You make a wide swath of accusations against the OF; however, the majority of your accusations are simply post hoc, ergo propter hoc statements with no foundation other than they occured after the OF was introduced; and in fact, a number of them were occuring before the OF was introduced; logically that leads to the conclusion that it was not the OF which was the causitive factor.
People hear these accusations, and without any critical examination of what foundation supposedly lays under them, they repeat the accusation and lo and behold, another urban legend is born…
…After Vatican 2, catechesis got thrown into the toilet and someone flushed, but there is no shown interconnection between the OF and the change from the Baltimore Catechism; that relates directly back to misdirection post Vatican 2 concerning catechesis itself on a separate track, because of the desire of some to get out of a doctrinal approach and into an experiential approach to teaching…
…About the only issue you name that has any connection is the loss of reverence; and that issue has slowly been changing over the last 10 to 15 years, particularly as we have had the ordinations of the group called the John Paul priests. And granted that it has not shown everywhere in all dioceses to an equal amount, it is most definitely occuring; and if it is occuring then not all blame can be laid to the format of the Mass.
It appears you are implying that there is no connection at all between the changes in the liturgy and the life of the Church. You would have to trace the causation elsewhere, but in the meantime, you must attempt to support the extremely erroneous opinion that the liturgy of the Church bears little substantially on Catholics or even not at all. Thus you are reduced to the proposition that the liturgy is essentially superfluous and arbitrary.
Liberals desperately wish to divorce this reality of the interconnection between the faith and spiritual health of Catholics with the liturgy so they can save that wretched experiment. Thus the true logic of your “logic” is a gross theological error. The formation of the spirit by the liturgy, and the bad effects of a false liturgy, transcend all logical category. But really it is more of a general observation regarding the fruits of both liturgies, and thus to point out a specific divergence from this general observation is to entirely miss the point.
You offer your own personal anecdote in order to bolster this divorce, but short of deeper probing, it amounts to very little in the way of actual evidence, either quantitatively or qualitatively. If in fact all those Catholics left because of some other cause, you would be hard pressed to deny that the changes had no effect at all. You must act as if drastic changes in the Church, e.g. in the liturgy, and changes or shifts within the faithful have absolutely no relation.
You point out that the currents of change existed prior to the Council. No one disputes this, the revolutionaries didn’t just arrive at the Council. And the SC contains the seeds of revolution, the real problem is the work of the Concilium itself. Even if Catholics were not affected at all by the radical changes of the liturgy, it still stands that the liturgy itself was based upon false principles. The admission of the Secretary of the Concilium that they intended on stripping the Mass of Catholic elements so as not to give offense to heretics is sufficient evidence that an unspeakable crime was committed in the name of ecumenism. No Catholic, who understands what it means to be Catholic, could passively accept this proposition.
But I would argue that the same spirit that formed the new liturgy, a spirit that renounced the divine wisdom contained in the ecclesiastical tradition of the Church, is the primary cause of the exodus of Catholics. For if the hierarchy could abandon tradition in the name of a new orientation, those that were already losing their faith to the spirit of the world simply followed suit. The causation is reciprocal. Their work was a form of iconoclasm and once the forms devoloped over time were negated, there was little left remaining to at least extrinsically form the faithful themselves.
And one really wonders what kind of “catechesis” is being promoted that will supposedly save the Church and bring back lost souls. God help them if it serves only to entrench the habits of the novus ordo structure itself. For if it retains even a shred of that spirit which ultimately was responsible for this universal crisis, it is a self-defeating proposition. To turn your logic back on you, you would be deluding yourself, and committing your own post hoc fallacy if you were to think that you are bringing souls back into the Church on the basis of your “revival” work. And to mention that “reverence” is coming back with regard to a rite and spirit that detested reverence for all that is holy is a most comical assertion.
To sum up, you lack any serious or substantial understanding of both causes and effects. You simply fail to grasp the gravity of the darkness pervading the Church, as your comments regarding “John Paul priests” evince. And this in turn is the result of a very superficial spirit, one that is not at all rooted in the tradition of the Church. Anyone who holds John Paul II up as the standard of health in the Church is so extraordinarily deluded, so disoriented, that there is little hope of getting him to see the true nature of the problems.
