LIAR LIAR LABOUR'S PANTS ON FIRE

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 Liar! Liar! Pants on fire!

Attempting to defend the fastest volte-face, backdown, U-turn in New Zealand's political history, today Prime Sinister Jacinda Ardern claimed that the Labour's plan to rob taxpayers of $225 million A YEAR had been 'in the pipeline for years'. But hello, the Taxpayers' Union whose biz it is to know such stuff strongly denies that.

A reader of this blog, finding herself unexpectedly in hospital this week, took the opportunity to conduct a little vox pop of the medicos - socialists probably one and all - asking if they'd vote for Ardern next time. Nup, said they. But can New Zealand survive this evil, amoral narcissist's rule that long?

David Farrar of the Taxpayers' Union is doing his darnedest to ensure our financial interests are protected in the meantime. Maybe we should lend him our support.

What a day! In what is probably the fastest backdown in the history of backdowns, Revenue Minister David Parker has just announced that he is pulling the pin on the Government's proposed "Super Tax" on 

Kiwisaver and managed retirement funds!

The hundred billion-dollar backdown

The news came through as staff were literally going through draft designs for full-page nationwide newspaper ads, pencilled in for tomorrow.

What’s incredible is that Ministers were across the media all morning defending the policy – they were clearly well briefed and knew exactly what they were proposing. But by this afternoon the writing was on the wall. Minister Parker was forced into a swift U-Turn following widespread opposition.

This Government is student politics disorganisation but at a national level.

In Parliament today, the Prime Minister claimed that the GST change has been in the pipeline for years, but we keep a very close eye on IRD’s tax consultation papers – and let me tell you this proposal came from nowhere.

So, more lies from 'the podium of truth'.. Yawn. What's new? 

This Government's fiscal management and wasteful spending is out of control. Grant Robertson, David Parker and Jacinda Ardern are desperate to paper over their fiscal holes with your money. That's why a strong Taxpayers' Union is so important right now.

BUT: no time for celebration.The team are back to work!

 

self-explanatory

  In addition to the 'Stop Three Waters' campaign, tomorrow the Taxpayers' Union are releasing the 2022 edition of “Ratepayers’ Report” local government league tables. Go to their website to see how your local council compares.

 

 

WHY THE NOVUS ORDO IN LATIN WON'T WORK

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"Why can't we just have the Novus Ordo in Latin?"

That's been the perennial plaint of a certain reader of this blog and perhaps many others stranded out there by New Zealand's  receding tide of true Catholicism.

So as the Divine Will has ordained that the writer of this blog take time out temporarily, we turn to the much more highly qualified Peter Kwasniewski PhD to explain why the Novus Ordo in Latin just won't work. 

In the wake of Traditionis Custodes, some have made the good-faith suggestion that a “solution” for a future depleted of traditional Latin Masses is “doing the Novus Ordo in Latin.”

This is an absolute non-starter for several reasons.First, the missals are notably different. All you have to do is compare them to see that the Order of Mass and the Propers of the Mass are largely divergent. The classic article here is Matthew Hazell’s, demonstrating that only 13% of the orations of the old missal are found intact in the new one (and not 17%, the already-low figure at which Fr. Anthony Cekada had arrived, but which turns out on closer inspection to be too generous).

As I demonstrate in my book The Once and Future Roman Rite: Returning to the Traditional Latin Liturgy after Seventy Years of Exile (due out from TAN Books early October 2022), we are dealing here not with two versions of the Roman Rite but with:  two rites-the Roman Rite and whatever one must call the other one: the “modern rite” or “Vatican rite” or “Pauline rite” of Paul VI.

If someone happens to enjoy the modern rite in Latin, by all means let him have it; but that’s not a substitute for the TLM, and no one who is even a little bit familiar with the TLM would be able to perceive it to be such.

Second, the new liturgy was never designed by its architects and implementers to be said in Latin. Pope Paul VI bade adieu to Latin (and Gregorian chant along with it) in his infamous general audiences of March 1965 and November 1969, as I discuss in a lecture that has become one of the chapters of the aforementionedbook. On November 19, 1969, he declared:

The introduction of the vernacular will certainly be a great sacrifice for those who know the beauty, the power, and the expressive sacrality of Latin. We are parting with the speech of the Christian centuries; we are becoming like profane intruders in the literary preserve of sacred utterance. We will lose a great part of that stupendous and incomparable artistic and spiritual thing, the Gregorian chant.We have reason indeed for regret, reason almost for bewilderment. What can we put in the place of that language of the angels? We are giving up something of priceless worth. But why? What is more precious than these loftiest of our Church’s values?

The answer will seem banal, prosaic. Yet it is a good answer, because it is human, because it is apostolic. Understanding of prayer is worth more than the silken garments in which it is royally dressed. Participation by the people is worth more— particularly participation by modern people, so fond of plain language which is easily understood and converted into everyday speech.

This is the same pope who noted only five years later, in a moment of melancholy and unintentional self-criticism: “Modern man is sated by talk; he is obviously tired of listening, and what is worse, impervious to words.”[1]

 

In the giant doorstopper of a book Documents on the Liturgy 1963–1979, one can find hundreds of references to Mass in the vernacular, and scarcely any reference to Mass in Latin. The Latin editio typica of Paul VI’s Missale Romanum [sic] was understood by all, except perhaps Opus Dei clergy, as a launching-point for the multitudinous vernacular versions. One can tell because the Latin itself is clunky and clumsy throughout; it’s a committee product intended for practical extrapolations.

Third, and moving more deeply into the heart of the matter, the Novus Ordo is in fact built for a kind of immediate rational comprehension and active engagement that is foreign to traditional liturgy conducted in an archaic sacral language, where much that is said and done is not being said and done for or towards the congregation at all, and where being caught up in the larger liturgical action is the main point: the “creation of a presence.”[2]

No one has analyzed the stark differences between the rites, as far as language goes, better than Dr. Joseph Shaw of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales and my fellow contributing editor at OnePeterFive.

In a masterful five-part series at his blog LMS Chairman, Dr. Shaw explains why the “Reform of the Reform” (ROTR) was dead in the water even before it started (and before it was euthanized for good effect by Pope Francis). Here I would like to take up a few of the major points he makes.

In Part 1, “The death of the Reform of the Reform?,” Shaw introduces his main argument:

While I am in favour of Latin, worship ad orientem and pretty well everything the RotR promotes, it is clear to me that the difficulty of imposing them on the Novus Ordo is not just a matter of parochial habits. The problem with the texts and ceremonies, in terms of bringing them closer to the Traditional Mass, is not just a matter of how many changes you would need to make. The problem is that the Novus Ordo has its own ethos, rationale and spirituality. It encapsulates its own distinct understanding of what liturgical participation is. It is to promote this kind of participation that its various texts and ceremonies have been done as they are. If you put it in Latin, ad orientem, and especially if you start having things not currently allowed, like the silent Canon, then you undermine the kind of participation for which the Novus Ordo was designed. This means that there is a danger, in promoting something which amounts to a compromise between the two Missals, of falling between two stools.

In Part 2, “The Liturgical Movement,” Shaw notes that the movers and shakers of the Liturgical Movement were frustrated that the people before the Council were not more “into” the liturgy (according to presumably enlightened notions of what such “into-ness” should look like). The poor folks did not understand its content as well as the experts themselves did, being fluent in Latin as they were and having lots of time to study and so forth. Having grown impatient with educational approaches, they tried a blunter method:

Some liturgists made a final effort to get the wonderful texts of the ancient liturgical tradition across to the Faithful. They experimented with having Mass facing the people, so everyone could see what was going on. Then they realised that, if you want people to understand the texts, you really are a lot better off having the texts read aloud, and in the vernacular. It stands to reason! But things were moving on. Even aloud, and in English, the texts were too long, too complicated. In fact, putting them into the vernacular simply served to emphasise that these texts were unsuitable for repetitive use in the congregation’s mother tongue. Furthermore, the order in which things happened was confusing and (apparently) illogical. And then there were other theological fashions which disliked the emphasis on sin, penance, and the saints. It all had to go.

What we got instead was a Missal which the Faithful could follow word by word, without the need (after a while) of hand-missals. The prayers were simple, the ceremonies short and cut down to the bone, and (apparently) logical. It was in the vernacular. It faced the people. The translation used words of one syllable wherever possible. It all fitted together.

Now, when the ROTR folks look at the result, they sense that there’s a great lack:

Something is missing from the Mass, the sacrality has gone. So they want to put some sacrality back. They see the things which seem most associated with it in the Traditional Mass, and they want to put them back. So they propose, and actually practise, the use of Latin, celebration ad orientem, Gregorian Chant and so on. These are all good things. But when the reformers said that they had to be sacrificed for the sake of comprehensibility, they weren’t entirely wrong. Thinking about word-by-word understanding, verbal communication, it is perfectly true that, unless you are a superhuman Latinist, it is harder to follow the Canon in Latin than it is in English. Unless you are lip-reader, it is harder still if it is silent. Unless you have X-Ray eyes, it is harder still if the priest has his back to you.

Pope Paul VI famously said, using a phrase of Jungmann’s, that Latin was a ‘curtain’ which obscured the liturgy, it had to be drawn back. Yes: if you have a very narrow understanding of participation. But that is the understanding of participation upon which the entire reform was based.

In Part 3, “Falling Between Two Stools,” Shaw makes explicit the assumptions of the reformers and why they are mistaken.[3] He then explains what happens when you try to “mix n’ match”:

The Novus Ordo is geared towards verbal comprehension. It may be lacking in other things—certainly the Reform of the Reform people tell us so—but in terms of understanding the liturgical texts it must be said it is pretty successful. They are read nice and clearly, usually amplified, in one’s mother tongue (at least for those of us who have a major language as a mother tongue, and live where it is an official language); the vocabulary (at least until the new translation) is not challenging. Yes, we get the message, at the intellectual, word-by-word level.

To say the Vetus Ordo operates at another level is to state the obvious. You can’t even hear the most important bits—they are said silently. If you could hear them, they’d be in Latin. And yet, somehow, it has its supporters. It communicates something, not in spite of these barriers to verbal communication, but by means of the very things which are clearly barriers to verbal communication. The silence and the Latin are indeed among the most effective means the Vetus Ordo employs to communicate what it communicates: the mysterium tremendum, the amazing reality of God made present in the liturgy.

If you take the Novus Ordo and make it verbally incomprehensible, or take the Vetus Ordo and take away the Latin and the silence, you are not creating the ideal liturgy. You are in grave danger of creating something that is neither fish nor fowl: that doesn’t work at either level.

Please go and read the rest of the article, which I refrain from quoting here only to prevent my own article from ballooning past all readability.In Part 4, “Novus Ordo in Latin?,” Shaw ties together his various points:

[A] compromise missal, with ‘the best’ of the Ordinary Form and of the Extraordinary Form, could turn out to be something which doesn’t allow the Faithful to engage with it effectively, in either the typical Traditional fashion or the typical Novus Ordo fashion.

The idea that you can make the Traditional Latin Mass easier to participate in by making various changes—using the vernacular, having silent prayers aloud, having the priest face the people—is based on the idea that there is only one kind of meaningful participation, and that is an intellectual, verbal participation: a comprehension of the liturgy by a grasp of the liturgical texts word by word, as they are said. But, as I argued, this is not so….

I also warned that something similar can happen from the other direction. If you take the Novus Ordo and put it into Latin, for example, you instantly take away much of the intellectual, verbal engagement for which the 1970 Missal was designed. Will you create a sense of the sacred to compensate? Perhaps. But the whole rite has been set up wrong, from that point of view, and most Catholics in the pew will not find it at all obvious how to allow themselves to engage with it at the appropriate way, in the context of the mixed signals they are getting from the ceremonies and texts….

If we are going to talk about the future, of what there is some chance of really working with the bulk of ordinary Catholics, the Reform of the Reform is based on a terrible mistake. The mistake is to assume you can preserve what is attractive about one Form while combining it with what is attractive about the other. You can’t, because they are incompatible….

[I]n the EF it is precisely those things which impede verbal communication which facilitate non-verbal communication: Latin, silence, worship ad orientem and so on. An attempt to ramp up verbal communication in the EF will destroy what makes it attractive.

Similarly, an attempt to bring in more ‘sense of the sacred’ in the OF will radically reduce its big selling point: the ease of verbal communication. I’m not saying that it’s not a good idea to try, I’m just saying you need to be terribly careful.

(In Part 5, “1965?,” Shaw explains why the “interim missal” of 1965 also falls between two stools: it is neither what Sacrosanctum Concilium called for nor has it retained the subtle complexus of qualities of the usus antiquior. It is perhaps the worst of all: neither the old fish nor the new fowl. I would urge my readers, at their leisure, to go and read the full series by Shaw, since he makes many fine points in each of the five articles that I have had to skip over in the interests of space.)

Fourth and finally, it is often brought as a reproach against devotees of the TLM that we have too “aesthetic” a view of the liturgy, or conversely that we think too much in terms of “devotion” and “reverence” (as if these things were really a problem!). But the truth is, the TLM is inherently aesthetic and devotional, and the Latin language is an important component in its genetic makeup.

Those, on the other hand, who, knowing that the Novus Ordo was meant by Paul VI (et al.) to be in the vernacular, now seek for it to be in Latin, are indeed guilty of a kind of aestheticism and devotionalism.

In this scenario, the Latin becomes a decoration and a mystificiation, like the other “smells and bells” that give the illusion of continuity in our liturgical worship and smudge the profound differences in content between old and new.

It’s that dragon of optionitis rearing its ugly head once more. The TLM basically has to be in Latin: the language is bone of its bone, flesh of its flesh. It is written on its birth certificate and its passport. Yes, I know, I know: the Iroquois ended up getting some of the old liturgy in their own language, and there’s a Glagolithic Mass, and the high-church Anglicans did up a Cranmerized Roman Missal, etc. But 99.9% of the time, the old Roman liturgy was in Latin, and the same thing is true today in thousands of Mass locations across a hundred countries. Whereas in the Novus Ordo, even the language used is an option, like so much else. As a result, somebody has to choose to do the new Mass in Latin. This choice, like other choices, instantly creates polarization, in a way that something inevitable, something simply given, does not do.[4]

In short, the Latin Novus Ordo is not a solution for our woes. It is an awkward illusion that will confuse some, disappoint others, and inspire no one. The one and only solution, in both the short term and the long term, is a principled, inflexible adherence to the great Latin liturgical tradition, which no one on earth has the authority to outlaw, and which it would be spiritual suicide to surrender.

 [1] Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi, n. 42.

[2] Mosebach used this phrase to describe the traditional rite for reading the Gospel, but it lends itself as a description of the entire classical liturgy.

[3] “I described the historical process by which we ended up with a liturgy from which drama, gesture, mystery, awe, and beauty have been systematically removed. There is still some left, but less than before; the point is that their removal was not accidental, but deliberate and systematic. There was a principle at work: Mass should be readily comprehensible. Drama, poetry, anything which is hidden from sight or in a foreign language: these are inevitably harder to understand. And who can argue with the principle? What the reformers took for granted was the presupposition that we are talking about verbal communication. So let’s get this assumption out in the open: Mass should be readily comprehensible at the level of verbal communication.

“Suddenly it looks less obvious. Might it be possible that what is more readily comprehensible at the verbal level is actually less readily comprehensible, or, to use another term favoured by liturgists, meaningful, taking verbal and non-verbal forms of communication together? Listen to what Fr Aidan Nichols OP observed (Looking at the Liturgy, 59): ‘To the sociologist, it is by no means self-evident that brief, clear rites have greater transformative potential than complex, abundant, lavish, rich, long rites, furnished with elaborate ceremonial.’

“When you put it like that, it is clear enough. It is perfectly possible that the effort to make Mass more meaningful at a verbal level has had such a deleterious effect on its non-verbal aspect that we’ve ended up with something which is less meaningful all things considered.”

[4] Moreover, when anything traditional but optional in the Novus Ordo is done, it thereby becomes a personal accomplishment posited by the pastoral discretion, intellectual conviction, and good taste of the celebrant, and thus reflective of his personality or “ars celebrandi.” That is my own primary critique of the ROTR: see my pair of articles “Why the ‘Reform of the Reform’ is Doomed” and “Men Must Be Changed by Sacred Things, and Not Sacred Things by Men,” as well as “The Minor Options of the Old Rite and How They Avoid ‘Optionitis.’”

Peter Kwasniewski, PhD

Dr. Peter Kwasniewski is a graduate of Thomas Aquinas College and The Catholic University of America who taught at the International Theological Institute in Austria, the Franciscan University of Steubenville’s Austria Program, and Wyoming Catholic College, which he helped establish in 2006. Today he is a full-time writer and speaker on traditional Catholicism whose work appears online at, among others, OnePeterFive, New Liturgical Movement, LifeSiteNews, The Remnant, and Catholic Family News. He has published eighteen books, including Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass (Angelico, 2020), The Ecstasy of Love in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Emmaus, 2021), and Are Canonizations Infallible? Revisiting a Disputed Question (Arouca, 2021). His work has been translated into at least eighteen languages. Visit his website at www.peterkwasniewski.com.

 

OZZIE SPECTATOR HALF RIGHT: LOCKDOWNS ALL WRONG

 

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Not NEARLY as bad as it got at Parliament Grounds 

An 'I told you so' moment - and we critics of the global Covid hoax are looking forward to more of them. 

Not that it's awfully gratifying to share this good news so terribly late in the day, but the Australian Spectator, which knocks all NZ 'journalism' (barring our cherished BFD) into a cocked hat, exhibits the crack in the dam of mainstream media propaganda that we've been waiting for.

The Spectator however, is somewhat naive. Scales are yet to drop from its eyes - spiritual insight is in very short supply in the Fourth Estate.

Nevertheless we can shortly expect many more liars and propagandists like 'our dear Dr  Bloomfield' to depart the public square just as fast as their ill-gotten Lexuses can carry them. And New Zealand will be better off without them.

So, over 'the ditch' we go.

 

The tide has turned. Finally. Recently that organ of pro-lockdown orthodoxy, the New York Times, ran an editorial to the effect that during the Covid pandemic no schools should ever have been closed. And that it would take decades to recover from this public policy fiasco.

 

Sure, the NYT buried this editorial in a Saturday edition. But it’s a start. Especially for those of us who doubted the imposition of lockdowns from day one, publicly and in print, and were faced with a barrage of unhinged abuse about being ‘grandmother killers’ or ‘denying the science’ or having some talking head suffering from a toxic overdose of his own supposed virtue ramble on about ‘not on my watch’ as regards adopting the Swedish approach.

 

Last week the front page of the London Telegraph (far more sane through the pandemic, by the way, than the Australian - or the NZ Herald - ed) published a front page piece with a headline ‘lockdown effects feared to be killing more people than Covid’. In fact, the article by the paper’s science editor Sarah Knapton cites excess deaths data from Britain’s Office for National Statistics that make it plain this will happen.

 

Knapton says that ‘over the past two months, the number of excess deaths not from Covid dwarfs the number linked to the virus’.

Well, fancy that! Now why would that be??? 

 

Even some doctors’ organisations, who were all too willing to try to suppress and cancel lockdown dissenters for over two years, are doing about-faces – not least the British Heart Foundation. Others, like the man who goes by the moniker ‘The Naked Emperor’ (for obvious reasons) on Substack, have taken this data and drilled down further. For instance, for the week ending 5 August there were 1,350 excess deaths in England and Wales.

Guess what? That is 14.4 per cent higher than the 5-year average. And you’re seeing those noticeably higher excess deaths in Australia too. But the Naked Emperor makes a point the science editor of the London Telegraph still shies away from, a point related to wide-open, honest debate: ‘There is no doubt that lockdowns are one of the major causes [of these really high excess deaths numbers] but it would be stupid to not even consider vaccines.'

You can say that again. 

Investigate whether they have contributed to these excess deaths in any way, present the evidence and then say no they haven’t. But don’t just dogmatically say they are safe and not look into it.’

AT LAST. CARRY US HOME TO DIE. 

That sums up the view of this twice-vaccinated, no-boosters, writer. I have so little trust in the expert class (including the medicos) after the last two years I am taking nada, nothing, zero on trust from these people. Many of them spent the last two-plus years stifling dissent; or keeping their heads down and being too cowardly to voice honestly held doubts; or revelling in a heavy-handed ‘we are the incarnation of science and we’re not prepared to brook any dissent’ form of modern-day aristocracy.

 

And this in the context of Anders Tegnell’s Swedish approach (the same as the one recommended by the Great Barrington Declaration) looking better and better with each passing day – on every axis of concern and on every criterion. Not just as regards kids’ schooling outcomes. Not just all the economic outcomes from debt to small business closures to ruined CBDs to incredible asset inflation. Not just the invidious massive transfers of wealth from the young to the old and from the poor to the rich that lockdowns (and the money printing and massive spending needed to support those lockdowns, triggering the above-mentioned asset inflation, now price inflation and a hammered private sector) brought about. 

 

No, even on straight-up ‘which policy choice will have the fewest excess deaths’ criterion, lockdowns were a mistake. The right choice, the one that was WHO and British policy in October of 2019 based on a century of data, was to protect the vulnerable and leave everyone else alone to make their own calls while definitely not locking down, not closing schools, not weaponising the police as the enforcement arm of two-bit public health bureaucrats. It was right even if the only axis you cared about, the only one, was how many deaths your response to Covid would lead to.

Like the evil Ardern's and blithering Bloomfield's.

So to be blunt, Australia’s response to Covid was nothing to be proud of. As time goes by it is looking worse and worse. Scott Morrison and John Howard may say that Australia’s response was top of the class.  But I strongly disagree.

 

I don’t know what data they’re looking at but what I’m seeing indicates bad choice piled on bad choice – all while shutting down dissenting views; centralising decision-making within an incredibly narrow band of people; and maybe worst of all ‘engineering a situation whereby those with decision-making power had no skin in the game’. They paid virtually none of the costs they imposed on others.

When I made this critique a year ago and more, most people said I was wrong on the facts. These days more and more agree with me on the substance. They concede we should not have gone down the road we did. But they offer this secondary defence of our (and to be fair most of the democratic world’s) political and public health castes. They say something along the lines of: ‘Look, there was great uncertainty. No one knew for sure how potent this virus was. It was better to be safe than sorry, to opt for the least risk option. Maybe we were too slow to reverse course. But in the swirl of uncertainty we can forgive the initial lockdowns, school closures, massive spending, etcetera, etcetera.’

No, we can't forgive them. We can and must forgive those who made such bad decisions, but we can't forgive their mistakes. That would make them too easily repeated.  

Again, count me a strong dissenter to that plea in mitigation. In the face of uncertainty that is exactly the time when you should be guided by your core principles and values.  If your initial response is to copy China and more or less weld people in their homes that seems, to me, to be a despotic and wrong-headed response.

 

It is certainly not a recognisably liberal response. It amounts to invoking the precautionary principle on steroids, all while doing only ‘benefit’ analysis, not ‘cost-benefit’ analysis – because many people right at the start pointed out all the many likely medium-term costs to this sort of authoritarian, thuggish lockdown response.

 

Yet throw in some wildly wrong modelling by Neil Ferguson out of Imperial College. Stir in a bit of Pravda-like fear porn press coverage. Add a lot of cancelling those with dissenting opinions, especially by Big Tech. And here we are today. But uncertainty in no way justifies what our politicians did.

 

Heck, if we’re giving the full picture there was much less uncertainty than this attempted defence suggests. Right from the start they had the data from the cruise ship Diamond Princess. Not a single young person on that boat who caught the disease died or went into ICU. And the death rate even amongst the many elderly cruise ship passengers never came close to that of the Spanish Flu, forget the Black Death.

Anyway, I want politicians who fall back on liberal values in the face of uncertainty, when it counts. I don’t want those who, faced with uncertainty, resort to what you’d see from the Chinese Politburo.

Vote them all out. They richly deserve it.

And so say all of us - even more so, their New Zealand counterparts.  Labour, Greens, Maori. But what's the alternative? National and Act?

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