Remarkable Paragraph

The author is a 'former' Catholic retired magazine editor.

...I write this partly to rescue the old traditions from conservatives who use them as a symbol in their resistance to any reform. And also for those liberals who are just as adamant that concern about aesthetics is somehow suspect. Yes, I know the liturgy is not fundamentally a drama or theater but a ritual, a rite—it is worship, not spectacle. And I know that the council’s reforms were an effort to engage Catholics as participants in the Mass rather than as spectators closed off from each other in private devotion. And I know that my youthful liturgical experience at St. Mary’s was perhaps exceptional. The old rite was not always beautifully or even reverently done. But I still find it tragic that the unplowed and fallow fields of today’s Catholic youth no longer soak up the nutrients of two thousand years, composted from the dead language of the Romans and the poetic drama of the Greeks, with a heavy leavening of Gothic romanticism. Thank God—I say it now without irony—that Roman Catholic architecture, murals, sculpture, paintings, music, and the theater of the traditional services were there to nourish my soul, exactly as my father believed they would.

HT:  Badger Catholic