Cradle Catholic,
**You wrote: ** *I [initially] was excited to celebrate the “New” Mass. I was in my early 20’s during its first appearance. The Church had always given us a beautiful liturgy, so it never occured to me that the
Novus Ordo would be anything less. I tried for 10 years to love it, for the next 30 years I endured. Many didn’t.
It was my parent’s generation that was pushed aside & called ‘reactionary’, out of step, disobedient by the parish priests. They were none of the above & I resent anyone who claims that their generation of Catholics were dissident complainers. What they were was old & bewildered. Everything they knew – the Ancient Mass (which my Father could pray in Latin), the novenas, the Litanies, devotions to their patron saints – just disappeared.
Unless one was an adult when this happened & watched their parents disenfranchised (as Brotherholf describes it), I’d appreciate it if they kept their opinions about the pre-vatican II Catholics to them selves. If one was part of the abrupt rupture of the whole Church in the [19]60’s – the nuns leaving their orders, the beautiful Churches gutted, their confessionals gone, at the time our Communion rails & kneelers went out on the first flatbed truck. My Father was so worried about how my Mom was going to kneel on the floor – her arthritis was so bad. Little did they realize that there would be no more kneeling. *
Wow!
How so much of that parallels my own memories of the purported “liturgical renewal” (i.e. deconstruction) of the Holy Liturgy of the Mass during that dreadful period! At least, like you, I am old enough to remember things when they had been so much better (even though I was not a “cradle Catholic”), when the T.L.M. prevailed! I, too, was in my late teens and early- to mid-twenties when first the 1965
Missale Romanum’s (usually butchered almost beyond recognition) then the 1970’s
Novus Ordo’s vernacular liturgies were introduced
(to displace the real Vatican II liturgy, the 1962
Missale Romanum) or, rather, rammed down lay Catholics’ throats. Alas, I did not persevere through the hated chaos of all that. I fled all of that ugliness, resorting to Anglicanism and to Lutheranism, hoping vainly to find something saner, more secure.
I, too, chafe at younger Catholics parrotting the biassed and uncharitable opinions and judgments of trendoid clergy, then and now, who implemented and enforced, variously, all that chaos and abuse! I do not mind kneeling, despite my severe arthrosis now much later in life; I just do it in a one-better-knee-on-the-kneeler/buttocks-on-the-pew’s-edge squat, which still is better than standing during prayers (whenever the N.O.'s strange and inconsistent rubrics permit that)!
Now I have been ready for quite some time to return to full communion with the Church, but the Sacrament of Confession now (having been jettisoned for something else or for nothing) is so seldom available readily, at least hereabouts, that it is taking me months and months, needlessly, to find an opportunity to confess and then, at last, again to receive the Holy Communion. That’s the only reason that I still, frustrated, am a Lutheran as listed on my C.A. Fora submissions! Will I die before I can make a sacramental confession and return to the Church? Perhaps—. The mildly liberal priests do not care much or feel much of any urgency about all this.
However, the Mass is still the Holy Mass, despite what the N.O.'s depravations have wreaked on it!
Pax, Jerry Parker
. In answer to one poster, I was excited to celebrate the “New” Mass.I was in my early 20’s during it’s first appearance. The Church had always given us a beautiful liturgy, so it never occured to me that the Novus Ordo would be anything less. I tried for 10 years to love it, for the next 30 years I endured. Many didn’t.