Showing results by author "Peter A. Kwasniewski" in All Categories

The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the highest act of worship on earth, the unbloody renewal of Calvary, and the source and summit of the Christian life. Yet for many Catholics today, the liturgy feels familiar but not fully understood. Something essential has been obscured. In Ad Orientem: The Direction that Changes Everything, Peter Kwasniewski addresses one of the most overlooked but revealing elements of Catholic worship: the direction in which the Church prays. This is not a question of preference or aesthetics. It is a theological reality. The way we stand reveals whom we worship.

In his latest book, Dr. Peter Kwasniewski argues that ever since the new liturgical books following the Second Vatican Council came into force, Roman Catholic faithful have suffered the effects of a hasty and far-reaching reform permeated with nominalism, voluntarism, Protestantism, rationalism, antiquarianism, hyperpapalism, and other modern errors. Man is not master over divine liturgy, Dr. Kwasniewski emphasizes; rather, all of us are called to be stewards of the sacred, from the lowest-ranking layman to the pope himself.

More is at stake in the music we listen to or perform than most people are aware. In this vivacious and challenging work, Dr. Peter Kwasniewski—a philosopher, theologian, composer, conductor, and singer—explains why the great classical music of Western civilization is morally and intellectually good for us, as well as why certain other forms of music can actually be harmful.

In this often surprising book, Dr. Kwasniewski takes nine objections Catholics make to the traditional Latin Mass, and turns them around in a jiu jitsu fashion: “You are right—but you don’t realize how right you are!”

Recent decades have been marred by pervasive Eucharistic abuse, from violations of liturgical norms and rubrics to practices that encourage irreverence and facilitate habitual sacrilege. The coronavirus crisis in 2020 has occasioned a further wave of sacramental manipulation, desacralization, and deprivation that has left almost no Catholic in the world unharmed. The Holy Bread of Eternal Life is a powerful and timely book by scholar Peter Kwasniewski that exalts the divine gift of the Blessed Sacrament, which can never be too much loved or too much sacrificed for.

Pope Benedict XVI affirmed the ongoing growth and perpetual validity of the Traditional Latin Mass, insisting that "what earlier generations held as sacred remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden, or even considered harmful". However, with the 2021 release of Traditionis Custodes, his successor has declared the opposite.