Put aside everything else and go to First Things.
They have reprinted a piece written for The Tablet in May 1966… 1966… by Christopher Derrick, a student of CS Lewis and WWII RAF pilot.
He writes … in 1966… of how the fathers of a Vatican III would look back at Vatican II. Amazing insights.
Here are some snips…
[…]
Brows will be furrowed, analyses undertaken, theses written. It may become a cliché to speak of our generation as having enacted a further chapter to Knox’s Enthusiasm. The ghost of Abbot Joachim was walking again, and we were restless for a new Pentecost in the fullest sense, impatient with the mixed and imperfect character of the Son’s dispensation; and with these things came the inevitable antinomian tendency, leading good men to propose obscenities in the name of love. More generally, we showed a remarkable lack of interest in balance, in trimming the boat. The ark had certainly been listing to starboard [the right] for a few centuries, a situation that called for some balancing action, tempered and cautious; but when this fact was officially admitted we smelt a trend, an intoxicating prospect of change, and we all crowded across to port [the left] in high excitement. The ark tilted the other way, and more sharply; many of us climbed and swung on the port railings, each trying to be further out than his neighbour; some gazed longingly overboard, in love with visionary calentures, [fevered delusions] privately suspecting that we could now walk upon water and needed this shabby old tub no more.
This imbalance, this fretful one-sidedness, will be capable of endless illustration. Theologically, we shall seem to have gone absurdly far in a Pelagian direction; and all the more so if our descendants have been driven the other way by the grief and pressure of events, and have come to remember that this religion of the Resurrection starts with the Cross, has evil and suffering and death as its raw material, its prime subject-matter. In other and particular matters, great and small, we shall be remembered as a generation that saw only one side of things. We loved “becoming” and hated “being”: We cherished the idea of an emergent and evolutionary Christianity, and looked in some apathy upon the faith once delivered to the saints. We stressed the priesthood of all believers and played down the particularity of order; we indulged a passion of ecumenicism, and hushed up the painful fact that schism and heresy are still sins. We wanted the Church’s outward seeming to reflect the poverty of Christ, never his majesty. We stressed the spiritual and symbolic, at the expense of gross incarnational fact: Hence, we played down the material element in morality, the ex opere operato aspect of the sacraments, the biological purpose of sex, the concrete burden of the historic Church. We asserted freedom, at the expense of responsibility; we asserted the corporate aspect of worship so overwhelmingly as to suggest that the individual had somehow ceased to carry his own conscience, that prayer and (especially) fasting had become back numbers. We cheerfully asserted the goodness of the world, seldom its taint, its spoiling, its death wish: We were always ready to judge the Church by the world’s standard, reluctant to do the opposite.
[…]
Please do read the whole thing.
It is possible that not all of you noticed a special feature in my “Christmas cards received” entry, which I am occasionally updating.
From a reader…


One of the many gifts we receive for Christmas is the singing of the Martyrology which has the special Proclamation of the Birth of Christ, the “Kalenda“.
I saw an article at 























