Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night

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brotherhrolf

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In September of 1965 I was a freshman at an all boy’s Catholic high school. I was an altar boy in my home parish. Latin was still the norm

How many listen to the voice of us in my generation who didn’t want to change? I think that this is a critical piece of information which often gets left out.

The current wisdom is such that all of us back in 1970 said whopee! The reality was anything but. I want to stand for and with my generation. The myth that all of my my generation was happy to move to the NO is no more than “mortadella” or chopped liver.

We just don’t get no respect.
Where are my brothers and sisters up north?
 
Ditto from a 1966 grad of an all-boys Catholic High School, also a server.
 
This intriques me too.
There is a widespread assumption that 40 years ago everyone 40 years old or younger greeted the changes with glee and that now, with the older generations all but gone there is no need or desire for the older rite.

The problem with that line of reasoning is that it shows a complete lack of understanding about what happened in 1965/1970. You said it plainly - no one asked us.
It went thus:
VAT II ended - Boom
Change to English - Boom
Latin is out - Boom
Turn the Priest around - Boom
Change the Mass to N.O. - Boom

Meanwhile grandpa and grandma were told that all they knew and grew up with was not permitted anymore.

Sorry, I do occasionally rant a bit.

James
 
Not to mention the total disregard for younger people who prefer the older mass…yes, that’s right, the people who discovered indult forms of the Tridentine and prefer it to the Novus Ordo…even though they weren’t even born at the time of the switch.
 
As far as I can tell, no one consulted any of the laity before
ramming through the changes that followed VII. The "experts’
seem to have assumed that they knew what the people wanted
without referring to the people themselves. This was one of the
most remarkable phenomena in the history of the Roman
Church, where changes usually take decades, if not centuries,
to take place. The result was a slap-dash hotch-potch of a
Liturgy. Valid? Yes- beyond any doubt, since the Holy Spirit
protects the Church from substantial error. He does not,
however, protect the Church from gross lapses of judgement
in secondary matters.

The real problem was and is not the NO. It is a question of
fidelity to Christ through fidelity to the Magisterium. There was
a large-scale abandonment of that fidelity as if something had
changed, as if we were scrapping twenty centuries of Tradition
and starting from scratch - re-inventing the Faith. It couldn’t work
and it didn’t work and most of the pieces have yet to be picked up.
The tide of infidelity and folly is receding - slowly. Pray that the
Holy Spirit will act powerfully among us.

Edmac
 
In 65, I was senior in High School, and had been an altar boy since I was seven. I loved the Traditional Mass and still do. When I came home from overseas in 69, I found the entire Mass gone and in its place something that I could not even understand let alone appreciate. After some trials and tribulations I came home to the Church again, determined to try to see some, anything good in this new Mass that

WE HAD TO ACCEPT OR ELSE

I tried, I really did, but all I saw week after week was more and more and more gross disregard for the basic principles off the faith that had been drilled into me by my mother, the Daughters of Charity and the Redemptorist Fathers. I watched in stunned horror when the tabernacle, the most Holy Spot in the Church was removed. Not in procession and not even emptied, but picked up by two workmen who moved it set it in the ground amidst their tools and continued working as if nothing happened, I saw nuns giving homilies while “Priests” sat on the sidelines wearing rainbow striped stoles and no other vestments. I saw children taught that obedience to anything that they did not agree with was nothing more than a cop out. I saw entire convents and rectories emptied out for no other reason than that the Church was no longer relevent. I saw Protestant Ministers both receiving and handing out Holy Communion which in some cases was nothing more than corn tortillas because that was the food of the people. I saw Masses devoted solely to mind numbing harangues against the US Governments policy in Central America Asia, Africa you name it and over and over etc etc.

The the Holy Father who obviously saw that something was very very wrong allowed us to once again celebrate the Traditional Mass. All of a sudden, all the hypocrasy, all the experimentation all the nonsence was not a problem as long as there was a Traditional Mass to be found. Luckily, both of the towns I call home, San Diego and New Orleans had them, early I might add and well, very well attended. There we prayed that one day the Church would return from its quest for relevence in the modern world to its roots of the adoration and worship of God the Father, Christ the Son and the Holy Spirit the Paraclete. We prayed that once again the Blessed Mother could be called upon openly to aid us and intercede for us and not to have those requests laughed at and called superstitious and un biblical by the progressives.

And the Holy Spirit listened and gave us as the new Holy Father a man who too had seen the destruction of piety in the name of progress, who had seen the mindlessness of those comitted to change at whatever cost and saw just how dangerous allowing man to make his individual decisions on religion rather then listening to the Magesterium could be.

I think that we are turning the corner and the summer will soon be upon us and the new springtime just a nightmare that while never forgotten will recede from our memories like the tides.

WE WILL NEVER FORGET WHAT THEY TRIED TO DO TO THE FAITH

And we will not be silent again.
 
I graduated High school in 1954 and had been a Knight of the Altar ( an altar boy) since 3rd grade. My family moved into our new parish in 1964. Not much changed for the first couple of yeras. Then we wwere assigned a pastor whose special talent was “liturgy”. Within a six month period the statue like stations of the cross went to the dump and replaced by wooden crosses, the high altar was no longer used except to house the tabernacle, an Altar Table was put into place, the communion rails were demolished and sent to the dump, and total vernacular took over the Mass. No guitars yet. They came shortly after though, but in truth wre not the sole instrument as the organ was still in fairly regular use when we had someone who could play it (our regular organist and her husband departed for another parish that held out against most of the changes for almost a decade till that pastor retired.

To say that all was peace light and happiness would take a whopper of a lie. On the other hand to say that only a few were happy with the changes would also be a lie. For the most part there have not been a terrible large number of abuses of the NO in my parish. Only one clown Mass in forty some years. It obviously was not a hit. I have heard that we were also the first parish in our diocese to go all English.

I would have to admit that outside of the rapid and chaotic demolition of things and putting them in the dump, I have never been terribly unhappy with the NO and how it was celebrated. We did not have women giving homilies and all that stuff.

The only real pain I have now is that our Liturgist cum Music Director uses hymns from the Oregon Book. We have never sung most of them before, probably will not sing them again, do not practice before hand, they are often played in slooow time, and they are awful. I don’t see slow as necessarily reverent. It is painful and although one of our choirs has drums, brass, and base guitar on some Sundays of the month, that is not very pleasing either.

To say that there were no unhappy folks in the pews in the sixties is a gross exaggeration if not a flat lie. Some even totally walked away from the Church rather than put up with it.
 
brotherhrolf said:
In September of 1965 I was a freshman at an all boy’s Catholic high school. I was an altar boy in my home parish. Latin was still the norm

How many listen to the voice of us in my generation who didn’t want to change? I think that this is a critical piece of information which often gets left out.

The current wisdom is such that all of us back in 1970 said whopee! The reality was anything but. I want to stand for and with my generation. The myth that all of my my generation was happy to move to the NO is no more than “mortadella” or chopped liver.

We just don’t get no respect.
Where are my brothers and sisters up north?
Click to expand...
This reminds me of the book “The Stripping of the Altars” by Eamon Duffy. The party line had been that at the time of the Reformation the English people had found it wonderfully liberating to throw off the shackles of oppression and superstition found in the Roman Catholic religion. Duffy’s book showed that the people were quite happy with the Catholic Faith in England at the time of the Reformation as it penetrated their entire life.
 
Servulus said:
Ditto from a 1966 grad of an all-boys Catholic High School, also a server.
Click to expand...
Ditto from a college second year about to officially become a catechumen… in about 7 hours. Now, from my cursory reading of some threads, it seems that orthodoxy is either prevalent here or at least has a firm foothold, so I won’t preach to the choir by singing praises of the TLM.

Suffice it to say that I know a good number of like-minded young people, many who are still yet undergraduates, and anyone who says that only the very elderly desire the majesty of the Tridentine Mass is either woefully misinformed or guilty of deception.
 
In the late 90s my cathedral choir decided to produce a CD. Part of the CD was devoted to plainsong chant. We formed an ensemble of us old fogeys. We sang Pange Lingua, Jesu Dulcis Memoria and Veni Creator Spiritus.

We didn’t have to engage in lengthy practice. The seven of us were all of an age and we had sung these timeless chants oh so many years ago. We entered into and became one with the chant. And despite what is said, the congregation did sing prior to Vatican II. We weren’t doing anything special, my fellow choristers and I…We simply sang as we sung oh those many years ago.

Everyone is going on and on about - oh, we have to break all of this Chant and Latin back in. I would be willing to bet that if parishes asked their 50 somethings if they would be willing to sing and chant - they would find a large untapped and ignored resource.

I am appalled that an entire generation was painted with such a broad brush. No. I don’t want to sing with guitars. I will be perfectly honest. I can and do want to sing what my ancestors sang. Forty years later and our voices are only now being heard.
 
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