Catholic || FranciscanU Grad Alum || Research Foundation Pres. || Editor of 10 books, on the papacy, tradition, & reform || Views are my own
Baltimore, MD
Joined November 2021
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Excited to announce that my first authored book, To His Face: Indefectibility & the Problem of Dissent, is finally out! 📚🎉
“But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face.” (Galatians 2:11)
When may a Catholic withhold assent from the teaching of the Church? Progressives appeal to conscience, traditionalists to Tradition. In To His Face, I argue that both can fall into the same error of making themselves the final judge of the Church’s teaching. The book examines the authority of the Magisterium, the limits of theological dissent, and the Church’s indefectibility as the foundation of trust in her teaching office. Theologians may raise difficulties and seek clarification, but they cannot claim the authority to overrule the Church’s doctrinal judgments.
The book grew out of a 10,000-word exchange with Dr. Matthew Levering about the Church’s teaching authority and the problem of dissent. It examines what Christ’s promises to the Church mean for questions of conscience, obedience, and fidelity to the Magisterium.
I’m especially grateful to Dr. Robert Fastiggi, who wrote the foreword and provided detailed notes on the manuscript, and to Emmett O’Regan, who wrote the afterword and offered suggestions that strengthened the argument. 🙏
My thanks also to Mike Lewis and Where Peter Is, where I’ve been grateful to write, and to Dr. Sebastian Mahfood, OP, and En Route Books and Media for bringing the book into print. And a special thank-you to my parish community at the Baltimore Basilica, where my faith has been nourished and I’ve made many good friends.
Available in print, on Kindle, and as an audiobook. Purchase links are here. 👇
📚 Print edition
a.co/d/0fTt86Dm
📱 Kindle edition
a.co/d/0jfK8aLR
🎧 Audiobook
a.co/d/0aJTyK4s
Thank you for reading and supporting my work!
Here’s what a few scholars and authors had to say in recommending the book. 🙌
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“Andrew Likoudis here takes up one of the most important topics facing the Church. … Likoudis, along with scholars such as Robert Fastiggi and Emmett O’Regan, has staked out a constructive position that requires careful consideration by all who seek the good of Christ’s Church as obedient spiritual sons and daughters of the pope.”
Matthew Levering, PhD
James N. Jr. and Mary D. Perry Chair of Theology, Mundelein Seminary
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“Andrew Likoudis offers a penetrating and comprehensive exposition of the principles governing the relationship between the theologian and the Magisterium.”
Rocco Buttiglione
Friend and trusted collaborator of Pope St. John Paul II, member of the Pontifical Academies of Social Sciences and St. Thomas Aquinas
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“Andrew Likoudis offers a masterful analysis of the very issue that concerned St Paul VI in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, namely dissent against the teaching authority of the papal Magisterium.”
Stephen Walford
Author of Pope Francis, the Family and Divorce: In Defense of Truth and Mercy (Paulist Press), with a preface by Pope Francis
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“A clear, concise, and measured contribution to the pervasive discourse on obedience in today’s ecclesial atmosphere.”
Andrew Mioni
Author of The Sacrifice of Praise: Liturgical Debates and the Fundamentals of Worship
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“Andrew Likoudis offers us careful analysis of assent and dissent within the Church, mindful of the interaction between the different levels of the Magisterium, as discerned in the lives of the faithful. He does this in full consciousness of the presence of the Word Incarnate, the face of Him whom we seek in all discernment and in every act of assent.”
Very Reverend Canon Francis V. Tiso, PhD
Former Associate Director, USCCB Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs
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“It is remarkable how Likoudis has produced a text accessible to the layperson, rich enough for the seasoned theologian, and, above all, timely for our situation.”
Suan Sonna
Director of Apologetics, Diocese of Bridgeport, CT
Andrew Likoudis retweeted
With respect to actual liturgical renewal, the trad slop program is over and should be considered over.
Going forward, those seeking liturgical renewal in union with the Church should proceed as follows:
1. Stop making the liturgy, especially very specific particulars of the liturgy, the rallying banner around which you gather the community you need to support liturgical renewal.
Intentional communities are extremely important and are the base camp of local activism of any kind, but making your red line the St. Michael prayer, the Latin Mass, such and such a kind of homily, or whatever external you want to pick presents an obvious problem. Not only is there the possibility of these things being restricted or taken away, which clearly some of these communities cannot endure even the slightest possibility of, but this also creates a nonstrategic weak point in the community itself.
Nobody's going to like trying to partner with a group when the whole group is founded on a bunch of guys who don't care about you and only care whether or not they get their particular liturgical thing. You have to have an intentional community that has solidarity among its members and with the wider Church, and that also has a project of liturgical advocacy, rather than one whose entire existence depends upon obtaining or retaining particular liturgical arrangements. This is activism of any kind 101, but we are clearly too stupid to think this through.
2. There should primarily be a spirit of liturgical improvement and renewal, not a checklist of nonnegotiable liturgical preferences. It's fine to introduce an idea of increased reverence and intentional liturgical piety. But if that's going to mean that you have to do this or that or it's a bad community, not only are you going to be unintentionally divisive, but you also create concrete and trivial points of attack.
It's like educational reform. It's not whether or not the children get to see sodium thrown into water or read Pride and Prejudice; it's whether or not you have standards and concerns high enough that you might end up reading classical literature, doing concrete chemistry, becoming interested in systematic mathematics, or developing any general attitude of investment and improvement that might lead to an indefinite number of concrete improvements.
We have half a dozen or more books about what improving the contemporary liturgy would look like, and it is not necessary to tie ourselves down to this or that particular thing as long as we have intentional, concrete, and constant efforts toward improvement. This does not mean abandoning particular proposals or demands, but subordinating them to a general project of liturgical renewal rather than making each of them a test of fidelity.
More importantly, if it's an attitude and a set of shared principles, it is a community approach. If it's merely a set of nonnegotiable demands, it's an external condition that can be rejected. Very different.
3. The space you make for advocating in the Church has to be durable, independent of particular discretionary concessions, and difficult to take away. Is what you're doing dependent on some priest's personality? Wrong. Stupid. Don't do that. Is it dependent on some particular liturgical practice? Wrong. Stupid. Don't do that.
If the thing you're doing is sustained by the community, and if the community is capable of sustaining itself, the withdrawal of some particular permission or arrangement need not destroy it. Even if they shut down the parish, you can move and continue your work elsewhere, within the legitimate structures of the Church.
But if you cannot maintain some permanent, self-sustaining community to advocate for something, you have no hope of sustaining a serious project of reform. You are a complainer and an annoyance.
Next --->
My new book To His Face came out this week. I’m raising $2,000 to send free copies to seminarians, teachers, and university libraries, the places where the case against dissent from the pope most needs to be heard. $20 sends one copy to a seminarian. If you can help:
gofund.me/28228cd27
Andrew Likoudis retweeted
287/288
Catholic ←→ Eastern Orthodoxy
Scholars of the Sacred Dominican Theologians in Late Medieval Byzantium
—by James Likoudis
—FW by Rev. Christiaan Kappes PhD SLD
Andrew Likoudis retweeted
288/289
Catholic ←→ Eastern Orthodox
The Divine Mosaic: Piecing Together Catholic and Orthodox Unity
—by James Likoudis
FW by Tim Staples
AW by Michael Lofton
→ →
Watching Charlie Kirk’s killing was deeply traumatic for many people. Yet the U.S. government apparently thinks livestreaming Nidal Hasan’s execution will somehow be edifying. Make it make sense.
Iran, ISIS, and the Taliban are the only other governments or state-sponsored groups in the world that carry out public executions. Is that really the company we want to keep?
“We have to be more on the side of the authority of the Church than on that of Augustine or Jerome, or any other doctor.”
St. Thomas Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 10, a. 12.
“No one can shield himself with the authority of Jerome or Augustine or any other doctor against the authority of Peter.”
Aquinas, ST II-II, q.11, a. 2 ad 3.
It's taken some time, but my sisters Caroline and Elena have finally made the painting they collaborated on available as prints. Just in time for October, the Month of the Holy Rosary. 📿🙏 Proud of them both. 💙
(I also designed the website, in case anyone is interested in having a similar website built.)
brushandsoulstudio.com/produ…
It is possible to love Catholic culture so much that we begin to treat Christ as the means of preserving it.
I just published a new essay on my Substack, “Before There Was Christendom.” I’ve been working on it for a while. I look at Paul in Athens, Justin Martyr, and the Epistle to Diognetus to ask how the early Church approached a world it did not control, and what we might learn from its confidence that Christ was already at work in newly discovered and encountered peoples and. cultures before the evangelists arrived.
Read it here: traditionandrenewal.substack…
Thanks to Mark Wilson, the Catholic Bard, for the interview and the chance to share a bit about my intellectual journey, my reversion to the Catholic faith, and my writing!
patheos.com/blogs/catholicba…
Why is Sunday considered the weekend if it’s the first day of the week? We really need to get this sorted out.
A Catholic professor recently sent me a question his students raise every year. St. Thomas Aquinas taught that a long-established law should not be changed unless the disruption is outweighed by a great and evident benefit or by real urgency. The old Latin Mass was celebrated for centuries. So what was the urgency, and where was the benefit, that justified replacing it with the Mass most Catholics know today?
In this essay I take on Aquinas's question and argue that the reform of the Mass meets his test. I also look at what improvements are contained in the Novus Ordo and whether the Church was right to ask the faithful to insist on more active forms of participation in the Mass, drawing on Joseph Ratzinger, the Second Vatican Council, and Pope Leo's catechesis on Sacrosanctum Concilium which concluded this week.
traditionandrenewal.substack…
Andrew Likoudis retweeted
Finished reading this great book on Catholic-Orthodox re-approachment by James Likoudis
@LikoudisLegacy @A_lickity_split
"The Divine Mosaic: Piecing Together…" by James Likoudis,…. Try the book for free: read.amazon.co.uk/kp/kshare?…
Andrew Likoudis retweeted
NEW: The Trump-Vance administration is suing the Catholic Church to build a border wall beneath a statue of Jesus Christ — weeks after Pope Leo XIV stood at a migrant landing dock and defended the people the wall is meant to keep out.
“Human dignity has no passport and does not lose its value when crossing a border,” the first American pope said in the Canary Islands last month.
Pius XI created the Feast of Christ the King in 1925 to remind the baptized that no state holds their final loyalty.
A century later, federal lawyers say that no one may lodge a valid objection to the seizure of Church property. thelettersfromleo.com/p/noth…
Last week, Cardinal Burke stated that synodality has "no definition" and "no history in the Church."
The history exists, and it begins in Acts 15. It later runs through Nicaea, Lateran, and Trent — and in this country it runs through Baltimore.
The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 did not merely recommend synods. Canon 6 ordered provincial councils every year and diocesan synods annually, and suspended from office any bishop who neglected them. Trent renewed the requirement in 1563. Today's Code of Canon Law merely invites a bishop to hold one when circumstances suggest it.
So the traditionalist who wants to set aside Vatican II and return to the Church of Trent is asking for more synodality, not less.
Americans have the least excuse of anyone. The Councils of Baltimore organized our dioceses and gave us the Baltimore Catechism, and before them stood John Carroll's consultative diocesan synod of 1791 — one bishop, twenty-two priests.
I spent last week at the thirtieth Orientale Lumen Conference watching Catholic and Orthodox bishops discuss primacy and synodality for three days. Nobody once paused to ask what the word meant.
traditionandrenewal.substack…
Andrew Likoudis retweeted
#Peace is a responsibility. If our first instinct when we encounter a problem, experience tension or are insulted, is to judge others, accuse and even condemn them, then, inevitably, first indifference and then hatred will grow around us. There is a way of looking at reality that destroys and does not build. Peace instead, begins with me. It begins with us.
Andrew Likoudis retweeted
So I guess the pope who oversaw the development of the conciliar teaching on religious freedom in Dignitatis Humanae wasn’t a religious relativist/indifferentist after all. This is a truly head scratching quote coming from our putatively “Freemason” pope. Which only proves once again that the least reliable interpreters of Catholic tradition are the “traditionalists”.
St. Paul VI against religious indifferentism:
“Obviously we cannot agree with these various forms of [non-Christian] religion, nor can we adopt an indifferent or uncritical attitude toward them on the assumption that they are all to be regarded as on an equal footing… Indeed, honesty compels us to declare openly our conviction that the Christian religion is the one and only true religion, and it is our hope that it will be acknowledged as such by all who look for God and worship Him.” - Ecclesiam suam 107
