Hello,
I was born in the 80’s so I don’t know what the 60’s were like, but I’ve heard from people and read online that after the liturgical changes pursuant to Sancrosantum Concilium (sp?) that adherents of the Tridentine Mass sometimes started going to the Uniate/Eastern Catholic rites. I’ve never figured out why this was. Did anyone hear do that, and if do, why?
First, I think I should point out that the U**** word is banned from this site. Why that should be is not for me to say, but just so you are careful …
Also, the Eastern Catholics are now organized into ‘churches’, so the term ‘rites’ is not often used. Since you are talking about liturgies in a general sense, the term rites is probably correct.
The reason many people started attending the Eastern Catholic churches (in their many varieties) was because there were no indult Masses, at all, anywhere. There was no expectation that there would be an indult for what is now called the EF. For almost all people it was gone and inaccessable.
The Eastern Catholic Churches (actually, ‘rites’ at the time) had a generally more reverent liturgy which was appealing to many people. However, these ‘rites’ were not well understood by the majority of the laity, many of whom probably thought these were not really Catholic, so the phenomena was not an enormous shift of people at the time.
As the SSPX started to have a presence, some people who visited the EC went that way, and when the indult Masses were introduced in some places as a response to the SSPX, some people went that way. Then too, some went through the Eastern Catholic churches and on into Holy Orthodoxy, but it is still possible even today to run into people who started to attend Eastern Catholic parishes in the 1960’s and never left.
For their part, the Eastern Catholics needed the support, but the large number of Latin Catholics in some of those small parishes did cause some other problems.
