From something that you should read:
The elimination of altars and communion rails is the obliteration of sacred art. The obliteration of sacred art is the flattening of liturgical language. The flattening of liturgical language is the abandonment of ageless chants and hymns. The abandonment of those chants and hymns is the forgetting of immemorial devotions and prayers. The forgetting of those prayers is the secularization of time. The secularization of time is the laicization of clergy and religious. Their laicization is the rage to deny the mysteriousness of the faith. The denial of that mystery implies the building of churches as neutral spaces. The building of such churches is the destruction of churches like Saint Anne’s, and, as an ultimate but never to be realized aim, the destruction of Christ’s Church on earth.
Where’s that from? I’ll get to it in a moment.
I sometimes write that, today, we have lots of newish churches that look like municipal airports. No document, nothing, required that statues and altars and rails and windows be torn out of our churches, insulting the memories of our forebears who built them with the the sweat of their brows. There are no documents that says, “let paintings and decorations by removed or whitewashed”. But that’s what has been done time and time again. Not a single document said that our music should be ugly and our translations banal and our vestments impoverished. Nope. On the other hand, it is still possible to build beautiful, theologically rich churches. It just isn’t done too often. More often now that 10 years ago, perhaps. Just today I mentioned in a post the Shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe built by Card Burke near LaCrosse, WI. We can still have worthy sacred music, beautiful art, and decorum which point to the transcendent.
Here is a sample of a piece by Anthony Esolen at Crisis. Yes, that’s what I quoted, above.
What I’m trying to get at here is hard to put into words. When I entered Saint Anne’s in Woonsocket, a church that had narrowly escaped destruction by the diocese, it was as if I had entered the ruins of a lost way of life. Then I began to see that the libido delendi that seized my Church applied to everything in our worship and education. They were not separate but coincidental movements for destruction. They were and are parts of one movement, and not a new movement in the history of the Church, either.
Only academics can think themselves into pretending to like verse without music, music without harmony, painting without skies or flowers or animals or people. Intellectuals are the original smashers of images. It was not quarry workers who demanded that their communion rails be knocked out with sledge hammers. It was not little children who pleaded with their pastors to cover paintings with whitewash. It was not housewives who demanded that the high altars with all their draperies and candelabra be replaced with tables so bare and spare that they would not do for an ordinary kitchen.
Read the rest there. He tells about a great church in Rhode Island that escaped destruction and what that church teaches us.
Libido delendi … the lust to obliterate… is back.
Over the last few months, self-absorbed promethean neopelagians [SAPNs] are crawling out of the woodwork and from under rocks. They are getting up on their hind legs and braying against “triumphalism” and how liturgy requires “poverty” and none of that old “hoopla”. And we are going to see a lot more of this for a while, I’m afraid. We have some dark days ahead, I think, as this cycle plays out. If you don’t think you aren’t in their crosshairs… think again. It’s payback time for the 33 years of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
The SAPNs are pushing their agenda. Here’s what I think you ought to push.
Push for as many celebrations of the older form of the Roman Rite as possible in as many places as possible as soon as possible.
It will be hard to get going. SO WHAT? Make it work. Work with sweat and money to make it happen.
Get involved with all the works of charity that your parishes or groups sponsor. Make a strong showing. Make your presence known. When work needs to be done, step up and ask, “What do you need?”
Pray and fast and give alms. Think you have been doing that? Do more.
Get organized. Find like-minded people and get that request for the implementation of Summorum Pontificum together. Raise the money. Buy the stuff the parish will need. DO IT. ¡HAGAN LÍO!”
This will require that people put aside their petty little personal interpretations and preferences of how Father ought to wiggle his pinky at the third word. It is team-work time. If we don’t sacrifice individually, we will be sacrificed individually.
Remember that the legislation is in place. Young priests and seminarians are dying to get into this stuff. Give them something to do.
As I have written before take off the training wheels and RIDE THE DAMN BIKE!
Recently I read this quote from Pope Leo XIII’s 1899 Letter (sometimes called Encyclical, sometimes Apostolic) on the heresy of Americanism Testem benevolentiae:
Do you recall that, last year, Card. Burke consoled a little boy who was crying because he couldn’t yet receive Communion? 
