The return of PadreTex

PadreTex is back in a huge way
Thanks for the news, BJA

• Patrimony, part 1.
• Patrimony, part 2.
• Lex orandi, lex credendi.
• Why I like the Antiochian approach to WRO: Patrimony then, and as I said this is the most controversial of the fundamental points, is necessarily received from our immediate predecessors and not remotely. This means that Altar Missals of the 1950s are the legitimate continuation of the Patrimony in as much as this is when the WRV was established in this country – and with the specific directions to use the 1958 English Knott Missal as the English equivalent to the Latin. But if we don’t accept this (in both text and rubrics) then we are creating our own fantasy which is not the reception and continuance of a Patrimony. And in that case, better there be no WR in Orthodoxy at all.
• Phronema.

Sister Margaret, an occasional visitor here, wrote in a message-board discussion of this series (I didn’t link to it to spare you the typical jerkodox converts’ anti-Roman Catholic stuff):

If this is right, about the living tradition of the West, why do we need the WR in Orthodoxy? People who want it could join their local FSSP church. After all, the FSSP (and the SSPX if one doesn’t mind their slightly odd status) are using something they’ve had easily within living memory. I can’t help thinking that if someone wants the “living tradition of the West” they would be better going to where it never died.

Not to speak for the WRO but my guess is the internal, charismatic authority of traditional local custom in Orthodoxy that was also so in Western Catholicism for centuries (back when limited travel and communication made a strong central church command impossible), sort of like some ethnic Roman Rite parishes and the PNCC minus Hodur’s weirdness, is what motivates the best of the WRO, the Antiochian ones, to try to be Western Catholics living under the Orthodox.

So if you’re theologically sound and not mad at the Pope about something (divorced and remarried for example), why not just be a Roman Catholic? 1. This, the only real difference between the two sides, an inch wide but miles deep, which is why Antiochian WRO accepts just about everything in traditional Western Catholicism. 2. Seen your local Novus Ordo parish lately? But this Pope is great. Not only is he working hard to bring back what was lost after Vatican II (liturgically his way and WRO look much alike) but some say he has a similar understanding of church authority as the Orthodox (see above). So someday, who knows? Maybe the WRO will end up there after all.