Someone "anonymous" reading through the archives last night left this comment on an old post of mine. I don't know if it's the sarcastic take of a rad-trad or the sincere bitterness of a die-hard liberal over the resurgence of tradition among the young, but either way it's disturbing:
Fear not, when Benedict16 has left the scene, the TLM will go with him. Medieval aesthetics and mumbo jumbo before a plaster of paris altar and those countless genuflections, hand-wavings, and little torchbearers while monsignor in his fiddleback quietly mutters his dead language will become more and more a trip down memory lane by right-wing eccentrics. An anomaly the Church had to put up with to please the SSPX and those who march with them.What think you, readers?
With the German pope gone, the TLM can be tossed into the grave along with Benedict's remains. His successor will pay lip service to it, I have no doubt, for a couple of years; however, the Vatican will loosen the reigns and bishops will find loopholes for quietly putting it on the shelf. Something they've managed to do to date in a number of dioceses anyway.
Why you say? Because the extreme trads are just that, they're extreme. They've had their little run under Benedict, but a significant number of the worldwide hierarchy feel they've been imposed upon by old biddies with their liturgical demands imposed upon tired, over-worked, elederly priest who haven't studied latin in 50 years. While the bishop has been forced to redirect his precious priestly personnel to accommodate a handful of ultra trad flock and their "Temple police".
With Benedict gone, they'll feel emboldened to ignore the dictates of Vox Clara and the CDW. So, best to become accustomed to celebrating more traditional NO masses, with or without Latin. For the old TLM, like all good antiques, will eventually end up in the new Pontifical Museum for Quaint Rites and Cults.
6 comments:
Not a chance! This is the same wishful thinking as that of the condom cretins when JPII was alive. It's also probably written by an Englishman who knows virtually nothing of the remarkable growth of traditionalist Catholicism in France and the United States.
If the Vatican really does make theological concessions to the SSPX and sign some "clarification" document then Vatican II will be effectively done for. It won't sink overnight, but that legal hairline crack caused by the exact legal status of the old ceremonies will have become a full-scale breach.
Leaving aside Vatican II though(yesterday's council for yesterday's world), the new traddie orders are now a fact of life. Even in England they're starting to take over old churches that the "mainstream" Church has given up on. They're not shrinking. They don't have vocations crises. And most importantly from the Secretariat of State's point of view: (i) the laity are conspicuously generous towards them financially; and (ii) they're remarkably media friendly, in an age when a single YouTube video of a High Mass gets far more attention than any amount of episcopal verbal diarrhoea about progress and ecumemism and preferential options for the poor.
If the SSPX get their legal recognition from Rome then both they and the other old-Rite orders will be effectively hardwired into the structure of the Church, and only a spectacularly malicious future Pope's pressing the self-destruct button will get rid of them. And even the fantasists in the Curia won't want that.
I disagree with most of the comment, however they do make a valid point about a shortage of priests. Like it or no, the Extraordinary Form remains just that-- extra-ordinary.
Given that the original question posed was likely in reference to what the orientation of the poster was, I want to say Conservative/Trad. The reason?, well because they made the point to address what they defined as EXTREME TRADS. Isn't that precisely what Renegade Trads attempts to speak out against ?
I wouldn't necessarily say they were nasty, but rather that they made a pertinent point and its good that people are finally speaking out on the matter. A GREAT deal of Trads want to pretend VII didn't happen and return to this "pristine" era of The Church prior to VII. The fact of the matter is that won't ever happen. Vatican II for all its abuses and misapplications is part of both Liberal and Traditionalist discourses (at least in our immediate cultural memory (Well not for my generation)). Trads for the most part define themselves against The Council (Ironic given that if they applied a PATRISTIC understanding to its documents, it'd make sense...), whereas liberals usurp and misappropriate the understanding of those documents for their own ends. As it were, Traditionalists aren't exactly reacting against The Council itself, but against Liberal applications of it. However, most DON'T make that distinction. Which begs an equally valid question, WHAT IS TRADITIONALISM ABOUT ? The TLM or VII itself ?
PERSONALLY, I think the FUTURE of Traditionalism ISN'T a resurgence of The TLM in The West, but rather a resurgence of Latin/Western Rites PERIOD ! The TLM is indeed the more Traditional Rite, BUT that doesn't necessarily mean it appeals to EVERY person's charism. Some people have reservations regarding The TLM, that they perhaps wouldn't have with OTHER Traditional Latin Rites. Why isn't that explored as an equally valid option ?
My personal opinion is that white guys like him can't do religion.
While I do support the TLM, this poster might be right. We don't know who the next pope will be, and all it takes is the stroke of a pen or an ambiguous document and it could happen.
Furthermore, both secular psychics (e.g. Sylvia Browne feautred on Oprah) and Catholic bloggers/mystics (e.g. The Catholic Knight and Mark Mallett in Canada) think that a great schism in the Church or an event called the Chastizement is about to be struck upon us and it's gonna be really bad for us true Catholics. Mark Mallett calls it "The end of the era of ministry." Personally though I think Mallett is crazy to move his large family onto a farm in the Praries in Canada and not consult him about it as a father?
What a disgusting comment. Remind me again why it was so crucial to sacrifice nearly everything to keep these types inside the Church? Would a schism of the modernists really have been so terrible? I seem to remember something about letting yes be yes and no be no.
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