I am currently occupied with various family duties – which always take precedence over commentary and opining – so I’m just going to throw up a couple of posts from last summer:
And it occurred to me – among many other thoughts I don’t have time to write at the moment – the ecclesiastical powers that be talk quite a bit about how terrible it is to live in the past, be tied to the past, and so on. Whatever that means. And however idiotic it can be in any context, and particularly in the context of apostolic Christianity.
And one of the points you hear being made about the current situation with the TLM is that it’s a return to the days right after the promulgation of the current Mass, even the days (it is feared) before the establishment of groups like the FSSP, before the indult. It’s an attempt to re-create a moment in time that occurred about forty years ago. It’s a desperate attempt to reclaim a hope and a dream rooted, not in the present with all of its nuances and developments, but in a nostalgic vision of that immediate post-Vatican II era , when all seemed so simple and clear.
You know, those last decades of … the last century.
They are not traditional, they are “indietrists,” they are going backwards without roots — “That’s the way it has always been done,” “That’s the way it was done in the last century.”
Now, I don’t offer that as a gotcha – well, not really – but simply as a reminder of how useless “it was in the past” is as an evaluative category in Catholicism.
Charlotte was Both 