Interesting essay about veiling and Latin

[Loud-living-dogma]

Loud-living-dogma:

Oh, of course. The pre-Vatican II Church was just elitism, starch, brutality, and child abuse. Thanks for clearing that up!
Good thing we now have relativism in its various forms to fix all those problems, and everything is so much better.

Whoa. Whoa. Just whoa.

I never made an accusation that was anything like the pre-Vatican II Church was “just elitism, starch, brutality, and child abuse.” That is a total misrepresentation of the admission that we now know how many unpleasant truths were covered up. When you don’t know better, you can only do so much. When you know better, though, you have to do better.

The way you phrased this does seem to indicate that unpleasant truths were ONLY in the pre-Vatican II Church. It seems like there were plenty of unpleasant things covered up AFTER Vatican II as well, wouldn't you say?

...When the sexual abuse crisis in the Church became known, I was not really surprised. Was that because I had a low view of the Church? No! It was because I knew that mothers and grandmothers and aunts had failed to protect their children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews from sexual predators because they didn't want the shame that would come if the perpetrators were confronted and brought to justice. If your mom and your grandma would fail you because they wanted to deny the problem in your own family, why on earth would we think that bishops could not fall to the same kind of wishful thinking about the chances that offenses that were known could just be forgiven and forgotten and hoped to have been isolated incidents that would never happen again?

Just curious - - why is that fathers and grandfathers and uncles do not seem to share any blame in your scenario? Also, are you saying that you thought most women knew about the clerical abuse, and just covered it up? Because from what I have read, if anyone would have known, it would have been some of the civil authorities who turned a blind eye.

Honestly, I think bishops hid this stuff for the same reason that mothers did: they could not imagine how the good-seeming men they knew could ever do such a thing. .... They really truly wanted to believe that the acts they knew about were aberrations or misunderstandings or bad judgment and would never happen again.
That doesn’t mean there is a thing wrong with literal veiling. It does mean there is a lot wrong with wishful thinking that denies unpleasant truths, preferring instead simplistic pictures of an idyllic past that we all know now never existed.

I think some people did have a fairly idyllic experience in the past. Not everyone was abused, you know. Not every mother, grandmother, aunt, pastor, priest,or bishop was complicit or an abuser. Although in my opinion you seem to take the tone that they were.

Like I said, I’m pretty sure there was more to the pre-Vatican II Church than abuse.

 

[PetraG]

I don’t know how this got connected to Vatican II. I did not connect any of this to the Latin Mass. I merely pointed out that the ages during which the Latin Mass prevailed didn’t have these ideal societies that we ought to be in a big hurry to re-create. Latin is beautiful and one of the riches of the Church, but it isn’t a magic wand that is going to re-create the past, and even if it did we have to remember how many awful things we have now that we had then but just did not talk about.

Just curious - - why is that fathers and grandfathers and uncles do not seem to share any blame in your scenario?

Because I was not talking about sexual abuse by clergy! I was talking about sexual abuse that was committed and hidden within families! Years before clergy abuse became a big topic (but not that many years), sexual abuse victims started talking about sexual abuse within their families that had been covered up by their relatives! It is very likely that then, as now, most pedophiles were married men, not priests.
That is why I referred to the women: that is, because it is relatively rare for a female relative to be the offender and the male spouse of the offender to be the one who is in denial. I meant the case where your uncle was the pedophile and your aunt was in denial about what happened, or your mother remarried and her husband was the offender. That situation got me used to the idea that someone you think of as your protector might hush up that you had been abused, or might not believe it.

I think some people did have a fairly idyllic experience in the past. Not everyone was abused, you know. Not every mother, grandmother, aunt, pastor, priest,or bishop was complicit or an abuser. Although in my opinion you seem to take the tone that they were.

Like I said, I’m pretty sure there was more to the pre-Vatican II Church than abuse.

When I grew up, I learned about all the things that were never talked about. I learned that one of my mom’s classmates got pregnant in high school before she even knew how someone got pregnant, because apparently learning that kind of thing was considered likely to ruin “innocence.” I learned about the cousin who had a baby no one knew about, because she “went away” and then “came back” and some false reason was invented to explain her absence. I learned about the alcoholics that were covered for because they had a position in the community, I learned about the kids whose parents used discipline that went beyond spanking and into out-and-out abuse, about the suicides that were treated as if they had really been accidents, only it wasn’t admitted because nobody talked about those things. I remember when people who suffered from alcoholism were just considered drunks with weak characters and when people used to say that when a white married a black those parents weren’t thinking about how hard life was going to be for their children!!

 

[PetraG]

A lot has gotten worse in the last 50 years, but a lot of bad stuff that used to get covered up is now out in the open. A lot of things that needed more mercy back then get it now because we understand the mitigating factors better now than we did then. It wasn’t that people were awful; these decisions were honestly considered the best for everyone most of the time. Sometimes, people knew they weren’t doing the right thing, and covered it up and felt shame about it, but a lot of the time they really were doing the best they knew to do. Now we know better, though, that’s all. Latin didn’t cause those problems, but Latin also won’t solve problems that existed before the Mass was translated and would still exist no matter what language is used at Mass now.

The use of Latin in the Mass and the wearing of veils as a pious practice ought to be valued for their own sakes, but not imagined to be a time machine that will take us back to a time that wasn’t even what we might have thought it was at the time. That’s all I’m saying.