath them. People cannot distinct real for performance anymore, so that is why a humongous Mary statue translates to: ‘based Catholic stronghold’

For two decades, this pattern was applied first to their own pope and then to a series of public issues that the Church chose to fight over. Each time, the result was similar: an image began doing the work that belief and religious conviction had once done.

I described the mechanism of this hollow symbols in my article ‘Death to Nationalist Kitsch’ so I am not going to waste too much time explaining why it fails.

For a while, these religious worked surprisingly well for Poland. The symbols could create a sense of identity and solidarity even when the underlying religious commitment was becoming weaker.

But eventually these image stop convincing people, especially those under thirty.

Now, it is also important to say that John Paul II’s legacy is genuinely contested, rather than simply being forgotten or ignored.

In 2018 a collection of Polish perspectives on his significance brought together many different and often conflicting opinions. Some people viewed him with deep reverence, while others were strongly critical of him; sometimes these opposing views existed even within the same generation.5

My claim is not that John Paul II himself was void or meaningless. My argument is narrower: the public version of him that Poland chose to preserve, the cream cake first, and the moments afterwards, are empty of much of the substance that had originally made him an interesting figure… People do not actually care too much for the heterodox things he taught. Simultaneously he is treated as the holiest of holy Doctores Ecclesiae.

Even his opponents wanted the branding, not the doctrine

The clearest evidence that John Paul II’s public image had become completely separated from his religious teaching came from the most unlikely place: the Polish left.

For decades the Polish left had been one of Wojtyła’s strongest ideological opponents, but they never quite managed to let go of him. So in Krytyka Polityczna in 2014, the essayist Michał Tomaszewski asked what use the pope could still have for the political left.6

A little more than a year later, in an interview with Kontakt, Tomaszewski went further. Being Catholic and being politically left-wing, he argued, were not necessarily incompatible.7

The same argument now runs across Europe: the Catholic Church can be treated as a left-wing NGO whenever political elites need it to be one.

Poland had spent decades presenting John Paul II and Catholicism as belonging naturally to one political and social camp. And while Tomaszewski’s pieces were not a defence of Wojtyła’s teachings, they showed how valuable the public image had become as cultural territory. Even people who wanted to reject him could not walk away from the question of what he represented for the nation.

That is what a monument can do that a living teaching cannot. It can become whatever people can claim and use. And everyone wants a piece of it! But almost nobody, whether on the left or the right, religious or indifferent, feels the need to analyse the man or institute in order to argue about what he meant.

They find the most shallow, surface-level things: Christian charity (pro-immigration), anti-faggotry (against wokism), or whatever the politicians need to convince the sheeple.

But again, the numbers of John Paul II’s legacy do not lie. In 1979, he called on God to renew the face of Poland. By 2022, only 29.5 per cent of Polish Catholics attended Sunday Mass. And of those who still attended, just 13.9 per cent received Holy Communion. That means that fewer than half of those present received the sacrament at the centre of the Mass.

The image of Poland as the last great Catholic country in Europe and the reality of a Sunday in Poland no longer describe the same country.

That is why the left can still argue over Wojtyła. The monuments of a past times are there to be used. Whatever the Church once stood for (and technically still does if you reject Novusordoism) does not matter.

The End of the John Paul II Myth

Pilawa’s third stage is the one that the previous two were always likely to lead to, and it is also the stage Poland seems least prepared to deal with. Once an image has been repeated so many times that it begins to lose its meaning… first as a cake, then as a statue, a street sign, or the name of a parish hall… the next step is often to turn it into a joke…

In the early 2020s, a distinct meme culture had developed around John Paul II online. The most visible example was a recurring format known as ‘cenzopapa’. Much of this was created by people younger than Pilawa, who were too young to remember Wojtyła himself. Their main experience of him was not as a living religious figure, but through the statues, street names, souvenirs, and other symbols that their parents’ generation had already created.

And that brings the argument back to the first essay: The same generation that created this meme culture also experienced the sharpest decline in religious practice, with participation falling from 69 per cent to 23 per cent over three decades.8

At the same time, they grew up during years when reports of clergy abuse appeared in the news again and again, sometimes almost every month.

Pilawa is honest enough to include himself in this story. He says that his own experience of the Church as a teenager was shaped by all this cultural noise surrounding the pontificate. Instead of bringing him closer to the Church, it helped push him further away from it.

This should be a lesson for Traditional Catholics raising kids nowadays too: do not make the TLM into an idol, not your ‘trad life’, your kids will respond in a same way. They will be repulsed by it eventually, and never learn to truly love God… just know every SSPX vs. FSSP vs. Novus Ordo argument.

The young generation that grew up surrounded by the image of Wojtyła rather than his actual teaching, then encountered the abuse scandals on top of that, indifference was not necessarily an act of rebellion.

It was the most understandable response available to them. It felt like something of the past.

When Poland stopped listening

Line up the three stages and the pattern is not really about John Paul II character or his record, which remain, as my previous section noted, genuinely disputed. This what happens when a person (representing an institute) who once seemed to hold a country together begins to lose that power.

For one generation, John Paul II was not just a pope or a religious figure. He was the prophet that held Poland together during and after communism. His image gave the country something to rally around, and came to represent a unity that was larger than a single political argument.

But his magic began to weaken, and nobody is ready to admit that the thing holding the country together might no longer be working.

None of the three stages described required anyone to engage with what the heterodoxies John Paul II preached, taught, and the Catholic doctrine he broke down, together with the infallibility of canonisations (his new process introduced the Vatican II Saint Factory),

A Pope Pastry means nothing, but is the most logical consequence of the emptiness the Polish Golden Calf left behind. It is the answer to his request when he asked his entire country to be renewed: completely nothing, zero, nada.

Which leaves us with the harder question underneath this story. Which is: if Wojtyła really had become one of the things holding Poland together, what does it mean that his authority could be preserved in monuments even as his religious teaching lost its hold?

Perhaps the problem is not simply that Poland stopped listening to him. I believe the authority that had once seemed capable of renewing the country had itself become inseparable from the image built around it.

That is where this series goes next… Underneath the cake, the statues and the memes sits an actual theological argument, made by the man himself, in his own words, in places such as Redemptor Hominis and a synagogue in Mainz in 1980.

Poland spent forty years building a public image of a man it had almost entirely stopped reading. The next essay is about what he actually said…

Part I: what the 2021 census really said
Part II: how Poland turned a pope into a brand
Part III: the 1980 speech that moved a dogma nobody noticed move
Part IV: the parishes that survived without any of it

On 2 June 1979, in a square in Warsaw, John Paul II asked God to send his Holy Ghost down and renew the face of Poland. He meant that land specifically, and everyone listening understood he meant Poland, at that moment still ten years away from sovereignty.

The Roman Catholic Church was the only national institution the communists never managed to fully absorb, and its head standing in front of a million Poles that morning was proof Poland could produce a figure the whole world had to take seriously.

Pope John Paul II’s promise was not a subtle suggestion. He asked to renew this land, meaning: make it Catholic again… or make it Catholic finally… in a way the partitions and the communists never quite managed to destroy.

Forty-two years later, Poland ran a census that answered how effective his prayer has been. The results show nothing close to a renewal of Catholicism one Polish lands.

But the self-reported census was not the most honest number. In 2022, 29.5 percent of Poland’s Catholics went to Sunday Mass. Of those, only 13.9 percent received communion. Which is less than half the people still attending that took the sacrament Holy Mass was built around.

In 2011, 87.6 percent of Poles told the state they identified as Roman Catholic. By 2021, that figure had dropped to 71.3 percent. Sixteen percent is a huge change, a drift from the renewal that should have happened, in the same lifetime of people who were adults when the Pope made his request in 1979.

But the drop is not even the strangest number here: In 2011, 7.1 percent of Poles declined to even answer what religion identified with. Ten years later, 20.5 percent declined to do so. That means that one in five Poles, when asked directly, chose not to say no, but to not chose anything at all…

A country can fall out of love with an institution and still argue about it. We see that in Italy or Spain: aesthetically they look very Catholic with their processions and feast, while in morals and practice they do not care for what their priest says.

In Poland the arguing stopped, like in many Eastern European countries. People became indifferent, the way they did in every other formerly Catholic country in Europe, like the Netherlands.

To see why that silence (or indifference) matters, it helps us to understand what the 87.6 percent have been doing for two centuries before it started falling.

For two centuries self-reported Catholic believe functioned less as a statement of faith, but rather that of a load-bearing wall.

The Catholic Wall Poland built out of necessity

For 123 years, so from 1795 to 1918, Poland did not even exist. It was carved somewhere between the Habsburg Monarchy, Prussia, and the Russian Empire. That absence of nationhood made the Church one of the only structures still organised around a premise that a Polish nation could be real.

The scholar Geneviève Zubrzycki calls the result the country’s “national sensorium”: the visual and ritual grammar through which Poles came to feel their own nationhood.

After 1945, Poland’s borders shifted west, and its prewar religious plurality was largely deported or absorbed elsewhere. So the postwar state found itself governing one of the world’s most homogeneously Catholic countries, almost by accident.

Under communism the Wall of Catholicism did its job again. The sociologist José Casanova, compared Poland’s Church to Spain’s and Brazil’s, and described it as ‘a church carrying the unfulfilled ambition of a state church, protecting a nation the state itself was not permitted to protect.’

From this idea the Polish Solidarity movement rose, and began at a Gdańsk shipyard in 1980 to eventually break communist rule. The movement grew up inside a political culture the Catholic Church had spent forty years keeping alive. When Wojtyła (Pope John Paul II) stood in Warsaw in 1979 and asked for his land to be renewed... He was standing on a wall Polish people had constructed for two centuries, brick by brick, and out of a need that already had an expiry date attached to it.

Knowingly or unknowingly, the Catholic Church functioned as a vehicle to Polish nationhood.

The date when the Catholic Church became obsolete arrived around 1989. But the foundations stayed up anyway. A wall can stand for years after the weight is gone, but takes a fresh test to find out whether anything is still holding it up…

In the Polish case that wall still stands, but the interior of the house is already stripped to its bone…

So… what in fact tested the faith of the Poles?

Two things that are roughly a decade apart. And Poland’s institutions did not survive either test cleanly…

• The first test was a slow accumulation of clergy sexual abuse cases. The Catholic Church’s own reporting around a 2021 census named them as a main factor in the declining attachment of the Polish people. Alongside a second complaint that had been building for years: an episcopate had made itself a political actor instead of a moral one. (If you want to understand more about the mechanism of politicisation and psycholisation of the Catholic faith, read this.)

• The second test was on the 22nd of October in 2020, when Poland’s Constitutional Court ruled that permitting abortion on grounds of foetal impairment was itself discrimination against the disabled, and struck the exception from the law. Legal scholars had already questioned the court’s composition, citing government influence over recent appointments. This court ruling produced the largest protests Poland had seen in decades. An Ipsos survey afterward found 66 percent of respondents believed a woman should be able to terminate a pregnancy up to twelve weeks: a complete drift from Catholic moral teaching.

In the several publicised cases, doctors delayed treating pregnancy complications. They cited their fear of the new law, and the women involved died (this is what the news source says). Supporters of the ruling called these ‘failures of medical practice and communication’, but ignored the Catholic principle behind it. The opponents called them ‘the law working exactly as written.’

But neither the abuse scandal nor the abortion ruling created the decline… Weekly Mass was already optional years earlier. These two events only made it officialy optional.

A thinly formed generation of Catholics can keep the census box out of inertia. But they cannot keep it once the Polish Catholic Church spent a decade looking like a political actor with compromised moral claims. One reported controversy was then enough for an individual to turn their quiet drift into a formal exit.

A 2023 Ipsos study found the generational gap in religious commitment in Poland to be the widest recorded anywhere in their survey: Young Poles were leaving Catholicism faster than their peers almost everywhere else on the planet. The decline was sharpest exactly in the places a country’s self-image is written first: among the educated, and in its largest cities.

The census did not create a crisis in 2021, but only reported what already happened… and made it official. That is why this part is called: ‘Catholic Poland stopped existing in 2021’. Because it now did on paper.

Religious habit outlasts the reason, but that expires eventually

Poland’s own polling agency, CBOS, has been measuring religion for three decades. So their census only summarised what those surveys had already recorded.

The numbers: In 1992, 94 percent of Poles called themselves ‘religious believers.’

By 2021 that had fallen only to 87 percent, a soft drop that, on its own, would suggest not much had changed. Yet… belief and paper and actual practice are not the same question. So CBOS asked both, and saw that regular religious practice fell from 70 percent in 1992 to 43 percent in 2021.

Poland held its Catholic belief (on paper), but the practice nearly halved.

Among the young Poles this gap stopped being a gap, and morphed into a cliff. Sixty-nine percent of young Poles still practised regularly in 1992, by 2021 that figure was only 23 percent.

Archbishop Wojciech Polak, the Catholic Primate of Poland, called the decline among the young ‘devastating’, a word senior clergy do not reach for lightly when talking about their own institution.

The Catholic Church’s statistics office recorded the same collapse from their own pews. Mass attendance among those obligated to attend fell from 37 percent in 2019 to 28 percent in 2021. The Church attributed the fall partly to Covid-19 and partly, in its own bureaucratic phrase, to ‘socio-cultural factors.’ The type of language one would use when you do not want to name the obvious wound.

It is sad to see a growing number of Poles that stopped attending quietly and started leaving formally, through apostasy. Which is a step well past simply not showing up anymore…

Subscribe now

The number that finally answers the question: Is Poland still a Catholic nation?

The figures I mentioned above measure those who still call themselves Catholic, or those that still walk into a church on a Sunday. But the number that measures the real state of parish-life is known: in 2022, 29.5 percent of Poland’s Catholics went to Sunday Mass, and of those only 13.9 percent received communion.

The communion figure is the one figure that actually matters. It is visible for priests and by faithful in the pews before the census made it official. Less than half the people still who attend still take the sacrament the Mass was built around…

What differentiates a Catholic from a non-Catholic at Mass? Taking communion, since that is reserved for Catholics only. If 86.1 percent of attendees decide not to take communion, how are they still ‘in communion’ = practicing the Catholic faith?

This is what I often call zombification. In its early phase people will still often visit Sunday Masses, then only for Christmas, Easter, a wedding, or a baptism. These people keep the shape of a parish life, but no longer inhabit it. In its last phase the building outlives the rite, and the country will call the empty Church its ‘cultural heritage.’

The sacraments that used to be a default to being Catholic tell the same story from any other direction. It is not just the communion people are skipping: by 2024, only 50.4 percent of Polish marriages were conducted as a Catholic sacrament. Down from just over 70 percent a decade earlier. A country in which a Catholic wedding was once simply what a wedding was. Now it is closer to a coin flip.

Baptism has held up slightly better: 87 percent of newborns were baptised in 2024, against 93 percent a decade before. It is the one sacrament still functioning as something close to a default. But even that is eroding, just more slowly than the rest…

This has happened in every European country after World War II and Vatican II: the practice of baptism still remains as an initiation ritual, yet regular Church visit and taking part in parish-life fades away really quickly.

Churches end up being party locations for lavish gypsy weddings and a sacrament shop for the lukewarm faithful.

(VIDEO: First Holy Communion in Gdańsk)

Back to Poland: religion classes, taught in state schools but staffed and set by the Church, follow the same downward curve. Attendance to them was at 88 percent in the 2018–2019 school year, and dropped to 75.6 percent by 2024–2025. A decline of almost 12.5 percent in less than 10 year, and a decline spreading for the first time from secondary schools into elementary ones.

This happened because in 2023, Poland’s newly elected liberal government halved the teaching hours allocated to religion, and stripped religion grades from year-end averages.

The Catholic Church opposed the change loudly, but could do nothing to stop it. For thirty years the state made room for the Catholic Church inside its schools without much hassle. But that room is now being taken back, and the Church no longer has the societal standing to insist otherwise.

Two dioceses, two different countries

Neither the religion-class figure, nor any of the numbers above, describes a single country. Each one only describes an average, but that is a number no actual parish in Poland experiences.

The differences are gigantic:

In the diocese of Tarnów, in the southeast, religion-class attendance stands at a whopping 96.1 percent. While in Szczecin-Kamień, in the northwest, it has fallen to 59.1 percent: a 37-point gap!

And Mass attendance splits are wider still. In Tarnów an average of 62.3 percent of registered Catholic attended Mass in 2024, which is closes to the national figure of 1982 than to the national figure of 2021.

While in Szczecin-Kamień, on the Baltic coast, only 17.59 percent attended Mass in that same year. And Koszalin-Kołobrzeg, further along the same Baltic coast, sat at 17.53, which below one in five!

All three dioceses have to answer to the same bishops’ conference. They are all folded into the same 29.6 percent every time a headline runs the national Mass-attendance figure. But they function like completely different countries.

If one bases their claim of ‘Poland is a Catholic country’ while visiting only Tarnów that might seem true. But that is no different from the anecdotal evidence I have from my own parish. My own parish grows really fast, so in my experience there is a Catholic renewal, while in the grand scheme of things our parish with 150ish attendees is statistically irrelevant in a country of 18.17 million people.

A Catholic from Tarnów can read every number in this essay and feel like it describes another country. Simultaneously a Catholic in Szczecin-Kamień or Koszalin-Kołobrzeg can read the national headline and feel it describes a fairytale of 100 years ago. Yet all are counted in that same 29.6 percent national average.

What remains of the Catholic foundations of the Polish nation-state?

The numbers are painful. Poland will ordain 196 new priests in 2026, which is higher than most European countries, but its lowest total this century, down from 208 last year and 235 the year before (according to diocesan announcements compiled by The Pillar.)

Seven of its dioceses will ordain no one at all. A diocese that ordains no one for a single year have absorbed a gap, because with retiring clergy the burden of the future generations will become heavier. In The Netherlands it is normal for one priest to serve 10+ churches a week.

But a diocese without ordinations at all is watching its own succession stop, one empty seminary class at a time… happening in the the same country whose Pope asked God to renew its face. Is this the promised miracle of Saint(?) John Paul II?

None of these stats are being kept secret from the people who run the institution. Fr. Andrzej Kobyliński, when interviewed on the state of Polish Catholicism in 2018, was already calling the change structural rather than cyclical: ‘a genuine transformation, not a trough the next generation would quietly correct.’

Every figure published since has confirmed his diagnosis rather than debunked it.

A 2017 Pew Research report found that the majority of Poles viewed religious institutions too focused on money, too focused on rules, and too entangled in politics. Poles are now more inclined to criticise than to praise the Church: in a country where most people still, on paper, called themselves Catholic.

In some of these questions, Poles were equally critical of religious institutions as the Czechs are, the most secular country in Europe. Secularism is a comparison Poland has spent a century insisting it could never apply to it.

But it applies now. The Catholic Wall built to survive partition and communism, is still standing in the sense that the census box still exists and most Poles still vaguely identify with it.

It only has stopped doing what Wojtyła asked it to do in 1979. It holds its shape, but the face underneath it has changed. There is no renewal, only a managed decline.

That is the gap this series is about: between the Poland still performing its Catholic reputation and the Poland that has stopped practising the Catholic faith.

The next essay is about what Poland built to keep the Catholic performance going once the substance had already withered.

To be continued…

Poland still identifies with its Catholic past. Part I was all about the census and real numbers. Part II will be about the substitute: the shell that remained.

When belief thinned, the country could not argue an theology anymore. So it sold a cream cake from Wadowice, then filled the roundabouts with stone, and then watched the next generation turn its ‘Holy’ Pope into a meme. Pope John Paul II is rarely read, but he is deployed as a symbol of Polish nationalism.

Next week: how Poland turned its pope into a pastry

Part III will be the 1980 speech by the Polish Pope that moved a dogma.
Part IV, will be about the flourishing Polish parishes that survived the storm.

Subscribe now

Sources used

• Niechciał, P. (2025). Is Poland still Catholic? Glimpses of the changing cultural and religious environment. The Skalny Center Newsletter, University of Rochester.

• Reporting on Institute for Catholic Church Statistics (ISKK) data, church attendance and sacramental participation figures, 2024 to 2025 reporting year.

• Coppen, L. (2026, June 16). Priestly ordinations still declining in Poland. The Pillar.

• Gospodarek, D. (2018, August 13). W Kościele odbywa się rewolucja. “Trudno powiedzieć, w jakich krajach katolicyzm przetrwa.” Aleteia.

Our civilisation was held together by the collection of these small and grand ideas. Vestments, processions, customs, recipes, crafts, feast days observed in one place and nowhere else. Most of them faded or stopped being taught.

Not everything will come back. Some things ended for pragmatic reason. But you cannot decide what to want to keep or let go if you have never even heard of it.

For over four centuries, two figures stood closest to the Pope during his most solemn appearances: a layman of ancient Roman blood on one side, an a bishop robed in cope and mitre on the other. Both duties were abolished in 1968. Casualties of a Church remaking itself for the modern world.

Their story is really the story of the papal nobility itself…

The Prince Assistant to the Papal Throne

The office of Prince Assistant (Principe Assistente al Soglio Pontificio) was the highest honour available to a layman anywhere in the Papal Court. It was created in the early sixteenth century, not as an act of favour but as a peace treaty: Rome’s two great baronial houses, the Colonna and the Orsini, had spent generations locked in feud, and the papacy needed a way to seat both at its right hand without reigniting the quarrel.

Pope Benedict XIII settled the arrangement by decreeing that the title would alternate between the heads of the two families, a compromise that held from 1735 onward. Whoever bore it took his place beside the papal throne at every consistory, state reception and solemn liturgy, ranking in precedence just below the College of Cardinals.

The Orsini line ended in scandal. In January 1958, Pope Pius XII stripped Filippo Orsini of the title after a very public extramarital affair ended in a double suicide attempt.

Pope John XXIII tried to restore the old symmetry in 1962 by naming Alessandro Torlonia, Prince of Fucino, to stand alongside the Colonna.

It was a last gesture before the office was overtaken by events. Aspreno Colonna, the final Colonna to hold the post, and Torlonia were each allowed to keep the title personally until their deaths, but by then it carried no function.

Subscribe now

The Assistant to the Papal Throne

Parallel to the lay princes stood their ecclesiastical counterparts: a small number of patriarchs, archbishops and bishops formally attached to the Papal Chapel as Assistants to the Papal Throne. Where the Prince Assistants represented the nobility, these prelates represented the wider episcopate, and the honour carried real privilege.

Holders were automatically created Counts of the Apostolic Palace and were entitled to specific pontifical vestments.

During solemn functions they encircled the papal altar and chair, a visible guard of honour standing immediately below the cardinals in rank.

The Black Nobility

Both offices drew their lay membership from a distinct class of Roman aristocrats known as the Black Nobility. The name dates to 1870, when the Kingdom of Italy seized Rome and Pope Pius IX withdrew into the Vatican, declaring himself a prisoner within it.

The families who shut their palace doors in solidarity and refused to recognise the new Italian state, among them the Colonna, Orsini, Borghese, Barberini, Chigi and Massimo, became the Black Nobility, distinguished from the ‘White Nobility’ who had thrown their support behind the House of Savoy. It was the Black Nobility who continued to hold the papacy’s hereditary offices, and the 1929 Lateran Treaty formally recognised their papal titles as equivalent to Italian noble rank.

1968: The End of the Papal Court

The turning point came on 28 March 1968, when Pope Paul VI issued the motu proprio Pontificalis Domus. The document abolished the centuries-old Papal Court outright and replaced it with a leaner Papal Household.

The Noble Guard and Palatine Guard were dissolved, the hereditary civil and military titles of the Roman aristocracy lost their function, and the Assistant to the Papal Throne was absorbed into the general body of bishops.

The reform reflected the wider mood of the decade: Vatican II had unsettled inherited structures across the Church, and a court modelled on Renaissance precedent sat uneasily beside a papacy trying to present itself as pastoral rather than princely. What survived was largely symbolic: men who had earned the titles under the old system kept them until death, but no successors were named.

Nothing quite like it has existed since. The Colonna and Orsini remain prominent families in Rome, and the Palazzo Colonna now opens its galleries to visitors most weekends. But the office that once placed their heads at the pope’s right hand closed with the men who last held the titles.

An Afterlife: Princess Elvina Pallavicini

The Black Nobility did not simply disappear once its court offices were abolished. The instinct that had defined the class for a century, standing by the older order of the Church against a state or a reform it judged illegitimate, outlasted the abolition of the titles themselves. Some of its members went on to shelter the resistance that Vatican II itself provoked.

Princess Elvina Pallavicini, of one of Rome’s old aristocratic houses, was among them. On 6 June 1977 she opened the Palazzo Pallavicini to Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, hosting the conference at which he set out his critique of the post-conciliar Church under the title ‘The Church after the Council.’

Mgr. Lefebvre had spent the preceding years arguing that obedience to the Church’s lawful authorities did not extend to cooperating with reforms he believed were eroding the Faith he had received, and the Roman palace of a Black Nobility family provided him a platform to make that case in the city where the reforms themselves had been decided.

It was a small gesture with a long memory: A Roman palace once used to seat princes beside the pope’s throne, at the very centre of the pre-conciliar Church’s public ceremony, now sheltered a bishop arguing that the throne’s own reforms had gone too far.

The families who had once stood at Rome’s summit by hereditary right had, by the 1970s, no offices left to hold. What remained was their older instinct that had built those offices in the first place: a conviction, however contested, that continuity with the Church’s past was worth defending even after the institutions built to embody it were gone.

I do not check my phone during Mass. Most Sundays I am not in the pew at all. I serve, or act as master of ceremonies, which should mean the hour asks everything of me and leaves nothing over for a phone. And yet on the Sundays I am not scheduled to serve, I set up a tripod and film it for our church’s Instagram, tell myself I am capturing it for people who could not be there, and miss lines of the homily thinking about the crop.

Sunday itself has not always fared better. I have answered tweets Sunday morning. I have taken a weekly call for my old business on a Sunday evening, telling myself it was just that once. It was not.

I call this Zombification: a practice that still moves, still has a name, still happens on the correct day, with the cost quietly removed. The Mass still happens. I am even there, phone on a tripod, capturing it for people who are not.

It is not the moment I keep losing. It is my own word. I have promised myself Sunday before and broken the promise before, and each break filed the same evidence: you do not follow through. That is why the next resolution starts weaker than the last one did.

The reading of the Martyrs of Abitene in 304 as courage is correct and also not the point. Diocletian made Sunday assembly a capital offence. Forty-nine people in a small house in what is now Tunisia gathered anyway and were arrested together.

Under interrogation, a man named Emeritus, in whose house they had met, said: sine dominico non possumus. Without the Lord’s Day, we cannot exist.

These martyrs had nothing larger to compromise on. No monastery, no diocese, no room to trade one concession for another. One act, held completely, with nothing behind it.

The Sunday was not part of the institution. The Sunday was the entire institution. That is why an empire with soldiers and courts could not talk it down. It could only kill the people holding it.

Forty-nine people died to keep one day set apart. Now a closed shop for a single afternoon reads as an outrage. The instinct that made Sunday sacred and the instinct that makes its absence unbearable are the same instinct, aimed at opposite ends.

You did not lose your Sunday rest, you lost the possibility to control your own time…

Read more

That fact alone is now the strangest part of the painting.

Subscribe now

Now contrast Smith’s crowd with a modern First Communion. Microphones hum. Music fills every pause. Phones glow in half the pews. The party after runs longer and costs more than the sacrament before it. The distance between the two is not just a matter of style, they are are a different kind.

The same thing happened at a wedding I once attended. The bride walked down the aisle behind a wall of raised phones. Nobody in the pews was watching her cross the room. They were watching a screen record her crossing it, ready to post before she reached the altar. The threshold still happened, but almost nobody in the room was actually inside it. A hundred people stood a few feet from an irreversible moment and chose to experience it the next day on a feed.

Silence and undivided attention used to cost nothing and belong to the whole room. Somewhere in the last hundred years both became priced, timed, and switched off by whoever bought them. I have paid to sit in a quiet room in an airport. I have downloaded apps that promise ten minutes of calm on demand. Noise is everywhere, and now so is its opposite, sold back by the hour.

Max Picard called silence the one phenomenon that resists being made useful. The instant someone tries to improve it, it has stopped being silence. He argued the loss of it had changed man more than printing or compulsory education ever did, altering not one habit but his whole structure. It did not start with an app. The collapse started long before phones existed.

Subscribe now

What was built into stone…

Romano Guardini said the sacred act becomes vain without silence. Cardinal Robert Sarah, citing St John of the Cross, put the same law in six words: God is silence, the devil is noise. Neither man was describing the mood of the room. Both were describing a discipline, and a discipline held by one man alone rarely outlasts him.

Saint Benedict solved that problem in 529. He founded Monte Cassino and bound his monks to stabilitas loci, a vow that fixed a community, not a person, to one ground and one rhythm of prayer. The silence was never carved into anything. The permanence was, and permanence is what let the practice survive one monk’s death, then the next one’s, for centuries.

Lombards destroyed it in 570. Saracens destroyed it again in 883. An earthquake brought it down in 1349. French troops sacked it in 1799. Each time, the monks rebuilt, and each time the vow outlasted the ruin.

On 15 February 1944, Allied bombers destroyed the abbey a fifth time, acting on a report that German troops held it. The report was false, a fact the British official history later admitted. The monks rebuilt again. Pope Paul VI reconsecrated the abbey in 1964, and Benedictines live there still.

Four disasters and a world war could not end what Saint Benedict began at Monte Cassino…

In the Netherlands the property market finished the job without a single bomb…

No bombs needed…

Monasteries and convents across the Netherlands that once held living communities have been sold across the decades since, converted into apartments, offices, event halls, while the street outside stays swept and the canal beside it stays clean.

Nobody rebuilt these. Stabilitas loci does not survive a change of ownership, and unlike Monte Cassino, no community came back to reclaim the ground once it changed hands.

The bombing at Monte Cassino followed a mistaken military calculation. The sale in the Netherlands followed an economic one, a market asking the one question war never had reason to ask: what is this place actually worth?

Saint Thomas Aquinas would have called that question malformed. He held that goods, in the old sense of the word, meaning anything worth choosing, exist in an order, and that a life spent in contemplation ranks above a life spent producing, because some things are not means toward anything further. A monk at prayer generates no return that could have gone somewhere more useful instead.

Force every hour to answer for its output and that order does not bend. It disappears, and a monastery ends up worth exactly what an apartment block on the same plot would fetch.

G.K. Chesterton called religion the soul of a civilisation, not a decoration laid over the top of it. A soul does not get reinstalled once the body has been sold for parts, and nothing that fills the gap afterward arrives free of a price tag.

The app, the pod, and the retreat

A meditation app sells ten minutes of quiet that I can cancel the moment it becomes inconvenient. A corporate office installs a soundproof pod and calls it a wellness initiative. A weekend retreat sells a digital detox at a price that guarantees the phone goes back on the moment the invoice is paid. A newly renovated church can be acoustically flawless and still fill every pause with music before it settles.

Money buys the pod. It does not buy the silence that used to belong to a whole congregation at once. Money restores the façade of a monastery turned into flats. It does not restore the unbroken chain of psalms that made the stone different from an ordinary wall. Money stages a wedding photograph timed for the perfect light. It does not recreate the threshold that photograph only records.

The invaluable was never a luxury good with a higher price tag.

The paid essay gives a working rule: one fixed hour a week, phone in another room, one act that produces nothing measurable, and the same measure Aquinas applied when he ranked a monk’s prayer above a man’s labour, used afterward to tell whether the hour held.

What the frame cannot show

The girl near the front of Smith’s crowd will never be photographed the way this generation photographs its weddings and its Sundays, staged twice over until the light looks right and posted before anyone has finished the moment it claims to hold. She crossed her threshold once, in a street full of neighbours who had not yet learned to fear silence, and nobody standing near her knew the world that made that street possible would not last.

A parish that skips the microphones is choosing the older rule over the easier one. A couple that asks its guests to leave their phones at the door before the vows is doing, on a smaller scale, what Saint Benedict did with considerably more stone. A monastery not yet sold is still, for one more season, a place where the vow and the ground have not been pulled apart. None of it needs to be reinvented. It only needs to be chosen, in one particular room, at one particular hour, by someone who decides that hour is not for sale.

—Robbert

I am not a monk, but I do own a monk’s breviary. Once bought with the same confidence you have when just read something serious about discipline, certain that owning the object was the solution.

I made resolutions around it more than once: Prime before the day starts, Vespers before and on every Sunday. Each time the resolution held for a few weeks and then faded. Not through any deliberate decision to stop but through the ordinary erosion of a Sunday afternoon running long, then waking up late on Monday, until the ribbon markers had not moved in a week and I was pretending not to notice.

This is not a story about failing to keep a resolution. I have kept many resolutions. I have lost weight and got a sixpack, hit cold showers, fasted mornings, and structured the week. But what I could never keep is the reason for any of it. The forms hold for a season and then dissolves, not because I lack the willpower but because nobody handed me the mechanism I was supposed to protect. I own the book the monks prayed and red from from. But I do not own the house they prayed inside.

That is the specific shape of the fatigue I want to name, because I think it is yours too.

You may have tried the systems, 5 a.m. routines, strength programmes, groups/masterminds that meet twice and dissolve, or even switched between parishes.

Each one of these gave you a form. Likely none of them gave you a house to put the form inside. So the form wore out, as forms do when nothing structural is holding them up, and you were left assuming the fault was yours. It was not entirely yours.

You inherited a ruin and were handed a trowel with no instructions for restoring what the building once looked like.

I want to tell you about thirty men who inherited a ruin of their own, in a monastery that had already gone soft before any of them arrived, and about a standard that spread across continental Europe for reasons almost nobody tells you correctly.

What produced the softness

Softness is not mysterious and it is definitely not a modern disease alone. Cîteaux, the abbey Bernard entered in 1112, existed because the great Benedictine houses of the previous century had already loosened. Cluny and its daughters had grown wealthy, ornamented, and comfortable. The Rule of St Benedict was still read aloud in the refectory. But it had simply stopped being obeyed at the points that cost anything.

The fasting eased. Manual labour was delegated to servants so the choir monks could sing longer offices in finer vestments. The form might remained intact, but the friction the form was built to generate had been engineered out of it entirely.

This is the part men my age skip past, because we assume decline always requires villains. But it rarely does… Cluny did not abandon the Rule through malice. They abandoned the costly clauses one comfortable decision at a time, each one defensible by itself, none of them fatal alone, until the accumulated ease had produced an institution that looked identical to its founding, yet functioned nothing like it.

Saint Bernard was born into the third or fourth generation of that slippery slope. He did not create the softness, but arrived after it was already load-bearing.

Neither did you create yours.

If you were catechised in a modern parish, if you were catechised at all, you have already absorbed a century of the same accumulated ease: doctrine retained as language, obedience quietly optional, the ascetic clauses edited out because nobody wanted to be the priest who mentioned them.

You were not handed a broken Rule. They gave you the ordinary residue of a good thing, which I call the Zombification... We have to spent our adult life trying to feel discipline through a dead corpse that pretends it is alive.

A standard that actually held

In 1112 Bernard entered Cîteaux, a small and struggling reform house that had kept the full austerity of the Benedictine Rule at the cost of almost failing to attract new members. So he brought thirty men with him, most of them from his own family, exhausted noblemen who had spent their lives on horseback and in courts and had nothing left that resembled a formed interior life.

Three years later he was sent to found Clairvaux, a daughter house in a valley so poor it was called the Valley of Wormwood before the monks arrived. He was twenty-five. He was, by his own later admission and the testimony of those who knew him, physically frail for most of his life, undernourished by his own excessive early asceticism, a man whose body worked against him rather than for him. He was not a natural specimen of strength, and neither were the thirty who followed him. What they had was the Rule, restored in full, at the points where it actually cost something.

Bernard himself refused every promotion the Catholic Church offered him. He was proposed for at least two bishoprics.

He turned both down and stayed an abbot, a man with no formal jurisdiction beyond his own valley, and became in practice the most consulted figure in twelfth-century Europe. Popes wrote to him for counsel. Kings altered policy on his word.

He preached the Second Crusade at the Pope’s own request and mediated a Papal schism that had split the Catholic Church for years. None of this came from his title. It came from the fact that a restored standard, kept at cost, produces an authority no idle appointment can counterfeit.

Here is where the story you have probably heard gets it wrong, and where the actual mechanism becomes worth paying for.

The popular version says St. Bernard’s personal discipline and force of will multiplied outward, abbey by abbey, until 68 houses stood as monuments to one man’s austerity.

That is just a satisfying story. But not how it happened. The real mechanism by which a single valley’s restored Rule became a continental standard has nothing to do with willpower spreading by imitation, and everything to do with a specific structural problem that hundreds of already-existing communities were desperate to solve.

Once you see what that problem was, you will recognise it, because you are living inside a version of it right now.

Read more

Walk through a Dutch city centre on a Sunday morning now and you will struggle to guess the day. People are waiting in front of the Albert Heijn (supermarket) to open. The bakery has its lights on. A delivery van idles outside a clothing shop while a boy in a branded vest carries in the week’s stock.

Somewhere a phone buzzes with a promotional email timed for maximum weekend engagement. It is like a quite Wednesday.

But this was not always the case, and the distance between then and now marks the disappearance of a mechanism that once did real work in a society: a day that stopped everyone, all at once, by force rather than by choice.

What Maria von Trapp Noticed

In 1955, Maria von Trapp published an account of the year in Austrian and American life titled Around the Year with the Trapp Family. One chapter carried a title: ‘The Land Without a Sunday.’ In it she describes what struck her family hardest after fleeing Austria and encountering accounts of Soviet Russia. It was not the labour camps, or the poverty, but the absence of a Sunday

The Soviet state had not banned rest. It had banned the shared day. Workers were assigned to rotating schedules: first a five-day week with every sixth day off, then a nine-day period with a tenth day free, then an eight-day cycle.

The effect was precise and deliberate. While one shift rested, the next was in the factory, the field, or the shop, which never closed. Nobody’s day off matched his neighbour’s. The state had converted a communal interruption into a private, staggered entitlement, and in doing so had removed the one thing that made rest visible: the fact that everyone was doing it together.

Von Trapp wrote that after everything else they had witnessed, what she and her companions found themselves missing most was neither food nor comfort but: ‘a quiet, peaceful Sunday with church bells ringing and people resting after prayer.’

Sunday rest was not private rest. It was public rest. A day the whole society kept, whether it wanted to or not.

When she arrived in the USA she found something closer to the Soviet pattern than she expected, yet minus the ideology. Church bells were muted so as not to disturb the neighbours. A woman confided that she hated Sunday, calling it a bore, and explained that a rigid Puritan childhood had left her determined never to observe it properly as an adult.

What von Trapp saw around her was Saturday night revelry followed by a slow, private Sunday of lawns mowed and cars washed. No Church bells or shared rest. Only individuals, each managing their own patch of free time as they saw fit.

The slower death of the Sunday: The Dutch Case

The Soviet method was fast and brutal, a decree from above. The Netherlands offers the opposite case: the same destination was reached through sixty-six years of careful, incremental, entirely legal reform.

In 1930 the Winkelsluitingswet (Shop closing law) closed Dutch shops on Sunday as a matter of national law, with narrow exceptions for perishable goods and religious minorities. In 1951 that closure was reinforced. The public shape of the week held for over half a century, not through custom alone but through statute.

Then the retreat began. In 1984 municipalities were permitted 4 koopzondagen; shopping Sundays, a year. A rounding error against fifty-two weeks of closure. But 4 became a foothold, and a foothold in Dutch commercial law rarely stays a foothold.

In 1996 the Winkeltijdenwet (Shopping hours law) handed the decision to local councils entirely, and the councils, facing retailers who wanted the revenue and consumers who wanted the convenience, did what local councils facing that pressure do. City after city moved toward weekly Sunday opening.

Today the Zondagswet (Sunday Law) still exists on paper, holding a narrow window of stillness before one in the afternoon near churches, but its cultural force has all but evaporated in the cities. Only in the Bible Belt towns does anything like the old pattern persist, treated now as a curiosity rather than a norm.

Compare this to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, where large-scale Sunday trading remains restricted by law to this day. The contrast is not sentimental or nostalgic. It shows that the Dutch outcome was a choice, made in stages, by people who could see exactly what they were trading away and decided the trade was worth it.

The root the Church named 13 centuries earlier

None of this would have surprised the 49 Christians tried at Abitene in North Africa in the year 304, under an edict from Diocletian that forbade Christian assembly on pain of death.

Asked why they had gathered anyway, one of them, a man named Emeritus, gave an answer that the Church has repeated for 17 centuries: sine dominico non possumus. (Without the Lord’s Day we cannot exist.)

He did not mean he could not rest without it. He meant something the same as what von Trapp meant and what the Dutch councils, whatever their intentions, dismantled piece by piece: That a society organised entirely around production, with no fixed point where the market yields to something it does not control, ceases to be a society with a shape at all. It becomes a continuous shift.

Josef Pieper named the underlying logic in 1948, in Leisure: The Basis of Culture, calling it total work: an outlook in which every hour is potentially productive, every silence potentially wasted, and rest survives only as the recovery period the worker needs before returning to output.

Under total work, a day off is not the opposite of labour. It is a labour’s maintenance schedule.

The Sunday we lost

What disappeared was not leisure. Leisure is everywhere now, more abundant and more marketed than at any point in history. What disappeared was synchronisation: the fact that rest, on the old Sunday, was not a private negotiation but a public event, visible in closed shutters and silent streets and a Church bell that rang for the whole town whether any individual wanted to hear it or not.

The Soviet worker on his rotating tenth day off was resting. So is the Dutch office worker doing his laundry on a Sunday morning while the shop two doors down does its weekly turnover. Both have free time, but neither honours the Sunday. Both are alone inside their rest, indistinguishable from a man taking a personal day in the middle of any given Tuesday, because nothing external marks their hour as different from the rest of the week.

This is the substitute now sold back to the modern man as recovery: the self-care Sunday, meal prep laid out, laundry folded, a slow curated morning before the errands, all of it scheduled with the same discipline he brings to his working week.

It looks like rest, but functions as maintenance. It restores him for Monday rather than interrupting the logic of Monday altogether, and it asks nothing of the society around him, because the society around him is not resting.

It is open, lit, staffed, and running exactly as it did the day before.

What remains, for now, is only the noticing. A city centre on a Sunday morning that looks, sounds, and moves like a Wednesday.

A bell that either does not ring or rings for no one in particular. A calendar with weeks in it, but no day inside those weeks that the market has agreed, by law or by custom, to leave alone.

As a small Church remnant we cannot change this capitalist hell. We can only decide to not shop or do conspicuous consumption on Sunday. And live with natural order.

—Robbert

Subscribe now

That is an actual condition, and it is much worse than distraction. See, when you are distracted there still is somewhere you can try to get back to. But this condition is closer to you moving through his days animated but unmoored, going to work, coming home, consuming, sleeping, without any account of reality underneath the motion, because nobody taught him one. And the noise never stopped long enough for him to notice the gap.

Most men go through life as complete zombies, always finding distractions in music, video’s, social media, or worse: adult content… All of it deliberately engineered to keep you from having an inner dialogue or thoughts of your own.

An old beekeeper handed me a story, once, without meaning to. He was 92 years old at the time, and has kept bees his whole working life.

He was standing beside the hives with me in a light rain. He told his story in a way you would state a fact about weather: Never work a hive rushed, they will notice you are stressed or scared.

It might seems like a very obvious thing, but what he telling me was a warning for reality: A colony of bees that reads my mental state before I opened the hive, or said a word, and punishes my wrong state accordingly, every time, without malice and without exception.

Since he told me that story I have not opened a hive without first making myself completely calm. The story was not a fiction, or metaphor, but a report on how reality behaves, delivered by a man with 70 years of experience and no reason to lie to me about it.

That is what story did before it became monetised content. It was never primarily entertainment. It was the mechanism by which a people told its young what the world was, who made it, what happens in it, what happens after it, and where the listener himself stood inside that account.

Holy Scripture read aloud in a house that believed it was true did this. The Holy Mass, older than any nation now standing, does this every single day, placing the man in the pew inside the actual narrative of a creation, a fall and a rescue, not as metaphor but as the report of what is real.

A grandfather’s 10 minute rant did it at a kitchen table. A parish feast day did it several times a year, tying the calendar itself to the account, so that a boy learned the shape of reality from the shape of his own village’s year without ever being sat down and taught it directly.

None of these were trying to distract your attention. They were trying to tell you the truth about where you are, and a man who has been told that, even once, carries an orientation a man who has only been entertained will never have, no matter how many hours he logs.

Take that account away and you do not just become a man who simply lacks entertainment. You become something closer to what the old stories themselves warned against, a body still moving through the motions of a life with nothing behind the eyes directing it toward anything in particular.

You wake, consume, produce, consume again, and none of it accumulates into a life you could describe as heading somewhere, because heading somewhere requires a fixed point behind you and one ahead of you.

And both of those come from a story, not a busy schedule. A man in that condition is not lazy and he is not weak. He has simply never been handed the things that used to be handed to every man before him as a matter of course, an account of the world he could stand inside.

I know one place that still tells a true story every day of the week, and even those who attend it often fail to grasp the mechanism that guides them through reality.

Read more

The result is the “papal positivism” (or Mottramism) visible today. An outcome no one at Vatican I intended, but one that follows with grim consistency from the historical path the series has traced.

Unsettled questions remain unsettled - the “Inopportunists” at Vatican I

The perennial argument over how power is structured in the Church was definitively answered with the 1870 victory of Ultramontanism, but it doesn’t yet explain how that becomes the peculiar psychological phenomenon we are seeing today. Catholics in the 21st century are treating the Pope as a kind of continuously operating, quasi-divine Delphic Oracle whose every opinion requires assent, which was surely never the intention of the Definition’s drafters.

Pastor Aeternus defines a very specific doctrine of papal infallibility and very extensive papal jurisdiction. It does not say the Pope is always right. But the defeat of Gallicanism and competing ecclesiological models does leave Rome overwhelmingly dominant throughout the Church.

The Italian occupation of Rome caused the Council to be suspended in 1870 after it had dealt with the nature of the papacy, but before it had completed its larger treatment of the Church and how the papacy relates to it. The Church was left with a solemnly defined doctrine of papal primacy and infallibility but no similar definitive treatment of the episcopate and how it related to the Church on one side and the papacy on the other.

A look at the minority opinions at Vatican I shows that the danger of misunderstanding the definition was perceived at the time. A substantial minority accepted some form of papal infallibility but argued that defining it formally at that time, and in that way, was “inopportune,” fearing that it would create serious problems down the line. At the preliminary vote on 13 July, the division was significant: of 601 fathers, 451 voted placet, 88 non placet, and another 62 placet iuxta modum, essentially yes, but with qualifications or requested amendments.

The non placet and placet iuxta modum voters were worried about the larger ecclesiological implications, particularly the relationship between papal authority and the legitimate authority of local bishops, as well as relations with other Christians and the potential reactions of hostile anticlerical governments. Some also feared that a formal definition would be understood more expansively than its carefully intended limits. Some inopportunists even left Rome before the final solemn vote rather than publicly vote against a definition they knew would pass and to which they intended, once promulgated, to submit.

These inopportunists included John Henry Newman, although he wasn’t a council father. Newman believed in papal infallibility, but thought its formal definition unnecessary and feared what an exaggerated version of the doctrine might do to Catholic life, though in the end he expressed relief at the carefully restricted form of the definition that eventually emerged from the Council.

A meticulously formulated restrictive dogmatic definition is one thing, but its reception in the life of the Church is something else. The evidence within Catholic culture since then shows us that the dogmatic question was settled more successfully than the ecclesiological and cultural questions surrounding it. “The Pope is infallible under these precisely defined conditions” is a considerably more complicated proposition than “the pope cannot be wrong.” Obviously, the general public is not made up of exquisitely trained theological minds, and eventually even a distinction between “The pope cannot be wrong,” and “The pope is always right about everything,” can be lost.

Ultramontanism, and the definition, were popular because Catholics had just spent the better part of a century watching revolutionary and nationalist governments attempting to destroy the entire earthly edifice of the Church. In the same year that papal infallibility was defined, the armies of the new Italian State seized Rome itself and destroyed the thousand-year-old Papal States. The definition arrived in a Catholic culture in which loyalty to the Pope had become an enormously powerful symbol of Catholic resistance to an increasingly rabid and vicious modern world.

Over the following century, the interrupted council’s unaddressed issues would largely be answered. Rome became more administratively powerful and local ecclesiastical institutions became weaker. Communications technology brought the Pope closer to ordinary Catholics, with the Catholic and secular press amplifying his words and making his image familiar throughout the world. His pronouncements became easier to distribute (though no easier to parse) and because of the new infrastructure, easier to implement. The cult of his personality increasingly became inseparable in the popular imagination from the office he occupied.

None of this resolved the serious questions raised in 1870 about the proper relationship between pope, bishops and the universal Church, or about the danger of allowing a carefully circumscribed doctrine of infallibility to expand into a general presumption of papal correctness. Instead, the institutional and cultural development of Catholicism increasingly overtook those questions, causing most of us to forget they were there. What had not been settled theologically was gradually settled in practice.

The result was something Pastor Aeternus itself had never defined: a Catholic culture increasingly organised around the person, pronouncements and authority of the reigning Pope.

Modernism: defined, condemned and then enshrined

By the late nineteenth century, intellectual trends dominating secular academia - historical criticism, philosophical idealism, evolutionary theories of religion, etc. - were seeping into the Church through the work of Catholic intellectuals, often clergy of religious orders. By 1907, the situation was alarming enough, with these ideas circulating inside seminaries, universities, religious orders and among the clergy, that Pius X was moved to issue Lamentabili sane and Pascendi dominici gregis, define Modernism famously as “the synthesis of all heresies” and finally to require the anti-Modernist oath in 1910.

But though Pius X might have defeated organised Modernism institutionally he had no power to eliminate the intellectual currents producing it. By the 1930s and ‘40s a new generation of Catholic theologians was challenging the neo-Scholastic synthesis, and much of the will to stop it was already gone in Rome. By 1950, Pius XII warned in Humani Generis explicitly against theological tendencies he thought are destabilising dogma, relativising Scholastic terminology and introducing dangerous novelties.

By the time of Pius XII’s death in 1958, Rome had spent half a century attempting to contain theological tendencies corrosive to Catholic doctrine. Then came John XXIII, the Second Vatican Council, and the most extraordinary reversal in Catholic theological history. Theologians and the intellectual currents they promoted that had been regarded with suspicion under the previous pontificates suddenly found themselves welcomed into the centre of the Church’s deliberations.

The point is that the revolution came from the top, which, given the enormous centralised structure created during the Ultramontane period, is the only place revolutions can come from anymore. The city walls are impregnable; the only way to get in is if someone opens the doors. Or the windows. The enormous centralised structure created during the Ultramontane period did not disappear when the theological direction of Rome changed. The habits of obedience, the expectation of Roman uniformity and the practical ability to impose decisions throughout the universal Church remained firmly in place.

The machinery of total centralisation built over the previous century to defend the Church against modernity became the machinery through which an accommodation with modernity could be imposed. Catholics had been taught for generations that safety lay in obedience to Rome. When Rome itself became the source of enormous and bewilderingly rapid change, the same instinct remained: if it came from Rome, it must be Catholic.

The great conciliar bait and switch: the decentralisation that never was

Vatican II talked a pretty good game about “collegiality” and the “People of God”, but what was really the likelihood of power once gathered together ever being voluntarily relinquished? All the conciliar and post-conciliar noises were intended to sound like decentralisation. But the institutional structure through which the council and its aftermath were implemented remained exactly the same highly centralised Roman system inherited from the Ultramontane nineteenth century.

The council did not restore - was, of course incapable of restoring - the thickly layered network of genuinely independent institutions, jurisdictions and customs that had once limited the practical reach of the centre. Those institutions practically no longer existed. Nor did it return diocesan bishops to anything resembling their medieval independence. The machinery remained in Rome and the focus remained on the person of the pope.

Diocesan structures, seminaries and parish life, not to mention Catholic universities, all became unreliable as sources of sound doctrine. Religious orders imploded or became fountains of theological dissent. Catechetical output completely collapsed into competing heretical factions. And all that is before we even begin to talk about the liturgy. And through all this, and for the next half century, bishops were unwilling or unable to enforce even the Church’s own doctrinal teaching or restor liturgical peace. The result was a peculiar combination of decentralised chaos enforced, or at least tolerated, by a heavily centralised authoritarianism.

With the system set, apparently for all eternity, as a function of one man and his chosen court, none of this could have happened without at least his implicit consent. Local bishops, priests, theologians and liturgists were granted enormous practical latitude to experiment, while the unassailable authority that legitimised the new order continued to flow from Rome. Things that would previously have been condemned as disobedience could now be presented as obedience to the Council, the pope or the mysterious and infinitely adaptable “spirit of Vatican II.”

We certainly don’t need another recitation of the postconciliar collapse, and we’re not going to catalogue the catastrophic results here. But what is now inarguable by the numbers should have discredited the centralised model. Instead, among Catholics trying to remain orthodox, it has only intensified dependence upon the pope.

If nearly all the old institutions have been flattened and what remains are not reliable, where does an orthodox Catholic look for certainty? What’s left? Nineteenth-century Catholics surrounded by hostile revolutionary governments looked beyond the mountains to Rome. Twentieth-century Catholics surrounded by Catholic institutions collapsing from within, having no other options, did exactly the same thing.

The image of Pope John Paul II on his visit to Sandinista (Communist) Nicaragua in 1983 captures the dynamic perfectly. When organised government supporters attempted to drown out his open-air Mass in Managua with revolutionary chants and banners, an infuriated John Paul repeatedly demanded “Silencio!” to no avail. Finally he raised his papal ferula high above the crowd. For Catholics watching their own institutions succumb to political ideology and theological dissent, the message was difficult to miss: when everything else fails, look to the pope.

The image of John Paul II as a champion of Catholic orthodoxy was enormously powerful, but was largely a image created for him by a left-biased secular western media annoyed by his opposition to Communism and abortion and sustained by his personal charisma, his incredible ability to work a crowd. On the ground, however, the institutional collapse continued mostly unopposed throughout his long pontificate: episcopal conferences, seminaries, universities and religious orders remained riddled with dissent, while bishops who openly tolerated heterodoxy were rarely disciplined.

The striking contrast between the commanding figure presented to the world and the disorder continuing beneath him only strengthened the tendency to separate the pope from the failing Church he was ostensibly governing.

How revolution becomes orthodoxy

Ultramontanism originally made sense as a defensive response to real threats; it allowed the pope to be genuinely independent of the revolutionary State. Rome really did preserve doctrinal continuity when national churches were vulnerable to ideological capture. And after Vatican II, orthodox Catholics really did find themselves unable to trust many of their immediate institutions. But in the end what was an expedient survival strategy has come to entirely displace the Church’s ecclesiological self-understanding.

Catholics have progressively been deprived of all the intermediate structures through which the Faith had traditionally been received, interpreted and lived. Eventually the answer to almost every disputed question became the same. “What does the Church teach?” has transformed into “What does the Pope teach?” Finally even that has dissolved down to, “What does the Pope think?”

The system could function reasonably well while Catholics possessed enough intellectual formation to distinguish dogma from discipline, papal Magisterium from personal prudential judgement, ex cathedra definitions from an encyclical or an apostolic exhortation, and all of these from an interview on an aeroplane. After fifty years of catastrophic catechesis, combined with the more general decline of serious intellectual formation in the West, large numbers of Catholics simply lack the conceptual equipment required to make these distinctions.

Generations of poor catechesis have left them without much of the theological and historical equipment necessary to judge competing claims, while the one principle that has survived remarkably intact is that obedience to ecclesiastical authority is the highest expression of religious virtue.

The logic is very straightforward for the average online papolatrist pope-splainer: Rome ordered the transformation, therefore resistance to the transformation is resistance to Catholicism. Traditionalists discovered this painfully. The very hyper-papalism many of them had inherited from nineteenth-century Catholic culture was now being turned against them.

The machine built to preserve tradition proved equally capable of dismantling it.

Subscribe now

The Final Form: Papal Positivism

This brings us to our present difficulty.

The pope was historically understood as the guardian of a divine deposit he did not create. His authority was immense precisely because it was ministerial, custodial. He possessed authority over the Church, but not sovereignty over revelation, or over reality itself. His rule presupposed certain parameters that relied upon the existence and maintenance of real things, truths, accurate expressions of objective reality.

Under the previous understanding, no pope could make adultery virtuous or “bless” homosexual relationships into moral legitimacy. He could not make divorce and remarriage compatible with the indissolubility of marriage, declare contraception morally good under any circumstances. He could not make abortion or euthanasia acts of mercy, abolish the death penalty as intrinsically immoral, pronounce all religions equally willed by God, or transform the immutable differences of sex into matters of personal choice. He could no more do these things than turn the Trinity into a Quadrinity, add another sacrament or announce that Christ had never risen from the dead.

A pope is authoritative because he is charged with preserving and teaching what is true. But the new dispensation, that we can call “papal positivism” simply reverses this relationship and asserts the pope’s personal, godlike power over reality: a Catholic teaching is treated as true because the Pope teaches it.

Once that assumption becomes habitual, there is almost no limit to the mental contortions required of the faithful. If today’s papal statement appears incompatible with yesterday’s, yesterday must be reinterpreted. It is literally orwellian; reality is only what the pope says it is today. It is irrelevant that he said something different yesterday. (And doubly irrelevant if a previous pope said something else… A dead pope is not the pope, is he1.)

If Scripture appears to say something inconvenient, Scripture must be reread, or re-written2. If twenty centuries of the Lord’s Prayer create difficulties with someone somewhere, we must discover that everyone had misunderstood the matter until Thursday afternoon and correct Christ’s words.

And anyone pointing out the obvious discontinuity is simply accused of rejecting the authority of the Pope.

We have watched this mechanism operate repeatedly in recent years. Every controversy produces the same army of papal apologists insisting that the latest novelty is perfectly compatible with everything that preceded it. Or simply, that everything that preceded it must be discarded, because… the pope. The substance of the argument scarcely matters. The conclusion has already been determined: the pope cannot meaningfully be wrong, because if he were wrong the system itself would be endangered.

Mottramism and the principle of non-contradiction

In Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh gave us a useful illustration of all this. Rex Mottram approaches his Catholic instruction with an apparently limitless willingness to assent to whatever proposition his instructor puts before him.

Then again I asked him: ‘Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said “It’s going to rain,” would that be bound to happen?’

‘Oh, yes, Father.’

‘But supposing it didn’t?’

He thought a moment and said, ‘I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.’

The contemporary version of Papal Positivism is often now called, “Mottramism.” The problem with Mottramism is a joke in Waugh, because his intellectual flaccidity collides with one of the Aristotelian foundations of rational thought, the principle of non-contradiction. It says that a proposition and its contradiction cannot both be true at the same time and in the same respect. Catholic theology cannot dispense with this principle because Catholicism claims to make objectively true statements about actual reality.

If marriage is intrinsically indissoluble, indissolubility cannot simultaneously mean that a valid marriage may also be dissolved. If homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered, they cannot simultaneously become objects of ecclesiastical approval. If the deliberate killing of an innocent human being is always gravely wrong, circumstances cannot transform it into an act of mercy. We can distinguish circumstances, levels of culpability, pastoral responses and applications of principles until the cows come home, but distinctions cannot make contradictions disappear.

This is precisely where papal positivism becomes intellectually destructive. When an apparent contradiction arises, the Mottramist has ruled out one possible explanation before beginning his investigation: that the Pope might simply have said something wrong.

Everything else therefore becomes negotiable. The previous Magisterium may have been misunderstood. Scripture may require reinterpretation. Tradition may turn out to have been more fluid than anyone realised. Words may acquire previously unknown meanings. Historical context may be invoked to explain that a proposition which apparently meant A for centuries actually contained the seeds of not-A all along.

What may not be entertained is the vastly simpler proposition that the reigning pope has exceeded the limits of his office, made a prudential error, taught ambiguously or simply got something wrong.

The Pope is not the point - lex suprema salus animarum

We return then to the question underneath this whole series; the papacy exists for something. So does the hierarchy, canon law, the magisterium and every other ecclesiastical institution. Christianity’s purpose is not the successful maintenance of the ecclesiastical apparatus, and the highest Christian virtue is not conformity to the current occupant of an office.

Truth does not become true because the pope teaches it. The pope has authority to teach because his office exists to bear authoritative witness to the truth.

The Church survived the Reformation, the Wars of Religion, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Napoleon, the destruction of the Papal States, nationalism, communism, fascism and two world wars. To do so, it developed a formidable institutional machinery. But Christianity does not exist merely in order that the institution may continue to exist.

The Church exists for the salvation of souls. And salvation, in the deepest Christian understanding, is transformation in Christ, union with God.

I sold luxury goods for the better part of a decade, and early on I judged everything the way a customer judges it: by the shine, by the box, by the story printed on the card inside.

A manager I worked under, a man who had cut his teeth in Northampton before he ever stood behind a till, used to pick up a shoe I had just praised and turn it over without a word. He pressed his thumb into the waist, along the seam where the sole met the upper. Either it gave in the right place or it did not. He never explained what he was checking for. His hands knew before his eyes did, and mine had nothing.

What he was testing was whether the maker had let the leather do what leather does, or had forced it into a shape it would spend the next four hundred wears fighting. A badly made welt looks fine on the first day. It fails on a Tuesday eighteen months later, at the worst possible moment, when the leather that was bent against its own grain finally gives up trying.

I carry that thumb-press into every room I stand in now, and most rooms fail it. Not the obviously cheap ones. The expensive ones. The parish hall with the laser-cut gothic lettering on the noticeboard. The ‘heritage’ candle on your own shelf, weighted at the base to feel substantial, made of the same paraffin as the one at the petrol station. The framed print your brother-in-law bought because it looked like an old master and cost four hundred euros and is, if you look closely, a texture filter over a photograph. None of it is cheap. All of it looks fine on the first day.

That is the whole problem, and it is closer to your own hallway than it feels.

The failure is not laziness, and it is rarely about money. I have watched men spend real money trying to recover something solid and still end up with a hollow object, because they were solving for a feeling instead of a material. They wanted the room, the jacket, the desk to communicate strength and permanence, so they reached for the visual language of strength and permanence: oak veneer, wax seals, a typeface carved as deep as the printer would allow. None of it was drawn out of the thing itself. It was applied to the thing, the way a filter is applied to a photograph. The material underneath was never consulted.

There is an old name for the alternative, and older craftsmen treated it as a baseline rather than a virtue: material honesty. Form has to come from what the material actually is and what it can actually bear, not from what you want it to say about you. Wood carries a grain and a direction it wants to split. Stone holds compression and takes light along the line the chisel opens.

Leather stretches once, in one direction, and remembers that stretch for the rest of its life. Pixels have no grain and no memory at all, which is exactly why an AI image straining to look ‘painterly’ fails the same test a badly welted shoe fails. It is decoration performing a material it does not possess.

When a maker listens to what his material actually is, physical or digital, the object he produces carries an internal logic you feel before you can name it. When he overrides those facts to chase a preconceived look, what is left is a costume, and a costume does not matter whether it is progressive or reactionary, expensive or cheap.

The mechanism of the failure is identical, and you probably already own several examples of it.

Jan Toorop, working in a country I know rather well, never let a line float free of that discipline. His curves look ornamental at a glance and load-bearing on the second look, obedient to something underneath that is not mood. It took me years of standing beside shoes and belts to see that obedience, and I have spent the years since watching a man carve stone for a living defend the same principle against clients who wanted the stone to lie for them.

The gap between smelling the hollowness in your own front room and knowing, with your hands, what would have made the object honest instead, that gap is where most men who feel this get stuck. They can reject the noticeboard and the candle. They cannot yet say what should replace them.

I can close that gap in 6 steps…

Read more

In Part II she continues the account, showing how nationalising governments, the French Revolution, Napoleon and the loss of the Papal States drove the nineteenth-century Ultramontane response and the definitions of Vatican I: producing a papacy of formally unlimited jurisdiction that had, almost simultaneously, lost the last of its temporal power.

Attempts to nationalise the Church

While nationalism was developing its own sacred symbols, martyrs, ceremonies and myths, the Catholic Church was confronting political entities claiming an unprecedented monopoly of authority over their populations.

The discussion over the nature and limits of the primacy of the Bishop of Rome is ancient, and medieval popes made very large claims indeed for the authority of their office. Without getting into the weeds over the Investiture Controversy1, the eleventh-century Gregorian Reform2 had already produced some extraordinarily exalted accounts of papal power. But medieval papal monarchy existed inside the same complicated world of overlapping jurisdictions we have already described for secular rulers.

The Pope stood at the summit of an immensely complicated ecclesiastical organism. He did not operate anything resembling a modern centralised bureaucracy. Bishops today are treated like local branch managers appointed and supervised by Rome, but in medieval Europe they, and monastic abbots, were legitimate powers of their own that were respected by king and pope alike. The layers included the rights and duties of cathedral chapters, monastic hierarchies and religious orders and a multitude of ecclesiastical entities most of us have never heard of today.3

Kings and princes claimed rights of nomination or investiture, with varying degrees of opposition or acceptance from the Church. Local churches maintained their own liturgical uses, calendars, customs and legal traditions. Universities and theological faculties constituted centres of authority and influence in their own right.

But at the start of the Early Modern period, European monarchies became more centralised and rulers became increasingly unwilling to tolerate an international Church exercising independent authority. Even kings who wanted their countries to remain Catholic, as in France, sought to bring the Church under nationalised management. Gallicanism4 was the attempt to defend extensive powers for the Crown and the local Church against Roman intervention.

Similar movements elsewhere attempted to subordinate ecclesiastical institutions to the emerging sovereign State. The details varied from country to country, but the direction was increasingly the same: governments were becoming unwilling to tolerate an international Church possessing independent authority, property and institutions, what amounted to a parallel state, within their borders.

The Revolution and Napoleon make the question unavoidable

The French Revolution demonstrated what this new understanding of sovereignty meant when carried to its logical conclusion. The Church could no longer be permitted to exist as an independent society within the State, possessing its own property, laws, hierarchy and sources of authority. If the Nation was sovereign, then the Church in France must ultimately belong to the Nation too. Gallicanism was reworked into a state entity, with priests as government employees, an idea that has remained a favourite of ideological totalitarians ever since.

In the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790 the ancient dioceses of France were reorganised to correspond with the newly created administrative departments, bishops and parish priests became salaried public officials, and the clergy were required to swear allegiance to the new constitutional order. The result was a catastrophic rupture within French Catholicism between those who took the oath and those who refused it.

Of course, Rome strenuously rejected this new settlement, and thousands of the refractory clergy who refused the oath were eventually imprisoned, deported, driven underground or killed. Church property had already been nationalised, monasteries suppressed and religious vows abolished. Within a few years the revolutionary government had moved beyond controlling the Church to an explicit campaign of dechristianisation.

The lesson could hardly have been clearer. The new European order based on the sovereign State entirely rejected the old medieval idea that the Church possessed an authority of its own which the temporal power was obliged to respect. There could be no independent jurisdiction within the Nation because sovereignty, by definition, was indivisible.

The rise of Napoleon brought little relief. He restored a measure of normal Catholic life through the Concordat of 1801, but the reconciliation lasted only as long as papal independence remained politically convenient to his essentially military mind. In 1798 French troops had occupied Rome, proclaimed a republic and arrested Pius VI, an elderly and seriously ill man who was carried away into exile and died a prisoner the following year.

When Pius VII refused to cooperate with Napoleon’s continental policies, French troops again occupied the Papal States, annexed Rome and arrested the Pope in 1809. He too was carried off into captivity, remaining Napoleon’s prisoner until the collapse of the Empire allowed him to return to Rome in 1814.

Within little more than a decade, therefore, the supposedly sovereign head of the Catholic Church had twice been physically seized by the new brand of secular power, and one of those popes had died in its custody. It was this grave shock to the Catholic world that placed the Church on its inevitable course. Catholics learned that national churches were vulnerable, while Rome represented an authority the State could imprison but could not absorb. The nineteenth-century Catholic response would be to turn with unprecedented intensity toward Rome and the Pope.

Looking beyond the mountains

1815 did not restore the old world. The Congress of Vienna5 put many of the old rulers back on their thrones, but liberalism, nationalism, secularisation and the sovereign State survived the defeat of Napoleon. Pius VII returned to Rome in triumph, but there was no restoring the world that had existed before 1789. Italy especially was to suffer under the new paradigm. The Bonapartes were gone, but the revolutionary political ideas and methods they had helped establish in Italy survived them.

Over the following decades these currents fed into the Risorgimento and the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. Religious houses were suppressed by the laws of 1866 and 1867, ecclesiastical property confiscated and ancient institutions dissolved as the new State extended its authority up and down the peninsula. At the same time the Papal States, which had given the popes an independent territorial base for more than a thousand years, were progressively swallowed by the new kingdom. The political movement celebrated by modern histories as the “unification of Italy^”6 therefore appeared from Rome as the latest and most successful stage of the same revolutionary process that had begun in France.

For the Church, every attempt by a national government to absorb the Church into the machinery of the State strengthened the argument for an ecclesiastical authority that transcended national borders. If bishops could be intimidated or controlled by governments, religious houses suppressed by parliamentary decree and centuries-old ecclesiastical rights abolished by ordinary legislation, then the independence of the Church seemed increasingly to depend upon Rome.

Until this time, Ultramontanism mostly existed as a theoretical argument of those who favoured stronger papal authority over the claims of national churches and secular rulers. In the nineteenth century it developed into a powerful international Catholic movement centred upon the Pope as the visible guarantor of the Church’s unity and independence. Ultramontanism had enormous popular appeal. Catholics had watched governments nationalise churches, confiscate monasteries and brutally drive out contemplatives, imprison and murder clergy, drive bishops into exile and arrest two successive popes. As the sovereign State became more powerful and intrusive, a powerful papacy increasingly looked like the only institution capable of standing outside it.

1848 to 1870: Rome builds its own absolute monarchy

The revolutionary convulsions across Europe of 1848 confirmed Rome’s worst fears about the direction of the new European order. Violent revolutions broke out across the continent, governments fell, nationalist movements surged with anticlericalism at their centre. In Rome itself Pius IX was forced to flee and a republic was proclaimed again.

That republic was short-lived. Pius appealed to Catholic powers for intervention, and a French army besieged and captured Rome in July 1849, crushing the republican forces and forcibly restoring papal rule. Pius returned to the city in April 1850, but he was a changed man, no longer interested in appeasing or conciliating the new ideologies.

Before 1848, Pius was known for his liberalising tendencies, introducing administrative and legal reforms. Following the trauma of his exile, that was accompanied by the assassination of his prime minister, he abandoned these experiments. He concluded that modern liberal institutions were structurally incompatible with the independence of the papacy. What followed was an absolute theological and structural re-consolidation as a matter of institutional survival.

With the papacy under literal siege and the independent institutions of Catholic Europe steadily being weakened, nationalised or destroyed, Rome’s response was increasingly to answer the centralising sovereignty of the modern State with a centralising sovereignty of its own.

Meanwhile, Ultramontanism was transforming the internal culture of Catholicism, drawing Catholics away from the older world of strong local churches and reliable institutions and toward Rome as the indispensable guarantor of Catholic independence and orthodoxy. The Pope was increasingly seen as the visible centre around which Catholics could rally against governments claiming ever greater authority over religious life.

These tendencies and political movements finally hardened into an explicit confrontation with the modern political order. The Syllabus of Errors of 1864 condemned a catalogue of propositions associated with rationalism, religious indifferentism, secularisation and the expanding claims of the State.

The First Vatican Council was convened in 1869 amid all these political upheavals. Its work was cut short by the capture of Rome in 1870 by the Royal Italian Army, but not before Pastor Aeternus formally defined papal primacy of jurisdiction and papal infallibility under specific conditions.

The Pope’s “full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church” was solemnly defined with the specific conditions under which his teaching is infallible. The effect of the Council was the complete triumph of the Ultramontane understanding of the papacy.

It was almost immediately followed by one of European history’s greatest ironies.

Two months after Pastor Aeternus, troops of the new Kingdom of Italy breached the walls of Rome at Porta Pia. The Papal States disappeared and the Pope lost the temporal sovereignty that had guaranteed his political independence for more than a thousand years. At almost the same historical moment, therefore, the Pope reached the nadir of his power as a European prince and the zenith of his formally defined authority within the Catholic Church.

Next week, in Part III, Hilary examines what followed: how a carefully limited doctrine of papal infallibility, the post-conciliar collapse of intermediate institutions, and decades of weakened catechesis hardened into the practical assumption that the pope cannot meaningfully be wrong.

The result is the “papal positivism” (or Mottramism) visible today. An outcome no one at Vatican I intended, but one that follows with grim consistency from the historical path the series has traced.

Subscribe now

Our civilisation was held together by the collection of these small and grand ideas. Vestments, processions, customs, recipes, crafts, feast days observed in one place and nowhere else. Most of them faded or stopped being taught.

Not everything will come back. Some things ended for pragmatic reason. But you cannot decide what to want to keep or let go if you have never even heard of it.

-Robbert

Today, we start with the falda and subcinctorium. Two papal vestments that vanished within a single pontificate of each other.

The Falda

Until the middle of the 20th century a pope could not walk into his own Mass unaided.

When he wore the falda, which is a long skirt of cream silk under the alb, the train ran so far in front and behind that four attendants had to carry it. Two at the front, two at the back.

This was not bad tailoring... A garment that stops you from walking on your own is making a claim about who is wearing it. The falda showed that the Pope not as a private person who happens to hold an office, but as the office itself. A body that no longer belongs to itself, surrounded and supported the way a monarch is, because what it represents is too large to carry alone. (Even though some claim they can…)

The same logic explains why the Patriarch of Lisbon alone among all bishops of the Latin Church was granted the falda.The Patriarchate of Lisbon was one of the few sees in the Latin Church granted privileges that deliberately mirrored the papal court.

The falda was part of his vestments. It marked the patriarch not simply as a senior bishop, but as the holder of a dignity the Holy See itself had chosen to set apart.

The falda survived the loss of the Papal States and every other stripping of temporal power of the Pope. But it did not survive the 1950-1960s renewals: which brought a complete change in how the Church wanted its power to look.

After the Second Vatican Council the papacy chose to look less like a royal court and more like a pastoral ministry. The same drive simplified language, architecture, music and gesture in the name of closeness and accessibility. A garment whose whole purpose was to show that this man cannot move without help because he is more than a man had no place in that picture.

Pope John XXIII (top left) was the last one to wear the falda.

The cost of loss of a vestment is easy to underestimate… because… who cares about a piece of fabric? But when the signs that made the office larger than a single man are removed, the office itself becomes harder to see. Just like the current Catholic hierarchy, the office became more abstract, more authoritarian, more distant, people trust it less and have contempt for it… while the reforms should wanted to do the opposite.

What once had to be carried by others starts to look like just another interchagable role a man can put on and take off. Just like how Bergoglio became Pope when Ratzinger was still alive.

The Subcinctorium

The subcinctorium was easy to miss even in photographs: it is a short band of embroidered cloth, about the length of a forearm, worn at the Pope’s right hip and only at a Solemn Pontifical Mass. One end carries a small Agnus Dei, the other carries a cross.

And between them sits, in miniature, the logic of the Mass itself: the Lamb who is slain and the instrument of his death, held at the waist by the successor of His Apostle Peter. The man who is about to represent that sacrifice at the altar.

Saint Thomas Aquinas records that the use began as something purely practical, a strip of cloth that kept the stole from slipping free of the cincture. By the end of the 13th century that problem was already solved. But what the Church did next is the interesting part… instead of letting a garment with no remaining function disappear, it kept the subcinctorium because of its meaning.

Some saw in it a survival of the vestments of the Jewish high priest, binding the Pope’s ministry to that older priesthood. Others read it as a memory of the almspurse Popes once wore for the poor, or as an echo of the towel Christ tied around his waist the night before he died.

The Church let it carry all three: sacrifice, service, and the poor, worn quite literally at the Pope’s side every time he offered Mass.

For a time the privilege spread beyond the papacy, to bishops and in places even to priests. But by the 16th century it had narrowed again, largely to the pope. The Eastern Church kept its own related form in the epigonation, still worn by Orthodox bishops. In Rome the subcinctorium went the same quiet way as the falda. No decree ended it. The will to keep dressing a pope in a doctrine simply thinned out until it stopped.

What both garments share is the an argument made in fabric about what the Papacy is and what a Pope is ought to do. Clothing is never neutral. It says what the man standing there is and what he is doing.

When we lose either local dress, or vestments we did not just lose cloth. We lose one more sentence of a language our culture and Church once spoke fluently and now no longer does.

Less is not a bore, as the postmodernists would say it, but it is quite literally cultural and theological genocide.

Have a blessed Sunday,

-Robbert

There is an icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in my room, given to me by Fr. De Beer, and I noticed, the way you notice a wound once the adrenaline drops, that I dust it more often than I ask for her perpetual help. I own the icon, but have not built the practice of strong devotion to it.

This is a part that should sting more than it does. I have no wife or children, so no household of my own yet to disappoint.

Bu I am running an experiment on an audience of one, and I still cannot hold a fixed discipline through a single ordinary evening. If the practice cannot survive contact with nobody but myself, it will not survive contact with a wife’s exhaustion, a child’s fever, a Tuesday that runs late.

A man already leading a family does not get my excuses. He has crossed a threshold I have not yet, and the people around his table are watching him fail or win in real time.

This is a 6-step practice I myself will use to prepare for this…

First, the mechanism

Belief without practice cannot survive the next generation. It survives the man who holds it, but dies in his children, because he handed them a conclusion instead of a habit, and a conclusion is exactly the thing a grown child feels free to reconsider. This is why a lot of children of ‘trad’ parents eventually leave the Church.

This gap is not laziness, and is not even personal. It is the output of a life (married or not) that has stopped choosing its content on purpose and started defaulting to whatever costs least effort to install: e.g. the algorithmic feed instead of the fixed evening rite, the food delivery app instead of an inherited recipe, the therapeutic vocabulary of self-care instead of the older vocabulary of duty and station.

None of these defaults announced themselves as replacements, they arrived dressed as convenience. And convenience is precisely the register in which a household, or a single man rehearsing for one, stops transmitting anything on purpose.

The same week I lost the thread of my own Rosary, Spanish authorities were reporting roughly fifty thousand crossings into Ceuta in a single day, the largest movement of that kind the enclave has recorded.

In August of 1415 a Portuguese fleet of some forty-five to fifty thousand men crossed the same strait in the other direction and took the city by nightfall.

That symmetry is not an argument about policy, but evidence that the weight a serious man feels about the diminishment of his own civilisation is not a private neurosis manufactured by algorithms to keep him agitated.

The numbers are real and they rhyme across six centuries. What has changed is that the man who feels the weight of that rhyme is handed a script in which his own worry, not the condition producing it, is treated as the disorder requiring management.

We are told to examine out anxiety.

Because the pressure that reaches the strait also reaches the household.

A household, or a man preparing to run one, that cannot say why his own traditions, like evening prayer matter, that keeps no fixed hour, follows no calendar shaping his year, and transmits no skill deliberately from one hand to the next, has already lost the argument before any external pressure ever arrives.

Demographic replacement is a downstream problem. A civilisation that can no longer transmit itself is the upstream one, and it was hollowed out silently, by nobody’s decision in particular, long before the man at the centre of it noticed the icon on his own wall had become a decoration.

What was a standard that held?

In 1942, a young Irish-American priest named Patrick Peyton, recently cured of tuberculosis and convinced the recovery was owed to the Rosary, began what he called the Family Rosary Crusade.
His method was almost insultingly simple:

• One fixed time each evening

• One fixed practice: 5 decades of the Rosary, said aloud, together, led by the father

• One slogan, repeated until it became structural rather than sentimental: the family that prays together stays together.

Peyton built radio programmes and later television specials around this idea, and he filled stadiums on several continents, drawing crowds in the hundreds of thousands. At a single rally in Manila in 1985, he draw close to two million people.

What made his Crusade a standard rather than a sentiment was its refusal to be an optional part of life. He did not ask a father to feel devout. He asked him to pray at a fixed hour with his household present and his voice audible. Whether he felt like it and or not, he did so until the practice became load-bearing rather than decorative. The household traditions did the formation of the children.

Fr. Peyton only supplied the fixed point around which it could organise itself, decade after decade, without requiring each father to invent the mechanism from nothing.

That is the thing missing from my own evenings, and from most of the households I know. It is not the belief, but the fixed point.

So what follows below is a working method I have built to install one, drawn directly from a standard that once produced fathers who did not have to think twice at the bedside.

It is built so that a man can start it alone, before anyone is depending on him.

Read more