I don’t think so. If that were the case, then you would have seen primarily the conservative Catholics leave, and you would have seen widespread discontentment and protests about the change, people flocking to churches where the altar had been kept ad orientem, people cutting off donations unless the priest put things back as they had been, etc. None of that, though, seems to be the case.
Part of the reason you did not see these things was because there was a very different mind-set among much of the laity in those days. The majority of the people had been raised with a very different mindset about the Church…You simply did not DO some of the things you mention above.
Of course, like anything, this was not universally true. There WERE some who did question the changes. There were others who - strongly opposed - formed the schismatic groups that we see today.
But many - having been raised and taught that the Church was unchanging and unchangeable - were simply unable to incorporate these sudden changes that they saw but did not understand. They were taught that you did not question the priest and bishop and so had little recourse. In many cases not even the priests were all that comfortable with the changes and so they could not give good answers to those who DID ask.
The biggest problem, as I see it, with what happened immediately after VII, was that the changes were put in place without sufficient thought given to the need for recatechizing the parish priests and laity. As I expressed in my small example earlier, changes were introduced precipitously with little or no warning and with little or no explanation.
In most cases, because of the aforementioned mindset of the laity not questioning things, I believe many/most of the more liberal minded bishops expected a mostly quiet acquiescence to the changes. They were not prepared for the fallout that these changes brought about and they, again because of this older mindset (that they were raised in too) they were slow to recognize and act on the danger signals that began to surface.
They seem to have learned their lesson though…Look at how long and how much time the Church spent preparing the faithful for the recent and relatively minor changes in the Mass.
I’m sorry to ramble so. It’s early and I don’t seem to be able to organize my thoughts that well.
Long story short…The parishioners ability to protest were very limited because of mindsets and training. As a result, the only real “protest” available to most was to simply stop going to Church altogether.
No, this isn’t right either. I think the motivation was to move toward a different conception of the laity’s participation in the Mass on its own terms – which, independently, Protestant groups had adopted long before. In the same way, even though Protestants used the vernacular, the shift in the Catholic Church to the vernacular wasn’t to “be like the Protestants,” it was merely so that people could understand what was being said. The Protestants had simply been able to make the change sooner, since their liturgy was not “in the hands of a strictly centralized and purely bureaucratic authority” which “completely lacked historical perspective,” thereby keeping it “embalmed in the status quo” and calcifying it into “a rigid, fixed, and firmly encrusted system” (J. Ratzinger, Theological Highlights of Vatican II) which, for us unlike the Protestants, took an event like Vatican II to shake up.
In any event, I have never heard anybody say, “We should turn the altars around so that we can be more Protestant.” They say, “We should turn the altars around so that the people can see what is going on and participate more fully.” Likewise they say “The altar rails are a useless barrier and cause undue clericalization,” not “Hey, by getting rid of altar rails it can help us look more Protestant.” Now, those claims may or may not be true and it is all certainly quite arguable, but attacking the motivation (as is so popular in this strain of argumentation) is just an attempt to avoid having the real discussions on the merits. Besides which, I don’t know of any evidence that most priests and laity in 1960 would have had the slightest idea what Protestant services were like to begin with, still less the remotest desire to emulate them. Do you? That is especially true in countries like Italy, where there aren’t any Protestants to begin with and yet people were just as happy to make the same changes.
(Bolding Mine)
Agree with this completely. None of the decisions were made to “ape the protestants”.
Peace
James
