True ideas!
Hear! Hear!

adam
i am continually impressed with your ability to say exactly what needs to be said.

harrumph!

Gather us in,
the old and the flaky.
Gather us in,
the hippies of yore.
Gather us in,
the senile and kinky.
We were the young in 1964.

Okay, I have made a promise to self not to be petulant. And I kinda get what Liam's saying; in my case its the descent into the Piaget Curve late stages. That said,
Charles t Byz, I get the "senile." "Kinky," still? Not so much.
That was pleasant....

Not petulant like this, right?

Gather us in,
the Right-Thinking(TM) people;
Gather us in,
who know so much more;
Gather us in,
the young and the snarky:
We'll become old after B16's gone.

I don't think it's a matter of knowledge. Restoring the vertical dimension to the liturgy is a simple matter of justice. Restoring some sense of beauty to the liturgy is a perennial magisterial mandate, as well as a matter of justice.

And I don't think the ROtR has any monopoly on snark.

I am not saying it does. You need not be so defensive; your greatest strength, in fact, is in being intimately in touch with your real and perceived vulnerabilities (however just or unjustly perceived).

But where you see eternal verities as the foundation of what you propose, other people see other things also at work, and a more mixed picture as a result. And those other people are not all aging hippy dinosaurs.

In any event, there's a reason that one of the Roman sayings refers to thin popes being followed by fat popes.

And, I should add with regard to fat and thin popes, that the focus of Catholics on the episodic agendas of a given pope is a relatively modern development, not traditional at all. Roman culture, starting before the advent of Christianity but very much historically including Vatican culture, has a deep aversion to combining charisma and power, and therefore a wariness of depending too much on the person and personality of a given leader.

Catholics of all flavors - radicals, progressives, liberals, middling sort, conservatives, traditionalists, reactionaries - in our day and age are very prone to getting overly attached to papal/episcopal/pastoral personalities and agendas.

Beware the temptation, which can hide beneath very noble layers.

I think the primary difference between my generation and the boomers is that we don't seem as driven by ideology. Probably most women my age won't wind up being stay-at-home-moms, and consider the idea ridiculous. But they're not going to get upset because someone else decides the opposite. Same thing with the liturgy. For the "progressives" of the past, certain music and liturgical custom is associated with their vision of the Church. I think those that pretend members of my generation all like chant and organ are quite confused. But I'd say we're on a whole more open-minded to things we consider a matter of preference (like liturgy and music) than the generations who put a lot at stake to change things around.

I've yet to meet a single Catholic near my age who prefers solemn liturgy, whom I didn't meet at Mass or through a musical/liturgical forum. But I've also yet to meet one who rejects the idea of chant entirely, and have met very few who have objections to Latin. If anything is true of (most of) us, it's that we're largely untainted by the "liturgy wars", whatever side our preferences lie.

and to my sopranos!

As a Boomer who never bought into the 60s garbage, I would have to say we are not the only age group who are bitter clingers. I know plenty of late 20s and 30-somethings who are also in that category.

Of course Fr. Rutler is (just barely) a boomer, too.

It's sad, isn't it?

Every once in a while it seems like the snark recedes and there might be an opening for dialogue. And then the snark flares up again. The force of bitter anger is pitiable.

It's like trying to free a trapped wolf.