Those who say that it isn’t fair to blame the Novus Ordo for its abuses by all and sundry have a point, though not much of one, IMO. For all the snarky reminders of the bad old good old days, it seems safe to say that one never saw abuses in tridentine days on the scale of the last forty years, and certainly never saw such abuses as there were so lovingly tolerated. No, the present buffoonery began with the NO. IMO, it derives from the NO’s raison d’etre, the lately perceived indispensability of the vernacular, in the sense not only of linguistic accommodation, but in the wider and deeper sense of a general accommodation of the clumsily perceived “needs”, and often whims, of that most childish of creatures, modern man.
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Indeed, “we must be vigilant” concerning these abuses! Capital idea! Alas, the simple, forlorn fact of the matter is that the lion-hearted vigilance of the little man in the pew goes for naught if one’s bishop is a Levadaesque, go-along get-along schmoozer – not exactly an unheard of character among bishops. This makes for a dreadful equation: servile accommodation of the modern man-child + refusal to decisively curb abuses of said accomodation = general squalor. If such squalor did not already thrive in the Church like kudzu in Mississippi, this blog might very well not exist.
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And tell me, please, I really want to know: exactly what makes the modern man-child so different from his forebears? Why can these luminous paragons of Dr Spock’s wisdom not bear the discipline of church tradition? Why can these shining beacons of erudition not handle a small Latin vocabulary with the ease of their peasant great grandparents? Why are they “insulted”, or made to feel excluded, by having to face the back of the priest, who, after all, worships Him, not them? Why, in this land of rugged individualists and freedom-jabberers, must all emphasis be placed not on the final, unalterably personal judgment we all face alone, but on a contrived sense of “community” that has not been valid or viable since the days of Constantine, if indeed it ever was? Why has the mystical body of Christ on earth been reduced to a self-congratulatory community of sin-eaters?
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With this latest expostulation I will cease blogging until the day after the morning of the risen Christ. See you in (give or take) forty days.
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Indeed, “we must be vigilant” concerning these abuses! Capital idea! Alas, the simple, forlorn fact of the matter is that the lion-hearted vigilance of the little man in the pew goes for naught if one’s bishop is a Levadaesque, go-along get-along schmoozer – not exactly an unheard of character among bishops. This makes for a dreadful equation: servile accommodation of the modern man-child + refusal to decisively curb abuses of said accomodation = general squalor. If such squalor did not already thrive in the Church like kudzu in Mississippi, this blog might very well not exist.
.
And tell me, please, I really want to know: exactly what makes the modern man-child so different from his forebears? Why can these luminous paragons of Dr Spock’s wisdom not bear the discipline of church tradition? Why can these shining beacons of erudition not handle a small Latin vocabulary with the ease of their peasant great grandparents? Why are they “insulted”, or made to feel excluded, by having to face the back of the priest, who, after all, worships Him, not them? Why, in this land of rugged individualists and freedom-jabberers, must all emphasis be placed not on the final, unalterably personal judgment we all face alone, but on a contrived sense of “community” that has not been valid or viable since the days of Constantine, if indeed it ever was? Why has the mystical body of Christ on earth been reduced to a self-congratulatory community of sin-eaters?
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With this latest expostulation I will cease blogging until the day after the morning of the risen Christ. See you in (give or take) forty days.
