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HOLY FATHER: My name is Michael Matt. I stand before you tonight a lifelong Traditional Catholic and father to seven children who is grateful to you and to God for the many hopeful signs here in the first weeks of your pontificate.
As an accredited journalist, I covered the conclave and I was standing right across from you on the colonnade when from the loggia you first blessed us in Latin, prayed the traditional Confiteor, and later led the entire world singing honor to the Queen of Heaven, the Regina Caeli.
And though I am filled with Catholic hope that Your Holiness will lead us to greener pastures, I also come to you with a heavy heart. As you know, over the past twelve years faithful Catholics have endured scandals in the Church such as the world has never seen. In the wake of Fiducia Supplicans, entire conferences of Catholic bishops were obliged in conscience to resist Peter to his face, something no faithful Catholic ever expected to see.
Confusion, lack of clarity, and even mass defections became the hallmarks of the day over the course of the past decade.
When Your Holiness blessed the world from the loggia, I recalled how my father as a young American soldier had received that same traditional blessing from the same loggia when Papa Pacelli had blessed the troops back in 1944. After the war, my father returned home to found The Remnant, the oldest traditional Catholic newspaper in the United States.
I pray that you, Holy Father, will hear my voice as that of a sheep crying in the night. I am a traditional Catholic, but I will never allow scandal or any other malady to drive me out of my suffering Church. Again, I am a traditionalist who never left the Church. After Pope John Paul II granted the first Indult in 1984, my father obtained permission from our local ordinary to have the first Latin Mass in the United States. Consequently, my children received the Sacraments in the Traditional Rite, attend a diocesan Latin Mass every Sunday, and are all practicing Catholics.
I come not in defiance, then, but in supplication, living in a Church I hardly recognize anymore. I am no saint, but I know what our Church has taught infallibly for two thousand years. I come from a long line of Catholic publishers who spent their lives defending tradition and the infallible teachings of the Catholic Church.
One hundred and sixty years ago, my great-grandfather founded the oldest Catholic weekly newspaper in America today.
For his part, my grandfather, Joseph Matt, was a German immigrant who came to America when he was just 17 years old. Three decades later, he was made a Knight of St. Gregory by Pope Pius XI at a ceremony held here in the Vatican. After fifty years in loyal service to the Church, he was named Editor Emeritus of the Catholic press in America.
When Your Holiness blessed the world from the loggia, I recalled how my father as a young American soldier had received that same traditional blessing from the same loggia when Papa Pacelli had blessed the troops back in 1944. After the war, my father returned home to found the oldest traditional Catholic newspaper in the United States.
For 160 years, my fathers have stood on the wall in defense of the great social teaching of your predecessors. They held up the defense of Catholic Tradition as our sacred duty before God. I stand before you tonight, Holy Father, praying that you will do the same.
I trust that you understand the nature and extent of the scandal we all feel in our hearts. I trust that you know what it is like for a father to have explain to his son that so much corruption in the Church does not mean that she is not the Church founded by Jesus Christ.
The first time I had the honor of meeting you was in a Vatican press conference in 2023 during the Synod on Synodality. I was struck by your manifest sensus Catholicus. I remember your clarity in teaching when you told a secular press that it was not possible for the Church to abandon two thousand years of Tradition by ordaining women.
Your words on that occasion gave me hope. And now that you are the 267th Successor of Saint Peter, I pray that that same faith and courage will be your guide. I trust that you understand the nature and extent of the scandal we all feel in our hearts. I trust that you know what it is like for a father to have explain to his son that so much corruption in the Church does not mean that she is not the Church founded by Jesus Christ.
Surely you know that like Rachel weeping for her children, our wives and mothers weep for their children, so many of whom have been lost in the desert of Modernism and a Godless new world order.
For forty years in that desert, your predecessors have provided manna in the form of the Latin Mass for families like mine. I trust you understand that the Latin Mass is all our children have ever known. And since it has kept so many families united in the Catholic Faith, surely Pope Leo XIV – the missionary pope—would not take that away from us.
I am not sure how much more scandal our children can endure. They have overheard the things of which St. Paul tells us we should not even speak – the sexual abuse of children, the homosexual abuse of seminarians, blasphemy against God, and now Traditionis Custodes – that the Traditional Roman Rite – the only mass Roman Catholics have known for a thousand years – that the most beautiful thing this side of heaven is, according to a pope, divisive and must be canceled.
If Synodality continues down this path, Holiness, how will history not describe it as the hospice nurse who was summoned to provide palliative care for a dying Catholic Church?
What does Synodality mean? Thus far, we are told that it means the Church will accommodate the world’s demands that she bow to sodomy and bend a knee to heterodoxy. I feel certain that this is not what Your Holiness means by Synodality. But please understand that this is how Synodality has been presented to our scandalized children at the rainbow masses and the diocesan encounter sessions where all are welcome, but no one is encouraged to “repent and sin no more.” Your predecessor told the whole world that he wants to bless sinners living in sodmitical unions and that he wants unrepentant public adulterers to receive the Sacraments.
If Synodality continues down this path, Holiness, how will history not describe it as the hospice nurse who was summoned to provide palliative care for a dying Catholic Church?
Holy Father, you are committed to listening to the sheep. So, please, Holiness, listen to this from a lifelong Catholic journalist: The world does not need a Pope of the Synodal Church. The world needs a pope of the Catholic Church. And as a Traditional Catholic, I can assure you that Mother Church never abandoned us. She has been accompanying us since before we can remember. We never had to walk alone on pathways she didn’t walk first, out ahead of us, leading us, encouraging us to come and follow Him Who is the hope of the world.
When we came into this world, she was there, ready to receive us in the living waters of her baptismal font. From that moment on, she accompanied us every moment of every day of our lives.
When we were children, her nuns taught us how to listen to the voice of Mother Church. Her Sacraments were our rites of passage along the journey of life. The celebrations of her great feasts are our most cherished childhood memories. Her priests listened to us in the darkness of the confessional every morning.
Pope Pius wrote that “the true friends of the people are neither revolutionaries nor innovators, but traditionalists.” I would add to that: The true friends of the POPE are neither revolutionaries nor innovators, but traditionalists.
The Church was with us when our children came into the world, and she stood faithful guard at the deathbeds of our mothers and fathers. There she was in black cassock, purple stole, holy viaticum in hand, “Ego te absolvo” on the lips of her holy priests – accompanying us past the gatekeeper and on into eternal life.
We lived out our lives as our fathers had for a thousand years – in the shadows of her steeples, in joy and sadness, sickness and health, birth and death, she was always there. Every day of our lives – her Angelus bells woke us in the morning, called us for the midday meal, reminded us of when it was time to pray and prepare to sleep. She was our ever-constant companion, with her catechisms and virtues, lessons and precepts, her saints and angels, seasons, and sacraments, fasting and feasting, laughter and tears.
She is why we are.
Holy Father, lead us back to her. God has chosen you to lead His Church into greener pastures. So, lead on, Leo. And when you look out of your window, remember this: there are traditionalists all over the world who are not your enemies but who are your most loyal sons, watching and praying that Peter’s faith will not fail him. If it does, they will be left with no choice but to resist him to his face. If it does not, however, Peter will have no greater defenders in the world today than the traditionalists.
Pope Pius wrote that “the true friends of the people are neither revolutionaries nor innovators, but traditionalists.” I would add to that: The true friends of the POPE are neither revolutionaries nor innovators, but traditionalists. We stand with you, and we beg you, Holy Father, return to Tradition, liberate Mother Church from her chains, and save us, save our children, save our souls. If you carry the light of Christ out into the darkness of a world at war with God, we will follow you to the ends of the earth and, please God, to the gates of the kingdom of heaven.
https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/7795-open-letter-to-pope-leo
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