In discussions such as this, there has been a tendency for some who prefer the EF to peak about others “hating” Latin. That has a tendency to cloud issues and make discussion difficult at best.
Perhaps an anecdote may help: my mother born in 1917, was fourth generation in a line of Dutch Catholics who emigrated from Holland. Her graduating high school class consisted of 5 students, all of who grew up in a rural farming community, and most or all of those students could trace family back to the original 12 founding families.
She never went beyond high school (though she might have made a good engineer); and was a faithful, and relatively simple Catholic all her life. As a family we made Mother of Perpetual Help devotions (which never seemed to end), First Fridays and First Saturdays, and after my dad was severely disabled by a stroke and brain tumor, managed to get myself and my three siblings all through Catholic grade and high schools.
One day, a few years ago, I asked her what she thought was the most significant change coming from Vatican 2. Without even thinking, she said “Oh, the Mass in English!”
When I asked her what she thought about that change, she responded that she loved it. Never, ever, did she say anything about Latin; but she strongly appreciated having the Mass in her language. She, and the great majority of people from her age group to those born somewhere around the late 1950’s - early 1960’s, are not particularly sophisticated about rubrics; they might be able to tell you about some of the differences, but with the exception of whether the priests faces liturgical East or not, most of them seem to have no opinion on the matter.
There are radicalized people on both ends of the spectrum, and it is my observation that there are more on the liberal end than there are on the conservative end; but that has a lot to do with a combination of events and the cultural sea change that occurred in the 1960’s outside the Church as well as inside. And part of the driving force of the change within the Church had more to do with the explosion of commentary coming out of what suddenly seemed to be fame amongst theologians, and from there, into the pews, of the idea that seemingly the Church was going to “throw off” the “oppression of the past” (meaning, both doctrinal and moral) and become something new. People with not a lot more than the Baltimore Catechism for their foundations flowed along, as the bishops in large part seemed overwhelmed with the reactions, and failed in leadership.
And so we still have amongst us those 60+, 70+ and 80+ “elders” who make up the largest part of the liberals.
And has been noted thoroughly in the recent past, the liberal organizations who want to “remake” the Church are greying out, getting old, dying, and not being replaced in those organizations by new blood. In short, it is all in the process of self-correcting.
Within those liberal groups, I suspect that one will hear speech between dismissive and hateful. However, it is just as misguided to presume that they speak for the great number of Catholics who don’t identify either as liberal or as conservative; those who are busy with jobs, families, and parish activities and are trying to follow the Magisterium and Christ as best they can.
The short of it is that there are some, on the liberal end, who couldn’t say anything civil, let alone nice, about the EF if you paid them. They are a minority, but one should not be surprised that there are some on that end of the spectrum any more than that there are some on the other end. Most people simply do not want to go to a Mass in Latin (EF or OF), but that does not equate with hating the EF. Their concern is not about what someone else prefers, but rather about what they prefer; they have no objection to a Mass in Vietnamese, but definitely choose not to attend it. And that is different than hating it.
