We continue our series of looking at Graham Moorhouse's work, "Cult Fiction: The Protestant Cuckoo in the Catholic Nest." It is appropriate that this article is being published during the Octave of Easter, for the first subject that Moorhouse discusses in his section on the Neocatechumenal liturgy is the celebration of the Easter Vigil.
It is important to remember that this vigil is normally celebrated separately from the parish! So in parishes in which the Way are present there will be two Easter Vigils, an open one for the parish and a closed one for the Way! (Cult Fiction, p. 6)
This is entirely true, and applies to all Masses, not just the Easter Vigil (but more on that momentarily). Moorhouse also relates that he knows of some parishes in which the parish Easter Vigil has been scrapped entirely in favor of the Way's Vigil. I have fortunately not heard of this happening in any of the Way's parishes in my diocese, though I do not doubt that it happens.
[The Way's] liturgy reaches its culmination at the Passover Vigil, which is an all night affair... An ex-member has related to me how the vigil finished with a community breakfast at 6am in a large local hotel, for which everyone was required to pay £25! My informants had asked to be excused the breakfast because of family commitments but were instructed by the leaders of the Way that their place was at the community breakfast. (Cult Fiction, p. 6-7)
The all-night aspect is a defining feature of the Way's iteration of the Easter Vigil. In stories I have heard directly, this "community breakfast" also has alcohol served at it, which many people are more than happy to imbibe. Thus, by the time all the festivities are over, people are so tired (and often drunk) that they feel the need to do nothing but sleep the remainder of the day--which, to remind you, is Easter Sunday. They do not partake of any other parish activities; they do not visit or have a traditional dinner with their families; they do not commemorate the day in any other meaningful way, because they were up all night and now must sleep. The Way has completely monopolized the time and energy (and money) of its followers on the Church's highest Holy Day!
Now, activities at night and sleeplessness are not remotely unheard of in Catholic tradition. My own parish's Easter Vigil started at 4:30 in the morning this year. St. John Vianney slept very little, both due to his immensely busy schedule and the fact that he was often tormented by demons. The 4th-century ascetic St. Macarius is said to have once gone twenty days without sleep. St. Jerome would supposedly throw himself on the floor to keep himself awake if he got too sleepy to continue his work.
However, as one doctor wrote for Sleep and Health Journal, "Sleep deprivation is an essential component of many brainwashing groups. From David Koresh to Adolf Hitler, long nocturnal rituals were the main techniques for mind control." And, another blogger adds, "The fact is narcissists and other toxic people really do try to ruin...sleep schedules in order to be able to control [people] better... even though sleep depravity [sic] isn't a direct manipulation tactic, it can leave us much more vulnerable [to] actual manipulation methods and controlling behavior."
Given the reputation of Kiko and his many brutish catechists, these latter observations certainly deserve our consideration as much as any we give to the thought of "pious religious observance."
The next section details many of the peculiarities of the Neocatechumenal liturgy.
Their weekly Masses are also celebrated behind closed doors separately from the parish. These closed private Masses are radically different from parish Masses. (Cult Fiction, p. 7)
Indeed. In fact, not only are their Masses separate and closed off from the parish, but they are even separate and closed off from one another! Different small communities on different "stages" of the Way will not have Mass together, except at convivences or other major events. Some more advanced Neocat parishes have even constructed (or co-opted from existing parish property) official "catechumeniums." These are, according to the Way's official website, "dignified spaces where the communities [can] celebrate different liturgies." They often consist of numerous small rooms and a larger room and "serve to carry out the aesthetic and liturgical renewal of Vatican II." (My former parish, in fact, is currently in the process of building such a space, completely and falsely under the guise of building a new "parish center" to get all the unsuspecting normies to pay for it.)
As for the liturgy itself, the rubrics and statutes have supposedly undergone some heavy revision in the intervening years between now and when Moorhouse was writing. (I say "supposedly" because while these new statutes and other official Vatican publications are well-documented, the Way's proclivity to having its own way often precludes any "official" intervention). This, of course, does not mean that everything has changed, or that Moorhouse's observations are even remotely irrelevant.
Because Neocatechumenal liturgies are so private and closed-off, finding videos of them is understandably very difficult. However, back in April of 2020 (when churches around the world were in the process of shuttering their doors because of a certain virus), the Redemptoris Mater of Cape Town, South Africa live-streamed a full Mass for the public. My friend and co-blogger, a former Neocat, assures me (and all you readers) that apart from some minor aesthetic differences, it is a faithful representation of a typical contemporary Neocat liturgy, at least in her experience. It can be viewed in its entirety here. We will use this Mass as our primary example and comparison.
- "Altars are strictly taboo," Moorhouse writes. "A table decorated with flowers is set in the middle of the church with the brothers and sisters of the community and their catechists circled round it." Yes, clearly this is still the case, as is evident immediately in the video. A quick Google image search of Neocatechumenal Masses reveals the same thing. (Interestingly not present on the table in the video is the menorah, which you can see present in the photo above).
- "The Mass will typically last ninety minutes and takes place on a Saturday evening." Yes, Neocat Masses are always on Saturday evenings (the one in the video is no different). "The first Christians met on the night between Saturday and Sunday to celebrate the Eucharist," reports Kiko. "Later, after the Peace of Constantine [aka, when the Holy Spirit started His vacation], when Sunday became also a civic holiday, they began to celebrate the Eucharist on Sunday mornings too" (Catechetical Guide, p. 363). While the Mass in the video is indeed around ninety minutes in length, this is unusual only in the sense that a typical Sunday Novus Ordo Mass is only about sixty minutes. A Byzantine Divine Liturgy, however, can also easily run about ninety minutes, and the Traditional Latin High Mass for Palm Sunday can be as long as three hours; so timing is not always, as they often say, everything.
- "There is a certain amount of what may be called liturgical dancing, circling the table and such like." None of that to be seen in the video, but this clip from an Easter Vigil in El Salvador certainly fits the bill..
- "There is little kneeling." True. At no point in the video--including both during the consecration and after Holy Communion--can anyone be observed kneeling. Photographs of Neocatechumenal Masses also typically never show anyone on their knees (unless it's in front of Kiko...). Moorhouse goes on: "Indeed in some cases the Way has been responsible for the kneelers being stripped out of churches." While I have not heard of this specific renovation taking place in parishes near me, there certainly have been notorious others.
- "The bread for Mass is baked by the members themselves and resembles an ordinary loaf. In the breaking and sharing of our Lord's body, crumbs and fragments are inevitably scattered all over the church and trodden underfoot. This of course would and should scandalize any genuine Catholic." It is not so much the use of leavened bread itself which is a problem (those in the Eastern Churches use it, also), but how it is treated. Communion in the video begins at around 1:33:40 and continues for about the next five minutes. Observe the oddness for yourself. As for the scattered and trampled fragments and the scandal such practices cause, while the video does not show (or even suggest) them, there are numerous testimonies out there that all confirm this report. But I could go on about Eucharistic abuse all day...
- Moorhouse remarks that anyone can share reflections before the homily, and that additionally anyone can pray and express feelings openly during the Prayers of the Faithful. In the video (36:38), the priest--while seated--even says, "Before the homily, we have this gift of being able to share what the Lord has spoken to us." The passing of the microphone during the Prayers of the Faithful begins at about 1:10:55. What Moorhouse does not mention, which could easily be included here, is that each reading (including the Gospel) will also be preceded by a spontaneous and expository "exhortation" by a layperson. This practice seems to apply to all Neocatechumenal liturgies, as I experienced the same phenomenon during both the penitential liturgy (Night 10) and the "handing on the Scriptures" liturgy (Night 15) of the initial catechesis. In those cases, laypeople even gave little "mini homilies" after each reading, too!
The Neocatechumenate's "Mass" contains serious omissions from the normal public liturgy of the Church... It is claimed by the Neocatechumenate leaders (and I have yet to see anything to dispute their claim) that these omissions and general mucking about with the liturgy of the Mass have been approved by officials of the Liturgical Congregation in Rome. (Cult Fiction, p. 7)
Here is where I think some changes have been made - at least superficially. This article from Sandro Magister, titled "The Old Form of the Neocatechumenal Mass Is Illicit," offers some interesting perspective.
Moorhouse says here, and elsewhere, that the creed is not recited during Neocat Mass. As of today, this is only partially true. They do not say the Nicene Creed, but rather the Apostles Creed. This is true in the video (1:05:57) and is also true from years of my own experience. The Neocat priests at my old parish insist on the Apostles Creed every Sunday for even the regular parish Masses--I didn't say the Nicene Creed at Mass for several years! Moorhouse comments elsewhere [p. 6] that there may be some doctrinal issues present in the Nicene Creed that Kiko and Company do not accept, thus the suppression. I generally accept this theory. (Remember, too, that the Nicene Creed was first formulated in 325, and Kiko's timeline of "legitimate" Church history essentially ends in 313 with Constantine's Edict of Milan and doesn't pick up again until Vatican II in the 1960s.) Perhaps the Apostles Creed was a concession to Rome to at least have a creed in the liturgy.
Regarding the other omissions, Moorhouse lists four, and gives his doctrinal guesses as to why they've been removed: (1) the Lavabo, (2) the Orate, Fratres, (3) the Agnus Dei, and (4) the Domine, non sum dignus. All four of these prayers are present in the Cape Town video (1:17:39, 1:18:35, 1:32:30, and 1:35:56, respectively). One of the Vatican's sticking points with the Way's new statutes was that it needed to use the Roman Missal. With the exception of some significant departures (like the exhortations and community homily), the Cape Town Mass does indeed largely follow the Missal (even with its Kiko-fied chanting).
Why might we still wish to take these changes with a grain of salt? Sandro Magister again is enlightening with this article from 2012. The entire article is worth reading and reflecting on, but I want to focus on a quote from a particular book that Magister highlights:
...Kiko and Carmen drew their own personal conception of the Catholic liturgy, which they put into practice in the Masses of their communities. There is a book by a Ligurian priest of the Way, Piergiovanni Devoto, that uses previously unpublished texts of Kiko and Carmen to make public this bizarre conception of theirs...
Here are some of the passages of the book, taken from pages 71-77...
"The Church has tolerated inauthentic forms for centuries. The 'Gloria,' which was part of the liturgy of the hours recited by the monks, entered into the mass when a single celebration was made of the two actions, and that the 'Credo' emerged with the appearance of heresies and apostasies. Even the 'Orate Fratres' is a culminating example of the prayers with which the mass was stuffed full..."
While Devoto's book is from 2004 (and thus more in line with the liturgy with which Moorhouse would have been familiar, prior to the Vatican interventions of later years), such a quote corroborates that omitting prayers like the Orate, Fratres from the Mass is indeed very much in line with Kiko and Carmen's "doctrinally restorationist" mindset when it comes to overhauling the Church's liturgy. As even the "approved" version of their catechetical guides show, their faulty theology--and by extension, their entire program of catechesis--has not changed an iota. Carmen took it to her grave, and Kiko will likely do the same. Don't think that by adding a few prayers back into the Mass, the Way has somehow sorted itself out.
One may legitimately question whether the Neocatechumenate "Mass" is actually a valid Mass. The Church teaches that for the Mass to be valid it is necessary for the priest to intend to do what the Church does. However, the Church intends to offer a propitious sacrifice, but Kiko and Carmen explicitly deny the Mass is a propitious sacrifice, so how can their priests intend to do what the Church does? (Cult Fiction, p. 7)
This is indeed a very serious concern. In my own experience, I do not doubt that the Neocatechumenal priests who I have met and whose Masses I have attended have been sincere in their belief about the Eucharist. With no other pretext, I even asked one of them one time if the Mass was a sacrifice, and he unhesitatingly replied, "Yes, absolutely." Now, as we well know, the entire Neocat movement is plagued by duplicity and purposeful ambiguity, which is a true shame, because it prevents otherwise decent, humble, forthright people from being fully believed. For my part, though, I accept these priests' sincerity--at least in this specific regard.
I cannot, however, speak for every Neocat priest, and while this particular teaching may have been "softened" or "watered down" by Vatican editors, it did not go away. If all or almost all of your seminary training is done at the hands of Kiko and Carmen's "true believers," who know and embrace all the founders have said and taught, then it's really inevitable that regardless of your personal faith in the Eucharist, your professional training is going to be substandard, if not outright deficient. Seminary training in the last 60 years has been bad enough without adding more nonsense to the mix. And remember, priestly vocations are one of the Way's biggest selling points!
Regardless of any individual priest's personal beliefs about the Eucharist (which may never be knowable with certainty), knowing he belongs to a movement whose founders so openly embrace heretical ideas about the Blessed Sacrament should be a major red flag to the faithful.
Drawing the comparison to questions many have been asking about the Novus Ordo since its initiation, Moorhouse asks:
Is it really better that our liturgy should seek to drag Christ down into our pedestrian, workaday world, rather than seek to raise our hearts and minds up to the throne of the Most High...? Further: are we really the better off for having ditched holy intimacy for an unbecoming familiarity, or is this not rather part of that post-Conciliar move away from worshipping the Lord God Almighty to worshipping a god all-matey, made in our own image? (Cult Fiction, p. 8)
Whether you attend the Novus Ordo, or the Traditional Latin Mass, or an Eastern Divine Liturgy, or an Ordinariate Mass, these are fair and important questions to ask.
In The Spirit of the Liturgy - which we heartily recommend to all readers - Cardinal Ratzinger reminds us:
Worship, that is, the right kind of cult, of relationship with God, is essential for the right kind of human existence in the world. It is so precisely because it reaches beyond everyday life. Worship gives us a share in heaven's mode of existence, in the world of God, and allows light to fall from that divine world into ours... Liturgy implies a real relationship with Another, who reveals himself to us and gives our existence a new direction. (p. 21-22)
Of the kind of liturgy Moorhouse describes, using the example of the Hebrews and the golden calf, Ratzinger goes on to say:
Worship is no longer going up to God, but drawing God down into one's own world. He must be there when he is needed, and he must be the kind of God that is needed. Man is using God, and in reality, even if it is not outwardly discernible, he is placing himself above God... Worship becomes a feast that the community gives itself, a festival of self-affirmation. Instead of being worship of God, it becomes a circle closed in on itself: eating, drinking, and making merry. The narrative of the golden calf is an image of this self-seeking worship. It is a kind of banal self-gratification. The narrative of the golden calf is a warning about any kind of self-initiated and self-seeking worship. UItimately, it is no longer concerned with God but with giving oneself a nice little alternative world, manufactured from one's own resources. Then liturgy really does become pointless, just fooling around. Or still worse it becomes an apostasy from the living God, an apostasy in sacral disguise. All that is left in the end is frustration, a feeling of emptiness. (p. 23)
Watch the video of the Salvadoran Easter Vigil dance again, or think of the mass exodus of people--especially young people--from the Church at large, and all the lame, horizontal Masses they attended for decades (or maybe even the lame, horizontal Masses you still attend), and see if these words of the future pope ring any truer.
Moorhouse concludes his short but meaty section on Liturgy with a few references to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, used as counterpoints to some of the Way's doctrinal oddities that affect the liturgy. Here, we will focus on only one, since he draws a side-by-side comparison of teachings found in the Church's Catechism and in Kiko's.
Moorhouse's citation is once again striking, but frustratingly imprecise. We will here cite the Way's approved Catechetical Guide, addressing what we believe to be the same basic point:
This Passover is my Passover, Jesus says, my passage from death to life. He leaves us the Passover celebration as a memorial of what he came to do: pass from this world to the Father. He leaves us a sacrament; a memorial, which is a feast, a Eucharist, an exultation for what the Father has done in Christ for us...
Now however, there is a certain regression to a mentality that Israel had had but that had been left behind even in the Old Testament... To go back now to the sacrificial and sacerdotal ideas of paganism is like going back to erect the scaffolding again after the building has been finished. This is why, when in the middle ages people began to argue about sacrifice, some of them would argue about things that had a very different meaning in the primitive Eucharist...
The Eucharist is Passover, the passage from death to resurrection. This is why to say that the Eucharist is a sacrifice is true but incomplete... The Eucharist is above all a sacrifice of praise...
Moreover what many people see in the Mass is only that Jesus Christ sacrifices himself, they see only the sacrifice of the cross of Jesus Christ and not his resurrection. They don't see the Passover, the passage from death to resurrection. And even today if you were to ask people about this, many would say that all they see in the Mass is Calvary. Little by little the Mass is covered over. (p. 329, 347-349)
Moorhouse compares this to Paragraph 1410 of the Catechism, as well as to two canons (I and III from Session 22) from the Council of Trent. I will include what I believe to be the most pertinent of those here:
If anyone says that the sacrifice of the Mass is that only of praise and thanksgiving, or that it is a mere commemoration of the sacrifice consummated on the Cross but not a propitiatory one... let him be anathema. (Canon III, Session 22, Council of Trent)
To Moorhouse's points, I will also add this excellent quote by St. Leonard of Port Maurice, from his work The Hidden Treasure:
In what does the chief excellence of the Mass consist? In this, namely, that it is essentially the same, nay the very same sacrifice that was offered on the cross of Calvary, with this sole difference, however, that the sacrifice of the cross was bloody, and was offered once, and did, on that one tremendous moment, satisfy fully for all the sins of the world; while the sacrifice of the altar is an unbloody sacrifice, which can be repeated throughout all times, and was instituted in order to apply to each of us that universal atonement which Christ made for us on Calvary. (I.III)
If you made it all the way to the end in this one, thanks for sticking with us! In Part 4 (a much shorter section), we look at Moorhouse's analysis of the Way's "cruel deceit of the rank and file."
To read other articles in this series, check out: Part 1, Part 2, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9.
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