Cardinal Baldisseri ...

Does it strike anyone else as strange that almost 60 years ago, just when the world was on the verge of globalization in communications, travel, and trade, the only truly global organization, the Roman Catholic Church, had a common language -- and dropped it!

I was at last starting to study Latin when the Council opened in 1962. By the end of that school year, Latin had all but disappeared from the Mass and I was furious. Within a couple of years, everything else went, too: reverence and decorum,sacred music and the organ, devotions, Confession, Benediction, fasting and abstinence. The ravaging was capped by the Novus Ordo, but by then there was hardly anything of the ancient liturgy and practice left to replace. This was all the greatest act of clericalism in the history of the Church, even while they were telling us that Vatican II had opened the "age of the laity." Lies. All of it lies. And we have been drowning in lies ever since.

May Mary's Immaculate Heart triumph!

The latest Vatian villain, clericalism, entered the Church when the Novus Ordo placed the priest/presider between us and God as the focal point for Mass-goers. Bring back ad orientem. Cdl. Sarah for pope.

How much I agree with Donna Bethell. I am in my 70s and regard the majority of my life as having been a great trahison des clercs

A Billion upvotes to Donna Bethell!

The heterodoxic praxis in The Vatican is a reflection of the praxis of the Establishment Deep State in Washington.

Dear Father, you may not recall this but there were sizable majorities amongst liberals and conservatives not to bail out the Banksters after they caused the economic collapse in America but The Establishment - led by Barack Obama - did bail them out and the economy has not recovered since then.

ABS considers the New Theologians, who have control of The Church, are not unlike the Establishment Deep State in Washington (Which considered us malign deplorables) in that the laity expect and demand Orthodoxy from the powerful but the powerful (Which considers us benighted pharisees) know they can not be unseated anymore than the establishment deep state in Washington can be unseated and so the New Theology establishment just does what it desires and no longer even pretends it is doing the job it is supposed to be doing.

The arrogance of both the secular and sacred establishment deep state is sickening but, of course, the arrogance of the Vatican authorities is far more damaging and consequential as souls are involved.

There's a lengthy article on Rorate Caeli by John R. T. Lamont which seems to me capture the deeper causes of our current situation better than almost anything I have read. He concludes:

"The chaos that engulfed the Church in the 1960s and 1970s was probably due in large part to rebellion against the tyrannical exercise of authority that had been inflicted on clergy and religious prior to the 1960s. Like other revolutions recorded by history, however, this revolt against tyranny did not lead to the triumph of freedom. Instead, it produced a more far-reaching and thorough tyranny, by destroying the elements of the ancien régime that had placed limits on the power of superiors ...

"The progressive faction that seized power … had its own programme and ideology that demanded total adherence, and that justified the ruthless suppression of opposition. The tools of psychological control and oppression that had been learned by the progressives in their own formation were put to most effective use, and applied more sweepingly than they had ever been in the past -- the difference between the two regimes being rather like the difference between the Okhrana and the Cheka.

"Part of the progressive ideology was the falsity and harmfulness of traditional Catholic sexual teaching; the effect of this tenet on the sexual abuse crisis need not be laboured. But it would be a mistake to think that progressivism as such is responsible for this crisis, and that its defeat would solve the problem. The roots of the crisis go further back, and require a reform of attitudes to law and authority in every part of the Church."

(https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2018/10/tyranny-and-sexual-abuse-in-ca...)

This is remarkably clear sighted in my humble opinion. Unlike many in the tradosphere he has put his finger on the truth that there was indeed a great need for reform in the Church, which had reached fever pitch by the mid twentieth century. Our problems, including the abuse crisis, did not begin in 1962.

Older priests I trust have told me genuinely shocking experiences of cruelty and uncharity from superiors in their youth, which is often what drives prejudice against "going back to the old ways". Unfortunately what we have right now is simply the same unreformed authoritarianism but now being used to push heresy. All revolutionaries become dictators.

One might suggest too that we did and still do need a genuine development of doctrine in so many ways, and that the roots of that crisis also go back a long way before Vatican II. As you frequently point out yourself, Father, the same is true in matters of liturgy. The answers do not lie in simply winding the clock back, but in bringing out of the Lord's store house treasures both old and new (Matthew 13:52).

Thank you Father. And thank you, Thomas.