Cooking With Saints: Modernist Trivialization of Catholic Liturgy
The March 14, 2026, article on the NC Register blog promotes the cookbook Catholic Feast Days by Alexandra Greeley, which connects liturgical celebrations and saints’ feast days to culinary recipes. The piece, endorsed by Father Edward Hathaway of St. Veronica Catholic Church in Chantilly, Virginia, presents cooking classes and meal planning as a primary means of “living the faith” and sanctifying time. This approach reduces the sacred mysteries of the liturgical year to naturalistic, sentimental activities, utterly omitting the supernatural realities of sacrifice, grace, and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It embodies the Modernist infection condemned by the pre-1958 Magisterium, replacing the spiritual reign of Christ the King with a banal focus on food and family.
Factual Deconstruction: Culinary Focus Over Sacred Mystery
The article details recipes for various liturgical occasions: “Beef and Guinness Pie” for St. Patrick, “Zeppole di San Giuseppe” for St. Joseph, “Creamy Corn Chowder with Shrimp” for Good Friday, “Resurrection Rolls” for Easter Sunday, “Honey Cake” for St. John the Baptist, “Pentecost Cake” for Pentecost, and “Pistachio Rosewater Cookies” for the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart. It also mentions “Divine Mercy Shortcake” for the Second Sunday of Easter. Each recipe is presented as a central act of celebration, with the Resurrection Rolls explicitly described as a symbolic representation of the empty tomb using marshmallows and pastry. The book is framed as a “catechetical tool” for families and a means to “practice hospitality.” There is no mention of the liturgical prayers, the Mass propers, the fasting and abstinence obligations (especially on Good Friday), or the theological significance of the feasts. The focus is entirely on the sensory and social experience of eating.
Linguistic Analysis: Sentimental Naturalism Masquerading as Faith
The language employed is revelatory: “festive foods,” “delightful ways,” “fun supper club,” “treasured by many,” “take time to learn from the rich lives of so many saints.” This vocabulary exudes a relaxed, consumerist, and feel-good spirituality. Terms like “hospitality” and “family table” are elevated to the level of religious practice, while words like “sacrifice,” “penance,” “mortification,” “dogma,” “heresy,” “sin,” “grace,” “sacrament,” and “judgment” are conspicuously absent. The tone is one of cheerful domesticity, utterly foreign to the Catholic tradition which, as Pope Pius XI taught in Quas Primas, defines the kingdom of Christ as “primarily spiritual” and requiring “repentance,” “faith and baptism,” and the denial of self and carrying of the cross. The article’s rhetoric mirrors the “naturalistic humanism” condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici gregis and Lamentabili sane exitu, where the supernatural is replaced by immanent, sentimental experiences.
Theological Confrontation: Omission of Supernatural Realities
The cookbook’s entire premise is a direct affront to the Catholic understanding of the liturgical year. The liturgical seasons are not mere prompts for thematic meals but are sacred cycles designed to immerse the faithful in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, primarily through the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the reception of the sacraments. The article’s complete silence on the Most Holy Sacrifice is damning. As the 1917 Code of Canon Law (Canon 1254) and perennial teaching affirm, the Eucharist is the “source and summit” of the Christian life. To reduce Lent to “Red-Green Salad” and “Spinach Lentil Soup” without reference to fasting, almsgiving, and the Passion is to strip the season of its penitential and redemptive meaning. Good Friday is presented with a “Creamy Corn Chowder with Shrimp,” ignoring the obligatory fast and abstinence, the liturgical commemoration of the Passion, and the stark reality of Christ’s death for sin. This aligns perfectly with the errors condemned in the Syllabus of Errors (1864) by Pope Pius IX:
Error #56: “Moral laws do not stand in need of the divine sanction, and it is not at all necessary that human laws should be made conformable to the laws of nature and receive their power of binding from God.”
The cookbook implies that moral and spiritual discipline can be satisfied by culturally appropriate meals, divorcing action from divine law. Furthermore, the Syllabus condemns the separation of Church and State (#55) and the subordination of religion to secular power (#44). The article’s emphasis on “family table” and “hospitality” as primary vehicles of faith reflects the secularist error of privatizing religion, contrary to Pope Pius XI’s teaching in Quas Primas that Christ’s reign must extend to public life, laws, and institutions. The kingdom of Christ is not a private, domestic affair but a public, social reality that demands the submission of all human activities to divine law.
The treatment of Easter is particularly egregious. The “Resurrection Rolls” reduce the central, historical, bodily resurrection of Our Lord—the cornerstone of Catholic faith, defined by the Council of Trent (Session III, Decree on Original Sin) and proclaimed in every Mass—to a child’s baking metaphor. This is precisely the kind of “mythical invention” and “fiction of poets” condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu:
Proposition 7: “The prophecies and miracles set forth and recorded in the Sacred Scriptures are the fiction of poets, and the mysteries of the Christian faith the result of philosophical investigations.”
Proposition 36: “The Resurrection of the Savior is not properly a historical fact, but belongs to the purely supernatural order. For this reason, it is not proven, cannot be proven, and was slowly inferred by Christian consciousness from other facts.”
By presenting the Resurrection as a symbolic story told through marshmallows and dough, the cookbook propagates the Modernist error that the Gospel narratives are pious fables rather than objective, historical truths. This is a direct attack on the integrity of the Catholic faith, which holds the Resurrection as a tangible, bodily event witnessed by the apostles (1 Corinthians 15:14-17).
The inclusion of “Divine Mercy Shortcake” for the Second Sunday of Easter promotes the Divine Mercy devotion, which originates from the “visions” of Sr. Faustyna Kowalska. As noted in the provided context, Faustyna Kowalska is a “pseudo-mystic, controlled by the charismatic movement (freemasonry) Sopoćko, her writings are virtually identical to those of Mother Kozłowska, condemned by Pius X’s encyclical; the diary was likely written by Sopoćko himself. These writings are on the index of forbidden books.” The Divine Mercy devotion, therefore, is not a legitimate Catholic practice but a condemned Modernist innovation, often used to undermine traditional devotions like the Sacred Heart and to promote a sentimental, universalist “mercy” that contradicts the Catholic doctrine of God’s justice and the reality of eternal punishment. Its promotion in a “Catholic” cookbook is a clear sign of the conciliar sect’s apostasy.
Symptomatic of the Conciliar Apostasy
This cookbook is not an isolated novelty but a symptom of the systemic decay following the 1958 revolution. The post-conciliar “Church” has systematically replaced the supernatural with the natural, the sacrificial with the celebratory, and dogma with sentiment. The focus on “liturgical living” through cooking is a prime example of the “hermeneutics of continuity” in action—a deceptive attempt to make the revolutionary post-conciliar reforms appear as a development of tradition. In reality, it is a rupture. The traditional Catholic approach to feast days involved specific liturgical prayers, fasting, almsgiving, and meditation on the mysteries. The new approach, as seen here, is a secularized “cultural enrichment” program that could as easily be adopted by any religious or non-religious group. It reflects the “cult of man” and “theological novelties” condemned by St. Pius X.
The article quotes Father Hathaway saying the book is a “catechetical tool” and that meals can “mark these moments” of the liturgical year. This inverts the proper order: the liturgy itself is the primary catechesis. The Mass and the Divine Office are the official, authoritative teachings of the Church. To substitute them with cooking classes is to democratize and trivialize the faith, aligning with the Modernist error that doctrine evolves and can be expressed through cultural forms. This is the “evolution of dogmas” in practice—the Resurrection becomes a recipe, the Passion becomes a soup.
Furthermore, the article’s ecumenical and indifferentist assumptions are evident. St. Thérèse of Lisieux (canonized 1925, thus pre-1958) is mentioned with “rose-inspired” recipes, reducing her “little way” of spiritual childhood and sacrificial love to a floral motif. St. John the Baptist’s ascetic life is commemorated with “Honey Cake,” ignoring his call to repentance and his martyrdom. The saints are presented as cultural icons, not as models of heroic virtue who fought heresy, practiced severe penance, and shed blood for the faith. This sanitized, user-friendly version of sanctity is a product of the post-conciliar “beatification factory” that has canonized Modernist collaborators (like John Paul II) and pseudo-mystics (like Faustyna Kowalska), while ignoring the stark, uncompromising holiness of pre-1958 saints.
The Poison of “Divine Mercy” and Post-Conciliar “Saints”
The promotion of “Divine Mercy Shortcake” is a deliberate insertion of a condemned devotion into the liturgical fabric. The Divine Mercy devotion, based on Faustyna Kowalska’s “diary,” was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. Its theology emphasizes an unbounded, universal mercy that contradicts the Catholic doctrine of God’s justice and the necessity of contrition and sacramental confession. It is frequently used to undermine the traditional Lenten and Easter focus on penance and the Passion, replacing it with a vague, feel-good “mercy” that aligns with the ecumenical and indifferentist errors of the conciliar documents (e.g., Nostra aetate, Dignitatis humanae). The fact that the book recommends joining “the U.S. bishops’ consecration of America for its 250th birthday” is another red flag. This refers to the 2025 consecration of the United States to Mary under the title “Immaculate Conception,” an event orchestrated by the Modernist hierarchy occupying the Vatican. Such national consecrations, devoid of any reference to the Social Reign of Christ the King as defined by Pius XI in Quas Primas, are exercises in religious relativism and nationalist piety, not Catholic orthodoxy.
It is crucial to note that the “bishops” endorsing this cookbook—including the U.S. bishops mentioned—are not legitimate Catholic prelates. According to the theological principles outlined in the Defense of Sedevacantism file, a manifest heretic loses his office ipso facto. The post-conciliar “popes” and “bishops” have consistently promulgated heresy (e.g., religious liberty, collegiality, ecumenism) and have engaged in sacrilegious acts (e.g., the 1983 code of canon law, the Novus Ordo Missae). Therefore, they are invalid and illicit. Any “approval” from such individuals is worthless and constitutes a participation in their apostasy. Father Edward Hathaway, by approving this cooking class and book, demonstrates his adherence to the Modernist program and his rejection of the integral Catholic faith.
Conclusion: A Call to Reject Naturalism and Return to Tradition
Catholic Feast Days is not a harmless cookbook but a vector of Modernist contamination. It exemplifies the post-conciliar strategy of replacing the sacred with the secular, the supernatural with the natural, and the sacrificial with the social. By focusing on “festive foods” and “family meals,” it omits the essential elements of Catholic worship: the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the sacraments, penance, fasting, and the explicit confession of Christ’s kingship over all aspects of life. It promotes a sentimental, ecumenical, and indifferentist spirituality that aligns with the errors condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus and by St. Pius X in Lamentabili and Pascendi. The Divine Mercy devotion it endorses is a condemned pseudo-mysticism.
Catholics faithful to the immutable Tradition must reject such naturalistic novelties. The liturgical year is a sacred journey through the mysteries of Christ, not a culinary tour. Sanctification comes through grace, received in the sacraments administered by valid priests in the true Church, not through cooking classes. The true “feast days” are celebrated with the unbloody sacrifice of Calvary, with contrition for sin, and with a firm adherence to the dogmas of the faith—dogmas that the Modernists, like those who produced this cookbook, seek to dissolve into cultural metaphors. The only legitimate response is to return to the traditional liturgical practices, the pre-1958 calendar, the Roman Missal and Breviary, and the solid doctrine of the pre-conciliar Popes and Councils. Anything else is the “abomination of desolation” standing in the holy place.
Source:
Cook Your Way Through Lent, Easter and Beyond (ncregister.com)
Date: 14.03.2026