A friend driving across the United States stopped to visit a former colleague who attends the Tridentine Mass. My friend attends a very reverent Novus Ordo Mass in a parish renowned for its orthodoxy, excellent Catholic school, and tremendous sense of community. But her friend told her: “Your Mass; it’s a different Church.” A different Church? As in, not. . .Catholic? Such was the implication.
Later, she stopped for Mass at an unfamiliar parish. “It was horrible,” she told me: a homily empty of serious content; music for second-graders badly performed; and a dull liturgy sloppily done.
Welcome to the two fronts in the Liturgy Wars: on one side, squalid trenches built by those who won’t give up the clown and other Masses they thought the Second Vatican Council demanded (but didn’t), and on the other side, the platoons of those who refuse to relent on any detail of the Tridentine Mass regardless of the reforms the Church has called for.
Continue reading Dr. Randal Smith’s article at The Catholic Thing…
Image: Mass in Connemara Cabin by Aloysius O’Kelly, 1883 [National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin]