What Does The Prayer Really Say?
W D T P R S

There is an interesting article in The Catholic Herald which merits attention.  The topic: the revival of traditional Catholicism in France.

This article is interesting especially because it juxtaposes the tired old cliches of the agin-hippies with a more optimistic Catholic world view.

My emphases and comments.

The Catholic Herald

The return of the tonsure, wimple and soutane

With the quiet support of the Pope, France is seeing an explosion of traditional religious communities,
says Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis

We are often told that the Church has to modernise, because the young, especially, can no longer relate to its teachings. It is sometimes even suggested that we should be grateful for a decline in vocations to priesthood: could this not be a sign from the Holy Spirit that the age of the laity is finally dawning?   [This is an important starting point: for some, most, who embrace the "hermeneutic of discontinuity", is that we as human beings have matured, evolved beyond any need for the old ways.]

This eagerness to make a virtue out of a necessity finds its most radical conclusion in a booklet entitled Church and Ministry published in the Netherlands by a group of Dominican academics. One of them, Fr André Lascaris, recently explained his thesis in The Tablet. [Remember that?  Pure Schillebeeckx.]

Numbers of vocations to the priesthood in Holland are plummeting, and according to Fr Lascaris there is “no hope of a remedy for this situation”. [He should remember that Christians have hope.] Apart from his own remedy, of course. His proposal is clear and simple: “In the absence of ordained priests, lay persons should be allowed to celebrate the Eucharist.” He adds: “Whether they be men or women, homo or heterosexual, married or unmarried, is irrelevant.”

The beauty of all this, according to Fr Lascaris, is that it is “based on the statements of the Second Vatican Council, and on publications of professional theologians and pastoral experts”.

Did the Second Vatican Council really say that? Are we really supposed to believe that the Holy Spirit deliberately manufactured a crisis in vocations, just to make way for the establishment of a new age of laity?

Of course, we laity have an essential role in the Church’s evangelisation. We have the awesome responsibility of carrying the message of Jesus Christ to our contemporaries who are searching. If falling vocations force us to acknowledge this, and to act on it, then the Holy Spirit will indeed have brought much fruit from any current crisis.  [Right.  Clergy form lay people.  Lay people shape the world.]

But perhaps Fr Lascaris’s Brave New Church of feminists concelebrating Mass in rainbow-coloured jilabas is not the only remedy to declining numbers of priests. A beautifully illustrated new book on the religious life in France suggests that there might be another solution. Reading the two books side by side you might be forgiven for assuming that the authors belong to two completely different religions.

If the photographs in Les communautés traditionnelles en France are anything to go by, then just across the Channel there lies a whole rich seam of Catholic religious life that is young, vibrant and growing.

In addition to youthfulness and success, there are two other common features that unite the communities featured in this book. One is that they all have the extraordinary form of the Roman liturgy – the “traditional” rites liberated by Pope Benedict XVI’s recent Motu Proprio [Summorum Pontificum - part of Benedict’s "Marshall Plan" – is going to work!] – as the heart and foundation of their spirituality. [The enemies of the Motu Proprio chant their mantra that only old people and separated rad trads are the object of Benedict’s provisions.  Au contraire!  They also yodel that Summorum Pontificum and the old Mass point to a different "spirituality" than that of Vatican II.] The other is that many of them long enjoyed the steadfast, if unofficial support, of a certain well-placed cardinal in Rome. His name was Joseph Ratzinger.

There is no gain without pain and most of these 18 communities have at some stage suffered from misunderstanding and prejudice. [You can say that again.] Before the Motu Proprio there was often intense pressure from unsympathetic ecclesiastical authorities to abandon all adherence to the “old rite&r