A God Complex, or a Received Rite? A Reply to “Are Traditional Catholics Too Judgmental?”

A parish music director has made a video. It is titled Are Traditional Catholics Too Judgmental?, it is circulating widely, and its argument deserves a serious answer, which is more than its opening line deserves. The full transcript is published on this site so that nothing below depends on your trusting my summary of it. Read him first. Then read this.

“Every traditional Catholic I’ve ever met who goes to Latin Mass has a god complex.”

— the video’s opening line

A kernel of truth, absolutized into a lie

Let us give the man his due before we take anything away. Some traditional Catholics are insufferable. Anyone who has spent time in the movement has met the convert of eighteen months who speaks of the Pope as a problem to be managed, the young man who treats the Novus Ordo as a sacrament of lesser gods, the forum warrior who has never read the Summa but has memorized the names of every heretic since Arius. These people exist. They are a scandal to the people they claim to represent. Peter Kwasniewski, who has written more pages in defense of the old rite than anyone alive, has said in print and repeatedly that bitterness and contempt are the surest way to discredit the very liturgy the bitter man loves, and Benedict XVI, in the letter that restored the old Mass, warned the old-rite faithful in the same breath that they must not deny the validity or the legitimacy of the new one.

But finding a sin in a sizeable group of people is nothing new under the sun. Any body of Christians large enough to fill a parish is large enough to supply a vice for every critic. Were I minded to attack the Novus Ordo faithful, the material would not be hard to come by: the casual reception of Communion in the hand on the way back from the parking lot, the applause after the homily, the Sunday obligation treated as a suggestion, the catechesis so thin that polls find a majority of Mass-goers unsure what the Eucharist is. I could then take the worst of what I had seen and absolutize it: every Novus Ordo Catholic I’ve ever met treats the Mass as a social hour. It would be a lie, and I would know it was a lie, because I would be converting the failings of some into the character of all. And it would be no more legitimate from my mouth than from his. This is simply a case in which one should remove the beam from one’s own eye before going after the splinter in the Latin Mass crowd’s (Matthew 7:3–5).

So the video has found a real sin. It has simply misdiagnosed what the sin is attached to. Pride is a vice of persons. It is not a property of a rite. If it were, the test would cut the other way just as cleanly, and we will come to that.

The weakest possible opening

No evidence is offered, because none can be. “Everyone I’ve ever met” is a claim engineered to be unanswerable. It cannot be checked. It cannot be cross-examined. It convicts a group without a single fact about any member of it.

Notice how cheap the sentence is to manufacture. Every Novus Ordo Catholic I’ve ever met has a problem with silence. Every Novus Ordo music director I’ve ever met thinks the congregation came to hear him. Two of them, ten seconds, zero evidence required, and each of mine is exactly as true as his, which is to say that none of us has yet said anything at all. A sentence that can be aimed at anyone proves nothing about everyone. The difference is that I know mine are cheap shots and am not building a video on them.

So instead he talks about language. He talks about language for the entire video, because language is the only part of the traditionalist case he has encountered. That is the tell. Behind this video stands a man who has not met the Liturgical Movement, has not read its century of theology, and does not know that the argument he is having was settled against his framing of it by popes he would have to call traditionalists.

The movement he never mentions

In 1833 Dom Prosper Guéranger refounded the abbey of Solesmes and began restoring Gregorian chant from the manuscripts, on the conviction that the Church’s prayer is a treasure to be received, not a product to be manufactured. In 1903 Pope St. Pius X issued Tra le sollecitudini and gave the Church the very phrase at the center of this debate: the faithful’s active participation in the sacred mysteries. He wrote it as a pope of the old rite, in the same document in which he restored chant to the center of the Church’s worship and pruned the theatrical music of his day. Participation and the treasury of chant were not born as enemies. They were born in the same paragraph.

In 1909 Dom Lambert Beauduin launched the movement’s pastoral phase at the Malines congress, urging that the people be given missals and taught to pray the Mass itself: the old Mass, in Latin, with its chant. Romano Guardini’s The Spirit of the Liturgy followed in 1918, teaching that the liturgy is the Church’s objective, corporate prayer, not an expression of the congregation’s feelings. Josef Jungmann mapped the rite’s history in Missarum Sollemnia. In 1947 Pius XII gave the movement its charter in Mediator Dei. These men are the Liturgical Movement. They wanted chant and Latin and the people’s real participation, all at once, inside the traditional rite, and they saw no contradiction because there is none. The binary this video assumes, Latin and chant on one side and participation on the other, is a fiction invented later, by other people, for other purposes. Our speaker has inherited the fiction and mistaken it for the faith.

The fiction has witnesses against it from inside the reform itself. Louis Bouyer, the Oratorian who sat on the Consilium that produced the new Missal, wrote in his memoirs that the second Eucharistic Prayer was drafted by himself and Dom Bernard Botte in haste at a trattoria in Trastevere to meet a deadline, and that Annibale Bugnini, the reform’s secretary, had told the Consilium that the Pope demanded certain changes while telling the Pope that the Consilium demanded them. Paul VI, Bouyer records, confirmed the deception to him personally. This is not a traditionalist’s accusation. It is the testimony of a man who helped write the rite. When the people who fabricated the new liturgy say it was fabricated, the people who prefer the old one are not suffering from a complex.

One: the language argument refutes itself

His first point is that Latin is “not a divine dialect”: Jesus spoke Aramaic, the early Church wrote in Greek, and Rome adopted Latin in the fourth century because it was what ordinary people understood. The facts are roughly right and wholly beside the point, because nobody claims Latin is a divine dialect handed down on tablets. That is a straw man dressed for an applause line.

His history, followed one step further than he follows it, turns on him. Yes, the Church prayed in Latin when Latin was understood. Then the world changed around the language, and the Church kept it, for sixteen centuries, and at the Council of Trent anathematized the claim that Mass must be celebrated in the vernacular only (Session XXII, canon 9). She kept it because the Mass is not primarily a lecture to be overheard but a sacrifice offered to God, and a fixed, sacral language does what no living vernacular can. It guards the faith across generations, lex orandi, lex credendi. It makes one Church of every nation and century. It gives the most important words ever spoken a stability that languages shifting under our feet cannot promise. Nearly every historic religion develops a sacral register, from the Hebrew of the synagogue to the Arabic of the mosque to the Slavonic of the Russian Church. The Catholic Church had the honesty to defend hers on principle.

Then there is the council he waves like a flag. Sacrosanctum Concilium §36: the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites. §54: steps are to be taken so that the faithful can sing or say together in Latin the parts of the Ordinary that belong to them. Whatever else Vatican II did, it did not do what this video says it did. He is citing the Council against the Council and counting on his audience never to open it.

Two: the utopia nobody claims

His second point is that the pre-conciliar Church was no chant utopia: the people sat in silence at low Masses, the priest “muttered in Latin with his back to them,” and the hymns often had nothing to do with the altar.

Begin with the slogan, because it is the one place where he invokes the early Church as his authority, and the early Church is the one witness that refuses to testify for him. Ad orientem is not a back turned in contempt. It is priest and people facing the same direction, toward God, toward the rising sun, toward the Lord who will return from the East. That the early Church worshipped this way is not a traditionalist talking point; it is the finding of the scholars the reform itself relied on. Bouyer, in Liturgy and Architecture (1967), showed that the idea of the primitive Mass celebrated “facing the people” rests on a misreading of the Roman basilicas, where priest and people alike turned east at the Canon. Klaus Gamber, the Regensburg liturgist whom Cardinal Ratzinger praised as the one scholar who truly represented the liturgical thinking of the center of the Church, devoted a book to the same conclusion: the celebrant facing the congregation is a twentieth-century novelty with no ancient precedent. Ratzinger himself, in his own Spirit of the Liturgy (2000), argued that a congregation turned in on itself becomes a self-enclosed circle in which the priest, not the Lord, becomes the point of reference. The video wants the early Church on its side. The early Church had its back to the people too.

The silent Canon, meanwhile, was silent for the better part of a millennium not because it was dead but because it was holy. The Church lowered her voice at the words of consecration the way Moses removed his shoes. And the supposedly passive laity of 1955? They had hand missals by the million, Latin and English in parallel columns, and a dialogue Mass spreading since the 1920s under Benedictine leadership, which was the Liturgical Movement’s own work, inside the old rite. The picture of a laity that did nothing but wait for a bell is a caricature, and it survives contact with the evidence for about one paragraph.

The hymn charge boomerangs hardest. He mocks old-rite hymns that had “nothing to do with what was going on on the altar.” Grant it: the four-hymn low Mass of 1950 was a real abuse, and the Liturgical Movement said so first. But the chant of the old Mass is not decoration laid over the action. It is the action’s own text. The Introit, Gradual, Offertory, and Communion antiphons are the Scriptures the Church herself assigned to that day, sung. Nobody chanting the Proper can sing something unrelated to the altar. Kwasniewski has made this point at book length: the Propers are the liturgy’s own voice, and the “four-hymn sandwich” that replaced them in most parishes after 1970 is the old abuse made universal and given a budget. The modern practice our speaker defends, congregational songs chosen for the congregation and inserted where the Proper belongs, is precisely the thing he is mocking, wearing a parish music director’s name tag.

Three: development is our doctrine, not his

His musical history, chant to polyphony to Mozart, with traditionalists complaining at every stage, is offered as though it embarrasses us. It is our position stated back to us. Growth inside a received tradition, discerned and where necessary pruned by the Church’s authority, is what tradition is. Pius X pruned the theatrical style of his own century by the same principle. Development, in Newman’s sense, preserves the type across the centuries. Rupture replaces it.

Here the distinction is not ours but Ratzinger’s. In his preface to the French edition of Gamber’s The Reform of the Roman Liturgy, the future Pope wrote that what happened after the Council was no longer liturgy as the fruit of development but a fabrication, a banal product made on the spot. Alcuin Reid’s The Organic Development of the Liturgy (2005), which carries a preface by the same cardinal, traces the principle through the whole history of the rite: the Church reforms by growth, not by committee. A tree growing is not a tree felled and replaced with furniture. A man who cannot distinguish the two should not lecture anyone on the history of liturgical music.

And the reservations about the 1969 Missal did not come from people with a god complex. They came from the top of the Holy Office. On September 25, 1969, Cardinals Alfredo Ottaviani and Antonio Bacci presented Paul VI with a Short Critical Study of the New Order of Mass, arguing that the new rite represented “a striking departure from the Catholic theology of the Mass” as Trent had defined it. One need not accept every line of that study to notice who signed it. Ottaviani had been the Church’s chief doctrinal officer for a decade. Paul VI took the study seriously enough that the General Instruction’s definition of the Mass (article 7) was revised the following year. When a cardinal who ran the Holy Office raises the question, the layman who raises it afterward is not arrogant. He is late.

Four: participation, rightly understood

His third point is the theological center of the video, and it is where the absence of the Liturgical Movement costs him most. Vatican II and Musicam Sacram, he says, demand “full, conscious, active participation”; worship is “not a spectator sport for elitists.”

Read the documents whole. The same constitution that calls for participation in §14 gives Gregorian chant pride of place in §116, and Musicam Sacram (1967) repeats it. And actuosa does not mean what he needs it to mean. Ratzinger spent decades correcting the mistranslation: it means participation that is actual, real, interior, the mind and heart united to the action of Christ the Priest, not participation measured in motion and volume. Silence is participation. Kneeling is participation. Adoration is participation. Kwasniewski’s Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence (2023) argues the point at length: silence is not the absence of participation but one of its highest forms, and a liturgy that cannot tolerate it has lost something the old rite kept. Singing is one instrument among several, and the man who grades worship by its decibel level has not exalted the assembly’s part in the Mass. He has replaced the liturgy’s subject. The subject of the liturgy is God.

Which brings us to his closing test, the one about egos: if your liturgy leaves you “spiritually frustrated, arrogant,” it is feeding your ego rather than bringing you to Christ. Examine the test. It measures a liturgy entirely by the feelings and self-image of the people attending it. By that measure, worship is validated when the congregation feels humble and invalidated when it feels proud. The assembly’s ego is still the unit of account, merely audited instead of indulged.

The traditional claim is colder and far humbler. The Mass is not ours. Its worth does not rise or fall with our feelings about ourselves. A rite that nobody in the room invented cannot flatter anybody in the room, and this binds the priest first of all. Kwasniewski has pointed out what every old-rite celebrant knows: the rubrics govern his hands, his eyes, his voice, his posture, down to the inch, and leave him no room to improvise, to comment, to be interesting. The old rite is the great leveler of clerical personality. The new one, with its options and its “in these or similar words,” is where the celebrant’s personality was let back in. He went looking for a god complex and found one wherever the liturgy refused to be about the people in the pews. That refusal is not the disease. It is the cure.

A word about “working people”

He tells us he directs music at “a large parish of working people,” and these people sing, these people love God and neighbor, as though the old Mass were a country club for aesthetes. Walk into a traditional parish in 2026. You will find young families, one income stretched across six children, an hour’s drive each way, meeting at hours and in spaces nobody would choose for comfort, often by permission and precariously under Traditionis Custodes, past three nearer parishes. Some gatekeepers.

And on the subject of performance: Gregorian chant is the least elitist music the Church owns. It is anonymous. It is unison. It needs no instrument, no soloist, no frontman, no one whose name is on the video. Thomas Day made the structural point thirty years ago in Why Catholics Can’t Sing: the arrival of the amplified cantor, the one voice at the microphone leading the many, did more to silence Catholic congregations than any amount of Latin ever did. People will not sing over a soloist. They will sing a melody that belongs to nobody. Chant’s whole discipline is the effacement of the performer. That is not an insult to music directors. It is the job description.

“Change my mind”

He ends by inviting correction: go ahead and change my mind. Very well, but the invitation would carry more weight from a man who had not opened by diagnosing the souls of strangers. The offer stands anyway, and it is a reading list rather than a slogan. Guardini’s Spirit of the Liturgy (1918). Pius X’s Tra le sollecitudini (1903), where “active participation” is born wearing chant and Latin. Bouyer’s Memoirs, for what the reform looked like from inside the room. Gamber’s Reform of the Roman Liturgy, with Ratzinger’s preface. Ratzinger’s own Spirit of the Liturgy (2000). Then make the video again. The traditional movement can survive his arguments easily. His arguments cannot survive the traditional movement’s library.

Benedict XVI, restoring the old Mass in 2007, wrote the sentence this whole controversy turns on: what earlier generations held as sacred remains sacred and great for us too. The Catholics this video mocks are the ones who believed him. If that is a god complex, the diagnosis says more about the diagnostician than the diagnosed. A liturgy received cannot feed an ego. A video that begins “every traditional Catholic I’ve ever met” can feed exactly one.

References

• The video under discussion: “Are Traditional Catholics Too Judgmental?”, Catholic Explained (18 October 2026), speaker a parish music director (credit @nypianoman101); full transcript on this site.
• Domus Dei, The Traditional Latin Mass, on why the faithful attend the old rite.
• Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), §§14, 36, 54, 116.
• Musicam Sacram (1967), §§50–52, on Gregorian chant.
• St. Pius X, Tra le sollecitudini (22 November 1903).
• Pius XII, Mediator Dei (20 November 1947).
• Council of Trent, Session XXII (17 September 1562), canon 9.
• Benedict XVI, Summorum Pontificum and the accompanying Letter to the Bishops (7 July 2007).
• Romano Guardini, The Spirit of the Liturgy (1918); English trans. Ada Lane (Sheed & Ward, 1930).
• Josef Jungmann, S.J., The Mass of the Roman Rite (Missarum Sollemnia), trans. Francis A. Brunner, 2 vols. (Benziger, 1951–55).
• Louis Bouyer, Liturgy and Architecture (University of Notre Dame Press, 1967).
• Louis Bouyer, The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer, trans. John Pepino (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2015).
• Klaus Gamber, The Reform of the Roman Liturgy: Its Problems and Background, trans. Klaus D. Grimm (San Juan Capistrano, CA: Una Voce Press / Harrison, NY: Foundation for Catholic Reform, 1993); Joseph Ratzinger’s preface to the French edition, La Réforme liturgique en question (Le Barroux: Éditions Sainte-Madeleine, 1992).
• Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani and Antonio Cardinal Bacci, letter to Paul VI of 25 September 1969, presenting the Breve esame critico del Novus Ordo Missae (the “Ottaviani Intervention”).
• Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), part II, ch. 3, “The Altar and the Direction of Liturgical Prayer.”
• Alcuin Reid, The Organic Development of the Liturgy, 2nd ed., preface by Joseph Ratzinger (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005).
• Thomas Day, Why Catholics Can’t Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste (New York: Crossroad, 1990).
• Peter Kwasniewski, Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis (Angelico Press, 2014); Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness (Angelico Press, 2017); Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright (Angelico Press, 2020); The Once and Future Roman Rite (TAN Books, 2022); Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence (TAN Books, 2023).