My personal answer to this is that the drive toward the traditional Church it is not only possible, but visible every day and will acquire more and more strenght in the coming decades.
God willing, in 50 or 60 years time (one-two generations) the years of the post conciliars follies will be seen as a dangerous aberration, for which the Church has been punished badly enough in loss of followers and prestige, at least in the West.
In my eyes, this is all being undone now. The old becomes the new, or better said what the centuries have hallowed becomes the way of the Church again.
I do not see this process as reversible, on the contrary it seems to me that the decades will expose with increasing brutality all the mistakes of the past decades. The following generations will look at the seventies and eighties, and blush for those for made the mess possible.
I do not know whether the Church will return to a generalised latin mass (yes, I would say, given a generation or two), and even then probably starting from the 1962 missal, which is good enough anyway.
What I am persuaded of, is that more and more faithful, and the new generations who are going to come, are going to say no to the sugary fast food we have been served in the last decades, and demand the exquisite food which has been the privilege of all past generations until the post-conciliar phase of temporary madness.
And of course, coke quenches your thirst as well as Barolo; but you really do not want to compare.
This awareness is, I think, becoming increasingly common among catholics; the fast-food, shallow, emotional, “how-good-we-are”, “let us be marry” experience of the past will make place for the exquisite, deeply spiritual, beautifully and devoutly solemn, fulfilling experience our forefathers had the joy to celebrate.
A sacrifice, not a party. A solemn sacrifice and not the time for jokes and liturgical dances and guitars and tambourines; “the most beautiful thing this side of heaven”, not the disfiguring of the sacrifice behind a badly understood sense of “community”, and a very smug one at that.
I hope that before I die I’ll be able to see all the guitars, the tambourines, the liturgical dancers consigned to a shameful past always to be remembered, never to be repeated.
I hope to see the cheesy modern hymns substituted by the wonderfully spiritual Gregorian chant again; I hope to see chancels again, and churches which look like churches rathern than convention centres, and with proper bell towers.
I hope to see the Communion devoutly received as it has for so many centuries: kneeling, and on the tongue, as it fits to the most incredible of gifts, and the most beautiful of miracles, on Earth.
I hope to see priests devoting the homily to robust cathechesis rather than feel-good common places chosen in order not to offend anyone’s “feelings” (a modern god, these ones); to tell us what is right and what is wrong, in no uncertain terms; to remind us that it is not for us to reason but to obey, not for us to decide what Jesus would do today, but to try and imitate Him in what he really did.
And no, He was not a vegetarian; and no, He was not a teetotaller; and no, He was not a pacifist; but yes, He was Christ.
The time will come when Jesus’ teaching will be taught and respected again, rather than adapted to the ideologies of modern times, bent to the golden calves of political correctness, reduced to a sort of feel-good western Gandhi or made to adhere to every possible “-ism” on earth.
Much of this, I see already happening. It will be a long march, but frankly I cannot see who or what could stop it, the Cardinals are robustly conservative and the next Pope will be on the mould of the present one (may God give him a long and healthy life!).
Time is on our side, and the Holy Ghost is clearly at work …
All joking aside, yes I suppose that is the date I would use as the cutoff point.