Being a traditional Catholic is not about maintaining the trappings of the past, nostalgia, smells and bells, or simply some of the beauty or customs of yesteryear. Catholic tradition is our heritage. Too many Catholics today simply want a nice liturgy with a choir. But that is not what being traditional is about. Tradition itself is from the Apostles. It is based on the teaching of the Apostles and the sacred deposit of Divine revelation. It cannot change.
 

The Church's understanding of tradition has certainly grown over the centuries. But today, modernism has infected all venues and corners of the Church. And for the past 60 years we have been fed a new doctrine, one which says that the Church needed an aggiornamento (updating) and a modernization of our liturgy and Catholic ways to make it more relevant to the world. The hidden premise of this modernism is that the Church needs to learn from other religions too. This was the thesis behind ecumenism.
 

Very few clergy, even traditional priests, these days understand Catholic Tradition. No wonder the faithful are confused. Catholic teaching cannot change. The answer is to be found in the Magisterial teaching of the Church, our unchanging guide and teacher. So if there is any essential change in Church teaching, it is not Church teaching. It is not Catholic, and must be rejected.
 

To be an effective priest in the Latin Rite at the present time, one must have a comprehensive understanding of Latin, return to the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas and the scholastic tradition, the manuals of yesteryear, the catechisms of yesteryear, especially the Catechism of the Council of Trent and the Baltimore Catechism, the councils which embraced this tradition in all its fullness, the sensus fidelium (the sense or understanding of the faithful), and the official Bible of the Catholic Church, the Latin Vulgate as given to us by St. Jerome (for lay Catholics, the Douay-Rheims version is the only reliable translation).
 

I celebrate without compromise what is known as the pre-1955 Roman Rite, the Mass before any of the revisions that began in 1955. St. Pope Pius V stated in his famous bull, an infallible decree of his papacy, that this Mass was the official rite of the Mass to be celebrated until the end of the ages. The famous Catholic dictum of divine worship was lex orandi, lex credendi, the rule of prayer is the rule of belief. We at St. Dominic's Chapel joyfully retain this tradition. Looking not to the world or misguided clerics, we simply follow the way of being Catholic as always embraced by faithful Catholics in all times and places of her venerable history and in communion with all the saints. It is my joyful mission to make known that way, the narrow way, not the broad gate of modernism, which is the only sure way to eternal life.