We surmise that His Excellency Archbishop Viganò is cutting his own whiskey when he continues to write and give interviews for so many “traditional Catholic outlets,” yet declines to take any public and direct juridical action against the Vatican apparatchiks he so frequently condemns. When he requests a papal audience or occupies St. Peter’s square, maybe his credibility will rise a bit more…

…But whatever the case, he’s frequently spot-on in his analysis.

If readers haven’t already heard, rumors abound that the CDF is setting its sights on restricting access to the Traditional Latin Mass viz. Summorum Pontificum, and/or obliging traditional priests to somehow pledge allegiance to the modernist devolution of the last half-century.

Whatever the future holds, the enemies of the Church have always come for the Roman Mass – from within and without the ecclesiastical apparatus. This is not something strange – it’s part of being Catholic. God’s enemies cannot abide right worship.

So, we oughtn’t be surprised if it will soon be our turn to “pay up” in our own time.

Thus, we ask it again: Will you fight for the ancient Mass?

What are you prepared to do?

We encourage readers to read Abp. Vigano’s full cri de cœur here, which is a great explainer for those still piecing together the crisis in the Church. Below are some excerpts, emphasis in the original.

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I exhort my Brothers in the Episcopate, Priests, and laity to strenuously defend their right to the Catholic liturgy solemnly sanctioned by the Saint Pius V’s Bull Quo Primum [that is, the TLM] … The question of the Motu Proprio [Summorum Pontificum, 2007] is not in the least negotiable, because it reaffirms the legitimacy of a rite that has never been abrogated nor is able to be abrogated.

The Church is not an agency in which the marketing office decides to cancel old products from the catalog and propose new ones in their stead according to customer requests. Imposing the liturgical revolution with force on priests and the faithful in the name of obedience to the Council, stripping away from them the very soul of the Christian life and replacing it with a rite that the Freemason Bugnini copied from Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, was already painful. That abuse, partially healed by Benedict XVI with the Motu Proprio, cannot be repeated in any way now… If one really wanted to help the people of God in this crisis, the reformed liturgy should have been abolished, which in fifty years has caused more damage than Calvinism has done.

We do not know if the feared restrictions that the Holy See intends to make to the Motu Proprio will affect diocesan priests, or if they will also affect the Institutes whose members celebrate the ancient rite exclusively. I fear, however, as I have already had the occasion to say in the past, that it will be precisely on the latter that the demolishing action of the Innovators will be unleashed, who can perhaps tolerate the ceremonial aspects of the Tridentine liturgy but absolutely do not accept adherence to the doctrinal and ecclesiological structure that they imply, which contrasts sharply with the conciliar deviations that the Innovators want to impose without exception.

This is why it is to be feared that these Institutes will be asked to make some form of submission to the conciliar liturgy, for example by making the celebration of the Novus Ordo mandatory at least occasionally, as diocesan priests must already do. In this way, whoever makes use of the Motu Proprio will be constrained not only to an implicit acceptance of the reformed liturgy but also to a public acceptance of the new rite and its doctrinal mens. And whoever celebrates the two forms of the rite will find himself ipso facto discredited above all in his consistency, passing off his liturgical choices as a merely aesthetic – I would say almost choreographic – in fact, depriving him of any sort of critical judgment towards the Montinian Mass and the mens that gives it form: because he will find himself forced to celebrate that Mass.

This is a malicious and cunning operation, in which an authority that abuses its power delegitimizes those who oppose it, on the one hand by granting the ancient rite, but on the other hand making it a merely aesthetic question and obligating an insidious bi-ritualism and an even more insidious adherence to two opposing and contrasting doctrinal approaches. But how can a priest be asked to celebrate a venerable and holy rite in which he finds perfect coherence between doctrine, ceremony, and life at one moment, and at the next a falsified rite that winks at heretics and contemptibly keeps silent about what the other proudly proclaims?

Let us pray, therefore: let us pray that the Divine Majesty, to which we render perfect worship celebrating the venerable ancient rite, will deign to enlighten the Sacred Pastors so that they desist from their purpose and indeed promote the Tridentine Mass for the good of Holy Church and for the glory of the Most Holy Trinity. Let us invoke the Holy Patrons of the Mass – Saint Gregory the Great, Saint Pius V, and Saint Pius X in primis, and all the Saints who over the course of the centuries have celebrated the Holy Sacrifice in the form that has been handed down to us, so that we may faithfully preserve it.