Everything You Knew is Wrong

My license to write a Catholic blog will be yanked if I don’t write something about the upcoming motu proprio, I think.

I make no secret of the fact that I am, by orthodox Catholic standards, a political liberal. I’ve taken a harder line on some things as I get older, but I’ll always have my particular mix of liberal/libertarian beliefs.

So I enjoy Commonweal and its blog. During the countdown to the motu proprio, though, I’m coming to realize that my politics and my liturgical conservatism don’t mix very well. I should have known this all along…but a blog post about the MP turned into a rather amusing moonbat commentfest. (And I say this as someone who was somewhere between “lapsed” and “dissident” Catholic in 2005 and really disappointed at Benedict XVI’s election. At the time!) Then there was another post with much saner comments. The fear and scorn from many commenters is strange. The goal here isn’t to re-impose the Tridentine Mass on everyone, people! It’s to allow people who want to celebrate it to do so without depending on the whims of their bishops.

I haven’t been feeling well lately and haven’t the energy for any writing I’m not getting paid for. Instead, here’s a selection of comments from the dotCommonweal post. It was rather enlightening to see a more liberal perspective on this than what I’m used to reading online. It’s good for me to get out of my particular media ghetto, I guess.

I ask this seriously - can any of those favouring the older Latin Mass explain why they prefer a Mass said in a language they can’t understand.

If one needs to know Latin to be “better custodians of the mysteries ….” (whatever THAT is supposed to mean!) then one is simply interjecting an element of Gnosticism into the picture. It smacks of “secret knowledge” available only to the initiates.
Are you saying that non-Latin speakers are lesser classes when it comes to “the mysteries?” A loose parallel in your country would be saying that an Oxbridge accent is more English than all others.
I find it strange that Jesus, the gospel and epistle writers, and the early church fathers didn’t need a special language (sans secret decoder ring, of course) in order to preach, teach and sanctify.
My point about the situation at the NDC with the LC imposition of Latin into the English language Mass was that the good little sheep of yesteryear are, in the main, gone from the picture. Most contemporary Catholics no longer roll over and play dead just because Father Says So. And so it shall be once the motu proprio is fully implemented and some eager-beaver priest tries to impose a Latin mass in a parish where it is not wanted.

Diversity, nonsense. Such talk is either naive or a cynical attempt to hijack the language of the reform for the purpose of defeating it. What the proponents of the use of the 1962 liturgy are after is the suppression of the Mass of Paul VI. Read their literature, and it becomes plain. I suspect the next move will be to train all priests in both rites, so the move can easily be made later to a complete change back to the so-called Tridentine rite.

As far as Bishop Elliot is concerned I am really flabbergasted. What is he talking about? Of course mystification has always served the hierarchy well in that they would have to answer to no one.
Along with Humanae Vitae, the church’s stand on divorce and annulment, and contempt of women, people will ignore Rome and attend services and hope the clergy will come out of their wilderness.

I saved the worst of the bunch for last:

What we are witnessing vis-a-vis the upcoming motu proprio is the last gasp of a fearful and pitiful old man occupying the chair of Peter. Kinda’ sad, when one thinks of it.