Description:
This book is a work of prophecy. Like Jeremiah or Ezekiel under the Old Law, Roger-Thomas Calmel spoke and wrote as a priest who suffered to see God dishonoured and His people led astray. Those ancient prophets were charged by God to speak against false doctrine; to warn the people of God and their leaders to return to the fear of the Lord, in their worship and in their daily lives; and thus to prevent Israel from being dissolved into the nations round about. Father Calmel, simple priest of the New Law, likewise spoke out against what his sometime mentor, Jacques Maritain, had called 'immanent apostasy': the widespread dissolution, within the visible Church, of dogma, and the replacement of supernatural faith, hope, and charity by merely human simulacra.
Father Calmel's soul remains with us. It is present in his writings, standing on tiptoes, full of the Church's common doctrine and common prayer, stretching upward to grow in God's love. For him theology, liturgy, and the Dominican constitutions were not guides or regulations, but a source of inner nourishment. In our midst he fulfilled his task as a friar preacher, son of Saint Dominic, disciple of Saint Thomas, priest of Jesus Christ, and apostle of the Rosary.
He endures.
Review Quotes:
"Father Calmel was a key figure in the so-called 'traditionalist' movement. His works provide a firsthand account of the crisis in the Church and the first attempts at resistance." -Fr. Antoine-Marie de Araujo, FSVF
"The English publication of Brève apologie pour l'Église de toujours is truly an excellent initiative. His writings from the years following Vatican II and its liturgical reform-and especially this Brève apologie-served as providential theological markers for keeping to the right path amid the dense fog that then arose." -Abbé Claude Barthe, author of A Forest of Symbols: The Traditional Mass and Its Meaning
"Ecclesiastical ostriches-many of them mitred-who deny that the Catholic Church in the West is undergoing a profound crisis in faith and practice abound in our day. Father Calmel's intelligent and insightful critique of the roots of our crisis, now happily and expertly translated into English, deserves serious consideration. It will alarm us, and at a human level, we have every reason so to be. But so too we must take note of the witness of Father Calmel's faith and heed his advice-which is as pertinent today as it was all those decades ago-'We must not fear...but rather confidently persevere in the Church of the ages.'" -Dom Alcuin Reid, Prior, Monastère Saint-Benoît, Brignoles, France
"Among the heroes of orthodoxy who arose during and after Vatican II towered Fr. Roger-Thomas Calmel, who, with the strength born of a rigorous Thomism, identified, critiqued, and warned against the errors and sacrileges of his time. We may rejoice that this superlative classic of Catholic traditionalist thought is available, at last, in English!" -Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, author of The Once and Future Roman Rite