When I converted to Catholicism in 1977, one thing that attracted me was the sense of history, of connection to the ages, of doing what the faithful had been doing for centuries; and it seemed to me that nearly everyone else in the Church was rushing headlong the other way, scattering vestments, monstrances, hymnals and prayer books behind them as they went in desperate quest of ugly burlap banners, copies of Kumbaya, and the trendiest heresies. The Diocese of Charlotte’s education office even sent out tape sets that explicitly contradicted the Council of Trent! It was easy to think, in those days of swimming against the current and trying to preserve a few of the beauties of worship and art which were despised or ignored because they were old, and the inerrant, though vague, “spirit of Vatican II” mandated that we throw out everything old, no matter how uplifting, and embrace everything new, like clown masses, that the Church had lost her way, or been hijacked by modernists, as the council had allegedly been.
In this frame of mind, attending a week-long Ignatan retreat hosted by the SSPX in Ridgefield in 1980 was like a revelation. I had never in my life attended a Tridentine Mass, and the one that ended the retreat is still one of the most profounly moving liturgies I have ever attended. I was hooked. Here, it seemed, was the Church of the Ages I had sought in my home parish, only to find wishy-washy priests and the rather flat, everyday prose of the Novus Ordo.
However, none of the trappings, the Latin and Gregorian Chant and wonderfully contemplative liturgy, could mask forever the basic contradiction that you can’t have traditional Catholicism in opposition to the Pope and virtually the whole Church. Plus I noted disturbing trends of paranoia and anti-semitism in the Society, and eventually even reading many defenses and meeting Archbishop Lefebvre himself, I couldn’t stay. But returning to Catholicism, in full communion with the Pope and the bishops, has been a long, circuitous route, with many bizarre twists and turns irrelevant here. Reading a book called The Pope, the Council, and the Mass, by James Likoudis and Kenneth D. Whitehead, put the final nail in the coffin of my attraction to the SSPX. The authors list every major traditionalist argument against the Council and the new liturgy and decisively demolish them all. No one with an open mind can read this book and think the SSPX has a leg to stand on afterward. I wish I had read it in 1981, when it first came out; it might have saved me years of floundering.
I am, however, happy to see that in my parish respect for traditional Catholic practices like Benediction, Stations, the Rosary, and occasional Latin in the Mass (eg the “agnus dei”) have filled the pews and satisfied young and old alike. I look forward to the new liturgy, and hope it fulfills the promise of being more majestic and reverent.
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Maybe the other comments would be more appropriately started on a new thread?)