Peter Kwasniewski > Quotes

“If you want a church full of Catholics who know their faith, love their faith and practice their faith, give them a liturgy that is demanding, profound and rigourous. They will rise to the challenge.”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis: Sacred Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and Renewal in the Church

“The ancient liturgy, with its poignant symbols and innumerable subtleties, is a prolonged courtship of the soul, enticing and drawing it onwards, leading it along a path to the mystical marriage, the wedding feast of heaven.”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis: Sacred Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and Renewal in the Church

“In his eloquent defenses of the traditional Mass, Dietrich von Hildebrand speaks often of the need for an attitude of reverence prior to all acts of worship; he appeals to the influence of silence on the human soul, which, after the Fall, tends to be in a state of noisy flux. The liturgy exemplifies the truth that in love, silence speaks louder than words. The”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis: Sacred Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and Renewal in the Church

“Having the Mass in one's native language is no guarantee that a person will understand the mystery of the Mass. On the contrary, if the vesture of the ceremony is too familiar, the participants too easily thinks he has mastered what it's all about. The familiar becomes the routine, the routine becomes ignored. Our own language is a comfort zone that insulates us form the shock of the Gospel, the scandal of the Cross, the lure of the unknown. I would rather have a huge dose of foreignness, of music that is not current, words that are strange, language that is archaic, hieratic gestures that are grandly incongruous to a democratic society. A person thrown into this situation knows at least that he is dealing with something utterly different and possibly far deeper than his day-to-day occupations.”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis: Sacred Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and Renewal in the Church

“The greatest things are accomplished in silence—not in the clamor and display of superficial eventfulness, but in the deep clarity of inner vision; in the almost imperceptible start of decision, in quiet overcoming and hidden sacrifice. Spiritual conception happens when the heart is quickened by love, and the free will stirs to action. The silent forces are the strong forces.”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis: Sacred Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and Renewal in the Church

“As many have pointed out, it has often seemed in the past half-century or so as if the institutional Church cared more for atheists, modernists, and every type of non-Catholic than for her own faithful children who want to believe what has always been believed and want to live as holy men and women have always strived to live, “in the world but not of it.” One”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis: Sacred Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and Renewal in the Church

“In the context of the classical liturgy, it is clear that everyone is focused on one and the same act of worship: the priest in persona Christi and the people by their baptismal participation in Christ’s priesthood.6 The roles are vividly distinct yet seen to be convergent and harmonious because all are facing ad orientem in common, and at the end of Mass all are praying together, beseeching the Mother of God for her protection. The”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis: Sacred Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and Renewal in the Church

“Speech has been bossing around her sisters far too long. It is time for liturgical silence and liturgical song to take their proper places in the life of the Church, for the life of the world.”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness: Why the Modern Age Needs the Mass of Ages

“While the traditional movement is tiny in absolute numbers, it has (proportionally speaking) larger families and more vocations. It is a movement of youthful energy, not of church closures and mergers, lay-administered parishes, and elderly priests in retirement homes.”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass

“Few would maintain that the self-consciously “Vatican II” churches built since the 1960s are an improvement on the architecture of traditional churches designed to house the Latin Mass.”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass

“We want to avoid two extremes: a liturgical snobbery for which nothing is ever “good enough” (for indeed, nothing short of the beatific vision will ever be totally satisfying to us—although at its best, the sacred liturgy can be and ought to be a foretaste of heaven!), and, on the other hand, a false humility that pretends not to know the difference between fitting and unfitting, beautiful and ugly, noble and banal, reverent and irreverent—differences that have serious implications for our spiritual life and the exercise of the virtues of faith, hope, charity, and religion.”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass

“In the end, there are only two possible directions for the soul: either the liturgy shapes one’s personality, or one’s personality shapes the liturgy.”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass

“Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. How we pray shows, and shapes, what we believe; these, in turn, shape our way of life in their image. What faith do we profess, and how do we live our lives as Catholics? Look to the liturgy and it will tell you.”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass

“The Mass is not just a CDS (Communion Delivery System). It is a formal, structured, public act of worship consisting of prayers, chants, readings, ceremonies, and gestures, ordered to such movements of the soul as repentance, adoration, glorification, thanksgiving, and supplication. It is not simply a matter of “wherever Jesus is, God is pleased”; it is also a matter of what we are doing, what we are offering of ourselves to God, and how, and why.”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass

“Speech” does not mean filling the air with talk, any more than “song” means a rousing chorus into which all voices must be drafted.”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass

“Generally speaking, the old Mass and much that goes with it embody and practically cry out a vision of an intellectually and aesthetically unified and coherent Catholicism, one that encompasses the fiery polemics of the Church Fathers, the towering dogmatic theology of the Doctors, the intricate and intimate poetry of the mystics, the uncompromising fortitude of the ascetics. It represents the Catholic Faith in all its otherworldly, culturally dominating grandeur.”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass

“Tradition-loving Catholics hold exactly the opposite. We adhere to the Faith because it is true across all ages until the end of time, and we reject modern errors because they conflict with the truth about God, Christ, man, and the world. We know that the Church makes a serious impact on society and culture only to the extent that she lives at a level beyond the merely temporal and temporary. The way we practice our religion enshrines our anti-modernism because traditional worship is heavily marked by elements from every age through which the Church has passed, amalgamated and elevated into signs of perpetual youthfulness and immortality. You can imagine how thoroughly this must dismay and enrage the Modernists in our midst.”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass

“Out of the mouths of infants you have perfected praise to foil the enemy and the rebel” (Ps 8:3).”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass

“I would prescribe for adherents of the Novus Ordo attendance for three months at a Byzantine Catholic liturgy, followed by three months at traditional Latin High Masses.”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass

“Gregorian chant, the music “specially suited to the Roman rite,” which “should be given chief place [principem locum] in liturgical services,” as Vatican II stated, consistent with what all the preconciliar popes had encouraged.”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass

“There is a distance all the same. It is the distance between heaven and earth, between what is holy and set apart, and what is profane, the everyday world: not between the good and the bad, but between the supernatural and the natural. By acknowledging the reality of the distance between heavenly and earthly things, the Extraordinary Form allows us to witness, to experience, heavenly things, and not only to experience them, but also to unite ourselves with them.”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass

“Occasionally one will hear Catholics say: “My family has gone to this parish for generations; I can’t abandon it, even though the liturgy is pretty bad. I will stay and work as hard as I can to improve things.” They fail to realize that in maintaining this attitude they are holding their children hostage to the hope that things will in fact improve—which may or may not be realistic, and, given the scope of episcopal corruption and incompetence and the ubiquity of liturgical abuse in the Church, is far more likely to be unrealistic; meanwhile, the children are being malformed at this parish right now and for as many years as it may take to achieve the better conditions about which their parents dream.”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass

“This is why the devil hates the return of the age-old Latin Mass so much. He hates, in fact, all things traditional, for they are the fruits and the tools of good parenting in every sphere of Catholic life, be it liturgy, devotion, doctrine, morals, or artistic culture. They were prepared for us by centuries of spiritual fathers who profoundly understood and fervently lived the fundamental acts of adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, and supplication. These are the acts that save our souls from the world, the flesh, and the devil. It is never too late to adopt better spiritual parents and to begin one’s childhood anew.”
― Peter Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass