The Daily Wire host shared with Raymond Arroyo how they had seen or experienced the profoundly transformative impact of the Traditional Latin Mass firsthand.
(LifeSiteNews) — Daily Wire host Michael Knowles compared the Vatican’s suppression of the Traditional Latin Mass to King Henry VIII’s Protestant hijacking of Catholic churches in England.
In an interview aired on EWTN’s The World Over with Raymond Arroyo, both the EWTN and Daily Wire host shared how they had seen or experienced the profoundly transformative impact of the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) firsthand.
Arroyo told how “many years ago,” his wife was not only not Catholic but had absorbed the standard anti-Catholic propaganda. When he took her to Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where she heard a homily by the powerful orator Cardinal John O’Connor, “it cut through,” Arroyo said, “but it didn’t seal the deal.” It was not until he took her to the TLM in Washington, D.C., that she made the decision to become Catholic.
Asked what he believes so strongly attracts young people to the TLM, even during a time when “Rome seems determined to stamp it out,” Knowles replied, “It should not be surprising that the Mass which formed, statistically, all of the saints, ever, would have some pull on people.”
He highlighted the beauty of the liturgy, noting that “so much beauty was ripped away” in the creation of the Novus Ordo Missae that overwhelmingly took its place after the Second Vatican Council.
“Why are the young people drawn to the Traditional Latin Mass? Because we want truth. We’ve grown up in an age in which we were taught from diapers that there is no truth. Or if there is a truth, we can’t really know anything about it,” Knowles sid.
He observed, with hyperbolic emphasis, that the average age of those attending a TLM is much younger than those attending the Novus Ordo.
“It would seem to me that if you really want to bring some aggiornamento to the church, in the spirit of accompaniment, in the spirit even of Synodality, perhaps, we ought to listen to what the laity want, and what the laity want is tradition, reverence, and beauty,” Knowles told Arroyo.
“There’s something fitting about these traditional liturgies being driven underground by these very bishops. I think of Henry VIII when he goes in and destroys Canterbury cathedral and destroys such beautiful icons and steals all the land. The Protestants got all the good churches, and the Catholics went underground,” the Daily Wire host continued.
He pointed out that the so-called “reforms,” which he referred to as “deformations,” to the liturgy that were implemented after Vatican II, “in many ways” were intended to make the Mass more “Protestant.”
This is essentially true, as Protestant observers were consulted during the creation of the Novus Ordo, and the architect of the Novus Ordo, freemason Annibale Bugnini, had expressed the intention of removing “obstacles” from the Mass that would keep Protestants from joining the Catholic Church. If anything, the new Mass had the opposite effect, since the number of practicing Catholics, priests, and religious all plummeted after Vatican II, as Arroyo had earlier noted.
“And so once again we have these Protestant rites, or seemingly Protestant rites, cropping up, and once again the Mass of the Ages is driven underground,” Knowles said. “But it is in that struggle, it is in that oppression, that the Church often flourishes.”
