(LifeSiteNews) – A Catholic U.S. Army veteran is telling the story of how his struggle to bring the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) to the Catholic faithful within America’s armed forces was met with years of resistance from the very military chaplains who were supposed to provide for the spiritual needs of men and women in uniform.

Published this summer by Os Justi Press, Rites and Wrongs: One Man’s Struggle for the Latin Mass in the U.S. Army is an updated and expanded edition of the firsthand account (originally published in 2007) of David Sonnier, who “loved the Army and worked to be a model soldier” and, after his life-changing exposure to TLM, sought to “work within the system to obtain access to the old rite” for other Catholic soldiers and their families. 

But throughout six years of efforts “military Catholic chaplains repeatedly lied and dissembled, pulling every possible string to ensure that the Latin Mass would never be said on any military base so long as they had breath,” according to the publishers’ summary. “Indeed, these chaplains vituperated anyone even remotely interested in any aspect of Catholic tradition and, as Sonnier discovered, worked to undermine the authority of the Catholic Church from within the ranks.”

On Tuesday, Sonnier joined Catholic Unscripted for an extended interview about his story. It begins by recapping Sonnier’s service, which spanned 1981 to 2001. He graduated from West Point, went into the infantry and then Special Forces, with his tour spanning Central America and South America. After returning to the U.S. from Colombia, he found he and his wife “could never quite be comfortable with any Catholic church we found.” 

Eventually, he settled into Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where he discovered the TLM and experienced what he described as a “divine light bulb” as he “felt instantly this was where I belonged.” His service later took him away from Ohio and to the South, where he no longer had access to TLM, so he began looking into changing that, including lining up priests who were willing and able to conduct Mass in Latin “with no problem at all.”

“It was once we got to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, that it became truly puzzling,” he said. “Now, the U.S. Army has always been kind of in our society on the forefront of doing things that are right and good,” such as racial integration, so “we expected it would be well-received by our chaplain.” But “they were so hateful. I mean, I have no other word. I’m sorry to describe it, but just hateful. And it was shocking.”

Sonnier noted that he was fortunate to have gone into special forces at a time when recognition of its importance was expanding. In some ways, that “made it very hard for them to marginalize us,” but they still did “some things that were very strange,” such as “hints that we would be disciplined somehow just for making these requests.”

“I know exactly what it was, or I think I do,” he said. “There had been a push, and I wish I could have captured this, but I wasn’t really thinking to at the time, but there had been a push for the ‘ordination’ of women, and at that time (Bill) Clinton was our president, and diversity was the thing, and you can’t have any kind of a role anywhere that women can’t take. It’s just, it’s wrong. And he had people in his administration even condemning the Church as an all-male priesthood and, you know, and making derogatory comments about the Catholic Church just from that point of view.”

Liberal elements within the Church “really were trying to build a case for the ‘ordination’ of women,” he went on. “And the chaplains who treated us the most harshly were big advocates of the ‘ordination’ of women and did not accept the teachings of the Church on that and probably who knows what other issues.”

“At one point, there was a colonel who worked for the chief of chaplains,” he said. “Out of frustration, I finally wrote to him and I said, look I’ve got to live here and work at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in my specialty. I mean, if I’m going to do that we, you know, I mean, we need to have a Latin Mass. You know, there’s not one within six hours in any direction. What am I supposed to do?”

The colonel, Sonnier recalled, said he would not interfere with the decisions of the local commander. But about a month later, that same colonel was featured in an Army Times article “bragging about how he had coerced a senior commander to buy knives for a serviceman who wanted to do a Wicca service.”

Since then, some progress has been made on the subject, but controversy persists. In 2017, Army Armored Corps Chaplain Sargeant Major Johnny Proctor, a founding member of the Fort Hood Traditional Latin Mass Community, wrote to Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese for the Military Services on the vocational crisis leading to a shortage of priests in the military, noting the boom in TLM vocations, but was told the military should not accept priests who offer only TLM.

“What we are left with from Archbishop Broglio’s letter is a stunning conclusion that under the auspices of pastoral efficiency and paternal concern, it is better to have no priest-chaplains than to have ones devoted exclusively to the Traditional liturgical books,” Proctor concluded at the time.

In 2019, a Solemn High Traditional Latin Mass was celebrated at West Point’s Most Holy Trinity Catholic Chapel for the first time in almost 60 years.

Overall, left-wing bias and hostility to traditional values are long-standing issues within the U.S. Armed Forces.

The steady rise of “woke” ideology within the military that has persisted and grown since the Clinton years despite the presidencies of Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump’s first administration were intensified by former President Joe Biden, who upon taking office quickly moved to open the military to recruits suffering from gender dysphoria in a reversal of Trump policy, then had his Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin launch a review of supposed “domestic extremism” within the military that many saw as a pretext to purge conservative views from the ranks.

Under Biden, the U.S. Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force, Secret Service, State Department, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, FBI, National Security Agency, Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, Immigration & Customs Enforcement, Customs & Border Protection, Citizenship and Immigration Services, Transportation Security Administration, FEMA, and more all celebrated “Pride Month” with social media posts, official messages, rainbow flags, videos, and more.

In his second administration, Trump has taken several steps to reverse this trend by reinstating soldiers who had been discharged over COVID shots with their former ranks, back pay, and benefits; re-establishing a ban on service members afflicted with gender dysphoria; and ordering the elimination of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) programs from the military and discharge of service members afflicted with gender confusion. The administration has also banned LGBT “pride” and “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) flags from being flown at U.S. embassies and other State Department facilities and ended observation of all identity-based “cultural awareness” months.

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