Andrea Grillo and Another Benedictine Monk Reply to the Abbot of Solesmes: Juxtaposition and Forced Assimilation Are Not Unity

The Abbot of Solesmes' strange proposal—to create a hybridized missal that would please exactly no one, except perhaps a few monks in the Fontgombault congregation—has prompted more than a few responses. Here we present a translation of the barbed critique of Andrea Grillo, the mind behind Traditionis custodes, followed by a lucid assessment from a Benedictine monk.

Liturgical unity, not typographical. The One Roman Rite and Fr. Guéranger

by Andrea Grillo

The context in which the Abbot of Solesmes, Fr. Kemlin, frames his reflection—in a letter to Pope Leo dated November 12 of last year (made public only in recent days)—is of some significance. He knows that Solesmes is not a place like any other. It preserves the memory of one of the Fathers of the Liturgical Movement, who, as is rightly stated at the beginning of the letter, stands at the origins of the Liturgical Movement that led to the Liturgical Reform. [This is a repugnant falsehood, as anyone can see who reads Guéranger's Liturgical Institutions. - PAK]

He admits, however, that the monastic congregation of which he is president has experienced a rift between the practice at Solesmes—which uses the rite reformed by Paul VI—and other monasteries, such as Fontgombault, where the Tridentine rite is used instead.

The Architect of the Restrictions to the Latin Mass really - REALLY - hates the newly canonized Carlo Acutis

Andrea Grillo is such a detestable character. But, unfortunately, we are forced to return often to covering him because of the outsized influence he was given by the late Francis. As Rorate mentioned in the earlier words about this matter,

The detestable Italian professor was introduced by some malevolent Vatican spirit to Francis and created the document that would later be signed by the late pope as "Traditionis custodes", whose aim is explicitly to destroy the Traditional Latin Mass in the long term.

Last month, we covered the first consequences of his tirades against the (now newly canonized) Carlo Acutis, when his own university disowned him. 

There are criticisms to be made of the Acutis canonization, but mostly regarding (as often in recent decades) an accelerated procedure, not the person himself. By all accounts, Acutis was really a fine boy who, despite growing up in a secularized, barely nominally Catholic, family, was saved by a supernatural love for the Blessed Sacrament.

His Own University is Now Against Him: Andrea Grillo, Francis' Liturgist and the Father of Traditionis Custodes, Hates the Eucharist and Must Have His Imprint Erased

 

Andrea Grillo: has any man done more to rekindle the liturgical wars?

The detestable Italian professor was introduced by some malevolent Vatican spirit to Francis and created the document that would later be signed by the late pope as "Traditionis custodes", whose aim is explicitly to destroy the Traditional Latin Mass in the long term.

But it seems Grillo has at last bitten more than he can chew (or at least at last because it happened during this new pontificate). In an article from early June, the Father of Traditionis Custodes, lambasted Carlo Acutis, the young man beatified by Francis and to be canonized by Leo XIV in October. 

“Before the Egghead Fell Off the High Wall and Shattered into a Thousand Pieces”: Charlier on Grillo

The devotional map of the late 19th century depicts the Holy Mass as the center of the unity of the triumphant, struggling and suffering Church. As in heaven, so also on earth.

If Andrea Grillo were a professor at a German theological faculty, we could confidently put his interview to one side—irrelevant drivel, like most of what is produced by theology professors. But although he would fit very well into the German environment, his position as a liturgy teacher at a papal university and a well-networked organizer of the fight against the liturgical tradition gives him an importance that should not be underestimated. On the one hand, he is the mouthpiece and, on the other, the cue for the three or four men at the head of the Bergoglian pontificate, who for years have had no other goal than to adapt the liturgy and—one must always see this together—the teaching of the Church to the demands of the anti-Christian zeitgeist. Further and further away from Christ and the apostolic tradition.

EXCLUSIVE: Dom Alcuin Reid’s Response to Prof. Grillo’s Interview

Wrong, Professor Grillo—Think Again!

Dom Alcuin Reid

Amidst the ‘liturgy wars’ of over a decade ago, Father John Baldovin SJ published an article: “Idols and Icons: Reflections on the Current State of Liturgical Reform.” (Worship 2010, n. 5) He argued that some were given to the idolisation of certain ritual forms, complaining that he found “a paradoxical kind of narcissism in certain attitudes towards the liturgy in which people think they are arguing for more transcendence at the same time as they are promoting an idolatrous attitude toward the liturgy itself.” Borrowing from the French phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion, Baldovin argues that the liturgy should, instead, be iconic whereby (in Marion’s words) “the icon does not result from a vision, but provokes one…[it] summons sight in letting the visible be saturated little by little with the invisible.” Baldovin quotes further: “In the idol the gaze of man is frozen in its mirror; in the icon the gaze of man is lost in the invisible gaze that visibly envisages him.” (p. 389)

Pope’s Anti-TLM Theologian Shows His Pro-Contraception Cards

Pope Francis is fond of saying “everything is connected.” Traditionalists have been saying the same thing for the past six decades. We have long emphasized that those who transformed the Catholic liturgy on paper and in practice were also entertaining doctrinal novelties, oddities, and, at times, even heresies. Conversely, a radically changed liturgy has led to the weakening, and occasioned the loss of faith in, any number of central doctrines of Catholicism, or that the loss of reverence for God is bound up with moral drift in every sphere of life. It is not hard, after all, to see that the lex orandi, the lex credendi, and the lex vivendi stand and fall together.

The Radical Claim and Fatal Flaw of TC’s Article 1 — Article by a French Priest

Rorate is pleased to bring to its readers an English translation of a critique of Traditionis Custodes written by a priest of the Institute of Christ the King, published initially behind a paywall in Revue Catholica on November 10, 2021, but now available online for free. Fr. Jestin addresses the theological radicalness of the motu proprio and exposes its fatal weakness by concentrating on the infamous Article 1, with Francis’s accompanying letter and articles by Andrea Grillo dated July 16, July 19, July 21, and July 24. Since Grillo is the doyen of the liturgical progressives currently in power, the attention paid to his work is both right and revealing (see also this related article). My thanks to Zachary Thomas and John Pepino for assistance with the translation.—PAK

The End of Conciliation Efforts

Fr. Laurent Jestin, ICKSP, La Rochelle

November 10, 2021

[English translation: January 10, 2022]

Andrea Grillo: The Mind Behind the Motu Proprio

Andrea Grillo: The Mind Behind the Motu Proprio

by Peter Kwasniewski*

Andrea Grillo (born 1961) is a professor of Sacramental Theology and Philosophy of Religion at the Pontifical Athenaeum of St. Anselm in Rome (Sant’Anselmo) and of Liturgy in Padua at the Abbey of Santa Giustina. With the promulgation of Pope Francis’s motu proprio of July 16th, 2021, Traditionis Custodes, he has become a more important figure in Catholic thought. Many indications point to Professor Grillo as an author or at least inspirer of the document, serving as the Pontiff’s “house” liturgist and theologian, as he is often called in Rome. He joins many others from Sant’Anselmo who have exercised a disproportionate progressive influence.

The Foundations of the Motu Proprio

For years now, Professor Grillo has espoused avant la lettre the tenets of Traditionis Custodes, maintaining that the Mass of Paul VI represents the exclusive rite of the Roman Church and that the Traditional Latin Mass should be legislated in such a way that its disappearance is assured.^[1]