Traditional Catholicism’s First Pioneer, Founder of the Catholic Traditionalist Movement Gutsy Fr. Gommar DePauw Fought the Novus Ordo before Archbishop Lefebvre

From: The TRADITIO Fathers

Fr. Gommar DePauw (1918-2005) (Right)
Founder of the Catholic Traditionalist Movement
This Combat Medic for Belgium in World War II and Naturalized U.S. Citizen
Viewed His Reception by U.S. President Reagan as a Highlight of His Life
In 1964 Fr. DePauw Went Independent from the Newchurch Structure
To Found the Catholic Traditionalist Movement
There Was Nothing Left for Traditional Catholics in the 1960s
After the Vatican II Anti-council
Except Fr. Depauw’s Traditional Latin Masses on Radio
And His Periodical, Sounds of Truth and Tradition

May 6, 2019 marks the fourteenth anniversary of the death of the gutsy Fr. Gommar DePauw, who in 1964 formed the first traditional Catholic organization in the United States. He had held the Chair of Moral Theology and Canon Law at Mount St. Mary’s Major Seminary, the seminary of the United States’s primatial see in Baltimore, Maryland. He had also been Professor of Fundamental Dogmatic Theology and Dean of Studies at the same institution and an Associate Professor of Philosophy. As a peritus at the first session of Vatican II in 1963, he was scandalized by the resurgence of the Modernist heresy that had taken hold there, culminating in Sacrosanctum concilium (The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy), which opened the way to the invalid New Mess and Sacraments. Fr. DePauw saw, before practically anyone else, clergy or lay, the devastation that this document would wreck upon the Church.

Setting an example for all true Catholics, Fr. DePauw did not excuse participating in the heresy by “obedience” to a bishop, but immediately stood with St. Peter, who commanded: “We ought to obey God rather than man” (Acts of the Apostles, 5:29/DRV). Fr. DePauw refused to accommodate the corruptions and continued to say his daily private (traditional Latin) Mass per usuale, even when the Cardinal of Baltimore. James Sheehan, tried to break his door in.

In 1964 Fr. DePauw left his professorship and began saying a public Traditional Latin Mass in the Pan American Building in New York, when the first group of changes to the Traditional Latin Mass were imposed by the Novus Ordo sect. Eventually, he purchased a beautiful Gothic-style Ave Maria Chapel in Westbury, New York, where he continued to offer the Traditional Latin Mass exclusively until his death in 2005 and continued to publish to the world his denunciations of the New Order by periodical, LP, CD, and internet.

It was due to Fr. DePauw originally that the Solemn Papal Bull Quo primum‘s prohibition in the Roman rite of any but the Traditional Latin Mass was brought to full public light in a series of publications entitled Sounds of Truth and Tradition, the only traditional periodical in print at that time. In those dark initial days of the New Order, Fr. DePauw was an inspiration for courage in the Faith, perhaps the only well-known one. While other priests and laymen pandered to the New Order, Fr. DePauw called the heretics publicly what they were: “LITURGIACS!” and “OECUMENIACS!,” words that he himself coined. For many years the Traditional Latin Mass was broadcast every Sunday on major radio stations around the United States and Canada from a tape he once recorded of a Marian Mass at his chapel.

True Catholics, John Paul I-Luciani, who lasted a mere 33 days in 1978, had summoned Fr. DePauw to Rome to work on a Vatican Commission to restore the Traditional Latin Mass to the Church. Unfortunately, that pope died (or was assassinated) before the Commission could be assembled. If Fr. DePauw had sat on such a commission, Newchurch might never have survived him! Surely, no bishop or cardinal, or even pope, would have intimidated Fr. DePauw where the truth of the Mass, the Sacraments, and the Roman Catholic Faith were concerned.