Yesterday’s Gospel in the Traditional Latin Mass reads:
Then came to [Jesus] from Jerusalem scribes and Pharisees, saying: “Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the ancients? For they wash not their hands when they eat bread.” But He answering, said to them: “Why do you also transgress the commandment of God for your tradition?”—Mt 15:1-2 (DRB)
St. Jerome comments on this in Matins:
The stupidity of the Pharisees and Scribes is something extraordinary. (Mira pharisæórum scribarúmque stultítia.) They rebuke the Son of God because He doth not observe the traditions and commandments of men for they wash not their hands when they eat bread. It behoveth us to cleanse, not the hands of the body, but the hands of the soul, namely, our works, that we may do the commandments of God.
If St. Jerome were alive today, he would certainly say that clerics who are more concerned about clean hands for viruses are living in stupidity (stultítia) for putting the concerns of man (an arbitrary government overreach) ahead of “the cleansing of the soul.” This is further proof of what I have been saying for many years: The traditionalist Catholics are not the modern legalists. It is the modernists ensnared in the superstitions of man as coronavirus has made all-too-obvious. I think of how striking is Our Lord’s rebuke in the Gospel yesterday: “Why do you transgress the commandment of God for your tradition?”
Our Lord continues in that passage from yesterday’s Gospel:
Hypocrites, well hath Isaias prophesied of you, saying: This people honoureth Me with their lips: but their heart is far from Me. And in vain do they worship Me, teaching doctrines and commandments of men. And having called together the multitudes unto him, he said to them: Hear ye and understand. Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man: but what cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.
What would St. Jerome say if he walked the earth today and came into parishes like those seen in the above picture? I suspect he would say about the same thing as the above Gospel, namely that those viruses which go into the mouth of a man defiles him not, but the false doctrines and commandments of all these modernist dual-tongued clerics truly defile the souls of the laity.
And we clergy are indeed stupid for putting health-communism ahead of the Gospel: When we close confessionals and baptismal fonts just to fall on our Victorian fainting chairs to look like we’re “doing the right thing” for a virus now proven ubiquitously to have global over-reporting on its case-fatality rate, we know for sure that modern Pharisees have placed a superstitious cleanliness of the body above cleanliness of the soul.
This is just further proof of what I have been saying for five years: The modernists (not the traditionalists) are the ones who put superstition and legalism ahead of the Gospel and common sense.