Advent Distortions: When Liturgical Symbolism Replaces Repentance
Denver, Colorado, Nov 29, 2025 / 12:36 pm
The Catholic News Agency portal promotes Advent practices emphasizing emotional sentimentality over doctrinal substance, framing the season as a mere countdown to Christmas while obscuring its penitential essence. The article states:
“To help remedy this surprise, the Church provides songs, signs, and symbols to enter into the season of Advent more fruitfully.”
This reduces the season to aesthetic rituals, ignoring Quas Primas (Pius XI, 1925) which mandates Christocentric governance over all temporal affairs, including liturgical preparation.
Naturalization of the Supernatural
The article’s description of Advent hymns focuses on psychological states like “mournful remorse” and “hope” while omitting the Four Last Things (Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell) integral to pre-1958 Advent spirituality. References to “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” are stripped of their eschatological urgency, reduced to emotional anticipation. Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors condemns such subjectivism:
“Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to a continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the advancement of human reason” (Condemned Proposition 5).
The Spanish carol “Alepun” is praised for evoking “donkey hooves clattering,” exemplifying the post-conciliar obsession with sensory pageantry over contritio cordis (contrition of heart).
Penitential Subversion Through Color Symbolism
The claim that Advent purple has a “blue hue to teach… the Marian heart of the season” is a modernist fabrication. Pre-1958 rubrics never endorsed blue vestments, reserving violet to signify penance. The article’s comparison of Advent to Lent—”a little Lent”—trivializes the Parousia-focused fast, which the 1917 Code of Canon Law mandated as rigorously as Lent (Canon 1252). Silence about mandatory abstinence (still binding under true Catholic discipline) reveals the conciliar sect’s rejection of mortification.
Marian Devotion Stripped of Dogmatic Substance
While mentioning the Immaculate Conception and Our Lady of Guadalupe, the article reduces these dogmas to sentimental symbols. No mention is made of Pius IX’s Ineffabilis Deus (1854), which defined the Immaculate Conception as necessary to preserve Christ’s sinless nature. The lack of warning against “communions” received in invalid Novus Ordo Masses—where Marian devotion is divorced from the propitiatory sacrifice—exposes the article’s sacramental indifferentism.
Liturgical Omissions as Doctrinal Betrayal
The description of “restrained use of instruments” and “deliberate emptiness” ignores the true purpose of Advent: to prepare souls for the Final Judgment through exomologesis (public confession of sins). The article celebrates Gaudete Sunday’s flowers while omitting that the pre-1958 liturgy forbade them until December 17th—a discipline reflecting intensifying penance. Worse, it cites “Pope” Francis’ notion of a “horizon of hope,” a naturalistic concept condemned by Pius X in Lamentabili Sane:
“Revelation was merely man’s self-awareness of his relationship to God” (Condemned Proposition 20).
Saints as Cultural Props
St. Nicholas and St. Lucy are presented as folkloric figures disconnected from their martyrdom against heresy. No mention is made of St. Nicholas’ condemnation of Arianism at Nicaea or St. Lucy’s defiance of Diocletian’s persecution—models of doctrinal intransigence anathema to the conciliar “dialogue.” The article’s silence on the Dies Irae—once central to Advent—betrays its evasion of judgment and hell.
Conclusion: Advent Without the Judge
The article epitomizes the conciliar sect’s inversion of Advent: a season of fear becomes a festival of cheap grace. By replacing penance with pastels and repentance with rhythm, it fulfills Pius X’s warning in Pascendi that Modernism reduces faith to “individual experience.” True Catholics must reject this travesty, clinging to the Missale Romanum (1962) where Advent still proclaims: “Erunt signa in sole et luna… homines prae timore et exspectatione” (There will be signs in the sun and moon… men dying of fear and expectation [Luke 21:25-26]).
Source:
Don’t let Christmas take you by surprise: advice on Advent from the Church (catholicnewsagency.com)
Date: 29.11.2025