Chas,

Your 95% number is misleading. I don't mean to be polemical when I say this, but consider:

If everyone -- all 8 bridesmaids and all 8 groomsmen, the groom, the priest, the wedding coordinator, the professional choir and orchestra are all present -- all, except the bride, is it reasonable to say "95% of everything you want is there"? Mere numbers aren't the issue. Someone or something which is essential is missing, in my analogy.



So, let me put you a counter example, less figurative:

People claim that it is necessary to accept the Council, and to accept the liturgical reforms of the council. They say there's no big difference (as your example proposes), but only people getting persnickety because they don't really want to be Catholic. I reply: since there's no big difference, let us keep the old form, there being no big difference between it and the new form, and let us keep the old expressions of the faith (there being no big difference, numerically or otherwise) between these and the newer forms. People accuse those who take the position I've outlined of not being real Catholics, because they won't update with the Church. I reply: if you can show me some substantive, proposition-articulated statement which is definitively to be held by the faithful and taught as such by the Council documents and the popes since, in which a proper development of doctrine has taken place.... then we can have a sensible discussion. Merely claiming that someone doesn't accept the teachings of the Church is inadequate to make the claim true.

Tomjaw, what of the chanted, in Latin, and ad orientem mass included sung propers instead of hymns? We would be singing the texts of the mass.

Consider as an example the funeral mass for St John Paul II. I recently watched a recording. It was in Latin with the propers. It wasn't said ad orientem, but I imagine it would give most of us here pretty close to the ideal.

I say there is one big difference, mandated by VII, and that is that the rubrics acknowledge the existence of a congregation.

Hawkins,

It's a fair paraphrase of what you said to say this:'he laity have more freedom of movement in the older ordo missae'. After all, they used to be told what the priest had to do, and what they, the faithful, were not permitted to do. Now their gestures and postures are more tightly regulated. How is this the "greater freedom" promised by the advocates of the spirit of the Council?

BHCordova,

I won't speak for anyone else who attends the TLM and contributes to this forum, but surely your comment falls prey to the same shortcoming that Chas' did, above. It says, "They should be willing to take less than everything", without identifying what gets included or left out, and without a profound understanding of the reticence.

To quote (or paraphrase) from A Man for All Seasons, because the question posed this way is relevant, "Will you come along, for fellowship?"

@Nathan_the_Organist
In the Ancient rite of the Church we have one set of Propers, the same text prayed by the priest is the text sung by the choir. I believe the N.O. has two sets of Propers... so the text being sung by the choir is not always the text used by the priest...

"I believe the N.O. has two sets of Propers... so the text being sung by the choir is not always the text used by the priest..."

Um, no. There are choices for propers (Missal and Gradual), as well as alternatives to them, but not that the priest would do something different from the congregation/choir.

My understanding is that the Missal propers are meant for read masses while the Graduale ones are for sung masses. This line is normally blurred in practice however.

I'm not saying it makes sense, I'm just stating the intention between two sets of propers. I was adding to Liam's comment to Tomjaw. The priest doesn't recite the Missal antiphon while the choir sings the Graduale antiphon. You select which antiphon to use depending on if the mass is read or sung.

One reason why some of the Missal read propers are different from the sung ones is that the sung propers carefully preserve the ancient Gradual texts, even where the translation into Latin was considered inaccurate by Jerome when he wrote the Vulgate. Also alternative texts for the Communions were added using Gospel texts.
Of course no NO Mass uses both, this is one of the reforms requested by 99.8% of the Fathers at Vatican II (and warmly endorsed by Abp Lefebvre).

To the traditionalist, it seems quite obvious — if you like your new liturgy, you can have it. In return, you can let us have the latest organic growth of the ancient cycle of readings, prayers, and the whole ritual language of the ancient rite. But to the reformists, that’s not acceptable. Because they didn’t change all those things just to try something new or different. They change those things, because they felt a radical change was necessary.

In short, the anti-traditionalist crew are radicals, married ideologically to a pretty thoroughgoing reform of the whole liturgy, texts and all.

Bingo.

I will add to this that in my colloquial experience, trads I've met might very well have strong opinions about these matters, but they aren't trying to fiat stamp the other party out, whereas the novus ordites who feel very strongly about this would just as quickly see the trads exterminated at all costs, rather than coexist peacefully. They will gladly knock down the churches, throw old silk vestments away, use clay vessels, and see masterpiece reredos cut up for firewood or moved to a local art museum, rather than grace an altar. It is neo-iconoclasm, and yet it is much more severe than that, even. These same people are downright eager to "pray" with muslims and pagans, and yet cannot stomach permitting a trad group to offer a TLM at an inconvenient time when no one else would even be at church anyway. Riddle me that.

Serviam, I agree that there are those on the liturgically progressive side who do wish to destroy anything appearing to be traditional. I believe that this should be called out when it does occur. However, I know there are TLM people who call the new mass invalid and insist that none of us should attend it (this includes a traditionally aesthetic mass with chant, incense, etc, which would be my preference). There are those that want the new mass abolished and everyone returned to the TLM.

As a general rule, I think the progressive side is far less likely to simply coexist liturgically, but to say that everyone on the traditional side simply want to be left alone and to leave everyone else alone seems slightly inaccurate.

As a general rule, I think the progressive side is far less likely to simply coexist liturgically, but to say that everyone on the traditional side simply want to be left alone and to leave everyone else alone seems slightly inaccurate.

True, and the nuance is appreciated.

many of the TLMers, on this site, are all-or-nothing types. If they can't have it all, exactly the way they want it, then they don't want it at all. Several of the TLMers drive hours to go to an EF Mass. The only reform of the OF that they want is for it to go away

.

I'll cop to that.
But there's a difference between "want to go away" and "want to make go away." I think that in a liturgical free market, the NO would be pretty much extinct in a century. But I am not willing to do or to see done to most Catholics what was done to most Catholics in the 1960s. Of course, we have mostly not had a "liturgical free market", and even less now than before.

IT'S NOT THE LATIN, except in the sense of preserving the "installed base" of church music. It's the bowdlerized lectionary, the linearized liturgy, the reinterpreted and desacralized Eucharist, etc. I'd be happy with Tridentine in English, as long as we could keep Latin in the Ordinary and motets (I'd even be willing to compromise on the Propers, though not without a fight.). I'd welcome being able to sing music in English occasionally. And yes, a Vatican II Mass is more beautiful and reverent than a "Vatican II Mass". But it's not the same as the Tridentine Rite.

The peace has been broken. I've been hearing tales of a bishop out West who has ordered that no Latin is to be spoken or sung during the N.O. Mass. The hardening is not just on one side. And when somebody tells me, "You'd get 95% of what you want", I feel patronized. How do you know what I want, or how I would quantify it? This isn't a game. Many of us are picking out way through this minefield, knowing that our choices affect our immortal souls. The one personal rule that I've tried to maintain is not to judge anyone on how they face this crisis.

We very easily could have had a Mass that was Tridentine in substance but with increased vernacular

No, thank you! The use of Latin (with the little bits of Greek and Hebrew) is a feature and not a bug of the Roman Rite.

lNo, thank you! The use of Latin (with the little bits of Greek and Hebrew) is a feature and not a bug of the Roman Rite.

I agree; I’m just observing that the call for “reform” could have turned out VERY differently, and in a way that is much more friendly to the actual substance Mass itself. Latin is a sacral language (as any exorcist is quick to remind people). This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, why the council fathers intended for even the new mass to retain heavy doses of Latin.

Perhaps… but sometimes these things are simpler than people make them out to be, too.

If people [writ large] were more willing to call spades… well, spades, then there would be less to disagree upon. The devil is in the details, as they say, which is another way of saying “you can ‘nuance’ something into madness.”