The traditionalist movement did not actually have it’s origins in traditionalism, it was a reaction to what was perceived as a lack of diginity in worship.
This is one of the most perceptive posts I have read in a while. Permit me to add some thoughts.
It is insightful to note that the traditionalists movement was not rooted in “traditionalism,” of the kind that motivates the monks at Solesmes. As you say, it was a reaction against the new mass forms promulagated through the 70s.
The response was yearning for what people knew or remembered, this was not so much traditionalism as it was nostalgia. This was my impression 25 or 30 years ago, we yearned for the 50’s once again.
I would qualify the comment that this was mere nostalgia. They felt that the new mass forms were improper and they felt that the tridentine mass was right. While they knew the trid. mass from the 50s, they did not necessarilly associate it with the 50s. To them, it was simply the correct way to celebrate mass.
Now we have a new generation of ‘traditionalist’ Roman Catholics who prefer the SSPX/FSSP Extraordinary Form of liturgy, and I don’t blame them one bit, but it is an really the only alternative they know, being unaware of early Roman Catholic church practices.
Catholic traditionalists believe the tridentine rite to be the “gold standard” of liturgy for a severa reasons - one is universal familiarity, the second, equally important, is at least tepid episcopal tolerance.
However, an interesting trend is growing in Catholic traditionalism - increasingly, some traditionalists are asking for the rubrics that were used in the first half of the 20th century, which have their antecedents in the 16th and 17th century. This indicates that Catholic traditionalists are starting to linking theology with worship authentically.
This development might bring a smile to some within the monasteries of Mount Athos or St. Catherine’s. They could say with justification, “What took you so long?” since they have been systematically safeguarding traditions regarding worship (such as the painting of icons) since at least the 1600s, and the Russian Church attempted a genuine reconciliation with ancient tradition in the reforms that led to the Old Believer schism, much as Trent attempted to genuinely restore the mass to the best medieval forms. But the effort was interrupted by war and revolution in the west. So, Orthodoxy has a consistency of liturgical recension that goes back at least 400 years.
Ostensibly, Vatican 2 undertook to renew this process. Unfortunately, the process was affected by what could be called a kind of “primitivism.” The Fathers might have called it something else. This happened due to the deep seated Catholic aversion to adopting an Orthodox mindset about anything (here Orthodox = Greek), which is based on a fear that critical analysis based on a close reading of the Fathers and bishops of the later imperial period will comprimise concepts regarding the papacy. This retards Catholic liturgical renewal based on masses that Catholics actually used from the post Apostolic period through the 1100s, and particularly the Gregorian mass of the 6th and 7th centuries, which really was a golden age for the mass.
Many Orthodox observers observe that Catholic traditionalists up to now have followed exactly the reasoning as their contemporary Catholic bretheren! “Going back before Trent, et hic dracones sunt.”
Traditional minded Christians are going to have to revisit pre Tridentine thinking. Catholics, in particular, are going to have to reevalute ecclesiology in a post Christian society, as Greeks and other Orthodox had to do after 1453. We have a model for Christians to strive for, but it cannot be found in Trent, or in Florence, or in Avingnon. Catholics should ask why the Venerable Bede, writing in England, in the 8th Century, still referenced events by who were serving as consuls at Rome - 300 years after the last Western emperor was deposed. It is even more basic than the position of one’s hands during the paternoster, which Pope St. Gregory added to the mass.
