Oh it is so on...

See here for updates at the Fisheaters forum. I am a ''raving loon'' on one blog, and a notorious sodomite waving a pink flag on Fisheaters. Or perhaps I am just a simple unassuming Christian who lives life to the full, and wants the real thing when I go to church on Sunday? I think I am very misunderstood. I venture to add that perhaps all this bickering detracts from the raison d'être of this blog - which is to raise awareness about the loss of liturgical sense in the West by taking a critical look at where things have perhaps gone wrong in the Roman Church (and not just since the Council!), or some devotions/traditions have got ''out of hand,'' to the detriment of Liturgy.

It doesn't do to just assume that everything was hunky dorey 50 years ago, and that the great enemies of Tradition are Bugnini and trendy nuns casting aside their habits. There were huge problems in the Church in the 1950s - the photo I criticized in the last post is evidence enough of this (though I do not pretend to know exactly when it was taken); it may well have been the ''Old Rite,'' but it was a state of Liturgy clearly exhausted by tampering at magisterial level, and degraded by the spectacle of bad clergy and disinclined laity. As a friend of mine said over lunch on Sunday - in Ireland 60 years ago, the attitude to Liturgy was pretty much the same as it is now - the only difference being that now the Celebrant begins (if you're lucky): ''in the name o' the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost;'' rather than Introibo ad altare Dei. What difference does it make if the Mass is in banal English or garbled Latin when you just can't be bothered? It's this aliturgical attitude, and not just prevalent in Ireland, that is an underlying problem in the Church, and which quite frankly I think is irredeemable. The problem lies largely in the imbalanced view of the Roman Church that the Eucharistic Liturgy eclipses all other Liturgy in the sense of the prime importance of the Blessed Sacrament, and reducing the Sacred Liturgy to bare sacramental validity - that however the Eucharist is procured is irrelevant, so long as it's there. This is, to borrow a phrase aptly coined by an Orthodox friend, the ''Low Mass mentality.'' The result of this is the relegation of the Divine Office to the private prayerbook, and obligation, of the priest alone rather than the public prayer of the Church, and the duty of all the People of God; the aliturgical abuse we now have, namely, evening Mass; a series of garbled Low (or ''private'') Masses celebrated at side Altars, to the clear detriment of High Mass; and ultimately a peasant religion of cults, miraculous medals and beads, where Liturgy is just incidental to the ecclesial life of the parish, and something one puts oneself through of necessity on Sunday for an hour. I do not seriously think that humble parishes with the scantiest resources can provide Liturgy to match that of a Cathedral or Monastery. What I do think, however, is that it behoves them to do all that they can within their means to emulate Cathedral Liturgy; and I do not mean add a million candles and more lace on solemnities but trying to procure something authentic and traditional; to be catholic in the all encompassing sense of that term.

I'm sorry but this is an impossible ideal in the Roman Church. The damage wrought by the Pope and his sycophants in the Curia to the Sacred Liturgy has been too great, and neglected for too long. The Church has done literally nothing to correct her gross alterations of the liturgical texts in the last 100 years, or anything ''pastoral'' in the sense of trying to get Catholics to understand their own importance in matters liturgical. The Traditionalist ''response'' to the crisis has been predictable and misguided - they seek only to emulate the errors of the pre-Conciliar Church by assuming that Low Mass and Benediction are acceptable, and remedies to a deep-seated problem. They are not interested in historical liturgical accuracy any more than the liberals, and are afflicted with exactly the same attitude - they are just a different side to the same coin; they scoff at ''active participation'' as though it is a bad thing, when in fact the Roman attitude to the presence of laity at Mass is one of several bad ''developments'' in the Liturgy. Why have sung Office and High Mass as the liturgical norm when you can have a million Low Masses instead? I don't see that the ancestral forms of Liturgy are in any way simple. I think it is precisely because they are so complex, and require that much more effort, that these people simply can't be bothered.

As for Fisheaters; carentium caritatis pro zelo accipiunt, et ignorantiam pro orthodoxia.