The biggest issues with Vatican II seem to have been church leaders and church scholars reading the Vatican II documents in the "spirit of the age" (which remember, was the '60s) rather than what the documents actually said.
For example, devotees of the traditional pre-Vatican II Mass will complain that the post-sVatican II liturgy went w…
The biggest issues with Vatican II seem to have been church leaders and church scholars reading the Vatican II documents in the "spirit of the age" (which remember, was the '60s) rather than what the documents actually said.
For example, devotees of the traditional pre-Vatican II Mass will complain that the post-sVatican II liturgy went well beyond the directives of "Sacrosanctum concilium" which called for much more gradual reforms. I tend to think they have a point.
Proponents of the traditional Mass will often argue along the lines of “if a Catholic from 1955 were to time-travel to 1975, they would find the Mass unrecognisable”. That is undeniably the case, but as a Catholic who was born in 1965 and started attending Mass regularly in 1970 - just as the “new Mass” was in also in its infancy - I can attest that the Mass of 2021 is barely recognisable compared to the Mass of 1971. My late parents told me that a lot of people stopped going to Mass almost overnight in those days, the typical argument being that if it could change so drastically, it couldn’t be of much value or even what it purported to be. For those that stuck around, the decades-long rollout of innovations that I was witness to - from communion in the hand to the rise of the “extraordinary minister“ to “Hooray For Everything” - sorry, “Go Make A Difference” - seemed to reinforce the diminishment of value, ever-so-gradually transforming not only the look and feel of the Mass but also the practise and understanding of the faith. To me now, the Mass is like a suburban street where I grew up - still somewhat familiar all these years later, but only just.
The biggest issues with Vatican II seem to have been church leaders and church scholars reading the Vatican II documents in the "spirit of the age" (which remember, was the '60s) rather than what the documents actually said.
For example, devotees of the traditional pre-Vatican II Mass will complain that the post-sVatican II liturgy went well beyond the directives of "Sacrosanctum concilium" which called for much more gradual reforms. I tend to think they have a point.
Proponents of the traditional Mass will often argue along the lines of “if a Catholic from 1955 were to time-travel to 1975, they would find the Mass unrecognisable”. That is undeniably the case, but as a Catholic who was born in 1965 and started attending Mass regularly in 1970 - just as the “new Mass” was in also in its infancy - I can attest that the Mass of 2021 is barely recognisable compared to the Mass of 1971. My late parents told me that a lot of people stopped going to Mass almost overnight in those days, the typical argument being that if it could change so drastically, it couldn’t be of much value or even what it purported to be. For those that stuck around, the decades-long rollout of innovations that I was witness to - from communion in the hand to the rise of the “extraordinary minister“ to “Hooray For Everything” - sorry, “Go Make A Difference” - seemed to reinforce the diminishment of value, ever-so-gradually transforming not only the look and feel of the Mass but also the practise and understanding of the faith. To me now, the Mass is like a suburban street where I grew up - still somewhat familiar all these years later, but only just.