I can’t speak for those other forums. I’ve been a member of CAF for over five years.
I can only speak for myself. I am 58 years old and I grew up within HMC before Vatican II. I was an altar boy. What gets lost today is that when the changes started around 1967, most people were simply appalled. What gets lost today is that none of us…not me, not my parents, aunts, uncles, etc. would ever dream of defying the Magesterium of HMC. Rome spoke and we obeyed - which is a concept which is alien to today.
I firmly believe that there are any number of people of my generation and my parent’s generation (still alive) who were not happy with what happened in 67. (Yeah, I am more than aware that the OF was installed on the first Sunday of Advent in 69. Been there, done that). It was formalized then. The changes started two years earlier.
I was the senior altar boy for my parish when the archbishop consecrated our new church in 1967. I saw my parents marginalized in the years following. When the 10 Mass whipped out the guitars and the “hippie” music in the early 70s, they started going to the 8 Mass. When the 8 Mass unplugged the “state of the art” electronic organ in the mid 70s; they went to the 4:30 vigil Mass on Saturday.
I saw my parents and our neighbors reduced to second class citizens. I can understand some of the resentment coming from my parent’s generation.
I wasn’t happy to have to sing Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge over Troubled Waters and Sounds of Silence at my Catholic high school’s graduation Mass in 1969. If you had not been there, you would not have understood just how appalling that was - particularly since I sang in the choir for the class of 1968’s graduation and it was Latin and traditional hymns.
I do not understand my fellow traditionalists who came to understand what we have lost in the last 40 years. I grew up before Vatican II. I am not dead yet and I profoundly miss that which I grew up with. I am not about to challenge the Magesterium and haven’t for these last 40 years.
I don’t think y’all have any idea of how absolutely “gut wrenching” Vatican II was. Just for the record, I do not attend an EF parish. My last EF (and I do not like that word, for me it is the TLM) was in 1975.
I try very hard not to be bitter or snappish but I remember what HMC was like before.
Agreed on almost all points. I have two years on you, though… those who “came later” would find it very difficult indeed to believe the cruel way the Faithful were treated back then. And yes, actually “The Changes” came rolling in every 2 years or so from 1962. Just enough to keep us all off balance for nearly a decade. Each change was more extensive than the last. The 1962 change was almost imperceptible. I very clearly remember the first 1965 Mass – no Prayers At the Foot of the Altar – goodbye ‘forever’ (as I thought) to that refrain all through my childhood: Introíbo ad altare Dei: * “I will go up to the altar of God: Unto God, who gave joy to my youth”.* [p.s. I will be practising my youngest son, and his friend, through these very words after Mass this morning – thank you, Pope Benedict and Mgr Lefebvre]… then in 1967 the Canon was said all through out loud. But by then there were literally hundreds of “experimental” Liturgies being used indiscriminately. So by the time we got the 1969 Official Liturgy, my initial feeling was one of relief: at least some stability! Just as I was supposed to feel. For it was done on purpose, a calculated strategy. Conspiracy theory? No. Cdl Heenan, leader of the Catholic Church in England, said so in so many words towards the end of that dreadful decade: “If we had introduced the changes all at once you would not have accepted them”.
Regularly, after Mass, worldwide, some of the men would be boiling mad and the some of the women would be in tears.
My parents – my mother a convert, my father an Irish Catholic tracing his Faith unbroken to St Patrick, 1500 years before – stopped going to Mass, because they could no longer recognise The Church there. They were contemptuously – I must repeat, contemptuously – brushed aside, with their objections.
Then in 1983 I went to a Novus Ordo in Latin & discovered that the English “translation” was – shall we say – inaccurate. The “Lord I am not worthy” (Domine non sum dignus etc) in the NO says …“Et sanabitur anima mea”, word-for-word with the TLM (EF). A literal translation of both is “and my soul shall be healed”. So how do we get “and I shall be healed?” [It was only later I discovered the systematic deletion of the word ‘soul’ …]
The phrase in Eucharistic prayer I, identical with the TLM in Latin, reads “and that which Thy high priest Melchisedech offered unto Thee, a holy Sacrifice, an immaculate Victim”. So how does that translate as “… and the offering of Thy priest Melchsedech”? [It was only later I discovered the systematic deletion of the concept of Expiatory Sacrifice …] Much later on, I was to discover how many essential dogmas are systematically deleted from the New Order. But on that Sunday morning …
As
brotherhrolf mentions … you new generation can scarcely imagine what that did to a cradle Catholic who, even gritting his teeth through The Changes, had taken the integrity of the Hierarchy for granted?" “We’ve been swindled!” I exclaimed to myself – and later on, to others.
continued….
There are many Catholics I have spoken to who have never heard of Catholic Answers. One priest I met said CA is too ‘right wing’.
